Word: bidault
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...muster, De Gaulle freed eleven imprisoned members of the old "French Algeria" Secret Army Organization (O.A.S.), including its old chief, General Raoul Salan, who was serving a life term. Taking advantage of De Gaulle's mood, one of his bitterest enemies returned to France. He was Georges Bidault, 68, a Fourth Republic Premier who fled the country in 1962 after being implicated in an O.A.S. plot to overthrow De Gaulle. Bidault, an extreme rightist, seemed unlikely to play a major role in the elections, but he indicated his willingness to stand for office and aimed withering criticism at Gaullism...
Once firmly ensconced in the Elysée, though, De Gaulle granted Algeria its independence. Most Frenchmen have by now accepted the fact; not Bidault, who fled France in 1962 to organize a second resistance movement-this time against De Gaulle. Bidault disclaims any responsibility for the terrorism that accompanied the Algerie Française campaign; nevertheless, he was charged with treason, and for five years he wandered in quixotic exile in Europe and Brazil. Now living in Belgium on the understanding that he will not engage in politics, he still hopes to negotiate his return to France. This book...
Self-pitying and venomous toward De Gaulle, Bidault does his cause little good in this book. As he tells it, granting Algeria its independence was a spiritual defeat for France comparable to the military defeat of 1940-hardly a rational conclusion. "If there are fascists in France today, they are De Gaulle's men," Bidault insists. "The present French regime, which some call a 'monocracy,' is basically a dictatorship...
Here and there, Bidault does hit his mark: De Gaulle bases "his decisions on reports, gossip, memories-chiefly grudges"; "A great actor has been touring around a world he used to ignore, looking for applause at the end of his career, but I know that the curtain is about to fall...
What the book shows most clearly and painfully is the decline of Bidault, betrayed by the courage of his own futile convictions. And at least one of his statements is certain to set swivel chairs spinning in Washington. According to Bidault, during the siege of Dienbienphu in 1954, France asked the U.S. for military aid against Ho Chi Minh's army, then poised on the brink of victory. In reply, says Bidault, John Foster Dulles asked him "if we would like the U.S. to give us two atomic bombs." It is curious that Bidault alone of the many participants...