PARTISAN REVIEW
a party of logrollers. At the end of the nineteenth century, the rela–
tively feeble impact of politics on the economy made parliamentary
battles of secondary importance.
If
General Boulanger had been the
victor in 1889, the French economy would not have been noticeably
changed. The genius of parliamentary leaders thus lay, essentially,
in
a talent for trading; and the majority of the great parliamentarians
in
Europe between the wars of 1870 and 1914 possessed this talent
to a high degree.
Today the intense polarization of political convictions (between
Stalinism and whatever may be, for the time being, its principal
adversary) and the polarization of power (between Russia and your–
selves) make decisiveness, and not a talent for trading, the first
political virtue. Our last great parliamentarians and General de
Gaulle are rather successive than contrasting psychological types. The
history of our country from 1936 to 1940 runs from the compromise
Matignon settlement (the great strikes of 1936 were ended without
victims, but the Popular Front government, to which so much hope
had been attached, wound up where we
all
know) to De Gaulle's
summons to resistance on June 18, 1940.
Burnham:
What reason have we to suppose that De Gaulle
has a solution? How is his solution distinguished from that of the
Third Force?
You must understand, Malraux, that Gaullism has been presented
in the United States as a reactionary, dictatorial, probably fascist
movement. It is, we have been told, a ganging up of the extreme
Right: collaborationists, finance-capitalists, the Church hierarchy,
monarchists, and landlords.
My own direct impressions have suggested that it is a movement
that has not yet crystallized; that it is impossible as yet to define
it because it is still in the process of defining itself. It is quickly
obvious that what might be called the "official apparatus" of the
existing French state-the leadership of the political
p~es
and
the unions, the influential capitalists and bankers, the Church hier–
archy-is today either non-Gaullist or anti-Gaullist. This seems to
imply a genuinely revolutionary potential.
Gaullism is still fluid, in organization as in direction. It would
seem, therefore, that events still in the future may well control the
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