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sis. He commented on his country's political and intellectual debates
with a lofty rationality which could never be pinpointed simply to
anyone camp or faction.
His memoirs show us how in the prewar period he was among
the rare members of the French intellectual milieu who understood
economics and its imperatives and who could criticize both France's
deflationary politics and the subsequent economic recklessness of the
Popular Front. He could fathom the blindness of French elites vis
a
vis Nazi Germany, their refusal to rearm, and their incomprehen–
sion of international affairs.
In
1940, Aron left for England where he
joined de Gaulle's Free French, but on the margins and never as a
Gaullist diehard. Contrary to the London Resistants, he argued on
behalf of contacts with members of the Vichy government and re–
gretted deeply that in 1942 a French government in exile was not
created in North Africa, around which all the French could rally .
Aron the philosopher and de Gaulle the consummate man of action
in history were never on the same wavelength. It is significant that
Aron would become a Gaullist not during the years spent in London
nor during the Fifth Republic, but during the General's years in the
"wilderness" from 1947 to 1958. Aron was never a Mendesiste; he
praised the Fourth Republic for its economic achievements and for
its opening to Germany, precisely two of its most disputed aspects to
its contemporaries. Above all, Aron argued loud and clear that the
French would have to leave Algeria sooner or later and that they
should do it in the least damaging manner to their own interests. At
the time of Aron's stand, France's political class, whether on the Left
or on the Right, was solidly "Algerie Franr;:aise." It is characteristic of
Aron that he did not argue on behalf of Algerian independence on
moral or revolutionary grounds like the French intelligentsia, but on
the ground that an independent Algeria was an inevitable historical
outcome in keeping with the international phase of decolonization .
Aron commented critically on de Gaulle's presidency and
above all on his "grand dessein" in foreign policy while approving
(though often for reasons that were different from the General's) the
force de frappe,
England's exclusion from the Common Market, and
France's withdrawal from the military wing of NATO. What he con–
demned most was de Gaulle's equating of the two superpowers as a
way of carving a special role for France in international affairs. For
Aron, de Gaulle knew the difference between a democracy and a dic–
tatorship, but he chose to minimize it in international relations, thus
