Books: A Cry from Quixotic Exile

RESISTANCE by Georges Bidault. 348 pages. Praeger. $6.95.

There is an echo of classical tragedy n the career of Georges Bidault. For two decades, beginning with his leadership of the French Resistance in World War II, his countrymen regarded him as a hero. The diminutive onetime history professor and Catholic moderate was twice Premier and nine times Foreign Minister in the Fourth Republic. He had the satisfaction of helping to write the U.N. Charter and to launch European economic unity; in Geneva in 1954, he also had the unhappy task of negotiating France’s retreat from Indo-China. It was he who invited De Gaulle to take power in 1958 in order to keep Algeria part of France.

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, subtitled a “Political Biography,” is the keening, embittered tirade of a man without a country. At 67, says Bidault in the words of Victor Hugo, he has only “the injustice of his fate and the justice of his cause.”

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 in that troubled time, including Sir Anthony Eden, Allen Dulles and President Eisenhower, should recall such an unlikely proposal.