Gaullism

Gaullism in the novel is a political project organized around Charles de Gaulle’s authority and the restoration of a strong French state. Its decisive significance lies in the gap between what its followers expect and what de Gaulle actually chooses: for Marc Rodin, the promise of national renewal initially appears to guarantee French Algeria, but de Gaulle’s eventual acceptance of its separation turns devotion into rebellion. The resulting conflict is not simply between government and insurgents. It is also a struggle over who may claim to speak for France, and whether military loyalty can overrule the decisions of civilian authority.

A state rebuilt around de Gaulle

The narrative places Gaullism in the political transition of June 1958, when de Gaulle returned as Prime Minister, displaced the failing French Fourth Republic, and founded the French Fifth Republic. For Rodin, this was the prospect of France ruled by a soldier rather than by politicians he regarded as weak or disloyal. De Gaulle’s words about French Algeria seemed to confirm that the Army would receive the wholehearted support it had lacked during the war. Rodin invested the new leadership with almost sacred expectations: political restoration, military recognition, and the defense of French authority in Algeria appeared to him to be parts of one national undertaking.

That investment was not Rodin’s alone in its historical origins. Before becoming an OAS leader, Colonel Antoine Argoud had served under de Gaulle in the Free French and fought for the liberation of France from Nazi rule. The later hostility between Gaullist France and the OAS therefore emerges from a split within a military and patriotic tradition, not from a simple opposition between loyal Frenchmen and outsiders. Once de Gaulle’s policy contradicted the future Argoud and Rodin wanted, a shared history of service became part of the conflict’s bitter irony.

Algeria and the collapse of an expectation

Rodin’s attachment to Gaullism rests on a particular understanding of national purpose. After service in Indochina and a frustrating year in France, he believed the Army had been betrayed by civilian politicians and denied the support necessary to win. He carried that conviction to Algeria in 1956, regarding the campaign as the chance to restore the Army’s standing and secure France’s position. His faith in de Gaulle followed from the belief that a soldier at the head of the state would reverse the political failures he associated with the previous governments.

At first, de Gaulle’s words about French Algeria seemed to validate that hope. Rodin expected the new leader to suppress political opponents, discipline public life, and commit France more fully to the Army’s cause. But de Gaulle’s restoration of France did not mean the preservation of French Algeria. As reports of talks with the FLN circulated, Rodin tried to interpret them as tactical; when the direction of policy became unmistakable, his confidence collapsed. The narrative makes the consequence personal and political at once: Rodin’s loss of faith becomes hatred of de Gaulle and the system he leads, and he takes his battalion into the April 1961 military putsch.

The break exposes a limit in Rodin’s conception of Gaullism. He had treated the authority of a soldier-leader as a guarantee of the outcome he desired; de Gaulle’s independent policy showed that military identity did not entitle the Army to dictate the state’s decisions. For Rodin, the decision over Algeria is betrayal. For the state, the same decision is an exercise of political authority that must withstand an armed challenge. The novel’s conflict grows from these incompatible understandings of loyalty.

The putsch and the struggle for allegiance

De Gaulle defeats the putsch not through a battlefield encounter but through radio. Conscripts across Algeria turn on sets that had seemed to officers to be harmless comforts, and hear the President address their choice of loyalties. The intervention reaches soldiers dispersed across barracks and separates them from commanders who expected obedience. Some battalion leaders wake to find that only a handful of officers and sergeants remain with them. Rodin retains 120 officers, noncommissioned officers, and enlisted men, in part because his unit contains more veterans of Indochina and the Algerian countryside than most.

That remnant becomes part of the Secret Army Organisation, pledged to overthrow the leader whom its members call a traitor. The episode gives Gaullism a practical form in the narrative: authority depends not only on the Army’s senior officers or on political declarations, but on which voice individual soldiers recognize as legitimate. The broadcast reverses the putsch’s intended chain of command. Radio, a mass medium issued for distraction, becomes a means by which de Gaulle reasserts state authority directly over the troops.

The aftermath is not reconciliation. As French settlers leave Algeria, the Secret Army Organisation directs violence against what they are abandoning, while its known leaders go into exile. In that setting the OAS’s later campaign against Gaullist France carries the unresolved consequences of military defeat and imperial withdrawal into the metropolitan state. The insurgency is a continuation of the political rupture created by the putsch, not an isolated conspiracy detached from it.

State power and its coercive edge

The novel does not portray the defense of Gaullist authority as purely constitutional or bloodless. The SDECE Action Service infiltrates the OAS, supplies information that enables arrests, and sometimes kills wanted men abroad. After the OAS captures and kills seven barbouzes in Algiers, a vendetta follows. The account also distinguishes these covert operations from rumors of a separate, unofficial police: the supposed parallel force is denied, while the dirty work attributed to it is assigned to Action Service operatives and temporarily recruited underworld figures. The distinction complicates the state’s public image without making the covert violence disappear.

The authorities also use conspicuous public-order measures. Alexandre Sanguinetti’s office issues decrees that bring street barriers, identity-card checks at major junctions, and roadblocks on main roads; the CRS deploys large anti-riot forces against demonstrations on both the left and the right. Those measures earn Sanguinetti hostility from political opponents and ordinary people alike, while the press labels him Monsieur Anti-OAS. In this account, Gaullist order is maintained through both centralized authority and everyday coercion, and the measures that protect the state also generate resentment toward it.

The OAS’s capacity to threaten that state remains serious. After the arrest of Argoud, Marc Rodin takes over operational leadership; later, intelligence places Rodin and two other senior OAS figures together in a Rome hotel, guarded day and night by eight former Foreign Legion members and unwilling to venture outside. Their precautions register the danger created by covert state action, but they also show how far the contest has moved from open military command into exile, surveillance, and clandestine violence.

Political meaning and narrative significance

Gaullism is therefore defined in the novel by both restoration and refusal: de Gaulle rebuilds the state, but refuses to make the Army’s desired outcome in Algeria the measure of national policy. That refusal converts a source of hope for Rodin into the reason for his revolt. The novel’s account of the putsch, the OAS, and the state’s countermeasures follows the consequences of that rupture across institutions and methods, from a presidential radio address to infiltration, roadblocks, and assassination plots.

The stakes are larger than the fate of an individual leader. Roger Frey understands that the death of de Gaulle could, in the fragile political conditions of 1963, be followed by a putsch and civil war. His alarm clarifies why the government treats the threat as an attack on the political order, not merely as a danger to one man. At the same time, the security apparatus’s covert operations and restrictive public measures show how defense of that order can blur the boundary between lawful government and unofficial force. Gaullism in the narrative is thus neither a detached statement of doctrine nor a settled national consensus: it is an active, contested claim to political authority whose consequences are measured in military disobedience, underground retaliation, and the state’s effort to survive.