In Europe

gradually de Gaulle came to believe all those stories himself. Over time his already considerable ego took on absolutely mythic proportions. He was, in his own eyes, the body and soul of France, he thought what
la France
thought, and eventually he began referring to himself in the third person, as though he had entered history during his own lifetime. But in the village he was simply himself.
    Now he lies amid the families of Colombey, his grave marked by a simple marble cross, beside Anne and his wife Yvonne. During his funeral on 12 November, 1970, the myth became fused with the village, once and for all. The men in the café show me a photograph: it shows them with rusty wheelbarrows, preparing the big grave. The places at the funeral were reserved for the family, the old companions in arms and the towncouncil of Colombey. ‘But still, 40,000 people came to our village that day. And the boys here turned a pretty penny! They sold little bags of earth, supposedly from the cemetery, for five francs apiece! What a day!’
    Pilgrims are allowed to leave their own tribute against the wall of the graveyard. It is full of crosses of Lorraine and marble plaques reading ‘Regrets’. And there is always a sentry standing guard. ‘Always?’ I ask the gendarme on duty. ‘Yes, day and night.’ ‘Even after almost thirty years?’ ‘Yes, but of course, it's the general!’
    If de Gaulle had not been de Gaulle, if he had not been that theatrical, brilliant, stubborn spirit, would France be a different place? The trust placed in him by the French of which he spoke so proudly in 1940 was only so much hot air; he imagined it, and only received it once the war was almost won. But as a role model, as father of the fatherland, he restored the self-respect of the French as no one else. That process repeated itself when the French Empire fell apart, when the nation's pride was deeply hurt by the humiliations in Indochina – where 20,000 French soldiers were killed – the Suez conflict, and when the Algerian question cut the nation to the quick.
    In Algiers in October 1954, the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) began a national uprising that led to countless attacks on French targets; gradually the French – its army under the command of General Jacques Massu – became entangled in a violent, urban guerrilla war.
    In 1958, under the title
La Question
, the European-Jewish Algerian Henri Alleq, editor of the
Alger Républicain
, published a detailed report of his arrest and interrogation by French police: the continuous hitting and kicking, the electrodes attached to ears and mouth, the partial drownings, the barbed wire in the mattress, the salt water to quench his thirst, the drugs to make him talk.
    This dealt yet another blow to the national self-image: many French people felt deeply ashamed. Their own soldiers were applying methods associated with the Gestapo.
    In spring 1958 the already divided Fourth Republic was shaken to its foundations; under Massu's leadership, an ultra-right-wing coup was in the offing. French paratroopers based in Algeria were made ready to be dropped in Paris, de Gaulle was called in to restore order, and what finallyhappened was reminiscent of the Second World War: the French rebels in Algeria called on de Gaulle to save their cause, de Gaulle used them to consolidate his own power, and in the end there was little or no heed paid to their demands.
    On 1 June, 1958, de Gaulle was appointed prime minister. Within three months the country had a new constitution which placed the most important executive powers in the hands of the president. De Gaulle's Fifth Republic was born. Four years later, Algeria gained independence.
    In essence, de Gaulle's utopia was a nineteenth-century one: a regal France within a Europe of self-aware ‘fatherlands’ from the Atlantic to the Urals, led by the French-German axis and excluding Britain and America, and with a gradual thawing of relationships with the East. But when Warsaw Pact troops put a brutal end to the Prague Spring in August 1968, the general was forced to abandon his dream.
    But even more dramatic were the events that had taken place three months earlier, when it turned out that France possessed neither the internal equilibrium nor the economic power needed for European leadership. In fact, in May 1968 it seemed that de Gaulle's political role had been played out. One last time he brought all his theatrical talents to bear, one last time he