Maurice Couve de Murville

Maurice Couve de Murville, a French patriot, died on December 24th 1999, aged 92

During the 1960s France practised what are remembered as the “politics of grandeur”. They were the creation of Charles de Gaulle, the French president from 1959 to 1969, and his foreign minister, Maurice Couve de Murville. They sought to imbue in the minds of their countrymen a new and glorious France, untarnished by defeat. Historians are divided on whether they succeeded, and if they did whether their success has been lasting. What is clear is that in its pursuit of la gloire France managed to upset, and sometimes anger, its closest friends, notably Britain and the United States, creating distrust for French policies that persists to this day.

One view of Mr Couve was that he was simply a servant, reporting to his master on Friday mornings and receiving his instructions for the following week. It was an excusable mistake. How could anyone be other than servile to the towering De Gaulle? But it is probably more accurate to think of Mr Couve as a Jeeves, the highly intelligent interpreter of his master’s wishes and the quiet dissuader of his eccentricities.

But an unsmiling Jeeves. Mr Couve was known for his chilly silences. Ask him a question and he might simply look at you without speaking, undermining your confidence by the second. Was the question so idiotic? Eventually Mr Couve would pronounce. “Our thinking is different,” he replied to a journalist who asked about France’s differences with the United States. Different in what way? Another silence. The questioner found out in 1966 when, to show its independence from the “Anglo-Saxons”, France withdrew from the NATO command structure and expelled its American-led staff from Paris. For years Britain was made to look foolish trying to get into the Common Market, the forerunner of the European Union, when the De Gaulle−Couve partnership had decided its entry to the club would weaken French influence. Even the Germans and others in the club deferred to the French, who for months in 1965 boycotted all market affairs until their farmers could be assured of favoured treatment. For Mr Couve, De Gaulle wrote in his memoirs, “nothing in life” was more important than that France should “survive in the first rank of nations”.

When France was defeated by Germany in 1940 Maurice Couve de Murville at first worked for the puppet government in Vichy. He had been a senior civil servant in the pre-war government, specialising in financial matters. In Vichy he was said to have done his best to stop the Germans seizing France’s gold reserves. He was then in his early 30s, married with a young family, and Hitler was the master of continental Europe. Like many Vichy officials who later had successful post-war careers, his time as a collaborator was not held against him.

In 1943 he left France and eventually joined De Gaulle’s government in exile. The two men seemed immediately to hit it off. Apart from having a common purpose in liberating France, they saw themselves as near nobility with a duty to defend traditional values. Mr Couve’s father, a lawyer and later a judge, had added the aristocratic “de Murville” to the family name. De Gaulle claimed as an ancestor a

knight who fought at Agincourt, although perhaps not hard enough as England won.

De Gaulle was briefly the leader of post-war France before resigning in disgust over the country’s political system, which he considered unworkable. In 1958, at a time of deep crisis for the country, he returned, first as prime minister and later, having changed the constitution, as president. By then Mr Couve had become ambassador to West Germany. De Gaulle made him foreign minister, a job he was to hold for ten years, longer than any other occupant of that post; longer even, he observed, than Talleyrand, the foreign minister under Napoleon, who was also ambitious for France.

Although the 1960s might seem to have been an exhilarating time for France, there is little evidence that most ordinary French people shared the Gaullist view of history, destiny and all that. The tenth anniversary of De Gaulle’s rule in 1968 was marred by student riots and a general strike, ostensibly against the Vietnam war but which developed into a protest against authoritarian, centralist government in general.The French franc came under attack and a chastened government had to apply for an emergency loan to the International Monetary Fund, an organisation that De Gaulle had attacked as the villain of “dollar hegemony”. Mr Couve was made prime minister with a brief to sort out the mess and bring France to order. But the clever diplomat was no politician. His chilly silences might be a formidable weapon in the conference room, his cerebral qualities were undisputed, but to the voter he was seen as a cold fish. He was too old to learn populist tricks; and anyway would have regarded them as unprincipled. De Gaulle stood down in 1969 after losing a referendum on proposed reforms that had been drafted by Mr Couve. Georges Pompidou was elected president, and after a few months dropped Mr Couve as prime minister. It was time for France to repair its friendships.