On the evening of Sunday, April 23, 1961, French families gathered anxiously around their television sets to hear an impassioned plea from President Charles de Gaulle. A group of retired generals had launched a putsch to overthrow the French republic and install a military junta. “Frenchwomen, Frenchmen!” said de Gaulle, “help me!”
The catalyst for rebellion was the war in Algeria. For seven years, Paris had battled the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), an Algerian insurgency seeking independence. The rebel French generals feared that de Gaulle was about to sell out the war effort and betray the pieds-noirs, or the one million whites of French descent in Algeria. On April 22, the generals made their move, seizing control of Algiers, as pied-noir car horns hit a five-note drumbeat: “Al-gé-rie fran-çaise!”1
The situation in Algiers wasn’t the end of de Gaulle’s problems. Outside Paris, in the forests of Orléans and Rambouillet, thousands of rebel paratroopers waited to march on the capital. And to top it all off, the French president had a possible loose nuke on his hands. A French atomic bomb was in the Saharan desert ready to be tested. In a nightmare scenario, the rebel generals might seize the weapon as a bargaining chip. How could the president defeat the generals and escape the bleeding wound in Algeria?
First of all, de Gaulle had to outmaneuver his opponents. He took his case directly to the people with a national television appearance. Despite being seventy-one and long retired from the army, de Gaulle dug out his old World War II-era uniform. “A quartet of retired generals” had dishonored the country, he said. “I forbid every Frenchman, and in the first place every soldier, to carry out any of their orders.”2 The force of de Gaulle’s personality was irresistible. Across the nation, soldiers, police, and ordinary people rallied around the regime.
The coup soon unraveled. De Gaulle’s administration scooped up the rebel leadership on the mainland. The paratroopers were left milling around the forests outside Paris until a few gendarmes turned up and ordered them to disband. And de Gaulle defused the atomic threat by bringing forward the date of the test. On April 25, in the midst of the putsch, a blinding fireball in the Sahara demonstrated the French Republic’s power. With the plot defeated, de Gaulle stepped up his efforts to negotiate Algerian independence. A year later, in March 1962, France and the FLN agreed on terms in the Evian Accords.
De Gaulle knew that negotiating an exit from Algeria was only half the battle. He also had to craft a narrative of the war to unite the French people and avert the impression of catastrophe. The president cared less about the details of Algerian independence and more about the impact of withdrawal on France’s image at home and abroad. The retreat from Algeria could prove a crippling blow to the national psyche. France had suffered a string of recent losses—the blitzkrieg in 1940, Indochina, Suez, Morocco, Tunisia, and now Algeria—that could easily meld into a humiliating tale of national malaise. “To lose an empire is to lose yourself,” said one Frenchman. “It takes all the meaning away from the life of a man, the life of a pioneer.”3
Fortunately, as one French general remarked in 1867, “We have a special talent for explaining and justifying our defeats.”4 De Gaulle needed all this national acumen for rationalizing retreat to conjure a positive narrative of the withdrawal.
The first task was to protect France’s image as a great power. De Gaulle believed that if the French lost confidence in their global status, the nation would succumb to squabbling and division. “France cannot be France without grandeur.”5 As Paris wound down its imperial project, de Gaulle discounted the importance of colonies as a gauge of prestige. “We do not believe that the interest, honor and future of France is now in the least connected with maintaining domination over populations most of whom do not belong to her people and who are and will increasingly be driven toward emancipation and self-government.”6
At all costs, France must not seem to be driven out of Algeria by military failure. In other words, there should be no repeat of Dien Bien Phu in Indochina in 1954 (where the French radio operator’s final words were, “The enemy has overrun us. We are blowing up everything. Vive la France!”). As he negotiated peace in Algeria, de Gaulle carefully cultivated the image of control. He made inevitable concessions to the FLN look like bold exercises of French will. France could accept Algerian independence, he wrote, but only as a magnanimous act initiated by Paris. “France, eternal France, who alone, from the height of her power, in the name of her principles and in accordance with her interests, granted [independence] to the Algerians.”7
The narrative of withdrawal required a new mission for the French military. The soldiers had lost an empire but not yet found a role. The answer lay with the atom. The French military’s sacred duty was now to protect the homeland through nuclear deterrence. The force de frappe, or nuclear strike force, allowed Paris to reassert civilian primacy over the military and project an aura of national power.8
The president’s story also required France to be master of its own destiny and beholden to no one—not even the United States. In 1966, de Gaulle announced that France was withdrawing from full membership in NATO. He told the U.S. secretary of state to remove all American troops from France. The secretary asked acidly if that included the dead ones.9
De Gaulle abandoned the dream of an Algérie française. But in the process he saved France and forged a new destiny for the country as a modern and prosperous European democracy. At the heart of his exit strategy was storytelling, or the use of rhetoric and optics to cast withdrawal from Algeria as an honorable chapter in the national tale.
When American presidents pursue the surge, talk, and leave exit strategy from a failing war, they must also explain the conflict as a meaningful story and avoid the image of catastrophe.
The earliest surviving literature on war is a story. The Epic of Gilgamesh is a collection of poems from Mesopotamia, in modern-day Iraq, carved into clay tablets over four thousand years ago. The poems tell the tale of Gilgamesh, the king of Uruk, who was two-thirds god and one-third man. Gilgamesh sought to slay the terrifying monster Humbaba. With his companion Enkidu, a savage man from the wild lands, Gilgamesh killed Humbaba and carried the monster’s head home in triumph. And this was only one of his achievements. Gilgamesh also fought and defeated Akka, the king of Kish, and won independence for the people of Uruk.