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1 82 Walter A . McDougall 



from above to reify his "certaine idee" of Technocratic France, the 

 R&D state.' 



The unabashed theme of GaulHsm was grandeur, la globe — for "la 

 France ne pent etre la France sans la grandeur." But "glory" is not a 

 policy any more than "peace" is, and in the case of GauUist France, 

 grandeur was an axiom or self-definition implying that any "France" not 

 willing or able to play the role of a Great Power was not France at all. 

 And if de Gaulle had cherished such beliefs ever since 1940, two events 

 just prior to his return sufficed to persuade his countrymen. The first 

 was the 1957 British White Paper in which Defense Minister Duncan 

 Sandys argued that economic decline, social demands, and super- 

 power dynamism forced Britain thenceforth to rely on cheap nuclear 

 deterrence. 1 hough directed against the Soviets, a beefed-up deter- 

 rent would, as Harold MacMillan admitted the following year, also 

 increase British leverage vis-a-vis the United States. 



The second event was Sputnik. Now that the Soviets were capable of 

 threatening the U.S. homeland with hydrogen bombs and intercon- 

 tinental ballistic missiles, was the American nuclear umbrella still credi- 

 ble? Would America risk New York to save Paris? Such imponderables 

 reinforced French determination to press on with their own nuclear 

 force de frappe. But Sputnik gave another ironic twist to Franco- 

 American relations, for the Eisenhower administration, in the post- 

 Sputmk panic, expanded strategic cooperation with Britain, while Gon- 

 gress amended the McMahon Act to enable more nuclear secrets to be 

 passed to friendly nuclear powers. In the interest of nonproliferation, 

 friendly no^muclear powers received no such aid. W^hen de Gaulle 

 sought to purchase KG- 135 tankers for inflight refueling of his Mirage 

 IV jets, the U.S. government hindered the sale. When France con- 

 cluded contracts with Boeing for missile components, the State Depart- 

 ment withheld approval. 1 he French concluded that U.S. policy was 

 designed to keep France a nation secondaire for all time, and when de 



^This notion of modern technocracy as the R&D state, "the institutionahzation of 

 technological change for state purposes," is the theme of my article, "I echiiocracy and 

 Statecraft in the Space Age: Toward the History of a Saltation," /4m<'nr«?) Hi\toncnl Revifw 

 87 (Oct. 1982): 1010-40. For Gaullist ideas on politics and technology, see esp. his 

 Memoirs of Hope: Renewal and Endeavor {New York, 1970) and his collections of speeches 

 in Ambassade de France, Major Addresses, Statements, and Press Conferences oj General 

 Charles de Gaulle (New York, 1964), as well as De Gaulle parte, 2 vols., ed. Andre Passeron 

 (Paris, 1962-66) and the following works on Gaullist foreign policy: Paul-Marie de la 

 Gorce, De Gaulle entre deux mondes (Paris, 1964) and La France centre les empires (Paris, 

 1969); VV. W. Kulski, De Gaulle and the World (Syracuse, N.Y., 1966); John Newhouse, 

 De Gaulle and the Anglo-Saxons (New York, 1970); Paul Reynaud, The Foreign Policy of 

 Charles de Gaulle, trans. Mervyn Savill (New York, 1964). 



