Former large pen of Figaro, Christine Clerc was one of the first women to win the Albert-Londres prize for “Le Bonheur être français” (Grasset, 1981). She has published some twenty books, including
Journal intime de Jacques Chirac
(Albin Michel, 1995) and
Tigres et Tigresses, intimate history of presidential couples
(Plon, 2004).
Last published work:
Adieu la France!
Why de Gaulle left
(Éditions de l'Observatoire, 2019).
They will not go this Monday, November 9 to Colombey to pay homage to him for the fiftieth anniversary of his death.
But all politicians will celebrate his memory and claim his spirit of resistance.
Because, left or right, all are now Gaullists.
For fifty years, however, all have forgotten the lessons of the General.
Buried, his great hospital reform
Of course, no one imagines that de Gaulle would have known, by the sole power of his word, to defeat the Covid.
Faced with the virus, he would have been almost as impotent as Clémenceau “
le Père la Victoire
” was in the face of the so-called “
Spanish flu
” epidemic
which in 1918 caused several hundred thousand deaths in France.
But the health system that the founder of the Fifth Republic wanted to rebuild would have avoided deaths.
In December 1958, even before being elected President of the Republic, the new head of government appointed by President René Coty resumed contact with Professor Robert Debré, an illustrious pediatrician, close to the Popular Front, who, in the French internal resistance , created a clandestine care service.
The father of the future Prime Minister Michel Debré has a big project: to renovate the public hospital and bring it to a level of excellence by uniting it by convention with the faculties of medicine and by creating, for all the nursing staff, a system full time.
De Gaulle nods his head, skeptical: "
Do you really want to force the doctors to stay all day with their patients in the hospital?"
But he will sign without delay three ordinances, enacted on the eve and the very day after the presidential election of December 21, 1958: to create the CHU (University Hospital Centers).
Birth of a high-quality French healthcare system, intended to cover the entire territory.
Read also:
Charles de Gaulle: from Warsaw to the Russian front, the birth of a strategist
We know what happened to it.
Decades of administrative complications, of financial mismanagement under the pretext of cutting expenses and underpaying nurses and hospital doctors have led to this result: services had to be closed for lack of personnel.
Resuscitation devices were sorely lacking, such as masks.
French people with Covid had and still have to be sent to intensive care in German hospitals.
Forgotten, his resistance to Islamism
In 1958, de Gaulle was first confronted with the war in Algeria.
It ended in 1962 in the cries, tears and blood of Pieds-Noirs forced to leave and harkis murdered by their compatriots.
However, we must try to turn the page.
In March 1964, the French president receives, at the castle of Champs-sur-Marne, the president of independent Algeria, Ahmed Ben Bella.
“
Stop sending us migrant workers
,” he told him (Alain Peyrefitte “It was de Gaulle”, volume 2, Editions de Fallois-Fayard, 1997)
You wanted independence, you have it.
You have become a foreign country.
All Algerians had one year to opt for French nationality.
This deadline has largely passed.
We will not admit any more.
Do your best to make them live on your soil
”.
Peyrefitte, at the time young minister and talented "
scribe
" of the General, would he have invented this sentence?
Would he also have invented the famous "
Colombey-les-deux-Églises would become Colombey-les-deux Mosques
", quoted by the unfortunate Nadine Morano, immediately pointed out as "far
right
"?
Numerous testimonies confirm it, however: for de Gaulle, France, a country of Christian origin, could not without risk accept too many Muslims.
"
There were 40,000 immigrants from Algeria in April," he declared in the Council of Ministers on May 7, 1963. I would like more babies to be born in France and less immigrants to come there.
I ask you, Mr. Prime Minister,
(he was addressing Georges Pompidou)
to study the parades
”.
Faced with the repeated spectacle of these attacks on a flock of frightened sheep, how can we not imagine the General being angry?
Almost thirty years later, François Mitterrand would speak of a “
tolerance threshold
”.
But the collective guilt born of the Algerian war and maintained by a certain left which would teach the young college student Emmanuel Macron that French colonization had been "
a crime against Humanity
" was going to be the strongest.
For twenty years, while whistleblowers would describe, in books entitled "
Colleges of France
", "
The Lost Territories of the Republic
" or "
The conquered territories of Islamism
", the situation created by the influx of radicalized immigrants, the General's successors would turn a blind eye: the National Front should not be voiced under any circumstances.
Neither the murder, by Mohammed Merah in 2012, of three children including a Jewish girl, nor the 265 assassinations that would follow in the name of "
Allahu Akbah
" were going to break the Omerta.
Until the throat of Professor Samuel Paty.
Faced with the repeated spectacle of these attacks on a flock of frightened sheep, how can we not imagine the General being angry?
Or sad to death.