Eighty years ago this week de Gaulle resigns rather than face the ordinariness of political life

 

General de Gaulle resigned as the head of government. There was no single, overwhelming issue; rather he felt he was unsuited to the contingencies and compromises of party politics if he was not able to dominate the whole political scene. He had debated his intentions in the course of a week's holiday at Antibes and seemed to have accepted that he ought to have withdrawn immediately after the liberation in a vividly imagined vision of his role model caught by a far more banal fate than the one which actually befell her, "...one can't imagine Joan of Arc married, a mother, and who knows, deceived by her husband." (Je n'imagine pas Jeanne d'Arc mariée, mère de famille et, qui sait, trompée par son mari). It was more appropriate for the saviour of the nation to be martyred than to be swallowed by life in all its ordinariness.

The Soviets used the newly established UN Security council as a springboard for two attempts to assert their power. Off their own bat they tried to raise the question of Greece where a short-lived royalist putsch served as a reminder that the Communists had been baulked of power there. This coincided with a visit to Moscow of the Greek Communist EAM. Via the Ukrainian delegation  they threw their support behind the movement for independence in Indonesia. At that point Ukraine was a separate member of the UN albeit as a docile tool of Stalin. These initiatives helped inspire George Kennan's "long telegram" from the US embassy in Moscow to the State Department in Washington which marked the end of US illusions that Stalin's government was in any way benign.

As Parliament resumed the  Conservatives marked out the government's nationalization programme as a battle ground. The fullest possible deabte of the planned nationalization of coal mining was demanded and the Bill to take over the Bank of England was criticized in the House of Lords, albeit not to the extent of voting against it.