‘WE ARE NOT here to laugh,” General Charles de Gaulle liked to say about the responsibilities of public life: his own epic contribution to which ended 40 years ago this week.
But a private laugh is what he may have been having in the two months that followed his resignation as French president when, to the consternation of some of those scrambling to replace him, he chose self-imposed exile in Ireland.
Disillusioned by the events of May 1968, he had staked his reputation on a referendum to reform some of France’s age-old political structures. The reforms were sensible and much needed. Unfortunately, by then, the estrangement between the general and his country had become mutual. Given the opportunity to hasten his demise, voters took it by a narrow margin.
As good as his word, Gen de Gaulle resigned with a two-line communiqué. The career of the great soldier and statesman – almost mortally wounded at Verdun in 1916 before recovering to lead the Free French during the second World War (under sentence of death from the collaborators in Vichy) and to rescue his country again the late 1950s, was finally over.
Pausing only to shake hands with the commander of the Élysée Palace, he headed quietly into retirement at his home of Columbey-les-Deux Églises.
He might have attempted to keep his head down there during the election campaign that followed. But to the inexpressable delight of Bord Fáilte, the old general opted for more dramatic type of evasive manoeuvre. In early May, without fanfare, he flew into Cork Airport and was driven from there to the Ring of Kerry, where he took up temporary residence at the Heron Cove Hotel in Sneem.
Gen de Gaulle had well-estalished Irish roots, albeit at the other end of the island, among the McCartans of Co Down. An ancestor was one of the wild geese who fled to France after the Treaty of Limerick in 1691. And long before the birth of its most famous son, the family had taken the trouble to retrace the lineage. Two French-born McCartans visited Dublin in 1837 to certify the link with Gaelic nobility.
On top of this, the general’s grandmother on the de Gaulle side of the family had written a biography of Daniel O’Connell. The visitor’s interest in his host country was deep and genuine. Even so, what de Gaulle most sought from Ireland in 1969 was probably hinted in another comment of his from a few years before: “In the tumult of men and events, solitude was my temptation. Now it is my friend.” Despite the sensation caused by the visit, he enjoyed six weeks of largely uninterrupted solitude here. The late Claude Cockburn, writing about his arrival in Co Kerry for The Irish Times, reported that the first thing the general did in Sneem “was to put the Heron Cove hotel out of telephonic communication with the world, or at least to block incoming communications”.
The intention, suggested Cockburn, was to “cock a snook” at those, including his former prime minister Georges Pompidou, who had benefited from opposing him in the past but were now anxious for the great man’s blessing: “He is saying in effect: ‘Don’t call me. I may possibly call you’.”
Any more direct access was discouraged by the Special Branch and Garda sniffer dogs, who patrolled the grounds of the hotel. Although the general emerged occasionally for walks or sight-seeing drives, the press was kept at zoom-lens distance, or further. Once, when the visitors embarked on a tour of the Macgillycuddy Reeks followed by some 20 media vehicles, a Garda car pulled across one of the narrow mountain roads and cut the posse off.
Gen de Gaulle’s aide-de-camp, Capt François Flohic, was the nearest reporters got to the man himself. Spotted buying newspapers in Sneem one day, Capt Flohic confirmed that the former president was indeed reading the papers and listening to radio, “but not with any great passion”. Asked whether Gen de Gaulle would be visiting President de Valera in Dublin, he quipped: “He is a general and generals don’t usually give away their plans in advance.” If de Gaulle wasn’t laughing during his stay here, Bord Fáilte certainly was. Its Paris office was deluged with bookings, inquiries, and requests for film footage of Co Kerry: a spokesman reporting “more publicity in three days than in the past 10 years”. Galway shared the limelight too, eventually, when the general spent several days touring Connemara before, for once, being outflanked.
His nemesis was a 24-year-old telephonist called Brigid Diamond, because of whose wedding the general and his wife had to check out early from the Cashel House Hotel. From there it was back to Co Kerry. And finally, in mid-June, he travelled to Dublin for that meeting with Dev. He didn’t make it to Co Down. Down had to come to him instead, in the form of a delegation of McCartans who met him at Áras an Uachtaráin.
Both rounds of the French presidential election were safely over (the de Gaulles voting by proxy) before the party left Ireland. The general returned to Colombey-les-Deux-Églises, where he spent his short retirement, living modestly on only a military pension.
When he died unexpectedly 17 months later, his successor president Pompidou declared solemnly: “France is a widow”.