g selfish interests under cover of higher principles. As a nation which thinks of itself alone as having proclaimed a universal message liberty, equality and fraternity it can only be deeply resentful that the American model of democracy and markets has stolen the show. Its great solo artist of international politics of the post-war era, Charles de Gaulle, didn't give a damn who he annoyed in expressing his `certain view of France' on the world stage. His country must be `dedicated to an exalted and exceptional destiny', and had no value, particularly in the eyes of Frenchmen, without a world responsibility. Others might use less sonorous words, but if anybody expressed France's view of itself, it was the man who saved his nation's honour twice in a lifetime. The tone was set in 1940, when he insisted on his Free French command in London being the only Allied European force not to be integrated under the British. For the next four years, he struck a belligerently autonomous pose, even if his Free French crusade depended on the readiness of his allies to continue fighting. In 1945, he tried to make London choose between Paris and Washington, with predictable results. For more than a decade of the Cold War from 1958, Gaullist Paris presumed to act as a bridge between East and West and denounced the division of Europe, if only because it had been enshrined at the Yalta summit of 1945, to which De Gaulle had not been invited. It insisted on freedom to target friend and foe alike with its nuclear force. In 1963, France vetoed Britain's entry into the European Common Market for the first time, mocking poor Prime Minister Macmillan from across the Channel and acting, in the eyes of London, with almost unbelievable rudeness. A little later, the President simply left the French chair at Common Market meetings empty for months when he didn't like the way the embryonic Community was going. Independence from Washington has been a constant...
