![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
Abstract
Based on multi-archival research in France, the United Kingdom, and Germany, this article analyses the Second Berlin Crisis (1958–1963) from a Franco-British perspective which has thus far been neglected. It argues that there was a fundamental divergence between Macmillan and de Gaulle about the nature of the crisis and about the role of their respective countries within the Cold War bipolar order. Thus de Gaulle began already at this stage to implement a revisionist concept of détente, which, by contrast with Macmillan’s own understanding of détente, aimed at progressively calling into question the bipolar division of Europe. The ensuing strategic disagreement between the two men had major repercussions for European integration.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Frédéric Bozo, Leopoldo Nuti, Nicolas Badalassi, Christine Leah, and Andreas Lutsch, as well as Kathryn E. Banks, for their helpful comments and suggestions. The Nuclear Proliferation International History Project held conferences and workshops without which this article would not have been possible.
Notes
1 According to the American strategist William Kaufmann, quoted by Brent Scowcroft, foreword to Berlin 1961: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Most Dangerous Place on Earth, by Frederick Kempe (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2011): ‘Berlin was the worst moment of the Cold War. Although I was deeply involved in the Cuban Missile Crisis, I personally thought that the Berlin confrontation, especially after the Wall went up, where you had Soviet and U.S. tanks literally facing one another with guns pointed, was a more dangerous situation.’
2 Lawrence Freedman, Kennedy’s Wars: Berlin, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Georges-Henri Soutou, La guerre de cinquante ans: le conflit Est-Ouest, 1943–1990 (Paris: Fayard, 2001), 367–80; Gerhard Wettig, Chruschtschows Berlin-Krise 1958 bis 1963: Drohpolitik und Mauerbau (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 2006); Vladislav Zubok, ‘Khrushchev and the Berlin Crisis (1958–1962),’ Cold War International History Project, Working Paper no. 6 (Washington, DC: Wilson Centre, 1993); Vladislav Zubok and Konstantin Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).
3 John P. S. Gearson and Kori N. Schake, eds., The Berlin Wall Crisis: Perspectives on Cold War Alliances (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); Marc Trachtenberg, A Constructed Peace: The Making of the European Settlement, 1945–1963 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 251–82.
4 The British and French policies towards the Berlin Crisis have been studied separately. On the British policy, there are two monographs, John P.S. Gearson, Harold Macmillan and the Berlin Wall Crisis, 1958–1962: The Limits of Interests and Force (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998); Kitty Newman, Macmillan, Khrushchev and the Berlin Crisis, 1958–1960 (London: Routledge, 2007). By contrast, the French policy has not been studied in detail yet: Cyril Buffet, ‘De Gaulle, the Bomb and Berlin: How to Use a Political Weapon,’ in The Berlin Wall Crisis, ed. Gearson and Schake, 73–95; Georges-Henri Soutou, ‘Paris als Nutznießer des erfolglosen Wiener Gipfels,’ in Der Wiener Gipfel 1961: Kennedy – Chruschtschow, ed. Stefan Karner (Innsbruck: Studien-Verlag, 2011), 185–203; Maurice Vaïsse, La grandeur: politique étrangère du général de Gaulle, 1958–1969 (Paris: Fayard, 1998), 267–83.
5 Among other examples, Newman, Macmillan, Khrushchev and the Berlin Crisis; Trachtenberg, A Constructed Peace.
6 This article is based on some of the conclusions of the author’s PhD thesis ‘The Great Schism: France, Britain and the Euro-Atlantic Issues, 1957-1963’ (PhD thesis, University of Paris III-Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2014).
7 Entry of 9 March 1959, in The Macmillan Diaries, vol. II, prime minister and After, 1957–1966, ed. Peter Catterall (London: Macmillan, 2011), 204 – hereafter, the Macmillan Diaries will be abbreviated as HMD.
8 Gearson, Harold Macmillan and the Berlin Wall Crisis, 48–54.
9 This expression was used by Macmillan in a heated conversation with a member of de Gaulle’s Private Office: Note of the Presidency for the Minister of Foreign Affairs, not signed, Paris, 16 March 1959, volume 684, 5 AG 1, French National Archives, Pierrefitte-sur-Seine (hereafter, FNA). All translations from the French or German documents are mine. See also Rumbold’s record of his conversation with Laloy, Geneva, 21 July 1959, FO 371/145619, United Kingdom National Archives, Kew (hereafter, TNA).
10 On Live Oak, read Gregory W. Pedlow, ‘Three Hats for Berlin: General Lauris Norstad and the Second Berlin Crisis, 1958–62,’ in The Berlin Wall Crisis, ed. Gearson and Schake, 175–98.
11 Gearson, Harold Macmillan and the Berlin Wall Crisis, 185–90.
12 A fuller essay on the French contribution to Live Oak will be published soon by the author of this article.
13 Note du Service d’Europe centrale, ‘action sur l’autoroute de Berlin. Planification de l’emploi d’une division,’ de Carbonnel to Debré, 15 June 1961, Secrétariat Général – dossier Berlin, vol. 83 (hereafter SG-83), Archives du Ministère des Affaires Etrangères, La Courneuve (hereafter AMAE); General Olié (chef d’État-Major général de la défense nationale) to Michel Debré (prime minister), 16 June 1961, SG-83, AMAE.
14 Leusse (NATO-Paris) to Lucet, 15 September 1961 (on instructions to Norstad), SG-83, AMAE.
15 Soutou, ‘Paris als Nutznießer des erfolglosen Wiener Gipfels,’ 198–9.
16 In a meeting on 25 July 1961 with his French counterpart, Pierre Messmer, the British Minister of Defence Harold Watkinson declared that ‘the full implementation of the LIVE OAK Plans seemed most unlikely’; Messmer answered that ‘any plan that was finally made needed to be clearly laid down and of the sort which could be put into force at once’; then, he defended the usefulness of ‘para commando type operations’ to ‘blow up any barricades the Russians might try to construct’ (meeting Messmer / Watkinson, DEFE 13/138, UKNA). This Franco-British difference became even more apparent when the potential use of nuclear weapons in the event of a Berlin blockade came to be discussed in four-power talks (UK-US-France-FRG), in 1962 (see note 42).
17 Letter to Eisenhower, 11 March 1959, in Charles de Gaulle, Lettres, notes et carnets, juin 1958-novembre 1970 (Paris: R. Laffont, 2010) – hereafter DG-LNC –, 133–5.
18 Entry of 10 March 1959, HMD, 204–5; see also the records of the tripartite meeting in Rambouillet, Eisenhower / Macmillan / de Gaulle and Debré, 20 December 1959 and Macmillan / de Gaulle conversation in the Elysée, 21 December 1959, PREM 11/2991, UKNA.
19 London attacked the EEC, a customs union with a Common External Tariff, as discriminatory towards the European countries that did not participate in it. The FTA was supposed to mitigate this trade discrimination.
20 Macmillan to Lloyd, 28 November 1958, PREM 11/2532, UKNA. For a list of the occurrences of this phrase in Macmillan’s papers and minutes, see Jeffrey Giauque, Grand Designs and Visions of Unity: The Atlantic Powers and the Reorganization of Western Europe, 1955–1963 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 267, n. 99.
21 Meeting of Macmillan held at 10 Downing Street, with a delegation of the Economic League for European Cooperation, 10 June 1959, PREM 11/3002, UKNA.
22 The Permanent Under-Secretary of State at the Foreign Office, Frederick R. Hoyer Millar, had exactly the same analysis of this as Macmillan (Hoyer Millar to Lloyd, 25 May 1959, FO 371/145617, UKNA). By contrast, the British Ambassador in France, Gladwyn Jebb, tried to convey his impression that there was something more about French ‘rigidity’ regarding Berlin than ‘the curious love affair between Chancellor Adenauer and General de Gaulle!’ (Jebb to Lloyd, 9 April 1959, FO 371/145617, UKNA).
23 The British diplomat Bernard Ledwidge, after working in West Berlin at the time of the crisis, became a historian and made Macmillan’s vision his own (see John P.S. Gearson, ‘British Policy and the Berlin Wall Crisis 1958–1961 – Witness Seminar,’ Contemporary Record 6, no. 1 (1992): 107–77). Read also James Ellison, Threatening Europe: Britain and the Creation of the European Community, 1955–58 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), 212–14; Newman, Macmillan, Khrushchev and the Berlin Crisis, 43. For a slightly different narrative, see Eckart Conze, Die gaullistische Herausforderung: Die deutsch-französischen Beziehungen in der amerikanischen Europapolitik 1958–1963 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1995), 79–87: although Conze, in the title of a subchapter, speaks of ‘a quid pro quo’ involving Berlin and the FTA without bringing to bear compelling evidence, his analysis of the French Berlin policy is more nuanced than this title leads one to expect. For a more accurate account of the Bad Kreuznach meeting, see Giauque, Grand Designs, 63–4 and 86–8.
24 The linkage between Berlin and the FTA does not appear anywhere in the French minutes of the meeting (Documents diplomatiques français (published archives of the French Foreign Ministry, hereafter DDF), 1958-II, doc. no. 370 and 378), neither in the German documents that the author of this article could consult (Blankenhorn to Auswärtiges Amt, no. 980, 12 November 1958; no. 999 and 1002, 17 November; no. 1031, 24 November – respectively conversations with Joxe, Couve de Murville, and de Gaulle, to prepare the Bad Kreuznach meeting –, B130, vol. 8411A, Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amts, Berlin – hereafter PA AA); moreover, the agreement between de Gaulle and Adenauer regarding the European issue occurred in the morning of 26 November, that is to say before the Berlin topic came up, in the afternoon’s session; last, de Gaulle’s speech regarding Berlin consisted in encouraging the West Germans to show both resolve and restraint … the French leader’s advice was to ‘wait and see’ and not to decide anything before the Soviet note arrived. If the principle of strategic solidarity between the two countries neighbouring the Rhine was recognised, de Gaulle then exposed a long-term vision of the future of Europe in which the East should be integrated: ‘What is needed is an agreement, in Europe, in which new elements (the East) would participate and that would make us independent from the Americans.’ It is, therefore, impossible to see this as an alignment of de Gaulle’s position along Adenauer’s, as Macmillan believed.
25 On the French decision-making regarding the FTA, read Laurent Warlouzet, Le choix de la CEE par la France: l’Europe économique en débat de Mendès-France à de Gaulle, 1955–1969 (Paris: Comité pour l’histoire économique et financière de la France, 2011).
26 Franco-German conversations, 3–4 March, part II, DDF, 1959-I, no. 131.
27 Gearson, Harold Macmillan and the Berlin Wall Crisis, 36.
28 Ellison, Threatening Europe, 213.
29 Therefore, contrary to what Ellison suggests, Macmillan did not keep silent in front of Adenauer about the connection he saw between Berlin and the FTA (record of meeting between Macmillan and Adenauer, 12–13 March 1959, doc. 3, PREM 11/2676; record of Adenauer’s visit to the UK, 17–19 November 1959, doc. 4–5, PREM 11/2714, UKNA).
30 This rationale appears in Macmillan’s diary as early as 28 November 1959 (HMD, 172–3), that is to say the day following Khrushchev’s ultimatum, and two days after the Bad Kreuznach meeting.
31 DDF, 1958-II, no. 370.
32 Conversation between Macmillan and one member of de Gaulle’s Private Office in Paris, 16 March 1959, vol. 684, 5 AG 1, FNA.
33 Chauvel (London) to Couve de Murville (conversation with Lloyd), 22 October, DDF, 1959-II, no. 199. Macmillan, from the beginning, supported what he called ‘a policy of contact’ with Moscow (record of a conversation with Macmillan, London, no author, 26 January 1959, vol. 684, 5 AG 1, FNA). Thus, he wanted a summit with Khrushchev as soon as possible, comparing personal diplomacy to ‘social life in England’: ‘if there was a prospect of grouse shooting after the pheasant season had ended you were less likely to quarrel with your host’ (Macmillan / Chauvel, French embassy in London, 4 November 1959, FO 371/145620). After the Western summit of December 1959, he was glad that the principle of a ‘series’ of summits had been accepted by his counterparts (Macmillan to Lloyd, 22 December 1959, FO 371/152095, UKNA).
34 Franco-British meetings in Paris, 9–10 March, part I, DDF, 1959-I, no. 146; letter to Macmillan, 20 October 1959, and letters to Eisenhower, 20 and 26 October 1959, DG-LNC, 178–84.
35 Jean-Raymond Tournoux, La tragédie du Général (Paris: Plon, 1967), 364–5.
36 Throughout the crisis, de Gaulle repeatedly went out of his way to convey his certitude that there would be no war: Chauvel (London) to Couve de Murville, 29 November 1958 (on the German record of the de Gaulle-Adenauer meeting in Bad Kreuznach), f. 180–1, Secrétariat Général – Entretiens et messages (hereafter SGE), vol. 6, AMAE; conversation Jebb / de Gaulle, Paris, 25 April 1959, FO 371/145617; Rumbold to Shuckburgh, on a conversation between de Gaulle and Eden, 2 July 1962, FO 371/163499, UKNA (‘the General said that the Russians seemed to him to be quiet, and that he was struck by the ‘absence de sens guerrier’). See also the testimonies of two high-ranking French diplomats: regarding Berlin, ‘I find the General at his firmest; he has instilled this firmness in all the French services, including the Quai d’Orsay’ (entry of 9 February 1959), in Hervé Alphand, L’Étonnement d’être: journal 1939–1973 (Paris: Fayard, 1977), 301; ‘All that Berlin crisis … it was terrible! We were not scared of war, but of defeat!’ [defeat meaning here the loss of West Berlin, with all its consequences], Jean Laloy, interviewed by François Duchêne, 4 March 1987, 11–12, Historical Archives of the European Union (HAEU).
37 Conversation de Gaulle / Adenauer, 6 September 1962, DDF, 1962-II, no. 67.
38 In a conversation with Dulles (15 December 1958, Pactes 1950–60, vol. 35, AMAE), de Gaulle declared: ‘If Khrushchev says “there will be war”, we must say the same thing as him. That’s the best way of avoiding war.’
39 Couve de Murville to Seydoux (Bonn), 11 March 1959 (on Franco-British meetings in Paris of 9–10 March), DDF, 1959-I, no. 147.
40 Meetings de Gaulle / Adenauer, Bad Kreuznach, 26–27 November, DDF, 1958-II, no. 370 and 378.
41 Conversations between de Gaulle and Vinogradov, 2–6 March, DDF, 1959-I, no. 120 and 136.
42 ‘Nothing could be more dangerous than to give the Russians the impression that the West would not fight a nuclear war over Berlin’ declared Geoffroy de Courcel (French Ambassador in London) to Philip de Zulueta, Macmillan’s Private Secretary (27 November 1962, FO 371/163499, UKNA), thus capturing a permanent feature of the French policy regarding Berlin: the reliance on nuclear deterrence to defend West Berlin. This was expressed both at the military and political levels: General Olié to Debré, 16 June 1961, SG-83, AMAE; Couve de Murville / Rusk, New York, 7 October 1962, f. 48–72, SGE-17, AMAE; this was also the taproot of the joint Franco-German resistance, in June-July 1962, against the Anglo-American inclination to postpone the use of nuclear weapons in the event of a Berlin crisis: see the confidential quadripartite consultations, well documented in SG-83, AMAE – for example the note regarding the ‘phases of a conflict over Berlin’, Service d’Europe centrale, 27 July 1962, in which the author recommends, against the ‘strong [British] reluctance towards any wide-ranging military action’, to ‘play more energetically the card of deterrence, right from the beginning [of a crisis], as the swiftness and sweep of our first reactions could be a means of giving pause for thought to the Soviets and of dissuading them from moving forward’.
43 Conversation between Home and Courcel, 13 November 1962, FO 371/163499, UKNA.
44 Entry of 4 February 1959 (discussion with Dulles in London), HMD, 189–190; conversation Eisenhower / Macmillan in Camp David, 20 March 1959, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958–60, vol. VII-2, 845–7. On the considerable impact of the First World War experience upon Macmillan’s life and worldview, see D. R. Thorpe, Supermac: The Life of Harold Macmillan (London: Chatto & Windus, 2010), 46–59. Wounded five times, he took part in the battles of Loos and the Somme.
45 Visit of the prime minister and Foreign Secretary to Paris, 9–10 March 1959, doc. 2 (meeting with Debré and Couve de Murville), FO 371/145616, UKNA.
46 In the Franco-British conversation in Matignon, 9 March 1959, vol. 684, 5 AG 1, FNA, Macmillan said: ‘We must avoid bluffing. Khrushchev is the only man with whom it is worth speaking.’
47 Macmillan repeatedly spoke of ‘moving children to Canada’, supposedly to make sure that his interlocutors (Adenauer or de Gaulle) realised the dangers of preparing for a war over Berlin (for example, conversation between Macmillan and one member of de Gaulle’s Private Office in Paris, 16 March 1959, vol. 684, 5 AG 1, FNA).
48 Franco-British conversations in London, 13–14 April, part I, DDF, 1959-I, no. 225; see also the British record, 13 April 1959, §10–18, PREM 11/2701, UKNA.
49 Couve de Murville to Seydoux (Bonn), 11 March, DDF, 1959-I, no. 147.
50 Conversation Dulles / Macmillan, 4 February 1959, 9 p.m., PREM 11/2876, UKNA; visit of the prime minister and Foreign Secretary to Paris, 9–10 March 1959, doc. 4 (Couve de Murville / Lloyd), FO 371/145616, UKNA.
51 In order not to ‘drive Germany to despair’, ‘we must avoid making her feel that she is cut in half for ever’, advised de Gaulle in a meeting with the Italian Segni, prime minister and Pella, Foreign Secretary, Paris, 20 March, DDF, 1959-I, doc. no. 174.
52 For de Gaulle’s concern about the West German morale and ‘neutralist’ temptations, see Blankenhorn (Paris) to Auswärtiges Amt, no. 1031, 24 November 1958 (conversation with de Gaulle), B130, vol. 8411A, PA AA.
53 Hancock to Rumbold, 29 May 1959, FO 371/145618, UKNA (private conversations in Geneva with Soutou); Rumbold’s record of his private conversation with Laloy, Geneva, 21 July 1959, FO 371/145619, UKNA; note on the ‘present state of the Berlin affair’, Froment-Meurice, 10 December 1962, vol. 685, 5 AG 1, FNA.
54 Note on the second meeting Thompson-Gromyko, Laloy, 20 January 1962, f. 17–19, Cabinet du Ministre, vol. 373, AMAE. See also Franco-British conversations (Shuckburgh/Lucet, Laloy, Soutou), 20 October 1961, f. 21–7, Europe/Grande-Bretagne (1961–70), vol. 261, AMAE.
55 Chauvel (London) to Paris (discussion with Hoyer Millar after the de Gaulle/Macmillan meeting in Birch Grove), 1 December 1961, SG-83, AMAE.
56 Franco-British conversations in Paris, 9–10 March, part II (de Gaulle / Macmillan), DDF, 1959-I, no. 146. This was an idea that the French constantly repeated: Western conference of 19–21 December in Paris, part I (Eisenhower, Macmillan, de Gaulle, Adenauer), DDF, 1959-II, no. 295; Ministerial meeting of the six Foreign Ministers of the EEC, 25–26 January, DDF, 1960-I, no. 35.
57 Franco-British conversations in London, 13–14 April, part I, DDF, 1959-I, no. 225.
58 Note of the Direction des affaires politiques (Jean Laloy), ‘East and West’, 21 November 1961, vol. 685, 5 AG 1, FNA.
59 The French agreed to go quite far in the direction of a de facto political neutralisation of West Berlin, once the non-negotiable character of the Allied rights in West Berlin was admitted by the Soviets and the framework of negotiation was in this way precisely delimited (DDF, 1959-I, no. 225, part I; Jebb to Lloyd, 9 April 1959, FO 371/145617, UKNA – report of a conversation with Laloy).
60 Conversation Dulles / Macmillan, 4 February 1959, 9 p.m., PREM 11/2876, UKNA. This conversation is all the more significant as it took place two days after Macmillan had learnt that the Soviets accepted his proposal for a visit to Khrushchev in the Soviet Union (entry of 2 February 1959, HMD, 188).
61 In a somewhat desultory discussion, Macmillan did not precisely define what he meant by ‘German neutralisation’, either at a juridical level or in terms of the timeframe he envisaged. The impact upon NATO was not mentioned either.
62 Toshihiko Aono, ‘“It Is Not Easy for the United States to Carry the Whole Load”: Anglo-American Relations during the Berlin Crisis, 1961–1962,’ Diplomatic History 34, no. 2 (2010): 325–56.
63 Trachtenberg, A Constructed Peace, 322–51.
64 Ibid., 339–41; Andreas Lutsch, ‘From Bonn to Valhalla? Nuclear Assistance and West German Nuclear Ambitions, 1960–1963’ (paper presented at the international conference ‘The Franco-German Duo and Nuclear Deterrence’, University of South Brittany, Lorient, France, 30 June–2 July 2016).
65 Chauvel to Couve de Murville, 29 November, DDF, 1961-II, no. 196.
66 The principle of an independent nuclear strategy for France was publicly formulated by de Gaulle in his 3 November 1959 speech at the Ecole militaire, and a first nuclear test was conducted in February 1960. See Beatrice Heuser, NATO, Britain, France, and the FRG: Nuclear Strategies and Forces for Europe, 1949–2000 (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1997), 107–8.
67 Meetings of Birch Grove, de Gaulle / Macmillan, 24–25 November, DDF, 1961-II, no. 192.
68 Trachtenberg, A Constructed Peace, 379–98.
69 On the revisionism of de Gaulle’s foreign policy, read Frédéric Bozo, ‘France, “Gaullism”, and the Cold War,’ in The Cambridge History of the Cold War, vol. 2, Crises and Détente, ed. Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd A. Westad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 158–78.
70 Meetings de Gaulle / Khrushchev, Paris, 23 March-2 April, parts II, VI and VII, DDF, 1960-I, no. 146.
71 For more details about the Franco-Soviet relations during that period of time, read Thomas Gomart, Double détente: les relations franco-soviétiques de 1958 à 1964 (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2003).
72 In his conversations with Khrushchev, de Gaulle was clear on his refusal to recognise East Germany as an equivalent of the FRG. By contrast with the Soviet leader’s thesis of the two Germanys, de Gaulle referred to ‘the existence of the Republic of Pankow’ as ‘an artificial fact’ that ‘did not result from its inhabitants’ freely expressed consent. Therefore, there was no question of enshrining this fait accompli’ in a peace treaty or of accepting to consider the German division ‘as definitive’.
73 ‘De Gaulle’s policy on the German question’, Hartlieb, Bonn, 9 November 1959, B24, vol. 294, PA AA.
74 ‘Instructions for the new FRG ambassador in Paris, Manfred Klaiber’, part II on ‘France and the German Question’, 17 September 1963, f. 34–36, B24, vol. 475, PA AA.
75 Benedikt Schoenborn, La mésentente apprivoisée: De Gaulle et les Allemands, 1963–1969 (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2007), 319.
76 Note of Norman Brook, ‘East-West Relations’, 20 August 1959, PREM 11/2687, UKNA.
77 This method is apparent in the meeting that took place on 23 July 1962 between Home and Gromyko (the British report, intended for American and German diplomats, was transmitted by the latter to the French – note of the Direction des Affaires politiques, 26 July 1962, f. 211–6, SGE-15, AMAE); see also the analysis by Chauvel in his message to Couve de Murville, 29 November, DDF, 1961-II, no. 196.
78 In the same vein, in his press conference of 4 February 1965, the French president would strikingly call the German question ‘the European question par excellence’, Charles de Gaulle, Discours et messages, vol. 4 (Paris: Plon, 1970), 338.
79 ‘Notes au sujet de l’Europe,’ 17 July 1961, §3, DG-LNC, 381–2.
80 Meetings of Birch Grove, de Gaulle / Macmillan, 24–25 November, parts I-II, DDF, 1961-II, no. 192.
81 See Jean Laloy, interviewed by François Duchêne, 4 March 1987, 11–12, HAEU: ‘de Gaulle’s extreme resistance regarding the Berlin issue’ was not motivated ‘by anti-Sovietism. He had the idea that the Americans were going to give up, and that the Germans would then turn to him, as being the most reliable ally. At that moment, he could revive his plan to make Europe a counterweight to the United States and the USSR.’
82 Meetings of Birch Grove, de Gaulle / Macmillan, DDF, 1961-II, no. 192.
83 Conversation between de Gaulle, Adenauer and Schröder, Paris, 9 December 1961, f. 300–6, SGE-15, AMAE.
84 Meetings in Rhöndorf and Bonn, 20 May, DDF, 1961-I, no. 249; see also the meetings between de Gaulle and the President Lübke in Paris, 20–23 June, DDF, 1961-I, no. 300, during which the French leader repeated his idea that the consolidation of the unity of purpose among the Six member-states of the European Community would force the Russians ‘to keep quieter’.
85 Summit of the Six in Bonn, 18 July, DDF, 1961-II, no. 36; telegram of Couve de Murville, 24 July, DDF, 1961-II, no. 47.
86 Meetings of Champs-sur-Marne, de Gaulle / Macmillan, 2–3 June, DDF, 1962-I, no. 172.
87 Ibid.; see also a similar remark by de Gaulle, in front of Adenauer, 5 September, DDF, 1962-II, no. 67.
88 Macmillan / de Gaulle conversation, Champs-sur-Marne, 3 June 1962, f. 18, PREM 11/3775, UKNA.
89 Franco-German meeting in Rambouillet (29–30 July), part III, DDF, 1960-II, no. 54.
90 De Margerie (Bonn) to Couve de Murville, 27 June, DDF, 1963-I, no. 224.