France’s moderate Left chose de Gaulle as lesser evil than the paras.

Evidence

On the evening of the 28th the voice of the Front Populaire briefly drowned out all others, with a mass march (500,000 according to L’Humanité; 120,000 according to Le Figaro) to the Place de la République. Apart from Jacques Duclos and the Communists, Mitterrand and Mendès-France—as well as a relic of an earlier, defunct Républic, Edouard Daladier—were conspicuously to the forefront, amid a sea of banners proclaiming “Down with Fascism!” and “Vive la République!” There were abusive shouts of “Hang Massu!” “Send the paras to the factories!” “De Gaulle au musée!” and “La Girafe au zoo!” though in general Simone de Beauvoir detected, regretfully, an unexpected note of respect for de Gaulle. The crowd was also surprisingly good-humoured, not at all in a fighting mood; as Michael Clark notes, they were “no revolutionary cohort; this was no lashing out of popular fury against the Bastilles of tyranny and pride. It was more in the nature of a funeral procession”—certainly an enterrement de première classe for the Fourth Republic. … The theme of “rather de Gaulle than Massu” (in itself bearing echoes from the days of the pre-war Front Populaire), as expressed by Beuve-Méry, the editor of Le Monde, had become the view generally endorsed by the moderate Left of France. In purely practical terms, any physical confrontation with the paras would, said Mollet, “have been a Spanish civil war without the republican army”. — Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Algeria 1954-1962, 902

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to earlier chapters on the Front Populaire heritage and how 1936-era leftist symbols resurfaced against Gaullism. — connects to: The moderate French Left chose de Gaulle over facing civil war with paratroops; The Left’s abortive strike showed it could not mount a counter-coup — Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Algeria 1954-1962, 891

Related

• The moderate French Left chose de Gaulle over facing civil war with paratroops (similarity 0.95)
• The Left’s abortive strike showed it could not mount a counter-coup (similarity 0.84)
• A broad front of ex-ministers formed around Algérie française in 1960. (similarity 0.78)