In re: Right v. Charles de Gaulle

Archduke Otto in this issue of national review presents an able and persuasive brief for Charles de Gaulle. It derives an exceptional interest from the fact that Otto, as heir to the house of Habsburg, is the prime living embodiment of the tradition that Charles de Gaulle integrally shares: of the ancestral, Christian Europe “of Fatherlands” that arose from the ashes of the Roman Empire.

Otto’s brief, like all ex parte presentations, edits its data with an eye on the interests of the client. To offer as sole disproof of the charge that de Gaulle has moved toward dictatorship one’s ability to buy at a French newsstand a journal attacking de Gaulle is a synecdoche too frail to carry its logical burden. The concentration camps cannot be so lightly brushed away, nor the thousands of arrests by purely administrative action, nor the ruthless exploitation of the government’s TV monopoly, nor the violations of the Constitution. Nor, for that matter, the suppression of not a few issues of those journals that routinely appear on the newsstands.

JB

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James Burnham

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Archduke Otto in this issue of national review presents an able and persuasive brief for Charles de Gaulle. It derives an exceptional interest from the fact that Otto, as heir to the house of Habsburg, is the prime living embodiment of the tradition that Charles de Gaulle integrally shares: of the ancestral, Christian Europe “of Fatherlands” that arose from the ashes of the Roman Empire.

Otto’s brief, like all ex parte presentations, edits its data with an eye on the interests of the client. To offer as sole disproof of the charge that de Gaulle has moved toward dictatorship one’s ability to buy at a French newsstand a journal attacking de Gaulle is a synecdoche too frail to carry its logical burden. The concentration camps cannot be so lightly brushed away, nor the thousands of arrests by purely administrative action, nor the ruthless exploitation of the government’s TV monopoly, nor the violations of the Constitution. Nor, for that matter, the suppression of not a few issues of those journals that routinely appear on the newsstands.