The Week

Cosmopolitan Hastings Banda, Premier of Malawi (née Nyasaland) last week corrected a widespread assumption concerning the fabled nineteenth-century African traveler, Dr. David Livingstone. “He came as a tourist to Malawi,” Banda commented. “He was no more an explorer than I was when I went to London.”

With the sort of unexpected turn she often makes, History has presented, not the military or the diehard Right or the Secret Army underground, but the coal miners, employees of the very mines that de Gaulle himself nationalized in 1946, as the first great domestic challenge to the Fifth Republic: that is, to the personal rule of Charles de Gaulle. When the government’s threat of drafting them into the army failed to shake the miners’ solid ranks and when the regime thereafter hesitated and temporized in obvious indecision, it was clear that de Gaulle’s authoritative prestige, on which the entire regime basically rests, was badly and perhaps permanently hurt.

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Cosmopolitan Hastings Banda, Premier of Malawi (née Nyasaland) last week corrected a widespread assumption concerning the fabled nineteenth-century African traveler, Dr. David Livingstone. “He came as a tourist to Malawi,” Banda commented. “He was no more an explorer than I was when I went to London.”

With the sort of unexpected turn she often makes, History has presented, not the military or the diehard Right or the Secret Army underground, but the coal miners, employees of the very mines that de Gaulle himself nationalized in 1946, as the first great domestic challenge to the Fifth Republic: that is, to the personal rule of Charles de Gaulle. When the government’s threat of drafting them into the army failed to shake the miners’ solid ranks and when the regime thereafter hesitated and temporized in obvious indecision, it was clear that de Gaulle’s authoritative prestige, on which the entire regime basically rests, was badly and perhaps permanently hurt.