When Trust Falters
“The sobriety of speech heightens the relief of one’s bearing. Nothing enhances authority better than silence — the splendor of the strong, and the refuge of the weak.” — Charles de Gaulle, The Edge of the Sword, 1932

The first four installments of this series followed a precise pattern: that of a counter accelerating, first toward revenge, then toward peace. This fifth installment follows a different one, less linear: that of trust, which is not built all at once but through a succession of trials — some successful, like the gamble of Ludwigsburg, Ostpolitik, or the 1983 speech; others more ambiguous, like the denial of December 1989.

What strikes one, in hindsight, is that the Franco-German axis was never truly tested by a disagreement between equals, but rather by moments when one of the two countries got ahead of the other — Germany with Ostpolitik, France with the 1983 speech, then Germany again with reunification. Each time, the partner left behind had to choose between falling in line or falling behind. In 1969 as in 1983, the axis held. In 1989, for the first time since Colombey, it was France that fell behind — a choice whose consequences the sixth installment of this series will fully assess, right up to the relationship as it stands today.

“Our social outlooks, our political commitments, and, who knows, perhaps our characters: everything should, a priori, have kept us apart,” François Mitterrand would write late in life about Helmut Kohl. “We really weren’t made for one another at all,” Kohl would confirm some years later, at a Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung conference[12]. That this Socialist president and this Christian-Democrat chancellor managed to carry the Franco-German relationship and European construction to an unprecedented level in the 1980s and 1990s was anything but a given. Today, rightly, they are counted among the founding fathers of Europe.