Charles De Gaulle and the Founding of the Fifth Republic in France
Lecture delivered February 1977
Kenyon College
Gambier, Ohio
The last conversation between Charles de Gaulle and André Malraux took place about a year before the General died in November 1970. They had collaborated politically since they met in 1945, when de Gaulle headed the French provisional government in the aftermath of the liberation of their country by Allied troops. The history of that meeting and that collaboration interests me, but it’s not what I’m here to talk about. I intend to describe their collaboration on the level of ideas, not history. Because they both looked at politics as Frenchmen thinking of France, I will approach them from two angles. First, describe their analyses of what they saw as France’s two major problems: the French national character and modern technology. Then I’ll describe their strategies for mitigating those problems in terms of epistemology, ethics, and politics. Their political strategies were of two kinds: institution-making and myth-making. You’ll notice that I spend more time on de Gaulle than on Malraux; that’s because I’ll be giving a lecture on Malraux tonight.
Those of you who have read de Gaulle’s Memoirs of Hope know de Gaulle’s assessment of the French national character. His opinion there remained unchanged since at least the mid-1930s, when he called the French “changeable, uncertain, contradictory,” with “plenty of passion but little constancy.” “Each Frenchman,” he wrote at that time, “holds too much to his independence,” a habit that makes “common action unequal and uneasy.” The “dominant and contradictory passions of the French in each [historical] period” are “the desire for privilege and the taste for equality”–a remark Malraux quotes in Felled Oaks.
These inclinations worsened in the twentieth century for spiritual and political reasons. “Incertitude marks our period,” he wrote in 1932: denials, losses, scandals, and deceptions “have shaken the established order.” This weakening of morale affects and is affected by the lack of political direction; parliamentarianism, the rule of the political parties, yields what might be called a stagnant instability—lots of orating, careers made and ruined, but no consistent policy. This twofold unsteadiness will bring danger in wartime—the disaster of 1940, when Nazi Germany conquered France in a matter of days—and mediocrity in peacetime.
Still, de Gaulle remained a republican. He didn’t regard Frenchmen as corrupt, or at least entirely so. During two world wars he saw their “instinctive will to survive and to triumph.” That instinct is superior to the conscious thought of France’s parliamentarians. Good republican rulers first of all must acknowledge the underlying moral strength of the French and then guide it rightly.
Malraux’s analysis of the French national character resembled de Gaulle’s. In 1932, thirteen years before they met, Malraux asserted that “there exists in France a psychological individualism and an ethical individualism, which are nearly always confused.. The first sets its value on ‘difference,” on the unique character of ‘each one'”—this roughly equivalent to what de Gaulle called the desire for privilege); “the second on the absolute right of ‘action’ demanded by the individual”—or, as de Gaulle put it, “the taste for equality.”
Malraux agreed that certain things about the moral atmosphere prevailing in the twentieth century magnified these characteristics. These were the crisis of belief, but less as the crisis of French politics as the crisis of Europe, of Western civilization. In his 1926 book The Temptation of the West, one character finds “an essential absurdity” “at the center of European man,” who wants not only to love—to lose his individuality—but to be loved—to please his individuality. Political scientists have described what they call the ‘whipsawing’ of French life: the oscillation between extreme individualism and frantic groupishness. Malraux finds the civilizational foundation of this national trait in the individualism that insists on self-importance while unable to ignore the opinions of other selves.
There is thus a stubborn theatricality about Western man. The events of May 1968, when student demonstrators allied with leftist trade union groups to challenge de Gaulle’s regime, seem to exemplify this will-to-drama. An extremely British historian named Anthony Hartley provided this unenthusiastic account of ‘The Events’: “The one-day general strike on May 13 was rapidly followed by strikes and occupations all over France, until, by the end of the week, the entire country was paralyzed…. [At the Sorbonne], as anarchists, Maoists, and Trotskists peddled their ideological wares, and groups of students argued about every subject on earth, others among them coupled on the floor of the corridors underneath a banner proclaiming, ‘We fear nothing, we have The Pill….’ ‘Contestation’ was the order of the day, and the symbolic ‘happenings’ staged by the students were more decorously imitated in factories and offices.” America’s own ‘Movement’ types had some drama kings and queens among them—you remember Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin—but the French seemed to have more yeast in them, with less conscious self-parody. One gets the sinking feeling that those students really imagined themselves scandalous and shocking, instead of merely inane.
A difficult people to govern, then. And the crisis of May ’68 illustrated the second of the two problems seen by de Gaulle and Malraux. Malraux said that May ’68 was a “crisis of civilization” provoked by technology, by modern science, and de Gaulle concurred. De Gaulle had written on technology many times, beginning in 1934 with the publication of his book, Towards a Professional Army. There he emphasizes the worthwhile characteristics of modern tank warfare, saying that it resuscitates many of the ancient virtues of warriors—most importantly, battlefield leadership and therefore the need of character in the military leader.
But de Gaulle also knew that technology can lend itself to modern tyranny, the very opposite of character. Hitler defeated France with superior tanks and planes. Stalin’s underling, Molotov, conceived himself as it were technologically; he “was and wanted to be only a cogwheel in an implacable mechanism.” De Gaulle saw that the machine is power in modernity. In his famous radio appeal to the French of June 18, 1940 he insisted: “Crushed today by a superior mechanical force, we can vanquish in the future by a superior mechanical force. The destiny of the world is there.”
For the next thirty years de Gaulle tried to gain this real power for France, while at the same time knowing, as he said in a 1945 speech, that “the great social and economic problem of our time consists of saving liberty and making it live inside the rigid and bellicose organization that the machine imposes.” In the Bayeux Manifesto of 1946 de Gaulle argued that mechanization makes the state more necessary than ever but also more dangerous, as modern rulers may attempt to turn the nation itself into a sort of machine, accelerating national life to the point where all moderation, all balance is lost, the ‘machine’ whirs out of control, and the tyranny that turned on the ignition key fails. In two 1959 speeches at French universities he described modern man as being “at grips with the universe, that is to say first of all with himself,” a man who wants to “emerge from himself, to accede to that new world where desires remain infinite but where nature ceases to be limited.” For that reason, technology, both in itself and in its psychological effect, hugely increases the human capacity for doing good and for doing evil. Both American-style corporate capitalism and Russian communism are technocratic ideologies in the bad sense–systems of excess, lacking in moderation, and therefore lacking in humanness.
Along these lines, de Gaulle told an interview that May `68 was a revolt “against modern society, against the society of consumption, against mechanized society, whether it be communist in the East or capitalist in the West.” “How to find a human equilibrium for civilization, for the mechanical modern society? There is the great question of the century!”
For Malraux the question was similar. The legendary conqueror, Alexander the Great, symbolizes the West: “Powerless against himself (he kills Clitos), all-powerful against the world.” Since the eighteenth century, science has served this ‘conqueror’ psychology and exaggerated it by its failure—its necessary failure—to answer the fundamental ethical question, ‘What is man doing on the earth?’ In 1937 Malraux said that although “the struggle against nature, the exaltation of the conquest of things by man,” remains “one of the highest traditions of the West, from Robinson Crusoe to the Soviet cinema” (Malraux was friendly with the great Russian cinematographer, Sergei Eisenstein), “we refuse to consider this struggle as a fundamental value.”
Like de Gaulle, Malraux saw the dilemma: in order to protect values other than those of modernity, one needs power, and machines embody power. In the Spanish Civil War, in World War II, and in his talks with rulers as diverse as Nehru and Kennedy, Malraux repeatedly heard two complaints: modernity lacks a supreme value; sheer survival requires continued modernization. At the same time, these necessary means of survival also endanger the nations–not only because nuclear weapons could destroy them, not only because nuclear weapons make such nations as France more dependent upon others for defense, but also because technology threatens the very idea of the nation. Technology gratifies consumption, and the most efficient producers of consumer goods are international, even anti-national corporations.
I said before that the strategies de Gaulle and Malraux devised were ethical and political. Politics derives from ethics, and ethics presupposes an ‘epistemology’–to use a Greek-sounding word invented in the last century–a theory of knowledge. How does one come to know right from wrong?
You probably didn’t think de Gaulle had an epistemology. He did, and he derived it from the writings of the turn-of-the-century French philosopher, Henri Bergson. With Bergson, de Gaulle believed that the mind consists of two faculties: intellect and intuition. Intellect clarifies; it readies conceptions for use but does not produce them. The intuition does that, with its “direct are very often revelations of mystery, not any certain truth. To Malraux, the important thing is to convert these experiences into consciousness; the wider the field of experience, the better. contact” with “the realities”—that is, nature. Intuition is not only the faculty of “profound perception”—profound because it gets beneath the surface of things–it’s also the faculty of “creative impulse” because it links the mind with nature, and nature is not only orderly but ordering. Hence participation in nature via intuition is creative, order-making, as well as realistic; the military leader has a well-developed intuition which gives others “the impression of a natural force which will command events,” although in fact it’s insight into the nature of things which accounts for his success. The leader must also have a well-trained intellect; “the true school of command is general culture,” in which one learns discernment and orderliness. “Behind the victories of Alexander, on always finds Aristotle.”
Malraux’s epistemology is essentially religious or epiphanic; he believed that there are certain moments in one’s life when thins stand revealed as they are. Inasmuch as Malraux was an agnostic, these moments usually reveal mystery, not any certain truth. Malraux seeks to convert these experiences into consciousness; the wider the field of experiences, the better.
Notice that both of these epistemological stances incline toward an active life, not a life of contemplation. De Gaulle aimed at a life of military leadership and eventually statesmanship, Malraux at adventure, then publishing, soldiering (in the Spanish Civil War, and finally politics. For them, doing rivaled thinking in the moral order of rank.
Activity implies ethics: what should one do? The chief Gaullist virtue is “character”—”the virtue of difficult times,” the moral equivalent of intuition. The man of character realizes himself in struggling with a difficulty; psychologically, his reward is “the austere joy of being responsible.” “If the affair succeeds he distributes advantage generously and, in the case of a reverse, he does not allow reproach to descend on any but himself.” He has little taste for revenge; in the dozens of speeches de Gaulle made during the war he mentioned revenge only two or three times. His man of character recalls Aristotle’s magnanimous or great-souled man, described in Book IV, chapter 3 of the Nicomachean Ethics. Notice how alien he is to almost everything you believe or aspire to. The man of character is benevolent to his followers, but not compassionate. Indeed, when de Gaulle toured newly-liberated French cities in 1945 he spoke “not of pity, which none wanted, but of aspiration and pride.” The man of character may desire glory, but popularity means nothing to him. He’s not a ‘nice guy.’ He is not ‘sensitive.’ He doesn’t crave love. A republican, yes, but a republican aristocrat. Men and women of democratic temperament will likely find him off-putting, even offensive. But they may find that they need him, in difficult times.
If character is the moral equivalent of intuition, moderation is the moral equivalent of intellect. It tells this strong-willed man of character when to stop. In his 1938 book, France and Her Army, de Gaulle criticizes Napoleon because “each victory excited even more [his] ambition, exaggerating his projects, pushing them beyond the boundary of the possible. There comes a day when the proportion between the means and the ends breaks, and all the contrivances of genius are in vain.” “Souls, like matter, have their limits,” and Napoleon exhausted the French. As you will remember, this was de Gaulle’s criticism of modern tyranny, as well; without moderation, perhaps this man of character would become a near-tyrant. As a republican aristocrat, de Gaulle wants to rule by the consent of the governed. Citizens who share in rule assume responsibility for themselves, and “one cannot be responsible if one is not free.” He went so far as to say, “We would prefer the fall of atomic bombs to the loss of liberty.”
Malraux also praises strength of character and responsibility, finding it in the great Spanish painter, Goya. “To allow his genius to become apparent to himself it was necessary that he should dare to give up aiming to please.” More than de Gaulle, whose man of character finds strength in moments of solitude, Malraux esteems fraternity. But he never descended to what he consistently regarded as democratic sentimentality. Malraux reports with evident approval that de Gaulle “reproached in Saint Augustine the absence of political spirit, for having compared it to an assembly of brigands.”
De Gaulle thought that “our times are hard for authority”—hard for political life—because conventions are doubted and little “taste for deference” remains. He also thought such attitudes could not last. “These political animals have need of organization, that I to say of order and of leaders.” De Gaulle is unmodern in calling man a political animal, but neither was he straightforwardly an Aristotelian. For Aristotle the political community arises from simpler communities, both depending on the human capacity for speech and reason. De Gaulle’s epistemology doesn’t ascribe to speech and reason the power of apprehending nature; intuition does that, assisted by the intellect, which clarifies intuition. At most one might argue that Bergsonian intuition parallels the capacity for noesis seen in the older philosophers. If so, it is a sort of apprehension that knows movement as readily as stable forms, which leads to activity as much as to contemplation, and to a politics that emphasizes the importance of executive action as much as legislative debate and judicial deliberation.
Gaullist politics aims at grandeur, which appeals to “the obscure wish of men” who are imperfect, and therefore “accept collective action with a view that it leads to something great.” The Gaullist citizen augments himself through participation in such action. This contrasts with the explanation of politics seen in the ‘social contract’ theories, which often regard political life as an unfortunate necessity. I am tempted to call it a political Nietzscheism, but I resist that temptation in fear of succumbing to death by untenable paradox.
In light of all this, de Gaulle asserted that “sentiment alone does not suffice for building political constructions.” And although at one point in his Memoirs of Hope he announces that the voice of the people is for him the voice of God, four pages later he adds, apropos of his strategy for ridding France of its now-burdensome colony, Algeria, “I would lead the game in such a way as to accord little by little the sentiment of the French with the interest of France, while evading whatever would rupture national fidelity…. It is only progressively, by utilizing each concussion as the occasion to go further, that I would obtain a current of consent strong enough to gain all. Without ever changing course, it was therefore necessary to maneuver until the moment when, decidedly, good sense would pierce the mist.” What the statesman’s intuition, intellect, and character enable him to see clearly, citizens must be brought to see in good time. His prudence derives from thinking, theirs from experience guided by the elevating of their minds toward the good of their country.
Employed in matters foreign and domestic, de Gaulle’s tactic served two strategies directed at the founding of a new republican regime in France: institution-making and myth-making. In studying the Fifth Republic’s institutions, you will see how de Gaulle attempted to reestablish the link between the French state and French society, a link that had been broken some two centuries before. He did this first by reestablishing the existence of a state with a real executive branch, as opposed to a state misruled by a collection of parliamentary interest groups. Technology makes a stronger state more necessary than ever for two reasons: parliamentary immobilism might slow technological advance by failing to supply money for research; more important, left on their own, technology and science generally may have no direction other than their own interest. The state, de Gaulle said. must ensure that “concurrently with a scientific and technical formation, pure thought the philosophy that expresses it, the literature which asserts its worth, the arts which illustrate it and also the morality which proceeds from conscience and reason inspire and orient this immense effort of evolution.” The state has responsibility for the country as a whole, beyond the responsibilities of any of the interest groups within it and beyond the sum of their interests.
De Gaulle treats economics the same way, calling economic development “the route that leads us to the summits.” Free enterprise “must not be a rampart of immobilism, but a base for élan, for risk, for development.” De Gaulle again wants to use a modern phenomenon—industrial capitalism–for an unmodern purpose: grandeur. The states provides the power and the overall planning, without controlling all the individual firms, as under socialism. But can such a modern phenomenon—to which de Gaulle adds another, a strong executive branch within a centralized state—really lend itself to unmodern ends? De Gaulle addressed the problem of modern statism. He did so with his notion of “participation.” After After the rebuilding of the French state, the decentralization program called “participation” became de Gaulle’s intended institutional reform. In order to reestablish the link between state and nation, a reformation of the character of French citizenship was indispensable to prevent the newly empowered state from dominating the nation. De Gaulle had first to wrest power from the interest groups and empower the state; he then tried to redistribute part of that power to the citizens, to men as Frenchmen, instead of to men as business operators or laborers.
The name “participation” came late, but decentralization—reflecting, as it does, the Gaullist esteem for individual and collective responsibility—formed part of de Gaulle’s plan for reforming the French army as far back as the early 1930s. During and after the war years he spoke o the association of labor, capital, and technology as a third choice between communism and laissez-faire capitalism. Under the Fifth Republic, in 1964, de Gaulle instituted the Commission on Regional Development, whereby the plans and the credit of the state were to be “conjugated with local initiatives and resources.” In 1966 he announced that “in the future and when evolution in its course will reveal the opportunity, we must undoubtedly reunite in a single assembly the representatives of the local collectives with those of the great organisms of the economic and social order to deliberate on affairs of this nature before the National Assembly.” The crisis of May 1968 brought just such an opportunity for decentralization. De Gaulle didn’t urge the economic decentralization he had proposed two ears earlier, instead trying for Senate reform and regional reapportionment. He lost that referendum by five points and resigned the presidency soon afterwards,
The only way de Gaulle could make the interest groups consent to his policies was to get a majority of the population on his side; in modernity, even the interest groups must acquiesce, however reluctantly, to a clear statement by the majority. But the many are disinclined to serve the ends of the few. Modernity, whose soul is egalitarianism, prefers not to serve uncommon purposes. Only an extremely skillful statesman can arrange things otherwise, and one miscalculation can defeat him.
De Gaulle recognized that institutions alone will not suffice to counteract the toxins of egalitarianism. “Without doubt,” he said, “the malaise of souls which results in a civilization dominated by matter would not be cured by whatever regime that there may be.” Only a “change of moral condition, which would make Man responsible instead of being an instrument” could do that. Institution help, but it is “consent which renders the laws fruitful.” Events can push people to consent, but events have meaning only in relations to principles of some sort. And principles seize the imagination by the means of myth. As de Gaulle put it in 1944, one of the two preconditions of French grandeur is republican order; the other is “concentrated ardor which allows building legally and fraternally the edifice of renewal.” Without ardent consent both laws and fraternity will die by force, or perhaps by indifference and the lassitude it brings.
Malraux stated the problem as well as anyone. In 1958, when de Gaulle returned to power, “I did not think that the twentieth century, or France, aimed at the birth of a constitution surrounded by a Roman respect, like that of the United States; I thought that a constitution which made of the referendum a means of government would be made for the people, and not the people for the constitution.”
Any political myth reinforces a claim to rule. De Gaulle founded his claim to rule on le salut public—the public safety, salvation, and welfare, as demonstrated by his actions during World War II and in the crisis over rebellion in France’s Algerian colony in the late 1950s. Malraux defined le salut public as a non-chauvinistic patriotism founded on the idea of “responsibility at the service of liberty” and therefore of authority embodied by the state at the service of liberty. For de Gaulle, liberty and responsibility finally mean the same thing: the moral aspect of that man-sided concept, grandeur. In Felled Oaks Malraux writes that grandeur involves a “harsh rejection of the theatrical.” If the West, especially the modern West, loves theatricality, de Gaulle’s fusion of liberty and responsibility attacks something near the core of people like us. It would end the fragility of our individualism by strengthening that in us which unites us with others without making us vulnerable to their caprices, making our public side public again, our private side private.
No grandeur, though, in an age of skepticism: in 1945 de Gaulle spoke of the need to “give the French people constitutional faith.” Ten years earlier he’d written that “some great national dream” maybe “necessary to a people for sustaining its activity and conserving its cohesion.” This “common hope lessens divergences and gathers together devotions. If the masses in our country today seem to have lost the sentiment of the general interest, the lack of exterior ambitions is perhaps related to this debility.” Or, as he writes in the often-quoted first paragraph of his War Memoirs, “France is really herself only at the first rank; only vast enterprises are capable of compensating for the ferments of dispersion that her people carry in themselves. In short, in my judgment France cannot be France without grandeur.” Hope is the link between the French people and the grandeur of France. The faith—constitutional and extra-constitutional—on which hope depends is a faith in France confirmed, de Gaulle hoped, by the regime’s success in carrying out the “vast enterprise” of détente between the two Cold-War blocs and the simultaneous building up of a Europe of les patries —of the fatherlands—a Europe of federated but still-sovereign peoples extending from the Atlantic to the Urals. This assertion of French independence of action from both sides in the Cold War was intended to give the French consciousness of themselves as a people capable of working toward the morally and politically great task of reconstituting European civilization against the modern forces of hyper-capitalism (which de Gaulle associated with the United States) and modern tyranny (seen in the Soviet regime but not in Russia as a fatherland). Many historians and journalists have observed that the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia damaged the regime as much if not more than the ‘Events of May,’ because that invasion so sharply set back de Gaulle’s hope for détente, for enlisting a decreasingly ‘Soviet’ Russia in the task of rebuilding Europe.
To de Gaulle, the referendum establishes not so much the legitimacy of de Gaulle as the legitimacy of the French. Do they consent to living up to France? In the 1969 referendum on Senate reform, the French lost. But they might regain their legitimacy, perhaps long after de Gaulle and Malraux have died. Hence de Gaulle’s act of writing his unfinished Memoirs of Hope and hence Malraux’s writing of Felled Oaks.
De Gaulle tells Malraux, “In our country, one can found nothing durable on the lie; that is a troubling and certain fact.” The Gaullist myth is no lie, although it is partly imaginary. It’s founded on a reality: the French nation, which de Gaulle believed to be more lasting than such ideologies as fascism and communism. The Gaullist myth also rests on principles. Malraux tells him that lesser men won’t be able to use the myth for selfish purposes “because a myth becomes inactive when separated from what gave it birth,” and evocations of grandeur do not persuade when issued by mediocrities. What gave de Gaulle’s myth its birth was “the sentiment that [de Gaulle’s] motives, good or bad, were not those of the politicians”—motives of self-interest and group-interest. “To legitimize sacrifice is perhaps the greatest thing a man could do.” In saying so, the agnostic Malraux acknowledges what Chateaubriand, whom he takes as a forebear in the tradition of French autobiography, called the genius of Christianity, itself so deeply a part of what made France great.
In his book on American politicians, the historian Richard Hoftstadter titled one chapter, “Abraham Lincoln and the Self-Made Myth”—giving us to understand that he disapproves of that sort of thing. This only shows that historians at times fail to appreciate that statesmen do not necessarily aspire to university chairs in contemporary ‘history departments.’ They have other, sometimes greater ambitions. If a statesman intends to appeal to the best in his people, he must select what’s best in himself and display that, hoping to persuade fellow-citizens that the virtues displayed deserve emulation and deference. Malraux says that in one sense de Gaulle made the myth of de Gaulle with his radio speeches during the war. In another sense, however, de Gaulle embodied a pre-existing myth; he was, Malraux writes, “the last metamorphosis of the myth of France.” Metamorphosis: the creative part was de Gaulle’s adaptation of that myth to his own, his country’s own, circumstance.
That circumstance may have defeated Gaullism in the end. De Gaulle tells Malraux that “the soul of politics, in Europe, was the nation. After the [atomic] bomb, does the nation remain what it was?” Worse, de Gaulle’s prime minister and successor as president, Georges Pompidou, told a journalist that he didn’t know what “participation” really meant. According to Malraux, de Gaulle thought “that he was the last statesmen before [the triumph] of the age of technique”–that is, the triumph of the putatively scientific administrative state—”the last statesman for whom the values of the spirit remained fundamental.” The last statesman of European Christian humanism.
But reality can surprise, as both men also knew. If the Gaullist regime, the Fifth Republic, isn’t what de Gaulle wanted it to be, it’s nonetheless true that there are more people alive today who could identify the name of de Gaulle than those of Pompidou or Valéry Giscard-d’Estaing. Memoirs of Hope and Felled Oaks exist because de Gaulle and Malraux intended to keep it that way. The title, Felled Oaks, refers to Hercules, the hero of Greek myth. Hercules’ heroism manifests in his labors as a destroyer of monsters–the dragon-slaying monsters of Christian-European legend derive from him—and thus as a guardian and protector of men. Hercules was said to preside over Greek education. At the end of his life he built his own funeral pyre (out of pine branches in the Greek version, but out of oaks in Victor Hugo’s version, the French version). Before the flames touched him Zeus transferred him to Olympus, the home of the immortals. By writing Felled Oaks Malraux transfers de Gaulle out of the mundane world, the world of Pompidou and Giscard. He writes, “The legendary man is the man who escapes destiny,” calling to the “human instinct for the more-than-human.” With Malraux’s book, de Gaulle-as-myth remains present, for us. He could be present for others, after everyone here today is dead. The effect that presence may have on political life in that future will depend on those who engage in it.
2016 NOTE: This lecture, along with “Can Democracy Be Cultural?” was delivered at the invitation of Professor William V. Frame, then chair of the Kenyon College Political Science Department and later the president of Augsburg College in Minnesota. Professor Frame had introduced me to the study of Charles de Gaulle several years earlier, when I was a student at the college. The lecture on the Gaullist founding was for his class in comparative politics; the lecture on Malraux was for a general college audience. Eventually, I wrote and published books on both de Gaulle and Malraux.
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