A Certain Idea of France: The Life of Charles de Gaulle

by Julian T. Jackson

The unenviable task of teaching de Gaulle English was taken on by a M. de Valence, a Mauritian working for the BBC.23 In fact at that time most members of the British elite spoke good French, and de Gaulle did not need to practise his shaky English too often. (De Gaulle occasionally liked to quote what he claimed Charles V had said on the subject of English: ‘One speaks French to men, Italian to women, German to horses, Spanish to God but who ever heard of one speaking English?’)

All his life de Gaulle, who thrived on movement and action, was subject to these bouts of despair.

De Gaulle was lunching at home with his wife on Sunday 7 December 1941 when they heard the news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Passy, who was with them, remembered de Gaulle remarking immediately: ‘The war is now definitely won! And there will be two future phases: the first will be that the Allies will save Germany; the second will be a war between the Russians and the Americans.’9 A few days later he apparently offered another prediction to his military aide Pierre Billotte: ‘From now the English will do nothing without the agreement of Roosevelt.’10

truth was that Roosevelt, who had been deeply shocked by France’s defeat, took the view that the country had lost any claim to be treated as a great power. On the other hand, he was pragmatically ready to deal with Vichy if this could serve American interests, and he sent an ambassador to Pétain in the form of the Catholic and very conservative Admiral William Leahy. Roosevelt’s policy did not in principle rule out contacts with the Free French, but he concluded from the Dakar fiasco that de Gaulle enjoyed little support and was just a creature of the British. He viewed the Free French with a mixture of suspicion and derision, and was confirmed in his suspicion by Leahy who reported that the Vichy regime was so opposed to de Gaulle that any move in his direction would push Vichy towards the Germans, exactly the opposite of Roosevelt’s policy of gambling on Vichy.15

Behaving like a great power was Gaulle’s way of becoming one.

‘Men pass, France continues.’29 De Gaulle wrote to Pleven on the following day: ‘The worst thing about this affair is that people think we are playing a poker game.’30 Obviously his theatrical withdrawal contained a strong element of bluff, but he had worked himself into a genuine frenzy about Muselier. Hour after hour he ranted against the perfidy of the British: ‘It is not enough for them to have burnt Joan of Arc once. They want to start again … They think perhaps that I am not someone easy to work with. But if I were, I would today be in Pétain’s General Staff.’

In April 1942 the British became interested in a possible alternative to de Gaulle in the person of another general who had suddenly emerged into the spotlight. This was General Henri Giraud, former commander of the Seventh French Army, who had been taken prisoner in 1940.

Brossolette put himself at the service of the Free French and returned to France as an agent of the BCRAM. The next arrival was d’Astier on 12 May. As leader of his own Resistance movement, Libération-Sud, d’Astier certainly had no intention of putting himself completely at de Gaulle’s service. Even stripped of its ironic and literary tone, his later account of his first meeting with de Gaulle at the Connaught is remarkably similar to that of Pineau: The Symbol entered. He was even bigger than one expected. His movements were slow and heavy, like his nose. His small head and waxen face are supported by a body which seems to have no shape. His most frequent gesture is to lift his forearms while keeping his elbows close to his side. At the end of his arms, his inert, very white, rather feminine, hands with their palms turned downwards attached to very slender wrists, seem to lift a world of abstract burdens. He asked me no questions. We dined. He does not like his fellow men. He likes their history, above all that of France, of which he was acting out a chapter which he seemed to be writing in his head as he went on, as if he were Michelet … He spoke as if he were bearing a thousand years of history or as if he watched himself in that history a hundred years in the future. He painted a bleak picture of his Calvary – that of the person that was France.10

In the summer of 1942 Warner Brothers in Hollywood even conceived the idea of a film about de Gaulle, seemingly at the suggestion of Roosevelt himself. The novelist William Faulkner was commissioned to write the screenplay. He spent several months on the project and produced 1,200 pages of script portraying de Gaulle as an almost Christ-like figure. Faulkner’s problem was that de Gaulle’s representatives in the United States, consulted on the script, were continuously raising nitpicking points of detail. Faulkner became so exasperated that the project was ultimately abandoned. By this time the Roosevelt administration had turned firmly against de Gaulle and was certainly not pushing Faulkner to continue. The film was never made.25

No one in the Assembly dared criticize de Gaulle personally, but other members of the CFLN found themselves in the firing line – especially André Philip, whom de Gaulle had put in charge of relations between the Assembly and the CFLN. Once again Philip tried to offer de Gaulle some home truths: In an admirable chapter of the The Edge of the Sword you drew the portrait of the leader, cold, reserved, accepting the need to be alone and repressing his feelings … You need to establish a human contact; the tragedy with you is that you do not feel this: your intelligence is Republican, your instincts are not. This Assembly is consultative; it must be consulted if only to give it a feeling of fulfilling a useful role.35 De Gaulle took the point. He appeared before the Assembly twenty times and delivered some important policy speeches to it. Jean Chauvel (a hostile witness) gives an amusing account of de Gaulle receiving members of the Assembly’s Foreign Affairs Commission.

In Bayeux, loudspeakers informed the population that de Gaulle was arriving. Coulet had preceded him at the prefecture where he was welcomed by the Vichy sous-préfet who clambered on to a chair to remove the portrait of Pétain before greeting de Gaulle respectfully. De Gaulle refused a glass of champagne and met local dignitaries, including the bishop. The transition from one regime to another was effected in a matter of minutes. De Gaulle now proceeded on foot to the central square where he made a speech. Whether bemused or flattered, the peaceable Norman peasants who had not suffered terribly under the Occupation until the recent Allied bombing were enjoined by him to ‘continue the combat today as you have never ceased to do since the start of this war and since June 1940’.

The story that at one lunch, where Admiral Leahy was present, Roosevelt turned to his former Ambassador to Pétain and said he should be drinking Vichy water, is probably apocryphal. And another story recounted by an American observer that, to break the ice after one dinner, the Chair of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, who was also a professional entertainer, offered a mystified de Gaulle a trick cigar, seems improbable.36 De Gaulle’s account of the visit in his Memoirs does not dwell on such trivialities but drips with irony. He remembers Cordell Hull as displaying an ‘elevation of soul’ that was ‘handicapped by his limited knowledge of everything that was not America’. He tells us that before leaving he presented Roosevelt with the gift of a small mechanical submarine made by the workers of the arsenal of Bizerta and that in return Roosevelt gave him a photograph dedicated to ‘General de Gaulle who is my friend’.37 (What de Gaulle did not know was that Roosevelt passed on the submarine at Christmas to his youngest grandchild Curtis. When his wife pointed out that it was not proper to dispose in this way of a present from a head of state, Roosevelt replied that de Gaulle was only head of ‘some French committee’.)38

there is only one revolutionary in France: that is me.

hilarious arrogance

Pétain refused to recognize the authority of the court, remaining silent throughout and often seemingly unaware of what was going on around him. After two weeks of courtroom wrangling, Pétain was condemned to death with a recommendation that this be commuted to life imprisonment. This is what de Gaulle had always intended.

detailed proposals could be drafted without some idea of what the Allies were thinking, but already it was clear that de Gaulle’s preference was to eliminate any central German authority – breaking Germany up into some form of pre-1870 confederation – to incorporate the Rhineland and the Saar into France, and to find a way of neutralizing the industrial might of the Ruhr. When Massigli produced a note in October 1943 expressing scepticism about the idea of breaking Germany up, de Gaulle annotated it with the comment ‘All that weakens Germany reinforces us’; when in another note in August 1944 on the future of the Rhineland Massigli observed that Clemenceau had wanted permanent occupation of the region in 1919, de Gaulle annotated it with ‘Events proved he was right.’34

The conference was a pre-emptive strike against the anti-colonial views of Roosevelt, a propaganda exercise to prove that the French were aware of the need for change.78 But one of its organizers, Henri Laurentie, certainly intended it as more than a cosmetic exercise. Laurentie was a colonial civil servant who had been an adviser to Eboué in August 1940 when Chad rallied to de Gaulle. Laurentie, who prided himself on being one of the first Gaullists, was a maverick in the staid world of colonial officialdom. He was a surrealist poet in his spare time and unique among colonial officials in not addressing black servants by the familiar ‘tu’ form.

In a number of speeches over the summer, de Gaulle made it clear that his preference was for a double ‘yes’ – ‘yes’ to the need for a new republic, ‘yes’ to the limitation of the sovereign power

Communists called for a ‘yes’ to the first question and ‘no’ to the second. In the elections on 21 October, a return to the Third Republic was massively rejected by 96 per cent of the electorate who voted ‘yes’ to the first question; and a less resounding majority of 66 per cent voted ‘yes’ to the second, ensuring that de Gaulle had prevailed in his desire to limit the sovereignty of the Assembly.

The diaries of Mauriac and Guy are a precious source for understanding de Gaulle’s volatile state of mind over the next few months. On his first night of ‘freedom’ at Marly, he plunged into a biography of Disraeli by André Maurois. At one point he triumphantly read out a passage where Bismarck told Gladstone: ‘Never defend yourself in front of a popular assembly except by attacking; in the pleasure that your opponents get from the new attack they forget their attack on you.’

In 1949, France had signed the Atlantic Alliance setting up NATO despite a strong neutralist current in French opinion which argued that France should remain free of both the western and the Soviet blocs. This argument might have appealed to de Gaulle, but he was persuaded by Aron that the Communist threat made such a position untenable. De Gaulle was not entirely happy with the way NATO was structured, but his position was that an imperfect pact was better than none. He was at this time a committed Atlanticist. But as Cold War tensions subsided, he began to warn against the danger of French military dependence on America.49 By 1952, he was putting the existence of an ‘American protectorate’ almost on the same level as ‘Soviet servitude’.50

France’s hopes of preventing the re-emergence of a central German authority had failed once it became clear that America would not back such a policy. From 1949, Germany was divided by the Cold War into a Soviet puppet state in the east – which the non-Soviet bloc did not recognize – and the German Federal Republic in the west. De Gaulle realized that this development was irreversible, and his speeches from 1949 started to float the possibility of, as he put it, an accord between ‘Gauls and Teutons’

On 6 February 1948, Anne died at the age of twenty after catching bronchitis. The family had lived with the knowledge that the weak immune systems of children with Down’s Syndrome made them vulnerable to infection. But Anne’s death was a terrible blow. The curé noted in his diary: ‘I found the General collapsed in awful grief. He said to me: “I am a man annihilated. You decide everything: the time and the day. I want a funeral as they are done at Colombey.”’79 De Gaulle wrote to his other daughter Elisabeth, who was at that time living in Africa: Anne died in my arms with her mother and Madame Michiguau [the nurse since the retirement of Mlle Potel] by her side while the doctor administered an injection in extremis. M. le Curé came over to bless her … The disappearance of our poor suffering child, our little girl without hope, has caused us immense grief. I know you will feel the same. From heaven let little Anne protect us and first of all protect you, my dearest Elisabeth.80

The idea of a supranational ‘European’ army sponsored by the Americans, and supported from the sidelines by the British, was anathema to de Gaulle.

As a model and inspiration, he had in 1946 started to re-read the Mémoires d’outre-tombe of René de Chateaubriand – as he was to do again when starting his second set of Memoirs in 1969. De Gaulle’s War Memoirs certainly are a ‘work’, not only because of their highly wrought prose, their formal structure (three volumes each covering two years), and their deployment of all the arts of classical French rhetoric, but also because, in addition to offering de Gaulle’s narrative of ‘his’ war, they are a distillation of his vision of the world and his philosophy of history. As far as the narrative of the war is concerned, the thread running through all three volumes is de Gaulle’s ceaseless struggle to defend French independence from all sides – from allies as much as enemies. Every detail of every quarrel with the British and Americans is recounted in meticulously unforgiving detail. Unsurprisingly the reader is given a minute account of the conflicts with the British over the Levant but remarkable space is also accorded to the most insignificant spats.

Gaulle picked up on the simmering discontent in the army after the abandonment of the Suez operation.74 It was the convergence of these two elements – pied noir anger and army discontent – that would eventually cause the fall of the Republic in 1958. But it was not obvious that this would serve de Gaulle’s cause. Algeria had been strongly Giraudist in 1943 and the most radical pied noir activists had no love for the man who had introduced some moderate democratic reform in March 1944 in Algeria.

De Gaulle’s library at Colombey contains a novel, Kaputt, by the Italian writer Curzio Malaparte published in 1947. It does not however contain Malaparte’s most famous book, published in French in 1931. At that time Malaparte, a disillusioned former supporter of Mussolini, was in exile in Paris. His book, Technique of a Coup d’Etat, examined the mechanics of a coup d’état by studying examples like those of Lenin and Mussolini, as well as Primo de Rivera’s in Spain and Piłsudski’s in Poland. As a counter-example, he took the failed Kapp Putsch in Germany in 1920. For Malaparte the exemplar of the modern coup was the ‘18 Brumaire’ of 1799 when Napoleon seized power as First Consul.1 He saw Brumaire as the perfect ‘grafting of revolutionary violence on constitutional legality’.

Pflimlin, who had never met de Gaulle before, was struck by his contempt for the Algiers putschists (‘not very interesting people’). Even so, he refused to denounce the army publicly: if he did, how could he be sure that Pflimlin would then cede power to him? Pflimlin wrote later: ‘This time I felt we were at the heart of the matter. He was observing me, weighing me up, mistrustful, a little disdainful, and doubtless coldly calculating.’ Pflimlin replied that, if de Gaulle condemned the army, the government would resign and smooth his return to power. De Gaulle was not convinced: ‘When one has power, it is generally because one wants to keep it.’ The truth was that Pflimlin was desperate to divest himself of the non-existent power he was exercising but he wanted to respect proprieties.37

De Gaulle was able to ‘legalize’ his coup because France’s elites had lost confidence in the existing regime to resolve the Algerian crisis.

The organization of NATO was not ideal from the French point of view. The French resented being junior partners to Britain and America, and they intermittently lobbied to change this situation by proposing some kind of three-power directorate to run NATO and institutionalize France’s claims to be a world power.3

All the issues raised by de Gaulle would have come up even if he had not returned to power. The American President Eisenhower observed in November 1957 that the French government was threatening ‘the most dire things such as a complete breakup of the Atlantic Alliance’.8 Harold Macmillan noted in his diary a month later: ‘All kinds of usual accusations about perfide Albion. We and the Americans are accused of (a) trying to dominate NATO … (c) preventing France becoming a nuclear power etc.’9 Such Anglo-American concerns about France would become ever more familiar over the next few years. At the end of 1957, however, the French premier was Félix Gaillard – and de Gaulle was still festering in inactivity at Colombey.

De Gaulle saluted the ‘courage’ of the fighters who had taken up arms against France and offered them reconciliation; he announced that Muslims and Europeans would now be fully French and their votes would count equally in elections. He ended: ‘Never more than here and never more than this evening, have I understood how beautiful, how great, how generous France is.’

De Gaulle’s preferred solution to the crisis was a meeting of the four great powers to broker a negotiated settlement. This was vetoed by the Soviet Union, which was inciting Nasser to hold firm. On 2 June, as tension escalated, the French government issued a communiqué, drafted personally by de Gaulle, declaring that France opposed the opening of hostilities by any power. On the next day, he announced an embargo on arms deliveries to all powers in the region. Since France was Israel’s main arms supplier, this was not really an even-handed measure. Just before hostilities broke out, de Gaulle told Foccart: ‘They are going to launch war … I recognize that the Arabs are also unbearable, I recognize that the Arabs are threatening and that the Israelis feel suffocated … [But] the Israelis will win, and after that everything will be different.’58 This prediction was entirely accurate. On 5 June, the Israeli air force launched a series of air raids on Egyptian airfields and destroyed the Egyptian air force in a day. The Israeli government did all it could to restrict the conflict to Egypt alone, but the Jordanian and Syrian governments both decided to join in, believing Egyptian propaganda that Israel was about to be defeated. Despite de Gaulle’s public declaration regarding arms deliveries, on 7 June he did discreetly authorize the delivery of war matériel already paid for by Israel, including spare parts for Mirage jets. So during the short conflict Israel did not in fact lack...

In 1990, the twentieth anniversary of de Gaulle’s death, the fiftieth anniversary of his Appel and the hundredth anniversary of his birth offered the opportunity for a triple celebration. In that year the Fondation Charles de Gaulle organized a centennial conference whose seven published volumes run to a total of 4,000 pages. Twenty years later, on 18 June 2010, three television channels covered the anniversary celebrations live for several hours. Later in that year there was another bout of Gaullomania for the anniversary of de Gaulle’s death; there were pilgrimages to his tomb at Colombey by many politicians including President Sarkozy. Le Monde ran a leader in November 2010 declaring that the French were still ‘orphans of de Gaulle’.

As France shrinks de Gaulle seems to grow. If, then, de Gaulle is now widely viewed as ‘the last great Frenchman’, where does his greatness lie? Was he, as many have argued, a great visionary? François Furet, one of those many left-wing intellectuals so viscerally hostile to de Gaulle, wrote in 1963: ‘What characterizes de Gaulle is not his ability to predict the future, it is his extraordinary capacity to be deceived by history yet to adapt to it. What makes him a great politician is not his strategy, it is his tactics.’

One can find other examples of de Gaulle’s often startling lucidity about the future. For example, he predicted in a conversation with Peyrefitte in 1964 that Yugoslavia would not last: ‘For that there needs to be a Yugoslav nation. There isn’t. There are just bits of wood stuck together with a piece of string. That piece of string is Tito. When he is no longer there, the bits will fall apart.’19

having learnt from his errors, de Gaulle showed a pragmatic capacity to adapt. He refused to hold on to impossible positions. Over Algeria, what is most striking is not that he predicted in 1958 what would happen in 1962 but the single-minded ruthlessness with which he pursued his objectives once he had decided to act.

But it would be wrong to reduce de Gaulle’s interventions to pure showmanship. He did not succeed in ending the Cold War, or reshaping the world order, or creating a ‘political Europe’, but many of the questions he posed and the issues he tried to address – how to create ‘Europe’, the problem of European defence, how to plan for a post-Cold War order – were genuine ones. It is true that his vision of the future of Europe looked more like the Europe of 1914 than the Europe in which we live today – but his intuition that a European project built by technocrats would have difficulty in creating a durable sense of common destiny and collective identity seems more compelling today than it did thirty years ago.