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

by Julian T. Jackson

When an opinion poll in 2010 asked the French to rank the most important figures in their history, 44 per cent placed de Gaulle top (he accumulated 70 per cent of all choices), far ahead of Napoleon in second place with 14 per cent (38 per cent).2 All politicians, from left to right, invoke de Gaulle’s name.

Although ostensibly a war of decolonization, the conflict had the characteristics of a civil war. Administratively Algeria was part of France, and had been ‘French’ since 1830, longer than the city of Nice (French since 1859).

Many of the one million Europeans of Algeria had lived there for generations. It genuinely was their home, and for them its loss was even more traumatic than France’s defeat by Germany in 1940.

The range of these comparisons reflects de Gaulle’s extraordinary contradictions: he was a soldier who spent most of his career fighting the army; a conservative who often talked like a revolutionary; a man of passion who found it almost impossible to express emotions.

With de Gaulle ‘word’ and ‘deed’ are inseparable. The ‘deed’ that launched him in 1940 was a speech – a speech almost no one actually heard. But

In the 1960s, when he was President of France, it was often said that he governed through the magic of his rhetoric and his mastery of television.

So, in the first six pages of de Gaulle’s officially collected speeches, we are offered a speech that was delivered but not in the form we read it; a speech that was never delivered (and not even written on the day it was supposed to have been delivered); and we lack a speech that was delivered.

In the book he published on leadership in 1932, de Gaulle wrote that great leaders needed to display mystery, ruse and hypocrisy.

He often confuses the magical power of de Gaulle’s rhetoric with the reality of his policies. For the man who came close to declaring war on Britain in 1945 because he wanted to defend the French Empire in Syria; whose government presided over a massacre of Algerian nationalists at Sétif in 1945; who then dragged the French into an unwinnable war to save French Indo-China in 1946; and who, once France had abandoned her African Empire, devised ingenious new ways of hanging on to influence in Africa, the image of prophetic decolonizer needs serious qualification.

But by the end of de Gaulle’s life Pompidou had become so estranged from de Gaulle that some Gaullists dubbed him the ‘anti-de Gaulle’.

One historian has offered an interesting interpretation which views the constitution of 1958 as the embodiment of liberal Catholic ideas de Gaulle had inherited from his family in the late 1890s – the assumption being that de Gaulle’s political ideas never changed.

De Gaulle may have had a certain idea of France ‘all his life’ but it was not always the same idea.

Once de Gaulle was in power, and once Algeria had become independent, the new style of Gaullism that emerged during the 1960s was the result not only of the choices made by the President himself but of those imposed by economists, other experts and civil servants, many of whom had opposed his return but now took the view that they could make something of him.

There is no moment of my life when I was not certain that one day I would be at the head of France … But things worked out in a way that I did not predict. I always thought that I would be Minister of War and that everything would come from that … De Gaulle, May 1946, in Claude Mauriac, Un autre de Gaulle, 99

the eighteenth century, the family moved from Burgundy to Paris where they served the ancien régime monarchy as state lawyers and administrators. This gave them the status of minor nobles de robe – that is, nobles through office rather than birth.

Henri de Gaulle (1848–1932) had a more conventional career than his brothers or father. He had passed the examinations for the prestigious Ecole Polytechnique but did not take up his place.

[De Gaulle said] that there were two sorts of Right in France: the petite noblesse de campagne [the country gentry] and the moneyed classes. The former class (‘Et j’en suis’ [And I am from it]) was inspired with the highest forms of patriotism and was willing to make any sacrifice for the glory of France or for the good of the country; many of the clergy belonged to this group. The latter class, composed of the very rich, was much more self-interested

‘For those who had to choose between their material possessions and the soul of France,’ he remarked in 1962, ‘their material possessions chose for them. Those with possessions are possessed by what they own.’19

De Gaulle’s maternal grandmother, Julie Marie Maillot (1835–1912), was partly of Irish ancestry. Her own mother (née MacCartan) descended from one of those Irish families – ‘wild geese’ – that had served the Jacobite cause fighting English Protestantism in the armies of Louis XIV before settling in Valenciennes

on his father’s side de Gaulle came from the Parisian noblesse de robe fallen on hard times, and on his mother’s from the wealthy provincial bourgeoisie, both wings of the family shared similar conservative, Catholic and patriotic values.

De Gaulle’s mother, Jeanne, was raised in a household of rigorous and joyless Catholic faith. Two of her sisters were nuns.

De Gaulle came from a deeply devout Catholic and conservative sub-culture that rejected the revolutionary myth

This was a world of sobriety, religion and work. After three months, his parents took the baby back to Paris, but de Gaulle’s links with northern France remained important during his childhood.

De Gaulle’s son later observed that these Lille roots represented ‘not just a birthplace but also an ethic, an education, a way of seeing the world’: austere, traditionalist, suspicious of ostentation.

Living in the atmosphere of ‘military melancholy’ – a favourite phrase of de Gaulle’s – of the seventh arrondissement, the de Gaulle family was out of step with the prevailing political values of the age.

This possibility was scuppered when the legitimate Bourbon pretender, the Comte du Chambord, refused in 1873 to accept the throne if it also meant accepting the tricolour flag of the Revolution. From that moment royalism was a lost cause in France.

In 1875, France became officially a republic for the third time. Scarred by the short-lived fate of France’s two previous republics (1792–9, 1848–51), the leaders of the Third Republic set about instilling in the French people the idea that the identity of their nation was inseparable from republicanism. In 1879, the revolutionary hymn the ‘Marseillaise’ became France’s national anthem; in 1881 the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, 14 July, became a national holiday; statues of ‘Marianne’, the female incarnation of the Republic, were erected all over the country.

While not among those royalists who actively plotted against the Republic, the de Gaulles were internal exiles from it.

Henri de Gaulle read Action française but so did most intelligent conservatives of the period.

The recent tendency among historians has been to downplay this aspect of de Gaulle’s heritage and to argue that the de Gaulle household was more influenced by the newspaper Le Correspondant. This represented a royalist tradition different from Action française.

is plausible that the liberal monarchism of the Correspondant was more in tune with the values of the de Gaulle family than the diehard and reactionary royalism of Maurras, but the direct evidence is patchy and circumstantial.

Many historians have also noted the importance of social Catholicism in de Gaulle’s intellectual heritage. Social Catholics sought to overcome class struggle by finding a middle way between capitalism and socialism. This tradition was strong among the Catholic industrialists of northern France like de Gaulle’s maternal ancestors. We

It has become an article of faith among biographers of de Gaulle that Henri was convinced of Dreyfus’s innocence, a claim rescuing de Gaulle from the insinuation that his family background was ‘Maurrassian’.

The de Gaulles will certainly have uncompromisingly opposed the Republic’s war on the Catholic Church. The enmity between Catholics and republicans was one of the themes of France’s nineteenth-century history.

And it was after a decree in 1880 expelling Jesuits from France that Henri had decided himself to become a lay teacher in a Catholic school. It would have been inconceivable for Henri de Gaulle to educate his children in the state schools of the secular and anti-clerical Republic.

What had changed around the time of his fifteenth birthday was that de Gaulle decided to embark on a military career. There would be no chance of success without passing the competitive examinations for the military academy of Saint-Cyr. For the first time de Gaulle applied himself seriously to his studies – not just in history and literature, where he shone, but also in mathematics and the sciences.

Ernest Renan,

Even after embracing patriotism and Catholicism, he did not renounce his previous socialism and republicanism or his opposition to anti-Semitism. Péguy’s strange incantatory and repetitive prose, which is like nothing else in the French language, aspires to a synthesis of all French traditions – as exemplified in his haunting dictum ‘The Republic, One and Indivisible, is our Kingdom of France.’

Péguy did turn violently against those with whom he had worked during the Dreyfus Affair but this was because he believed they had betrayed the nobility of the cause in favour of base partisanship. Hence his most famous axiom: ‘All begins as mystique and ends as politique.’

Although Barrès was, like Maurras, an ardent anti-Dreyfusard and anti-Semite, his nationalism was different from Maurras’s dogmatic reading of France’s past. Barrès sought not to turn back the clock to the monarchy but to reinvigorate the Republic with vitalist values.

The other two Bs in de Gaulle’s list – Emile Boutroux (1845–1921) and Henri Bergson (1859–1941) – were both widely read philosophers who attacked the mid-nineteenth-century positivist view of the world that all phenomena can be explained by scientific determinism and rationalism.

When he became President of France in 1958, he reinstalled a chapel in the Elysée Palace so he could attend Mass privately if he was in Paris over the weekend. But the ostentatious adolescent piety de Gaulle had displayed at Antoing was not characteristic of de Gaulle in adulthood.

verses as proof that ‘French intellectuals have always betrayed France.’77 Of France’s nineteenth-century writers, none was more revered by de Gaulle than the romantic René de Chateaubriand whose Génie du christianisme played a role in the return to Catholicism of the French bourgeoisie – including families like his own – after the Revolution.

De Gaulle passed his entry examinations to Saint-Cyr in September 1909. He was ranked only 119 out of 221 entrants but this was creditable since it was rare to be admitted at the first attempt. As a result of the Dreyfus Affair, future officers had to serve a year in the ranks before starting at Saint-Cyr: the intention was to prevent them becoming separated from the lives of ordinary soldiers.

To rise to the occasion, he adopted a tone of self-conscious solemnity: ‘Goodbye to my apartment, to my books, to familiar objects. How much more intense life appears, how the tiniest things take on significance, when perhaps all is soon to end.’

In his twenty seconds of combat, de Gaulle had made two discoveries: one about himself, the other about modern warfare. The first was that he was indifferent to physical danger. Throughout his life he would display the same bravado he had shown at the level-crossing at Dinant – to the despair of those in charge of his security. The second lesson was summarized in one sentence of the book on the French army de Gaulle published in 1938: ‘In the twinkling of an eye, it became clear that all the virtue in the world is powerless against firepower.’

De Gaulle rejoined his regiment on 17 October. He was so desperate to take part in the fighting that he left hospital before his wound was fully healed.19 He found that the war was already assuming a character very different from his experience on the bridge of Dinant.

The German gamble almost succeeded. By the first days of September German forces were within reach of Paris. The situation was saved in extremis by a French counter-attack on the River Marne to the east of Paris.

For the French army 1915 was the bleakest year of the war. Today that year is overshadowed in popular memory by the innocent excitement of the offensives of 1914 and the sombre heroism of the defence of Verdun in 1916. Yet more French soldiers died in 1915 than in any other year.

De Gaulle wrote home at the end of 1914: ‘The regiment has few officers left because in addition to those we have lost in combat, there are more and more who fall ill, not being able to support this existence which is truly very hard both physically and morally.’ For the same reason he was confident that he would soon earn his promotion to captain: ‘If I continue to live, the war will necessarily require the promotion of those who are still young because here the old cannot hold out.’22 The promotion came in the following February.

On 10 March, the day his regiment was pulled back from the front, de Gaulle was wounded in the hand by a bullet. The injury became severely infected and he was hospitalized for a second time. (This injury had permanent consequences: when he later married he wore his wedding ring on his right hand.)