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June 20 - August 31, 2025
On 14 February 1916, de Gaulle reported to his mother that his unit was being sent for a few days’ rest – much needed relief because his men were ‘a little dazed [un peu abrutis] by a very prolonged period in the trenches’.
The city of Verdun formed a potentially vulnerable salient jutting out into the German lines. Situated on the River Meuse, Verdun, surrounded by a complex system of forts, had long played a crucial strategic defensive role on France’s eastern frontier. The German commander Erich von Falkenhayn later claimed that, by forcing the French to defend this symbolically important site, he had set out to bleed the French army to the point of exhaustion.
The experience did not of course make de Gaulle a pacifist. But much of his inter-war writing is about finding a way to reinvest the soldier’s vocation with ‘sombre beauty’ in a world where industrialized mass warfare seemed to have eliminated any place for heroism and individuality.
For him the root of the problem was the failure to take account of contingency and to escape from a priori assumptions about the nature of warfare. This idea owed much to his own experiences of the murderous consequences of the offensives of 1915 but also to his reading of Bergson and Boutroux. His prison notebooks contain a quotation from Boutroux: ‘Contingency is the characteristic of what might not have been or could have been different.’
The quality of generalization was in evidence when de Gaulle moved from purely military questions to develop a more holistic analysis of the war, discussing economic planning, diplomacy and politics.
The ideas which de Gaulle sketched out in these lectures – the nature of leadership, the importance of contingency in war and in politics, the relationship between civil and military power – were developed at greater length in the four books he wrote in the inter-war years.
When de Gaulle became famous, his aides would despair at what they called his ‘cyclothymic’ temperament: his volatile and unpredictable mood swings, his sudden descent into the blackest pessimism. Like Churchill’s ‘black dog’, these moments of despair became incorporated into his myth: the man of destiny surmounting the temptation to give up, bouncing back from adversity to save his country.
De Gaulle was desperate for action to redeem his wasted years. The best prospect seemed to be the French military mission which was advising the army of the newly independent Polish state. Soon
Nor did the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in May 1919 lighten his mood. Although France had recovered the territories of Alsace-Lorraine, lost in 1871, the more ambitious demands of French conservatives, such as detaching the Rhineland from Germany and creating a buffer state on France’s eastern border, had not been achieved. France got no more than the demilitarization of the Rhineland and its occupation by Allied troops for fifteen years.
We know little more about de Gaulle’s time in Poland. His interpreter later recalled that he kept aloof from the other French officers and did not join their social outings in Warsaw:
He now sought a less demanding position in France to allow him to prepare for the examinations for entry to the Ecole de Guerre, the training academy for senior officers. Any doubts about continuing a military career had been overcome.
month later he was back in Poland where events had become more exciting. The country now found itself fighting a full-scale war with Russia.
On 15 July, as the situation of the Polish armies became desperate, the French government, more pro-Polish than the British, authorized its military representatives to take a more active role and offer technical advice to the Polish army. De Gaulle was attached to the General Staff of the southern Polish army. He witnessed at first hand the extraordinary reversal of events – the so-called Miracle of the Vistula – when a bold Polish counter-offensive stemmed the Soviet attack.
By the time de Gaulle left Poland definitively at the end of 1920, he had served there almost as long as the entire period he had spent fighting on the western front. What did he take from his Polish experience?
Some writers have speculated that this experience was the seed of de Gaulle’s subsequent thinking about how tanks might be used to reintroduce movement into warfare.
What most impressed de Gaulle during his second posting in Poland was the importance of morale and self-belief in warfare confirming views he had already formed about Germany’s collapse.
The lesson he drew from Poland’s victory was that a country is defeated only when it has lost the will to fight – a lesson which influenced his view of France’s plight in 1940.
This was Yvonne Vendroux from a family of prosperous Calais industrialists. Her father owned a biscuit factory and was a figure of standing in the city where he headed the local chamber of commerce. The Vendrouxs did not have the same austere and intellectual high-mindedness as the de Gaulles.
The book’s five chapters were framed around an analysis of five turning points in the history of the war. De Gaulle’s main source was his intensive study of all the memoirs so far published by Germany’s military leaders.
The first is that Germany lost the war because she had not achieved the correct balance between civil and military power.
De Gaulle’s second argument is also familiar from his wartime lectures: ‘In war – save for some essential principles – there is no universal system, but only circumstance and personalities.’
De Gaulle’s third argument, illustrated by a chapter on the sudden collapse of German resistance in 1918, centred around the importance of self-belief and morale in warfare.
By the time de Gaulle’s book came out, he was a student at the Ecole de Guerre. This proved an unhappy year, the first setback in his strategy to rebuild his career. De Gaulle’s cohort cannot have been easy to teach since they all had their own personal experience of warfare to measure against the certainties of their lecturers.
At the end de Gaulle emerged not in the top rank of ‘très bien’ but the second tier of those marked ‘bien’ (ranked 52 out of 129).
The moral he drew: ‘In every form of action, military, political and industrial … the essential role of the leader is to appreciate the nature of the circumstance in each particular case. Action must be constructed on contingency.’
De Gaulle’s article therefore neatly achieved the double objective of expressing his own ideas and paying homage to Pétain. It was no coincidence that in July 1925, five months after his article had appeared, de Gaulle was rescued from his routine existence in Mainz and seconded into Pétain’s cabinet (private office).
While working for Pétain, de Gaulle also started to frequent the circle of Colonel Emile Mayer, forty years his senior.45 Mayer was a nonconformist military thinker whose promising military career ended in 1898 when he became the target of right-wing attacks for publishing articles in defence of Dreyfus. Forced out of the army, he became a prolific writer on military affairs, expressing heterodox, original (and often prescient) ideas on the nature of the next war.
In 1927, de Gaulle’s secondment to the Pétain cabinet came to an end. His relations with Pétain began to sour. Having worked on the Marshal’s history of the army for two years, he was beginning to worry either that Pétain had lost interest in publication or that there would be no acknowledgement of his contribution.
De Gaulle drafted a speech but commented to Nachin that it was a delicate task because ‘one of them could not stand the other and it was reciprocal.’51 None of de Gaulle’s suggestions ended up in the eulogy Pétain finally delivered in 1931. They were insufficiently critical of Foch to pass muster.
Yvonne de Gaulle thought the cause might have been the shock of witnessing a street brawl in Trier between some of her husband’s troops and a group of German war veterans while she was pregnant.
The birth of Anne tested and deepened the ties of the couple. Two years after Anne’s birth, de Gaulle was posted to Beirut. The entire family moved with him.
De Gaulle’s two years in the Levant were the only ‘imperial’ moment in his pre-war career.68 The Levant had entered France’s colonial orbit after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1918 when the victorious Allies carved up the Middle East, the British taking Iraq and Palestine, the French taking Syria and Lebanon.
Because so much of de Gaulle’s future career was bound up with decolonization, biographers have sought clues to his future policies during his eighteen months in Beirut. In
The decision seems to have been sudden, and he did not initially plan to stay long since within two months of arriving he was in contact with Pétain about the possibility of securing a professorship at the Ecole de Guerre. We can assume that for de Gaulle the Levant was an interlude before he could return to the centre of things in Paris.
In his leisure time de Gaulle was not to be seen at the racecourse, the clubs or the bridge parties that formed the daily routine of the French community. He spent his leisure time reading, writing and thinking.
In essence, the book is a tract on leadership. De Gaulle returns to his obsession about the perils of a priori thinking. In his view the successful leader had to combine, to use de Gaulle’s Bergsonian phrase, a ‘creative spark’ with a capacity for abstraction and critical intelligence.
The Edge of the Sword was not just a timeless meditation on leadership. It also had contemporary purpose, articulating de Gaulle’s disillusionment with the trend of French politics and diplomacy since the mid-1920s. In the first half of the decade, French governments had done all they could to exact the reparations owing to them under the Treaty of Versailles.
Pétain suggested de Gaulle apply instead for a position on the Secretariat of the Conseil Supérieur de la Défense National (CSDN).3 This turned out to be good advice. However much de Gaulle mocked him in private, Pétain remained a useful patron.
What especially irritated his superiors about de Gaulle’s book was the implication that no one else in France was aware of the need to modernize the army. In reality, modernization was the subject of intensive policy debates; no military planner believed that the Maginot line had solved all France’s problems.
These Leagues included the monarchist Action Française which had been around since the start of the century, but there were other new ones like Croix de Feu whose military-style demonstrations aped the fascist movements which had emerged throughout Europe in the 1920s.
this only further radicalized French conservatives. Politics in France reached unprecedented levels of verbal and physical violence. Although the French army had traditionally kept out of politics, some army officers so feared the threat of Communism that they set up clandestine networks ready to intervene in politics in case of revolution. Members of Pétain’s entourage were involved in these conspiracies.
This excitable language puts de Gaulle squarely in the camp of those on the right who saw the events of 6 February as a salutary challenge to parliamentary democracy – but it is not clear what positive alternative he favoured.
De Jouvenel’s book, published in 1914, had lambasted the politicians of the parliamentary Republic as an isolated caste cut off from the realities of the nation: its most famous observation was that two députés of different parties always had more in common with each other than with their electors.
In a note he penned in 1927 on the memoirs of the French statesman Raymond Poincaré, de Gaulle sketched his impressions of what a political leader should not be. Poincaré, a sober and hardworking conservative who
Poincaré was an executant [commis] of the first rank. If there had been a great Frenchman to harness his talents: think what he might have given under Louis XIV! But left to himself, he was half great, half honest, half understanding. In short, a statesman tailored to the requirements of the Republic.
If we assemble all these pieces, de Gaulle’s political ideal in the mid-1930s seems to combine elitist and managerial authoritarianism with charismatic leadership.
In December 1934, Jean Auburtin set up a meeting between de Gaulle and Paul Reynaud, a leading centre-right politician. Reynaud who had held several important ministerial posts, was one of the most able politicians of his generation, but when he met de Gaulle his career had stalled.
Although he did not refer to de Gaulle in the speech, his name was explicitly raised twice in the subsequent debate by two left-wing opponents of Reynaud’s bill: Léon Blum and the Communist leader Maurice Thorez. They deplored any return to the theories of the offensive that had been so costly in 1914: ‘all that is missing are the red trousers,’ declared Thorez in reference to the red trousers worn by French soldiers as they marched to their deaths in 1914.43 De Gaulle, who presented himself as a modernizer of the army, was depicted as a throwback to the past.
On the face of it Reynaud’s prospects seemed to have dimmed after the electoral victory of the left-wing Popular Front in May 1936.
The new Minister of National Defence was the left-of-centre Radical Edouard Daladier, a close supporter of the army Chief of Staff, General Gamelin. Both men firmly opposed the professional army.
