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

by Julian T. Jackson

Hatred went beyond words. De Gaulle was the target of about thirty serious assassination attempts, two of which – in September 1961 and August 1962 – nearly succeeded. For some anti-Gaullists, the fixation on de Gaulle became so incorporated into their personality that their original reasons for wanting to kill him were eclipsed by the hatred he inspired. This was true, for example, of André Rossfelder who planned the last serious assassination attempt against him in 1964. Like many anti-Gaullist fanatics, he hated de Gaulle for having accepted Algerian independence in 1962.

Industrialists like the Maillots were imbued with the traditions of Catholic paternalism which were particularly strong in northern France. Employers saw it as their duty to look after the moral and material welfare of their employees.

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;

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

On 13 July 1940 he proclaimed on the BBC: ‘Those whose duty it was to wield the sword of France have let it fall from their hands, broken. I have picked up again the pieces of the sword [le tronçon du glaive].’

The new generation, according to Agathon, displayed a ‘taste for action’ centred around ‘patriotic faith’ and a return to religious values.

Péguy deserves special attention because he was an author who mattered immensely to de Gaulle, who told one of his ministers in the 1960s: ‘No writer more influenced me than Péguy.

By 1914, Péguy had developed an almost physical revulsion from parliamentary politics – another aspect of his writing that left traces on de Gaulle. So too did Péguy’s cult of Joan of Arc about whom he wrote two long plays. There was no moment of France’s history which his eucumenical nationalism did not embrace: ‘Valmy and Jemappes [two famous battles of the Revolution] are’, he wrote, ‘in the direct line of Patay [one of Joan of Arc’s victories against the English]! … They are of the same race, the same spiritual family.’53 What links the early socialist and republican Péguy and the later nationalist and Catholic Péguy was a sense that throughout history France had had a mystical vocation to bring enlightenment to humanity.

Bergson is especially remembered today for his argument that rational intelligence is incapable of conveying the way that consciousness apprehends the passing of time – an important influence on Marcel Proust. But this was only part of Bergson’s philosophical quest to assert the importance of intuition over analytical intelligence, élan vital against frozen doctrine.

In the 1960s, he expounded the importance to him of Bergson in a conversation with an American journalist: I was much influenced by Bergson particularly because he made me understand the philosophy of action. Bergson explains the role of intelligence and analysis. He saw how necessary it is to analyze questions in search of the truth, but intellect alone cannot act. The intelligent man does not automatically become the man of action. Instinct is also important. Instinct plus impulse; but impulse alone is also not sufficient as a basis for action. The two, intellect and impulse, must go together … Great men have both intellect and impulse. The brain serves as a brake upon pure emotional impulse.

If de Gaulle ever suffered religious doubts, we have no record of them

What is certain is that de Gaulle’s Catholicism was inseparable from his patriotism and his sense of France.

he told one biographer: For me the history of France begins with Clovis, who was chosen as King of France by the tribe of Franks who gave their name to France. Before Clovis, we have the Gallo-Roman and Gaulish history. The deciding element for me is that Clovis was the first king to be baptised a Christian. Mine is a Christian country and I count the history of France from the accession of a Christian king who bore the name of the Franks.

In the history of France, the period with which de Gaulle was most out of sympathy was the anti-religious and freethinking Enlightenment when, as he wrote in the 1930s, ‘scepticism and corruption … dissolved loyalty and paralysed authority.’76 Voltaire was an author whose corrosive irony he particularly deplored, often citing his verses as proof that ‘French intellectuals have always betrayed France.’

Once he had returned to power in 1958 as President of a formally secular state, he avoided such overtly religious language. Even so, his quasi-mystical nationalism was saturated by his religious sensibility.

Péguy at the Battle of the Marne on 5 September.

back in Poland where events had become more exciting. The country now found itself fighting a full-scale war with Russia. Conflict between the two countries had been simmering for eighteen months while the government of the newly independent Poland, taking advantage of the revolutionary turmoil in Russia, tried to push its frontiers eastwards. In April 1920, the Polish General Józef Piłsudski launched a successful offensive into Ukraine, taking Kiev. But once the Soviet Red Army had finally crushed the internal opponents of the Revolution, it launched a counter-offensive against Poland in July. As the Soviets advanced unstoppably towards Warsaw, the British and French governments sent missions to mediate between the two sides.

There were two military legends in 1920s France: Pétain and Foch. Each represented a different approach to the war. Ferdinand Foch was the arch-exponent of the offensive and the believer in the importance of will as a key to victory; Pétain was known for his emphasis on the need for meticulous preparation. Pétain had become a national icon for his tenacious defence of Verdun in 1916

After 1918, the two men, who loathed each other, headed a competing system of patronage. To secure advancement, it helped to be in either the maison Foch or the maison Pétain.

if Pétain chose to bring de Gaulle into his cabinet in 1925 it was above all because the younger man had revealed himself to be a stylish writer. With an eye on the Académie Française, Pétain was planning to write a history of the French army. Since he had no literary gifts, de Gaulle was an ideal candidate to act as his ghostwriter.

Yvonne de Gaulle’s disapproval of Pétain’s irregular private life did not facilitate relations between the two couples.

De Gaulle’s former prisoner-of-war companion, the future General Georges Catroux, who served in the Levant during the 1920s, had shown great diplomatic skill negotiating between the different ethnic and religious communities whom the French played off against each other.

It is not clear why de Gaulle chose the Levant in 1929. Most officers served a stint in the Empire and perhaps he felt this was an obligatory rite of passage.

The family arrived in Beirut in December 1929. The city was not yet the elegant metropolis it was to become in the 1930s.

Nothing about his posting excited de Gaulle’s imagination except that he was in the land of the Crusades. One expedition took him to the River Tigris and he wrote to his father that ‘it was not without emotion that we dipped our hand in this river’ – the first French soldiers to do so since the Crusades.

If the Lebanese experience left any imprint on de Gaulle it was possibly to sharpen a suspicion of Britain which was never far under the surface among Frenchmen of his generation.

In the inter-war years the Levant was the only region where Anglo-French imperial rivalry remained acute as the two powers struggled for influence over the spoils of the Ottoman Empire. This was the theme of one of the best-selling novels of the inter-war period, Pierre Benoit’s La Châtelaine du Liban, published in 1924 five years before de Gaulle set off for Beirut.

The seeds of de Gaulle’s violent clashes with the British over the Levant in 1940 were sown in these years.

what caused problems for his superiors was his argument that the creation of tank divisions required a professional army. The commitment to the idea of the ‘nation in arms’ was sacred in France as a way of linking the nation to its army. Although de Gaulle was not arguing for the abolition of conscription, the creation of a professional army alongside an army composed of conscripts would have involved a massive reorganization.

The demonstration of 6 February 1934 turned violent. When it seemed as if the demonstrators were planning to cross the bridge separating the Place de la Concorde from the parliament building across the Seine, troops guarding the bridge opened fire. Fifteen demonstrators were killed.

The previously disunited parties of the left, from the Communists on the extreme left to the Radicals on the centre-left via the Socialists in the middle, reacted by forming an alliance called the Popular Front. At the elections of June 1936 the Popular Front triumphed. The Communists, who had previously had only a handful of députés, were now a major player in French politics. The Socialist leader Léon Blum became premier of the first Socialist-led government in French history. Soon afterwards in Spain, where a Popular Front government had also been elected, there was a military uprising, prelude to a three-year civil war.

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 Gaulle’s political ideal in the mid-1930s seems to combine elitist and managerial authoritarianism with charismatic leadership. In practical terms this could have led him in directions which had little in common with parliamentary democracy.

Poland is nothing, and anyway she is playing a double game.

Relations with Britain nearly tipped into war when on 4 July the British, still terrified that France’s navy would fall into German hands, bombed part of the French fleet at Mers-el-Kébir in North Africa after first offering it the chance to sail under British escort to the West Indies. Thirteen hundred French sailors were killed at Mers-el-Kébir. The Vichy government retaliated by bombing Gibraltar but drew back from declaring war. From now on there were no official diplomatic links between the French and British governments; contact took place through informal emissaries. The British instituted an economic blockade of France.

Many years later he said in private that he completely understood why the British had acted in this way.37 He would hold many grudges against the British – some of them dating back hundreds of years – but Mers-el-Kébir was not one of them.

Among those who joined de Gaulle at the start there were, however, no senior diplomats, no prefects or senior civil servants, no well-known writers or intellectuals, and only two obscure parliamentarians.

Less surprising was Jean Monnet’s decision. Although he had worked with de Gaulle on the Franco-British Union proposal of 16 June, he quickly became wary of de Gaulle’s political ambitions and did everything possible to sabotage his abortive committee. He argued in a long letter to de Gaulle that ‘it is not from London that this effort of resurrection’ can come: a movement based in London would seem ‘protected by England, inspired by her interests’. This was an ironic comment from the internationalist Monnet and in view of the stormy relations de Gaulle would have with the British over the coming years.52 Monnet instead decided to offer his services to the American government.

Maurice Schumann and René Pleven, who rallied to de Gaulle, and Pierre Maillaud and Jean Monnet, who did not, were on good terms with each other; all opposed the armistice; all shared broadly similar values. The fact that they made different choices in 1940 shows how the decision to join de Gaulle was more about instinct than about calculation.

(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?’

If we proclaim simply that we are fighting for democracy, we will perhaps win provisional approval from the Americans but we would lose a lot with the French

De Gaulle’s speeches gradually started to include attacks on Vichy’s suppression of political liberties, but this was never for him the central issue: that issue was the armistice.

Roosevelt’s negative view of de Gaulle was reinforced by the numerous French exiles in the United States, many of whom were well connected in elite American circles. These included Jean Monnet and Alexis Leger who had both while in London tried to warn Churchill against making an agreement with de Gaulle in June 1940. Other prominent French exiles suspicious of de Gaulle included writers like André Maurois and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (author of The Little Prince), the filmmaker Jean Renoir and former Third Republic politicians like Camille Chautemps. Many of the brightest talents of pre-war France were in America – and few of them were pro-de Gaulle.

de Gaulle, who found it ‘troublesome that His Majesty’s Government attached so much importance to giving satisfaction to the United States’,

When Molotov paid a visit to London he accorded de Gaulle an interview on 24 May. De Gaulle poured out his bile against the Allies and hoped the Russians might be able to help him over Madagascar; Molotov hoped in return that de Gaulle might be able to help on the issue of the second front.

Schumann, who spoke on the radio more often than de Gaulle, circumvented the censorship issue by becoming friendly with the two censors he had to work with – but this was not de Gaulle’s style.

The belief that Pétain was doing his best behind the scenes to resist Germany was widely shared. Many resisters hoped to win the secret support of Vichy insiders,

The General’s startling intensity was anathema to his smooth patrician urbanity. He told Churchill that he was ‘concerned at the spiritual look’ in de Gaulle’s eyes.38 He afterwards recounted, with many embellishments in the retelling, that de Gaulle had compared himself to Joan of Arc. The truth was more complicated. When Roosevelt told de Gaulle he could not recognize him because he had not been elected, de Gaulle replied that Joan of Arc had not been elected either but that her legitimacy had come from taking arms against the invader. The two men were talking an entirely different language: de Gaulle was making an historical argument, Roosevelt a constitutional one, de Gaulle invoking ‘legitimacy’, Roosevelt legality.

Feeling like a prisoner in the fenced compound of Anfa, de Gaulle smuggled out an alarmist letter to a former Saint-Cyr student of his living in Casablanca. He warned him that the Americans were planning to ‘establish in North Africa and, if possible throughout the French Empire, and then in France itself, a French authority that is completely beholden to them’. If he found himself prevented from communicating with the outside world, he wanted it known that he had not ‘betrayed’ the French. He ended by comparing the atmosphere in Anfa to that of Berchtesgaden. He was presumably referring either to the occasion at Berchtesgaden in February 1938 when Hitler had bullied the Chancellor of Austria, Schuschnigg, into accepting the Anschluss, or the one in September 1938 when he had bullied Chamberlain into accepting the Munich Agreement. In both these analogies Roosevelt was Hitler.39 The comparison might seem an example of de Gaulle’s paranoia except that even Oliver Harvey, de Gaulle’s Foreign Office admirer, had predicted that de Gaulle might be ‘Muniched’ at Anfa, that is forced to accept an American diktat and subordinate himself to Giraud.40 But de Gaulle was made of sterner stuff than Schuschnigg or Chamberlain.