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

by Julian T. Jackson

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.