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

by Julian T. Jackson

Churchill’s attitude to de Gaulle was always shot through with this mixture of exasperation and grudging admiration. Only his intervention prevented the conference being even more unfavourable to de Gaulle. Without informing Churchill, Roosevelt had signed a memorandum committing the Allied governments to the position that ‘all the French fighting against Germany [should] be reunited under one authority’ and recognizing Giraud as that authority – a total contradiction of his own policy that no one authority had the legitimacy to speak for France. When Churchill discovered this after the conference, he had the document amended, adding de Gaulle’s name. For all his bouts of fury against de Gaulle, he felt an obligation to him.

Although de Gaulle now realized that Giraud was not going to give way gracefully, he returned from Anfa convinced that his rival was ‘a ghost from 1939’ with no understanding of how the war had changed the world – by which he meant that the Resistance in France would never accept this attempt to impose a pseudo-Vichyite government on the French.

‘Jean Monnet.’ ‘That little financier in the pay of the British …’

At some level Churchill, instinctively Francophile in a way that Roosevelt was not, probably accepted that France’s interests were in some way embodied in de Gaulle – the man he had impulsively backed in 1940.

Now Roosevelt, informed by Murphy, suddenly realized that, after only ten days, de Gaulle was close to assuming full control of the Committee. In what one Foreign Office diplomat described as a ‘hysterical diatribe’, Roosevelt wrote to Churchill on 17 June suggesting – again – that the time had come to break with de Gaulle entirely.115 Eisenhower was instructed to tell de Gaulle that French North Africa was occupied territory and the Americans would permit no weakening of Giraud’s authority. This was exactly the wrong tactic.

Overt foreign intervention was guaranteed to cement French unity.

On 22 June, the Committee accepted a compromise negotiated by Monnet.

de Gaulle gave an audience to André Gide, one of France’s most famous writers, who was living in North Africa. Gide was not one of his preferred authors but receiving great writers was the act of a head of state – the role which de Gaulle was rehearsing.

The only tense moment occurred when Gide tried to defend the writer André Maurois who, from the United States, remained faithful to Pétain:

was clear to American military leaders in North Africa not only that Giraud was politically incompetent but that his military ideas were hopelessly outdated as well. The ‘great soldier’ remained Commander in Chief for another few months but politically he was finished.

Giraud’s only asset was the support of the American government, but this was ultimately a liability. Faced with de Gaulle’s political ruthlessness, brilliance as a popular tribune and total clarity about what he wanted to achieve, Giraud never stood a chance.

Other snubs followed. Meeting in Moscow at the end of October, Allied leaders set up a European Advisory Commission to plan post-war policy. The French were not on it. Nor was de Gaulle invited to a summit at Tehran at the end of November where the decision for D-Day was taken. De Gaulle drew the moral in his memoirs: ‘There was no doubt! Our allies were in agreement to exclude us, as much as possible, from decisions concerning Italy. It was to be predicted that in the future they would agree the destiny of Europe without France. But they needed to be shown that France could not permit such an exclusion.’

even Churchill cabled Roosevelt arguing that ‘it is very difficult to cut the French out of the liberation of France.’95 He was under increasing pressure from British public opinion, parliament and his own government to bring de Gaulle into the discussions about the Liberation.

‘In literature as in everything talent confers responsibility.’ If this really was his view, it meant that one of the arguments used by Isorni and Mauriac to save Brasillach – his distinction as a writer – was actually what condemned him in de Gaulle’s eyes.

For de Gaulle, however, the problem was that the prosecution concentrated on what he saw as the secondary question of the internal policies and crimes of the Vichy regime rather than on what he considered the central issue: the signing of the armistice from which, in his view, all the rest followed. This is what separated his reading of the Occupation from that of the Resistance.

in the autumn of 1943. At a dinner in October, there was a fascinating conversation between de Gaulle and Monnet on post-war Europe. Monnet outlined his vision of a unified European entity including France and Germany. De Gaulle was sceptical: ‘You need to take account of traditions. Never after this war will you put the Germans and the French together in the same grouping.’ Instead he envisaged some kind of economic bloc which could include the Rhineland (which he no longer saw as part of Germany) and perhaps also Italy. It would have close ties to Russia and Britain, although Britain would not participate in it because she was ‘torn between … Europe and her Empire’.

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.’

In his Memoirs de Gaulle reports that he proposed a kind of privileged partnership between their countries so that they could stand up to both the Soviet Union and United States. Not only was this as grandiose as it was vague, but since de Gaulle knew perfectly well that Churchill prioritized his close relationship with Roosevelt, one can assume that these comments, if they were made at all – and they are not registered in the British record – were made with his Memoirs in mind rather than intended as a serious proposition.

Shortly before Churchill’s visit, de Gaulle had asked Bogomolov for an invitation to visit the Soviet Union. For de Gaulle, this was the chance for a spectacular entry into the world of international diplomacy. There were also more practical objectives. De Gaulle wanted to probe whether the Soviet Union might be more ready to back French objectives in the Rhineland than the British and Americans. He set off for the Soviet Union on 24 November. Because of the intense fighting on the eastern front, the Soviet government had proposed that he travel to Moscow by train from Baku. He therefore had to fly first to Tehran via Cairo, and then board the train from Baku. He was away from France for just over three weeks. That he was prepared to risk being absent for so long when the internal situation was still so uncertain and parts of French territory had still not been liberated shows the huge importance he attached to this trip.

The Soviets, who had kept Churchill informed of the discussions, reported London’s suggestion that instead of a bilateral treaty with France there might be a tripartite pact between the three countries. De Gaulle was furious.

In the famous pages de Gaulle devoted to this visit in his Memoirs, accompanied by some marginally doctored documents,47 he portrayed himself as having for a week resisted Stalin’s pressure to recognize the Lublin Committee and contrasted this with what happened two months later at the Yalta Conference where Roosevelt and Churchill effectively abandoned eastern Europe to Stalin. Since de Gaulle was not present at Yalta – he was not invited to attend – he was able to claim that his hands were clean in this. Time and again, he would return to his idea that Yalta had revealed to the world ‘that there was a correlation between France’s absence and Europe’s new laceration’.

how little Stalin cared about France was demonstrated at Yalta only six weeks later when he was the leader least favourable to French interests. While pushing Churchill and Roosevelt to recognize the Lublin Committee, he remarked mischievously that de Gaulle’s democratic base of support in France was no greater. At Yalta, France was in fact granted a zone of occupation in Germany, a permanent seat on the Security Council of the newly created United Nations and a seat on the Inter-Allied Control Commission in Berlin – although this last concession was resisted by both Stalin and Roosevelt until the last day of the conference. These French successes were won by the arguments of Churchill with some support from Roosevelt’s special adviser Harry Hopkins. In this case, Churchill’s Gaullophobia was trumped by his Francophilia: the need for a strong France to restore a normal balance of power in Europe and act as a counterweight to Germany and the Soviet Union. De Gaulle himself admitted in his Memoirs that Yalta had offered France ‘important satisfactions’,

the founding of the United Nations. He was not willing to put his name to a document in whose drafting he had played no part.

As well as attacking the Communists as an internal enemy, the RPF also offered a positive alternative to Marxist class struggle by developing a distinctive social doctrine. This was encapsulated in the idea of an ‘association’ between employers and workers, capital and labour. This idea was entirely de Gaulle’s. He had first raised it at the meeting in February 1947 where he unveiled his intentions to his immediate followers. A few weeks later, he expressed frustration that whenever he mentioned ‘association’ he encountered only a ‘lack of curiosity, complete ignorance, indifference, if not indeed resistance’. What he really encountered was incomprehension because no one had a clue what the term meant.

this idea was more than just an opportunistic response to the Communist Party; it was one to which he was to return intermittently for the rest of his career.

For the first time he offered an interpretation of Nazism, which he viewed as a consequence of ‘the transformation of the conditions of life by machines, the growing concentration of the masses and the resulting gigantic collective conformism’ threatening the freedom of the individual:

Such fears were shared by many cultural commentators and intellectuals in inter-war Europe. They are reflected in films like Chaplin’s Modern Times, René Clair’s À nous la liberté and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. The Belgian symbolist playwright Maurice Maeterlinck expressed these ideas in best-selling books of what might be described as ‘cultural entomology’ in which he compared the social habits of insects to those of humans. His Life of Termites in 1926 was a cautionary tale warning that the crushing of individual freedom under Bolshevism was reducing humans to the level of termites.

This was also a theme of the Catholic novelist and polemicist Georges Bernanos (1888–1948), who published in 1947 a book entitled France against the Robots, denouncing the way that the ‘civilization of machines’ (machinisme) was destroying the human spirit. The affinities between Bernanos and de Gaulle are worth underlining even if de Gaulle never succeeded, as he put it a bit regretfully, in ‘harnessing’ him fully to his cause. A former pupil of de Gaulle’s father at the College of the Immaculate Conception, Bernanos had started out as a fervent monarchist and supporter of Action Française. His famous novel of 1936, Journal of a Country Priest (Journal d’un curé de campagne), described the anguish of a Catholic priest in a small village of northern France wracked by physical ailments and disgusted by the indifference of his parishioners to Christianity. Those who thought they knew where to situate Bernanos politically were startled when he published a violent polemic in 1938 denouncing the conduct of the Catholic Church during the Spanish Civil War. In 1940, living in self-imposed exile in Brazil, he pushed his heterodoxy a stage further by instantaneously denouncing Vichy.

A kind of romantic Christian anarchist, Bernanos was a man out of his time, dreaming of a lost civilization of saints and heroes.

France against the Robots can be found in de Gaulle’s library at Colombey, and on more than one occasion he remarked that the Journal of a Country Priest was the work of fiction published in the inter-war years that he most admired.

another possible source of the association idea were the writings of French pre-Marxist socialists like Fourier and Proudhon whose social thinking revolved around the idea of ‘cooperation’ and social harmony, not class struggle.

The American Ambassador in Paris, Jerome Caffery, convinced that de Gaulle would be swept to power, kept in close contact with Palewski and others.17 The Americans now viewed de Gaulle as the most reliable bulwark against Communism, although Caffery was worried by the ‘fascist’ resonances of the General’s social ideas.

Auriol began to wonder about de Gaulle’s sanity on receiving a letter from him in February 1947 turning down the Médaille Militaire which the French government had simultaneously awarded to Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt (posthumously). De Gaulle replied that he could not accept the decoration because in the war he had acted as France’s head of state, and the ‘State does not decorate itself’.

Jerome Caffery, who had been in frequent touch with de Gaulle’s entourage in the early months of 1948,30 had come to the view by the end of the year that, since the Third Force was proving such an effective barrier against Communism, de Gaulle was more of a problem than a solution.

De Gaulle ruthlessly exploited Soustelle’s devotion, often treating him with savage cruelty. If he made Soustelle his number two, it was not only for his organizational skills but because his lack of charisma meant he would never be a threat.

With Malraux art and life, fantasy and truth, were impossible to disentangle. He was not among the first batch of writers invited to meet de Gaulle in Paris at the Liberation, possibly because of his 1930s reputation as a Communist fellow-traveller. Malraux’s Gaullist epiphany dated to the day in August 1945 when a car drew up at his door with a message from de Gaulle: ‘The General asks you in the name of France if you would be willing to come to his aid.’ This encounter had been set up by members of de Gaulle’s entourage who had reason to think Malraux might be susceptible to such an appeal.

Malraux had repented of his former admiration for Communism and was ready to strike out in a new direction. De Gaulle’s summons could not have been more timely.

Raymond Aron once suggested that Malraux was ‘one-third genius, one-third charlatan and one-third incomprehensible’.

Within days of the meeting in August 1945, Malraux had been co-opted into de Gaulle’s cabinet to look after propaganda. He was among the tiny group to whom the General unveiled his plan to set up the RPF. De Gaulle may have hoped that Malraux would rally leftist intellectuals to the RPF. This never happened

his role in the RPF was to use the magic of his rhetoric to transfigure the banality of day-to-day politics into Legend and History. As he had once said of his previous hero T. E. Lawrence: ‘It is not the man who makes the legend but the legend that makes the man.’ Malraux and Soustelle were the heart and head of the RPF, jockeying for de Gaulle’s favour.

Soustelle he used, Malraux he admired.

Raymond Aron, who provided expertise on economics. Although during the war Aron had been among those in London suspicious of de Gaulle’s authoritarian tendencies, he was now drawn to him by anti-Communism, while never being a fully paid-up anti-Gaullist.

Soustelle, to whom fell the unglamorous tasks of administration and organization, was irritated by the grand airs of Malraux, who had set himself up in luxurious offices near the Opera rather than in the more cramped RPF headquarters

even Pompidou could find de Gaulle’s severity trying: ‘He is maladroit with people, humiliating them, wounding their sense of self-esteem.’

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.

Ultimately it was ‘fidelity’ to Gaulle that bound the RPF together. The movement was a community of believers around a charismatic leader and saviour.

‘There are only two motors to human action, fear and vanity,’ de Gaulle told Pompidou

many former Pétainists who would have execrated de Gaulle at the Liberation. De Gaulle was ready to make some gestures to these voters by making public his unease at the fate of Pétain who, since his conviction in 1945, had been imprisoned in a fortress on the Ile d’Yeu off the coast of Britanny. Now in his nineties Pétain was often described in the press as the ‘oldest prisoner in the world’. De Gaulle declared on various occasions that it was wrong that this old man, now harmless and senile, who had once ‘rendered great service to France’ should die alone in prison

the US government to urge west European states to assume a larger part in their own defence. One solution was to allow West Germany to re-establish a military force, but so soon after the war this was obviously political dynamite in France. Instead the French government came up with the idea (originally hatched by the fertile brain of Jean Monnet) of absorbing German rearmament into a ‘European’ army – the EDC. The treaty approving the EDC was signed in May 1952,

The idea of a supranational ‘European’ army sponsored by the Americans, and supported from the sidelines by the British, was anathema to de Gaulle. On this issue the RPF found itself objectively on the same side as the Communists, who opposed the EDC for different reasons.