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

by Julian T. Jackson

‘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.’

‘Heavens! To whom can I confide / The secrets of my soul and cares of my life? / Take back the power you have given me / If by giving me subjects it deprives me of friends’

The leader deprives himself of the sweetness that comes from relaxation, familiarity and friendship. He dedicates himself to that solitude that is the sad fate of superior beings … That state of satisfaction, of inner peace, of calculated joy that people agree to call happiness is incompatible with leadership.

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. The brain surmounts impulse; but there must also be impulse and the capability for action in order not to be paralyzed by the brake of the brain.

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 leader also has to cultivate mystery and keep his distance while exercising a ‘large dose of egoism, of pride, of hardness and of ruse’. Leadership is a solitary exercise of the will, a semi-ascetic vocation: ‘An intimate struggle, more or less intense according to the individual, but which at every moment lacerates his soul as the flint tears the feet of the penitent sinner’.77

This mood was picked up by Adrien Tixier, who arrived in London for his first meeting with the man who had appointed him to head the Free French Delegation in Washington a few months earlier. Tixier took the temperature of many conversations and reported to Peake: The General was getting so free a run that unless something could be done to check him he would become unmanageable … With a really strong Committee to challenge the General’s arguments and force him to think out what he wanted to do, the General’s value to France and to the Allies would be enormously improved. He had a powerful and original mind, but it suffered from lack of other minds on which it would, so to speak, sharpen itself.33 This was from the head of de Gaulle’s American Delegation.

One recurring source of irritation was the requirement to submit his speeches to the BBC for approval twelve hours before they went on air. Sometimes de Gaulle ignored this rule and had to be called to order. He would retaliate by threatening to stop Free French broadcasts. But as one British official noted, the prospect could ‘be faced with equanimity’ since this would harm no one more than de Gaulle himself.61 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.

One member of the Free French wrote to de Gaulle with unusual frankness in November 1942: Your way of treating people … arouses in us a painful preoccupation, I would even say a real anxiety. There are subjects where you tolerate no contradiction, not even any debate. Moreover these are issues where your position is especially emotional, that is to say precisely those where you have the greatest interest in testing the reactions of other people. In such cases your tone makes your interlocutors think that in your eyes their disagreement reveals infirmity in their mind or their patriotism.

to admit he was wrong. He told one resister at the end of the war: ‘I only esteem those who stand up to me but unfortunately I cannot stand them.’

So if you do not now adopt the habit of consulting your colleagues and winning a majority by skilful persuasion, you will never acquire it and, whatever your intentions, you will end up, once back in France, taking an authoritarian attitude and I guarantee that the working-class and Republican mass of the people who have confidence in you today will at once abandon you.25

‘I have smashed so many doors when leaving rooms that soon there will be no doors left for me to come back through.’

‘Once the balance between the ends and means is snapped, the manoeuvres of a genius are in vain.’

How do you define success or failure? Only history itself can define these terms. In reality, life and action are always made up of a series of successes and failures. Life is a combat and therefore each one of its phases includes both successes and failures. And you cannot really say which event was a success and which event was a failure. Success contains within it the germs of failure and the reverse is true.

We should not leave the Chinese to stew in their own juice. Otherwise they will become venomous.30

De Gaulle was also a master at expressing ideas in a simple way. Before a speech on 14 June 1960, his advisers prepared for him a mass of complex data on the economy.24 De Gaulle turned these into a speech beginning: ‘Once upon a time there was an old country weighed down by habits and caution. Having been in the past the most populous, the richest, the most powerful of the countries on the world stage, after suffering many misfortunes, it turned in on itself.’ De Gaulle had a clear idea of what he was trying to do in these speeches: ‘You need to speak to them like children and yet at the same time you must get to the bottom of things.’25 Both these elements were in evidence: he had a genius for simplification (when he was not deploying his equal genius for obscurity), but at the same time he always had something to say. As during his wartime speeches, de Gaulle’s rhetoric invariably contained an argument and an appeal to reason.

At the same time, the leaders of the CNJA quickly realized that in the Fifth Republic it was ‘better to have two well-placed civil servants than 25 députés’.

‘The social consequences of capitalism are not acceptable. It crushes the weakest. It transforms men into wolves … Collectivism is no better: it removes from people any desire to fight. It turns them into sheep. We need a third way – between wolves and sheep.’