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

by Julian T. Jackson

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.