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
