Le grand Charles(Charles de Gaulle)

Biography & Memoirs

Charles de Gaulle by Paolo Garretto, 1969

Le grand Charles

SUDHIR HAZAREESINGH

TLS

July 10, 2018

There can be few more compelling subjects for a biography than Charles de Gaulle, the modern symbol of French grandeur. During his remarkable political career, he twice rescued his country from disaster: first through his bold leadership of the Resistance after France’s defeat by the Nazis in 1940, and later by his skilful handling of the crisis provoked by the Algerian war of national liberation. As the founder of the Fifth Republic in 1958, he redesigned France’s political system along presidential lines, and his shadow has loomed heavily over all his successors (on his official photograph, Emmanuel Macron’s most prominent talisman is an open copy of de Gaulle’s War Memoirs). once reviled by liberals and progressives for his authoritarianism, and by the extreme Right for his anti-fascism and anti-colonialism, de Gaulle is now celebrated by the entire French political class. Indeed, le grand Charles has become the nation’s most revered historical figure, with thousands of streets, schools and public squares across France bearing his name. His vision of Frenchness has reshaped his compatriots’ sense of their collective self, and of their country’s rightful place in the world. To understand de Gaulle, in sum, is to appreciate what it means to be French, both intellectually and emotionally.

However, any attempt to reconstruct the Gaullian mindset is fraught with challenges, as Julian Jackson recognizes in this wonderfully poised, erudite and captivating work. This was a leader for whom silence was a virtue, and impenetrability a defining quality. He tended to keep his innermost thoughts to himself, and often made conflicting observations to members of his entourage – simply to gauge their reactions. He was an inveterate producer of myths, framing grand idealized narratives that distorted the French past, while systematically exaggerating his role and belittling that of his rivals and adversaries (many wartime documents of his Free French movement, and even his own collected speeches and notes, were later doctored). Moreover, as Jackson notes, de Gaulle was riddled with “extraordinary contradictions”. He veered between buoyant optimism and crippling melancholy, calcu­lating rationalism and ethereal mysticism, selfless abnegation and narcissistic egotism, shameless opportunism and obdurate inflex­ibility (fittingly, his surname was derived from the Flemish word for “wall”). To this list might be added his greatest paradox: he loved France, but was contemptuous of the French – a characteristic example of the Gallic intellectual preference for idealized abstraction over empirical reality.

Throughout the book, Jackson deftly hand­les these “different registers” of the Gaullian voice. He also shows how these cross-pressures were often grounded in de Gaulle’s formative years. As a cadet at Saint-Cyr, and a rising star in the French military establishment in the interwar era, he was already displaying many of his basic character traits – notably his aloofness, tinged with a certain misanthropy; his belief in his manifest destiny (one of his youthful writings even imagined France being saved by a “Général de Gaulle”); and his romantic and syncretic patriotism, nourished by his readings of Charles Péguy and Maurice Barrès. In common with many of his generation, de Gaulle found his political culture decisively shaped by war: he was fascinated both by the Napoleonic epic, and by the defensive patriotism of republican leaders such as Lazare Carnot and Léon Gambetta; he shared the wounded nationalism of his father Henri, a combatant in the Franco–Prussian War; and he himself fought gallantly in the First World War (for which he received the Legion of Honour). Apparent, too, during these years were de Gaulle’s maverick qualities: he had little of his contemporaries’ fascination for the French colonial empire, and in the 1930s he defied the strategic orthodoxy of the military high command by advocating greater reliance on armoured divisions. That said, Jackson rightly observes that de Gaulle’s overall political philosophy before 1940 was not especially original, and was broadly in conformity with the authoritarian elitism of the French conservative establishment.

All of this changed irreversibly with the onset of the Second World War, and the French capitulation to the Nazis in June 1940. At the time a junior Minister in Paul Reynaud’s government, de Gaulle refused to accept defeat. He flew to London, where on June 18 he broadcast an appeal to his compatriots on the BBC to continue the struggle, vowing to kindle the “flame of resistance”. De Gaulle was true to his word. Over the next four years, the exiled General became the symbol of the French collective fight against the Germans, and their collaborationist stooges in Vichy. In a brilliantly forensic series of chapters, Jackson traces how de Gaulle inexorably established his leadership over the Resistance movement, and eventually imposed himself as the primary diplomatic interlocutor of the Allies. He did so through a combination of tactical skill, ruthlessness, obstinacy and sheer, grinding willpower. He overcame all obstacles, including his lack of familiarity with English (he took lessons from “M. de Valence, a Mauritian working for the BBC”), the rancorous divisions among his own supporters in London, the calculated slights of the Americans (Roosevelt dismissed him as “the head of some French Committee”), and the clumsy and half-hearted attempts by Churchill to keep him on a leash.

Jackson also highlights de Gaulle’s capacity for pragmatism: he thus makes a convincing case that the “republican turn” signalled by his Albert Hall and Oxford speeches in late 1941 was largely a product of his encounter with Jean Moulin, who impressed upon him the democratic aspirations of the internal Resistance forces. De Gaulle made a triumphant return to liberated France in 1944, and was installed as the leader of the French provisional government. Yet he did not forget the humiliations endured at the hands of Roosevelt and Churchill, who constantly tried to sideline him and kept him in the dark about Allied troop landings in North Africa in 1942, and Normandy in 1944. De Gaulle retaliated by not mentioning the Allies in his speech at the Hôtel de Ville after the liberation of Paris. This prompted perhaps the most extravagant Gaullian myth of the post-war decades: the notion that the French had freed themselves from fascism without any external assistance. The General religiously celebrated the anniversary of his June 18 appeal each year, and in 1964 refused to attend the commemorations of the Normandy landings; somewhat perversely, he maintained that his wartime struggle had also been waged against British and American imperialism.

Having won the war, de Gaulle contrived to lose the peace. His re-entry onto the French scene after 1944 was a calamitous failure; Jackson lucidly chronicles his succession of inept political moves in the immediate post-war years. He expressed no gratitude to the brave men and women who fought in the internal Resistance, and alienated many of them by churlishly playing down their role. His colonial policy in 1944–5 was a catas­trophe and only served to exacerbate anti-French sentiment in Syria, Indochina and Algeria (where French troops massacred tens of thousands of civilians at Sétif in May 1945). Even though he yearned for a break with the parliamentary regime which had presided over the 1940 debacle, and loudly proclaimed his “revolutionary” ambitions, he failed to put forward a clear constitutional alternative. He resigned as Prime Minister in early 1946, expecting the political class to implore him to return on bended knee (his faith in his providential qualities had slightly gone to his head, as he now saw himself as the personification of the nation; when the government offered to award him a medal for his patriotic services, he responded that “one does not decorate France”). This cascade of blunders culminated in 1947 in the formation of a Gaullist political movement, the Rassemblement du Peuple Français. Even his mild-mannered wife Yvonne felt that this was a stupid project, predicting it would damage the national liberator’s non-partisan image. This duly happened, and the RPF was inevitably sucked into the quagmire of the Fourth Republic. Tactically outflanked by the “regime of parties”, de Gaulle did not help matters by giving little clear strategic direction to his party, and forcing its leaders to traipse to his lugubrious home at Colombey-les-Deux-Églises in the Haute-Marne to receive their instructions (which mostly consisted of being berated for their incompetence). De Gaulle’s reputation as the saviour-in-waiting was restored by the publication of the two volumes of his War Memoirs in the 1950s, which were greeted with near-universal enthusiasm. He was justifiably proud of his work as a memorialist, which also allowed him to display his legendary black humour: referring to the numerous assassination attempts against him, he once described himself as the French writer who had been most shot at.

All great leaders need their dose of luck. De Gaulle’s political resurrection was made possible by the anti-colonial insurrection launched by the Algerian Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) from 1954. Blinded by their axiomatic belief that Algeria was part of France, Parisian elites were unable to handle the colonial conflict except by an escalation of military force. In 1958, after discreetly encouraging the French army in Algeria to rebel against the national government, de Gaulle returned to office through what was in effect a legal coup d’état (in a nod to the Bonapartist tradition, Jackson terms it his “18th Brumaire”). From these inauspicious beginnings, however, the old Gaullian magic reappeared: he swiftly created a new presidentialist constitution, which was adopted by referendum; he solved the regime crisis by browbeating the colonial army into obedience, and facilitating Algerian independence in 1962; and he then consolidated his grip on power by another referendum which sanctioned the direct election of the president. Three years later, de Gaulle was duly re-elected for a second term – although the French people disappointed him (once more) by forcing him to contest a run-off against François Mitterrand. He always believed that his fundamental legitimacy rested not on the endorsement of popular suffrage, but in his Rousseauvian “assumption of France” during the Resistance years.

Drawing on recently declassified presi­den­tial archives, Jackson sheds new and revealing light on the inner workings of the Gaullian executive after 1958 – notably the tensions between the President and his Prime Minister, Michel Debré, the author of long moaning letters to de Gaulle (who did not like speaking on the telephone). The documents also show that de Gaulle’s Algerian policy was initially very fluid, as he clung to the possibility of salvaging some form of French rule in the territory, in association with “moderate” Muslim elements. However, once he realized that the FLN represented the popular will of the Algerians (and the white colons were trapped in a colonialist time warp), the General moved decisively. His new foreign policy restored France’s diplomatic and moral credibility across the globe: he established the Franco-German axis as the foun­dation of European unity, recognized communist China, strongly criticized America’s war in Vietnam, and twice vetoed British membership of the European Community (if anything, his wartime wariness of “Anglo-Saxon” hegemony was now heightened; to the delight of French progressives, he pointed his nuclear missiles at Washington). He also condemned Israel’s seizure of Arab ter­ritories during the Six Day War in 1967, prophetically anticipating that its military occupation would provoke widespread popular resistance.

De Gaulle’s final years in office were anticlimactic: he looked old and out of touch during the events of May ’68, whose significance he completely failed to grasp – although he did manage a gloriously Gaullian escapade by flying under the radar to Germany on May 29; for several hours no one in Paris knew where the French President was. Yet it was only thanks to the Prime Minister, Georges Pompidou, that the Gaullists eventually turned the crisis to their political advantage by calling a snap legislative election (de Gaulle rewarded the ultra-loyal Pompidou by sacking him; gratitude was never one of his strong suits). The General resigned in 1969 after a losing a referendum on regional reform: the French had failed to live up to his expectations – yet again. A year later he was dead. André Malraux, one of the few visitors to see him during his final period of internal exile, claimed that he compared himself to Tintin, always on the side of the underdog against the world’s fat cats.

Julian Jackson’s tribute is more sober, but no less comprehensive: he ends this exemplary biography with a homage to de Gaulle as the saviour of French honour in 1940. He is somewhat more ambivalent about the legacy of the Fifth Republic. There is no denying that de Gaulle had a strong Bonapartist streak, as reflected in his sense of destiny, his cult of the State, his plebiscitary con­ception of democracy, his contempt for idle parliamentary chatter, to say nothing of his cavalier treatment of his own constitution. Yet the General’s journeys to the dark side were never more than fleeting. He always returned. In fact, his fundamental instincts remained those of a democratic republican. He was steadfast in his attachment to the principles of national self-determination, in his respect for popular sovereignty, in his dedication to the common good, and above all in his scrupulous ethic of personal integrity: he paid his own electricity bill when he was at the Élysée. He was in this sense, and will forever remain, the most republican of French monarchs.