AS A CORRESPONDENT in Paris in the 1960s, I quickly learned that
the surefire way to get the attention of the editors back home was
to put “Charles de Gaulle” in the first paragraph. I could just see
their eyes light up with interest (“Now what’s he done?”)
as the story clattered into New York on the teletype. He knew he
was good copy. “They feed on me,” he once said scornfully of us
gentlemen of the Fourth Estate, fully aware that we needed, and
used, each other.
For three turbulent decades he was the man we loved to hate. So
stubborn, so damned sure of himself. Downright arrogant.
When asked if he agreed to a proposal, he would reply, “I do not
agree, I decide yes or no.” U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk once
compared meetings with him to “crawling up a mountainside on your
knees, opening a little portal at the top, and waiting for the
oracle to speak.” When he did speak, he said the most outrageous
things. Like “States do not have friends, they have only
interests.” And “Treaties are like young girls and roses; they last
while they last.” Frustrated statesmen found themselves swearing
like sailors after a session with him. “I don’t like the son of a
bitch,” Harry Truman told his staff.
The consummate diplomat Charles “Chip” Bohlen clinically
described de Gaulle as “essentially egocentric with some touches of
megalomania”; less formally he called him “one of the biggest sons
of bitches who ever straddled a pot.” During de Gaulle’s years in
London as he rallied French resistance, Churchill’s foreign
secretary, the courtly Anthony Eden, wrote that “it may well be we
shall find that de Gaulle is crazy.” Shown still another
intransigent cable from him, Eden spluttered in unaccustomed rage,
“I hate all Frenchmen.” In a calmer moment face-to-face
with the General, as he preferred to be known, Eden casually
remarked, “Do you know that, of all the European allies, you have
caused us the most difficulties?” A secretly pleased de Gaulle
replied with a smile, “I don’t doubt that. France is a great
power.”
It was a great power only in his own imagination, as he carried
the honor of a beaten, subjected, collaborating France on his
shoulders during those darkest days of World War II. Then, and
again nearly two decades later, the country owed its salvation to
de Gaulle, as Jonathan Fenby reminds us in his masterful,
definitive new biography, The General: Charles de Gaulle and
the France He Saved (Skyhorse Publishing, 707 pages, $32.95).
Fenby, a former editor of London’s Observer and onetime
bureau chief in France for both the Economist and Reuters,
gives a full-length portrait of Charles André Joseph Marie de
Gaulle. He doesn’t shy away from the case against de Gaulle, but as
he sums up, “The final judgment has to be that he was a man who
made a huge difference, and put a lasting mark on his
country.…Twice, in 1940 and 1958, he offered France an alternative
to disaster, overcoming huge odds by the force of his personality,
his belief in his mission and his acute tactical sense. The
institutions he created in 1958 still function.”
His upbringing explains much of de Gaulle’s messianic belief in
himself. Born in northern France in 1890 into a deeply conservative
Catholic family of the minor aristocracy—an ancestor fought the
English at Agincourt in 1415—he was taught to revere the noble
values of monarchical France and to be suspicious of a republic
that removed crucifixes from courtrooms and gave equal weight to
commoners and the elite. No singing of the “Marseillaise” or
celebrating Bastille Day was permitted. He discovered his military
vocation early, staging battles with his collection of 1,800 toy
soldiers. At 15 he wrote a detailed account of a coming war with
Germany, describing himself leading bayonet charges.
De Gaulle got his first taste of real war after graduating from
the St. Cyr military academy as a second lieutenant shortly before
WWI. He showed unusual physical courage, often standing on the
battlefield as other officers dived to safety during heavy
shelling. (Years later, during the fierce Battle of the Somme in
1940, this attitude unnerved British officers he was with: a
British general exclaimed, “The bloody man will get us killed” as
German artillery pounded the area.) During hand-to-hand combat in
the 10-month Battle of Douaumont in 1916, he was brought down by a
bayonet thrust, overcome by poison gas, and initially left for
dead. As he explained his almost mystical lack of fear: “I have a
providential mission to fulfill. I think nothing will happen to me.
If it does, I will have been mistaken.”
IT TOOK THAT KIND of outsized self-confidence and patriotic zeal
for de Gaulle to fly to London on June 17, 1940, with only a vague
idea of what he might accomplish. He was an unknown two-star
general disobeying France’s legal government following catastrophic
defeat. When he did not comply with Vichy’s order to appear at a
court-martial, he was sentenced in absentia to four years in
prison—later increased to the death penalty—for treason, desertion,
and aiding the enemy. He declared the judgment null and void,
claiming with characteristic chutzpah, “We are France.” Churchill,
often driven to distraction by de Gaulle, admitted grudging
admiration: “His country has given up fighting, he himself is a
refugee, and if we turn him down he’s finished. But look at him! He
might be Stalin, with 200 divisions behind his words. Perhaps the
last survivor of a warrior race.”
The day after his arrival, de Gaulle made his first of 67
broadcasts from London, wearing his general’s uniform complete with
polished boots. (In Downing Street, Churchill was finishing his
“Finest Hour” address, which he delivered to the House of Commons
later that day.) The General’s famous Appel du 18 juin,
still commemorated every year in France, was only 400 words, but
offered hope. Defeat was not final, France was not alone. It had
overseas possessions, could align itself with the British Empire,
and “use without limit the immense industry of the United States.”
(What he did not say, as many think, was “France has lost a battle,
but France has not lost the war.” He appears to have read that
summary in an Associated Press dispatch and said, “That’s pretty
good.” He used it on July 14.)
Punching far above his weight, de Gaulle was constantly at
loggerheads with his British hosts, often complaining about “the
usurpation of French rights by the British.” One of Churchill’s
cabinet members noted, “The prime minister is sick to death of
him.” But Churchill understood that intransigence was de Gaulle’s
only weapon: “He had to be rude to the British to prove to French
eyes that he was not a British puppet.” That didn’t keep Churchill
from being seriously annoyed when the General initially refused to
attend the Casablanca conference in January 1943 to review the
progress of the war. De Gaulle objected to a meeting organized by
foreign powers on French soil, Morocco then being a protectorate of
France. “You’ve got to get your problem child down here,” Roosevelt
told Churchill. “De Gaulle is on his high horse,” Churchill
replied. “Refuses to come down here…Jeanne d’Arc complex.” Having
made his point, de Gaulle showed up.
After the Allied victory—and convincing Eisenhower to let French
troops appear to liberate Paris—de Gaulle served briefly as prime
minister of the new Fourth Republic before abruptly resigning in
disgust over petty party squabbling. He headed for his country home
of La Boisserie in the village of Colombey-les-deux-Églises, 155
miles east of Paris. There he sulked for 12 years while France went
through some two dozen governments, losing all its overseas empire
except Algeria. When civil war threatened over the revolt in that
last colony, the Fourth Republic collapsed and the scene was set in
1958 for the General to once again save his country. He oversaw
creation of the Fifth Republic and wrote a constitution tailor-
made for him, with sweeping decree powers in periods of national
emergency. As he put it loftily, “Great circumstances bring forth
great men.”
He presided over France for the next 11 years, often going to
the brink to annoy “les Anglo-Saxons” and his European
neighbors with a pantomime of power. He hated Common Market Europe
for undermining French national sovereignty, blocked it at every
opportunity, kept the British out, and insisted that only
nation-states were politically viable. He was a constant irritant
to Washington, withdrawing from the NATO integrated command
structure and refusing to sign the 1963 nuclear test ban treaty
(which mandated underground tests) because France was testing its
new nukes above ground in the Sahara. But when the chips were down,
it was clear where his loyalties lay. When the four-power summit in
May 1960 degenerated into a Khrushchev-led slanging match, de
Gaulle took President Eisenhower aside and said, “I want you to
know that I will be with you to the end.” Eisenhower later told an
aide, “That de Gaulle, he’s somebody.”
Maybe because of the military link, Eisenhower was the American
leader de Gaulle respected most, and the feeling apparently was
mutual. Eisenhower apologized in 1943 for having underestimated
him, leading the General to reply with his highest compliment,
saying in English, “You are a man.” After he accorded Richard Nixon
10 hours of personal conversation in 1969, Nixon concluded, “An
aura of majesty seemed to envelop him.…His performance—and I do not
use that word disparagingly—was breathtaking. He was not always
right, but he was always certain.”
BUT THE UNCERTAINTIES he learned early in life no longer
obtained in the chaotic 1960s. The man from the day before
yesterday and the day after tomorrow, as André Malraux put it, was
blindsided in 1968 by university students rioting over what was
initially no more than a panty raid. He lost his bearings. He
hadn’t read Marcuse or the structuralists, had barely heard of
somebody called Che Guevara. Sensing that the French had wearied of
him—demonstrators chanted “Ten years are enough”—he decided to
commit political suicide. In April 1969 he rigged up an irrelevant
referendum and declared he would leave if it failed. He lost and
issued a terse, “I cease to exercise my functions as president of
the Republic.”
Today the French, who chafed under his stern standards and
derisively called him le Grand Charles, have come to
appreciate what he did for them. Hardly a town is without a street
named after him; France’s main airport and its nuclear aircraft
carrier bear his name. A poll in 2005 picked him as the outstanding
figure in all of French history. But he had always been
disappointed by his compatriots: too frivolous, too prone to avoid
the hard choices or make the effort national greatness required.
They always gave up the fight. He despairingly called them
veaux, literally “calves” but best translated as “sheep.”
“I cannot always hold them up,” he said toward the end. “I can’t
substitute myself for them. And the French will have to do without
me one day.” That day came on November 9, 1970.
