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22 August 2018

How Charles de Gaulle Rescued France

By Adam Gopnik

Charles de Gaulle, Julian Jackson insists in the preface of his new biography, “De Gaulle” (Harvard), is “everywhere” in modern France, its undisputed hero. This claim, like some other confident statements in the book, may strike a reader as both narrowly true and what a French thinker might call metaphysically false. His name is certainly everywhere—on the great airport outside Paris; on the Place Charles de Gaulle, once called the Étoile, where traffic streams perpetually around the Arc de Triomphe—but his example seems remote. He is more a ceremonial than a controversial figure, his work now done. In forty years of passing in and out of France, I have almost never heard him pointed to as an exemplar useful in any way for today’s crises. His name having been placed on l’Étoile is apt: the traffic goes around all day but never stops for long.


If he lives anywhere, it is in the endless flow of books about the Second World War written by Americans and Brits, in which he emerges as the biggest pain in the ass in the history of the liberal order. By alphabetical accident, the heading “De Gaulle: Personal Characteristics” in Jackson’s index gives us, in sequence: arrogance, austerity, authoritarianism, cigarette smoking, coldness, contempt for human nature. It’s quite a list. Yet, as this classically composed and authoritative (if culturally somewhat shallow) book makes clear, he remains an amazing figure.

De Gaulle had three rendezvous with history, in the old-fashioned sense he loved: in 1940, in 1958, and in 1968. On all three occasions, he saved the French state by sheer theatricality and élan. First, by embodying the French republic in retreat from the Germans; then by seizing power, in a republican mode, to end the Algerian crisis; and, finally, when he ended the potential chaos of the May revolt by massing almost a million people on the Champs-Élysées in a counter-demonstration.

It was not all theatrical élan. As Jackson, a British history professor, shows, it also involved political savvy and the quiet weighing of odds among competing factions. But he depended more on theatrical élan than did pretty much any other public man of his century. Churchill in 1940 was far from powerless. He had radar and Ultra, an intact R.A.F. and a large empire. De Gaulle had nothing except his uniform and his voice. No one has ever played a weaker hand more compellingly. His life was one long brilliant bluff, and the things that make him exasperating—his vanity and closed-mindedness; his unearned sense of superiority and egocentric blindness—were also why the bluffs worked. He convinced others, sitting at the card table with all the aces in their hands, that he might have somehow manufactured an extra ace by pure force of will.

He is, perhaps above all, a significant figure owing to the fidelity of his republicanism: from a background that in most places and circumstances would have led, in crisis, toward some form of Bonapartism, he remained a faithful believer in the norms of democracy, in oscillating governments and principled resignation. He believed in “a certain idea of France,” to use his famous phrase, but it was a republican idea of France. He embodied a reactionary and regal style of politics, completely distinct in tone from the usual “progressive” kind, but no less committed to the institutions of democracy. This was achieved only with some coaxing from his advisers at key moments (but, then, he had chosen the advisers) and with sporadic fits of spleen—but in the end de Gaulle always offered a staunch reaffirmation of republican values. His life is proof that unapologetic right-wing politics do not necessarily bend toward absolutism; they can also sometimes stiffen the spine of liberal democracy.

Before 1940, when he emerged as the voice of Free France, de Gaulle was best known as a career French military man, notable chiefly for having survived Verdun; for having written in favor of modernizing the French Army, particularly on behalf of the then daring doctrine of tank warfare; and for being very tall. Personal traits matter: people looked up to him because they had to.

Although he insisted on his origins among the country gentry, in fact he was raised in Paris’s Seventh Arrondissement—then a place, as he put it perfectly, marked by a “military melancholy,” a sadness of grand and empty green spaces. As Jackson ably shows, his family may have been hyper-conservative and Catholic, but they did not appear to be passionate anti-Dreyfusards. His father, who taught in a lycée, was aligned with the Catholic, reactionary side of politics—but by no means with its Jew-hating or monarchist fanaticism. (De Gaulle was, unusually for a man of his background, not particularly anti-Semitic. He condescended to Jews, but then he condescended to everyone.)

De Gaulle’s reactionary politics were also humanized by a dense literary culture. “The most wonderful job in the world would be as a librarian,” he once said. He was being puckish but not entirely so. He knew Corneille by heart and could quote his plays, and this immersion, Jackson makes plain, was not merely for show. De Gaulle had absorbed the lesson of French tragedy: that most hopes are doomed, that all choices come at a cost, that enduring loss with dignity is the highest of human callings. This stoical view was married to a conscious philosophy of action. He had been exposed at length to the philosopher Henri Bergson, whom he chose to read as a kind of proto-existentialist. Intellect needed to be braced by impulse, and impulse should be valued as a kind of instinctive ethics. What you felt you should do, however irrational it might seem to others, is most often what needed to be done.

When the worst happened, and the German tank corps overran France, in the spring of 1940, de Gaulle felt not only that his talents had been misused but, worse for a Frenchman of intellect, that his theories had been ignored. “Our initial defeat,” de Gaulle, newly promoted to brigadier general, wrote in a memorandum whose effect on his desperate superiors one can only wonder at, “comes from the application by the enemy of ideas that are mine.” There’s now a lively debate among military historians about the true causes of the fall of France. For a very long time, it was widely accepted that the speed and the panache of the German Army left the French Army helpless in its entrenched and conservative defensive positions. A newer generation of military historians—for instance, John Mosier, in “The Blitzkrieg Myth”—argues persuasively that the blitzkrieg happened mostly in panicked headlines, that the German tank corps had outrun its supply lines, and that France was in no worse shape in May of 1940 than it had been in a similar moment in 1914.

The failure—and this is a view that Jackson seems to share—was political. Paul Reynaud, the Prime Minister, had plenty of room to fall back and reorganize, as the French had done successfully in the Great War. But Reynaud, crazily, chose to bring into the cabinet the defeatist generals Pétain and Weygand, and he was under the crucial influence of his equally defeatist lover, Madame de Portes. Perhaps more important, the price of the earlier comeback had been millions of dead Frenchmen, and there was simply no will to try that experiment again. The French leaders had no fight in them, or not enough.

And so de Gaulle chose exile. A mere sub-cabinet minister of defense, he fled to London with no arms and few supporters. “Since the French revolution,” Jackson writes, “exile has had only negative connotations in French political culture.” Here, as in his estimation of de Gaulle’s place in contemporary French political culture, Jackson’s certainties seem a little at odds with the facts. Victor Hugo, the greatest hero of the French left, had chosen honorable exile in Britain, as did so many refugees from the Commune and the Franco-Prussian War. And, just as Hugo was heard best from exile, so was de Gaulle. He made two speeches on the BBC that, Jackson documents, could not have been heard by very many Frenchmen and yet somehow burned through the damaged French consciousness. What was said about the speeches seems to have been more important than what the speeches said. In the midst of a squalid surrender, one young general had spoken up for France. The idea of French honor, quaint but essential, was revived.

In de Gaulle’s isolation, paradoxically, lay his strength. There was something of St. Joan about it, and his solitariness appealed to the French collective myth of the single defiant individual. His passion in London was, exactly, a scene out of Corneille, like that of Rodrigue in “Le Cid,” the hero who rises to gloire in a moment of individual trial. (Shakespeare’s heroes, like Henry V, rise by inspiring others, as Churchill knew; Corneille’s by duelling alone with their principles.)

As Jackson demonstrates in hilarious detail, the Pétainist government in Vichy unintentionally added to de Gaulle’s prestige. In a very French touch, the Vichy officials first publicly stripped him of his rank as general and then made him the center of a hate campaign, showing his tall figure on posters hidden behind a microphone surrounded by swarthy Jews. This had the effect of making him the one anti-German leader whom most French people had heard of. The Vichy regime, in the blindness of its hatred, helped create—and promote—the de Gaulle brand.

Jackson’s is an essentially sympathetic account of de Gaulle in London—which does not keep de Gaulle from seeming even more of an egotist and a prima donna than his previous biographers had made him. Both the British allergy to hyperbolic disquisition and the American taste for getting right down to cases—not quite the same thing—were alien to him. He irritated Churchill, in particular, with his refusal to placate Roosevelt, acting as if he were in command of a major army instead of a few borrowed rooms in Mayfair. Jackson recounts an episode in which Churchill summoned de Gaulle to speak to him. One interpreter after another was thrown out for not conveying what each intended to say to the other—Churchill was trying to bully de Gaulle, and the interpreter, understandably uneasy, made him sound diplomatic—until at last the two men were alone, conversing in French.

But only by being impossible could de Gaulle have an independent voice. “You will see, if you say ‘no,’ they will crawl to you and offer you the moon,” he once explained to a subordinate. His behavior was maddeningly adolescent, but he chose it for the same reason that an adolescent chooses his—as the one way, in a position of actual dependency, to declare one’s autonomy. Slamming the door of your bedroom is sometimes the only power you have when you are living in someone else’s house. And he knew, as well, that the Allies had no plausible alternative to him, and that Churchill admired (and identified with) what Jackson rightly calls the quixotic side of de Gaulle’s character.

Eisenhower, despite Roosevelt’s distaste, turned out to be the one to fully embrace de Gaulle as indispensable to the Normandy invasion. The American general understood what subsequent American generals planning invasions of poorly understood countries have easily forgotten—that it is essential to have on your side not the local forces you wish were popular but the local forces who actually are popular. De Gaulle had become, often to the exasperation of those doing the fighting and dying inside France, the sole credible symbol of French resistance. “From the purely military viewpoint we must . . . deal with him alone,” Eisenhower wrote home to Roosevelt. And, as Eisenhower saw, de Gaulle could be a good listener, too. In Michel Tauriac’s oral history of Gaullism, “Vivre avec de Gaulle,” one of his subordinates points out that when de Gaulle appeared to be listening, eyes wide open and attentive, he was really ignoring you; only when he took on his more familiar pose of sleepy-eyed indifference was he actually engaged.

Jackson does a brilliant job detailing the evolution of de Gaulle from a normal French officer who has contempt for the squabbling, mediocre politicians of the Third Republic into a clear voice for republicanism. He came to understand that only revolutionary republican values could speak to a working class in need of a democratic alternative to Communism. In this, he showed the influence of Jean Moulin, the high-ranking left-wing prefect who came to London to build a secret army, and then was parachuted back into France to lead it.

At first, de Gaulle had no vision of an armed internal resistance in France. The fight, he thought, would come from the colonies and the remnant French armies and navy. But the colonies were of limited value; for a while, the only pledge of support de Gaulle got was from New Hebrides, in the South Pacific, not hugely useful for a European war. Only when, with the help of Moulin, he saw that there was resistance within the occupied country did his tactics and politics change.

It didn’t escape him that Moulin’s strength of character and clear mastery of the only credible resistance network inside France were tied to his impeccably republican attitudes. De Gaulle, realizing that he had to move left to hold the center, then had to execute a complex dance. The Communist Party of France was a slavishly obedient arm of Stalinism and the Soviet Union—which did not alter the other reality that, after the invasion of Russia, in 1941, many of the most courageous of the resisters would be Communists. Moulin had credibility with all sides; de Gaulle took on some of it. This was critical as he sought to thread his way through a maze of sects and sides. On a single page of this biography one encounters the C.F.L.N., the C.N.R., the F.F.I., the B.C.R.A., the amgot, and the C.D.L.—all Free French factions of the forties.

Especially after Vichy made anti-republicanism synonymous with surrender, de Gaulle came to see that France had to be addressed by the republic’s magic words—liberty, equality, and fraternity—and not the near-Vichyite ones of fatherland and family, which he had first favored. De Gaulle was the farthest thing in the world from an instinctive democrat, but he didn’t have to be. It was enough that he understood that democracy had become one of the instincts of France.

The tale of de Gaulle’s years in exile is a reproach to anyone who underestimates the role of personality in history. People of all sides who met de Gaulle were exasperated by him, but mostly they were impressed by him—by the way his personality was enfolded in his politics, and his politics in his personality. Jackson reproduces a moving letter from Georges Boris, a socialist Jewish journalist in exile, to the imprisoned Jewish socialist Léon Blum, in France, detailing his view of de Gaulle: “De Gaulle gave me back honour, the possibility of being able to look people in the face again. . . . To a large degree, his unwillingness to bend, his intransigence are willed. He likes to say that being as weak as he is, intransigence is his only weapon.”

Moulin was eventually tortured to death by Klaus Barbie, betrayed to the Gestapo in circumstances that remain murky. Was Moulin’s Judas a Communist fellow-resister obeying Moscow’s orders to eliminate anti-Communists? We still don’t know. We do know that when de Gaulle heard of Moulin’s brutal murder he merely said, with the stoicism of a Corneille hero, “Continuons”: “We’ll go on.”

And he did. On August 26, 1944, after the Allies liberated Paris, he claimed the victory as his own, organizing a personal parade down the Champs-Élysées, in which he walked alone—his fellow-resisters were asked to hang back a few feet—amid a hysterical throng that may be the largest ever assembled in Paris. He even managed to get the French as witnesses to the German surrender, the following May, which was “a remarkable achievement, inconceivable without de Gaulle’s tenacity, obstinacy and political skill,” as Jackson writes. (“The French are here, too?” one of the German generals reportedly said.) If this triumph allowed the French to evade what had actually happened during the war—the abject armistice with Hitler, the delivery of the deportees to their persecutors, the entire black hole of Vichy from which so little light escaped for so long—it did put France in a position to, well, go on.

De Gaulle’s coexistence with the Fourth Republic, in which he briefly led several governments, was unhappy and contentious; his general’s temperament was not made for intricate parliamentary maneuvering. Now that he was a head of government, his theatrical tactics backfired. The Fourth Republic that emerged largely after his resignation from government was, as Jackson itemizes, far more of a success than is often allowed. But it came crashing down amid the horror of the impossible Algerian war; like Lyndon Johnson’s Administration, it did well domestically and had a disaster in a colonial war.

Then, in June of 1958, a group of right-wing French military men, alarmed by the Fourth Republic’s failure to defeat the ongoing rebellion in Algeria, and worried that the French nationals there would be abandoned, set about to organize a coup of sorts. They more or less took charge in Algiers, and demanded a change of government in Paris. De Gaulle, who with rather magnificent Machiavellianism both did and did not encourage the junta’s actions, cultivating its actors at the time and condemning them not long after, was asked by the French President to lead a government of “national union” for six months and then to offer a new Constitution, which became that of the still extant Fifth Republic.

The complexities of the Algerian crisis are still tragic to read about. The O.A.S., the colonial secret army, continually attempted assassinations, and the Algerian guerrillas, the F.L.N., continued, bizarrely, to commit terrorist acts in Paris long after the game was essentially won. After two years of futile negotiations, de Gaulle gave up, saying that “France would contemplate with the greatest sangfroid a solution by which Algeria would cease to belong to her.”

This was, as everyone knew at the time, a sellout of the pieds noirs, the huge community of French nationals in Algeria, for whom it had been as much a home as any other department of France. As Jackson says, de Gaulle got exactly what any other French politician would have: a surrender with the barest fig leaf. (One thinks of the long fall of Vietnam, where what was achieved in 1975 was also what would have happened in 1968 anyway, with fewer deaths along the way.) The pieds noirs were left helpless, as were the Harkis, Algerian Muslims who had fought with the French Army. De Gaulle’s triumph, as Jackson writes, was to make the French “believe that he had controlled the process; and to create a compelling narrative that explained France’s disengagement from Algeria and turned it into a victory rather than a defeat.”

But, at the same time, de Gaulle rebuilt France and made it modern. The secret of the Fifth Republic, as Herrick Chapman details in his new history, “France’s Long Reconstruction,” was that, beneath the sonorous grandiosity and medievalist rhetoric, de Gaulle’s government was entirely technocratic and modernizing. Many of the most important policies that his Prime Minister, Michel Debré, took up were, in an age-old cycle, the policies of the previous, much maligned administration of the Fourth Republic. But they were pursued with especial vigor: the Fifth Republic, under Debré, became an even more technocratic and administrative one than France had had before—which is saying something.

The effects of these reforms could be salubrious. France became, in many respects, an even more extraordinarily well-run state; anyone who has had encounters with the upper reaches of the hautes fonctionnaires class of the Fifth Republic still has to be impressed with their level of education, worldliness, and efficiency. And the effects could also be infuriating: France remained an extraordinarily bureaucratic state, too. Anyone who has ever had regular contact with the lower reaches of the administrative regime will know of the parallel paper, or pixelated, universe in which no event has occurred on earth until it has a folder in a file.

Jackson writes wonderful political history, but social history does not sneak into his work very often or very well: the larger world of literature and commentary in which French political life is always entangled is not dramatized with any relish, giving the biography a slightly dutiful monotone. Sartre and Camusmake at best sideways appearances, although they were de Gaulle’s ideological antagonists as much as any politician. (Sartre was at one point during the Algerian war so extreme in his support of the F.L.N. that he was on the verge of being arrested, until, as the story goes, de Gaulle said, “One does not arrest Voltaire.”) Jackson’s writing, encyclopedic in knowledge—obscure sources make easy appearances—is a little short on pictorial and sensory intensity. During de Gaulle’s days in power, the monuments of Paris were all sandblasted, under his and Malraux’s orders, and the face of the city changed from grimy black back to its original blue-gray and beige and white. It was as keenly symbolic of Gaullist triumph as any law or edict, but, though the alteration is mentioned, we never really see it or feel it.

Jackson does make us feel one consequential flaw in the Fifth Republic as a political invention. By seeming to concentrate so much power in one regal figure, de Gaulle made it possible to rule France again, but also insured that opposition would have to be impassioned and clamorous to register at all. Prime Ministers, when they become unpopular, are eased out by their supporters; kings, when they become unpopular, must be thrown out by a mob. Afterward, theatrical mini-revolutions became the norm in French politics. The ability of each new President to survive the coming wave of street protests became even more important than his ability to hold the legislature together.

Of the anti-government demonstrations that de Gaulle confronted, the most famous manif was the one that proved fatal to his career: the student rebellion that began in the streets of Paris and then spread to the factories outside it. An anti-materialist revolt with a largely incoherent practical politics—a militant French version of the Summer of Love, “Sgt. Pepper” with Trotskyite liner notes—it expressed so deep an impatience with Gaullism that it transformed France within a week. De Gaulle retreated to his country house, and seemed on the brink of resignation. Instead, he returned to Paris and led an immense counter-demonstration. It was a reminder that the center of popular gravity in France remained on the right, even as its mind and imagination remained on the left; in elections held in June, the Gaullist party gained an outright parliamentary majority. For all that, the Events of May seemed to exhaust him spiritually; he resigned only a year later, after losing an insignificant referendum on regional reform. It was a form of ritual political suicide.

And de Gaulle’s legacy? A reasonable case can be made, after closing Jackson’s book, that it was all theatre and hot air. The Allies would have retaken France with or without him, and some French politician would have taken that walk in 1944. France was going to surrender Algeria sooner or later; all de Gaulle did was extend the fight and put a noble face on the surrender. He knew this as well as anyone. “In reality we are on the stage of a theatre where I have been keeping up the illusion since 1940,” he once told a confidant. “I am trying to give France the appearance of a solid, firm, confident and expanding country, while it is a worn-out nation. . . . The whole thing is a perpetual illusion.”

Worse, by placing myth over history, he injected a toxic hallucinogen into French memory. It took decades for France to begin to address the reality of Vichy. Almost to this day, the reality of the civil war that Algeria ignited in France is obscured: the drowning, by the police, of perhaps five hundred Algerians in Paris in 1961 was suppressed at the time, and is barely commemorated now. There is a side of de Gaulle that is merely hateful: vindictive and vain and deeply selfish. His ingratitude to the British, who had saved his life and given him a platform to save his country—an ingratitude that became almost obsessively bitter in his memoirs—is unforgivable, except as a reminder of the truth that we always resent most those to whom we owe most. His infamous improvisation in Quebec in 1967, when he cried out “Vive le Québec libre!,” was inspired by his absurd fantasy that Quebec, already becoming a multiethnic modern state, was still occupied by the “English.”

Yet this account misses the central lesson that de Gaulle intuited: myths matter. Without a sense of shared symbols, it is impossible for any modern state to go on. France is a frustrating state, but it has never been a failed one. It works. National dignity is hugely important to any program of national renewal. (Had American policy toward Russia post-1989 been shaped with an eye not just to that country’s political system but to its pride—to making sure that the Russians had a myth of their own self-liberation, instead of being so obviously plundered and defeated—the ensuing disaster would, conceivably, have been less disastrous.) De Gaulle crafted a symbolic history for the French in place of a real one, because symbols were among the most real things they knew.

The distinction that’s sometimes made between patriotism and nationalism is at the essence of his existence. The patriot loves his place and its cheeses and its people and its idiosyncrasies; the nationalist has no particular sense of affection for the actual place he advocates for (he is often an outsider to it) but channels his obsessive grievances into acts of ethnic vengeance. De Gaulle is a nearly perfect example of the right-wing patriot in power—of the constitutional conservative who accepts the modern order.

With his love of honor and pageantry, de Gaulle might seem to offer a very dated model of politics. And yet in an odd way there’s an urgent, living lesson for the twenty-first century in what de Gaulle accomplished, one that can’t be overlooked—indeed, President Macron spends every day trying not to overlook it. What de Gaulle’s example reminds us is how valuable an insistence on the shared symbols of a common fate can be if carried out with integrity and a residual deposit of democratic values. The politics of grandeur, he shows, need not be the exclusive province of bullies and gangsters and crooks and clowns. It’s a fine French lesson. ♦

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