The War Memoirs of Charles de Gaulle, by Charles de Gaulle (Simon & Schuster, 976 pp., $23)
When Charles de Gaulle published the first volume of his war memoirs, in 1954, it looked like an acknowledgment that he no longer belonged to the present, but to history. His achievements during the Second World War were indeed historic. In June 1940, as France collapsed and its leaders agreed to a humiliating armistice, de Gaulle escaped to London. There, he went on the radio, to appeal to his countrymen to continue the struggle against the Axis. Over the next four years, he became the moral symbol and political leader of Free France, rallying support in the overseas colonies and among domestic resistance groups. After D-Day, he returned to France in the wake of the British and American armies, quickly created a provisional government, and led the liberated country in the Allied victory.
But de Gaulle’s leadership could not long survive the war. The fact that he belonged to none of France’s established political parties had been an asset during the German occupation, allowing him to transcend the ideological divisions that had paralyzed France and helped lead to its defeat. But when ordinary political life resumed, de Gaulle found that keeping aloof from the party system meant he had no reliable support in the National Assembly. After governing by fiat for so long, he was unwilling to court the votes of Socialist, Communist, and Radical deputies, whom he regarded in much the same way that Shakespeare’s Coriolanus did the voters of Rome: “Why in this wolvish toga should I stand here,/To beg of Hob and Dick, that do appear,/Their needless vouches? . . . Rather than fool it so,/Let the high office and the honour go/To one that would do thus.” In January 1946, he resigned the leadership he had claimed five years before, returning to private life like Cincinnatus and Washington.
Unlike them, however, de Gaulle was not truly content to go back to his plow. He hoped to return to power by replacing the parliamentary system of the Fourth Republic with a presidential system on the American model, including a powerful, directly elected head of state—who would, of course, be de Gaulle himself. For several years, he campaigned for this reform at the head of his own party, which he refused to call a party. Rather, it was the “Rally of the French People,” a national movement that transcended partisan politics, just as Free France had done during the war. After some initial electoral successes, however, Gaullism faltered at the polls, and in 1952, de Gaulle essentially retired from politics, returning to his home in the village of Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises to write his memoirs.
The three volumes he produced—The Call, Unity, and Salvation—are classics of French prose and an invaluable source for historians of World War II. But we now have a more pressing reason to read them, as they have been reissued in English translation in a single thick volume as The War Memoirs of Charles de Gaulle. There are unmistakable parallels between American politics today and de Gaulle’s France—a country torn by culture war, disillusioned with its political elites, and frustrated by the failure of parliamentary democracy to come to grips with fundamental problems. The malaise of interwar France ended in military defeat and the replacement of democracy by the authoritarian-populist Vichy regime. The prospects for America are not so dire, but the merits and future of liberal democracy seem open to question now in ways that would have been unthinkable not long ago.
In this context, the de Gaulle’s achievement raises some pertinent--and unsettling--questions. Is it possible for democracy to become so decrepit that it can only be rescued by undemocratic means? Does a country that cherishes equality need larger-than-life heroes in order to survive—and if so, what does it do with them after they’ve served their purpose?
Reading de Gaulle’s memoirs, it is clear that nothing in his character or experience predisposed him to democracy. Unlike Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, who spent their whole adult lives in politics, de Gaulle was a career soldier in a French Army historically hostile to republican government. He was especially disgusted by the revolving-door ministries of the 1930s, which failed to prepare France for the inevitable next war against Germany. Looking back on the prewar years, he writes: “As for the mass of the people, it was bewildered…feeling that nothing and nobody at the head of the state was capable of dominating events.”
Many other Frenchmen felt the same—which is why, when France fell, they were happy to rally around Marshal Philippe Petain, the World War I hero who became the head of the puppet government in Vichy. De Gaulle had been a personal protégé of the Marshal, writing that “My first colonel, Petain, showed me the meaning of the gift and the art of command.” Yet at this crucial moment, de Gaulle, practically alone among France’s leadership, refused to follow orders. Instead, he flew to London and announced that he would carry on the war as the leader of “Free France.”
No one had elected or appointed de Gaulle to that position. His only justification for claiming power was that France’s leaders had forfeited it, by surrendering while its empire and much of its military remained intact. In a quite literal sense, De Gaulle’s bid for leadership was a world-historical example of running it up the flagpole and seeing who salutes. As he writes in the memoirs, “By acting as the inflexible champion of the nation and of the state…it would be possible for me to gather the consent, even the enthusiasm, of the French and to win from foreigners respect and consideration.” If he succeeded, he would become one of the greatest heroes in French history. If he failed, he would be a traitor: in August 1940, he was tried in absentia before a French military court and sentenced to death.
The first two volumes of the war memoirs tell the story of how de Gaulle vindicated his claim to leadership, against all odds. The first and indispensable condition was the support of Winston Churchill, whose romantic imagination kindled to the idea of a Joan-of-Arc-like crusade. “From one end of the drama to the other,” de Gaulle writes, Churchill appeared “as the great champion of a great enterprise and the great artist of a great history.” Without British support, de Gaulle would not have been able to get on the BBC to make his famous Appel de 18 Juin, much less contact French troops in equatorial Africa or resistance groups in France.
But de Gaulle’s understanding of the war, and his own role in it, inevitably led to conflicts with Churchill, and later Roosevelt. To them, France’s defeat removed it from the military and political calculus. Defeating Germany meant liberating France, but how this would be done was a problem for British and American war planners to solve. In the meantime, French resources—in manpower, colonial territory, and international good will—should naturally be at the disposal of those Allies actually fielding armies. Any recognition they gave de Gaulle’s Free French movement was a kind of charity.
If de Gaulle had shared this view, however, he could not have started the movement in the first place. He maintained that Free France, which initially consisted of a few dozen officers and “barely seven thousand” soldiers stranded in England by the armistice, was France, and that the government of Marshal Petain, which controlled the southern third of France, its North African colonies, and a substantial fleet, was a doomed fiction. The fact that de Gaulle was completely dependent on Britain and America, not just for the liberation of France but for the clothes on his back, must not prevent him from dealing with Churchill and Roosevelt as equal to equal.
The disparity between de Gaulle’s power and his demands is the main reason why his name became a byword for arrogance. He had always had a certain loftiness, even as a young man—not least because, at 6’5”, he was almost always the tallest person in the room. During his first year of military service, at 18, he displayed great talent but was not promoted; as his commanding officer said, “Would you have me nominate as sergeant a boy who would only be at his ease as the Grand Constable?” Half a century later, Jean-Paul Sartre quipped that he would rather vote for God than de Gaulle, since God was more modest.
But none of the Allied leaders in World War II was notable for modesty; it wasn’t part of the job description. De Gaulle stood out because he insisted on being proud, even though he was poor. Indeed, it was because he was powerless that he could not afford to be humble. The only reason he was listened to, at home or abroad, was because he insisted he was France’s leader. If he didn’t act like it, the basis of his authority would vanish.
A good case in point was his decision, on Christmas Eve 1941, to invade the islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon off the coast of Newfoundland. The tiny French colony was under Vichy rule, and now that the U.S. had entered the war, the Americans and Canadians intended to occupy it, to prevent the islands from serving as a base for German submarines.
To de Gaulle, this was an inadmissible encroachment on France’s sovereignty. However small the islands were, they were part of France, and it was unthinkable that the Allies decide the fate of French territory without consulting the French government—that is, Charles de Gaulle. Accordingly, he ordered a small naval force to land on the islands and take control, and without asking or even notifying the Americans.
The cost of antagonizing the U.S. was so much greater than the benefit of controlling St. Pierre and Miquelon that even de Gaulle’s admirers were astonished--and infuriated. Roosevelt loathed him until the end of the war, trying repeatedly to replace him with a more tractable French general. Long after the war, de Gaulle writes in the memoirs, someone sent him a copy of a letter in which Roosevelt described him as “essentially an egoist.” “I was never to know,” he comments loftily, “if Franklin Roosevelt thought that in affairs concerning France, Charles de Gaulle was egoist for France or for himself.”
Writing about oneself in the third person, as de Gaulle often does in the memoirs, is hardly an effective way to dispel the charge of arrogance. But it is true that his arrogance was never merely personal. It was the pride of a king or prophet, certain that he embodies the destiny of an entire people. “I myself had already determined what I must do in the liberated capital,” he writes of his return to Paris in 1944. “I would mold all minds into a single national impulse, but also cause the figure and the authority of the state to appear at once.”
It may be a kind of madness for any individual to think about himself in such grandiose terms. But when madness is vindicated by reality, can it still be called mad? When de Gaulle led the victory parade on August 26, before a crowd of 2 million people, it was exactly as he had envisioned:
I went on, then, touched and yet tranquil, amid the inexpressible exultation of the crowd, beneath the storm of voices echoing my name, trying, as I advanced, to look at every person in all that multitude in order that every eye might register my presence…This was one of those miracles of national consciousness, one of those gestures which sometimes, in the course of centuries, illuminate the history of France.
This was democracy as de Gaulle understood it—as acclamation, the spontaneous submission of the masses to their deserving leader. It is not entirely different from the way Hitler and Mussolini understood their relationship with their peoples. And in the third volume of the memoirs, dealing with his leadership of France’s provisional government after the Liberation, de Gaulle ends up making many of the same criticisms of parliamentary democracy that fascists had made before the war. Parties represent factions, not the nation as a whole; partisan politicians carp and scheme, but they never take action or responsibility. Before the first postwar election in autumn 1945, he warned French voters not to return to the bad old ways of the Third Republic: “Tomorrow, still more than yesterday, the state can take no effective action and—I say it categorically—French democracy can have no future if we return to a system of this order.”
But return it did, and in January 1946 de Gaulle resigned, handing back to the people the power he had claimed in June 1940. In the memoirs, he does not try to conceal his feeling that France had let him down. “Gone was that atmosphere of exultation, that hope of success, that ambition for France, which had supported the national soul,” he writes.
Another way of putting it might be that a nation of 50 million cannot permanently subordinate its judgment to that of one man, no matter how brave and good. The best argument for democracy is not that it reliably chooses the best leaders and policies—it clearly does not—but that, in a free society, people expect to have their judgment taken into account. A government that refuses to listen to the public because it thinks it knows better than them—or even because it really does know better—insults the very people whose support it requires in order to function.
It is only in moments of crisis that a free people is willing to suspend its own judgment and take orders without questioning. The fall of France was such a moment. In 1958, another crisis, spurred by the war in Algeria, brought de Gaulle back to power, this time for a decade, allowing him to remodel the French constitution in the ways he hoped for. Then he resigned again, and ever since, the Fifth Republic has been post-Revolution France’s most stable regime.
France was lucky to find in Charles de Gaulle a leader strong enough to meet these crises, yet principled and patriotic enough not to keep manufacturing new crises in order to maintain his grip on power. Perhaps all democracies need that kind of luck at certain junctures in their history. There’s no guarantee we will find it.
Top Photo: Bettmann / Contributor via Getty Images
