De Gaulle:
The Rebel, 1890-1944
By Jean Lacouture
Norton, 615 pages, $29.95
On the evening of June 18, 1940, a tall, pale Frenchman appeared in Studio 4B of the BBC in London. In his hands he clutched two heavily reworked pages of script. A technician asked for a voice check, and the visitor replied, in a tone betraying none of his inner turmoil, ”la France.” Minutes later, Charles de Gaulle, an unemployed junior minister in a discredited government, reinvented himself as ”I, General de Gaulle,” defiant symbol of eternal France.
France had not been defeated, De Gaulle insisted over the airwaves, only temporarily ”submerged” by superior German tanks and tactics. Joined to a global war, she might draw upon the resources of her own African empire and aid from Britain and the United States to reverse Hitler`s conquest and redeem the honor of bleeding France.
Few heard the broadcast; for several weeks after June 18, De Gaulle remained a general without an army. The collaborationist regime at Vichy headed by Marshal Henry Phillipe Petain, octogenarian hero of Verdun, condemned the rebel to death in absentia. Jean Monnet, future architect of a united Europe, pronounced De Gaulle`s gesture ”too personal” and left for the United States. Across the Channel, the general`s dying mother had a different reaction. ”He has done what he ought to have done,” she said.
In this majestic first volume of a two-volume biography, published in America to commemorate the centennial of De Gaulle`s birth, Jean Lacouture shows how the refugee from disaster came to his role well-prepared by temperament and training. As a child of 7, an obstreperous Charles informed his mother that he should like to ride a pony. She refused, on the perfectly reasonable grounds that he had ridden the day before. ”Then I`m going to be naughty,” Charles announced, stamping his feet and tossing his toys to confirm his point.
The willful little boy grew into a magnificently disobedient leader. As a young graduate of Saint Cyr, France`s military academy, he denounced the deadly conventions of trench warfare and the mediocrities of the French General Staff, who clung to defensive thinking long after the advent of tanks and planes demanded battlefield mobility. Severely wounded by a German bayonet in 1916, the towering prisoner ”wholly formed for action” spent his days reading Greek and Roman history and plotting his getaway. Three times he tried and failed to reach France. After his second attempt, prison authorities took away his writing utensils but not his will to escape. That was unbreakable.
At war`s end, De Gaulle described the peace of Versailles as nothing more than ”a shabby cloak thrown over unsatisfied ambitions.” In 1934 he published ”The Army of the Future” as part of his crusade for a French mechanized force capable of defeating a rearmed Germany. He broke with the aged Marshal Petain with the devastating comment, ”His philosophy consists in adjustment.” It was an uncanny forecast of the shameful peace of 1940.
”All my life I have had a certain idea of France,” he would write in the famous opening of his war memoirs. Few could live up to such lofty standards. Politicians playing a parliamentary game of musical chairs would not heed his warnings of impending disaster. Generals wedded to theories as static as their defense lines lampooned the white-gloved colonel who argued that tanks should advance faster than infantry and whose personal motto as commander of the 507th tank division was ”Always more.”
”Being inert means being beaten,” De Gaulle admonished his superiors in January 1940. Five months later he crossed the English Channel and his personal Rubicon. At the age of 49 he was condemned to an uncertain exile among unreliable Anglo-Saxons, sustained only by the magnificent fiction that he alone embodied French legitimacy. Asked by a well-meaning sympathizer to describe his mission in London, De Gaulle replied, ”I have not been sent on any mission, Madame. I am here to save the honor of France.”
Such an attitude invited ridicule from more pragmatic men, or those blessed with greater military resources. Franklin Roosevelt thought De Gaulle ”impossible,” a prima donna best suited to be governor of Madagascar. More complicated was the response of Winston Churchill, who had bestowed legitimacy on the emigre of 1940 (”a man of my own size” commented the old lion) only to bellow three years later at the difficult man who refused to be anyone`s protege, ”You are not France.”
To exalt France, De Gaulle must exasperate her allies. ”I was nothing to begin with,” he wrote afterward. ”But this very destitution pointed out my line of conduct . . . because I was so restricted and alone, I had to reach the heights and never come down again.”
After just 10 days in his new home, De Gaulle asked a colleague if he had read ”Mein Kampf.” ”Hitler is thinking of the Ukraine,” he explained,
”the war is a terrible problem, but it is one that has been solved. What remains is to bring the whole of France back to the right side.”
It would not be easy. Twelve million Frenchmen bought portraits of Marshal Petain in 1941, despite the voice on the London radio barking his defiance at ”the sultan of Vichy.” Although scornful of the collaborators who had dishonored France, De Gaulle was less intransigent than legend suggests. Following Churchill`s reluctant order to sink the French fleet rather than allow Hitler to lay hands upon it, the general saved his rage for private encounters.
”Major, if only you know how solitary I feel,” De Gaulle told a friend after a second disaster, an aborted attack on the Vichy fortress of Dakar in French West Africa. ”Should I go on?” he asked; some around him detected an impulse to suicide. But De Gaulle soldiered on, rallying French Africa with toy armies, establishing a toehold in Algiers and turning back Roosevelt`s clumsy attempt to replace the man of June 18 with General Henri Giraud, a second-rate authoritarian.
Lacouture`s assessment of Roosevelt is a harsh one. He describes a self-determinationist who clung to Petain long after the aged Marshal forfeited any claim to popular support; a wily politician who outraged De Gaulle`s representative in Washington by declaring of the French quisling even more obnoxious than Petain, ”If Laval gives me Paris, I shall entertain Laval”; a distracted idealist eager to dismantle France`s empire in Indochina yet oblivious to his own country`s Philippine colonialism.
Whatever the weaknesses of FDR`s policy, it is hard to imagine that it was influenced, as the author suggests, by any fraternal feelings old General Pershing had for Petain, his French comrade in Vichy. Aside from this failure to understand the elusive Roosevelt, Lacouture has written a nearly flawless biography: incisive, elegantly phrased, profoundly moving. No one who reads it will soon forget the image of the great man and his daughter, Anne, who suffered from Down`s syndrome and whose affliction taught De Gaulle humility as she played with his oak-leafed kepi or rocked in his arms during nighttime hours stolen from military duties.
Anne died in 1948 at the age of 20 and was buried in the churchyard at Colombey. After the funeral, General de Gaulle, once more exiled after his wartime triumph had turned to ashes in the revival of France`s party system, turned to his wife and said, ”Come. Now she is like everybody else.”
Charles de Gaulle could never be like everybody else. It was both his curse and his claim to historical greatness. Inscribing a copy of his war memoirs, he wrote, ”It is by suffering that we learn.” One eagerly awaits the second volume of Lacouture`s biographical masterpiece to see the lessons of De Gaulle`s suffering applied in Algeria and the Fifth Republic.
