Charles De Gaulle: Self-Portrait of a Patriot

by CURTIS CATE

1

PARODYING Marshal Foch, who once observed that Communism is a disease of defeated countries, a cynic might be tempted to say that memoir-writing is a malady of defeated generals. But the experience of these last few years has shown that this affliction can prove just as fatal to the victorious. Since the Second World War, Gamelin, Weygand, Pétain, and Giraud in France; Halder and Guderian in Germany; Graziani in Italy; Montgomery in England; Arnold, Bradley, Clark, Eisenhower, and (through the voices of Generals Whitney and Willoughby) MacArthur in this country, have bequeathed their memoirs to the world. This is only to mention the best-known; and it does not take into account those cases where, an inborn discretion (Marshall) or an untimely death (Patton) having intervened, industrious wives have sought to make up for the silence of illustrious husbands. But when all has been said and written, when all the great heroes of World War II have had a chance to dip their pens into the inkwells of immortality, it will probably still be true that two, and only two, of these literary post-mortems will stand out as major contributions to the world of history and letters: the massive six-volume chronicle of that soldierstatesman Winston Churchill (for five years a Field Marshal in all but title), and the smallerseale but no less distinguished memoirs of General de Gaulle, The Call to Honour ( Viking, $5,00).

When the first volume of de Gaulle’s memoirs appeared last autumn in Paris under the characteristically laconic title L’Appel (The Summons), it was hailed as the major literary event of the year. One enthusiastic deputy in the French Assembly exclaimed with oratorical verve that it reminded him of the Song of Boland, the replies of Joan of Arc to her accusers, and Napoleon’s Mémorial de Sainte Hélène. A critic not known for being easily swept overboard did not hesitate to place it next to Julius Caesar’s De bello Gallico and Chateaubriand’s Mémoires d’Outre-tombe.

Such a chorus of praise for the writing talents of a soldier may well sound strange to us, for our historical experience has prepared us to expect generals to be more at home in the exercise of the riding crop, the whiskey bottle, or the golf club than in that of the pen. But in a literary country like France (where, as a friend of mine recently remarked with Gallic condescension, even politicians must know how to write) it has not been uncommon for soldiers to be men of letters as well as men of the sword.

Even so, the literary quality of this first volume of de Gaulle’s memoirs came as a surprise to his compatriots. They had forgotten, if they had ever known, that de Gaulle, by virtue of his pre-war writings alone, deserves to rank with the best French stylists of this century. How many Frenchmen even today have ever glanced at Le Fil de l’Épée (The Sword’s Edge), that immaculately groomed little essay on the qualities and problems of human leadership? Now many have taken the trouble to read Vers l’Armée de Métier (The Army of the Future), the fateful book which inspired the German General Staff to launch that grim monster, the blitzkrieg — a book of such literary perfection that even the most technical secrets of armored warfare are unveiled in classic periods and images as fresh and poetic as a sun-filled morning in the Bois de Boulogne? The truth is; not many. These volumes have suffered the fate that has often befallen works overtaken by the events they prophesy: that of not being read.

No such fate could overtake this latest book of de Gaulle’s. The three years covered in this first volume of memoirs (1940—1942) were the most humiliating that the French have suffered since the Franco-Prussian War. Because they are here described by a man who never ceased to believe in his country, this book is more than another chapter of recent history written by one of its participants. It is the chronicle of a passion; the autobiography of a will; the self-portrait of an exiled prophet.

If Churchill’s memoirs may be said, by virtue of their gigantic sweep, to form a massive Himalayan range, those of de Gaulle, in their single-minded concentration on one theme, form an icy, isolated peak. But the appearance of this peak suffices by itself to alter the familiar silhouette of the wartime panorama, which up until now has been dominated by the monumental bulk of Churchill’s memoirs. For what de Gaulle offers us is a picture of the behind-the-scenes activities of British officialdom which we barely glimpse or are totally unconscious of in Churchill’s writings. In its aloof, majestic way it is de Gaulle’s apologia for his wartime inflexibility; it is his answer to Churchill’s famous lament — that of all the crosses he had to bear during the war, the heaviest was the Cross of Lorraine.

There is a memorable description in these memoirs of a meeting between the two men in June of 1942 which gives us the key to de Gaulle’s proverbial intransigence. “Don’t rush things!” said Churchill to de Gaulle, as the latter was pouring out his grievances against Roosevelt. “ Look at the way I alternately yield and rise again.” “You can,” answered de Gaulle, “because you are seated upon a solid state, an assembled nation, a united Empire, and vast armies. But I? Where are my resources? And yet, as you know, I am responsible for the interests and the destiny of France. It is too heavy a burden, and I am too poor to be able to bow.”

Too poor to be able to bow! How admirably this rigid phrase sums up de Gaulle! Here is a man whom nature seems to have conspired to make so tall, so statuesque, that the slightest bend in his frame would threaten to break him in two like a folded stalk of asparagus — the nickname (la grande asperge) that he was given by his colleagues when he was a cadet at the Officers’ School of Saint Cyr. Alongside of the robust, ruddy form of Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle will always cut a stiff, angular, almost anemic figure. His extraordinarily frigid personality, which members of his family used jokingly to explain away in his youth by saying that he had once fallen into an icebox, cannot but compare unfavorably with the buoyant jocularity and irrepressible vitality of the doughty warrior of 10 Downing Street. Yet, stripped of their corporeal integuments and reduced to the elemental force of sheer will power, it is not an unequal match.

Let us look at the record as de Gaulle unfolds it. Here is a recently appointed general, the youngest in the French army, who arrives in London in the darkest days of June, 1940, with no money, no staff, no arms, and who finds that he must carry on the battle alone. Does he hesitate? Not for an instant. Face to face with a redoubtable Prime Minister, behind whom are marshaled a united Parliament, a determined nation, and the vast resources of a loyal Empire, this solitary general who has no government, no party behind him, no mandate from electors, who is virtually unknown to his people and an outlaw in his own country, displays the incredible pretension of speaking out not in his own name, but in the name of France!

He has to combat the resignation, the prejudices, the intrigues of his own countrymen who are irritated by the presumption of this upstart general. He has to fight against the ill-concealed scorn felt by certain British echelons about the fighting qualities and discipline of the French; against the British government’s natural propensity to treat him as a useful pawn in its chess game with Vichy, and his forces as an arm of the British war machine; against efforts of the British Intelligence to lure Frenchmen away from him to work for them in France. He even has to resort to Machiavellian tactics to force the British Middle East Command to recognize the fighting usefulness of the Free French forces he manages to scrape together in Syria from the colonies in Central Africa. In the end, only by threatening to send them to fight in Russia does ho browbeat the British into letting them take part in the Libyan campaign. Yet it was one of these half-strength divisions, under General Koenig, which in June of 1942 held off one Italian and two German Afrika Korps divisions for ten days at Bir Hakeim, helping to save the Eighth Army from destruction by Rommel.

Exaggerated suspicions of British “maneuvers” and genuine misunderstandings no doubt played an important part in exacerbating these differences. Yet these memoirs reveal that even for a man of such a naturally authoritarian temperament it was not easy to maintain the almost superhuman intransigence that he felt the proper defense of French interests required.

Reading these memoirs is enough to make one realize that nations, in victory or defeat, are not the simple pawns of vast impersonal forces. For if — for better or for worse — France came out of the war on the side of the victors and officially resumed her place as a first-rate power; if last July, at Geneva, Edgar Faure could quite naturally sit down next to Eisenhower, Bulganin, and Eden, it was due as much as anything else to the awesome will power and granitic spinefulness of this one Frenchman.

2

IN THE memoirs the consciousness of being a man of destiny sometimes leads de Gaulle to speak of himself in the third person, like Julius Caesar in the commentaries. Nevertheless, it would probably be an oversimplification to attribute to this sole sense of destiny the caryatid-like inflexibility he displayed during the war. Rather this seems to have been the product of a clearly thought out principle which he had expressed years earlier in a quotation from Hamlet: “Rightly to be great . . . is greatly to find quarrel in a straw, When honour’s at the stake.” It was no doubt the result of that predominance of the intellect which, from Robespierre down to Woodrow Wilson, has typified ultrarationalist and stubborn politicians.

The key to de Gaulle’s personality is the fact that he was the son of a professor of literature and philosophy who taught at a Jesuit college in Paris. He thus underwent the baptism of ideas before the baptism of fire. In de Gaulle the theorist antedates the general, the thinker comes before the man of action. It is this which most distinguishes him from Churchill, just as in a more general sense it distinguishes the French from the British. Just as Churchill’s wartime flexibility was his native, Anglo-Saxon tribute to the demands of action, so de Gaulle’s inflexibility was his Cartesian tribute to the demands of thought.

A symptom of this essential rationalism can be found in the memoirs precisely where de Gaulle seems most irrational — in his powerfully emotional, almost mystic belief in France. This belief, amounting to a credo, is stated in the very opening lines: “All my life I have thought of France in a certain way. This is inspired by sentiment as much as by reason. The emotional side of me tends to imagine France, like the Princess of the Fairy Tales or the Madonna of the frescoed walls, as dedicated to an exalted and exceptional destiny. . . . But the positive side of my mind also convinces me that France is only herself when in the front rank, that vast enterprises alone are capable of offsetting the ferments of dispersion that her people bear within them.”

André Malraux has given this almost Bonapartist declaration an aura of intellectual profundity by observing that, whereas the British have found national unity by withdrawing in on themselves, the French have only found it when they could espouse some international cause greater than themselves — as in the France of Saint Louis, or the revolutionary France of Napoleon.

The failure to understand this will almost certainly lead the reader of de Gaulle’s memoirs to see in them no more than a reactionary political testament. But because de Gaulle is first and foremost a rationalist, his nationalism itself can be reduced to laws and principles. “Patriotism,” he once wrote before the war, “always has something local about it.” It is this axiom which underlies the thrill he used to experience as a child before “the symbol of our glories: night falling over Notre Dame, the majesty of evening at Versailles, the Arc de Triomphe in the sun, conquered flags fluttering in the vault of the Invalides” (as he describes them in the memoirs). The importance of such symbols is that they, above all, are capable of inspiring martial heroism and ardent patriotism.

Esprit de corps, patriotism — these concepts have always enjoyed a place of honor in de Gaulle’s tidy, military mind; for they are the fuels of human greatness in hours of crisis. It was de Gaulle’s passionate belief in France, Churchill’s massive confidence in Britain, which made them in 1940 the champions of a Europe in chains.

De Gaulle’s memoirs are a reminder that that national fervor which has proved so destructive to Europe can also on occasion be a saving grace. It need not necessarily be anti-European. In this there is, I think, a realism which found its echo in de Gaulle’s recent dislike for the geometric labyrinth of the EDC. It is due to the realization that in a continent as old and as diversified as Europe you cannot plow under traditional habits, loyalties, or institutions overnight and expect anything living to remain. You cannot make a weak Frenchman or a bad German into a good European simply by putting him into a Continental uniform. As André Malraux once remarked: “We believed that in becoming less French a man became more human. Now we know that he simply becomes more Russian.”

Deep down beneath de Gaulle’s stiff-necked Gallic patriotism there is, after all, a fundamentally European concern for human individuality and freedom. As the German writer Friedrich Sieburg has pointed out, the Frenchman’s growing resistance to European “integration” is but a new expression of his vigilant hostility to any organization, beginning with the state, which threatens to trespass on his sphere of personal autonomy. He has no desire to be part of a monolithic European superstate if the price of its creation is to be the destruction of regional individualities, and if to belong to it he must cease to be a Frenchman, independent, skeptical, and freethinking.

Because every page breathes this fierce Gallic pride at a time when French amour-propre is on the defensive in the Far East and North Africa, de Gaulle’s memoirs have raised his sagging prestige to a height unequaled since 1947 and perhaps the war. They have been interpreted by many as an indication of the General’s definite retirement from French political life. In turning his back on the present to recapture the past, he can now say along with the Chateaubriand of the twilight years: “At my age one has intrigues only with one’s memories.” If this is true and this eloquent intrigue represents de Gaulle’s political swan song, it will be proof that not all generals fade away, that there are still some who can make their exit with éclat. It will also be proof that France has usually been better served by her writers — and has always been kinder to them — than by her politicians.