by Roy Jenkins
Even with Pétain relations began to fray, but more for reasons of literary jealousy than of strategic disagreement. Pétain wanted a ghost-writer but de Gaulle wanted a literary reputation of his own. When Pétain became War Minister in 1934 he recoiled from his original thought of making de Gaulle his directeur de cabinet because of warnings that de Gaulle had become too much his own man. De Gaulle was relieved because the post might have prevented him publishing his third and best-known pre-war book, Vers l’Armée de Métier (Towards a Professional Army). This was a plea for a small, highly trained, highly mobile corps of 100,000 men. Although it did not decry the supplementary use of fortifications, it was essentially hostile to the Maginot Line mentality.
It was, however, his fourth book, La France et son Armée, that provided the final irritable chapter in de Gaulle’s literary relations with Pétain. The basis of the book was the historical material that de Gaulle had prepared when working under Pétain in 1925-7, which Pétain had wanted to publish under his own name in 1928 but which de Gaulle had successfully resisted. Ten years later Pétain less successfully resisted de Gaulle’s claim to copyright and eventually agreed, subject to a negotiated dedication, the form of which de Gaulle slightly changed. Pétain was furious, and de Gaulle tried to appease him by promising that any second edition would carry the proper version. It was a supreme example of a storm in a teacup, particularly as publication took place at the height of the Munich crisis and was little noticed. Even without that diversion, however, the work would have been unlikely to sell much. All of de Gaulle’s books of that epoch had rippling repercussions but small sales - Vers l’Armée de Métier sold only 700. It was reminiscent of the joke that ‘the reason academic disputes are so bitter is that the stakes are so small’. In France at least the habits of the Champ de Mars could rival those of the groves of academe in this respect. But few professors achieve the positions that Pétain and de Gaulle were to do within two years of the fracas.
De Gaulle, apart from producing his books, spent the twelve pre-war years first as a light infantry battalion commander in Trier, the Moselle city in which Karl Marx was born, then as a staff officer in Beirut, then for nearly six years in Paris with the French equivalent of the Imperial General Staff, until in the summer of 1937 he was promoted to full colonel and given command at Metz of one of the very few fully armoured regiments. It was the first time he had been in charge of troops for eight years. It was a crucial test of his soldiering qualities, for he had written so much about the deployment of tanks that if he could not make a success of handling them himself he was going to look fairly foolish.
There is considerable dispute about how good he was at this practical task. In any event he was promoted in May 1940 and given command of a newly formed armoured division. He engaged it with the enemy in the last weeks of May and is claimed by his biographers to have inflicted one or two dents on the advancing Germans. There is also a view, however, that he was essentially a theoretical and political rather than a tactically competent fighting general, and it is adduced in support of this view that not a single one of his officers of that armoured division subsequently joined the Free French. What is certain is that he did not have to exercise his command for long. On 5 June he was recalled to Paris and made under-secretary for National Defence in the Reynaud Government. It sounded a junior political assignment, but as Reynaud combined the National Defence portfolio with the premiership de Gaulle was in effect in charge of the department and was close to the centre of the crushing chain of events that unfolded between then and the surrender on 18 June.
He was next to Churchill at the dinner on the evening of the conference at the French High Command on 11 June, and fortified the favourable impression that he had made on the British Prime Minister when they had first met in Downing Street two days before (de Gaulle was on a six-hour mission to London to persuade Churchill to commit more resources to France, but was already being converted to the contrary doctrine that it was crucial for Britain to retain the capacity to fight on alone). He appeared to Churchill like a lofty island of calm resolution sticking up out of a sea of defeatist confusion. This was of determining importance for the reception that de Gaulle received in London when he left France on 17 June. Without this strongly positive personal impression he would have been an unknown two-star general. As it was, he was received by Churchill within hours of landing, allowed to broadcast in the name of France on both the second and third evenings of his exile, officially recognized by the British Government as the leader of the Free French on 28 June, given a subsidy of £8 million a year, and showered with Churchill invitations to Downing Street luncheons and Chequers weekends during the next desperate two months (de Gaulle left for eleven weeks in Africa on 28 August) when Britain’s fate hung in the balance.
De Gaulle as an allied leader was thus very much Churchill’s creation, and at a certain level of consciousness he knew this perfectly well, and even felt persistent stirrings of subterranean gratitude. But he believed that gratitude had no place in the relations of statesmen. And although his early resources of 7000 scattered men entitled him to be no more than the commander of a motley brigade, it was a statesman that he was determined to be - on his own behalf and on that of France.
The display of nerve by which he achieved this remains awe-inspiring. His position was far more difficult and dangerous than that of the groups of Homburg-hatted gentlemen who constituted the half dozen or more other allied governments in London. They clustered together for comfort, mostly had the legitimacy of their sovereign’s support and had left nothing with any claim to be an indigenous government behind them. De Gaulle was alone. He was also a soldier subject to the harsh discipline of the still extant even if defeated French army, in which he had spent his whole life. His old commanding officer and patron-general had become head of state, was cosseted by Roosevelt, who alone could lead the free world to full victory, and was recognized by the Vatican, the Soviet Union and even Britain. De Gaulle was recalled to duty by Weygand on behalf of Pétain in July, and was condemned to death for desertion by a Vichy military court in August. It required great self-certainty to stand against the military hierarchy and the French state, which even in degradation had a continuing centralized tradition. But what rendered the performance breathtaking was that at the same time he bit the British hand which fed him and defied the latent power of American leadership before which even Churchill almost prostrated himself.
When Anthony Eden, who was de Gaulle’s most effective friend in Britain, exasperatedly asked him why the Free French were twice as much trouble as the rest of the allies put together, he replied with the grand simplicity of an illogicality erected on a false premise: ‘Because France is a great power.’ France was nothing of the sort at the time, but it had been, and thanks largely to de Gaulle it came as near to being so again, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s, as any fifty-million nation could hope to be in the age of Washington/Moscow bipolarity.
De Gaulle, whose attitudes were to an unusual extent historically governed, no doubt had a full sense of traditional Gallic rivalry and even antipathy towards the British. ‘[He] did not like England,’ his principal French biographer (Jean Lacouture) wrote. ‘He admired her.’ He once expostulated to General Spears that he did not particularly want England (which was the term he always used) to win the war. He only wanted France to be victorious, to which end he accepted that an English victory was also necessary. He knew that his own objectives would be compromised if he appeared as an auxiliary fighting under the Union Jack. There had to be a great deal of the Cross of Lorraine. And the weaker he was the more intransigently he had to uphold its dignity. He also had to keep his distance. He saw this need in almost astronomical terms. Many years later he wrote in relation to America that ‘a small or medium-sized [country] cannot stand too close to a very great power without risk of being drawn into its orbit’. Throughout his life his reaction to setback was always to try both to distance and heighten himself. And he had
the nerve to take frightening risks in the pursuit of this tactic. His definition of a great statesman was ‘a man capable of taking risks’, and the fact that the definition so manifestly did not exclude himself no doubt increased its attraction.
His behaviour in the early autumn of 1940 encapsulated these various attributes. On 23-25 September he suffered the humiliating failure of an Anglo-Free French naval assault on Vichy-controlled Dakar. The failure was joint but the humiliation was his. He was blamed by Roosevelt for the foolhardiness of the concept and by his British collaborators for the deficiencies of Free French security which was thought to have made a substantial contribution to the defeat. And many (although conspicuously not Churchill) noted without too much dismay that his name and his appeal had carried little resonance with the garrison. Immediately afterwards he was almost suicidal. He retired to Lagos, not one of the most recuperative cities in the world. A natural human reaction would have been to hope for and half to invite messages of reassurance and support. Instead de Gaulle plunged off on a tour of various French equatorial outposts where he received some of the first of the bains de foule (immersion in an enthusiastic crowd) which subsequently became one of his few necessary forms of psychological massage. Then, at Brazzaville in the French Congo, barely five weeks after the débâcle of Dakar, having indisputably distanced himself from the British, he proceeded to heighten himself by proclaiming ‘We, General de Gaulle’ as the true and legitimate heir to all the sovereignty of the French Republic. He compounded his insolence by summoning the American Consul from Léopoldville (now Kinshasa) across the river and offering to negotiate with the United States over the occupation of western hemisphere islands currently under the control of the Vichy Government which Washington was anxious to propitiate. It was dangerously on the edge of bathos, but de Gaulle just got away with it. The State Department never replied. The Foreign Office was appalled but de Gaulle was too far off and too necessary for them to do much about it. Churchill got de Gaulle to come back to London in mid-November, but more by cajolery than by discipline.
Thus was the pattern set for the next few years. De Gaulle continued to push his luck almost unbelievably far. In Syria in the summer of 1941 he practically provoked a war within a war. After he got back to London at the end of August Churchill suspended all communication with him for nearly two weeks. When the Prime Minister eventually saw him he was determined to give him a tremendous dressing down. It did not work. De Gaulle was impervious and Churchill’s wrath was not cold enough. There is a hilarious description of the occasion in Colville’s diaries. It was partly Churchill’s belief that he could speak French that undermined him. First he thought that he would make his disapproval clear by declining to do so and conducting the interview through an interpreter. Colville was deputed to act in an amateur capacity but was quickly discarded because Churchill claimed that he was rendering his phrases in a way too polite to the General. A bilingual Foreign Office official was then sent for, but Churchill found him equally unsatisfactory. So he plunged on alone with de Gaulle. This meant in his own inimitable French, in which he had little command over the nuances of what he was saying and was also anxious that de Gaulle should pay him the compliment of comprehension. This self-imposed weakness destroyed his chance of being successfully magisterial. After an hour and a half they had moved to sit side by side, the Prime Minister was declaiming in French and de Gaulle was smoking the peace-offering of a large Churchillian cigar.
A year later, when Madagascar was added to a repeat of Syria as a scene of de Gaulle-induced trouble, they had a more serious quarrel. The atmosphere was vitiated by the presence on that occasion of four other people, so there could be no smoke-wreathed tâte-à-tête on a sofa. And by then - 30 September 1942 - the tension for Churchill was increased by the looming proximity of the Anglo-American landings in North Africa and by de Gaulle’s complete inability or unwillingness to make himself acceptable to Roosevelt. Just over three months later there occurred the farce of the shot-gun ‘embrace’ (actually it was only a hand-shake in spite of their being French generals) between Giraud and de Gaulle in Casablanca, with Roosevelt and Churchill seated behind them and looking like duennas who had each produced an offspring for the nuptial. De Gaulle was summoned from London in a British aeroplane to be received as a client in an American security enclave on sovereign French territory. He arrived truculently but he none the less achieved as great a star role in Casablanca in 1943 as Bogart and Bergman together had done in 1942. In 1942-5 American power was nearly always decisive. It defeated Keynes at Bretton Woods in 1944. But in 1943 it did no good for Giraud against de Gaulle. By November the four-star general had been eliminated by the two-star one (it was part of de Gaulle’s strength that, although he referred to himself as General de Gaulle as automatically as the US Chief of Staff and future Secretary of State called himself General Marshall, he never advanced his military rank and eschewed both the polished field boots and ‘scrambled egg’ képis to which most French generals were then attracted; he dressed as a junior general, but modestly so, almost as a desk-bound one).
Churchill frequently contemplated withdrawing support from de Gaulle and trying to eliminate him as leader of the Fighting French (as they had become in 1942) and on one occasion delivered himself of the immortal phrase: ‘Si vous m’obstaclerez, je vous liquiderai.’ But he knew that he could not do so for three reasons of mounting order of importance. First, he had Eden as a sometimes exasperated but courageous and persistent ally of de Gaulle sitting on his doorstep. He set higher store by Roosevelt, but Eden was more present. Second, he did not in the last resort wish to ditch de Gaulle. He was sentimental and the General was for him part of the magic myth of 1940. Third, de Gaulle’s strength in France (and his popularity in Britain) grew almost inexorably with every wartime year that went by. The unknown and presumptuous brigadier of 1940 became the national leader of 1942, 1943 and 1944. In the second half of the war he could not have been jettisoned without the most appalling consequences on the French internal resistance movement.
De Gaulle was not allowed much of a role in the Normandy invasion. On 4 June, two days before D-day, he was summoned to Britain after an absence of a full year in North Africa and given a briefing by Churchill. The military part of the discussion went well, the political part much less so. De Gaulle wrote in his memoirs that Churchill had said: ‘How can you expect us to differ from the United States? We are able to liberate Europe only because the Americans are with us. Any time we have to choose between Europe and the open seas (le grand large), we shall always be for the open seas. Every time I have to choose between you and Roosevelt, I shall choose Roosevelt.’ These do not strike me as ipsissima verba, but no doubt they approximate to the reality, and in any event were what de Gaulle believed Churchill had said, which was what counted for the future.
After some hesitation de Gaulle was allowed to pay a forty-eight-hour visit to the bridgehead starting on the eighth day of the invasion. His visit was regarded as an irritating distraction by both the Americans and the British, but not by the French population. In Bayeux he was received with an emotion and an automatic acceptance of his authority that was wholly spontaneous because he was not expected and people at first had difficulty realizing that it was he. This first bain de Joule on metropolitan French soil was a major fortification of his self-confidence. It did not make him more amenable but it made him calmer. He accepted a further two months away from France, mostly with his provisional government in North Africa, but interspersed with visits first to the Pope in Rome and then to Roosevelt in Washington. The latter did not go as badly as it might have done.
He returned to France (from North Africa) only after the allied troops had broken out of the Normandy peninsula and the liberation of Paris seemed imminent. He came in an American plane which broke down on the way, and he was full of suspicion. But he reached Eisenhower’s headquarters on 20 August and mostly got his way with him. Leclerc’s French division was allowed to lead a
direct assault on Paris and de Gaulle himself entered the city on 25 August. His objectives then were a mixture of the warm and the cold. He wanted to savour, in joyous unity with some of those who had helped him achieve it, one of the most remarkable turns of fortune in a span of fifty months ever brought about by any individual. He also wanted to make clear to the leaders of the Resistance, many of whom were Communists, who was boss.
In the glow of the first he never lost sight of the second objective. Thus, after a rendezvous with Leclerc and a Resistance representative at the Gare Montparnasse, he went first, not to the Hôtel de Ville where the other Resistance leaders were awaiting him, but to the Ministry of War in the rue St Dominique where he installed himself in the office (curiously quite unchanged) out of which he had been prised by the government’s evacuation of Paris on 10 June 1940. Then, having established both continuity and a grip on the levers of authority, he did go to the Hôtel de Ville, but via police headquarters (thus putting his hand on another lever), and when he got there announced his triumphant parade down the Champs Elysées for the following afternoon. He thought that ‘perhaps two million people’ attended. ‘Ah! C’est la mer,’ he recorded himself as saying, ‘And I, in the midst of it all, feel not a person but an instrument of destiny.’ From the Concorde he went to Notre Dame for a Te Deum. Thus did he seek a reunion of state and Church which had been rare since 1870, and only intermittent since 1789.
Three days later he organized a more surprising parade over the same mile and a half of grand avenue. He and General Omar Bradley reviewed an American march past. Eisenhower said it was at de Gaulle’s request. He wanted to show the Resistance that if there was any trouble he had the big battalions on his side. If the explanation was correct it was a striking illustration of his ability not only to use pride when he wished but also to subordinate it when that too served his purpose.
