January 16, 2020 45
The Man Who Was France
Mark Mazower
De Gaulle
by Julian Jackson.
Belknap Press/Harvard University
Press, 887 pp., $39.95
French president Charles de Gaulle’s
press conferences in the 1960s were
early masterpieces of live televi-
sion. Towering above the journalists
crammed beneath his rostrum—he
was six foot four inches tall—he would
invite question after question before
ignoring them all to embark on one of
his renowned tours d’horizon. A con-
temporary cartoon from Le Figaro
shows him, glasses in hand. “I believe
I heard,” he is saying, “from the back
of the room, someone failing to ask me
the question that I will now answer.”
The capacious double-breasted suits
underlined how far he, and France,
had come since that glorious summer
in 1944 when a younger, trimmer Gen-
eral de Gaulle in belted uniform had
pronounced Paris liberated from the
Germans.
He was in his seventies and had out-
lived the Big Three—Roosevelt, Stalin,
and Churchill. His physical stamina re-
mained extraordinary, his memory and
repartee legendary, and he cheerfully
denounced those preparing what he
called après-gaullisme. A man of mod-
est personal habits, he fed coins into the
electricity meter in his apartment at the
Élysée Palace himself. But deep down
he felt tired, and he sometimes won-
dered what his long and remarkable
career had really been for. One night in
1967, with only his close aide Jacques
Foccart present, he soliloquized:
In reality we are on the stage of a
theatre where I have been keeping
up the illusion since 1940. I am try-
ing to give France the appearance
of a solid, firm, confident and ex-
panding country, while it is a worn-
out nation, which thinks only of its
own comfort, which doesn’t want
any problems.... I make people
believe, or I think I do, that France
is a great country, that France is
determined and united, while it is
nothing of the sort. France is worn
out, she is made to be supine not
made to fight. That is how things
are, and I cannot do anything
about it.... I keep the theatre
going as long as I can, and then,
after me, have no illusion, things
will go back to where they were.De Gaulle once described his old
sparring partner Winston Churchill as
“a great artist,” but the phrase could
as profitably be applied to him. In the
spring of 1968 he turned his bewilder-
ment at the student demonstrations
and workers’ strikes into a last demon-
stration of his brilliance: disappearing
for twenty-four hours from Paris—his
intentions remain uncertain—he re-
emerged to announce the elections
that gave the Gaullist party an un-
precedented majority. Yet the exhaus-
tion was real, and when, the following
April, he resigned after losing a com-
pletely pointless referendum on re-
gional reform, it was almost as though
he were looking for a way out. In re-
tirement he had barely enough time to
complete the first volume of memoirs
of his presidency before he died on No-
vember 9, 1970. France has been living
in his shadow ever since.
Julian Jackson’s biography is a wor-
thy monument to this extraordinary
figure. He has a good eye for the telling
quotation and a magnificent capacity
to place de Gaulle, one of the most fas-
cinating subjects in twentieth-century
politics, in his historical and political
setting. The result is a wonderful his-
tory of modern France disguised as the
biography of a statesman.De Gaulle was born in his mother’s
hometown of Lille in 1890. His father,
a teacher, was the dominant presence
in his early life and inculcated in his
son the love of learning, books, and
writing that always marked him out
from most of his fellow officers. “What
a man, what a father, what a figure in
our lives,” de Gaulle wrote to his older
brother after their father’s death in- “If my destiny offers me honour
of any kind, it will have been to live in
the image of Henri de Gaulle, my fa-
ther.” De Gaulle père taught at a Je-
suit high school before founding his
own private Catholic school, and once
described himself as a “monarchist in
feeling, and republican in thought.”
This paternal strand of republican
Catholicism—devout, patriotic, frugal,
and dedicated to the nation’s honor and
history—shaped his son and goes some
way toward explaining de Gaulle’s
ability and desire to bring together a
country that had been torn apart by
the passions of the Dreyfus Affair in
his youth, and would later be torn apart
again in war. One of Henri de Gaulle’s
students was the writer Georges Berna-
nos, whose ascetic faith and hatred of
fascism made him a sympathetic figure
for his near contemporary Charles: it
is no surprise that Bernanos’s Diary of
a Country Priest, with its idealization
of the life of service and its mistrust of
human nature, was one of his favorite
books. Both the sense of duty and the
misanthropy—de Gaulle was a quin-
tessential loner—remained prominent
throughout his life.
Out of de Gaulle’s education came at
least two other enduring elements. One
was the debt he owed to the intellectual
giants of the years before World War I
—especially their taste for action over
talk and their fervent patriotic faith.
The writer Ernest Psichari moved from
republicanism and pacifism into the
Catholic Church before he was killed
in 1914; in 1940, when fighting at the
front against the Germans, it was Psi-
chari’s works that de Gaulle requested.
The philosopher Henri Bergson’s be-
lief in the importance of intuition over
rationalism was a major influence on
de Gaulle’s idea of political leadership.
De Gaulle’s interwar study Le fil de
l’épée (The Edge of the Sword) was a
Bergsonian treatise that underlined the
importance of instinct and experience
and warned against the French zeal for
logic and theorization. Raymond Poin-
caré, France’s president during World
War I, was, de Gaulle once wrote, an
example of intelligence without intu-
ition, “an executant of the first rank.”
Nothing could have been more antipa-
thetic to him. The mark of the leader,
he liked to say, was to disobey—a pre-
cept he lived up to with spectacular
success, especially during World War
II. Anyone could talk (though few bet-
ter than de Gaulle); the leader knew
when to remain silent. Above all, he
wrote, the leader had to suffer, to un-
dergo “an intimate struggle... which atevery moment lacerates his soul.”
De Gaulle’s other formative influ-
ence was the army. In 1909, before he
could begin studies at the French mili-
tary academy St. Cyr, he spent a year
with the thirty-third infantry regiment,
which was commanded by a fifty-five-
year-old colonel whose career was ap-
parently behind him: Philippe Pétain.
Thus began the extraordinary asso-
ciation between the two men, one that
started in admiration and patronage,
reached its climax after France’s col-
lapse in 1940 in what became a per-
sonal duel of words over the airwaves,
and ended when the war was over with
the younger man—having succeeded
the older as national leader—holding his
former commander’s life in his hands.
At St. Cyr, de Gaulle did not do espe-
cially well, and later, when he returned
to the École de Guerre (the school that
trained high-ranking French military
officers), his instructors were struck
by his aloof bearing and his arrogance,
his attitude of “a king in exile.” On
the other hand, as he demonstrated in
World War I, he was indifferent to dan-
ger. Wounded and captured at Verdun,
he spent nearly three years as a prisoner
of war, passing the time by reading his-
tory. After the war, he served with the
Polish army in its struggle against the
Bolsheviks, and then, back in France at
the start of the 1920s, he set about forg-
ing a career.One of the greatest and strangest
works of French Romanticism, Alfred
de Vigny’s Of Military Glory and Ser-
vitude, is a lengthy meditation on the
place of the soldier in peacetime. The
nobility and melancholy of a life dedi-
cated to service, in particular to the
service of a society that is enjoying the
pleasures of peace, was a theme that
resonated with de Gaulle. Like one of
de Vigny’s heroes, he felt a lingering
regret at not having done more during
wartime. But he believed a new war
was coming: as early as 1917 he had
been warning that “this war is not the
last.” He prepared for it by reading and
writing and acquiring a reputation as a
strategist. He also attended the salon
of a remarkable mentor, the Jewish
colonel Émile Mayer, forty years his
senior, who had a reputation as a first-
class military theorist. Both of them
were what the French called militaires
cultivés.
It was also in the 1920s that de Gaulle
got married and thereby found the do-
mestic tranquility that became indis-
pensable to this most private of men.
Yvonne Vendroux was the daughter of
a prosperous family of Calais industri-
alists, and together they had three chil-
dren, the last of whom, Anne, was born
in 1928. She had Down syndrome, and
both parents were devoted to her. One
of the few touching photographs of de
Gaulle, whose life was lived almost en-
tirely in the public eye, is of him, in suit,
tie, and Homburg, sitting on a deck
chair on a Brittany beach engrossed in
a game with the five-year-old Anne on
his lap.
His relationship with Pétain, who
had became a national hero during
World War I for his defense of VerdunCharles de Gaulle