48 The New York Review
Allies were planning to invade France
with little consultation, and to direct
it themselves. By the time D-Day ap-
proached, Roosevelt loathed him, and
Churchill, in the words of one aide, was
almost as “insane at times in his hatred
of him” as the American president and
contemplated having him sent back to
Algiers, “in chains if necessary.”
As a perceptive observer noted, a
fundamental cause of this was person-
ality: believing himself to embody his
country, de Gaulle felt its humiliation
keenly; it was his duty as the national
leader to suffer, and to suffer alone.
But the tantrums, rages, and glacial si-
lences—the demeanor that could move
from icy disdain to gentle courtesy in
seconds—were also the attributes of
a master of political theatrics. As he
sometimes confessed to his aides, in his
position it was necessary on occasion
to smash things, to do the unexpected,
just to force others to take note. A clas-
sic case was the utterly ridiculous row
with the Americans that he manufac-
tured at what many would have re-
garded as the worst possible time over,
of all things, the unannounced Free
French takeover of the small islands
of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon off the
coast of Newfoundland.The summer of 1944 was thus de
Gaulle’s liberation in a double sense:
it was the moment in which he took
charge of France and steered it out of
the era of collaboration into its postwar
position as one of the four victorious
Allies and a major force in the recon-
struction of Europe. But it was also the
moment when he was finally liberated
from the yoke of exile and could assert
himself as a free man in a free country.
All of this erupted in that extraordinary
moment of national and self-assertion
that August when de Gaulle hailedParis! Paris outraged! Paris bro-
ken! Paris martyred! But Paris
liberated! Liberated by itself, lib-
erated by its people with the help
of the French armies, with the sup-
port and the help of all France, of
the France that fights, of the only
France, of the real France, of the
eternal France!France was liberated, but so at last was
de Gaulle.
The Liberation brought dilemmas of
its own. De Gaulle—for whom the di-
vide between the military man and the
politician was sacrosanct—had spent
the war in a state of deliberate ambigu-
ity about what he stood for politically.
Between 1940 and 1944 he had tacked
first one way and then the other, de-
pending on whom he needed to woo.
First there were the old conservatives;
then, as he seduced the Resistance,
he turned momentarily to the left. To
the Communists at the Liberation, he
declared that “there is only one revolu-
tionary in France: that is me.” Yet what
revolution did this least revolutionary
of men intend to lead? One that reaf-
firmed the authority of the French state
over the forces of disorder, by which
he chiefly meant the roaming armed
bands of the Resistance and all those
dispensing various kinds of summary
justice against collaborators real and
imagined.
He had always been ambivalent
about politics. Like many between the
world wars, he had wanted a “thirdway” for France—a path that eschewed
both Bolshevism and unfettered capi-
talism—which led some, mistakenly, to
accuse him of fascist sympathies. (No
fascist, de Gaulle was politically very
much within the mainstream of inter-
war Catholic corporatism.) He loathed
political parties and did not hide it.
Yet what he was restoring to France
was a republican tradition, and he now
faced a choice: he could withdraw, or
he could enter the fray. He wanted to
believe that politics was beneath him.
But those closest to him—his wife, his
housekeeper at Colombey, where he
had a country house—knew better.
Segueing smoothly from his wartime
position as leader of the Free French
to chairman of the provisional govern-
ment, he resigned in January 1946 fol-
lowing the election of a new constituent
assembly and began “hibernating.” He
formed a party, the Rassemblement du
Peuple Français (RPF), as a vehicle for
future political ambitions, but follow-
ing a series of poor election results he
retreated to the isolation of Colombey
to write his memoirs: he wanted to be
responsible for the historical record
himself, much as his model, Chateau-
briand, had once been. Churchill was
doing the same thing.
Jackson suggests that the memoirs
were intended as a consolation for the
failure of the RPF. They did burnish
his image as someone above politics,
a hero in whom the private man was
subordinated to the public leader.
The milieu was international, the Re-
sistance was co-opted as a secondary
source of popular esprit, and collabo-
ration was largely unmentioned. The
memoirs created an image of the war
that the French could live with and be-
came a best seller. De Gaulle sent his
first four copies to the pope, the Comte
de Paris, the president of the Republic,
and Queen Elizabeth II.
But the life of the historian was too
sedentary, and de Gaulle’s restless tem-
perament forced him outward. I n Par is,
he paid sporadic visits to the RPF’s
headquarters, which reminded some-
one of “the waiting room of a doctor’s
surgery in a spa town out of season.”
He traveled around much of France
giving speeches and plunging into
adoring crowds, and he went overseas
as well. By the mid-1950s, with the RPF
dissolved, he began to feel his time had
passed. His beloved daughter Anne
had died in 1948, a terrible blow to the
family, and his brother Xavier followed
in 1955, while his own health remained
remarkable.And then came the Algeria crisis, in
which the forces of Algerian national-
ism met white settler resistance and the
state’s dogged insistence that Algeria
was not just a colony but an integral
part of France. De Gaulle had always
been aware of the French empire’s
value—his wartime rise would have
been inconceivable without colonial
support—but he did not have a senti-
mental attachment to it. He watched
in silence as the Fourth Republic stag-
gered on, the violence spreading to the
mainland itself. By 1958 his return was
being sought both by the politicians in
Paris and by the generals in Algiers
who were plotting to topple the repub-
lic. The man the conspirators knew as
“le Grand Charles” had withdrawn
to Colombey. Mistrusting even the
telephone, he was in touch with themthrough gnomic messages delivered via
trusted backchannels. Asked how much
de Gaulle knew about their plans, his
rival François Mitterrand said, “Only
as much as God at the creation.”
The details remain murky. De Gaulle
wanted to come to power by legal
means, not a coup, though he was will-
ing to hasten the process along. In May
1958 he announced that he was ready
to form a new government. The prime
minister was blindsided and promptly
resigned. De Gaulle agreed to accept
full powers, and if granted them, to
rule for six months. He appeared in
the Chamber of Deputies for the first
time since 1946, and within six months
France had a new constitution—the
Fifth Republic—and a new president
with much greater powers than his
predecessor.
Although de Gaulle remained in of-
fice for the next decade, Jackson treats
this period more summarily than the
early heroic years. He does, however,
explain in detail how de Gaulle suc-
cessfully brought the fighting in Alge-
ria to an end, how under his leadership
the country obtained its independence,
and how the French army was brought
back under civilian control. Ending
the Algerian war was necessary for de
Gaulle to pursue his goal of restoring
French grandeur. France became a nu-
clear power, and he formed a close part-
nership with West German chancellor
Konrad Adenauer, which allowed him
to take charge of the process of Euro-
pean economic integration; ever dis-
trustful of perfidious Albion, he denied
Britain membership in the European
Economic Community and marginal-
ized it from Europe. (It was not allowed
to join the EEC until 1973, after he
died.) French society was transformed:
backed by the president, a new genera-
tion of technocrats led the country’s
modernization, while the number of
farmers dropped sharply.
In 1958 the British diplomat Glad-
wyn Jebb reflected that “the General
is not like anyone else, either physi-
cally or psychologically.” His great
height combined with his reserve and
his hauteur to give the sense of a man
apart, which he cultivated all his life.
He loved France, yet—as he famously
put it—chiefly as an idea. He viewed
himself as a historical figure, and his
greatest agony must have come from
fearing that history was going to pass
him by. This feeling was bound up with
his other striking characteristic: his
love of literature, of writing, of words.
A great reader, he kept up a correspon-
dence with the writers of his day. A
great writer himself, he worked hard at
his prose. The product of an age that
took rhetoric seriously, he practiced his
speeches over and over again.
How on earth did he find the time
for all this? Part of the answer, I think,
is in the regularity and modesty of
his domestic life. But there is also the
question of silence. To a degree un-
thinkable for a politician today, de
Gaulle used silence as a defense and a
weapon. There was only one phone at
Colombey, and he preferred to work
through intermediaries. He was a
master of the enigmatic utterance. He
learned how to bide his time, to disap-
pear and reemerge to stunning effect.
There was no better exponent of the
dramaturgy of public life in twentieth-
century Europe, a kind of theater that
has vanished completely amid the end-
less noise of contemporary politics. QLIVE IT LOVE IT OWN ITLISAGSMITH.COM
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