46 The New York Review
and been named commander in chief
of the army and a marshal of France,
brought professional advancement, and
de Gaulle made his way onto the Con-
seil Supérieur de la Défense National,
which was in charge of war prepara-
tions. His books had made him well
known in defense circles. His first—a
study of why the Germans had lost in
1918—stressed the importance of civil-
ian control over the military and the
preservation of morale, but his second
and third focused on what kind of army
was going to be needed in the future.
In opposition to the received wisdom
that the next war would, like the last,
be a defensive war fought in trenches,
de Gaulle, following his mentor Mayer,
predicted that the offensive would be
decisive and would require the forma-
tion of mechanized units and a highly
trained professional army.
Initially his views were unpopular,
but in the mid-1930s he found a new
patron in the center-right politician
Paul Reynaud. Others came round as
well, and after the remilitarization of
the Rhineland, Léon Blum, the social-
ist prime minister, sought his advice.
De Gaulle’s deeply conservative cast of
mind never precluded him from mixing
with socialists, or for that matter with
Jews. Nor did his Catholicism ever lead
him into appeasement and fascism like
the conservatives around Charles Maur-
ras and Action Française. He was, at
heart, a realist in international affairs:
power and the balance of forces counted
for more with him than ideology,
and he valued Russia—Bolshevik or
not—as a potential partner for France.
Before World War II broke out, de
Gaulle had predicted that cowering
behind the Maginot Line—the line of
fortifications constructed in the 1930s
along the German border—would lead
to a “political, social and moral crisis.”
France’s only hope in the event of attack
was an assault on the German lines.
When Reynaud became prime minister
in March 1940, de Gaulle helped draft
his speech before heading to the front;
two months later he led his tanks into
action against the invading Germans.
The heat of battle was not his natural
milieu. As a leader of men, his fearless-
ness was offset by his solitary manner
and his intimidating silence. When a
military chaplain asked him, “Why are
you always alone, Colonel? One would
like to meet you and talk with you,” his
response was, “To say what?” A staff
officer recorded:He exercised a command that was
independent, exclusive, authoritar-
ian and egocentric, based on the
conviction that his judgement was,
in every case, the best.... Insisting
in all circumstances on the signs
of respect that the regulations re-
quired, he kept his officers at six
paces, creating around him a void
where he stood out in the centre....
He received a report without say-
ing a word; disconcerted people by
his ironic sallies.Yet when he carried the same style
into politics, it appeared to do nothing
to impede the remarkable progression
that took him within the space of four
years from political nonentity to inter-
national statesman.De Gaulle’s ascent began when Rey-
naud appointed the relatively unknownyoung brigadier-general to the position
of under-secretary of state for defense
on June 5, 1940. Without that brief
time in ministerial office, his claim in
the summer of 1940 to embody the con-
tinuity of the French state would have
been utterly preposterous rather than
merely implausible. Reynaud resigned
on June 16 to make way for Marshal
Pétain, but by then de Gaulle had been
brought into the heart of governmental
decision-making and come to the atten-
tion of the new British prime minister,
Winston Churchill. The two men met
for the first time in London on June
9, after de Gaulle made a dash across
the Channel: he impressed Churchill
as a man of action, an impression re-
inforced when they met a second timeduring Churchill’s extraordinary last
visit to a France on the verge of capitu-
lation nine days later. By then it was
clear that Pétain planned to come to
terms with the Germans. Fearing ar-
rest, de Gaulle said farewell to his wife
and children and flew back to London.
He later said, “At the age of forty-nine
I was entering into an adventure.”
Pétain was his superior; yet the mark
of the true leader was to know when to
disobey, and his first act of disobedience
was to the marshal, a man he had known
intimately for decades. Pétain stood for
the very thing that de Gaulle rejected—
compromise with Hitler in the belief
that this would permit France to survive
as a great power. To Pétain’s invocation
of the “soil of France,” he invoked his
own “idea of France.” De Gaulle’s ini-
tial appeals to his countrymen—start-
ing with his famous broadcast of June
18, 1940, in which he invited French
officers and soldiers in Britain to join
him and declared, “The flame of French
resistance must not be extinguished
and will not be extinguished”—took
direct aim at his former patron.
Within days, his radio talks had be-
come deeply personal and started to
alarm the British Foreign Office, which
had not given up hope of maintaining
relations with Vichy. But de Gaulle
had the support of Churchill. “You are
alone,” Churchill told him privately.
“Well, I will recognise you alone.” He
was as good as his word: on June 28 de
Gaulle was publicly recognized by the
British as “leader of all the Free French
wherever they might be.”
This was an extraordinary step. Even
the French who found themselves in En-
gland did not rush to accept de Gaulle:
to the contrary, this remote and chillyfigure lunching alone at the Savoy ap-
pealed to few of them, and most of the
troops who had been evacuated from
France that summer eventually made
their way back across the Channel and
regarded Pétain as the legitimate head
of the French government. Outside
the New Hebrides, whose governor
came out for de Gaulle in July, there
were few signs of support for the Free
French for some time. The French colo-
nies in Equatorial Africa rallied to the
cause in August, and within months in
France his broadcasts made his name
synonymous with resistance. Yet the
formation of a political movement in
exile and the establishment of connec-
tions with the Resistance in occupied
France took much longer. It would not
be for another two or three years that
de Gaulle’s claim to stand for France
had any credibility at all, and longer
than that before Churchill managed to
bring the cabinet around to his view.
This fundamental weakness in his
position explains his endless duel with
Churchill, even though the British
prime minister was his most ardent
advocate in Whitehall. The two men
were, in many ways, kindred spirits.
Both were accomplished writers and
celebrated orators. Both loved history
and felt themselves to be living it. Per-
haps for that reason, both of them felt
the mystique of monarchy. (De Gaulle,
always a republican, maintained re-
spect for the pretender to the French
throne, the Comte de Paris.) Both
were unabashed in their defense of na-
tional prestige. Above all, both were
unlikely politicians, always outsiders,
mistrusted yet respected for their bril-
liance and for their sense of timing.
But there were differences too:
Churchill was a sybarite; de Gaulle was
frugal. Churchill was gregarious, warm,
and sentimental; de Gaulle despised
humanity and preferred to keep his
own counsel. Churchill was effusive in
his love of France; beside his reverence
for the British royal family, de Gaulle’s
Anglophilia was nonexistent. Above all,
Churchill stood at the helm of a unified
nation that was still one of the world’s
great powers, while de Gaulle’s home-
land was a fractious, riven society whose
national humiliation was complete.
It would take a great novelist to de-
scribe the combustible relationship
that developed between the two men.
Jackson describes it as “strangely pas-
sionate,” which seems an understate-
ment. There were tempestuous rows.
“Si vous m’obstaclerez, je vous liquide-
rai,” Churchill stormed when he was
trying to force a public reconciliation
between a reluctant de Gaulle and his
detested rival, General Henri Giraud,
in Casablanca in early 1943. But the
tension had been building for months.
In the summer of 1941, British forces
had fought and defeated Vichy loyal-
ists in Syria and Lebanon to prevent
the Germans from getting a foothold
in the Middle East. When they reached
an accord, bypassing the Free French,
de Gaulle was outraged.
His relations with the British went
downhill fast, and they left him “stew-
ing in his juice” and even prohib-
ited him from leaving the country. In
Whitehall, he became known as “the
Monster of Hampstead.” De Gaulle’s
insistence that the Allies recognize him
as the incarnation of a Great Power was
regarded by them as absurd, given his
almost total logistical and political de-
pendence on them. He hated that theCharles de Gaulle at the French military
academy St. Cyr, 1912BridgemanImagesAvailable in bookstores, call (646) 215-2500,
or visit http://www.nyrb.com“Genet’s sense of language
[moved] seamlessly from
street argot to the sublime....
Genet’s poetry drew me to
write; his imagery drew Robert
[Mapplethorpe] to the camera.”
—Patti Smith, The Paris ReviewThe Criminal Child offers the first Eng-
lish translation of a key early work by
Jean Genet.
In 1949, in the midst of a national de-
bate about improving the French reform-
school system, a French radio station
commissioned Genet to write about his
experience as a juvenile delinquent. He
sent back a piece about his youth that
was a paean to prison instead of the
expected horrifying exposé.
Revisiting the cruel hazing rituals that
had accompanied his incarceration,
relishing the special argot spoken be-
hind bars, Genet wondered if regulat-
ing that strange other world wouldn’t
simply prevent future children from dis-
covering their essentially criminal na-
ture in the way that he had. The radio
station chose not broadcast Genet’s
views.
“The Criminal Child” appears here with
a selection of Genet’s finest essays,
including his celebrated piece on the
art of Alberto Giacometti.“[This book is] united by Genet’s
signature probing prose and his
fascination with morality, misfits,
and art.... Throughout, Genet is a
deft, sensual, and outrageous
critic—in regards to theater, he
proclaims, ‘A performance that does
not act on my soul is vain.’ Fans
will be pleased with this gathering
of Genet’s inimitable reflections
on art, life, and his muses.”
—Publishers WeeklyTHE CRIMINAL CHILD
SELECTED ESSAYS
Jean Genet
Translated by Charlotte Mandell
and Jeffrey Zuckerman
Paperback • $15.95
Also available as an e-book
On sale January 21, 2020