Le Grand Charles

The problem was that he could be brusque, distant, disdainful, obstinate, and overbearing. And that was on a good day. During his wartime exile in London, as the creator and leader of the Free French forces, he regularly infuriated Churchill, his usually good-humored sponsor and ally, and most Foreign Office officials, including two future prime ministers, Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan.

Drawing on the letters and diaries of these men and others, the British historian Julian Jackson, in this tenaciously researched, nuanced, largely sympathetic biography, describes how hard they tried to accommodate their touchy French guest, up to a point, and beyond that point kept wondering if he had gone mad. In the position of a backseat driver during most of the war, the general was capable of saying things like: “You think I am interested in England winning the war? I am not. I am only interested in France’s victory.”

He conducted himself as France incarnate, but the France he personified was largely one of his history-steeped imagination. It was the France of Joan of Arc, Louis XIV, and (though he didn’t really approve of him) Napoleon—France as a heroic actor in history, a great power, not the humiliated nation that had been quickly overrun by the German Army in May and June 1940 and, under the Vichy regime of Marshal Pétain, had negotiated an armistice with Hitler that turned it into a neutered, half-occupied country.

But this epochal sense of himself is precisely what allowed him to defy all the odds and all the Vichyites. His eloquent BBC radio appeals rallied the French to his cause, giving them back a sense of national purpose and pride and spurring the Resistance.

He never explained himself. I recall him extolling, somewhere in his memoirs, the power of silence. André Malraux, the most prominent literary convert to Gaullism after the war, wrote that an “inner remoteness” was de Gaulle’s most striking trait. It reminded him of the inscrutability of “distinguished men of religion.” And in an early book quoted by Jackson, de Gaulle identified “mystery” and “ruse” as two of the essential attributes of a great leader. He sometimes seems as remote and as mysterious in his motives as a king or saint of the Middle Ages. Like them, he was half-legend, and this carefully cultivated mystique was the secret of his success.

“General de Gaulle symbolizes that France which did not despair, which did not give in,” Pierre Brossolette—a prewar socialist journalist who joined the Resistance—reported from London during the war. “France needs a myth, and for the moment France has fallen so low that this myth cannot be found in a formula or an idea: it needs to be incarnated in a man.”

Myths are, of course, somewhat hard to live with at close quarters. And solitude was another attribute that de Gaulle associated with greatness. He had a long placid marriage with his wife Yvonne and was devoted to his three children, especially his younger daughter Anne, born with Down syndrome, but he had few friends and kept allies and associates at a frosty distance. He might have adopted as a motto the line from Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People: “The strongest man is he who stands alone.”

He was never more alone than when he arrived in London on a small plane from Bordeaux in June 1940 with a couple of suitcases, a handful of francs, and almost no acquaintance with the English language. “I appeared to myself,” he wrote in his memoirs, “alone and deprived of everything, like a man on the edge of an ocean that he was hoping to swim across.” But Churchill, as immersed in the glories of British history as de Gaulle was in the historical “grandeur” that was for him inseparable from France, must have recognized in him a kindred spirit, endowed with a “quixotic nobility.” Churchill decided to gamble on him, approving his first inspiring (if largely unheard) BBC speech directed at France on June 18.

The towering (6-foot-4) 49-year-old general had written four books, incisively opposed the defensive Maginot Line strategy of the French general staff, led some of the most effective counterattacks against the Germans in May 1940, and taken a minor post in the government of his friend Paul Reynaud, which collapsed before it could flee, as de Gaulle was urging, to North Africa to continue the fight there.

Yet he was almost as unknown in France when he arrived in London as he was in London. That changed when the Pétain government, after he refused its orders to return from England, condemned him in absentia to death and added public attacks on him. Soon the French across the occupied and Vichy zones were furtively tuning their radios to hear him.

For all his quixotic nobility, de Gaulle had an instinct for the art of the possible. Jackson points out that he admired the underlying realism in the foreign policy of the Old Regime—the spirit, you might say, of Cardinal Richelieu. He thought Napoleon had exhausted France with imperial excess, a hubristic refusal to acknowledge limits. He made, Jackson notes, the same point about German philosophy and German geopolitical ambitions—they both lacked the classical French sense of moderation and balance.

He seems to have derived from his favorite philosopher, Henri Bergson, a modern version of Pascal’s esprit de finesse, a trust in intuition and a distrust of rigorous a priori rationalism. This made him immune to any dogmatic, systematic ideologies, such as the absolutist royalism of Charles Maurras, the dominant ideologue of the French right before World War II. A vehement anti-Dreyfusard and founder of the proto-fascist Action Française, Maurras ended up a diehard Vichyite.

De Gaulle, born into a family of scholarly provincial gentry that had been discreetly royalist and devoutly Catholic for generations, was a monarchist at heart. “The regret of my life,” Jackson quotes him as saying at the end of it, “is not to have built a monarchy, that there was no member of the Royal House for that. In reality I was a monarch for ten years.”

But unlike Maurras, de Gaulle didn’t want to annihilate the entire legacy of the Revolution, and he wasn’t anti-Semitic and conspiracy-minded. He probably just wished the Revolution had stopped in 1791 so that France, like England, could have had a stabilizing, symbolic constitutional monarchy. The Fifth Republic, with its strong presidential system, is the bastard child of his intuitive royalism, and the current president, Emmanuel Macron, openly emulates the general.

Jackson’s meticulous account of de Gaulle’s postwar exile from power and his presidency (1959-69) can’t help feeling like an anticlimax, as it may have to de Gaulle himself. The main drama came from his cutting the Gordian knot of Algeria, conceding its independence and surviving the subsequent assassination attempts and an abortive army coup, and confronting the one-month wonder of the student rebellion of May 1968. The latter was drama in the literal sense of theater. The students, with their vacuous slogans, more Rousseau than Marx, scrawled on Parisian walls—“It is forbidden to forbid,” “Beneath the pavement, the beach,” etc.—were playing at revolution. De Gaulle, to his credit, couldn’t understand them. Many of them drifted into a trancelike fascination with, at a safe distance, Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

Gamma-Keystone / Getty

De Gaulle indulged in a few quixotic gestures while president, e.g. Vive le Québec libre! (an imprudent exclamation that cut short his state visit to Canada in 1967). But he mostly practiced realpolitik on the smaller scale that France’s diminished role in the world allowed him. He always believed that perennial national interests (and national characters) would prevail over the ideologies that temporarily concealed or distorted them, and he was usually, sometimes uncannily, right in his geopolitical fortune-telling—predicting, for instance, the violent rupture of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the Soviet-Chinese clashes of the early sixties, and the American failure in Vietnam.

Jackson’s tactful, generous examination of de Gaulle’s literary and philosophical affinities is one of the most unexpected and illuminating aspects of the book. The favorite writers of de Gaulle’s youth were two lyrical Catholics, Chateaubriand and Charles Péguy; a brooding nationalist, Maurice Barrès; and, more surprisingly, the poète maudit Paul Verlaine. Among contemporary novelists, he admired the classical-minded Marguerite Yourcenar but had little use for Gide or Proust. He drew some writers, like Malraux and the Catholic novelist Georges Bernanos, to his side and repelled others, notably Sartre.

From these affinities and his long residence in the tiny, remote northeastern village of Colombey-les-Deux-Églises, you get the impression that de Gaulle’s deepest impulse was a romantic nostalgia for a classical France, a love of the landscape and history, of la France profonde. Like Churchill, he belonged in some ways to another age and was out of step with the times. But being out of step with the times in June 1940 was both honorable and vital. De Gaulle’s mad dash to London to keep France in the war helped preserve Europe and its heritage from apocalyptic futurists. In the process, as Jackson says in the last sentence of the book, “He saved the honor of France.”