Still Hangin' With My Homie, Charles de Gaulle

Alice Roosevelt Longworth (yes?) said her father, Teddie, wanted to be the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral.  I'm not sure about the wedding part but consider this about Charles de Gaulle:

In November 1963, at the funeral of Kennedy, who had been assassinated on the General’s birthday, he towered over the heads of state and government, and insisted on walking to the cathedral beside Jacqueline Kennedy and the diminutive figure of Haile Selassie of Ethiopia despite the concerns of the US security service for his safety. He was seated in the eighth row, which he considered below the dignity of France. So, putting on his spectacles, he made his way forward, greeting fellow statesmen and royalty until he reached the front. ‘Right, we can start,’ he said to a protocol official and sat down where he was.

Fenby, Jonathan (2012-06-20). The General: Charles De Gaulle and the France He Saved (p. 516). Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

Roosevelt v de Gaulle: What Was FDR Thinking?

The rest of you puzzle over Putin, I'm still trying to figure out de Gaulle.  No, not de Gaulle, but his "allies," in this case the President of the United States.  You remember FDR, the one in the wheelchair, with the cigarette holder and the benign (if icy) smile.

Here's the thing:  de Gaulle had one overvaulting purpose which was to preserve the identity of an independent French nation, aka "the Free French."  In pursuit of his goal, he stepped on toes, kicked shins, wounded egos. But he also had a clear and coherent strategy: he also understood that to achieve his purpose, his best path was to make the French indispensable to the Allied war effort (and to make sure that the Allies knew it).   Many--perhaps most--people who encountered de Gaulle during the war did not love him, but quite a few came to understand him.  Notable example, de Gaulle drove Churchill into legendary rages.   But Churchill was not one to let personal indignation blind him to pragmatic convenience: he usually found a way to accommodate himself to de Gaulle  because he understood that at the end of th day, de Gaulle was on his side.  And Eisenhower--he certainly had his disagreements with the general, but he was usually pretty good at keeping his relationships off the boil, and he seems to have understood just what de Gaulle could do for the common cause.

The puzzle is Roosevelt.  He seems to have encountered de Gaulle in a posture of sporadically contained outrage, laced with withering contempt.   Unlike Churchill, he seems never to have let down his guard.  Worse, his rancor seems to have infected those round him--Secretary of State Cordell Hull, for example, or Secretary of War Henry M. Stimson (though Hull who wasn't the sharpest knife in the drawer, might well have wound up in the same posture without exterior assistance).

And why?   Particularly after D-Day, when the Allies were back on Northern European soil, and when it was clear that de Gaulle, vindicated, was evolving into an authentic national hero--what was the percentage for Roosevelt in persisting in trying to marginalize, even to humiliate, him?  Why not at least tolerate--no, why not embrace someone who was clearly emerging as the authentic voice of a liberated nation?

I don't have any answer to that one.  One might be tempted to say that FDR found de Gaulle "too conservative" for his taste.  Such a conclusion might have been a mistake--de Gaulle eluded and still elude simple characterization.    But in any event, it didn't prevent Roosevelt (or at any rate, his government) from maintaining cordial relations with the quisling Vichy statelet almost to the end.  One might speculate that Roosevelt found de Gaulle too cozy with then communists.  This would surely have been a misjudgment of the man who did more than any other to thwart communism in postwar France.  And in any event, it would be pretty rich coming from someone so chummy for so long with "uncle Joe" Stalin).

One is--I am--tempted to speculate that de Gaulle brought out the inner Roosevelt: a steely-hearted loner who really didn't like anybody very much, however well he may have concealed his isolation under a gauzy exterior of charm.  One might be tempted, but then you'd have  to explain Roosevelt's apparently genuine affection for Churchill--often at least as refractory as de Gaulle, yet a man who may well have been Roosevelt's one genuine friend.  As I say, I don't have a good answer to that one.  For valuable prizes, readers are invited to set me straight.

Great Men: a Matched Set

Once again I'm indulging my curiosity about General Charles de Gaulle who, among other achievements, personally created "the free French" in World War II by spinning threads out of his own gizzard.   You don't build such an unusual resume without being a difficult person and de Gaulle  was surely difficult.  People remember Churchill saying that "the heaviest cross I have to bear is the cross of Lorraine." Apparently it wasn't actually Churchill (it was somebody close to him).  But it's one of those remarks that lives because it sounds so right.  Here's a memorable occasion when the two alphas lock horns.  Churchill had become, shall we say, profoundly disappointed with de Gaulle, but he felt tht circumstances demanded that he try to path things up. 

 He ... carefully choreographed the meeting at Downing Street, telling [his secretary, Jock] Colville that he would rise and bow slightly but not shake hands, while indicating to the General the chair in which he should sit on the other side of the big table in the Cabinet Room. He would not speak in French but would converse through Colville as interpreter

Churchill went through this rigmarole when de Gaulle came into the room. ‘General de Gaulle, I have asked you to come here this afternoon,’ he began. Colville translated, ‘Mon Général, je vous ai invité à venir cet après-midi.’ Churchill broke in to say: ‘I didn’t say Mon Général, and I did not say I had invited him.’ 

After a little more from Churchill, de Gaulle began to speak, also correcting the translation. So the secretary left the room and called in a linguist from the Foreign Office. When he arrived, the two leaders had been sitting looking at one another silently for several minutes. After a short time, the interpreter emerged red in the face, protesting that they must be mad: both had told him he could not speak French properly so they would have to manage without him.

Fenby, Id.
 
Later:

The Prime Minister warned that some British figures suspected that his visitor had ‘become hostile and had moved towards certain fascist views which would not be helpful to collaboration in the common cause’. Rejecting the charge of authoritarianism, de Gaulle said he ‘begged the Prime Minister to understand that the Free French were necessarily somewhat difficult people: else they would not be where they were. If this difficult character sometimes coloured their attitude towards their great ally . . . [Churchill] could rest assured that their entire loyalty to Great Britain remained unimpaired.’ It was just the kind of statement designed to melt his host’s anger.

Outside, Colville tried to eavesdrop, but the double doors defeated him. He decided it was his duty to burst in – ‘perhaps they had strangled each other’. Just then, Churchill rang the bell for him. Entering, Colville found the two men sitting side by side, ‘with an amiable expression on their faces’, smoking cigars and speaking in French.

Fenby, Jonathan (2012-06-20). The General: Charles De Gaulle and the France He Saved (p. 175). Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.. Kindle Edition. 

And on a separate occasion:

[W]hen the writer and politician Harold Nicolson said that, for all the problems he caused, the General was a great man, the Prime Minister responded: ‘A great man? Why, he’s selfish, he’s arrogant, he thinks he’s the centre of the universe . . . You’re right, he’s a great man!’

Fenbyn Ibid., 133. 

De Gaulle Again: They Don't Make 'em That Way Any More

Aside from snarfing my head off, I spent most of my trip over the Atlantic this week finishing off the first volume of the of Mémoires de Guerre of Charles de Gaulle, revolving chiefly about his efforts to organize French overseas opposition to the Nazis in the early months/years of World War II (cf. link).  I was reading it mainly to practice my French, for which it is much to be recommended--fairly straightforward grammar and vocab, if a bit grandiose in town.  But all the time I kept saying to my self: what a near thing.  Honestly, if you ever had reason to doubt the "great man" theory of history, just take a look at how de Gaulle, personally and by main strength, stepped into the ruins of a nation and spun the remnants together into a coherent entity.

After the humiliating walkover effected by the Nazi armies in just a few spring days in 1940, there can't have been anybody who  could have expected the French to recover/   Indeed, "legitimate" France capitulated in a heartbeat, to reemerge as the client-state that persisted to the end of the war.  The emergence of de Gaulle himself as a counterforce was itself something of a happy accident.  He did have a reputation (like Churchill before him) as a Cassandra before the war, warning the French of their unpreparedness in terms that proved more true than anyone would have wanted. But the fulcrum of his campaign was the fact that at the beginning of hostilities, he was working as a kind of an ambassador to the British, with the task of trying to stiffen the Brit's own resolve.  It was in this role that the Brits, more or less by default, anointed him as the leader of what came to be known as "La France Libre"--somehow it sounds better in English as "The Free French." (de Gaulle himself later tried to shift to "La France Combattante," but it never caught on).

But the British clearly got a lot more than they bargained for.  It's pretty clear that they thought of their declaration of solidarity as something more or less cosmetic, allowing them to absorb French weaponry and technical skill--and probably also French resources and colonies--into a a more general British operation (solidarity didn't stop the Brits from slaughtering nearly 1,300 French sailors in an attack on the French navy at Mers-el-Kébir, an episode that de Gaulle refers to with surprising economy).  But it was de Gaulle who over and over again said "mais, non!" and insisted on an independent French identity.  And not just the British: the Americans, to all appearnces, were willing to let the French cause go and make whatever peace they could with the puppet government.  And individual Frenchmen themselves, at least at the beginning, were far from eager to sign onto a quixotic crusade, were far more eager to join the British, or slip away to America, or to make a separate peace.

Yet de Gaulle himself, for all his intransigence, had his limits.  Adverse as he was to the puppet state, he went to great lengths to make sure that his campaign did not degenerate into a civil war among Frenchmen--he took some heat for his reluctance to engage with the puppet forces at Brazzaville; later in Syria and Lebanon, he made it clear that former servants of the puppet would be welcomed back to the fold.  And however troubled his cooperation, he can be generous with the Brits: he seems to have genuinely liked and admired Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden.  And if he concedes that Winston Churchill gave him a hard time, well, he concedes that Churchill himself was having a bit of a hard time, losisng as much and as often as he did in 1940 and 1941 and into 1942.

De Gaulle ends this volume with an account of the Battle of Bir Hakim when a French force (under a General with the anomalous surname of "Koenig") held off German attackers and inflicted more casualties than it suffered.  De Gaulle is exultant to display "La France Combattante" at last and he has every right to be.  He treats it as a great victory,.  It wasn't, exactly: it was more of a holding operation, but holding itself may have made it possible for the Brits to turn the tide against the Germans elsewhere.

Through it all we see a picture of de Gaulle as one who entertained a vision: "il veut sauver la nation," it says on the back cover, "pour affirmer les droits et la grandeur de la France..."   It says something of the politics of our own time that it is almost impossible to say that phrase in any language without a tone of bitter cynicism or at least wry caricature.  Yet there is no doubt that de Gaulle would have endorsed every word of it, and that by his own efforts he achieved everything a single person could achieve to make it true.

More de Gaulle: "Now She is Like the Others"

As we gasp and admire at the spectacle of the incredible shrinking presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy, it is pleasant to go back and again remember le grand asperge, Charles de Gaulle, of whom I wrote yesterday.  Wherefore I pulled down my copy of Clive James' quirky but compulsively readable Cultural Amnesia and flipped open to James' appreciation of the great man,.  And here is something I had forgotten: de Gaulle had a daughter "who had a severe case of Down's" syndrome," abnd, per James "died choking in her father's arms."  De Gaulle wrote to his sister: "A spirit has been set free.   But the disappearance of our poor suffering infant [she was 20--ed.], our little daughter without hope, has done us an immense pain."   He is reported to have said at her funeral: "Now she is like the others."  James explains:

The awful beauty of that remark lies in how it hints at what he had so often felt.  Wanting her to be like the normal children, the ones who couldn't help noticing that she was different, must have been the dearest wish of his private life.  Knowing that the wish could never come true mus have been his most intimate acquaintance with defeat.  For us, who overhear the last gasp of a long agony, there is the additional poignancy of recognizing that the Man of Destiny lived every day with a heavenly dispensation that he could not control.

 James appears to believe that it humanized  the angular and difficult man.  He writes:

"De Gaulle behaved as if the fate of France was his  sole concern, but the secret of his incomparable capacity to act in that belief probably lay in a central humility. ... [L]ikely ... the touchstone of his humanity was his poor daughter.  Nothing is more likely to civilize a powerful man than the presence in his house of an injured loved one his power can't help.  Every night he comes home to a reminder that God is not mocked; a cure for his invincibility.

One can only hope that that is true.  Or, one wishes that it were true. 

James' de Gaull sketch is in Cultural Amnesia pp 157-60.  And here's another excellent insight: flipping to the next, I find that James consigns to the ranks of the overrated one Edward Gibbon, author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.  Man, I've been waiting for someone to say that.

Where's Charlie?

There's a wonderful New Yorker from perhaps the 60s (I'm working from memory) where the lady is at the polite party with her husband; he is tall, with a parsnip nose in the air and an underslung chin, probably a mustache.  "The French," she is saying, "just loved Elmer."  New Yorker readers, unlike the speaker, would of course instantly recognize hubby as a ringer for Charles de Gaulle, sometimes military theorist, resistance leader, national leader and all round pain in the neck; also perhaps the one most incorruptible figure in 20th Century world politics..

I suspect that Europeans and Americans have pretty much put de Gaulle out of mind.  Not the French: the Union pour un Mouvement Populaire, party of Nicolas Sarkozy, lives on as the "Gaullist" party with a virtually unstoppable 40 percent voting bloc in a famously fractious parliament.  It's testimony to the long shadow of a man who was not merely tall but whose political aura has outlasted him for so far 40 years--he died in 1970, just after having finished his decade-long tenure in the presidency of France.


My most vivid picture of de Gaulle comes from the moment in 1958 when he stepped in to prevent France from tearing itself to shreds over the Algerian war.  Here he was on television (television!) looking earnest, solemn and as always slightly goofy "Francais, Francaise," he exhorted "aidez moi!"  It was testimony to his capacity for connection that he offered language that even I can understand.


But he didn't arrive from nowhere, of course; de Gaulle was already the overvaulting presence on modern French life for his role--virtually single-handed, one might say--in keeping French national identity alive, and French self-respect at least somewhat intact, through World War II when a more realistic analyst would have given up France as defeated, humiliated, a closed chapter in the history of nationhood.    Churchill--hell, just about everybody--found him a colossal annoyance "the greatest cross I have to besr,"Churchill is said to hsve said, "is the Cross of Lorraine."  


But in the end, you'd have to say that de Gaulle saved France the same way Churchill saved Britain--by an iimplacable romanticism, which is to say a stubborn unwillingness to face facts.  Churchill could encounter one of the greatest cataclysms of British history and utter poetic nonsense about s "finest hour."  de Gaulle could encounter the debacle of the fall of France and act as if somebody had nicked the national bootheel in a crosswalk.   There is only one way to deal with this vision and determination, and that is to yield to it; as so much of the world did to Churchill and as Churchill did to de Gaulle.


I'm in a kindly mood towards de Gaulle at the moment because, wanting to brush up on my risibly rudimentary French, I hauled down a three-volume set of his Mémoires de Guerre (link, link, link), where de Gaulle gives his own account of World War II--not a general history like Churchill's but a gripping account all its own.  It's readable stuff, in the narrow sense that it can be read by one with modest French, and in a broader sense that it's got a sonorous directness you'd have to call Churchillian.  "Toute ma vie," he declares on page one, "je me suis fait une certaine idée de la France... J'ai, d'instinct, l'impression que la Providence l'a créée pour de succès achevés ou des malheurs exemplaire."   And later, after the hideously swift and brutal fall of France to the Germans in 1940: "Pour moi, ce qu'il s'agissait de servir et de sauver, c'était la nation et l'Etat.  

"Servir et sauver" in "malheurs exemplaire..."  The columnist Art Buchwald put it in perspective.  He said the point was that de Gaulle was tall, and that he had a giant Adam's apple, and wore a tunic.  So when he talked you found yourself staring at the tunic as it bobbed up and down.   So, explained Buchwald, de Gaulle just thought everybody was agreeing with him.  Whatever.  With thinking like that, you can take on the assembled might of the Axis powers and even Winston Churchill will have to stop and listen.