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A Certain Idea of France – The Life of Charles de Gaulle by Julian Jackson review: how to make France great again
To the British, Charles de Gaulle remains a strangely incomprehensible figure. Perhaps it is because he possessed traits that we assume are very unlike our own: a lack of humour, a wilful disregard of reality and, most of all, an obsessive patriotism. This outstanding biography should change that: with scholarship of the highest class, Julian Jackson presents with utter clarity the life of a man who, he concludes, for all his faults, "saved the honour of France".
De Gaulle did that in his supreme moment in June 1940, when he caught a ride on a plane to England as the Wehrmacht tore through France, and convinced Churchill to adopt him as a symbol of France's continuing fight after Pétain had capitulated to the Nazis. Yet there was far more to de Gaulle even than that.
Born in Lille in 1890, he was shaped, like most of his generation, by the Great War. He fought at Verdun and was taken prisoner. From then on, his personality seemed to require an enemy, even in peace. Having risen to lead France after the Liberation, he found governing to be little more than a tussle with the communists, and surrendered office in early 1946, "seething with bitterness against politicians unworthy of their liberator", in Jackson's words. Did de Gaulle think his departure would spark protests demanding his return? It took 12 years for that to happen; but, as he seemed to suspect it would, a France in chaos, confronted by the apparently insoluble problem of Algeria, recalled him from internal exile to found the Fifth Republic.
De Gaulle was a man so convinced of his own rectitude that he demanded the right to make laws without parliament for an interim six months, for he had to have France just as he wanted it. He governed for 11 years, first as prime minister, then as president, maintaining an economic boom and steering France through decolonisation. Now, as Jackson writes in his measured summation, he is regarded as France's "last great man", although that must be a backhanded compliment, after the Vichyiste Mitterrand, the corrupt Chirac, the bling-laden Sarkozy and the preposterous Hollande.
"Ernst is das Leben," Schiller wrote: life is earnest. That was one regard in which de Gaulle learnt from the Germans. In his wife Yvonne, he found someone even more conservative and Catholic than he. Yvonne was long-suffering, but not in the traditional way of French wives: her husband's mistress was France, and Yvonne followed him to his postings in the Twenties and Thirties before getting out of France with their children in 1940 and joining de Gaulle in England. An intensely shy woman, and principal carer for their youngest daughter Anne, who had Down syndrome, Yvonne spent the war isolated in Bexley, Berkhamsted and Shropshire before finally settling in Hampstead. Later, when enduring rather than enjoying the Élysée Palace, she used to de-stress by knitting, or washing the General's socks in a basin. Together, the de Gaulles would vet new ministers, examining them in particular for moral uprightness.
If 1940 was the making of de Gaulle, at that stage a two-star general and a junior defence minister, then it was also the making of myths that Jackson dissects. The armistice that Pétain signed in June 1940, which left France with an unoccupied zone governed at the pleasure of the Germans from Vichy, was anathema to de Gaulle. He constructed myths to combat this, for him, horrific reality.
It began with denying the fact of France's dependence on her allies. The British, unsure of de Gaulle's standing and still debating whether to make an accommodation with Vichy, reluctantly let him broadcast to the French on June 18 to say that he was carrying on the fight. It would be months before the British gave him anything like wholehearted support, but they did bankroll his growing outfit, replenished by escaped prisoners-of-war and help from some French colonies.
But de Gaulle was never remotely grateful to the British, and indeed drove his hosts to despair with his absurd demands and vanity. An anglophobia inherited from the Hundred Years War frequently manifested itself in him, as when he rebuked the young Mitterrand for visiting him in North Africa on a British plane.
Arrogance runs through Jackson's vivid portrait of the General, even before the war. One starts to suspect that he was in some measure autistic. He struggled to relate to people outside his family, and was stiff even with them, showing emotion only towards his disabled daughter, whose death in 1948 was an almost unbearable blow. When escaped prisoners and résistants made their way to join him in London during the war, he showed neither interest in their sufferings, nor gratitude: why should he thank them, he asked, for "doing their duty"?
De Gaulle, like his country, was in extremis in those years. His rigidity can be seen as a defence mechanism to reinforce his belief that the Battle of France was merely the opening skirmish in a war in which the Axis powers would be defeated. Indeed, he maintained that France herself was undefeated, that the occupation of more than half of it by the Germans was a technical error by Vichy. The writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry put the reality succinctly: "Tell the truth, General, we lost the war. Our allies will win it."
Such sentiments outraged de Gaulle, who died refusing to believe them, or that France was not a great power. When he managed to bulldoze his way into Paris after the Americans (with the help of a small contingent of Free French) had liberated it, he famously told the Parisians they had liberated themselves. It wasn't so much a lie as a pathetic delusion. After the war, he stuck to his story that France had liberated itself, and that France was united. As the collapse of the Fourth Republic showed, it was nothing of the sort.
De Gaulle's elevation in 1958 to resolve that mess was effectively a coup d'état: it was only when the army made clear it supported him that he agreed to take over. An incipient monarchist, he regarded Napoleon with a mixture of admiration for his conquests and contempt for his vulgarity and ultimate failure. His prime minister and successor, Georges Pompidou, said with only a trace of humour that he had served in a "dictatorship".
Certainly, some of the methods of government under de Gaulle were totalitarian: as when in the autumn of 1961 the Paris police, run by the Nazi collaborator Maurice Papon, murdered dozens, and perhaps hundreds, of Algerians peacefully protesting about independence, and threw their bodies in the Seine. They also managed a news blackout on the atrocity. De Gaulle, who had changed his mind on the need to be rid of Algeria, shrugged his considerable shoulders.
Duff Cooper, who knew de Gaulle during the war and became Ambassador to Paris after it, observed that "obstinacy, tactlessness and lack of political experience have always been his drawbacks". He had an ancien regime conception of lèse-majesté, and it made him few friends or allies. He was livid when Pompidou suggested he would "replace" him, observing that de Gaulle (he often spoke of himself in the third person) could not be replaced; someone else would merely become president after him.
His political limitations finally did for him after les événements of May 1968, when he bizarrely flew to Germany to consult the head of the French army there about how to react to the wave of protests. Unwilling to show weakness, he called a referendum early the following year on a pointless constitutional change, lost it and resigned. He disappeared from public view, and dropped dead of an aneurysm just before his 80th birthday. His cult, which had declined in his years of office, was now permanently restored.
Jackson takes his title from the opening line of de Gaulle's war memoirs: "Toute ma vie, je me suis fait une certaine idée de la France" - all my life, I have had a certain idea of France. This magnificent phrase introduces the creed to which de Gaulle adhered: a France independent, victorious, Catholic, strong and radiating - the word appears again and again in Jackson's narrative - grandeur.
Jackson attempts a definition of what de Gaulle meant by the word, an idea of dignity that he pursued all his public life, often in the face of reason, and even though to his friends and enemies he sometimes seemed absurd. Criticism made little impact on him. Perhaps that is what made him a great man. He is certainly now the subject of a truly great book, for after this all other biographies can be cast aside.
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