De Gaulle’s Gamble

Charles de Gaulle saved France twice. The first time was in June 1940, when the World War I hero Marshal Philippe Pétain signed an armistice with Hitler after France’s defeat by the Germans and set up a new collaborationist and authoritarian French state at Vichy, since Paris was occupied. De Gaulle, a relatively unknown brigadier general, gathered a few dissidents in London to form what became known as Free France. He gambled rashly but correctly that by contributing, however marginally, to the war against the Axis he was assuring a French presence on the ultimately victorious Allied side.

He saved France again in May 1958, when the faltering Fourth Republic faced a revolt by army leaders in Algeria who were frustrated by its failure to suppress the Algerian independence movement. As civil war threatened, de Gaulle assumed power without being elected but with the relieved assent of President René Coty and Prime Minister Pierre Pflimlin. On June 1, 1958, his authority was legitimated by a vote of 329–224 in the National Assembly. Seizing the moment, de Gaulle quickly commissioned a new constitution that replaced the unloved parliamentary republic with a strong presidential system. That constitution, which created the Fifth Republic, was approved by a referendum on September 28, 1958, and signed into law on October 4. On December 21 de Gaulle was elected the first president of the Fifth Republic. In a further referendum on October 28, 1962, the constitution was amended to provide for direct election of the president. De Gaulle was then reelected in 1965. The Fifth Republic’s powerful presidency, now solidly established, is his lasting monument.

De Gaulle, always determined to give the world his version of the great events in which he had been involved, recounts the first of these salvations in The War Memoirs. This work—originally published in three volumes between 1954 and 1959—is justly celebrated for its sonorous prose, its sharply personal portraits of Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin, its narrative sweep, and its self-confident tone. It pleads without modesty the case for de Gaulle’s place in history. Its only rival is Churchill’s six-volume history of World War II.¹

The War Memoirs begin in earnest, after a few biographical details, with the 1930s, as the Third French Republic faced a rampaging Hitler. De Gaulle was at that time a maverick cavalry officer who advocated the creation of mobile armored units capable of functioning quickly and independently of infantry. Excellent new French tanks were coming into service. The Somua S35—considered the best tank of its era—and the heavily armed Char B1 were a match for the lighter but faster and more numerous German Panzer IIIs and Panzer IVs. The French high command, however, employed its tanks in a way contrary to de Gaulle’s proposals, scattering them among infantry units in order to strengthen defensive lines, and it trained its officers to be cautious. This poor distribution of forces helped the invading Germans break through French lines at Sedan on May 14, 1940. Then two German tank commanders—Heinz Guderian and Erwin Rommel—raced their divisions westward to the English Channel against orders, taking an enormous risk as they exposed their flanks to powerful French units. They got away with this gamble, for the French, in keeping with the training that doomed them, maintained defensive lines instead of launching counterattacks.²

In the Battle of France in May 1940, despite his unorthodox views, Colonel de Gaulle was placed in command of the Fourth Armored Division. With his brand-new unit only partly assembled, he engaged the advancing German forces in the Aisne Department northeast of Paris twice, on May 17 and May 19. His energetic maneuvers were locally effective, but they did not slow for long the German advance, as no infantry units were available to consolidate his gains. In his memoirs he does not mention his neglect to provide air cover. Nor does he mention the superior performance of the First Armored Division, whose cavalry corps under General René Prioux held off a German assault at Gembloux, Belgium, for four days, from May 10 to 14, giving way only when threatened with encirclement by German forces that had crossed the Meuse River at Sedan. It is an odd omission, since this was the first battle in history between armored units alone, as de Gaulle had foreseen. Prioux remained loyal to Vichy, however, and was sidelined after the liberation in 1945. De Gaulle’s account of his battle experience creates a vivid sense of too little, too late, as his division failed to match the speed and momentum of Guderian’s and Rommel’s armored divisions in their dash to the Channel.

During the night of June 5–6, now promoted to brigadier general, de Gaulle was brought into the government of Prime Minister Paul Reynaud as undersecretary of state for national defense in an effort to reinvigorate the French army’s efforts. Combating a growing sentiment for capitulation, he made several trips to London to coordinate with the British military leadership. Desperate in the last days before the surrender, he helped draft a stillborn treaty of Franco-British unification.

After Pétain, his former commanding officer, became prime minister on June 16 and declared that France must stop fighting, de Gaulle returned without authorization to London. There, on June 18, with Churchill’s support, he addressed the French public on the BBC with words that amounted to an act of insubordination against Pétain’s request for peace terms. The war was not over, de Gaulle said. He assured his listeners that the British, backed by the enormous resources of the United States, would defeat Hitler. He called on all like-minded French people to join him in London. After fruitlessly attempting in the following days to attract some more senior French general to whom he promised to subordinate himself, de Gaulle denounced the armistice with Germany in a second speech on the BBC on June 22. At this point the French government, which had fled to Bordeaux, revoked his promotion to brigadier general. He had burned his bridges.

Supported financially by the British, de Gaulle’s Free French gradually gathered about eight thousand volunteers by the autumn of 1940. He now needed to accomplish two things before he could give legitimacy to his breathtaking claim to speak for all of France. First, he needed to find some part of the French Empire that would accept his authority and give him a base on French territory. He found an ally in the governor of the Chad colony, Félix Éboué, France’s first black colonial governor, who helped lead most of Equatorial Africa into the Gaullist camp in the fall of 1940. The revered Marshal Pétain retained control of most of the other colonies and of the French navy, however, and for a time de Gaulle, who had been condemned to death by Pétain’s government, seemed a marginal figure.

Pétain’s government moved in July 1940 to the spa town of Vichy. It was as if the United States, following the occupation of Washington by a victorious foreign army, had moved its capital to Hot Springs, Arkansas. With Pétain, France’s most eminent old soldier, at its head, however, and fortified by an overwhelming vote of the two chambers of parliament assembled at Vichy on July 10, the newly declared French State easily established control over the French civil service and administrative machinery. The Third Republic was abolished unlamented after its miserable performance in the military campaign of 1940.

Vichy France was recognized as the legitimate government by every country in the world except Great Britain and the Dominions of the British Commonwealth. The British Empire withdrew its ambassador, viewing Vichy as having violated its agreement of March 28, 1940, that neither government would make a separate peace. De Gaulle, with his small band of volunteers and his fragment of French Equatorial Africa, sided resolutely with the Anglo-American alliance.

With these modest resources de Gaulle set out to restore France to its rightful place as “one of the chief belligerent—and, shortly, victorious—powers.” From its base in Chad, a minuscule force of six hundred French troops and about 2,700 colonial soldiers—under the daring General Philippe Leclerc (the pseudonym adopted by Philippe de Hauteclocque to protect his family in occupied France)—worked its way north during 1941 and 1942, conquering the Italian forts in the Libyan desert one by one. In January 1943 Leclerc’s tattered force joined the British troops under General Bernard Montgomery who were driving Rommel’s Afrika Korps out of North Africa. When Leclerc’s men joined the Americans who had landed in Morocco and Algeria in November 1942 in a victory parade in Tunis on May 20, 1943, the Free French showed they had won a place among the Allied armies.

The second essential step to establish de Gaulle’s leadership was to win the allegiance of the multiple resistance movements that had sprung up spontaneously on French soil. The resistance leaders did not automatically accept his overall authority. He was an “émigré” who had not had to bear the pains of occupation. But he had several assets in his dealings with the resistance: money, radio transmitters, and weapons provided by his British sponsor, and wide name recognition from his radio broadcasts. Little by little emissaries from the resistance movements came to London to receive the general’s official blessing.

On January 1, 1942, de Gaulle sent his representative Jean Moulin, a former prefect, to France with funds and instructions to unify the resistance movements and to obtain their recognition of the authority of the Free French. Moulin was betrayed and captured by the Germans; he died, apparently under torture, on July 8, 1943. He had nevertheless fulfilled his mission with the creation of the National Council of the Resistance under the ultimate authority of de Gaulle at a clandestine meeting in Paris on May 27, 1943.

Following the liberation of North Africa, the French colonial forces there, previously deeply loyal to Pétain, provided the raw material for building a French army of liberation, bringing together, despite some friction, units from Vichy’s Armistice Army and Free French units like General Leclerc’s veterans of the Libyan desert. The amalgamation of these disparate forces and their armament by the Americans allowed the French to participate in the war against Hitler, first in the Italian campaign of 1943, in which a French division formed in North Africa under a former Vichy general, Alphonse Juin, took part.

Another French force under Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, a former Vichy general who changed sides in November 1942, participated in the Allied landing in Provence in August 1944. The Second French Armored Division, prepared in North Africa under General Leclerc, landed in liberated Normandy on August 1, 1944. Leclerc’s division entered a cheering Paris on August 25. In the Normandy landing of June 6, however, the Free French had been represented only by a 177-man commando under Lieutenant Philippe Kieffer that helped capture the seaside casino at Ouistreham. De Gaulle had not been informed of the date of the Normandy landing until two days before, and he sulked for many hours before acceding to Churchill’s request that he assist it with an appeal on the BBC to all French men “to fight the enemy by every means in their power.”

Even so, de Gaulle was now an international hero. A year later, on August 27, 1945, he was driven up Broadway in New York City in an open car under a shower of confetti in a ticker-tape parade—a popular accolade reserved for the most admired foreign visitors, along with domestic heroes such as polar explorers or victorious sports teams. Fifteen years later, on April 26, 1960, the general received a second ticker-tape parade as president of his new Fifth French Republic. Only nine other people, out of 206 who have been accorded this rite of American celebrity, have received it more than once.³

De Gaulle thought this “explosion of enthusiasm…revealed the city’s extraordinary love of France.” A short six years after the second parade, however, President de Gaulle exited the NATO military command structure (though not the alliance itself) and was arousing more visceral hostility in the United States than any other European leader since Hitler or Stalin. Outraged Americans poured French wines into the gutters of the streets where he had earlier been rapturously received.

The relationship between the United States and de Gaulle was a long roller-coaster ride, and it forms a major theme of The War Memoirs. Both countries matter to each other, and each expects a special measure of gratitude from the other. (France helped us in 1776, and we helped France in 1917.) But President Franklin D. Roosevelt had recognized the Vichy government soon after its formation and had sent a personal friend and close associate, Admiral William D. Leahy, as ambassador. Many French people assumed that this step reflected a personal preference for the Vichy dictatorship, just as some foreign commentators later suspected de Gaulle of Communist sympathies because he recognized Communist China in 1964. Both gestures were, in fact, exercises in realpolitik, and both Roosevelt and de Gaulle were master pragmatists.

De Gaulle, while affirming his respect for Roosevelt as a fellow war leader, paints a particularly acid portrait in The War Memoirs of what he saw as the American president’s ambition for world domination. In these pages Roosevelt’s “will to power cloaked itself in idealism.” He wanted to use his leadership of the Allies in World War II to “make law and dictate rights throughout the world” and to create “a permanent system of intervention that he intended to institute by international law” under a four-power directory formed by the United States, Great Britain, Russia, and China. The United States would acquire bases around the world, including some in French territory. All of this would take place without French participation or assent. The picture was further complicated by the fact that the United States had provided the armaments and equipment for the French units set up in North Africa for the liberation of the French metropole.

De Gaulle’s relationship with Churchill was no less complicated. The British prime minister had provided the BBC microphone with which de Gaulle introduced himself to the French public in June 1940 and with which he subsequently prepared his return to French soil as the undisputed national leader. Churchill had funded the Free French movement and provided its home base until de Gaulle had been able (with British support) to take over parts of French Equatorial Africa in 1941 and rule, at last, some piece of French soil. The two men respected and admired each other, yet they quarreled like cats and dogs over the Allies’ use of the French Empire in the war against Hitler and over the Empire’s postwar fate. Churchill helped see to it that the French had an occupation zone in defeated Germany. It was in his interest to do so, as the Americans were not planning to keep a military force on the Continent, and the burden of defending Western Europe against the Soviet Union was beyond his resources.

At the war’s end, de Gaulle had won his gamble. Against all odds, a French representative participated in the signing of the surrender documents alongside the British, Russian, and American representatives in Berlin on May 9, 1945, to the shocked surprise of one of the German signers, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, who exclaimed, “What, the French too?”

De Gaulle had France at his feet at the end of World War II. He oversaw the first steps of a new constitutional arrangement and of treason trials for the ministers of the Vichy regime, now almost without supporters. He commuted Pétain’s death sentence to life imprisonment on the tiny Île d’Yeu, off La Rochelle, where he died and was buried in 1951. A small Association Pour la Défense de la Mémoire du Maréchal Pétain urged the old soldier’s reburial at the World War I memorial at Douaumont, where he had wanted to lie. But Pétainism had little appeal to the younger generation of postwar conservatives. Marine Le Pen doesn’t mention him, though her father had done so, and she explicitly rejects the Vichy regime as a model for what her party, the National Rally, wants to achieve. Pétain’s reputation suffered worse than disapproval; it was increasingly forgotten.

As president of the Provisional French Republic after the liberation, de Gaulle quickly became frustrated by the return under the new Fourth Republic of the multiparty squabbling that had weakened the Third Republic in the 1930s. He resigned his position on January 20, 1946, and retired to his country house at Colombey-les-Deux-Églises in the Champagne region, not far from the battlefields of the two world wars, where he wrote The War Memoirs. He explained in a rare speech at Bayeux, in Normandy, on June 16, 1946, the kind of presidential republic he thought France should have. He authorized the formation of a Gaullist political party, the Rassemblement du Peuple Français (he disliked the term “party”), which reached its peak in the 1951 elections with 22 percent of the vote and 121 parliamentary seats. The RPF quickly declined, however, and was dissolved in 1955. Then came de Gaulle’s second salvation of France in May 1958, followed by his eleven years as president of the Fifth Republic.

In April 1969 he resigned from office after the defeat of a referendum that proposed two constitutional changes: transforming the Senate from a second legislative body into a representative of social and economic interest groups, and establishing assemblies at the regional level. Some observers believed that de Gaulle engineered a quiet retirement in this way, but Julian Jackson, the author of the best biography of de Gaulle in any language, argues convincingly that he meant to win the referendum and decided only afterward to step down.⁴

De Gaulle always disdained outward manifestations of pomp and celebrity. His uniform never bore more than the two stars of a brigadier general, which did not prevent him from making gold-braided five-star generals quail. He paid the electric and telephone bills of his personal rooms in the Élysée Palace while president. He would have hated the huge Cross of Lorraine that was raised near his country house by private admirers. He stipulated in a letter to French president Georges Pompidou that at his death there should be no formal state funeral. Nevertheless, after a heart attack felled him on November 9, 1970, dozens of heads of state came to his funeral mass in Notre Dame. He lies in a plain grave in the churchyard at Colombey-les-Deux-Églises with the simple epitaph “Charles de Gaulle 1890–1970.”

The War Memoirs end with de Gaulle in retirement, renewing contact with nature, observing the turning seasons. He does not expect to return to power. He signs off with a farewell of planetary dimensions:

Old Earth, worn by the ages, wracked by rain and storm, exhausted yet ever ready to produce what life must have to go on!

Old France, weighed down with history, prostrated by wars and revolutions, endlessly vacillating from greatness to decline, but revived, century after century, by the genius of renewal!

Old man, exhausted by ordeal, detached from human deeds, feeling the approach of the eternal cold, but always watching in the shadows for the gleam of hope!