Sudhir Hazareesingh
THE MELANCHOLIC PROPHET
The General: Charles de Gaulle and the France He Saved
By Jonathan Fenby (Simon & Schuster 707pp £30)
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Charles de Gaulle is France's favourite national hero, embodying the country's highest collective ideals: devotion to public service, patriotism, military valour, and personal integrity (he paid his own electricity bills when he was president). He is also a literary giant: ever since their publication in the 1950s, his War Memoirs have become one of the monuments of modern French prose. Indeed, de Gaulle is so iconic today that more French streets and public squares bear his name than any other historical figure. This is a tribute to his founding of the Fifth Republic, which has produced a stable presidential democracy, as well as his pivotal role as the symbol of the French Resistance during the Second World War.
In June, President Sarkozy will pay a special visit to London to mark the seventieth anniversary of the General's BBC appeal of 18 June 1940, which launched the Gaullian rebellion. The commemorative flurry in France has already begun, and it includes a raft of new publications on de Gaulle - of which the most amusing (but also revealing) is Benoît Duteurtre's novel Le Retour du Général, in which de Gaulle rises from the dead to save France from the ravages of globalisation.
However, de Gaulle's life also illustrates the saying that no man is a prophet in his own land. Indeed, one of the merits of Jonathan Fenby's The General is to remind us that le grand Charles was not always treated with such reverence by his countrymen. After 1940 he battled to establish his leadership over the different components of the Resistance, notably the communists, and his credentials among the Allies were vigorously contested: occasionally by Churchill, with whom his relationship was tempestuous, but also and more fundamentally by Roosevelt, who thought that de Gaulle suffered from a 'Joan of Arc complex' and should be sent off to administer Madagascar. His domestic and foreign policies were opposed even by many on the French Right, especially over the independence of Algeria; and his presidency ended in a painful divorce from the French people that culminated in his resignation in April 1969. Most importantly, de Gaulle's legitimacy was never really accepted by the French Left, which regarded him as a Bonapartist adventurer: when the General returned to power in 1958, Simone de Beauvoir thought France had committed collective suicide.
Why did the General provoke such passions? Although given to moments of morbid self-doubt, he was driven both by a prodigious sense of national purpose and by a belief that he was its most fitting incarnation. In a nation wedded to Rousseauist collective ideals, such messianic individualism was always likely to be received with considerable suspicion. But de Gaulle was also in many respects a healer, a pacifier. He sought to reconcile the great schisms that had bitterly divided his countrymen since the Revolution (order and change, tradition and modernity, faith and secularism), and on two occasions he brought France back from the brink of civil war. In doing so, the General became the obvious target of those with vested interests in perpetuating these conflicts. During the Algerian war alone he miraculously survived several assassination attempts; with his characteristic black humour, he once remarked that he was, in all of French literary history, the writer who had been the most shot at.
De Gaulle's powerful personality and epic life provide excellent material for a biographer, and Fenby draws a compelling portrait of the General as a 'highly realistic dreamer'. In constructing his presidential power after 1958, de Gaulle combined the mystery of the old monarchy with the techniques of modern mass communication; his radio and television broadcasts produced great flights of oratory, which both mesmerised his audiences and moved them to action. For example, the April 1961 Algerian military rebellion melted away when soldiers heard de Gaulle lambast the 'quartet of retired generals' who had led the putsch.
The author also makes effective use of the dramatic episodes in de Gaulle's public life, switching the narrative pace to give a breathless, day-by-day account of the climactic events of June 1940, May-June 1958, and May 1968. Broadly sympathetic to the Great Man, Fenby absolves him of the traditional accusation of being a dictator: even if he did have autocratic tendencies, de Gaulle defended and extended democratic rule in France (notably by giving women the right to vote in 1944). It is also worth remembering that he resigned in 1969 after losing a referendum vote, although this was perhaps evidence of another familiar Gaullian sentiment: the French were not worthy of him. Fenby also highlights de Gaulle's notable mistakes and shortcomings: his resignation in 1946, carried out in the belief that he was indispensable; his creation of a neo-Gaullist party in 1947, which shattered his image as a national figure who transcended partisan divisions; and his incapacity to understand the revolt of May 1968.
De Gaulle was a notoriously private man, who regarded no one as his peer (with the possible exception of André Malraux), and on many fundamental issues his innermost thoughts are shrouded in mystery - and will remain so until historians sift through his unpublished correspondence, and the presidential archives for the period 1958-69. By choosing to rely heavily on the writings of de Gaulle's associates and relatives (notably the erratic memoirs of his son Philippe), Fenby unwittingly plays up the mythical aspects of the Gaullian saga, notably by buying excessively into the General's own providentialism. For example, de Gaulle's decision to challenge the legitimacy of the French government in June 1940 was in no real way connected to his political and military ideas in the inter-war era: as a Resistance leader de Gaulle reinvented himself completely. Likewise, his return in 1958 was far from inevitable - although he made it seem so by rewriting the conclusion of the third volume of his War Memoirs.
The book's real weakness is the absence of analysis of de Gaulle's republicanism. Fenby takes the characteristic Anglo-Saxon view that de Gaulle was above all a pragmatist, and that 'Gaullism' was merely a pattern of behaviour rather than a political doctrine. Yet the General's central ideas about liberty, national sovereignty, citizenship and the public interest were all drawn from the French republican tradition (Maurice Agulhon's wonderful little book on de Gaulle, which is not mentioned in The General, would be a valuable addition to the bibliography). And de Gaulle's republicanism has considerable explanatory value, too: it sets the natural boundaries to his autocratic tendencies, and also explains the profound cultural difference (to this day) between British conservatism and the French mainstream Right. De Gaulle's republican values are also embedded in his foreign policy in the 1960s, notably his anti-imperialism. Fenby often barks up the wrong tree here. For example, he rounds on de Gaulle's criticism of the Israeli conquest and occupation of Arab lands after the 1967 war, which he attributes to an alleged Gaullian 'network of resentments' against the Jewish state. But the General was arguing primarily from principle (and from his own experience): both had taught him that Israeli occupation would only breed 'oppression, repression, and resistance'.
And the General's foresight did not end there: with respect to the futility of America's war in Vietnam, the unsustainability of Soviet oppression in Eastern Europe, the resilience of the nation-state in Europe (and, let's face it, Britain's unsuitability for membership of the European Community), posterity has vindicated the melancholic prophet of Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises.
Sudhir Hazareesingh teaches at Balliol College, Oxford. His latest book, 'Le Myth Gaullien', has just been published by Editions Gallimard in Paris.