Julian Jackson

France will always have a love-hate relationship with its heroes

Napoleon and de Gaulle are still widely revered — but few now recognise the other ‘grands hommes’ memorialised in endless street names

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The French have a love-hate relationship with heroes. For the great 19th-century historian Jules Michelet, the French Revolution was supposed to have inaugurated the age of the people: ‘France cured of individuals,’ he wrote in the preface to his history. But that same Revolution created a pantheon for its grands hommes. Anyone who has spent time in France will be familiar with the names of those figures celebrated endlessly in street names: Hugo, Gambetta, Pasteur, Jaurès, Moulin and so on. Many French people might now be hard-pressed if asked who some of these heroes were. But the two names everyone knows — even if neither is actually in the Panthéon — are Napoleon and de Gaulle.

In this erudite book, Patrice Gueniffey has had the interesting idea of comparing the careers and the myths of these two legendary figures. And there is a nice symmetry to their stories. Napoleon left history, aged 46, with his defeat at Waterloo on 18 June 1815; de Gaulle entered history, aged 50, with a speech on the BBC on… 18 June 1940. If he had lived long enough, de Gaulle planned to end his memoirs with an imagined dialogue between himself and Napoleon.

Although they were both brilliant creators of their own legends, in most respects the careers of the two men could not be more different — except for one moment. When de Gaulle returned to power in 1958 he pushed through an extraordinary number of reforms — monetary, administrative and institutional — which have been justifiably compared with those of the Consulate of Napoleon (1799-1804). The latter gave France the Civil Code; the former gave France the Fifth Republic. Before turning against Napoleon, Chateaubriand described him as France’s Washington, for having institutionalised the Revolution; and the same comparison has also been made for de Gaulle, whose constitution, after controversial beginnings, created a consensus around France’s political institutions for the first time since the Revolution.

De Gaulle had a shrewd sense of the need to respect realities, once comparing himself to Tintin

From that point, however, the two careers diverge.

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