Getting to know the General | 14 June 2018

When General de Gaulle published the first volume of his war memoirs in 1954, he signed only four presentation copies: for the Pope, the Comte de Paris (France’s royalist pretender), the President of the French Republic and Queen Elizabeth II. One of his associates remarked: ‘All de Gaulle’ was in that gesture.

But what was de Gaulle? Catholic? Conservative? Romantic? Arrogant? All these, surely, and not least ideologically eclectic. His political beliefs were not only enigmatic but were often vague in his own mind. When he took the world stage in June 1940 it was unclear whether he was a royalist, a Christian Democrat or even a proto-fascist.

This uncertainty was a major reason why many were suspicious of him — most damagingly, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It took time for de Gaulle to become ‘de Gaulle’, as Julian Jackson puts it, and for this reason it is fruitless to try to track down the intellectual origins of ‘Gaullism’. Like many labels, it was first coined by his enemies. He did not begin with an ideology, but with passions, indeed obsessions, plus a few fixed ideas, such as the overriding importance of history and geography. His greatest passion was, as he wrote in the first lines of his memoirs, ‘une certaine idée de la France’ — the phrase that gives this book its title.

As Jackson notes, de Gaulle is the most written about Frenchman since Napoleon, and the Institut Charles de Gaulle continues to produce on an almost industrial scale. It is hard to see this as disproportionate. There are only a handful of examples in modern times of individuals making such a profound impact on their countries in so many mainly positive ways. Churchill, for example, may have moulded world history, but he did not change Britain. De Gaulle’s life is important on this side of the Channel too: no Frenchman since the Bonapartes has played such a role in British history.