Codename Resurrection

‘He had one illusion – France; and one disillusion – mankind, including Frenchmen.’ John Maynard Keynes’s description of the political philosophy of Georges Clemenceau, who led France through the end of the First World War, applies even more to the country’s most illustrious leader of the 20th century, Charles de Gaulle. It captures the strange mixture of idealism and realism that constitutes the essence of French, and probably any, nationalism.

Despite his nostalgia for monarchical institutions, de Gaulle keenly admired Clemenceau, a staunch republican. In his War Memoirs, de Gaulle recounted that as he walked down the Champs-Élysées to celebrate the liberation of Paris on 26 August 1944, he hailed the statue of Clemenceau, who ‘looked as if he were springing up to march beside us’. De Gaulle wrote that during the parade he recalled other glorious Frenchmen, including Turenne, Napoleon and Foch – three generals who had vanquished German armies – and two Frenchwomen: Genevieve, whose prayers saved Paris from Attila’s Huns in the fifth century, and Joan of Arc, who inspired the liberation of France from the English in the 15th century. His appreciation did not extend to anyone foreign, least of all Free France’s Anglo-American allies, who had done most of the fighting from the Normandy beaches to Paris but were not invited to the parade: apart from a few foreign ‘reporters and photographers’ who were allowed to immortalise this instance of French glory, ‘only Frenchmen’ took part.

The War Memoirs, published in three separate volumes between 1954 and 1959, can be considered the canonical text of contemporary French nationalism – a nationalism cleansed of racism and antisemitism as well as the folly of world or European hegemony, and updated in order to maintain the greatness of a former great power. In Imagined Communities (1983), Benedict Anderson remarks on the similarities between religious and national feeling, and the way the latter prevailed over the former thanks to the development of print capitalism. De Gaulle’s War Memoirs fit Anderson’s analysis perfectly. The Champs-Élysées parade is the apotheosis of the second volume, entitled L’Unité (Unity). It celebrates not military victory but the restoration of national concord: ‘this was one of those miracles of national consciousness … In this community, with only a single thought, a single enthusiasm, a single cry, all differences vanished, all individuals disappeared.’ The three volumes were immediate and enduring bestsellers. The first, L’Appel (The Call to Honour), sold 100,000 copies within five weeks of publication in 1954. In 2000, a collected edition came out in Gallimard’s most prestigious imprint, La Pléiade. The introduction says that sales over the decades surpassed two million copies and describes de Gaulle as ‘the last great writer about France’.

In 2010, the third volume, Le Salut (Salvation), was assigned as a set text, alongside Homer’s Odyssey, to students sitting the national baccalaureate exam in literature. The ultimate stage of national commodification was reached when Emmanuel Macron included a copy of the Pléiade edition, lying ostentatiously open next to a golden inkwell surmounted by a Gallic cockerel, with a tricolour flag in the background, in his official portrait in 2017. Anderson is mostly concerned with the initial imagining of the nation as the common horizon of disparate individuals. De Gaulle’s War Memoirs sought to reimagine the French national community. To a large extent, the enterprise succeeded, working its magic for several decades.

The War Memoirs should be read neither as a work of literature nor as historical testimony. François Mauriac, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1952 and a fervent Gaullist, thought them worthy of Bossuet and Pascal – two masters of 17th-century French prose, but theologians before they were writers. The more impartial Roland Barthes characterised de Gaulle’s prose as ‘frantically anachronistic’, ‘the style of a pastiche writer’. The memoirs are even more pompous in English translation. This is not to fault the 1950s translators: Jonathan Griffin for the first volume, Richard Howard for the second and third. (This new edition fails to give them credit.) Yet translating the sacred text of a foreign creed is fraught with difficulty. Thinking of France ‘in a certain way’ does not quite convey de Gaulle’s mystical opening sentence of The Call to Honour, in which he says he has all his life had ‘une certaine idée de la France’. ‘Singing to France the ballad of her greatness’, as de Gaulle described his own endeavour, rings false in any language other than French.

As testimony, the War Memoirs are notoriously unreliable. Of De Gaulle’s succinct account – just four sentences – of the conditions under which the British government let him broadcast on the BBC on 18 June 1940 his famous call to keep fighting, notwithstanding France’s military collapse, Julian Jackson’s equanimous biography says: ‘De Gaulle knew that not one of these four sentences was entirely true.’* The text reproduced in the War Memoirs is the speech he had written for the occasion, not the exact words the British government – fearful of alienating the French authorities – allowed him to use. Yet the speech delivered was brave and rousing enough. A mere colonel, temporarily promoted to the rank of brigadier general not three weeks earlier, rejected the legitimacy of the French government and, banking on the resources of the British Empire and future US intervention, promised ultimate victory to the French willing to join him. He did say: ‘The flame of French resistance must not be extinguished and will not be extinguished.’ Marshal Pétain’s new Vichy regime, bent on collaboration with Nazi Germany, rescinded de Gaulle’s temporary promotion and condemned him to death in absentia for rebellion.

Although de Gaulle’s recollections often exaggerated his foresight and sagacity, the liberties he took with historical reality were inspired by political considerations rather than personal vanity. First came a desire to legitimise France’s status as a victorious power, by inflating the role of Free France in the Allied struggle against the Axis. To counter Vichy’s characterisation of the Free French as mercenaries fighting for Britain, he magnified his quarrels with Allied governments and overlooked the numerous occasions when he gave in to their demands. Lengthy, unexciting descriptions of military operations in the Libyan desert, the Italian Apennines and southern Alsace gave the impression of a significant Free French military contribution. To appease domestic divisions, de Gaulle also forgot many of his friends and forgave most of his enemies. He underplayed the heroism of resistance movements in occupied France and overstated the ease with which they rallied behind him. And instead of asking painful questions about popular adherence to Vichy’s Révolution nationale, he blamed capitulation and collaboration on the thirst for power of a handful of individuals, not least Pétain: ‘Military glory … had not satisfied him, since it had not loved him alone. And here, suddenly, in the extreme winter of his life, events were offering to his gifts and pride the opportunity – so long awaited! – to expand without limits.’ In his 1882 lecture ‘What is a nation?’, Ernest Renan said that ‘forgetting, and I daresay historical error, is an essential factor in the creation of a nation.’ Reinventing a nation, too, requires historical licence.

The writing of the War Memoirs was itself a political act, because it aided de Gaulle’s eventual return to power. Faced with a newly elected Constituent Assembly hostile to his constitutional ideas, he resigned as leader of the French government in 1946. He then failed to prevent the adoption of the Fourth Republic’s constitution which, if anything, increased the powers of a fractious parliament, perceived by de Gaulle as the root cause of French decadence in the 1930s and collapse in 1940. His attempt to regain power by founding a new party, the Rassemblement du Peuple Français, ended in failure in the early 1950s. Only then did de Gaulle seriously embark on writing about his years as the leader of Free France. The warm reception of the first two volumes, in 1954 and 1956, helped rebuild his reputation. By the time the third volume came out, in 1959, he was back in power. He had successfully pushed through the adoption of a new constitution that strengthened the powers of the presidency and was elected the first president of the Fifth Republic in December 1958.

Yet​ the greatest political comeback in 20th-century France owed more to the travails of decolonisation than to the sales of the War Memoirs. Ignominious defeat in Indochina, the growth of opposition to French rule in most colonies and above all the FLN’s armed struggle for Algeria’s independence from 1954 undermined the international prestige and domestic stability of the Fourth Republic. Algeria seemed intractable because it had been annexed as part of France for more than a century. The political elite and military leaders – not to mention the million European settlers who made up 10 per cent of Algeria’s population – could not imagine separation from metropolitan France. When a weak government seemed about to bow to American pressure and consider negotiations with the independence movement in 1958, the army, with the support of European settlers, seized power in Algiers and threatened to invade metropolitan France unless de Gaulle was called back to power. The operation’s codename was ‘Resurrection’.

This context helps to explain why the War Memoirs pay so much attention to French colonial territories. By my rough count, a third of the book is dedicated to the empire – as the setting of de Gaulle’s incessant travelling and scheming, as a contributor to the war effort and as the guarantor of France’s status as a great power. Only the gradual rallying of French colonies to de Gaulle gave Free France a measure of credibility on the international stage. De Gaulle paid due homage to Félix Éboué, the governor of Chad who switched allegiance from Vichy and gave Free France its first territory in August 1940: ‘This man of intelligence and heart, this coloured man so ardently French, this humanist philosopher, revolted with his whole being against the submission of France and the triumph of Nazi racial intolerance.’ Until 1944, a majority of Free French troops were non-white colonial subjects. This helped persuade de Gaulle of the need for reform to improve their lot, but also convinced him that France ought to keep its empire. In surreal passages he even envisages the acquisition of new colonies at the expense of Fascist Italy, or describes in detail his manoeuvres to thwart Britain’s plan to become the Middle East’s ‘sole suzerain’. ‘Here we are back in the Fashoda days,’ he quotes approvingly from a report by his emissary in Syria in 1943 – an allusion to the confrontation between British and French forces on the banks of the Nile in 1898, during the ‘scramble for Africa’.

De Gaulle’s colonial delusions were snide attacks against a Fourth Republic that he considered incapable of maintaining French imperial greatness. In the first volume, written shortly before the military disaster of Dien Bien Phu sealed the fate of French Indochina, he recounts taking an oath, after Japan invaded the colony in September 1940, that he would one day bring it back into the orbit of France. In the third volume he is still suggesting that a ‘secret plan’ he had concocted (involving the improbable restoration of Duy Tân, a former emperor of Vietnam exiled to Réunion in 1916 and an early supporter of the Free French) might have preserved French interests in Asia. On the other hand, the War Memoirs say nothing about the claims of Algerian nationalists. The harsh repression of protests in the province of Constantine by de Gaulle’s government in May and June 1945 – estimates range from five thousand to thirty thousand Muslim protesters killed – is dealt with in a single, matter-of-fact sentence: ‘In Algeria, an insurrection begun in the Constantinois … was put down by Governor General Chataigneau.’

When he returned to power in 1958, de Gaulle was cautious not to commit himself to any specific policy on Algeria, but readers of the War Memoirs could be forgiven for believing he had hatched another secret plan to preserve French rule in North Africa. Perhaps he had himself come to believe in his capacity to perform miracles. But once he realised that keeping Algeria diminished rather than enhanced French power, he became instead a resolute advocate of self-determination – putting down a coup attempt by the army and surviving assassination attempts by supporters of French Algeria – and accepted independence in 1962. He went on to try to reinvent French greatness yet again, by conducting an autonomous global foreign policy. After France secured its own nuclear deterrent, he withdrew the French military from Nato command and loudly criticised American policy in Latin America, Vietnam and the Middle East. This pursuit of a geopolitical third way echoed the aspiration expressed in the War Memoirs that France should become ‘the spokesman of the small and medium-sized nations’.

Did this policy reflect a visceral anti-Americanism? In the War Memoirs de Gaulle evokes countless squabbles with the British government. But he also lavishes praise on Churchill, ‘the great champion of a great enterprise and the great artist of a great history’. He admired the patriotism of ordinary Britons and called them a ‘great people’. Yet after the US entered the war, he became distraught by the growing ‘subjection’ of Churchill and other British leaders to American power. He was especially shocked by Churchill’s pledge of allegiance to America’s leadership in June 1944: ‘each time we [Britons] must choose between Europe and the open sea, we shall choose the open sea. Each time I must choose between you [de Gaulle] and Roosevelt, I shall always choose Roosevelt.’ De Gaulle must have been as horrified by the renunciation of national independence as by the personal snub.

Apart from soldierly admiration for MacArthur and Eisenhower, the War Memoirs are short on kind words for Americans and especially their political leaders. The secretary of state, Cordell Hull, was ‘conscientious’ but ‘hampered … by his summary understanding of what was not American’. Commenting on the confidence of ‘the American elite’, de Gaulle notes sarcastically, and with a touch of envy, ‘how becoming optimism is to those who can afford it.’ American soldiers stationed in England, although ‘good-natured’, seemed to him ‘bad-mannered’. Yet his main quarrel was with President Roosevelt: ‘his will to power cloaked itself in idealism.’ Distrust was mutual. Roosevelt suspected de Gaulle of being an aspiring dictator. The US kept up diplomatic relations with Vichy France until Pétain’s government severed them in November 1942. Roosevelt then continued to court Vichy supporters, officially in order to minimise the effects of collaboration and encourage Vichy’s backing of the Allied cause. But for de Gaulle, it was a ploy to pass France off as a defeated country and ensure American dominance in Western Europe after the war. Tensions culminated in a bizarre Franco-American military stand-off in May 1945, when the US government demanded that French forces withdraw from French-speaking portions of Italian territory that de Gaulle hoped to annex: with extraordinary aplomb, he maintained that ‘the source of this affair’ was America’s ‘desire for hegemony’.

It is easy to discern why America distrusted this grandiloquent officer who claimed to embody France – in the War Memoirs, he referred to himself in the third person whenever he incarnated his country – and to ridicule de Gaulle’s obsession with the American desire to subvert French sovereignty. He occasionally portrayed the US and its British auxiliary as adversaries on a par with Nazi Germany. In the autumn of 1944, de Gaulle went to Moscow to negotiate a treaty of alliance with the Soviet Union. He was hoping to revive ‘the old Franco-Russian solidarity which, though repeatedly betrayed and repudiated, remained no less a part of the natural order of things, as much in relation to the German menace as to the endeavours of Anglo-American hegemony’.

Yet in hindsight, shouldn’t we admit, with de Gaulle, that the US is no more immune than other nations to the ‘will to power’? The assumption that only Americans are committed to moral internationalist ideals while other nations are inspired by narrow-minded realpolitik is no less ridiculous than de Gaulle’s fear of American hegemony. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 and Trump’s grotesque neo-imperialism confirm that de Gaulle was a shrewd analyst of international relations. From his conviction in 1940 that Nazi Germany was bound to lose the Second World War to his belief that Russia wouldn’t remain communist, that British aspirations to take part in European integration were doomed to failure and that the US would not resist the temptation of global empire, his prophetic record is impressive.

In his own land, however, the prophet’s thundering commandments have been mostly forgotten. Even as all political parties – including Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National, founded by supporters of French Algeria who loathed de Gaulle – now pay homage to ‘the man of 18 June’, there is little about French domestic politics or foreign policy that evinces the Gaullist legacy. A fractious parliament has relegated an impotent president to the shadows. On the international stage, the crusade led by Jacques Chirac against the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq now looks like the last gasp of a dying creed. In 2009 Nicolas Sarkozy rescinded the Gaullian withdrawal of France from Nato command. Under the presidencies of François Hollande and Macron, France has abandoned singularity in foreign policy, let alone the pretence of greatness.

The decay of Gaullism wouldn’t have surprised de Gaulle, who often complained about his countrymen’s lack of commitment to national greatness. As a Frenchman myself, I find it difficult to make up my mind about de Gaulle. Jews aren’t permitted to approve or disapprove of Moses. Ultimately, I suppose I’d subscribe to the verdict of my Jewish great-grandmother, a left-winger with little sympathy for Gaullism: de Gaulle was tough but necessary medicine for an ailing France. He was an insufferable peacock and a remarkable statesman.