By Mark Weber

June 2024

No figure of modern French history is as honored as Charles de Gaulle. His name has been given to more streets, avenues and monuments in France than to any other man of the nation’s past. The country’s largest airport bears his name. French politicians – right, left and center – invoke his name and claim his legacy.

In 1940 he refused to accept his country’s defeat by Germany, and from London he founded and led the pro-Allied “Free French” force during World War II. From 1944 to 1946 he headed the provisional government of France. In 1958 he was called from retirement by popular acclaim to resolve the seemingly unsolvable crisis over Algeria. He demanded, and got, a new French constitution with a strong executive, which established the “Fifth Republic” that has endured to the present. During the years that he dominated his country’s political life – 1958-1969 – he charted an independent foreign policy, tied neither to the US nor the USSR, and strove to make France the preeminent nation in Europe. Like other great historical figures, he was hated as well as revered. He was the target of more than two dozen serious assassination attempts, two of which nearly succeeded.

Julian Jackson, a professor of history with the University of London and a well-regarded specialist of modern French history, has produced a biography worthy of such an extraordinary man. A Certain Idea of France: The Life of Charles De Gaulle is detailed, balanced and well written. It’s impossible to read any lengthy biography of this man without admiration for his audacious self-confidence, courage, determination, and cunning.

After childhood and youth in a comfortably middle-class, traditionalist, Roman Catholic family, and a good education, he chose a military career. He did well at the Saint Cyr military academy. During the First World War, he served with distinction, was wounded in combat, and was taken prisoner. After the war, he rose to the rank of colonel, and lectured at a school for officers. He attracted some attention for his writings on military affairs, in which he made the case for a more “modern” and “professional” army.

Two days after German forces struck against Poland on September 1, 1939, France and Britain declared war against Germany. Even after Hitler’s forces quickly subdued Poland, the leaders in Paris and London still believed that the German Wehrmacht was overrated, and remained confident that it was no match for their combined forces. After several months in which the French declined either to accept Hitler’s offers of peace or to launch any serious offensive against Germany, German forces struck westward on May 10, 1940. In the battle for France, de Gaulle proved himself a daring and innovative commander, especially in his deployment of mobile and tank forces.

With French defeat imminent, the 49-year-old de Gaulle made the momentous decision to turn his back on his military commanders and government. Breaking his oath as an officer, he flew to England where he declared himself the embodiment and savior of France. “It is indeed hard to exaggerate the extraordinary nature of the step that de Gaulle was taking,” Jackson remarks. “Equipped with two suitcases and a small stock of francs, he was heading for a country in which he had set foot for the first time ten days earlier, whose language he spoke badly, and where he knew almost no one. He was going into exile.

In one of the most stunningly successful military campaigns of modern times, the German Wehrmacht defeated the numerically superior French-British forces after just six weeks of battle. France agreed to an armistice. According to its terms, the French coast as well as northern France – including Paris – would remain under German occupation. But everyone in France and Germany, including Hitler, considered this a temporary arrangement, anticipating that Britain would quickly “see sense” and likewise agree to an end of fighting.

Along with the great majority of his fellow countrymen, de Gaulle regarded the defeat not merely as a military calamity, but also as glaring proof of the failure of France’s parliamentary democracy. Their politicians had declared war against a country whose leader never wanted war with France. However valid the reasons they gave for going to war against Germany may have been, few could excuse their lack of adequate preparation for armed conflict, and their abject failure to anticipate the enemy’s markedly superior military leadership, morale, and resourcefulness.

French scorn and loathing for the regime that had brought on such a stunning and ignominious defeat was nearly universal. Most agreed that the Republic itself must be abolished. On July 9-10, 1940, the members of the French Chamber of Deputies and Senate met in extraordinary joint session in the town of Vichy, where they voted overwhelmingly — 569 to 80 – to end the parliamentary democracy of the “Third Republic,” and give sweeping authority to Maréchal Philippe Pétain, the country’s most distinguished military commander in the Great War of 1914-1918.

Even today, the significance of this popular repudiation of democracy is not well understood. As Jackson makes clear, Pétain became France’s leader by nearly universal acclaim. “The core of Pétain’s appeal to the French people in 1940,” he tells readers, “was his decision to remain on French soil to defend his compatriots, to defend French lives, while de Gaulle left France to defend what he later called his ‘idea of France’.” The dissolution of the Republic and the establishment of an authoritarian state was an entirely French affair. The Germans played no role in the decision to replace the “French Republic” with an authoritarian “French State.” Indeed, German newspapers at the time voiced some suspicion of the radical regime change, wary that France’s new leaders might try to use it as pretext for somehow evading the provisions of the armistice agreement.

Pétain and Hitler met in person for the first and only time in October 1940. In a radio address a short time later, the French leader announced: “I enter today on the path of collaboration” with Germany. The legitimacy of the Pétain government was based not only on its solemn ratification by the country’s political representatives, but also its formal recognition by nearly all of the world’s countries, including the United States and the Soviet Union.

De Gaulle’s rejected this government was not because it was authoritarian and “undemocratic,” but because it refused to continue the war against Germany from North Africa or overseas. Similarly, he disliked the Hitler regime not because it was National Socialist, but because it was German and formidable, and therefore an obstacle to French pre-eminence in Europe.

Jackson repeatedly makes the point that de Gaulle’s political views, values and worldview were not at all in line with the egalitarian democratic outlook that prevails in the US and western Europe today. Along with most Frenchmen, he was contemptuous of the multi-party democracy of the “Third Republic.” He was a traditionalist and an authoritarian. It’s little wonder that, as Jackson repeatedly reminds readers, he was widely regarded as a “fascist.” When an important member of his inner circle asked him to make a public commitment to democracy, he replied: “If we proclaim simply that we are fighting for democracy, we will perhaps win provisional approval from the Americans, but we would lose a lot with the French, which is the principal issue. The French masses for the moment link the word democracy with the parliamentary regime as it operated before the war … That regime is condemned by the facts and by public opinion.”

After establishing himself in England, his ambitious effort to win support for his “Free French” enterprise faced immense difficulties. Because he was only a second-level figure in French military or political life, few even recognized his name. No prominent Frenchman rallied to his side. As Jackson notes, his “efforts to recruit among the thousands of French servicemen who had ended up in Britain after the Fall of France were largely unsuccessful.” That’s because nearly all French during this period regarded the war for their country as finished and settled.

Moreover, French public opinion was very hostile to Britain – the only major power still at war against Germany. The French did not forget that when the chips were down, the British had refused to fully commit their forces against the common enemy, preferring instead to keep their remaining troops and military aircraft to defend their home island, thereby leaving their ally to its fate.

On July 3, 1940, British forces attacked French war ships at the Mers-el-Kébir naval base, near Oran, in French Algeria. They sank one battleship, damaged two battleships and two destroyers, and killed 1,297 French and wounded 350. This attack — by a country that just weeks earlier had been a military ally – intensified already bitter anti-British feeling in France, where it was widely regarded yet another example of betrayal and treachery by “La perfide Albion.” France came close to declaring war against Britain. In September, British and de Gaulle “Free French” forces attacked military and naval posts at Dakar, in French-controlled Senegal. For the first time in the war, Frenchmen fired on Frenchmen. The venture failed. De Gaulle later acknowledged that the campaign — which was widely characterized as the “Dakar Debacle” or the “Fiasco at Dakar” — was so humiliating that he contemplated suicide.

De Gaulle’s complete dependence on British funding and support during those years, 1940-1944, was a never-ending source of embarrassment and frustration. Each day, writes Jackson, “provided a reminder of this humiliatingly total dependence.” His radio broadcast speeches were subject to British approval, and he could not even leave the country without permission. Beyond that, he could never forget the reality that his ultimate success was entirely dependent on the military victory of the Americans and the Soviets.

De Gaulle’s personality, Jackson notes, was imperious, reserved, and ungracious. He was given to “terrifying and unpredictable rages, which were usually sparked by an imagined (or genuine) slight.” This contributed to the already inherently contentious relationship he was obliged to endure with his London hosts. Jackson cites many examples of his distrust and dislike of the English. “Hour after hour he ranted against the perfidy of the British,” Jackson notes on one occasion. “It is not enough for them to have burnt Joan of Arc once,” de Gaulle said. “They want to start again … They think perhaps that I am not someone easy to work with. But if I were, I would today be on Pétain’s General Staff.”

When British forces struck against the French colony of Madagascar in May 1942, de Gaulle was furious because the operation had been launched without consulting him. The French forces there – loyal to the Pétain government – fought against the invaders for nearly six months. As Jackson notes, “The French held out longer against the British in Madagascar in 1942 than they had against the Germans in 1940.”

De Gaulle’s distrust of his British ally was reciprocated. A meeting with British premier Winston Churchill in 1942 “reached new levels of acrimony. De Gaulle smashed a chair in his fury.” Churchill wrote at the time that “there is nothing hostile to England that this man may not do once he gets off the chain.” When American and British forces landed in French-controlled North Africa in November 1942, the British once again took care to keep de Gaulle in the dark. Understandably furious, he screamed: “I hope the Vichy people throw them back in to the sea.” Indeed, the French forces there met the American and British “liberators” with gunfire. Back at home, French authorities allowed German troops to land in Tunisia to counter Allied forces.

De Gaulle’s distrust and dislike of his hosts encouraged him to look across the Atlantic for support, a hope that proved short-lived. “De Gaulle, who had once hoped for so much from America,” Jackson explains, “now worked himself up into a paroxysm of fury against the United States. He started referring regularly in conversation to the threat of American ‘imperialism’.” Describing a wartime meeting with President Franklin Roosevelt, he later wrote: “As is only human, the desire to dominate was dressed up as idealism.” During a conversation with a “Free French” delegate to the US government who tried to defend American foreign policy, then under the direction of Secretary of State Cordell Hull, de Gaulle “screamed”: “You tell that old fool Hull from me that he is an asshole, a moron, an idiot. To hell with them. The war will sweep them away and I, France, will remain and I will judge them.”

On another occasion de Gaulle denounced the British-American “Anglo-Saxons,” shouting that after the war France would have to lean towards Germany and Russia. In his memoirs, he detailed episodes of that persistent wartime tension. “There was no doubt!,” he wrote. “Our allies were in agreement to exclude us, as much as possible, from decisions concerning Italy. It was to be predicted that in the future they would agree on the destiny of Europe without France. But they needed to be shown that France could not permit such an exclusion.”

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