Don Cook On Charles de Gaulle and Post-War France

Don Cook, Charles De Gaulle: A Biography

(New York: G.P. Putnamʼs Sons; 1983), pp. 22, 23.

ʻDe Gaulle viewed relationships between the superpowers and lesser powers rather like the planetary system, in which each planet has its own gravitational pull.

But medium-sized planets have to stay well away from the big ones if they are to retain a place of their own and an orbit of their own in space, and not wind up as satellites.

For de Gaulle, in political terms, the Soviet Union exercised no such gravitational pull on France or at least none that he feared or acknowledged.

But the United States did.

This invariably pitted him against Washington in an endless, obsessive opposition to all things American in order to show that France had her own policy and place in orbit.

ʻDe Gaulle possessed two great assets enabling him to pursue goals of power that in lesser men would have looked like chasing butterflies or boxing shadows.

His intelligence was formidable, and he had an extraordinary ability to create drama.

With his enormous absorption of history, diplomacy and political theory, and his capacious memory, he could synthesize his thoughts and give even dubious ideas or theories a vitality, precision and endless stimulation in his news conferences, monologues, speeches, conversations or instructions for his subordinates.

He had that famous French capacity for logic although more often than not it could be based on a curious selection or adjustment of facts. But he was never superficial, and never dull. On top of that, his histrionic ability was unmatched on the world stage certainly during his second era in power.

The greats of the war years had faded or were gone – Roosevelt, Stalin, Churchill (“A great artist of a great history,” de Gaulle wrote of him admiringly), Truman, Eisenhower.

Then, for a while, he shared the stage with Macmillan, Adenauer, Kennedy, Khrushchev, and then he was alone.

. . .

ʻ[I]n the narrower context of France itself, which was all that mattered to de Gaulle, his achievements place him on the highest plateau of his country's history.

ʻThe first was the restoration of France between 1940 and 1945 from a defeated nation to the ranks of the victorious Allied Powers of World War II.

The legitimacy of his assertion or usurpation of power against Marshal Henri Philippe Petain and the Vichy government will no doubt always be debated by tedious French constitutional historians. It did not happen overnight, but in the end, General de Gaulle prevailed as the State.

If he had not, and Vichy had remained the only government of France, then France would have remained a defeated, disgraced, collaborationist nation, rescued by the Anglo-Saxons, with no voice or rights of her own in the occupation of Germany or the postwar reconstruction of Europe.

ʻDe Gaulle's second great achievement was the rescue of France from the brink of civil chaos in 1958, and with his return to power the skillful ending of the Algerian War and at the same time the conversion of the rest of the French Empire from a mounting liability into a political asset of free and independent self-governing states in the Third World.

ʻFinally, he bequeathed to France genuine constitutional stability, with the institutions and structure of strong, stable and lasting government for the first time since Napoleon.

ʻFor the rest, the cult of Gaullism, with all its scribes and apostles and pharisees and interpreters from left to right, is a permanence in French politics. Frenchmen of every walk of life measure his greatness simply by asking, “Without de Gaulle, what would France be today?”ʼ

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