Synopses & Reviews
No leader of modern times was more uniquely patriotic than Charles de Gaulle. As founder and first president of the Fifth Republic, General de Gaulle saw himself as “carrying France on [his] shoulders.”
In his twenties, he fought for France in the trenches and at the epic battle of Verdun. In the 1930s, he waged a lonely battle to enable France to better resist Hitler’s Germany. Thereafter, he twice rescued the nation from defeat and decline by extraordinary displays of leadership, political acumen, daring, and bluff, heading off civil war and leaving a heritage adopted by his successors of right and left.
Le Général, as he became known from 1940 on, appeared as if he was carved from a single monumental block, but was in fact extremely complex, a man with deep personal feelings and recurrent mood swings, devoted to his family and often seeking reassurance from those around him. This is a magisterial, sweeping biography of one of the great leaders of the twentieth century and of the country with which he so identified himself. Written with terrific verve, narrative skill, and rigorous detail, the first major work on de Gaulle in fifteen years brings alive as never before the private man as well as the public leader through exhaustive research and analysis.
Review
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Charles de Gaulle has no rival as the most significant Frenchman of the 20th century. What he signified remains a matter of opinion; that he saved France from ignominy, after the surrender of 1940 and the humiliating Nazi occupation, is beyond question. In the dire days immediately preceding Marshal Pétain's call for an armistice, the then "unknown," still belligerent junior general was recognized by Winston Churchill as "a man of destiny." It took one to recognize one. Both warriors were also eloquent historians, not least of their own myths. Each had a mystic belief in national identity; each believed that he was its incarnation; each came to regard the other as both hero and villain.Churchill authorized de Gaulle's broadcast from London, on June 18, 1940, with its proclamation that France had lost a battle but had not lost the war. Although heard by many fewer in France than later claimed to have been inspired by it, the (two-star) general's brave words made him the rallying point for "Free Frenchmen." His self-importance, however, exasperated his allies. In 1943, during the lead-up to the invasion of Europe by the Allies, Roosevelt, quite openly, and Churchill, more furtively, tried to oust the general from his self-appointed eminence. Finding it easier to embrace old enemies than to forgive old friends, de Gaulle told Stalin that same year, "With all my heart, I hope you get to Berlin before the Americans." Through all of his ups and downs, de Gaulle knew how to hang in, nurse his grudges and bide his time.If the general had a majestic, occasionally prescient, view of world history, his Olympian vision was narrowed by spite. He could not forgive the English for victory at Agincourt in 1415 or at Waterloo in 1815 (he often compared himself, favorably, with Napoleon). The only American for whom he had unmitigated respect was another general: In 1944, he told Eisenhower, in English, after the latter had apologized for underestimating him: "You are a man." Later, when the two generals were presidents of their countries, de Gaulle reminisced to Ike: "Roosevelt thought that I took myself for Joan of Arc. He was wrong, I simply took myself for General de Gaulle." A few years later, the general was gracious to the Kennedys but less charmed by Jackie than she liked to imagine. He observed, some time before Aristotle Onassis came into her reckoning, "She will end up on a yacht with an oil tycoon."Jonathan Fenby's biography, entitled simply "The General," is large but not overweight. It tracks the great man's career with more journalistic industry than literary distinction. While not hiding de Gaulle's vanities and conceits (more highlighted than alleviated by odd moments of self-doubt), Mr. Fenby does not question that de Gaulle supplied his disheartened countrymen with a necessary myth, about himself and about France's place in the world; he made little distinction between the two.De Gaulle's certainty that he could rise above politics was fostered from an early age by his exceptional height (6-foot-5) and a conviction that a great commander must "exercise self-control and be cold." People have little reverence, he remarked, for what they know too well. Only one man, his fellow general Alphonse Juin, ever addressed de Gaulle as "tu" rather than the formal "vous." De Gaulle's name alone persuaded him that he was born to impersonate France. Yet "the French" in his mind tended to be those living in the north of the country. He had none of the heat and showed little of the sensuality associated with the Mediterranean.The GeneralBy Jonathan FenbySkyhorse, 707 pages, $32.95If he considered himself above politics, de Gaulle was never above the pursuit of power. In January 1946, having supervised the establishment of the new Fourth Republic, he resigned abruptly, frustrated by the checks which the old political parties imposed on the executive power. In 1958, when civil war threatened after the Arab revolt in Algeria, he showed small reluctance to be maneuvered back as the supreme civil authority. Yet he always attached great importance to his military rank. As head of the new Fifth Republic, which he had shaped to make its president a virtual autocrat, he was annoyed by anyone who addressed him as "Monsieur le Président" rather than as "Mon Général."As a young man, de Gaulle's desire to go into the army was less careerist ambition than sacred vocation. His first posting, before World War I, was to Arras, where his commanding officer was Philippe Pétain, with whom he was to have a long, tangled and almost Oedipal relationship. Pétain once declared that he loved two things: sex and the infantry. Mr. Fenby suggests that, while in Arras, the two men shared a mistress. De Gaulle was, however, already on the lookout for a suitable, virginal wife.Yvonne Vendroux, whom he married in 1921, would fill that role with implacable Catholic rectitude. The general's mythographers, beginning with himself, have portrayed him as a model husband and father, especially of his Down syndrome daughter Anne, to whom he devoted himself with rare tenderness. Looking back later, he said: "Without Anne, perhaps I should not have done all that I have done. She gave me so much heart and spirit." When she died in 1948, at the age of 20, de Gaulle said, "Now she is like everyone else."De Gaulle's first experience on the battlefield was early in World War I. As a young officer, he was wounded three times. Promoted captain, he was left for dead in No Man's Land. In a premature obituary, the then Colonel Pétain described him as "an incomparable officer in all respects." In fact, de Gaulle had been wounded by a bayonet thrust and taken prisoner. He made several frustrated attempts to escape from prison camps. In captivity, lordly modesty led him never to use the common showers, and it is reported that no one saw him naked. Philippe (later Admiral) de Gaulle says in his hagiographical memoir of his father that, even at home, the general never came out of his bedroom until fully dressed, complete with tie.In the Shadow of the GeneralBy Sudhir HazareesinghOxford, 238 pages, $29.95Pétain meanwhile was laureled as the victor of Verdun. In fact, the series of battles around that city had resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths with no triumphant conclusion. Pétain was appointed to command on that front only after many units had refused to advance to their deaths. He restored discipline (Stanley Kubrick's film "Paths of Glory" contains a caricature of a Pétain-like general doing so through the exemplary execution of "cowards") and abandoned the tactics of futile frontal attack in favor of sitting tight.By 1918, Pétain—along with Prime Minister Georges "the Tiger" Clemenceau and Ferdinand Foch, Allied Supreme Commander—was a national hero. He asked his protégé de Gaulle to "ghost" a book for him on the history of the French army. Having first judged the text "faultless," Pétain later declared its analysis of the Great War to be "uniformly catastrophic." To put it mildly, De Gaulle did not wholeheartedly endorse the Marshal's conviction that infantry would continue to have the primordial role in modern warfare.De Gaulle was livid, but reticent, until 1934, soon after Hitler took power in Germany. He then published a long, polemic essay—"The Army of the Future"—arguing for the need for mobile armored forces. The Maginot Line, which was being constructed along France's frontier with Germany, had to be part of an overall plan in which a key part would be played by armored divisions led by a "master" (guess who). De Gaulle's most responsive reader was the young German colonel Heinz Guderian, who shaped the Panzer strike-force that would rupture France's static defenses in 1940.That defeat was the result of military ineptitude and political divisions. The rest of de Gaulle's life, whether in power or scheming to attain it, was consecrated to unifying a country that is still regularly said to be "divided in two." For the general, national glory was always in danger; the French had to live or die together in its defense. In war, he never took cover; in peacetime, he stood up for his idea of France, not least against other Frenchmen.In August 1962, in the Parisian suburb of Petit-Clamart, he only just escaped an ambush laid by the "Secret Army" of aggrieved veterans who accused him of betraying French Algeria. After his driver steered his punctured Citroën to safety through a fusillade of bullets, de Gaulle was confirmed in his view that he was a Man of Destiny. His biographer has the tact not to mention that Adolf Hitler took the same view of himself, after he had escaped the bomb left in his headquarters by Col. Claus von Stauffenberg in July 1944.Mr. Fenby misses little in the way of nice detail. In London, during World War II, Yvonne de Gaulle wore black, in mourning for France, and laid a black tablecloth in the dining room. In postwar France, she became a byword for prudery; she feared for the virginities of female university students and advocated banning the miniskirt. In 1945, de Gaulle agreed that women should have the vote, but continued to think their proper place was "among the saucepans." As president, he paid his own electricity bills and the price of family meals at the Élysée Palace. His successors, Gaullist or not, were never so punctilious.Among many good stories, Mr. Fenby cites de Gaulle, in 1963, reproaching Dutch foreign minister Joseph Luns for allowing his countrymen to be "lackeys" of the British at the time of Harold Macmillan's attempt to take Britain into the European Economic Community (a move de Gaulle vetoed). I happened once to have had dinner with Luns, who gave the full version of what the general said: "I have always had great admiration for the Dutch, a people both courageous and independent; why, therefore, have you agreed to become the slaves of the British?" The disarming preamble masked the sharpness of the final thrust. It was what French fencing masters call "un coup de Jarnac." Mr. Fenby misses one telling episode, however: In 1944, when de Gaulle refused to reprieve Joseph Darnand, commander of the Vichy Milice (militia) that fought so savagely against the Resistance (both Gaullist and communist), he sent word to the condemned man that he would personally supervise the education of his children.Sudhir Hazareesingh's "In the Shadow of the General" deals less with the day-to-day qualities and foibles of de Gaulle than with his myth and his afterlife, an essential feature of "religious saviors" among whom the general is here included. De Gaulle's wishful postwar insistence that France was "freed by its own people" encapsulated a heroic gospel that the French, the great majority of whom had long remained passive under Pétain, were happy to endorse. De Gaulle was less the conscience of France than the means by which so many of his compatriots were excused from having one: At the trial of Pétain in 1945, no mention was made of deportation of Jews, of the Vichy Milice or of the forced labor for which three million Frenchmen were transported to Germany.Mr. Hazareesingh must be a fluent French speaker, but who will accept that "all my life I have thought of France in a certain way" is a valid translation of the opening sentence of de Gaulle's memoirs: "Toute ma vie, je me suis fait une certaine idée de la France"? The general's idea was less a personal opinion than a Platonic vision emblazoned in the heavens, so to say, which de Gaulle could claim to be paying homage, whatever deviousness or divisiveness it entailed. Elsewhere we are told: "In a wonderful Freudian slip, one of his earliest military companions, Admiral d'Argenlieu, addressed him as monsignor—which would not have at all astonished those . . . who saw in him the herald of the reign of Christ the King in France." Mr. Hazareesingh fails to observe that the slip reveals more about its speaker than about its subject: The admiral had been a priest before he went into the navy.Later we are treated to a tendentious translation of de Gaulle's denunciation of the Jews (after the Six-Day War of 1967) as "un peuple d'élite, sûr de lui-même et dominateur." Mr. Hazareesingh wants to have this mean: "the chosen people, sure of itself and dominant." No French speaker I know agrees with this version. "Chosen people" would be "peuple élu." The word "élite" is regularly a term of praise, implying first-class quality; hence de Gaulle's affectation of surprise when accused of anti-Semitism because of a remark he claimed was flattering. In fact, he probably calculated that it was in France's long-term interest to appease the oil producers rather than risk losing energy supplies, both from the Middle East and, in particular, from the recently liberated Algeria. Whatever his personal feelings, de Gaulle foresaw, with apprehension, the completion of the "Muslim ring" that might encircle and threaten his country. History was an unending battle in which what mattered above all was that France should come out on top.Mr. Hazareesingh tells us, with a wealth of statistics, how many streets and squares in France have been, and continue to be, named in the general's honor. De Gaulle's saintly status is amply illustrated, but the continued influence of his high-flown patriotic legacy may be exaggerated. A quick local poll in the part of southwestern France where I live revealed that few people under 60 now regard the general as more than a "personage." His successors, left and right, have done little to maintain the austere personal morality that de Gaulle honored. His Fifth Republic continues to function, but the divisions among Frenchmen remain, perhaps healthily, unresolved. How wise is it, after all, for any country to defer to a leader, of whatever genius, whose edicts are sacrosanct?—Mr. Raphael's "Ifs and Buts," the fifth volume of his journals, has recently been published by Carcanet Press.
A version of this article appeared July 7, 2012, on page C5 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Indomitable de Gaulle." The Wall Street Journal
Review
"A keen biography conveying the French general’s driving sense of destiny. . . . With a nod to previous (French) studies by Jean Lacouture, Eric Roussel, Alain Peyrefitte, as well as the general’s own extensive memoirs, this work is astute and psychologically probing." Kirkus
Review
"Fenby’s will be an obligatory purchase." Booklist
Review
"Jonathan Fenby's biography, entitled simply The General, is large but not overweight. . . .While not hiding de Gaulle's vanities and conceits (more highlighted than alleviated by odd moments of self-doubt), Mr. Fenby does not question that de Gaulle supplied his disheartened countrymen with a necessary myth, about himself and about France's place in the world; he made little distinction between the two. . . . Mr. Fenby misses little in the way of nice detail." The Wall Street Journal
Review
"Dare I call a 707-page biography a page-turner? For once, the fake enthusiasm of blurb prose rings true. I did 'finish the book in one sitting,' as another chestnut has it, though the sitting was a very flight of 16 hours. And why? Because Jonathan Fenby, a former editor of The Observer of London and a prolific author, knows how to turn breadth and depth into enthrallment." Joseph Joffe
Synopsis
The gripping narrative of the founder of the French Fifth Republic.
About the Author
Jonathan Fenby is a former editor of the Observer and the South China Morning Post, and is a former bureau chief in France for the Economist and Reuters. He is the author of ten books, including the acclaimed biography Chiang Kai-Shek: China’s Generalissimo and the Nation He Lost and The Sinking of the Lancastria, which tells the story of the greatest disaster in British naval history. He was made a commander of the British Empire and a knight of the French Order of Merit for services to journalism. He lives in London.