Dare I call a 707-page biography a page-turner? For once, the fake enthusiasm of blurb prose rings true... 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. Academic historians tend to shy away from the grand sweep, while journalists like to stick to the chatty and topical. Mr Fenby has blended the best of both crafts – the historian’s gravitas, the journalist’s feel for drama – into a magnificent book that will rank alongside a classic like Jean Lacouture’s multivolume biography of Charles de Gaulle.
The General isn’t just the story of a 20th-century giant who captivated the public’s imagination even while he was still alive. It also traces the course of a great nation that refused to come to terms with the loss of the strategic pre-eminence it had once enjoyed.
Le Grand Charles looms so large because his nation kept shrinking. Humiliated by Prussia-Germany in 1871, France was barely saved by America’s intervention in World War I. Succumbing to the fatigue of the 1920s and 1930s, France was done in for good by Nazi power in 1940. The end of the war signalled the death of an empire, from Indochina to Algeria, and the relentless decay of the Fourth Republic while the world became English with an American accent. Enter Charles de Gaulle, a man from the day before yesterday and the day after tomorrow, as his admirer André Malraux put it.
At 6-foot-3, naturally he could see farther than his contemporaries. As France hunkered down behind the Maginot Line after World War I, he preached the armoured offence Hitler’s panzer armies would use with devastating efficiency. When Nazi Germany rearmed, de Gaulle railed against appeasement as an “irreparable disaster”.
When Hitler subdued France in a matter of weeks, de Gaulle escaped to London. “It was for me,” he wrote while Vichy France half resisted, half embraced Hitler, “to take the country’s fate upon myself.” He and who else? De Gaulle’s war years in London read like “Don Quixote Doing Achilles at the Court of St James’”.
Hitler was the enemy across the Channel, Churchill the enemy next door. He (and Roosevelt) barely suffered the general’s antics. Anthony Eden, the foreign secretary, politely asked him: “Do you know that, of all the European allies, you have caused us the most difficulties?” De Gaulle smiled: “I don’t doubt that. France is a great power.”
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France was not. De Gaulle perfectly embodied an economy-class power that insisted on flying first class. With Germany’s defeat in sight, the general triumphantly returned to Paris (Roosevelt and Churchill let his troops march at the head of the parade), but soon both the man and the country were found wanting. De Gaulle, who probably never heard of the deadly sin of pride, would either rule or retire. After only a few days as head of the government he huffed “I’ve had enough,” and not long after he abruptly resigned. So he was off to Colombey-les-Deux-Églises, where he would hole up for the next 12 years.
While de Gaulle sulked, his country sank, going through about two dozen governments with an average life span of six months. France lost Indochina, Suez and l’Algérie française and was obliged to watch as the heirs of Prussia-Germany regained economic primacy and rose to become America’s “continental sword”. By 1958, on the cusp of civil war over Algeria, the Fourth Republic was ready to collapse, and it did — right into the hands of Le Grand Charles.
De Gaulle reigned over the Fifth Republic for the next 11 years — a latter-day Sun King forced to suffer the ornery ways of democratic politics. As his various grands desseins faltered, de Gaulle fell back on a classic from his days in London: maximising his nuisance value. Bribe me, or else! His “readiness to go to the brink,” Mr Fenby writes, “created an exaggerated impression of power,” a power France did not have, never mind the atom bomb acquired in 1960. So the US finally called his bluff. Dean Rusk, John Kennedy’s secretary of state, said: “We learned to proceed without him.”
And so did his people. Les événements of May 1968, the mightiest student revolt in the West, brought up to 10 million students and workers into the streets. In the midst of the revolution, de Gaulle’s prime minister, Georges Pompidou, declared: “The General doesn’t exist anymore; de Gaulle is dead.” Not quite.
The last few chapters read like a thriller with footnotes. De Gaulle escaped back to Colombey, then to French Army headquarters in Germany to plead for the support of the military. He was the nation’s saviour no more, as he had been in 1940 and 1958. When he called a referendum on his reforms – actually, on himself – he lost, and resigned on the same day. In November 1970, just short of his 80th birthday, he died in Colombey.
Mr Fenby has written a story that is learned, incisive and gripping — an intellectual pleasure as well as a French window, so to speak, on Europe’s demise and rebirth. There is no more fitting epitaph than Mr Fenby’s last sentence: “The world would not see his like again.”
THE GENERAL
Charles de Gaulle and the France He Saved
Jonathan Fenby
Skyhorse Publishing/A Herman Graf Book
707 pages; $32.95
©2012 The New York Times News Service