Charles de Gaulle died in 1970 at the age of eighty. He was thus fifty years old when, as an unknown officer recently promoted to the (temporary) rank of brigadier general, he made his famous broadcast from London rejecting the capitulation of France to the Nazis after the debacle of May-June 1940. From that time, and until he resigned as President of the French Republic in April 1969, he was a more or less constant presence on the world scene, spoken of in the same breath as Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin. During the 30 years which spanned the call to his countrymen over the BBC and his death at his house in Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises, he was able again and again, by dint of his determination and his powerful personality, to impose his vision and his will on events which were momentous for his country and for the world.

To give a proper account of such a long and crowded life, to exhibit the hero’s character in all its complexity and contradictions, keeping in view both the wood and the trees, is a daunting task from which many writers would flinch. One’s admiration for the French political journalist Jean Lacouture, who has undertaken this task and triumphantly brought it to a conclusion,¹ is thus very great—all the greater in that the kind of biography he has written, with its spacious narrative and meticulous concern for detail, though very familiar in the English-speaking world, is a genre hardly practiced by French authors. Lacouture’s style, moreover, elegant, ironical, lively, witty, and allusive, carries the narrative forward at a smart pace, engaging the reader’s interest all the way.

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A valuable feature of this biography is that it serves to situate Charles de Gaulle in his particular familial and social milieu. His father, a product of Jesuit education, himself became a teacher in Jesuit collèges. When the religious congrégations were expelled from France at the beginning of the century, he founded and headed a private school run on the same principles. Both he and his wife were fervent Catholics and monarchists. Henri de Gaulle believed that the Revolution of 1789, like the Protestant Reformation, was in essence Satanic, and that to love the Revolution was to become remote from God. It was natural that he should have been an early subscriber to the paper of the ultra-nationalist, anti-Dreyfusard movement, Action française. His son Charles continued to read it into the 1930’s.

By tradition and upbringing, then, Charles de Gaulle belonged on one side of the great divide which ever since 1789 had split—and in many ways still splits—French society and politics. But in the case of both de Gaulle and his father, some qualifications have to be made.

Some time after the Dreyfus trial, Henri de Gaulle began to doubt the captain’s guilt and to set his face against the anti-Dreyfusard hysteria. His son Charles was neither a follower of Charles Maurras, the leading ideologist of Action française, nor a monarchist. He identified himself, in a mystical sort of way, with France itself. Although France had been made by the French kings, it had in time become a republic, and from the very beginning of his career as an officer de Gaulle was faithful to republican institutions. As for his religion, he was certainly raised as a Catholic, but his loyalty to Catholicism was bound up with his consuming loyalty to France, to the idea of France. As he told a nephew, “I am a Christian by reason of history and geography.”

The adolescent de Gaulle seems to have been already fully formed in his outlook and attitudes. They exemplified those of a certain French society, traditionalist in its political loyalties, bien pensant in its religion, attached to the idea of French greatness, and taking for granted public service and the sacrifice necessary to defend and preserve that greatness. De Gaulle was, naturally, bent on a military career, one which would enable him to render a signal service to his country. At the age of fifteen he already had a vision of himself at the head of an army confronting and repelling a German invasion of France.

In 1909 he applied, and was admitted, to the officers’ school of Saint-Cyr, and after six months’ service he was promoted to the rank of corporal. To someone who suggested that his abilities justified promotion to sergeant, de Gaulle’s commanding officer retorted that the suggestion was absurd, given that the young soldier would have considered beneath him anything other than the rank of connétable—i.e., the supreme commander of the army in France under the monarchy. In a felicitous phrase, Lacouture describes de Gaulle as striving, from his very beginnings, to make himself his own Pygmalion. Connétable he considered himself, and connétable he would become.

On graduating from Saint-Cyr in 1912, de Gaulle was appointed lieutenant in an infantry regiment commanded by Colonel Philippe Pétain. This was the beginning of a long and complex relationship which started on de Gaulle’s side as almost filial but suffered progressive estrangement, and then after 1940, when Pétain became the head of the Vichy government under the Nazis, turned into one of irreducible opposition and enmity.

During World War I, Lieutenant de Gaulle was twice wounded on the Western Front, received the croix de guerre, and was promoted to captain. In 1916 he took part in the deadly battles at Verdun. His company was decimated, and he himself was thought to have fallen in battle. In fact, the wounded de Gaulle had been taken prisoner. Between 1916 and 1918, he tried twice to escape from captivity, but was recaptured on both occasions.

In 1922, Captain de Gaulle was admitted to the Ecole supérieure de guerre, the military equivalent of the Ecole normale supérieure where generations of French statesmen and government officials received their training. He spent two years there. His teachers, though impressed with his abilities and his intellect, nonetheless had their doubts. One of them noted that de Gaulle spoiled his undoubted qualities by excessive self-confidence and by his disdain for the views of others. His attitude, the teacher noted, was that of “an exiled king.”

In 1925 de Gaulle was appointed to the staff of Pétain, who was by then a marshal and the vice president of the Supreme War Council. There, de Gaulle was to serve as Pétain’s draftsman or ghost writer. In particular, Pétain had in mind a survey of the French soldier through the ages, which de Gaulle would draft under Pétain’s guidance and which would eventually appear under the marshal’s name. De Gaulle was busy with this task for two years, but when he left Pétain’s service in 1927, he was given to understand that his work would be changed or amended by the officer who had taken his place. De Gaulle objected, and some years later, over Pétain’s protests, he brought out a modified version of the work under his own name.

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By the time La France et son armée (France and Its Army) was published (in 1938), de Gaulle already had a number of other works to his credit. These, fresh, original, eloquent, went counter to established doctrine among French military leaders about the conduct of war under modern conditions. Thus, de Gaulle was one of the first to see the potentialities of armor on the battlefield in making possible, indeed mandatory, a war of movement, a Blitzkrieg, to use the term which characterized the similar strategy adopted by the German army and which enabled it swiftly to overrun France in 1940.

His writings also put forward a distinctive view of the military vocation, and of military leadership. The army, for de Gaulle, was akin to a religious order. He envisaged a professional force, dedicated to the defense of the state and the advancement of its interests, and commanded by a leader devoid of prejudice and unencumbered by clients, “strong enough to impose himself, adroit enough to persuade and attract, great enough to undertake a great task.” In Vers l’armée de métier (Toward a Professional Army), published a year after Hitler’s coming to power, he called for a reconstruction of French institutions which would of necessity begin with the army, “the most complete expression of the spirit of a society.”

Between 1927, when he left Pétain’s staff, and 1931, de Gaulle commanded an army unit stationed in Germany, and then served in Beirut as head of intelligence and operations. When he came back to Paris in 1931, he was attached to the general secretariat of the Ministry of War, an important post which he occupied until 1937 when he was appointed to command a tank regiment headquartered in Metz. During this period he was not only becoming better known as an author, but his presence in Paris allowed him to seek support for his ideas in political circles—ideas of which his military superiors were contemptuously dismissive. Through the circle of Colonel Mayer, which he assiduously frequented, de Gaulle was able to approach prominent politicians to convey his sense of the imminent danger posed by Hitler—which he saw very early—and to advocate a change in strategic views and a much greater emphasis on armor and on the war of movement. He even saw Léon Blum shortly after Blum became Prime Minister in 1936, but the interview produced no results.

Some two years earlier, de Gaulle had established relations with Paul Reynaud, a former minister and by then a very influential figure in the National Assembly. Reynaud read Vers l’armée de métier, was persuaded by it, and henceforth became a champion of the colonel’s ideas. Reynaud became Prime Minister on March 19, 1940. Less than two months later, the Germans invaded and quickly routed the French. Facing a disaster, Reynaud replaced the commander-in-chief and himself took over the Ministry of War.

On May 23, de Gaulle was promoted to the temporary rank of brigadier general. On June 3, he sent a remarkable letter to the Prime Minister, pointing out that the French defeat had resulted from the application by the Nazis of military concepts which he himself had propounded for France but which the French command had refused to employ. Now, he continued, Reynaud had given power and position to yesterday’s men—Pétain as vice president of the Council of Ministers, and Maxime Weygand as the new commander-in-chief—who would lose the war if they were not stopped. The country would welcome the advent of a new man, fit for the new kind of war. He wished to serve by Reynaud’s side, but not as a mere official. If Reynaud could not appoint him under-secretary of state for war, then let him be the commander of the armored corps. “Let me say without bashfulness,” the letter concluded, “. . . that I alone am able to command this corps which shall be our supreme resource. Having invented it, I make bold to direct its use.” Two days later, de Gaulle’s appointment as undersecretary of state for war was announced.

It was, however, entirely too late. Between his appointment and the French capitulation on June 17, de Gaulle did his best to encourage Reynaud to continue fighting, but in the end Reynaud gave in to the views of the majority of his cabinet and resigned. Pétain succeeded him and immediately asked for an armistice. De Gaulle had just returned to Bordeaux—where the government had taken refuge—from a visit to London where he had persuaded Churchill to offer an Anglo-French union. He immediately decided to go back to London and from there, on June 18, he made the historic broadcast in which he rehearsed the reasons for the French defeat and predicted that the same tanks which had destroyed the French army would one day serve to destroy the victors. “Whatever happens,” he concluded, “the flame of French resistance must not go out and will not go out.”

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The brigadier general (temporary) was now on his own. His country defeated, he chose to throw in his lot with a power whose own survival was, to say the least, very questionable. Britain, moreover, though an ally of the Third Republic, was now looked upon as a quasi-enemy by the French soldiers and politicians who had decided to bet on a Nazi victory—and in the summer of 1940 that looked like an almost sure bet. Such a victory, these Frenchmen believed, would ensure the survival of France, albeit with a diminished status, and would eradicate the anticlerical and godless Third Republic which had been exploited, corrupted, and destroyed at the hands of Jews and Freemasons.

By his connections and upbringing, by his profession and professional associations, de Gaulle might have been expected to sympathize with such views and attitudes. But ever since his period of service on Pétain’s staff he had increasingly become the adversary of the ruling military orthodoxy and its proponents. And there was something else of even greater importance, something which went to the very heart of the contention between him and most of his fellow officers and military superiors. In 1926 or 1927, when he was drafting for Pétain the book which he later published under his own name, de Gaulle had referred to the political frenzy which at the time of the French Revolution had made a plaything of the French generals, depriving them “of prestige, often of their life, and sometimes of their honor.” Pétain, in going over the draft, had changed the order of the words, putting “life” at the end of the sentence to emphasize its primacy over prestige and honor. De Gaulle wrote a rejoinder on the margin: “This is a gradation: prestige, life, honor,” half-underlining the last word. This punctilious and steadfast preference of honor over life proved after 1940 to be the foundation on which de Gaulle built his political career.

In the four years between the London broadcast and his triumphant entry into Paris on August 25, 1944, de Gaulle, from being an unknown officer sentenced to death by the lawful government of his country, made himself into the embodiment of the French state. His outraged sense of honor was the goad which drove him. This was not, however, a blind or irrational passion, for he rightly believed that there had been no need to capitulate in June 1940, since the Republic, with its navy intact and a great number of troops at its disposal overseas, could have fought on from a North African base.

He was thus correct to despise Pétain and his followers as defeatists. But he could do nothing to dislodge Pétain, who had the support of the bulk of the French people, or to drive out the occupying power. To achieve any of this, the military might of Britain, and above all of the United States, was indispensable.

Moreover, his Vichy opponents could and did argue that what de Gaulle advocated was mad and dangerous, and that it was safer for the French people to accept the harsh conditions of the armistice, with a large part of France free of occupying armies, than to go on fighting a war which would inflict new and greater suffering. Besides, the outcome of such a war was doubtful in the extreme: it looked as if the Axis powers would win, but even if they lost, France could avoid the consequences of defeat at no cost to itself. Either way, de Gaulle’s speeches and posturings could not by themselves affect the results.

The President of the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt, thought very little of de Gaulle and his Free French, considering it much better to maintain good relations with Pétain, who controlled a territory and an administration and whose authority was recognized in North Africa and other parts of the French empire. Roosevelt’s antagonism continued unabated until the Normandy landings in the summer of 1944, when the Americans actually proposed that France be administered by an Allied military government, as Italy had been after the invasion of the previous year.

By that point, however, it had become clear that this was an impracticable and foolish policy. Unlike Italy, France was not a former enemy—and anyway, the Allies had already recognized de Gaulle’s Committee of National Liberation as representing French interests. Roosevelt’s policy, whatever its original justification in 1940, now seemed merely the expression of a gratuitous hostility, and had to be abandoned.

Roosevelt’s attitude to the Free French was later responsible, in part, for de Gaulle’s own hostility, during his years of power after 1958, to those whom he called the Anglo-Saxons. Another powerful and lasting cause of his festering resentment had to do with the destruction of the French position in the Levant at the hands of the British—approved and supported by the U.S.—in 1942-45. The British invaded the two French-mandated territories of Syria and Lebanon in the summer of 1941, accompanied by a small Free French contingent. They formally recognized Free French authority there, but in a foolish and shortsighted policy from which neither they nor the populations concerned were to reap benefit, did their best to incite the local governments to defy the French mandatory power. Not only was de Gaulle unable to resist, he also had to endure the taunts of Vichy that he was the dupe or lackey of the British. This humiliation, and the powerlessness which caused it, de Gaulle was not to forget.

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De Gaulle entered Paris on August 25, 1944, and installed himself in the Ministry of War. The situation which confronted him was daunting. As the head of the provisional government of the French Republic, he had to attend to the military operations in eastern France where the German threat was far from eliminated. He had to remedy the penury to which Germans had reduced Frenchmen. He had to reestablish legality and the authority of the government in a country riven by hatreds and ferocious desires for vengeance, and where Resistance forces, mostly leftist and Communist, sought to impose themselves in those areas where they had operated.

The head of the provisional government had next to confront a range of issues which were both complicated and unfamiliar. It was no longer a simple question of standing fast against the Germans, against Vichy, against Roosevelt. It was now a matter of governing a country emerging from a ruinous foreign occupation, divided upon itself, and where the political parties which had been active in the Third Republic, and others which emerged at the liberation, were by no means willing to obey the general without question. De Gaulle, to do him justice, in no way envisaged running the country single-handedly; he was advised and assisted by a Consultative Assembly which had been set up in Algiers. Over a year after the liberation of Paris, elections were held for a Constituent Assembly.

Very soon, however, it became clear that he and the political parties in the Assembly (where the Communists were the largest group, followed by the Socialists and the Christian Republicans) were at loggerheads. De Gaulle was determined that the Fourth Republic should on no account suffer from the instability, the disorder, the anarchy promoted by party quarrels in the Third Republic, while the parties in the Assembly, the Communists in particular, resented de Gaulle and accused him of Bonapartism and dictatorial tendencies. Such a state of affairs could not last for very long. On January 20, 1946, the savior of his country, unprepared to subordinate his policies to the whims and ambitions of shifting parliamentary majorities, resigned his office.

He may have expected that the Assembly, finding itself rudderless, would recall him to power. But this did not happen. De Gaulle retired from the political scene, only to reemerge with a new political organization, Rassemblement du peuple français (Assembly of the French People), which was intended to be above and beyond the sordid factions battening on the body politic. This venture was clearly an attempt to recreate in peacetime the kind of natural solidarity called forth by the need to resist a foreign invader; as such, it was out of place in governing a polity where a multitude of interests and views were in perpetual competition.

De Gaulle’s philosophy of government was encapsulated in a speech of October 1944 which, Lacouture rightly remarks, sets out the views he was never to abandon and scarcely to modify during the quarter-century which followed. He showed himself in this speech to be a thoroughgoing dirigiste. In order to exploit the resources which belonged in common to the French people, he declared, there was no other way than “what is called the planned economy.” “We want the state,” he went on, “to direct the economic effort of the whole nation to the benefit of all.” The state must take direction of the principal sources of the wealth which was the common possession of the people, and should also supervise some of the other economic activities. (He did add that this should not exclude initiative and the quest for just profit.)

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The Rassemblement, which initially attracted a great deal of public support, proved a failure. In 1947, it won 40 percent of the vote in municipal elections, but by the 1951 general elections its vote was down to 22 percent, and in 1956 plummeted to 4 percent. In the same year an opinion poll revealed that only 1 percent of the electorate wished to see de Gaulle at the head of affairs.

Yet de Gaulle had not given up his political ambitions. In April 1954 he confided to a follower that he wanted to return to office and would undoubtedly do so. He felt confident because the French were losing the war in Indochina, and this would once again, as in 1940, open to him the gates of power.

To climb again to the supreme power, de Gaulle was counting on a catastrophe. What took place in May-June 1958 was not exactly a catastrophe—and certainly nothing in any way to compare with the debacle of 1940—but a complication of plot and intrigue, and the threat of a military coup d’état.

It had to do with Algeria. The guerrilla-led Algerian insurrection, which began in November 1954, posed a formidable threat to French rule and even to the stability of the Fourth Republic. A large army had to be sent from the metropolis, while the status of the native majority and the position of the European settlers in Algeria became a pressing political issue. Between the end of 1954 and May 1958, when the Fourth Republic came to an end, successive governments grappled with the problem. At the time and afterward, Gaullists sneered at the efforts made by these governments to end the insurrection and institute equity between natives and Europeans. Yet by the summer of 1958, when de Gaulle took over, these unstable and short-lived governments had won the “battle of Algiers,” had methodically worked to reduce terrorism elsewhere in the country, and had set up a fortified barrier on the Algerian-Tunisian frontier which the guerrillas in the so-called Army of National Liberation were powerless to penetrate.

To defeat the insurrection, however, was much less difficult than to establish an equitable and evenhanded political order. This would have to be done in the face of entrenched and determined opposition by the European settlers who had been accustomed for decades to impose their will on the administration in Algiers as well as Paris. These Europeans were by no means willing to abandon their privileged position, or to allow Paris to make changes in the governance of Algeria which might threaten their interests. Many army officers, smarting from the recent French defeat in Indochina, came to sympathize with the cause of the Europeans in Algeria, to mistrust the resolution of the government, and to fear that victory on the ground would be rendered useless by pusillanimity or worse on the part of the politicians. It is hardly surprising that the governments of the Fourth Republic had neither the means nor the time to grasp this nettle.

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Matters came to a boil in the spring of 1958. The Europeans and the French army officers in Algeria feared that a weak government in Paris would give in to U.S. and British pressure to internationalize the Algerian question. On May 13, General Salan, commander-in-chief in Algeria, supported by other senior officers, took over the headquarters of the government in Algiers and called for de Gaulle to come to power. They believed, or had been led to believe, that he sympathized with the cause of French Algeria and would become its savior.

The call for de Gaulle to take over was by no means a spontaneous development. De Gaulle, as Lacouture shows with much detail, had an organized apparatus working for him in Algiers, where his devoted followers were able to establish connections with civilian and military leaders and to spread the gospel of the savior. These agents were joined by an old and fervent Gaullist, Jacques Soustelle, who had recently been governor-general of Algeria and whose behind-the-scenes influence was crucial in ensuring that the military junta would raise the Gaullist banner. All these—Soustelle in particular—were to see themselves duped by de Gaulle’s policies after he took power.

The junta threatened that its forces would descend on Paris and oust the government there unless de Gaulle were allowed to take over. De Gaulle knew of these demands, and encouraged them both privately and publicly. Privately he evoked the prospect of parachutists occupying the National Assembly unless he were put in power, while his public declarations, in which he adamantly refused to condemn the Algiers coup d’état, served to undermine the authority and legitimacy of the lawful government.

De Gaulle’s actions during this period his sympathetic biographer calls a masterpiece of strategy and stratagem. De Gaulle, writes Lacouture (in a passage which does not figure in the English translation), had conducted much more praiseworthy operations, or ones at any rate with greater purity, but none which more eloquently showed that “there was no action taken by him, however cynical, which was not (in his own eyes) taken for the good of the state.”

This is, one supposes, the best construction that can be put on de Gaulle’s actions between May 13 and 29, when the supine parliament and the intimidated politicians nervelessly allowed power to fall from their hands. But it is very difficult to describe his behavior and his triumph as honorable.

Nor was the sequel exactly honorable. He tricked and bamboozled his most devoted followers and his military supporters, who believed that he had at heart the cause of French Algeria, when in fact, as Lacouture reveals, he had already persuaded himself that French sovereignty over Algeria had to be abandoned. There was the famous occasion in Algiers when, a few days after he came to power, he shouted to the crowd: “Je vous ai compris” (“I have understood you”). Read in the context of the whole speech, this exclamation by no means signified that he supported the notion of a French Algeria, but it nevertheless gave the impression that he was fully at one with the feelings and desires of his audience. More than once, whether carried away by the enthusiasm of the crowd, or intoxicated by his own voice, de Gaulle expressed sentiments the sense of which admitted of no misapprehension, but which he emphatically did not share. There was thus the exclamation “Vive l’Algérie française!” thrown to the crowd in another speech during the same trip, and a long passage in still another speech to the effect that for France to abandon Algeria would be a great crime. On the way back to France, however, de Gaulle told a confidant that the Europeans as well as the army officers were dreaming.

De Gaulle also tricked his own Prime Minister, Michel Debré, one of his most devoted partisans. In November 1960 the President gave an important speech on Algeria, the text of which he showed beforehand to Debré. Shortly before it was broadcast, Debré was informed of a slight change. Where the original speech had referred to an Algerian republic which had “never existed,” now it affirmed an Algerian republic that “one day will come into being.” In his memoirs, Debré describes this event as “brutal.”

De Gaulle had his way. His policy rendered nugatory the achievements of the army, which had succeeded in checkmating and neutralizing the rebellion, and handed over Algeria to the National Liberation Front (FLN). The officers who had made possible his ascension and who could not stomach what they considered a betrayal were led to attempt a coup d’état which he suppressed ferociously—as, of course, he had to.

As for the main issue in Algeria—namely, the coexistence of Europeans and native inhabitants on tolerable and equitable terms—de Gaulle settled it by abolishing it. His impatient and brutal policies handed over Algeria totally to a band for whom politics was nothing but violence (even though its violent courses on the battlefield had not been successful). The Europeans left in a panic, since there was now no one and nothing to protect them from a lawless regime: the French troops still awaiting transport back to France were forbidden to intervene and protect the Europeans, or those Algerians who had served the Republic, from molestation, rapine, and murder. Of these Algerians it is said that 100,000 were murdered at the hands of the triumphant FLN and its now proliferating camp followers. The native population, too, was left to the mercies of a despotic regime, the misgovernment, incompetence, and corruption of which during three decades have driven Algerian society and economy into the ground.

Lacouture cites a declaration made before the High Military Tribunal by one of the hundreds of officers who rose against de Gaulle’s Algerian policy in April 1961. This officer, Major Denoix de Saint Marc, took full responsibility for his own actions and those of the officers under his command. A lot, he said, can be asked of a soldier, and in particular he can be asked to die, since this is his profession. But he should not be asked to cheat, to lie, to perjure himself. When the officers decided to rise they had in mind the slogans written on walls all over the countryside, pledging that the army would remain and protect villages and encampments. And he added: “We thought of our forsaken honor.” One does not know if Major Denoix had in mind de Gaulle and his defiant gesture of June 18, 1940. That gesture too had been made for the sake of honor.

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Honor and pride naturally go hand in hand, but pride may slide into arrogance. The eleven years in power which the triumphant beneficiary of the coup d’état of May 1958 would enjoy were indeed marked by the imperiousness and arrogance of power.

De Gaulle had never liked parliamentary and party politics. The circumstances of his departure from power in 1946, the failure of the Rassemblement, and the twelve years in the wilderness which followed served to make that dislike invincible. As soon as he was installed he set in train preparations for a new constitution, in which the wings of the National Assembly were radically clipped and the President was endowed with extensive powers and in effect given control over the Council of Ministers and the Prime Minister. He was also given sweeping emergency powers, overriding and suspending ordinary laws. The Assembly, as one critic said, thus became akin to the parlements which under the monarchy had served merely to register the royal decrees sent down to them. As de Gaulle said to a confidant in April 1961: “I have reinstated the monarchy to my benefit.”

This was not enough, however. The 1958 constitution provided for the election of the President by an electoral college made up of deputies, senators, representatives from overseas territories, and regional and local councilors in metropolitan France and in overseas possessions. In September 1961, de Gaulle sprang on his government the proposal that the President should be elected by a referendum of all the voters. This required a change in the constitution which, de Gaulle also proposed, should itself be the subject of a referendum. De Gaulle’s proposal elicited disagreement within the Council of Ministers, and was defeated in the Assembly. De Gaulle dissolved the Assembly. He resolutely went ahead with the referendum and won the vote, as well as the elections which the dissolution of the Assembly had made necessary.

De Gaulle’s constitution is, so far, the last of a long procession beginning in 1790. Its chief virtue is said to be that it reduces considerably the governmental instability which was a feature of the Third, and even more the Fourth, Republic. It is undoubtedly true that the new constitution has drastically reduced the turnover of ministers in France. But whether France as a result is better governed is moot, since the government of a modern, complex polity depends, to a very large extent, on an efficient and honest bureaucracy, and much less than is commonly thought on the politicians who succeed one another, in an evanescent procession, at the head of the various administrations.

For de Gaulle, governmental instability was a consequence of the quarrels and maneuverings of the political parties which he hated and wanted to destroy. It is, however, chimerical to seek to destroy political parties in a free society—and in any case, the referendum did not succeed in preserving de Gaulle himself from political failure. Though he had tamed the parliament, in May 1968 a combination of student riots and industrial strikes so shook his position that in panic he took refuge for a day, together with his family, with the French forces stationed in Baden. The day was saved by his Prime Minister and devoted follower, Georges Pompidou, who had remained at his post in Paris. For this de Gaulle never forgave him, and Pompidou resigned shortly thereafter.

The tumults of May 1968 shook de Gaulle’s prestige profoundly. They may be said to have brought him down, as riots and tumults have brought down so many governments in French history. The following spring he insisted on a referendum on some changes in the organization of local government. He lost. The issues involved were hardly a resigning matter, but de Gaulle, who only a few months previously had affirmed that he would remain in office for the seven years to which he had been elected in 1965, abruptly resigned.

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One important consideration—perhaps the most important—which led de Gaulle to liquidate Algeria was his desire to make France into a first-class military power. His object was to enable France to pursue a Weltpolitik, a global policy. In his estimation, the Algerian entanglement greatly hampered such a project.

The project required first and foremost that France should become a nuclear power. Without nuclear armaments France, de Gaulle considered, would be unable to defend itself, and thus to pursue a foreign policy strictly geared to its own interests. France did become a nuclear power in 1960. This was two years before the liquidation of French rule in Algeria—a liquidation which, according to de Gaulle’s own logic, should therefore not have been any longer required.

At the forefront of de Gaulle’s mind in pursuing a French Weltpolitik was the humiliation of his country and of himself between 1940 and 1945; he was determined to avoid a repetition. Also, he believed it imprudent to rely on the United States for the defense of Europe. If it came to a crunch, was it conceivable that the U.S. would risk a nuclear strike to protect Paris or London? The question was reasonable, but the practical consequences which de Gaulle drew from it—that the defense of France had to be the affair of France itself—were not feasible.

Defiance of the Americans and generally of the “Anglo-Saxons” seemed now to be the guiding principle of this imperious and willful man (although in one particular case—his veto of British membership in the European Economic Community in 1963—his position made a great deal of sense in terms of French interests). In 1959, he withdrew the French Mediterranean fleet from NATO, and in 1966 he withdrew France from NATO’s military structures. On an official journey to Mexico and Latin America, he took pleasure in taunting the U.S. by a public denunciation of “hegemonies,” and by promising the crowds in Mexico City that they would henceforth walk with him hand in hand. He was, he rejoiced to one of his ministers, planting a French flag at the doorstep of the U.S. With the same imperiousness, he denounced Israel for, in effect, daring to win the Six-Day War of 1967, and that same year during an official visit to Canada he shouted to the crowd in Montreal, “Long live free Quebec!” After his retirement, while on a visit to Dublin, he drank a toast to a united Ireland.

During that visit to Dublin in 1969, the French ambassador asked de Gaulle to inscribe for him a copy of his war memoirs. Doing so, de Gaulle wrote down a quotation from Nietzsche: “Nothing is worth anything. Nothing happens, and yet everything takes place. But this is of no consequence.” The weary skepticism of this sentiment disengages, at the last, the man of power from the passions and obstinacies of a long life crammed full of prodigious peripeties, and in so transcending them, in a measure purifies and consecrates his genius.

¹ Volume I, Le Rebelle 1890-1944; Volume II, Le Politique 1944-1959; Volume III, Le Souverain 1959-1970, Editions du Seuil (Paris), 1984-86. An abridged English translation in two volumes has been published by Norton: The Rebel 1890-1944, 615 pp., $29.95, and The Ruler 1945-1970, 640 pp., $29.95.