De Gaulle

...And then he played the game so skillfully that the Word became flesh, the transubstantiation took place before our eyes...

...It is indeed the greatest historical achievement of the General to make us forget that official France actually opted first for surrender and then for collaboration and complicity with the enemy after 1940...

...I cannot, for my own part, remember whether Churchill actually made that remark, or where, or whether someone made it for him, on the principle of se non e vero e ben trovato ("if it isn't true, it ought to be...

...achieve in the way of historical sleuthing, however, is less important than the synthesis he achieves...

...To this end, teams of Anglo-American military-civilian experts, so-called, were trained and readied to take over, maintain order, and "let the people decide" after our landings in Normandy and in the south...

...The author was posted to Paris during the sixties with the rank of Minister at the British Embassy and, judging from the role he played during the Soames affair (a bizarre incident in the General's rear-guard action to control the entrance of the U.K...

...This is an interesting-and fateful-question into which Ledwidge scarcely ventures...

...What Ledwidge is thus able to H.J...

...but what we have here is the essential stripped-down historical version presented by an Englishman who (tempered, perhaps, by his own experience in India and the Middle East as a soldier and diplomat and by the prevailing winds from Whitehall, which have been moderately francophile since the Entente Cordiale) is able to understand and forgive de Gaulle's bloodymindedness towards Britain and the "Anglo-Saxons," his preferred term when he wanted to put us all in a sack...

...It is no denigration of the General's iron will and intelligence to say that this could not have happened if it had not become increasingly clear after 1943 that legitimating this new Joan of Arc would serve the Allied interest, which was to restore France and western Europe to working condition as quickly and smoothly as possible after the war...

...There are lessons for us to ponder in Sir Bernard's book, and they do not all concern the career of Charles de Gaulle...

...and to sympathize with the General's travail in presiding over the dissolution of the French empire and strengthening the Republic, in each case acting powerfully against the grain, out of a sense of the national interest that overrode his family tradition, his youthful Maurrassian ideology, his Jesuit training, indeed every other consideration...

...Against these odds, General de Gaulle not only imposed himself in North Africa (where the European population was far more petainiste than the metropolitan French) but swept all before him in France, so that Eisenhower was obliged to report to his Commander-in-Chief that tranquillity could be assured in his rear as he drove into Germany only by recognizing de Gaulle's authority forthwith...

...Jir Bernard's forbearance is so great that he never, if memory serves, gets around to quoting Churchill's famous groan to the effect that, of all the crosses he had to bear, the Cross of Lorraine was the heaviest...

...This is a twice-told tale, this implacable opposition of the American government to the Gaullist enterprise...

...Another, perhaps less well-known, was blithely to welcome and actively to further the dissolution of existing systems and structures-the old colonial empires, especially-with no clear notion of what was to take their place...

...Sir Bernard's De Gaulle is a fine and useful piece of work...

...Apart from Roosevelt's irrational personal distaste for de Gaulle, how to explain his stubbornness in pursuing a vendetta which could only complicate our relations with a nation bound to emerge as the strongest western European power after the war...

...The answer to it is rooted, I submit, in the extraordinary ignorance and naivete which we brought to the business of international relations when we were thrust -by our overwhelming economic and military preponderance-into a role that few Americans'wanted and even fewer were prepared for: the leadership of the free world...

...The General and his followers were a tiny band, too tiny in fact to wage a civil war, let alone win one-at least until the Allied armies had invaded and secured the southern littoral of the Mediterranean...

...De Gaulle was able to render this great service to his country not only because he was a political genius with a compelling program but also because the extraordinary role he had invented and played during World War II made him the arbiter of the situation-the country's "recourse, " as he liked to say-when France hovered on the brink of civil war...

...The Cross of Lorraine, in any case, was the symbol of what Charles de Gaulle first called Free France, then Fighting France, and finally-when he had returned in triumph to his country and seen it through the dicey business of disarming the Communists, only to find himself confronted with the old prewar party system-the RPF (The Rally of the French People), the movement he created to carry him back to power again...

...Churchill knew that this was nonsense, of course, but he would do nothing to jeopardize his famous "special relationship" with Roosevelt...

...into the Common Market) and the light he is able to throw on de Gaulle's mysterious behavior during the "May events" of 1968 (when some Latin Quarter distempers blew up into a tornado and almost swept the government away), had unusually good access to the Ely see palace and even, on occasion, to the aging Olympian who had made it the center of state power in France after the Fourth Republic foundered on the Algerian reef...

...In any event, it was not the RPF but the Algerian war and the threat of a military coup d'etat that made it possible for Big Charles (as the French generals called him in their conspirational communications in 1958) to administer legal euthanasia to the Fourth Republic and endow the Fifth with a constitution that has brought France a presidential government and a greater measure of stability and efficacy than the country has experienced-in freedom-since the downfall of the Old Regime...

...He merely records that Roosevelt withheld recognition from the Fighting French as long as he could, went to inordinate lengths to keep de Gaulle out of Africa, and, even when the General had clearly out-maneuvered him' and established a provisional government (recognized by all French factions except the tiny remnant committed to a German victory) in Algiers, actually persisted in planning to administer the territory of metropolitan France directly...

...It was at first an attempt to assert the presence of a real country (as opposed to the legal one embodied in the old parliamentary disorder and business-as-usual, the vices into which France invariably fell, according to the General, when she abandoned her natural posture, which was to be GREAT), but the conditions of the fifties were not propitious, the French had had enough of GREATNESS for a while, and the RPF became just one more political party in the churning parliamentary mix...

...This in itself would make our author unique among the chroniclers of Charles de Gaulle...

...Kaplan is a former Foreign Service officer and editor of Geo magazine...

...In 385 pages of lucid text, plus a bibliography and an index, he gives us a balanced sense of the man and the role he played-second to none, in my opinion, despite the paltry elements he had to work with-in shaping contemporary France and the Europe that emerged from World War II...

...an attitude that they cannot always summon up-the French in particular can rarely summon it up-when it comes to dealing with us, the nouveaux riches on the other side of the Atlantic...

...One well-known effect of that ignorance was Roosevelt's illusion about Russian postwar behavior-illusions which were finally beginning, but only beginning, to melt away under the hot sun of Yalta...

...A year later the French (who were not even invited to Yalta and thus forever after could disclaim all responsibility for the misfortunes that befell Eastern Europe) were nevertheless given a seat in the Allied Control Commission and a zone of occupation in Germany...

...Kaplan Offhand, I would hardly have nominated Charles de Gaulle as a subject crying out for biographical study, the "literature" in existence being already so considerable and the man barely cold in his grave-or so it seems to a relic like me who watched the General make a monkey of Giraud and his American sponsors in Algiers, anno 1943-but Sir Bernard Ledwidge has just demonstrated that there is always something to be learned when the right man goes over the record once more...

...He did this, first, by pretending that he was France, a pretension that Churchill was willing and able to humor and understand, especially in the dark days after Dunkirk when Britain stood alone-providing it did not get.in the way of essential operations, such as assuring that the French fleet did not fall into German hands...

...Nor does the compression of so complicated a record into so short a compass preclude occasional glimpses into the General's style and wit, his famous gouaille...

...and then he seemed to lose interest, biding his time in his Lorraine village...

...It became increasingly clear, that is, to everyone save Roosevelt and Cordell Hull...

...and on this occasion as on others he told the General as much, thereby confirming de Gaulle in his belief that the constant purpose of the'"Anglo-Saxons" was to do him-France-in...

...and Ledwidge makes no more sense of it than most historians...

...The British, like the French, have "been there," and this gives those on both sides of the Channel who can speak to each other at all a sometimes surprising forbearance, even when they are at loggerheads with each other on this or that specific issue...

...De Gaulle used it to block the movement toward a United States of Europe-ironically, because to federate Europe was perhaps France's last chance to be a truly great power on a world scale-in 1954...

...This was true of both the legal country and the real one, to revert to de Gaulle's Maurrassian terms...

...Yet de Gaulle saw to it-making an utter pest of himself in the process-that France ended the war on the victorious side...

...As for Stalin, although we have no way of knowing what he knew or thought about the political situation in occupied France, he told Roosevelt in effect that he saw no reason to allow de Gaulle and his alleged government back into the Allied camp, except in a thoroughly subordinate rote...

...He lived in Algeria and Paris during and after World War II...