De Gaulle

...In The Army of the Future (1934), de Gaulle had argued that the Maginot Line "doomed France to impotence...

...The young officer, who was Charles de Gaulle, replied quietly and even modestly, "Yes, so have I." The story could serve as a leitmotif to Jean Lacouture's biography, published last year in France to mark the hundredth anniversary of de Gaulle's birth...

...We close The Rebel hoping against hope that the subsequent volume will not merely match this one in detail, but also surpass it in balance and fairness...

...Although a veteran correspondent who covered most of the big stories of postwar France, including the wars of Indochina and Algeria, and author of commercially successful biographies of Andre Malraux, Pierre Mendes-France, and Ho Chi Minh, for most of his career Lacouture was associated with the French left, who have been remarkably ungenerous and ungrateful to a man to whom their country owed so much...

...But as Lacouture shows very well, the break with Petain had actually come much earlier—over the issue of active versus passive defense against a possible German invasion...

...THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS 701 West 40th Street, Suite 275, Baltimore, Maryland 21211 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1991 37 minimize casualties in the North African landings...

...It was as head of these forces (with a rather important assist from the British and American armies) that he was eventually to enter Paris as the Supreme Liberator in 1944...

...AMERICA'S CONSTITUTIONAL SOUL Lately, Harvey Mansfield argues, Americans have begun to value the right of privacy above all others, to consider their rights entitlements, and to forget their pride in governing themselves...

...Moreover, in France itself—this is the dirty secret of the war and the Resistance—most people were Vichyite until almost the last year of the war...

...What is particularly irritating is not so much Lacouture's views as his tone...

...Lacouture lurches into an ultra-orthodox Gaullist version of the war, in which "France" and de Gaulle are virtually coterminous...

...The real problem facing American (and to some extent, British) policy was when to recognize that de Gaulle's forces had attained sufficient critical mass to be taken seriously in the high politics of the war...

...The only defense against aggression was counterattack and movement...

...The postmoderns have caused us to lose our pride in the American Constitution...

...Though little read in France, they were well known in Germany and the Soviet Union...

...This meant that, instead of mixing monumental quantities of concrete, France should have been building tanks—hundreds, if not thousands, of them...

...Lacouture seems to have taken a look at some materials in English, a language he knows well, though not Herbert Feis's Our Vichy Gamble, Sumner Welles's Time for Decision, or other works that shed a more sympathetic light on American policy toward both Vichy and de Gaulle...

...Of the Lacouture who appears in these pages it could be said, at times at least, what Jean Villars recently said about Regis Debray: that he is "un gaulliste hysterique it defaut d'avoir ite un gaulliste historique...

...They are not among those directly cited here...

...2"a hysterical Gaullist, having not been a historical Gaullist...

...Lacouture does know something about the United States—but not as much as he thinks...

...Indeed, it is de Gaulle's supreme act of defiance in 1940—while nearly 'In the recent Gulf crisis, the tiny "anti-war" movement in France, consisting of Communists, Trotskyites, Greens, Arabs (and Arabists), constantly appealed to the country's Gaullist "heritage," which the Socialist government was accused of traducing by fighting on the same side as the United States...

...HARVEY C. MANSFIELD, JR...

...This is the sad tale that Lacouture could have told so much more compellingly had he been willing to cut his Gaullism with a bit of soda and ice...

...Now, however, Lacouture (and perhaps the left in general) has gone over, bag and baggage, to the other extreme...

...In this volume, Lacouture devotes half his text to the period up to the 1940 collapse, half to the subsequent four years.' In many ways they are two quite different books: one is a biography in the best sense of the word, rich in dramatic detail, and with a good sense of the relationship between the subject and his time...

...Nor does he seem to be familiar with Raoul Aglion's ground-breaking Roosevelt and De Gaulle, published in France seven years ago...

...they will be published later this year...

...And not without serious provocation from de Gaulle—it was Churchill, remember, who said, "Of all the crosses I must bear, the heaviest is the Cross of Lorraine...

...Among other errors of fact, Alger Hiss was not a "victim of McCarthyism," nor was New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia a "Sicilian," nor was Henry Wallace the "future" vice president in 1944...

...If Americans failed to swallow the Myth of the Resistance whole, on this at least they were not misinformed, even if they sometimes arrived at their conclusions by twisted, even bizarre routes...

...As Aglion points out in his book, 85 percent of the French community in the United States was anti-Gaullist, when not Vichyite through-and-through: this included not merely the business community in New York but the French Embassy and such cultural luminaries as Andre Maurois and Antoine de SaintExupery...

...If this seems unremarkable today, when so many people in France assert false claims to having been resistants, one has to recall how few men of de Gaulle's profession, let alone education, temperament, and family background, refused to take an oath to the collaborationist Vichy regime...

...everyone else in bien-pensante France, beginning with his old mentor Petain, was falling over himself to be of service to the Nazi occupiers—that justifies the title of this volume...

...Yet all of this was but prologue to his role as the focal point of all those forces Mark Falcoff is resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute...

...Instead, Lacouture dredges up every petty resentment, every paranoid suspicion, every unfortunate misunderstanding, and wrings from each problem as much currency as he can in order to add it to the historic account of French grudges against Great Britain...

...This and the breathless, liturgical prose leave one feeling that there is more to the story than we are being told...

...Writing in the late 1980s, he finds everything so much simpler than it appeared more than four decades before...

...that refused to accept France's humiliation at the hands of the Germans...

...Imaginez-vous, then, what Lacouture has to say about de Gaulle's relations with the United States...

...This explains to a large degree why Roosevelt spent so much time cultivating Petain, and later, the Vichyite or quasi-Vichyite officers in North Africa (Admiral Darlan and General Giraud...

...It seems this point was never really reached—certainly not by Roosevelt at any time—and a subsequent generation of Americans were left to pay the bill, as they paid for so many of his other wretched policies...

...To argue so was to take on not only Petain but the entire French army establishment, which immediately recognized the threat to the enormous prestige it had invested in the Maginot concept...

...2 Is anti-Americanism the persistent link between the "old" and "new" Lacouture?' T he account of de Gaulle's early 1 life—that is, the years before 'The other two volumes, The Politician and The Sovereign, which carry the story from 1944 to de Gaulle's death in 1970, are being condensed into one...

...As a prisoner of war in Germany in 1915 and 1916, de Gaulle shared quarters with a young Russian captain who would later become Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky...

...It is all too easy to forget that, for much of the time between 1940 and 1944, de Gaulle's "fighting France" was a very small France indeed...

...armed with the foreknowledge of de Gaulle's later greatness, he artificially (and wrongly) reduces the dimensions of all his wartime contemporaries...

...0 38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1991...

...36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1991 1940—is rich in unexpected (and often contradictory) details...

...As for Petain himself, he now spoke of his former protege only as "an ambitious man, and very ill-bred...

...Like most French officers, de Gaulle was drawn to the right politically, but as a military reformer, he had more in common with men of the center and the moderate left, who were willing to listen to his proposals...

...it was by their attitude to the proceedings of the Nazis that he judged them...

...In the 1920s de Gaulle began to write on military topics, and his books, particularly The Edge of the Sword and The Army of the Future, established him as an unusually learned and cultured exponent of armored warfare...

...My dear fellow," he said, "I have a curious feeling that you are intended for a very great destiny...

...A tale of this type must be projected on a very large canvas, and Lacouture does not always maintain an adequate sense of proportion...

...The rest of the story is how de Gaulle I gathered up a handful of demobilized soldiers, proscribed intellectuals, and out-of-work parliamentarians and created something he called la France fibre, and then la France combattante...

...It was in this capacity that he flew to London for the first time, to try to persuade the British to throw in more forces rather than withdraw at Dunkirk...

...De Gaulle deserves no less...

...The decision to work with Darlan was also inspired by a desire to 4Are are promised a complete bibliography in the second volume (yet to come), so it is possible that these works were consulted...

...When we have devoted so much effort to the building of a fortified barrier," said War Minister Gen...

...If de Gaulle had died in late 1940, he would still merit a significant mention in the history of the French army for his brilliant career as a cadet at St-Cyr, a distinguished combat record in the First World War, military attache in Poland, member of the French general staff, professor at the Ecole de Guerre, officer in Syria and in new model field units in France, author of a strategic doctrine of armored mobility, leader of the desperate effort to resist the German invasion in June 1940, and veteran of Dunkirk...

...It mattered little to him," Lacouture writes, "whether someone belonged to the right or the left...

...The nicest thing that can be said about his policy toward France and de Gaulle was that it was downright wrong...

...Louis Maurin, "is it to be supposed that we should be mad enough to go outside that barrier, in pursuit of who knows what adventure...

...The most exciting chapters deal with the period 1935-40, during which de Gaulle, having disentangled himself from the pátainiste military establishment, quietly, patiently, and persistently worked the French parliament and press on behalf of his ideas, He was ultimately rewarded by premier Paul Reynaud in the spring of 1940 with a temporary promotion to brigadier general and a position as undersecretary of state in the Ministry of War...

...Iagree with Lacouture's interpreta- tion of FDR—that, when it came to European politics, he was a fool, and a dangerous fool at that...

...And if, as Lacouture says here, the moguls grew tenfold between January and August 1944, might one be permitted to connect this less to growing opportunities for action than to a correct reading of the signs of the times...

...the second is a prolix, scrappy, contentious (and often tedious) history of French-American and French-British relations during the Second World War...

...In essays on the Reagan "revolution," the conservative movement, religion, affirmative action, the media, and the separation of powers, one of America's leading political theorists and most penetrating thinkers on the Constitution describes what's wrong with American politics today—and what can be done about it...

...Conversely, at a time when virtually nobody in France had even heard of the Nazi party, de Gaulle had already read Arthur Moeller van den Bruck's prophetic book Das dritte Reich, which appeared in 1923, the year of the Munich beerhall putsch...

...Though his father was a typical conservative Catholic of the Third Republic, he was also a Dreyfusard...

...The final two hundred pages read like a lawyer's brief intended to justify the great Frenchman's subsequent (at times nearly pathological) anti-Americanism...

...Would that this had been the case...

...Even so, the case against Washington's "Vichy gamble" is not nearly as one-sided as this book makes out...

...Though de Gaulle was unsuccessful, he made a strong impact on Churchill, who knew a good man when he saw one...

...It did not turn out well for me...

...Thus was forged a relationship that would change the course of French history and, indeed, the course of the Second World War...

...A more generous interpretation would have congratulated Churchill on having staked his prestige and resources on such a long-shot, and stuck with his investment through thick and thin...

...When de Gaulle graduated from St-Cyr and was posted to his first infantry regiment in Arras in 1911, his commanding officer was Colonel Philippe Petain—who would sponsor his rapid ascent in the officer corps, only to sign his sentence of death in absentia twenty-nine years later...

...29.95 Mark Falcoff O ne day during the 1920s, a senior French general sat down under a tree at the Ecole de Guerre with one of his students, a field-grade officer, to refresh himself during a break between maneuvers...

...If FDR was wrong in his judgment of individuals (seeing anti-German Vichyites where for all practical purposes none existed), and particularly wrong in his belief that de Gaulle was a fascist, he was helped to reach those conclusions by Alexis Leger, former permanent undersecretary of the Quai d'Orsay, who had taken refuge in Washington and was regarded as little less than an oracle on French affairs...

...As late as April 1944 the perfidious Petain was welcomed by friendly crowds in occupied Paris...

...The Johns Hopkins Series in Constitutional Thought: Sotirios Barber and Jeffrey Tulis, Series Editors $25.95 hardcover Available at your bookstore or call 1-800-537-5487...

...In fact, his campaign for a Franco-Soviet pact in 1935, his denunciation of the Munich accords, and his eventual willingness to throw in with the defiant and near-defeated British led the royalist Action Francaise to denounce him as a warmonger...

...And let there be no mistake about it: this is a book about a truly extraordinary man...

...First of all, the great fear of both Britain and the United States after 1940 was that the French fleet, then among the world's largest and most modern, would fall into Axis hands...

...Never did I take so much care of any young officer," the old marshal summarized the relationship in his last days of captivity and disgrace...

...General Henri Giraud was only slightly less wounding: "Colonel de Gaulle's ideas may be brilliant, but they are the kind that may make us lose the next war...