De Gaulle
Cosgrave, Patrick
"De Gaulle" Two IDEAS, and no more, dominate the European understanding of relations between states as it has developed since the end of the Middle Ages. The first is the idea of raison d'etat, according to...
...Gaullist propagandists have argued the General's prevision of tank war, and made him a prophet of the form...
...and another series of tensions within each idea...
...Crozier's book...
...this phrase has many meanings—the favorite British one describes the holding of the balance between combinations by a disinterested power, namely Britain—the most important of which for the purpose of this review is that suggesting the tendency of any sophisticated system of states to come to a balance and remain at peace...
...It was one of the General's favorite quotations...
...That was a vital debate for the French, not so much because Petain, de Gaulle's patron, had won a battle in the First World War, but because Weygand, the commander who lost the battle of France, had written a book about Turenne, praised that commander's challenge to the defensive orthodoxy of his time, and himself crumbled into defense when faced with the German challenge...
...Patrick Cosgrave...
...He achieved the success it stated...
...Crozier takes a close-up view of his own times...
...Crozier, in his account of de Gaulle's fight against the orthodoxy of the Maginot Line, tells us little about these internal stresses within the French military systemWeygand, after all, was once de Gaulle's commander in Poland...
...Crozier, however, does not deal with even the first period—from the flight to England to the end of the war—either adequately or historically...
...The foremost original theoretician of raison d'etat was Machiavelli: of the balance of power, the Englishman Overbury...
...It is in the nature of noble hearts," said Lacordaire, "to discover the essential necessity of the times in which they live and to devote themselves to meeting it...
...In truth, what de Gaulle contributed to the theory of modern warfare has little to do with that subject itself, and much to do with the history of French ideas about strategy...
...The second is the idea of the balance of power...
...Actually, they did lose it, but de Gaulle got it back...
...only in Chapter Five ("A Prophet Ignored") does Crozier offer a controversial view of de Gaulle's contribution to the theory of mechanized warfare...
...and learned from it...
...But he announces in Volume One the intense hostility to the General's ideas which he will delineate in Volume Two...
...Crawley is large and dull, Sulzberger light and trivial, Crozier ramshackle...
...That hostility is based on a conviction that de Gaulle, between 1958 and the end of his reign, betrayed the Western alliance by fooling around with Communist powers...
...and most of what he did was good...
...This is, then, an unsatisfactory book...
...De Gaulle's contribution in the thirties was to suggest that modern methods of war open the way to an intelligent offensive...
...There is, evidently, a series of tensions between these two ideas...
...and in de Gaulle's development of that capacity to extremes...
...Most of the book merely repeats what we know...
...Nothing of this intellectual background to de Gaulle appears in Mr...
...but, because of the resistance of the Anglo-Saxon mind to the high style, we need, it seems, a French pen to describe how he did it...
...De Gaulle read Weygand's book...
...Later historiansnotably Alastair Horne—have pointed out the vagueness of de Gaulle's ideas, and the postwar revision of Towards the Army of the Future was designed to make them more precise...
...have been able to manipulate their tensions—Richelieu, Bismarck, Salisbury, and de Gaulle...
...The question that remains is why no Anglo-Saxon has yet written a good study of de Gaulle—something which, for example, could be compared to Tournoux's Peltain et de Gaulle, or La Tragedie du General...
...In the seventeenth century Turenne overthrew ideas favoring caution in battle and, since then, the French have oscillated between offensive and defensive strategic postures...
...True, one gathers from his preface that his publishers have cut the work in half—arbitrarily and wrongly, as that preface implies...
...One must not review a second volume before it has appeared—though I am, I think, entitled to record my own view that de Gaulle did much more, and was more important, in his second period than in his first...
...Crozier is more in line with the Gaullists than with Horne, but he had a chance to sum up, and declined it, almost as though he were ignorant of the existence of the debate...
...The first is the idea of raison d'etat, according to which a statesman may break any rule—moral or other—in the interest of his country...
...The answer seems to lie both in our inherent resistance to the capacity of the French mind to combine logic and mysticism, objectivity and personality, at a very high level of tension...
...Within the history of modern Europe only four statesmen have understood the two ideas, and...
...the General looked at history in a longer perspective...
...In 1940 they favored the defensive—and nearly lost their country...
...In 1914-1918 they favored the offensive élan of Plan 17—and lost millions of men...
Vol. 8 • October 1974 • No. 1
