The Complete War Memoirs of Charles de Gaulle

"The title of the book comes from one of the most famous sentences he ever wrote, ‘All my life I’ve had a certain idea of France.’ That’s the opening sentence. He wrote the memoirs in the 1950s when he was out of power. He’s writing them for a very explicit purpose, which is the creation of his own legend. It was a piece of very self-conscious mythmaking. It was making him into the central figure of what happened in France between 1940 and 1944. For example, he rather underplays the role of the internal resistance, and many resistors much resented the fact that de Gaulle didn’t give them enough space. But the story he wanted to tell was really about the military resurrection of France. The memoirs are in three volumes that came out successively in 1954, 1956, and 1959. The first one is called L’appel , The Call , referring to the call he made in London on the BBC for the French to resist, but also to the call of history that calls on France’s saviour to save the country — that’s de Gaulle. So there’s an ambiguity there. The second volume is called Unity and the big theme of the second volume is the way the French, dispersed and unhappy in occupied France between 1942 and 1944, gather together around the saviour figure who’s in London. And then the third volume is called Salvation . It basically covers the period from ’44 when he comes back to France up to his retirement in ’46. The story in that volume is that he offered the French salvation: he saved them and then they rejected him. So it’s a kind of redemptive story from the fall in 1940 to the offer of salvation by the saviour who is later spurned. So he writes this epic story in retirement as a way of re-inserting himself back into French consciousness. It’s not exactly a piece of propaganda, but it is a piece of conscious mythmaking with a purpose. What is the idea of France? Who knows? That’s one the mysteries in a way, because he never says what his idea of France is and you have to intuit it. The phrase probably comes from a writer who much influenced him, Maurice Barrès, who was a nationalist writer at the turn of the century. But he never defines this idea, because it is un-definable. I say somewhere in the book that de Gaulle is an existential nationalist, not an essentialist nationalist. Where, for example, the Vichy regime wanted to recreate a certain kind of rural, Catholic France of tradition inspired by certain profoundly conservative ideas, de Gaulle didn’t want to preserve a particular kind of France in aspic. He wanted to preserve a France that was — another key word he uses — in the front rank (‘ rang’ ). When I say he’s an existential nationalist, I mean he sees the relationship between nations as a continuous fight, and France has always got to be top, or near as top as can be, and that might involve change. So he’s not someone who’s holding onto an image of the past, he’s holding to an idea, not of what France is, but of the place that France should have in the world, which isn’t quite the same thing. One of his other famous phrases is that ‘France must marry her century.’ So he wasn’t holding on to an idea of an eternal, unchanging France, he was holding onto an idea of where France needed to be, and if to be there France had to change he was absolutely ready to change. That’s a good question in the sense that volumes 1 and volumes 2 are written when he’s in the desert, to use the Gaullists’ biblical terminology. Volume 3 is almost finished at the moment he comes back to power in 1958. So, astonishingly, aged nearly 70, he found the energy in the first summer of his period as president to finish volume 3, which comes out in 1959. It ends talking about the French looking for a ray of hope and, by the time it’s published, the ray of hope has materialized — he’s in power!"

"There are three volumes, and they’re very readable. There are portraits in there of all the great characters de Gaulle encountered – Churchill, Stalin , Roosevelt. He’s very generous. Despite the fact that he was at heart Anglophobic and thought the British would screw the French if they possibly could. He believed Churchill only helped France because it was in Britain’s interest to do so. When de Gaulle turned up in London and said, ‘I now speak for France’, it was almost an absurd situation – France had a legally appointed government headed by a distinguished old soldier, Marshal Pétain, and a lot of people in England and America thought de Gaulle was off his rocker, crazy, delusional. In the Memoirs de Gaulle has a sentence: ‘Faced with the political disaster, I had to become France.’ He sort of carries the country on his shoulder – and that’s what Churchill saw. Although de Gaulle was actually a little delusional – perhaps you have to be in such situations – he was driven by this greater sense that only a free sovereign France could restore the nation’s pride and sense of purpose … and that he was the man to do it. At the same time there was also a kind of modesty about him, humility even, and that comes out very clearly when you look at the way the French commemorate the Resistance after 1945. Even when de Gaulle is in power there’s no a huge fanfare – he never wants it to be about him but about all those anonymous heroes Kessel had written about."