Fallen Oaks

"Well, it refers to an image by a celebrated cartoonist in the Figaro, Jacques Faizant, which just showed an enormous oak tree that had been felled – no caption, just this huge oak which was the symbolic representation of de Gaulle’s death. Malraux’s book is a very epic work and he was a very epic kind of writer as well, and he had a special place in de Gaulle’s heart. He’d been a Communist sympathiser and certainly not someone you’d expect to affiliate with de Gaulle. But it was the Resistance which brought them together and after 1945 Malraux remained a passionate Gaullist all his life. His vision of Gaullism is a romantic one – he sees de Gaulle as a kind of mythical figure who belongs to a long line of French heroes like Joan of Arc, Saint-Just and Napoleon. Fallen Oaks is based on the last conversation the two men had in 1969 at Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises where de Gaulle had retired to. The key question Malraux is asking in this book is ‘What is it that makes France a great nation?’ And, according to Malraux, de Gaulle’s idea of greatness is not military force, grandiloquence or any kind of flashiness, but the idea that France stands for a set of republican values: freedom, equality, justice. He also ponders on why de Gaulle is such a great figure and it comes down to the fact that there’s an almost religious quality to him. He’s a bit like the leader of a religious cult – he’s separate, he’s solitary, but he has this ability to take ordinary events and transform them into mythical events. It’s not de Gaulle the politician that comes out of this book; it’s de Gaulle the creator of myths. Gaullism as a political force continued for another 30 years after his death but it became very conservative, very right-wing. Malraux’s book plays an important part in separating out the Gaullist myth from the political movement. The myth lives a separate life from the political movement, which is why de Gaulle’s myth is very much alive to-day, even though the Gaullist party is dead."