The War Memoirs
“DeGaulle’s writing about politics and war is stirring and reflective, poignant and inspiring, passionate and stoic, detailed and contextual.”
“All my life I have thought of France in a certain way.” So begins Charles DeGaulle, World War I hero, promoter of mechanized warfare in the 1920s and 1930s, leader of Free French forces in World War II, and later President of France from 1958 to 1969, in his memoirs of the Second World War.
Originally released in France in three volumes by Librarie Plon between 1954 and 1959, released in America in three volumes between 1955 and 1959, then reprinted in one volume by Carrol & Graf Publishers in 1998, Simon & Schuster has once again reprinted in one volume DeGaulle’s war memoirs, which George Will called “the greatest political memoirs of [the 20th] century.”
DeGaulle’s writing about politics and war is stirring and reflective, poignant and inspiring, passionate and stoic, detailed and contextual. He saw the broad picture of global war but did not neglect the importance of unique events and important personalities. His judgments, especially about French leaders, could be harsh, but that harshness was warranted. He eschewed humility, recognizing the oversized role he played in restoring France’s honor and respect. He answered the call of history.
DeGaulle wrote that even as a child “a certain anxious pride in our country came as second nature.” It was inspired, he explained, “by sentiment as much as by reason.” This pride, this concern for the fate of France, continued into adolescence and grew as DeGaulle joined the army. Wounded in World War I, he witnessed and participated in what he called the “measureless sacrifices” that resulted in France’s victory. But victory brought only a fragile peace. France’s Marshal Ferdinand Foch presciently warned in 1919 after the Versailles Peace conference that, “This is not a peace. It is an armistice for twenty years.”
DeGaulle also recognized the fragility of the peace and lamented in his memoirs that “it was on France alone that the burden fell of containing the [German] Reich.” But politically, France was divided, suffering under 14 governments between 1932 and 1937, while militarily, though it boasted Europe’s largest army, it became in DeGaulle’s words “stuck in a set of ideas which had their heydey before the end of the First World War” and its leaders “were wedded to errors that had once constituted their glory.”
In the years leading up to the Second World War, DeGaulle proposed “an army of maneuver and attack, mechanized, armoured, composed of picked men, to be added to the large-scale units supplied by mobilization,” but France’s political and military leaders, remembering the slaughters of Verdun and the Somme, approached the gathering storm behind a physical and psychological Maginot Line.
Meanwhile, German army commanders, like Generals Guderian, Rundstedt, von Seeckt and Keitel, shared DeGaulle’s enthusiasm for mechanized warfare that emphasized maneuver and speed. It was that type of warfare that doomed France when the storm broke on May 10, 1940. “It can be said,” DeGaulle wrote, “that in a week our fate was sealed. Down the fatal slope to which a fatal error had long committed us . . .”
In the appeasement policy that both France and Britain adopted toward Nazi Germany in the mid-to-late 1930s, France, wrote DeGaulle, “played the part of the victim that awaits its turn.” When its turn came, the French government, “having neither faith nor vitality, decided in favour of the worst surrender,” which resulted not only in military defeat but also “the enslavement of the state.” “So true it is,” DeGaulle reflected, “that, face to face with great perils, the only salvation lies in greatness.”
Across the English Channel, Britain chose greatness over defeatism. Winston Churchill, who was named Prime Minister just as Germany launched its attacks against France and the low countries, overcame the appeasers in Britain and refused to parley with “that man” (Hitler). DeGaulle throughout his memoirs has high praise for Churchill, recognizing that in Churchill France had an ally who was a “fighter,” who would “not flinch” in the face of great perils.
DeGaulle admired Churchill’s character and judgment, his knowledge and his ruthlessness. He also admired Churchill’s eloquence: “the original, poetic, stirring flow of his ideas, arguments, and feelings,” that DeGaulle judged had brought Churchill “an almost infallible ascendancy in the tragic atmosphere in which the poor world was gasping.” DeGaulle concluded that “from one end of the drama to the other,” Churchill was the “great champion of a great enterprise and the great artist of a great history.”
DeGaulle was France’s champion in World War II. His memoirs are devoted mostly to his leadership of the Free French movement, a movement of courageous, patriotic French men and women in France and its larger empire who refused to surrender, who fought against Nazi tyranny with limited material resources but with an indomitable spirit. A spirit that DeGaulle fostered with his own stirring speeches that reminded French citizens that “The destiny of the world is at stake” and that “the flame of French resistance must not and shall not die.”
General DeGaulle marshaled the forces of France’s empire abroad to join the Free French movement. He insisted on France having a say in Allied strategy, much to the dismay of Allied leaders in Britain and America. He acclaimed himself France’s true leader, forming a government in exile in Algiers. He refused to allow British or American generals to command Free French forces. He conducted his own personal diplomacy with other nations. His admiration for Churchill did not extend to U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt, whose “will to power,” DeGaulle wrote, “cloaked itself in idealism.” He worried, too, that Roosevelt wanted to exclude France from a role in the postwar structure of power.
When Allied forces landed in France, Free French forces under the command of DeGaulle and other French generals joined in the liberation of their country. “We returned to France,” DeGaulle wrote, “bearing independence, Empire and a sword.” He recalled that in the campaign to liberate France, the Free French army contributed 230,000 men, including 50,000 sailors and 30,000 airmen. When DeGaulle arrived in a liberated Paris, he was “gripped by emotion and filled with serenity.” “I felt,” he wrote, “I was fulfilling a function which far transcended my individuality, for I was serving as an instrument of destiny.”
With France liberated, DeGaulle’s government established itself in Paris. Order had to be maintained. DeGaulle visited other parts of the country. He paid homage to France’s war dead, which included partisans who had waged war against the traitorous Vichy regime and the Nazis since the surrender of June 1940. Those French citizens who collaborated with the Nazis were sought out and punished, sometimes legally and other times with vigilante justice. The French nation, DeGaulle wrote, “approved their punishment, but quietly mourned these fallen children, too. . . One day tears would dry, the transgressions dim, the tombs disappear. But France would remain.”
DeGaulle’s goal after victory was to ensure that France would play a great role in the postwar world. And he wanted to ensure that France regained authority in its empire abroad, including the Far East. He decried the decisions made by Roosevelt and Churchill at Yalta, recognizing that “the rapidity of [the] Sovietization” of Central and Eastern Europe was the inevitable result of those decisions. And he decried the British electorate’s decision to end Churchill’s premiership, writing that “his countenance, etched by the fires and frosts of great events, had become inadequate to the era of mediocrity.”
That would be DeGaulle’s fate, too, at least in the immediate postwar period. But France would later call on him again in another time of peril to lead the nation as its president. DeGaulle always answered the call of history.