De Gaulle: The Tragic Poet Magnifying...

What did Charles de Gaulle have in common with the man who had left France four years earlier (as war began), a half-clandestine traveler into the impossible, clinging to the raft of the vanquished, more an actor than a general, more illegal than heroic, more of a scandal than a prophet?

From failure to rejection, condemned by Vichy, made game of by the eminent, reviled by his equals, denied by Roosevelt, disowned by Churchill, he had survived and increased in size; he had mastered fate. And now, shaped for four years on end by the most dangerous “surge of history” ever faced by a man sailing the high seas in a cockleshell, here he was, turned into himself at last by the trial.

We know that he had never doubted that he would be at the head of “French affairs.” At first he had surprised people: that mythical name coming from the remotest ages, that voice, now strident and now deep, that came with its horn and trumpet tones from the other side of the sea, making its way through fogs and jamming. Then he had moved, a pathetic watchman who, not content with standing upright, sent true reasons for hope through the darkness.

He had also angered some with his conscientious presumption and his denial of an obvious collective collapse that went much farther and deeper than the humiliations of field-gray uniforms on the Champs-Elysees. And lastly he had convinced them, when he, the emigre, had obtained an undeniable vote from the fighting-men inside the country.

And here he was at last, marching toward his consecration through a landscape of ruins and barbed wire, in a confused noise made up of shrieks from torture-chambers and the song of the resistants, the uncompromising bearer of a hieratic legitimacy.

The Republic could not wait to be proclaimed by his voice--even though it might fear being stifled under his weight. All he had to do was to appear, spread his prodigious antennae and speak with his vibrant, crusade-preaching voice for Coutances, Rennes, Chartres and Paris.

In the first place, it was the giant who struck the people’s imagination. This height of rather more than six feet, four inches stalking above the ordinary motions of his contemporaries attracted the attention of the most indifferent. Curious windmill motions, surprising jerks, strange lurches.

“An odd-looking fellow” is a usual description of someone out of the ordinary. No words could suit him better. Merely by walking into a room, merely by standing, high above the crowd, his arms like Maypole ribbons, he was continually making people stare. If only the ground were suitable, as it was near Montcornet in May, 1940, for example, he saw fit to increase his height by standing on some knob, bank or mound, thus adding more layers of air between the eyes of those addressing him and his own. Thunderbolts ought to come from on high.

Then his face. Whether or not it was crowned by that kepi in the shape of an imperfect tube that the French army inflicts upon its higher ranks, it was rich in unlikely planes and above all in a nose whose Bourbonian proportions seemed all the greater for being directed at his opponent like a gun-barrel, a nose so large that it took away from the chin’s asperity and made the beholder forget the forehead bordered with brown locks that seemed to have been plastered flat by some imaginary rain.

Did this unusual body distress him? He paid no attention to it, feeling neither heat nor cold and being very insensitive to pain--pain arising from wounds between 1914 and 1916 but not from illness, which he was almost always spared.

He did not mind bad weather. He had a good appetite; he ate fast, drank moderately and could do without food for long periods.

This great frame in which he housed his great dream did not inconvenience him. Indeed, he thought it had certain advantages: It turned him into a semaphore, giving his gestures such as the V formed by his arms, a superhuman dimension.

He was a soldier. Up until the period we have reached, August, 1944, he was in no hurry to take off his uniform, even when it was a question of charming foreign political leaders or statesmen, and he wore mufti only with his family. He took pleasure in the straps, accouterments, sword-belts, boots and leggings--everything that irks an ordinary man. It was in vain that he despised his colleagues: He found it hard to suppress the reflexes of his caste, he loved going back to the staff-officer’s style, drafting communiques, using the barracks vocabulary.

It is true that war is never anything but the most convulsive form of politics. This he both said and wrote. And in the order of values he set the writer above the great civil servant and the great civil servant above the officer. But after all, that was where his profession lay. Although he had no great esteem for military men, he valued warriors highly indeed. He had chosen the profession of arms, he had exercised it with passion and it was a calling that he still loved enough to keep his most savagely sarcastic remarks for it.

He was a politician. He was ambitious in his views, clever in his proceedings, relentless in execution, attentive to circumstances; his only inhibition was that “idea” he had conceived of France, as upright as a cathedral spire, an idea that gave his bearing a stiffness. A great project is of course fitting for a great politician. But even so he must know how to avoid becoming its prisoner; he must be able to cast about, to try other doors, to follow other scents.

He was an intellectual: A man whose life, decisions and acts were inspired and motivated by ideas. Of course, this man of action strongly distrusted doctrines and applied himself to a proper evaluation of circumstances. As he saw it, doctrines were harmful in that they caused the free motion of ideas to coagulate into systems. This Machiavellian was an idealist who, paying great attention to the real, rendered it conceptual by a continual effort of will. In those famous words which serve as his motto forever, “All my life, I have formed a certain idea of France,” the key words seems to be “formed.” Inspired by an idea, certainly; but by an idea that he had formed for himself, that he had carved according to his own image, an exacting, proud, inaccessible idea.

A realist? Undoubtedly in immediate aims and procedures and where the strategy was longsighted only to correct the general myopia that prevailed all around him in the government, the institutions, his colleagues, the world at large. But he was a realist who imagined, one who with his powerful hands manipulated, kneaded and dealt with data that his inventive spirit had already shaped.

Many of his colleagues who had seen the pitiless roughness of his conduct have doubted whether so savage a fighter can have been a good Christian. . . .Yet it may be observed that, at the end of 1940, when a London public-relations agent asked him to give a description of himself, the second phrase in his self-portrait was “I believe in God.” And we may take notice of his reply when his nephew Michel Cailliau asked him whether his great scheme was compatible with religious belief: “I am a Christian by history and geography.”

Lastly he was an artist. The writer never resigned in him although he wrote with difficulty, crossing out and rephrasing his sentences. Was he looking for subjects worthy of him? “De Gaulle is a man who never stops scribbling drafts of his memoirs, wherever he is,” observed Ambassador Jean Chauvel, a man who had watched him with great indulgence.

“I do not speak without a purpose,” he used to say. And it is true that when he seized the remains of a slaughtered country with the intention of bringing it back to life and restoring at least the outward show of its greatness, he found nothing better than words.

From behind those words that he had been launching like so many bottles into the sea, these four years past, the French were to see a body and a face come into sight. But though the words were thus incarnated, it was still words that were to lead the nation, words hammered out and put together by a tragic poet who seemed to be concerned with magnifying France solely to make a tottering history suit his majestic style.

1990, Editions du Seuil 1984, 1990. Translation 1990, William Collins and Sons Ltd. Reprinted with permission of W.W. Norton & Co., Inc.

BOOK REVIEW: “DeGaulle: The Rebel 1890-1944” by Jean Lacouture” is reviewed on Page 4 of today’s Book Review section.