Everything for France

By Donald Morrison

CHARLES DE GAULLE: A BIOGRAPHY by Don Cook: Putnam; 432 pages; $22.95

Shortly after World War II, one the heaviest smokers in French government abruptly gave up cigarettes. "I have succeeded in sticking to it by telling everyone I was not smoking any more," he explained gravely. "De Gaulle cannot go back on his word."

Who else but the speaker ever took himself quite so seriously? The man who rescued France from ignominy in World War II and from constitutional paralysis afterward was not always as good as his word, much to the exasperation of his wartime Allies and the puzzlement of his countrymen. But as Don Cook, longtime Paris bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times, points out in this robust, unsentimental biography, Charles de Gaulle never deviated from the idea that animated his entire career. As he once summed it up, "France cannot be France without greatness."

De Gaulle appointed himself guardian of that greatness at an early age. His father had fought in the Franco-Prussian War, and Charles grew up in Lille and Paris during the period of Prussian pre-eminence following France's loss. Determined to help restore la gloire, he won admission to the prestigious St.-Cyr military academy, where he stood out for his arrogance and scholarship as well as for his height (6 ft. 5 in.). As an officer in the late 1920s, he insisted on wearing his beret tilted unconventionally to the right, and championed the superiority of tanks to fixed defenses, an unfashionable notion in the France of the Maginot Line. When his homeland was invaded in 1940 De Gaulle, then 49, put his theories into action: he threw together an armored division and won two important battles against the Germans before they overwhelmed the French positions.

As France fell, the general fled to Britain and, with less than $500 in his treasury, proclaimed himself leader of the Free French forces. Most of his countrymen--including 90% of the 2,000 French soldiers who had been evacuated from Dunkirk--ignored him, remaining loyal to the Vichy regime of Marshal Philippe Petain. Cook summarizes De Gaulle's monumental presumption: "A marshal of France and head of government had ordered French soldiers to lay down their arms before the enemy. A brigadier general virtually unknown outside military circles was refusing to obey, and compounding this disobedience by calling upon others to join him."

Yet just four years later, De Gaulle marched into Paris triumphant, the unchallenged leader of France. How did he do it? With threats, bluster and a deafness to the word no. De Gaulle cajoled enough weapons from the Allies to arm the Free French troops, 7,000 of whom had been recruited by midsummer 1940. When he felt that Churchill and Roossevelt were neglecting him, he courted Stalin and threatened to send French forces to the Soviet front. Shut out of the planning for Dday, he retaliated by creating his own civil administration for liberated France. In the end, the general extracted just about everything he wanted from the Allies, a feat that won him the enmity of F.D.R. and the grudging admiration of Churchill. When someone suggested that De Gaulle was un grand homme, Churchill sputtered for many colleagues, "A great man? Why, he's selfish, he's arrogant, he thinks he's the center of the universe ... He ... Yes, you're right, he's a great man!"

Just how great became more evident after the war. By sheer persistence, De Gaulle won France a mostly undeserved role as an equal to Britain, the U.S. and the Soviet Union in tidying up Europe after V-E day.

When the French people ignored his warning about giving too little power in the 1946 constitution to the presidency, he gracefully retired. Twelve years and 24 governments later, De Gaulle returned to save France from civil war over Algeria. He eventually gave the rebellious, predominantly Muslim province its independence, earning the animosity of the pied-noir settlers and the rightist supporters of Algerie francaise who plotted to kill him. (One assassination attempt inspired Frederick Forsyth's 1971 thriller The Day of the Jackal.)

At the same time, De Gaulle made the world defer to France as no leader had since Napoleon. He withdrew his country from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's command structure, gave France its nuclear force de frappe and blocked Britain's entry into the Common Market To many countrymen, he was merely demanding the respect a great nation deserved. To others, he was being thin-skinned and dictatorial. Indeed in ten years after De Gaulle returned to power, Cook reports, his government obtained 350 convictions under an old law against "insulting the head of state," up from three in the preceding 14 years. De Gaulle's Sun King tendency to equate himself with France's destiny led to his undoing. After the student and worker protests of May 1968, he demanded a referendum to confirm his mandate. He lost, resigned the presidency and retired to his home in the Lorraine village of Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises. De Gaulle died less than two years later, at 79, while playing solitaire.

It was a poignant end to a solitary life. De Gaulle's strength was a loner's dogged refusal to compromise his vision of France's potential. His weakness was an inability to compromise at all. His refusal to cooperate with NATO diminished France's security as well as that of all of Western Europe; his foot dragging on Britain's entry into the Common Market probably hurt the French economy as much as it helped. Cook is more conscientious than many De Gaulle biographers in noting those failings and, with his journalist's gift for detail, in describing the general's appalling pettiness. Suspicious of British Intelligence, he once fired all the Britons on his wartime staff in London, down to the cleaning woman. Cook presents a lively mosaic of a man so confident, so innocent of personal corruption, so effective in getting his way that his lack of warmth seems only a minor flaw. "For him," the author writes, "the pursuit of power was much too serious a matter for the intrusion of laughter or pleasure." De Gaulle's career may have been an ordeal for his contemporaries, but in Cook's hands it has become a delight for readers. --By Donald Morrison

Excerpt

On one occasion in those early years, a young fellow officer ventured in a rare moment of conversational reflection when they were out on a maneuver to say to De Gaulle: 'Man cher ami, I am going to say something that will probably make you smile, but I have a curious feeling that you are heading for a very great destiny.' To this, De Gaulle simply gazed out into the distance and replied with toneless thought: 'Yes, I do too' . . . De Gaulle himself wrote: 'Solitude was my temptation. It became my friend.

What else could satisfy anyone who has been face to face with history?' . . . De Gaulle's humor, such as it was, was invariably sardonic, mordant and consisted largely of put-down remarks or pointed barbs.

When one of his supporters, D'Astier de la Vigerie, once ventured to tell him that friends of his were worried about some particular government policy, De Gaulle's response was: Then, mon cher D'As-- tier, change your friends!'