De Gaulle before ‘de Gaulle’

by Julian Jackson

Julian Jackson’s magnificent biography of Charles de Gaulle is the first major reconsideration in over twenty years and captures this titanic figure as never before. Drawing on the extensive resources of the recently opened de Gaulle archives, Jackson reveals the conservative roots of de Gaulle’s intellectual formation, sheds new light on his relationship with Churchill, and shows how he confronted riots at home and violent independence movements from the Middle East to Vietnam. No previous biography has so vividly depicted this towering figure whose legacy remains deeply contested. Here is a brief excerpt of De Gaulle looking at the first speech he gave on BBC Radio, when he was relatively unknown, after Germany threatened France in 1940.

De Gaulle was a voice before he was a face. He entered history through a short BBC broadcast from London on the evening of 18 June 1940. Six weeks earlier, the German army had launched its assault on France. The French were overwhelmed with extraordinary rapidity, and on 17 June the head of the French government, Marshal Philippe Pétain, announced on French radio that he would be suing for an armistice with Germany. De Gaulle’s speech the next day was a challenge to Pétain’s defeatism:

The leaders who, for many years, have been at the head of the French armies, have formed a government.
This government, alleging that our armies are defeated, has made contact with the enemy to end the fighting.
Certainly we have been overwhelmed by the mechanized forces of the enemy, on the ground and in the air.
Infinitely more than their number, it was the tanks, the aeroplanes, the tactics of the Germans which forced us into retreat. It was the tanks, the aeroplanes, the tactics of the Germans that took our leaders by surprise to the point of bringing them to where they are today.
But has the last word been said? Must hope disappear? Is the defeat definitive? No!
Believe me, I am someone who speaks to you with full knowledge of the facts and I tell you that nothing is lost for France. The same means that conquered us can one day bring us victory.
For France is not alone! She is not alone! She is not alone! She has a vast Empire behind her. She can make common cause with the British Empire which controls the seas and continues the struggle. She can, like England, use without limit the immense industry of the United States.
This war is not limited to the unfortunate territory of our country. This war is not decided by the Battle of France. This war is a world war. Despite all our mistakes, all our failure to catch up, all our sufferings, there are in the world all the means necessary one day to overcome our enemies. Struck down today by mechanized force, we will be able to conquer in the future by a superior mechanical force. The destiny of the world is at stake.
I, General de Gaulle, currently in London, invite the officers and the French soldiers who are located in British territory or who may be in the future, with their weapons or without their weapons; I invite the engineers and the special workers of armament industries who are located in British territory or who may be in future, to contact me.Whatever happens, the flame of the French resistance must not be extinguished and will not be extinguished.
Tomorrow, as today, I will speak on Radio London.

Few people heard de Gaulle’s broadcast. Nor can we hear it today because the BBC did not think it was important enough to keep the recording. De Gaulle spoke many more times over the following weeks, and increasing numbers of people started tuning into his speeches. Later they were vague in their own minds about whether they had actually heard his first broadcast, although they wanted to think they had. One future Gaullist, who was only a boy in 1940, writes in his memoirs: ‘On the evening of 18 June in the evening, in an alley bordered by holiday homes surrounded by gardens, I think I remember [my italics] having heard the speech of 18 June. The windows of the villa were open and a radio was relaying a speech which seemed unexpected to my ears.’ One person who knew he had not heard it was the writer Léon Werth who spent the Occupation deep in the French countryside. His diary charts his growing enthusiasm for de Gaulle, but he did not know what de Gaulle had said in that first broadcast until four years later when it was read out again (not by de Gaulle) on the BBC after D-Day. If Werth did not hear de Gaulle’s rst speech, it was because on that day, like millions of other French people, he was fleeing south as the Germans advanced: ‘I was near the River Loire. I only got rumours that I could pick up on the road and incoherent snatches of false information, given out by a poor radio set plugged into a car battery. So on that 18 June I did not hear de Gaulle.’ Forty years later, the President of France Valéry Giscard d’Estaing offered a contrasting memory:

As a young boy of 14, I remember hearing in our house in the Auvergne the voice of General de Gaulle. One afternoon, June 18, my uncle came to find us: ‘Come along! There is going to be something important. They are announcing a declaration of General de Gaulle.’ We sat in a semi-circle around the radio . . . We had the presentiment that the course of events had changed. For each of us, the black band that had come to cover the image of France was on that day wiped away.

Giscard was no Gaullist, and since this ‘memory’ coincided with a moment when he was desperate for the support of Gaullist politicians, it must be taken with a pinch of salt.

Few contemporary diarists refer to the speech of 18 June. One who did was the Prefect of the Paris Police, Roger Langeron, who wrote in his diary on that day: ‘Today is a great day. A voice reaches us from London.’ But the famous words he cites from de Gaulle — ‘France has lost the battle; she has not lost the war’ — were not in the speech of 18 June, even if they con- vey its essence. Those words are to be found in a proclamation which was produced as a poster by the Free French in London during July. Probably Langeron touched up his diary when it was published immediately after the war to make it seem as if he had heard the broadcast. One rare diarist who did authentically mention the 18 June speech was the art historian and future resister Agnès Humbert, who like Léon Werth had been swept up in the wave of refugees fleeing Paris. On 18 June she landed up in a small village south of Paris. Desperate for news, and luckier than Werth, she found a radio: ‘It is tuned to London. By pure fluke I find myself listening to a broadcast in French. They announce a speech by a French General. I don’t catch his name. His delivery, jerky and peremptory, is not well suited to the radio. He calls on the French to rally round him, to continue the struggle. I feel I have come back to life. A feeling that I had thought had died for ever stirs again: hope.’ Even when Humbert was told the name of the ‘French General’, it meant nothing to her. A few months later, as a member of one of France’s first Resistance groups, she found herself distributing tracts in support of de Gaulle, but she still had little idea who he was:

How bizarre it all is! Here we are, most of us on the wrong side of forty, careering along like students all red up with passion and fervour, in the wake of a leader of whom we know absolutely nothing, of whom none of us has even seen a photograph. In the whole course of human history, has there ever been anything quite like it? Thousands upon thousands of people, red by blind faith, following an unknown figure. Perhaps this strange anonymity is even an asset: the mystery of the unknown!

De Gaulle was indeed unknown to the vast majority of the French people. Where did he come from? What did he believe? What did he look like? Few people had any idea. As late as October 1942, Léon Werth, who had become a regular listener to de Gaulle’s broadcasts, was still trying to picture him: ‘I am trying to nd de Gaulle in his voice. It rst strikes me as a bit pinched. If I hated him, I would perhaps say that it was a voice wearing a monocle.’ When de Gaulle eventually arrived back in France after the Liberation in 1944, people would sometimes rush up to greet one of the more highly ranked generals accompanying him. They assumed mistakenly that de Gaulle must be a five-star general.

As the mysterious name ‘de Gaulle’ started to circulate more widely through occupied France, it was often taken to be a pseudonym. It seemed too good to be true that the General proclaiming himself France’s saviour should be called after Gaul, the ancient name of France. Such was the view of the novelist Romain Gary, if his fanciful autobiography is to be believed. Born Roman Kacew, Gary had arrived in France from Vilnius as a boy in 1928. Since his ambition was to become a ‘French’ writer, he decided to adopt a more French-sounding name, covering reams of paper with different pseudonyms. None seemed right: ‘When in 1940 for the first time I heard on the radio the name of General de Gaulle, my first reaction was one of fury because I had not thought of inventing that splendid name . . . Life is full of missed opportunities.’ Gary forgave de Gaulle for having beaten him to it, made his way to London and became a pilot with the Free French. In the first months of the Occupation, it is not uncommon to find de Gaulle’s name spelt in many different ways: ‘Degaule’, ‘Dugaul’ or simply ‘Gaul’. Even the successful Parisian lawyer Maurice Garçon, who knew everybody that counted in the French elite, had no clue to the identity of de Gaulle. He noted in his diary on 29 June 1940 that he had heard a speech by ‘de Gaule (I have not seen his name written; is that how it is spelt?)’.