The man in studio B-2
Frank Johnson
Charles de Gaulle: A Biography Don Cook (Secker and Warburg £15) The French Army and Politics: 1870-1970 Alistair Horne (Macmillan £15, £4.95) De Gaulle was among other things inflexible, intransigent, a prima don- na, self-centred, obsessed with personal prestige, honour and rank, and from an early age had an unusual sense of personal destiny. Or so suggest all the biographies, including this one from the veteran Paris correspondent of the Los Angeles Times.
The books, and all those television historical series, further agree: after 1918, those Third Republic politicians are at their games again, and Germany remains a problem. Tanks, and a small, professional army, are the answer, according to the writings of this young officer who is self- centered, obsessed etc., and unusually tall. His advice is taken but unfortunately by the Germans. Before we know where we are, we are at 1940. Boom! Boom! De Gaulle reaches a microphone in studio B-2 of Broadcasting House, London. He per- suades a sufficient number of people that he is France, including above all himself. After a while, the scene changes to North Africa in early 1943.
De Gaulle sees off General Giraud. Who? Giraud! He too wanted to be France. He was `conscious of his own prestige' and Inflexible' (Jean Monnet, quoted by Mr Cook). He is a `prima donna . . . intransigent. . . obsessed with person- al prestige, honour and rank'. (Mr Cook himself). Indeed, see opening paragraph of this review. Also, according to Monnet, he is `tall'. Probably too, he had from an early age an unusual sense of personal destiny. There was, then, more than one of them about.
But most of us have known many de Gaulles. De Gaulle is a stock human type. Even the prophetic writings are not un- usual. In the various shops, offices and factories in which most of us have worked, a familiar figure has been the self-centred obsessive who writes long memos to the chairman explaining what the firm needed. Always, the Main figure ignores the stuff. Sometimes the writer is correct. More often, he is a bore.
Mr Cook quotes a fellow officer, out on a manoeuvre with De Gaulle: 'Mon cher ami, I'm 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.' De Gaulle: `Moi aussi.'
This is one of life's routine p'eces of dialogue. Indeed, at Eton, Holland Park Comprehensive or the new intake of the House of Commons, the number of youths giving De Gaulle's reply to the remark of the fellow officer probably exceeds the number playing the role of the fellow officer.
Well into the war, the likelihood re- mained that in the 1950s and 1960s stran- gers would have him pointed out to them in the tabac at Colombey: 'See that tall fellow over there. Tried to make a broadcast from London in 1940. Claimed he was France. Of course, the concierge at the BBC wouldn't let him in.' Why did De Gaulle achieve such feats as outwitting rivals such as Giraud, returning in 1958, and being so constantly magnificent? Mr Cook, and other biographers, say he was very clever.
Giraud, they all agree, was stupid. The rest of us may suspect that, because Giraud had the support of the Americans, de Gaulle was easily able to incite the communists and the extreme Gaullists against him. De Gaulle obviously was clever. But what made him different from all the other de Gaulles that one meets was luck. That was why he became de Gaulle in the end — unlike, for example, Mr Enoch Powell. De Gaulle was lucky in that Churchill gave him the BBC microphone before realising how troublesome he would become; lucky in that the crisis that broke the Fourth Republic came after only 13 years, some- thing which took 65 years to happen to the similarly constituted Third Republic. Does his luck mean that he was not great? Surely not. Why should the one preclude the other? But we can now see that his greatness lay in his genius as a domestic French politician: in the verY skills he despised in others. It required a political genius to convince French voters that France still made things happen to the rest of the world. Such prestige enabled him to establish and preserve his true monument, which was not his foreign policy — most of which has been aban- doned by his successors — but France's only good constitution. Being an American, Mr Cook uses 'mad' to mean angry rather than insane, as in 'the haughtier de Gaulle got, the madder Roosevelt got' (page 99), and 'Churchill got all the madder' (page 166). British readers should be tolerant of such usages when, as here, they are part of a straight- forward and, in the best sense, American version of a devious European subject' This is the Anglo-Saxon version of de Gaulle, the best such biography so far,. Other versions are permissible, so with' guous are these de Gaulle figures. In 90 lucid pages (the book was original' ly the Lees-Knowles Lectures in Military Science at Trinity Cambridge), Mr Hornef tells us all we need to know about one ei those subjects which are important, hit' which we do not want to go on readiq about. There are limits to the charm of nit those Weygands and Gamelins. On this subject, too, there has been unanimity: France collapses in 1940 be cause of too much loafing, scandal, wine- consumption and Maurice Chevalier: t. 'ooh-la-la' version of the disaster. lvt'e Horne gives this version its due. But II brings out the immense difficulty, at a times since 1870, of France containing Germany. I believe that France fell in 1940, because no amount of de Gaulle: reorganised tank formations could han, beaten a bigger neighbour for whom tu: greatest pleasure in life was war — than pleasure. And no amount of ell Gaulles could get rid of the occupier. The,_ took an invasion led by Mr Cook's comln, riots, upsetting though it was for Al' Cook's subject. Nth.;
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