FRANCE: The Symbol

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Among the ruined olive groves and the drab, pathetic rubble of small Italian towns, exultant Frenchmen with glittering eyes were rubbing out the memory of June four years ago. Down the dusty, twisting road from the ancient hill village of Esperia, toward Monticelli and the pockmarked Liri Valley, buzzed a jeep with the shield of a general of France. “Voila le grand Charlie!” sweaty Frenchmen shouted to one another, and froze in proud salute.

The awkward, gangling lubber beside the driver gravely touched his two-star cap. General Charles de Gaulle, Commander in Chief, had come to watch his countrymen redeem themselves in the fierce last round of the battle for Italy. For the Frenchmen and noncoms (if not for the dark Goums, shiny Senegalese and swarthy Algerian riflemen who fought with them) it was the start of the battle for France.

Back in Algiers De Gaulle observed: “The battles are just beginning.” He meant the military battles; his political battle was near its climax.

Last week the French Committee of National Liberation and the 100 earnest, arguing men who make up its Consultative Assembly formally declared themselves the Provisional Government of the French Republic. That made the slope-shouldered, big-boned man with the pursed mouth and the melancholy eyes the Provisional Premier-President of what he calls the Fourth Republic. The Committee became a Cabinet, the Assembly a sort of Chamber of Deputies—though without the power to legislate: the Assembly could only advise. The symbolic power of Gaullism had triumphed over the doubts and fears of the U.S., of Britain, of a vocal minority of Frenchmen.

Question Mark. Those doubts and fears still existed. In fact, they had never been larger.

One simple fact about De Gaulle and the people of France might dispel some of the doubt. This fact is that De Gaulle the man does not amount to a great deal —now. The De Gaulle who counts is De Gaulle the symbol—the half-seen, half-known figure who to millions of Frenchmen personifies the French will to survive, to kill Germans, to lay Germany forever low, to restore France to greatness.

For the immediate purposes of France and of most Frenchmen in France, that fact makes nonsense of all the questions about De Gaulle. Is he a democrat? A Fascist? A megalomania with an appetite for personal power, whatever the label? A natural born, latter-day First Consul—a Fourth Napoleon? Tough old Rightist Republicans like Louis Marin, newly arrived in London after a close call with the Gestapo, throw back their heads and roar when apprehensive Britons ask if France is ready to accept dictatorship (meaning De Gaulle’s) after four years of Nazi rule.

But another fact about Charles de Gaulle and France is equally important—perhaps even more important to those who must determine U.S. and British policy toward him, his Government, and postwar France. This fact is that the vast majority of the French in France, wholly accepting De Gaulle as the symbol of all they want now, have in no wise accepted him as the long-term ruler of France.

Who Was De Gaulle? If ever a Frenchman had the perfect name with which to make himself the lord of France, it is De Gaulle. Every French child started kindergarten history with picture lessons about nos ancêtres, Us Gaulois, early inhabitants of La Gaide. The sound is part of France.

Charles André Joseph Marie de Gaulle, 6 ft. 4 in. tall and 53 years old, is very French indeed: not the explosive, whiskery, gesturing type of Frenchman, but the sober, hard-working kind to whom God is one of many inescapable facts. In the dreary industrial city of Lille in Flanders, close to Belgium, Charles de Gaulle was born Nov. 22, 1890. The De Gaulles were petty aristocracy, provincial squires, not well off. Papa taught philosophy. For hulking Charles, the family determined on St. Cyr, the West Point of France. Charles entered low, graduated high—in 1911. As an honor student, he had the privilege of choosing his regiment. He chose the 33rd Infantry, commanded by a Major Pétain.

Soon after the war, De Gaulle married and had a son, named Philippe. The boy’s godfather was De Gaulle’s old Commandant Philippe Pétain. Mme. de Gaulle, Yvonne Vendroux of Calais, also presented her husband with two daughters: Elisabeth, now a trained nurse, and Anne, who has never been well. Nearest thing to a personal anecdote: when first the ungainly Captain called upon the Vendroux family, he spilled a cup of tea on Yvonne’s best frock.

What Was De Gaulle? Like many another professional soldier, De Gaulle could write, and write well. His style was austere, persuasive, marked by a quality of Cartesian logic. And his writings portrayed the writer as he then was. To some of these expressions of the years between wars, his critics turn today for evidence of what he is. Fairly, they can be taken only as evidence of what he was. A revealing sample from his famed The Army of the Future (1934) : “Men, in the army as elsewhere, are not fashioned solely by training. Life sets its mark upon them. … If the imparting of instruction and daily routine suffice to fashion most of our fellow creatures, the more powerful of them form themselves.

Destined to leave their impress, rather than to receive one, they build up in the secrecy of their inner life the structure of their feelings, of their ideas, of their will.

“That is why, in the tragic hours when the storm sweeps away conventions and customs, they alone stand up. . . .

“[Such] a man, made for great deeds, is not popular except in critical times. . . .

His faculties, ‘shaped for heroic feats, despise the pliability, the intrigues and the parade through which most brilliant careers are achieved in peacetime. . . . He would be condemned to emasculation or corruption, if he lacked the grim impulse of ambition to spur him on … the hope of playing a great role in great events. . . .

For Glory gives herself only to those who have always dreamed of her.” De Gaulle had to nurse his dreams. He inveighed against the doctrines of static defense (the Maginot Line) which be mused the General Staff. He urged an elite, mechanized, relatively small army of attack. Almost nobody listened except the Germans, who applied his teachings in the development of the streamlined Reichswehr and later the mighty Wehrmacht.

His idol, old Marshal Pétain, himself a rebel in his younger days, dismissed it all as “witticisms.” De Gaulle got his colonelcy at a reasonably early age (47), but that was poor comfort. Just before the Germans fell upon France, he wrote one last memorandum, warning of the danger in trusting to the forests around Sedan in lieu of proper defenses. Nobody paid attention. Frustrated, agonizingly sure of what was to happen, equally sure that he might have saved France, Charles de Gaulle went into battle.

Day of Tears. Five weeks later, Paris had fallen and Paul Reynaud’s Government had fled to Tours. De Gaulle had the two stars of a brigadier (still his rank).

He had commanded two of the French Army’s very few distinguished actions.

Reynaud had made him Under Secretary for War, and he too retreated with the government to Tours.

In a dismal old Loire chateau on June 13, the Ministers and the generals assembled to deliberate the fate of France. Reynaud presided, flanked by Pétain and Weygand. The rest gathered around the long table, with young General de Gaulle inconspicuously seated near the lower end. They had a distinguished visitor. Winston Churchill.

Coldly General Weygand analyzed the situation. Hopeless, he said; nothing to do but give up. Churchill recalled the dark spring days of 1918, when the British were in desperate straits around St. Quentin and Marshal Pétain dispatched a force in the nick of time. Churchill reminded the old Marshal that bold action then brought victory on Nov. 11. Yes, said the Marshal, but where is there a British force to save the French today? Churchill had no answer; Dunkirk had robbed him of everything except the will to fight. It had robbed Pétain of everything. He decided to surrender.

As the meeting broke up and the bowed men filed out, some of them in tears, De Gaulle sidled up to Churchill and begged for a word. Resistance could go on, he said; France was battered but not beaten. Would Churchill stand behind him if he tried to bind the falling parts together, arrest the toboggan of doom? Churchill knew almost nothing of this stiff, self-conscious giant. Gloomily he gestured his agreement. A British destroyer took De Gaulle to England.

Day of Rebirth. On June 18, De Gaulle’s words bombarded France from a BBC studio: “France has lost a battle. But France has not lost the war.” The Fighting French movement was born that day.

A stubborn man with a single, overriding idea set out with nothing but his voice and Churchill’s backing to prove that France was still a power. So single was his purpose, so passionate his belief in his mission and in himself that he occasionally confused their identities. Once when Churchill pressed hard for some adjustment which struck De Gaulle as a backward step, he drew himself to his full, unshapely height: “Mr. Prime Minister, now that at last you have Joan of Arc on your side, you are still determined to burn her.” As time went on, Churchill’s patience with his solemn, intransigent protege wore thinner and thinner.

At first the Free French movement was a handful of bewildered men with time to burn in a shabby London office. Then Frenchmen began to arrive. They stole planes from under German noses and flew to England. They chartered Breton fishing smacks. They wangled passage on British ships.

De Gaulle blossomed forth with a big desk in a big room and an array of aides to question visitors and coach them on the General’s ways. He had a drawing account on the British Treasury, could charge his costs against a still hypothetical future.

The biggest task was double-barreled: he had to rouse the will to resist among despondent Frenchmen and he had to develop channels for communications between the growing underground and the men outside. De Gaulle established a propaganda service, radioing constant appeals across the Channel and spreading the doctrine of effective resistance. This service is in charge of young, brilliant George Boris, pressagent extraordinary.

To keep in touch with the underground (and to carry on a variety of secret-service functions) De Gaulle set up an office which promptly became a storm center of violent recriminations and defense.

Still in charge is a youthful, blue-eyed officer, of excellent family and connections, who learned his trade in military intelligence. His true name is never given, but every Frenchman in London knows of “Colonel Passy.” He trails a faint odor of Cagoulard, the Royalist-Fascist secret society of unsavory name in the latter days of the Third Republic. Ugly stories circulate (and are denied) of Passy’s use of the third degree to intimidate those Frenchmen who choose to fight the Germans but not to join De Gaulle. Some also say that he makes it his business to block all underground communication except with proved Gaullists. But even his enemies concede that he is a skillful operator, trusted by the British and utterly loyal to his chief.

What is Gaullism? A year ago the headstrong headman of Fighting France forced his way into grubby, squalling Algiers, administratively a part of metropolitan France. Reluctantly, General Eisenhower had granted him permission to take a hand in the snarled affairs of the floundering, Vichy-tainted regime of luckless Admiral Darlan and, after Darlan’s assassination, of befuddled General Giraud.

Coolly, skillfully, De Gaulle evolved his present government from the old Free French movement. Today, with Giraud gone, its components are:

¶ The French Committee of National Liberation, the ruling body, dominated by De Gaulle men and varying in its make-up from Rightist to Communist.

¶ The Consultative Assembly, an advisory body of some 100 members mostly out of Occupied France. It is the nearest thing to an interim Chamber of Deputies, but it can make no laws, no binding decisions. Nevertheless its power is great; it speaks for France, and its voice is heard.

¶ Charles de Gaulle himself. In Algiers today, he is no dictator. The Liberation Committee can (and occasionally does) overrule his wishes. And he is especially sensitive to the Consultative Assembly.

¶ Resistant France. Until invasion lifts the curtain, the many elements which make up French resistance—groups still bearing the old party names, saboteur bands, the maquis, the manifold underground press, millions & millions of individual Frenchmen—cannot be seen as a clear whole. But through the Assembly, through the Committee, and through Charles de Gaulle, resistant France constantly guides and limits the acts of the Algiers Government.

All this, together, is what Charles de Gaulle and his followers now call the Provisional Government of France.

Men and Deeds. Precisely opposite conclusions can be drawn from what the Gaullist Government has actually done to date. Examples: a harsh, clearly authoritarian press law would certainly deprive France, at least for an interim, of anything like a free press; a sane, clearly democratic .election law would provide step-by-step elections, from towns to provinces to all France, as Allied troops liberate the departements.

Frenchmen and the Future. In any event, Britons and Americans only fool themselves if they assume that they and the Frenchmen of France will necessarily judge Gaullism’s deeds and plans in the same way. France, for example, does not forget the decadence of her “free” (and freely bought) prewar press, the wartime sins of the Vichy press. Nor has she forgotten the rot in the frame of her prewar democracy.

Neither De Gaulle nor the Algiers Committee envisages the Fourth Republic as a replica of the Third. Neither private cartels nor utterly free enterprise find favor with De Gaulle. He has said that France must have a stronger executive, an important extension of Government ownership among industries large enough to influence the body politic and an array of social securities to warm the hearts of Socialists. De Gaulle holds that these things are demanded by the vocal underground. In Algiers today there are enough chosen delegates from resistance groups in France to give validity to his claim.

The Alternatives. Such is the man, the Government, the idea to which the U.S. has so far refused full recognition. On invasion’s eve, De Gaulle and his movement enjoy a grudging, strictly limited recognition by the U.S.; and equal (although more warmly expressed) recognition by the British; a fuller (although still incomplete) recognition by De Gaulle’s “dear Russia.”

Gaullists cry out against this niggardly policy and against its chief instigator, President Roosevelt. But they are actually in Roosevelt’s and Washington’s debt: the more De Gaulle the symbol seems to be kicked around by the U.S., the bigger he looms to Frenchmen in France.

Precisely that chain of cause & effect is the strongest argument for granting De Gaulle immediate recognition.

According to overwhelming evidence from France, the alternative to interim recognition may well be lasting distrust among the western Allies, incalculable bitterness in France itself, the killing of Frenchmen by Frenchmen who will surely act for themselves if they do not have a mid-invasion government strong enough to deal with traitors. Frenchmen will as surely reject any attempt by De Gaulle, by the U.S., by Britain, by anyone to impose upon postwar France what France does not want.

Beyond the invasion beaches 40 million judges are waiting.