Patriotism is when love of your own people comes first; nationalism,
when hate for people other than your own comes first.
Charles de Gaulle¹

You have enemies? Good.
It means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.
Winston Churchill
 

On 18 June 1942, the second anniversary of his great Appel to the French nation of 1940, General de Gaulle addressed the Free French assembled in London’s Albert Hall. He began with a quotation from the great 18th-century writer Nicolas Chamfort: “The reasonable have survived. The passionate have lived.” Despite the betrayal of the Vichy regime, he lauded the undimmed fighting spirit of those Frenchmen who had rallied to him, adding: “we have lived a lot [during the previous two years] because we are passionate. But we have survived as well. Ah yes, how reasonable we are!”

These words could be a description by de Gaulle of himself, complete with the final faintly sarcastic flourish to which his British hosts were all too well accustomed. Arguably de Gaulle, from early on in his career, thrived on being about the most unreasonable man on the planet. The weaker his diplomatic or political position seemed to be, the more intractable he tended to become. He was cold to the point of apparent hostility with long-suffering subordinates. He made enormous scenes in which his Anglophobia (some of it performatory, some genuine) was given full vent; on one occasion he got so furious in discussion with Churchill that he broke one of the valuable Downing Street chairs. He was a master of the strategic sulk, both during the war and during or between his terms as President of France. His rages terrified allies and opponents alike, even though such rages might, like an extremely scary thunderstorm, be succeeded after 24 hours of brooding with a disarming charm offensive. “I have many crosses to bear”, Churchill is supposed to have said, “but the heaviest of all is the Cross of Lorraine.”² “When I am right”, complained de Gaulle, “I get angry. Churchill gets angry when he is wrong. We are angry at each other much of the time.”

And yet, and yet… Anyone reading Julian Jackson’s quietly brilliant biography³ of de Gaulle will be reminded that he was one of the most brilliant statesmen of the modern age, bestriding a decade of post-war French politics like a Colossus as formidable for his enemies as he was exasperating to his allies. Like Churchill, he was totally without physical (or any other kind of) fear, extremely well read (two to three books a week while President), also a gifted writer⁴ and even better rhetorician; in short, his achievements are enough to give chauvinism a good name.

We are fortunate that contemporaneously we have been given another masterpiece of political biography in Andrew Roberts’ massively researched and vividly written account of Winston Churchill.⁵ Neither of these authors could be accused of hagiography: to the contrary, they deal candidly with their protagonists’ errors, miscalculations, even follies. They are indeed assiduous in featuring the many charges that writers from academe, many of them extremely hostile to the two statesmen’s respective national and imperial visions, have carefully assembled over the years. For the most persistent and disingenuous of their detractors both men had responses that now seem prescient. De Gaulle once said crushingly: “always go for the highest position; it is generally the least crowded”. Churchill, with his mischievous capacity for wit, said something more sophisticated: “Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.”

A PARTNERSHIP OF CHALK AND CHEESE

It would be difficult to imagine a more potentially dysfunctional partnership in politics or any other sphere than that between Churchill and de Gaulle. Churchill was an aristocrat, de Gaulle from the higher gentry, but with a decidedly bourgeois life-style. Both believed that there had always been men of destiny, themselves being cases in point. Ironically however, it was Churchill who contemplated a biography of Napoleon, wrote a screenplay about him and kept a bust of Napoleon on his desk; whereas de Gaulle, while accepting the great man’s military prowess, entered the important caveat that he left France “smaller” than he had found it. He would also have been aware that the Corsican had considered offering his services to the Sultan when his career had temporarily stalled in France, something which would not have sat well with de Gaulle’s fierce patriotism. Nevertheless he saw in Napoleon a reconciliation of military dictatorship and civil governance, even if the latter had broken down. His own return to power in 1958 had for some more than a whiff of Napoleonism about it.⁶ If he had lived long enough, de Gaulle would have planned to end his memoirs with an imagined dialogue between himself and Napoleon. When Churchill adroitly rejoined the Conservatives in 1924, one observer described how he ”walked through the lobbies of the House of Commons with an air appropriate to Napoleon Bonaparte on the morning of the crisis of 18 Brumaire”.⁷

Churchill was convivial, probably agnostic and liked a drink, de Gaulle was austere, solitary and pious (malicious opponents used to say: “De Gaulle resides at Colombey-les-Deux-Églises – and one of these is for God”). Churchill had an irreverent wit, de Gaulle’s only semblance of humour was manifest in crushing sarcasm. Churchill was decidedly Francophile, de Gaulle was Anglophobe. Among Churchill’s cheerfully embraced vices were gambling and being almost permanently in debt, which he traded against an expected inheritance from the Marlborough estate, or otherwise persuaded his wealthy backers to bail him out from. He made sometimes eye-watering amounts from his bestselling books written with amazing fluency and speed, but spent the proceeds just as quickly. Even his cigar and wine suppliers in St James frequently complained of unpaid bills. Both he and his American wife Clementine tended to live extravagantly, as is entertainingly described in David Lough’s book No More Champagne.⁸ He regarded the maintenance of his lifestyle in a manner reminiscent of Count Széchenyi, who was asked how he would be able to live after giving his annual income for the foundation of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and replied: “My friends will support me.” De Gaulle seems to have been distressingly frugal – “unredeemed by a single vice”, to misquote Oscar Wilde.

Churchill had indeed a huge circle of friends and acquaintances which cut across party lines. He founded the 100 Club to entertain them bibulously at the Savoy and he enjoyed the company of dodgy plutocrats. De Gaulle was contemptuous of human weakness (whereas Churchill could be indulgent) and preserved his privacy to an extent that bordered on sociopathy, although he loved the adoring reception given him by vast crowds. His biographer relates a hilarious incident in North Africa where de Gaulle went to the beach one day with Harold Macmillan, Churchill’s political representative at the time. Macmillan stripped and dived into the sea naked; de Gaulle sat stiffly on a rock “draped in his uniform and his dignity”, as his biographer amusingly puts it. Certainly the vision of the massively tall General as a naked giant even taking a bath at home is quite alarming, whereas the rotund Churchill, we learn from Roberts, loved to wallow in a very hot tub as he slowly turned the hue of pink blancmange while sipping his dram.

 

IMPERIAL PERSPECTIVES

Yet, for all the stark differences of personality and character, de Gaulle and Churchill were like each other in many important respects. Both were statesmen whose political roots were in the 19th century; and both believed in their respective countries’ civilising mission as imperial and colonial powers. In defending this attitude verbally, Churchill could use the debating rapier, or perhaps one should say, could wield the ironic sword of self-righteousness. There was an amusing moment at a White House dinner when the proprietor of the New York Herald Tribune, a keen protagonist of Indian independence, indignantly asked him what he was going to do about those poor Indians. “Madam”, replied Churchill, “to which Indians do you refer? Do you by any chance refer to the second greatest nation on earth which under benign and beneficent British rule has multiplied and prospered exceedingly, or do you mean the unfortunate Indians of the North American continent which under your administration are practically extinct?” When being serious, he was perfectly prepared to make a defence of what, in his view, the British had contributed to the life of those “poor Indians” – road, rail and harbour infrastructure, medicine, the beginnings of mass education, the rule of law, the establishment of a lingua franca for commerce and politics, keeping the peace between Moslems and Hindus, the suppression of suttee and thuggee, and much more. In regard to the last two phenomena, the British were following a lead given by the Brahmin philosopher Raja Ram Mohan Roy (1772–1833) and it is interesting that the latter’s statue stands prominently in front of Bristol Cathedral,⁹ which is perhaps another indication that interaction between rulers and ruled in the Empire was not as wholly and opportunistically negative as it is now obligatory to claim.

Until the Algerian Crisis from the mid-1950s, de Gaulle believed the French had to stay in North Africa, where indeed he had set up a Free French government in 1943 after a terrific tussle with both the British and the Americans, especially the latter. In that year, the formerly Pétainiste Admiral Darlan was assassinated in Algeria after changing sides when the Americans landed in North Africa. De Gaulle showed his unbreakable determination not to be sidelined when General Giraud (under whom he had served in the First World War) took charge with Roosevelt’s backing. This struggle was perhaps a significant source of his violent anti-Americanism later. Roosevelt loathed him and in a stormy meeting deployed the self-serving argument that he could not recognise de Gaulle because nobody had elected him (as if they had elected General Giraud!). De Gaulle replied that neither had Joan of Arc been elected but her legitimacy lay in the fact that she had taken up arms against an invader. The example was probably not chosen by accident – Churchill could not afford to upset Roosevelt and in his efforts to get de Gaulle to share power with the lacklustre Giraud came close to withdrawing British support altogether. But in the end he was reluctantly admiring of the General’s obduracy, his unwavering vision of France as a great nation temporarily disabled. “His country has given up fighting”, said Churchill, “he himself is a refugee, and if we turn him down he is finished. Well, just look at him… He might be Stalin with 200 divisions behind him.”

Both Churchill and de Gaulle seemed to feel that their own interests as politicians were invariably aligned with those of the nation (“When I want to know what France thinks”, said de Gaulle, “I ask myself.”) Both believed in the enlightening mission of their respective civilisations, though Churchill identified the United Kingdom with “the English-speaking nations” (by contrast de Gaulle once complained that “Belgium is a country invented by the British to annoy the French”). The imperialism of both men was essentially paternalistic: British subjects of the Empire were, at least theoretically, entitled to the rule of (British) law, something which Churchill considered to be one of the great achievements of imperialism, especially in India. De Gaulle long clung to his view that the link with Algeria was indissoluble. Events forced both men to change course when their views proved unsustainable. Churchill was obliged to see Dominion status conferred on India, followed by independence; de Gaulle made the politically astute yet high risk decision to withdraw from Algeria in the early 1960s. Many of the thirty alleged assassination plots against him were from the irredentist pieds noirs (French Algerians), and indeed some of these plots very nearly succeeded. Churchill’s political aims were usually couched in the rhetoric of friendship, mutual respect and shared vision, while de Gaulle’s were manifest in the rhetoric of Realpolitik – as he put it: “France has no friends, only interests.”

The notion of civilisation, the benefits of which were to be dispensed to the as yet less “civilised” nations, is an especially interesting one in the French case, being traditionally contrasted with the somewhat mystical German idea of Kultur. The polarity of these two concepts, now perhaps considered old-fashioned as an historical topos, has occasioned much scholarly debate. Emily A. Vogt encapsulates a common view of the matter when she elaborates on the development of the word Kultur in contradistinction to the dominance of the French cultural influence of the Enlightenment (civilisation) among the German aristocratic elite of the 18th century. The impermeability of the German class system led to an incipient Bildungsbürgertum building up a notion of spiritual and cultural perfection, the real Deutschtum, to which the educated German should aspire, and which lay beyond the political and commodifying limitations of French civilisation.¹⁰ This attitude also surfaces in regard to other nations too – for example the economist Werner Sombart (1863–1941) contrasted the German “hero” to the British “trader” ( the German version of what Napoleon referred to as “a nation of shopkeepers”) – but it was primarily aimed at France .

A German sense of superiority and uniqueness regularly surfaced in the notion of Kultur, which sometimes looks like a Teutonic inferiority complex played out against a French superiority complex. For example, the great novelist Thomas Mann in his conservative-patriotic phase described Deutschtum [”Germanness”] as follows: “culture, soul, freedom, art and not civilisation, society, voting rights and literature” [Italics added]. The qualities enumerated were primarily spiritual ones to which Germans, in his view, had a special claim.¹¹ No prizes for guessing at whom the word “civilisation” was aimed! Even after the Second World War, Martin Heidegger, the influential philosopher who collaborated with the Nazis, evidently considered Soviet Communism and American capitalism to be two sides of the same coin. They shared “the same dreary technological frenzy, the same unrestricted organisation of the average man”. Germany should nurture Kultur rather than be assimilated by Western civilisation.¹²

And de Gaulle? His biographer has used one of the General’s Delphic observations for the title of his book, namely “I have always had a certain idea of France”. What did he mean by that? Ironically the UK’s present tougher-line Brexit negotiator gave one interpretation in a recent Brussels lecture. It was clearly addressed to his equally stubborn opposite number, Michel Barnier, himself a former Gaullist member of the Assemblée Nationale and Cabinet Minister. “I know that Michel is a great admirer of Charles de Gaulle”, said David Frost. “He probably doesn’t know that I am as well. De Gaulle was the man who believed in a Europe of nations. He was the man who always behaved as if his country was a great country even when it seemed to have fallen very low and thus made it become a great country yet again. That has been an inspiration to me, and those who think like me, in the low moments of the last three years.”¹³ This was a none too subtle reminder that obduracy, what de Gaulle would no doubt have called “passion”, cuts both ways. A British government with a large majority in the House of Commons would not behave in the same way as its weak and muddled minority predecessor. Monsieur Barnier presumably admires de Gaulle’s statecraft rather than his attitude to European integration, given that he has embraced Europhilia. But there are traces of Gaullist Anglophobia in his gleeful determination to “make the UK regret it ever decided to leave the EU” and his frequent and somewhat de haut en bas ”warnings” to the UK designed to correct the UK’s absurd and intolerable pretension that it should be treated like any other ”third country” – that is, as a sovereign state negotiating as partner, not simply as a supplicant. This was exactly the line taken by de Gaulle when the British, in his view, tried to make him a tool of their interests during his exile in the UK in the war.

 

EXCEPTIONALISM AND CHARGES OF RACISM

Each nation state with the will to survive develops its own version of exceptionalism. Some Americans, for example, nurtured the idea of “manifest destiny” which used to appear in all the schoolbooks. The contemporary economic and military power of America have made it the modern protagonist of economic imperialism, an ideological successor to, and opponent of, the British claim of a civilising mission. At least in theory, the USA’s power is not racially, but idealistically based, an undertaking to protect peoples from the scourge of Communism and encourage freedom, trade and the rule of law. By contrast, the British had rationalised and defended Britain’s imperial mission by citing “the white man’s burden”, which was the theme of a poem (1899) by Rudyard Kipling.¹⁴ Both British and French colonialism were of course economically motivated, but their apologia was vested in the concept of superior civilisations “teaching” their benefits to less developed ones. Nowadays such an attitude is simply labelled ”racism” by most academics concerned with Empire, with the natural result that both Churchill and de Gaulle have also been dismissed as no more than racists.

While this may chime with the now fashionable use of that word, it is also a ploy designed to close down in advance any discussion of possible beneficial effects of Empire, and thereby hugely over-simplifies its history. The few dissident historians who venture down the road of imperial apologetics – Nigel Biggar, Deepak Lal, Jeremy Black¹⁵ – can expect to be vilified as reactionaries and the implication often seems to be that they are themselves racists. Churchill’s “racism” was that of a 19th century Liberal Imperialist, rooted in the now equally unfashionable aristocratic notion of noblesse oblige; he does not fit the image of the tattooed White Supremacist riding his motorbike to a black-baiting rally. There is no reason to doubt his sincerity when he made statements like: “let us have only one measure for treating people subject to our rule, and that a measure of justice”, though obviously he is referring to the rule of law, not equal rights.

De Gaulle certainly feared the dilution of the French nation by mass immigration and for that reason, if no other, was profoundly opposed to the notions of fusion and integration espoused by his one time supporter, and later implacable foe, Jacques Soustelle. “If we carry out integration”, he said, ”if all the Berbers and Algerians were regarded as French, how would one stop them coming to settle on the mainland where the standard of living is so much higher? My village would no longer be called Colombey-les-deux-Églises but Colombey-the-two-Mosques.”¹⁶ Soustelle, who clung to the progressive republican tradition whereby the universal values of French republicanism created a community that superseded racial or ethnic identities, regarded this attitude as racist. De Gaulle’s remark may however seem rather prophetic to a good many in France today in the shadow of Islamic extremism and the social calamity of the banlieues. However the most unfortunate casualties of de Gaulle’s implacability were the Algerian Muslims who had served with the French Army, known as Harkis, who faced reprisals or death if they remained in Algeria, but whose numbers allowed to come to France were severely limited.

There is no doubt that Churchill believed the European and English-speaking races had reached a higher peak of civilisation and of course technological development than Africans, Arabs and Indians, a view that would now be called “white supremacism”. On the other hand, like his father Lord Randolph Churchill who was accused by the anti-Semites of his day of being “philo-Semitic” because of his wide circle of Jewish friends, he was not anti-Semitic. He automatically included the Jews in his category of the superior civilising peoples and one reason he admired Oliver Cromwell was because the latter readmitted the Jews to England. Likewise de Gaulle, who had anti-Semitic members of his staff, once reprimanded them: “I know only two types of Frenchmen: those who do their duty and those who do not.” Vichy propaganda posters in fact depicted de Gaulle as being the voice of sinister Jews lurking behind him as he broadcast. However de Gaulle did cause an uproar at a press conference in 1967 when he referred to the Jews as an “elite people, sure of themselves and domineering”, which rather overshadowed his critique of illegal Israeli occupations, which echo uncannily what you might now read any day in The Guardian.

Churchill’s observations to his cabinet in 1954 seem to mirror those of de Gaulle recorded above with reference to North Africans – and like the General’s remarks, they home in on the likely pressures of future immigration: “Problems will arise if many coloured people settle here”, he told them. “Are we to saddle ourselves with colour problems in the United Kingdom? They are attracted by the Welfare State. Public opinion in the United Kingdom won’t tolerate it once it gets beyond certain limits.” However he thought Commonwealth immigrants should be allowed to continue to enter Britain and no new curbs on immigration were in fact imposed under his government.¹⁷ There is a certain contemporary irony to the similar views expressed by the two statesmen – as I write, cutters of the French coastguard have been videoed shepherding boatloads of illegal migrants into English waters…

Where the attitudes of Churchill and de Gaulle towards overseas empire clashed, it was almost always because the imperial interests of the two countries collided or had collided within living memory. For example, one source of de Gaulle’s not very latent Anglophobia is his childhood memory of the notorious Fashoda incident (1898), when British troops forced the French back in their attempt to take over the Sudan. “In the first pages of his War Memoirs”, writes Jackson, “de Gaulle remembers Fashoda as one of the moments of national humiliation that formed the backdrop to his childhood.”¹⁸ Determination to restore France’s dignity as a great nation after too many humiliations – defeat by the Prussian Empire in 1870, pyrrhic victory in the First World War and now again occupation by the Germans, was a powerful driving force of de Gaulle’s psyche. His position of being effectively a semi-house-arrested and censored petitioner in London, and arguably one subject to manipulation in the service of British interests, was literally intolerable to him. It accounted for many of his tirades against Churchill and the British generally.

SAVIOURS OF DEMOCRACY

Despite their very different trajectories to power, it is not unreasonable to claim that both de Gaulle and Churchill were not only true democrats but even the saviours of democracy in their respective countries. They were both populists who appealed to the electorate over the heads of the party establishment. Both were at times viscerally hated by politicians of those parties all across the political spectrum due to their opportunism and alleged lack of scruple. “Populism” is in any case too often no more than the preferred term of abuse from politicians whose own narrow obsessions and ideology have failed to ignite the enthusiasm of the public.

Churchill was accused of being a warmonger, wanting to stage a coup and other undemocratic tendencies, but he was a liberal in domestic policies and in wartime headed an effective coalition government. His able deputy was the Labour leader Clement Attlee, who was the last officer to leave Gallipoli after the disastrous First World War campaign championed by Churchill; but he had always conspicuously avoided heaping all the blame on his new boss and colleague, as Churchill’s many enemies and indeed the public had done, not least because he had believed the idea of the Gallipoli campaign had been strategically correct. Churchill did make some silly remarks in the 1950 election, saying Labour would have to behave like the Gestapo to impose Socialism, but after all the Labour firebrand Aneurin Bevan called the Tories “lower than vermin”. The most important point is that he left office in 1945 as a democrat must; being Churchill he could even joke about it when the King offered him the Order of the Garter (”Why should I accept the Order of the Garter from His Majesty when the people have just given me the order of the boot?”). He may have been hurt that his achievement was rewarded with such ingratitude by the electorate, but he behaved with dignity, remarking of the public “that they have had to endure so much”.

De Gaulle, like Churchill, could boast of democratic commitment, despite accusations of aspiration to a military dictatorship when he returned to power in 1958. Pourquoi voulez-vous qu’à 67 ans je commence une carrière de dictateur?, he mocked journalists at a press conference. His cult of personality was admittedly far stronger than Churchill’s in terms of actual governance, but the Fifth Republic he set up in 1958 is generally accepted as a great improvement on the chaotic parliamentary squabbling that had so weakened France in the past and again in the immediate post-war period. At any rate the Fifth Republic is still with us, a type of government that accords the President more powers than the British Prime Minister and far more than in any other EU member country. His interviews with deputations of nervous ministers were not exactly collegiate. On one occasion such a deputation, intending to offer de Gaulle its members’ views on current policies, was chiefly subjected to a monologue, though he did allow a few to voice their anxieties before dismissing them. “Well, General”, said his aide after they left; “that seemed to go well!” “Crumbs for the ducks”, said the President, ”crumbs for the ducks.”

De Gaulle was an early believer in “third way” politics and fiercely opposed to the class system which he felt disfigured France. Jackson quotes his remarks to his minister Alain Peyrefitte: “The social consequences of capitalism are not acceptable. It crushes the weakest. It transforms men into wolves... Collectivism is no better: it removes from people any desire to fight. It turns them into sheep. We need a third way – between wolves and sheep.” One might compare this observation with Churchill’s take on the same conundrum: “The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.” After the experiences in my lifetime of both Communist and Neo-Liberal political experiments, this seems incredibly perspicacious for 1962, although “third wayism” has also been tried and is currently out of fashion with electorates that have moved to the right. His ideas evolved from the notion of “association” to the slogan of “participation”.¹⁹ It is remarkable that many Communists, of whose ideology de Gaulle was sworn enemy, ended up being Gaullist supporters; it was only when the wily François Mitterrand cobbled together a united Left of Communists and Socialists that the progressive Conservatism of Gaullism lost its political sway. Overall de Gaulle’s autocratic methods produced a remarkable number of reforms – monetary, administrative and institutional – which has led to his record being compared by some to that of the Napoleonic Code. He detested the cynicism of Voltaire but once remarked in a rather Voltairian manner that in the performance of great Frenchmen, Napoleon always beats Parmentier (Napoleon ravaged whole countries, Parmentier taught the French to eat potatoes).²⁰ Mutatis mutandis, on hearing of Churchill’s death in 1964, he was heard to murmur: “Now Britain is no longer a Great Power.” In 1958 he had invested Churchill with the Croix de la Libération. For his part Churchill had made many speeches in which he honoured de Gaulle. Of course he did also say: “He thinks he’s Joan of Arc, but I can’t get my bloody bishops to burn him.”

Notes: