A master of tactical retreat

A fanciful and doubtless risky parallel between Charles de Gaulle and the Russian emperor Alexander I suggested itself while I read Marie-Pierre Rey’s superb new biography of the latter.

Both men came to power through an act of political parricide: Alexander because he was tacitly complicit in the plot to overthrow his father, a plot which ended in Paul’s sordid murder in 1801, strangled with a scarf by the conspirator-courtiers after they discovered him cowering behind a screen in his bedroom; de Gaulle because he rebelled against his former mentor and the undisputed national hero from the Great War, Marshal Pétain, both on military strategy before the second world war and on the political choice to be made once it broke out.

Both men saved their nations from extinction by pulling off perhaps the greatest existential victory of their respective histories, against all the odds and using a similar strategy — even if it was forced upon them — of reculer pour mieux sauter.