Getting to know the General | 14 June 2018

When General de Gaulle published the first volume of his war memoirs in 1954, he signed only four presentation copies: for the Pope, the Comte de Paris (France’s royalist pretender), the President of the French Republic and Queen Elizabeth II. One of his associates remarked: ‘All de Gaulle’ was in that gesture.

But what was de Gaulle? Catholic? Conservative? Romantic? Arrogant? All these, surely, and not least ideologically eclectic. His political beliefs were not only enigmatic but were often vague in his own mind. When he took the world stage in June 1940 it was unclear whether he was a royalist, a Christian Democrat or even a proto-fascist.

This uncertainty was a major reason why many were suspicious of him — most damagingly, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It took time for de Gaulle to become ‘de Gaulle’, as Julian Jackson puts it, and for this reason it is fruitless to try to track down the intellectual origins of ‘Gaullism’.