Don Cook: Charles de Gaulle. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1984.
Originally published in Chronicles of Culture, Vol. 9, No. 3, March 1985. Republished with permission.
“The head rules the belly through the chest,” C. S. Lewis writes. Reason cannot rule appetites directly; it needs what the Greeks called thumos, the soul’s “spirited element,” to rule the appetites so that reason can go free. Spiritedness cares for itself oneself and for those like oneself. Refined, it animates patriotism, courage, honor; at its best it animates magnanimity, “greatness of soul.” Unrefined, it animates warlikeness, rage, egoism; at its worst it causes madness. Lewis describes modern democratic ‘intellectuals’ as “men without chests.” Their heads, however well-trained, remain ineffectual. Our intellectuals lack “heart”—not only the compassion they feebly praise but the courage they ridicule, nervously, as machismo.
Few political men have opposed this dispiritedness. Charles de Gaulle was among the greatest to do so. His latest biographer, an American journalist, describes a man of thumos caught in but also defying, sometimes exploiting, the entropic forces of the modern age. On the force commonly taken to symbolize late modernity, Cook writes that de Gaulle “had not the slightest interest in the question of the control of nuclear weapons, in nuclear disarmament, in a test-ban treaty, in the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, or in any of the treaties that were spawned in Geneva…. He had no interest in think-tank theories about the use of nuclear weapons or the risks of one country triggering another into holocaust. He had only one theory and that was nuclear retaliation.” During the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, de Gaulle met American and Soviet representatives. To Kennedy’s envoy, Dean Acheson, he said, “You may tell the President that if there is a war, France will be with you. But there will be no war.” He added, characteristically, “I must note that I have been advised, but not consulted.” With Serge Vinogradov, the Soviet ambassador to France, de Gaulle deployed fewer words but greater irony. As was customary, he opened the meeting by saying, “Well, Mr. Ambassador, I am listening.” Vinogradov ran on about the possibility of the annihilation of France; de Gaulle remained silent. The ambassador continued, and de Gaulle’s silence continued. “At last the Soviet ambassador ran out of things to say. De Gaulle then rose from behind his desk with heavy and ponderous motion, stretched out his hand in farewell to Vinogradove and said: ‘Hélas, Monsieur l’Ambassadeur, nous mourirons ensemble! Au revoir, Monseur l’Ambassadeur.'” [“Alas, Mr. Ambassador, we will die together! Goodbye, Mr. Ambassador.”)
Thumos serves reason here in two ways: It defends reason against tyranny, including the psychological tyranny totalitarians seek to impose; more subtly, it defends the mind from excessive fear, allowing de Gaulle to see that the Soviets are not likely to risk Moscow for the sake of missile bases in the Caribbean. The complementary insight is de Gaulle’s famous suspicion that the United States might not risk its existence for the sake of France. He told Eisenhower, “I know, as you yourself know, what a nation is. It can help another but it cannot identify itself with another.” De Gaulle accordingly ordered the construction of France’s own nuclear arsenal, forcing any would-be attackers to consider how much they want to risk for the sake of conquering France. Thus thumos and practical reason allied themselves in the service of moderation—or, at least, restraint.
Thumos defends its own. Even when the schoolboy de Gaulle played with toy soldiers he insisted, “France is mine!” Wounded and captured by the Germans during the Great War, he used his enforced confinement to study the enemy’s language, “return[ing] home from thirty-two months as a POW with a suitcase full of materials for future writings and lectures”—many of which would warn against German military resurgence. In 1919 he saw action in Poland, participating in “the miracle of the Vistula” when Polish troops and foreign volunteers unexpectedly defeated the Red Army and saved Poland from foreign domination. Decorated by the Polish government, de Gaulle evidently regarded Poland as an exception to the perfidious general run of foreign countries. He condemned the Yalta settlement from the beginning and, as late as 1967, visited Gdansk and said, “The obstacles that you think are insurmountable today, you will without any doubt surmount them. You know what I mean.” Poland too had become “his,” and there can be little doubt that he also viewed it as a potential buffer against Russian and German ambitions in France’s neighborhood.
No tyrant, de Gaulle admired thumos in others. In the interwar period he saw the French colonies in the Middle East and wrote, “My impression is that we haven’t really made much impact here, and that the people are as alien to us—and we to them—as they ever were.” The French must therefore either compel obedience or “get out.” His disband France’s colonial empire, decades later, followed from this recognition of both the strength and the limits of thumos.
“A statesman is needed.” De Gaulle wrote that on May 3, 1940 to the Third Republic’s last prime minister, Paul Reynaud, who proved unequal to the need. As the Nazis conquered France and his mentor, Marshall Pétain, capitulated, de Gaulle reacted simply to France’s “men without chests.” “I saw treason before m eyes, and my heart refused in disgust to recognize it as victorious.” Not only military and political timeservers but many intellectual luminaries endorsed Pétain; these included Gide, Mauriac, and Claudel. “In those days,” Cook writes, “it was not men of experience or leadership, it was not the intellectuals or politicians or administrators or serving officers who were the first Gaullists and rallied to the Cross of Lorraine. They did not come from the châteaux or the cathedrals, but from the parish churches and the synagogues,, the French of the Paris Métro, the fishing villages, the factories, for whom all was clear and simple.” When de Gaulle founded Free France in London, less than one-sixth of the French then on British soil joined him; those likely to be on foreign soil—businessmen, diplomatic personnel—were unlikely to respond to a simple call to honor.
By 1941, de Gaulle “had made up his mind that the war would be long, that Britain and the Allies would win, and that his priority from then on would be to claw back everything he could for a victory for France.” The clawing among de Gaulle and Churchill, Roosevelt, and the anti-Gaullist French elements drew blood. Although Churchill quarreled angrily with him (going so far as to threaten, “If you obstruct me, I shall liquidate you!”) de Gaulle found Roosevelt and the French elites more consistently hostile. The American president dreamed of a new, postwar state, “Wallonia,” to be fabricated from “the Walloon parts of Belgium with Luxembourg, Alsace-Lorraine and part of northern France.” Considering various explanations of Roosevelt’s allergy to de Gaulle, Cook finally decides that “there can be no rationale or explanation of what amounted to a personal obsession.” It is surely true that Roosevelt distrusted de Gaulle’s military background, recalling such adventurers as Napoleon Bonaparte and Boulanger; it is also possible that Roosevelt, exemplifying the American liberal’s ambivalence toward thumos, resent a man ‘of one piece,’ a man who at once the liberal’s ambitions but who did not share the liberal’s moral reservations concerning ambition.
As for the French, during the war de Gaulle contended with the old right (the Vichyites condemned him to death in absentia); after the liberation “it was a struggle between the Communists and the Gaullists,” a struggle de Gaulle won by the spirited expedient of ordering the Communists to the front lines. It was the postwar exhaustion of thumos that caused de Gaulle to resign as prime minister. “Although de Gaulle could be master of any parliamentary debate he chose to enter, he was never cut out for the maneuvers and cut-and-thrust of parliamentary democracy…. It was not his idea of how to run a government.” The French viewed his departure with relief and did not expect him to return. When he did, in 1958, it was of course on his own terms. Foremost among these was a new constitution, a presidential regime that ended parliamentarism while retaining parliament as a separate branch of government. The men without chests, talkers who confused action with the force of inertia, found themselves once more defeated by the man of thumos.
In previous books, Cook has written extensively on World War II, and sixty percent of this book concerns the war and its aftermath. The chapters on de Gaulle’s founding and defense of the Fifth Republic are well supplemented by Bernard Ledwidge’s recent biography (De Gaulle, New York: St. Martin’s Press), by two excellent chapters in Stanley Hoffman’s Decline or Renewal? France Since the 1930s (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), and by Malraux’s Le Miroir des Limbes, parts of which were translated into English as Anti-Memoirs and Felled Oaks (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston). De Gaulle’s constant theme during those years, la grandeur, inspired fear and hatred, admiration and ridicule. Cook does not quite understand de Gaulle’s intention, but he does present the words and actions of a statesman attempting to bring a thoroughly modernized, democratized populace to the unmodern virtues of courage and moderation, a statesman forced to use modern tools for unmodern ends.
Cook gives the two customary explanations of de Gaulle’s failure to complete his second term as president: from 1958 to 1968, French university enrollments tripled and de Gaulle did not sufficiently anticipate the resulting tensions; in 1968, the Soviets crushed Czechoslovakia’s experiment with civil liberties, thus refuting de Gaulle’s claim that Soviet ideology mattered less than Russian nationality. In both instances, the man of thumos underestimated the power of ideologies. (The French university students were not only numerous; a significant fraction of them had put on ideological costumes, stitching together patches of anarchism, pop psychology, and the teachings of Mao Zedong). De Gaulle rightly considered these ideologies absurd. He wrongly dismissed them as irrelevant to modern politics. That is, he underestimated the power of intellectual absurdity in human life, a power that never lasts at its peak but reappears with the persistence of dandelions. If allied with reason, thumos can rule the appetites. But in late modernity the appetites have themselves made alliance with reason, using reason to build ideologies, distinguished from religions and philosophies by their egalitarianism. And thumos also makes alliance with reason, but now as the dominant partner, serving ambition or ‘the will to power.’
Statesmen are still needed.
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