Charles de Gaulle: The Man Who Rebuilt France

In June 1940, France was collapsing. Paris was in enemy hands, the government had fled, and Marshal Pétain was preparing to surrender. Into that chaos stepped a lanky, rigid French general with no army, no government and almost no followers - Charles de Gaulle. From penniless exile to twice head of state, his career would span two world wars, the collapse of empire, and the birth of modern France. Dan Snow is joined by Richard Vinen, author of 'The Last Titans: Churchill and de Gaulle', to unpack the extraordinary, contradictory life of this formidable statesman. Produced by James Hickmann and Dougal Patmore. and edited by Tim Arstall. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can also email the podcast directly at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Dan Snow's History Hit is a History Hit podcast. History Hit is part of Little Dot Studios, a Certified B Corp™. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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• 0:00Dan Snow?

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• 2:57Dan Snow?

  It's impossible to exaggerate the crisis that France found itself dealing with in mid-June 1940. It looked as if one of the richest and most powerful states on earth, ruler of an empire that stretched across the globe, was facing utter, total, complete collapse, possibly disintegration. German forces were rampaging across the country. French and British military units were being pushed back, some disintegrating before them. Paris was in enemy hands.

• 3:37Dan Snow?

  The French government had fled south to Bordeaux, crowding into a reasonably small city that was the last refuge of a defeated state. On the 16th of June, Paul Renaud resigned as Prime Minister. His successor was the Titan of the First World War, Marshal Philippe Pétain, and he was preparing to ask Germany for an armistice, a ceasefire. In the space of a few hours, a few days, people went from asking how France could win a war to survive a war, to accepting that she wouldn't be able to continue fighting one at all. Now, folks, I saw often in history, mayhem is the seedbed of a new generation of titans.

• 4:17Dan Snow?

  And amidst this mayhem, on the 17th of June, a British aircraft lifted off from the tarmac of Merignac aerodrome near Bordeaux. And aboard was a lanky, rigid French officer, whose nickname was the Great Asparagus. That British aircraft was carrying him into exile. As the aircraft climbed, he looked down at a country that was literally in flames. Military stores were exploding, columns of refugees were choking the roads. He was looking at a remnant of a defeated army, of a defeated nation. That man's name was General Charles de Gaulle. He feared he was about to be arrested by Pétain's newly-formed government, and so he decided to flee to England.

• 5:01Dan Snow?

  He had no army, he had no government accreditation, he had no money, almost no followers. But he did have an astonishing degree of self-confidence. He had a vision. He would rally the French people and still in them, the desire, the drive to fight against the Germans, no matter, no matter that France had been occupied, no matter what the cost, no matter how long it took. The very next day, he was given a BBC microphone to speak into in London, and he broadcast his legendary Appeal of the 18th of June. He declared to his countrymen that while France had lost the battle, she had not lost the war.

• 5:46Dan Snow?

  And thus it was in those chaotic June days, when history was there to be written, that a legend was born of the man who refused to accept defeat. A man who at that moment set forth on the path that would see him become one of the defining European statesmen of the 20th century. De Gaulle's career spanned some of the most extraordinary upheavals of European history. He fought in both world wars. He lived through the collapse of the French Empire, the start of the Cold War, the emergence of a new Europe. A politician who was a lifelong political outsider, the leader of Free France and twice head of two different French republics. He had an extraordinary sense of France's place in the world.

• 6:26Dan Snow?

  He had equally extraordinary conviction that he himself was essential to restoring it, maintaining it. His iron determination reshaped French politics and put him at odds with Britain and the United States. He drove both Churchill and Roosevelt loopy. But for all his importance, De Gaulle remains a difficult figure to get your head around. He's a contradictory figure. He's proud, austere, ambitious, deeply conscious of history. He was intensely French and yet in some ways occasionally detached from the politics of his own country. He had the most astonishing relationship with Winston Churchill, sometimes almost coming to blows, other times seeing themselves in each other as they smoked cigars and chatted. To explore the life and significance of Charles de Gaulle and to look at his relationship

• 7:11Dan Snow?

  with Churchill, I'm joined by Richard Vinen. Richard's the Professor of History at King's College London and author of The Last Titans: A Dual Biography of Churchill and De Gaulle. Let's get into it.

• 7:33Dan Snow?

  Richard, thank you very much for coming on the podcast.

• 7:35Speaker 04

  It's a pleasure.

• 7:36Dan Snow?

  Was De Gaulle born into the sort of the French ruling elite? Where was he from?

• 7:40Speaker 04

  He's born in Lille. He's not really born into the ruling elite. He describes himself, when he has to describe himself during the Second World War, the British, he says, petite noblesse de campagne, small provincial nobility. So second son of a minor family. His father, in fact, is a schoolteacher, so not grand at all in that way. There's no family chateau or anything like that. Very striking contrast with Churchill. Churchill's grandson of a duke. And of course, when De Gaulle first meets Churchill, I think actually it's the first time in his life he's met that kind of grand aristocrat.

• 8:12Dan Snow?

  And, I mean, France, France in this period, I find it so fascinating. I mean, there are monarchists around, there's Catholics and so, anarchists. Does his family background give him a sort of strong grounding, a sort of a worldview that will sustain? Or was it sort of slightly more Neolus family?

• 8:28Speaker 04

  Absolutely. So De Gaulle comes from a royalist family. So it's a family that is not at ease with the French Republic, the Third Republic that's been in power since the 1870s. It's a family that it's, it's hard to know how seriously to take French royalism. In a way, French royalism is a kind of style rather than a political project. It means a kind of distaste for parliament, nationalism, a certain kind of...

• 8:56Dan Snow?

  Yes, I always wonder, Rich, when you see the royalists winning elections, is there like a prince across the water? Is there, is there some bourbon that they're all toasting? Or is, again, is it just a, it's just a sort of expression of somehow opposition to the Republic?

• 9:08Speaker 04

  A bit of both. So there is a prince across the water, there is a bourbon pretender of the French throne, who we might come back to in 1940, in fact. But it is also partly a kind of political style. And Action Française, which is the political movement that probably is most intellectually influential in terms of royalism, which becomes influential from the early 20th century onwards. They particularly, I think they have this rather odd relationship where they're not on very good terms with the pretenders of the French throne. And so for them in particular, royalism is a style more than a project. Likewise Catholicism, you know, there's a feeling that Catholicism should be at the centre of French national life, which doesn't necessarily mean that you yourself are a religious believer.

• 9:52Dan Snow?

  Brilliant. So complicated, wonderful. So are they growing up, is the father encouraging that? Are the boys steep, for example, in the narrative of lost provinces after the Franco-Prussian War of the 19th century? Are they proud patriotic Frenchmen who wants the Alsace-Lorraine back in the motherland?

• 10:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely. So de Gaulle, de Gaulle was born 1890, he very much grows up in the shadow of the defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, the loss of Alsace-Lorraine. He's more or less kind of born to fight Germany and thinking about Germany as the centre of his life. So up until 1945, Germany is the enemy for de Gaulle and Germany much more than Nazism, I think, he's a nationalist. After 1945, rather curiously, Germany becomes the key interlocutor for France and in a way, he sees one of his great aims after 1945 as being a certain reconciliation with Germany.

• 10:50Dan Snow?

  Yeah, he pivots back to that more traditional French antipathy towards the British. Good, okay, excellent. We'll come on to that, we'll come on to that.

• 10:56Speaker 04

  Antipathy towards the British is always there for de Gaulle.

• 10:59Dan Snow?

  You can hate the British and Germans at the same time. I mean, that's also very French. Okay, so was the army an obvious decision for him?

• 11:07Speaker 04

  I think it was. So the army is one thing to do if you're a royalist, because the army kind of predates the republic and the army is part of what the French royalists would call real France, rather than the kind of artificial legal France, as they would put it, the France of politics and the civil service and things like that. So the army is an honourable career in that sense and the army obviously matters very much because of what de Gaulle sees, I think, as the coming conflict with Germany. And the army matters to him because I think as a young man, but very emphatically not in most of his adulthood, he's a kind of romantic.

• 11:46Speaker 04

  So the appeal of chivalry and valor and so on matters to him quite a lot, I think, up until 1914. And it's a very striking thing, which is that de Gaulle actually writes adventure stories up until 1914, kind of romantic adventure stories about a glamorous young man who, you know, kind of bojezt type stories, bojezt with a bit more sex, in fact. But in 1914, when he sees real combat, so he's 24 and the First World War is this kind of absolutely formative thing for him. So he sees combat in very, very brutal and horrible circumstances. And I think that kind of blows away his romanticism.

• 12:27Speaker 04

  So he actually writes his last romantic story at the very beginning of the war and then kind of renounces that view of the world. And he's very lucky not to be killed in the war, he's a very brave officer, but he's captured by the Germans quite early on, wounded and captured. And that, I think, partly saves his life. It also means that it makes him very reflective. He has three years sitting in a German prisoner of war camp, thinking at a time when a large number of his contemporaries are fighting and sometimes being killed. So I think he comes back from captivity a different kind of person.

• 13:03Dan Snow?

  Fascinating. It reminds me of how Napoleon wrote, thought of himself as a sort of heroic lead in a romantic novel as well, very interesting. So during the war, he is, as you said, you've told us, given us a brief priesty there, but he's wounded three times, isn't he? Takes a bullet to the knee, he's crawling to no man's land to scout out, doing incredibly dangerous jobs. And he's then stabbed in the thigh at Verdun in a hand-to-hand combat. He has a very, very busy war. How does that change his thinking or shape his thinking just on the military side of things? Or should I say, is he clearly, just before he's taken prisoner, was he, looked like he was on a fast track to command? I mean, is he a very able, is brave, but is he able as well?

• 13:48Speaker 04

  I think he's able. It's rather hard to know. There's a special kind of ability in the French officer corps, where I think French army officers are seen as more intellectual perhaps than army officers elsewhere. It does occasionally seem to me that de Gaulle has some rather major failings as an army officer. So he's not very good at reading maps, which has always struck me as being a catastrophic disadvantage for an army officer. He is, as you say, very brave. He's very decisive, or at least when he takes a decision, he kind of pushes it through very hard. He's not always very good at the practical military skills, he's not a terribly good shot, he can barely swim, he's a very big, ungainly kind of figure. It's not completely obvious what would have happened to him without the First World War,

• 14:30Speaker 04

  but either way, the First World War does turn you into a different kind of officer. I think in terms of thinking, I mean, first of all, he has this very strong sense that he's lived with modern war and he kind of accepts modern war. He has a very interesting phrase to his son in the interwar period where they go to see a film. And de Gaulle says, very characteristic phrase of de Gaulle, he says, "My boy, in the cinema, love is almost always more beautiful than it is in real life and war is always less terrible." So I think he thinks he's seen the horrors of war, but he also thinks that modern warfare is what you need to embrace. So again, unlike Churchill, even the hydrogen bomb after the Second World War, he doesn't

• 15:15Speaker 04

  flinch from. He says, "We need to kind of be prepared to embrace this kind of new military technology." And being a military moderniser becomes a big part of what he does. I think the other really important thing about de Gaulle, which is perhaps rather unexpected for a man who's a professional officer until he's 49 years old, is that he acquires a very strong belief that military matters must be subordinate to civilian control. So he gives a set of lectures to his fellow prisoners during the First World War. And it's called Discord Among the Enemies, it's about why the Germans are going to lose the war. And he says the Germans are going to lose the war because in fact the generals have

• 15:55Speaker 04

  acquired too much power and the civilians have lost that kind of overall grip on strategy. And thereafter, in fact, very notable that he does think very strongly it must be for politicians to set the overall tone. And the strange thing about de Gaulle's life is actually the big dramatic moments of his life are usually ones that put him in conflict with the senior command in the armed forces, where in the end he always says, "No political authority is what must prevail."

• 16:21Dan Snow?

  How fascinating. You'd expect some contradictions there, but that's very interesting. He goes to Poland after, I'm very interested, we won't get into it, but I'm very interested in that Russia-Polish war following the First World War. But he goes and sees, well, he helps the Poles fight the communists. Does that shape his worldview in terms of the threat of global communism?

• 16:41Speaker 04

  He's certainly an anti-communist, but he's quite cold-blooded about communism. So by the 1930s, he's beginning to say, again, like Churchill, you know, "I don't like communism, but we may have to make an alliance with the Soviet Union." He really always sees the Soviet Union as a kind of Russian nationalist power and is less preoccupied by the kind of ideological dimension of communism. I think Poland is important to him in all sorts of ways. It's also slightly chilling in that, of course, in Poland, he sees something which ties in with his own background, which is very violent antisemitism. So he does actually at one point witness and describe what's really a pogrom in which a group of Jews who are seen as pro-Soviet are massacred.

• 17:22Speaker 04

  And he describes this, I mean, he certainly doesn't approve of it, but he describes this in an oddly cold-blooded way. And I think probably in Poland, he comes closest to being an anti-Semite. He does seem to say things that imply antisemitic opinions. He's never, although he comes from a background where people often are antisemitic, he's never really antisemitic with regard to French Jews. He accepts people like Pierre Mendes France, who come to join him in London during the war, who is Jewish. But there is certainly that dimension in his life and that is probably most visible in Poland.

• 17:58Dan Snow?

  I learned from your work that he goes to staff college in the 1920s and he is said to have excessive self-confidence there. So you can see the beginnings of that, where you can see certainly that's the character of de Gaulle as the man who would become notorious for that all over the world. As you say, he's obviously thoughtful, he's writing, he's ghostwriting for other military biographies, but he's also writing, he's thinking about the future of the army, isn't he?

• 18:21Speaker 04

  Yep. I mean, writing in some ways is the most important thing he does in the interwar period. It's again, perhaps something you could only do as a French army officer. And in some ways, his reputation, such as it is in the late 1930s, is largely a reputation as a writer. He takes writing very seriously. I don't think he ever gets his writing quite right up until 1939. They're always the books of a young man struggling to make a reputation, trying a bit too hard. After 1945, I think his literary style becomes something different. And books, writing his memoirs later on, writing in the interwar period, tremendously important to him. He becomes associated with Particularly pressing for the modernisation of the French army and particularly pressing

• 19:03Speaker 04

  for what he calls a modern army, by which he means an army of mobility, an army of tanks, which is probably his work that becomes best known in retrospect, although I think actually at the time, people don't pay a huge amount of attention to it. He also becomes associated, he publishes his book on tank warfare, under the title "Vers l'armée du métier", Towards the Professional Army, which is a strange title, partly because actually he's not calling for a completely professional army, but also because calling for a professional army in France is very controversial, because a conscript army is associated with the defence of the Republic. The idea is conscript soldiers will always defend the Republic.

• 19:44Speaker 04

  And so it looks like it's an authoritarian gesture to call for a professional army.

• 19:50Dan Snow?

  But he is getting involved in that interwar debate. He wants to see tanks dashing across the landscape with close air support, linked together with new communication systems, what we might refer to as blitzkrieg. The French, we can sort of characterise them at the time as depending on fixed defences, the Maginot Line people have heard of, these giant concrete defences, big guns built on the border with Germany. I mean, is that something that is true, or is that something that is a sort of a legend that's been exacerbated by time and subsequent reputation?

• 20:22Speaker 04

  Well, two things. First of all, the Maginot Line, in the way we think of it, is a bit of a myth, in the sense the French really always understand that the Germans will in fact go round the Maginot Line and that they'll have to fight the Germans in Belgium. So they're not daft about what the hopes they place in the Maginot Line. And de Gaulle himself actually writes about defensive fortifications quite a lot in the 1920s. In terms of tank warfare, of course, the big problem with this is, first of all, the world's full of people who say they invented the blitzkrieg. So Little Heart in Britain, who always hates de Gaulle, claims that he invented the blitzkrieg. I think, on the whole, the answer is the Germans invented the blitzkrieg, which is why they won in 1939 and 1940. And also, of course, there's always a slightly abstract quality to the way de Gaulle is writing.

• 21:07Speaker 04

  So saying how you might use tanks in theory is quite different from actually using them in practice. And there is always, it must be said, a very abstract quality in the way that de Gaulle approaches things.

• 21:19Dan Snow?

  Yes, it's like me blithely talking five years ago about how we need more drones, but with actually no operational concept at all. Okay, so we do see some blitzkrieg though. Someone was paying attention to him a bit. Tell me, how senior was he on the outbreak of war in 39? How did his war go?

• 21:41Speaker 04

  He's not enormously militarily senior, so he becomes a general de brigade during the war, promoted to being the most junior rank of a French general. And in fact, one of the big mistakes about de Gaulle, as far as the British are concerned, is always to think he's a general, because they say when he arrives in London, this man is a brigadier, not a general. You know, there are hundreds of brigadiers in the British Army, and indeed, there are two other generaux de brigades in Britain in 1940 from France. So in that sense, his military rank is not enormously important. What is very important about him is his political contacts, and particularly, he's developed good relations with Paul Reynaud, who becomes Prime Minister of France in March 1940.

• 22:25Speaker 04

  So his leading political patron becomes Prime Minister of France, and that's a big moment for de Gaulle, so that at that stage, he gets taken much more seriously. He's also, in a moment of kind of French doubt and confusion, de Gaulle has the enormous advantage of complete certainty. So he's always prepared to tell the politicians, this is what you need to do, you need to do it now. And he is then made a very junior member of the French government in early June 1940. So really, just before the defeat is the moment at which he becomes a kind of politician.

• 23:00Dan Snow?

  That's remarkable, we'll come on to that. So let's just quickly, he actually does take part in the fascinating and bizarre counterfactual moment of the French incursion, the French little mini invasion of Germany, and right at the beginning of the war in September, October 1940. So de Gaulle steps foot on German soil, I'm sure he's quite pleased about that, but the French army stopped and withdrew quite quickly. But a fascinating thought experiment to wonder what would happen if they'd gone in strength there. Battle of France in May 1940, does de Gaulle perform, I mean, the de Gaulle myth is that he alone performs reasonably well in amidst this world historic collapse of the French army in May and early June 1940. What's the reality? Does he show any flair?

• 23:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think he does. He's certainly a very brave commander. He's very kind of enterprising, aggressive commander, which is obviously a quality that you need under the circumstances. I think it's not he alone, the French army as a whole performs rather better than we give them credit for. So the French army initially is very kind of taken aback by the speed of the German advance, but as they rally, they do begin to fight quite effectively. So de Gaulle is not a unique figure, but yes, he certainly does perform well.

• 24:11Dan Snow?

  And he leads, but he uses his tanks.

• 24:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, he uses his tanks. I mean, again, it's always hard to know the difference in theory and practice. So, once you start using tanks, you do run up against some very basic things, like they're going to run out of petrol, because they're heavy things that use lots of petrol. And I think de Gaulle doesn't always think enough about those kind of practical things. But yes, he does use his tanks, and he is certainly able to say with some justification, I was a good commander in 1940.

• 24:39Dan Snow?

  And there was a sort of mini, he led a mini counterattack that briefly gave the Germans some pause and...

• 24:45Speaker 04

  That's right, yeah, he does. You said counterfactuals in history. My own favourite counterfactual in this context actually is an extraordinary interview in the Imperial War Museum by a British soldier, just a private soldier, who says, and I think, I mean, of all the stories one tells about de Gaulle, this might even be true. He says that in 1940, he's sitting in a wood with a French liaison officer and a couple of brand gunmen, and they're told, shoot anything in front of you, the Germans are coming, shoot anything in front of you. And suddenly a staff car pulls up and a tall man gets out, and he reaches for his rifle, and the liaison officer touches his arm and says, no. And he realises that he's almost shot de Gaulle. So you can see this slightly imprudent, very brave officer rushing around on the front

• 25:28Speaker 04

  line, might have ended his career very quickly.

• 25:31Dan Snow?

  Goodness me, imagine that, no de Gaulle. Right, so the French government, still hoping to resist by the middle of June, appoints de Gaulle, brings him into the political fold, fascinating. Why is that? Because he has shown a bit of flair, he's shown a bit of fight.

• 25:45Speaker 04

  Because, I think, partly because Reynaud knows him for a long time, several years, partly because, as I say, de Gaulle has this enormous self-confidence, which is very, very attractive if you're trying to work out what you're going to do in 1940. De Gaulle, I should say, is deeply unpopular with a great deal of, a great many of the people he works with. So a great deal of the other aides to Paul Reynaud dislike de Gaulle, they find him arrogant and difficult to work with. And he's quite aggressive in his treatment of the French army. So particularly Maxime Vagon, who is brought back as commander really at the very last moment, when they decide that Gamla, his predecessor, is insufficiently aggressive.

• 26:28Speaker 04

  Maxime Vagon, de Gaulle actually thinks about dismissing him. And Maxime Vagon is 73 years old, the most senior general in the French army, and Charles de Gaulle is 49 years old and the most junior general in the French army, but has this political authority, which he tries to use or considers using against Vagon. So in that sense, de Gaulle kind of takes some very dramatic measures, or thinks about some very dramatic measures during his very brief period in the last government of the Third Republic.

• 26:57Dan Snow?

  Wow. So, I mean, also, life comes at you pretty fast. So in the space of a couple of weeks, he's gone from being a relatively junior commander in doing his bit on the front line, to advising the government and potentially even toppling these absolute legends of the French military.

• 27:13Speaker 04

  It is an extraordinary period. It's also extraordinary to remember that the whole of France is on the move during this period. So you've got waves of refugees running away from the Germans in the east and the north. You've got the French government itself, which leaves Paris and retreats down towards Bordeaux, so that there's this succession of kind of desperate last minute meetings with Churchill and British ministers flying out to meet the French, in a succession of kind of improvised conferences, some of which are attended by de Gaulle. And then you have de Gaulle himself, I remember once working out that in the last seven days, I think, before he leaves France, de Gaulle doesn't sleep in the same bed twice. So he's constantly on the move, he's moving with the French government, then he goes

• 27:58Speaker 04

  to Brittany to see if we might organise, the French might organise some last kind of redoubt in Brittany. Then he sails to Britain, talks to the British briefly, then he comes back to France, and then finally, he flies to Britain for the last time on the 17th of June 1940. So yeah, there's a very, very kind of dramatic period of rapid movement in the period immediately before he goes to London.

• 28:21Dan Snow?

  Astonishing. So his political career in France lasts about a fortnight.

• 28:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly.

• 28:28Dan Snow?

  Okay.

• 28:29Speaker 04

  Pre-war career of France lasts a fortnight.

• 28:31Dan Snow?

  Yeah, exactly. As France is in the process of collapsing to an extraordinary defeat. Just quickly, in any of those meetings, is that what, just because I love it, I love this little moment, Churchill's suggestion of a union between Britain and France, which I'm a big fan of, an Anglo-French, you know, Henry VI style merger. Do we know if de Gaulle was in any of those meetings and whether he took that seriously?

• 28:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, de Gaulle is one of the people who kind of telephoned, so he's actually in London at the moment when that proposition is made. He actually telephones Paul Reynaud to kind of tell him about it. I don't think either de Gaulle or Churchill take the project of union very seriously, actually.

• 29:07Dan Snow?

  Sadly.

• 29:08Speaker 04

  And is primarily, of course, a means by which the British might maintain control of the French fleet and possibly the French overseas empire, after what they know is about to happen, which is the defeat of the French in mainland France. I think there's a third man in London in 1940, who is, in the long term... Almost the antithesis of both Churchill and de Gaulle, which is Jean Monnet. So Jean Monnet is the key person behind the project of Union from the French side. And you might think, well, this is because it's some kind of idealistic airy-fairy proposal for international cooperation. But actually, Jean Monnet's argument in 1940 is that the Brits are not fighting a real war. They're expecting the French to fight a desperate conflict on their own soil in which they're

• 29:53Speaker 04

  going to take huge casualties. But the British, I mean, you know, when you read Cabinet meetings in minutes in 1940, they're talking about, you know, the grouse season or the rationing of tea, things like that. And I think Monnet wants to impress on the British, no, you know, if you're going to throw in your fate with with France, it's a real thing and you're going to have to mobilise. He talks about an army of several million men. And so I think that's the key to that particular moment, but it doesn't last. And by the 18th of June, by the time de Gaulle gives his address on the BBC, which is actually the day that the project is announced in the British papers, it's a dead letter. Everyone knows it's finished.

• 30:29Dan Snow?

  Let's break it down because this is such an exciting period of history. So we've got Paris is occupied on the 14th of June. On the 16th of June, Renault's government resigns and Philippe Pétain, a giant French military figure from the First World War, becomes premier. That is its own story and that will eventually become something we remember as Vichy France. But what is de Gaulle doing on that, at that moment on the 16th? Because presumably he loses his government job at that point, does he?

• 31:00Speaker 04

  So he actually goes back to Bordeaux, having been talking to the British. He then finally leaves Bordeaux on the 17th of June. And he's flown out on a British plane. The British have kind of lent him a plane, really, saying he might need to get out in a hurry, which he does. He's obviously an opponent of what the Vichy government is going to do, which is to seek an armistice with the Germans.

• 31:24Dan Snow?

  So that's clear, really. Pétain's coming from the beginning, saying, yes, I'm afraid I'm your man to come to an agreement here with the Germans. The war has been lost. That was clear from minute one.

• 31:34Speaker 04

  Pétain has been brought in to the government, partly by Renault, in the hopes he might actually lend the government prestige. People don't initially think that Pétain is going to be the voice of defeat. But Pétain, and also in fact, Wagon, the commander, who comes from a rather different kind of angle to Pétain. So Wagon is certainly not a defeatist in the sense he dislikes the Germans, he wants to go on fighting, but he thinks it's impossible to go on fighting. And Wagon's argument is that Britain is defeated, Britain will have, as he puts it, his neck, its neck rung like a chicken. And at that stage, France will have to come to terms with Germany and that she must sign an armistice with Germany, particularly to keep her army intact, because it might be used to maintain order internally.

• 32:19Speaker 04

  Wagon is quite frightened at that stage, there might be a communist revolution in Paris. So I think those are the kind of key thinkings behind this. But it's important to say that, first of all, there are multiple projects for how the French might go on resisting. So quite a lot of French ministers think we'll fight on from North Africa, which turns out to be a bad idea because they're then arrested by the authority of the Pétain government, that this is an armistice, not a surrender. So that an armistice is something temporary and it doesn't mean the end of war, strictly speaking. And everything about the Pétain regime is temporary. So the armistice is temporary. The fact that Pétain is 84 years old means he's obviously, people think, not going to be around forever.

• 33:03Speaker 04

  Even the fact they install themselves at Vichy, Vichy's a kind of summer resort town. Everyone assumes, well, you couldn't possibly stay at Vichy, you know, through November and December. So for all these reasons, in the summer of 1940, people think we're just coming to a short term kind of arrangement, which is then going to be changed to something much more permanent in the very near future.

• 33:23Dan Snow?

  Well, you say everybody, not Charles bloody de Gaulle, because I'm just trying to do the maths here. So he's flying to Britain on the 17th. And then on the 18th, he's galloping on to the main stage of world history. So just talk me through what's going on in these hours.

• 33:38Speaker 04

  Well, you say it's dramatic. It's dramatic partly because he broadcasts on the BBC on the 18th of June. So the 18th of June, you know, all history comes to London on the 18th of June. It's Waterloo Day, apart from anything else. It's the day of Churchill's finest hour speech, the most historically resonant of Churchill's speeches. And it's the day when de Gaulle broadcasts what the British come to know as the call to honour, when he calls on the French to go on resisting the Germans. He almost doesn't broadcast because the British government, precisely because they're not really sure what's going on at Vichy, they still hope they might persuade the French not to sign an armistice, or they might win over part of the French from, from supporting, from making a deal with the Germans.

• 34:22Speaker 04

  So they're still hoping they'll get allies in France. And for that reason, they say, don't let this awkward general broadcast on the BBC. And really, with Churchill's personal authority and with intervention from particular people, de Gaulle is allowed to broadcast on the BBC. And then he makes this mind-boggling broadcast. He's only the second time in his life that he's spoken on the radio. So, you know, when I was 49, I'd spoken on the radio more often than Charles de Gaulle had spoken.

• 34:53Dan Snow?

  And you hadn't managed, you'd managed not to blow up the international settlement whilst doing so.

• 34:57Speaker 04

  Right. So he walks into a studio and the technicians say, test the sound, please. So he just says, la France, just one word, two words. And then he makes a speech that changes world history, you know, like as if this was just something one did in the course of an ordinary evening.

• 35:18Dan Snow?

  And we should say to people, he declared a French government in exile.

• 35:22Speaker 04

  He's never a government in exile.

• 35:24Dan Snow?

  Okay.

• 35:24Speaker 04

  So de Gaulle says, ask people to join him. He says, I in London, General de Gaulle, represent something. But he doesn't claim to be a government in exile and the British don't recognise him as a government in exile. So the British are very emphatic that he can't be a government in exile. They don't have diplomatic relations with the Vichy government themselves, but they say Vichy is a legitimate government. It's not, we're not at war with Vichy. Vichy is a neutral power and the Vichy government has been elected by the French parliament. It is a legitimate government. South Africa and Canada, both members of the Commonwealth, both at war with Nazi Germany, both have ambassadors at Vichy until 1942.

• 36:07Speaker 04

  And the Brits know that and they, they do in fact keep kind of back channels open with Vichy. So in that sense, there's no chance that de Gaulle is going to be recognised as a head of government. He's not, you know, like the Polish government in exile or something like that. It's not that a whole government has fled. It is simply that de Gaulle is represented in this rather ambiguous status. Churchill, I think, says, I recognise you as the leader of the Free French, wherever they may be. And I mean, that doesn't, that could mean everything or nothing. And of course, de Gaulle has quite small forces at his disposal, probably just a few thousand men in 1940. And de Gaulle has very little kind of formal status. And I think at first, most of the British just hope de Gaulle's going to be a soldier.

• 36:52Speaker 04

  They just think de Gaulle's basically going to be a commander of a kind of unit operating under British command and as part of broad British forces. I mean, they couldn't be more wrong. That's not what de Gaulle thinks he's going to do, but.

• 37:05Dan Snow?

  But do the British see the transcripts of what he's going to say on the radio?

• 37:09Speaker 04

  They exercise a degree of control. What he says on the 18th of June is not very controversial, in fact. Later on, they certainly do try to exercise control over what he says. De Gaulle hates that. He hates to admit that the British ever controlled what he said, but I think in practice they do.

• 37:26Dan Snow?

  So on the 18th, he is just saying, I'm here in London, the fight goes on irrespective of what the French government chooses to do.

• 37:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, so he's calling on soldiers and technicians, as he puts it, to come and join him. The 18th of June is a very ambiguous declaration in retrospect. So first of all, of course, not many people hear it. Lots of people who do hear it have no idea who de Gaulle is. De Gaulle is not very famous in France. French people don't know what he looks like. Vichy cartoons always show him as short and fat. So in 1944, some people are quite surprised that he isn't short and fat, that he's actually a very tall man. They don't know how to spell his name. They don't know that his name is real. Lots of them assume it's too good to be true. It must be a kind of nom de guerre that he's adopted. And they're not completely sure about the implications of what he's saying.

• 38:16Speaker 04

  So for example, his speech is heard by one French intellectual, who is in fact one of Pétain's speechwriters, who writes some of Pétain's early speeches in 1940, when he's head of government. And that guy says, well, you know, this is an admirable speech and it doesn't contradict what I'm doing. He thinks it's perfectly reasonable to assume that soldiers may go to London to continue the fight and that he may serve Marshal Pétain back in France. And these are not kind of mutually exclusive things.

• 38:45Dan Snow?

  The nom de guerre, by the way, we should say that, it's a society, isn't it? What is the etymology of Charles de Gaulle? It's like asterisk de Gaulle. I mean, it's, it's, it's the most French name imaginable.

• 38:54Speaker 04

  It is indeed. And I mean, it's just coincidence that France happens to be led by this person. The American ambassador, who is a rather naive person, says at one point, of course, when the French talk about being Gaulistes, they mean they're kind of, you know, they're inheritors of ancient Gaul, rather than they're loyal to this dreadful man in London. But I don't actually think many French people do think that. All sorts of interesting things about de Gaulle's name. I mean, every few years, some old buffer writes to the Figaro, saying that it's not really an aristocratic name, it's a Belgian name and de is not a kind of aristocratic part of it.

• 39:29Dan Snow?

  Oh my God, it's Belgique. Jesus God, horrifying. It's from Flemish. Okay, so I guess the first thing is, so very few people hear it, no one knows who it is. Does anyone answer his call? Is there, is there a rash of sign-ups?

• 39:44Speaker 04

  There are some people who answer his call, some people hear it, lots of people who are very important don't hear it. And lots of people who do come to London don't hear it. So Raymond Aaron, great French intellectual, does come to London but hasn't heard the call of 18th of June. And some people are of course already on their way to London. Some people don't know de Gaulle's in London. One army officer, you know, is sitting on a train. He knows de Gaulle from before the war. And some old lady tells him, oh, this man de Gaulle is in London. And he's actually, you know, on his train, train Portsmouth to London himself at that moment. So in that sense, the call itself probably is more important for its kind of retrospective mythologisation than for the direct impact it has on the day.

• 40:27Dan Snow?

  Well, but then he's, he's away to the races at this point. We think of him as the commander of the Free French Forces. How does he make that a reality over the years that follow?

• 40:40Speaker 04

  Slowly is part of the answer to that. So he acquires quite a lot of territory in Africa. The British sponsor an expedition to try to recapture Dakar, French port in West Africa, which fails. But de Gaulle does then kind of bifurcate and go into Sub-Saharan Africa, where he acquires, because people rallied to him, local governors and so on rallied to him, he acquires quite a lot of territory, not territory that's necessarily very, certainly not prosperous, not strategically important, but it means he acquires a kind of independent base, which I think is very important to him. Soldiers slowly come over, including soldiers particularly who have a higher rank than de Gaulle himself. So one

• 41:25Speaker 04

  of the striking things is that de Gaulle, because I think he sees his role as primarily by this stage, a political one, he feels it's normal for soldiers who are technically higher in the French army than himself to rally to him. And it's very interesting, he never tries to change his rank. He always wears two stars on his uniform as the most junior French general, even after generals like Katrou, who is much more senior to him, have rallied behind him. And I suppose the most famous of the three French generals is the man who becomes General Leclerc. He takes a new name when he comes to London to hide his identity. But he rises up the hierarchy very fast. And there's a lovely

• 42:07Speaker 04

  moment in de Gaulle's memoirs where he says, ah, Leclerc had become, as if by magic, a colonel. And you can see that de Gaulle is amused by this, but he thinks it's a faintly undignified business seeking after this kind of promotion. And of course, eventually, Leclerc outranks de Gaulle in military terms, although clearly in political terms is completely subordinate to de Gaulle.

• 42:31Dan Snow?

  You're listening to Dan Snow's History. We're talking about Charles de Gaulle, more coming up.

• 42:42Dan Snow?

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• 45:38Dan Snow?

  Let's talk about the big relationship here, the Churchill-de Gaulle relationship. I mean, two titans, two men who probably both believed they were creatures of fate and destiny. But how did they get on initially? And did that change radically? Well, through the course of the war, let's just finish at 1945 for the moment.

• 45:56Speaker 04

  First of all, Churchill is crucial to de Gaulle's survival in 1940. And Churchill is the main important backer of de Gaulle in the summer of 1940, for that very brief moment when his survival hinges on just one thing. That one thing is probably Churchill's support. I think they appreciate each other from a very early stage. So they've met in one of these conferences in the defeat of France. Very significantly, Churchill recalls that. He always says, I remember saying, "l'homme du destin," the man of destiny, to de Gaulle. And de Gaulle always denies that Churchill ever spoke these words. And there's a revealing difference between the two of them, I think, which is that I said de Gaulle

• 46:39Speaker 04

  had lost his romanticism in 1914, at the beginning of the First World War. Churchill is always a romantic, of course. And I think de Gaulle appeals to Churchill because de Gaulle, although he's not a romantic in how he sees the world, is a romantic figure. You know, it's an extraordinary kind of gesture to put yourself alone as the leader of France. So I think that appeals to Churchill. Churchill has this famous witticism about de Gaulle. He says, he thinks he's Joan of Arc, but I can't get my bloody bishops to burn him. I think you understand that remark differently when you remember that Churchill is an obsessive admirer of a Joan of Arc. And so this kind of idea of chivalry, almost

• 47:23Speaker 04

  like being a medieval knight about de Gaulle, appeals to Churchill. So for that reason, Churchill backs him in the short term. I think in addition to that, Churchill is a tremendous Francophile. De Gaulle has never set foot in London before the 9th of June 1940, never set foot in England. Churchill has been to France 100 times by 1940. And so Churchill, France appeals to him, France matters to him. Because of that, sometimes he thinks maybe there are other French people I could use rather than de Gaulle. Because of course, he knows all sorts of people who are left behind in France. He knows Veygond, he knows Georges Mondel, who's been the French Minister of the Interior, and who

• 48:03Speaker 04

  is, you know, in political terms, more important than de Gaulle. I think also Churchill understands France in some respects that we perhaps underestimate. And especially, one strange thing about Churchill is he does quite admire, and he's very unusual among British people in this context, he does quite admire the Third Republic, he does admire the republican tradition in France. And there is an extraordinary proposal in 1940, even the beginning of 1941. Some British people say, maybe what we need to do is to restore the French monarchy, and that will rally all the kind of nationalist, right-wing French people behind us. And the person who puts a stop to that is not de Gaulle, who in fact is rather kind of

• 48:47Speaker 04

  ostentatiously silent about this proposal. He is, of course, a monarchist by tradition himself. It's Churchill. It's Churchill who says, no, this is a bad idea. And I think Churchill is very much a man who admires especially the most kind of fierce republican of the Third Republic, Georges Clemenceau, the leader of the First World War. And I think that's why Churchill thinks keeping the republic is so important. So Churchill goes along with de Gaulle, but also, I think, goes along with a wider French tradition. Churchill then quite quickly turns against de Gaulle. I mean, he finds de Gaulle exasperating beyond belief, and de Gaulle is exasperating beyond belief. And poor old Churchill, he's got a bloody water run, you know, he's constantly thinking about military matters, of course,

• 49:32Speaker 04

  you know, often interfering in the decisions of his own generals. Meanwhile, de Gaulle...

• 49:38Speaker 04

  Is playing a political game, which often puts him at odds with Churchill, the insistence on respect for the dignity of the Free French and so on and so forth. And at that stage, I think something different kicks in, which is that the British establishment, who have been rather hostile to de Gaulle at first, then begin to say, actually, we need to live with de Gaulle, especially they begin to say de Gaulle has come to represent the anti-German, pro-resistance forces in mainland France. So at that stage, people like Anthony Eden, Duff Cooper, they become, I mean, Anthony Eden becomes Foreign Secretary, Duff Cooper eventually becomes the representative to the Free French, Desmond Morton, Churchill's adviser on intelligence matters, all these

• 50:20Speaker 04

  people begin to kind of press for de Gaulle, even when Churchill wants to turn against him.

• 50:27Dan Snow?

  Just such an astonishing aspect of World War II is you've got this guy with really, frankly, not much in the way of troops following him, no money, no formal status, making these sort of demands constantly throughout the war, like he's just an equal partner. It must have been absolutely infuriating for Churchill, but deep down, it's exactly what Churchill had done, if Churchill was in that position, he was in Washington or Toronto or something, if the war had gone differently.

• 50:55Speaker 04

  That's what, that's what the people like Harold Macmillan constantly saying that to Churchill, they're constantly saying, imagine you were in this position, if we were in Canada, if we were in Washington, you would need to stand on British dignity. So yeah, you're right, Churchill probably would have behaved like that, and I think people around Churchill understand that better than Churchill understands himself.

• 51:16Dan Snow?

  Let's quickly move on to the liberation of France. What is the French contribution to that liberation? I mean, this idea that de Gaulle has built up Free French forces, is that becoming a sort of reality? Is it a useful contribution militarily at this point, or is it still quite tokenistic?

• 51:31Speaker 04

  In Normandy, it's tokenistic at best. I mean, de Gaulle almost refuses to let any French troops go to Normandy, and in the end, a kind of symbolic force goes.

• 51:40Dan Snow?

  And why is that?

• 51:41Speaker 04

  Because de Gaulle is himself kept in the dark about D-Day until very late in the day. He's brought back to England, he's in Algeria at that stage, he's brought back to England and told about it at the last moment, and he's incredibly offended, and incredibly offended by the idea that he would not then, for example, be allowed to broadcast to the French and say, no, French government is in power and so on. And de Gaulle never forgets this, I mean, de Gaulle says in the 1960s, one of his ministers, Churchill convoked me as a squire convokes his butler, Churchill called me in and gave me instructions. So in Normandy, the French contribution is quite small. Obviously, it does matter that de Gaulle does in the end broadcast to the French, that's very crucial.

• 52:23Dan Snow?

  Presumably Churchill was vaguely trying to keep his options open, then just realised, well, hang on, we've got this guy, we've got, no, realistically, it's de Gaulle, I mean, we've got to give the guy a mic and tell him, we're back on French soil, France is being liberated, what government are we going to replace, what are we going to do in that area? Well, de Gaulle's the only game in town, I guess.

• 52:40Speaker 04

  De Gaulle is, to be honest, by June 1944, the only game in town. The British and the Americans have tried to replace de Gaulle, or Churchill and the Americans have tried to replace de Gaulle late 42 with another general, General Giraud, that's failed. So all the smart money by 1944, Churchill's ministers understand that de Gaulle is the only game in town. De Gaulle himself, I should say, I think, is quite nervous in June 1944, because remember, de Gaulle has not set foot in mainland France, he's never been an elected politician, he's no idea how he's going to be received. Churchill, very, very rudely, doesn't allow him to go back to Normandy until after Churchill has been to Normandy. Churchill takes, of all people, General Smuts of South Africa with him when he goes to

• 53:25Speaker 04

  Normandy, doesn't take de Gaulle. But then, de Gaulle is finally allowed to go to Normandy, and when he sets foot on French soil, he doesn't know how he's going to be received, but in fact, he's received quite well, and he's kind of euphoric. That's like his proper meeting with the French people. So I think that changes things for de Gaulle, I think it also changes things for the British. The British, and especially the Americans, begin to see de Gaulle does excite enthusiasm for the French people. They also begin to say, the Americans especially, take a very cold-blooded military view, they just say, look, we don't care about French internal arrangements, but if working with Gaulists is the simplest thing to do in military terms, then that's what we must do.

• 54:06Speaker 04

  And of course, there are two other things about the Free French in 1944, one of which is there's another invasion or liberation of France happening from the south, from North Africa, in which French forces are much more important. And the other is, of course, the French Resistance, which by this stage has very much rallied behind de Gaulle, and which is clearly very important in the political dimension of the liberation, the resistance is what kind of comes to power as the Germans driven out.

• 54:34Dan Snow?

  And then you get this extraordinary moment, the debate over the liberation of Paris, and the Allies make a big decision.

• 54:40Speaker 04

  So there is in fact a moment when they think they might not liberate Paris at all, you know, why bother with this symbolic capital, why not just keep heading east to attack the Germans? They do liberate Paris, and then de Gaulle makes this very, very famous or notorious speech on the 25th of June, when he says, Paris liberated, libéré par lui-même, liberated by itself, which of course is a shocking remark in the sense that clearly what has liberated Paris is the presence of large numbers of American soldiers very close to Paris. But obviously, symbolically, that's very important, and the liberation of Paris plays a huge role in kind of Gaulist mythology.

• 55:21Dan Snow?

  And we should say, people who don't know, so the Germans sort of, Hitler gives orders for Paris to be destroyed, which thankfully went carried out, and then the Germans sort of largely withdraw, so there's not going to be a street fight for Paris.

• 55:30Speaker 04

  There's not really much, no, there's not much fighting in Paris, it's one of the reasons why Paris is so beautiful, it's one of those very lucky cities like Prague, where they escape, you know, the military consequences of the war.

• 55:42Dan Snow?

  Unlike Warsaw. And so with Americans' troops streaming around on the other side, de Gaulle is able to, quote unquote, I mean, he marches in at the head of a French unit, and that decision, who took that, no doubt he insisted on that, and was that a controversial moment?

• 55:58Speaker 04

  I think by that stage, not terribly, I mean, I think people know that de Gaulle has to be kind of recognised, he isn't yet recognised as a head of government, that comes a couple of months later, but in practice, it's obviously, that's obviously the direction everyone's heading in. And in practice, you know, it suits everyone to do this, it suits people to have a figurehead of the Free French in Paris, and so I don't think it's particularly controversial by that stage. I mean, it certainly exasperates Churchill at various stages, but...

• 56:28Dan Snow?

  When he marched into Paris, are there other cheers? I mean, is it the fact that Paris has been liberated, or is he clearly gaining in popularity himself as well at this point?

• 56:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, so there's joy that Paris is liberated, joy that France is liberated, but de Gaulle by this stage also, of course, because he'd been broadcasting on the BBC, although the French people have very little kind of physical contact with him, very few French people have met him, lots of them have heard him, and he's become very much the voice of Free France. So for that reason, I mean, lots of people say there's almost this kind of mystical moment when they meet de Gaulle, because you're meeting someone that you've heard on the radio for four years. They say, you know, I realised that the voice was also a human being. And later in life, de Gaulle, when he wants to make a special impact, sometimes broadcasts on the radio as a conscious means of evoking the Second World War.

• 57:17Dan Snow?

  I mean, constitutionally, it all gets quite interesting and complicated here, but because he claims that the French Republic never ceased to exist, and so he doesn't need to sort of re-establish it. Does he take a job title with actual meaning? I mean, when does, when does he regularise his role as the sort of de facto boss of the bits of France that have been liberated?

• 57:35Speaker 04

  He's recognised as head of the government by the British and the Americans in the autumn of 1944. He becomes Prime Minister, so head of government, not a head of state, which I think is for de Gaulle a kind of significant division. He's running at that stage a government which is made up primarily of professional politicians, some resistance people, but quite a lot of people left over from the old Third Republic. So it's a slightly kind of uncomfortable period in de Gaulle's life, up until January 1946, when he resigns, the period between the liberation and January 1946, when he's suddenly cast into being a conventional kind of politician. Now, I think he's been a politician for a long time, but he's been a politician, of

• 58:19Speaker 04

  course, operating in a world where the rules of political gravity don't fully apply. So, you know, he's never had to stand for election or anything like that. He is, of course, he's not only never stood for election, I think he's never voted, because French army officers don't vote. And in fact, Madame de Gaulle, I think, votes before her husband does, because women get the vote after the liberation, and she votes in municipal elections before army officers are given the vote, and de Gaulle himself votes. So he's completely removed from the world of kind of electoral politics and party politics, he's never been a member of a political party. And I think he finds that a difficult period, and I also think he's a man who has very abstract conceptions of what he wants France to be.

• 59:03Speaker 04

  The famous opening lines of his memoirs are, all of my life, I've had a certain idea of France. And once he's asked to make that concrete, that's quite hard. So I think he finds that brief period as a real head of government, a tricky period.

• 59:18Dan Snow?

  Yes, I'm not surprised, it's, judging from current heads of government, it seems to be a kind of universal feature.

• 59:25Speaker 04

  Easier said than done.

• 59:26Dan Snow?

  Yeah, the rhetoric is easy in the build-up. So he resigns in 1946, what is, what is his next move?

• 59:36Speaker 04

  Well, it's, it's hard to say, so he resigns kind of in a huff, no one quite understands why. Duff Cooper, British ambassador by this stage, writes a dispatch saying this is completely unexpected, Duff Cooper has been in bed, he says, with flu, and therefore missed out on things. De Gaulle himself, I think he probably hopes by the drama of resignation, to compel the French people to bring him back, and therefore, he thinks, you know, he'll be summoned back to Paris and become Prime Minister again, with a much freer hand over what he wants to do. So particularly what he wants to do is have a constitution in which the executive will have greater power, and Parliament will have less power. That doesn't happen.

• 1:00:21Speaker 04

  And at that stage, he then begins to think, well, maybe I need to make it happen. So he does what he's always, I think, been reluctant to do. And he always does kind of almost backing into, which is to form something called the rassemblement du peuple français, the Assembly of French People, or the Gathering of French People. Now, he always denies this is a political party. He always says it's meant to be bringing together everybody, even from different political parties. But of course, in practice, it is a party. And it's a party that then campaigns against what has become the Fourth Republic Constitution. De Gaulle wants to overthrow that. He wants to introduce a stronger executive head, a strong presidency.

• 1:01:03Speaker 04

  He is also at this stage, very ferociously anti-communist. This is of course, the early stages of the Cold War. And I think De Gaulle is probably most emphatically a right winger in the late 1940s. And one of the things about him is that although he is a right winger, he's never comfortable with being a conventional right winger. And he's always most successful when somehow he manages to kind of transcend his own political background and have an appeal that draws in the left as well as the right. And he conspicuously doesn't manage that in the late 1940s. He also gambles very high so that all the other political parties make deals, form alliances. De Gaulle says, no alliances.

• 1:01:47Speaker 04

  We'll fight the 1951 election, all or nothing, while either win it and have our way, or we don't win it, and that's that. And although they win a huge number of seats, he doesn't have an absolute majority in parliament. And therefore, in his terms, he's been defeated. And then, in fact, he dissolves the RPF and retreats from politics for a time in the mid 19, well, from about 1953 onwards. So there's then the first of his kind of great withdrawals, where he goes to his country house at Colombie La Diziglise, writes his memoirs. I think genuinely thinks at this stage, my political career is over. And I think one of the reasons why these wonderful memoirs assume such importance is

• 1:02:32Speaker 04

  because he thinks this is going to be my political legacy. This is what I'm going to leave to France. And probably for a period of two or three years in the mid 50s, he thinks, I'm not ever going to come back to power.

• 1:02:44Dan Snow?

  And yet, like Cincinnatus, like a great figure of the Roman Republic, he is dragged back from his plough. Again, it's, I suppose, it's a sort of a military or foreign policy crisis that sees him brought back into government.

• 1:02:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't go too heavy on Cincinnatus and De Gaulle. So De Gaulle doesn't really plough, and De Gaulle certainly isn't reluctant to be dragged back to power. On the contrary, all his emissaries are maneuvering to get him back into power as soon as they realize there's a chance of it, with De Gaulle's tacit help and support. So what happens is that there's a rebellion against French presence in Algeria that starts in 1954, which destabilizes the Fourth Republic. And particularly, the army comes to feel that the French government is not sufficiently firm in defending French Algeria. And so that begins to provoke a mood of discontent.

• 1:03:40Speaker 04

  De Gaulle certainly, in a rather dishonest way, does talk to people in the army, and never exactly gives them kind of carte blanche to go ahead, but never exactly stops them either. The army finally rebels in Algeria. So there is a rebellion by settlers and by the army in Algeria in May 1958, at which they call for the return of De Gaulle. And at that stage, De Gaulle's playing a very delicate game. So De Gaulle does want to come back, but he wants to come back on his own terms. And that means he mustn't be a creature of the politicians. He wants to make it clear the politicians have asked him, not vice versa, and that he has free hands. But I think also, he's quite careful not to be a creature of the army.

• 1:04:22Speaker 04

  He doesn't want to be the leader of a military coup, or the beneficiary of a military coup. He wants to say, you know, I was almost called back by almost kind of supernatural, man of destiny type memes. So that he pretends that he's had nothing to do with all the shenanigans that lead him back into power. And eventually, the leaders of the Fourth Republic say, De Gaulle is the solution. We must turn to De Gaulle. So he is therefore made initially head of government. So he comes back as Prime Minister. He does, much to his own distaste, give a speech to parliament. So he has to kind of accept that it is a parliamentary vote that has brought him back to power.

• 1:05:03Speaker 04

  And then he forms a government which is going to remake France and particularly create a new constitution. So this government creates the constitution of the Fifth Republic, which means now there will be a president which will have real power, which will not be a figurehead president, but which will be the real head of politics in the country. And of course, De Gaulle himself is to be the first president of Fifth Republic.

• 1:05:27Dan Snow?

  You're listening to Dan Snow's History. We're talking about Charles De Gaulle, more coming up.

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• 1:07:24Dan Snow?

  So he takes over and does that strange thing that right-wingers seem able to do, which is then do something radically progressive. He grudgingly accepts Algerian independence.

• 1:07:35Speaker 04

  Yeah. I think he doesn't know he's going to do this in 1958. One of the keys to De Gaulle is his terrific poker play. He's very good at keeping other people guessing about what his real intentions are. And he's a master of ambiguity. And of course, he goes to Algiers in 1958, and he makes this speech in which he says, je vous ai compris, I have understood you. And the settlers and the army assume that means I am sympathetic to you, which he doesn't necessarily mean at all, and it could mean exactly the opposite. But I actually think De Gaulle has not himself understood what he's going to do. I think probably initially, he does hope he will keep Algeria French.

• 1:08:17Speaker 04

  He moves out of it through a succession of deliberately uncertain formulations. So he talks about Algérie-Algerienne, Algeria and Algeria. He talks about autodetermination, but he says that autodetermination is not the same as self-determination. So he's kind of, by baby steps, moving towards the idea of Algerian independence and French withdrawal. I think he's much more motivated to do this by a concern for France, but then by a concern from Algeria. So De Gaulle is not a natural decolonizer. De Gaulle is a racist, nowhere around that. And in some way, of course, he's a decolonizer because he's a racist, because he doesn't

• 1:09:02Speaker 04

  believe that you can have an integrated France and Algeria, in which then there would be a large Muslim population. So he says, we need a kind of clean break. And therefore, eventually, he presents to the French people this need to break with the past. He makes a wonderful speech, the most quintessential De Gaulle speech, I think, where he says, I'm a man of the 19th century. I was born in the age of the oil lamps and the fleet at sail. And you know, this kind of beautiful nostalgic vacation. And then suddenly he bangs the table and he says, but that's over. And there's no policy that's valuable unless it's rooted in reality.

• 1:09:43Speaker 04

  And he means we need the reality of France, accepting it's no longer an imperial power. So he does pull France out of Algeria. He is then obviously enormously unpopular with sections of the political right, with the French settlers and with part of the army. And indeed, there's a military putsch against him in April, 1961, launched in Algeria. And when you say only a right winger could get away with doing this, I think that's true, and particularly only a right wing army man can get away with facing down the army. So he appears on television in uniform, faced with this general's putsch, and describes the putschist as a cadre de généreux en rétrete,

• 1:10:26Speaker 04

  bunch of retreat half paid generals, and it kind of dismisses them. And he he toughs it out. He survives the the general's putsch and it fails.

• 1:10:34Dan Snow?

  Fascinating, and indeed, he also survives an assassination attempt.

• 1:10:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, so he survives a lot of assassination attempts. In fact, because the people who are nostalgic for French Algeria hate him and believe that killing him is the solution to France's problems. I think there's a strange kind of way in which nothing kind of becomes de Gaulle better than the assassination attempt, because it dramatizes his position wonderfully. There's this sense that, you know, this man is absolutely the center of the great national drama, that people should want to assassinate him. It makes him into a kind of center of attention. It exposes also, reveals his extraordinary kind of cool courage. So if you contrast, as people often do in the early 60s, his position with Churchill's.

• 1:11:22Speaker 04

  Churchill, of course, very frail at this stage. Private Eye has this phrase, the greatest dying Englishman. And so poor old Churchill is slowly moving towards the end of his life, very sick. Meanwhile, de Gaulle is stepping out of a Citroen D S, which is pumped, you know, the O A S, the Algerian settlers have pumped 200 machine gun bullets into it. And de Gaulle just sort of steps away from the car, brushes the glass off his sleeve and says, you know, they can't shoot. So there's this kind of magisterial indifference to danger on de Gaulle's part, which I think is very useful to him and actually contributes to, A, it contributes to his image and also gives him an excuse to do something that is really the kind of consecration of the Fifth Republic, which is, he says,

• 1:12:05Speaker 04

  because my life is at such risk, therefore we must have a means of choosing my successor. And therefore we must have something that hasn't happened previously. We must have direct elections for the presidency, which he introduces in 1962. And then in 1965, he himself becomes the directly elected president by the whole French population. And that is the only time in his life where de Gaulle stands for election by universal suffrage at the age of 75.

• 1:12:33Dan Snow?

  Fascinating. There's a whole subset of politicians that survive assassination attempts and for whom that bolsters there. I mean, Teddy Roosevelt, Donald Trump, it's remarkable, isn't it? It makes them irritable, it can give them a particular halo. Just on the details of that assassination attempt, he's in, he's just, what, driving through a car and there's an ambush and they.

• 1:12:53Speaker 04

  The famous assassination attempt, the one that features at the beginning of the wonderful film, The Day of the Jackal, is the assassination at Petit Clamard, where his car is driving to an airport where he's going to go to his country house. A group of, you know, ex legionnaires, foreign legionnaires and so on ambush him. They shoot up his car. His driver, I think all the tires are shot out and his driver manages to keep on driving. De Gaulle himself stays very calm. People regard it, I mean, some of his aides say it's miraculous. He's escaped and it contributes this kind of mystique of this man who's had this almost supernatural escape. There's a wonderful moment just after it actually where de Gaulle is on the one hand, this figure of kind of superhuman grandeur and courage.

• 1:13:37Speaker 04

  On the other hand, he can be a very human figure in very touching ways. So when he gets out of the car, he says to his aide, who is also his son in law, he says, from now on, we don't travel in the same car because I don't want my daughter to lose her father and her husband at the same time. So it's it's rather sweet that in this extraordinary moment, his thoughts should be for his daughter.

• 1:14:01Dan Snow?

  So in 1965, he runs the only time he's elected on universal suffrage. Fascinating. Speaking of which, I'm always, I'm always a big fan of the fact that Churchill never fought an election as leader of the Conservative Party in which he won more votes than the opposition.

• 1:14:13Speaker 04

  That's true, yes. I mean, electoral defeat is something that de Gaulle hates. I mean, the mere sniff of electoral defeat makes de Gaulle resign. And in fact, he thinks he's put into the second round of the presidential election in 1965, doesn't get enough votes to be instantly elected. And he almost resigns at that stage. The idea of me, de Gaulle, having to fight a second round is undignified. Whereas of course Churchill, I mean, you know, he's fighting elections all his life from the age of 25 months.

• 1:14:41Dan Snow?

  And he's no stranger to defeat. Yeah. Okay, so we got then, then so de Gaulle is now, is now the directly elected president. And let's come to his, let's come to his downfall in that year of years, 1968. There was something in the water. What happened?

• 1:14:57Speaker 04

  So 1968 in France is marked by two things. The thing we all know about student rebellion, the thing we see all over the world, in parts of the Western world at least. More specific to France, there's also a very big general strike. The working classes are involved in the protests of 1968. So it's a very dramatic moment. And there's a period really in May, June, 1968, where France just comes to a halt. De Gaulle has a funny relationship with this. So first of all, this might sound a very strange thing to say, but de Gaulle, in some ways, has some things in common with the students in 1968. So he's quite critical of America. He's withdrawn France from the NATO integrated command structure.

• 1:15:41Speaker 04

  He's very critical of America and Vietnam. He's not really comfortable with the consumer society. And in some ways, the kind of, you know, the comfort and luxury of France in the late 60s, very great economic success, although he liked economic success, he didn't always like the idea of a comfortable country. He's a very austere man. And of course, as some of the students recognize, he's the great leader of anti-Nazi resistance in 1940. And some of the students themselves eventually become nostalgic for de Gaulle. They come to say, de Gaulle's a great hero, we should have appreciated him more. But he's circumvented by 1968. He just looks too old, out of touch. His prime minister, Georges Pompidou, is much more quick on his feet,

• 1:16:24Speaker 04

  much more able to adjust to the modern world. So for a time, it just looks like de Gaulle's been kind of sidelined. He's just sitting in the Élysée Palace and the students really can't even be bothered to attack him. He's just become a figure from the past. And then he suddenly does something. He flies to Germany to see General Massu, Gaulist general he's known for a long time. And it's not entirely clear what's going on here. I think what's going on is, first of all, de Gaulle wants to reassure himself that the French army will be with him if he has to put the students down with force. And of course, the French army, large parts of which have been annoyed by Algeria, he can't necessarily take their loyalty for granted. But I think Massu reassures him, he says, yes, the army will be with you.

• 1:17:09Speaker 04

  I think there's also a sense in which de Gaulle just briefly reseizes the initiative. So for the first time, when he flies to Germany, everyone's talking about de Gaulle. In a funny kind of way, his absence from France makes him more present. And then he comes back to France. He makes a broadcast on the radio, just like in 1940, not on the television. So people can't see the old de Gaulle, the wrinkled, fat old man. They just hear this extraordinary voice, the voice they've heard in June 1940, or at least the voice they know about from June 1940. And then, in fact, there's a huge rally in favor of de Gaulle. So the biggest demonstration in France in 1968 is actually a pro Gaulist demonstration.

• 1:17:51Speaker 04

  And then the Gaulists sweep the board in elections to parliament a bit later in 1968. So actually, as is often the case, one thing's about 6080 is you've got to remember that the big winners are usually right wingers. Nixon in America, Heath in the long term in Britain and the Gaulists in France. So it looks like de Gaulle has won, but I think de Gaulle is uncomfortable with his victory. And when I talked about the R P F, I said he never likes being a conventional right winger. And I think the problem with 1968 is that de Gaulle is boxed into the position of being a conventional right winger. And he doesn't like that position.

• 1:18:33Speaker 04

  He doesn't like just being an old man who people like because he's reassuring or anything like that. So he's almost then looking for an excuse to kind of commit political suicide. He holds a referendum on various issues, not in fact very important issues, but he then makes this a kind of issue of confidence. He says, I don't win the referendum, I leave. He loses the referendum and he resigns instant. He just makes an announcement, I will cease to exercise my functions at 12 o'clock. Bye bye. And he's gone. He only comes to Paris one more time in his life. He comes to, I think, his granddaughter's first communion. Other than that, he's off to his country house. It's over.

• 1:19:14Dan Snow?

  And he's dead just over a year later, age 80 or.

• 1:19:17Speaker 04

  I think he's just short of his 80th birthday. His birthday is in November.

• 1:19:21Dan Snow?

  Goodness me, what a story, what a life. I mean, what is his, what is his reputation now like in France?

• 1:19:28Speaker 04

  His reputation stands very high. So he was actually, of course, very unpopular for much of his life. I mean, even in the 60s, when he's head of state, he has many bitter enemies. And François Mitterrand, who of course becomes the most long serving president of the Fifth Republic, more long serving than de Gaulle himself. François Mitterrand almost defined himself by opposition to de Gaulle. He's de Gaulle's opponent in the second round of the 65 presidential election. So when de Gaulle dies, he's not a unifying figure. And in some ways, I'm not being entirely flippant to say that de Gaulle's death is his last great service to France. Because when he dies, France can move on. They can move on from the Second World War, they can move on from Algeria, they can move on from all these divisions that have been associated with de Gaulle.

• 1:20:14Speaker 04

  And his successor, Georges Pompidou, is a much more kind of banal, uncontroversial figure. But over the years, people come to admire de Gaulle more. And you see that, I think, for several reasons, one of which is the kind of increasing emphasis on France in the Vichy years, which becomes a big national obsession in the 80s and 90s. And therefore, de Gaulle comes to stand as the man who is clearly against Vichy. I think there's a very sharp contrast with Mitterrand. So Mitterrand had been in the resistance, had probably run greater risks than de Gaulle during the war. But Mitterrand is always a figure where his relations with Vichy and all sorts of

• 1:20:56Speaker 04

  aspects of his career are always a bit kind of fluid and uncertain. And Mitterrand, often associated with a certain corruption. So somehow the asceticism and the purity of de Gaulle come to seem very attractive during the Mitterrand years. And de Gaulle also comes to transcend political differences. So that he's admired by bits of both the right and the left, which is something he would very much have liked, I think. And he's seen almost by accident as having been on the right side of history twice. So the right side of history against fascism and then the right side of history against empire and colonialism. Now, I think that's not an entirely fair representation.

• 1:21:38Speaker 04

  As I say, I think de Gaulle is more an anti-German than an anti-Nazi. And I think de Gaulle is a decolonizer because of French interests, not because of the interests of colonized. But nonetheless, again, in contrast to Churchill, of course, now is becoming an ever more controversial figure. In contrast to Churchill, de Gaulle looks as if he's been on the right side. And so for that reason, he becomes a great figure of kind of national unity. And people from all sorts of different backgrounds would now express their admirations for de Gaulle. So Marine Le Pen on the extreme right, whose father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, hated de Gaulle and defined himself by opposition to de Gaulle. She speaks well of de Gaulle. The French left in large measure admired de Gaulle.

• 1:22:22Speaker 04

  So in that way, he's become perhaps the thing he was never in his lifetime, which is uncontroversial.

• 1:22:28Dan Snow?

  Lovely place to end. Thank you very much. I'm reminded of various other political leaders whose greatest gift was their death, like King John of England. He saved his dynasty by dying when he did. Thank you very much, Richard. That was such a fantastic... Thank you for giving us so much of your time. What a wonderful, what a wonderful description of a, one of the great lives of the 20th century. I appreciate that.

• 1:22:51Speaker 04

  No, it's absolutely my pleasure. Thank you.

• 1:22:53Dan Snow?

  What's your new book called?

• 1:22:54Speaker 04

  My current book is called The Last Titans: Churchill and de Gaulle.

• 1:22:57Dan Snow?

  All right, Richard. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

• 1:22:59Speaker 04

  Thank you.

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• 1:24:33Dan Snow?

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