Churchill was the archetypal hero of the twentieth century, and his life was so long, and full, and varied that one has to concentrate on salient points to sharpen the profile. First, health and energy. There were various physical crises in his life, including a near-fatal accident on Park Avenue in 1931 and heart attacks in the war and postwar. But on the whole his health was astonishingly good, as emerges clearly from the book by his personal physician, Lord Moran, Winston Churchill: The Struggle for Survival (1966). (This is one of the two really good books about him, the other being The Winston Churchill As I Knew Him (1965) by Lady Violet Bonham Carter, dealing with the years 1906–1918).
Why did Churchill enjoy such good health? He took little regular exercise. He ate exactly what he wanted. Most people believed he drank too much, especially of whiskey and brandy. After brandy, said Cyril Asquith, “he looked like a tortoise.” But he sipped the brandy very slowly, and he took his whiskey heavily diluted with water. He never gulped liquor. In 1949, aboard Aristotle Onassis’s yacht, Christina, he boasted of his alcohol consumption, and said: “If all the whisky and brandy I have drunk in my life was added up, it would fill this state-room to overflowing.” Professor Lindemann, Lord Cherwell, his scientific adviser, was present, and doubted Churchill’s assertion. So he was given his master’s daily intake, the measurements of the stateroom (which, like everything else on the yacht was of great size) and told to get out his slide rule. Cherwell calculated that the spirits Churchill had drunk in his life would fill the room only up to a depth of five inches. Churchill was mortified. After he died, an autopsy was carried out and various bodily organs were examined. His liver was found to be in a perfect state, “like a five-year-old.”
Churchill was both a very active and a very inactive man. He spent an extraordinary amount of his time in bed. This was not sloth but method. The first time I met Churchill, in the autumn of 1946, when I was still a schoolboy about to go up to Oxford, I asked him this question: “Mr. Churchill, sir, to what do you attribute your success in life?” He replied, instantly: “Conservation of energy. Never stand up when you can sit down, and never sit down when you can lie down.” Curiously enough, exactly the same principle was laid down by Mae West: “I never walk when I can sit, or sit when I can recline.” Churchill followed his axiom. If possible he spent the morning in bed, like a duchess in the good old days. But he was not inactive. He read his letters, and dictated answers, went through the newspapers, and did a good deal of telephoning. He also received visitors. Once seated, especially in an armchair, he was reluctant to rise. That aroused the indignation of President Theodore Roosevelt, who said (1904): “That young man is not a gentleman. He does not rise to his feet when a lady enters the room.”
Churchill’s record of activity is unlikely ever to be equaled. In addition to being prime minister for a total of nearly nine years (for much of which he was also minister of defense), he was twice first lord of the admiralty, secretary of state for war, and secretary of state for the colonies. As chancellor of the exchequer, he carried into law five consecutive budgets, a record equaled only by Walpole, Pitt, Peel and Gladstone, and unlikely ever to be broken. He published over 5 million words. His six volumes on the Second World War alone total 2,050,000 words (including appendices and index). For purposes of comparison, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is about 1,100,000 words. Churchill built walls, made lakes, painted over a thousand canvases, made thousands of speeches all over the world, some of the finest ever delivered, and mastered the art of broadcasting in a way never surpassed. He is the only member of the House of Commons who, after sitting in the cabinet, commanded an infantry battalion in action. He also survived a number of personal and political crises of great ferocity, notably when he was blamed for the Dardanelles disaster, and when he made a fool of himself during the abdication crisis in 1936. On the second occasion, wrote Lord Winterton, the longest-serving MP, Churchill was the villain of an ugly and humiliating scene, “one of the angriest manifestations I have ever heard directed against any man in the House of Commons.” At one time or another, Churchill was viciously attacked from every quarter of the political spectrum. He fought or threatened more libel actions than any other MP in the twentieth century. In 1923 he had the poet Lord Alfred Douglas sent to prison for six months for criminal libel, and threatened to do the same to Clifford Sharp, editor of the New Statesman, in 1926. The Tories elected him their leader in the autumn of 1940 only with the greatest reluctance, and many hated him in their hearts, as he did them. The period of his life to which he turned back with the greatest satisfaction were the years 1906 to 1912, when he and Lloyd George were laying the foundations of the British welfare state. Right at the end of his life, he had a curious conversation with a friend of mine, “Curly” Mallalieu, MP. Churchill, nearly ninety and frail, was allowed to use a facility called “the House of Lords Lift” to save him going up the stairs, in which Parliament abounds. Other MPs suffering from temporary debilities were also permitted to use it, and Mallalieu had hurt himself playing football. One day, he found Churchill already in the lift and eyeing him narrowly: “Who are you?” “I’m Bill Mallalieu, sir, MP for Huddersfield.” “What party?” “Labour, sir.” “Ah. I’m a liberal. Always have been.”
Next to energy, Churchill had intelligence. This aspect of his armory for life has generally been underestimated, not least by his parents. It recalls Lady Mornington’s foolish dismissal of her son, the future Duke of Wellington (another highly intelligent man) as “food for powder, nothing more.” Lord Randolph Churchill and Lady Randolph, disappointed by Churchill’s poor academic performance at Harrow, thought him fit only for the army: and, in the army, fit only for the cavalry, which demanded fewer brains than the foot guards or the light infantry. Later in life, he was sneered at by intellectuals such as A. J. Balfour, Harold Laski and R. H. S. Crossman, mainly because he did not use their academic vernacular. But Churchill abounded in natural intelligence, and though almost entirely self-educated (chiefly as a subaltern in India), he was capable of arguing through all kinds of problems. It was the philosopher Karl Popper who first drew attention to the sharpness of Churchill’s analytical intellect. He quotes a passage from My Early Life, Churchill’s fascinating volume of autobiography, first published in 1930:
Some of my cousins who had the great advantage of university education used to tease me with arguments to prove that nothing has any existence except what we think of it. I always rested upon the following argument which I devised for myself many years ago. Here is this great sun standing apparently on no better foundation than our physical senses. But happily there is a method, apart altogether from our physical senses, of testing the reality of the sun. Astronomers predict by mathematics and pure reason that a black spot will pass across the sun on a certain day. You look, and your sense of sight immediately tells you that their calculations are vindicated. We have taken what is called in military map-making a “cross-bearing.” We have got independent testimony to the reality of the sun. When my metaphysical friends tell me that the data on which the astronomers make their calculations was necessarily obtained originally through the evidence of their senses, I say “No.” They might, in theory at any rate, be obtained by automatic calculating-machines set in motion by the light falling upon them without admixture of the human senses at any stage. I reaffirm with emphasis that the sun is real, and that it is hot—in fact as hot as Hell, and that if the metaphysicians doubt it they should go there and see.
Popper’s comment is as follows:
Churchill’s argument, especially the important passage I have put in italics, not only is a valid criticism of the idealistic and subjectivist arguments, but is the philosophically soundest and most ingenious argument against subjectivist epistemology that I know…The argument is highly original; first published in 1930 it is one of the earliest philosophical arguments making use of the possibility of automatic observatories and calculating machines, programmed by Newtonian theory.
It is possible to find many other examples of Churchill’s intellectual ingenuity dotted about his writings, and not, as in this case, acknowledged by a great philosopher. The truth is, Churchill had a fine mind, and the fact that it was an undisciplined and uneducated mind sometimes worked to his advantage.
Churchill prided himself on his liberalism and his (by the standards of 1906) progressive notions. He was also a skeptic. It is a curious fact, which some of his warmest admirers find hard to accept, that he had little religious belief. Indeed he regarded orthodox religion as a sham. When he was educating himself in India in his early twenties, he read Winwood Reade’s powerful but crude antireligious tract, The Martyrdom of Man, written a generation before, in 1872. It made a huge impression on him, which was never quite effaced. He wrote to his mother after finishing the book:
One of these days the cold bright light of science and reason will shine through the cathedral windows and we shall go out into the fields to seek God for ourselves. The great laws of Nature will be understood—our destiny and our past will be clear. We shall then be able to dispense with the religious toys that have agreeably fostered the development of mankind.
Churchill shared the belief, common among nineteenth-century intellectuals, that organized religion was “the opiate of the people.” It was the enemy of progress and of worldly success. He said he believed
that people who think much of the next world rarely prosper in this; that men must use their minds and not kill their doubts by sensuous pleasures; that superstitious faith in nations rarely promotes their industry, that in a phrase, Catholicism—all religions, if you like, but particularly Catholicism—is a delicious narcotic. It may soothe our pains and chase our worries, but it checks our growth and saps our strength.
This was not just a young man’s iconoclasm either. When he wrote My Early Life he was in his late fifties. He still held that Reade’s book was “a concise and well-written universal history of mankind,” proving that, in dying, “we simply go out like candles.” Churchill had even less respect for the Church of England than he had for Catholicism, regarding it as essentially a social institution, perhaps of some value as such, but not a depository of transcendental truth. There is no evidence he ever developed a belief in life after death. He sometimes found it convenient or amusing or provocative to posit the existence of a divine providence. But he did so not in the deeply serious tone of a Lincoln, whose religious faith or nonfaith was similar, but in the manner of a man sharing a cosmic joke. Thus, when early in 1951, still leader of the opposition, he told a group of Tory MPs in the smoking room: “It is fortunate that this war in Korea has come while Labour is still in power. We had no alternative but to fight, but if I had been Prime Minister, they would have called me a warmonger. As it is, I have not been called upon to take so invidious a step as to send our young men to fight on the other side of the globe. The Old Man has been good to me.” Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller (puzzled): “What old man, Sir?” Churchill: “Why, Sir Reginald, almighty God, the RULER OF THE UNIVERSE!”
But if Churchill had no religious faith as such, he had a system of pietàs, centering around Britain’s unwritten constitution, the Houses of Parliament, and the House of Commons in particular. There lay his household gods, and he honored them for seventy years of public service. He said more than once that “parliamentary democracy is a very unsatisfactory form of government,” and it certainly dealt him some painful blows at times, but it was nonetheless “immeasurably superior to any other.” He loved power, and sought it greedily always, most anxious to possess it “in all its plenitude” (a favorite phrase) and most reluctant to relinquish it, keeping the unfortunate Anthony Eden waiting for two nail-biting years as his career drew to a close. He said that the Dardanelles campaign was a failure “because I did not possess the power to make it a success,” and he applied the lesson in the Second World War, insisting that he be invested with sufficient power to direct the war effectively. As he put it, “I acquired and exercised power in ever-growing measure.” There is a vignette of him, face stern and proud, striding up and down the cabinet office, clenching and unclenching his fists, and saying: “I want them to feel my power.” And he was referring not to the enemy but to his colleagues.
Yet in the pursuit and enjoyment of power, he was always not merely careful but punctilious in observing the constitutional rules and respecting those persons and institutions charged with upholding them. This to my mind is the quality in Churchill which makes him so quintessentially the democratic hero. His relations with the sovereign were always exemplary. Watching Churchill bow to the newly enthroned Queen Elizabeth II, a young woman less than a third of his age, was a magnificent exercise in constitutional deportment. He bowed not just to a person but to an institution and to a historical process over a millennium old. And he bowed with genuine humility and a kind of childlike love. History, to him, was the great teacher, and he remained under her iron rod all his life. Along with the sovereign, as head of state, he revered the Commons, ultimate source of the power and authority he enjoyed. It had given him the power; it could take that power away unless he exercised it prudently. Hence satisfying the Commons was always at the center of his preoccupations as prime minister. There were all kinds of complaints laid at his door, but never once was he accused of treating the Commons with indifference, let alone contempt. He respected its offices too, above all the speaker, whom he always obeyed, even in moments of great emotional stress.
Churchill was particularly careful during his wartime days of power to observe the rules which governed his relations, as political master, with the service chiefs, as executives. It would not be true to say that he never sought to teach them their business. He had his views on warfare, often right, sometimes wrong, always well informed and invariably argued with force, even genius. But in the end he always submitted to their judgment about how the policies of the war cabinet were to be implemented. He restrained his skepticism or anger or will—it was sometimes a huge effort—but he kept to the rules. And that was one reason the generals and admirals and air marshals, who often found him a trial and a burden, respected his leadership.
The tensions and efforts of Churchill’s life were always made more bearable by his love of jokes and laughter. His sense of humor was not ubiquitous—he could sometimes be stony faced when confronted by absurdities others found hilarious. But it popped out again pretty quickly. He was never glum for long. At his first meeting with Violet Bonham Carter, in 1906, she recalled him saying: “We are all worms. But I really think I am a glow worm.” The glow came from a sense of fun that was never wholly extinct, and sometimes radiated warmth of a metaphysical kind. His jokes ran the gamut, from horseplay through whimsy and irony to self-deprecation. They were seldom cruel or savage. He found Sir Stafford Cripps a trial, but the worst he ever said of him, as he passed through the central lobby, was: “There, but for the grace of God, goes God.” The only political enemy he could not joke about was Aneurin Bevan (“a squalid nuisance”). He invented the cab joke, about the (comparatively) insignificant Clem Attlee: “An empty taxi drew up outside the House of Commons, and Mr Attlee got out.” He made one nasty joke about the detested Vic Oliver, the stand-up comic who married Churchill’s stagestruck daughter Sarah. When Mussolini’s misfortunes became overwhelming, Churchill commented: “Well, at least he had the pleasure of murdering his son-in-law.” Churchill bore rancor at the time but seldom afterward. He said himself he was not a good hater: “The moment victory came, I ceased to hate Germany.” His behavior toward Chamberlain was noble. “In war, resolution, in defeat, defiance, in victory, magnanimity, in peace, good will.” That was the central maxim of his life. The public turned him out once or twice—spectacularly in 1945. But he always accepted the electoral verdict without recrimination. When suddenly turned off in July 1945 after five years of magisterial authority, he was taken aback. His wife said: “Perhaps it is a blessing in disguise.” He replied: “It appears to be very effectively disguised.”
In fact, Clementine Churchill was right. Not only did dismissal by the electorate save Churchill from making strategic errors of judgment in the immediate postwar period, especially over India, where he would have tried to hang on, but enforced idleness, after his hectic industry during the war years, made it possible for him to get down immediately to the business of telling his side of the wartime story. In this book I have drawn attention to the efforts of some great actors in history to get posterity on their side. Alexander arranged for writers to put his case. Caesar wrote his commentaries on the Gallic and civil wars. But Churchill was by far the most thorough and successful in ensuring that his tale was told. After his electoral defeat Churchill buckled down to the task of his war memoirs straight away, and by the time he returned to power at the end of 1951, the bulk of the work had been done. If he had remained in office, it might never have been done at all.
The work has five remarkable characteristics, all of which were described in detail in a remarkable book by David Reynolds, In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing in the Second World War (2005). First, and perhaps most important, the book was a documentary history as well as a personal memoir. Churchill had always been a hoarder of papers (as was George Washington), and from an early age had kept a personal archive, preserving every scrap of importance about himself. He had earlier dealt with the First World War in about 750,000 words, provoking a famous quip from his cabinet colleague (and former political opponent) A. J. (later Earl) Balfour: “Winston has written an enormous book about himself and called it The World Crisis.” He learned a lot from the experience, especially the need to get possession and make use of official papers. He applied this lesson to the Second World War from the start. It is likely that many of the most important assessments and telegrams Churchill wrote while the war was on were classified by him at the time with a view to future use in his memoirs. When he left Downing Street in summer 1945, he made what has been called a “remarkable bargain” with the then cabinet secretary, Sir Edward Bridges, the custodian of government documents. Under the bargain, a vast quantity of his wartime papers were classified as his personal property, and he was allowed to remove them physically to the archive at his country house, Chartwell, in Kent. The only condition was that their publication had to be approved by the government of the day. This bargain not only made it easy for Churchill to document his work in full but also benefited the Churchill family financially. He donated all these papers to the Chartwell Trust and this, in turn, sold them to Lord Camrose, the owner of the Daily Telegraph, as part of a clever legal device to avoid the punitive taxation which would have made the memoirs financially pointless.
The second characteristic was size, which I have already described. Thanks to the documentary element, all the important episodes in the account, and many minor ones, are described in considerable detail, all of which were new at the time of publication. The work, whether serialized or read in book form, was thus fascinating, despite its size. This raises the third point. By any standards, this was one of the most successful books ever written, both financially and in terms of readership. The original book deal of May 1947 (for a projected five volumes) brought the author $2.23 million, which in today’s terms might be anything up to $50 million. In addition Churchill got huge sums from Time Life and the New York Times for serial rights. The work helped to win him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953. This meant Churchill joined the elite group of Britons such as Kipling, Shaw and T. S. Eliot, and which included only one other historian, Theodore Mommsen, the German chronicler of ancient Rome. At the time of the Nobel Prize winning, the Daily Telegraph, which serialized the last volume in London, stated that volumes one to five had already sold 6 million copies, and extracts had appeared in fifty newspapers in forty countries, concluding: “No book has ever so swiftly achieved such dissemination.” Both British and American publishers made fortunes from the enterprise, as did Churchill’s agent and Riviera host, Emery Reeves.
Fourth, the work was both a personal achievement and a team effort. It was based upon what the author called “the three Ds—documents, dictation and drafts.” The wartime minutes and telegrams formed the core, but Churchill also dictated a number of passages on key episodes that he remembered with particular intensity. There were also drafts on the background history of events put together by “the Syndicate,” the team of research assistants headed by Bill Deakin, Henry Pownall and Gordon Allen. In addition, other experts, industry service chiefs who held important positions in the war, were called in to supply drafts of particular events, not always successfully. Bill Deakin, an academic who was the only professional historian in the Syndicate, played an unusually important role in revising the entire text of the volume, The Hinge of Fate, when Churchill lacked the time to do it himself.
The fact that Churchill was not the sole author (though always the final authority on what went in, or not) does not diminish his achievement. The production of the work may be compared to the efforts of a big research group in science directed by a major figure who gets the credit. Denis Kelly, the office manager of the Syndicate, varied the metaphor. Asked if the great man really wrote the book himself, he replied it “was almost as superficial a question as asking a Master Chef, ‘Did you cook the whole banquet with your own hands?’”
Fifth, and this links up with the first point, the work had an impact on how we see the history of the war and its aftermath, which for many decades was almost determinative, and still helps to shape the received history. Here the documentation was all important. The British documents to which Churchill alone had full access were permanently locked up (except to certain select official historians) until in 1958 Parliament enacted legislation on access, but even this concession included the “Fifty Year Rule,” which meant half a century had to elapse before the public could see a particular document. In 1967 this was reduced to thirty years, but by then Churchill was dead, having got in with his documents well ahead of the pack.
Churchill was also lucky in that, during the seven years it took him to write and publish the work, he had virtually no competition. Hitler, Mussolini and Roosevelt were dead. Stalin wrote no memoirs, thinking official Soviet history would do instead—and he was also in power continuously until his death in 1953. Being in opposition, and moving (all things considered) with all deliberate speed, Churchill published long before the various generals, admirals, air marshals and politicians who might have helped to shape the vision of history. In effect, the period of revisionism did not begin until after his death, and by then many of the verdicts he sought to impose had already become part of the concrete and granite of historical teaching, exceedingly hard to undermine and replace. It is difficult to say how widely the work is still read, half a century after it was published, though as there are still millions of copies of it still on the shelves of public and private collections, one must assume it is still dipped into. But in a sense the question is irrelevant, since the message of the work, and many of its details, have passed into the public historical memory, at least in the English-speaking world, and probably much wider.
To a great extent then the heroic epic which gathered around Churchill was written or inspired by himself. From a study of how his War Memoirs were done, including deliberate omissions, suppressions and manipulations, the impression that emerges is that Churchill was a historian of great passion, insight, romantic and almost poetic gifts, huge industry and remarkable power, but also an operator of considerable ruthlessness. In writing his masterpiece describing the course of the greatest of all wars, and his own role in it, he knew very well that he was fighting for his place in history and his heroic status. He fought hard and took no prisoners, and on the whole he won the war of words too, as he had earlier won the war of deeds. And, as he once truly remarked (May 1938), “Words are the only things that last for ever.”
Churchill’s younger contemporary, Charles de Gaulle (1890–1970), was a national hero too, who saved the country twice, first in 1940 from shame and ignominy, second in 1958 from civil war. He also gave France the first successful constitution in its history (after twelve failures), which still serves well after half a century. These are substantial achievements. But it would be wrong to suppose that de Gaulle was ever a popular hero in the way Churchill was from 1940 on. A certain segment of the population, the same (roughly speaking) which had idolized Napoleon III, supported him fanatically, though not with warm affection. He had devoted followers, but no friends. On the other hand he was much hated, in all parts of the political spectrum. He was always a divisive, never a consensual, figure. This was the consequence in part of objective facts springing from the deep wells of French history, but at least as much to his adamantine character and the free rein he gave to it.
The first thing that struck you about de Gaulle was his appearance. It was extraordinary. He was over six foot six, enormously tall for a Frenchman. Tall men interested him. He was delighted with Lord Reith (six foot eight), the head of the BBC, whose incongruous height made him a savage loner. At Kennedy’s funeral in Washington, de Gaulle demanded to be introduced to the lofty Kenneth Galbraith—“Presentez-moi à ce grand homme-là!” His height cut him off from the rest of mankind, or so he felt. He made a virtue of his singularity, turned it into a philosophy of life. As he put it: “Solitude was my temptation. It became my friend. What else could satisfy anyone who has been face to face with history?” It is important to note that de Gaulle’s height did not give him grandeur. He was not far from being grotesque. General Spears recorded his impression on first meeting de Gaulle in the crisis of 1940:
A strange-looking man, enormously tall: sitting at the table he dominated everyone else by his height, as he had done when walking into the room. No chin, a long, drooping elephantine nose over a closely cut moustache, a shadow over a small mouth whose thick lips tended to protrude as if in a pout before speaking, a high, receding forehead and pointed head surrounded by sparse black hair lying flat and neatly parted. His heavily hooded eyes were very shrewd. When about to speak he oscillated his head like a pendulum, while searching for words. I at once remembered the nickname of Le Connétable, which Pétain said had been given him at Saint-Cyr. It was easy to imagine that head on a ruff, that secret face at Catherine de’Medici’s council chamber.
According to Malcolm Muggeridge, who had various opportunities to be close to de Gaulle during the war, he suffered from chronic halitosis, and knew it. This strengthened his habitual tendency to push people away before they had a chance to draw back in distaste. He was, literally, a repulsive person. He had acquaintances, some of whom he met regularly in specified restaurants, for purposes of discussion rather than camaraderie. But he had no camarades. To get close to somebody was a possible source of weakness. He demanded intense loyalty from his followers, and usually got it, but gave none in return. There was a revealing exchange with one of the most devoted of them, Jacques Soustelle, about Algeria, after de Gaulle returned to power in 1958. Soustelle said he was unhappy about de Gaulle’s move away from the Algerian colons, adding, “All my friends are unhappy.” De Gaulle replied: “Alors, Soustelle, changez vos amis!” After de Gaulle’s death, I asked Soustelle if this anecdote was true. He replied: “Yes. He did say that. He was a terrible man.”
This terrible man, capable of evoking heroism of the grandest kind but also of inspiring the sublimity of dread, was an intellectual. By that I mean he thought ideas more important than people. More particularly he thought the idea of France infinitely more important than individual Frenchmen, whose role in life was simply to work, fight, suffer and if need be die for France. Though determined from an early age to be a soldier, and devoting his life to it wholeheartedly, he was never successful at soldiering. This was possibly bad luck: he spent much of the First World War in a prison camp (a notoriously destructive experience, which aggravated his sense of solitude). In his late thirties he was still a captain. His only patron was Marshal Philippe Pétain, who befriended him on a number of occasions. He got him to give a course of three lectures on leadership at the Military Staff College. Everyone present was senior to de Gaulle, and the lectures, an astonishing display of historical knowledge, delivered without a note, were heard in stony silence, Pétain alone expressing his approval. They discussed, among other topics, the nature of the hero in war, and the need, on occasion, for the hero to disobey foolish or cowardly orders from above. He published them later in a slim volume called Le Fil de l’epée (The Edge of the Sword), and they are an uncanny adumbration of his later role.
De Gaulle put his ideas in print on other occasions, in specialist journals, and in a book, Vers l’Armée de metier (Toward a Professional Army), which had much to say about armored warfare. He had a brief and successful experience of commanding a scratch armored brigade after the collapse of France had already begun in 1940, but otherwise his soldiering was essentially intellectual—the attempt to propagate novel military ideas. De Gaulle had no more affection for writers and intellectuals than he had for any other group in society. But he recognized the important role they had always played in French history, and genuflected to it. He had no reason to like Jean-Paul Sartre (who hated him), but, as president, he honored France’s best-known philosopher and always addressed him as maître. He made André Malraux his minister of culture, seated him on his right hand at cabinet meetings, and usually asked him to open the discussion on any really important topic. These were not mere gestures. On one point de Gaulle agreed with Churchill: in the end, words last longer than anything else. He would have agreed with Dr. Johnson too, in saying, “The chief glory of every people arises from its authors.” This point came out markedly in a press conference in Paris which I attended sometime before he returned to power but when the question of the European Union was already sur le tapis. But before describing it, it is necessary to record that de Gaulle’s body language was quintessentially French. If there is one gesture the French male is particularly attached to, and brilliant at, it is the shrug of the shoulders (French women do not do it). De Gaulle, with his great height and peculiar pear-shaped body, turned the shrugged shoulder into a work of art. At this press conference, de Gaulle said he was not inspired by the coal-steel “community” as the foundation of the future European Union. He continued: “For me, the materialism of Brussels is uninteresting. Pour moi, l’Europe c’est l’Europe de Dante, de Goethe, et de Chateaubriand.” I interjected: “Et de Shakespeare, mon général?” He darted at me a look of intense hatred, then paused, reflected, and gave a classic demonstration of his monumental shoulder shrug, adding: “Oui, Shakespeare aussi.” It is worth pointing out that this little exchange showed de Gaulle, with characteristic percipience, putting his finger on the real weakness of the European Union in the half century since—its degrading materialism and its total failure to build itself on the civilization which is Europe’s essence.
Being an intellectual, however, and thinking people less important than ideas, de Gaulle was not a warm and friendly man, or a generous or forgiving or magnanimous man. He was quite unlike Churchill in these respects. He was an egoist on a monumental, indeed a superhuman scale, someone who raised selfishness or self-regard into a principle of life, and of government and of metaphysics, and who, by identifying himself with La France, also embodied the natural selfishness which is the salient characteristic of France and of French people generally. There cannot have been on this planet, in the last two centuries, a human being more difficult to deal with or who came so close to the abstract quality of intransigence. De Gaulle made himself particularly difficult to those in Britain in the summer of 1940 who befriended and helped him to set up the Free French movement, notably Churchill. Indeed, if there was one characteristic even more prominent in de Gaulle than his egotism and selfishness, it was his ingratitude. He saw gratitude as a weakness in general and, to a man in his position, as a fatal weakness. If a grateful impulse ever sprang up in his stony bosom, he stamped it out instantly. Ingratitude to his personal benefactors, and to France’s allies and friends, was absolutely central to his weltanschauung and to his geopolitics.
There was also, in de Gaulle, a streak of ruthlessness quite alien to the Anglo-Saxon world of politics, and which belonged more to the Continental autocracies of the ancien régime than to the constitutional democracies of the West. He did not say “L’État c’est moi,” like Louis XIV. Certainly he thought he was the French state, from 1940 till the liberation of 1944. But he went further. He thought La France, c’est moi, too. Thinking this, he felt himself constitutionally empowered, and morally entitled, to act exactly as he chose provided he could convince himself he was acting in France’s interests. Hard as he was on his allies, the people he was hardest of all on were the French. They were, from time to time, the victims of the blackest side of his nature. He could be, and occasionally was, cruel, vicious and terrible. In keeping absolute control of the Free French movement, first in London, then in North Africa, and in frustrating attempts to infiltrate it by its various French enemies, especially the Vichy regime, he did not hesitate to allow his agents to employ murder and torture. His ruthlessness was also evident in his reestablished regime from 1958 onward. Not only did he turn on the people in Algeria, army officers and civilians, who had helped to restore him to power (many of whom were killed, exiled or suffered long terms of imprisonment), he also, as president, used the full resources of the law to keep his critics under control. Under legislation passed in 1881, it is a crime punishable by fine and/or imprisonment to insult the French head of state. Under the Third Republic, over sixty-nine years there were only six persecution convictions under the act. In the fourteen years of the Fourth Republic there were only three. But in the decade of de Gaulle’s rule, 1958–1968, there were 350, chiefly writers, cartoonists and publishers but also ordinary citizens who booed when de Gaulle’s image appeared in movies, or shouted “Down with de Gaulle” as his car passed in the street. There is no question that de Gaulle, though never personally involved in these many prosecutions—three a month—both authorized and approved of this legal strategy.
Yet de Gaulle’s rule in the Fifth Republic he created, though authoritative, was never authoritarian. The student revolt of May 1968, though it appeared to shake his presidency, culminated in a general election which returned an overwhelming Gaullist majority, the biggest vote of confidence ever recorded in a French government. When de Gaulle lost a referendum, he instantly resigned from office for good, though there was no compulsion on him to do so. His pride, his amour propre, was always more powerful than his love of rule. Like Churchill he wrote his memoirs. He finished his wartime series but only half-completed his account of the years after 1958. The prose is magisterial in places, like Churchill’s, but the interest is less compelling. The egoist often elbows out the historian. He was less experienced than Churchill at this mode of self-presentation and had not been able to establish a corner in the documents. Yet his views were always interesting, not least about the future. André Malraux recorded his last conversation with de Gaulle in which the general spoke of Europe:
I have tried to set France upright against the end of the world. Have I failed? It will be for others to say. We are certainly present at the end of Europe. Why should parliamentary democracy (involving as it does here in France the distribution of tobacco shops!) which is on its last legs everywhere, create Europe? Good luck to this federation without a federator! Why should a type of democracy which nearly destroyed us, and isn’t capable of ensuring the development even of Belgium, be sacrosanct when we have to overcome the enormous difficulties which face the creation of Europe? You know as well as I do that Europe will be a compact between the States, or nothing. Therefore nothing. We are the last Europeans in the Europe that was Christendom. It was a lacerated Europe, but at least it did exist. The Europe whose nations hated each other had more reality than the Europe of today. Don’t ask whether France will make Europe—we have to grasp that France is threatened with extinction through the death of Europe. Nothing is final, to be sure. Supposing France became France again? I have learned the hard way that putting France together again from the broken pieces has to be done over and over. But perhaps this time…I have done what I could. If we must watch Europe die, let us watch. It doesn’t happen every day!
Both Churchill and de Gaulle were old-style national heroes, with the limitations of such. But both had a transcendental gift of reflecting upon the process of history, which is perennially interesting.