Seventy years ago an obscure exiled general started out on the path to greatness, writes RUADHÁN Mac CORMAIC
FRENCH PRESIDENT Nicolas Sarkozy will join British prime minister David Cameron in London today to mark the 70th anniversary of Charles de Gaulle’s famous radio broadcast in 1940 urging the French to resist Germany’s invading armies.
The mythic “Call of June 18th”, delivered from the BBC studios by a then little known French general with a powerful moral force and a memorable rhetorical flourish, is being celebrated in France this month as one of the major symbolic moments of the last century.
In itself, the exiled de Gaulle’s first broadcast into occupied France – just four days after the Nazis reached Paris – achieved little. It was heard by very few people and managed to rally no military leaders or politicians. His credentials were patchy, with his previous writings on military strategy suggesting a capacity for bold ideas and huge self-belief but little to indicate he was destined for national leadership.
From his base in Carlton Gardens in London de Gaulle assembled under his command merely an embryo force, and his relationships with Churchill and Roosevelt were endlessly tempestuous. (De Gaulle reportedly said that Churchill shouted when he was in the wrong, whereas he, de Gaulle, shouted when he was right, with the result that they were always shouting at each other.) And yet de Gaulle’s would become the first national reputation to be made entirely by radio. As the broadcasts continued, the self-proclaimed leader of “Free France” gradually managed to transform himself into a recognised leader, and when he arrived in Normandy with his entourage a week after the Allied D-Day landings in June 1944, the depth of the popular welcome he received in Bayeux confirmed his claim to represent liberated France. “Only a soldier,” wrote former prime minister Léon Blum of the London broadcasts, “could set out with such force and authority what our simple duties were, simple as the cry of our conscience”.
The 70th anniversary of that first appelis being marked in France this month with a series of exhibitions, seminars, films and books. A special €2 coin has been issued bearing an image of de Gaulle at his microphone, and tomorrow several newspapers will publish supplements to celebrate the anniversary. Forty years after his death, the resistance leader and founder of the fifth Republic bestrides modern France like a colossus. The constitution he drafted and the institutions he created in 1958 – notably the role of the president as republican monarch – have changed little. He is commonly voted the greatest ever Frenchman, and there are few towns that don't have a street or square named in his honour. Just last week, a lively row broke out when a group of teachers objected to the addition of de Gaulle's acclaimed Mémoires de Guerreto the literature section of the baccalaureatexam. The book's opening line is probably the most quoted of any in the country: "All my life I have had a certain idea of France."
In politics, his legacy is inescapable. Gaullism has always been difficult to pin down, but his fusion of an ideology of French grandeur and independence in foreign policy with a certain pragmatism and adaptability at home still speaks to a generation of modern-day politicians. Even on the Left, his memory and his language are regularly invoked in the name of social justice and French independence of mind.
Perhaps no public figure more self-consciously mines the Gaullian lexicon than the eloquent former prime minister Dominique de Villepin. It’s surely no accident that he has chosen this week to launch his new centre-right movement aimed at wresting power from President Nicolas Sarkozy and, presumably, reasserting the Gaullist heritage.