‘The fabulous twins’ – Lara Marlowe on de Gaulle and de Valera

Before it became the Fondation Charles de Gaulle, the building on the rue de Solferino in Paris was the base from which Gen de Gaulle built his RPF movement between 1947 and his return to power in 1958.

On a recent evening, the foundation invited Pierre Joannon, a historian and Ireland’s Consul General on the Côte d’Azur, to talk about de Gaulle in Ireland. Joannon has served Ireland in southern France for the last half century.

Before an audience of retired diplomats and devoted Gaullists, Joannon discusses his book, L’Hiver du Connétable, which translates roughly as The Winter of the Commander.

When British prime minister Neville Chamberlain and taoiseach Éamon de Valera negotiated the restitution of bases in Ireland prior to the Emergency, it was suggested that de Valera should employ a foreign military adviser, Joannon recounts, quoting In Time of War, Ireland, Ulster and the Price of Neutrality, 1939-1945, by the late journalist and historian Robert Fisk.

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High-ranking Irish Army officers told Fisk that in 1938, de Valera wanted to recruit a French colonel called Charles de Gaulle. Absolutely not, the British said. “The French are no good at keeping secrets”.

Sean Murphy was Ireland’s ambassador to Paris when the Germans invaded, and stayed on, with accreditation to the Vichy collaborationist government, while de Gaulle led la France libre from London.

“Murphy reported to Dublin that de Gaulle’s popularity was increasing, and that France would rise again,” Joannon says.

The secretary general of what was then Ireland’s department of external affairs sympathised with the collaborationist leader Philippe Pétain. The Irish official was “very reactionary” and believed that “the inevitable defeat of democracies constituted just punishment for their revolt against divine order,” Joannon writes.

De Valera was minister for external affairs as well as taoiseach. He fired the Pétainist secretary general and kept Murphy as ambassador to occupied France. When the war ended, the French ordered ambassadors accredited to Vichy to return home. As leader of the provisional government, de Gaulle intervened to allow the “Gaullist” ambassador Murphy to remain.

In April 1969, de Gaulle lost a referendum on regional reform and resigned after a decade as president. “I was wounded by (the student and workers’ revolt of) May 1968,” he told a French diplomat in Dublin. “Now they have finished me off.”

De Gaulle decided to visit Ireland, the country of his maternal ancestors, the MacCartans. The French leader requested “a wild site, far from towns and with access to the most deserted beach possible.”

The outgoing president, his wife Yvonne and faithful aide de camp, Admiral François Flohic, spent six weeks in the west of Ireland. They went for long walks and de Gaulle worked on his memoirs. “Each day,” Admiral Flohic wrote, “I see the harmony between (de Gaulle’s) feelings and character and this country.”

The visit ended at Áras an Uachtaráin. At the dinner given by de Valera in his honour, de Gaulle thanked Ireland for giving him “at this grave moment of my long life, what I was looking for: to be face to face with myself.”

The French journalist Jean Lacouture, quoted by Joannon, called de Gaulle and de Valera “the fabulous twins”.

Dev told a French diplomat in Dublin that if he were French, he would be a Gaullist. When he died in 1975, the headline in the London Observer was “De Valera, the Irish de Gaulle”.

“They looked alike,” says Joannon. “The same great height. Both had very poor eyesight and the same careful gestures. By the time they met, both had made history and exited history. There was a kind of symmetry between them. Both were born in the 19th century and believed in their own destiny. De Gaulle was a soldier in the first World War; Dev was the last commander of the Easter Rising to lay down arms before the British. They were imprisoned and tried to escape, then came to power because they’d fought for liberation. Both were traditionalists and practising Catholics who revolutionised their countries.”

Joannon and his wife Annick are taken upstairs to visit the general’s shrine-like office, furnished with his simple wooden desk, a globe given to the French leader by staff at the Élysée, and the Underwood typewriter on which a secretary typed his famous appeal of June 18th, 1940, to resist Nazi occupation.

De Gaulle made his headquarters across the street from the former ministry of information of Pétain’s Vichy regime, whose chief propagandist, Philippe Henriot, was assassinated by the Resistance in the street outside. Later, the Socialist leader François Mitterrand, who had been de Gaulle’s political arch enemy, set up shop in the former ministry.

“The Socialists came after de Gaulle and they’ve gone now,” Marc Fosseux, president of the Friends of the Charles de Gaulle Foundation, says with satisfaction.

“De Gaulle is still here.”