GAULLISME
By A FORMER PARIS CORRESPONDENT
IEUCH political discussion is at present being conducted as though NI the reasons for which the Anglo-French alliance was sought is an essential buttress to our -security have ceased to be valid. This is singular ; the bombs dropped on this island by aeroplanes operating from bases in France have surely been the most con- clusive evidence that our frontier ought to be at least on the Rhine, if not, indeed, a good deal farther east.
The military defeat of France, therefore, has not proved that we were wrong to link our fate with the French, but that the co-operation of the two great western nations was totally insufficient, that our joint preparations were too late' and on too narrow a basis. If the French people had, indeed, followed the lead of the collaborators, there would be very- little today for us to fight for. rthout a French people determined to be free again, it would b: impossible to build a western Europe not dominated by Germany. lie should have to accept a future in which we were permanently within range of German-controlled guns on the Calais shore. Britain would become a cis-Atlantic barbican of America—a sort gigantic Malta. Our own sacrifices, therefore, would lose more than half their value as a contribution to our future if the French People did not refuse to be intimidated by the murder of hostages nel the blackmail exercised by the retention of their prisoners. Looking back, we are bound to recognise that the crystallisation French resistance was to a quite astonishing degree the work one man, Charles de Gaulle—a man of whom the French people blew very little indeed before his promotion to the rank of General a May 15th, 1940, but who had made a very considerable reputation for himself as a military thinker with the German General Staff.
M. Philippe Barris, in the useful little book* he has just written on leader of the Free French Forces, rightly begins by recalling first occasion on which he heard the name de Gaulle mentioned. That occasion was a dinner at the house of Ribbentrop in Berlin in 1934. The speaker was Ribbentrop himself, who asked if it 'as really true that Colonel de Gaulle, who had exploded the theory the Maginot Line, was practically unknown in France. He was, It he was already thoroughly well known in Germany. General de Gaulle's great decision to defy the authority of larshal Petain and of General Weygand was made the easier for him tecause he had already schooled himself to independent judgement ti French military technique and organisation. The collapse of the French army was not for him the end of an illusion. Since the application of his own ideas was the secret of the enemy's °Icons, he had no reason to believe in a monopoly of victory held his opponents. At Moncornet, on May 17th-19th, and at Abbe- On May 3oth-31st, he had shown that in the practical handling tanks a French general had little to learn from the Germans in It theory of their use.
* Charles de Gaulle. By Philippe Barres. (Hutchinson. 96* 6da
On June 17th, 1940, the Paul Reynaud government, of which General de Gaulle was a member, resigned. On June 18th the General flew to London, and on that night he issued his first appeal to the French people over the wireless. This appeal was not an act of faith ; it was an intellectual analysis. The General first of all pointed out that it was the men who had been responsible for France's armies for many years who had formed a new government, and had appealed for an armistice. "It is the tanks, the aeroplanes, the strategy of the Germans which surprised our chiefs and brought them to the point where we are today. The very same means that conquered us can be used One day to give us victory. France is not alone. She has a vast empire behind her. She can form a coalition with the British Empire which holds the seas. She can, like England, have limitless access to the immense industrial powers of the United States. The war has not been decided by the battle of France. This war is a world war." To this admirable statement of the case General de Gaulle added : "Whatever may come, the flame of French resistance must never be extinguished, and it will not be extinguished." It is fitting that the declaration by which one man made certain that France, and, therefore, Europe, should survive, should be an unvarnished statement of fact leading logically to action. Realism, reason and action are the three condi- tions of liberty.
It would obviously have been unrealistic, however, to expect the masses of the French nation, scattered in appalling confusion along the roads of France, to react at once to this logic. Its appeal was in the first instance to the few men in responsible positions who were able to act. Why did so few of them follow General de Gaulle's lead? The error into which practically all concerned fell was excessive hope of action from French overseas territories, especially N. Africa. The political leaders who wished to carry on the fight fled to Morocco, but found that they had fled into a trap. There is in French colonial history no tradition of independent political judgement. French colonies are expected to grow up as organic parts of the motherland, sharing with and dependent on the decisions taken at Paris. In practice this meant the will of Marshal Petah', to which all colonial Governors bowed except M. Eboue, who rallied the Tchad to the Free French move- ment at the end of August.
The Free French colonial territories which were ultimately grouped together in Africa, and in the Pacific, are of very great strategic and of some economic importance, but they are not comparable in political importance to the movement of resistance which has grown up inside France. This movement probably does not, in most cases, owe its initial organisation to intervention from the Free French Headquarters, but its unifying inspiration was the act of resistance performed by Charles de Gaulle on the London wireless on June ath, 1940. The Free French Forces are the bodily symbol of the French will, of French honour preserved through adversity. The German plan of maintaining an occupied and an unoccupied France, of leaving to a government at Vichy sufficient rope to go through the gestures of independence, was admirably conceived for the division and confusion of French minds. German propaganda has sought to play on all the old French partisan instincts, both as between the two zones and by representing General de Gaulle sometimes as a Fascist and some- times as an agent of Jews, Freemasons and Communists.
But the greatest unifying force in France today is the desire to expel the Boche, and the only Frenchmen who can work for this overtly are the members of the Free French Forces. They are, therefore, the natural centre of attraction for all healthy French elements, and " Gaullisme " is a movement which includes groups of independent origin ranging from the extreme Right to the extreme Left. That is why General de Gaulle is necessarily a political leader, and not merely the commander of a military force. He is hampered as a politician by his own intellectual approach to problems, by a lack of personal warmth in public contacts, and no doubt also by his lack of political experience prior to his entry into Paul Reynaud's Ministry on June 7th, r940. But his rational courage has placed him indisputably at the head of the French movement of resistance in all important sectors of French opinion, most of all in France itself,
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