Charles de Gaulle: ‘portrait-mosaïque’ par Éric Vial (review)

Éric Vial has produced an ideal stocking-filler for Gaullophiles: a book of de Gaulle quotations about the size of an Oxford Very Short Introduction. And rather more than that. Each of Vial’s six chapters, chronologically arranged, opens with an admirably concise biographical summary of the period; within each chapter, the quotations are grouped in short sections, with the occasional illustration. He casts his net wide before making a necessarily painful selection, interleaving material from the General himself with the views of admirers and critics, from Minute to Alain Krivine via Raymond Aron and Pierre Mendès-France. Alongside the obvious published sources (the War Memoirs, the Discours et messages, the Lettres, Notes et carnets) are the recollections of Philippe de Gaulle, Alain Peyrefitte, Claude Mauriac, and many others, plus the press, plus the critics’ memoirs, plus, on occasion, other people’s quotation books. My own favourite entry is probably de Gaulle’s verdict on his own Algerian record, noted by Jean-François Deniau: ‘C’est du boulot salopé. Je n’avais pas le temps’ (p. 84). If you teach de Gaulle, you will find here, in one place, many of the quotations you would wish for (although, frustratingly for anyone wanting to go back to the sources, the references lack page numbers). Meanwhile the casual Gaullophile will find a little book to dip into, or, as Vial claims, a portrait in fragments. The overall result, however, is too franco-français, and too smooth. I counted just ten non-French entries (three from Churchill; one each from Eisenhower, Galeazzo Ciano, Nixon, the Soviet embassy, Der Spiegel, The Times, and, curiously, Michael Foot): rather few for a figure who placed the world stage at the centre of his concerns, and they are mostly rather too nice (we do not get Harold Macmillan’s ‘He goes back to his distrust and dislike, like a dog to its vomit’). The selection tends to overstate de Gaulle’s consistency, whereas authors such as Jean Touchard (Le Gaullisme 1940–1969 (Paris: Seuil, 1978)) have highlighted the at times yawning gulf between the speeches and the memoirs. And it surely underestimates de Gaulle’s brutality. An important source unused by Vial is Jacques Foccart, whose Journal de l’Élysée (Paris: Fayard, 1997–98) gives us such frankly nasty utterances as ‘Vous commencez à m’emmerder avec votre RPF’ (from March 1953), or ‘J’aime mieux crever que d’aller au Canada porter un toast à la reine d’Angleterre’ (on his return from Montreal in July 1967), or ‘Voyez-vous, lui, il n’a pas de couilles, et ça, on n’y peut rien!’ (on Pompidou, in October 1967), or ‘Foutez-moi la paix avec vos nègres! Je ne veux plus en voir avant deux mois, vous entendez?’ (on visiting African heads of state, in November 1968). These are no more the ‘real’ de Gaulle than the speeches and memoirs, but they are certainly a part of the man. In the most striking mosaics, each fragment catches the light at a different angle; Vial’s, though constructed with enormous care, presents, in the end, too uniform a face.