Timothy Garton Ash: De Gaulle and Churchill Have a Message for Sarkozy and Cameron
[Timothy Garton Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist.]
In London tomorrow, Nicolas Sarkozy and David Cameron will join French and British veterans to celebrate the 70th anniversary of Charles de Gaulle's historic radio appeal to the French to go on fighting against Hitler. On the same day that De Gaulle broadcast his message from London on the BBC, 18 June 1940, Winston Churchill delivered his "finest hour" speech to the House of Commons, declaring that the Battle of France was over and the Battle of Britain was about to begin.
Summer 1940. Churchill and De Gaulle. Here is the moment, here the men, that have shaped our two countries ever since. All British foreign policy since 1940 is footnotes to Churchill; all French foreign policy, footnotes to De Gaulle. The myths of Churchillism and Gaullism, initiated by the two orator-writer-statesmen, never cease to grow, like mighty oaks. The myths of other postwar British and French politicians, even of Margaret Thatcher, are mere saplings in their shade.
The question is: what should we make of this legacy now? What does it mean to be Churchillian or Gaullist today? Is it not time for Britain to go beyond Churchillism and France beyond Gaullism? If so, to what? Together or apart?
In London, outside De Gaulle's wartime headquarters at 4 Carlton Gardens and in a grand muster at the Royal Hospital in Chelsea, this 18 June will be cast as the joyful celebration of a wartime comradeship in arms. Unmentioned, I suspect, will be the fact, which Jonathan Fenby records in his new biography of the general, that the British cabinet initially decided De Gaulle's proposed broadcast would be "undesirable". The ban had to be reversed by Churchill, who had been absent from the cabinet meeting to prepare his "finest hour" speech. Unmentioned, or skimmed over, will be the tragic British decision to sink the French fleet at Mers-el-Kébir a few weeks later, to prevent it falling into German hands. Lightly passed over will be the volcanic rows between Churchill and De Gaulle, which led to the story that Churchill said the heaviest cross he had to bear during the war was the Cross of Lorraine (the symbol of De Gaulle's Free French).
Unmentioned or skimmed over – and rightly so. For the larger story of those years is one of a great shared struggle. Furious though the arguments were between the two wartime leaders, if sometimes given a comic turn by Churchill's macaronic French ("si vous m'obstaclerez, je vous liquiderai!" he once admonished the general), Churchill knew that he would have behaved very much like De Gaulle, had he been in his shoes.
Anyway, both were themselves past masters of sweeping inconvenient facts under a gloriously embroidered carpet of inspiring myth. Churchill's myth was the sempiternal comradeship of the English-Speaking Peoples; De Gaulle's, that of the one, true, eternally resisting France, beside which the collaborationist reality of Vichy and occupied France was a mere aberration. Both knew exactly what they were doing in creating these myths. "I raised the corpse of France with my arms, making the world think it was alive," André Malraux recorded the general saying at the end of his life.
In a subtle new book called Le mythe gaullien, the Oxford historian Sudhir Hazareesingh uses some of the many letters sent to the general by ordinary citizens to show just how deep his example and myth penetrated into the popular psyche. Exactly the same could be said of Churchill and Churchillism. The two statesmen-bards told us stories about who we are – the British, the French – and because we believed them, we became, in some measure, the peoples they had invented.
The trouble is, however, that our national myths led us in different directions...
Read entire article at Guardian (UK)
In London tomorrow, Nicolas Sarkozy and David Cameron will join French and British veterans to celebrate the 70th anniversary of Charles de Gaulle's historic radio appeal to the French to go on fighting against Hitler. On the same day that De Gaulle broadcast his message from London on the BBC, 18 June 1940, Winston Churchill delivered his "finest hour" speech to the House of Commons, declaring that the Battle of France was over and the Battle of Britain was about to begin.
Summer 1940. Churchill and De Gaulle. Here is the moment, here the men, that have shaped our two countries ever since. All British foreign policy since 1940 is footnotes to Churchill; all French foreign policy, footnotes to De Gaulle. The myths of Churchillism and Gaullism, initiated by the two orator-writer-statesmen, never cease to grow, like mighty oaks. The myths of other postwar British and French politicians, even of Margaret Thatcher, are mere saplings in their shade.
The question is: what should we make of this legacy now? What does it mean to be Churchillian or Gaullist today? Is it not time for Britain to go beyond Churchillism and France beyond Gaullism? If so, to what? Together or apart?
In London, outside De Gaulle's wartime headquarters at 4 Carlton Gardens and in a grand muster at the Royal Hospital in Chelsea, this 18 June will be cast as the joyful celebration of a wartime comradeship in arms. Unmentioned, I suspect, will be the fact, which Jonathan Fenby records in his new biography of the general, that the British cabinet initially decided De Gaulle's proposed broadcast would be "undesirable". The ban had to be reversed by Churchill, who had been absent from the cabinet meeting to prepare his "finest hour" speech. Unmentioned, or skimmed over, will be the tragic British decision to sink the French fleet at Mers-el-Kébir a few weeks later, to prevent it falling into German hands. Lightly passed over will be the volcanic rows between Churchill and De Gaulle, which led to the story that Churchill said the heaviest cross he had to bear during the war was the Cross of Lorraine (the symbol of De Gaulle's Free French).
Unmentioned or skimmed over – and rightly so. For the larger story of those years is one of a great shared struggle. Furious though the arguments were between the two wartime leaders, if sometimes given a comic turn by Churchill's macaronic French ("si vous m'obstaclerez, je vous liquiderai!" he once admonished the general), Churchill knew that he would have behaved very much like De Gaulle, had he been in his shoes.
Anyway, both were themselves past masters of sweeping inconvenient facts under a gloriously embroidered carpet of inspiring myth. Churchill's myth was the sempiternal comradeship of the English-Speaking Peoples; De Gaulle's, that of the one, true, eternally resisting France, beside which the collaborationist reality of Vichy and occupied France was a mere aberration. Both knew exactly what they were doing in creating these myths. "I raised the corpse of France with my arms, making the world think it was alive," André Malraux recorded the general saying at the end of his life.
In a subtle new book called Le mythe gaullien, the Oxford historian Sudhir Hazareesingh uses some of the many letters sent to the general by ordinary citizens to show just how deep his example and myth penetrated into the popular psyche. Exactly the same could be said of Churchill and Churchillism. The two statesmen-bards told us stories about who we are – the British, the French – and because we believed them, we became, in some measure, the peoples they had invented.
The trouble is, however, that our national myths led us in different directions...