In Europe (78 page)

If the notion of a ‘conceptual nation’ applied to anywhere, it was to de Gaulle's idea of France. A nation, after all, consists of more than shared territory and a common language, of governmental and cultural unity and everything that may flow from that, but also of a communal mentality, of the sense that that unity exists in the minds of all citizens, and that it is valuable, an honour and a joy in which to participate. In France, more than in any other European country, this sense of grandeur had traditionally been cultivated to great heights. That explains why the collapse of 1940 was so precipitous: the French had lost their conceptual nation. It was above all to this mental crisis that both Pétain and de Gaulle tried to find a solution, each in his own way.

In doing that, de Gaulle had to operate as a Baron Munchausen: only by his own hair could he pull himself and his horse out of the quagmire. He had, in reality, almost no power, even his costs were at first largely defrayed by the British government. At the same time, his conceptual nation demanded that he behave like a great and powerful statesman,
self-willed and independent of the other allies. ‘General de Gaulle needs constantly reminding that our primary enemy is Germany,’ someone in his coterie once noted. ‘For if he were to follow his natural instinct, it would be Britain.’ De Gaulle's conceptual France was still a world power, and seen from that vantage both Great Britain and the United States remained his major rivals.

On 20 January, 1941, Harold Nicolson, in those years parliamentary secretary at the ministry of information, lunched with de Gaulle at London's Savoy hotel.‘I do not like him,’ he wrote in his diary.‘He accuses my ministry of being
Pétainiste.“Mais non!”
I say, “
Monsieur le Général!
” “Well, then at least
Pétainisant
.” “We are working,” I tell him, “for all of France.” “All of France!” he shouts. “That is the Free France. That is ME!’” In late 1941 they dined again. ‘His arrogance and fascism annoy me. But there is something like a fine retriever dog about his eyes.’

Churchill too saw in de Gaulle an impassioned and emotional spirit. Churchill knew the French, he recognised the importance of symbolic figures for an occupied France and understood the complexity of the political situation within which de Gaulle had to manoeuvre. Despite all their conflicts, there were also moments of reconciliation and friendship between the two statesmen.

Roosevelt, who barely had personal ties with de Gaulle, wrote the general off quite quickly. He considered him to be an ‘almost intolerable’ idiot, and seriously doubted his authority over the French. For the American president, it was unimaginable that a modern Western democracy like France could accept the authority of a strictly self-declared leader. Following a conference in Casablanca in January 1943, Roosevelt publicly joked about de Gaulle: ‘One day he says he's Joan of Arc, the next day he says he's Clémenceau. I told him: you've got to decide which one you want to be!’

After two years of war, therefore, de Gaulle found himself increasingly isolated, a powerless nuisance in the eyes of the Allies, a caricature of himself in the eyes of many of his supporters. Regularly, after yet another quarrel, he would be denied access to the BBC microphone. On one occasion, in April 1942, Churchill even issued orders that he not be allowed to leave England: at that point, de Gaulle was effectively his prisoner.
Jean Monnet, acting as liaison between the three statesmen, noticed in his talks with the general ‘a mixture of practical intelligence that can only command one's respect, and a disturbing tendency to go beyond the boundaries of common sense.’

De Gaulle's relationship with the Resistance in France was also a troubled one. He mistrusted the communists in particular. Many Resistance leaders suspected, on the other hand, that de Gaulle was using the guerrilla force primarily to advance his own ambitions, for after the war. Despite all his pretensions of leadership, the lines of communication between him and the Resistance only developed systematically after autumn 1941.

In March 1942, the first Resistance leader arrived in London for personal consultations. Christian Pineau, leader of the large Libération Nord organisation, described his meeting with de Gaulle as an audience with an ‘authoritarian prelate’ who mostly delivered monologues and had no interest at all in the daily problems encountered by the Resistance. British documents released more than fifty years later show that in May 1943 Churchill and Roosevelt were on the point of expelling de Gaulle from the Allied command. Between themselves they spoke of him as the ‘prima donna’ and ‘the bride’, and hoped to replace him with his rival General Henri Giraud.‘He hates England and has left a trail of Anglophobia behind him everywhere,’ Churchill wrote in a coded telegram to his cabinet during a visit to Washington.

Yet the Allies did not dare publicly to dethrone de Gaulle. He was too important for the French, and had indeed succeeded in working his way up to the status of a kind of Joan of Arc, a living monument, a modern myth.

De Gaulle moved his headquarters from London to Algiers, where he was free to implement his own brand of politics. In June 1944, when the invasion of France was about to take place after years of preparation, he was informed about the landing with a day and a half's notice. Although the rest of the Allied command was involved with other hectic issues at that moment, de Gaulle immediately demanded their full attention. And what was his problem? The soldiers had French money with them that had been issued without his approval, and Eisenhower, in the text of his planned speech, had not said a word about de Gaulle or the Free French
Forces. Futilities and formalities in the eyes of the British and the Americans – ‘
Allez, faites la guerre, avec votre fausse monnaie!
’ Churchill shouted – but de Gaulle did not see it that way. As the paratroopers of the British 6th Airborne Division were about to seize the first strategic bridges in France, de Gaulle decided at the last moment to recall the 200 French liaison officers who were to accompany the invasion. He himself threatened to go straight back to Algiers. American General George C. Marshall shouted angrily that ‘no sons of Iowa would fight to put up statues of de Gaulle’.

De Gaulle was the great nuisance again, but once more he finally took part loyally in all the actions. But was he really wrong? In the final analysis: no. The problem, after all, was due to the American's refusal to take him seriously, even though – after Giraud stepped down in 1943 – all representatives of free France had emphatically recognised him as their leader. Nor was it de Gaulle's fault that the issue of temporary authority over France – for that, in fact, was what this was all about – was raised only at the eleventh hour: it was the British and the Americans who had confronted him with a fait accompli by waiting until 4 June to tell him about the invasion.

In his heart of hearts, Churchill understood that, but his interests lay elsewhere. During lunch that day, when an enraged de Gaulle shouted that he had not been consulted at all, not even in regard to the provisional authority over France, Churchill sneered back at him: ‘And what about you? How do you expect us, the British, to adopt a position separated from that of the United States? We are going to liberate Europe, but it is because the Americans are with us to do so. For get this quite clear, every time we have to decide between Europe and the open sea, it is always the open sea we shall choose. Every time I have to decide between you and Roosevelt, I shall always choose Roosevelt.’

De Gaulle would never forget those words. In 1963 he used his veto as president of France to block British admission to the European Economic Community: by admitting them, Europe would also be admitting the Trojan Horse of America. In 1966 he withdrew France from the military organisation of NATO: the American troops were to leave Europe, and certainly to leave France. About 26,000 GIs were sent home. The American secretary of state, Dean Rusk, cynically asked de Gaulle whether ‘the dead Americans in the military cemeteries’ also fell under the evacuation orders.
A cartoonist drew a GI on his way out, shouting to the president: ‘If you need us again, our number is 14–18 — 39–45!’ That year, de Gaulle travelled to Moscow to establish new ties with Eastern Europe.

And time after time, in intimate circles, he would recount Churchill's words from June 1944.

Finally there is the story of all those millions of French citizens in occupied France. After the confusion, the fleeing and the humiliation, they felt the impact of foreign occupation chiefly in their stomachs. On an unheard-of scale, the Germans quickly picked their part of the country to the bone, and that soon became felt. In October 1941, the Parisian authorities were warning against the use of cat meat in daube provençale.

In addition, as from 1942, millions of men from the occupied territories were transported to Germany to perform forced labour there at the factories and farms, and this new manhunt drove people all over Europe into the arms of the Resistance. Former Vichy supporters also now became convinced that, in practical terms, Hitler's European
Grossraumwirtschaft
amounted to nothing less than a European economy dedicated solely to the service of Germany.

In the Lozère, the Cevennes, the Creuze, Auvergne, the Massif Central, in all those huge, sparsely populated mountainous regions, the ‘unregistered’, the refugees and those dodging the
Arbeitseinsatz
, quickly formed resistance groups of their own, operating more or less independently of the official Resistance. As early as summer 1942, the word
maquis
– Corsican for rough, wooded terrain – had become a normal part of the French vocabulary. ‘
Prendre le maquis
’ was the expression used both for going into hiding in the French interior and joining the Resistance. In autumn 1943, the southern French Resistance estimated the number of
Maquisards
at 15,000.

Unlike the official Resistance, the Maquis was and remained a spontaneous movement taken part in primarily by young people. They formed something like Robin Hood clans, each with its own subculture, its own jargon and its own leader, always on the move, always busy surviving. Each group carried out its own war against Vichy and the Germans. Most of them were hardly involved in any coordinated resistance activities, such as espionage for London, systematic sabotage or support for the Allies.

The leader of the Maquis in the Drôme, L'Hermine, wandered the countryside in a black cape decorated with his own coat of arms. When the British philosopher A. J. Ayer arrived as an undercover agent in southwest France just before the liberation, he found the region, in his own words, to be ‘in the hands of a series of feudal lords whose power and influence were strangely similar to that of their fifteenth-century Gascon counterparts.’

In January 1943, the Vichy regime launched the
Milice Française
, a large countermovement of at least 30,000 blackshirts. Their oath of honour made no bones about the true business at hand: ‘I swear to fight against democracy, against the Gaullist revolt and against the cancer of Judaism …’ From the start to the very finish, of course, the Maquis and the
Milice Française
were arch-enemies, although it became increasingly unclear who was hunting whom. As it had in Italy, all this rage and desperation finally resulted in a civil war of unknown cruelty,
la guerre franco-française
.

A total of some 30,000 French Resistance fighters were executed between 1940–5. About 60,000 were sent to concentration camps, and 20,000 disappeared without a trace.

After more than half a century of utter silence, what remains of a real, live French village from 1944? A morning's drive from Vichy is the village of Oradour-sur-Glane. Between the charred walls lie bedsteads, rusted bicycles and the remains of a sewing machine. Grass grows on the torched boulangerie of the Bouchoule family, the wrecked cars in the garage that belonged to the family Désourteaux, the petrol station of M. Poutaraud. On summer evenings the village danced at l'Avenir Musical, while the tram peeped and squeaked down the street and Dr Désourteaux raced off in his Renault to a late house call. The overhead tram lines still hang above the street, even the doctor's Renault stands rusting beside the road, but otherwise everything here came to a dead halt on 10 June, 1944.

In the local museum you can see a brief film of the village made in 1943. It contains the following scenes: a laughing couple pushing a pram; people swimming in the River Glane, lovers kissing in the grass; a picnic – a man points jovially at the camera; a child chases a running dog, and turns for a moment to look back. That is the last movement from Oradour that has been preserved.

Zamość, Anogia, Putten, Lidice, Marzabotto – throughout the twentieth century echoes the weeping and wailing of collectively punished villages, and since Srebrenica we know that things can get even worse. But Oradour is about more than that. Oradour symbolises the impotence and discord within France itself. Soldiers of the SS
Das Reich
Panzer Division encircled the peaceful village in the afternoon of 10 June, took the children from the classrooms, herded all the villagers together and suddenly began shooting. By midnight they had liquidated almost the entire population: 191 men, 245 women, 140 schoolchildren, 67 babies, toddlers and young children: 643 souls. The men were shot and killed, and women and children driven into the church and burned alive. The oldest was Marguerite Foussat, ninety years old. The youngest Maurice Vilatte, three months.

The reason behind the massacre remains unclear. Today people suspect that the SS made a mistake: forty kilometres from here was the village of Oradour-sur-Vayres, a hotbed of resistance. During the trial, held in February 1953, the full facts of the case became painfully clear: of the twenty-one defendants, fourteen were from France itself, from Alsace. They had been conscripted into the German Army, they said, and had only been following orders. After the verdict was handed down – two were sentenced to death, the others to hard labour – so many protests poured in from Alsace that the French government finally granted amnesty to all the murderers.