Charles de Gaulle

16. Mahoney, Statesman as Thinker (13 August 2022)

by kurto

Holds up Cicero, Burke, Lincoln, Tocqueville, Churchill, de Gaulle, and Havel as exemplary statesmen, demonstrating excellence of vision and execution through contemporary turbulence. Courage, moderation (temperance and prudence), and magnamity (greatness of soul, according to classic or Christian ideals) in pursuit of justice are the essential attributes of those who would command practical reason in service of ordered liberty. Aristotle’s is the classic statement of a gentlemen-statesman, the opposite of Weber’s charismatic leader. Modern political thought and social science cannot discern the requisite qualities, believing in a false realism: in ascribing every action to naked power, the ability to assess motivation is forfeit and consequently to distinguish the statesman from the tyrant. The study of humanity includes legitimate uses of authority, Aron observed: Napoleon’s tyranny demonstrates greatness unchained from humility. The unbounded will seeks to reshape nature and society, but energy without wisdom is of little use.

Cicero: contending with Caesar, the Roman served as prototype in exemplifying foresight via reflection not ambition or will.

Burke: Reason is to be tested against practical modifications; theory alone will fail: prudence needs principle as much as principle prudence. ‘Ingratitude is the first of revolutionary virtues’ (p. 40)

Tocqueville: a deterministic fatalism (‘democratic history’) cannot illustrate the role of greats in history.

Churchill: Berlin’s Mr. Churchill in 1940 is the consummate statement.

De Gaulle: depreciated ‘Nietzschean disdain’ for the limits of human experience, common sense, law, seeing instead the need for balance, what is possible, and mesure. The Maginot line was morally corrupt – effete. Where Aristotle’s magnamity countenances hauteur, de Gaulle’s great man was Christian.

Havel: the Czech’s genius was to identify and surmount the ideological traits of post-totalitarian (post Leninist-Stalinist) regime, no longer dependent on mass violence yet still repressive.

Reagan and Thatcher receive honorable mentions as conviction politicians.

6. Kissinger, Leadership (12 February 2024)

by kurto

Portrays six postwar leaders whose statesmanship transformed the international (or at least regional balance of power) so as to promote stability and domestic order by establishing common purpose (not factional triumph). Framing the era as successor to the ‘second 30 Years War’, thereby sidelining the ‘ideological’ contest between Communism and liberalism, and establishing a typology of responsible and reckless politicians (i.e., statesmen and prophets), Kissinger asserts leaders must address tragedy – the nation’s history and limitations. Later chapters underline the importance of incrementalism – raison d’état trumps ideas – although why de Gaulle in particular is not a prophet (of grandeur) but only a self-appointed exponent of lost glory is unaddressed. Leadership requires analysis, strategy, courage, and character (possibly religious). The author disdains the views of Reagan, the hidden antagonist, which happened to sideline the author and his considerable sense of self-importance.

Adenauer: perhaps the best chapter, demonstrating his success in establishing Germany’s contrition, which certainly was to precede reunification and possibly not come until the USSR’s decline, and commitment to harmonious Europe. Christianity is the source of European civilization. Adenauer opposed Kurt Schumacher’s leftist populism, submissive to the ‘will of the people’, which raised the specter of interwar fanaticism. Suez showed America would not inevitably protect Europe, which therefore must unite; Cuba demonstrated further divergence.

De Gaulle: where Churchill saw his role as fulfilling English (British) history, de Gaulle his as resurrecting. attempting to recover historic grandeur, the failed quest for European preeminence (counterpoised by British commitment to the balance of power). He was very effective at persuading the public of a vision of independence with little connection to reality. However, the more pronounced the Cold War challenge, the more supportive of the Atlantic alliance (e.g., Cuba).

Nixon: governing at a time when (liberal) elites had lost faith in national interest as a legitimate or even moral end of policy, he sought to retore Theodore Roosevelt’s balance of power, and ‘never succumbed to the conceit of leadership’ as personal agency. Sometimes rambling in defense of his own role, Kissinger nonetheless makes a fair point that the US was excoriated for not interceding in Bangladesh even while condemned for warring in Vietnam. The liberal consensus arrived at the dubious view that ‘bad’ regimes will collapse if only pushed; friction results from ‘misunderstandings’; a Kantian rules-based order is inexorable. In this sense, Kissinger’s incrementalism is a middle ground. Nonetheless, his understanding of American exceptionalism is poor, overlooking liberalism as its basis in favor of identity and geography, with a dash of natural law.

Sadat: the Six Day War dramatized the danger of placing pan Arabism in front of the Egyptian national interest (for which he had been imprisoned) in the Mediterranean and world system. Breaking with Nasserite orthodoxy could only be sustained by continuing progress: Sadat was the closest of these half-dozen to a prophet. America isn’t the Middle East’s mediator but a benevolent power, given to republicanism as well as its economic interests (e.g., oil, shipping.) NB: the UN condemned Camp David for ignoring the resolution of Palestine, voting against 102-37, an example of the perfect being the enemy of the good.

Lee: Singapore required growth to sustain its population, domestic (cultural) cohesion, and a nimble foreign policy balanced among Russia, China, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Civil services were famously scrutinized for corruption, with salaries pegged to 80 percent of the private sector; the army made small but professional (with all subject to reserve service); and racial classification abjured. ‘It is only when you offer a man – without distinctions based on ethnic, cultural, linguistic, and other differences – a chance of belonging to this great human community, that you offer him a peaceful way forward to progress and to a higher level of human life’ (p. 295). And: ‘Certain basics about human nature do not change. Man needs a certain sense of moral right and wrong. There is such a thing called evil, and it is not a result of being a victim of society. You are just an evil man, prone to do evil things, and you have to be stopped from doing them’ (p. 304). Is technocracy not an ideology? Kissinger elides the question.

Thatcher: a ‘conviction’ leader who fought the battle of ideas but not to the ends of imposition, as did the Communists, and her achievement was to make the ‘middle ground’ see her view. She believed in international law up to the point where sovereign states cede their moral authority to the UN: the Falklands reasserted the validity of territorial sovereignty, as opposed to national interest (masquerading as ideology) and as an alternate to the post (anti) colonial quest for rules. Disraeli saw German unification as a greater political event than the French Revolution. Thatcher’s opposition to reunification stemmed from here personal experience of World War II, and her antagonism to the proto-European Union on grounds of its transformation from a trading community to socialist statism.

Western elites have moved from a public-minded aristocracy, embodying the virtues of their nation-states, to a meritocracy strayed into a vague internationalism, technocracy (Lee?), and class interest.

2. LaCouture, DeGaule: Ruler (19 Jan 2014)

by kurto

A biography of 20th-century France’s leading figure, authoritatively narrated by the foreign editor of

    Le Monde

in the classical mode of synthesizing primary sources and interviews. This second volume ranges from de Gaulle’s efforts from August 1944 to restore France’s international status to his passing in 1970. The protagonist excelled in affairs of state, wherein the government must be preeminent (e.g., relations to the big 3, Algeria, the formation of Europe); whereas his endeavors to guide domestic politics without participating in them (styming communists in postwar elections, the 1962 constitution, the tumult of 1968-69) expose the authoritarian, arbitrary mnature of ‘Gaullism’ and the general’s egomania. De Gaulle was a warrior who parlayed close study of history into statesmanship, but he could not surmount politics as the French state is democratic. He also was a fine writer, thereby providing rich material for this study, which evinces a finely balanced dialectic treatment of core episodes while deftly using synthesis to energize the narrative. (Is it possible for an American to write in this style? It requires adjustment merely to read it.) However, the nuance of such an approach sometimes leaves one grasping for the author’s principal conclusions of the man.

5. Fenby, The General (13 Mar 2020)

by kurto

A biography of a 20th century’s great, emphasizing his distinctive approach to military and political leadership. Charles de Gaulle was a ‘lifelong teacher’ of men, dating to his days as a World War I prisoner war. He saw military organization as the model for the mass-production economy and also government management of society. Great leaders surpass hierarchy to act independently, accordingly they must be distant, reserved. De Gaulle evinced autocracy but was to work through referenda; notwithstanding Roosevelt’s views he was a committed democrat, using established institutions. He held out French rationalism as the native counter to fascism.
de Gaulle had broken with Petain well before the treason of 1940, yet was strongly opposed by such London Frenchmen as Raymond Aron and Jean Monnet. His popular appeal via radio outlasted Hitler and Roosevelt. Free French (yet less than 20,000) had scored several tactical successes in Africa, thereby winning Churchill’s grudging support, and established its elan. By 1941, he had prevailed over admiral Emile Muselier and opposition leader Jean Moulin. He then relocated the Free French to Algiers to reestablish himself of on French soil, and in 1943 was recognized as supremo by Eisenhower.
In country from 1944, after the war he blocked the Communist from the ‘three great levers’: foreign affairs, military, interior (police) – each of which had been conceded in Eastern Europe. Though the logical executive, he disavowed a political party a la Bolingbroke, seeking to become a ‘national arbiter’ above the fray, and so left politics. His strategy for return was to take the electoral route while allowing the establishment to envision his leading a coup, thereby ‘frightening [the [populace] into acquiesce’. By the time of the Algerian crisis, he was seen as the only rampart between communism and fascism; in the 1958 elections 344 of 475 incumbent deputies lost their seats.
Under de Gaulle, centralized authority expanded: power lay not in the legislature but unelected civil servants or state-run corporations. He himself was Olympian in hauteur, ‘crab like’ in duplicity. France depended on his status, justified in settling the Algerian civil war and German rapprochement. But the OAS affair forced him to abandon the presidential for the partisan – the beginning of the end of the regime, evidenced by poor elections result of 1962. By 1965 he could no longer claim to represent the general will. He blundered in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war; in 1968 he could still outwit politicians but not the new generation of students; only the disconnect between students and unions prevented a disgraceful exit.
De Gaulle poses a problem for historians who deny individual greatness – he twice saved France from cataclysm (surrender, civil war), twice showed himself a natural autocrat in service of popular nationhood and rule. Fenby suggests the authoritarian start of the Fifth Republic could not be sustained, yet the country’s movement toward parliamentarism is better observed in the European Union. Genuinely rooted in the country’s claims to greatness, Gaullism is merely a political behavior (not unlike Peronism). The author writes crisply yet fails to elaborate what is the France his subject saved.