Portraits and Miniatures(34)
He was at last forced to accept a date in October 1963 when he was removed from the Chancellery like a crustacean from a rock. He lived another three and a half years, discontented despite his vast achievements, and ungenerous towards his successor to whom he owed the solid economic base that was the foundation of his rehabilitation of Germany. This last phase brought him the irritation of seeing Erhard do much better in the 1965 elections than he himself had done in 1961, accompanied by the satisfaction of seeing Erhard’s Chancellorship collapse only a year after this.
Adenauer’s gothic arches had proved themselves to have much more staying power than the baroque rotundity of his successor and junior by thirty-one years. But even Adenauer was not ultimately indestructible. He died in April 1967, aged ninety-one, a little younger than Macmillan, a little older than Churchill. He had accomplished much more than the former, almost as much as the latter, compared with whom, however, he had enjoyed his life much less. Triumph over despair, achieved by endurance and guile, was his motto for himself and his country. It was a recipe for quiet strength rather than for rumbustious joy.
Charles de Gaulle
Compared With his companions on the world stage, Charles de Gaulle had mostly to play a poor hand from a weak seat. He believed from an early age that he was a great man, and he always acted like one, often to the fury of those who thought he should have been a supplicant. He behaved in a way which, seeking grandeur, invited ridicule, yet always escaped it. He was the frog that puffed itself up but instead of bursting became almost as big as it wanted to be.
Although indisputably a man of action, he was also a notable man of words, the story of whose life could be measured out in his own transfixing phrases. And the governing phrase, the one that most informed his whole career and best expressed his guiding purpose was ‘une certaine idée de la France’. He wrote it in the first volume of his memoirs (published in 1954) about his boyhood attitude, and defined it in terms at once romantic and impersonal. France to him was like ‘a princess in a fairy tale or a madonna in a fresco’. If France performed mediocrely then the fault must lie with the mistakes of the French people rather than with the genius of the land. But France could only fulfil itself through grandeur: ‘only great enterprises can neutralize the poisons of disunity which her people carry in their veins’. France must ‘hold itself erect and look to the heights if it is not to fall into mortal peril’.
His eighty years of life in the Third, Fourth and Fifth Republics gave him a full experience of the poisons of disunity, of mediocre performances and of mortal perils. He was born in 1890, when France was at once a defeated and defensive power and the centre of world civilization. He spent most of his childhood in the Paris of la belle époque, la ville lumière and the mixture of cultural flowering and uninspiring politics that marked the midstream years between the two wars against Wilhelmine Germany. Yet he never seemed very Parisian. Proust’s world of Swann searching frantically for Odette in the cafés of the grands boulevards, or of Gilberte and Marcel playing in the gardens of the Champs Elysées, or of the Guermantes or Verdurin salons, or even of Saint-Loup’s smart cavalry barracks at Doncières all seem very remote from him. He described himself as un petit Lillois de Paris, for although his father taught at the Jesuit school of the Immaculate Conception near the Luxembourg Gardens he had been born at his maternal grandparents’ house in the dour northern industrial city of Lille, and always carried a whiff of the more austere and enclosed parts of France about him. His father’s family were petite noblesse de province before the Revolution. They lost their property then but kept themselves on the edge of gentility for the next hundred years. His mother’s (and indeed his maternal grandmother’s) family were of bourgeois substance in Dunkirk.
When the Jesuits were expelled from France at the height of Third Republican anti-clericalism in 1905, Henri de Gaulle established his own Paris school, but Charles de Gaulle went with the Society to Antoing, just over the Belgian frontier and in the purlieus of the forbidding round towers of Tournai Cathedral. When he joined the army in 1909 it was at Arras for a year of non-commissioned service in that hard landscape of the Pas-de-Calais. St Cyr provided two years in the softer surroundings of the Ile-de-France, but then it was back to Arras. His World War I service (three wounds, two in the first six months, the third at Verdun in March 1916, which led him to his spending the rest of the war as a prisoner) was all in the north-eastern approaches. When he married Yvonne Vendroux in 1921 it was in NotreDame de Calais. His wife’s family were biscuit makers in the port which faced but did not emulate England. When he acquired a modest country property in 1934 it was in the Haute Marne on the western edge of Lorraine at Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises (of which one was missing) a thousand feet up and 140 miles from Paris in a lonely forest landscape uniquely far from even a one-starred Michelin restaurant. There were very few beakerfuls of the warm south, or even of the cosseting countryside of the core of France in this experience.