Arnon Grunberg

Rubble

Smoke

And now De Gaulle - Ferdinand Mount in LRB on a new De Gaulle biography:

"What gives de Gaulle’s nationalism its peculiar bleakness is his lack of illusion. He was fond of quoting Nietzsche’s aphorism that ‘the state is the coldest of cold monsters.’ Yet this realisation in no way weakened his obsession with the nation state and its embodiment in the army. Like other biographers, Jackson puzzles over the question of Dreyfus and whether the de Gaulles were Dreyfusards or anti-Dreyfusards. The truth is surely that Charles de Gaulle was not much interested in the rights and wrongs of the case, or indeed in antisemitism generally. He agonised only that the affair might have torn the army apart and weakened the nation.

In the same way, for de Gaulle it was the armistice of 1940 that was Pétain’s crime, and he was furious that the marshal’s trial increasingly focused on the later crimes of Vichy, to which he seemed curiously indifferent, as he was to Hitler’s or Franco’s crimes (he paid a courtesy call to Franco after his retirement). There is a certain moral blankness except where the survival of the nation is in question."

(...)

"It all comes back to 1940. De Gaulle’s appel du 18 juin – ‘France has lost the battle, she has not lost the war’ – remains his enduring claim to fame. Those words did not actually appear in his BBC broadcast any more than the words ‘Vive l’Algérie française’ appear in his collected speeches, though he undoubtedly did utter them in the heat of the moment. Perhaps the dramatic crux of those dark days was the last meeting between Churchill and Pétain at the château du Muguet outside Orléans seven days earlier. At this grim encounter, superbly described by Sir Edward Spears in Assignment to Catastrophe, de Gaulle, as the most junior general present, scarcely spoke. General Weygand had that day declared Paris an open city under the Geneva Convention: it would not be defended and should not be attacked. Churchill implored the French not to give up:

He wanted the French to fight in Paris, describing how a great city, if stubbornly defended, absorbed immense armies. And the pageant of history, the lurid glow of burning cities, some as beautiful as Paris, collapsing on garrisons who refused to accept defeat, arose before our eyes. The French perceptibly froze at this.

Except for de Gaulle. Not only did he want to defend Paris street by street, he wanted to carry on fighting across France to make a last stand in ‘the Breton redoubt’ with the army’s backs to the sea. Churchill spoke up warmly for the Breton redoubt. Uncle Charlez probably would have too. But the other French generals foresaw another Dunkirk, only ten times bloodier.

It was not as if the French had collapsed at the first puff of smoke. In six weeks, they had already had nearly a hundred thousand men killed and lost half their tanks, a worse kill rate than at Verdun. Nobody had fought with greater élan than de Gaulle and his tanks in their three sorties, which failed only because of the odds against them. When Churchill recalled that in 1918 Clemenceau had said, ‘I will fight in front of Paris, in Paris and behind Paris,’ Pétain replied that in 1918 he had had sixty divisions to spare. Now there were none. ‘To make Paris into a city of ruins will not affect the issue.’ After the war, Weygand was proud that, thanks to him, Paris almost alone of the great European capitals had maintained its beauty intact. Spears commented caustically that future generations of Frenchmen might think ‘that a few ruins in Paris would have been more becoming to her fame than her unscarred beauty’. Had it not been for Pétain and Weygand, de Gaulle might have had to pick his way through the rubble when he walked down the Champs Elysées on Liberation Day. Like Churchill, he would have preferred it that way."

Read the article here.

Some prefer dignity and rubble to saving buildings and people and yes the state is still the coldest of all cold monsters but some people do their utmost to come close.

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