Britain’s Prime Minister Winston Churchill, centre left, and General Charles De Gaulle, centre right, salute at the Arc De Triomphe in Paris on Nov. 12, 1944.The Associated Press
Title: The Last Titans
Author: Richard Vinen
Genre: Non-fiction
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Pages: 400
One was an aristocrat with child-like impulses, the other a middle-class soldier steeped in the sobriety and austerity of deep faith. One was an intuitive reformer, the other obsessed with what he called “a certain idea of France.” One was voluble, the other reserved. Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle were, as Richard Vinen put it in the title of his new dual biography of the two, The Last Titans.
Books we're reading and loving in April
At the centre of this book – which carries a telling subtitle: “How Churchill and de Gaulle Saved Their Nations and Transformed the World” – is the conviction that each of these two leaders is best understood when considered alongside the other. Both were army officers, both were writers, both were, as Vinen argues, resolutely figures of the 19th century. Churchill in his estimate was “an intensely theatrical politician,” while de Gaulle was “the last great tragedian.” Both are figures with no analogue today.
Supplied
What ties them together, too, is that both spent time in military prisons run by their countries’ adversaries and that they had starring roles in the defining battles of the 20th century – the global war of 1939-1945 and the Cold War of 1945-1989. Both saw the threat from Nazi Germany clearer, and earlier, than their compatriots, though de Gaulle was more preoccupied with ground forces and Churchill with air power. Actual warfare propelled both into enduring prominence. “The defeat of France was the first episode in the premiership of Winston Churchill and the last episode in the conventional military career of Charles de Gaulle,” writes Vinen, a history professor at Kings College London.
The war brought them together, face to face, for the first time, even as it shattered their most beloved military assumptions. “Churchill was shocked that an army in which he placed such faith collapsed so fast, but he saw this as a primarily military event,” Vinen writes. “De Gaulle was less surprised by events on the battlefield. The most important feature of the defeat for him was the way in which it was marked by a broader crisis (‘a shipwreck,’ to use one of his favourite images) of the French state.”
Book recommendations: Books we’re reading and loving in April
On one fateful day – can there be any oratorical rival to June 18, 1940, in the entire history of humankind? – the two delivered, from London, perhaps the most important speeches in the long annals of their respective countries.
De Gaulle: “The flame of French resistance must not and will not go out.”
Churchill: “Let us brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth shall last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finesthour.’”
The impact and importance of those two speeches was not apparent when they were delivered. “In the summer of 1940,” Vinen argues, “it would have seemed unimaginable that de Gaulle would one day be considered as important as Churchill.” (That is because de Gaulle had at hand no military force, only moral force.) Nor was it clear that Great Britain would prevail in the war. (Almost the same would be true for Churchill.)
The clash of British moral power and French moral power would not be pretty. Tempers and tension flared. At one point, with de Gaulle about to return to England in September, 1941, Churchill declared: “No notice will be taken of General de Gaulle’s arrival, and it will be left to him to make any overtures.” De Gaulle continually angled to be regarded not as a refugee but as the leader of a government. Churchill continually angled to deny him that platform and prestige. No pronouncements of “we happy few, we band of brothers” here. (Both men were conversant in Shakespeare.)
Despite revisionist interpretations that inevitably followed the war, the two still remain giants of history, largely because of the way they characterized their nations, the way they sought, and in some measure succeeded, to personify them, experiencing and then defining their national characters for their twin battles of survival. History’s irony is at its strongest here, for Vinen points out that the defining elements of their personal characters was defeat: for de Gaulle the mortifying fall of France to Nazi Germany in 1940, and for Churchill the humiliating surrender of Singapore to Japan in 1942.
A Sotheby’s worker cleans a bronze bust of French General Charles de Gaulle next to a bronze bust of Sir Winston Churchill, on July 8, 1999.Sinead Lynch/AFP / Getty Images
But, in a way, how different they were. Churchill was more famous at 24 than de Gaulle was at twice that age. Churchill operated in public life through political parties (he was, after all, a member of two, first a Conservative, then a Liberal, then back to the Conservatives) while de Gaulle was a partisan but a member of no party – until he led one.
Another important difference: De Gaulle, who adapted more readily and better than Churchill to the modern world, had a far more successful postwar experience. “De Gaulle did not have many equals outside France,” Vinen writes. “Churchill had ceased to be the man of 1940 before de Gaulle returned to power in 1958.”
Quebec-based online bookstore network expands across Canada, giving independent shops an edge
The great shared frustration of the two men was how the two reigning empires of the age were superseded by a former colony, the United States. This transition was substantially easier for Churchill, who had an American mother and consorted, with highball drinks and high spirits, throughout the war with Franklin Delano Roosevelt, than it was for de Gaulle, who was reared in America’s first great ally (France sided with the U.S. during the American Revolution) but who recoiled at what he saw as American arrogance and cultural superficiality.
No matter, perhaps, in the long run. The great lesson for our time may not be from the Second World War but from its aftermath. “All great powers eventually face decline,” Vinen reminds us. “The question of how leaders adjust to this decline – the question that Churchill and de Gaulle once faced – will one day face the leaders of today’s great powers.” You know whom he’s talking about.