Gaullist chutzpah: Creating reality through the power of language

[Image: Charles de Gaulle on the BBC, 18 June 1940]

Introduction: The Genocide of Truth

Chapter 1: Truth // Chapter 2: Ideology // Chapter 3: Religion // Chapter 4: Science // Chapter 5: Attention // Chapter 6: Distraction // Chapter 7: (True) Expertise // Chapter 8: Authority

In the face of the confusion of French souls, in the face of the disintegration (?) of a government fallen under enemy servitude, in the face of the impossibility of bringing our institutions into play, I, General de Gaulle, French soldier and leader, am aware that I speak in the name of France.

Charles de Gaulle on the BBC, 19 June 1940

There are leaders and there is Charles de Gaulle. There is audaciousness and there is Charles de Gaulle. He may not have been Jewish, but his life was the very embodiment of chutzpah. Here was a barely known military man who, upon fleeing to London from the Nazi terror, simply declared himself the leader of the free French people!

He represented nobody. Absolutely nobody. To be sure he had shown extraordinary military bravery in both World Wars, spying on the German trenches in the former and valiantly leading an armoured regiment in the latter. To be sure he had just been selected undersecretary of defence by then-ousted French premier Paul Reynaud. Yet at just 49 years of age, and hardly a household name in metropolitan France, he announced himself on the BBC as the true leader of the “free French”. Although Marshal Pétain, installed at the head of a Nazi puppet government in Vichy, was by far his senior in military ranking and despite being a Pétain mentee in better times, he spoke of his senior officer as accepting “an act of debasement” in agreeing to servile armistice terms with the German government.

What is extraordinary here is less de Gaulle’s statements, but more the acceptance of the new Gaullist reality by others who were unforced by either power or logic to accept them. “You are alone”, Churchill said to de Gaulle. “Well I will recognise you alone”.

Many have been the men in American prisons who have claimed to be Jesus Christ resurrected. Few have been the listeners that have accepted these claims. Yet on this occasion, we see a typically Churchill-esque break from the norm. For though France had its own government on its own territory with citizens of multiple and unknown opinions upon the concept of France, and though there were other former governmental figures such as Édouard Deladier and Georges Mandel with greater seniority and experience to run a shadow government in exile, de Gaulle had the unprecedented brass neck to claim that he alone had the embodied authority to represent the “real France”. [And Churchill had the brass neck to support such pretentious positions against Roosevelt’s unsurprising scepticism.]

De Gaulle’s extraordinary approach to leadership, which amounted to changing established reality through sheer force of will, continued unabated throughout the war years: