By Charles de Gaulle
"Toute ma vie, je me suis fait une certaine idée de la France." Translation
"Oui, c'est l'Europe, depuis l'Atlantique jusqu'à l'Oural, c'est l'Europe, c'est toute l'Europe, qui décidera du destin du monde!" Translation
"Comment quelqu'un peut-il gouverner une nation qui possédé deux cent quartante-six types de fromages différents?" Translation note
About de Gaulle
So when De Gaulle came to power, on the back of military revolt in Algiers, the dilapidated estate he inherited in fact offered solid bases for national recovery. He, of course, promised much more than that. France, he had announced, was inconceivable without grandeur. In his vocabulary the word had connotations that escape the vulgar claims of ‘greatness’ attached to Britain; it was a more archaic and abstract ideal, that appeared even to many of his compatriots out of keeping with the age. Yet it is difficult to deny it to the man, and the reconstruction over which he presided. It is conventional to pair him with Churchill, as statues in the national pantheon. But, beyond romantic legend, there is a discrepancy between them. De Gaulle’s historical achievement was much larger. Colourful as it was, Churchill’s role in 20th-century Britain proved by comparison quite limited: an inspirational leadership of his country, crucial for a year, in a war won by Soviet troops and American wealth, and a brief epilogue of nondescript office in time of peace. The image he left was huge, the mark modest. Little in postwar Britain, save lingering imperial illusions, is traceable to him...De Gaulle’s wartime leadership was more purely symbolic, and his adjustment to peace, at which he threw in a hand stronger than Churchill’s, little more successful. But he was a generation younger, with an altogether more reflective and original cast of mind. When he returned to power a decade later, he had mastered the arts of politics...In the West no other postwar leader comes near his record. The largest colonial conflict of the century...was brought to a dextrous end, and resistance to the settlement by those who had put him in power crushed. A new republic was founded, with institutions –- above all, a strong presidential executive –- designed to give the country political stability. High-tech modernisation of the economy proceeded apace, with major infrastructural programmes and rapidly rising living standards in the towns, as growth accelerated. Large-scale farming was shielded by the Common Agricultural Policy, a French construction, while the countryside started to empty, and the capital regained its pristine splendour...As the Cold War continued, De Gaulle made France the only truly independent power in Europe...No country of the period was so plainly removed from any notion of decline. Equipped with a vigorous economy, an exceptionally strong state, an intrepid foreign policy, France displayed a greater elan than at any time since the Belle Epoque.
The history of the European Resistance movements is largely mythological, since...the legitimacy of post-war regimes and governments essentially rested on their Resistance record. France is the extreme case, because there the governments after Liberation lacked all real continuity with the French government of 1940, which had made peace and cooperated with the Germans, and because organized, and let alone armed, resistance had been rather weak, at any rate until 1944, and popular support for it had been patchy. Post-war France was rebuilt by General de Gaulle on the basis of the myth that, essentially, the eternal France had never accepted defeat. As he himself put it, "Resistance was a bluff that came off"... It was an act of policy that the only fighters in the Second World War commemorated on French war memorials today are Resistance fighters, and those who joined De Gaulle's forces.
— Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes note
