THE COMPLETE WAR MEMOIRS OF CHARLES DEGAULLE (1940-1946). 1,048 pages. Simon & Schuster. $12.50.
When Charles de Gaulle fled his prostrate country in 1940, he was all that the Free French had—and he had nothing: "Not the shadow of a force or of an organization at my side. In France, no following and no reputation. Abroad, neither credit nor standing." Four years later, the obscure and penniless general had helped liberate France, become its first postwar President, and taken his place among world statesmen of the first rank. History records no more telling example of the will to power.
De Gaulle's three volumes of war time memoirs, published for the first time in their entirety, are a rung-by-rung account of that ascent. There were no mysteries about it, and De Gaulle makes none. He has been accused of melodrama, egocentricity and arrogance, but his memoirs are written in an eloquently understated, supremely lucid style. As to the familiar gibe about his Joan of Arc complex, le grand Charles has never believed that he or his beloved France had any special claim to divine protection. True, he was superbly, even illogically confident. But above all else, De Gaulle has al ways been a realist. In his serene, eminently aristocratic view of human affairs, man is an infinitely corruptible, infrequently brilliant creature. It was the task of Charles de Gaulle, as he saw it, to make the children of darkness see the light. But in the years of France's humiliation it took all the patience, compassion and perseverance of which he was capable.
"Limitless Fury." A soldier's son, De Gaulle grew up in Paris with an all-consuming love of country. "France," he decided in early youth, "cannot be France without greatness." As an army colonel in the 1930s, he was keenly aware of his country's disavowal of that destiny. Petty partisan squabbling and interminable changes of government kept France's defenses in a shambles. While Hitler armed to the teeth, the French staked all on their grande illusion, the Maginot Line. Risking his career, De Gaulle badgered his superiors to create a mechanized army capable of swift, massive attack. Only Hitler took his advice. France's capitulation, he writes, was the expression of a "profound national renunciation."
De Gaulle's reaction was "limitless fury." He vowed: "If I live, I will fight, wherever I must, as long as I must, until the enemy is defeated and the national stain washed clean." De Gaulle tried to persuade the Vichy government to carry on the war from French North Africa, but no one of any eminence followed him into exile. "At this moment, the worst in her history," De Gaulle realized, "it was for me to assume the burden of France."