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The system worked for a time and after a fashion. But with World War II and the unmistakable decline of France and Western Europe to a secondary role in world affairs, it ceased to work at all. Dazzled by the powerful light from the Red star over Moscow, millions of Frenchmen -and one-quarter of France's Parliament -gave their primary allegiance to a foreign power. Refusing to recognize the force of the passion for independence that has seized the peoples of Asia and Africa, millions of other Frenchmen -and another quarter of the nation's Parliament -became obsessed with a blind and bloody determination to hang on to France's imperial possessions. French moderates, bickering among themselves and haggling for office, were able to do no more than fight desperate rearguard actions in defense of a crumbling status quo.
"The Big Asparagus." The political impotence that was ultimately to afflict France was already clearly foreseeable when Charles de Gaulle was born in the dreary northern factory town of Lille in November 1890. From his father, a veteran of the Franco-Prussian War who taught philosophy and literature at a Jesuit school. De Gaulle, by his own account, early acquired a vision of France as "the princess in fairy stories or the Madonna in the frescoes . . . dedicated to an exalted and exceptional destiny." But by the time he was in his teens, earnest, awkward Charles was already "saddened at seeing so many gifts wasted in political confusion and national disunity." Already, too, he had acquired the conviction that "France would have to go through gigantic trials, that the interest of life consisted in one day rendering her some signal service, and that I would have the occasion to do so."
When he graduated from St. Cyr (where his fellow cadets nicknamed him "the big asparagus"), Honor Student de Gaulle, privileged to choose the regiment with which he would serve, selected the 33rd Infantry Regiment commanded by Colonel Henri Philippe Petain. Regarding Petain with something close to idolatry, De Gaulle earned in return the patronage of the future marshal of France and Vichy chief of state. After World War I, in which De Gaulle suffered three wounds and won the Croix de guerre, Petain consented to stand godfather to his protege's son -who was duly christened Philippe. Shortly later, the marshal wrote of De Gaulle: "One day a grateful France will call on him."
In the years between the two world wars, Major de Gaulle became increasingly convinced that France must have a relatively small professional army built around mechanized units. This forward-looking strategic concept won him immediate fame in Germany, where his book The Army of the Future was carefully studied by the men who later organized Hitler's Panzer divisions, but was regarded as heresy by French senior officers.