Pétain as de Gaulle

With his hyperacute sensibility to the deeper movements of the psyche, Rudolph Binion has precisely traced the character of French leadership in both 1940 and 1958. He has found it uncannily congruent. I don’t believe I invalidate his conclusions if I find a Pétain as de Gaulle in his narrative. As Binion says, “Diametric opposites meet.”

Of course the psyche must respond to outer events. The great crash of the 1940 battle defeat—the destruction of the French state—was as traumatic as it was real. The events of 1958, radiating out traumatic effects, recalled 1940—but with differences which Binion has expertly delineated. The first was a monolithic disaster, the second, a puzzle of a splintering of defeats: Vietnam, Tunisia, Morocco, and, after de Gaulle accepted it, Algeria.

I marvel at Binion’s fine understanding of the two huge personalities: their individual touchiness, magical thinking, and somnambulistic triangulation of political reality. As he shows, both triumphed at the cost of the other, but then the great

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ego, in character, recognizes no other. Binion does not mention the dénouement: a jury had declared Pétain guilty and sentenced him to death but with a recommendation for mercy. Having previously refused to let Pétain escape by way of banishment, the victor de Gaulle granted him that much, but not a miette [crumb] more—to live out his 95 years as a state prisoner. For de Gaulle it was surely a fair concordance of personal pique, appropriate politics, and justice.

In the mediocre record of overt history, as Binion shows, de Gaulle was another Pétain. But are we not forced to see Pétain as de Gaulle? Consider de Gaulle’s legerdemain. Defying assassination, the military man completed France’s decolonialization as the civilian leaders had disgracefully begun it. He went to Algeria to tell the exultant colons: “Je vous ai compris” [I have understood you]. He understood them better than they understood themselves and prepared their welcome in France.

De Gaulle balanced France’s parliamentary institutions by giving the country an effective executive. Accepting and extending the Monnet Plan, he supported a reasonable organization of the economy. He befriended Germany as part of a prickly adjustment of a uniting Europe. If he strengthened French and European democracy so much, cannot he rescue Pétain as well? At his trial the old man told the court: “while General de Gaulle pursued the struggle beyond our frontiers I prepared the way to liberation by preserving France stricken but alive.”

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