Pétain and De Gaulle: A Contrast in Personality and Leadership

The two most momentous and severe national crises for the French people in the Twentieth century brought to power individuals who were uniquely suited to handle these crises: Marshal Phillippe Pétain in dealing with the military defeat of France and the concomitant fall of the Third Republic in 1940, and General Charles de Gaulle in presiding over France in the wake of the fall of the Fourth Republic. Professor Rudolph Binion demonstrates how their personas intertwined and how the crisis of 1958 bears many similarities to the one of 1940, as well as great differences.

I concur with Professor Binion’s thesis regarding de Gaulle identifying with Pétain about a change in regimes; what he did resembled Pétain’s own actions 18 years earlier. My paper, is also in line with the psychohistorical approach, which Professor Binion takes, will be to contrast their personalities. At the beginning of de Gaulle’s military career, when he was a lieutenant, he chose to serve in the regiment commanded by Pétain, but they eventually came to clash in the 1920’s over the authorship of a book de Gaulle ghost wrote for Pétain. In wanting credit for his work, de Gaulle defied Pétain, who was not only his superior officer, but now as a Maréchal de France was one of the most illustrious leaders in the French army.

Pétain and de Gaulle were temperamentally quite different, even though they had similar backgrounds and political orientations. True, these authoritarian traditionalists were both graduates of Saint Cyr, chose military careers, had Catholic upbringings, were monarchists, were not enamored with the course of the French Revolution of 1789, and were critical of the political system of the Third Republic. Eventually, they diverged, turned against each other, and came into power under dissimilar historical circumstances.

Fundamentally, Pétain and de Gaulle had radically different characters: disparate psychic structures, unconscious motivations, methods of reconciling intrapsychic conflicts, and patterns of behavior, feeling, and action. Their personalities developed in divergent childhoods, they came to power under quite different historical circumstances, and, because of their personal histories, took the French people in opposing directions. Pétain served to establish the reactionary, fascist, Vichy regime in 1940, whereas de Gaulle, despite his controversial rise to power, essentially took France in a progressive direction in 1958.

Professor Binion observes that eventually there was an “ambivalence” in the relationship of these two figures that turned “deadly” and that for their historic acts, “Tactics aside, the basic equivalence of 1958 with 1940 remains: just as Pétain had used the 1940 defeat to destroy the Third Republic, so de Gaulle used the 1958 Algerian crisis to destroy the Fourth Republic.”

Turning our attention to the essence of their personalities and backgrounds, we begin with Pétain whose life and career can be epitomized in a remark he made about himself, which was, “They only call me in disasters” (See Jacques Szaluta, “Marshal Pétain and the French Army Mutiny of 1917: A Study in Military Leadership and Political Personality,” Third Republic—Troisième Republique, [No.6, 1978], pp. 181-210). Pétain was a passive person who liked to be asked to respond to a crisis, unlike military officers who are expected to be assertive, like the more typical de Gaulle.

Pétain’s childhood was traumatic. Phillippe was born in 1856 to a peasant family in a

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small village, as the fourth child and the first-born son. When his mother died when he was 17-months-old his father hired a temporary housekeeper. In 1859, his father remarried and the following year his wife gave birth to a child. Soon thereafter, he was sent from his father’s home to live with his maternal grandmother. At the age of 11 Phillippe was sent to board in the Jesuit collège at Saint Bertin. In short, Pétain’s childhood was marked by the anxieties and fantasies most dreaded by children. By the time he was only four years old he felt that he had been rejected by at least two women, and by his father. He was further abandoned by his family when he was sent to a boarding school. Such early traumatic experiences prevented him from developing, in the words of Erik Erikson, “basic trust” in people. This was accompanied by feelings of rage, loneliness, and low self-esteem.

The consequences of Pétain not having the advantages of a consistent, loving family affected him adversely throughout his life. His adult behavior was noted, widely witnessed, and recorded by his contemporary critics and supporters alike as being aloof, cold, reserved, cautious, and secretive. He did not have any close friendships with men or women. Not surprisingly, he did not marry until he was 64 years of age, and only after he had become a Marshal. Many felt that he was a pessimist, and at critical times in his career he was considered a defeatist. Many noted that he had a nervous tick in his eye, an example of unresolved emotional conflict defended against by repression. In his last years of life, he recalled his childhood experiences with bitterness: “My father remarried; my step-mother turned out to be a bitch; my parental home was practically closed to me” (For a more detailed discussion, interpreted in a psychoanalytic light, see Jacques Szaluta, “Apotheosis To Ignominy: The Martyrdom of Marshal Pétain,” The Journal of Psychohistory, Vol. 7, No. 4, [Spring 1980], pp. 416-453).

Certainly, Pétain was an ambitious man, but in a reserved, overly modest, and sometimes self-effacing manner. In his pattern of behavior, he needed to be coaxed—to be “wanted”—and although he was to eventually win fame he did this in a defensive mode and he also ultimately acted in a self-destructive manner as I will show below. In 1914 he won an important battle on the defensive, and when he was in command at Verdun in 1916, the battle was fought on the defensive. He was summoned to quell the French Army mutinies of 1917 and again in 1934 following a Right-wing political insurrection in France. Then he served as ambassador to Spain after Franco’s victory and finally, in 1940, to head the French state at Vichy.

As France was being defeated by German armies in 1940, the government was split as to the continuation of the war: Pétain favored an armistice while Reynaud and most of the ministers were opposed to it. As Professor Binion discusses, the French government was being compromised by defeatist pressure to stop the fighting. Pétain especially wanted to end the war and was opposed to the government leaving for North Africa to continue the resistance, in opposition to Reynaud and most of the ministers who were opposed to the armistice. Due to his enormous prestige, a resignation by Pétain would have meant the collapse of the government. President Lebrun turned to Pétain on June 16, and asked him to form a new government. The Marshal of France was prepared and power was legally handed to him. Underlining the legitimacy of his ascendance, the opening words of Pétain’s first address to the French people were, “At the appeal of the President of the Republic.” The way Pétain reacted to and treated France’s greatest national trauma, the débâcle of 1940, was distinctly linked to the experiences of his own childhood trauma. On July 10, the National Assembly voted full constituent powers to Pétain. Vichy, the new state which emerged was the kind of authoritarian regime he had always wanted for France. Pétain promised to create a better “New Order” with the Vichy State. In actuality, Vichy caused immense suffering for the French people, created civil war conditions, collaborated with the enemy, and opposed the Allied liberators (Jacques Szaluta, “Marshal Pétain’s Ambassadorship to Spain: Conspiratorial or Providential Rise Toward Power?” French Historical Studies, Vol. VIII, No.4 [Fall, 1974], pp. 528-533).

Pétain courted suffering. Well before 1940, this was manifested in his speeches as he preached the value of regenerative suffering. Although born and raised a Catholic, he was in conflict with his religion and defied many doctrinal prohibitions: he did not attend church and married

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a divorced woman in a civil ceremony. (For his relationship with his wife, see Jacques Szaluta, “The Correspondence Between Marechal and Madame Pétain, 1913 to 1949: A Psychoanalytic Interpretation,” American Imago, Vol. 47, No. 2 [Summer 1990], pp. 169-196.) What was congenial to his neurosis is that he accepted the Church’s social teachings such as mystical fatalism, motivated by personal suffering: he did seek martyrdom as he identified with Jesus Christ. It is in this sense that he declared in 1940, “I make to France the gift of my person to alleviate her suffering.”

Ultimately, because of his rage and hostility, and unconscious recognition that he had “sinned,” he sought to be punished. When he was tried for treason at the end of the war, he did little to contest his sentence but instead entrusted his judgment to “Fate,” which is synonymous with what Freud calls “Destiny”—”the last representative of the parents.” In August 1945, Pétain was found guilty of having collaborated with the enemy and he was condemned to death. Marshal Pétain wanted to be punished, to sacrifice himself, and to be a martyr (Szaluta, “Correspondence,” p. 194). De Gaulle, the head of the Provisional Government, upheld the sentence, but because of Pétain’s advanced age of 89, commuted it to life imprisonment. He insightfully observed of Pétain: “He wished to be judged and he was; for reasons of state, he had to be.”

De Gaulle judging Pétain was a total reversal from only five years earlier, when following his own defiance of Pétain’s Vichy State, he had been tried in absentia and condemned to death. However, in the inter-war years, Pétain had been de Gaulle’s great benefactor. Just as there was an emotional cohesiveness and consistency throughout Pétain’s life, culminating in his ignominious martyrdom, de Gaulle’s life and career made possible his apotheosis in 1958, culminating in being widely considered as the greatest leader of France since Napoleon.

In contrast to Pétain’s early years, de Gaulle’s childhood was remarkably stable and loving. He was born in 1890 as the third of four brothers and one sister. His parents had a comfortable bourgeois life and, as his father’s financial circumstances improved, they lived in fashionable homes and had servants. They were devout Catholics and monarchists who had a patriotic interest in the position of France in European affairs. The de Gaulles were attentive to their children, they staged plays at home, went to the theater, and took vacations together. The future general identified closely with both of his parents. Charles remained close to his mother, maintaining an active correspondence with her until her death in 1940. The influence of Charles’ father was heightened by all of his sons attending the Jesuit school where he taught. De Gaulle was a good student and a voracious reader who had a passion for history (Bernard Ledwidge, De Gaulle [NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1982], pp. 3-11). In line with growing up in such a nurturing family, he married at the age of 31, had three children, one of whom he named Phillippe, after Pétain.

As an indication of this fortunate and privileged childhood, de Gaulle opens the first of his three volume memoirs movingly as follows, “All my life I have thought of France in a certain way….inspired by sentiment as much as by reason. The emotional side of me tends to imagine France, like the princess in the fairy stories or the Madonna in the frescoes, as dedicated to an exalted and exceptional destiny.” This is a paean to his mother. Also in the first paragraph he states: “France is not really herself unless in the front rank…to my mind, France cannot be France without greatness.” De Gaulle adds: “This faith grew as I grew, in the environment where I was born. My father was a thoughtful, cultivated man, imbued with a feeling for the dignity of France. He made me aware of her history. My mother had an uncompromising passion for her country, equal to her religious piety…a certain pride in our country came as second nature” (Charles de Gaulle, War Memoirs: The Call to Honour, 1940-1942, Vol. I, [NY: Viking Press, 1955], p. 4).

These remarks are revealing of his identification with his parents, the religious convictions he maintained, and an unstated royalism: French traditionalists believed that France could only be great when ruled by a king. By extension, this was a veiled criticism of the republican government and the multi-party parliamentary system. These remarks also serve to indicate de Gaulle’s motivation for pursuing a military career, the nature of his principles, in the sense of his having demanding

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superego ideals and values, or conscience, as in his strong sense of duty. As he said, “When I joined the Army, it was one of the greatest things in the world” (De Gaulle, Memoirs, Vol. 1, p. 4). De Gaulle was consistent. As a young lieutenant, he addressed new recruits, and he told them: “You are no longer ordinary men: you have become soldiers” (Jean Lacouture, De Gaulle: The Rebel, 1890–1944, [NY: W.W. Norton, 1990], p. 22).

Freud said that the essence of success was to have gotten farther than one’s father. De Gaulle surpassed his father who was an ardent French nationalist who fought in the war of 1870, with the rank of lieutenant and was wounded in battle. It grieved Henri de Gaulle that Prussia defeated France, diminishing French prestige and power, and bringing about a republican form of government. As Jean-Raymond Tournoux writes, the father was “obsessed, and the obsession was revenge” (Sons of France: Pétain and De Gaulle [NY: Viking Press, 1966], p. 5). Imbued with the glories of France by his father, as well as its reverses, the young de Gaulle was his father’s apt pupil. The French army could be Charles de Gaulle’s instrument of redress. While in the infantry during World War I, he amply demonstrated his valor and fighting spirit. Living by the code he advocated, he was wounded several times, narrowly escaped death, and ended up as a prisoner of war.

De Gaulle was a brilliant military historian and intellectual as well as a soldier. He wrote widely on military affairs, was a visionary if not a prophet, and with realism explained and rationalized the historic importance of armies and the use of force by the state. His book, At the Edge of the Sword, (Criterion Books, 1960), points to his behavior in 1940 and 1958 and reveals his dedication to exemplary military virtues such as the need for courage and the necessity to maintain the will to achieve victory. He believed “the fighting spirit, the art of war, the virtues of the soldier are an integral part of man’s inheritance…. The self-sacrifice of individuals for the sake of the community, suffering made glorious…are the basic elements of the profession of arms.” Furthermore “The noblest teachings of philosophy and religion have found no higher ideals” than the profession to which he devoted his career (Edge of the Sword, p. 10).

In both his writings and actions, de Gaulle is consistent. While still a junior officer, he wrote his book, The Edge of the Sword, which he starts with a quote from Shakespeare (italics are his): “Rightly to be great is not to stir without great argument” (p. 7). It is a meaningful precept, revealing that he understands that to be a maverick, to stand out against great odds, is going to be controversial. It’s a premonition of what he will do in a crisis, and it points to the role he will play throughout his career, tenaciously in 1940 and in 1958.

Although there are similarities between the acts of de Gaulle and Pétain, ultimately de Gaulle’s intentions were quite different. Highlighting their dissimilarity, de Gaulle was an astute politician who was more in touch with reality than Pétain. This included acting deceptively and cryptically even to his supporters. Under the circumstances he did not have much of a choice, for he had a higher purpose in mind, a form of “necessity of war.”      What he planned and he achieved was to establish a new republic, save the nation from civil war, and end the conflict with Algeria. Though de Gaulle often acted imperiously and controversially while in power, his rule was marked by many successes and reverses. Overall, he was a more adaptive, flexible, intellectual, and realistic than Pétain. Also, he was far less angry toward the people of France.

There is also the matter of the psychic differences between the two men. Certainly, de Gaulle initially had a favorable opinion of Pétain, and was impressed by him since Pétain was distinguished, the colonel of his regiment, and appeared to be a military maverick. But this idealized view could not last, as the course of events would eventually determine, for their diverging temperaments revealed themselves in the military theories they espoused. Clearly, their conscious and unconscious motivations were not compatible. Before World War I, Pétain favored the doctrine at the defensive, which had much tactical merit, but de Gaulle was a man with a zeal for the offensive spirit. De Gaulle sensed, or intuited, that Pétain’s military strategy was not the ideal one for ultimately achieving victory. As Jean Lacouture writes of the private notebooks de Gaulle kept of this time, he already was not in agreement with

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Pétain (De Gaulle, pp. 21-23). The seeds for 1940 and subsequent divergences with Pétain germinated in 1913. Remarkably, in a lecture on patriotism to a group of officers in 1913, in which he made many encouraging remarks, de Gaulle said perspicaciously “the man who does not love his own mother more than other mothers and his own country more than other countries loves neither his mother nor his country!” (Lacouture, De Gaulle, p. 25). Pétain did not love his mother, while de Gaulle certainly loved both his mother and motherland.

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