The Saboteur. Paul Kix
with an aide of de Gaulle’s. La Rochefoucauld mentioned his family name, “which may have possibly facilitated things,” he wrote, and because de Gaulle’s daily schedule allowed for fugitive Frenchmen who wanted to see him, Robert was told he would meet with the general that afternoon. He gulped.
The interior was all dark wood and high Gothic ceilings—an airy space with lots of natural light but poor insulation. In the winter, the Free French, across four floors, each nearly three thousand square feet, shivered in their huge rooms.
When the hour came, the secretary asked La Rochefoucauld if he was ready, and they climbed an ornate stairwell to a landing where doors led first to the offices of De Gaulle’s aide-de-camp, and then past those to the general’s own quarters. La Rochefoucauld’s heart thrummed in his chest.
Then the door opened and there he was. The man whose voice over the last few years Robert had heard scores of times, The soul of Free France, La Rochefoucauld thought. He sat behind his desk, peering over his glasses, with a look that asked, Now what might this one want? His presence filled the room. Everyone in London called him Le Grand Charles, due only in part to his towering height. Robert took in the office, uncluttered and organized, befitting a general, with a map of the world pinned to the wall behind de Gaulle and one of France hanging to his right. Out of his large French windows, the general had a view of St. James Park.
He rose to greet La Rochefoucauld, unbending his immense frame and straightening to his full six feet five inches, a half-foot taller than the nineteen-year-old. He had an odd body, “a head like a pineapple and hips like a woman’s,” as Alexander Cadogan, Britain’s permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office, once put it. His trimmed half mustache, a hairy square on his upper lip, was not a good look for a man with such a long face. The severed patch of facial hair only drew attention to his high forehead, and rather than shave the mustache, de Gaulle had taken to wearing military caps in many photographs and official portraits. He was aware of his ungainliness. “We people are never quite at ease,” he once told a colleague. “I mean—giants. The chairs are always too small, the tables too low, the impression one makes too strong.” Perhaps because of this, the general had welcomed solitude in London, taken on few friends, and worked in Carlton Gardens most days from 9 a.m. until evening, which allowed him to see people like La Rochefoucauld but returned him home only in time to talk with his wife and perhaps kiss his two daughters good night.
Visitors did not mistake his remoteness for timidity though. He came from a bourgeois family and his Jesuit education and elite military training at Saint-Cyr had instilled in him a kind of moral absolutism. Because he alone had cried out to continue the fight among his military brethren, because he alone had established an exile government of sorts in London, he alone spoke for the true France, he felt, and he alone could return it to grandeur.
“You are not France,” Churchill had once barked at him during a wartime negotiation. “I do not recognize you as France.”
To which the general replied: “Why are you [negotiating] with me if I am not France?”
Indeed, part of the reason no one else could claim to speak for France was because no one else had the bully pulpit of the BBC. By 1943 his name had become a political position, Gaullism, in the same way that his former mentor, Pétain, now stood for collaboration (Pétainism). And where he had once bluffed about his prowess—his initial Council of Defense consisted of himself and one other man—by 1943 the Free French fought alongside Allied troops throughout the world, and acolytes like La Rochefoucauld fled France almost daily to meet de Gaulle.
Still, he had a habit of treating impressionable Resistance fighters with such incuriosity or outright derision that they came away heartbroken. One described his rudeness as being like that of an “authoritarian prelate.” Another man, a courageous Resistance leader, said upon leaving a meeting with the general: “I have … witnessed ingratitude in my life, but never on this scale.” Walking now across the room and shaking La Rochefoucauld’s hand, de Gaulle’s greeting was characteristically “simple” but also “cordial,” La Rochefoucauld would later write, proving what Alain Peyrefette, a spokesman, once said of his boss: “To each his own de Gaulle. He was different with each new person he met.”
La Rochefoucauld explained how he’d gotten to London, and “de Gaulle first complimented me on wanting to join the Free French forces,” Robert wrote. La Rochefoucauld then said that the British had intervened and asked him to join its clandestine service; he wasn’t yet clear on the details, but that’s why he had come to see de Gaulle. He had only wanted to work under the general, but now he wondered: Should he join this secret British organization?
De Gaulle had a complicated and contentious relationship with the Brits. He demanded autonomy and yet relied on Britain financially to train and equip his troops. He needed to be diplomatic with London to achieve his ends but, to appeal to Frenchmen as the true voice of France, needed to undercut his diplomacy, too. “He had to be rude to the British to prove to French eyes that he was not a British puppet,” Churchill wrote. “He certainly carried out this policy with perseverance.” Churchill loved and loathed him. The romantic in Churchill saw a rebel and great adventurer in de Gaulle, “the man of destiny.” But the general’s incorrigible rudeness and unending demands on behalf of a sovereign nation that was, in truth, occupied by the Nazis, drove Churchill mad. Over the course of the war the prime minister went from wondering if de Gaulle had “gone off his head,” to calling him a “monster,” to saying he should be kept “in chains.” Franklin Roosevelt didn’t like him any better. The United States president gave de Gaulle all of three hours’ notice before the Allies’ massive 1942 landings in French-controlled Algeria and Morocco.
De Gaulle didn’t get along well with the British intelligence services, either. His Free French staff initially believed Piquet-Wicks and other Brits were poaching would-be French agents. Some Free French staffers thought of the British as a “rival organization,” Piquet-Wicks wrote. But in time certain spies in London saw the benefit of working with de Gaulle—nearly every Frenchman who came to the city wanted to meet him—and so Piquet-Wicks’s division began sharing information, and then missions, with the intelligence bureau of the Free French. Loyalties blurred, and many secret agents Piquet-Wicks oversaw considered themselves to be working first for de Gaulle, and the operatives’ success in France drew more people to London, which in turn strengthened the general, militarily as well as politically.
Now, weighing La Rochefoucauld’s question of joining the British, de Gaulle peered again at the young man, until he reached a conclusion that Robert would remember for the rest of his life: “It’s still for France,” de Gaulle said, “even if it’s allied with the Devil. Go!”
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