‘Anglo-Gaullism’ piece for Unherd

With added extras and a Substack update

Hello All,

I would like to point out an article I’ve written for Unherd on ‘Anglo-Gaullism’, based on a reading of Julian Jackson’s marvellous biography of Charles de Gaulle, A Certain Idea of France.

You can read the piece on Unherd via this link.

As is often the way with these things, the piece went through several stages of editing that resulted in it having a slightly different self-presentation to the one I had initially given it (the picture of Emmanuel Macron accompanying it being the most significant example of this).

However this gives me the opportunity to highlight a few things here which didn’t make the final cut. If you haven’t read the article already and are interested in de Gaulle and the (counter-intuitive) idea of applying his example to Britain and a wider Anglophone context, I would recommend you read it first. It has the argument; here we will simply add a few adornments which I think are interesting.

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To start with, I led my first draft with a quotation from the novelist Jonathan Franzen about the situation of the writer which I thought demonstrated de Gaulle’s position in the Second World War quite well. This was a time when he was struggling to assert his status as the representative of France to sceptical, sometimes dismissive allies, with virtually nothing to back it up.

As Franzen put it, “You adopt a certain attitude when you feel like you have something that’s not appreciated. You have to generate some sense of bigness on your own; that’s an insufferable activity.”

De Gaulle certainly made himself insufferable to Churchill, the British, and then the Americans when they showed up. And he continued that habit pretty much to the end of his life. He was not a ‘consensual’ politician. He had a strong idea of what was good and worthwhile – specifically himself and France as an exalted entity, melded together – and he was reluctant to compromise on this.

In the original version of the piece, I also used a quotation from the socialist Georges Boris, who was one of the first to join de Gaulle in London:

de Gaulle gave me back honour, the possibility of being able to look people in the face again, my sense of being a Frenchman. It is thanks to him that I am not purely and simply an émigré.

As I said following this, in a passage from which only the last sentence made the final edit: “During the war, De Gaulle made himself big by acting big. He wasn’t afraid to show anger and make a scene. He showed no gratitude to his allies. But, rather than acting like a big fish in a small pond, a natural temptation for those on the fringes, he reached above and beyond to that ‘idea of France’. This made him insufferable to both colleagues and allies. But, whether they were asking for it or not, he provided leadership: and in response they started treating him as a leader.”

If you want more on De Gaulle, I wrote an extensive Twitter thread on my reading of Jackson’s book, with plenty of interesting bons mots from the man himself.

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In relation to this Substack, I have been quite surprised to have got a lot of new subscribers recently, precisely during the time I have suspended it and haven’t been writing anything.

As yet, I haven’t made a decision on where to go. For one thing, I still have a lot of other business to attend to at present, including editing The Progress Factory. It needs quite a bit of work to improve the structure and also to give the most essential arguments more prominence.

There’s a thing about writing a book, at least a non-fiction one: that by the time you’ve got to the end of writing it, you’ve more or less forgotten what you wrote at the beginning. What I need to do now is get the whole thing to sing the same song, albeit with different and hopefully interesting verses.

Best wishes to all readers,

Ben

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