June 22, 2015

Finest Hour 106, Spring 2000

Page 35

By Robert Franks

Churchill, by Francois Bedarida; Paris, Fayard, 576 pp. 160 F. ($25). Text in French. Will members desiring a copy please contact the editor.

No one is better qualified to write a French biography of Churchill than Francois Bedarida, a specialist in both British history and the Second World War. The risk is large, as so much has been said, but the merit of Bedarida is in presenting a more synthetic work, which delves into interesting facets of historical interpretation.

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The book seeks to scrutinize the resiliency of a fantastic personality, both flamboyant and contradictory. Bedarida believes young Winston’s lack of affection from his parents left “an indelible mark on his innermost being,” resulting in an incessant need to attract attention and to seek recognition. Throughout his life he had to fight against his cyclothymic nature.

After mostly mediocre studies, he is admitted to the military academy at Sandhurst. But the prospect of a life in a garrison bores him and his diirst for action propels him, at the age of 21, into becoming a volunteer soldier and journalist in Cuba (1895), India (1897), the Sudan (1898) and South Africa (1899). Captured by the Boers, he escapes and writes a best-seller. Fame opens Parliament to him, where he sits among die Conservatives from 1900 on.

Bedarida provides the political portrait of both an opportunist and idealist. His flair for action drives Churchill to join the Liberal Party in 1904, but in 1924 he comes back to the Conservative fold in what the author says is a typical course for a “Tory Democrat.” Patrician, nationalist, colonialist, racist in many respects, Churchill is at the same time convinced of the need for social reform, as much for the guarantee of order as for the stability of the Empire. This fundamental ambivalence makes him ill at ease within the party system.

Bedarida refuses a teleological dodge: all of Churchill’s roads do not lead to the glorification of 1940, and there is, in his life, more luck than necessity. On the question of India, the statesman obstinately refuses the solution of self-government, appearing like a politician of the past. As a dramatic consequence of diis typically Churchillian error, he loses credibility in his warnings about Hitler. His clairvoyance is total from 1933, but his argument against appeasement lacks the consistency which he wanted to attribute to it after the war. During the middle Thirties, he displays indulgence towards fascist Italy when she invades Ethiopia, then chooses Franco when war breaks out in Spain. These errors in judgment can be explained through his fear of communism founded on a very shrewd analysis of the Soviet regime whose criminal and totalitarian dimensions he calculates very early on. At the hour of greatest danger, the protagonist becomes “Churchill of England.”

Bedarida devotes only one-fourth of his work to the war years. In order to breathe life into the “epic,” he cites the formulas by which Churchill “mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.” In studied terms, the author put in perspective the role of Churchill in the war, notably in intelligence as well as in his strategic debates with Roosevelt and his Realpolitik with regard to Stalin.

Too fleeting, no doubt, are the pages devoted to the decline of the “Old Lion” after his electoral defeat of July 1945, his return to the Opposition, and then again heading the Government (1951-1955). His effort on behalf of European unity has been sufficiently treated. In return Bedarida adds an interesting touch to the portrait as he describes the evolution of Churchill from champion of the cold war, to a peacestriver who proposes a forerunner of detente after the death of Stalin.

To sum up, Francois Bedarida knows how to utilize all the colors of his palette: this biography is not only a vivid and elegant account, it is also a lesson in the historical process, a reflection in depth of the British identity, and of the European democracies of the 20th century.

Excerpted from Mr. Franks’ review published in Le Monde, 22 October l999, translated by Gert Zoller.