February 28, 2015

Finest Hour 157, Winter 2012-13

Page 13

By Richard M. Langworth

“For more than thirty years in peace and war I have marched with you,” Churchill told the French in 1940… . “je marche encore avec vous aujourd’hui, sur la même route.” He loved France with the passion of a Frenchman. Napoleon was his hero, Clemenceau his epitome in the Great War, de Gaulle his embodiment of France in World War II, the south of France his refuge in old age. In boyhood he wrote of “fair Alsace and forlorn Lorraine,” having learned of France’s greatest tragedy (up to then), at his father’s knee. In 1947 he recalled those impressions in a short story about the return of Lord Randolph, half a century after his death.

“I remember,” his father says in The Dream, “taking you through the Place de la Concorde when you were only nine years old, and you asked me about the Strasbourg monument. You wanted to know why this one was covered in flowers and crepe. I told you about the lost provinces of France. What flag flies in Strasbourg now?’‘

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“The Tricolour flies there,” Winston tells him, and Lord Randolph says, “Ah, so they won. They had their revanche. That must have been a great triumph for them.” “It cost them their life blood,” Winston replies sadly—to a father who does not know of the two World Wars.

Allen Packwood answers many questions herein on Churchill’s infatuation with Napoleon. Though WSC did call him an “ogre,” modern historians were far more scathing. Bonaparte, said one, was “less a great strategist or defender of liberty, than an opportunist and a mafia godfather”; others compared him to Hitler.

Churchill would not have it: “I always hate to compare Napoleon with Hitler, as it seems an insult to the great Emperor and warrior to connect him in any way with a squalid caucus boss and butcher.” His generation, French and British alike, was steeped in Napoleonic myth, Allen Packwood explains. Yet Churchill recognized Napoleon’s flaws as a warlord, one of which he shared with Hitler: “Both these men were temperamentally unable to give up the tiniest scrap of any territory to which the high watermark of their hectic fortunes had carried them.”

Least known among the trio of Frenchmen discussed herein is Pierre Flandin, who had, Richard Marsh writes, much to recommend him—and was rewarded when, on trial for his life, Churchill’s testimony saved him.

Foreign Minister Flandin came to London after Hitler occupied the Rhineland, desperate for British support in a French action to throw the Germans out—and ran head-long into an intransigent Prime Minister. Flandin’s oratory at that hour was Churchillian: “Today the whole world, and especially the small nations, turn their eyes toward England. If England will act now, she can lead Europe.”

But England would not act. “You may be right,” Stanley Baldwin told him, “but if there is even one chance in a hundred that war would follow from your police operation, I have not the right to commit England.”

A despairing Flandin returned to France, certain that inaction now meant war later. His effort to stop Hitler was greater at that time than that of Churchill, who never forgot that Flandin had tried to prevent “the unnecessary war.”

The relationship between Churchill and de Gaulle has occupied these pages often, and whole books have been written on it. The subject will never be closed, but herein we offer the conclusions of an undergraduate, Natalie Rosseau, who took up the subject with no preconceptions.

Ms. Rosseau deftly separates the wheat from the chaff, culling out the famous, furious, often comic encounters of de Gaulle and Churchill to focus on what really matters—and what both knew of each other in the end. “L’homme du destin,” Churchill said of de Gaulle…. “Here is the Constable of France.” And after WSC’s funeral in 1965 de Gaulle wrote: “Dans le grand drame, il fut le plus grand.” (In the great drama, he was the greatest.)

It was Churchill’s and France’s destiny to be “somewhat mixed up together” for half a century; to share glory and anguish, triumph and tragedy, and the greatest of victories. “Dieu protège la France,” he told them in 1940. “Never will I believe that the soul of France is dead…. Rappelez-vous de quelle façon Napoléon disait avant une de ses victoires: ‘Ces mêmes Prussiens qui sont aujourd’hui si vantards étaient à 3 contre 1 à Jéna et à 6 contre 1 à Montmirail.” (Remember how Napoleon said before one of his battles:  “These same Prussians who are so boastful today were three to one at Jena, and six to one at Montmirail.”)

It was Sir Martin Gilbert who drew to Allen Packwood’s attention a tactful omission in that famous peroration: Napoleon said those words to his Marshals just before Waterloo. Perhaps the irony was intended.