De Gaulle of This Zelensky Guy
John F. Harnes
Mar 03, 2025
History, Rinse, & Repeat is a blog dedicated to the idea that history repeats itself, that one can look at virtually any event in today’s news, and gain some perspective by finding a comparable event in history. Each week, A.H. and I strive, sometimes more successfully than others, to find a historical precedent for something we see or hear in the news. Just this week, I was preparing an article about the pervasive sense of déjà vu I experience listening, whether on the news or in podcasts, to many of the same political arguments of today, whether on race, foreign policy, or urban living, through which I lived as a child and teenager in the Sixties.
Then comes an event that stumps us, that is universally regarded to be so unprecedented” that neither A.H. not I can come up with a precedent. That event was, of course, the White House news conference last Friday, in which the fissures between President Trump and Ukrainian President Zelensky were exposed to full view. However, as one pundit, whose name is lost in my memory amid the torrent of commentary that followed, remarked -- the blow-up between Presidents Trump and Zelensky was hardly unprecedented, but is indeed normal for diplomacy. It is that such blow-up occurred in full view that was unprecedented.
Viewed through that lens, the events of last Friday fit into a more traditional mode. There have been numerous instances of erstwhile allies, particularly where the dynamics of the relationship are unequal, who have privately detested each other, yet have put aside their differences to reach a common goal (assuming that, at a minimum, the United States and Ukraine share a common goal of achieving peace). One such example jumps immediately to mind, a man so arrogant, so cantankerous, and so capable of infuriating anyone with whom he dealt that, by comparison, Volodymyr Zelensky is a milquetoast. That man was Charles de Gaulle.
De Gaulle’s Roots
Charles de Gaulle was born and raised in Lille, a city in France’s northern, industrial area, the son of a university professor who taught literature and philosophy. Although an average student, de Gaulle determined, while in his teens, to attend the French military academy at St. Cyr.
De Gaulle’s career prior to World War II, although reasonably successful, could not have predicted the future role he would play in history. Upon graduation from St. Cyr, he rejected a post in one of France’s colonies where more ambitious officers could be assured of gaining combat experience. Instead, he had the good fortune to be posted to the regiment of Philippe Pétain, and he was thereafter a member of the “House of Pétain” for some time until the eve of World War II, when he broke with the Marshal.
De Gaulle served with Pétain in World War I at Verdun, where he was captured by the Germans, spending the rest of the conflict as a prisoner of war. After the war, he served on Pétain’ staff, taught at St. Cyr, and served in Lebanon. He distinguished himself as the author of two books, one of which advocated for the use of tanks in mass columns to fight a war of mobility, not one of entrenched positions such as the Maginot line. His ideas, consistent with the German notion of blitzkrieg, were rejected by the French, in large part due to the opposition of Pétain. As a result, when war broke out, French tanks were scattered throughout the front as piecemeal support for infantry formations.
De Gaulle was still a colonel when the war began. He was given command of an armored division, temporarily promoted to Brigadier General, and then named Undersecretary for Defense where he was dispatched to London to lobby the British, unsuccessfully, to employ the RAF over France.
During this period, negotiations between the British and the French to continue the war whether from France or Northern Africa were ongoing. De Gaulle returned to France; in the middle of his flight, the Reynaud government resigned, and De Gaulle’s old mentor, Marshal Pétain, was appointed the new head of state to conduct negotiations with the Germans for an armistice. De Gaulle immediately returned to London. It was then that de Gaulle began his campaign to restore France. He was a virtual unknown in both England and France. It was his determination to continue the fight that grabbed Churchill’s attention.
De Gaulle’s and Churchill
De Gaulle’s troubles with the British began almost from the start. Even before Marshal Pétain had announced the capitulation of France to his countrymen. De Gaulle proposed to Churchill that he broadcast to the French nation, using the airwaves of the BBC, to urge it to continue the fight. While Churchill approved, the British cabinet, still keen to negotiate with the French government, was opposed. Eventually, he was granted permission, but it was only after hope of cooperation with Pétain had been extinguished that the British threw in their lot completely with the general.
Relations between De Gaulle and the British remained uneasy. For example, de Gaulle was initially outraged by the British attack on the French fleet at Mers-el-Kebir. When, at a lunch, Clementine Churchill said she hoped that France’s remaining fleet would support the British effort to defeat the Nazis, de Gaulle replied that it would give the French more satisfaction to turn their guns on the British.
For De Gaulle, to be acknowledged as leader of a great nation, and not a lackey of the British, he needed to assert his independence. As Churchill wrote in his history of World War II:
He felt it was essential to his position before the French people that he should maintain a proud and haughty demeanour towards "perfidious Albion", although in exile, dependent upon our protection and dwelling in our midst. He had to be rude to the British to prove to French eyes that he was not a British puppet. He certainly carried out this policy with perseverance.
For his part, de Gaulle resented being dependent upon Britain for help, and he remained bitter that he needed to cooperate with them to achieve his goal of restoring France, particularly as he felt that the interests of his country, and those of Britain, did not necessarily coincide.
As he later wrote in his memoirs:
The Anglo-Saxons never consented to treat us as true allies. They never consulted us, from government to government, on any of their provisions. As a matter of policy or convenience, they sought to use the French forces for the purposes they themselves had set, as if these forces belonged to them and alleging that they were helping to arm them.
Relations between De Gaulle and the British reached perhaps their nadir when a combined French and British force sought to recapture for the Allies the French colonies of Lebanon and Syria. The Vichy commander and his troops were resolute in their antipathy for the Free French troops. Rather than surrender to de Gaulle, the commander negotiated a surrender to the British. De Gaulle refused to accept the agreement, declaring not only that he would operate independently of the British and assume control of Syria, but that he would suspend his overall commitments to Britain. He even threatened that his troops would fire on a fort, surrendered to the British, if it were not handed over to the Free French. Eventually, de Gaulle and Churchill worked out their differences for the time being.
De Gaulle and Roosevelt
If De Gaulle’s relationship with Churchill could be rocky, the general’s relationship with Roosevelt was abysmal. Roosevelt did not recognize the Free French as legitimate until America’s entry into the war, considering De Gaulle to be Churchill’s creation. Roosevelt recognized Vichy as the legitimate government of France, because he deemed it to be of more use in defeating the Germans than De Gaulle.
Once the US entered the war, Roosevelt’s relationship with de Gaulle worsened almost immediately. Just two weeks after Pearl Harbor, a Free French fleet occupied the islands of Saint Pierre and Miquelon, a French colony off the coast of Newfoundland, without notifying the Americans.
Roosevelt had no interest in seeing de Gaulle become the leader of France. His vision of post-war Europe included the occupation of France by British and American troops, as he viewed Vichy France to be an ally of Germany.
Roosevelt took steps to sideline De Gaulle. Roosevelt ordered that De Gaulle not be informed of Operation Torch, wherein American troops landed in French West Africa on the Moroccan and Algerian coasts. More to the point, the Americans sought to replace de Gaulle outright as commander of the newly liberated French forces. Initially, they sought to put in place General Henri Giraud, but quickly pivoted to appoint the Vichy Admiral, Francois Darlan. Darlan’s assassination opened the door for De Gaulle to cooperate with Giraud, and eventually to outmaneuver him. This was against the wishes of the Americans, who had agreed to arm the Free French troops in Africa only if they were led by Giraud.
Despite de Gaulle’s maneuvering, Roosevelt and, by this time Churchill, continued to plan to remove him. In a cable to Roosevelt the following year, Churchill had come around to the President’s view of the general, labeling him “vain,” “malignant,” and “well-nigh intolerable,” and noting that ''he hates England and has left a trail of Anglophobia behind him everywhere.''
In response, Roosevelt cabled Churchill:
In de Gaulle’s telegram to Catroux on May third, there were derogatory references to the United States, saying in effect that it was the power against which the French must join forces. . . . All in all, I think you and I should thrash out this disagreeable problem and establish a common policy.
Roosevelt concluded: “I do not know what to do with de Gaulle. Possibly you would like to make him Governor of Madagascar!”
Ultimately, De Gaulle was never sent to Madagascar. Both Churchill and Roosevelt came to realize that he was too much a unifying figure to the French to discard, particularly if France was to be restored to its prior place in Europe to serve as a wester ally. De Gaulle forestalled any attempt to circumvent him by quickly forming a provisional government after D-Day, ultimately outlasting both Roosevelt and Churchill in power.
De Gaulle and Zelensky
As is readily apparent even from just the above narrative, de Gaulle was a far more troublesome ally than Zelensky has ever been. If, as President Trump declared last Friday, Zelensky does not have the cards, then De Gaulle, arriving in England without rank or position, without an army, and, indeed, without a nation, held no cards at all.
Unlike Zelensky, de Gaulle was not elected. Like Zelensky, he was accused of being a dictator. Like Zelensky, he was accused of being ungrateful to his allies and not granting them respect. Like Zelensky, he put the interests of his country above all else, and sought to maintain his, and its, independence. As Clementine Churchill is also reported to have told him: “General, you must not hate your friends more than you hate your enemies.”
Despite their differences with de Gaulle, Roosevelt and Churchill learned to work with him. Indeed, the Allies made sure that Free French troops were the first to liberate Paris. As much as they disliked him personally, they kept their focus on higher goals.
One hopes that the current administration adopts the same attitude. However troublesome an ally, or difficult an individual Zelensky may be, it is the interests of both nations that the war is ended with an independent Ukraine. Once that goal is accomplished, President Trump can consider sending Zelensky to Madagascar.
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A guest post by
John F. Harnes
John F. Harnes is a semi-retired litigator who is a contributor to the New York Sun, has been frequently published in Real Clear History and Law360, and has been published in Real Clear Science. He tries never to end a sentence with a preposition.
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