In Europe

of them came back.
    Meanwhile, in faraway London, General de Gaulle was trying to save the French national honour. In June 1940 he had left for England, as he saidhimself, empty-handed. ‘My father,’ Lucienne Gaillard said, ‘started his resistance work after an appeal by de Gaulle. The general was very important to us, he was a symbol, but at the same time he didn't really exist. He was not closer to us than Napoleon.’
    Churchill, who had a weakness for France and initially for de Gaulle as well, could help him in only two ways: he gave recognition to his French National Committee as the only legitimate French authority, and he gave him the opportunity to speak to the French regularly through the BBC.
    De Gaulle made the most of both opportunities. In June 1940 almost no one in France listened to his broadcasts. By 1941, according to estimates from his Vichy opponents, there were 300,000 listeners; by 1942 there were 3 million. He always spoke of the Resistance as though it were a regular standing army, rather than a guerrilla force of beginners that consisted at first of fewer than 7,000 men and women. He saw himself as its natural commander-in-chief. That the members of the Resistance themselves, particularly the communists and socialists, had different ideas about that did not seem to concern him. From the start he worked on a new national myth, a hopeful historical tale that was to resurrect the French morale. ‘In 1940, France lost a battle, but not the war,’ he kept repeating.
    If the notion of a ‘conceptual nation’ applied to anywhere, it was to de Gaulle's idea of France. A nation, after all, consists of more than shared territory and a common language, of governmental and cultural unity and everything that may flow from that, but also of a communal mentality, of the sense that that unity exists in the minds of all citizens, and that it is valuable, an honour and a joy in which to participate. In France, more than in any other European country, this sense of grandeur had traditionally been cultivated to great heights. That explains why the collapse of 1940 was so precipitous: the French had lost their conceptual nation. It was above all to this mental crisis that both Pétain and de Gaulle tried to find a solution, each in his own way.
    In doing that, de Gaulle had to operate as a Baron Munchausen: only by his own hair could he pull himself and his horse out of the quagmire. He had, in reality, almost no power, even his costs were at first largely defrayed by the British government. At the same time, his conceptual nation demanded that he behave like a great and powerful statesman,self-willed and independent of the other allies. ‘General de Gaulle needs constantly reminding that our primary enemy is Germany,’ someone in his coterie once noted. ‘For if he were to follow his natural instinct, it would be Britain.’ De Gaulle's conceptual France was still a world power, and seen from that vantage both Great Britain and the United States remained his major rivals.
    On 20 January, 1941, Harold Nicolson, in those years parliamentary secretary at the ministry of information, lunched with de Gaulle at London's Savoy hotel.‘I do not like him,’ he wrote in his diary.‘He accuses my ministry of being
Pétainiste.“Mais non!”
I say, “
Monsieur le Général!
” “Well, then at least
Pétainisant
.” “We are working,” I tell him, “for all of France.” “All of France!” he shouts. “That is the Free France. That is ME!’” In late 1941 they dined again. ‘His arrogance and fascism annoy me. But there is something like a fine retriever dog about his eyes.’
    Churchill too saw in de Gaulle an impassioned and emotional spirit. Churchill knew the French, he recognised the importance of symbolic figures for an occupied France and understood the complexity of the political situation within which de Gaulle had to manoeuvre. Despite all their conflicts, there were also moments of reconciliation and friendship between the two statesmen.
    Roosevelt, who barely had personal ties with de Gaulle, wrote the general off quite quickly. He considered him to be an ‘almost intolerable’ idiot, and seriously doubted his authority over the French. For the American president, it was unimaginable that a modern Western democracy like France could accept the authority of a strictly self-declared leader. Following a conference in Casablanca in January 1943, Roosevelt publicly joked about de Gaulle: