In Europe

‘One day he says he's Joan of Arc, the next day he says he's Clémenceau. I told him: you've got to decide which one you want to be!’
    After two years of war, therefore, de Gaulle found himself increasingly isolated, a powerless nuisance in the eyes of the Allies, a caricature of himself in the eyes of many of his supporters. Regularly, after yet another quarrel, he would be denied access to the BBC microphone. On one occasion, in April 1942, Churchill even issued orders that he not be allowed to leave England: at that point, de Gaulle was effectively his prisoner.Jean Monnet, acting as liaison between the three statesmen, noticed in his talks with the general ‘a mixture of practical intelligence that can only command one's respect, and a disturbing tendency to go beyond the boundaries of common sense.’
    De Gaulle's relationship with the Resistance in France was also a troubled one. He mistrusted the communists in particular. Many Resistance leaders suspected, on the other hand, that de Gaulle was using the guerrilla force primarily to advance his own ambitions, for after the war. Despite all his pretensions of leadership, the lines of communication between him and the Resistance only developed systematically after autumn 1941.
    In March 1942, the first Resistance leader arrived in London for personal consultations. Christian Pineau, leader of the large Libération Nord organisation, described his meeting with de Gaulle as an audience with an ‘authoritarian prelate’ who mostly delivered monologues and had no interest at all in the daily problems encountered by the Resistance. British documents released more than fifty years later show that in May 1943 Churchill and Roosevelt were on the point of expelling de Gaulle from the Allied command. Between themselves they spoke of him as the ‘prima donna’ and ‘the bride’, and hoped to replace him with his rival General Henri Giraud.‘He hates England and has left a trail of Anglophobia behind him everywhere,’ Churchill wrote in a coded telegram to his cabinet during a visit to Washington.
    Yet the Allies did not dare publicly to dethrone de Gaulle. He was too important for the French, and had indeed succeeded in working his way up to the status of a kind of Joan of Arc, a living monument, a modern myth.
    De Gaulle moved his headquarters from London to Algiers, where he was free to implement his own brand of politics. In June 1944, when the invasion of France was about to take place after years of preparation, he was informed about the landing with a day and a half's notice. Although the rest of the Allied command was involved with other hectic issues at that moment, de Gaulle immediately demanded their full attention. And what was his problem? The soldiers had French money with them that had been issued without his approval, and Eisenhower, in the text of his planned speech, had not said a word about de Gaulle or the Free FrenchForces. Futilities and formalities in the eyes of the British and the Americans – ‘
Allez, faites la guerre, avec votre fausse monnaie!
’ Churchill shouted – but de Gaulle did not see it that way. As the paratroopers of the British 6th Airborne Division were about to seize the first strategic bridges in France, de Gaulle decided at the last moment to recall the 200 French liaison officers who were to accompany the invasion. He himself threatened to go straight back to Algiers. American General George C. Marshall shouted angrily that ‘no sons of Iowa would fight to put up statues of de Gaulle’.
    De Gaulle was the great nuisance again, but once more he finally took part loyally in all the actions. But was he really wrong? In the final analysis: no. The problem, after all, was due to the American's refusal to take him seriously, even though – after Giraud stepped down in 1943 – all representatives of free France had emphatically recognised him as their leader. Nor was it de Gaulle's fault that the issue of temporary authority over France – for that, in fact, was what this was all about – was raised only at the eleventh hour: it was the British and the Americans who had confronted him with a fait accompli by waiting until 4 June to tell him about the invasion.
    In his heart of hearts, Churchill understood that, but his interests lay elsewhere. During lunch that day, when an enraged de Gaulle shouted that he had not been consulted at all, not even in regard to the provisional authority over France, Churchill