In these lapidary words, in which politics is implicitly treated as defiling and marriage as sullying, is distilled the heroic, pathetic grandeur of a man whose philosophy owes as much to the inspiration of the classic French stage as to the mundane exigencies of twentieth-century politics. This philosophy is clearly the opposite of Dale Carnegie's: it is a gospel of heroic intransigency, not one of suppliant blandishment, and it is based on an ever-readiness to antagonize rather than on a relentless desire to please. To no other statesman of our time would it have occurred to preface a book on the art of leadership with this quotation from Hamlet: “Rightly to be great is … greatly so find quarrel in a straw.” In his memoirs he recalls how Anthony Eden one day chided him on this singularly mulish gift: “Do you know that you have caused us more trouble than all the rest of our European allies?” “I do not doubt it,”was the superb reply. “France is a great power.”

It is characteristic of De Gaulle that he should have made a virtue of his notable lack of the usual political graces. He has none of the expansive charm of a Franklin Roosevelt nor the sweeping oratorical power of a Winston Churchill. He is better at writing speeches than making them, and his delivery, usually deliberate and unemphatic, is seldom more inspiring than a schoolroom lecture on the declension of Greek nouns. He lacks that personal bonhomie which is a prime political prerequisite in this democratic age, and he has, very likely, never slapped a back in his life. The statesman he most resembles, in his stiffness and in the intensity of his inner, prophetic vision, is doubtless Woodrow Wilson.

One of his classroom notebooks, preserved from the days when he was a nineteen-year-old cadet at the Military Academy of Saint-Cyr, contains this revealing quotation from a book, Le Reveil de la Race, written by an eccentric uncle: “In a camp surprised by a night attack, where each fights alone against the enemy no one asks the rank of the one who raises the flag and utters the first rallying cry.” Twenty years laser, we find him, now an obscure major in the Defense Ministry, with his eyes still trained on the heights. “Nothing great is done without great men, and these are great because they willed it,” he proclaims in Le Fil de l'Epée. “From adolescence on Disraeli accustomed himself to thinking like a Prime Minister. In Foch's classroom lessons the Generalissimo is already apparent.”

What we encounter here is not simply a relentless ambition; it is a deliberate magnification of the ego, which has no French equivalent unless we go back to the Romantic Age, which made such a cult of what Sainte-Beuve called l'exaltation du moi. The turbulent France into which De Gaulle was born in 1890 seems to have impelled him early in his life toward the kind of inflated pride and inward-looking self-reliance typical of the Frenchmen of the chaotic post-Napoleonic years. Here was a country which had taken a disastrous second fling at being an empire, had lost a star, been amputated of a province; a land torn by the hitter feuds of monarchists and republicans, Catholics and anticlericals, militarists and pacifists, and held together by one aspiration: the reconquest of Alsace-Lorraine. Add to this the bitter disappointment an ardent young lieutenant must have felt having to sit out must of the long-awaited War of Revenge in German prison ramps; the disillusionment of having to witness the postwar repudiation of Clemenceau by his fellow politicians; the personal exasperation an ambitious military theorist must have suffered at having to endure the somnolence of the French general staff, entrenched behind the turrets of the Maginot Line, while the Germans adopted his own ideas of warfare, reoccupied the Rhineland, and undid every guarantee and protection France had fought and bled for in four terrible years of trench warfare—and it is possible to get a fair idea of the pressures which helped to forge one of the most exalted and determined egos of this century.