The ultimate reductio of Gaullism

Le Pen criticized for denying French blame in WWII roundup

The central fiction of Gaullism, parodied.

France's far-right presidential contender Marine Le Pen has prompted a major outcry by denying that the French government was responsible for the roundup of Jews in World War II.

Le Pen said Sunday on RTL radio "I don't think France is responsible for the Vel d'Hiv,"— a reference to the stadium where thousands of Jews were rounded up before being sent to Nazi death camps.

Some 13,000 Jews were deported by French police on July 16-17, 1942, many of whom were first holed up in harsh conditions at Paris' Vel d'Hiv — its Winter Velodrome stadium.

In all, about 75,000 Jews were deported from France to Nazi concentration camps during World War II. Only 2,500 survived.

. . . .

Le Pen later specified in a written statement that she "considers that France and the Republic were in London" during the war and "the Vichy regime wasn't France."

She argued that had been the position of France's heads of state, including Charles De Gaulle, until former President Jacques Chirac "wrongly" acknowledged the state's role in Jewish persecution during World War II.

"It does not discharge the effective and personal responsibility of the French who took part into the monstrous roundup of the Vel d'Hiv," she wrote.

"France has not lost the war"

An astute French critic once described the author of Les Miserables, famous for his self esteem, as "a lunatic who thinks he's Victor Hugo."

That would be an apt way to describe the general, "a lunatic who thinks he's Charles De Gaulle."

Fenby's biography is very insightful.

De Gaulle dreamed he was a masculine Joan of Arc, a savior of France.

1940 created circumstances in which a man thus deluded could, by dint of unshakable conviction, become the man he dreamt he was.

Reading The General.

Reading Fenby

De Gaulle's feelings [about France] went beyond simple pride.

He vaunted nationalism as the 'most generous and disinterested of feelings' and quoted approvingly the saying of the militant polemicist Paul Deroulade, that 'the man who does not love his mother more than other mothers and his own country more than other countries loves neither his mother nor his country.'

The General.

De Gaulle

The General, Jonathan Fenby.

Explaining his refusal to take cover when German shells were falling around him in 1944, he told an official: 'I have a providential mission to fulfill. I think nothing will happen to me. If it does, I will have been mistaken.'

Even GW thought as much.

Nothing quite like a conviction of divine election to elevate your self-esteem to the height of the job.

For France, De Gaulle was a fortunate lunatic.

When we consider Stalin and Mao and so many others, we see how fortunate.

He was a madman who made much of the world share his delusion that even after 1940 France was a great power.

And he made many of those who were not in the least fooled play along, or at least tolerate his play-acting.