Léon Noel, the former ambassador who is today president of the French Constitutional Court, enjoys recalling how one day during Dr Gaulle's exile from power he happened to be talking to some workers in an industrial suburb of Paris. Suddenly he switched the conversation to the General, whose admirer and friend he had long been. There was a moment of silence, and then, to his amazement, one of the workers pulled off his rap, and one after the other followed suit. It was as though the ghost of the “Grand Charles” had walked by in person, tearing from these freethinking proletarians an unexpected, grudging gesture of respect.
This incident is typical of a career which has flouted every canon of political success in our vote-cajoling, demagogic age. Charles de Gaulle has always understood that the quest for immediate popularity and power is an essentially ephemeral pursuit and can at worst be a betrayal of a nation's trust. For a dozen years after World War II, he sat out the petty bickerings and intrigues of Paris parliamentarians. He lived in provincial simplicity on a colonel's meager pension in the little village of Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises, not out of any love for the hermit's life but because he knew, with that mixture of prophetic genius and personal self-magnification which is so peculiarly his, that he must remain the undimmed mirror of his country's self-respect. Already in 1944, while the guns were still firing, he could announce to Pierre Bertaux, the Resistance leader: “I am retiring. I have a mission, and it is coming to an end … France may still one day need an image that is pure. She must be left this image. If Joan of Arc had married, she would no longer have been Joan of Arc.''
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