DE GAULLE: ANGLO-SAXON ATTITUDES
IT is one of the great paradoxes of contemporary history that it was an Englishman who first enabled the General to exercise those prince-like qualities that were to cause Britain so much trouble. Fortunately, in the difficult days after the rupture at Brussels, nobody was tactless enough to ask the classical question: `Qui t'a fait roi?' De Gaulle's own answer would have been `Providence'; but the truth is that he was installed on the Thames Embankment as leader of the fighting French by Winston Churchill, then Prime Minister of England -- mainly because nobody more eminent turned up.
It was on Monday 17 June 1940 that de Gaulle was flown to England in an R.A.F. fighter aircraft with no more than a few thousand pounds from the secret service fund of his Prime Minister, Paul Reynaud. The British promptly gave him offices, money, and (most important of all) radio facilities, to stimulate as many Frenchmen as possible to go on with the war. Thereafter, with extraordinary speed and dexterity, de Gaulle asserted himself as leader of the Fighting French. Before long his name became associated in Metropolitan France with the struggle for national liberation, and he acquired a status and authority independent of his British paymasters.
Ten days after his arrival in Britain he received a letter from M. Jean Monnet, who was also then in London: 'You are wrong', said M. Monnet, `to form an organization which might appear in France as under British protection. I fully share your wish to prevent France from abandoning the struggle. But it is not from London that the effort of resurrection can begin.'
But the General did not need to be reminded that he must on no account appear to the French as England's puppet. Being the enfant terrible among the crowd of exiled dignitaries became for him an imperative daily duty. Churchill was later to recall that he
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