戴高乐：一个有意志力的幻想家

 在正常情况下，凭借他的战场经验、晋升为准将的经历和智慧的光芒，戴高乐可能会渴望获得军队的最高指挥权，再经过十年左右的服役，也许会获得法国内阁的职位。

而他会成为法国的象征，这几乎是不可想象的。

 

Under normal circumstances, with his battlefield experience, promotion to brigadier general and intellectual brilliance, de Gaulle might have aspired to a top command in the army and, after another decade or so of service, perhaps to a position in the French cabinet. That he would, instead, emerge as the symbol of France itself was scarcely conceivable.

 

然而，改变历史的领导人很少以线性路径的终点出现。

我们可能会认为，一个低级别的准将在法国向希特勒德国投降的混乱中宣布建立一个抵抗运动，其结局可能只是一个脚注，承认他在一个将由最终胜利者决定的未来中扮演一个辅助角色。

然而，在抵达伦敦时，除了他的制服和他的声音，戴高乐实际上一无所有，他使自己摆脱了默默无闻的地位，进入了世界政治家的行列。

在我50多年前写的一篇文章中，我把他描述为一个幻想家。 [16]

首先作为战争期间自由法国的领导人，后来作为第五共和国的创始人和总统，
他创造了超越客观现实的愿景，在这个过程中说服他的听众把它们当作事实。

对戴高乐来说，政治不是可能的艺术，而是意志的艺术。

 

Yet leaders who alter history rarely appear as the endpoint of a linear path. We might expect that the arrival on the scene of a low-ranking brigadier general declaring the establishment of a resistance movement amid the chaos of France’s capitulation to Hitlerite Germany would have ended by meriting perhaps a footnote acknowledging his role as an auxiliary actor in a future that would be determined by the ultimate victors. Yet, arriving in London with effectively nothing but his uniform and his voice, de Gaulle catapulted himself out of obscurity and into the ranks of world statesmen. In an essay I wrote over fifty years ago, I described him as an illusionist.[16]

First as a leader of the Free French during the war, later as founder and president of the Fifth Republic, he conjured up visions that transcended objective reality, in the process persuading his audiences to treat them as fact. For de Gaulle, politics was not the art of the possible but the art of the willed.

 

战时的伦敦充斥着波兰人、捷克人、丹麦人、荷兰人和其他半打国家的国民，他们逃离了被占领的祖国。

他们都认为自己是英国战争努力的一部分。

没有人提出任何自主战略的要求。

只有戴高乐从一开始就这样做了。

虽然他接受了英国对军事行动的管理，因为他的部队还太小，无法做到这一点，但他的最终战争目标与他的盟国不同。

 

Wartime London teemed with Poles, Czechs, Danes, Dutch and nationals from a half-dozen other countries who had fled their occupied homelands. All considered themselves part of the British war effort. None made any claim to an autonomous strategy. Only de Gaulle did so from the start. Although he accepted British management of military operations because his forces were yet too small to do otherwise, his ultimate war aim was different from that of his allies.

 

英国和1941年后的美国都是为了打败德国和日本而战。

戴高乐也为这些目标而战，但主要是作为实现其最终目标的一个驿站：复兴法国的灵魂。

 

Britain and, after 1941, the United States fought for the defeat of Germany and Japan. De Gaulle fought for these aims too, but primarily as a waystation to his ultimate goal: the renewal of the soul of France.