Your first book is about Churchill and de Gaulle, written by François Kersaudy, a professor at the Sorbonne. Do you want to tell me a bit about this relationship and why you chose this book?

The relationship between Churchill and de Gaulle began just before the fall of France, when Churchill went over on two trips to see the French government, trying to get France to stay in the war. Then on 17 June 1940, de Gaulle flew to London and went to see Churchill in the garden at Downing Street. Churchill said: ‘Welcome to London. I will give you the facilities of the BBC.’ And the next day, on 18 June, de Gaulle made his famous call for the French to resist. It was really the first big statement against surrender to the Germans, and one interesting element, which is not often told, is that the British actually tried to veto the speech. They still wanted to try to reach an understanding with the government in France. But eventually de Gaulle got his way and went ahead and did it. 

Kersaudy charts the relationship thereafter between Churchill and de Gaulle which was one of the more extraordinary relationships ever between any wartime leaders, then or since. Churchill identified de Gaulle as the man who would represent France – although the British went on for some time trying to find other people.

Why?

Because he was just a little-known Brigadier-General, a junior minister. De Gaulle depended on Churchill’s help because he had nothing when he came to London. So there’s a mutual respect between them. But they were two very strong-willed people, so they kept having the most tumultuous rows all through the war, and Kersaudy charts that. It’s a very well-based book in terms of the documentation and the evidence. In a very serious historical way it recounts the often volcanic relationship between the two men. At one point Harold Nicholson says to Churchill: ‘De Gaulle is a great man,’ and Churchill replies: ‘No he’s not, he’s impossible, he’s unbearable,’ and goes on and on denouncing de Gaulle. But then, at the end, he says: ‘Hmm, you’re right – he is a great man.’

When they had had one of their biggest rows – at the Casablanca conference – Churchill watched de Gaulle leaving his villa and said: ‘There he is, the representative of a defeated nation. But he acts as if he had as many armies as Stalin, the last of a great warrior race.’ So Churchill had this kind of human admiration for de Gaulle. De Gaulle, throughout the war, stood up for French interests, and that often got him on the wrong side of Churchill. In part it was also because Roosevelt disliked de Gaulle a great deal. He thought de Gaulle was a kind of crypto-fascist dictator. He put pressure on Churchill to drop de Gaulle and Churchill sometimes gave way to this, because he wanted to keep in Roosevelt’s good books. So it was always a testy relationship, but in the end a very important one. 

Why did Churchill take so much to de Gaulle in the first place? Why did he decide that this was the man?

Because in June 1940 he made these two trips to France, once to a place near Orléans and once to Tours. The French government had left Paris and was fleeing down to the south of France as the Germans advanced. The Prime Minister Reynaud wanted to go on fighting, but an increasing number of his government didn’t, and he was struggling to hold things together. In the circumstances, it was de Gaulle, who was his defence minister and his deputy, who was the one person who said, ‘We must go on fighting, we must not surrender. If we are defeated in France we must go to North Africa or wherever and keep going.’ There is this line in Churchill’s memoirs about the second of these meetings in Tours. De Gaulle hadn’t been invited but he heard about it, and hurried and got there. As they passed, Churchill said of de Gaulle: ‘Ah, l’homme du destin.’ I’m not sure – that may have been a bit of Churchill rewriting history later on – but he saw de Gaulle as this great man. But then de Gaulle would, of course, stand up to Churchill and that infuriated him.

So they were always having tremendous rows… 

Yes. On one occasion de Gaulle had gone over and established the Free French in West Africa, and he made a lot of anti-British statements while he was there. And he came back to London and Churchill was absolutely incandescent with him. He called him around to Downing Street and Churchill rehearsed how he was going to humiliate de Gaulle before the meeting with his private secretary, John Colville, who was going to act as interpreter. And Colville found interpretation absolutely impossible because Churchill corrected him the whole time to be as insulting as possible. So Colville left and a Foreign Office interpreter came in, and he left the room after five minutes saying, ‘Those two men are completely mad.’ So Colville waited outside, wondering, ‘Are they killing each other?’ And after a decent amount of time he pushed the door open and looked in, and they were sitting beside each other in armchairs smoking cigars. 

Also, the morning of D-Day at about one in the morning, Churchill gave an order that de Gaulle, who was being very obstreperous as the British saw it – he was standing up for French interests – should be flown out of Britain in chains if necessary. His secretary did not act or pass on that order. 

The Kersaudy book is a serious, sober account of that relationship, but it’s got all that material in it. 

Let’s go on to the Edward Spears book, Assignment to Catastrophe. Could you explain who he was?

Edward Spears was a friend of Churchill’s. He was a British general, and Churchill sent him to France in the summer of 1940 to be his personal representative to the French government. Spears witnessed the whole of the collapse of France, and of the French government, of Reynaud losing power, of Pétain taking over – and his account of that in this book is absolutely wonderful. Some people say it’s a somewhat coloured account, but it’s grand politics, it’s debacle, it’s disaster. Spears has a tremendous eye for the little details: for instance, this image of Pierre Laval, a politician who became a leading collaborator with Pétain, sitting in a restaurant in Bordeaux tucking into these enormous meals, waiting for his moment to come. He also has this wonderful portrait of the French Prime Minster Reynaud’s mistress – Hélène de Portes – who was a great friend of the German ambassador. She is constantly urging Reynaud to surrender, as they’re going down through France, staying in châteaux. She bustles through the corridors casting poisoned looks at everyone else – she is an extraordinary figure – small and squat and apparently she didn’t wash very much. 

The book is almost like a gossip column, but at this great tragic moment. Spears’s account of how he flew de Gaulle out to London on 17 June is that de Gaulle was afraid of being arrested and possibly shot and so begged Spears to be flown out. And they set up a subterfuge at the airport and de Gaulle went to say goodbye to Spears and was pulled on the plane at the last minute. Of course the Gaullist account has a much more dignified exit…

Does the book reveal anything unusual or unexpected about the fall of France?

It’s probably better than any single French account. It’s just an absolute close-up of the Third Republic, the decay, the falling to bits. A lot of it is happening in these châteaux, the foreign ministry in Paris before they leave, the staff burning all the documents in the garden. It’s just a wonderfully vivid account. It’s quite long, and there’s quite a lot of bits of it which someone who is not familiar with the French politics of the time might want to skip over… 

What about your next book, Matthew Cobb on The Resistance? 

The Resistance in France is this iconic, emblematic moment in French history – but at the same time there’s the uncomfortable fact that most French people did not belong to the Resistance. They weren’t necessarily active collaborators, but a lot of them were just waiting for the war to be over. So it is still quite a touchy political subject in France. Particularly at the end of the war, there were a lot of unjudicial killings by members of the Resistance of people who had been collaborators or were suspected of being collaborators. As a result, some right-wing revisionist historians have painted the Resistance as being a violent and Communist-dominated movement – whereas other people, like my wife’s family in France, who were in the Resistance, if you said a word against the Resistance, the whole dinner party ended, as it were. It’s still quite a live thing. Cobb is a very judicious guide to all that – and it’s got tremendous detail and descriptive material in it too. 

He’s managed to be fair?

There is so much written about the Resistance, that you can never capture it all, but I think this book is very fair. At the same time, of course, the danger of writing a book that is very fair is that you’re endlessly saying ‘on the one hand, on the other…’ He doesn’t shortchange the shortcomings of the Resistance, but it was a good thing, and there is no doubt it was a good thing. The irony of it all is that, initially, the Resistance set up inside France without much reference to de Gaulle…