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Charles de Gaulle

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1. “De Gaulle had instructed that on the next day he would stage a procession down the Champs Allis his plan was not for a military parade, but to walk slowly and show himself to the population, to his people. There was no precedent for a walkabout of this kind, risky in a city swarming with snipers, but the idea was a supreme example of De Gaulle's instinctive showmanship. Even so, no one could have predicted the extraordinary success of the parade. The size of the crowd is impossible to estimate. It was probably the largest gathering of its kind in the history of France. Extraordinary intensity of those strained faces who were seeing him for the first time, it was indeed de Gaulle, towering over everyone else whom the crowds had turned out to see and to cheer. The Voice from London was made flesh at last.”

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2. “After the speech De Gaulle was asked if he would now declare that the Republic was restored. De Gaulle's curt reply expressed the thought behind every action he had taken. The Republic has never ceased to exist. Vichy was always and remains null and void. I am the president of the Republic. Why should I proclaim it?”

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3. “So he's still serving the army at this point. And so now he gets to fight the Nazis. And so this is a description of de Gaulle fighting the Nazis. He has three battles with them. All witnesses were unanimous about his resource. Remember I said earlier that he's unapologetically extreme and a crazy person. Says all witnesses were unanimous about his resourcefulness, energy, and complete indifference to physical danger between May 15th and June 2nd, he slept only three nights. Does he take time to eat? This is somebody that's in his division describing this period with de Gaulle. Does he take time to eat? No one knows. Does he sleep? The cigar butts one finds in his room in the morning allow one to calculate the extremely short time are cigarette butts, I'm sorry, short time between the last and first cigarette. A map properly set up and properly lit, a map constantly and exactly updated. That is the essence of his command post. So he doesn't sleep. He pushes.”

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4. “But nobody is listening to him. So he goes again. De Gaulle took the bold step in January 1940 of sending a long memo, setting out his ideas to 80 important political military figures. I'm just going to pull out a couple highlights here for you. The striking successes that the enemy has achieved in Poland thanks to motorized warfare will only encourage him to go further down this new road, to break this mechanical force, only mechanical force is certain to be effective, which is exactly what he wanted you to build up five years before you found yourself in this position. The creation of an instrument of shock and speed is absolutely imperative to us. The conflict which has just begun could well be the most widespread, complex, and violent ever. Again, he was right about that. It is high time that the French drew the necessary conclusions. In sending this document, de Gaulle was appealing again to the political class above the heads of the military. As in the past, this extraordinary step got him nowhere.”

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5. “And really, what you think about this is the same thing I've repeated default aggressive is the path that De Gaulle wants to take here. Our military system has been exclusively built around defense. If the enemy attacks us tomorrow, I am sure we will hold out. But if he does not attack, we are reduced to almost complete impotence. Then when he judges that we are wary with waiting, disoriented and unhappy about our own inertia, he will launch an offensive with from a psychological and material point of view, much better cards than he holds today. So he's like, go attack him now while he's weak and you can actually take him. In my humble opinion, there is nothing more urgent and necessary than to galvanize the French people instead of comforting them with absurd illusions of defensive security, and he was dead on because I think it takes Germany six weeks to take over France. He's like you're comforting them. Again, prophetic. Galvanize the people now. Instead of comforting them with absurd illusions of defensive security.”

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6. “So now the war has begun with Germany, and he's writing to the Prime Minister, the President of France, he's going to wind up being in his cabinet for like 11 days before Germany overtakes France. But he just, again, they call it a prophetic letter. And so de Gaulle right now is just pointing out, like, this is a problem with your stupid strategy where you're just waiting around. What are we doing? So, actually, I'm wrong. This is after Germany invaded Poland, but before they start fighting in France.”

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7. “And another thing about the Gauls, he saw himself as this he was destined for greatness to play this role, right? And so he's talking about the fact that people have to have great people, in his case, great men to lead them, right? So he says crowds in modern urban society were irrational and malleable. Their emotions needed to be harnessed and manipulated by leaders who knew how to exploit their irrationality. Men cannot do without being led any more than they can do without eating, drinking, and sleeping. So he's definitely a bit of an elitist, okay? In short, the leader was a this is his description of leadership. The leader was a master towards whom people's faith and dreams are directed.”

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8. “De Gaulle viewed this not as a glorification of war, but as a statement of fact. And so now this is right before where a few years before he's going to be proven correct, he winds up getting promoted to a battalion commander, and this is what he said about this. It is indeed a pleasant advance up the ranks, but the real issue is to make a mark. That's the Gaul at thirty seven years old, saying I want to make a mark on the world.”

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9. “This is where they're not building up their army. They're not being strong. This is de Gaulle was calling. He's like, you think this war is over. This isn't, it was Dan Carlin, my favorite podcaster in history. He has this great series on World War II called The Ghost of the Osfront, and he talks about, he's like, listen, the gap between, he quotes somebody, I don't remember who it was, but, you know, that 20-year gap between the end of World War I and the beginning of World War II. He's like, that wasn't the end of the war. It was an intermission. And De Gaulle picked up on that too. And he says, De Gaulle believed, talking about Francis policy of reconciliation trying to placate Germany in between the two world wars. He says, believed to be a fantasy contrary to the laws of history. And he says, this war is not the last. Whatever the horrors, sacrifices, grief, tears that it was brought that had brought in its wake,”

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10. “They just had a meeting. One of the military leaders that's serving under him came back unannounced a few minutes later because they forgot his briefcase and he walks in. And again, de Gaulle's super serious, never betrays like he has the greatest poker face in history, never betrays what he's thinking to anybody and does that intentionally. And he finds, he stumbles upon De Gaulle with his daughter in his arms singing her, dancing with her and singing her a song. That was just, you just couldn't believe there was that side of de Gaulle ever even existed because de Gaulle refused to show that side. But this idea I found extremely touching, like his love and affection for his daughter. Okay, so now we're in the 1930s before war. He writes this book. Actually, I think it was published in 1932. It's called The Edge of the Sword. And it's amazing because this is what I meant earlier when I said De Gaulle has receipts. And I wanted to find this book. I cannot find it. I want to say it was like $1,500. And it's, it's...”

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11. “And who he was. There's one area of his life where that's different. So his third child, little Anne, unfortunately, was born with Down syndrome. And at the time, it was a very common history. De Gaulle and his wife said, No, no, she's staying with us. In fact, she was with him the whole time. She winds up dying when she's 20 years old in their arms. But you see the human side of Gaul that he hid from other people. So he talks about her birth was a trial for my wife and myself. But believe me, Anne is my joy and my strength. She's the grace of God in my life. Bless his heart for saying that. After Anne's premature death, he wrote to his sister, her soul had been liberated. The tenderness of the relationship between De Gaulle and his little daughter, the one person perhaps who was not in awe of him, shines out in a photograph of De Gaulle sitting in a deck chair on the beach with his little girl on his knees, her finger entering in his, this strangely austere man who found it so hard to express affection would spend hours playing with his child, bless his heart. There's another great story in the book where I think”

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12. “But if it is a matter of mauling my philosophy and my style, I oppose it a few days later De Gaulle compounded his insolence by writing another letter in a tone quite extraordinary for a mere captain addressing the most venerated military figure in France. He warned Paton against changing anything in their agreement. He would not allow others to be involved in the writing of the book. So de Gaulle was very hard for people even around him that were on for a long time to feel like they knew who he was. He spoke very little, would not tell you what he was thinking. I've told you over and over again that, you know, one of the great things about reading biographies is when you get to the end, you feel like you know the person, I don't feel like I know who DeGaulle is. I know his ideas and I think his ideas are extremely intelligent and inspiring. And I'm just shocked that no matter what you throw in front of this guy, he's just refusing to quit. I think that's very admirable. But I have no idea who he was not forthcoming.”

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13. “And I think I'm going to wind up doing another podcast on him. There's not a lot of. I've read the two books, the Outsiders and then Distant Force, that actually talk about him, but there's also material online. So it's like maybe reread those two books, read a bunch of things that you can find online, and then combine that into a podcast. And then maybe I can tell you then the ideas I stole from him and my application of them, because again, like.”

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14. “Life, whether it will be a long or short life, that regret will not leave me. Let it at least serve as a spur to think and act better. And so now the book goes and it covers a large part of his life rather quickly. So from, let's see, he would be by the time he's like 29 to 42. This is all before the war is going to break out in Europe. He's still back in the army. He's getting a lot of experience. But this goes more on this fact that he suffered depressive states intermittently throughout his entire life. Says when de Gaulle became famous, his aides would despair at what they called at his temperament. His volatile and unpredictable mood swings, his sudden descent into the blackest pessimism. This is something they're going to draw an analogy that Winston Churchill also had to deal with. Churchill called this periods of his life the black dog.”

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15. “Like six months, if I'm not mistaken, he's been shot twice, bayoneted, and hit by a grenade. So he's going to spend the rest of the war in a prisoner war camp. He's going to try to escape five times. But this is also the first incidence. He has this melancholic nature throughout his life. So he's in a deep, deep depression. Endlessly, he returned to an inexpressible sadness caused by the humiliation of being a prisoner. At this moment, I am gripped by a grief so bitter and so deep that I do not think I will ever again experience anything like it. And it will only end when my life ends. So that is, if I'm not mistaken, he is 24 years old when he sang that. So eventually World War I ends. He's released. This is November 1918. So that would put him at what, 28. And now it says, as he wrote, I'm returning to France. The great joy I share with you is mixed for me. More better than ever with the indescribable regret at not having played a greater role. Remember, he dedicated his entire life to this, and he's like, I'll never get another chance. I think that for the rest of my life,”

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16. “Been almost entirely wiped out. He was believed to have been killed, and Patan, remember this is the guy that's going to sign the armistice with Hitler before he does that, he's a mentor to de Gaulle. Paton signed a citation commending him for his bravery in the field, thinking he's dead. A few days later, it became known that he had been taken prisoner. And so de Gaulle tells us what happened. I set off crawling along the trench. I had barely gone 10 meters, went down a trench perpendicular to mine, I caught sight of some Germans crouched down to avoid bullets. They spotted me at the same moment. One of them gave me a bayonet thrust that wounded me in the thigh. Another killed my, it's a French word for kind of like an assistant at point-blank range. Seconds later, a grenade exploded literally under my nose and I lost consciousness. It's astonishing that he survived the explosion. So I want to pause here. So far in battle, right? This is the first year of battle.”

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17. “Really, that's what I'm taking away from spending who knows 60 hours studying Deval. It's unbelievable. He heals up. He goes back into battle, okay? Oh my goodness. Okay. Then he goes back into battle. By the end of, and then the Germans are destroying them. If you ever study World War I, all military historians talk about people that actually served and fought in combat. They're like, listen, you put me in, like, I'll fight in any war. I don't want to fight in World War I because they did not update the fact that they essentially just sent a bunch of young people to die against machine guns, which did not exist on this scale before that war. And so they all talk about that's the absolute worst because there's no tactics, there's no strategy. It's just, okay, go over that hill. We lost 90%. Let's do it again, wave after wave. And let's talk about in the book. Obviously, I'm going to skip over it. But I want to bring up this point. This is when he's going to become a prisoner of war. And this is extremely important in his life story. By the end of the day, his company...”

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18. “To repel the multiple temptations that a cunning enemy is starting to offer us. And so that's again, when I read stuff like that, I think about not just what De Gaulle's doing in this battle again in the World War I, but really it's like, let's come up with a, he came up with a certain idea of France. Let's come up with a certain idea of our life and never give up on that, the absolute and definitive victory of our forces, the peace must be dictated by us, we must harden our hearts and concentrate our energies, concentrate our energies on our certain idea of our life, our business, or whatever we want out of this experience that we call life.”

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19. “So it heals up, goes back into war, and he shot again. De Gaulle was wounded this time by the hand by a bullet. The injury became severely infected and he was hospitalized for a second time. And then it says right after this, and this is, I think, the most important thing to know about de Gaulle, and I underline the sentence. It said a million different ways in the book. Nothing dented his belief in victory. Nothing dented his belief in victory. There's just no quit. There's no other option. I have a single purpose. I'm going to win. France is going to be glorious or I'm going to die trying. He writes about this. We must conquer. Italicized that. The victor is the one that wants victory most energetically. His view remained that the French could accept nothing less than the absolute and definitive victory of our forces. The peace must be dictated by us. We must harden our hearts and concentrate our energies”

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20. “of those in charge of his security. The second lesson was summarized in one sentence, winds up writing this book. In the twinkling of an eye it became clear that all the virtue in the world is powerless against firepower, and so he winds up being sent to the hospital, he was so desperate to take part in the fighting that he left the hospital before his wound was fully healed.”

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21. “Four other men with me were also mown down in the same instant. His friend was killed outright right next to him. For the next half a minute there was a terrible hail of bullets around me. I could hear the bullets entering with a dull thud into the bodies of the dead. With my leg completely numb and paralyzed, I extracted myself from the bodies around me and crawled along the street underneath the same ceaseless hail of bullets. How I was not pierced like a sieve will forever remain one of the great questions of my life. In his 20 seconds of combat, De Gaulle made two discoveries, one about himself, the other about modern warfare, and this is also going to be something that he warns people a decade before World War II begins. The first was that he was indifferent to physical danger. He was like this his entire life. He's an insane person. This was the first study. He was indifferent to physical danger. Throughout his life, he would display the same bravado he had shown at this river crossing to the despair.”

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22. “Feeling of satisfaction came over me. At last, we're going to get them. So he thought of Germany as France's historical enemy. And that's why when he was 15, he's writing this dream essay where I'm fast forward in 15, 20 years of my future, and I'm a general in France, and I've just defeated Germany. And now he's getting a shot as a young man to actually fight German, to actually fight the Germans. And so, yeah, I was right. He winds up getting injured in the first 20 seconds. This is what he says about that. I screamed out first section forward with me. Remember, he's leading 65 people into battle. I rushed forward, realizing that our only chance of success was to move very fast before the enemy. It's funny that he says that now because he's default aggressive. And that's one of his biggest criticisms about the French generals in World War II is they just sat around and waited for Germany to attack instead of taking the fight to them. I hardly cover 20 meters when I felt a kind of whiplash on my knee. That's when you get shot in the knee, which caused me to stumble.”

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23. “Obsessed with war, he was obsessed with defending the glory of France and maintaining its empire, and so World War I breaks out. He's a young man. He's already in the military, and he gets shot for the first time. War regime in France and Germany broke out on August 1914. He was a platoon commander and a lieutenant at this point, and he had about 65 men under his control. So now he's going to describe this. He's writing about this later in the hospital after he gets shot. And so it says de Gaulle wrote up his impressions on that first morning while they were still fresh in his mind. And I'm pretty sure he got shot the very first day. The first shots of the campaign, what impression did this make on me? Why not admit it? Two seconds of physical emotion, a knotted throat, and that was all. I could even say that a feeling of satisfaction, now think about how crazy this is. You were getting literally putting your life on the line, you could die in a few minutes, people around you were dying. And this is what he says. I could even say that a”

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24. “So he graduates, he elects to join the infantry, and this is what he writes about that. When I joined the army, it was one of the greatest things in the world. Under the criticisms and insults that had been hurled at it, it waited with serenity and even muted hope, for the days when everything would depend on it. So the noise left myself on this page is de Gaulle talks about the army the way Enzo Ferrari spoke of his cars. So there's a great quote from that book Go Like Hell. I think it's like Founders Number 97, something like that. And it says, Enzo Ferrari spoke of automobiles as if they were animate. Cars possess unique behaviors. They breathe through their carburetors. They were skinned with metal. When Ferrari was asked which trick of his cars was his favorite, he answered, the car which I have not yet created, and which of his victories meant the most, the one which I have not yet achieved. So it's like almost like this poetic, like, they speak of these things as if they're speaking to like a lover. So De Gaulle finds himself at the right place for him at the right time and the right place in history because he was a”

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25. “His physical appearance, his small head, his heavily hooded eyes, his long neck, and his lack of chin. Although de Gaulle was not prone to intimate self revelations, he made occasional comments which hint that the icy reserve he projected was rooted in a certain physical awkwardness about his appearance. I did not have a physique that pleases, he wrote.”

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26. “Okay, so at this point in the story, De Gaulle's about 18 years old. I already said by the time he was 10, hey, I'm going to dedicate my life to the military. He says his only fascination was with war, the last war and the next one. So he goes to this military academy. It's called St. Cyr. Most likely pronouncing it incorrectly. So it says he graduated from there in the summer of 1912. We have no evidence that he stood out in any way except for his height. So that's another thing that he's well known for. And if you look at pictures of him on Google Images, he's like a foot taller than everybody else. So he was six foot five at the time, the average height in France for a man was 5'3. So they call him like a giant. They called him the giant asparagus or something was his nickname, something to do with an asparagus, and that relates to his height. There were many other odd features. Okay, so this talks about his physical appearance being odd. He's a very odd person in general, just like Singleton. There were many other features of his physical features.”

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27. “Okay, so we're going to jump into its early life way before World War II. This is one of the most, I would say probably the most influential person on the life of Charles de Gaulle was his father. So this is what he wrote about his father in his autobiography. My father was a man of thought, culture, tradition. He was imbued with a sense of the dignity of France. He made me discover its history. Later in life, when asked to name the person who most influenced him, he would always mention his father. Now he's talking about his early life. In this family, intellectual work was all that counted. Henri passed on to his son a reverence for writers and the life of the mind.”

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28. “Listen to how he talks. Whatever happens, the flame of the French resistance must not be extinguished, and it will not be extinguished. The Gaul spoke many more times over the following weeks and increasing numbers of people started turning into his speeches.”

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29. “So it says, but has the last word been said? Must hope disappear? Is the defeat definitive? No. I tell you that nothing is lost for France. The same means that conquered us can one day bring us victory. He goes on. Despite all of our mistakes, all of our failures to catch up, all of our sufferings, there are in the world all the means necessary one day to overcome our enemies. The destiny of the world is at stake. He always talks like this. Like he was on a mission. Go back to that mental model that Jeff Bezos taught us a long time ago. He's like, listen, when you're recruiting people to your company, you don't want missionaries, not mercenaries. Mercenaries are just there for the money, maybe for the perks or whatever. Missionaries will always make better products because they believe in your mission. So make sure you siphon off the people you're recruiting and put them into two camps and only bring the missionaries with you. DeGaulle was a missionary. Whatever happened.”

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30. “That he would be suing for an armistice with Germany. De Gaulle's speech the next day was a challenge to Baton's defeatism. Remember, I just love the idea what De Gaulle said. Don't turn your back on he who will not accept defeat. So this is what DeGaull said. I'm just going to pull out some highlights from his speech here. This government, alleging that our armies are defeated, had made contact with the enemy to end the fighting. Certainly, we have been overwhelmed by the mechanized forces of the enemy on the ground and in the air. Infinitely more than their number, it was the tanks, the airplanes, and the tactics of the Germans who forced us into retreat. It was the tanks the aeroplanes attacked us of the Germans that took our leaders by surprise to the point of bringing them to where they are today. I want to pause here. That sentence is extremely important because for 10 years before the war, de Gaulle is writing. He's given speeches. He's building relationships with different people in France. He's talking about we need to mechanize our forces. He wrote a book.”

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31. “About this, he was obsessed with this idea since he was a little boy. His father served in the French army. He would take him to the battle when he was a young kid, take him to the battlefield or the cemetery where all the soldiers that died in battles and the prussian war and things like that, where he'd make them read the headstones and then they would like recite passages and stuff. So almost like he was brainwashed. By the time De Gaulle was 10 years old, he decided he was going to pursue a life in the military. At the age of 15, The Gull writes an essay, which he projects himself forward to the year 1930. And in this vision that he's writing in the essay as a 15-year-old boy, he is a general of the French Army and he is just defeated Germany. Okay, so then the book begins after the introduction, talks about, hey, he's a voice before he was a face. And really more important than he's a voice, he's an idea. He was an idea that France was not.”

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32. “Arthur Rock was dead on. He had a singleness of purpose, and that was France is going to survive. We are not going to accept defeat. So I think that applying that idea to, this is exactly what I want my business to be like, right? This is exactly what I want my life to be. And it's more important than the business part is, what do you want your life to be, to have a certain idea of your life and to never give up on that idea? I think it's an extremely powerful idea that you learn by studying the life of Charles de Gaulle. Okay, so I want to move on. There is just so many good de Gaulle quotes. This guy is unapologetically extreme. This is one that's coming from after the liberation of France when he's actually in power. And this is how crazy it is. He says, there is no moment of my life when I was not certain that one day I would be at the head of France. But things worked out in a way that I could not predict. And so the crazy thing.”

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33. “The point is Churchill in England. I covered that back on the podcast The Splendid and the Vile. It was a few months ago. If you want to listen to that, if you haven't already. So at this point he's in London. He has fled and he's saying, I am the French government because I am the only one that's not giving up. And he's got a great quote. DeGaull's got a great quote in that movie that I watched of his. And it's describing himself. And he says, don't turn your back on he who will not accept defeat. So it says, the deed that launched him in 1940 was a speech, a speech almost no one actually heard. But subsequent speeches fared better. And for millions of French people between nineteen forty and nineteen forty four, de Gaulle existed as a voice heard on the radio, and so he used the radio as a tool to build up support. In fact, it was so remarkable by the time he comes back to France after the liberation, a lot of people are running up.”

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34. “Hey, he's very similar to this other historical figure. I took that as a challenge to okay, let me go and study de Gaulle and I really want to know what Arthur Rock meant by he is like de Gaulle, that Singleton is like de Gaulle. And so that is why I decided to spend all this time, why I read it 800-page biography and did all these other things, because I think it's important. It's another reminder that I don't look at these as separate episodes. I look at founders as just one giant discussion on the history of entrepreneurship. A discussion that is already hundreds of hours long and hopefully a discussion that will continue decades into the future. So with that, let's jump into the book. There's just a few things in the introduction I want to pull out before I get into his early life, and then from there, the book flows on a chronological order, so it's easier to follow. And so the very first thing is the fact that de Gaulle built his myth. So it says one of the de Gaulle's greatest achievements was the myth that he constructed around himself. And that myth was launched by the radio.”

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35. “Was an excerpt from the book that I'm going to talk to you about today, which is De Gaulle and is written by Julian Jackson. And before I jump back into the book, I want to tell you why I spent so much time studying and learning about Charles de Gaulle. So this might be outside of the episode I did where I read all of Warren Buffett's shareholder letters, this is probably the episode that took the most amount of time and preparation. So I listened to the audiobook before I read this book. Previously, I told you I listened to the audiobook. I said it was 60 hours. It's not 60 hours. It's 35 hours long. And then I read the book. The book is 800 pages long. It might be the most detailed biography I've ever read. And then I also watched, there's a movie that just came out. It's in French with English subtitles. It's called De Gaulle. Came out, I think, like two years ago. And so I watched that movie as well. And the reason that I thought spending all this time studying Charles de Gaulle was valuable came from just a simple quote that I read in a book about two years ago. All the way back on Founders number 110, I read this book called Distant Force.”

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36. “Over the next four years, de Gaulle claimed that he, not Patan, represented the true France. He returned to France in nineteen forty four, acclaimed as a national hero. De Gaulle challenged the way that the French thought about their history and politics.”

    2022-01-05 · Founders · #224 Charles de Gaulle · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source