ABSTRACT
After Winston Churchill, with Churchill and in some respects more than Churchill, to whom he was personally linked by a bond of manly mutual respect, de Gaulle was the most statesman like of all contemporary statesmen. Chronologically, de Gaulle’s public activity began after Churchill’s. De Gaulle came at the same time as Churchill because each was, knew himself to be, and also knew the other to be, a man of destiny, that is a man who was born with what Alexander the Great called his ‘hope’, Caesar his ‘luck’ and Napoleon his ‘star’. In fact, de Gaulle was an intellectual as of right by sheer talent, and by his efforts, in his youth, to define himself in his own philosophy of life. Like a good Bergsonian, de Gaulle himself accepted that both intuition and reason give to the human being the creative force of life, and that life itself is a constant motion, changing the action and the actors simultaneously.
