Of Gallantry and Gall : DE GAULLE; The Rebel, 1890-1944 <i> By Jean Lacouture translated by Patrick O’Brien (W. W. Norton: $29.95</i> ;<i> 613 pp.)</i>

“All my life I have had a certain idea of France.” All of Charles de Gaulle is in the first line of his “War Memoirs,” and the page that follows makes clear what this idea was: the image of France as a fairy-tale princess, the insistence that France cannot be France without greatness, the memory of that “anxious pride about our country” with which he grew up, the fascination with symbols of French glories: Notre Dame, Versailles, the Arc de Triomphe, Invalides--a patriot’s tour of Paris. It would take a very resolute patriot-visionary to rescue Princess France from the slough of despond and the German dragon. Jean Lacouture’s book tells us how this came about.

Thanksgiving Day, 1990, marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Charles de Gaulle, in his grandparents’ house at Lille in the north of France. He was to grow up in Paris, but always considered himself a Lillois de Paris, characteristically taking sides with the provinces against the capital, with the sober north of coffee-drinkers against the self-indulgent south of wine-bibbers.

The lad, who liked to read (especially History, which he always wrote with a capital H) and to write poems, grew up to be a soldier. He entered the national military academy at Saint-Cyr, was 119th of 221 candidates admitted in 1909, graduated 13th in his class in 1911, and joined the 33rd Infantry Regiment at Arras (again in the north), then under the command of Col. Philippe Petain.

The careers of the two men were going to intertwine, the older appreciating the younger, the junior officer admiring his senior but increasingly critical of him. Original, authoritarian, rigorous, remote, ironic, lonely, are words that Lacouture uses to describe Petain and that can as easily apply to De Gaulle. Two men so alike may have been bound to clash, but conflict was guaranteed by fundamental disagreement on military doctrine: Petain was the great preacher of defensive strategy; De Gaulle stubbornly championed initiative and movement.

Petain’s insistence that “fire kills” was to be justified by the great massacres of 1914-18, during which his junior repeatedly was wounded, decorated and promoted. It was on the greatest of the war’s slaughtergrounds--at Verdun in 1916, where a thousand men died per square meter--that Capt. De Gaulle was left for dead and taken prisoner, to spend the remainder of the war trying to escape from German camps. It was Petain, commanding at Verdun, who wrote his last mention in dispatches. And it would be Petain, now Marshal of France, who took the released prisoner under his wing thereafter.

Lacouture does a very good job describing the beanpole captain’s rise through the interwar years, the exceptional talents and the prickly personality that carried him forward but made more enemies than admirers. He serves in Poland, where he helps break the Bolshevik offensive against Warsaw. He serves in Syria and Lebanon: “Here are to be found peoples who have never been satisfied with anything or anyone, but who will bow to the will of the strongest if only that will is expressed. . . .”

He serves on Petain’s staff as ghostwriter. He becomes the sharpest, most articulate critic of his superiors (who react with surprising mildness) and the relentless advocate of massed armor in battle, more honored by English and German comrades than by resolutely stick-in-the-muddy French.

War in 1939 comes as no surprise, nor the German offensive in May, 1940. As German tanks run through the French like a knife through butter, De Gaulle’s armored corps is one of the few units to hold them even briefly. The colonel becomes a brigadier general, then an undersecretary of state, but never stops insisting that France must not throw in the towel. He witnesses the liquefaction of the French government; he observes will and pride oozing away, first in fear, then in cowardly relief. He leaves for England when Petain takes over and signs an armistice with the Germans.

De Gaulle’s break, in June of 1940, with what the immense majority of French and foreigners regarded as his country’s legal government, and his appeal against defeatism were denounced as treason. Lacouture makes clear how well these actions fit in a long record of rebellion by a man well used to challenging his superiors; but also how alone the brigadier general stood in London in 1940, how slow would be his march to representation, then to success.

Pending victory, De Gaulle’s only relaxation (said an Englishwoman who knew him well), his only pleasure, would be hating, “and he hated everybody, particularly those who tried to be his friends.” Winston Churchill, who knew something of the Frenchman’s nature, may be said to have invented De Gaulle as symbol of Free France, and commented that the heaviest cross he had had to bear had been the Cross of Lorraine.

Battered by one setback after another, the general who stood for France became only more pugnaciously self-assertive. The more helpless he looked, the more arrogant he acted. Armored in pride and in rigidity, he maddened his friends, while his crusade took on a Wild West style--bold, guilty, risky--exciting to watch but sparking even more hostility than before the war.

The most stubborn of the general’s critics was the most powerful man in the world: Franklin D. Roosevelt, who never abandoned his admiration for Marshal Petain or his dislike of Petain’s conceited, autocratic competitor. Those who want to understand persistent French suspicions of American “imperialism” should read the chapters that describe De Gaulle’s long struggle against our President’s blundering determination first to keep the Free French out of French North Africa (Roosevelt preferred to deal with Vichy’s creatures), then to freeze them out of liberated France itself, which F.D.R. wanted placed under Anglo-American occupation. Only Gen. Eisenhower’s good sense saved the alliance from serious trouble: He permitted De Gaulle to set foot on French soil almost four years to the day after he had left it, and made it possible for him to march down the Champs-Elysees some long weeks later.

Lacouture is a felicitous biographer. Nevertheless, a warning is in order. The blow-by-blow account that Lacouture provides can be read as an adventure story, but only by those with passionate interest in French adventures. Others may run out of interest after a while, or lose their way amid thickets of French references.

After De Gaulle has triumphed at Algiers, in 1943, over assorted French, hostile Americans and irritated British, the story gets ever more complex, and confusing for non-specialists. The stage becomes more crowded, clarity falters; so does the translation, The simple plot lines of De Gaulle’s early struggle turn to a cat’s cradle of maneuvers, less than fascinating to non-French readers who do not automatically recognize familiar figures of our day in the second lieutenants of 1942 and 1943.

That said, no one to date has come closer to doing this extraordinary figure justice. Lacouture has etched an idealistic Machiavelli who knows that war is only the most convulsive form of politics; who is a savage political soldier full of dreams, aware that gratitude and consistency are weaknesses of lesser minds.

Great men are not nice men. Like the Pyramids, greatness is best contemplated from a distance. Thanks to Lacouture, we can begin to do so in perspective.

BOOKMARK: For an excerpt from “DE GAULLE: The Rebel, 1890-1944,” see the Opinion section, Page 2.