#224 Charles de Gaulle

**David Senra** (0:00)
De Gaulle's admirers have included both Henry Kissinger and Osama Bin Laden. He has been compared by admirers and detractors to French figures as diverse as Charlemagne, Joan of Arc, Henry IX, Louis XIV, and Napoleon. And to non-French figures as diverse as Bismarck, Mussolini, Mao, Castro, and Jesus Christ.
The range of these comparisons reflect de Gaulle's extraordinary contradictions.
He was a soldier who spent most of his career fighting the army, a conservative who often talked like a revolutionary, a man of passion who found it almost impossible to express emotions.
In France today, Charles de Gaulle is everywhere, in memories, in street names, in monuments, in bookshops. At the most recent count, over 3,600 localities had a public space, a street, an avenue, a square, a roundabout, named after him.
When an opinion poll in 2010 asked the French to rank the most important figures in their history, 44% placed de Gaulle at the top, far ahead of Napoleon, in second place, with 14%.
Throughout his career, he was a brutally divisive figure. He was reviled and idealized, loathed and adored, in equal measure. Hatred went beyond words. De Gaulle was the target of about 30 serious assassination attempts.
If the lives of the French were so passionately caught up in their relationship with de Gaulle, it was because he was the central actor in France's two 20th century civil wars.
The first civil war resulted from France's defeat by Germany in 1940, when the government of Marshal Patton signed an armistice with Hitler. Refusing to accept this decision, de Gaulle departed for London to continue the battle. His act of defiance transformed him into a rebel.
Over the next four years, de Gaulle claimed that he, not Patton, represented the true France. He returned to France in 1944, acclaimed as a national hero. De Gaulle challenged the way that the French thought about their history and politics.
That was an excerpt from the book I'm going to talk to you about today, which is de Gaulle, and it was 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. It 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. It's the closest thing we have to a biography of Henry Singleton. And the quote comes from this guy named Arthur Rock. Arthur Rock is one of the first venture capitalists. He funded companies like Intel, Apple, and Teledyne. Teledyne was the company that Henry Singleton founded. And this is what he worked, Arthur works with some of the most gifted entrepreneurs in history, one of those being Henry Singleton. And this is what he said about Singleton. And he says, Henry reminds me of de Gaulle. He has a singleness of purpose, a tenacity that is just overpowering. He gives you absolute confidence in his ability to accomplish whatever he says he's going to do. Yes, he is rather aloof, operating more or less by himself and dreaming up ideas in his corner office. Let me tell you this, that corner office produced a cornucopia of ideas. And Arthur Rock is not the only famous person in the history of entrepreneurship that sang the praises of Henry Singleton. I actually discovered who Henry Singleton was through Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger. Warren Buffett, not only in shareholder letters, but also in speeches, he talked about that. He says Henry Singleton has the best operating and capital deployment record in American business. If you took the top, the 100 top business school graduates and made a composite of their triumphs, their record would not be as good as Singleton.
He went on to say that the fact that business schools didn't study Henry Singleton, he said that was a crime. And then Charlie Munger, this is a quote from Poor Charlie's Almanac. It says, sharing Buffett's admiration for Henry Singleton, Charlie wonders, given the man's talent and record, have we learned enough from him? And so when you have three people that have studied entrepreneurs for multiple decades, people have dedicated their life to this, like Arthur Rock, Warren Buffett, and Charlie Munger. And they're telling you, hey, this is the guy, this is the guy you should study, you need to learn from him. And then one of those people say, 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.