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1The comma that separates français and libre in the title of Guillaume Piketty’s fine, new biography of Pierre de Chevigné says a lot. Chevigné was a graduate of Saint-Cyr, a military man by vocation with an appetite for combat. He distinguished himself in the campaign of 1940 and refused to give up the fight even in the wake of defeat. Chevigné repudiated Pétain’s armistice, headed to England, and, once there, rallied to La France libre. This was no easy choice. Chevigné left behind two motherless daughters (his wife had died in early 1939). He left behind France, a nation that he loved. And he left behind a military hierarchy he was sworn to uphold, a hierarchy that viewed what he had done as desertion, in due course condemning him to death in absentia.

2Again, after the war, Chevigné faced a hard set of choices. He had risen through the ranks in Free France’s army, attaining the rank of colonel, and yet he opted to leave military life for a career in politics, winning election to parliament in the Basses-Pyrénées in 1945. He aligned himself with the Mouvement républicain populaire, not a surprise for a man with local roots who counted one of the Southwest’s leading political figures, the Christian-Democrat Auguste Champetier de Ribes, as a mentor. More surprising is Chevigné’s tenacious refusal to associate his own political fortunes with those of Charles de Gaulle. The two men after all had been companions in arms during the war. When de Gaulle had a tough assignment, he leaned on Chevigné time and again. De Gaulle dispatched him to the Middle East in 1940-1941 to command a Free French unit, fighting alongside the British in Syria against Vichy troops. He sent him to Washington, D.C. in 1942 to head up Free France’s military delegation in the United States. Then in 1944, de Gaulle tasked Chevigné with asserting Free French military authority in the liberated regions of northern France. All these assignments were fraught ones. In Syria, Chevigné had to face the agonizing task of taking up arms against fellow Frenchmen. In the US, he had to square off with American officials who looked on de Gaulle and the Free French cause with suspicion and condescension. As for managing affairs in liberated France, he had to find a way to come to terms with the armed Resistance, all while preserving order and the continuity of the State. Chevigné was more than a match for all these challenges. It helped, thanks to a British nanny, that he had a strong command of English. It helped too that the American commander in Europe, General Eisenhower, unlike superiors back in the States, grasped what Chevigné was trying to accomplish in a France just emerging from a brutal occupation. But the main point remains : Chevigné was a man de Gaulle could count on to execute tough jobs.

3Yet, in the postwar, when de Gaulle entered the electoral arena himself with the founding of the Rassemblement du peuple français in 1947, Chevigné stuck with the MRP. The year 1958 found Chevigné as Minister of Defense in the ill-starred Pflimlin government. He endeavored in vain to keep the army in line as the Algerian crisis spun out of control, and then de Gaulle stepped in to take charge. Chevigné, now a minister on the way out, voted in favor of the General’s investiture as prime minister. He voted “yes” in the September referendum on the Republic’s new constitution. But that was as much of Gaullism as Chevigné was prepared to stomach. He had no liking for de Gaulle’s high-handed governing style. In the presidential elections of 1965, he backed fellow MRP member, Jean Lecanuet. Chevigné distanced himself from de Gaulle and from the regime the General created, and it cost him. He was booted out of national office in the elections of November 1958 and never returned to parliament again (although he remained a figure of note on the local scene in the Basses-Pyrénées).

4Chevigné then was someone who could say “no” when it was hard to do so. He rejected the armistice of 1940, and, post-1958, he rejected what he called de Gaulle’s “pouvoir personnel” (394). Chevigné, in a word, was his own man : a Français libre who was also a français, libre.

5Chevigné’s life trajectory has its inspirational side, which Piketty highlights with storytelling verve, but it also has its zones of gray, when problems arose that Chevigné proved slow or unable to master. One of these had to do with empire. Chevigné’s experience in wartime taught him lessons : first, that Free France relied on the kindness of strangers, on Britain’s sometimes shaky good will and America’s sometimes stinting military assistance. This sense of dependency, of “déclassement”—a word Piketty makes use of more than once—, enhanced the value of empire in Chevigné’s estimation. His wartime service, moreover, made him a connoisseur of France’s far-flung imperium, as he globetrotted from Syria to Lebanon with later stopovers in the Antilles and Algeria. In 1948, he had a chance to show how he understood what a commitment to empire entailed. He was named interim High Commissioner of Madagascar and stayed on into the following year. The island had been rocked by an uprising in 1947, and Chevigné was tasked with mopping it up, which he accomplished with characteristic dynamism, not commanding from behind, but traveling the island from end to end. He was firm, moreover, when it came to repression, crushing what remained of the insurgency and sanctioning the trials of Malgache nationalists, some of whom had only the most tangential connection to the revolt. The job he was assigned to do was a dirty one, and he did it. But Chevigné pivoted away from empire in the decade that followed. This softening of commitment was abetted in part by a compensatory engagement in the construction of a united Europe, which under the influence of MRP colleague, Robert Schuman, he came to see as a potential multiplier for French prestige.

6It is important at the same time not to overplay how much Chevigné cooled on the question of empire. As Secretary of State for War in 1952, he paid an official visit to Indochina. Once again, as in Madagascar, he went on tour, this time not to oversee the reimposition of order but to consult with officers on the ground then at grips with an insurgent Viet Minh. Chevigné came away persuaded that the Vietnamese revolution, fueled by Soviet and Chinese military support, was more than French forces could handle and that a negotiated peace was the sole way out. It took a little more time, but he came to a similar conclusion about Algeria. Yet, what he hoped for in Algeria, as in Indochina, was a resolution that preserved ties between the metropole and its erstwhile dependencies via some sort of federal arrangement. National independence, which is in fact the path that both revolutions took, was not an outcome he favored.

7A second problem bedeviled Chevigné’s career, that of civil-military relations. He entered onto the historical stage in 1940 with a courageous act of disobedience. In Syria, he fought against Vichy forces and a military establishment he had once been a part of. As the war neared its end, de Gaulle, as we have seen, charged Chevigné with reconstructing France’s military apparatus in the liberated North. This he did with spectacular success, helping to build a new army and one that answered to de Gaulle’s authority. The Liberation was a bloody moment of undeclared civil war between Frenchmen, but it could have been worse, as it was in Greece or Serbia, where full-scale civil conflicts erupted. France avoided this fate, and that was thanks in part to Chevigné’s efforts. Piketty signals the importance of this achievement, and he is right to do so. But the new military that Chevigné had a role in fashioning in turn became restive, bridling under a civilian leadership it came to regard as weak and compromising. The politicians, some army brass felt, had lost Indochina, and in 1958 it appeared that Algeria was headed the same way. Pflimlin recruited Chevigné to serve as Minister of Defense in part because he nursed hopes that Chevigné had the requisite credibility and stature to guarantee the military’s obedience, but in the end, he did not. A career launched by disobedience was also undone by disobedience.

8It is not as though de Gaulle did so much better, at least at first. He did not want an independent Algeria under FLN leadership, but finally, he cut the Gordian knot and bowed to necessity. As for civil-military relations, elements in the army did not bend the knee to de Gaulle any more than they did to Chevigné. But de Gaulle faced them down, also facing down repeated assassination attempts along the way. The 1930s opened a period of simmering dissensions within French military ranks. The 1960s witnessed the closing of the parenthesis, which happened on de Gaulle’s watch, not Chevigné’s.

9Piketty’s biography is exceptionally well documented, drawing on Chevigné’s own private papers, a raft of interviews, and a rich mix of French, British, and American archives. It is written in two registers, a heroic one associated with the epic of Free France and a more prosaic one mired in the complexities of Fourth Republic politics. There is a through line to Chevigné’s story, however, which binds the two, and that has to do with background and character. Count Pierre de Chevigné, by his full title, was a man of distinguished pedigree. His grandmother, Laure de Sade, is said to have been one of the models for Proust’s Duchess of Guermantes. Chevigné’s second marriage to Anne de Vogüé (née d’Ormesson) was an aristocratic match, and his eldest daughter, Gisèle, married a nobleman with a distinguished military career of his own, Count François de Castries. The Chevigné family had a motto, it goes without saying : Quod decet (What is befitting). The ethic of proud independence that Chevigné lived by did not come from nowhere but was anchored in a chivalric past. This comes through in Piketty’s biography, but less clear is the role of religion in patterning Chevigné’s life course, and there are hints that religion did indeed matter to him. He attended a Jesuit collège. When he entered the political arena, it was Christian Democrats he aligned with, from Champetier de Ribes to Schuman to Lecanuet. The mention of Schuman’s name is a reminder just how much the construction of Europe was a Christian-Democrat project, one that Chevigné, under Schuman’s tutelage, came to make his own. Then there is the issue of Chevigné’s enduring commitment to the MRP, despite the siren calls of Gaullism. It is tempting to attribute such loyalty, if but in part, to the party’s Christian orientation. One final point : at Chevigné’s passing, a mass was said for him at the Saint-Louis des Invalides Cathedral, the military and Catholic dimensions of the life that he led coming together in death. In Chevigné’s double commitment to honor and faith, he more than a little resembled de Gaulle himself, but in Chevigné’s case, as Piketty’s rousing biography recounts so well, that double commitment, which at first brought the two men together, in the end led to a rupture that never healed.