Winston Churchill or Charles de Gaulle – who was the greater leader? A niche question about bygone times but relevant given their ability to lead their country through perilous times. A new dual biography of them shows how different they were: one patrician and curiously childish, the other a bourgeois brigadier.
Winston Churchill, 30 November 1874 1.30am Woodstock, England; Charles de Gaulle, 22 November 1890 4am Lille, France.
They did have some similarities and in different ways rallied morale. Both had an adventurous, upbeat Mars Jupiter conjunction in an Air sign – de Gaulle in Aquarius and Churchill in Libra. Both had a determined Pluto in the 8th giving them unseen power and influence and a streak of stubbornness.
Indeed both had Pluto and Neptune in the 8th giving them the ability to project a powerful and mesmerising aura – as indeed did Hitler.
‘Churchill, who believed that nothing was inevitable, was a more optimistic human being than de Gaulle whose thinking “was permeated by … a melancholy, sometimes apocalyptic, belief that all human enterprises will fail sooner rather than later. In his darker moments, he was not sure that even France would endure.”
Churchill had a fiery Sagittarius Sun in his communicative 3rd house and a Leo Moon conjunct Regulus; where De Gaulle was a Sun Scorpio with a cautious Saturn in Virgo. De Gaulle did have his Venus and Mercury in Sagittarius and an Aries Moon. But he lacked WC’s Fire Grand Trine of Moon trine Neptune North Node in Aries trine Venus in Sagittarius.
A Fire Grand Trine is inspirational, has strong self-belief, is a risk-taker, can be arrogant and unrealistic. “For one extraordinary moment all his defects became qualities . . his defiance of the rules, even his “detachment from reality”, of which his colleagues had long despaired, became a “superb optimism of the will”. At that moment he became the personification of a colossal national effort.
What is interesting is Churchill’s relationship chart with the UK which has a fated composite yod of Jupiter sextile Saturn inconjunct Pluto North Node – tr Jupiter was moving through Aries as war started in September 1939 with Churchill moving from Head of the Navy to PM in 1940.
De Gaulle’s relationship chart with France was also inspirational in its own way with a composite Jupiter trine Pluto trine Neptune; though also tied together with a focal point controlling Pluto which possibly made De Gaulle a better peacetime leader than Churchill who was better suited to Boys Own Paper escapades.
Churchill was rife with flaws – bad judgement of people. He liked Mussolini and Stalin, was racist and fought to keep Edward VIII on the throne. There is an unnerving thought that had Edward not abdicated it is unlikely when Chamberlain resigned, that as king he would have accepted the recommendation to send for Churchill, the “warmonger”, rather than an appeaser.
But for all that his Fire Grand Trine was wildly unrealistic and over the top, it was that which made the difference as he ‘empowered Britain to stand among the Second World War’s victors as probably no other contemporary Englishman could have contrived.’
It’s extraordinary to think that Churchill was born a decade after the American Civil War, rode in a cavalry charge in 1898, lived through atomic bombs and died a decade before the foundation of Microsoft.
Both fiery Moons.
This is one of my favorite subjects. It must be remembered that Churchill played a less than glorious role in WWI. As minister of the Interior, he had the Irish republican leaders shot after the Easter uprising in 1916. He was a military adventurer who counseled an Allied invasion of Turkey which became a ghastly defeat in the Dardanelles. Also, he was less than stellar after he returned to power in the early Fifites. He was a great wartime leader in WWII who changed world history, but his successor Atllee was much the better peacetime leader. Churchill would likely not have accepted the independence of India or Pakistan in 1947, or he woiuld have delayed it considerably.
De Gaulle completely changed and greatly improved the constittution of his country, which Churchill didi not even contemplate. De Gaulle retrieved his country’s honor after the shameful Vichy government. He was a miltary visionary who promoted tank warfaire but was not listened to by his superiors, unlike his German enemies who read his book on modern strategy. He was taken prisoner in WWI but escaped, and in WWII led one of the few successful French divisions against the German invasion. This got him a promotion in the French cabinet and a meeting with Churchill, who saw his potential and inivted him to London.
As prime minister from 1944 for two short but eventful years, he ensured that France would become an occupying power in Germany, whiich enraged the Nazis, and a permanent member of the Security Council of the UN despite its defeat in 1940. As President in the Sixties, he solved the tricky Algerian war of independence and made of France a nuclear power significantly more independent of the US than the UK. His Mars-Jupiter conjunction in Aquarius allowed him to leave a greater legacy for the future and more sympathy from the Third World and non-aligned countries. He forgave Germany for the horrid past and became close to Adenauer. De Gaulle was a modern leader as well as a WWII hero. Not all French presidentts are remarkable men, but De Gaulle made Macron possible. Churchill is a great inspiring man of the past, while De Gaulle was quoted as saying that inevitably one day someone would follow in his footsteps and go on from there.
Happily, they admired each other and found a way to work together despite De Gaulle’s hubris. Churcchill was so fond of France he proposed that the countries merge when Hitler attacked. That was unworkable, as were some of his other far-fetched ideas, but maybe it will happen some day despite what would have been De Gaulle’s stubborn opposition. In the French psyche, shared to a degree in Québec where I am, De Gaulle is the modern-day Jeanne d’Arc, a providential and unexplainable figure. He did retire near her village of biirth and used the Cross of Lorraine, the region of her birth, as his stadard.
De Gaulle was a devout Catholic and a loving father to his mentally retarded daughter. A niece, Genevieve de Gaulle, died in the Resistance. One of my favorite stories is that in 1944 he asked Pius XII for the removal of the Cardnal of Paris because he had collaborated with the Germans. He asked that he be replaced by Cardinal Roncarelli, who had served in Istanbul for the Church where he had saved many Jews. Cardinal Roncarelli became Pope Jonn XXIII when De Gaulle became President. The two were comfortable with each other.
Kissinger wrote that when De Gaulle entered a room, it tilted towards him. In Québec, his cry of Vive le Québec libre! in 1967, which shocjked not only the Canadian government but also his own country’s political class, remains to many a potent isnpiration.
Both men had delusions of grandeur. Both men could afford them.
As a staunch Canadian federalist, I do not share your enthusiasm whatsoever for Charles De Gaulle, whom I consider a pompous ass and an ingrate who interfered in internal Canadian politics and gave support to an independence movement rooted in a far-right nationalism despite the enormous sacrifice of Canadian blood, predominantly by non-Québécois, in the First and Second World Wars. Let’s not forget that far-right nationalists in Quebec such as Adrien Arcand wanted no part in the Second World War, or that many of those who managed to obtain an education in the Roman Catholic theocracy that was Quebec until the Quiet Revolution of 1960 were instructed by pro-Bourbon Sulpicians that had left the Third French Republic (1870-1940) after France officially secularized its society in 1905 and had driven the Catholic clergy out of the field of public education.
After De Gaulle’s disgraceful cry of “Vive le Québec libre” from the balcony of Montreal’s City Hall in 1967, my hometown of Ottawa, the national capital of Canada, renamed De Gaulle Boulevard in the neighbourhood of Old East Ottawa. The street’s name was changed to Centennial Boulevard in response to De Gaulle’s appalling insult. De Gaulle was in Canada for Centennial celebrations celebrating the creation of the Dominion of Canada on July 1, 1867 and the World Fair, Expo ’67, in Montreal. Unfortunately, the boor came to spoil the party with his remarks in Montreal. Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson, the 1957 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, refused to see him and De Gaulle left Canada after spending only a few days in the Province of Quebec.
In addition to insulting Canadian war veterans and the sacrifices of Canadian soldiers who died while liberating France in the First and Second World Wars, De Gaulle’s grossly inflated ego was massaged by the American and British senior commanders in the Second World War who believed that De Gaulle’s legitimacy as the leader of the Free French would be bolstered if Free French forces were permitted to lead the liberation of some major French cities, such as De Gaulle’s hometown of Lille. The Canadian Army was responsible for clearing the Atlantic Ocean, English Channel and North Sea coasts after the Allies had established their beachhead in Normandy on D-Day, June 6, 1944, but Canadian forces had to be detoured away from the city so that General Philippe LeClerc’s 2nd French Armoured Division could be inserted in order to liberate Lille.
Churchill saved all of us from speaking German -Thank God or Danke Gott!
Transiting Uranus made its 3rd pass over Churchill’s Taurus Pluto on 3rd May 1940. A week later on the 10th he became Prime Minister after Chamberlain was forced out. Talk about being empowered out of the blue!