146 FRENCH PERSONALITIES AND PROBLEMS
armies opposed to Hitler since September 1939 to this day. That
was the doing of the de Gaullist movement.
And, perhaps unwillingly, perhaps unconsciously, the movement
has been forced to become political, to admit that this war is about
other things than the territorial security of France and the Empire.
It is not the only organized force that has claims on the future of a
France freed from Hitlerism by the United Nations. It may not be
the most important claimant. But it is among the runners in that
race. The "good, the wise and the rich," to quote the old Federalist
classification, are not. As the war has moved to its crisis, as the
issues have been sharply drawn, I have been more and more
impressed by a favourite text of mine from Burke. Burke was, as we
all know, the apostle of the counter-revolution. Yet at the end of his
life he felt the force of the movement of history. " If a great change
is to be made in human affairs, the minds of men will be fitted to
it; the general opinions and feelings will draw that way. Every fear,
every hope will forward it."
Basically, it is because the French National Committee is not
fighting against this great movement of history that it is important.
Because its history has been chequered, its early hopes deceived, its
character made for it by events, it has its present symbolic import-
ance in France, in the other occupied countries and in England. It is
not by its very nature condemned to futility, although of course it is
not guaranteed even temporary victory or power in a liberated
France. In this grey and grim world, it is something not to be pre-
destined to defeat, as any policy based merely on the support, in
France or the Empire, of the French higher officials, les gens nantis
as Vandal called the political profiteers of the Directory, is certain
to be. Of course, the profiteers of 1799 did turn the Revolution to
their profit. But the Revolution had happened. Brumaire could not
have been worked in 1793. And they had a chief with Arcola behind
him and Austerlitz before him. He also had Waterloo before him.
If the State Department has a Bonaparte up its sleeve, it should
produce him. Even so, the distance between Austerlitz and Water-
loo will be a lot shorter than ten years, if he or any other general or
diplomat or even banker gets in the way of the great movement of
the peoples of which the President of the United States has hitherto
been so brilliant, so successful and so trusted a leader*