June 1940. The German blitzkrieg has destroyed France's defences, the French government has surrendered, and a general named Charles de Gaulle flees to England.1
He intends to establish himself as the leader of Free France — the legitimate government in exile, against the German-dominated Vichy regime now ruling much of the country.1
Greene lists what he had to work with:
The odds were stacked heavily against de Gaulle: he had never been a high-profile figure within France. Many better-known French soldiers and politicians could claim the role he wanted; he had no leverage to make the allies recognize him as the leader of Free France, and without their recognition he would be powerless.1
No constituency. No standing. No army. No cards.
From the beginning de Gaulle ignored the odds and presented himself to one and all as the only man who could save France after its disgraceful surrender.1
Note the tense. Not a candidate for the role — the occupant of it.
The activity followed:
The last of those is the one that eventually mattered, and it is the least visible. The speeches and the touring built the appearance; the Resistance contacts built the only thing that would eventually make the appearance costly to contradict.
Churchill admired him but often found him unbearably arrogant. Roosevelt despised him.1
Time and again the two leaders tried to persuade him to accept shared control of Free France — which was, on any reasonable assessment of his position, a generous offer to a man with nothing.
But his response was always the same: he would not compromise. He would not accept anything less than sole leadership.1
And the behaviour in the room:
In negotiating sessions he was downright rude, to the point where he would sometimes walk out, making it clear that for him it was all or nothing.1
Churchill and Roosevelt cursed de Gaulle's name, ruing the day they had let him take any position at all. They even talked about demoting him and forcing him out of the picture. But they always backed down, and in the end they gave him what he wanted.1
The reasons are specific, and they are worth separating because neither is about de Gaulle's strength.
To do otherwise would mean a public scandal in delicate times and would disrupt their relations with the French underground. They would be demoting a man whom much of the public had come to revere.1
Every one of those is a cost to them, generated by things de Gaulle had built rather than by anything he could threaten. The broadcasts created the public reverence. The Resistance contacts created the disruption risk. The intransigence created the scandal risk — because removing a man who has publicly staked everything on being the sole legitimate leader is a story, and accommodating one who would have settled is not.
Greene's statement of it is the sharpest formulation of asking-price dynamics in the book:
if you are weak and ask for little, little is what you will get.1
And the mechanism by which the opposite works:
But if you act strong, making firm, even outrageous demands, you will create the opposite impression: people will think that your confidence must be based on something real.1
That is an inference the other party makes on their own. De Gaulle never claimed to have a base — he behaved as though he had one, and Churchill and Roosevelt supplied the explanation.
You will earn respect, which in turn will translate into leverage.1
Then the escalation available once the position exists:
Once you are able to establish yourself in a stronger position, you can take this further by refusing to compromise, making it clear that you are willing to walk away from the table—an effective form of coercion.1
And the contingency, which is the part most people leave out:
The other side may call your bluff, but you make sure there's a price to pay for this—bad publicity, for instance. And if in the end you do compromise a little, it will still be a lot less than the compromises they would have forced on you if they could.1
The chapter's framing of when this matters most:
Sometimes in life you will find yourself holding the weak hand, the hand without any real leverage. At those times it is even more important to keep advancing. By demonstrating strength and resolve and maintaining the pressure, you cover up your weaknesses and gain footholds that will let you manufacture leverage for yourself.1
You want something and you have no standing to ask for it — no track record, no alternative offer, nothing the other side needs.
The first decision is the ask itself, and the instinct is wrong. Asking for less does not make you easier to accommodate; it makes you cheap to dismiss, because a small request carries no information about what is behind it. A large one forces the other party to construct an explanation, and the explanation they construct will be more flattering than the truth.
Then behave as the occupant rather than the applicant. De Gaulle did not campaign to be recognised as the leader of Free France; he acted as its leader and let recognition become the question of whether to contradict him. That is a different position entirely and it changes who bears the burden.
Then build the two things that make refusal expensive, because the demands alone do nothing.
A constituency that would notice. The broadcasts. Not power — witnesses. Someone who would have to be publicly overruled is harder to overrule than someone who can be quietly declined.
A relationship the other side needs. The Resistance contacts. Find the thing your counterparty wants that runs through you, however partially, and be the route.
Then hold the position through the period where you have nothing, and expect to be disliked for it. Churchill found him unbearable, Roosevelt despised him, and both accommodated him — being liked and being accommodated are different currencies, and the mistake in a weak position is spending the second to buy the first.
And prepare the bluff-call, because it will come. Not a threat — a cost, already arranged and visible: the story that would run, the people who would ask, the relationship that would be disturbed. A refusal to compromise with no consequence attached is a tantrum. A refusal with a visible cost is a position.
De Gaulle's June 1940 flight, the BBC broadcasts, his difficult relations with Churchill and Roosevelt, and his eventual establishment as the sole leader of Free France are all well documented, and Roosevelt's animosity toward him is a standard feature of Allied wartime history. [POPULAR SOURCE]
The account under-weights the structural reasons the strategy worked. Greene presents this as an almost pure demonstration that acting strong manufactures leverage. But the British needed a French figurehead, urgently, and the field of plausible candidates who had refused the armistice was thin — de Gaulle's obstinacy was expensive to accommodate and the alternatives were worse. His intransigence exploited a real structural need; it did not create one out of nothing.
And the Resistance relationship was more mutual than the page's ordering suggests. De Gaulle's authority over the internal Resistance was contested for years and was consolidated largely through Jean Moulin's work in France from 1942 — that is, after the period when Churchill and Roosevelt were already dealing with him. The "he built contacts and therefore they couldn't remove him" sequence is cleaner in Greene than in the record.
The strategy also has an unexamined selection problem. De Gaulle is remembered because it worked. Intransigence from a position of genuine weakness usually results in being replaced by someone more accommodating, and those people are not in the chapter. What distinguished this case is that the accommodating alternatives had already discredited themselves by accepting the armistice — a condition that is not generally available and that Greene does not name as a precondition.
Against Strategy 10: Deterrence Strategies this is that chapter's method transplanted into diplomacy. De Gaulle made himself expensive to fight in exactly the way John Boyd did inside the Pentagon — not by having power but by ensuring that any attempt to remove him would cost more than tolerating him. Both were structurally weak and both were left alone, and Greene teaches them eleven chapters apart as different strategies.
Against Strategy 21's other cases the contrast is instructive. Philip and Metternich both operated from positions of genuine strength or genuine informational advantage; de Gaulle had neither. He is the chapter's only case where the leverage did not exist and had to be conjured — which makes him the most useful and the least reliable of the three.
Against Strategy 4: The Death-Ground Strategy, the all-or-nothing posture is a burnt ship. De Gaulle eliminated the possibility of shared control for himself as much as for the Allies — having refused it publicly and repeatedly, accepting it later would have destroyed the only asset he had.
Business → The Anchor Set by Someone With No Alternative. Negotiation research is clear that an aggressive opening anchor shifts outcomes, and equally clear that the party with the weaker alternative usually anchors lower — precisely when anchoring high would help most.
The insight the pairing produces: the reason weak parties under-ask is not miscalculation but fear of the relationship ending, and the fear is usually mispriced because the other side's cost of walking away is invisible to them. De Gaulle could not see Churchill's need for a French figurehead any more clearly than a job candidate can see how long a role has been open or how badly a team needs it filled. What he did instead of estimating was behave as though the need existed and let the other side reveal it by not walking. That is the transferable move: when you cannot assess your counterparty's alternatives, an outrageous ask is partly a leverage play and partly a cheap probe — the response tells you what you could not otherwise learn, and the cost of the information is a discomfort rather than a loss.
Psychology → Confidence Read as Evidence. Churchill and Roosevelt inferred that de Gaulle's certainty must rest on something. That inference is a well-documented pattern: observers treat displayed confidence as a signal of underlying competence or backing, and the correlation between the two is much weaker than the inference assumes.
The insight neither field gives alone: this makes confidence a transfer of interpretive labour rather than a performance. The weak party does not have to persuade anyone of anything; they have to behave in a way that makes the other side generate an explanation, and the explanations people generate for unexplained certainty are systematically generous. This is why the technique survives contact with sophisticated observers — Churchill was not naïve, and he was not being deceived about any fact. He was filling a gap, and the filling was his own work. The corresponding defence is unusually specific and rarely practised: when someone's position seems unaccountably firm, name the account you have privately supplied for it and check whether you have any evidence for that account — because you almost certainly invented it.
Nobody was deceived. Churchill and Roosevelt both disliked de Gaulle, saw exactly how little he had, and accommodated him anyway — because his certainty made them supply an explanation, and the explanation they supplied was more generous than the facts. Which means confidence in a weak position works not by convincing anyone but by handing them the interpretive work, and people reliably do that work in your favour.