Was this a well-worn cliché among the French? If so, which cheeses make the grate? Or are there holes in this figure? (forgive me)
"Comment voulez-vous gouverner un pays qui a deux cent quarante-six variétés de fromage?"
Les Mots du Général, Ernest Mignon, 1962
There are two things to consider here: the quotation and the number.
The quotation
De Gaulle had a way with words, and many of his famous quotations can be traced back to something he wrote (Une certaine idée de la France) or said in a recorded public speech (Je vous ai compris !). Unfortunately, the cheese quotation is not one of these. It exists in numerous versions, repeated and modified since the 1960s, with the number of cheese types varying between 246 and 600. There is no definite source for it, and it cannot be found in the published collections of De Gaulle's speeches and messages.
The earliest printed version is indeed that published by "Ernest Mignon" in 1962 (number of cheeses: 246). How "Mignon" can be trusted is debatable: "Mignon" was in fact Constantin Melnik, de Gaulle's shadowy head of intelligence services during the Algeria war, a colorful Cold Warrior and a later writer of political romans à clef. He does not give a source for the quotation which has no date and no context. Melnik was a good storyteller but hardly the most reliable person.
Another source for the cheese story seems more accurate: La tragédie du Général (1967), a well-regarded book of contemporary history written by political journalist Jean-Raymond Tournoux. According to Tournoux, de Gaulle said this after the 1951 legislative elections, where his party (the RPF) failed to gather enough votes. Page 111 of the book seems to quote a speech made after the election. It ends by:
Suddenly, the General switched from tragedy to comedy: "Dear friend, one cannot simply bring together (rassembler à froid) a nation that produce 265 kinds of cheese".
Number of cheeses: 265. The quotation appears credible, notably the odd-sounding rassembler à froid. Still, Tournoux fails to source it, unlike the other citations on the same page. In fact, the text is a patchwork of separate quotations, and the "suddenly" just bridges a quotation from an actual speech with the unsourced cheese anecdote. Tournoux's book also includes the phrase "One can only unite the French under the threat of fear", which appears several paragraphs before the cheese one. Since then, numerous collections of famous quotations (eg the Collins Dictionary of Quotations) join the "fear" quotation with the "cheese" quotation in a single one, with the source being "Speech, 1951"!
One interesting clue can be found in another collection of De Gaulle anecdotes by journalist Jean-Michel Royer, Les petites malices du Général. Royer gives the "fear + 265 cheeses" as the original quotation, and says that Louis Vallon, a left-wing gaullist (and a friend of Royer), claimed to have heard it directly late 1952. He also says that there were many other witnesses, "direct or indirect" ones, which caused "those divergent figures for our cheese fauna". It's still second hand (Royer got it from his friend Vallon) but its close to the source.
At this point the best hypothesis is that De Gaulle, circa 1951-1952, actually said something like that in private to a few people - and possibly even repeated it to different people, who found it witty and disseminated their own versions with endless variations in phrasing and cheese numbers.
The number
As mentioned previously, there is no certainty about the number cited by De Gaulle. In fact, he may have given different numbers to different people. It is important to note here that a similar quote is attributed to Churchill in June 1940 ("A country producing almost 360 different types of cheese cannot die") - I'm not going to track down this one! - and that Resistance fighter Colonel Rémy claimed in his memoir that an English friend of his, Kay Harrison, told him the same thing, but with only 200 types of cheese.
In his book Lettres de noblesse (1935), Curnonsky, the ultra-famous "elected Prince of Gastronomy", wrote an elegy about the richness and diversity of French food, including its "four hundred and eighty three cheeses". In 1961, another book, Le Livre de l'amateur de fromages, found Curnonsky too optimistic: the real number was 289! (Lindon, 1961). Well, unless it was 456 (Le Temps, 11 November 1934 and Le Petit Parisien, 3 March 1942), 200 (Rivarol, 27 November 1953), 300 (Marianne, 14 June 1939), 250 (Le Progrès de la Côte d'Or, 13 December 1929), 346 (Rivarol, 23 March 1961), 400 (L'Ouest-Eclair, 26 May 1934), 406 (Le Démocrate Savoyard, 17 June 1939), 130 (L’Événement, 4 September 1948), 137 (Le Matin, 22 January 1941), etc.
In the first half of the 20th century, nobody was able to give a reliable number for the varieties of cheese produced in France. This can be explained by the fact that cheese production until the 1960s was not yet as organized as it is now (Ozouf-Marignier, 2008). The numbers given by De Gaulle and others were some sort of placeholder for a large, approximate number, similar to "umpteen", and not unlike "40" in many traditions (see the Bible). It was meant to represent the diversity of France rather than a real number.
Today, the "official" number of types of cheese given by the CNIEL, the trade organisation of the French dairy sector, is 1200.
In 2012, the French were the world’s leading consumers of cheese at 26.2 kg/inhabitant/year.
Sources