Charles de Gaulle: A Certain Idea of France
At ten o'clock on the evening of 18 June 1940, a French brigadier general of twenty-six days' standing sat down at a BBC microphone in London and told his countrymen that nothing was lost. "Whatever happens, the flame of French resistance must not be extinguished and will not be extinguished." Almost nobody heard him; the BBC failed to record it. He was nearly fifty, unknown at home, isolated abroad, and within six weeks sentenced to death for treason. He proceeded to behave, for the next thirty years, as though he personally constituted the French state.
The Professor's Son at Verdun
He was born on 22 November 1890 in Lille, third of five children of Henri de Gaulle, a professor of history and literature, and Jeanne Maillot, in a household devoutly Catholic, monarchist and steeped in French military history. From the Collège Stanislas he went to Saint-Cyr, 1909 to 1912, graduating thirteenth in his class, and joined the 33rd Infantry Regiment under a colonel named Philippe Pétain, whom he admired without reserve.
The First World War nearly killed him three times. Wounded in the knee at Dinant in 1914, he won the Croix de Guerre in 1915, was shot through the left hand at the First Battle of Champagne, and at Verdun in 1916 was bayoneted, gassed and captured. He spent thirty-two months as a prisoner across six camps, mostly at Ingolstadt, attempting escape five times, failing five times; fellow prisoners nicknamed him *le Connétable*.
The Man Who Was Right Too Early
After the war came a mission to Poland that earned him the Virtuti Militari, a lectureship at Saint-Cyr and a stint ghostwriting for Pétain. He published *La Discorde chez l'ennemi* in 1924 and, in 1934, *Vers l'Armée de Métier*, arguing for a professional mechanised force built around 3,000 tanks. It sold 700 copies. Made colonel in 1937, he commanded the 507th Tank Regiment at Metz.
The vindication was catastrophic. Given the 4th Armoured Division in May 1940, he counter-attacked at Montcornet on 17–19 May, losing 23 of 90 vehicles but forcing a German withdrawal — one of the few French successes of the campaign. He was promoted brigadier-general on 23 May, struck at the Abbeville bridgehead on 28–29 May, and on 5 June Paul Reynaud made him Under-Secretary of State for National Defence. Twelve days later he flew to London with General Edward Spears.
London
The Appeal insisted France had been beaten by German technical superiority and bad leadership, not by national weakness, and invited soldiers, engineers and armaments workers to join him. He repeated it on 22 June — recorded this time, and heard by far more people — calling the armistice "not only capitulation but also slavery." A court martial condemned him to death in absentia on 2 August 1940. His reply: "I consider the act of the Vichy men as void."
He then built a state out of a broadcast. From Brazzaville in October 1940 he set up an Empire Defence Council and invited Vichy's colonies to defect; in May 1943 he moved to Algiers and took over the French Committee of National Liberation. Roosevelt called him an apprentice dictator and refused to recognise his authority; Churchill was more sympathetic and frequently exasperated. On 14 June 1944 de Gaulle landed at Bayeux and declared it the capital of Free France, establishing by fait accompli that his provisional government would run liberated territory. He extracted from Eisenhower an agreement that French troops would enter Paris first; on 25 August Leclerc's division took the city.
The Purge and the Exit
As head of the Provisional Government he handled the *épuration* with more restraint than the mood demanded, commuting 998 of 1,554 capital sentences, including every one passed on a woman, and Pétain's to life. He was never invited to Yalta or Potsdam and never forgave it; his resentment of the Anglo-Americans could be petty, and he closed a British-staffed ambulance unit for flying Union flags.
On 20 January 1946, he simply resigned, expecting to be recalled with greater powers. He was not. He retired to Colombey-les-Deux-Églises and wrote his war memoirs, which open: "All my life, I have had a certain idea of France." The Rassemblement du Peuple Français, founded in 1947, took 121 seats in 1951 and then faded for want of press and television access. The wilderness lasted twelve years.
Recalled
On 13 May 1958 pied-noir settlers seized government buildings in Algiers and General Massu formed a committee of public safety. De Gaulle let it be known he was available. "Who honestly believes," he asked on 19 May, "that, at age 67, I would start a career as a dictator?" Coty warned on 29 May that France was on the edge of civil war, and on 1 June the Assembly made him prime minister by 329 votes to 224, on his terms: a powerful presidency and six months of emergency powers. Michel Debré drafted the constitution, 82.6 per cent approved it on 28 September, and on 21 December he was elected the Fifth Republic's first president.
He then did what the settlers had installed him to prevent: Algerian independence in 1962, through repeated OAS assassination attempts. Abroad he pursued a politics of grandeur: an independent nuclear force that made France the world's fourth nuclear power, withdrawal from NATO's integrated command in 1966, the Élysée Treaty with West Germany in 1963, two vetoes of British entry to the EEC, attacks on American policy in Vietnam and on the dollar's exorbitant privilege, and the cry of "Vive le Québec libre" from a Montreal balcony in 1967. He rode out May 1968 and won the snap election that followed with an increased majority. In April 1969 he staked his office on a referendum about decentralisation, lost, and resigned the next day. He died on 9 November 1970, aged 79.
Why Charles Is Called a Genius
The claim is not an intellectual one, and it is more honest to say so: de Gaulle produced no philosophy and no economics. His gifts were prophetic military judgment, political timing and — decisively — a writer's and an actor's craft. The judgment is documented: *Vers l'Armée de Métier*, in 1934, described the armoured warfare that destroyed France six years later, and its author was among the few French commanders to win anything that May.
The craft is the harder thing to name and the more important. In June 1940 he had no troops, no mandate, no recognition and a death sentence. He had a voice, a prose style and an absolute refusal to accept that Vichy was France. Out of those he manufactured legitimacy: a government in exile the Allies were forced to treat as a state, and a national story in which France had never surrendered.
The counter-case is real. His 1934 book changed nothing, selling 700 copies while the Germans acted on the same lesson. His 1946 resignation was a miscalculation that cost him twelve years, and the RPF failed. His 1958 return rode a military insurrection he had not organised but was willing to use, and the constitution he commissioned has been called plebiscitary ever since. His treatment of allies shaded from strategy into vanity, and he ended by staking the presidency on a referendum he need not have held.
Legacy
The Fifth Republic is still standing, still shaped around the office he designed for himself, and France's insistence on being treated as a great power is his too. So is a word: Gaullism, claimed by parties across the French spectrum that agree on nothing else. His deepest bequest is the fiction he made true in 1940 — that a nation is not defeated so long as somebody, somewhere, refuses to say it is.
Achievements
- President of the French Republic (1959–1969)
- President of the Council (1958–1959)
- president of the Provisional Government of the French Republic (1944–1946)
- French co-prince of Andorra (1944–1946)
- Grand Cross of the National Order of Merit
- Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour
- Knight Grand Cross with Collar of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic — 1959
- Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order
- Educated at École Spéciale Militaire de Saint-Cyr and Collège Stanislas de Paris
