Charles de Gaulle

1. Who was Charles de Gaulle, and why does he matter?

Charles de Gaulle (1890 to 1970) was a French general and statesman who shaped his country’s destiny across three of the most turbulent decades in its modern history. He matters for reasons that reach well beyond any single act. In 1940, when France collapsed under German invasion and its government signed an armistice, he refused to accept defeat and broadcast from London the call to resistance that gave the French people a reason to keep fighting. After the war he founded a new constitutional order, the Fifth Republic, that replaced a broken parliamentary system with one built around strong executive authority, and which France still lives under today. He gave his country its nuclear deterrent, withdrew it from NATO’s integrated command, and pursued an independent foreign policy that defied both American and Soviet pressure. He was, in the judgement of most French historians, the greatest French leader since Napoleon.

2. What kind of soldier was de Gaulle, and what did the First World War do to him?

De Gaulle was born in Lille on 22 November 1890 into a devoutly Catholic, patriotic family, and entered the elite military academy of Saint-Cyr in 1909. He graduated in 1912 and joined an infantry regiment commanded by Colonel Philippe Pétain, the officer who would become both his mentor and, decades later, his greatest antagonist. In the First World War he was wounded three times, mentioned in dispatches three times, and captured by the Germans at the Battle of Verdun in March 1916. He spent the remaining two years and eight months of the war as a prisoner of war, making five unsuccessful escape attempts and using his confinement to study, write, and reflect on the failures of French military thinking. The experience left him with a deep conviction that France’s military and political leadership was too wedded to the lessons of the past and too resistant to new ideas.

3. How did de Gaulle’s thinking about modern warfare differ from his superiors?

Between the wars, de Gaulle became France’s most original and most ignored military thinker. While the French military establishment invested in the Maginot Line, a vast system of static fortifications on the German border, and planned for another war of trenches and attrition, de Gaulle argued for the opposite. In 1934 he published Vers l’armée de métier (Towards a Professional Army), proposing a smaller, fully professional force built around concentrated armoured divisions supported by air power, capable of rapid offensive manoeuvre. His superiors showed little interest. The Germans read his book with considerably more attention. When France fell in May 1940, it fell in large part precisely because the Wehrmacht used the kind of combined-arms armoured tactics de Gaulle had advocated, while French strategy was still anchored to a defensive mentality his book had spent six years arguing against.

4. What did de Gaulle do during the Fall of France in 1940?

In the weeks of catastrophe that followed Germany’s invasion of France in May 1940, de Gaulle was the only French general to launch a sustained counterattack. Given command of the incomplete 4th Armoured Division, he struck German bridgeheads at Montcornet and then at Abbeville in late May, taking hundreds of prisoners and earning enough notice from Prime Minister Paul Reynaud to be appointed Under-Secretary of State for War on 6 June. When Reynaud’s government collapsed and Marshal Pétain sued for an armistice, de Gaulle flew to London on 17 June 1940, facing imminent arrest if he had remained in France. The following evening, 18 June 1940, he broadcast over the BBC a short address to the French people, arguing that the battle of France was not over and that France was not alone. Few people heard it that day. No recording of it survives. Over the following years it became the founding text of French resistance.

5. How did de Gaulle build Free France, and what obstacles did he face?

Building a credible force from nothing, against the resistance of allies who found him abrasive and difficult, was de Gaulle’s achievement between 1940 and 1944. Churchill recognised him as the leader of the Free French, but both Roosevelt and the American government regarded him with deep suspicion, preferring to deal with other French factions. De Gaulle had no army, no territory, and no democratic mandate: his sole source of authority was the radio broadcast of 18 June and the force of his own conviction that he alone embodied the France that had not surrendered. He gathered forces in Africa, the Middle East, and wherever Frenchmen could be persuaded to join him. He quarrelled with his allies repeatedly, defending French sovereignty and French prestige with a stubbornness his critics found infuriating and his supporters found essential. By 1944 the Free French had become a substantial military force, and de Gaulle had successfully resisted every attempt to reduce France to a subordinate role in its own liberation.

6. How did de Gaulle return to France, and what happened in Paris in August 1944?

7. Why did de Gaulle resign in 1946, and what was the Fourth Republic?

De Gaulle had his own clear vision of what France’s postwar constitution should look like: a strong executive president, capable of governing without being held hostage to the shifting coalitions of a fragmented parliament. The Constituent Assembly that was elected in 1945 had a different view, dominated by parties that wanted a parliamentary republic similar to the Third Republic that had preceded the war. Unable to impose his model, de Gaulle resigned as head of the Provisional Government in January 1946, believing the politicians were repeating old mistakes. The Fourth Republic that followed proved him partly right: it was plagued by governmental instability, with twenty-one different governments between 1946 and 1958, unable to resolve the colonial crises in Indochina and Algeria that would eventually bring it down. De Gaulle withdrew to his house at Colombey-les-Deux-Églises and waited.

8. How did de Gaulle come back to power, and what was the Fifth Republic?

The crisis that returned de Gaulle to power was Algeria. France had been fighting a brutal colonial war there since 1954, and by 1958 the army in Algeria was in open revolt against the Paris government, threatening a military coup. Political leaders across the spectrum concluded that only de Gaulle had the authority to hold the country together. He was brought back as prime minister in June 1958 with emergency powers, and immediately set about writing the constitution he had always wanted. The new Fifth Republic gave the president the power to dissolve parliament, call referendums, appoint the prime minister, and in moments of national crisis govern by decree. It was approved by referendum in September 1958 with 82.6 percent in favour. De Gaulle was elected the Republic’s first president in December 1958 and took office in January 1959. The constitution he wrote is still France’s.

9. What was de Gaulle’s vision for France in the world?

De Gaulle’s foreign policy rested on a single organising idea, which he called grandeur: France was a great power with a distinctive civilisation, and it could not fulfil its destiny by subordinating itself to either of the two superpowers. He granted independence to Algeria in 1962 after a searing political process that nearly triggered civil war and cost him several assassination attempts. He developed France’s independent nuclear deterrent, the force de frappe, conducting the country’s first atomic test in the Sahara in February 1960. In 1963 he signed the Élysée Treaty with Konrad Adenauer, establishing the Franco-German partnership as the axis of European politics. He twice vetoed British membership of the European Economic Community, arguing that Britain was too close to the United States to be a genuinely European power. In 1966 he withdrew France from NATO’s integrated military command, insisting that no foreign troops would be stationed on French soil under foreign authority. The policy was contentious and remains controversial; its central premise, that France must be the master of its own defence, has shaped French strategic thinking ever since.

10. How did de Gaulle’s presidency end, and what is his legacy?

The events of May 1968, when student protests and a general strike brought France to a standstill, exposed the limits of de Gaulle’s authority. He survived the crisis by rallying the army and winning a decisive election in June, but the episode showed that his style of leadership, personal, presidential, and resistant to social change, no longer commanded the automatic deference it once had. In April 1969 he staked his presidency on a referendum proposing to reform the Senate and decentralise government. When 52.4 percent voted against, he resigned immediately, as he had always said he would. He retired to Colombey-les-Deux-Églises and died there on 9 November 1970, just short of his eightieth birthday, from a sudden aneurysm while watching the television news. His funeral, by his own instruction, was a private affair attended only by his companions of the Resistance. His legacy is the institutional framework within which France still governs itself, the independent foreign and defence policy that still defines French sovereignty, and the idea that a nation, even in its darkest hour, can refuse to accept that the battle is lost.