Charles de Gaulle

Charles André Joseph Marie de Gaulle was born on November 22, 1890, in Lille, an industrial city in northern France, though his family lived mainly in Paris ^[1]. His father, Henri de Gaulle, taught philosophy and literature at Jesuit schools, and the household combined Catholic piety with a deep attachment to French history. The young Charles absorbed both. He read widely, memorized long passages of verse, and grew up hearing about the defeat of 1870, when Prussia humiliated France and seized Alsace and Lorraine ^[1].

He decided early on a military career. In 1909 he entered the military academy at Saint-Cyr, graduating in 1912 and joining an infantry regiment commanded by Colonel Philippe Pétain, a man whose path would cross his own in dramatic and eventually bitter ways ^[2]. De Gaulle was tall, standing roughly six feet five inches, bookish, and self-assured to a degree that some superiors found difficult. Those traits never left him.

The First World War tested him quickly. He was wounded at Dinant in August 1914, wounded again in 1915, and at Verdun in March 1916 he was bayoneted, gassed, and captured by German forces ^[2]. He spent thirty two months as a prisoner of war, attempting escape several times without success. Captivity gave him time to study German military organization and to sharpen the ideas about warfare and leadership that would define his interwar writing ^[1].

Between the wars de Gaulle built a reputation as a military intellectual rather than a conventional careerist. He served briefly with French forces advising Poland during its 1920 war with Soviet Russia, taught at Saint-Cyr, and studied at the École Supérieure de Guerre, where his independence of mind irritated instructors ^[2]. He also worked on Pétain's staff, and the two men later fell out over authorship of a historical study, an early sign of the rupture to come.

His books made his name. Le Fil de l'épée (The Edge of the Sword, 1932) set out a theory of leadership built on character, mystery, and calculated distance. Vers l'armée de métier (1934) argued that France should abandon its faith in static defenses like the Maginot Line and build a professional force organized around tanks and mechanized units capable of rapid offensive action ^[3]. French commanders largely ignored him. German officers, by several accounts, read such armored warfare theories with more interest, and the campaigns of 1940 vindicated the argument in the cruelest possible way ^[3].

When Germany invaded in May 1940, de Gaulle commanded the 4th Armored Division and led counterattacks at Montcornet and Abbeville, among the few French actions that forced German units to pause ^[2]. On June 6, 1940, Premier Paul Reynaud appointed him undersecretary of state for national defense. Ten days later the government fell, Pétain sought an armistice, and de Gaulle flew to London rather than accept surrender. On June 18, 1940, speaking over the BBC, he called on the French to continue the fight, insisting that France had lost a battle but not the war ^[4]. Few heard the broadcast that evening. It became, in retrospect, the founding act of the Free French movement, and a Vichy court soon condemned him to death in absentia ^[4].

Anyone asking who was Charles de Gaulle usually starts with the war years, and with reason. From London, and later Algiers, he built the Free French from a handful of volunteers into a movement with its own army, administration, and claim to legitimacy. He rallied French colonies in Equatorial Africa in 1940, and under his authority Jean Moulin unified the fractious internal Resistance into the National Council of the Resistance in 1943 ^[4]. His relations with Churchill were stormy and with Roosevelt worse; the American president distrusted him and preferred other French figures. De Gaulle outlasted them all in French politics. On August 26, 1944, the day after the liberation of Paris, he walked down the Champs-Élysées before enormous crowds, a scene that fixed his place in national memory ^[1].

He headed the provisional government from 1944 to January 1946, restoring republican legality, nationalizing key industries, and extending the vote to French women, who cast national ballots for the first time in 1945 ^[5]. Frustrated by the return of party maneuvering, he resigned abruptly, expecting to be recalled. He was not, at least not for twelve years. During that period he wrote his war memoirs and waited at his country home while the Fourth Republic cycled through governments.

The Algerian crisis brought him back. In May 1958, with the army in Algiers in open revolt and civil war a real possibility, parliament turned to de Gaulle as the one figure with authority over both the military and the public. He accepted on condition that he could draft a new constitution ^[5]. The result, approved overwhelmingly by referendum in September 1958, created the Fifth Republic, with a strong presidency largely insulated from parliamentary instability. Among the central Charles de Gaulle achievements, this constitutional settlement may be the most durable: France still lives under it. Elected president in December 1958, he moved, cautiously and then decisively, toward Algerian self-determination, surviving assassination attempts by the OAS, a terrorist organization of settlers and officers who considered him a traitor. The Évian Accords of March 1962 ended the war, and Algeria became independent that July ^[6].

As president he pursued what he called a politics of grandeur. France tested its first atomic bomb in 1960 and built an independent nuclear force. He twice vetoed British entry into the European Economic Community, recognized the People's Republic of China in 1964, and in 1966 withdrew France from NATO's integrated military command while remaining in the alliance itself ^[6]. In 1962 he secured direct popular election of the president by referendum, deepening the office's authority, and in 1965 he won the first such election, defeating François Mitterrand in a runoff ^[5].

In April 1921 de Gaulle married Yvonne Vendroux, the daughter of a biscuit manufacturer from Calais. The marriage lasted until his death and was, by all serious accounts, devoted and intensely private ^[1]. They had three children: Philippe, born in 1921, who became an admiral in the French navy; Élisabeth, born in 1924; and Anne, born in 1928 with Down syndrome. De Gaulle, so famously stiff in public, was tender with Anne in a way that surprised those who saw it. Her death in 1948, at age twenty, wounded him deeply, and the couple founded the Fondation Anne de Gaulle to care for children with disabilities ^[2].

Home was La Boisserie, a house in the small village of Colombey-les-Deux-Églises in the Haute-Marne, purchased in 1934. There he wrote, walked, and played solitaire during his years out of power, and there he returned whenever office released him ^[1]. He took no salary beyond his general's pension for long stretches, paid for the family's own electricity at the Élysée Palace, and left a modest estate. Faith remained constant; he attended Mass regularly throughout his life.

His personality became part of French political vocabulary. Aloof, ironic, given to lapidary pronouncements, he treated his own person as an instrument of the state, once remarking on the distinction between the private man and the public figure called de Gaulle. Aides found him exacting. Voters, for a long time, found him reassuring.

The last phase of his presidency was turbulent. In May 1968 student protests in Paris grew into a general strike involving millions of workers, the largest social upheaval in postwar French history. For a few days the government seemed to lose its grip, and de Gaulle briefly and secretly flew to Baden-Baden in West Germany to confirm the army's loyalty through General Jacques Massu ^[6]. He then returned, dissolved the National Assembly, and watched his supporters win a crushing majority in the June elections. The victory restored order but not his standing.

In April 1969 he staked his presidency on a referendum concerning regional reform and changes to the Senate, announcing in advance that he would resign if it failed. Voters rejected the proposal on April 27, and he left office the next day with a two sentence statement ^[5]. There was no farewell address and no attempt to cling on. Georges Pompidou, his former prime minister, succeeded him.

De Gaulle withdrew to Colombey and worked on a new set of memoirs, completing only the first volume. On November 9, 1970, while playing patience in the early evening, he suffered a ruptured aneurysm and died within minutes, less than two weeks before his eightieth birthday ^[1]. Following instructions he had written years earlier, he was buried in the village churchyard beside his daughter Anne, in a plain ceremony without presidents or ministers, while a separate memorial service at Notre-Dame drew dozens of heads of state. President Pompidou told the country that General de Gaulle was dead and France was a widow.

Few modern leaders shaped a nation's institutions and self-image so directly. The Fifth Republic's constitution, built around a strong elected president, has proved the most stable French regime since the Revolution, and every subsequent president has operated within the framework he designed ^[5]. Gaullism outlived the man as a political tradition emphasizing national independence, a strong state, and skepticism of bloc politics, claimed in varying forms by parties of the right and invoked, when convenient, across the spectrum.

His foreign policy legacy is equally visible. France's independent nuclear deterrent, its permanent seat diplomacy, and its habit of distinguishing its positions from those of the United States all trace back to his presidency. France returned to NATO's integrated command only in 2009, more than four decades after he withdrew from it ^[6]. Historians continue to debate his record: critics point to his autocratic style, his handling of May 1968, and the human cost of the Algerian endgame, including the fate of the harkis, Algerians who had fought for France. Admirers answer that in 1940 and again in 1958 he supplied legitimacy when the state itself had collapsed.

The commemorations are hard to miss. Paris's principal airport, the Place de l'Étoile, France's nuclear aircraft carrier, and hundreds of streets and schools carry his name, and among basic Charles de Gaulle facts, one is telling: polls of the French public have repeatedly ranked him as the most important figure in their national history ^[7]. His war memoirs, admired for their prose as much as their content, entered the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, the canon of French literature, in 2000 ^[3].