1890-1970
French soldier and politician
1. Introduction
Charles de Gaulle was a soldier, writer, the leader of Free France during World War II and a president of post-war France. He is known for establishing a distinctive nationalist approach, characterised by a strong, centralised state and the advancement of French interests internationally, now referred to as ‘Gaullism’. He had difficult relationships with Churchill and various US presidents but gained their overall support in wartime through his opposition to Nazi Germany. Although proud of French colonial influence, he oversaw the independence of Algeria and Madagascar. He died at the age of 79, a year and a half after resigning from his second term as president.
2. Stories
- De Gaulle had a distinguished military career prior to his exile in the UK.
- In June 1940, Churchill agreed to a proposal to merge the UK and France into a single country, which was rejected by the French cabinet.
- Roosevelt and Churchill viewed de Gaulle as being extremely difficult; meanwhile de Gaulle was highly suspicious of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ motives.
- De Gaulle’s strong personality and aloofness helped to create his mythical status.
- Over time, de Gaulle gained his own ‘-ism’.
- De Gaulle survived over 30 assassination plots.
- De Gaulle was an extremely private person, strictly segregating his public and personal lives.
De Gaulle had a distinguished military career prior to his exile in the UK.
De Gaulle was the third of five siblings in a devout Catholic household in Lille, northern France. After school, he enrolled at the Saint-Cyr military academy in Brittany and joined the infantry under Philippe Pétain, later head of Vichy France. He was injured three times in World War I, by a bullet in the knee, a bullet in the hand and a bayonet in the thigh. He passed out after being shelled and gassed and was taken prisoner. He made five escape attempts but was held for two and half years until the end of the war.
Between the wars he served in various training and operational posts and was a ghost writer for Pétain. He was an advocate of military mechanisation, particularly the use of tanks, which Churchill had helped to create (see H.G. Wells). He rose to colonel by the start of World War II and was given command of the French Fifth Army tank battalions before being appointed as under-secretary of state for national defence and war.
He met Churchill for the first time in London in June 1940 to request more air cover in France (not forthcoming, just ahead of the aerial Battle of Britain) and to discuss a possible military and government evacuation from France to north Africa. He had further meetings that included Churchill the following week in France and again in London. On return to France, he discovered that Pétain had just replaced Paul Reynaud as prime minister with the intention of making peace with Germany.
De Gaulle immediately contacted Major General Eddie Spears, Churchill’s liaison officer assigned to Reynaud. The next morning, de Gaulle and Spears flew on a British aircraft from Bordeaux to the UK, where de Gaulle remained for four years. The day after de Gaulle’s arrival, Churchill gave his ‘Finest Hour’ speech and de Gaulle made his ‘Appeal of 18 June’ on BBC radio, including the words: ‘Must hope disappear? Is defeat final? No! […] Whatever happens, the flame of the French resistance must not be extinguished and will not be extinguished.’1 Very few heard the live speech (which was not recorded) but it is commonly viewed as marking the beginning of the French Resistance. One of de Gaulle’s nicknames is ‘the Man of 18 June’.
In June 1940, Churchill agreed to a proposal to merge the UK and France into a single country, which was rejected by the French cabinet.
Paul Reynaud become French prime minister in March 1940 and was opposed to appeasing Nazi Germany. He signed an agreement with the UK that neither France nor the UK would seek peace with Germany separately. With military defeat looming after the German invasion beginning in May 1940, Reynaud advocated retreat to north Africa to regroup and fight back, but his cabinet voted on 15 June to ask Germany for armistice terms, which Reynaud said would need to be cleared with the UK. The UK war cabinet agreed on condition that the French navy was moved into British harbours to avoid being taken over by Germany.
Meanwhile plans were afoot to give Reynaud a way to avoid an armistice. French entrepreneur Jean Monnet was based in London as part of wartime Anglo-French economic coordination efforts and had already floated the notion of an Anglo-French political union. Prompted by the urgent development of events, a small group drafted a ‘Declaration of Union’, including the wording: ‘France and Great Britain shall no longer be two nations, but one Franco-British Union. The constitution of the Union will provide for joint organs of defence, foreign, financial and economic policies.’2
It was initially met with scepticism by Churchill and much of his cabinet. However, on 16 June de Gaulle arrived in London, learned of the Declaration, and persuaded Churchill that a major move would be needed to prevent a French armistice. The UK cabinet approved the Declaration.
When De Gaulle and Churchill called Reynaud to transmit the news, Reynaud’s eyebrows ‘went up so far they became indistinguishable from his neatly brushed hair’,3 wrote Spears. He was ecstatic but his cabinet rejected the move due to suspicions about British motives and the belief that the UK would soon be defeated by Germany.
Not yet knowing this, Churchill boarded a train at Waterloo Station in London to head to Southampton on the way to France to sign the Declaration. After being told about a French cabinet crisis, he disembarked and returned to Downing Street to discover that Philippe Pétain was the new French prime minister, ending any prospects of a Union.
Roosevelt and Churchill viewed de Gaulle as being extremely difficult; meanwhile de Gaulle was highly suspicious of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ motives.
In early encounters, Churchill was impressed with de Gaulle’s fighting spirit, calling him a ‘man of destiny’.4 Before long, however, he was complaining about de Gaulle’s intolerable rudeness and commenting that he ‘hates England and has left a trail of Anglophobia behind him everywhere’.5 In 1943 Churchill wrote to his cabinet asking whether de Gaulle should be removed as a political force.
US president Roosevelt felt even stronger, excluding him from communications and meetings, and was quoted by Roosevelt’s son as saying, ‘I can’t imagine a man I would distrust more’.6 President Truman continued this approach after Roosevelt’s death, ensuring that de Gaulle was not invited to the Potsdam Conference.
De Gaulle, on the other hand, felt that France’s prime minister Clemenceau had been betrayed after World War I when an American and British pledge to protect France from re-invasion was withdrawn. Clemenceau had dropped his proposal for French annexation of the Rhineland for the pledge. There was also a legacy of bad feeling from Anglo-French colonial conflicts. De Gaulle became determined never to depend on allies, an attitude reinforced after the US and UK gave prompt diplomatic recognition to the Vichy government in World War II, even if this was to try and persuade them to fight against Germany and was later withdrawn.
American entry into World War II was a double-edged sword for de Gaulle, adding US resources but increasing the likelihood of plots by the ‘Anglo-Saxons’, as he referred to the British and Americans (a more restricted group than Churchill’s concept of ‘English speaking peoples’). He was particularly suspicious about Anglo-Saxon intentions towards French influence in the Middle East and Indochina and about the UK-US ‘special relationship’, much desired and vaunted by Churchill.
De Gaulle’s rancour was exacerbated by an angry comment made by Churchill: ‘Each time I must choose between you and Roosevelt, I shall always choose Roosevelt.’7 Many years later, in 1963 and 1967, de Gaulle would veto the UK joining the European Economic Community (‘EEC’), accompanied by a forceful ‘Non’ for the television cameras, fearing UK troublemaking and its possible role as a US Trojan horse.
De Gaulle’s strong personality and aloofness helped to create his mythical status.
Like Churchill, de Gaulle had a vision at a young age that he was destined for great things, writing an essay in 1905 at age 15 about how ‘General de Gaulle’ would save France in 1930 from military attack by Germany. His self-belief was sometimes seen as arrogance by his army superiors, one of whom wrote that he ‘spoils incontestable qualities by his excessive self-assurance, his harshness towards other people’s opinions, and his attitude of a king in exile’.8
Roosevelt would later say that ‘De Gaulle may be an honest fellow but he has a messianic complex’.9 As a senior officer, he created an exclusion zone around himself, making his subordinates keep a distance of six paces away. His lofty attitude was emphasised by his height of 6’5” (1.96 m), France’s tallest president to date.
Churchill’s interpretation was that de Gaulle ‘felt it was essential to his position before the French people that he should maintain a proud and haughty demeanour towards “perfidious Albion”, although in exile, dependent upon our protection and dwelling in our midst. He had to be rude to the British to prove to French eyes that he was not a British puppet. He certainly carried out this policy with perseverance.’10
There was more to his haughtiness than met the eye. Not long before his death, he disclosed to his aide Jacques Foccart: ‘In reality we are on the stage of a theatre where I have been keeping up the illusion since 1940. I am trying to give France the appearance of a solid, firm, confident and expanding country, while it is a worn-out nation’.11
Author Andrew Shennan has described three de Gaulles: the private man, the politician and the mythic figure.12 The latter is the image that now predominates, as with Churchill. In a 2010 opinion poll in France, de Gaulle was voted the most important person in French history, easily beating runner-up Napoleon Bonaparte by 44 percent to 14 percent.
On being asked if he regarded de Gaulle as a great man, Churchill is said to have responded, ‘Why, he’s selfish, he’s arrogant, he thinks he’s the centre of the universe… he… You’re right, he’s a great man.’13
Over time, de Gaulle gained his own ‘-ism’.
‘Gaullism’ is difficult to define and has been appropriated by various types of movements invoking de Gaulle’s legacy. Similarly, politicians of various types have tried to invoke Churchill, although he does not have his own ‘-ism’ as a form of politics. Gaullism has a combination of features: French patriotism, strong presidential powers, republicanism, right-of-centre politics, national unity, social conservatism, and a strong and independent France in international relations.
De Gaulle’s belief in the importance of a powerful national leader was shaped in part by France’s history, particularly the dominant roles of Louis XIV and Napoleon Bonaparte. One of Roosevelt’s main concerns about de Gaulle was that he would become a post-war dictator. De Gaulle resigned as head of government in January 1946, perhaps hoping to be recalled with greater powers, which eventually happened in 1958 during the disintegration of the Fourth Republic into factionalism. He commissioned a new constitution for the Fifth Republic, with considerable authority for himself as president.
He oversaw France’s establishment as the world’s fourth nuclear power in 1960 (after the USA, Soviet Union and UK), although this was largely due to developments while he was out of power. Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos gained independence from French control during de Gaulle’s ‘desert years’ (equivalent to Churchill’s ‘wilderness years’), leading to pressure on him to grant the same to Algeria, where a civil war had begun in 1954. In 1962, he acceded to Algeria’s independence, much to the horror of most of the pieds-noirs (European settlers),14 exacerbated by the fact that Algeria had officially been an integral part of France for over 100 years, rather than a colony.
In 1963, he signed the Élysée Treaty, a friendship agreement with Germany as a counterweight to American, British and Soviet influence. In Canada he caused a diplomatic incident in 1967 by declaring ‘Vive le Québec libre’ (‘Long live free Quebec’), supporting French-speaking nationalists. He reduced France’s participation in NATO because of USA and UK dominance, and UK membership of the EEC was only granted in 1973, four years after his retirement and two years after his death.
His threat to resign if he did not win a referendum on constitutional reform in 1969 may have contributed to his own downfall. He departed with a poor reputation which has subsequently been transformed.
De Gaulle survived over 30 assassination plots.
One of the most serious attempts was in August 1962 when the Organisation de l’armée secrète (‘OAS’) opened fire on de Gaulle’s car as he was travelling from the Élysée Palace in Paris to an airbase near the city. De Gaulle’s wife Yvonne and his aide-de-camp Colonel Alain de Boissieu (who was also his son-in-law) were in the car with a police driver. De Boissieu shouted to de Gaulle to get down, which he did reluctantly. Fourteen bullets hit the vehicle, one of them passing very close to where de Gaulle’s head had just been. Two tyres were punctured but the vehicle was able to escape.
‘This time, it was close,’ de Gaulle said, with understatement, on arrival at the airbase. ‘Don’t forget the chickens’, his wife said, referring to some food in the boot for lunch the next day. ‘I hope they’re all right.’15 That evening de Gaulle played the incident down in a phone call with Prime Minister Pompidou, saying that ‘those men shot like pigs’.16 The incident was incorporated into Frederick Forsyth’s novel The Day of the Jackal (1971).
The ringleader, Colonel Jean Bastien-Thiry, was motivated by his anger about Algerian independence. He was convicted and executed by firing squad at Fort d’Ivry in Paris, the last death sentence to have been carried out in France. Two of his accomplices also received death sentences, commuted by de Gaulle to life imprisonment.
Around a year earlier, de Gaulle had been travelling by car from Paris to his country home with his wife. The car approached a pile of sand by the side of the road in which there was a container of fuel, plastic explosives and nitroglycerin. The bomb burst into flames but failed to explode. The driver accelerated through the fire and the occupants changed vehicle a short distance later. Six men were arrested and jailed, also apparently opposed to Algerian independence.
De Gaulle was known for his bravery and calmness under attack, including during sniper fire on the Champs Élysées in Paris in 1944 and gunfire in the Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris in 1945, although he was not necessarily a target in those cases. He caused security headaches by a lax approach to self-protection but conceded to greater caution over time.
De Gaulle was an extremely private person, strictly segregating his public and personal lives.
It is thought that the name ‘de Gaulle’ is associated with the Dutch name de Wal, fittingly meaning ‘rampart’. He once wrote, ‘Foreign affairs cannot include sentiment: men can have friends but statesmen cannot’,17 a completely different approach to that of Churchill. On a wall at Chartwell, a signed photo of de Gaulle is addressed formally to Churchill (in French) as being ‘from his companion’.18
In 1934 he bought La Boisserie, a nine-acre estate in Colombey-les-Deux-Églises, 135 miles (220 km) south-east of Paris. It was his country home for life, initially partly for the wellbeing of his daughter Anne who had Down’s syndrome. She died from pneumonia, aged 20. His wife Yvonne appeared in public with him but never gave interviews. His son Philippe was an admiral and senator and his other daughter Élisabeth chaired a foundation established by de Gaulle for young women with mental health conditions.
His departure from public life was announced with only two sentences: ‘I am relinquishing my functions as President of the Republic. This decision takes effect from noon today.’19 He then disappeared to his estate, never to give another public statement or interview.
Some of his home life has been disclosed over time. He usually went for two or three walks a day, played cards (solitaire and bridge), liked classical music, and drank Bordeaux wine and Drappier champagne. In the evenings he watched the news and movies on television. He disliked having a telephone and kept it in a cupboard under the stairs.
He was in good health for his age when he suddenly collapsed from a ruptured blood vessel in his neck, dying within half an hour. He had refused a public funeral and was buried in a private ceremony in Colombey-les-Deux-Églises. A public service was held simultaneously at Notre-Dame cathedral, attended by many international leaders, including Prime Minister Edward Heath from the UK. Churchill had died five years earlier and had not wanted de Gaulle at his own funeral, but relented (see Elizabeth II). At Colombey-les-Deux-Églises, there is now a 145 foot (44 m) high Cross of Lorraine (a symbol of Free France), a memorial centre, and a museum in part of his family house.
3. Biographical summary
| Occupation | Army officer, writer, statesman |
| Country | France |
| Career | Corporal (1910). Platoon commander (1914). Captain (1915). Prisoner of war (1916-18). Army trainer/lecturer (1919-25). Writer for Pétain (1925-27). Major (1927). Staff officer (1930s). Tank commander (1939-40). Division commander (1940). Brigadier-General (1940). Under-Secretary of State for National Defence and War (1940). Leader of Free France (1940-44). Chairman of the Provisional Government of the French Republic (1944-46). Minister of Algerian Affairs (1958-59). Minister of Defence (1958-59). President (1959-1969). |
| Born | 1890 at 9 rue Princesse (maternal grandparents’ house), Lille, France (16 years younger than Churchill) |
| Father | Henri de Gaulle (1848-1932), civil servant, teacher, Jesuit schoolteacher |
| Mother | Jeanne Maillot (1860-1940), businessman’s daughter |
| Siblings | Third of five children: 1. Xavier (1887-1955), mining engineer, resistance fighter, diplomat 2. Marie-Agnès (1889-1983), resistance fighter 3. Charles André Joseph Pierre Marie (1890-1970) 4. Jacques (1893-1946), mining engineer, paralysed by encephalitis 5. Pierre (1897-1959), resistance fighter, prisoner of war, politician, businessman |
| Education | His father’s school in Paris; secondary Catholic school Collège Stanislas, Paris; Military Academy St. Cyr, Brittany |
| Spouse | Yvonne Vendroux (1900-1979), m. 1921 until her husband’s death; known in France as ‘Aunt Yvonne’ |
| Children | 1. Philippe (b. 1921), admiral and senator 2. Élisabeth (1924-2013), chair of father’s charity; married Alain de Boissieu, army officer and de Gaulle’s aide-de-camp 3. Anne (1928-48); died of pneumonia, aged 20 |
| Died | 1970 at home La Boisserie in Colombey-les-Deux-Églises, north-eastern France (5 years after Churchill), aged 79; aneurysm |
| Buried | Notre-Dame-de-l’Assomption church cemetery, Colombey-les-Deux-Églises |
| Nicknames | The Great Asparagus (due to height and features); the General; Colonel Motors (due to enthusiasm for tanks and armoured cars); the Big Moustache; the Man of 18 June (due to 1940 radio address); General Micro (caricature due to his wartime use of a BBC microphone); the Constable (the title of the medieval commander-in-chief of the French army) |
| Height | 6’5” (1.96 m) |
| TIME magazine | Man of the Year 1958. Front cover ten other times: 1941, 1944, 1947, 1958, 1960 (with others), 1962, 1963, 1966, 1968 and 1968. |
4. See also
French leadership
Other World War II leaders
- Roosevelt, Franklin D.
- Truman, Harry
Churchill’s French connections
- Chanel, Coco (French fashion designer)
- Edward VIII (exiled in France)
- Elliott, Maxine (American actress living on the Riviera)
- Maze, Paul (French artist)
- Pol-Roger, Odette (champagne company executive)
5. Further reading
De Gaulle
- Fenby, Jonathan, The General: Charles De Gaulle and the France He Saved (Simon and Schuster, 2010)
- Jackson, Julian, A Certain Idea of France: The Life of Charles de Gaulle (Penguin Books Limited, 2018)
- Shennan, Andrew, De Gaulle (Taylor & Francis, 2014)
De Gaulle and Churchill
- Kersaudy, François, Churchill and De Gaulle (Atheneum, 1982)
- Morrisey, Will, Churchill and de Gaulle: The Geopolitics of Liberty (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2014)
De Gaulle and ‘Anglo-Saxon’ tensions
- AP News, ‘Churchill-de Gaulle Feud Detailed’, 2000
- Berthon, Simon, Allies at War (Thistle Publishing, 2013)
- Capet, Antoine, ‘How Charles de Gaulle Saw the “Anglo-Saxon” Relationship’, The International Churchill Society, 2011
- Keylor, William R., Charles de Gaulle: A Thorn in the Side of Six American Presidents (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2020)
- Morrisey, William, ‘What Was the Reason for Roosevelt’s Antipathy Toward de Gaulle?’, The Churchill Project – Hillsdale College, 2018
Modern France
- Fenby, Jonathan, The History of Modern France: From the Revolution to the War on Terror (Simon & Schuster UK, 2015)
- Schwartz, Vanessa R., Modern France: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2011)
6. References
1 Charles de Gaulle, ‘Charles de Gaulle Speech’, BBC News, 1940.
2 Hansard, ‘French Republic (Proposed Union with Great Britain)’, 1940.
3 Major-General Sir Edward Louis Spears, Assignment to Catastrophe, Vol. 2: The Fall of France, June 1940 (Lucknow Books, 2014), p. 291.
4 Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War: Volume 2: Their Finest Hour (Houghton Mifflin, 1949), p. 182.
5 AP News, ‘Churchill-de Gaulle Feud Detailed’, 2000.
6 Elliott Roosevelt, As He Saw It, 1946, p. 73.
7 Charles de Gaulle, War Memoirs: Unity, 1942-1944 (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1959), p. 253. Similarly, he said, ‘Each time we must choose between Europe and the open sea, we shall always choose the open sea’: de Gaulle, Unity, p. 253.
8 Jackson, De Gaulle, p.000
9 AP News.
10 Churchill, p. 509.
11 Julian Jackson, A Certain Idea of France: The Life of Charles de Gaulle (Penguin Books Limited, 2018), p. 000.
12 Andrew Shennan, De Gaulle (Taylor & Francis, 2014), pp. vii–viii. The categories were derived from American political scientist Stanley Hoffman, whose third category was ‘historic figure’.
13 François Kersaudy, Churchill and De Gaulle (Atheneum, 1982), p. 210.
14 The pieds-noirs, ‘Blackfeet’, were people of European origin who were born in French Algeria. There are differing opinions about the origin of the term.
15 Jean Lacouture, De Gaulle: The Ruler, 1945-1970 (Avon, 1968), p. 328.
16 Lacouture, p. 328.
17 Jackson, p. 95.
18 For signs of a conciliatory approach by Gaulle towards Churchill (and Clementine), see National Trust, ‘Symbols of Freedom and of Friendship’, National Trust.
19 Régis Debray, Charles de Gaulle: Futurist of the Nation, trans. by John Howe (Verso, 1994), p. 38.