Charles de Gaulle

• 1. Introduction

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  Charles de Gaulle was born on the 22nd of November 1890 in Lille, the third of five children in a devoutly Catholic, conservative, and monarchist household. He died on the 9th of November 1970, leaving his presidential memoirs unfinished. Between those two dates he became the man widely regarded as the greatest Frenchman of the 20th century. His father Henri was a professor of history and literature at a Jesuit college. His mother Jeanne descended from wealthy entrepreneurs. At fifteen, young Charles wrote an essay imagining himself as "General de Gaulle" leading the French Army to victory over Germany in 1930. Decades later, something remarkably close to that fantasy came true. How did a mediocre cadet from a Lille family, taken prisoner during the First World War, become the man who single-handedly kept France in the fight during its darkest hour? And once France was liberated, how did the same man reshape the entire structure of French politics, withdraw his country from NATO's military command, and acquire nuclear weapons for a nation that had been occupied just years before? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. Family, Formation, and Ambition

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  Henri de Gaulle traced his line back through parliamentary gentry of Normandy and Burgundy, and the family name itself may have Dutch origins, possibly derived from van der Walle, meaning "from the rampart" or "defensive wall". Charles grew up in a household where historical and philosophical debate was encouraged at the dinner table. His mother's tears over the French capitulation at Sedan in 1870 planted his first obsession with military strategy. His uncle, also named Charles de Gaulle, was a passionate Celticist who dreamed of uniting the Welsh, Scots, Irish, and Bretons into one people. His grandmother Josephine-Marie wrote poetry that inflamed his Christian faith. In his early teens he was already writing, and his family paid to have a one-act verse play privately published. He read voraciously: the German philosophers Nietzsche, Kant, and Goethe sat alongside Plato and the prose of Chateaubriand on his shelves. By July 1906, he had abandoned his undistinguished school record and set his sights on the military academy at Saint-Cyr. Biographer Jean Lacouture suggests he joined the army partly to please his father and partly because it was one of the few institutions representing the whole of France. The army's reputation was poor: in 1908 there were fewer than 700 applicants for Saint-Cyr, down from 2,000 at the turn of the century. De Gaulle's future mentor at Saint-Cyr, Colonel Philippe Petain, would write glowing appraisals of the young lieutenant in 1913, a professional bond that would eventually crack under the weight of one of history's most consequential betrayals.

• 3. Wounds, Captivity, and First Books

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  On the 15th of August 1914, Charles de Gaulle received his baptism of fire and was among the first officers wounded, taking a bullet in the knee at the Battle of Dinant. By March 1915, at the First Battle of Champagne, a shot through the left hand became infected and incapacitated him for four months. The wound was serious enough that he was forced to wear his wedding ring on his right hand for the rest of his life. His worst wound came on the 2nd of March 1916 at Douaumont during the Battle of Verdun. Leading a charge to break out of a surrounded position, he took a bayonet wound to the left thigh after being stunned by a shell and passed out from poison gas. He was one of the few survivors of his battalion. He then spent 32 months across six prisoner camps, most of that time at Ingolstadt, where his fellow inmates included journalist Remy Roure and Mikhail Tukhachevsky, a future commander of the Soviet Red Army. De Gaulle and Tukhachevsky discovered that their theories of fast-moving, mechanized warfare closely resembled each other's. He made five unsuccessful escape attempts during his captivity: hiding in a laundry basket, digging a tunnel, breaking through a wall, and even posing as a nurse. Each failure brought punishment: long stretches of solitary confinement and withdrawal of newspapers and tobacco. He turned his frustration into analysis, writing his first book, Discorde chez l'ennemi (The Enemy's House Divided), which examined the divisions within the German forces. The book appeared in 1924, and it was followed by others: The Edge of the Sword in 1932, drawn from three lectures he delivered at the Ecole de Guerre, and Vers l'Armee de Metier in 1934, which proposed mechanizing the infantry around an elite force of 100,000 men and 3,000 tanks.

• 4. The Appeal of 18 June

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  On the 17th of June 1940, de Gaulle landed at Heston Airport shortly after 12:30. He saw Winston Churchill at around 15:00 and Churchill offered him broadcast time on the BBC. Both men already knew that Marshal Petain had earlier that day declared that "the fighting must end" and that he had approached the Germans for terms. De Gaulle had flown out of France on a British aircraft alongside General Edward Spears, who had personally spirited him to safety. He later told Andre Malraux of the mental anguish the flight caused him, a break with the French Army and the recognized government that many would inevitably regard as treason. The following day, the British Cabinet was reluctant to agree to the broadcast because Britain was still communicating with the Petain government about the fate of the French fleet. After individual lobbying, consent was granted, recorded by a handwritten amendment in the cabinet minutes. Few actually heard the Appeal of the 18th of June; the speech was published in some newspapers in mainland France but was largely aimed at French soldiers evacuated from Norway and Dunkirk. Most of those soldiers showed no interest in fighting under de Gaulle and were repatriated, where they became German prisoners of war. On the 2nd of August 1940, the Vichy regime condemned him to death by court martial in absentia, though Petain privately commented he would ensure the sentence was never carried out. De Gaulle's own response was terse: "I consider the act of the Vichy men as void." His support grew from a colonial base: Feli Eboue, governor of Chad, switched to him in September 1940, and by 1943 most of the French colonial empire had followed.

• 5. Liberation and Its Bitter Aftermath

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  General Dwight Eisenhower gave de Gaulle a personal assurance in Algiers in 1943 that a French force would liberate Paris, and arranged for the division of General Philippe Leclerc de Hauteclocque to be transferred from North Africa to the UK to carry it out. On the 14th of June 1944, de Gaulle left Britain and arrived in Bayeux, Normandy, which he proclaimed as the capital of Free France, appointing Francois Coulet to head the civil administration before sailing back to England that same night on a French destroyer. The German garrison of 5,000 men surrendered on the 25th of August 1944, though on the evening of the 26th the Wehrmacht launched a massive aerial and artillery barrage on Paris in revenge, leaving several thousand dead or injured. On the 29th of August, the US 28th Infantry Division was rerouted from the front line and paraded down the Champs Elysees as a show of strength. The purge that followed occupied de Gaulle throughout his tenure as head of the Provisional Government. Justice Minister Francois de Menthon was appointed to lead the Epuration legale. Of the near 2,000 people who received death sentences, fewer than 800 were executed; de Gaulle commuted 998 of the 1,554 capital sentences placed before him, including all sentences on women. Petain received a death sentence, which de Gaulle commuted to life imprisonment. Weygand was acquitted. Some, like Maurice Papon and Rene Bousquet, escaped consequences by claiming to have secretly worked for the resistance. The joy of liberation was punctured by a series of confrontations: French troops threatened to fire on American soldiers in the Italian border region of Val d'Aoste, and a crisis in Syria ended with British forces driving the French to stand down. When de Gaulle saw the crisis end in humiliation, he told British ambassador Duff Cooper: "You have betrayed France and betrayed the West. That cannot be forgotten."

• 6. The Fifth Republic and the Politics of Grandeur

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  On the 13th of May 1958, Pied-Noir settlers seized the government buildings in Algiers, and General Raoul Salan announced over radio that he was assuming provisional power. Facing civil war, President Rene Coty told parliament he was turning to "the most illustrious of Frenchmen". De Gaulle accepted under conditions: a new constitution, a powerful presidency, and extraordinary powers for six months. On the 1st of June 1958, the National Assembly voted 329 to 224 to make him Prime Minister. A referendum on the 28th of September 1958 saw 82.6 percent of voters support the new constitution and the creation of the Fifth Republic. He was subsequently elected President with 78 percent of the vote. The actual drafter of the new constitution's text was Michel Debre, who wrote up de Gaulle's political ideas. De Gaulle signed the Elysee Treaty with Konrad Adenauer on the 22nd of January 1963, restoring cordial France-Germany relations and creating a European counterweight between the Anglo-American and Soviet spheres of influence. In the same year, he vetoed Britain's entry into the European Economic Community for the first time. He withdrew France from NATO's integrated military command and launched an independent nuclear strike force that made France the world's fourth nuclear power. During a 1967 speech in Montreal, his cry of "Vive le Quebec libre" generated enormous controversy in North America. When protests swept France in May 1968, he had the Army's support and won a snap election with an increased majority in the National Assembly. He resigned in late April 1969 after losing a referendum on decentralisation, and died a year and a half later at the age of 79.

• 7. Legacy in Stone and Argument

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  De Gaulle introduced his dirigiste economic policy as early as 1944, directing substantial state control over the French capitalist economy. Historians credit that policy with helping to produce the Trente Glorieuses: thirty years of unprecedented economic growth that followed the war. Many French political parties and leaders continue to claim a Gaullist legacy, and streets and monuments across France and other parts of the world were dedicated to his memory after his death. The famous opening paragraph of his Memoires de guerre declares, "All my life, I have had a certain idea of France (une certaine idee de la France)", and argues that France cannot live up to that ideal without a policy of "grandeur". His War Memoirs, written during his retirement in Colombey in the early 1950s, quickly became a staple of modern French literature. He had told Pierre Bertaux in 1944 that he planned to retire because "France may still one day need an image that is pure. If Joan of Arc had married, she would no longer have been Joan of Arc". He left his presidential memoirs unfinished when he died on the 9th of November 1970.