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June 20 - August 31, 2025
When the government had consulted Gamelin in March 1936 on the possible responses that France could offer to the reoccupation of the Rhineland, he had nothing to offer except an unwieldy general mobilization.
Although nothing came from this meeting, Blum’s new government, elected to implement social reforms, announced in September 1936 an ambitious programme of rearmament, including the production of tanks. At the same, time the government decided on the creation of two heavy armoured divisions (DCRs) of the kind de Gaulle had been advocating.
The fact that Socialists like Blum were now converting to the need for rearmament suggests that de Gaulle was right to have predicted to Reynaud that there would be a regrouping of French politics in the face of the German threat. Such a regrouping was indeed about to occur but not in the way that de Gaulle had hoped.
It was in this spirit that in 1934 the conservative government of Doumergue had started the process of building up ties with France’s eastern allies including the Soviet Union, resulting a year later in the signing of a security pact with Moscow. But when the pact came up for ratification in parliament in February 1936, some 150 conservative députés voted against because of their concern about the rising influence of Communism in France. This was a sign of new political alignments to come.
In 1938, de Gaulle became a subscriber to the recently founded Christian Democratic newspaper Temps présent. Christian Democracy, which had sought since the nineteenth century to reconcile the values of democracy and Catholicism, was not part of his ideological inheritance – unlike the social Catholic traditions of the Nord. What presumably attracted him to the Christian Democrats at this time was the fact that their anti-Nazism was leading them to oppose appeasement of Germany. For de Gaulle this was the issue of the day, leading him in potentially new political directions.
After searching for two years, they alighted upon La Boisserie, a property in a remote part of eastern France at the tiny village of Colombey-les-deux-Eglises (320 inhabitants) in the Champagne region. Since this was not a fashionable region for second homes, unlike Brittany or Normandy, the house was affordable.
De Gaulle had no qualms about burning his bridges with Pétain because in Reynaud he had a powerful new patron committed to his ideas. The
De Gaulle was almost unique in 1940 in sharing none of that reverence for Pétain which affected most of the French political class. Whether Pétain had really ‘died’ for him in 1925 as he later claimed, he certainly was ‘dead’ for him by 1939. This was intellectually liberating.
But where de Gaulle differed from the Action Française vision of the world was in his readiness to judge different periods of French history pragmatically and unideologically. He was ready to find virtues in any regime, or any individual, that had successfully defended French grandeur. For this reason he writes warmly of Lazare Carnot, the revolutionary leader and member of the notorious Committee of Public Safety, who reorganized the French armies in 1793–4. Thanks to Carnot, writes de Gaulle, the revolutionary Republic ‘renouncing the illusions which on two occasions came close to throwing
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In his analysis, organization, method and order are impotent if they are not harnessed to national energy; but national energy and élan without order can lead only to chaos.
In April 1938, the Popular Front had finally collapsed. A ‘national unity’ government was formed under Daladier. Reynaud returned to office for the first time since 1932 – although his portfolio as Minister of Justice, and then Finance Minister, did not give him any influence over defence policy.
There had been two de Gaulles in the 1930s: the public crusader and the anonymous military bureaucrat; the de Gaulle who celebrated in mystical terms the nobility of the soldier’s vocation and the de Gaulle who grappled with technical questions of military organization; the de Gaulle who mused on charismatic leadership and the de Gaulle who aspired to a rationalization of the machinery of the state.
Trust in the Red Army had been shaken by Stalin’s purges, while the Polish army, the fourth largest in Europe, inspired surprising confidence. These prejudices were bolstered by political suspicion of Communism.
Chafing under his enforced inactivity, de Gaulle spent these months meditating on what could be learnt from the defeat of Poland. He drafted several notes for his superiors arguing that the rapid defeat of Poland vindicated his views on tank divisions.
was an open secret that the days of Daladier’s government were numbered. Like Neville Chamberlain in Britain, Daladier was seen as a man of Munich who lacked the qualities of a war leader. So he was opposed both by those committed to a more vigorous approach to the war – the bellicistes who thought he was not acting with sufficient energy – and by former appeasers who still hoped the war could be stopped.
This is the first mention of Churchill from the pen of de Gaulle. His optimism regarding Reynaud was vindicated, and it was in fact Chamberlain who suffered the consequences of the Norway failure.
But during the afternoon of 29 May the attack ran out steam because of the fatigue of the troops, the loss of about 100 tanks, and – once again – the lack of sufficient infantry.
Even so, de Gaulle’s three weeks in command of the division do not suggest that he had all the human qualities to be an inspirational military leader on the battlefield. We will never know because politics was now to absorb the rest of his life.
De Gaulle’s ultimatum to Reynaud paid off. On 5 June he was appointed Under Secretary of State for Defence. For the next eleven days, until the resignation of Reynaud on 16 June, de Gaulle was closer to the centre of power than he had ever been – and yet at the same time on the sidelines. As a junior minister he was not entitled to attend full Cabinet meetings, and at several critical moments he was absent on various missions to London, to Brittany and elsewhere.
meant also that he arrived in London not merely as a recently promoted French general but as someone who had been a member – albeit a junior one – of the last regularly constituted government of the Third Republic.
Although the meeting solved nothing, de Gaulle made an excellent impression on Churchill, who was only too aware of the defeatism affecting many of France’s leaders.
The choice of Huntziger as a replacement for Weygand was curious since he was anything but dynamic. He had been in command of the Second Army, whose performance in May 1940 had been particularly disastrous. Later he would be a loyal servant of the Vichy regime.
Georges Mandel,
Jean Laurent,
Se non è vero
In French republican demonology, the term ‘émigrés of Coblentz’ summons up an image of squabbling exiles, cut off from the patrie. The monarchist tradition of de Gaulle’s family did not view exile so negatively.
That experience offered a model of exile not as treason but as fidelity to one’s conscience. Nevertheless this was at odds with the dominant French tradition. One of
The core of Pétain’s appeal to the French people in 1940 was his decision to remain on French soil to defend his compatriots, to defend French lives, while de Gaulle left France to defend what he later called his ‘idea of France’.
The intervention of human will in the chain of events has something irrevocable about it … Responsibility presses down with such weight that few men are capable of bearing it alone. That is why the greatest qualities of intelligence do not suffice.
Without the Fall of France, de Gaulle would undoubtedly have become a leading general in the French army, probably a minister of defence, perhaps even head of the government – but he would not have become ‘de Gaulle’.
De Gaulle and Spears arrived in London in the early afternoon of 17 June. De Gaulle deposited his belongings at the small flat in Seamore Grove (today Curzon Place) overlooking Hyde Park, whose keys he had been lent, lunched at the RAC Club with Spears and then went with him to 10 Downing Street.
By the end of the evening Monnet was convinced that de Gaulle was either a mystical lunatic or an ambitious adventurer. This would weigh heavily in the future relations between the two men.
It is common to talk of the ‘myth’ of 18 June because so few people heard the speech and even fewer acted upon it. But the speech was no myth, and what matters is that it was made.
In the end only eighty voted against: the parliament of the Republic had committed suicide. On the next day, Pétain used his new powers to prorogue parliament indefinitely, grant himself full executive powers and proclaim himself Head of State. As Prime Minister Pétain took the wheeler-dealer Third Republic politician Pierre Laval.
But other Vichy insiders, like Laval, made no secret of their view that France’s future lay in seeking good relations with Germany – what was later dubbed ‘collaboration’. No one really knew what Pétain himself believed.
By the end of August de Gaulle had recruited only about 7,000 troops in total. The odds were certainly stacked against him, but his personality did not help. Spears remarks of de Gaulle’s visit to one camp: ‘He showed himself utterly unable to make contact with his audience. His speech was received in cold silence. Nor did he succeed in conveying a human touch when he reviewed the men.’
Georges Thierry d’Argenlieu
The few French naval vessels that had rallied to de Gaulle were put under the command of Admiral Emile Muselier, who had arrived in London at the end of June. Muselier, the most senior officer to rally, had a dubious reputation in the French admiralty partly because he made no secret of his leftist opinions.
On 26 August, Pleven flew to Fort Lamy, the capital of Chad, where a much relieved Eboué greeted him. The rallying of Chad to de Gaulle was formally announced the next day.
For the Free French, winning Dakar would be the key to controlling the French Empire in West Africa and providing a possible base for future operations into North Africa.
His intention was to ‘establish himself’ in Equatorial Africa and set up a central organization to link the colonies together.
The truth was that Equatorial Africa (AEF) had always been considered the poor relation of France’s African empire. One member of the Free French remembered Fort Lamy, capital of Chad, as ‘a collection of huts and shacks with corrugated iron roofs, dirt roads, a smell of latrines competing with the smell of rotting meat … a miserable little place with about 20,000 inhabitants and no electricity’.
Brazzaville, the capital of French Congo, with a population of about 40,000 (1,500 Europeans), became the capital of the Free France. It harboured a radio transmitter which eventually allowed de Gaulle some independence from the BBC, although until the end of 1942 it was too weak to be heard in most of France.
Gaulle was only an ‘ass’ if his objective was to win Vichy leaders over to the British side but not if he was seeking to ensure that he – and no one else – was recognized as the leader of the French who were continuing the fight. If Weygand had rallied, the Allies would have gained; de Gaulle would have lost.
By the end of 1940, de Gaulle’s successes were uneven. He had acquired a French colonial base, but most of the Empire remained loyal to Vichy; he had secured the backing of the British government but had not persuaded it to make a complete break with Vichy; he had gathered a group of followers but fewer than he had hoped.
Raymond Aron
Such was the experience of Jacques Bingen, a young engineer who had worked in the shipping industry before the war.14 Bingen’s background made him the obvious person to liaise between the British government and that part of the French merchant navy which happened to be in Britain at the time of the armistice.
Three questions were posed: what attitude should the Free French take to Pétain if (1) his government continued on its existing course of technical neutrality; (2) it transferred to North Africa but remained neutral; (3) it decided to join the Allies? To the first question, there was unanimity: unofficial contacts need not be ruled out (Catroux was the most emollient, Eboué and Leclerc the most intransigent) but there could be no compromise on the principle that the armistice had made Vichy illegitimate.
His intimate conviction, knowing Pétain well, and having closely observed Weygand in 1940, was that no important Vichy leaders were going to rally – ‘Weygand has never had the taste for taking risks,’ he wrote – but his own future depended on this being right.
De Gaulle himself wrote curtly to Weygand on 24 February for the last time proposing they unite to bring the Empire into the war. He ended: ‘If your reply is yes, I assure you of my respects.’
