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August 25, 2020 - January 23, 2022
At the Presidential elections of 2012 he was cited as an example by both the Socialist François Hollande and his right-wing (supposedly Gaullist) opponent Nicolas Sarkozy – and by pretty well everyone else.
Administratively Algeria was part of France, and had been ‘French’ since 1830, longer than the city of Nice (French since 1859).
To understand de Gaulle’s political career, however, we should not expect some extraordinary future revelations. The challenge is to interpret the material that is now available.
what is certain is that for families like the de Gaulles royalism was more a sensibility and a culture than a political commitment: it represented loyalty to a family tradition, revulsion at the violence of the Revolution, opposition to the persecution of religion.
When he became President of France in 1958, he reinstalled a chapel in the Elysée Palace so he could attend Mass privately if he was in Paris over the weekend.
On 10 March, the day his regiment was pulled back from the front, de Gaulle was wounded in the hand by a bullet. The injury became severely infected and he was hospitalized for a second time. (This injury had permanent consequences: when he later married he wore his wedding ring on his right hand.)
De Gaulle escaped four other times, but never managed to remain at large for longer than ten days before being discovered. He was not someone who passed easily unnoticed.
For example, Yvonne’s father owned a grand 4HP De Dion Bouton, and her mother was the fourth woman in France to have acquired her driving licence.
That’s De Gaulle future father and mother in law
It turned out that Anne had been born with Down’s Syndrome or, as it was commonly called at the time, Mongolism. Although we now know that the handicap is caused by a chromosomal aberration, in the 1920s it was a mystery shrouded in lurid fantasies about degeneration, inherited defects in the bloodline or even the morality of the mother.
Children with irreversible mental handicaps were usually sent to asylums or hospitals. But Yvonne and Charles decided to keep the small girl in the family. She remained constantly with them until her early death in 1948.
Thus de Gaulle was more a horrified witness than a central actor in the final stages of France’s defeat. But these days were pivotal for his future. On three occasions he met Churchill. As a result he was not entirely unknown to the British when he decided to leave France for London. It 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.
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.
In August 1940 de Gaulle was condemned to death for desertion; in December, he was stripped of his nationality. In other respects, Vichy was not sure how to best deal with him.
Other prominent French exiles suspicious of de Gaulle included writers like André Maurois and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (author of The Little Prince), the filmmaker Jean Renoir and former Third Republic politicians like Camille Chautemps.
One of de Gaulle’s favourite negotiating tactics was to intimidate his opponents by threatening to resign – in the confidence that his bluff would not be called.
De Gaulle had been woken early in the morning, on 8 November, to be informed of the American landing. Furious that he had been given no advance warning, he screamed: ‘I hope the Vichy people throw them back into the sea.’
The defeated putschists had formed a terrorist organization, the Organisation d’Action Secrète (OAS), ready to defend French Algeria to the bitter end. Their enemy was not so much the FLN as French ‘liberals’ and the French police.
He did not ‘grant’ independence: it was wrested from him. And he only partially avoided civil war. The truth is that the FLN had won independence by fighting and by mobilizing international support.
That's a comment on De Gaulle's handling of Algerian war of independence.
One of his favourite tricks was always to deliver a speech – or part of a speech – in the language of the country he was visiting (unless that language was English).
