Charles de Gaulle

Biography

Charles de Gaulle (1890-1970) led Free France during the Second World War and went on to found the Fifth Republic, which he headed as president from 1959 to 1969. A career soldier turned statesman, he embodies for many French people the refusal to accept the defeat of 1940 and the country's recovery.

Born on 22 November 1890 in Lille into a Catholic family, he graduated from the Saint-Cyr military academy in 1912 and fought in the First World War, in which he was wounded several times. On 2 March 1916, at Douaumont near Verdun, he was wounded and taken prisoner; he made five unsuccessful attempts to escape before the Armistice. Between the wars he argued in “Vers l'armée de métier” (1934) for an armoured corps, without convincing the general staff. Promoted to general during the Battle of France, he joined Paul Reynaud's government on 6 June 1940 as Under-Secretary of State for War.

Rejecting the armistice sought by Marshal Pétain, he left for London and on 18 June 1940 broadcast an appeal on the BBC to carry on the fight. Sentenced to death in absentia by the Vichy regime, he organised Free France, won over part of the colonial empire and gained the support of Winston Churchill, despite often stormy relations with the Allies. Head of the French Committee of National Liberation in Algiers in 1943, then of the Provisional Government of the French Republic in June 1944, he delivered his speech at the Hôtel de Ville in liberated Paris on 25 August 1944 and walked down the Champs-Élysées the next day. Under his authority women won the right to vote, part of the economy was nationalised and the social security system was created; yet, hostile to rule by the parties, he resigned in January 1946.

After the failure of the Rally of the French People, which he founded in 1947, he withdrew to Colombey-les-Deux-Églises and wrote his “War Memoirs”. The Algerian crisis of May 1958 brought him back to power: invested as Prime Minister on 1 June, he had the Constitution of the Fifth Republic approved by referendum on 28 September, was then elected President of the Republic on 21 December and took office on 8 January 1959. Having defeated the Generals' Putsch of April 1961, he led Algeria to independence through the Évian Accords of March 1962, and he escaped the assassination attempt at Petit-Clamart on 22 August 1962. The referendum of October 1962 introduced the election of the president by direct universal suffrage; in December 1965 he was re-elected in the second round against François Mitterrand.

His policy of grandeur gave France the atomic bomb, first tested in the Sahara in February 1960, sealed reconciliation with Germany through the Élysée Treaty of 22 January 1963 and withdrew the country from NATO's integrated command in 1966. Shaken by the crisis of May 1968, he left power on 28 April 1969, the day after losing a referendum on regional reform and the reform of the Senate. He died on 9 November 1970 at Colombey-les-Deux-Églises, where he is buried; the institutions he wanted, built on a strong executive, still govern France.