Who was Charles de Gaulle?
A French army officer who became the leader of Free France. Wounded and captured at Verdun in 1916, he commanded the 4th Armored Division in May 1940, refused the armistice and called for resistance from London on 18 June 1940. He led the provisional government after the liberation and returned in 1958 to found the Fifth Republic.1
Charles de Gaulle is remembered for the Appeal of 18 June 1940 and the Fifth Republic, but for nearly three decades before that he was a professional soldier: wounded and captured at Verdun, an adviser in Poland in 1920, a theorist of armored war and in 1940 commander of an armored division.2
- 1912Leaves Saint-Cyr for Colonel Pétain's regiment.
- 1916Captured at Douaumont, Verdun.
- 1920With the Polish army in the war with Soviet Russia.
- 1940Montcornet; the Appeal of 18 June.
- 1944Returns to liberated Paris.
- 1958Founds the Fifth Republic.
Lille, Saint-Cyr and Colonel Pétain
De Gaulle was born in Lille on 22 November 1890. He entered the military academy of Saint-Cyr and on leaving it in 1912 joined the 33rd Infantry Regiment at Arras under Colonel Philippe Pétain, whom, the historian Julian Jackson writes, he then greatly admired.3
Wounded three times, captured at Douaumont
The Fondation Charles de Gaulle records that Lieutenant de Gaulle was hit in the leg at Dinant on 15 August 1914 and in the hand in March 1915. In March 1916, defending the village of Douaumont early in the Battle of Verdun, Captain de Gaulle was wounded again and taken prisoner; the Fondation dates it to 2 March and says he was first thought dead. He tried to escape five times, was sent to a reprisal camp for unruly officers and was freed only by the armistice of November 1918.4
Poland, 1919 to 1921
After the war he went to Poland as an instructor with the French Military Mission training the new Polish army, from April 1919 to May 1920 and from June 1920 to January 1921, according to both the Fondation and the IPN historian Mariusz Kwietniewski. In the summer of 1920, as the Red Army closed on Warsaw, he joined the staff of General Joseph Bernard, adviser to General Edward Śmigły-Rydz, and followed the fighting from Volhynia to Mazovia during the Battle of Warsaw. He held the wartime rank of major in the Polish army and received the Silver Cross of the Virtuti Militari, number 2980.5
The interwar theorist
Between the wars he served on Marshal Pétain's staff from 1925 and wrote four books, among them Le Fil de l'épée (1932) and Vers l'armée de métier (1934). The second called for an armored corps of professional soldiers used independently and offensively, against a high command entrenched behind the Maginot Line; in France it raised only brief curiosity. The bond with Pétain cooled: de Gaulle later said that for him Pétain had died in 1925, and Jackson argues that from 1934 he found a new patron in the deputy Paul Reynaud.6
May 1940: the 4th Armored Division at Montcornet
In 1939 Colonel de Gaulle, former commander of the 507th Tank Regiment at Metz, took charge of the Fifth Army's tanks. On 10 May 1940 the 4th Armored Division (4e DCR) was formed under his command. The French Ministry of the Armed Forces lists one battalion of 34 new B1 bis heavy tanks, battalions of R35 light tanks, older D2 tanks, 75 mm guns and a battalion of chasseurs.7
With Guderian's panzer corps through the Ardennes and driving west, de Gaulle attacked from the Laon area toward Montcornet on 17 May. In the ministry's account the attack began at 4.15 a.m.; Captain Penet's R35s went into Montcornet without the heavy tanks and were cut up by 88 mm guns; the B1 bis battalion, short of maps, lost three tanks near La Ville-aux-Bois; by evening Stukas drove the division back to its base. The ministry calls it a military defeat that took on the look of a moral victory amid general defeatism, while the Fondation counts Montcornet among the actions in which de Gaulle distinguished himself.8
Abbeville and the government
Sent to the Somme, the division held the Germans at Abbeville from 27 to 30 May, in the Fondation's account. De Gaulle was made a temporary brigadier general, a promotion the Élysée and the ministry date to 25 May and the Fondation to 1 June. In early June Paul Reynaud made him under-secretary of state for war and national defense. On 16 June he was in London discussing a Franco-British union with Churchill; back in Bordeaux that evening he learned that Reynaud had resigned and that his successor, Pétain, would seek an armistice.9
What was the appeal of 18 June?
The appeal of 18 June 1940 was a BBC radio broadcast from London in which de Gaulle, a brigadier general of a few weeks, rejected the armistice that Pétain's new government was seeking. He told the French that the war was a world war, that France was not alone, and that the flame of French resistance must not go out.
He had flown to London on 17 June with his aide-de-camp, Geoffroy de Courcel, and asked Churchill for leave to speak. He spoke on the evening of 18 June and near the end said, as the ministry quotes him: "la flamme de la résistance française ne doit pas s'éteindre et ne s'éteindra pas". No recording was kept and few people in France heard it; the recording played today is of a later appeal, broadcast on 22 June. Vichy canceled his promotion, and in early August a military court sentenced him to death in absentia.10
What did de Gaulle do in WW2?
In the Second World War de Gaulle commanded a French armored division in May 1940, served briefly as under-secretary for war and then refused the armistice. From London he built Free France and its forces, rallied much of French Africa, brought the Resistance under one leadership and headed the provisional government that returned to liberated Paris in August 1944.
Free France: Brazzaville, Dakar and Bir Hakeim
On 28 June 1940 Britain recognized him as leader of the Free French. Chad joined him on 26 August, followed within days by Cameroon and Middle Congo, but the Anglo-Free French bid for Dakar, Operation Menace, failed on 23 to 25 September. At Brazzaville he set up the Empire Defence Council on 27 October. In 1942 the 1st Free French Brigade held Bir Hakeim in Libya, from 26 May to 11 June in the Fondation's dates, in the desert war later decided at El Alamein.11
Churchill, Roosevelt and Giraud
Jackson argues that Churchill backed de Gaulle without grasping that he meant to speak for France itself. Franklin Roosevelt distrusted him, writes the historian Sylvain Cornil-Frerrot; Jackson adds that even Dwight Eisenhower wanted an agreement with de Gaulle before D-Day. In North Africa, the Fondation notes, the Americans imposed General Henri Giraud as commander. On 3 June 1943 the French Committee of National Liberation (CFLN) was formed in Algiers under the joint presidency of de Gaulle and Giraud; by the autumn de Gaulle led it alone, and on 3 June 1944 it became the Provisional Government of the French Republic.12
The liberation of Paris, 25 and 26 August 1944
On 25 August, in the Fondation's account, General Leclerc's French 2nd Armored Division and the US 4th Infantry Division entered Paris; in the afternoon the German commander, General Dietrich von Choltitz, surrendered to Leclerc, and de Gaulle arrived about an hour later. He then spoke at the Hôtel de Ville: "Paris outragé, Paris brisé, Paris martyrisé, mais Paris libéré !" On 26 August he relit the flame under the Arc de Triomphe and walked down the Champs-Élysées at the head of the procession, through cheering crowds.13
After the war
He resigned as head of the provisional government on 20 January 1946 after clashing with the Constituent Assembly. Recalled in the Algerian crisis of May 1958, he oversaw a new constitution approved by referendum that September and became President at the start of 1959. A referendum in January 1961 approved self-determination for Algeria, and the Évian Accords of March 1962 opened the way to independence. He resigned after losing a referendum in April 1969.14
Rebel, savior, or both?
To Vichy he was a rebel condemned to death; to the Élysée today the 18 June appeal is the founding act of the Free French Forces. Historians have tempered the legend. Jackson describes a 1930s conservative who put the nation above ideology, broke with the right's appeasement of Germany and showed almost no trace of antisemitism: a flexible pragmatist rather than the rigid figure of myth.15
Colombey and Paris today
De Gaulle died on 9 November 1970 at his home in Colombey-les-Deux-Églises and was buried in the village cemetery. In Paris the square around the Arc de Triomphe bears his name, and the City of Paris lists an exhibition at the Musée de l'Armée, De Gaulle avant de Gaulle, on his early career, from 21 November 2026 to 20 June 2027. More French soldiers: the greatest commanders of France.16
