Charles de Gaulle

Charles de Gaulle was a French army officer who refused to accept France's defeat in 1940 and led the Free French from London during the Second World War. He headed the provisional government after the liberation, returned to power in the crisis of 1958 to found the Fifth Republic, and as its first president ended the war in Algeria and pursued an independent foreign policy. He is the most influential French statesman of the twentieth century, and the political system he designed still governs France.

De Gaulle was born on 22 November 1890 in Lille, into a Catholic, patriotic family; his father taught history and literature at a Jesuit school. He entered the military academy of Saint-Cyr in 1909 and joined an infantry regiment commanded by Philippe Pétain. In the First World War he was wounded several times, and in March 1916 at Verdun he was wounded and captured. He spent the rest of the war as a prisoner in Germany, making five unsuccessful attempts to escape.

After serving with a French military mission in Poland during the Polish–Soviet War of 1919–1920, he taught at Saint-Cyr, worked on Pétain's staff and wrote on military thought and leadership. In the 1930s he argued, in Vers l'armée de métier (1934), for a professional army built around tanks and mobile armoured divisions. The French high command, committed to a defensive strategy based on the Maginot Line, largely ignored him.

When Germany invaded France in May 1940, Colonel de Gaulle commanded an armoured division and was promoted to brigadier general. In June he joined the government of Paul Reynaud as under-secretary for war. When Reynaud resigned and Pétain prepared to seek an armistice, de Gaulle flew to London. On 18 June 1940 he broadcast an appeal on the BBC calling on the French to continue the fight. Few heard it at the time, but it became the founding act of the Resistance. Pétain's Vichy regime sentenced him to death in absentia.

With the backing of Winston Churchill, he built the Free French movement, rallying colonies in Africa and the Pacific and forming forces that fought in North Africa and later in Italy and France. His relations with his allies were often stormy. He insisted on being treated as the representative of France rather than as a client, and Franklin D. Roosevelt distrusted him and backed rival French leaders. De Gaulle outmanoeuvred General Henri Giraud to become sole head of the French Committee of National Liberation in Algiers in 1943, and won the loyalty of most of the internal Resistance. After the liberation of Paris in August 1944 he walked down the Champs-Élysées before vast crowds.

As head of the provisional government in 1944–1946, de Gaulle restored state authority, gave women the vote, and oversaw nationalisations and the creation of the social security system. He clashed with the parties over the new constitution, which he thought gave too much power to parliament, and resigned abruptly in January 1946. His movement, the Rally of the French People, founded in 1947, did well at first but faded, and in the 1950s he withdrew to his home at Colombey-les-Deux-Églises to write his war memoirs.

The Fourth Republic was weakened by frequent changes of government and by the war of independence in Algeria, which had begun in 1954. In May 1958 French settlers and army officers in Algiers rebelled and threatened to move on Paris. Parliament called on de Gaulle, who became prime minister on 1 June with special powers. A new constitution creating a strong presidency was approved by referendum in September, and in January 1959 he became the first president of the Fifth Republic.

Many in the army and among the settlers expected him to keep Algeria French. Instead he moved towards self-determination, and the Évian Accords of March 1962 led to Algerian independence. Opponents in the army staged a failed putsch in 1961, and the terrorist Secret Army Organisation tried several times to assassinate him. The war's final years were marked by torture and violence on all sides, including the killing of Algerian demonstrators by police in Paris in October 1961, and many of the harkis, Algerians who had fought for France, were killed after independence. In 1962 de Gaulle won a referendum to have the president elected by direct popular vote. Most of France's colonies in sub-Saharan Africa became independent during his presidency, as part of the wider decolonisation of Africa.

De Gaulle wanted France to be a great power in its own right, independent of both superpowers in the Cold War. France tested its first atomic bomb in 1960 and built its own nuclear deterrent. He twice vetoed British entry into the European Economic Community, in 1963 and 1967, signed a treaty of friendship with West Germany in 1963, recognised communist China in 1964, and in 1966 withdrew France from NATO's integrated military command. His cry of "Vive le Québec libre" in Montreal in 1967 caused a diplomatic row with Canada.

In May 1968 student protests and a general strike paralysed France. De Gaulle dissolved parliament and his supporters won a large majority in the June elections, but his authority was weakened. In April 1969 he put a plan for regional and Senate reform to a referendum, said he would resign if it was rejected, and when it was, stepped down at once. He died at Colombey on 9 November 1970, shortly before his 80th birthday, and was buried in the village churchyard in a simple ceremony, as he had asked.

Almost every French political party now claims some part of de Gaulle's legacy. Admirers see him as the man who saved France's honour in 1940, restored its institutions and ended a ruinous colonial war. Critics on the left long condemned the strong presidency as authoritarian, and the far right never forgave him for Algeria. Outside France, he is remembered for his prickly insistence on national sovereignty, which shaped French policy towards Europe and the United States for decades.