Category: French History

576 Charles de Gaulle with Elyse (Dec 14)

[00:00:16] Introduction

Annie Sargent: This is Join Us in France, episode 576.

Annie Sargent: Bonjour. I’m Annie Sargent and Join Us in France is the podcast where we take a conversational journey through the beauty, culture, and flavors of France.

[00:00:31] Today on the podcast

Annie Sargent: Today, I bring you a conversation with Elyse Rivin of Toulouse Guided Walks about Charles de Gaulle, the towering figure who shaped modern France.

Annie Sargent: From his military brilliance in both World Wars to his controversial leadership as a president, we dive into his life, legacy, and the sheer force of will that made him a legend.

Annie Sargent: Whether you admire him or question his methods, this episode reveals why de Gaulle remains one of history’s most fascinating leaders. Listen now to uncover the man behind the myth.

[00:01:04] Podcast supporters

Annie Sargent: This podcast is fueled by chocolatine, coffee, and the generosity of listeners like you. You book itinerary consults, take my VoiceMap tours, join the boot camp… well, not for 2026, but perhaps another time, hop in my electric car for a day trip around the Southwest of France, or chip in on Patreon. And I am so grateful.

Annie Sargent: If you want to keep me going and skip the ads, there’s a link for that in the show notes as well, and you’ll find everything else at joinusinfrance.com/boutique, and thank you so much.

[00:01:39] Magazine segment

Annie Sargent: For the magazine part of the podcast, after my chat with Elyse today, I’ll discuss New Year’s Eve in Paris, because I know Paris is a popular place for visitors to enjoy the celebration, and there’s a few things you should be aware of.

Annie Sargent: If you’re interested in the links and the full episode transcripts, you can find those at the page that lists all episodes by month, joinusinfrance.com/episode. And if you’d like a handy summary of the conversation we have on the podcast every week, subscribe to the newsletter at joinusinfrance.com/newsletter.

Annie Sargent: It is the best way to stay in the loop.

[00:02:24] Charles de Gaulle with Elyse

Annie Sargent: Bonjour, Elyse.

Elyse Rivin: Bonjour, Annie.

Annie Sargent: We are going to talk about Charles de Gaulle today. We’re taking on a big, big, big one. So I have to say at the onset, we are going to tell you a little bit about the story of his life, but we are nothistorians who specialize in this. So, do not crucify us if we get a detail wrong, okay?

Elyse Rivin: Or if we get, if we make a factual mistake somewhere along the way, right.

Annie Sargent: Yeah, yeah. We’re not pretending to be the all, end all of the history of Charles de Gaulle. But I think both of us have done enough research that we can safely talk about him, at least ingeneral terms.

[00:03:03] Early Life and Family Background

Annie Sargent: I’ll get it started this time with his birth and his family, very interesting family. But the first thing I want to mention is the name, de Gaulle, because the Gauls, as you know, are the people who were, who they named the country. La Gaule was the first name that this part of the world was known as before it was known as France.

Annie Sargent: And he was de Gaulle, so a particle which indicates that he was a nobleman and he was, but he was not, was not thenoble de robe. It was an… One of his ancestors got a title in the 1600s, which happened. Not very wealthy people.

Elyse Rivin: No.

Annie Sargent: His father was a history teacher and literature teacher. His mother was extremelycatholic, so was pious, yes. His wife was also very pious. As a matter of fact, she ended her life in a convent.

Elyse Rivin: Oh, did she?

Annie Sargent: Yeah.

Elyse Rivin: I didn’t even realize that.

Annie Sargent: After he died, yeah. So, a very kind of traditional family of the north of France. He was born in Lille in 1890, November 22nd, 1890. His mother was Jeanne Maillot de Gaulle and his father was Henri de Gaulle. He was raised a strict catholic with a lot of patriotism and French history because his father was a French history teacher. Well, he was a history teacher in general.

Elyse Rivin: In general, and if I understand correctly, there were shades of monarchism still left in the family. Yes, you know, the royalists as they like to call them, sounds like.

Annie Sargent: Royalists, yes, yes. There were some of the people in… Some of the members of his family were… wouldn’t have minded a good king.

Elyse Rivin: A good king.

Annie Sargent: Yes, yes.

Elyse Rivin: I suspect if you’ve… after listening to the whole story of his life that that probably rubbed off on him a bit, you know? So…

Annie Sargent: Yeah, it did. It did.

[00:05:05] Military Aspirations and World War I

Annie Sargent: From a young age he aspired to pursue a military career. He was obviously inspired by family discussions of France’s defeat in 1870, and the desire to restore French greatness, and I know I’ve said this a few times on the podcast and I say this to people when I do guiding in person, the reason why we have so many statues of Joan of Arc in French churches is because of this desire to rekindle the, kind of a momentum for French greatness that happened after the defeat of 18 70.

Annie Sargent: And there were a lot of groups of people who started to put together funds to buy statues and bring her back. There was a global sentiment of a need for a renewal of patriotism.

Elyse Rivin: National spirit.

Annie Sargent: National spirit, exactly.

Annie Sargent: He entered the Saint-Cyr Military Academy in 1909.

Elyse Rivin: Which is very prestigious, everyone, that… you should all know if you don’t, that this is probably the equivalent of West Point.

Annie Sargent: Yes. It’s very prestigious. He graduated in 1912. His classmates noted him for his intelligence, seriousness, and confidence. A few people said he was aloof, but he was generally very confident, and he liked to write papers, which is really interesting. I don’t want to skip around, but we’ll get back to his writing in a moment.

Annie Sargent: So he had this deep sense of destiny and mission of France, which was reinforced by his Catholic beliefs. He really believed that France was supposed to be a grand country.

Elyse Rivin: And needed to come back in terms of the world’s eyes to be what it had been, of course, in the past. Yeah.

Annie Sargent: Right, right, right. And everybody who knew him says he was serious, confident, and had a very strong will.

Elyse Rivin: And for those of you who have no image of him, he was very tall. This is one of the things, you know, when you see pictures of Charles de Gaulle, he stood well a head taller than everybody else. I actually figured out the conversion from meters to feet because I kept thinking, "Oh my God, he had to have been the equivalent of two meters." He was…

Annie Sargent: Not quite.

Elyse Rivin: Not quite. He was basically almost 6’6. And the French, especially at the beginning of the 20th century, were really not that big.

Elyse Rivin: So, when you see pictures of him with the other even military, he is… You cannot miss him. He is a head taller than everybody with a very distinctive face.

Annie Sargent: Correct, correct. He stands out. He married Yvonne de Gaulle,in 1920, and this was kind of not quite an arranged marriage… buthe actually wrote to his mother. He was very, in close contact with his mother his whole life.

Annie Sargent: He wrote to her and she asked him if he would like her to find him a wife. And he said yes. She introduced him to several women, and he hit it off with this one. And they got married.

Elyse Rivin: I had read that he had actually had a sweetheart who got killed during the bombing of World War I, and that apparently, he was not someone who was particularly social, I guess, and so when that ended, and ended of course tragically, I guess he just turned to his mom to find him somebody else, you know?

Annie Sargent: Yeah, I hadn’t heard that story. Maybe I … You know, the book was so long. It was 45 hours. I’m basing a lot of this on a book that I read. I should tell you the name of it because some of you might be interested. it’s called A Certain Idea of France by Julian Jackson, and it’s a very long book. I looked for books by French authors but none of them were on Audible so I just decided to get that one.

Annie Sargent: Anyway, his wife was an extraordinary woman. They were very faithful to one another throughout their lives. She followed him around, raised their children, they were clearly very much in love. It was a very good kind of arranged marriage. They never looked back, you know? They just enjoyed their lives together. They had a daughter, Anne, who was polyhandicapped. It’s not clear to me what all was wrong with her but she had Down Syndrome for sure, and she had other things. She died at age 20. Charles de Gaulle was very close to her. You know, I think parents of handicapped children will testify to this, they’re very much attached to their normal children but particularly to their handicapped children as well because this is a person that really, truly relies on them always.

Elyse Rivin: Correct.

Annie Sargent: And they established an Anne de Gaulle Foundation.

Elyse Rivin: And she was the only daughter. He had two sons first, and she was the last child.

Annie Sargent: And Yvonne, his wife, ran the Foundation until her death. And she influenced him on many issues such as the contraception rulesfor France.Because he was very conservative but she felt that perhaps there was a need for a bit of leeway. They didn’t seem to be super fertile, both of them, because they had three kids, but his brothers had like seven or eight, all of them, big, big family.

Annie Sargent: They were both very private people, didn’t enjoy particularly being in the spotlight. His mother was another big influence on his life and she was very sharp. She insisted on him getting as much education as possible and they say that Charles was her favorite child. She believed he was special and had a destiny.

Elyse Rivin: Interesting, because I know that he was the third of six. What I was reading was that it was his oldest brother, Xavier, who apparently was brilliant at school. Some people in school predicted Xavier would be the one that everybody would remember, and then of course it turned out to be Charles.

Annie Sargent: So that’s about all I’m going to tell you about his young years. So he was born in Lille but he grew up in Paris most of his life, and spent a lot of time… He traveled a fair bit, but we might get to that when we talk about his life.

Elyse Rivin: Yeah.

[00:11:28] Rise to Prominence and World War II

Elyse Rivin: So maybe we should start with World War I since this is a man who had made his name in the world by being a military man and a very interesting, unique and courageous one. He was 25. Obviously having gone to Saint-Cyr, he was already, he was an officer by the time World War I broke out. He was under the auspices of Philippe Pétain, who is someone who is very important in talking about the history of World War I and II and France, but he’s a side person in the story of today about de Gaulle. But Pétain was already one of the most important generals of the French Army and had been a great hero even in the war with Prussia, so he was not a young man even by World War I.

Elyse Rivin: And he had taken de Gaulle under his wing even though apparently a lot of the other officers didn’t think de Gaulle would be the most brilliant soldier. He earned a reputation very early on, which you find out served him very well in the end with the rest of his life, for being very obstinate, and for having a very strong opinion about military operations.

Elyse Rivin: He was obviously a brilliant soldier and, as Annie, you just mentioned, he started writing. He even started writing early before he even finished Saint-Cyr about military things. He had this vision of what the army should be, of what a strong country should be. The patriotism and the military sort of blended together in his brain. He fought, of course, in World War I. And de Gaulle, Charles de Gaulle, was wounded three times in World War I.

Elyse Rivin: For those of you who know nothing about World War I, you have to try to imagine a third of the male population of France was killed in World War I. The miracle of the de Gaulle family is that all of the sons came out alive, and came out without being handicapped, which is, in and of itself, just absolutely amazing.

Elyse Rivin: And Charles de Gaulle, who I guess we should just keep calling de Gaulle, he was wounded twice in the leg, almost immediately, the first wound, he kept on going.

Elyse Rivin: He was in charge of a tank division. He was in charge of tanks and artillery, which became basically his specialty and his obsession. And he was serving, of course, on the northeastern front. But even with his wound, he continued to advance, and he was wounded a second time, he was wounded a third time, and then unfortunately, even though he was starting to make some advances, there were very, very few companies that were able to do so. His regiment was decimated in 1916 in a major offensive. But he was captured along with a group of officers by the Germans.

Elyse Rivin: And of course, the treatment of officers as POWs was very different from the treatment of your basic foot soldier.

Elyse Rivin: And he was, by this time, of course, a lieutenant who even had been noticed by the Germans as being brave beyond normal in a sense. I mean, he was considered, he was actually threatened with being punished by his own hierarchy for disobeying orders, which of course in the military is absolutely a no-no, because he … when an superior officer gave him an order that he didn’t agree with, he … it’s hard to imagine, but he just went ahead and did what he wanted to do. The fact that he survived all of this and he came out and didn’t get actually court-martialed is actually amazing.

Elyse Rivin: And then he gets taken prisoner along with the rest of this particular regiment, and he wound up spending the last two and a half years of World War I in POW camps in Germany. He tried five times to escape. This is like one of those movies, you know, one of the… it’s like, I keep thinking of a Steve McQueen movie, with the people escaping from World War II.

Elyse Rivin: He was transferred ten times from one camp to another because they couldn’t figure out what to do to keep him from trying to escape, and he wasn’t released until the armistice was signed in 1918.

Elyse Rivin: The fact that he survived all of this and came out is already a miracle, but for him, it was the great shame of his life that he was taken prisoner. Like Annie, I didn’t know that much about him before starting to read for the podcast. The conclusion I draw from this is that so much of what he did later on came out of this experience. First of all, the fighting, and his ideas about what is a good, efficient army. And the second part being taken prisoner, and the shame, somehow, of being taken prisoner, and giving up the power to this enemy. It colored his vision of war and how war should be conducted, and everything else for absolutely the rest of his life.

Annie Sargent: Yeah, and while he was a prisoner of war, he would actually write essays, trying to crystallize all that he had learned and all that he thought his fellow officers should know about tanks, about the way to run an army, et cetera.

Annie Sargent: And he started out just writing an essay and posting it on the wall.

Annie Sargent: And then people were reading them, and so they distributed them, which, you know, it’s kinda crazy that he took it upon himself, becauseI mean, he was bored, obviously, and he wanted to do something useful with his time.

Elyse Rivin: And he was also obsessed with the idea of building up tank divisions. It’s very interesting. The question of where the future and the place of aviation in fighting in war. At the first apparently, of course coming out, he was born in 1890. This just the beginning of using any kind of flying machine to fight in the war. But he is adamant that you need divisions of tanks that are advanced armory with artillery, not having tanks scattered here left and right, and that the old-fashioned way of fighting from the 1700s, 1800s, was no longer possible to do. And people didn’t listen to him at first, and this was one of the things that eventually caused a split between him and Pétain and some of the others, because he wanted a modern armored army with a strong person leading everything.

Annie Sargent: Yes, he was definitely the young guy arriving into an army that was led by a lot of old people, what he saw as old people, at the time. And he took advantage of his youth and his enthusiasm and his energy to just make a name for himself.

Elyse Rivin: He made such a name for himself that, in fact, after the end of World War I, he was made, first of all, he was made a captain because you had to be a captain to be the head of a division in the army, and then he was offered an opportunity to work in the Ministry of the Defense and the Army, which is, of course, a desk job. He was really a man who wanted to be out in the fields fighting, but he took on the desk job because of his ability and his belief that he could help change the way the army was, and the way the army was run. This is where he started to come up against the old ideas, and the fact that there was a lot of resistance to changing the way the military was run, and the things that were priorities in the military.

Elyse Rivin: He associated with a lot of different political groups, from what I understand, in the 1920s and ’30s, which is of course a time of extremely complicated politics in France, extremely complicated, with lots of turmoil and lots of groups both on extreme left and extreme right.

Elyse Rivin: He was someone who never specifically identified with any one political group. He hung out a lot with people that were more right-winged, sometimes associated with a group that was considered to be extremely right-winged, but he never actually belonged to any specific group or party, and he also listened at times to people that were members of the Socialist Party and people that were on the left. It’s like he was able to take a little bit from everybody and sort of use it and turn it around in his brain to put out his ideas. Because he wrote several books between the end of World War I and the beginning of World War II.

Elyse Rivin: And then it comes to the end of the 1930s, and you have the debacle of what happens with the rise of Hitler and Nazism in Germany, and a great disappointment on the part of de Gaulle when he sees that the man who at first had been his great hero, Philippe Pétain, agrees to the signing of what is called the Munich Accords.

Elyse Rivin: And the Munich Accords were basically an agreement that allowed Germany to take over parts of Czechoslovakia, which is no longer, of course, now even Czechoslovakia, parts of Poland, and everybody was warning the French that this was the beginning of German expansion into a war that would cover all of Europe.

Elyse Rivin: And de Gaulle tried to warn them, and he knew that this was going to happen, and none of these older officers wanted to listen to him. They said that the pact would make sure that France was kept out of the war, that it was not important whatever Germany was going to do with Poland, the eastern part of Europe, it didn’t concern them, and of course they were 100% wrong.

Annie Sargent: Yeah. When saber-rattling starts, you better, even if you’re not right under it, if it’s not right over your head, yeah, pay attention.

Elyse Rivin: So the Munich Accords were signed, actually in 1938, in September of 1938, and it was at this point that De Gaulle broke definitively with Pétain.

Elyse Rivin: And he said, "If you are a true patriot, you will do everything to keep France’s sovereignty and not risk that the Germans will invade a second time and will take any territory that belongs to us."

Elyse Rivin: He was totally obsessed with the idea that France would have to be able to defend itself, and really and truly, very few people listened to him at this time.

Annie Sargent: Right. Yeah, and you know, it’s like Pétain rolled over, it was really sad because he had gotten old and he had had a lot of fight in him in the First World War, and he didn’t want to see the horrors of the First World War. Like you mentioned, lots of people died, and he thought it was better to appease than to fight, and that was a terrible decision.

Elyse Rivin: Yes, he thought it was.

(Mid-roll ad spot)

[00:21:58] Divisions of Tanks

Elyse Rivin: In January of 1940, de Gaulle wrote a memo that he sent to 80 of the most important military and civilian authorities in the country insisting that France had to have a specifically well-prepared army with divisions of tanks.

Elyse Rivin: The problem in France was that economically and industrially, after World War I, they were not as modern as some other countries had become, and it was very difficult for them to produce as much as, ironically Germany, which was given a big boost by the help that it got losing the war after World War I. And so between his advanced thinking about what was necessary to have an army and the fact that many of the older officers in the army just said, "We can’t go through another war. It is only 20 years later, we cannot go through another war," he knew that France was not going to be prepared if and when Germany invaded.

Elyse Rivin: He was given a division of tanks. He actually started in May of 1940 with 364 tanks, but these were older tanks, these were not new models. These were the kinds of tanks that had been used for World War I. He was one of the bravest people to fight in the 40 days before the French army actually gave up. His division fought in several different battles. In one case, they actually made it 14 kilometers across into enemy lines. They lost a huge number of men, a huge number of tanks. Three times he tried to get across the lines and he was beaten back. Why? Because the Germans had air power, which the French did not, and because they had much more artillery, which the French did not. And at this point, I think de Gaulle probably already understood that the French would not be able to last much longer and that everything that he had imagined was going to happen, which, of course, was an absolute nightmare.

Annie Sargent: There wasn’t… I mean, in between the two wars, and you mentioned that Germany got a lot of help financially from the Americans, because they wanted them to be able to rebuild and not… I mean, there was no point to letting their country destroyed to the level that it was, but they helped the Germans, they didn’t help the French. The French were supposed to help themselves, I guess, and they didn’t quite make it.

Elyse Rivin: Yep. Yep. They didn’t quite make it, and I… It is very complicated, and that certainly is not my domain to understand all of the shenanigans of politics. The Brits were also left on their own to deal with rebuilding after World War I, but for some reason, they were able to rally and create a Royal Air Force in a much shorter amount of time than the French. This is one of the things I didn’t know, and this was one of the things that amazed me, before even the entrance of the allies on the 21st of May, 1940, de Gaulle took it upon himself to go onto the radio, and it was the first of his many speeches appealing to the French to be courageous, to rally, to defend their country, even those who didn’t have arms, who were just, you know, normal citizens and farm people. He was so obsessed with the idea that the French needed to protect themselves and to have the morale to keep on going, and this idea of broadcasting on the radio to try and keep the morale up, of course, is something that became famous and that he did all through World War II.

Annie Sargent: Yeah, I think when I was hearing about this period of his life, it kind of reminded me of a Zelenskyy today, like, you know, somebody who’s just rallying the people and just saying, "We’re not going to give up." You know? They needed someone to do this, and honestly, most French people had given up. They were beaten and didn’t have anything left in them, but he was able to rally enough to just stick a little bit of difficulties into the advance of the Germans, and it was better than nothing.

Elyse Rivin: It certainly was better than nothing. It was just a few days after that that he was finally made general. Me, coming to France, I’ve always considered de Gaulle to be a general. It’s like he was born a general in my head. It’s like I can’t imagine him being a lieutenant, a lieutenant colonel, a colonel, or anything like that.

Elyse Rivin: But it wasn’t until actually May of 1940, when he was… after he broadcasted this message and he was in charge of this division of tanks, that he was actually made a one-star general, and when he went to London to spend timerallying the French and he was with Churchill, he was never more than a one-star general. He was not that high up on the scale of things. But it was like he was born to be a general. I really think that, you know? There’s something about him.

Annie Sargent: Yeah. Yeah. Well, but he had prepared well. I mean, if you write essays constantly about the way the army should work and the grandeur of your country and whatever, I mean, he had been preparing his whole life for this.

Elyse Rivin: He had been. He had indeed. In June of 1940, in 1940, he’s of course extremely important in all of this, in June of 1940, he was actually called to Paris, and he was made undersecretary of war and national defense under a new government, the government of a man named Paul Reynaud. And Paul Reynaud was a moderate who really aligned himself with de Gaulle in his thinking about defending the country. It was the beginning of de Gaulle’s role as both a representative of the country and as a diplomat.

Elyse Rivin: Unfortunately for him, Reynaud was pushed out of office by Petain and Laval and the group that became the head of the government in Vichy. If Reynaud had stayed in power, I think things would’ve been very different and he would’ve had much more of an army backing him up and fighting with him. But that did not happen.

Elyse Rivin: This is the first time de Gaulle, on June 9th of 1940, he was actually sent by this government though, the Reynaud government, before Petain pushes this guy out, he was sent on a mission to London to talk to Churchill to see how they could create a long relationship of fighting along with the British, because of course the British knew that they were going to have to fightthemselves, and it was Churchill who allowed de Gaulle to make the first overseas broadcast from London, having been convinced by his determination and his charisma that this was the man to represent the French.

Annie Sargent: Right. And he probably thought, "Okay, it’s not going to make much difference, but it can’t hurt, so let’s try it."

Elyse Rivin: Right. I mean, you know, there are lots of different versions, there are different films that show these scenes from the point of view of the British, from the point of view of the French. It’s kind of hard to really know exactly how things went down at this particular moment.

Elyse Rivin: But it is true that at least at the beginning of World War II, after Germany declared war on both England and France, that Churchill really wanted to have de Gaulle next to him, and they were going to, they were hoping to work together all through World War II, what wound up becoming World War II. Churchill recognized de Gaulle as the representative of the free French forces, and that he was the proxy for an alternative government. The problem was that once  Reynaud was pushed out and Petain became the leader of the French government, that signed an armistice with the Germans and created a government in the town of Vichy, which of course is why it’s called the Vichy government, nobody, that is none of the other Western countries that were occupied by the Germans, and not England, and not the United States, wanted to recognize the few exiled military and statesmen that joined de Gaulle in London as an alternative official government. This was one of the worst things that happened in World War II, is that for reasons that I really find very complex, it’s hard to understand completely, but they could have recognized them as a government in exile, but they did not.

Annie Sargent: Right, because the problem is, they hadn’t been elected to nothing. Like, you know? Did Petain get elected to anything?

Annie Sargent: I don’t think so either. So, you know, it was just a complicated thing, and perhaps there was a bit of a feeling that this de Gaulle guy was too big for his britches.

Annie Sargent: And might take over the world, or might not play nice with kind of democratic institutions? Who knows?

Annie Sargent:

Elyse Rivin: You know, it’s hard to understand why they thought that. What is true is that he certainly, he had pretentions of being the leader of France, that is for sure. Hey, I mean, he made no bones about that. He also, he pleaded with Churchill, and he then eventually pleaded with Roosevelt and the Americans to disown the Vichy government completely, and to consider that his group, including diplomats, who were all in exile, were the official French government, and they refused.

Annie Sargent: That’s what caused a lot of problems between de Gaulle and Churchill, and Roosevelt, yeah.

Elyse Rivin: For whatever reasons, Churchill had a much clearer understanding of who de Gaulle was, and I’ve read a few articles where Churchill talks about him. He understood de Gaulle. He was at times aggravated with him, he was at times angry with him, he was at times that he did not help him, but he did really understand de Gaulle and what he wanted, and the position he had.

Elyse Rivin: Whereas, what apparently was the case was that Roosevelt did not like him, did not trust him, and even though de Gaulle, all he wrote about was, he didn’t write about being an imperialist. He wrote about being a strong leader for his country. Rooseveltmistrusted him enormously. It seems like it’s far deeper and more complicated than I can imagine at this point, you know?

Annie Sargent: Pheromones.

Elyse Rivin: Yeah, it’s very much.

Annie Sargent: Bad pheromones.

Elyse Rivin: It’s very bad. I mean, it was very bad. I read two articles where they literally talk about how much Roosevelt detested him, and yet he had no specific reason to. I mean, it’s very, very strange. What I didn’t know was that the Vichy government, after he started, de Gaulle, his activities, first in London and then eventually going to Alger, broadcasting, havingsoldiers in exile, having diplomats in exile, the Vichy government condemned him to death as a traitor.

Annie Sargent: Wow.

Elyse Rivin: In contumace, meaning that, of course, you know, he wasn’t there, but I had no idea that it actually happened. They said he was a traitor to the country, and that if he ever came back into France, he would be executed.

Annie Sargent: That’s insane.

Elyse Rivin: It’s insane when you think about it.

[00:33:07] Post-War Leadership and Political Career

Elyse Rivin: So, we have the war. The war lasts basically between 1940 until August of 1944, then there were skirmishes until the treaties are signed in May of 1945.

Elyse Rivin: All this time, de Gaulle is trying desperately to get the English, and then the Americans, to work with him, and instead what happens is that they make plans and exclude him.

Annie Sargent: Right, he wasn’t made aware of most things that the Americans and the English were planning.

Elyse Rivin: And largely, if I understand correctly, because Roosevelt did not want him to be privy to these plans. He was not aware that they were going to come up from North Africa and invade from the south of France and into Italy.

Elyse Rivin: He was not told about the specific dates for the invasion in Normandy. He was invited to take his soldiers and join some of the British forces, and go along with them once these things were put into motion. But he kept insisting and kept writing and saying, "I want to make decisions. I want to be included in the decision-making." And at one point, he was in Alger, and Churchill finally backed him and said, "Okay, okay, we’re talking about his country, we have to include him in the meetings where we make these decisions and talk about it." And so they had him come to Alger and join in the meetings, but they brought someone else in, so they had to do a power-sharing. And de Gaulle basically said, "Me or nobody." So this was, of course, partly his attitude as well, and he was, if he hadn’t done the one thing that he’s really famous for at this point, for World War II, which was create the Committee of National Resistance inside the country of France, he probably would not have even had been included in what he was included in by the British and the Americans. What he did do, it was try to find a way to rally the people inside the country.

Elyse Rivin: So he created this committee of National Resistance of the Interior, basically, and this is where the man that we talked about, Jean Moulin, was brought in, because he was flown to London to meet him. And de Gaulle said, "Look, we have to see if we can get all of these different groups to join together and create some kind of cohesive whole." Just like his attitude towards the army, if you don’t have a resistance that has a unified front and has a unified plan, nothing is ever going to work.

Annie Sargent: So, what de Gaulle was worried about is that the English and the Americans, at this point, I should say, at this point, de Gaulle believed that the allies were going to prevail. He wasn’t worried about that. But what he thought, what he worried about is that he saw the British and the Americans were going to divide up Europe without consulting anybody. The way they divided up the Middle East without consulting anybody, by the way. And that’s what he fought tooth and nail.

Annie Sargent: He said, you know, "Europeans should be involved in deciding what happens to Italy, what happens to Poland. We must be involved." And he was met with a lot of incredulity from the powerful forces. The money all came from the US, and the English, I think because they spoke the same language.

Annie Sargent: I tried, I forgot to do this, but I intended to try and listen to some of de Gaulle speaking English. His English was probably not that great.

Elyse Rivin: It wasn’t very good, no.

Annie Sargent: Right. And so, you know, it’s really hard to fight for your ideas in a second language. You know, you can’t really say things the way you would like to. Anyway, so that was his concern is, "We’re being left out of everything at this point, and this could end up very badly."

Elyse Rivin: Yes, and I know that was one of the biggest fears. I put down two quotes. At some point, when Churchill really gets angry with him and basically says, "You are in France," because, you know, he’s annoyed with him for being so pretentious, and he says, "You’re fighting for France, but you are not France." And de Gaulle’s response was, "I am speaking for France. I represent free France."

Elyse Rivin: The two different visions of what was actually happening, and you’re absolutely right, because apparently, mostly on the part of Roosevelt, there was this idea that when they won the war and the war was over, that all these countries that had basically submitted to the Germans and who had basically given up would be taken over and dealt with in a different kind of way, including part of France.

Annie Sargent: Well, yeah, they wanted vassal states. They wanted states, they wanted to be able to install whoever they wanted to lead those countries, and all praise to the liberators, which even de Gaulle did a lot. You know? So, there you have it.

Elyse Rivin: Yeah. When it came to the invasion of Normandy, I can just imagine the fury that he had to realize that he hadn’t been consulted and that his soldiers were not included, because there were just a few.

Annie Sargent: There were a few, but very few. There were a few that were fighting with the English and had stayed with the English, yeah.

Elyse Rivin: So what happened though was thatonce they get to the banks of the beaches of Normandy, he convinced Churchill and General Montgomery, who of course was the head of the British Army, you know, and Montgomery apparently had a much better relationship with him than almost anybody else. It was very interesting. He also actually got along with Eisenhower, which is also very interesting. But he had not been with them on the beaches, but he was there the second they were off the beaches into Normandy, and he convinced Montgomery to let him speak on the radio from Bayeux. And so in 1944, in June, after they did that, this was the first time he got on the radio and basically said, "We have saved the country."

Elyse Rivin: Well, they were a long way from saving the country, and of course, a lot of it was totally demolished anyway, but the fact that he was there speaking in French on the radio, he was right, it gave the people of France hope.

Annie Sargent: Right, because you have to understand, what really happened during the D-Day is that, of course, they bombed some German positions and whatever, but it’s mostly French villages, farm houses that got blown up into smithereens.

Annie Sargent: And it wasn’t the Germans doing it, it was the allies doing it. And so at this point, what do you say to the French people?

Annie Sargent: And you had, on the one hand, you had Pétain saying, "Oh my God, they are bombing us. You know, they are the real enemies, we would have done better if we had accepted the Germans." And you have de Gaulle saying, "Listen, it has to be this way. We have to get rid of the Germans somehow, and we have to suffer through this." But I understand, the people on the ground, like, how would you see it if it was happening to you? It’s really hard.

Elyse Rivin: It’s very complicated, and that is one of the reasons why those speeches that he gave were so incredibly important. He also, by the way, agreed…I did read this, that he did understand and agree as a pure military man, the destruction of the French fleet. He understood that it was necessary, that if they couldn’t move the fleet out, he said, "If I had been in charge, and it had been my decision, I would’ve done the same thing."

Annie Sargent: Well, except he got mad about the one, the big, I can’t remember the name of the big ship…

Elyse Rivin: El Kebir.

Annie Sargent: Yeah. There was a big ship in Algeria that they sunk, and he was like, "You didn’t have to do that."

Elyse Rivin: Right, anyway, it was from this point on, in spite of all of the rest of what had to continue in terms of the battles, that de Gaulle positioned himself by force of his stubbornness, his insistence, basically, really, that he was publicly visible as the Allies approached Paris from Normandy. To me, it is unbelievable that he managed to do that. He actually positioned himself so that he was physically visible at that time.

Annie Sargent: Right. They just wanted the Americans and the British. That’s it. That’s it. "That’s the people we want to see. The other people, psst, F off."

Elyse Rivin: And sure enough, when the, of course Roosevelt, especially Roosevelt, but Roosevelt and Churchill, they said, you know, "We are the ones who are pushing back the Germans. We are the ones-"

Annie Sargent: Which they were… they were.

Elyse Rivin: And he said, "No, no, no." General Leclerc, who was, of course, the majorother general, French general who had fought with the British, and he said, "No, no, we are going to be there when you arrive in Paris to show the French people that there is a French military that is still standing, that there is a representation of the French that is not the Vichy government that is coming in." And of course, that is exactly what happened.

Elyse Rivin: You know the Yiddish word chutzpah? I mean, chutzpah. If you push far enough, and you are sure enough of yourself, you can maybe get away with something, and that is actually what I think he did, you know?

(Mid-roll ad spot)

Annie Sargent: Yeah, and after the war, we’re not quite done with the war, but…

Elyse Rivin: And after the war, well, of course, the war goes on for another nine months, really. But he is put in charge of the provisional government. Bless the man, right? I mean, this is…

Annie Sargent: Yeah. He felt like there was, there had to be somebody French who could represent, like who could be the figurehead.

Elyse Rivin: He wanted to make sure there was, number one, no civil war, because there was a chance in France, of course, of a huge, terrible civil war between those who complied with the Vichy government and those who suffered the Vichy government and the Germans.

Annie Sargent: Which is, most people complied. Most French people complied. You know, they were not that brave. They just decided it was easier to get along and shut up and get along, which is what happens when you have a big, scary leadership kind of person in a country. Like, you know, it’s hard to resist.

Elyse Rivin: And there was, there were those, of course, who collaborated.

Annie Sargent: Even worse, yeah.

Elyse Rivin: He knew. He knew. Between the resistant groups, between the collaborators, between those people who basically just, you know, laid down and let the world pass over them, he knew that there was going to be a huge amount of tension. There was a lot of political tension. There was a lot of hatred and resentment. There was the beginning of retribution in 1945 and 1946. There were incidents of retribution. And basically, what he did was he put a stop to that, and he said, "No. We have to have national unity, and at least, at least, at first, forget about who did what. We have to look forward. We have to create a new government," and that was when he began his political career, basically, creating the provisional government.

Annie Sargent: Yes, and one thing we should point out is that the, during this whole time, one of the places that he drew the most power from and the moststrength from was the French Empire, such as it was.

Annie Sargent: You know, France had colonies in Africa, and these places were very willing to work with him, to send troops, to work with him to help the mainland, which most of them had never set foot on. It’s incredible that they did this. And throughout this whole war, De Gaulle spent a lot of time living in Algeria, as a matter of fact, because it was the biggestcolony. My parents lived in Algeria at the time, and they were very young, both of them. But they remembered the Americans coming to take over in their village, and they didn’t seem to mind. The kids were given chewing gum, which they had never had. My mom remembered the chewing gum. But the French Empire and the battalions of black soldiers who fought for France were incredible. It kind of gave him a lot of… he was like… We’re not alone. We’re not alone in this fight. It’s not lost because we have the colonies." You know? And it made sense.

Elyse Rivin: It made sense, but, of course, the irony of all this is, of course, not only was he given the charge of creating a provisional government from 1944 to 1946, but he went on to create his own political party…. called the Rassemblement du Peuple Français.I’ll leave you to translate that.

Annie Sargent: The Assembly of the French People.

Elyse Rivin: The Assembly of French People, I guess.

Annie Sargent: We all called it le RPR forever.

Elyse Rivin: Which was basically a center-right party. And he helped create a new republic.In France, each time there’s basically a modification of the rules of the government and the constitution, so he was part of the creation of this, of what’s called the Fifth Republic. And of all things, he wound up becoming president of France from 1959 to 1969.

[00:46:16] Legacy and Conclusion

Elyse Rivin: The destiny of this man who started out fighting against the archaism of the troops and the material in World War I, who never imagined himself as a politician but as a military man, and who actually wound up being the hero in the eyes of the French people, and I have nothing… I would prefer that you talk about him even in his political career and his government because I know so little about it, you know?

Annie Sargent: One of the things that complicated a lot of things during World War II is communism. Because there were a lot of communist groups in France, it was a major political party in France. It was huge. I mean, at one point they had almost 50% of the votes.

Annie Sargent: And for obvious reasons, the Americans didn’t want the communists to win elections, and that’s one of the things that kind of swayed them to support de Gaulle. At first, they said, "Well, we don’t have a choice. We have to support Pétain because otherwise it’s the communists," but then de Gaulle kind of came up as another possibility, and it took a long time for him to establish himself. But there were massive tensions, and de Gaulle was no communist, but he worked with some of them. When he was the president, he had communists in his cabinet, usually at, you know, minor positions, but you know, they were elected. If you have a political party that earns 30% of the votes, you got to put them somewhere. That’s just how it is. We’re not going to go into all of this after war thing, but I just would like to say that because I am the daughter of Pieds-Noirs, so that’s the French people who colonized Algeria, and lived in Algeria for a few generations, and then came back to France when de Gaulle decided to return Algeria to its own devices. My parents were not political at all, had gone to hear him give a famous speech in 1962 where tensions were very, very high. The Algerian War had been going on for a while already, a couple of years, and they went to hear him and he said, "Je vous ai compris." That’s the quote that my dad used to repeat all the time. And he took it to mean, "We understand that you wanna stay in Algeria and we’re going to fight for you," and he did exactly the opposite. And this is something that de Gaulle was famous for. He was able to give a speech where at the end of it you weren’t sure if he was going to go right or if he was going to go left, and that’s one of the things that really annoyed the Americans about him, because besides the language difficulties, he was also very slick, okay? He was a slick politician and he fooled a lot of people, even native speakers. As the daughter of people… I mean, obviously, my parents did not like him, they didn’t… Most Pieds-Noirs did not like Charles de Gaulle or the political party that he founded afterwards.

Annie Sargent: And he wasn’t the perfect person. He had a lot of flaws, but you have to give it to him, he was able to rally French people who were about to completely give up.

Elyse Rivin: Yeah.

Annie Sargent: because they had been beaten into a pulp in the First World War.

Elyse Rivin: Right.

Annie Sargent: And the Second World War, you know, you make another kid and you’re happy your husband’s back from the war. You make another kid, now he’s 20, and there’s another war.

Elyse Rivin: Yep.

Annie Sargent: Like, "What would they do to you?" So, I was not raised in, like, you know, a "We love de Gaulle" kind of situation, but I still have to say, he was a very important character in French history.

Elyse Rivin: I certainly agree with you. I think that, if there’s anybody who colored and influenced everything between World War I and basically the 1980s, you know, because of course there’s the aftermath of the party he founded and everything else, and there are still politicians who call themselves Gaullists, you know, and…

Annie Sargent: Oh, yeah.

Elyse Rivin: … you can wonder what that means sometimes, but there they are.

Elyse Rivin: But, I mean, here was this man. I quoted him at the end because I think it’s the perfectepitaph for him. He said, " The end of hope is the beginning of death." And I think that that’s actually tells you everything about him. He never gave up hoping, he never gave up believing that if you convince people to look forward, to hang in there, to rally, that things will eventually get better. I mean, that was the way he was as a military leader and I think that’s probably the way he was in terms of his broadcasting during World War II. The complications of… And of course part of his destiny was what is the role of France in the world at… I mean, that’s a whole other…

Annie Sargent: Yeah, that’s a big one.

Elyse Rivin: Oh, that’s a big bag of beans there, you know.

Annie Sargent: So he was the president of France. Another major achievement is that he instituted the Fifth Republic, which in France, when you have a new republic, when you change the constitution in significant ways, you just bring about a new version of that constitution.

Annie Sargent: And being, he wasn’t a lawyer, he wasn’t anybody who… But he worked on a system that he thought would work better, and that has actually been in place since he was in power, so it’s been in place now for many years. It seems to have served the country well. It’s far from perfect, but it seems to have worked for a long time. France has become a bit more stable politically. They still fight but… They fight.

Elyse Rivin: They fight. They fight. The French like to fight politically.

Annie Sargent: But at the end of his career, at the end of his life as well in ’69, he just lost an election and he quit. He just left. And he told them, "At noon today I’m done." And he left, picked up his family and went to Colombey-les-Deux-Églises where he had a house, where he had been on and off for a long time. And he never went back to Paris except I think for the wedding of one of his nieces. But he just didn’t go back.

Annie Sargent: But of course he didn’t live that much longer.

Elyse Rivin: He only lived less than a year.

Annie Sargent: Yes, he lived for another year and he died of an aneurysm, which is what had killed his brother and his father as well.

Elyse Rivin: Ah.

Annie Sargent: So modern medicine would have probably avoided him that fate. Although perhaps it was a serious enough aneurysm that there’s not anything that they could have done about it.

Annie Sargent: At any rate, he was an amazing statesman. He’s right up there with people like Napoleon and people like that, French people that are famous enough to be talked about outside of France. I think he did some good and he did some bad.

Elyse Rivin: But he certainly was very important in the history of France for almost 100 years.

Annie Sargent: Definitely.

Annie Sargent: Thank you very much, Elyse. All week long I’ve been listening to that book about Charles de Gaulle. There are some assignments that are very fun. This one was arduous. I had to really concentrate on what the heck was happening. So much was happening. So…

Elyse Rivin: Yeah. Well, let’s face it, a lot happened in the world in that time.

Annie Sargent: Yes. And in the end I decided I’m going to avoid the details and just go to the general stuff. Thank you so much, Elyse.

Elyse Rivin: You’re quite welcome.

Annie Sargent: Au revoir.

Elyse Rivin: Au revoir.

[00:53:47] Thank You Patrons

Annie Sargent: Again, I want to thank all my patrons for giving back and supporting the show. Patrons get several exclusive rewards for doing that, you can see them at patreon.com/joinus.

Annie Sargent: And a special shout-out this week to my new Join Us in France champion, Melissa Pope.

Annie Sargent: And thank you, Beth and Blake Hall, for editing your membership up as well.

Annie Sargent: Would you join them too? You can do it for as little as $3 a month if you want the ad-free version of the episodes. But if you can afford it and you want more of the stuff, I would love to have you pledge more so you can have access to more of the rewards, including Zoom time with Annie that we had this weekend and is always a lot of fun.

Annie Sargent: And to support Elyse, of course, who does such a great job, go to patreon.com/elysart.

[00:54:46]  New Year’s festivities in Paris

Annie Sargent: I need to keep this short this week, so let’s go directly to December 31st, 2025, New Year’s festivities in Paris. This is a quick update from Paris about the New Year’s Eve celebrations on the Champs-Élysées and why they’re going to look a little bit different this year.

Annie Sargent: For the past few years, the city has offered a full evening program on December 31st, including a big public concert right on the avenue. But for New Year’s Eve 2025, that concert has been canceled. The fireworks at midnight will still happen, but there will be no live musical event before that.

Annie Sargent: The reason is simple, security concerns. According to the Paris Police, last year’s festivities, which brought more than a million people into the Champs-Élysées area, created several frightening crowd movements.

Annie Sargent: One police commissioner even said that they had more scares in two hours on New Year’s Eve than during the three full weeks of the Olympic Games.

Annie Sargent: That gives you a sense of the pressure they’re under.

Annie Sargent: Because of that, the police prefecture asked the concert be dropped, and the mayor, Anne Hidalgo agreed.

Annie Sargent: So instead of a live event, France 2 will broadcast a pre-recorded concert that was filmed few days ago, actually, at the Place de la Concorde, complete with paid extras standing in for the crowd. Some Parisians shrug it off, many locals say they avoid the Champs-Élysées on New Year’s Eve anyway because of the crowds, I certainly do personally, but tourists may find the night a little bit less festive than expected.

Annie Sargent: Still, the big show remains, the fireworks at midnight are going ahead exactly as planned, and if you’re in Paris during the holidays, the Champs-Élysées lights are still dazzling every night through January 4th. They turn on at 5:00 PM and switch off at midnight on weekdays and 1:00 AM on weekends, except for Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve when they stay on until morning.

Annie Sargent: So, it’s going to be fewer crowds, no live concerts, but the traditional fireworks and holiday sparkle are still very much happening at the most avenue in France.

Annie Sargent: And when it comes to Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, those are very much family events in France.

Annie Sargent: If you are in Paris at this time, make sure to reserve your meals and be prepared to pay extra for special meals.

Annie Sargent: And this is true also of New Year’s Eve. If you don’t want to go to the fireworks but you’d like something special, look around if you’re already in Paris, or look on TheFork, the app for reserving meals, and look for special New Year’s Eve dinners. They cost more, but they are usually a lot of fun.

Annie Sargent: My thanks to podcast editors, Anne and Christian Cotovan, who produced the transcripts and the audio.

[00:57:37] Next week on the podcast

Annie Sargent: Next week on the podcast, an episode about 40 visits to France with Janice Chan.

Annie Sargent: How’s that for a long-term love and appreciation for France, from our friend Janice from Canada? Janice is a lot of fun to chat with, you’ll love our conversation.

Annie Sargent: Thank you so much for listening, and I hope you join me next time so we’re going to look around France together. Au revoir.

[00:58:00] Copyright

Annie: The Join Us in France travel podcast is written, hosted, and produced by Annie Sargent, and Copyright 2025 by AddictedToFrance. It is released under a Creative Commons attribution, non-commercial, no derivatives license.

Subscribe to the Podcast

Apple YouTube Spotify RSS

Support the Show

Tip Your Guides Extras Patreon Audio Tours

Read more about this transcript

Episode Page 

Category: French History