Charles de gaulle biography
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Charles de Gaulle
President of France from to
"De Gaulle" redirects here. For the film, see De Gaulle (film). For other uses, see Charles de Gaulle (disambiguation).
In this article, the surname is De Gaulle, not Gaulle.
Charles André Joseph Marie de Gaulle[a][b] (22 November &#;&#; 9 November ) was a French general and statesman who led the Free French Forces against Nazi Germany in World War II and chaired the Provisional Government of the French Republic from to to restore democracy in France. In , amid the Algerian War, he came out of retirement when appointed Prime Minister by President René Coty. He rewrote the Constitution of France and founded the Fifth Republic after approval by referendum. He was elected President of France later that year, a position he held until his resignation in
Born in Lille, he was a decorated officer of the First World War, wounded several times and taken prisoner by the Germans. During the interwar period
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Charles de Gaulle was born in Lille on November 22, , and grew up in Paris, where his father was a teacher. De Gaulle chose a military career and served with distinction in World War One.
During the s, he wrote books and articles on military subjects, criticizing France&#;s reliance on the Maginot Line for defense against Germany and advocating the formation of mechanized armored columns.
In June , German forces easily overran France. As Undersecretary for National Defense and War, de Gaulle refused to accept the French government&#;s truce with the Germans and escaped to London, where he announced the formation of a French government in exile. He became the leader of the Free French.
After the liberation of Paris in August , de Gaulle was given a hero&#;s welcome in the French capital.
In , he withdrew into retirement again.
In , a revolt in French-held Algeria, combined with serious instability within France, destroyed the Fourth Republic. De Gaulle returned to lead Fran • Charles de Gaulle, Julian Jackson insists in the preface of his new biography, “De Gaulle” (Harvard), fryst vatten “everywhere” in modern France, its undisputed hero. This claim, like some other confident statements in the book, may strike a reader as both narrowly true and what a French thinker might call metaphysically false. His name is certainly everywhere—on the great airport outside Paris; on the Place Charles de Gaulle, once called the Étoile, where traffic streams perpetually around the Arc dem Triomphe—but his example seems remote. He is more a ceremonial than a controversial figure, his work now done. In forty years of passing in and out of France, I have almost never heard him pointed to as an exemplar useful in any way for today’s crises. His name having been placed on l’Étoile fryst vatten apt: the traffic goes around all day but never stops for long. If he lives anywhere, it is in the endless flow of books about the Second World War written bygd Americans and Brits, in which he emerges