At fifteen, Charles de Gaulle imagined himself as General de Gaulle
As a teenager, Charles de Gaulle wrote an essay picturing a certain General de Gaulle leading France to victory over Germany in 1930. Cadets later nicknamed the lanky youth the great asparagus. Decades on, he really did become the general who rallied the French against Nazi Germany, and then the founder of France's Fifth Republic.
Born in Lille in 1890, the third of five children in a devout Catholic, monarchist family, he grew up debating history with his father, a teacher at a Jesuit college. His mother's stories of weeping as a girl over France's defeat at Sedan in 1870 fed his fascination with strategy. A voracious reader of Bergson, Nietzsche and Plato, he wrote poetry, and his family paid to publish a short verse play. His biographer Jean Lacouture suggests he joined the army partly to please his father, despite being better suited to writing.
He entered the military academy of Saint-Cyr in 1909, ranked a middling 119th of 221. First he had to serve in the ranks, where a commander refused to make him sergeant, joking that nothing less than Constable of France would satisfy him. Standing 196 centimetres tall, he climbed steadily and graduated 13th in 1912, then joined a regiment commanded by Philippe Pétain, whom he credited with teaching him command. In the First World War he was wounded several times and captured by the Germans.
Between the wars he championed mobile armoured divisions, and in May 1940 he led one in a counterattack. Refusing to accept the armistice, he fled to Britain and on 18 June broadcast his appeal urging the French to keep fighting. He led the Free French, headed the provisional government from 1944 to 1946 and introduced state-guided economic policies that preceded three decades of boom.
Recalled during the 1958 crisis, he oversaw a new constitution creating the Fifth Republic with a powerful presidency. As president he pulled France out of NATO's integrated command, built an independent nuclear force, sealed reconciliation with West Germany in the 1963 Élysée Treaty and twice vetoed British entry to the European Economic Community. He resigned in 1969 after losing a referendum and died in 1970.
Source: Charles de Gaulle
