De Gaulle Dies: France Mourns Its Liberator

Charles de Gaulle's France walked out of NATO's integrated military command in 1966, expelled American military personnel and bases from French soil, and pursued an independent foreign policy designed to make France a power that answered to neither Washington nor Moscow. It was the most dramatic assertion of national sovereignty within the Western alliance during the Cold War. Born in Lille on November 22, 1890, de Gaulle was a career military officer who served in World War I, was wounded three times, and spent over two and a half years as a prisoner of war in Germany. Between the wars, he wrote books on military strategy, particularly the use of armored divisions, that were largely ignored by the French military establishment. The Germans read them. When France fell in June 1940, de Gaulle was an undersecretary of defense. He flew to London and, on June 18, 1940, made a BBC radio broadcast calling on the French to resist. Almost nobody heard it. He had no army, no government, and no legal authority. He had a microphone and a refusal to accept facts. Over the next four years, through pure intransigence, he made himself the face of Free France, persuading Churchill and Roosevelt to treat a man with no army and no country as a legitimate head of state. He returned to Paris in August 1944 and led a provisional government until 1946, when he resigned over disagreements about the Fourth Republic's constitution. He spent twelve years in political wilderness. He returned to power in 1958 during the Algerian crisis, when the Fourth Republic collapsed under the weight of the colonial war. He founded the Fifth Republic with a strong presidency and eventually negotiated Algerian independence in 1962, surviving multiple assassination attempts by disaffected military officers who considered his withdrawal a betrayal. His independent foreign policy, nuclear deterrent, and vision of a "Europe of nations" free from American dominance defined French diplomacy for decades after his death. He died on November 9, 1970, at Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises, watching the evening news. Heart attack. Hands on the table. He was 79.