When US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt first met General Charles de Gaulle in Casablanca in 1943, he was unimpressed. Allied troops had seized French North Africa from Vichy forces, and Washington had its own plans for who would oversee the colonies until Paris could be delivered from Nazi hands. De Gaulle, the proud and prickly leader of the Free French, was not on Roosevelt’s list.
When the two men came face to face, the US president accused De Gaulle of trying to set himself up as the sole legitimate representative of France – despite the fact, he pointed out, that the general had never actually been elected.
“Neither was Joan of Arc,” De Gaulle replied.
The comparison might be more apt than it first seems. Adopted by Marshal Philippe Pétain and the ultra-nationalist collaborators of the Vichy regime as a symbol of an eternal Catholic France betrayed by domestic subversives, the virginal warrior-saint was taken up in turn by the Resistance as a figure who fought to free France from foreign occupation.
A year before the French election, De Gaulle remains politically fashionable
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De Gaulle, too, seems to mean many things to many people these days.
France’s ongoing obsession with De Gaulle is again on full display this summer with the back-to-back release of a two-part film project of the same name focusing on the general’s unlikely campaign to rally French resistance to the Nazi occupation.
The first part of French director Antonin Baudry’s diptyque, “Résistance” hit cinemas this week after receiving favourable reviews at the Cannes Film Festival. The second part, “Liberté”, will be released a month later on July 3.
Watch moreCharles de Gaulle and the French Resistance: History in the spotlight at Cannes
Historical revisionism
Sixty-eight years into the Fifth Republic that De Gaulle made in his own image, the general has no shortage of admirers. Each political camp in the fractured National Assembly lays claim to his legacy – even, now, the far-right movement led by Marine Le Pen.
In the clamour and chaos that followed French President Emmanuel Macron’s abrupt dissolution of the National Assembly in 2024, the rebranded Rassemblement national, or National Rally – a likely nod to De Gaulle’s own Rassemblement du people français movement launched in the wake of the Liberation – proclaimed itself as the sole defender of General de Gaulle’s legacy.
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It was the latest in a long line of public statements from the younger Le Pen striving to distance herself from the furious anti-Gaullism of her father, who built the far-right movement in part out of the rage of French settlers freshly returned from Algeria, who never forgave De Gaulle for accepting the country’s hard-won independence from France.
And while the country’s left viewed De Gaulle with distrust long before he rode the threat of a military coup back to the presidency in 1958, France Unbowed figurehead Jean-Luc Mélenchon has also drawn upon elements of the general’s legacy in recent years. Mélenchon, who has called for France to withdraw from NATO, has spoken warmly of De Gaulle’s decision to pull the country out of the military alliance’s integrated command structure and pursue a foreign policy independent from both Washington and Moscow.
The new Napoleon
David Todd, a professor in modern history at Sciences Po University Paris, said that the once divisive De Gaulle has reached a level of universal acclaim in France not seen since the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte.
“De Gaulle has now replaced Napoleon as the incarnation of national unity and glory – perhaps because French nationalism is more concerned with resisting global perils than invading the world,” he said. “The cult of De Gaulle has little to do with the actual practices or policies of Gaullism. In my view, it rather reflects a yearning for national cohesion and greatness.”
So what does it actually mean to be a self-proclaimed Gaullist in 21st-century France?
On the left, it means a renewed fight for military sovereignty and a non-aligned foreign policy freed from Washington’s dictates – but also a full-throated rejection of the concentration of constitutional power in the figure of the president that remains the general’s most lasting institutional legacy.
For the neoliberal Macron, who shares the general’s contempt for party politics, it has meant a sweeping rhetoric that places France at the heart of world affairs and a remote yet regal president at the heart of the French state – but also a deeply held antipathy to the active state role in the nation’s economy that underwrote De Gaulle’s third-way compromise between communism and liberalism.
And for Le Pen, it means yet another bid to fold the far-right group into France’s republican tradition and a way to distance itself from the collaborationist Vichy regime that still stands as its ideological forebear.
But while every politician in France has their own certain idea of De Gaulle, the common thread that runs through them seems to be the general’s almost religious reverence for French sovereignty.
Wary of Washington
As US President Donald Trump continues to hammer Washington’s European allies with trade tariffs and demand they step up military spending and support his war on Iran, De Gaulle’s long-held fears of the US bid for global hegemony have found a new relevance – as have his efforts to pursue an independent foreign policy.
“De Gaulle’s policies were a half-success,” Todd said. “France in the 1960s acquired a degree of autonomy and was more apt than any other country at voicing criticisms of the United States. But the constraints of the Cold War seriously limited this autonomy – the threat posed by the Soviet Union’s huge military and ideological hostility ensured Western Europe’s eager subservience to American leadership.”
The historian drew parallels with the agony of indecision facing modern European nations, many of whom continue to champion a US military presence in Europe as a bulwark against a revanchist Russia even as Trump threatens to pull his forces out of the European theatre.
Read moreA look at the US military presence in Europe as Trump seeks to withdraw troops from Germany
“De Gaulle himself was well aware that only good relations with ‘Russia’ – as he persisted in calling the Soviet Union – was the only means of severing dependence ties to the US. Hence his controversial trip to Moscow and attempt to negotiate a Franco-Soviet pact in 1944 – after 1947, fear of communism rendered such a policy unconceivable,” Todd said. “Today, similarly, fear of Russia paralyses Europeans, although objectively the Soviet/Russian threat is much less serious.”
In any case, he said, France no longer had the same economic and military weight that it enjoyed in the decades following the Liberation. Nor, he added, was De Gaulle’s single-minded devotion to French sovereignty likely to find the same fertile soil in modern France as it did in a period wracked by war and resistance.
“Nationalism, in the neutral sense of faith in one’s nation, is not as intense as it was in the second half of the twentieth century. The centrist elites believe instead in Europe or the Atlantic community. The populist right cultivates a xenophobic and racist conception of the nation – they care about white Frenchmen, rather than France,” he said.
“De Gaulle was pompous, his ‘War Memoirs’ are full of deliberate omissions and half-truths, but his passionate love of France was sincere,” he added. “I very much doubt that anyone – myself included, although I feel quite patriotic – loves France in the same mystical way today.”
This story originally appeared on France24
