page_title: Henri de Kérillis
section_title: Exile
hierarchical_section_title: Henri de Kérillis / Exile
context_page_description: Henri Calloc'h de Kérillis was a French aviator, reporter, writer and politician. A hero of World War I, he traveled widely in the 1920s, and wrote several books about his adventures. He became a journalist, then entered politics as an independent Republican. He was right-wing, conservative and profoundly nationalist. He was hostile to the parties that favored appeasement of Germany in the lead-up to World War II, and went into exile rather than be arrested after the armistice of July 1940. At first a strong supporter of Charles de Gaulle and his Free French, he later fell out with de Gaulle too. He spent the last years of his life in voluntary exile in the United States.
context_section_description: When Reynaud's cabinet fell on 16 June 1940, de Kérillis flew in a small plane piloted by his brother Hervé from Bordeaux to Jersey, from where the English took them to Exeter on 15 June 1940.
  De Kérillis met General Charles de Gaulle in London before going on to New York.
  He reached the United States in mid-July. He was not present in Vichy on 10 July 1940 when Marshal Philippe Pétain was voted full powers.
  De Kérillis was expelled from the Legion of Honor and his property was confiscated.
  He was deprived of French nationality in the summer of 1940, and was sentenced to death in absentia.
  His son Alain was arrested. De Kérillis never saw him again.
  Geneviève Tabouis, a friend of the Roosevelts and passionate anti-Nazi, created a weekly journal Pour la victoire (For Victory) that first appeared in January 1942.
  De Kérillis wrote the main editorials for the journal.
  De Kérillis persuaded prominent writers to contribute to the journal, including Jacques Maritain, Ève Curie, Claude Lévi-Strauss, André Breton, Henri Peyre, Julien Green and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
  At first he was a strong supporter of de Gaulle in the United States and Canada.
  In September 1942 de Kérillis published Français, voici la vérité (French people, here is the truth) in which he criticized the government of Marshal Petain and praised General Charles de Gaulle.
  In September 1942 he signed a letter sent to General Charles de Gaulle by five members of the French parliament.
  The other signatories were Édouard Jonas, Hervé de Lyrot, Pierre Mendès France and Pierre Cot.
  De Kérillis sympathized with de Gaulle's difficulty, saying in a letter to him,
  Wherever there are twenty Frenchmen they fight among themselves. There are those for de Gaulle and those against him, those for him and against the British, those for the British and against him, those for Pétain, those for Weygand, and those for Laval. There are also the fools, the cowards and those who are afraid. There is all and everything. The terrible tragedy has taught them nothing and has changed nothing. 
  By 1943 de Kérillis had become hostile to de Gaulle.
  The turning point came when de Gaulle began to assume total control of the Free French movement, both military and political, starting with his attacks on General Henri Giraud in North Africa. His hostility deepened when de Gaulle brought communists into the government in exile, since de Kérillis considered that the communists had betrayed France by supporting the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact.
  He was among the prominent refugees from France who created friction between de Gaulle and Franklin D. Roosevelt.
  De Kérillis left Pour la victoire in December 1944.
  In October 1945 he published a work called De Gaulle dictateur.
  In it he accused de Gaulle of having lost sight of his first objective of liberating France in favor of his personal political ambitions.
  He said that de Gaulle's entourage included former "Cagoulards", extreme right wing terrorists who had tried to destabilize the 3rd Republic in the 1930s.
  He described André Dewavrin ("Colonel Passy") as de Gaulle's "evil genius", describing him as the "all powerful head of the Gaullist Gestapo."
  De Kérillis chose voluntary exile in the United States after the war rather than return to a France "humiliated and enslaved by her new masters."
  He died on 11 April 1958 at his farm on Long Island, New York.
caption: Henri Giraud (left) and Charles de Gaulle sit down after shaking hands in presence of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill at the Casablanca Conference on 14 January 1943, in an insincere public display of unity.
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