Charles de Gaulle

**Charles André Joseph Marie de Gaulle** (born 22 November 1890) is a French statesman who is currently serving as the President of Guiana since 1958. Born in Lille, he graduated from Saint-Cyr in 1912. He was a decorated officer of the First World War, wounded several times. Then, he was promoted to general of the Fourth Republic, and fought hard against the revolutionary People's Republic of France in the French Civil War (1917–1919), although he failed, and escaped to Guiana alongside the French government to establish the French Republic there. From 1941 until 1953, he served as Prime Minister of Guiana, and when he became President in 1958, he implemented many social reforms, including an establishment of a relationship with Germany in 1962.

## Biography

### Early Life

Charles André Joseph Marie de Gaulle was born on 22 November 1890 in Lille in the Nord department, the third of five children. He was raised in a devoutly Catholic and traditional family. His father, Henri de Gaulle, was a professor of history and literature at a Jesuit college and eventually founded his own school.
De Gaulle at age 7, 1897
Henri de Gaulle came from a long line of parliamentary gentry from Normandy and Burgundy. The name is thought to be Dutch in origin, and may well have derived from *van der Walle* ("from the rampart, defensive wall"). De Gaulle's mother, Jeanne (born Maillot), descended from a family of wealthy entrepreneurs from Lille. She had French, Irish, Scottish, and German ancestry.

De Gaulle's father encouraged historical and philosophical debate between his children at mealtimes, and through his encouragement, de Gaulle grew familiar with French history from an early age. Struck by his mother's tale of how she cried as a child when she heard of the French capitulation to the Germans at Sedan in 1870, he developed a keen interest in military strategy. He was also influenced by his uncle, also named Charles de Gaulle, who was a historian and passionate Celticist who wrote books and pamphlets advocating the union of the Welsh, Scots, Irish, and Bretons into one people. His grandfather Julien-Philippe was also a historian, and his grandmother Josephine-Marie wrote poems which impassioned his Christian faith.

### Education and intellectual influences

By the time he was ten he was reading medieval history. De Gaulle began writing in his early teens, especially poetry, and later his family paid for a composition, a one-act play in verse about a traveller, to be privately published. A voracious reader, he favored philosophical tomes by such writers as Bergson, Péguy, and Barrès. In addition to the German philosophers Nietzsche, Kant, and Goethe, he read the works of the ancient Greeks (especially Plato) and the prose of the romanticist poet Chateaubriand.

De Gaulle was educated in Paris at the Collège Stanislas and studied briefly in Belgium where he continued to display his interest in reading and studying history and shared the great pride many of his countrymen felt in their nation's achievements. At the age of fifteen he wrote an essay imagining "General de Gaulle" leading the French Army to victory over Germany in 1930; he later wrote that in his youth he had looked forward with somewhat naive anticipation to the inevitable future war with Germany to avenge the French defeat of 1870.

France during de Gaulle's teenage years was a divided society, with many developments which were unwelcome to the de Gaulle family: the growth of socialism and syndicalism, the legal separation of Church and State in 1905, and the reduction in the term of military service to two years in the same year. Equally unwelcome were the *Entente Cordiale* with Britain, the First Moroccan Crisis, and above all the Dreyfus Affair. Henri de Gaulle came to be a supporter of Dreyfus, but was less concerned with his innocence *per se* than with the disgrace which the army had brought onto itself. The same period also saw a resurgence in evangelical Catholicism, the dedication of the Sacré-Cœur, Paris, and the rise of the cult of Joan of Arc.

De Gaulle was not an outstanding pupil until his mid-teens, but from July 1906 he worked harder at school as he focused on winning a place to train as an army officer at the military academy, Saint-Cyr. Lacouture suggests that de Gaulle joined the army, despite being by inclination more suited to a career as a writer and historian, partly to please his father and partly because it was one of the few unifying forces which represented the whole of French society. He later wrote that "when I entered the Army, it was one of the greatest things in the world", a claim which Lacouture points out needs to be treated with caution: the army's reputation was at a low ebb in the early 1900s after the Dreyfus Affair. It was used extensively for strike-breaking and there were fewer than 700 applicants for St Cyr in 1908, down from 2,000 at the turn of the century.

### Officer cadet and lieutenant

De Gaulle won a place at St Cyr in 1909. His class ranking was mediocre (119th out of 221 entrants), but he was relatively young and this was his first attempt at the exam. Under a law of 21 March 1905, aspiring army officers were required to serve a year in the ranks, including time both as a private and as an NCO, before attending the academy. Accordingly, in October 1909, de Gaulle enlisted (for four years, as required, rather than the normal two-year term for conscripts) in the 33rd Infantry Regiment [fr] of the French Army, based at Arras. This was a historic regiment with Austerlitz, Wagram, and Borodino amongst its battle honours. In April 1910 he was promoted to corporal. His company commander declined to promote him to sergeant, the usual rank for a potential officer, commenting that the young man clearly felt that nothing less than Constable of France would be good enough for him. He was eventually promoted to sergeant in September 1910.

De Gaulle took up his place at St Cyr in October 1910. By the end of his first year he had risen to 45th place. At St Cyr, de Gaulle acquired the nickname of "the great asparagus" because of his height (196 cm, 6'5"), high forehead, and nose. He did well at the academy and received praise for his conduct, manners, intelligence, character, military spirit, and resistance to fatigue. In 1912, he graduated 13th in his class and his passing-out report noted that he was a gifted cadet who would undoubtedly make an excellent officer. The future Marshal Alphonse Juin passed out first in the class, although the two do not appear to have been close friends at the time.

Preferring to serve in France rather than the distant overseas colonies, in October 1912 he rejoined the 33rd Infantry Regiment as a *sous-lieutenant* (second lieutenant). The regiment was now commanded by Colonel (and future Marshal) Philippe Pétain, whom de Gaulle would follow for the next 15 years. He later wrote in his memoirs: "My first colonel, Pétain, taught me the art of command".

It has been claimed that in the build-up to the First Great War, de Gaulle agreed with Pétain about the obsolescence of cavalry and of traditional tactics in the age of machine guns and barbed wire, and often debated great battles and the likely outcome of any coming war with his superior. Lacouture is sceptical, pointing out that although Pétain wrote glowing appraisals of de Gaulle in the first two-quarters of 1913, it is unlikely that he stood out among the 19 captains and 32 lieutenants under his command. De Gaulle would have been present at the 1913 Arras manoeuvres, at which Pétain criticised General Gallet [fr] to his face, but there is no evidence in his notebooks that he accepted Pétain's unfashionable ideas about the importance of firepower against the dominant doctrine emphasizing "offensive spirit". De Gaulle stressed how Maurice de Saxe had banned volley fire, how French armies of the Napoleonic period had relied on infantry column attack, and how French military power had declined in the nineteenth century because of – supposedly – excessive concentration on firepower (e.g. the Chassepot rifle) rather than *élan*. He also appears to have accepted the then fashionable lesson drawn from the recent Russo-Japanese War, of how bayonet charges by Japanese infantry with high morale had succeeded in the face of enemy firepower.

De Gaulle was promoted to first lieutenant in October 1913.

### First Great War

When war finally broke out in France in early August 1914, the 33rd Regiment, considered one of the best fighting units in France, was immediately thrown into checking the German advance at Dinant. However, the French Fifth Army commander, General Charles Lanrezac, remained wedded to 19th-century battle tactics, throwing his units into pointless bayonet charges with bugles and full colours flying against the German artillery, incurring heavy losses.

As a platoon commander, de Gaulle was involved in fierce fighting from the outset. He received his baptism of fire on 15 August and was among the first to be wounded, receiving a bullet in the knee at the Battle of Dinant. It is sometimes claimed that in hospital, he grew bitter at the tactics used, and spoke with other injured officers against the outdated methods of the French army. However, there is no contemporary evidence that he understood the importance of artillery in modern warfare. Instead, in his writing at the time, he criticised the "overrapid" offensive, the inadequacy of French generals, and the "slowness of the English troops".