FREE ARTICLE: Charles de Gaulle: Origins
This week, I’m going to be looking at the early life of Charles de Gaulle, beginning with his background and his initial military training today, and then on Friday, an extensive look at his experience of the First World War.
De Gaulle might be the most famous individual in French memory. Nobody, not even Napoleon, tops him in terms of commemoration. In 2010, 44% of French voters named him the most consequential Frenchman, or woman, in their history. Which is all the more impressive when you consider how man people didn’t like him when he was alive. I suppose it stands to reason that a man who inspired such unwavering devotion on the part of some incited the complete opposite in others. Perhaps it was because he was hard to pin down in terms of ideology that modern politicians at both ends of the spectrum claim his legacy. In the words of one historian: ‘he was a soldier who spent most of his career fighting the army; a conservative who often talked like a revolutionary; a man of passion who found it almost impossible to express emotions.’ Behind the man people think he was, pick apart the fact that there is the man who crafted his own extensive legend. Artfully.
But before the war that made him famous, before he gave that speech (that hardly anyone heard) in 1940 and rejected the premise of Pétain and his incoming, collaborative government to launch the Free French movement, who was Charles de Gaulle? Where did he come from? What shaped him as a man? And how did the single most important military influence on his career, the First World War, shape the leader he would become in the middle of the 20th Century?
When the name de Gaulle started to gain traction immediately following Hitler’s stunning victory over France, people weren’t even sure if it was even a real name.
De Gaulle as a child (Wikipedia)
Origins
It was. A Jean de Gaulle apparently fought against the English at Agincourt in 1415. It would have made an excellent origins movie montage, but no link has ever been proven to Charles. What is tangible, is the ennoblement of an ancestor in Burgundy in 1604. The family subsequently moved to Paris, where in the 18th Century they served the ancien régime. It wasn’t their birth that elevated the de Gaulles to a position of minor prominence, but their position among the ranks of lawyers and bureaucrats serving the King.
Then came hard times. De Gaulle’s great-grandfather was arrested during the Revolution and only escaped the guillotine with the fall of Robespierre in 1794, and so Charles’s paternal grandparents, both of whom died before he was born, earned their crust by writing. His grandfather Julien penned numerous history books, but his grandmother Joséphine was truly prolific. She put out more than eighty tomes in her lifetime, as well as editing a Catholic newspaper. Of their three children, only one, Henri, had a family. Forced to support his aged and infirm relatives too, Charles de Gaulle’s father gave up the chance to study at the prestigious Ecole Polytechnique, and instead took a government job. Later on, he would become a teacher at a Jesuit school in Paris, before setting up his own institution.
It was into this household that Charles de Gaulle was born on 22nd November 1890. His mother’s kin were well off. De Gaulle’s youth was shaped by the time he spent in Lille with his maternal family, the Maillots. Led by his formidable grandmother Julie, who bore a teeny part of Irish ancestry, this side of the tree had made their money in the textile industry. Julie’s reach was long, as were here exacting standards. When he was eighteen, de Gaulle would write of an illicit trip to the opera to see Carmen: ‘it goes without saying that not a word of this must reach grandma.’
As well as being pious, the family was one of social principles. One of the pillars of de Gaulle’s life was a kind of paternalism, the duty he believed he owed to people less well off, to his country as part of his allegiance to this lower rung of gentry folk; a commitment to think less of oneself and more of the greater good. Those with great riches were not so pure in terms of nourishing the soul of France, in his mind. In 1962 he quipped: ‘’their material possessions chose for them. Those with possessions are possessed by what they own.’ There were precedents in his recent lineage. His great uncle Charles Kolb-Bernard, a sugar manufacturer, set up a branch of a Catholic organisation to aid the poor. He also helped finance the construction of Lille Cathedral. This was a pious, northern family; in which two of de Gaulle’s aunts were nuns. Austerity was the family watchword, as was tradition. Ostentatious behaviour was distasteful.
Whilst frequent sojourns to Lille were characteristic of de Gaulle’s childhood, he was raised in the seventh arrondissement of Paris; close to where his father taught. This serious neighbourhood bore an air of faded grandeur, of attachements to the sensibilities that the de Gaulles held dear: the Invalides, the Ecole Militaire, Catholic schools, religious institutions. It was a perfect, respectable home for his father; ‘a gentle survivor from another age: distinguished and formal, undemonstrative and erudite.’ The de Gaulles erred on the side of a royalist course; if not in favour of a militant return, then at least towards a conservative nostalgia of days gone by.
The young Charles de Gaulle was far from academic. In fact he was hyperactive, restless. If he did sit down, he would be more likely to write poetry than study for his exams. Then he underwent somewhat of an epiphany in his mid-teens. At about fifteen, de Gaulle decided that he wanted a military career.
In order to get into Saint-Cyr to train as an officer, he would have to seriously buck his ideas up, because admission was competitive and demanding. There was no family precedent for a life spent in the army, but it was not such a surprise when put into context. He belonged to a new generation that, it was argued, ‘displayed a ‘taste for action’ centred around ‘patriotic faith’ and a return to religious values.’ A figurehead for this was the writer Charles Péguy, and he had an immense impact on the young de Gaulle. ‘In the years before the war I read everything he wrote, during my adolescence, then at Saint-Cyr and as a young officer ... I felt very close to him... He experienced things exactly as I experienced them.’ Also key was Maurice Barrès. De Gaulle would claim that he ‘gave back to the elite a consciousness of national eternity by revealing the links that attached it to its ancestors.’
De Gaulle was also into the works of a few philosophers too, and once again you can see the impact on how he would operate throughout his life. Key to his thinking was Bergson, who put it out there that intellect is one thing, but to become a great man, you needed more than pure smarts. In de Gaulle’s own words:
The intelligent man does not automatically become the man of action. Instinct is also important. Instinct plus impulse… The two, intellect and impulse, must go together... Great men have both intellect and impulse. The brain serves as a brake upon pure emotional impulse. The brain surmounts impulse; but there must also be impulse and the capability for action in order not to be paralysed by the brake of the brain. I remember this from Bergson who has guided me here through my entire life.
And what about his faith? This is a complicated one. Certainly as he got older, the piety that characterised his early years receded. Some will tell you that he was profoundly religious. Others will say that he looked bored in church, that it looked like he was ticking a box as opposed to meaningfully worshipping.
One thing is certain, de Gaulle considered Catholicism an institution integral to the structure of France and this was wrapped up in his fierce patriotism, his sense of duty, and his devotion to his country. The young de Gaulle talked about sacrificing oneself for his country in the same vein as Rupert Brooke would at the beginning of the war. Later de Gaulle would say:
Nothing matters to us and nothing preoccupies us more than to serve her. Our duty to her is as simple and elementary as the duty of a son to an oppressed mother... We have nothing other to ask from her except perhaps that on the day of victory, she opens maternally her arms to us so that we can cry with joy and that on the day when death comes to claim us she enfolds us gently in her good and holy earth.
So all of this was churning in his head, and then there was the international situation, which now gave the adolescent Charles de Gaulle a cause:
In 1905, the year he turned fifteen, Kaiser Wilhelm turned up at Tangier, throwing his weight around and sparked a diplomatic incident that ranks high amongst the eventual causes of the First World War. Suddenly, Germany was very real threat to the likes of France and Britain.
And already bubbling under the surface for de Gaulle, there was Revanche. Though the desire for revenge over the loss of Alsace and Lorraine had largely waned in France since 1871, it was still a very real issue for de Gaulle’s family. Henri de Gaulle was a veteran of the Franco-Prussian War. According to Julian Jackson:
The de Gaulle boys were often taken by their parents to see the war memorial erected at Le Bourget where de Gaulle’s father had fought in the campaign of 1870-71. The bas-relief carries the carving of a broken sword with the inscription: The sword of France, broken in valiant French hands, will be forged again by their descendants.’ That phrase haunted de Gaulle. On 13th July 1940 he proclaimed on the BBC: ‘Those whose duty it was to wield the sword of France have let it fall from their hands, broken. I have picked up again the pieces of the sword.
De Gaulle pictured in 1910 (Wikipedia)
And so Charles de Gaulle chose the army. He spent the summer of 1908 in Baden, learning German, the language of the enemy. He noted that the newspapers were anti-French: ‘It is clear that something has changed in Europe in the last three years and, seeing this, I think of the malaise that precedes great wars, notably that of 1870. I hope that this time the roles will be reversed.’
De Gaulle passed the entrance exams fo Saint-Cyr in September 1909. He clocked in at 119 out of 221 entering, but actually this is still good, as it was rare enough to make it in at the first attempt. That year, one in four got in. But first, he would have to serve a year in the ranks. This was new. Anyone who wanted to be an officer in the French Army now had to first learn to empathise with the sort of men they would have to command. De Gaulle chose to join a northern regiment, and departed for Arras to serve in the 33rd Infantry Regiment under none other than Colonel Philippe Pétain.
By the time he graduated from Saint-Cyr in the summer of 1912, now 21, de Gaulle was an odd looking young man, not least because he towered over his contemporaries. At nearly six and a half feet tall, unsurprisingly, he was not comfortable in his own skin. He often referenced his awkwardness. In 1943, he would remark to another tall man: ‘We giants are never at ease with others... The armchairs are always too small, the tables too low, the impression one makes too strong.’
But he stuck out for another reason too. By the time he graduated, de Gaulle had worked himself up to thirteenth in his class. His marks gave him the option of serving in any branch of the army he chose. He opted for the infantry. That he didn’t go for the shiny cavalry has been commented on before, but actually, the choice to go back to the 33rd was significant for another reason. It meant that he had made the choice between building a career in France, or opting to serve in the colonies.
In 1912, the army lacked some of the prestige of yesteryear. Applicants for Saint-Cyr had more than halved since 1900, to just 800 the year de Gaulle entered. Though he might have been influenced by the likes of Péguy, and Barrès, the wider population had lost some of the passion for revenge or hopes of glory on the battlefield that fired people up in the aftermath of the last war with Germany. They had also been impacted by the stain of the Dreyfus affair. Prestige had been diminished, anti-militarism, and pacifism permeated public opinion.
On the eve of the First World War, Charles de Gaulle was happy with his lot, but not blind to the challenges that France and her army faced in the event of a war. In 1913 he delivered a lecture to his men in which he said:
It is impossible to deny, dear comrades, that if really disinterested and generous feelings exist in the world, the main one is patriotism. I do not think that any human love has ever inspired greater and purer devotion... And if there is one absolutely necessary obligation whose negation causes also the negation of patriotism, that is military service ... Certainly war is an evil, I am the first to agree, but it is a necessary evil... Nothing more awakens in a people male virtues and noble enthusiasm than the sense that the fatherland is in danger... In seeing his fatherland threatened by ambitious enemies, the citizen understands the need to remain manly to defend it better. While prolonged peace provokes the love of gain and the appetite of vice, war develops in men’s hearts much that is good; peace allows what is bad to thrive.
The life and times of Charles de Gaulle is an intimidating rabbit hole. If you are minded to wade through a biography fat enough to floor a rhino, which is standard, I recommend ‘A Certain Idea of France,’ by Julian Jackson.