Charles de Gaulle: what he did, and what is argued over

On 18 June 1940 a man walks into a BBC studio and speaks to a country that is not listening. He has been a brigadier general on a provisional basis since the first of the month, and he is no longer a minister: the government he belonged to fell two days earlier. Nobody records it. On 2 August a military tribunal sitting at Clermont-Ferrand sentences him to death in absentia.

Four years later he governs. He signs the ordinance of 21 April 1944, which makes Frenchwomen voters; on 25 August, at the Hôtel de Ville in Paris, he cries “Paris outragé ! Paris brisé ! Paris martyrisé ! mais Paris libéré !”, Paris outraged, Paris broken, Paris martyred, but Paris liberated. Then he leaves: resignation on 20 January 1946, and twelve years out of government.

The return takes a few months. Algiers rises on 13 May 1958; on 1 June the Assembly votes him in, 329 to 224; on 28 September the Constitution he wanted is approved by referendum with 82.6 per cent of the vote, and promulgated on 4 October. Eleven years of power follow: self-determination for Algeria, the Évian accords of 18 March 1962, the election of the president by direct universal suffrage. On 27 April 1969, 52.41 per cent of voters say no to his last referendum. The next day he leaves office.

The appeal heard every 18 June is not the one of 18 June. The BBC kept no recording of that evening’s speech, which very few French people heard. The voice broadcast ever since is that of 22 June: a second appeal, four days later, and that one was recorded. It is that recording, not the first, that UNESCO listed in 2005 beside the manuscript of the 18th.

The best-known line of the appeal is not in the appeal. “La France a perdu une bataille ! Mais la France n’a pas perdu la guerre !”, France has lost a battle but France has not lost the war, opens the poster “À tous les Français”, put up on the walls of London on 3 August 1940 and printed at first in a thousand copies. The poster takes up phrases from the June speeches, but it is a different version of them: he did not say that sentence on the 18th.

Votes for women were not decided by one man. The text discussed by the consultative assembly in Algiers provided only that women would be eligible for office. It was an amendment by the communist deputy Fernand Grenier, voted on 24 March 1944, that wrote that they would be voters and eligible on the same terms as men. De Gaulle signed the ordinance a month later.

How he came back, in 1958. René Rémond keeps to what is established and public, and stresses the collapse of the Fourth Republic, the absence of consensus and the country’s indifference to its abandonment, rather than a plot. Odile Rudelle argues the opposite: a Gaullist manoeuvre held from one end to the other, and recalls a line of his from 1951, that to make an 18 June you need the atmosphere. Gaetano Quagliariello shifts the question to the grey zone where the illegality of some widens the room of legal actors, and uses for the episode the phrase democratic coup d’état.

What he wanted for Algeria. Guy Pervillé reviews the readings without fully endorsing any. For Xavier Yacono and Irwin Wall, de Gaulle did everything at first to keep Algeria French, until conceding self-determination in September 1959. General Challe thought him without a plan, improvising. Others, keeping to the public statements, judge that he did change policy, but far more slowly than he said afterwards.

29 May 1968, and memory. That day he disappears and goes to see General Massu at Baden-Baden. Massu reported a man telling him everything was finished and coming to find refuge; his son-in-law Alain de Boissieu argued the opposite, the decision taken before leaving and the speech of 30 May already lying on the desk at the Élysée. More broadly: it was Henry Rousso who coined the word résistancialisme, in Le Syndrome de Vichy, for the myth of a nation that stayed united and uncompromised under the Occupation, built up gradually after 1944.

The institutions first: the Constitution of 4 October 1958 is still in force, and the president has been elected by direct universal suffrage since the referendum of 28 October 1962. Then the texts: the manuscript of the appeal of 18 June, the recording of the one of 22 June, the manuscript of the poster “À tous les Français” and the poster itself have been on UNESCO’s Memory of the World register since 2005. And a grave at Colombey-les-Deux-Églises, where he died on 9 November 1970.