![]() It was the crossing of paths again with Petain that helped de Gaulle - his old commanding officer arranged for an increase in his grade so that he could serve on his staff, and later for de Gaulle to lecture at the college. He received a mere satisfactory grade while attending the latter as a student. His instructor, Colonel Moyrand, deemed him eminently intelligent, but also arrogant. Made overall commander, Petain would rally the French against the enormous German offensive, and as an officer positioned at Fort Douaumont, an epicentre for a lot of the campaign’s action, de Gaulle was wounded and captured.īetween the wars, de Gaulle, like Petain before him, became a lecturer, at Saint-Cyr, and later at École de Guerre - the staff college. rather than reliance on elan, or ‘offensive spirit’.)ĭuring the First World War, both men were sucked into one of the conflict’s greatest battles, Verdun. De Gaulle had heard and been inspired by Petain’s lectures on the importance of intelligently applied firepower to the winning of wars (i.e. He next sought out a position under Colonel Philippe Petain, commanding officer of 33 Regiment. De Gaulle’s extreme height of 6’5”, along with his high forehead and nose, is said toĮxplain the nickname he acquired while he was there: the great asparagus. (‘Special Military School of Saint-Cyr’, or just Saint-Cyr) in 1912, ranking an impressive 13th amongst his graduating class. He would go on to emerge from the École spéciale militaire de Saint-Cyr His mother, meanwhile, fuelled his military interests by relating her sadness at the defeat of France during the Franco-Prussian War. Their father was a professor and encouraged Charles and his siblings to engage in ![]() The major events of de Gaulle’s life, on the other hand, certainly are widely recorded, and well known.Īs French President Emmanuel Macron visits London today, Thursday, for a ceremony to mark the 80th anniversary of General de Gaulle’s call for wartime resistance, it is to de Gualle's background that we look to discover the experiences that made the man.īorn on November 22, 1890, into an upper-middle class Catholic family in Lille, de Gaulle was one of five children. Instead, a variant broadcast again on the BBC four days later, on June 22, is what is generally referenced. Unfittingly, his actual Jspeech was not widely heard or recorded (it did end up in some newspapers in France). Rather, it was Charles de Gaulle, wartime leader of the Free French and a man whose biography was as interwoven with France’s 20th Century history as Churchill’s was with Britain’s.
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