Charles De Gaulle . . . The History Maker

Charles de Gaulle died quietly forty seven years ago on 9 November 1970. The end came to him as he sat watching the news on television in his country home in Colombeyles-deux-Eglises.

- Syed Badrul Ahsan

It was the passing of a man who had played an instrumental role in the reshaping of Europe and the reinvention of France in the aftermath of the Second World War. He ascended to power once the Nazis had been defeated and France had been liberated, but left when he discovered, to no one’s surprise, that the French political system would not permit him to carry out the political and constitutional reforms he thought were necessary to transform France into a country ready to meet changed times.

De Gaulle waited, as he had waited in exile in London during the years of the Nazi occupation of his country and meanwhile making sure that his Free French forces were causing enough trouble for Hitler to permit him any peace, either of mind or policy. During the war, General De Gaulle had electrified his people with his exhortations of defiance of the Nazis. ‘France has lost a battle,’ he declared in bold strokes, ‘but she has not lost the war.’ That was his rallying cry. And where the Vichy regime of Marshal Petain and Pierre Laval was in collaboration with Germany, Charles de Gaulle made sure that French pride did not falter, that his people, in alliance with their friends in America, Britain and the Soviet Union, intensified the struggle for a renewal of liberty. In the end, they succeeded and De Gaulle came home to preside over a restructured France.