De Gaulle: June 18, 1940 — One Unknown Man Alone

News Report

On June 18, last Friday, the leaders of France and Britain marked the 70th anniversary of Charles de Gaulle’s stirring radio appeal for the French to resist Nazi occupation.

In a ceremony in London attended by Second World War veterans, Nicolas Sarkozy, the French President, and David Cameron, the British Prime Minister, also paid tribute to their soldiers who fought together in the last century and now in Afghanistan.

Mr. Sarkozy, who was accompanied by his wife, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, had lunch at 10 Downing Street with Mr. Cameron and his wife, Samantha.

The topics of conversation were reportedly this week’s Group of Eight and Group of 20 summits and the war in Afghanistan, along with the World Cup – where both countries’ teams are struggling.

Although very few French actually heard it, de Gaulle’s speech is seen as a founding act of the resistance to the Nazis, coming four days after the fall of Paris and as the French government headed by Marshall Philippe Pétain prepared to sign an armistice with Germany.

Neal Asherton Remembers

(Source: Open Democracy)

It’s seventy years since a reedy, strained voice came from the BBC in London, telling the French to fight on. Almost nobody in France heard it. Almost nobody in France had heard of General Charles de Gaulle, either. It was not even a great speech, but rather a set of quite disjointed, sometimes disconcerting remarks. But those who did hear the broadcast of June 18, 1940, picked out what mattered, and were astonished.

“Is defeat final? No!” France was not alone. De Gaulle repeated that line: “La France n’est pas seule!” With American and British industrial might, Germany could be overwhelmed. The tank-commander in him was speaking. “Vanquished today by mechanical force, in the future we will be able to overcome by a superior mechanical force.” He, General de Gaulle, was now in London. He asked French “officers, soldiers, engineers and specialized workers” to make contact with him.

That was the Appeal of the Eighteenth of June 1940. A few days later, de Gaulle spoke again, and this time was heard much more widely. His oratory improved. Nonetheless, almost all the French soldiers and sailors stranded in Britain after Marshal Pétain’s surrender chose repatriation rather than Gaullist exile. One could go home to mum, or one could stay on to be bombed in this cold, perfidious country that – as they saw it – had deserted the French army at Dunkirk and then murdered the French navy at Mers-el-Kébir. In the summer of 1940, this choice seemed like a French no-brainer.

And yet de Gaulle won through. The tiny faithful remnant who stuck by him gradually grew much larger. The appeal, dropped across France by the Royal Air Force, became a clandestine message of hope, then a call to resist and eventually a sacred text in the myth of post-war France.