Seventy years ago this week in London, on 18 June 1940, Charles de Gaulle defied the course of history. In a short broadcast on the BBC and with France on the brink of armistice, he appealed for resistance to â??the mechanised forceâ? of Germany. France's war was about to change and in France's future there now gaped a de Gaulle-shaped hole.
For more than a quarter of a century after the end of the Second World War, and from in and out of office, de Gaulle rewrote French political culture. Strong leadership, audacious friendships and the art of saying â??No' became firmly entrenched in the French republican toolkit and, amongst other things, set the tone for France's relations with the European Union.
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