The minute-and-a-half-long radio address that altered the course of Geneviève de Gaulle’s life crackled across the airwaves and into her heart on Monday, June 17, 1940. Seated by the wireless in her family’s crowded rental house in northwestern France, the nineteen-year-old history student listened intently as Marshal Philippe Pétain addressed a frightened nation.
“Frenchmen,” the eighty-four-year-old war hero began. “Having been called upon by the President of the Republic, I today assume the leadership of the government of France. Certain that our admirable army has fought with a heroism worthy of its long military traditions against an enemy that is superior in number and in weapons, certain that by its magnificent resistance it fulfilled its duties to its allies, certain of the support of veterans that I am proud to have commanded, I give to France the gift of my person in order to alleviate her suffering.”
As Pétain spoke, Geneviève understood that the country was indeed in distress. Although France had declared war on Nazi Germany the previous September, things had been relatively quiet on the western front until May 10, 1940, when German forces stormed into the country, surrounding one contingent of Allied troops that had attempted to ward off their attack before forcing other divisions to evacuate by sea and slicing the rest into four tired and tangled ribbons. Stunned by the ruthlessness of the Nazi onslaught, the nation took flight. The government fled Paris for Bordeaux in advance of the Nazi siege of the capital. Prime Minister Paul Reynaud resigned rather than give in to political pressure to capitulate to the enemy. Pétain replaced him. Millions of men, women, and children crowded the roads to escape Adolf Hitler’s incoming men. Those who chose to remain in Paris sobbed as they watched the Nazis glide in on their tanks.
Away from the capital, civilians clogged the thoroughfares with their cars crammed with suitcases and whatever valuables they could manage. Children cried in the tumult. Eventually, vehicles ran out of gas and were abandoned in place, forcing people to run from the unknown on foot as their food supplies dwindled to nothing. The roads became impassable and German planes swooped in to fire on columns of weary soldiers who shuffled back from the front, their heads down, their rifles tossed in the bushes. In his broadcast Pétain told these refugees he was thinking of them, and he assured them of his compassion and care.
Geneviève was concerned. Pétain’s voice was tired and unsteady, weighed down with a truth he had yet to utter. He did not sound like the same Philippe Pétain who had implored French troops to remain courageous against the Germans at Verdun in World War I. France was outgunned and outmaneuvered then too, and yet it fought back savagely at his urging. Something was different now.
“It is with a broken heart that I tell you that we must stop fighting,” Pétain continued. “I have spoken with our opponent and asked him if he is willing to seek with us a means to end the hostilities.”
There it was. Geneviève looked around the room at her family and shook her head in disbelief.
“This is not Pétain,” she exclaimed as she pointed at the radio, barely able to contain the dismay that was growing in her delicate five-foot-two-inch frame.
Her father, Xavier, sighed.
“Alas, my dear, but I’m afraid it is,” he said.
“This is some fifth column type, some traitor who wants to fool us into surrender,” she shot back, as Pétain asked the country for support and faith. “I won’t accept this!”
When faced with loss or hardship, Geneviève looked for ways to make things better. It was, perhaps, her nature as the oldest of three children. A reflective and reserved young woman, she was a diligent student, a doting big sister, a dutiful daughter who knew the right thing to say or do in a given moment. But she was also a de Gaulle, which meant that she had been raised to embrace a certain set of ideas about faith, family, courage, and country. Her France was a grand France, a country that fought and was worth defending in times of trouble. As Geneviève tried to reconcile what Pétain had just said with what she believed, she knew she had to do something. The question was what, how, and when. Her father and sixteen-year-old brother, Roger, looked across the room and could tell from the way her soulful brown eyes flickered that she was ruminating about what her next steps might be.
Two hours later, the German advance forced civilians in the surrounding area to flee westward for their safety. A small configuration of rival planes bombed the railway station in nearby Rennes shortly before 10:00 PM. One of the bombs hit a munitions train that carried a deadly combination of high explosives, artillery shells, and cartridges. When it detonated, the town shook. Debris fell from the sky. Windows shattered, raining shards of glass onto the ground. Tiles flew from the rooftops. A 262-foot-long crater hollowed out the ground where the munitions train once stood. Startled residents awoke to a city shrouded in thick black smoke and took to the roads to escape.
Geneviève de Gaulle was born into a world that hoped it would never see another great and destructive war. The last conflict had begun in 1914, spanned four years, claimed the lives of nearly 1.4 million Frenchmen, and wounded some 4 million more. Geneviève’s father, Xavier, and his three younger brothers were soldiers in that contest, and it was no small miracle that the four of them survived. Their devoutly Catholic mother, Jeanne, maintained that her boys were spared because of the Sacred Heart medals she had given them before they went off to the front. They did not all return unscathed, however. Xavier, who had put his career as a civil engineer on hold to the join the fight, returned from combat with what would become a lifelong reminder of the field of battle: a limp he sustained after his horse was hit by an enemy shell round and toppled onto his leg.
Most of the de Gaulle brothers returned to a normal, civilian existence. But the middle son, Charles, who was a captain and protégé of Philippe Pétain, remained with the army. He was concerned that peace with Germany would not last. Brooding, he wrote a friend: “Many years after this war, men should be afraid and ashamed of themselves. But their souls will not have changed. They will forget this horror. . . . And one more time, they will throw themselves at each other, swearing before God and mankind that they are innocent of spilled blood.”
His brother Xavier had a more immediate concern: starting a family. He wanted a spouse who shared his values so that his future offspring could have the kind of childhood he had. His father, Henri, had been a soldier in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, then worked in the Interior Ministry before beginning a second career as a well-regarded teacher at a Jesuit high school in Paris. By all accounts Henri treated his five children—Xavier, Marie-Agnès, Charles, Jacques, and Pierre—as if they were his students too, encouraging them to recite Homer at the dinner table, engage in historical and philosophical debates, and listen to tales of France’s magnificent past. He was “witty, charming, wonderful,” and never to be disobeyed, whereas their mother Jeanne was sweet, decent, and deeply pious. By the time the de Gaulle children were teenagers, they were firm believers in hard work, duty to family and country, and strong Catholic faith.
Xavier was perhaps the most conscientious student and was believed by family and friends to be a brilliant young man with great promise. Sensitive and quiet, he loved classical music, adored painting and drawing, preferred adult company (he could learn more from them than from his peers), and minded his siblings with the ardor of a parent. He was accepted to the prestigious National School of Mines in Paris and earned a civil engineering degree from the school in 1909.
Where Xavier was dutiful, his younger brother Charles was inscrutable. He was the most difficult child of the five and spent his days breaking rules and imagining himself as the king of France. He terrorized his two younger brothers, threw tantrums when he didn’t get his way, and took a slapdash approach to his studies until the age of fifteen. One teacher saw past his shortcomings and acknowledged that “if [Charles] wishes, he is capable of great success.” His desire to attend the celebrated Saint-Cyr military academy focused his academic and interpersonal energies; he graduated from the school in 1912.
No matter their idiosyncrasies, the de Gaulle children knew they had their parents’ unconditional love and support. Such was the family life Xavier envisioned for himself when friends introduced him to Germaine Gourdon over tea one afternoon in 1918. Eleven years his junior, Germaine came from a family of nobles whose descendants made a fortune in the textile industry. Her father, Pierre, was a prolific writer, and her mother, Geneviève, busied herself with their eight children. As they got to know each other, Germaine charmed Xavier with her alluring disposition and cultivated tastes. Soon the couple realized they had fallen deeply in love.
They married on September 30, 1919, and a grand banquet was held at the Gourdon family’s sixty-room estate in the Maine-et-Loire. All the de Gaulle brothers cut dashing figures in their military uniforms that day. A photograph taken at the celebration showed Xavier glowing with newly wedded bliss; Charles, unsmiling and standing ramrod straight; Jacques to his left, not nearly as stern; and the youngest, Pierre, whose arms were gallantly folded across his chest. Germaine’s outspoken eleven-year-old cousin, Madeleine Delepouve, was particularly smitten with Xavier’s youngest sibling. The frail, blonde girl walked up to him and declared, “Well then, it seems that we should be married too!” Pierre, age twenty-two, was stunned—and slightly amused—by the child’s forthrightness. When he realized Madeleine was not kidding, he decided to hold her at bay for as long as he could. She would come to her senses, he believed. But the youngster would show him over the next seven years that she was not to be deterred.
After the celebration Xavier and Germaine began their married life in the quiet medieval village of Saint-Jean-de-Valériscle, where Xavier had become engineer of the local coal mines. Tucked in a river valley in the Cévennes mountain range, the sun-kissed town was originally known for the sweet, pearly skinned onions it grew in hillside terraces built by Benedictine monks, who had learned that the region’s weather could go from drought to deluge at a moment’s notice. Building these structures on local slopes not only protected residents from sudden inundations but also captured much-needed water for the area’s most famous agricultural product.
Although the town’s coat of arms featured three onions on a green backdrop, it was coal mining that propelled Saint-Jean-de-Valériscle into prosperity after World War I. By the time Xavier and Germaine had moved there in 1919, steel mineshaft headframes dotted the landscape, and locomotives hauled coal out of the town to customers across France. Xavier was tasked with growing the industry, and he immediately went to work designing new mines and overseeing their construction.
At the end of each day, Xavier strolled down an alley of sycamore trees to the large stone house where he and Germaine resided. They spent evenings in their garden, admiring the surrounding countryside. “You have no idea how beautiful the view was,” Xavier would say for years to come.
On October 25, 1920, the couple welcomed their first child, a little girl named Geneviève. Although not much is known about Geneviève’s infancy, she was born to parents who were head over heels in love with each other and who likely showered her with a great deal of attention and affection. When Geneviève went back to visit her birthplace later in life, she was disappointed when nothing she saw lived up to her father’s descriptions. “My parents were so in love that they transformed [the landscape],” she joked.
One year after Geneviève’s birth, the family bid farewell to the vistas that so captivated them in Southern France and moved to the Saarland, a tiny industrialized zone across the forested French border from Alsace-Lorraine. The coal-rich area was placed under League of Nations governance after World War I as part of the penalties levied against Germany. Aside from sparking the conflict, the Germans had flooded two prominent French mines. As restitution France was handed the Saarland’s lucrative quarries, which had been neglected during the hostilities. Xavier was enlisted to get those collieries up and running and to search for new stores to excavate.
His job was complicated by an all-German staff. Although the two countries were technically at peace, Germans resented the French presence on their turf, and tensions worsened as postwar fines began taking their toll on the local populace. Unemployment was high. Provisions were not only scarce but also expensive. Suffering was great. Xavier carried a gun to work as a precaution. He had a young family to think about, after all. Germaine had given birth to another little girl, Jacqueline, in December 1921. Roger, their first son, joined the brood on February 10, 1923.
Due to the lingering tensions, French citizens living in the area were cautious when it came to interacting with Germans. This friction did not register with Geneviève, who as a toddler busied herself playing with her younger siblings in the large, lush garden that surrounded their home. Sarrois staff worked in her household and she was raised by her family to treat them affectionately and with respect. She spoke their language as soon as she was able, and in her innocence saw them as extended family.
By all accounts it was an idyllic life, despite the region’s simmering hostility toward the French. But the family’s good fortune would soon change. In 1925, when Geneviève was four and a half years old, her mother was pregnant with her fourth child. Within months, doctors determined that the baby had died in utero and that they had to operate in order to save Germaine’s life. They delivered the stillborn girl, but Germaine suffered complications from the procedure. Xavier stood by, helpless, as he watched his twenty-seven-year-old wife die on the operating table. Overcome with grief, he took her in his arms and carried her home.
Geneviève was playing underneath a magnolia tree in the family’s garden when a young au pair delivered the news. At the time she did not know what death was. She only knew that something tragic had happened to her mother. From that day on she would be unable to look at a magnolia without thinking of Germaine, who had smelled of the gently sweet Florentine iris sachets she used to freshen her laundry.
“Just like that, happiness ended with the death of Maman,” Geneviève later recalled, adding that her mother’s passing didn’t affect her siblings in the same way it did her. Because Jacqueline and Roger were younger than she was, Geneviève believed they did not have as many memories of Germaine as she did.
“I had what they did not: my mother’s tenderness for four and a half years,” she said. “And I remember it well.”
The family brought Geneviève to her mother’s bedside and encouraged the young girl to kiss her good-bye. She remembered thinking there was nothing left to kiss; this was not her mother but a cadaver, and she would soon be buried far away in the Gourdon family’s crypt in northwestern France. Xavier, Geneviève, Jacqueline, and Roger journeyed there by train in what felt like a never-ending trek. The car bearing Germaine’s coffin was hooked to the back of the locomotive, and Xavier took Geneviève and her siblings back there to visit it during the voyage.
“That’s where your mother is,” he told them solemnly, as the train chugged westward. It was pitch black inside of the car, impossible to see. As Geneviève stood in the darkness, holding her father’s hand, she didn’t understand why he would continue to tell them that this was where their mother was, if she was, in fact, gone. Perhaps his seemingly constant reminders were more for himself than his offspring, a way of holding on to his beloved wife because he simply wasn’t ready to let her go.
On the day of the funeral, Geneviève and her siblings donned hats with small white daisies that their maternal grandmother had embroidered onto them to symbolize their late mother, and relatives placed armfuls of white irises on Germaine’s coffin before it was lowered into the ground. For Xavier it was an unbearable moment that ushered in a desperate period. Germaine was dead, and he didn’t want to live without her. Geneviève tried to comfort her father, but his grief was far too much for the young girl to handle on her own.
The de Gaulles and Gourdons came to the family’s aid. Jeanne de Gaulle, for her part, was brokenhearted to see her eldest son so shattered. She left her husband’s side to look after Xavier and help with the children. Jeanne’s presence was a comfort to Geneviève, who did not know her grandmother as well as her cousins in France did. Where those cousins saw Jeanne as severe, Geneviève came to know her grandmother as a vibrant woman, full of emotion and deep faith. Her maternal grandmother, Geneviève Gourdon, also visited the family during this time, and her namesake grandchild enjoyed her warmth and old family stories. Xavier also hired an Alsatian nanny named Madeline Stutzmann, who became a “veritable mother” to his youngsters.
For all the support that surrounded them, the children’s first Christmas without their real mother was the most emotional. Geneviève and her siblings had placed their shoes by the fireplace, as was the custom, and were excited to find treats inside of them and gifts nearby. Although their mother wasn’t there, they were happy, as children normally are when they sort through the holiday’s surprises. Even Xavier seemed upbeat. But when he began singing the carols his late wife had painstakingly copied by hand, he lost himself in the flourishes of her penmanship and fled the room in tears.
It was a difficult time, but five-year-old Geneviève sensed that hardships such as these were something that should be endured without complaint. She also believed she needed to fill a void that had consumed the household. To her siblings she became a “little mother,” both tender and tough. When Roger wouldn’t do his homework, Geneviève smacked him with her comb. Sometimes her scolding escalated into a full-blown fight, where brother and sister beat each other up with their Greek and Latin dictionaries.
“It was because of Geneviève that I understood why having a mother was so important,” Roger said.
For the next two years, the family ate their meals around a portrait of Germaine that Xavier placed at the dining room table where she used to sit. For Geneviève the photo evoked bittersweet memories of her mother’s perfume and her favorite ecru evening dress. The girl pined for Germaine’s gentle sweetness but never felt like she could talk to her grief-stricken father about her pain. His was all encompassing, and Geneviève followed him around like a puppy in a youthful display of support. Although she may have been small, she believed she was necessary to him.
“As the oldest, I felt like I needed to be at his side, even if he never said a word,” she said. She took long walks with him in the forest, accompanied him to concerts in her best dress, and preoccupied herself with ways she could lift her father’s spirits.
In 1927 Xavier’s mood lightened somewhat when he learned that his brother Charles would be moving to the French military base in nearby Trier with his pregnant wife, Yvonne, their six-year-old son, Philippe, and their three-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Élisabeth. Although Charles, who had recently been promoted to major, would be busy supervising the infantry battalion that was stationed there, both brothers committed to frequent visits. With regional tensions increasing it was good to have family one hour away. Street brawls between German and French residents were on the increase, along with anti-French propaganda. When German troops picked a fight with some of Major de Gaulle’s men, Yvonne de Gaulle witnessed the scene and was so traumatized by it that she was concerned that her distress would impact the health of her yet-to-be-born child.
Xavier’s and Charles’s families drew strength and support from each other in this climate. Geneviève spent Christmas 1927 with her uncle’s family and was astonished to see how modestly they lived. Where Geneviève’s family had staff who maintained the daily operations of her home, at her uncle’s house she saw her aunt Yvonne get down on her knees to scrub the floors. Yvonne also went to great pains to decorate a tree for the entire regiment.
“That year, I don’t believe that my cousins received any Christmas gifts,” she said.
Overall Geneviève had fond memories of the holiday because she got along so well with her cousin Philippe, who was one year younger than she was. Jacqueline remained in the Saarland, jealous of all the fun her sister was having, and Élisabeth was miserable because she felt left out by the two older children. On December 31 Geneviève learned that her father and uncle had a “charming rivalry” over who could be the first to wish the other a happy new year.
“Uncle Charles always wanted to be the first one to do it because he was the youngest,” Geneviève said. “But my father had an enormous amount of respect and affection for his younger brother: he was determined to keep score.”
Major de Gaulle and his wife began 1928 by welcoming their daughter Anne into the world. Yvonne had had a difficult labor, and when the child was delivered, it was clear that something was wrong. Doctors diagnosed the girl with Down syndrome and told the de Gaulles there was no cure. At the time it was common to institutionalize patients with this genetic condition to ensure they got the care and attention they needed. Charles and Yvonne would have none of that, insisting that Anne would live with them and never be made to feel different from anyone else. She would be surrounded by her family’s love.
As Charles and Yvonne adjusted to the challenges of raising a child with Down syndrome, Xavier began to emerge from his dense fog of sadness. By 1930 family members urged him to marry again. His children needed a mother, they said. It had been five years since Germaine’s death, after all. They introduced him to his late wife’s younger cousin Armelle Chevallier-Chantepie, the twenty-seven-year-old daughter of a cavalry captain. Armelle bore a striking physical resemblance to Germaine, but Geneviève, who was ten years old at the time, did not view her as a substitute. She was very unhappy with Armelle’s presence and even unhappier when Xavier married her in Rennes, France, on December 22, 1930.
“Just like that, it was very hard for me because the little girl who felt that she was so indispensable to her papa had been replaced,” Geneviève recalled. “Naturally, I told myself that no one must know how I really felt, because at the same time I believed my father deserved a bit of happiness.”
It was not so easy for Armelle to find her place in the household, which bore traces of Germaine throughout: her presence lingered in family photographs and in evening prayers. Armelle knew she could never replace Germaine, but she did her best to be accepted by her three stepchildren. Roger and Jacqueline adjusted better than did Geneviève, who concealed her discontent under a polite, smiling facade.
Geneviève did not have to hide her feelings for long. Shortly after Xavier remarried, he sent his daughters to a Catholic boarding school just over the border in France. Although it is difficult to know why he decided to send his daughters an hour away for their education, one can assume that he felt it would be the safest place for his preteen daughters, given the anti-French sentiment in Germany and the uncertainties of the time. Xavier likely believed it to be a better place for a young girl, where she could be looked after, nurtured, and turned into a woman of great promise. Geneviève and Jacqueline became roommates, which they enjoyed, although their temperaments were dissimilar; Geneviève was reserved, where Jacqueline was carefree.
“[Jacqueline] loved life,” Geneviève said of her younger sister. “She was flirty and had begun to go out in the evenings . . . but me, I preferred to stay in and read, or talk to my father, who was always interesting.”
By all accounts Geneviève was a competitive student who was preoccupied with earning the best grades in her class. When she fell short of her academic goals, she would become angry with herself and everyone else around her.
As Geneviève and her siblings headed into their teen years, the world they knew had begun to change. Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist Party became increasingly popular with struggling Germans who wanted the garrulous leader to make good on his promises to return Germany to greatness. After the Reichstag building mysteriously burned down in February 1933, Hitler, who by then had been named chancellor of the Third Reich, suspended constitutional protections. Nazis tortured political opponents, persecuted Jews, held rallies, and pilfered official documents that helped them strengthen their grip on the populace. In the quiet, comfortable confines of the de Gaulle family’s living room, Xavier introduced Geneviève to the führer’s manifesto, Mein Kampf, as a way of explaining it all. The twelve-year-old girl, who was home visiting her new baby half sister, Marie-Louise, was shocked by the book’s violence and anti-Semitism.
“My father had taught me that each human being had value . . . and in this book, I learned that if you didn’t belong to the Germanic people, or the Aryan race, you were nothing,” she said.
Xavier explained that not all Germans believed as Hitler did, but his ideas needed to be taken seriously, especially in France, where memories of the Great War’s losses were still fresh. Few Frenchmen wanted to fight as they had from 1914 to 1918, but in Mein Kampf it was clear that the führer sought revenge against his neighbors.
Xavier wanted his children to understand and be able to discuss history and current events such as the ones that were unfolding around them. Although Xavier lived a country away, he followed the example of his father, Henri, by driving his youngsters across the border for long, rambling rides through the vast French countryside so they could gain an appreciation of their homeland’s beauty. He showed them the battlefields on which he had fought, explaining to them what had happened there and extolling the virtues of his brave compatriots. Like his father he hoped that his children would grow up to love and defend France as he had. However, he quietly worried that the nation he described to them was no longer anywhere near as valiant or prepared for battle as it had been in another time.
His brother Charles, who was now a lieutenant colonel, shared his views. In 1934 Charles wrote Toward a Professional Army. In it he criticized the French army’s reliance on infantry and border defense and offered a modern vision of warfare, which involved lightning-fast mechanized attacks that cleared the way for a smaller number of highly trained troops. His superiors rejected his ideas, but the German military believed they were worth exploring.
At the end of 1934, foreign armies came into the Saarland to police the territory before a planned vote about its future governance. Locals had three choices on January 13, 1935: they could be absorbed by the Third Reich, managed by France, or remain under League of Nations control. Officials who oversaw the plebiscite predicted a fair election, stressing the neutrality of poll monitors and ballot counters to the media covering the event.
Xavier de Gaulle was skeptical about that forecast. Before the vote he tried to convince his German mine workers that it would be a grave mistake to vote pro-Reich. They felt otherwise. Xavier then turned to local priests, hoping they could convince their parishioners that it would be dangerous to be ruled by Hitler. To make his pitch Xavier invited them to his house for dinner. Armelle spent the day preparing a sumptuous feast that concluded with a Saint-Cyr—a large cake that resembled a chocolate truffle. However, the guests were not swayed by the meal, and Geneviève understood that the Sarrois were already “in the wolf’s jaws.”
On the day of the vote, Max Braun, leader of the anti-Nazi United Front, called it “the worst pseudo-democratic election ever held outside of Germany’s farces.” He alleged that Red Cross nurses helped invalids vote pro-Reich, while local police appointed members of three different Nazi organizations to run the election. Voters who had hoped to cast their ballot for continued League of Nations rule were threatened with death, and Jews were advised by Nazi officers to leave for Germany because the Nazis would not be able to guarantee their safety if they stayed.
Geneviève was playing games at home with her brothers and sisters when Xavier returned from work in a somber mood. She could tell from the look on his face that the situation was serious. When the votes were tallied, 98 percent of the populace opted for German control. The Nazi salute became mandatory in the streets, and German interior minister Wilhelm Frick announced that the country would have no trouble coming up with the $59 million required to buy back its mines from France.
On March 1, 1935, Xavier de Gaulle and his kin were among the eighty-five French families to return to France after the Saarland officially returned to German control. Geneviève, then age fourteen, had felt for some time that the French were viewed as intruders in this part of Germany but knew that her father loved his work and that it might be difficult for him to start over in France. The family settled in Rennes, where Xavier found work supervising the construction of a local army barracks.
Back in Germany Adolf Hitler celebrated the French exit in Saarland’s capital, Saarbrücken, amid cheering throngs of people. He told them: “By this act of equality and justice, the way finally has been cleared for improving our relations with France. Just as we desire peace, so it is hoped our neighbor is willing to cooperate in common work for averting the difficulty that threatens to engulf Europe. . . . This day should also be a lesson for all who disregard the historic truth that through error or might, no people can be divested of its innermost self. You cannot tear out one section of a nation and attempt to steal its very soul. Blood is stronger than paper documents. By your vote, you greatly eased my task, which has no other aim save making Germany strong and happy.”
He asked for their help building a new Reich, beginning the very next day.