General de Gaulle and his Daughter

Written by an Aussie who demonstrated against General De Gaulle in 1968

It’s not surprising that I found the following story online, or that something drew me to it. After all, I spent the first four years of my early adult life in France. And those years included the 1968 student/worker rebellion in that turbulent (then)country. I was a student in Amiens and in Paris when I joined the melee on the streets of the Latin Quarter in Paris. Charles de Gaulle was the president of France and the nemesis of we radical students at the time.

There was a threat in the air that mingled with the smoke from student fires and the sting of police tear gas. This threat stoked fear in the hearts of students, especially those from overseas. I was one of them. We dreaded that we might be sent back to our home countries, and/or that President de Gaulle might set the army on to us.

I have already written about this day on Medium. But this story is about another character, a man who went into hiding on that revolutionary day back in May of 1968, President de Gaulle himself. He was, perhaps, just as fearful as we students and the workers who we had joined. After all, he had great decisions to make back then.

This story focuses on a tumultuous day further back in time and well before my time and one that I first read about online recently. The great man and his wife were about to welcome a third child into their family. One of the fears of many pregnant women in this modern age, and I was one of them, is to give birth to a disabled child. As an older mother, it was especially the possibility of giving birth to a baby suffering from Down Syndrome, that put fear into my heart. Later on I heard stories of personal transformations linked to this very event.

Anne de Gaulle (1 January 1928 – 6 February 1948) was the youngest daughter of General Charles de Gaulle and his wi

The birth of Anne de Gaulle occurred in Germany on the first of January, 1928. You can imagine the tumultuous thoughts and feelings stirring in the breast of Charles de Gaulle when he learned that his third child was a “Down baby”. Being a religious man, he may have cried out to his God asking what sin he had committed to deserve such an outcome. Nevertheless, he and his wife determined to give the child the best life and education that they could. Being a military man and a major he had to move his family a lot, often interstate. They took her everywhere with them.

Major de Gaulle first lamented, and then fell in love, as if for the first time, with this disabled and often ill child. Ironically, she taught him, he who had always been fortunate, how to get down from his tall horse and become humble. Through her, he learned how to communicate with a small child. Family members said that he was normally undemonstrative and stoic towards his family. With Anne, he sang songs, danced, and played as if a child himself once more.

One of his biographers wrote that at the age of 38, Major de Gaulle had been wounded in the very heart by the birth of this sick girl, and that his incredible faith in his lucky star had been shaken. By the time he turned forty, Charles de Gaulle had become another person. He had been transformed spiritually.

Anne died of pneumonia in 1948 at 20 years of age. When de Gaulle was 58, he was the target of an assassination attempt. He later claimed that the bullet of the perpetrator of this crime had been stopped from killing him by the frame of a photograph that he always carried with him and that he had placed it on the back shelf of his car that day. It was a photo of Anne, his beloved daughter.

When he died in 1970, he was buried beside his daughter in his hometown of Colombey.

Key Message: Sometimes what we fear and dislike the most turns out to be a salvation and a chance at transformation. A mysterious fate is often involved. Stories of France call out to me. So do stories of transformations. This one involving Charles de Gaulle’s third child, Anne, is one such story. Being disabled, Anne enabled her father to show a spiritual side of him in a dramatic way.