The son of General Charles de Gaulle died at the age of 102, reports the French edition "Mond".
Philippe de Gaulle was a French admiral, politician and writer, son of General Charles de Gaulle, President of France from 1959 to 1969.
Admiral Philippe de Gaulle was born in Paris on December 28, 1921. He died on the night of March 12 at the age of 102. He was the first child of Yvonne Vendreu and Captain Charles de Gaulle, who was wounded at Verdun in 1916 and was teaching at Saint-Cyr at the time.
Although he had a successful career in the French navy, he remained in his father's shadow for most of his life.
A victim of his illustrious ancestry, he avenged himself at the end of his life with the bestseller "De Gaulle mon père," an intensely personal version of the great man that captivated the general public but angered historians.
The date is November 9, 1970. In Colombey, the general died of an aneurysm while waiting for the television news and his evening meal, sitting next to his wife in his everyday armchair.
Philippe, the eldest, arrived at La Boisserie the next day. Before closing the casket brought by the village carpenter, he touches the back of his father's skull. To find out, he says, whether he and his father had the same flat spot on the top of the neck. The answer is yes.
For the first time that day, the "admiral", almost 50 years old, touches his father's head. The de Gaulle family did not have much physical contact, either in private or in public.
What the great Charles had in the way of soft words and gentle gestures, he saved for Anne, his daughter with Down syndrome, who died in his arms at the age of 20. Philip, on the other hand, had confidence but not completeness, and a striking resemblance to the great Charles: the same heavy eyelids, the same tall, erect stature, the same long arms, the same way of spreading them a little when he spoke. The same flat spot at the top of the neck.
Philippe tells all this in the book Charles de Gaulle, mon père, (My father, Charles de Gaulle), written at the age of 80 together with the journalist Michel Toriac.
80 years is the general's age at the time of his death. He doesn't seek to complain about his father's cold behavior, too busy restoring his golden legend.
In writing this book, he wants, as he explains, to "make things right" and erase the bad accusations leveled at de Gaulle: his alleged anti-Semitism, his alleged desire to "sell" Algeria. The result is a hagiography that restores some truths but erases some well-documented episodes (such as the denial of the shootout between de Gaulle and Churchill on the occasion of the June 18 appeal).
The book was a huge success and sold over 500,000 copies of each of the two volumes. A paradox. Defending the commander's monument, the admiral finally steps out of his shadow and becomes a public figure.
Does he like that? We'd guess so, given the number of TV appearances he's made, including those least suited to his old-fashioned seriousness.
"I looked like him, in the little things," he says.
What was his life like before that? He was born on December 28, 1921 in Paris. As a student at Stanislaus College, he devoured the novels of Paul Schack, a naval officer and writer (who was executed at the Liberation for active collaboration with the Nazi occupiers). Philip soon chose a military career and in 1940 entered the Naval Academy. On June 18, he was on his way to London with his mother and sisters and "missed" his father's call.
He immediately joined the Free French Forces, became one of the first to land in Normandy, participated in the bloody battle for Alsace and the liberation of Paris. It was there that he received his first medals.
It was he who reminded his father of his military exploits when his father wrote his war memoirs. "Oh, yes, that's right," replies Charles, who then adds to the manuscript this slightly laconic sentence: "My son is still fighting with the 2nd Armored Division."
After the end of the war, Philip continued his career in the navy - a branch hostile to the general, and where his origins are hard to forgive. Throughout his life he is suspected of having benefited from high protection.
They call him Sosten, after Vicomte de La Rochefoucauld, a poor soldier and politician known for lengthening the dresses of dancers at the Opera and covering the nudity of statues with plaster. "I could have been born the son of a pygmy or a Bantu," he admitted to Le Figaro in 2003. "Fate decided otherwise. He gave me a lot. I looked like him, in the little things...". Philip also tells how one day the general put his big hand on his and said: "I understand everything, son. Your position has never been easy. It is not at all easy to be the son of General de Gaulle. But your attitude has always been, what I expected from you'.
In 1986 he was elected as a senator by the RPR (Rassemblement pour la République) in Paris. He remained a senator until 2006, and when the UMP (Union pour un mouvement populaire, Union for a People's Movement) was created in 2002, he switched to it. /BGNES
