Charles de Gaulle
Charles de Gaulle was a French general and statesman who led the Free French Forces during World War II and later founded the Fifth Republic, serving as its first President from 1959 to 1969.
Charles de Gaulle was a French general and statesman who led the Free French Forces during World War II and later founded the Fifth Republic, serving as its first President from 1959 to 1969. He was emphatically in favor of an independent nuclear deterrent for France.1
De Gaulle won a seven-year term as president of France's newly constituted Fifth Republic in December 1958 by promising to find an acceptable compromise for ending the war in Algeria. The war sharply divided the nation, and other issues, such as continued support for Israel, seemed secondary.1
De Gaulle responded to the Six-Day War in 1967 by accusing Israel of being the aggressor and canceling all of France's arms sales to Israel, abrogating twelve years of close French support. He also delayed the pending shipment of fifty previously purchased Mirage III jet fighters. He even claimed to newsmen that he had not known of Dassault's contract with Israel until the first field test in 1967 of the Jericho I missile.1
Sources
- Hersh, Seymour M. The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy. Random House, 1991. Chapter 3, 13. ↩
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