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The Burden of France. In France's brief day of fighting in World War II, De Gaulle, with a hastily scraped-up mechanized division, inflicted upon the Germans two of the rare local defeats they suffered in invading France. Then, when the bemedaled marshals bowed to Hitler, the hulking, self-conscious brigadier general, whose very name was unknown to most of his countrymen, solemnly concluded that "at this moment, the worst in her history, it was for me to assume the burden of France." Fleeing to England, De Gaulle arrived "stripped of everything, like a man standing on the shores of an ocean proposing to swim across." Undaunted even by his own metaphor, he beamed toward his homeland a war cry that Frenchmen will never forget: "France has lost a battle. But France has not lost the war."
In the five years that followed, indomitable Charles de Gaulle built the Free French movement from his private dream into a 500,000-man force that served the Allied cause gallantly and effectively on battlefields from Bir Hacheim to Germany itself. By so doing he should have won the gratitude, if not the affection, of his allies. But because of his preoccupation with French prestige and the safeguarding of French national interests, De Gaulle won himself the name of an intransigent troublemaker. Franklin Roosevelt, reporting on the Casablanca Conference in a letter to his son John, wrote: "The day [De Gaulle] arrived he thought he was Joan of Arc and the following day he insisted he was Georges Clemenceau." A series of equally bitter arguments over British policy in Syria and Madagascar led Winston Churchill to complain: "Of all the crosses I have borne since 1940 none is so heavy as the Cross of Lorraine."
New Facade, Old Faces. But when, at last, De Gaulle entered Paris in triumph in August 1944, he was the symbol of liberated France. Styling himself Provisional President, De Gaulle was unanimously confirmed in that office by the reconstituted National Assembly. Fortified by his conviction that "France, betrayed by her elite and her privileged groups, will never be the same as the prewar France," he set out to establish the strong executive that the Third Republic had so desperately lacked.
But it was soon the same old France. As wartime memories faded, the reviving political parties showed increasing hostility to De Gaulle's proposed constitution, eventually succeeded in persuading the French electorate to reject it. Finally, one Sunday in January 1946, Charles de Gaulle, unable to stomach further "the intrigues, combinations, upsets, recoveries and illusions" inherent in French party politics, abruptly resigned office.