How De Gaulle's rallying cry was almost silenced

The French general had to fight the mistrust of British ministers, reveals a new biography
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Charles De Gaulle
General Charles de Gaulle in London, 1940, delivering his historical speech urging French people to fight Germany. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

It was a BBC broadcast that shaped the course of French history. But according to a new study of the French wartime leader, General Charles de Gaulle's impassioned call for resistance to the Nazi occupation in the summer of 1940 might never have happened.

Seventy years ago this month, De Gaulle arrived in London on a mission to further the French cause in the wake of the German invasion of his country. On 18 June 1940, his first full day in England, the general prepared a crucial call to arms for his defeated countrymen, hoping to broadcast it to his compatriots on the BBC later that evening. Now known as "L'Appel du 18 Juin", the text is inscribed on the walls of the De Gaulle Institute in Paris. "Whatever happens, the flame of French resistance must not be extinguished and will not be extinguished," the speech concluded.

Now a startling new understanding of the events of that sultry summer's day in London has emerged, which reveals the extent of the mistrust of De Gaulle in British government circles. Research by the French leader's new biographer, Jonathan Fenby, makes it clear that key members of the British cabinet were working secretly to thwart his plans to address his compatriots. After a day of frantic politicking, the address almost certainly went out far later than De Gaulle planned.

Suspicion of the general's motives, coupled with a reluctance to back an independent French resistance movement, prompted a move at a cabinet meeting to veto the broadcast. On De Gaulle's arrival in London the previous day Winston Churchill, the new prime minister, had offered him the chance to broadcast to France once Marshal Pétain, who was running the country with the Nazis, had sought an armistice. But the cabinet felt that an inflammatory broadcast would be "undesirable" while the Foreign Office was still negotiating with Pétain's collaborationists.

Alfred Duff Cooper, the British minister of information, lunched with De Gaulle that day but gave him no clue about the government's disquiet, recounts Fenby in his book, The General: Charles de Gaulle and the France he Saved, although the subject of the broadcast undoubtedly came up.

The new insight into the background manoeuvring during the day, Fenby argues, finally makes sense of factual anomalies which have troubled scholars since the end of the second world war. "It has been noted that, while De Gaulle says in his memoir that he was sitting behind a microphone in a BBC studio in Bush House at 6pm, the 'live' broadcast actually went out at 10pm," said Fenby this weekend.

The recent discovery of a letter from the late broadcasting veteran Leonard Miall, who claimed he had been in the studio on the evening of 18 June, confirmed the later timing. In the letter Miall said he watched De Gaulle read out the text for a live broadcast at 10pm.

Taken together, the findings indicate that the 10pm live broadcast was a second, desperate but successful attempt. Fenby had thought De Gaulle went to the BBC at 6pm for a simple sound check, but now he suspects the general returned to Bush House at 10pm when he discovered the broadcast had not been aired. "The version of the speech on the wall of the institute in Paris is different to the one that was actually broadcast, and this might explain it," said Fenby.

The writer and former editor of the Observer also thinks De Gaulle might have left this drama out of his autobiography because he wanted to create the impression that he had never been censored.

This was a particularly desperate and wild period of the war, explains Fenby. One serious proposal discussed between De Gaulle and Churchill was that Britain and France should agree a union of convenience and become one nation. At such a critical moment De Gaulle's words of hope, when they were eventually heard, had a huge impact in France.

"Vanquished today by mechanical force, in the future we will be able to overcome by a superior mechanical force," he promised. "The fate of the world depends on it."

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