De Gaulle sentenced to death

On 2 August 1940 the permanent military court of the 13th Military Region, sitting in Clermont-Ferrand, sentenced Brigadier General Charles de Gaulle in absentia to death, military degradation and the confiscation of all his property. He was charged with treason, with endangering the external security of the state and with desertion abroad in time of war. It was the second sentence passed on the general within a month. The government of Marshal Philippe Pétain had considered the first, milder sentence too lenient and arranged a retrial. The condemned man was meanwhile sitting in London, leading a handful of volunteers and preparing an agreement with Winston Churchill that was to give his movement a lasting form.

Two trials

De Gaulle had flown from Bordeaux to London on 17 June without any orders, and the next day called on the French over the BBC to continue the fight. Pétain’s government responded at first with disciplinary measures. On 19 June the Minister of National Defence, General Maxime Weygand, ordered him to return; on 22 June his appointment as a general with temporary rank was cancelled; and on 23 June President Albert Lebrun placed “Colonel de Gaulle” on the retired list. After the signing of the Armistice of Compiègne military justice took up the case.

On 4 July 1940, in the courthouse in Toulouse, the military court of the 17th Military Region, presided over by General André Boris, sentenced de Gaulle in absentia to four years’ imprisonment and a fine of a hundred francs. He was accused of refusing to obey an order in the face of the enemy and of inciting servicemen to disobedience. The verdict came the day after the Royal Navy opened fire on the French fleet at Mers-el-Kébir, in an atmosphere of hostility towards the British and all who worked with them. According to French accounts, Pétain and Weygand found the sentence ridiculously low for an officer who had publicly challenged the government’s right to conclude an armistice and was recruiting soldiers into a foreign army. Weygand had the case reopened, this time on charges carrying the death penalty.

The new trial took place in Clermont-Ferrand, in the unoccupied zone, a few dozen kilometres from Vichy, where the government had settled. The court consisted of seven generals. It was presided over by General Aubert Frère, who in May and June had commanded the 7th Army and so had recently been de Gaulle’s superior, and who was now military governor of Lyon. Its members included General Benoît-Léon Fornel de La Laurencie and General Joseph de La Porte du Theil, founder of the newly created Chantiers de la jeunesse, a labour organisation for young men. The hearing was short, since the accused was absent and the file was thin. On 2 August the court pronounced the death sentence, military degradation and the confiscation of his movable and immovable property.

According to the account of General Jean-Marie Etcheberrigaray, a member of the court, Frère conducted the case with evident reluctance: he read the file several times, questioned the prosecutor about the consequences of the vote and reminded the court that the accused could not defend himself. Frère himself is said to have stated in 1944, as he lay dying in a German camp, that two judges had voted against the death sentence in 1940, he among them. This version cannot be verified, as the vote was secret. Pétain, for his part, is said to have given assurances that he would see to it that the sentence was never carried out. The assurance cost nothing, since de Gaulle was beyond Vichy’s reach.

The answer from London

De Gaulle received the sentence with contempt. In a statement issued at the time he wrote: “I consider the act of the men of Vichy as null and void. After the victory I shall have it out with them.” These two sentences sum up his whole wartime stance. He did not recognise Pétain’s government as legitimate, because in his view it had been born of capitulation, and its full powers of 10 July had been granted by a National Assembly acting under the pressure of defeat. He held that legitimate France was wherever the fighting went on – that is, in London. The verdicts of Vichy courts could therefore not apply to him.

Paradoxically, the sentence helped the condemned man more than it harmed him. Few people had heard the appeal of 18 June, and de Gaulle’s name was known mainly to politicians and soldiers. The news of the death sentence appeared on the front pages of major newspapers, including Paris-Soir and Le Figaro. Many French people learned only then that a general in London had not laid down his arms. At roughly the same time a poster headed “To all Frenchmen” went up in the streets of London, bearing the line “France has lost a battle! But France has not lost the war!”

The sentence formed part of Vichy’s broader policy towards “dissidents”. A law of 23 July 1940 allowed citizenship to be withdrawn from French people who had gone abroad without orders or good reason between 10 May and 30 June. Their property could be confiscated. On this basis a decree of 8 December 1940 stripped de Gaulle of French citizenship, making him stateless. According to French research, 446 people in all lost their citizenship on these grounds. In the following months Vichy military courts passed death sentences in absentia on other commanders who had gone over to de Gaulle, among them General Georges Catroux and Philippe Leclerc. At the same time the court in Clermont-Ferrand was trying the deputies who in June had sailed for Morocco aboard the Massilia. Among them was Pierre Mendès France, sentenced in 1941 to six years’ imprisonment, who later escaped to London. On 30 July Vichy also set up a Supreme Court before which politicians and generals of the Third Republic blamed for the defeat were to answer. From this grew the Riom trial.

The agreement of 7 August

Five days after the sentence, de Gaulle and Churchill signed in London an agreement on the status of the volunteers. It was drafted by the lawyer René Cassin, to whom de Gaulle had entrusted the task at the end of June. It took the form of a memorandum and an exchange of letters, which Cassin considered consistent with British practice and no infringement of Free French sovereignty. De Gaulle could form the volunteers into land, sea, air and technical forces. He retained supreme command over them, accepting only the “general directives” of the British command. These forces kept their French character. They were not a foreign legion in the British army, and the agreement stipulated that they would never bear arms against France. Britain met the costs of raising and maintaining them, but, at de Gaulle’s insistence, as advances to be settled after the war. The final financial agreement was signed in March 1941. London also promised to help the volunteers after the war to recover their rights, including the citizenship that Vichy was just then taking from them.

In the letters accompanying the memorandum Churchill pledged himself to “the full restoration of the independence and greatness of France”. In a separate, confidential letter of the same day, however, he stipulated that this wording did not relate strictly to territorial frontiers, since Britain could not guarantee these to any of the nations fighting at its side. The agreement did not make de Gaulle head of a government-in-exile. It did give him what he had lacked on 28 June, when London had recognised him only as leader of the Free French: a legal basis, money and a British guarantee that his movement would be treated as a French ally and not as a band of mercenaries. At the end of July the Free French Forces numbered some seven thousand men.

Significance

The sentence of 2 August was a symbolic break between two Frances. From then on every Frenchman who joined de Gaulle knew that Vichy regarded him as a traitor and that the movement’s leader was formally a condemned man. For de Gaulle it confirmed that there would be no compromise with Pétain, and that the dispute over who represented France would be settled only by the outcome of the war.

A few weeks later de Gaulle’s movement won its first territories. At the end of August Chad, under Governor Félix Éboué, Cameroon and Middle Congo rallied to Free France, and in the autumn almost the whole of French Equatorial Africa followed. In September 1940 the failed expedition to Dakar (Operation Menace) sharpened the hostility between Vichy and London. On 8 December de Gaulle lost his citizenship. Some of his judges also paid for the sentence of 2 August. After the Germans occupied the free zone in November 1942, General Frère took charge of the Army Resistance Organisation (ORA), a clandestine network of officers of the former Armistice Army. In 1943 he was arrested by the Gestapo, and on 13 June 1944 he died of exhaustion in the Natzweiler-Struthof camp.

After the liberation the situation was reversed. The ordinance of 9 August 1944 on the restoration of republican legality declared the acts of Vichy null and void, and de Gaulle returned to Paris as head of the provisional government. A year later Pétain himself was sentenced to death for treason. De Gaulle, as he had promised, “had it out” with the men of Vichy, but he commuted the Marshal’s sentence to life imprisonment.