Philippe de Gaulle obit

Philippe de Gaulle, only son of Charles de Gaulle who wrote a bestselling memoir of his father – obituary

 He was not on the list.

Philippe de Gaulle, who has died aged 102, was the only son of General Charles de Gaulle, the French leader of the Free French during the war and postwar president; tall and ramrod-straight, he bore an extraordinary physical resemblance to his revered parent and in 2003 he published a bestselling memoir of his struggle to restore French dignity during and after the war.

As an 18-year-old, Philippe, his mother and two sisters followed his father into exile in London on the fall of France in June 1940. He joined the Free French navy, commanded a torpedo boat in the Channel and later fought as a soldier in the 1944 Allied advance into France, when he was wounded several times. Post-war, he rose to be an admiral in the French navy and later served for 18 years as a Gaullist senator and guardian of his father’s reputation.

In his memoir, De Gaulle Mon Père, a series of conversations with the journalist Michel Tauriac, Philippe described his father’s near-despair, following his famous BBC broadcast calling for French resistance on June 18 1940, when only 1,000 of the 50,000 French forces in Britain rallied to his call.

He rejected as a myth the claim that France rose up spontaneously behind de Gaulle, describing how his father would tour barracks alone and address meetings across Britain almost begging for support (though of course the myth was one fostered by de Gaulle himself to reinforce the claim that France had earned a right to be considered one of the victors of the war).

He recalled how his father suffered badly from the contempt in which the French army was held by the British after its defeat in 1940. Yet, although Britain’s wartime leader Winston Churchill was often driven to fury by  the “impossible” Frenchman, and de Gaulle openly expressed his disapproval of  Churchill’s fondness for whisky, which sometimes led to Churchill throwing tantrums “like a big child”, Philippe insisted that the two men liked and had great mutual respect for each other.

He never heard his father denigrate Churchill – “yet I lived in Britain at the time when he had plenty of reasons for doing so”. His father, he insisted, “considered Churchill as the great victor of the Second World War”.

Philippe Henri Xavier Antoine de Gaulle was born in Paris on December 28 1921 the eldest of three children and only son of then Captain Charles de Gaulle, and Yvonne, née Vendroux.

Educated at the Collège Stanislas de Paris, Philippe joined the French navy and was a student at the École Navale when Germany invaded France in 1940.

In his memoir Philippe recalled how his parents imbued him with a consciousness of his duty as a French patriot, gentleman and Roman Catholic. He recalled his mother darning clothes and tending a flock of hens at her wartime home in Wales and described his father, who addressed him as “dear old boy”, as a man who had difficulty expressing affection. “After having hugged me, which he did rarely, he sent me away after 15 minutes,” he recalled, though he also remembered the tenderness with which his father would sing songs to his severely disabled daughter, Anne, to calm her during the Blitz on London in 1940-41.

Philippe fought for the Free French navy in the Channel campaign and in the Battle of the Atlantic. Promoted to sub-lieutenant in 1943, he participated in the Battle of France (1944-1945) as a platoon commander of the Régiment Blindé de Fusiliers-Marins, an armoured regiment of marines of the 2nd Armoured Division.

On August 25 1944 he participated in the liberation of Paris and was tasked with obtaining the  surrender of Germans entrenched in the Palais Bourbon, the premises of the National Assembly, a potentially dangerous assignment which he carried out alone and unarmed. Subsequently he fought in the Vosges during the winter of 1944-1945.

Promoted to lieutenant in 1948, he remained in the French navy, and, trained as a naval pilot, fought in Indochina and Algeria. From 1976 to 1977 he was Commander of the Atlantic Fleet in the rank of vice-admiral. Promoted admiral in 1980, he ended his military career as Inspector General of the Navy, retiring in 1982.

From 1986 to 2004 de Gaulle served as a Gaullist in the French senate, where, generally speaking, he reflected his father’s views. In 1991 he joined Communists and other dissident members of the senate in voting against French military involvement in the first Gulf War, on the grounds that the French contingent would only be a subordinate element in a strategy conceived and driven by the Americans.

In 1992, as France prepared to vote in a referendum on the Maastricht Treaty, he weighed in on the side of campaigners for a “Non” vote, telling a news conference that his father opposed the idea of a homogenised “United States of Europe”, preferring the European Community’s original policy of leaving political decisions to individual member states.

After his father’s death in 1970, Philippe inherited his parents’ residence, La Boisserie, in the northern village of Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises, which he opened to the public. He went on to stand alongside a succession of French presidents and politicians who came to pay tribute to the great general at the annual memorial ceremony at his grave.

Even though comrades considered Philippe to be worthy of an honour for bravery, his father never appointed him a Companion of the Liberation or awarded him the Medal of the Resistance. But Philippe insisted that he had never suffered from the burden of having such a revered father and regarded himself as fortunate compared to Winston Churchill’s son, Randolph, who died young after an unhappy life.

He remained tight-lipped about his own offspring, however. In 1947 he married Henriette de Montalembert de Cers, a descendant of the family of the Marquis de Montalembert. She died in 2014 and he is survived by their four sons, of whom the eldest, Charles, served as a National Front MEP from 1999 to 2004, when the party was led by the far-Right Jean-Marie Le Pen. The youngest, Pierre, a business consultant based in Geneva, shocked the nation in November last year by announcing plans to apply for Russian citizenship because the West had abandoned “traditional values”.