Free French

Abstract The Free French movement (La France Libre) emerged coincident with the flight of Charles de Gaulle to London on June 17, 1940 and his immediate declaration of opposition to the incoming French government of Philippe Pétain, who was in the process of seeking an armistice with Germany, which de Gaulle found reprehensible. It might seem curious that in secular and anti‐clerical France, de Gaulle chose as the emblem of the Free French movement the Cross of Lorraine, in honor of Joan of Arc, who has become appropriated in recent years as a symbol of the neo‐fascist National Front party. But de Gaulle, whose roots were Catholic, as were those of most Frenchmen, intended Joan of Arc as a symbol of driving out an enemy from the country (substitute Germany for England), as in this astonishingly evocative — and provocative — excerpt from a speech he made on May 10, 1941, on the eve of her birthday: