In 1943, Roosevelt allegedly asked De Gaulle, “May I inquire why you are not wearing a suit like everyone else???”

by FrenchieB014

9 comments

  1. To which De Gaulle answered: “A suit’s the issue? Here we are, old allies, and you won’t even stand up to greet me!”

  3. Roosevelt hated De Gaulle with a passion and spent the war trying to push him aside.

    >President Roosevelt always refused to recognise the legitimacy of Free France, preferring to maintain an embassy with Pétain and the Vichy regime until November 1942, when he used the most tortuous maneuvers to try to remove Charles de Gaulle from power and install more malleable leaders in his place.

    >Thus, in August 1944, more than two months after the Normandy landings, President Roosevelt was still hoping to install Édouard Herriot – a radical politician of the Third Republic – and Pierre Laval – the most hated figure of the Collaboration, with whom he was related by marriage – in power in Paris.

    Charles-de-Gaulle: “Roosevelt was a guy who wanted to dominate the universe and, of course, decide the fate of France. So de Gaulle [sic] bothered him; he didn’t think he was flexible enough. He thought that the day the Americans landed in France, if the Maréchal was still there, he’d have nothing to refuse them; which was quite true.

    Then, Vichy having become truly impossible, he dropped Vichy. He tried to make up for it with Giraud.

    Then, seeing that it was no use, he tried to fall back on Herriot. He even tried to set up a government in Paris just as I was about to enter it, with Laval and Herriot. All this was arranged with Otto Abetz [Hitler’s representative in Paris during the Occupation] and with Allen Dulles, who was in Geneva on behalf of the CIA.”

  9. De Gaul from what I understand was kind of an asshole, look up Algeria in 1950s. Last time I checked Zelenskyy did’t send deaths squads to the Donbas.

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