(29th November 1895: Alès, Gard - 1st July 1962: Paris)

Eligible for Saint-Cyr in 1914, the class of the "Great Return", Edgard de Larminat, whose father was a Forest and Waterways Officer, continued the family tradition dating back to the 17th century of service to the state. Raised amongst the Jesuit community of Montfré and Les Postes, he attended high schools in Gap and Troyes and signed up at the age of 19 as a simple soldier in the 27th Infantry Regiment. Posted to the 134th, he undertook special studies as a student at Saint-Cyr and then joined in turn the 321st and 121st Infantry Regiments. Promoted to Captain in September 1917, he ended the war with four mentions on the military order of the day and was wounded three times, including once by gas (March 1918), having proved exemplary bravery at the fort de Vaux where he had been wounded by an exploding shell in June 1916. Because of this he would be singled out by the Légion d'honneur. With an independent nature and curious about distant horizons, he joined the marines (colonial army) in 1919 when his training at saint Cyr was completed. Sent to Morocco to implement the policies of Marshal Lyautey, he proved his full capability in commanding the 13th Battalion of Senegalese Tirailleurs of Ouezzane, a quality that earned him a further mention.

His command of the Kiffa Circle in Mauritania, between 1923 and 1926, left a lasting impression, as did his mission to Indochina from 1928 to 1931. As Head of Battalion in 1929, he studied at the Upper War Academy from 1933 to 1935, getting himself noticed for the depth of his cultural knowledge and his ability to understand military matters. As Lieutenant Colonel, he was posted to the Levant in January 1936 to carry out the role of Chief of Staff for the General Commander in Chief in the theatre of operations in the Middle-East. Made Colonel in March 1940, De Larminat refused to surrender his arms: whilst General Mittelhauser decided to follow the orders of the government in Bordeaux, he arranged the passage to Palestine of those troops who still wanted to carry on fighting. Arrested and imprisoned, he escaped, reaching Damascus on the 1st July and then joining the Free French (France Libre) whom he served with relentless fervour.

In Egypt, he regrouped the French contingents from Syria and then went as second in command to General Legentilhomme in Djibouti. Learning about the uprisings in Chad, Cameroon and French Equatorial Africa during a stay in London, he went to Léopoldville from where he prepared for the surrender of the garrison at Brazzaville on the 28th August, deposing the Governor General, taking command of the troops and the civilian and military command of the countries he had won over. Promoted to Brigade General, he carried out the duties of Superior Commander and Governor General and then High Commissioner until July 1941, when, appointed Division General, he returned to Syria alongside General Catroux. In December his North African adventure began. Commanding the French Forces in Libya, he took part in the Western Desert campaign, distinguishing himself at the battles of Gazalla (May 1942) and El-Alamein (October- November 1942) against Rommel.

He organised the 1st Free French Division at the head of which he brilliantly represented his homeland during the last operations of the Tunisian campaign, in May 1943 at Takrouna and Djebel Garci, thereby earning his stripes as General of the Army Corps. As Chief of Staff of the Free French Forces at the French Commission for National Liberation in June and July, in August 1943 he took command of the 2nd Army Corps, with whom he led the Italian campaign in May and June 1944 as deputy to the Commander of the French Expeditionary Corps to Italy. At its head, between the 10th June and the 4th July, he made his mark on the most glorious days of this operation between Viterbo and Sienna, in Tuscany, earning a further mention and the title of Commander of the Légion d'honneur. On the 16th August, De Larminat landed in Provence with the 2nd Army Corps, fighting through to Marseilles, liberating Toulon and opening the way for the reconquering of the country. Between October 1944 and June 1945 he led the Army Detachment of the Atlantic at the head of the Western Forces and played a decisive role in reducing the German pockets of resistance at Lorient, La Rochelle, Rochefort and la Pointe de Grave. During the winter of 1944-1945 he also carried out the task of turning the units of French Homeland Forces, which came from the resistance groups, into regular units. The army, the resistance movement and the Nation provided him with the subject matter for three books: L'Armée dans la Nation (the Army in the Nation); Bertie Albrecht, Pierre Arrighi, général Brosset, D. Corticchiato, Jean Prévost, 5 parmi d'autres (Bertie Albrecht, Pierre Arrighi, General Brosset, D. Corticchiato, Jean Prévost, to name but 5) ; Que sera la France de demain? (What will become of France tomorrow?)

As a Companion of the Liberation he carried out the role of Inspector General of the Overseas Forces between November 1945 and July 1947, was named as a titled member of the Upper War Council in 1950 and presided over the European Union Military Committee for Defence (1951-1954) - a subject that he covers in L'Armée européenne (The European Army). He was promoted to the rank of Army General in 1953, officiating as Inspector of Colonial Troops in 1955, before moving into the reserves on the 29th November 1956. Recalled in June 1962, when he had just finished Chroniques irrévérencieuses (Disrespectful Chronicles) (a book of memoirs of his early days at the end of the Second World War), De Larminat was given the presidency of the Military Court of Justice charged with instructing the trial of the instigators of the Algiers rebellion of April 1961. The trial was to open on the 2nd July against a background of the end of the war in Algeria, of a nation in tatters, contested power and virulent media campaigns. His dilemma was choosing his homeland, the army or allegiance to Gaullism, which led De Larminat to take his own life the day before the first session. On the 6th July General Dio read his funeral eulogy in the Cour des Invalides, ending his tribute as follows: "My General, may the God of the Army look after you. And may the earth in your small village in the Jura be soft. Your former comrades in arms, who are attached to you through so many memories, will piously preserve your memory " General Edgard de Larminat rests in the cemetery at Montain, in the Jura.

On the suicide of De Larminat: www.larminat-jm.com Historical publications, nos. 610, 615, 620, 632 Philippe Oulmont, editor. Larminat, un fidèle hors série (Larminat an out of the ordinary loyal supporter), Charles de Gaulle Foundation / LBM Publications. Distributed by Ouest France, 2008

Born on the 2nd February 1889 in Mouilleron-en-Pareds, in the Vendée, into an old aristocratic family from French Flanders, Jean-Marie de Lattre de Tassigny received a first class education at Saint Joseph's college in Poitiers.

Military career

From 1898 until 1904 he trained at the naval School and was accepted by Saint-Cyr in 1908. He took classes at the 29th Dragoons in Provins. He was a pupil at Saint-Cyr from 1909 until 1911, in the "Mauritania" class where he came fourth in his year. In 1911 he attended the school of cavalry in Saumur. In 1912 he was posted to the 12th Dragoons in Pont-à-Mousson and then to the front. During the First World War he was captain of the 93rd infantry regiment and ended the war with 4 injuries and 8 commendations. He was then posted to the 49th infantry regiment in Bayonne from 1919 to 1921. In 1921 he was sent to Morocco to the 3rd bureau and to the headquarters for the Taza region until 1926. From 1927 to 1929 he took courses at the French war college with the 49th class. He married Simone de Lamazière in 1927 and they had a son in 1928. In 1929 he became Head of Battalion to the 5th infantry regiment at Coulommiers.

In 1932 he was promoted to the high command of the army and then to that of General Maxime Weygand, Vice-President of the Upper War Council, as Lieutenant Colonel. In 1935 he became Colonel, commanding the 151st infantry regiment at Metz. Between 1937 and 1938 he took courses at the centre of higher military studies and in 1938 became the governor of Strasbourg's Chief of Staff.

Second World War

Promoted to Brigade General on the 23rd March 1939, by the 2nd September 1939 he was Chief of Staff of the 5th army. On the 1st January 1940 he took command of the 14th infantry division, which he commanded during the confrontations with the Wehrmacht at Rethel, where his division held out heroically, as far as Champagne and the Yonne, miraculously maintaining its military cohesion in the middle of all the chaos of the debacle. From July 1940 until September 1941, he was deputy to the Commanding General of the 13th military region at Clermont-Ferrand and then became Division General, commanding troops in Tunisia until the end of 1941. He subsequently commanded the 16th division at Montpellier and was promoted to General of the army corps. When the Free Zone was invaded by German troops, he refused to obey the order not to fight and was arrested. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison by the State tribunal of the Lyon section. Managing to escape from Riom prison on the 3rd September 1943, he went to London and then on to Algiers, arriving on the 20th December 1943, after promotion to the rank of Army General by General de Gaulle on the 11th November 1943. In December 1943 he commanded the B army, which became the first French army. He landed in Provence on the 16th August 1944, took Toulon and Marseille, headed back up the Rhone valley and then the Rhine, liberating the Alsace, entering Germany and advancing as far as the Danube. He represented France at the signing of the armistice on the 8th May 1945 in Berlin at the headquarters of Marshal Joukov.

After the war

Between December 1945 and March 1947, he was Inspector General and Commander in Chief of the army. In March 1947 he was Inspector General of the army and then Inspector General of the armed forces. From October 1948 until December 1950, he was Commander in Chief of the western European armies at Fontainebleau. He became High Commissioner and Commander in Chief in Indochina and Commander in Chief in the Far East (1950-1952) and established a national Vietnamese army. Exhausted by the strenuous workload to which he had been subjected throughout his career, which had not been helped by the injuries he had received in 1914, deeply affected by the death of his son Bernard, killed during the Indochina campaign and suffering from cancer, he died in Paris on the 11th January 1952, following an operation. He was posthumously promoted to the dignified position of Marshal of France at his funeral on the 15th January 1952. He is buried in his home village of Mouilleron-en-Pareds.

Son of François Queuille and Marie Masson de Saint-Félix, Henri was born into a bourgeois family in the provinces.

When his father, a chemist, died in 1895, the Queuilles moved to Tulle where the teenager attended the lycée starting in 1896. The young graduate studied medicine in Paris, where he made friends with Maurice Bedel and Georges Duhamel, before moving back to his home town in 1908. In 1910, he married Margueritte Gratadour de Sarrazin, with whom he had two children – Suzanne and Pierre. He rapidly rose in politics: member of the town council in 1912, mayor and general councillor of the Corrèze department the following year, and member of Parliament in 1914.

During the First World War, his service as a doctor with various ambulances on the Eastern Front earned him the Croix de Guerre 14-18.

A moderate member of the Radical Party, he entered the government of Alexandre Millerand in July 1920 as Undersecretary for Agriculture. Recognised by his peers, he held many ministerial portfolios (Agriculture, Health, Post, Public Works, Supplies), being appointed minister nineteen times between 1920 and 1940. He was the main driving force behind French agricultural policy between the wars (creation of rural engineering, creation and organisation of agricultural education, technical development of the countryside, etc.); he notably presided over the Fédération Nationale de la Mutualité et de la Coopération Agricole (National Federation of Reciprocity and Agricultural Cooperation).

He nationalised the railways and created the SNCF (French National Railway Company), and headed the Office National des Mutilés, Combattants, Victimes de Guerre et Pupilles de la Nation (1937). In 1939 he published Le Drame agricole: un aspect de la crise économique.

A staunch supporter of the Republic who worked with the Socialists, he became close with Edouard Herriot, but refused to vote to hand over full powers to Maréchal Philippe Pétain on 10 July 1940. He was then removed from his functions as mayor of Neuvic. His son Pierre’s membership in the Resistance made his contacts with Free France easier. Hettier de Boislambert convinced him to leave for the United Kingdom.

He reached London in April-May 1943, along with Astier de la Vigerie, Daniel Mayer and Jean-Pierre Levy, despite his distrust of de Gaulle. In May, he sent out a call to the French peasantry over the BBC, and was then appointed President of the landing commission in charge of developing the measures to be taken upon the Liberation of France. Two months later, the Vichy government issued a decree stripping Henri Queuille of his French nationality and his mandate as Senator. In August, he left for Algiers, where de Gaulle, bringing together the political parties, brought him into the Comité Français de Libération Nationale (CFLN - French Committee of National Liberation) in November 1943. Queuille asked to be relieved of his functions in September 1944, when the government moved to Paris, to return to his political career. He was elected mayor in October 1945, then member of Parliament in the legislative elections of 1946.

The war memoirs written by this recipient of the Médaille de la Résistance were published in Journal 1939/1945.

Loyal to Edouard Herriot, he headed the government of the 4^th Republic between July 1948 and June 1954. He was President of the Council (Premier) three times, curbing social unrest, the rise of Gaullism and government instability, applying a policy people called “immobilism”; he did not hesitate when it came to using force (October-November 1948) and postponing elections. But this policy enabled the Republic to survive.

His foreign policy activities led to the signature of a Franco-Vietnamese agreement in March 1949, practically recognising the colony’s independence, made France a member of the Atlantic Alliance and implemented the Marshall Plan the following month.

Defeated in the legislative elections of 1958, Henri Queuille returned to life in local politics. He transformed his town into a leisure resort, set up an agricultural high school and a technical school. Pursuing work on his memoirs that he had started in 1944, he gathered archives, documents, eye-witness accounts and objects from the Second World War and the Resistance, thus comprising the main collection of the Museum that bears his name.

A French general and politician (1890-1970), Charles de Gaulle was the first person to advocate the need for France to have armoured military vehicles. A leader of the French resistance during World War II, he was the founding father of the Fifth Republic, which was particularly noteworthy due to the election of the president under universal suffrage.

Charles de Gaulle was born in Lille on 22 November 1890 to a patriotic Catholic family. He spent his childhood in Paris, studying with the Jesuits and very early opted for a career in the forces. In 1908 he entered the special Military Academy at Saint-Cyr. After four years of study, he was transferred to Arras in 1912 as a sub-lieutenant.

During the First World War he was wounded in combat three times and left for dead in the Battle of Douaumont (1916). Taken prisoner by the Germans, he attempted to escape on five occasions, but was recaptured each time. He was not freed until the Armistice, on 11th November 1918. Pursuing his military career, Captain De Gaulle saw active service in several countries (including Poland and The Lebanon). Between the wars he wrote several works in which he was critical of French defence policy: in particular he believed that the army must be subject to the decisions of politicians and that it was essential for the defence of France, to raise a corps of armoured vehicles in order to face the threat of German mechanised power. At the same time he began his involvement with politics: in 1931 he was seconded to the General Secretariat for National Defence in Paris. Promoted to Colonel in 1937, de Gaulle was given the command of the 507th tank regiment in Metz. When France and Britain declared war on Germany on 3 September 1939, he was given temporary command of the tanks of the 5th army. At the time of the German invasion, de Gaulle distinguished himself several times at the head of his unit, in particular halting the Germans at Abbeville (27-30 May 1940). Appointed General on 1 June 1940, de Gaulle became Under Secretary of State for War and National Defence a few days later, in the Government of Paul Reynaud.

On 17 June, de Gaulle left to continue fighting the war from London; he launched an appeal for resistance over the BBC, on 18 June. As a rebel General, he was sentenced to death in absentia. Recognised by Churchill as the "leader of the Free French", de Gaulle organised armed forces that became the Free French Forces. Meanwhile, he provided Free France with a kind of Government in exile, the French National Committee, which became the French Committee for National Liberation (CFLN) on 3 June 1943, following its arrival in Algiers. From 1942 onwards, De Gaulle gave Jean Moulin the task of organising the National Committee for Resistance (CNR) in France within which political parties of all persuasions, trades unions and resistance movements had to be represented, in order to co-ordinate the struggle. After the Normandy landings on 6 June 1944, de Gaulle insisted with General Eisenhower, supreme commander of allied armies, that Paris should be quickly liberated, although the strategy was to head directly eastwards, bypassing the Capital. Eventually, the 2nd Armoured Division of General Leclerc liberated Paris on 25 August.

Once the fighting was over, de Gaulle began to rebuild the country at the head of the interim government. He introduced several major measures (including the founding of the Social Security system). But, on 20 January 1946, he left power due to a disagreement of the role played by political parties. The Constitution of the 4th Republic, adopted shortly afterwards, greatly displeased him. He criticised it several times (such as in his speech in Bayeux, in June 1946), reproaching it for the weakness of its executive power. De Gaulle then entered the opposition. In 1947, he launched the Rassemblement du peuple français (RPF or Alliance of the French People), a movement that performed badly in elections, despite attracting many members. This was the beginning of the "wilderness years" : de Gaulle withdrew to Colombey-les-Deux-Églises, wrote his memoirs and travelled.

From 1954, France was involved in a war of decolonisation in Algeria. On 13 May 1958, the French Algerians launched an insurrection in Algiers to consolidate their position. They called for de Gaulle to take power. The President of the French Republic, René Coty, fearing that this crisis might descend into civil war, offered de Gaulle the position of Leader of the Cabinet. De Gaulle refused to return to power unless he could change government institutions. During the summer of 1958, he inspired the writing of a new Constitution: this was approved in a referendum on 28 September 1958 by almost 80% of French people. The 5th Republic was born. On 21 December 1958, Charles de Gaulle was elected President of the Republic by indirect universal suffrage.

The most urgent task to be faced was Algeria. De Gaulle offered the Algerians self-government in 1959 and organised a referendum on the subject in 1961: 75% of French people said "yes" to Algerian self-government. In April 1961, disaffected partisans of French Algeria staged an attempted coup that failed. Negotiations between the French and Algerians ended with the Evian agreements, signed on 22 March 1962 and accepted by referendum in both France and Algeria. 1962 was a real turning point, firstly on an institutional level: the General proposed electing the Head of State through universal suffrage. This reform aroused strong opposition, but the referendum on constitutional reform was successful, with a "yes" vote of 62.2%. In 1965, the presidential election was conducted by direct universal suffrage for the first time. Through to the second round (with 43.7% of the vote), de Gaulle was finally elected, beating Mitterrand, with 54.8%. In terms of foreign affairs, de Gaulle pursued a policy of national independence, providing France with its own means of defence: the first French atomic bomb was detonated at Reggane in the Sahara in February 1960. De Gaulle refused the protection of the United States and in 1966 withdrew France from the integrated NATO system - but France remained a member of the Atlantic alliance. At the same time, France entered the European Economic Community (EEC) on 1 January 1959. The country faced a major crisis in May 1968. Students organised huge demonstrations, and were joined by workers, triggering a general strike. De Gaulle succeeded in calming the situation by granting certain benefits to workers. On 27 April 1969, he put a plan for regionalisation and reform of the senate before the French people. His proposal was rejected in a referendum by 52.4% of the vote. Failing to gain the approval of the French people, he felt he lo longer had their trust and preferred to resign. Charles de Gaulle retired to Colombey-les-Deux-Églises and continued to write his memoirs; he died on 9 November 1970. In accordance with his will, de Gaulle was not given a state funeral. He was buried next to his daughter Anne, with a simple inscription on his grave, "Charles de Gaulle 1890-1970".