At 6pm on 18 June 1940, a relatively unknown French two-star general, Charles de Gaulle, composed himself in front of a microphone at the BBC’s Broadcasting House in London and began a speech. Lasting less than six minutes, his words were an impassioned rejection of the armistice with Nazi Germany, which had been announced the day before by Marshal Pétain, prime minister and soon to be head of state of the collaborationist Vichy regime. Bristling with intent, de Gaulle was adamant that the Fall of France was just one battle and not the whole war, which he predicted would become a world war. Broadcast at 10pm, the speech was not obviously political. Rather it was a call to arms, aimed at the French military.

Few French people responded to de Gaulle’s plea, principally because it was difficult not to accept Pétain’s logic that Nazi Germany had won. Indeed, most saw de Gaulle as irrelevant, preferring to embrace Pétain as the saviour figure whose authoritarian antisemitic regime, based in the central spa town of Vichy, enjoyed mass support in autumn 1940.

However, after the Second World War, de Gaulle’s speech of 18 June 1940 became enshrined in French history as the starting point of the French Resistance, which led directly to the Liberation four years later. This founding narrative allowed French people to forget the humiliation of Nazi Occupation and rebuild national self-esteem.

Read the rest of the review at HistoryToday.com.

Martin Evans is Professor of Modern European History at Sussex University