Charles de Gaulle Trivia
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49 free Charles De Gaulle trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Charles de Gaulle trivia for history buffs, Francophiles and anyone who has flown through the airport named after him. The quiz begins with the tall Lille schoolboy who chose Saint-Cyr, the lieutenant wounded at Dinant and captured at Verdun, the five failed escapes from German camps, and the interwar years as Pétain's ghostwriter and a lonely prophet of tank warfare. Then comes June 1940: the flight to London, the BBC appeal that almost nobody heard, the death sentence from Vichy, the Brazzaville Manifesto, and the long road back to Bayeux and the Champs-Élysées. Later rounds cover the resignation of 1946, the return in the crisis of 1958, the constitution Michel Debré drafted, the Évian Accords and the exodus of the pieds-noirs, the machine-gun ambush at Petit-Clamart, Gerboise Bleue and the force de frappe, the two vetoes of Britain, the NATO walkout, 'Vive le Québec libre', May 68 and the flight to Baden-Baden, the lost referendum of 1969, and the quiet grave at Colombey next to his daughter Anne. Questions run from easy to expert, and every answer was checked against a reference page and carries its source. See also our France, World War II and Winston Churchill quizzes.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which French city was Charles de Gaulle born in 1890?
Lille
Lille was the home of his mother's well-to-do family of manufacturers, but de Gaulle himself was brought up and educated in Paris.
Q 02What did de Gaulle's father, Henri, do for a living?
Schoolteacher
Schoolteacher: Henri de Gaulle taught at a Jesuit school in Paris and later ran one of his own, and the French history he argued over with his children at home stayed with Charles for life.
Q 03De Gaulle is said to have asked how anyone could govern a country with 246 varieties of what?
Cheese
Cheese: the quip comes from a 1962 book of his sayings, and other tellings give other numbers, yet every one of them undercounts, since France makes over a thousand kinds.
Q 04At which French military academy did de Gaulle train as an officer before the First World War?
Saint-Cyr
Saint-Cyr made its cadets serve in the ranks first, so de Gaulle spent a year as an ordinary infantryman before he was allowed to take up his place at the academy.
Q 05De Gaulle was first wounded in August 1914 at Dinant, a town in which country?
Belgium
Belgium: his regiment was rushed over the border to check the invading Germans at Dinant, and Lieutenant de Gaulle was shot in the leg in the very first battle he fought.
Q 06At which 1916 battle was Captain de Gaulle wounded and taken prisoner by the Germans?
Verdun
Verdun: he was captured near Fort Douaumont in March 1916 and spent thirty-two months as a prisoner of war, trying five times to escape.
Q 07Which emblem did de Gaulle's Free French adopt as their symbol during the Second World War?
The Cross of Lorraine
The Cross of Lorraine, with its two bars, was chosen as an answer to the Nazi swastika, and a giant one now stands over the village where de Gaulle is buried.
Q 08Which Paris monument stands at the centre of the square renamed Place Charles de Gaulle after his death?
The Arc de Triomphe
The Arc de Triomphe: the square around it took his name in 1970, yet it is still often called the Étoile, the star, after the twelve avenues that meet there.
Q 09Which future Red Army marshal was held with de Gaulle in the prison fortress at Ingolstadt?
Mikhail Tukhachevsky
Mikhail Tukhachevsky had been sent there, like de Gaulle, for escaping too often; he rose to the top of the Red Army, only for Stalin to have him shot in the purge of 1937.
Q 10For which marshal did de Gaulle work as a ghostwriter from 1925?
Philippe Pétain
Philippe Pétain had been de Gaulle's first colonel and his patron, but the two quarrelled over credit for a book, and by 1940 they were leading opposite sides of a defeated France.
Q 11De Gaulle's 1934 book on national defence urged France to put its faith in what?
A small mechanised army
A small mechanised army: Vers l'Armée de Métier called for fast tank divisions of career soldiers in place of the fixed defences of the Maginot Line, a heresy that made him unpopular with his superiors.
Q 12Which Frederick Forsyth thriller follows a hired assassin's plot to kill President de Gaulle?
The Day of the Jackal
The Day of the Jackal opens with a real event, the 1962 machine-gun ambush of de Gaulle's car, and only then invents the nameless professional hired to finish the job.
Q 13De Gaulle fled France in June 1940 after less than two weeks in which government post?
Q 21Which president asked de Gaulle to form a government during the crisis of May 1958?
René Coty
René Coty called de Gaulle 'the most illustrious of Frenchmen' and threatened to resign the presidency himself unless the National Assembly accepted the general as prime minister.
Q 22In 1958 de Gaulle scoffed at the idea that at 67 he would begin a career as what?
A dictator
A dictator: asked whether he would trample civil liberties, he replied that he was the man who had restored them, and that 67 was no age to start a new career.
Q 23Who drafted the text of de Gaulle's 1958 constitution and then served as his first prime minister?
Michel Debré
Under-secretary for war
Under-secretary for war: he joined the cabinet in early June 1940, and when a new government sought an armistice days later he left the country rather than accept it.
Q 14De Gaulle's 1940 appeal urging the French to fight on reached them over the airwaves of which broadcaster?
The BBC
The BBC carried the Appeal of 18 June, which few people in France heard and nobody kept a recording of, yet it became the founding moment of the Free French.
Q 15What sentence did a Vichy court martial pass on de Gaulle in absentia on 2 August 1940?
Death
Death: the court also stripped him of his rank and confiscated his property, after an earlier Vichy court had given him only four years in prison.
Q 16Félix Éboué brought the first African colony over to de Gaulle in 1940 as governor of which territory?
Chad
Chad: Éboué, a Black administrator born in French Guiana, broke with Vichy there in 1940, and the rest of French Equatorial Africa soon followed him over to the Free French.
Q 17In which Normandy city, the first freed after D-Day, did de Gaulle make his return to French soil in June 1944?
Bayeux
Bayeux had been freed by British troops the day after D-Day; de Gaulle spoke there and, before sailing back that night, left one of his own men in charge of the liberated zone.
Q 18Which Allied leader distrusted de Gaulle and for years refused to recognise him as his country's rightful leader?
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Franklin D. Roosevelt kept up relations with Vichy and backed a rival general, Henri Giraud, and Washington recognised de Gaulle's government only after Paris had been liberated.
Q 19Whose division was allowed to enter Paris first in August 1944, at de Gaulle's insistence?
General Leclerc
General Leclerc grew so impatient with the delays that he sent a small column racing ahead into Paris against orders, and the next day took the German commander's surrender.
Q 20Why did de Gaulle abruptly resign as head of France's provisional government in January 1946?
Party squabbling
Party squabbling: fed up with the parties in his coalition, he walked out expecting the country to call him back on his own terms, and instead waited twelve years.
Michel Debré, once a committed defender of French Algeria, turned the general's ideas into a constitution within months, and left office in 1962, days after voters approved the Algerian settlement.
Q 24Which was the only French African colony to vote for immediate independence in 1958?
Guinea
Guinea, urged on by its leader Sékou Touré, voted No by more than 95 per cent, and France answered by cutting off its aid and pulling out almost at once.
Q 25Which March 1962 agreements ended the Algerian War?
The Évian Accords
The Évian Accords, signed at Évian-les-Bains in March 1962, brought a ceasefire after seven years of war, and Algeria was declared independent that July.
Q 26What name was given to the European settlers who fled Algeria for France in 1962?
Pieds-noirs
Pieds-noirs, literally 'black feet': well over three-quarters of a million of them left as Algeria became independent, many with only what they could carry in a suitcase.
Q 27Which group ambushed de Gaulle's Citroën DS with machine guns at Petit-Clamart in August 1962?
The OAS
The OAS, die-hard opponents of Algerian independence, riddled the car with bullets yet hurt no one in it, and the plot's leader became the last man France executed by firing squad.
Q 28After de Gaulle's 1962 referendum, how was the president of France to be chosen?
By direct universal suffrage
By direct universal suffrage instead of an electoral college of notables, and the first time the new rule was used, in 1965, de Gaulle himself was forced into a second round.
Q 29Where was France's first atomic bomb, Gerboise Bleue, tested under de Gaulle in 1960?
The Sahara
The Sahara: the bomb, named 'blue jerboa' after a desert rodent, was exploded near Reggane in French Algeria and made France the world's fourth nuclear power.
Q 30In 1966 de Gaulle took France out of which alliance's military command?
NATO
NATO: France stayed in the alliance but took its forces out of the joint command, and the organisation's own headquarters had to pack up and leave French soil.