Foot on de Gaulle

[I]n 1940 the external leader was hardly known, even by name, within the country that he felt he was. As Pétain the hero of Verdun was the most senior, de Gaulle was the most junior general officer in the French army; Pétain was a world figure; de Gaulle was a nobody. He was so dim that the BBC did not bother to record his original broadcast of 18 June 1940, which gaullists now revere as the starting-point of resistance. A few professional friends, and a handful of politicians, knew him; a few people had read his books on military theory, one of them dedicated to Pétain under whom he had served. His name sounded like a magniloquent pseudonym. It was in fact an old one — a Sieur de Gaulle had fallen at Agincourt — and one of his grandmothers was a MacCartan of Lille, descendant of an Irish soldier who had preferred Louis XIV to William III. It was not an ancestry to predispose a man to love the English.

—M.R.D. Foot, Resistance, (London: Biteback Publishing Ltd, 2016), 369.