When President Joe Biden traveled to France for the D-Day commemoration in June 2024, he and French President Emmanuel Macron emphasized the closeness of their relationship and the alliance between their two countries,. That closeness was most certainly not present in the 1960s, when French President Charles de Gaulle, who in my mind towers over his era in a way no politician does today, changed the course of my professional career.
It might be hard to imagine, but the story of Charles de Gaulle’s impact (and even potential implications or lessons for today’s national and global political dynamics) begins with my first stint in seminary. For the first time, I learned that the Old Testament had a plot. I was fascinated by the study of the prophets, whose writings I learned were commentary on the kings of Israel and the need for the people of Israel to seek justice. I immersed myself in the Hebrew language, with its unusual letters and reading right to left, and I became quite good at it. It was the onset of my career goal of becoming a religion professor in college or seminary. After this seminary work, I decided to pursue Old Testament as my particular focus.
The war in Vietnam was heating up. After two years of seminary, I volunteered for a term of alternative service with Mennonite Central Committee (MCC). MCC sent my wife Mary and me to Brussels, Belgium, for a year of French study, and then to Algeria, where I was an English teacher in an Algerian lycée (high school). After this interlude, I intended to finish seminary and then pursue graduate study in Old Testament.
During the years 1966-68 that we lived in Algeria, I listened to both French and Algerian news on the radio and read French and Algerian newspapers. At the news shop in town I could buy Le Monde, the influential and internationally-known French paper. In 1968, French president Charles de Gaulle was much in the news. As I recall, notable actions and policies of le grand Charles, as the 6-foot 5-inch de Gaulle was nicknamed, included the following: vetoing British entry into the Common Market, refusing to sign a nuclear test ban treaty, expelling NATO headquarters from Paris, boycotting Israel after the Six-Day War, attacking the U.S. dollar as the standard for international currency, instituting university reforms that had students rioting in the streets of Paris for a month.
He also put wind in the sails of Quebec separatism when he traveled to Canada and bypassed the capital in Ottawa. Heading directly to Quebec, de Gaulle gave a speech that concluded with the words, “Vive le Québec libre! Vive le Québec libre!” (Live free Quebec!). Such actions perplexed and angered both French and American peoples.
I certainly did not understand what de Gaulle was about. When I asked my French colleagues at school what de Gaulle was doing, the majority said, “C’est vieux est fou“ (that old man is crazy), as they referred to the seventy-eight-year-old president. Le Monde even had an editorial with the headline “Est-il fou?” (Is he crazy?)
When I asked Jacques, my best French friend, what was going on with Charles de Gaulle, he had a different answer. It usually began “You have to understand,” followed by a longish policy or history lesson.
One day, probably weary of my questions, Jacques gave me a set of books and explained that everything I needed to know was in those three volumes. These books, profusely illustrated, gilt-edged, bound in embossed leather, were a limited edition of de Gaulle’s war memoirs, his Mémoires de Guerre. Jacques’s father was a Gaulist member of the French parliament. De Gaulle had prepared 600 copies of this special edition as gifts for his members in parliament. Jacques had his father’s copy to loan to me.
De Gaulle’s tomes proved fascinating reading. Written two decades earlier, the memoir read like a suspense novel. I spent several spellbound weeks reading about the experiences of le grand Charles in two world wars, as he led the forces of truth and justice, namely the French, against an array of opponents.
The account was enlightening. Jacques was correct—what I needed to know was in these volumes. I learned that de Gaulle believed that in World War II, the United States and Britain had failed to accord him the role and the respect that he thought he and France deserved. Thus he simply did not trust them.
As I read his story, it became clear to me that his policies in 1968 were all designed to counter British and United States influence and to raise the profile of France at their expense. We might even say that he was getting even with Britain and the United States for their earlier attitudes. Rather than being the chaotic policies of a crazy old man, as most of my French colleagues said, the policies of 1968 reflected a coherent strategy, shaped by de Gaulle’s experiences more than two decades earlier. One certainly did not have to agree with his actions, but the story brought clarity to them and would give insight to those who sought to counter the policies.
From this reading in de Gaulle’s war memoirs, what I realized for the first time was how significantly historical understanding can clarify issues in the present. In this particular case, an account decades before explained the 1960s tumultuous context in France. After seeing how a bit of history clarified events in France, this insight about the potential impact of historical understanding convinced me to change my graduate school focus from Old Testament to church history.
And that redirected my entire career. Without Charles de Gaulle’s memoirs, I would have had a much different career. De Gaulle launched me on a new path. Eventually this led to my developing a new approach to atonement theology that garnered international attention. The path to that atonement image was neither smooth nor direct. Learning came from a variety of sources, sometimes with embarrassment. For the entirety of that story, see my memoir, New Moves: A Theological Odyssey
In that book, the historical context insights I learned from de Gaulle help me understand how multiple views of the atonement came to be. I tell of how my own personal and especially theological history shaped me to move, ultimately, beyond understandings I came to believe supported violence rather than the ways of peace Jesus taught and invites us to live out even amid today’s many violences.
J. Denny Weaver, Madison, Wisconsin, is Professor Emeritus of Religion who taught for over 30 years in the Religion Department of Bluffton University. Well known as the developer of a nonviolent approach to atonement theology, he is author and editor of many books, including The Nonviolent Atonement, Becoming Anabaptist, Defenseless Christianity (with Gerald J. Mast), Living the Anabaptist Story (with Lisa Weaver, and his memoir, New Moves: A Theological Odyssey. As senior editor of the C. Henry Smith series, he oversaw 13 volumes.