Private Life
Charles de Gaulle married Yvonne Vendroux on 7 April 1921. They had three children: Philippe (born 1921), Élisabeth (1924), who married General Alain de Boissieu, and Anne (1928–1948). Anne had Down's syndrome and died of pneumonia at the age of 20. De Gaulle always had a particular love for his handicapped daughter; one Colombey resident recalled how he used to walk with her hand-in-hand around the property, caressing her and talking quietly about the things she understood.
Like her husband, Yvonne de Gaulle was a conservative Catholic, and campaigned against prostitution, to stop pornography from being sold in newsstands and sex and nudity from being shown on TV, for which she earned the nickname "Tante ("Auntie") Yvonne." Later she unsuccessfully tried to persuade de Gaulle to outlaw miniskirts in France.
Charles de Gaulle had an older brother Xavier (1887-1955) and sister Marie-Agnes (1889-1983), and two younger brothers, Jaques (1893-1946) and Pierre (1897-1959). He was particularly close to the youngest, Pierre, who so resembled him that Presidential bodyguards often saluted him by mistake when he visited his famous brother or accommpanied him on official visits.
One of Charles de Gaulle's grandsons, also named Charles de Gaulle, was a member of the European Parliament from 1994 to 2004, his last tenure being for the National Front. Another grandson, Jean de Gaulle, was a member of the French Parliament until his retirement in 2007.
Read more about this topic: Charles De Gaulle
Famous quotes containing the words private life, private and/or life:
“What, really, is wanted from a neighborhood? Convenience, certainly, an absence of major aggravation, to be sure. But perhaps most of all, ideally, what is wanted is a comfortable background, a breathing space of intermission between the intensities of private life and the calculations of public life.”
—Joseph Epstein (b. 1937)
“All men, in the abstract, are just and good; what hinders them, in the particular, is, the momentary predominance of the finite and individual over the general truth. The condition of our incarnation in a private self, seems to be, a perpetual tendency to prefer the private law, to obey the private impulse, to the exclusion of the law of the universal being.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“God wills a full life for us all,
Loves us with tender care,
Asks us to take the sacrifice
Of broken life to share.”
—Paul R. Gregory (20th century)