Talk:Charles de Gaulle

Variety of English

This article currently contains a mix of American and British spellings, and has ever since its creation in 2002 (armored, but neighbour). By revision 27211288 of 01:48, 3 November 2005, although there was still a mixture of spellings, there seemed to be a tendency somewhat in favor of British spelling (18-12):

• AE: armored criticiz*-2 Defense favor harbor honor organization-2 recognized revitalize traumatizing
• BE: armoured-2 characterised criticised defence harboured labour-4 mechanised organised recognise revitalise satirised specialised sympathiser-2

As this tendency is also in accord with a certain level of ties to England for this topic (where de Gaulle spent the war years and marshalled his forces), I think it's reasonable to unify the spelling to British English per MOS:RETAIN and MOS:TIES, and to add the {{use British English}} template to the article. Before making this change, let's hold off for a week, to see if any objections or other comments are forthcoming. Mathglot (talk) 18:42, 18 December 2022 (UTC)

Replacement of the entire lead on 6 April by IP user via LLM

On 7 April at 01:52, IP user 2600:1702:3650:9050:88E3:9399:5608:8A92 (talk · contribs) replaced the lead of Charles de Gaulle in (diff; permalink). This user has no edits before today, and has replaced leads on eight biographies of French politicians or statesmen. In my opinion, these have all been generated by Chat GPT (I've been experimenting a fair bit, and I recognize the style, now.) The lead is pretty good, but it doesn't necessarily summarize the most important points in the body of *this* article, and I'm not convinced everything in it is already covered in more detail in the lead, where references can be found. If you'd like to compare this lead to one created by Chat GPT for this article, see /Chat GPT lead experiment. Finally, I'm not sure how to deal with this, so I plan to bring it to ANI for wider discussion. Meanwhile, I am reverting it. 05:33, 7 April 2023 (UTC)

See this ANI discussion. Mathglot (talk) 18:25, 7 April 2023 (UTC)

List of honours - citation and check needed over British award

I have raised a citation need over the alleged award of Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order (post nominal initials GCVO), which is uncited and undated. He does appear in the List of recipients of the Royal Victorian Chain, a distinctly separate honour, awarded when President of the French Republic in 1960. Wonder if there might be a confusion between the two? He definitely does not appear in the list of Knights and Dames Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order awarded by George VI or Elizabeth II between 1952-1977, although I note the recipients named all seem to be British or British Commonwealth subjects. Had he been made a GCVO on an honorary basis that is awarded to foreigners?Cloptonson (talk) 18:34, 15 July 2023 (UTC)

Bold move to reduce bloat

Hi, XTheBedrockX, I noticed your bold move (diff) of a big chunk of information from this page over to the new Charles de Gaulle during World War II; thanks for your efforts, it needed it. The size of this article was problematic, and certainly needed reduction (and likely still does). I note from the diff that you mostly either kept-or-moved, paragraph by paragraph, so whatever was left here in the end, is word-for-word the same as it was before. I think that's fine for starters, but I hope you're planning to continue the process in section § Second World War, leader of the Free French in exile so that it follows WP:Summary style.

What I mean by that, is that the section here should become a summary of the child article, meaning likely there won't be anything left here that contains anything word-for-word matching what it was before when it's done. The section even now after the major cull still remains the largest section in the article, with 37.4kb of wikicode and six subsections (see 'section sizes' in the header banners above). That's half again as large as the next largest section, which doesn't even have its own article. Now that this one does, it would be great to cut it back a whole lot further; ideally, by moving all of the remaining content over to the new article, and then replacing what's here with a summary of the other one.

One method to consider, which is also a method mentioned at WP:SS, is that once you're happy with the child article and feel you've written a good WP:LEAD section summarizing it, simply copy that lead back here, as your new summary section for the parent article. (And add a few refs here, if the lead over there doesn't have any.) Anyway, good job, it needed it, and if you've a mind to, keep going! I don't have a ton of time to help with this right now, but I do happen to have a copy of De Gaulle et la Libération from the library right now—it's focused pretty tightly on events of the summer and autumn of 1944, but if it would help you to have specific passages from it that are not visible in Google books, lmk and maybe I can help. Mathglot (talk) 05:54, 29 August 2023 (UTC)

Lede November 2023

User:Nikkimaria by this edit: [1] has reduced the size of the lede by 1,556 bytes. It seems to me though that the first para of the lede adequately summarises de Gaulle and we don't then need the following 3 paragraphs which are effectively just an expanded lede. Thoughts? Mztourist (talk) 05:22, 10 November 2023 (UTC)

If you're proposing only keeping the first paragraph of the lead: it's quite standard to have 4-paragraph leads for articles of this length. DFlhb (talk) 07:51, 10 November 2023 (UTC)

Is it quite standard to summarize his life in the 1st para and then expand that in the 2nd to 4th paras? Isn't that what the body of the page is for? Mztourist (talk) 08:55, 10 November 2023 (UTC)

Bad vision of the position of "President of the French Republic"

In the article (and this is true for the other sheets of the French presidents) he is presented as the "18th President of the French Republic". But in reality it's false. Not only if we really count, it's rather the 21st. But in addition, what must be understood with the political regime in France is that if we deliberately say "Vth Republic" it is because when France changes its constitution it is often that the Republic takes on a completely different face. And it was also to change the regime that he was called by René Cotty in 1958. The real highlight on De Gaulle is that he is the First President of the Fifth Republic.

Putting him 18th not only diminishes the truth of his appointment and his importance in the history of France, but it also integrates him in fact into a succession of presidents who have nothing to do with each other. Under the Third Republic the President hardly governs, it is the Prime Minister (President of the Council) who leads the country. Under the Fourth, the presidents do not hold the regime and the governments are changed every 3 months, hence the arrival of De Gaulle who stabilizes power and drafts the first Constitution that really gives power to the president and really places him at the head of the country. Julesc15 (talk) 10:44, 2 May 2024 (UTC)

Inconsistent with another Wikipedia article

It appears to me that the last sentence of the second paragraph of the “May 1968 and resignation” subsection (of the “Return to power” section) states as a matter of fact that de Gaulle granted amnesty to ensure military support.

“De Gaulle returned to France after being assured of the military's support, in return for which De Gaulle agreed to amnesty for the 1961 coup plotters and OAS members.”

This seems inconsistent with the English wikipedia article on Jacques Massu, the “Later life” section of which says (in the final sentence of the first paragraph):

“Massu assured de Gaulle of his support, but according to some sources conditioned it upon an amnesty for French soldiers involved in the Organisation armée secrète who had opposed Algerian independence and attempted to assassinate de Gaulle on several occasions.”

I didn’t know how to resolve this discrepancy so I figured it would be wise to raise this issue here rather than in the Jacques Massu talk page (given that this page is visited more frequently). Apologies for any inadvertent errors, I’m still unfamiliar with Wikipedia rules and procedures. Oldboad (talk) 09:10, 2 October 2024 (UTC)

Honours and awards section, subsection Medals

The list of awards, with one exception, in the subsection Medals, are all unreferenced. I have removed from there and reproduce on this page the following listed which are vague and could do with more precise naming, with date of award if available.

• Medal of Mexico
• Iraqi medal (I note he had an order from Iraq which is named and cited in previous subsection)
• Royal Medal of Tunisia
• Pakistani medal
• Greek medal (possibly the Greek War Cross awarded for service in WWII?)

Cloptonson (talk) 19:10, 24 November 2024 (UTC)

Vandalism

This article has been vandalised, please rollback/revert. I would do it myself but I can't figure out how to, sorry. Thank you 2A02:C7E:2F68:AC00:D1D:3460:3E1:C561 (talk) 14:57, 3 December 2024 (UTC)