Our posts on Charles de Gaulle are usually about his time as President of France, Founder of the Fifth Republic etc. This one is a bit different.
From the Irish Independent, November 12, 2018:
Charles de Gaulle's secret weapon: Love
De Gaulle and his daughter Anne 'so full of love and understanding'
A friend of mine sent me this picture recently. Isn't there something magnetic about it? It seems so full of love and understanding. This is Charles de Gaulle with his daughter Anne.
I didn't know anything about Anne, so I did a bit of googling.
When Anne was born, in 1928, there would have been a huge stigma attached to having a child with Down syndrome. It was often thought to be a result of parental alcoholism, venereal disease, or overall degeneracy. Eugenics was also coming into vogue at the time. In those days the norm would have been to put a child like Anne into an institution. (Indeed, nearly four decades later, when the great American moralist playwright Arthur Miller fathered a son with Down syndrome, he would not only make the boy a ward of the state and put him in an institution, he wrote him out of his life completely and pretended he never existed.)
The de Gaulles did not put Anne in an institution, although neither did they broadcast too much to the world that Anne had Down syndrome, and their family life became very private after she was born.
De Gaulle, as a human being, is generally thought of as a bit of a pig and a bully, often arrogant and unreasonable. He was not an easy man on a human level. He was apparently not very demonstratively loving to his family either - but with Anne he was different, as I think we can see in this picture. Apparently he delighted in telling her stories and singing her songs, doing little dances for her and putting on pantomimes. Who knows? Maybe she understood him more than others did, or accepted him more. Maybe he felt he could, with her, indulge parts of himself that he did not ordinarily indulge.
And indeed, in ways, she was de Gaulle's secret weapon: "She helped me overcome the failures in all men," he said, "and to look beyond them." So clearly she changed him, or taught him something. While we must be careful about the romanticising of people with Down syndrome as angels sent from God to bring us joy and teach us lessons, most of us who love someone with Down syndrome would probably admit that they teach us things, and bring us joy. But then, children do that, don't they?
Anne de Gaulle died of pneumonia at the age of 20. Of course she probably wouldn't die that way, at that age, now. Children with Down syndrome can be prone to respiratory infections, that can develop into pneumonia quite quickly. But we have better medical care now....
....MUCH MORE
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