Biography | Charles de Gaulle — The Platform Was Set Up Under the Trees

He came ashore on the Norman coast on 14 June 1944, eight days after the landings, carried across by the Free French escort La Combattante; whether he stepped onto the sand at Graye-sur-Mer or at Courseulles-sur-Mer is told differently by the institutions that describe it. He went first to Montgomery's headquarters at the château of Creullet, and reached Bayeux at about half past three. The platform, the town's own account says, was set up under the trees.

What the afternoon did was administrative. De Gaulle installed François Coulet as commissaire régional de la République — the appointment is dated 12, 13 and 14 June by three different sources — and Coulet removed the sous-préfet who held the post under Vichy. By 16 June, Raymond Triboulet had it.

The story usually built around this is that the visit pre-empted an Allied Military Government for liberated France. What is documented is narrower. Allied Military Government was never applied to France, and an American communiqué of 13 July 1944 announced that it would not be. That the Bayeux afternoon caused this rests substantially on de Gaulle's own memoirs. Washington recognised his provisional government on 23 October 1944.

No full authenticated text of what he said that day has been published, and no institutional source gives a figure for the crowd. The square, renamed for him, carries the claim instead. A stone column cut in Roman capitals says that in this place, to the people of Bayeux, joyful at their deliverance, Charles de Gaulle addressed his first words on liberated French soil. He came back to the same square on 16 June 1946 and used it to set out the constitution he wanted. A hundred metres off, on the sous-préfecture, a plaque from the Comité du Débarquement dates itself 14 December 1946 — two years later than some accounts of it allow.

📸 Cover: the column on Place Charles de Gaulle, Bayeux, marking the 14 June 1944 speech, photograph by M. Strīķis, 18 June 2007, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons. Second image: the Comité du Débarquement plaque on the sous-préfecture, photograph by Dave osm, 16 December 2025, CC BY-SA 4.0.