Chapter 543: The Proclamation of the Fifth Republic
The air was cold, but it burned with fire.
Not the fire of war, but something older, deeper: the fire of righteous fury, the kind that only smoldered in a person long humiliated, long denied their destiny.
Nearly a decade had passed since the French Civil War had ended. The streets of France bore scars of both foreign boots and domestic shame.
But at long last, they echoed again, not with despair, but with purpose.
A crowd gathered at the foot of the Place de la République, stretching from the steps of the broken Assemblée Nationale to the shadowed edge of Notre-Dame.
Frenchmen from all corners of the fractured nation had come to hear the man whose name had once been a whisper in the corridors of exiles.
General Charles de Gaulle stood atop a hastily raised platform, the tricolor fluttering behind him in the cold wind.
Soldiers of the Gallian Militia, and Réveil de France, bearing neither royalist lilies nor the insignias of Pétain’s collaborationist army, ringed the crowd like silent sentinels.
De Gaulle did not smile. He did not raise his hands in pleasantries. He spoke.
"Citizens of France. Sons of Gaul. Patriots of a betrayed and broken motherland."
The voice was rough, tired. Hardened by exile and war. But it carried across the plaza with unnatural clarity.
"Today, we end a lie."