Editing Charles de Gaulle (section)

=== Education and intellectual influences ===
De Gaulle began writing in his early teens, especially poetry; his family paid for a composition, a one-act verse play, to be privately published.<ref name="Pedley" /> A voracious reader, he favored philosophical tomes by such writers as [[Henri Bergson|Bergson]], [[Charles Péguy|Péguy]], and [[Maurice Barrès|Barrès]]. In addition to the German philosophers [[Friedrich Nietzsche|Nietzsche]], [[Immanuel Kant|Kant]], and [[Johann Wolfgang von Goethe|Goethe]], he read the works of the ancient Greeks (especially [[Plato]]) and the prose of [[François-René de Chateaubriand|Chateaubriand]].<ref name="Pedley">Alan Pedley (1996) ''As Mighty as the Sword: A Study of the Writings of Charles de Gaulle''. pp. 170–72. Intellect Books; {{ISBN|978-0950259536}}.</ref>

De Gaulle was educated in Paris at the [[Collège Stanislas de Paris|Collège Stanislas]] and studied briefly in Belgium.<ref name="Fenby-2010" />{{RP|51–53}} At the age of fifteen he wrote an essay imagining "General de Gaulle" leading the French Army to victory over Germany in 1930; he later wrote that in his youth he had looked forward with somewhat naive anticipation to the inevitable future war with Germany to avenge the French defeat of 1870.<ref name="Lacouture 1991, p13">Lacouture 1991, p. 13</ref>

France during de Gaulle's adolescence was a divided society, with many developments which were unwelcome to the de Gaulle family: the growth of socialism and [[syndicalism]], the [[1905 French law on the Separation of the Churches and the State|legal separation of Church and state in 1905]], and the reduction in the term of military service to two years. Equally unwelcome were the ''[[Entente Cordiale]]'' with Britain, the [[First Moroccan Crisis]], and above all the [[Dreyfus Affair]]. Henri de Gaulle came to be a supporter of Dreyfus, but was less concerned with his innocence ''per se'' than with the disgrace which the army had brought onto itself. The period also saw a resurgence in evangelical Catholicism, the dedication of the [[Sacré-Cœur, Paris]], and the rise of the cult of [[Joan of Arc]].<ref name="Fenby-2010" />{{RP|50–51}}<ref name="Lacouture 1991, p13" />

De Gaulle was not an outstanding pupil until his mid-teens, but from July 1906 he focused on winning a place at the military academy, [[École Spéciale Militaire de Saint-Cyr|Saint-Cyr]].<ref name="Lacouture 1991, pp9-10">Lacouture 1991, pp. 9–10</ref> [[Jean Lacouture]] suggests that de Gaulle joined the army, despite being more suited to a career as a writer and historian, partly to please his father and partly because it was one of the few unifying forces which represented the whole of French society.<ref name="Lacouture 1991, pp14-15">Lacouture 1991, pp. 14–15</ref> He later wrote that "when I entered the Army, it was one of the greatest things in the world",<ref name="Fenby-2010" />{{RP|51}} a claim which Lacouture points out needs to be treated with caution: the army's reputation was at a low. It was used extensively for strike-breaking and there were fewer than 700 applicants for Saint-Cyr in 1908, down from 2,000 at the turn of the century.<ref name="Lacouture 1991, pp14-15" />