I read a biography of him last year that I really enjoyed, A Certain Idea of France and it’s very funny that he was kind of Just a Guy^TM. He was, technically, a very junior member of the last cabinet before Pétain, but nobody in the public knew who he was and he had only just been promoted to general.

Even the British were a little dubious about him. Whether he was going to be allowed to speak on the BBC to rally the French was a question until a last minute intervention by Churchill essentially amounting to “why not.”