Daily Inspiration Quote by Charles de Gaulle

De Gaulle is doing what he always did best: turning a complaint into a throne. The line pretends to be a rueful inventory of enemies, but it’s really a diagnosis of the French state as he saw it - clogged with comfortable classes, rigid hierarchy, and professional negotiators who confuse process with destiny. By stacking “the bourgeois, the military and the diplomats” into one block, he collapses the usual pillars of authority into a single, self-interested establishment. It’s a rhetorical sleight of hand: he’s the general who distrusts generals, the statesman who sneers at diplomats, the head of government who treats the governing class as a rival faction.

Then comes the kicker: “only the people who take the Metro.” It’s a deliberately unglamorous image of legitimacy, the opposite of parades and salons. Not “the workers” or “the nation” - words that would sound like ideology - but commuters, the anonymous crowd moving under Paris. He’s not romanticizing the masses; he’s claiming a bond with ordinary life that the elites have supposedly forfeited. The Metro also carries a faint note of urgency and subterranean pressure: public opinion as something that travels beneath the official city, capable of surfacing suddenly.

Contextually, it fits a leader who governed through plebiscitary appeal and cultivated an almost theatrical solitude. De Gaulle casts himself as isolated yet authorized, besieged by institutions but buoyed by everyday France. It’s a line that flatters “the people” while quietly warning the establishment: I can bypass you, and I have done it before.