Aging & Wisdom Quote by Charles de Gaulle

De Gaulle’s line lands like a cold splash of realism dressed up as courtly romance. By pairing treaties with roses and “young girls,” he takes the ceremonial language of diplomacy and yanks it back into the realm of perishables: things prized partly because they don’t endure. The phrasing is deceptively simple, almost shrugging. That shrug is the point. It suggests that states sign agreements the way people exchange flowers - as signals of intention, not guarantees of permanence.

The subtext is classic Gaullist sovereignty. For de Gaulle, France should never let paper outrank national interest; alliances are tools, not lodestars. Coming from a leader who navigated WWII, the early Cold War, and France’s bruised post-imperial recalibration, the cynicism reads less like nihilism than lived experience. Treaties “last while they last” because power shifts, governments fall, threats mutate, publics turn, and the moral fervor of one moment becomes the inconvenient constraint of the next. He’s warning against sentimental faith in institutions when the engine of history is contingency.

The most revealing move is the metaphor’s gendered bite. “Young girls” frames diplomatic commitments as objects of beauty and consumption, a patriarchal aside that reveals the era’s casual sexism and also the psychology of elite statecraft: courtship, possession, replacement. It’s not just that treaties decay; it’s that powerful men assume they can outgrow them. De Gaulle’s intent, then, is both counsel and provocation: admire agreements, use them, don’t mistake them for permanence - and remember who gets to decide when the bloom is gone.