Charles de Gaulle was born at 9 Rue Princesse in Vieux-Lille on 22 November 1890, in the house of his maternal grandfather. The building is now a small museum dedicated to his early life and the city's connection to the man who led France's wartime government-in-exile and founded the Fifth Republic. The museum is modest in scale — three or four rooms, period furniture, family photographs, documents — but well done and genuinely informative about de Gaulle's Norman-Flemish origins.
Visitors who know de Gaulle primarily as the imperious wartime leader tend to be surprised by how much of his cultural formation was northern French — the puritanism, the sense of grievance, the attachment to France's borders and dignity that shaped his political career. The museum explains this connection clearly. It is located in a quiet street in northern Vieux-Lille, easy to combine with a visit to the Hospice Comtesse and the cathedral nearby.