Édouard de Castelnau

Noël Édouard, vicomte de Curières de Castelnau was a French military officer and Chief of Staff of the French Armed Forces during the First World War. Elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1919 for Aveyron and president of the Army Committee in the legislature, he then took the head of a confessional political movement, the Fédération Nationale Catholique. During the Second World War, he opposed Marshal Pétain and the Vichy regime and supported the French Resistance. For a long time controversial because of a Catholicism that was considered outrageous by his opponents, historians have moderated that portrait by emphasising his great loyalty to republican institutions and disputed in particular that he could have been reactionary or antisemitic.