ABSTRACT
In the course of Churchill’s 90-year span my calculations show that he spent an ascertainable 1,447 days, or just under four years, in France. And this is probably a mild underestimate, with a few lesser visits slipping through my net. It was a formidable total for anyone who was never domiciled or who never owned a residence there. (It contrasts with a total of under 400 days, despite his several extended lecture tours and frequent wartime visits to Roosevelt, spent in the United States.)
The French periods were reasonably spread over much of his life, although with a strong element of ‘back-end loading’. When World War II broke out his score was 668 days. During the five and a half years of hostilities he added only another 30, with an obvious gap between the fall of France in June 1940 and the opening of the Second Front four years later. During the six years between Churchill’s lost election of July 1945 and the end of his second government nearly ten years later his French score was 140 days. And then in the subsiding last decade of his life it soared to 609 days.
