It was General de Gaulle who gave the Fort de Brégançon its status as a presidential residence. He himself stayed there only one night, on August 25, 1964, on his way to Toulon to preside over the ceremonies of the twentieth anniversary of the landing of Provence. The military fortress did not appeal to the General, who praised its role in history but spent a particularly bad night there. He nevertheless decided by a decree of January 5, 1968, to permanently assign the fort to the Ministry of Cultural Affairs so that it could serve as an official holiday residence for the President of the French Republic and accommodate foreign and, in particular, Mediterranean heads of state in a context of decolonization.