In an interview with a journalist in 1962, France’s iconic leader Charles de Gaulle (1890 – 1970) famously remarked, “For those who had to choose between their material possessions and the soul of France, their material possessions chose for them.”
Biographer Julian Jackson records in the volume titled A Certain Idea of France: The Life of Charles de Gaulle, “Those with possessions are possessed by what they own.”