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In the Memoirs de Gaulle has a sentence: ‘Faced with the political disaster, I had to become France.’ He sort of carries the country on his shoulder – and that’s what Churchill saw. When de Gaulle turned up in London and said, ‘I now speak for France’, it was almost an absurd situation – France had a legally appointed government headed by a distinguished old soldier, Marshal Pétain, and a lot of people in England and America thought de Gaulle was off his rocker, crazy, delusional. He believed Churchill only helped France because it was in Britain’s interest to do so. Despite the fact that he was at heart Anglophobic and thought the British would screw the French if they possibly could. There are portraits in there of all the great characters de Gaulle encountered – Churchill, Stalin, Roosevelt. There are three volumes, and they’re very readable. Let’s move on to de Gaulle’s war memoirs. The Complete War Memoirs of Charles de Gaulle There is also a universality about the Gerbier character: there were people exactly like him in 19th-century Poland, in occupied Europe during the Second World War, in modern liberation struggles such as in Ireland, South Africa, and Palestine.

CHARLES DE GAULLE BOOKS FREE

And so, even though this is a kind of adventure story written by a novelist, what you get out of it as well is the real Gaullist idea of what the Resistance philosophy is – that when your country is under occupation and you’re fighting to free it, everyone is in it together. The other thing that comes out is that political difference doesn’t matter – workers, peasants, young and old, Communists, landowners, people who love the Republic, monarchists, all put their differences aside in order to fight this battle. Kessel vividly portrays their wonderful spirit – they believe they are going to win even if they themselves are not going to survive they believe the Resistance is a sacred cause. The probability was that they would be caught within 24 hours. In 19, the life expectancy of the agents flying over and being parachuted into France was very, very low. When he was in London with the Free French he used to fly missions across to France, taking agents over and then picking them up, so he knew these people. He is a composite character, based on several people Kessel knew. Is he based on a particular Resistance figure? He himself is nearly captured countless times and the novel makes you feel what it’s like to lead this life, to have that kind of extraordinary pressure. You see his world gradually disintegrating all the people he works with are being arrested, tortured and killed, and he tells it all.

About halfway through the book it stops being a story about the different characters and becomes almost like jottings by the main character, the Resistance leader Philippe Gerbier, and you see everything through his eyes: the Germans and the Vichy police squeezing the Resistance more and more. It was a wonderfully moving moment.Īrmy of Shadows really takes you to the heart of what it is to be in the Resistance and one of the book’s greatest characteristics is that it celebrates the anonymous heroes, the ordinary man or woman who hides an allied airman, carries a suitcase from one town to another… It’s absolutely gripping too, very cinematic – in fact, it was made into a very successful film by Jean-Pierre Melville in 1969. The other thing for which he’ll always be remembered is the hymn of the Resistance, ‘Le Chant des Partisans’, that everybody in the Resistance used to sing – and, incidentally, was sung by a French military band this summer at the London memorial celebration of de Gaulle’s famous speech from a BBC studio in 1940.

Army of Shadows, written in 1943, is the book that made him famous and is still regarded as one of the greatest novels about the Resistance. Well, Kessel was a writer and war correspondent who, when France was defeated in 1940, went over to London and joined the Gaullist Resistance, the Free French. Let’s start with Army of Shadows by Joseph Kessel.

Foreign Policy & International Relations.

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