It’s not exactly a piece of propaganda, but it is a piece of conscious mythmaking with a purpose. So he writes this epic story in retirement as a way of re-inserting himself back into French consciousness. So it’s a kind of redemptive story from the fall in 1940 to the offer of salvation by the saviour who is later spurned. The story in that volume is that he offered the French salvation: he saved them and then they rejected him. It basically covers the period from ’44 when he comes back to France up to his retirement in ’46. And then the third volume is called Salvation. The second volume is called Unity and the big theme of the second volume is the way the French, dispersed and unhappy in occupied France between 19, gather together around the saviour figure who’s in London. The first one is called L’appel, The Call, referring to the call he made in London on the BBC for the French to resist, but also to the call of history that calls on France’s saviour to save the country - that’s de Gaulle. The memoirs are in three volumes that came out successively in 1954, 1956, and 1959. But the story he wanted to tell was really about the military resurrection of France. For example, he rather underplays the role of the internal resistance, and many resistors much resented the fact that de Gaulle didn’t give them enough space. It was making him into the central figure of what happened in France between 19. It was a piece of very self-conscious mythmaking. He’s writing them for a very explicit purpose, which is the creation of his own legend. He wrote the memoirs in the 1950s when he was out of power. The title of the book comes from one of the most famous sentences he ever wrote, ‘All my life I’ve had a certain idea of France.’ That’s the opening sentence. What story do they tell, and how does he use them to elaborate this certain idea of France that he had? That brings us neatly on to your five choices, the first of which is de Gaulle’s memoirs. The Complete War Memoirs of Charles de Gaulle The great French biographies tend either to be very pro or very anti. But I genuinely think that the books on him to date haven’t really tried to think about him properly, so I hope my book offers a more sophisticated, subtle and complicated interpretation of him. I don’t really believe historians should be looking for skeletons in cupboards or smoking guns, I don’t believe history works like news scoops. I think the achievement of my book isn’t that there is suddenly some new revelation about de Gaulle. Having said that, I don’t think they have produced any major revelations, but these new archives did provide some interesting anecdotes and a new kind of texture. So this is the first biography that’s been able to use that enormous archive source. It was also stimulated by the opening of the public archives of de Gaulle a few years ago, covering his time as war leader, and then his time as president of the Fifth Republic. He’s the dominant figure, so it’s hard for a historian of that period, which I am, not to want to write about him. I suppose the reason was that, as a historian of 20th century France, and particularly the occupation period, he’s a figure you can’t avoid. There isn’t the same volume of stuff in this country on de Gaulle, but there have been a number of biographies of him over the years. In France he occupies a space in the national memory even greater than Churchill in this country it’s another order of magnitude. One was on de Gaulle’s humour, one was on the women in de Gaulle’s life - neither terribly big books! Another was on de Gaulle and Russia, there was one on de Gaulle and the Republic, one imagining what Franco and de Gaulle said to each other when they met in June 1970. I was just in France a few weeks ago and spotted in a bookshop seven new books on de Gaulle. There’s a huge production on de Gaulle, more than anybody else in modern French history, particularly in France today. What was the gap in the industry’s production that you hoped to fill with your biography? In fact, I think there’s an institute devoted to it. You mention in the beginning of your book that there’s a massive industry around de Gaulle publishing. I suppose the first question to ask is your motivation for writing a biography of Charles de Gaulle. Foreign Policy & International Relations.
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