History

General de Gaulle, his letters in a 'historical' auction

The correspondence is enriched by letters with François Mauriac, André Malraux, Georges Bernanos and Paul Claudel, Winston Churchill and Joséphine Baker

16 December 2024

3' min read

On 18 June 1940, around 3 p.m., in a small flat in Seymour Place, London, Elisabeth de Miribel finds two double-sided pages of a draft that she has to type. The young woman had been summoned the night before to act as secretary to a French general who had just landed in England. His name, Charles de Gaulle, remains largely unknown to the public. The 24-year-old recruit then sits before her unknown man. She laboriously applies herself to the reading and transcription of a finely written text overloaded with erasures; these words will write a page of history, as she will recall forty years later in her memoirs, La Liberté suffers violence (Cerf, 1981), but she does not yet know this.

General de Gaulle

The day before, having learned of the resignation of Paul Reynaud's government, General de Gaulle had refused to surrender and had flown to London, taking with him the fate of France and the draft of the speech that would be broadcast by the BBC. Now this original manuscript of the Appeal of 18 June - one of the most important in 20th century French history - is on display in the spaces of the Artcurial auction house in Paris, at the Hôtel Marcel Dassault (at 7, rond-point des Champs-Élysées) as a corollary to the sale dedicated to the former President of the French Republic Charles de Gaulle (1890 - 1970), scheduled for 16 December.

The son, Admiral Philippe de Gaulle

The auction features more than 370 lots of the General's writings, books, mementos and personal items from the estate of his son, Admiral Philippe de Gaulle, who died this year at the age of 102. It is estimated to be worth a total of €1 million and part of the proceeds will go to support the Anne de Gaulle Foundation, set up by Charles and his wife Yvonne in memory of their last and much-loved daughter, who suffered from Down's syndrome and died at the age of 20 in 1948.

The sale promises to be exceptional because it brings to light, through previously unpublished documents, some surprising traits of one of the most illustrious personalities in modern history. If he had not become a man of arms, de Gaulle would certainly have become a man of letters.

For instance, at the age of fourteen - an age at which one was already an adult in the early 20th century - he wrote Campagne di Germania, a notebook of short stories in which he saw himself as a general at the head of an army fighting the Germans, evidence of his hesitation between a literary and military career (estimate EUR 10,000 - 15,000). While another notebook of drawings, dated 1910, reveals his formidable dexterity in pencil sketching.

Unpublished Notebooks and Quotations report philosophical meditations, political analyses and literary considerations

Unpublished notebooks and quotations record philosophical meditations, political analyses and literary considerations and offer valuable evidence of the General's permanent intellectual construction.

The sale also features an extensive collection of private correspondence (estimates from €3,000 to €8,000) including coded letters addressed to his mother during his imprisonment at the end of the First World War. The correspondence is enriched by missives exchanged with personalities of the time such as François Mauriac, André Malraux, Georges Bernanos and Paul Claudel. Particularly interesting are those from Winston Churchill and Joséphine Baker, who in 1947 signed herself "your faithful and dirty Gaullist". There is no shortage of wristwatches; many received as gifts. the General particularly appreciated the French Lip, reliable but not ostentatious. The R 27 'Patent Pending' model No. 17298 18k gold, worn in the 1960s, is on sale for 6,000 to 10,000 euros.