On June 18, 1940, the voice of a general, unknown amounts in the night. Issued on the antenna of the BBC, it's called the French resistance, as their country comes from yielding to nazi Germany. The few who will hear this call do not know it yet, but this voice will join the thousands of good wishes. This voice, it is that of Charles de Gaulle, 50, a two-star general, a woman, and three children, including a daughter with a disability. The private life, he sacrificed it. It is necessary to save France, he wrote to his wife. With his companions, he will help to drive out the occupant and to restore the honour of France.
The Point is to publish, on the occasion of the anniversary of this call, a one-off edition that illuminates the complex personality and mysterious to the one who will dominate the French political life for nearly fifty years and whose spectre still hangs over our country. Don Quixote, the general de Gaulle ? It needed more guts to dare any and all to brave the 18 June 1940. President Roosevelt took it to a "crazy" ; Churchill, who loved him well, almost drop it twenty times. Haughty, sure of himself, often inhumane, de Gaulle was also admirable that unbearable. You loved him or you hated him.
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After once again pulling the country out of the crisis in 1958 by ending as much as the Algerian war, and in giving him a Constitution and stable for a long period of prosperity, it is a failure, no glory, he left power in 1969. France was fed up with the " old ". Remains this nagging longing for a voice strong and serious, exit the clouds, would be finally the solution. What ? To mediocrity, the sense of loss, of fear ? What would he have done, he, in the face of the pandemic of sars coronavirus and the global economy to stop ? What would he have thought of the chorus of complaints that arise today from all sides ? His conception of the participatory society would it still relevant ? It is in the storm that this arrogant man has better expressed. In the crisis that this temperament out of the ordinary has been able to give his full measure.
also Read "De Gaulle had a capacity of adaptation fascinating"
But what this special issue also reminds us, it is that de Gaulle was also a writer. Lyric, love the formula felt good, who had read his Tacitus, and which, in the opinion of his biographer, uk Julian Jackson, would have deserved the Nobel peace prize (but it is Churchill who had it). A writer who was also a political thinker of high standing, as evidenced by pages beautiful that The Point offers you find. Those on the edge of the sword, a masterpiece of reflection on the courage, the leadership (already), on the size that can reach a man, particularly of Memoirs, story of a fate remarkably staged, philosophy of action this off-series offers you to discover, at the same time that her life and legacy..
Read also Jean-Claude Casanova : "De Gaulle has invented rigour"
Read our dossier : response to the crisis, De Gaulle.
