Charles de gaulle biography book
The best books on Charles de Gaulle - Five Books...
The best books on Charles de Gaulle’s Place in French Culture
Let’s start with Army of Shadows by Joseph Kessel.
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.
Charles de gaulle biography book
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. 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.
It was a wonderfully moving moment.
Army 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 airm