Book: The War Memoirs

Overview
Charles de Gaulle’s The War Memoirs, first published in 1954 and completed across three volumes, is both an account of France’s ordeal from 1940 to 1946 and the author’s strategic brief for why he acted as he did. Written in lucid, elevated prose, it traces the collapse of the Third Republic, the birth of Free France, the liberation of the nation, and the difficult reconstruction of legitimate authority. The work projects a central conviction: that France, embodied in its state and historical vocation, must retain its sovereignty and dignity even at its darkest hour.

Context and Structure
The narrative unfolds chronologically: The Call to Honour (1940–1942) covers defeat and the London exile; Unity (1942–1944) follows the struggle to consolidate Free French forces and reconcile fractious allies and resistants; Salvation (1944–1946) recounts liberation, the restoration of republican legality, and de Gaulle’s break with the party system. The memoir blends battlefield episodes, diplomatic cables, speeches, and portraits of protagonists, forming a record of decisions under pressure and an argument about legitimacy.

From Defeat to the Appeal
De Gaulle begins from a “certain idea of France,” then recounts the swift collapse of 1940. As a newly promoted brigadier and briefly Under-Secretary for National Defence, he opposes the armistice championed by Pétain, travels to London, and on 18 June issues the Appeal that calls on the French to continue the fight. The early pages dramatize isolation and risk: few troops, uncertain colonial loyalties, British hesitations, and the moral imperative to keep a sovereign French flame alive. The failed attempt to rally Dakar and the painstaking efforts to bring Equatorial Africa, the Levant, and scattered forces under Free French authority reveal the fragility of his enterprise.

Forging Free France
The central section details how political legitimacy was wrested from Vichy and asserted before skeptical allies. De Gaulle describes tensions with Churchill and especially Roosevelt, who favor rival figures such as Darlan and Giraud and contemplate Allied administration on French soil. He frames his resistance as a defense of continuity: France must liberate itself to exist. Military episodes, from Leclerc’s desert campaigns to operations in Syria-Lebanon, punctuate the diplomatic struggle. Inside France, unity is built through the Resistance, coordinated by Jean Moulin and the National Council of the Resistance, which recognizes de Gaulle’s leadership. By 1943 the French Committee of National Liberation in Algiers gives institutional form to a government-in-waiting.

Liberation and Provisional Power
On the eve of D-Day, de Gaulle secures the French role in the invasion and rejects direct Allied rule. Landing at Bayeux, then entering Paris amid the August 1944 uprising, he dramatizes state continuity with the march to Notre-Dame and the swift reestablishment of republican institutions. The memoir presents a restrained, legal purge of collaborators, the extension of civic rights (notably women’s suffrage), and social-economic measures as acts of national renewal rather than vengeance. Yet the closing chapters turn austere: de Gaulle’s conception of a strong, impartial executive collides with the “party regime.” Refusing to preside over what he views as a fractious parliamentary system, he resigns in 1946, convinced that the work of salvation is done but the constitutional settlement remains flawed.

Themes and Style
Throughout, grandeur, independence, and the unity of the nation are leitmotifs. De Gaulle writes with spare, classical cadence, alternating terse judgments with set-piece scenes and primary documents. He portrays himself less as a politician than as a custodian of the state’s honor, insisting that the authority to govern stems from serving the nation’s continuity in war as well as in peace.

Legacy
The War Memoirs fixed a powerful narrative of France’s wartime experience and defined Gaullism as both posture and policy. At once testimony and construction of memory, the book remains a foundational text for understanding how France regained its sovereignty and how its most emblematic leader sought to ensure that the nation would never again be treated as a secondary power in its own house.