Discours et Messages

These five volumes bring together the speeches delivered by General de Gaulle, from the celebrated appeal of 18 June 1940 to the speech of 28 April 1969. The exact texts were preserved, either written in his own hand for radio and television addresses, or recorded by official stenography for his public speeches and addresses to the Assemblies.

The first volume of the Discours appeared in April 1970, and de Gaulle made a point of sending copies to those close to him, whether from political, cultural, literary or family circles. The remaining volumes followed over the course of 1970, during which de Gaulle, already unwell, corrected the proofs from La Boisserie, along with those of Mémoires d’espoir, published in October. He died on 9 November 1970 — four days after the publication of the fourth volume, Pour l’effort; the last, Vers le terme, was completed in print on 24 November, posthumously.

A fine provenance: that of Maurice Genevoix, to whom Charles de Gaulle entrusted the keys to the memory of the First World War.

From 1956, at the general’s request, Genevoix inaugurated the monument by the sculptor Landowski, À la gloire de l’armée française, on the place du Trocadéro, and then, again at de Gaulle’s instigation, launched the construction of the Mémorial de Verdun, which he inaugurated on 17 September 1967. The following year, together with Maurice Genevoix, de Gaulle went to inaugurate the monument known as “Ceux de 14” at the butte de Chalmont, the final stone of a project carried through from beginning to end by the writer.

Maurice Genevoix, then Perpetual Secretary of the Académie française and historiographer of the Great War, was the first to speak, recalling the fighting of this second Battle of the Marne. General de Gaulle responded with an epic account of the last great confrontation of the First World War; the speech delivered that day appears in the fifth volume of this edition (p. 315 and following).