Portrait photographique

It was only in 2022 that Studio Harcourt uncovered in its archives a group of previously unknown portraits of General de Gaulle, dating from the immediate postwar period. Two solemn poses, in uniform: two portraits stamped “Harcourt,” one showing de Gaulle standing, arms at his sides, the other with arms crossed, in a tight frontal framing.

The print offered here differs from these versions retained for the archive: unstamped, it constitutes an extremely rare period print, probably limited to a handful of copies, which escaped official distribution.

The rediscovery of these photographs led to further research in the Harcourt archives, identifying more than a hundred other forgotten portraits: 109 Companions of the Liberation. These findings gave rise to a recent exhibition (running until June 2025) organized by the Musée de l’Ordre de la Libération, at the Hôtel national des Invalides, shedding new light on the role of photography in the visual memory of the Resistance and the Liberation.

At the end of the war, de Gaulle embodied the figure of the leader of Free France, and then, from April 1947, the founder of the Rassemblement du Peuple Français (RPF). These Harcourt portraits contributed to the construction of a Gaullist iconography, in which the studio, known for its heroic and dramatized poses, lent the general an aura of monumentality.

A rare testimony to this long-obscure sitting, marking an important milestone in the visual history of Gaullism and in the postwar photographic corpus.