Mémoires d’espoir [Memoirs of Hope]

Paris, Plon, (August 30) 1970 and (February 6) 1971.
2 vols. (130 x 200 mm) of 314 and 223 p. Publisher’s cardboard.

First edition.
Presentation copy, inscribed: “For Mr. Claude Nielsen, with my best and indeed most cordial wishes. 27.10.70, C. de Gaulle”.
Copy offered by Charles de Gaulle to his publisher, Claude Nielsen, Chairman and CEO of Presses de la Cité, which owns the Plon publishing house.

We apologize for the imperfect translation generated by Deepl for the purposes of the show.

In 1954, when de Gaulle finished the first volume of his Mémoires de guerre, he turned to the publisher Plon: he had never forgotten that it was the publisher of his first books. He remained loyal to the company, even when it changed hands and was taken over by Sven Nielsen, creator of an empire with the Presses de la Cité, which he handed over to his son in the mid-1960s.

“A dialogue began between Marcel Jullian, chairman and managing director of Plon, who had chosen the best, or at least the most severe, of the house’s proofreaders for the General. There was no question of changing a word of the General’s text, but Mr. Petit did not fail to react to the author’s very personal punctuation. He took the liberty of deleting commas where they did not seem necessary to him. The General restored them all. To Marcel Jullian, he explained: “If you delete these commas, you will no longer find de Gaulle.” (Alain Decaux, Charles de Gaulle, solemn session of October 18, 1990 at the Académie française).

The first volume of Mémoires d’espoir is entitled: Le renouveau, 1958-1962. When death overtook him, he had not finished writing the second volume and the manuscript was published as he had left it, to be released in the spring of 1971. It was a huge success.

The first volumes of volume 1 arrived at La Boisserie in October: “De Gaulle devoted exhausting dedication sessions to his final work at La Boisserie. It was to meet with considerable success. The General signed almost five hundred copies (…) The Plon bookshop announced that after an initial print run of two hundred and fifty thousand copies, distributed from Wednesday morning, it had to start printing an additional one hundred thousand copies of this work on Friday. Among the recipients of the seventeen copies bearing the words “printed especially for…” and a dedication from the author were, in addition to Mrs. de Gaulle and her children, Mrs. Eisenhower, in memory of her husband, the son of Chancellor Adenauer, the Pope, the Queen of England, Mr. Khrushchev and Mr. Macmillan, as well as the three former prime ministers of the General. For his part, Mr. Georges Pompidou had received the copy intended for him on Tuesday, shortly before his departure for the USSR. (…) The General’s memoirs were awaited with a mixture of impatience and apprehension, as they deal with events on which passions and prejudices remain strong. But General de Gaulle proves, once again, that he knows how to give a historical perspective to the recent past.” (Le Monde, October 12, 1970).

General de Gaulle died a few days later, on November 9, 1970.