Mémoires de guerre

A precious copy presented to Maurice Genevoix, who became a member of the Académie française just as de Gaulle began writing his Mémoires, in April 1946.

Shortly before the publication of the third volume, Genevoix became the Académie’s permanent secretary, a position he held for fifteen years, from 1958 to 1973. In 1959, Charles de Gaulle came to Orléans to preside over the Joan of Arc festivities alongside Genevoix, an occasion Genevoix used to persuade him of the need to establish a university in the city and to launch reflection on building a Great War memorial, which he hoped to see erected at Verdun.

In a fittingly titled 1960 editorial, “En avant pour le Mémorial de la bataille de Verdun,” Genevoix described the “mission” — including in the religious sense of the term — that the veterans had taken upon themselves toward the fallen: the “heavy task — the last on behalf of dead comrades — of ensuring the perpetuity of their shared memory. Thanks to them, a solid structure will rise in the sky over Verdun, a kind of fortress of friendship, remembrance and evoked suffering. There men will come and learn what the Frenchmen of 1916 were” (Archives départementales de la Meuse, “Le Combattant de Verdun,” no. 68, Nov.–Dec. 1960).

At that time, de Gaulle was preoccupied with transmitting a unifying French memory. Maurice Genevoix, who for him embodied a “pure” memory of 1914–18 free of political rhetoric, and whose Ceux de 14 he regarded as a masterpiece of fidelity and humanity, answered these expectations; de Gaulle thereafter promoted his major role in national commemorations, accompanying him several times to the November 11 ceremonies in the Aisne or the Marne. Above all, he enabled the completion of the Verdun Memorial project, whose creation was decided on 23 October 1960 at the general assembly of the Comité national du souvenir de Verdun. The State launched a major national subscription to finance the project.

This memorial site for veterans of the First World War was inaugurated at Fleury-sous-Douaumont, near Verdun, on 17 September 1967. It stands on the very ground where, nearly sixty years earlier, on 2 March 1916, Captain Charles de Gaulle, commanding the 10th company of the 3rd battalion of the 33rd infantry regiment, had been taken prisoner by the Germans during the first capture of Fort Douaumont. In a letter to his superior, Lieutenant Colonel Boud’hors, in December 1918, de Gaulle himself recounted the circumstances of his capture: “One of them thrust a bayonet at me, piercing my map case through and through and wounding me in the thigh. […] I lay on the ground for a moment.” His command believed him dead. He was even awarded a citation to the order of the army and the Légion d’honneur posthumously, on 7 March 1916! Both were confirmed in 1919, this time as honors to a living man.

The following year, in 1968, de Gaulle came to inaugurate the monument to “Ceux de 14” at the Butte de Chalmont, the final piece of a project championed by Genevoix.

Through this inscription, Charles de Gaulle pays tribute to one of the most essential writers of French memory. Wounded in the trenches in 1915, Maurice Genevoix was the author of Ceux de 14, a monumental work dedicated to his comrades who fell at the front. De Gaulle, himself a veteran of the Great War, recognized in it a rare voice: sober, fraternal and faithful.

The bond between the two men was built on mutual respect, shared memory and a common vision of the duty of transmission. In his Mémoires de guerre, de Gaulle traces the history of national salvation; Genevoix, in his narratives, raises individual suffering to the level of collective history. Two forms of writing intersect: one from the heights of command, the other from the mud of the trenches.

De Gaulle held Genevoix in high esteem, both for his literary work and for his standing as a witness to the Great War. He regarded him as the truest and most humane voice of that generation of soldiers. Genevoix, wounded in 1915, wrote of the war without bombast or propaganda, a quality that impressed de Gaulle.

This bond between the general and the writer, discreet but profound, is even more legible today: in 2020, Maurice Genevoix was inducted into the Panthéon as the voice of the poilus, embodying the fighting France of the First World War that de Gaulle never ceased to honor: “All my life I have had a certain idea of France. This is inspired by sentiment as much as by reason […]. Only vast undertakings are capable of counterbalancing the tendencies toward dispersal that her people carry within themselves; our country, as it is, among the others, as they are, must, under pain of mortal danger, aim high and hold itself upright. In short, to my mind, France cannot be France without greatness.”

Among the many points of interest in the Mémoires de guerre, the reader can gauge how difficult and heroic it was for the future general to convince the entire world that official France was in London. Beyond its strictly historical value, de Gaulle’s literary talent is genuine, and the text has for some years been part of the syllabus for the “Littérature et débats d’idées” section of the terminale L. Unlike so many statesmen, de Gaulle, the son of a professor of letters, wrote all his own speeches and books. Examination of his manuscripts reveals an extraordinary concern for composition and style — in a language that Genevoix, himself a devotee of a rich style, grammar and vocabulary, would not have disowned.