Published two months before General de Gaulle’s death, this text was meant to open a new trilogy. Only two volumes would appear: Le Renouveau and then L’Effort, published posthumously in the first quarter of 1971, together with the reissue, in the same series, of the Mémoires de guerre.
Mémoires d’espoir constitutes the author’s political and literary testament. The first copies of volume 1 arrived at La Boisserie in October: “For his final work, de Gaulle held exhausting signing sessions at La Boisserie. It would meet with considerable success. The General signed nearly five hundred copies […]. Plon has announced that after an initial printing of two hundred and fifty thousand copies, distributed from Wednesday morning, it had to begin, on Friday, a further printing of one hundred thousand additional copies of this work […]. The General’s memoirs were awaited with a mixture of impatience and apprehension, as they deal with events about which passions and prejudices remain strong. But General de Gaulle proves, once again, that he knows how to give historical perspective to the recent past.” (Le Monde, October 12, 1970).