Portrait photographique signé

On 3 June 1944, only days before the Allied landings, General de Gaulle officially formed the provisional government of the French Republic in Algiers and naturally became its head. This was the final step before the removal of the Vichy regime and Operation Overlord, launched three days later from the English coast.

A famous portrait, in a strictly contemporary print made on the spot, signed by Germaine Krull.

It was on the occasion of these historic events that Germaine Krull, then head of the photographic department of the OFIC (Office français d’information cinématographique), took this portrait, captured from General de Gaulle’s office. De Gaulle had left his London exile and settled in Algiers, where on 3 June 1943 he had formed a French Committee of National Liberation, co-chaired by himself and General Henri Giraud. The Office français d’information cinématographique, under the Information Commission, had been created in April 1943, a month before de Gaulle’s actual arrival.

Germaine Krull first met de Gaulle in early 1944, in Marrakech, where she covered the meeting between Churchill and de Gaulle on 12 and 13 January. In exile since 1941 — she had left France for Brazil, sailing from Marseille on 24 March 1941 aboard the same ship as André Breton, Wifredo Lam and Claude Lévi-Strauss — she had signed on with the Free French from Rio. She then traveled to French Congo, arriving in September, to head the Free French Photographic Propaganda Service in Brazzaville until the end of 1943. After the Marrakech meeting, de Gaulle placed her in charge of the newly created OFIC photographic department. She covered the meetings at the Palais Carnot in late May and early June 1944, during the speeches establishing the provisional government, and took several portraits of de Gaulle, including this one, which was chosen as the official portrait of the provisional government.
Prints were made immediately on the spot, only a few of which are signed on the photograph by Germaine Krull.
She subsequently followed the American army from Naples to Rome in 1944, then landed at Saint-Tropez a few days after the Provence landings in August 1944; she passed through Marseille, traveled to the Vercors and then to the Vosges, covering the Battle of Alsace, the account of which was written by Roger Vailland (La Bataille d’Alsace, published by Jacques Haumont in 1945). She also covered the liberation of concentration camps. Her assignment ended in April 1945, three years after it began and a historic record of the conflict, the Resistance and the Liberation.

This portrait had belonged to Max-Pol Fouchet, hung in the offices of the review Fontaine in Algiers during the war.
Minor accidents to the lower margin. A precious document.