De Gaulle’s library at Colombey contains a novel, Kaputt, by the Italian writer Curzio Malaparte published in 1947. It does not however contain Malaparte’s most famous book, published in French in 1931. At that time Malaparte, a disillusioned former supporter of Mussolini, was in exile in Paris. His book, Technique of a Coup d’Etat, examined the mechanics of a coup d’état by studying examples like those of Lenin and Mussolini, as well as Primo de Rivera’s in Spain and Piłsudski’s in Poland. As a counter-example, he took the failed Kapp Putsch in Germany in 1920. For Malaparte the exemplar of
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