As a model and inspiration, he had in 1946 started to re-read the Mémoires d’outre-tombe of René de Chateaubriand – as he was to do again when starting his second set of Memoirs in 1969. De Gaulle’s War Memoirs certainly are a ‘work’, not only because of their highly wrought prose, their formal structure (three volumes each covering two years), and their deployment of all the arts of classical French rhetoric, but also because, in addition to offering de Gaulle’s narrative of ‘his’ war, they are a distillation of his vision of the world and his philosophy of history. As far as the narrative of
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