Leclerc wrote to de Gaulle in May 1942 warning him that these developments were ‘worrying the great majority of Free French’. In his view, the victory of the Free French had to be followed by ‘national revolution’ – the term used by Pétain for his own anti-democratic, reactionary and anti-Semitic policies.50 When Leclerc went further and told de Gaulle he was repeating the errors of the 1930s, he was sharply reprimanded.
