In the history of France, the period with which de Gaulle was most out of sympathy was the anti-religious and freethinking Enlightenment when, as he wrote in the 1930s, ‘scepticism and corruption … dissolved loyalty and paralysed authority.’76 Voltaire was an author whose corrosive irony he particularly deplored, often citing his verses as proof that ‘French intellectuals have always betrayed France.’
