Correspondent in Paris
Updated:
Keep
Philippe de Gaulle (Paris, December 28, 1921) is the most famous centenary of France, it has the most legendary French surname of our time and publishes his ‘Memories’, an exceptional document called to become a political canon during the presidential election campaign in April.
Charles de Gaulle (1890-1970) is, with Louis XIV and Napoleon, one of the great national heroes. Hero of the armed resistance against Hitler, founder of the Fifth Republic, is the mythical figure of the salvation of the country, its reconstruction and reinstallation in the new geography of world influence.
De Gaulle and his wife Yvonne (1900-1979) they had three children, Elisabeth (1925-2013), Anne (1928-1948), who died very prematurely; Y Philippe from
Gaulle, the heir to the paternal legend. A soldier, he participated in the armed resistance against the German occupation troops, when the Pétain government collaborated with the arrest and expulsion of Jews condemned to be exterminated in Hitler’s concentration camps.
Intimate balance
Decades later, Philippe de Gaulle is today the liveliest centenary of France. His ‘Memories’ are an intimate, political and cultural balance of national history, between two centuries that have changed many essential things.
As a military man, admiral, after a happy career, Philippe de Gaulle met the collapsed France after the Occupation. And its conversion into the third or fourth world atomic power, with nuclear submarines patrolling various oceans. This story, told by a de Gaulle, has much of an important document.
As a politician, Philippe de Gaulle was militant and senator of the successive conservative parties who claimed their father’s inheritance, intimate among the intimates of successive presidents, of Jacques Chirac a Nicolas sarkozy. In this field, his memories will help to understand the metamorphoses of French conservatism.
As a citizen, Philippe de Gaulle has been a privileged witness, installed in privileged positions. And he has decided to publish his memoirs at a time of doubts and uncertainties, national and European.
National distress
In the collective memory, the surname De Gaulle is associated to the liberation of France from Nazi occupation, the rescue of national sovereignty, the restoration of national pride. Among the political class, the figure of the general is a canonical reference. In his own way, Philippe de Gaulle has decided to celebrate the centenary of his birth with a penultimate tribute to his father.
Intimate tribute, without a doubt; but civic, cultural, political homage, to try save his father’s memory of the plundering and pillaging of one and the other, using the legendary figure for low political, even electoral purposes.
Philippe de Gaulle lives far from the Parisian political worlds, which he frequented throughout his life. But, like his father, he knows the essential importance of the public word. When many French live a certain existential anguish, fearing the decline and decadence of France, another De Gaulle takes the floor to proclaim the illusion, hope and faith in the common homeland, threatened and resistant, always.
www.abc.es