1914-1918: THE GREAT WAR OF GENERAL GIRAUD

The purpose of this book is to show, through the daily life of a young officer — like thousands of others — the driving forces behind the unwavering determination that sustained them. Through the emblematic case of Captain Henri Giraud, it offers a portrait of the famous "generation of Revanche", to which belonged — among others — half a dozen celebrated officers (Catroux, de Lattre, de Gaulle and Juin) who knew one another well and had done so for a long time, having lived through the same events together, sometimes under each other's command, events often of the grandest scale, and over which loomed the names of Joffre, Lyautey, Pétain, Franchet d'Espèrey, Foch, Mangin and Weygand. This generation of exceptional officers, who were to experience an extraordinary destiny during the Second World War, shared a common origin: for perhaps the first time in the history of our country, children had been raised by every institution — Family, School, Churches, Political Parties, etc. — united for this purpose: to avenge the unbearable defeat of the "Grande Nation" at the hands of the "Germanic barbarians". In short, they were deliberately shaped for war. As one of them put it: "Our childhood was marked by the moral injunction to be soldiers of the revenge for 1870." This generation also witnessed the creation of the French colonial empire and the greatest technological revolution of all time, having been born at the dawn of electricity and lived to see the unleashing of nuclear fire. KEY FEATURES: The centenary of the 1914-18 war; Exhibition at the Musée des Lettres et Manuscrits devoted to the period 1914-1944. Author biography: Henri-Christian Giraud is a journalist and historian. Former editor-in-chief of Le Figaro Magazine, he has published notably De Gaulle et les communistes (Albin Michel) and Réplique à l'Amiral de Gaulle, published by Éditions du Rocher in 2004.