DE GAULLE IN NORMANDY 1943 - 1967

General de Gaulle's ancestry is rooted in Normandy since the Middle Ages. One Richard de Gaulle can be found to have served under Philippe Auguste in the thirteenth century. A certain Jean de Gaulle was governor of the city of Vire at the beginning of the fourteenth century. De Gaulle himself stayed at Sainte-Adresse from 1921, visiting his parents there with his family; they were to be buried there. His brother Pierre married and settled in Saint-Pierre de Manneville.

Destiny brought him back to Normandy on 14 June 1944, when he set foot at Graye-sur-Mer on French soil and delivered a historic speech at Bayeux a few hours later — the first town to be liberated. He would return on 16 June 1946 for another historic speech. In the meantime, he had made other journeys through a devastated Normandy.

These visits were to be very numerous, principally in 1960 and continuing until 1967. He always received an enthusiastic welcome on Norman soil, Lower Normandy becoming a bastion of Gaullism after 1958. All these journeys allow us to follow him through the towns of this region, thanks also to a wealth of photographic documents.

The authors: Yves Lecouturier, historian and Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts et Belles Lettres since 2009, author of more than fifty books, had completed this work with his wife, Hélène Martin-Lecouturier. Suddenly deceased on 7 August 2023, this book, finalised by his wife, stands as a posthumous tribute to all his work as a historian and is the fifth published by Éditions Heimdal.