Let’s start with Army of Shadows by Joseph Kessel.

Well, Kessel was a writer and war correspondent who, when France was defeated in 1940, went over to London and joined the Gaullist Resistance, the Free French. Army of Shadows, written in 1943, is the book that made him famous and is still regarded as one of the greatest novels about the Resistance. The other thing for which he’ll always be remembered is the hymn of the Resistance, ‘Le Chant des Partisans’, that everybody in the Resistance used to sing – and, incidentally, was sung by a French military band this summer at the London memorial celebration of de Gaulle’s famous speech from a BBC studio in 1940. It was a wonderfully moving moment.

Army of Shadows really takes you to the heart of what it is to be in the Resistance and one of the book’s greatest characteristics is that it celebrates the anonymous heroes, the ordinary man or woman who hides an allied airman, carries a suitcase from one town to another... It’s absolutely gripping too, very cinematic – in fact, it was made into a very successful film by Jean-Pierre Melville in 1969. About halfway through the book it stops being a story about the different characters and becomes almost like jottings by the main character, the Resistance leader Philippe Gerbier, and you see everything through his eyes: the Germans and the Vichy police squeezing the Resistance more and more. You see his world gradually disintegrating; all the people he works with are being arrested, tortured and killed, and he tells it all. He himself is nearly captured countless times and the novel makes you feel what it’s like to lead this life, to have that kind of extraordinary pressure.

Is he based on a particular Resistance figure?

He is a composite character, based on several people Kessel knew. When he was in London with the Free French he used to fly missions across to France, taking agents over and then picking them up, so he knew these people. In 1943 and 1944, the life expectancy of the agents flying over and being parachuted into France was very, very low. The probability was that they would be caught within 24 hours. But they kept going. Kessel vividly portrays their wonderful spirit – they believe they are going to win even if they themselves are not going to survive; they believe the Resistance is a sacred cause. The other thing that comes out is that political difference doesn’t matter – workers, peasants, young and old, Communists, landowners, people who love the Republic, monarchists, all put their differences aside in order to fight this battle. And so, even though this is a kind of adventure story written by a novelist, what you get out of it as well is the real Gaullist idea of what the Resistance philosophy is – that when your country is under occupation and you’re fighting to free it, everyone is in it together. There is also a universality about the Gerbier character: there were people exactly like him in 19th-century Poland, in occupied Europe during the Second World War, in modern liberation struggles such as in Ireland, South Africa, and Palestine.

Let’s move on to de Gaulle’s war memoirs.

There are three volumes, and they’re very readable. There are portraits in there of all the great characters de Gaulle encountered – Churchill, Stalin, Roosevelt.

What does he say about Churchill?

He’s very generous. Despite the fact that he was at heart Anglophobic and thought the British would screw the French if they possibly could. He believed Churchill only helped France because it was in Britain’s interest to do so.

When de Gaulle turned up in London and said, ‘I now speak for France’, it was almost an absurd situation – France had a legally appointed government headed by a distinguished old soldier, Marshal Pétain, and a lot of people in England and America thought de Gaulle was off his rocker, crazy, delusional.

In the Memoirs de Gaulle has a sentence: ‘Faced with the political disaster, I had to become France.’ He sort of carries the country on his shoulder – and that’s what Churchill saw. Although de Gaulle was actually a little delusional – perhaps you have to be in such situations – he was driven by this greater sense that only a free sovereign France could restore the nation’s pride and sense of purpose ... and that he was the man to do it.

At the same time there was also a kind of modesty about him, humility even, and that comes out very clearly when you look at the way the French commemorate the Resistance after 1945. Even when de Gaulle is in power there’s no a huge fanfare – he never wants it to be about him but about all those anonymous heroes Kessel had written about.

Let’s move on to the André Malraux. What does Fallen Oaks mean?

Well, it refers to an image by a celebrated cartoonist in the Figaro, Jacques Faizant, which just showed an enormous oak tree that had been felled – no caption, just this huge oak which was the symbolic representation of de Gaulle’s death. Malraux’s book is a very epic work and he was a very epic kind of writer as well, and he had a special place in de Gaulle’s heart. He’d been a Communist sympathiser and certainly not someone you’d expect to affiliate with de Gaulle. But it was the Resistance which brought them together and after 1945 Malraux remained a passionate Gaullist all his life. His vision of Gaullism is a romantic one – he sees de Gaulle as a kind of mythical figure who belongs to a long line of French heroes like Joan of Arc, Saint-Just and Napoleon.

Fallen Oaks is based on the last conversation the two men had in 1969 at Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises where de Gaulle had retired to. The key question Malraux is asking in this book is ‘What is it that makes France a great nation?’ And, according to Malraux, de Gaulle’s idea of greatness is not military force, grandiloquence or any kind of flashiness, but the idea that France stands for a set of republican values: freedom, equality, justice. He also ponders on why de Gaulle is such a great figure and it comes down to the fact that there’s an almost religious quality to him. He’s a bit like the leader of a religious cult – he’s separate, he’s solitary, but he has this ability to take ordinary events and transform them into mythical events. It’s not de Gaulle the politician that comes out of this book; it’s de Gaulle the creator of myths.

Gaullism as a political force continued for another 30 years after his death but it became very conservative, very right-wing. Malraux’s book plays an important part in separating out the Gaullist myth from the political movement. The myth lives a separate life from the political movement, which is why de Gaulle’s myth is very much alive to-day, even though the Gaullist party is dead.