AI brings ‘missing’ wartime de Gaulle speech back to life

A LOST speech by Charles de Gaulle can now be heard for the first time after scientists used AI to give voice to a newly discovered transcript.

De Gaulle’s plea of June 18 1940 for the French to resist the Nazi occupation was broadcast from a BBC studio in London and is remembered every year by successive Gallic heads of state. Yet, no recording survived and the text, which appears in French history books, is not true to the words he read out.

It was thought that the transcript had been lost forever, but 82 years on, Le Monde yesterday published a speech that had been sitting in the archives of Swiss military intelligence for years.

As the transcript was in German, the newspaper asked historians to check if the French version adhered to the general’s style.

The results lay to rest any suggestion that it contained the famous De Gaulle line: “France has lost a battle but France has not lost the war.” That phrase was later added to a poster produced in early August 1940 which appeared all over London and circulated abroad.

Nor does the transcript contain the oft-cited line: “I, General de Gaulle, take up here, in England, this national task [of Free France’s political and military chief-in-exile].” Those words were actually uttered a few days later, on June 22.

However the transcript does end with the famous rallying call: “Whatever happens, the flame of French resistance must not be extinguished and will not be extinguished. Tomorrow, as today, I will speak on the radio from London.”

The actual speech was made the day after De Gaulle left France in disgust when Marshal Philippe Pétain declared an armistice with Germany.

Le Monde teamed up with the Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics/music in Paris where experts fed other De Gaulle recordings into its computer system and reconstituted the speech by hanging it on a recording of an actor’s voice, which they then morphed into that of De Gaulle.

Le Monde said its AI recreation of the transcript is faithful to the recordings of the time, which betrayed a “49-year-old resistance figure” with a “voice that was still stumbling and worried”.

What happened to the original speech’s recording remains a mystery.