Which typewriter typed the script for 'one of the most remarkable pieces in the history of radio broadcasting'?

Marilou Aussilloux plays de Gaulle's secretary Élisabeth de Miribel in the move De Gaulle.

The pandemic has had some small benefits. We don’t get to go to the movies much, but we have been able to catch up with a few films on one of the multitude of streaming services. We watched, for example, De Gaulle, a 2020 French biopic which Covid-19 forced us to miss in the cinema during the French Film Festival here last year. For all that, I didn’t know much about the movie before watching it and had just assumed it covered pretty much all of Charles de Gaulle’s life, especially the latter part. But De Gaulle only really covers a short period in the middle of 1940. De Gaulle tries in vain to get French leaders to stand and fight the Germans, but instead they run and hide in Bordeaux and North Africa, making matters all the worse by putting Pétain in charge. De Gaulle goes to London and sets out to spark French resistance from there.

This rearguard effort by de Gaulle is the pivotal part of the story, and of course it involves a typewriter, the one used to type de Gaulle’s famous speech, which he delivered on June 18, 1940, through the BBC radio service. But have the moviemakers got the right typewriter? Well, in a word, no. In the movie it is an Underwood SS, which didn’t enter production until May 1946.

So what typewriter was used? Well, not a French one, I'm sorry to say, and probably not one with a French keyboard, either. Because Geoffroy Chodron de Courcel (seen with de Gaulle, left), de Gaulle’s aide-de-camp, had to carry the machine up to de Gaulle's poky apartment at 3 Curzon Square (then called Seamore Grove) in London's Mayfair, and have unskilled typist Élisabeth de Miribel use it while de Gaulle was still trying to complete his draft in the next room, it was unlikely to be a standard. I'm betting on a portable.

But we will probably never know for certain, and will in the meantime have to forgive producers Aïssa Djabri and Farid Lahouassa their mistake, because it turns out the lady who typed de Gaulle’s speech never fully identified the machine she used. Indeed, when interviewed on the matter in 1971, Élisabeth de Miribel wasn’t even sure whether the typewriter she used had a French or an English keyboard. She did freely admit she wasn’t a typist and used a two-fingered hunt-and-peck method of typing.

The real Élisabeth de Miribel at an Imperial 50 in April 1990. This was at the time alleged to be the machine she actually used.to type de Galle's famous speech.

Most of what is known about what happened in de Gaulle’’s rooms that day comes from an interview Élisabeth gave to journalist Michel Tauriac of France-Inter in 1971 – later reproduced in Paris Match. In the intervening 31 years, Élisabeth had forgotten a few minor details. But when, in April 1990, almost 50 years after the event, Élisabeth was photographed by Manuel Litran of Paris Match, someone - Élisabeth herself, Litran or the weekly news magazine – identified the Imperial 50 as the typewriter Élisabeth had used on June 18, 1940. Of course, it makes sense to assume that since the speech was typed in England, it is far more likely the typewriter was an Imperial rather than an Underwood.

Sometime before her death in March 2005, at the age of 89, Élisabeth is reported to have donated this wide carriage Underwood to the Fondation Charles de Gaulle, and that it is now on display in the General's office at the former headquarters of the Rassemblement du Peuple Français on Rue de Solférino, Paris. It seems highly unlikely to me that de Courcel would have carried this monster upstairs, or that Élisabeth had kept the actual machine she used on June 18, 1940.

However, in the only known photograph of Élisabeth typing at that time, and in a military-style uniform, she was using a Hermes Featherweight portable. In The Paris Game: Charles de Gaulle, the Liberation of Paris, and the Gamble that Won France, by Ray Argyle (2014), Argyle states that de Courcel provided Élisabeth with his portable typewriter for her use on June 18, 1940.

De Galle in the BBC studios in June 1940.

Élisabeth’s original typescript was later found in the archives of the Swiss intelligence agencies, which had published the text for their own uses on June 19, 1940. This, as well as a recording of de Gaulle’s June 22 speech, were nominated on June 18, 2005, for inclusion in UNESCO's Memory of the World Register by the BBC, which called it “one of the most remarkable pieces in the history of radio broadcasting.” This despite the fact the BBC did not actually record the June 18 speech, much to de Gaulle’s considerable chagrin. De Gaulle had got special permission from Winston Churchill to broadcast it from Broadcasting House, overriding the objections of the British Cabinet, which feared it could provoke the Pétain government into a closer alliance with Germany.

Played by Marilou Aussilloux in the movie, the real Élisabeth, born on August 19, 1915, in Commercy, was the great-granddaughter of the third President of the Republic, Patrice de MacMahon. After the outbreak of war in September 1939, she volunteered her services to the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and was assigned to London as part of the “French economic warfare mission” headed by the writer and diplomat Paul Morand. She was asked by de Courcel, a childhood friend, to do secretarial work for de Gaulle. She remained with the general until 1942, when she was sent on a mission to Quebec, with the task of rallying Canadians to the cause of Free France and raising funds. She then became a war correspondent in Italy, with General Joseph de Goislard de Monsabert, and in Africa. She also covered the liberation of Paris in August 1944. She ended her career as a diplomat, as Consul General of France in Florence.