De Gaulle's coded letters to mother go to auction

A stash of previously unseen correspondence and artefacts belonging to the former French president Charles de Gaulle, including coded letters to his mother while he was a German prisoner in the first world war and messages from the singer Josephine Baker, is to go on sale after its discovery earlier this year.

- Kim Willsher

A stash of previously unseen correspondence and artifacts belonging to the former French president Charles de Gaulle, including coded letters to his mother while he was a German prisoner in the first world war and messages from the singer Josephine Baker, is to go on sale after its discovery earlier this year.

The correspondence is part of a trove of De Gaulle's documents and personal belongings, found in a safe in a bank vault, that will be auctioned in Paris on 16 December.

To accompany the sale, the auction house Artcurial is to display the handwritten manuscript of the general's appeal, broadcast by the BBC, that urged the French to resist Nazi rule and sparked the French resistance. The manuscript was also in the safe but is not included in the sale.