Philippe Daudy


Philippe Daudy was a member of the French Resistance, a journalist, a novelist, a publisher and a businessman. An Anglophile Frenchman, he moved to England and wrote a best-selling book about the English.

Origins

Daudy was born on 17 June 1925 and spent his childhood in Ethiopia, where his father, Bernard Daudy, was the medical officer for the French-run Imperial Railway Company of Ethiopia, but died young from a snake bite. Daudy’s mother, a great beauty, later married Hubert Jules Deschamps, the historian and sociologist who governed French Somalia, Côte d'Ivoire and Senegal and ended his career in 1960 as Governor-General of the Colonies, at the peak of French colonial administration.

Service in the Resistance

During the Second World War, Daudy served in a Resistance network operating in and around Lyons. He was wounded in an attack on a Gestapo transport depot at Villeurbanne and was awarded the Croix de Guerre. Interviewed in Marcel Ophüls's 1969 documentary on occupied France, The Sorrow and the Pity, Daudy was later to say:
At its best the Resistance was the first classless society in France. The two classes became comrades in arms, sharing the same dangers, and even death.

Writer

After the Second World War, Daudy worked as a correspondent for Agence France-Presse, covering the Greek Civil War, the Korean War, the Far East and Josip Broz Tito’s Yugoslavia. Daudy co-authored a leading work on the Korean War and later contributed to Thames Television’s leading television documentary history, Korea: the Unknown War.
Daudy continued to write and to publish prolifically. His works included:
In 1989, after extensive research, Daudy wrote the book for which he is perhaps best known in the English-speaking world, Les Anglais, an affectionate analysis of the English national character, which was later translated into English by his daughter Isabelle Daudy and published in England in 1991.

Other activities

Daudy began his own publishing house and co-founded the leading French literary prize now known as the Prix Décembre. He served as Vice-President of the Royaumont Foundation and also made his own Armagnac.
Along with the Hon. Robin Johnstone, Daudy was a founding Honorary Secretary of the Franco-British Council in 1972. He was awarded the MBE for his services to Anglo-French relations.

Family

Daudy married first Janine Sommer, by whom he had two daughters, Martine and Florence, who both live and work in Paris. He married secondly Barbara Guidotti, by whom he had one daughter, Isabelle, a writer and psychologist based in Toulouse.
On his death in Beijing on 12 March 1994, Daudy was survived by his third wife, :fr:Famille Goüin|Marie-Christine Goüin. By her he had a son Clément, an economist, and a daughter, Mathilde, a singer and documentary-maker. The family continue to live at Royaumont Abbey.