Michel Droit; Prize-Winning French Novelist, Expert on De Gaulle

Michel Droit, 77, a prize-winning French novelist and expert on Charles de Gaulle. Droit was an essayist and novelist who also wrote for the conservative daily Le Figaro for two decades. He began his journalism career at 21 as a correspondent covering the French army in World War II. He was the only journalist in France to interview De Gaulle on television and won wide acclaim for his reports, which aired in 1965, 1968 and 1969, a year before France’s most influential postwar leader died. In 1972 Droit won the Edmond-Michelet prize for “A Free Frenchman,” a documentary about De Gaulle. His five-volume “Man of Destiny,” published in 1972, is regarded as one of the most thorough examinations of De Gaulle’s life and accomplishments. In 1980 Droit was elected to the Academie Francaise, one of only 40 “immortals,” as the institution’s members are called. He wrote several novels, including “Le Retour” (“The Return”), which won the grand prize from the Academie Francaise in 1964. On Thursday in La Celle-Saint-Cloud, outside Paris.