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Comment by makeitdouble | Hacker News Reader

This felt like an actual "this belongs in a museum" moment, in particular when it comes to notes from a former president.

Granted the benefit partly goes to an officially recognized well meaning fund:

> A portion of the auction’s proceeds will be donated to the Anne de Gaulle Foundation. Named for de Gaulle’s daughter, who had Down syndrome, the foundation provides housing and support to people with disabilities.

The "portion" part is still intriguing, I assume most of the proceeds will go elsewhere ?

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A museum may acquire them. French law also gives museums the right to preempt auction sales, so wait and see how this one goes.

The documents were found in a safe owned by de Gaulle's son. I'd imagine his heirs have something to say about the matter.

The family has been relatively selective in sharing his personal notes, mainly because some of his ideas are now out-of-fashion (for example, it’s rumoured that he decided to let Algeria become independent after a bloody independence war, not because of the cost of the war but because demographers pointed out most French people would be Muslim by the year 2000) but it’s very likely the contents of the notebooks that are historically significant will be public.

Auction houses typically make a decent cut of the proceeds (in the US it's rarely lower than 10%, and usually closer to 20-25%) and the costs of authentication, chain of custody, etc probably eats up another smaller slice. Beyond that, I'm sure a few others will be making some retirement fund francs for it.

Often there are national laws that enable preemption of the sale after the auction. Essentially the auction is used to determine fair market value to compensate the owner (who is then paid with taxpayer euros).

Would you expect to get nothing from selling your grandparent's letters?

If he was considered a founding father of my country's current political system, yes I wouldn't expect my interests to prime over the general interest. They wouldn't get nothing either, we're talking about not randomly selling them to the highest bidder.

I don't know if it matters if DeGaulle's child were/are pretty affluent and were always part of the high society in France. Their success and extremely recognizable pedigree was supported by their grandfather's shine, so I'd think they got enough from it to give up on hyper-monetizing historic papers.

> I wouldn't expect my interests to prime over the general interest

If Charles taught anything to anyone listening, his children, troops, voters, or readers, it would be precisely that.

I don’t really like him as a person, or really his political ideas, but yes. One cannot deny that he was willing to make sacrifices for the good of the country.

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