Between Truth and Freedom: walking with Gandhi and Mandela towards leadership[Entre Vérité et Liberté : cheminer avec Gandhi et Mandela vers le leadership]

The question of leadership and its classifications has appeared in academic literature for about a century (Fairholm, 1998). Long considered to be based on innate abilities (Morin and Janand, 2019), the leader could be transactional and transformational (Burns, 1978), neo-charismatic (Hunt and Conger, 1999), explained by interaction with followers ( LMX theory, Graen, 1976) or depending on the context in which it operates (Fiedler, 1969). The concept then migrated at the beginning of the 21st century towards a conception based on the acquisition of skills (Morin and Janand, 2019): leadership then becomes "servant" (Greenleaf, 1991; Spears, 2004), "authentic" (Luthans and Avolio, 2003), or spiritual (Fry, 2003; Voynnet-Fourboul, 2014). For its part, if biography (in ancient Greek, βίος, life), or autobiography, is a genre to which history (Dosse, 2005) and certain currents of sociology (Bertaux, 1977; 2016) resort largely – not without controversy for the latter (Bourdieu, 1986) – management sciences have completely abandoned it (Sanséau, 2005), even though it is a means of understanding how life paths are forged in all their subjectivity ( Praquin, 2017) – in the sense of the acting subject and not a contrario of so-called objectivity – especially when it comes to autobiographies. It is this last choice that we made while working on The Autobiography or My Experiences of Truth by Mahatma Gandhi (1950) and A Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela (1994). Based on their own life stories, we first show the profound difference in temperament of these two men. Secondly, we establish a comparative reading grid around different themes that are common to them. The article ends with the place of spirituality in each of their lives and the type of leadership to which it is possible to attach each of them.