As Jackson, a British history professor, shows, it also involved political savvy and the quiet weighing of odds among competing factions. First, by embodying the French republic in retreat from the Germans then by seizing power, in a republican mode, to end the Algerian crisis and, finally, when he ended the potential chaos of the May revolt by massing almost a million people on the Champs-Élysées in a counter-demonstration. On all three occasions, he saved the French state by sheer theatricality and élan. Yet, as this classically composed and authoritative (if culturally somewhat shallow) book makes clear, he remains an amazing figure.ĭe Gaulle had three rendezvous with history, in the old-fashioned sense he loved: in 1940, in 1958, and in 1968. By alphabetical accident, the heading “De Gaulle: Personal Characteristics” in Jackson’s index gives us, in sequence: arrogance, austerity, authoritarianism, cigarette smoking, coldness, contempt for human nature. If he lives anywhere, it is in the endless flow of books about the Second World War written by Americans and Brits, in which he emerges as the biggest pain in the ass in the history of the liberal order. His name having been placed on l’Étoile is apt: the traffic goes around all day but never stops for long. In forty years of passing in and out of France, I have almost never heard him pointed to as an exemplar useful in any way for today’s crises. He is more a ceremonial than a controversial figure, his work now done. His name is certainly everywhere-on the great airport outside Paris on the Place Charles de Gaulle, once called the Étoile, where traffic streams perpetually around the Arc de Triomphe-but his example seems remote. This claim, like some other confident statements in the book, may strike a reader as both narrowly true and what a French thinker might call metaphysically false. Charles de Gaulle, Julian Jackson insists in the preface of his new biography, “ De Gaulle” (Harvard), is “everywhere” in modern France, its undisputed hero.
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