France Incarnate
UK history professor Julian Jackson has
written a very long (928 pages in the print edition) and very extraordinary
biography of Charles De Gaulle. Born into a conservative middle-class family De
Gaulle found his way to the St.-Cyr military academy. After serving in World
War I, part of the time as a POW, De Gaulle became what we would now call a
defense intellectual. He was way ahead of his time in his advocacy of tank
warfare in 1934 that would be more fully developed by Heinz Guderian with his “Achtung-Panzer!”
that was used with devastating effect against France in 1940.
De Gaulle saw up close the rot of the Third
Republic and lost patience for representative government. It was by the force
of his will that after the French surrender he formed the beginnings of the
Free French while in exile in London. There he had to hold together a disparate
coalition of his own countryman and defend French interests against Churchill
and Roosevelt. Needless to say he exasperated his allies especially after Churchill
gave him the go ahead for him to deliver his June 18, 1940 radio speech that
made him the voice of France. To say that De Gaulle was egotistical, prickly
and obstinate would be an understatement.
De Gaulle initially fails as a postwar
leader in 1945, but with France on the edge of civil war in 1958 over the
Algeria issue, France’s elected representatives turn to him to lead the
country. His constitution creates a strong executive and ends the series of round-robin
governments that haunted France in the Third and Fourth Republics. Jackson’s
tick-tock on the events of winter and spring 1958 brings to life what was at
stake at that time. Similarly his tick-tock on the 1968 student/worker
demonstrations that almost forced De Gaulle from power demonstrates the high
drama of that time.
Jackson’s De Gaulle is a serious and
widely read intellectual. He is the ultimate political realist who believes
that geography and history, not ideology, determines geopolitical power. Hence his suspicion of the U.K. and of the
Jean Monnet vision of a united Europe. Jean Monnet
We also see De Gaulle as a family man
with a very shy wife and his Down syndrome daughter, Ann, who he loved very
much. We also see his personal rectitude where he installs an electric meter to
monitor his personal use when he was in residence at the presidential palace.
Yes, the book is long, but a reader with
patience will learn a great deal about a person who dominated France for 30
years and exerted significant influence internationally during the turbulent
1960s.
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