De Gaulle

Review by Booklist Review

The famous opener to de Gaulle's war memoirs (All my life I have had a certain idea of France ), with its ambiguous disdain, is the conceptual starting line for any biographer. De Gaulle's idea of France--an idealized, mystically historical France, rather than a constitutionally delineated France--made him a controversial figure for nearly his entire adult life. Jackson, a historian of occupied France of the 1940s, weaves the particularities of de Gaulle's life into a clear picture of his idea of France. Contemptuous of political quarrels, de Gaulle proved a cagey player who almost always got his way. Jackson's narrative is astutely analytical about de Gaulle's calculated aloofness, and its application to the France he envisioned, from de Gaulle's rejection of surrender in 1940 to his recall to power in 1958 amid the imminence of a civil war. Immensely controversial in life, de Gaulle is generally admired in death by the French, a trajectory Jackson dramatizes forcefully in this excellent introduction. --Gilbert Taylor Copyright 2003 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Jackson, of Queen Mary University of London, comes as close to a definitive biography of Charles de Gaulle, one of the 20th century's most protean figures, as may be possible. De Gaulle was seen as rebel and savior, patriot and internationalist, ideologue and pragmatist, colonialist and emancipator; a half-century after his death, historians have reached no consensus. Jackson's de Gaulle is a man with an idea of France-but not always the same idea. He was sometimes moved by circumstance, as when he committed to resistance against the occupying Germans in 1940. At other times, he was influenced by relationships, such as his fraught wartime connections with Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt. He backed himself into political corners, most spectacularly when forced into retirement in the early 1950s, but then made a triumphant comeback in 1958, when rebellion in Algeria and constitutional crisis in the metropole swept him into office as first president of the Fifth Republic (France's current dual-executive republican system of governance). The political unrest of May 1968, which Jackson brilliantly describes, was the first stage in de Gaulle's final exit. Jackson's wide-ranging scholarship will dazzle academics, and his smooth synergy of narrative and analysis will engage general readers-who should not be daunted by the work's more than 800 pages. This comprehensive book repays time and effort. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Nearly 50 years after his death comes this exhaustive biography and reassessment of Charles de Gaulle's political career.As Jackson (History/Queen Mary Univ.; The Fall of France: The Nazi Invasion of 1940, 2003, etc.) notes, de Gaulle was not easy to peg politically. He emerged from a tradition of "social Catholicism" that "sought to overcome class struggle by finding a middle way between capitalism and socialism." What de Gaulle was, pre-eminently, was French, fervently devoted to his nation. During World War I, he had been a junior officer under Marshal Ptain, whom he would oppose when France capitulated to the Germans at the beginning of World War II; Ptain's role, de Gaulle thundered, put him "on the road to treason." De Gaulle evacuated to London and set up a Free French government in exile, and he was so much of a thorn in the side of the Allies in demanding an equal place at the table that Jackson writes Churchill said something along the lines of, "Each time I have to choose between you and Roosevelt, I will choose Roosevelt." Yet, because of de Gaulle, France did have an equal part as an occupying power of Germany after the war. Jackson writes clearly, if sometimes with a touch too much lingering detail, of de Gaulle's maneuvering to play both sides against the middle in such instances as the near civil war that broke out in France over the anti-colonial war in Algeria, which nearly led to a modern coup d'tat, and of de Gaulle's elaborate efforts to calve the European powers away from American influence and into the French sphere. Throughout, Jackson insists, de Gaulle, though often considered conservative, was a modernizer who "celebrated scientific progress, economic and social reforms and the modernization of the armed forces."A long but excellent, highly useful addition to the library of modern European history as well as the political history of World War II and the Cold War. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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