...Jackson follows, in occasionally tortuous detail, every significant quarrel in the career of this exceedingly quarrelsome man. But it has for the most part served Jackson well, allowing him to give us a judicious, authoritative, lucid, and engaging portrait ... His De Gaulle will likely remain the standard biography for many years to come. Jackson has composed De Gaulle in a venerable, and very British, empirical style, and makes no attempt to psychoanalyze his subject. While he quotes many people who questioned de Gaulle’s sanity, he never does so himself ... Jackson recounts de Gaulle’s career in a scrupulously fair manner, and his overall conclusions are entirely persuasive.
De Gaulle's beliefs were always slowly, tectonically evolving, and he fought a lifelong rear-guard action against that process, constantly characterizing those same beliefs as fixed 'for the last thousand years.' It's a sobering challenge for a biographer, and it makes Jackson's achievement here all the more impressive. He's always thorough but never pedantic, always clarifying but never simplifying, and he deploys an enormous amount of research with a consistently light touch and a dry wit his illustrious subject might have appreciated. Or not: Jackson never buys into the intense self-mythologizing that de Gaulle engaged in for the whole of his life ... And Jackson is particularly brilliant precisely where such brilliance is most badly needed: the Algerian War of Independence ... Jackson's nuanced version feels like the final word on the subject ... de Gaulle the man is painted perfectly in these pages.
In 1940 de Gaulle redeemed French honor by carrying on the war against Hitler, not from occupied France but from makeshift battle stations in London and equatorial Africa. Before and after Liberation he battled apologists for the quisling Vichy regime of Marshal Philippe Pétain as well as French Communists loyal to Moscow ... In May 1958 he came out of a restless retirement to avert civil war over colonial Algeria. Later that year he established the Fifth Republic, tailored to his contempt for party politicians like former French president Albert Lebrun (1932-40), of whom he observed ... finest one-volume life of de Gaulle in English, Julian Jackson has come closer than anyone before him to demystifying this conservative at war with the status quo, for whom national interests were inseparable from personal honor and 'a certain idea of France.'
The history of a nation and of a people is built from such defining moments [as De Gaulle's August 1944 march along the Champs-Elysées]. And, as Jackson’s remarkable 900-page study ably demonstrates, no one played a more influential role in 20th-century France than De Gaulle ... To tell the life of De Gaulle is also to chart the history of modern France, and in this suitably monumental biography rich with illuminating anecdotes, Jackson portrays his subject as a complex and contradictory character. The General (as he was known) was proud, arrogant and very difficult to deal with. Outbursts of sudden fury alternated with interludes of charm ... He remains hugely influential.
...Without de Gaulle, France would still have been liberated by the Allies, and Britain would still have pushed for France to enjoy a permanent seat on the Security Council and a zone of occupation in Germany, as Churchill insisted at Yalta ... In his title, Jackson echoes the famous opening sentence of de Gaulle’s War Memoirs, ‘All my life I have had a certain idea of France,’ and in his introduction argues that this may be true, but that it was not always the same idea. De Gaulle takes up all sorts of ideas – democracy, participation, socialism, even revolution – and weaves them into his rhetoric, but these are really only tools for acquiring and wielding power, and he drops them when they are no longer useful to him.
As Jackson 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 Pétain, whom he would oppose when France capitulated to the Germans at the beginning of World War II; Pétain’s role, de Gaulle thundered, put him 'on the road to treason.' ... A long but highly useful addition to the library of modern European history as well as the political history of World War II and the Cold War.
As Jackson 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 Pétain, whom he would oppose when France capitulated to the Germans at the beginning of World War II; Pétain’s role, de Gaulle thundered, put him 'on the road to treason.' ... A long but highly useful addition to the library of modern European history as well as the political history of World War II and the Cold War.
