TOWERING FIGURES

De Gaulle

By Julian Jackson.
928 pages.
Harvard University Press, 2018. $39.95.
Reviewed by Harold J. Goldberg

When people in France were asked to rank the most significant figures in the history of their country, Charles de Gaulle finished in first place. That’s not at all surprising, given that more than 3,500 public places in France are named in his honor. Think of France in the 20th century, and you must think of de Gaulle: his service in World War I, his rejection of the Vichy regime and the creation of the French Resistance during World War II, his insistence on a significant role for France in the postwar world, his actions in 1958 during the turmoil of the Algerian War of Independence, his response to the May 1968 student uprising, and his leadership in creating the Fifth Republic.

Despite the near-constant state of political flux in France in the 1930s and early 1940s, de Gaulle emerged as the nation’s most prominent, steadying, and influential public figure. While it is unusual to find a book of this length that is simultaneously comprehensive, well written, and able to hold a reader’s interest from beginning to end, Julian Jackson achieves all this in his biography of de Gaulle. As Jackson makes clear, de Gaulle fought mightily to maintain