It is a good moment to take the pulse of the man who epitomised France in the 20th century. In 2020, General Charles de Gaulle will have been dead for 50 years. Twice in his lifetime this imposing figure with his chinless ‘aubergine' profile stepped in to rescue his country – once in 1940, when ancient continental rivalries flared up, and again in 1958, when its troubled colonial legacy threatened to convulse it. Its proximity to disaster on both occasions and the ignominious manner in which his own constitutional reforms were rejected in 1969 in the wake of the previous year's students' revolt, suggest that his career was uneven, its political underpinnings shaky.
Today he has consolidated his place as a cross-party national symbol – to the extent that, in his official presidential photograph, the liberal internationalist Emmanuel Macron displayed, on his desk, an open copy of his predecessor's War Memoirs.
De Gaulle's secret, Julian Jackson suggests in this absorbing biography, was his ability to project a sense of French gloire, even when it didn't really exist. As the general disarmingly noted in those memoirs, ‘France cannot be France without grandeur'. In the same passage he wrote, ‘All my life I have had a certain idea of France' – words that Jackson adopts as his title and seeks to tease out in his book.
It is interesting to learn about de Gaulle's intellectual background. Never a fascist, but hardly a democrat, as a young man he was a scholarly Catholic monarchist, prone to reading conservative authors, such as the philosopher Henri Bergson and the poet Charles Péquy, whose efforts to marry political action with religious values led to the idea of ‘patriotic faith'.
Turning his back on academia, he joined the army officer training school at Saint-Cyr. The military was going through a period of reassessment. Still smarting from defeat in the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, it had endured the buffeting of the Dreyfus Affair. De Gaulle, tellingly, was not particularly for or against Dreyfus, only worried that the debate had torn apart his beloved army.
Joining the historic 33rd Regiment, he served with distinction in the First World War. After being wounded, he was captured and held prisoner for 32 months. His experiences and his reflective nature made him a natural lecturer on military history at Saint-Cyr. From there he attached himself as ghostwriter to Marshal Pétain, the ‘Lion of Verdun', who initially helped his career, before they fell out.
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