![]() ![]() Harold Macmillan, who failed to convince de Gaulle to admit Britain into the Common Market, described him as “the Emperor of the French”, adding: “I have never known a man at once so ungracious and so sentimental.” He distrusted both Britain (“perfidious”) and America (“it has no depth nor roots”). Outbursts of sudden fury alternated with interludes of charm. The General (as he was known) was proud, arrogant and very difficult to deal with. ![]() 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. After heading the provisional government from 1944 to 1946, De Gaulle stepped aside from power, though he returned in 1958 when France was threatened with a military coup by generals dissatisfied with the handling of the Algerian crisis.įiercely nationalistic, De Gaulle was driven by the belief that it was his destiny to save France A relatively unknown army officer when France was invaded in 1940, De Gaulle quickly established himself as the leader of the Free French in defiance of the legal government headed by Marshal Pétain, France’s most revered military figure, who signed an armistice with Hitler. He “was reviled and idealised, loathed and adored, in equal measure”, and aroused such passion due to his involvement in France’s two 20th-century “civil wars”. And, as Jackson’s remarkable 900-page study ably demonstrates, no one played a more influential role in 20th-century France than De Gaulle. The history of a nation and of a people is built from such defining moments. As far as the eye could see, there was only this living tide of humanity, in the sunshine, beneath the tricolour.” The roofs were also black with people … People were hanging from ladders, flagpoles and lamp posts. A huge crowd was massed either side of the street. De Gaulle recalled this extraordinary moment in his memoirs: “Ahead stretched the Champs-Elysées. It was “the largest gathering of its kind in the history of France”. Parisians flocked in their thousands to see the man most of them knew only as a voice broadcasting on the BBC from London. In a city still swarming with snipers, a walkabout was risky but, as Julian Jackson says, it was “a supreme example of De Gaulle’s instinctive showmanship”. The leader of the Free French had arrived in Paris the previous evening, a day after his advancing troops, and had declared himself president of the newly liberated republic. O n 26 August 1944, General Charles de Gaulle took a high profile walk on the Champs-Elysées.
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