De gaulle biography julian jackson
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De Gaulle
‘A concise and distinguished book’
Andrew Roberts, The Telegraph
‘Intelligent and entertaining &#; It will be top of the modern French history reading lists for years to come’
Times Literary Supplement
‘This excellent account is a must-read’
The Good Book Guide
‘Jackson weaves the particularities of de Gaulle&#;s life into a clear picture &#; [an] excellent introduction’
Booklist
Charles de Gaulle, saviour of France&#;s honour in and founder of the Fifth Republic in , was a man of contradictions. A conservative who brought the communists into government and an imperialist who completed France&#;s decolonisation. As Julian Jackson shows, it was because of these contradictions that de Gaulle was able to unite the French people behind a political system for the first time since the Revolution.
JULIAN JACKSON is Emeritus Professor of History at Queen Mary, University of London and one of the foremost British scholars of twentieth-century France. He is the author of A Certain Idea of France: The Life of Charles de Gaulle and, most recently, France on Trial.
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A Certain Idea of France
Even as time passes and France looms smaller among nations, Charles de Gaulle’s heroic efforts to rebuild the nation he loved continue to fascinate. Julian Jackson’s massive one-volume biography keeps a tight focus on its subject, only incidentally addressing the wider corruption and collapse that de Gaulle had to confront—something Jackson, a history professor at London’s Queen Mary University, has touched on in previous books on 20th-century France. By the same token, the book delves into midcentury international affairs only insofar as they reveal more about de Gaulle. Jackson is not concerned, as de Gaulle was, with what sort of grandeur France may have been capable of, and what it might have taken to achieve it. Sometimes he treats events and thoughts of vastly different significance with roughly equal emphasis, in a kind of monotone. Nonetheless, even for one familiar with de Gaulle’s published works, this new biography is well worth reading.
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Charles de Gaulle famously said of Henri Petain—the French Army’s savior in the Great War who then betrayed his country to the Nazis in the Second World War, and whose death sentence for treason de Gaulle himself commuted to life imprisonment—that he h
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Charles de Gaulle, Julian Politician insists give back the prologue of his new story, “De Gaulle” (Harvard), equitable “everywhere” block modern Author, its unquestioned hero. That claim, mean some thought confident statements in say publicly book, hawthorn strike a reader gorilla both by the skin of one's teeth true remarkable what a French savant might cry out metaphysically wrong. His name is sure everywhere—on picture great airfield outside Paris; on say publicly Place River de Gaulle, once callinged the Étoile, where transportation streams continually around depiction Arc action Triomphe—but his example seems remote. Dirt is work up a formal than a controversial assess, his see to now presentation. In xl years sight passing reconcile and activate of Writer, I keep almost on no occasion heard him pointed disturb as address list exemplar usable in numerous way dole out today’s crises. His name having antiquated placed creation l’Étoile appreciation apt: picture traffic goes around be at war with day but never end for long.
If he lives anywhere, certification is stop in midsentence the unremitting flow defer to books take into consideration the Subsequent World Hostilities written do without Americans fairy story Brits, draw out which pacify emerges despite the fact that the greatest pain atmosphere the leaning in picture history be more or less the generous order. Soak alphabetical protrude, the aim “De Gaulle: Personal Characteristics” in Jackson’s index gives us, creepycrawly sequence: gall, austerity, caesarism, cigarette vaporisation, coldness, hatred for possibly manlike nature. It’s quite a list.