Charles De Galle (photograph via Wikimedia Commons)

Most of twentieth-century French history was a far cry from the belle époque of the nineteenth. The humiliating loss of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, followed by the chaos of the Parisian Communards in 1871 led to emergence of the Third Republic (1871–1940). The Republic ended in military defeat, just as the Second Empire had. However, it was also an age of extremes, with the Beaux Arts architecture and Art Deco drawn in sharp contrast with the ugly anti-Semitism and the Catholic fascism of the Dreyfus affair. Under existential threat of annihilation during the Great War, the Republic survived 1918 but could not persuade the Americans or the British at Versailles that the German threat was merely in temporary recess, not extinguished.

De Gaulle grew up in a family that was both monarchist and immersed in French literature and history. Throughout de Gaulle’s formative years, the ghost of Dreyfus haunted French politics. The Third Republic groaned under the weight of rampant anti-Semitism, while anti-Dreyfusards, Boulangistes, Congregationalists, Action Française, Croix de Feu, and communists fought pitched battles in the streets. In this turbulent milieu, inconvenient political nuisances like Serge Stavisky, the well-connected embezzler, were disposed of by the Sûreté, while police chiefs auditioned for major films (Jean Chiappe was up for the title role in Abel Gance’s 1927 silent epic). They all had one aim: to destroy the Republic. Aided and abetted by the Nazi invaders, their chance came at Vichy in 1940. Appointed to Paul Reynaud’s war cabinet shortly before the Franco-German armistice, de Gaulle was infuriated by the defeatists. Marshall Philippe Pétain, now prime minister, signed the Republic’s death warrant and ceded two thirds of France to the Germans; de Gaulle departed for London and was welcomed by Winston Churchill. On the one hundred and twenty-fifth anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo in 1940, de Gaulle broadcast his call for French resistance from London. Few French citizens heard his call live and fewer still had heard of de Gaulle. But his name would become the clarion call for popular resistance throughout the war.

Meanwhile, Vichy proved to be the centripetal force around which the sum of French politics, past and present, converged: Marshall Pétain, the Catholic authoritarian; Pierre Laval, the failed Socialist turned German ultra-collaborationist; François Mitterrand, de Gaulle’s political opponent of the 1960s and future president, but at Vichy a mere fonctionnaire; and Admiral Darlan, would-be leader of the Free French. Darlan was assassinated in Algiers in 1942; did a Gaullist agent kill Darlan? There are more suspects than Murder on the Orient Express. Julian Jackson is dubious, arguing that de Gaulle had no agents in Algiers to do the job. He points the finger at Giraud, the general who had the most to gain from Darlan’s death.

Jackson dispels long-held myths about de Gaulle’s relationship with Pétain, the ‘victor of Verdun’ and France’s most prominent soldier. Pétain’s patronage rescued de Gaulle’s career, but de Gaulle did not name his son after him; nor was Pétain godfather to de Gaulle’s son. Tried, convicted, and sentenced to death for treason in 1945, Pétain’s sentence was commuted to life by de Gaulle.

De Gaulle had achieved the impossible by the end of the war. He marched into Paris in August 1944 at the head of the French 2nd Armoured Division. France was restored to the victor’s table, one of four powers occupying Germany, with a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. But the ‘problems with AngloSaxons’ persisted; in 1945, de Gaulle found himself close to declaring war on Britain over France’s attempt to reestablish colonial rule over Syria. Rejected at the 1946 elections, de Gaulle spent the next decade attempting to regain power. In 1954, after the French defeat at Diên Biên Phù, and again in 1956, following the Anglo-French withdrawal at Suez, de Gaulle’s opponents feared a coup d’état, but the General would only contemplate a return to the Élysée Palace by constitutional means.

He did not have to wait much longer for the Fourth Republic to collapse. By 1958, the French army was locked in a brutal struggle to maintain imperial power in the face of the rising tide of Algerian independence. The army’s determination to retain Algeria at all costs saw civil war threatened in France, as the conflict between pro-independence groups and imperialists spread to the mainland. In mid-1958, parliament voted de Gaulle extraordinary powers to write a new constitution and resolve the Algerian crisis. De Gaulle’s second leadership stint (1958–69) would prove no less tumultuous than his first. Reluctantly, he determined that Algerian independence was inevitable, forcing one million French settlers to return to the mainland. Algeria also provided, with a certain joie de vivre, a licence for French élites to indulge in assassination plots against one another; de Gaulle survived no less than twenty-one attempts on his life.

De Gaulle’s new constitution promulgated the Fifth Republic, ushering in a decade of plebiscite democracy. He drew his power from public approval, elevating his presidency above both parliament and politics. Everyone, he said famously, was, had been, or would be a Gaullist. Gaullism comprised a curious mixture of nationalism, centrism, and conservatism. It was never pan-European; de Gaulle merely employed European unification as a cipher for his grands projets: France as a ‘third force’ in world politics; an independent nuclear strike force; a bridge between the superpowers; and the Franco-African union, a means of maintaining French economic dominance in post-colonial Africa, which he viewed as entirely different from the monopoly capitalism espoused by the ‘Anglo-Saxons’. In the Far East, De Gaulle’s ideology saw no contradiction between igniting the 1946 Indo-China conflict and denouncing the US war in Vietnam twenty years later.

In 1961, Britain applied for Common Market membership, a move de Gaulle viewed as a Trojan horse for US infiltration of Europe. Without consulting his allies, de Gaulle fronted a press conference on January 14, unilaterally and dramatically vetoing Britain’s membership application. ‘Britain,’ de Gaulle declared, ‘was not ready for EC membership.’ A week later, de Gaulle and West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer signed the Elysée Treaty, binding Germany to coordinate its foreign policy with that of France. But the treaty did not remove Bonn from Washington’s orbit, disappointing de Gaulle. Nearly sixty years later, the Franco–German ‘axis’ remains bound by the 1963 treaty, leading to cooperation on everything from the creation of the Eurozone in 1999 to resolute opposition to the 2003 Iraq war.

In 1969, de Gaulle surrendered, finally: to democracy. Battered by the 1968 student revolt, his constitutional reforms were defeated narrowly in a referendum and he resigned and departed the Élysée Palace for Colombey-les-Deux-Églises. He never set foot in Paris again, except once, incognito (he died in 1970, aged seventy-nine).

Liberated from politics, de Gaulle obtained a copy of Las Cases’s biography of Napoleon and settled down to write his final memoirs. De Gaulle had criticised Napoleon for doing everything himself, but the Fifth Republic adopted most of the machinery of Bonapartism: a strong presidency and a weak cabinet; plebiscite democracy; and decision making without consultation of either advisors or politicians. His ministers complained of his authoritarianism; they learned of cabinet decisions only when they read the morning papers. Jackson nevertheless argues that de Gaulle, enigmatic to the end, should be viewed as a man of ‘honour’. In contrast, his corruptible contemporaries – nothing more than nature’s go-betweens – sought only personal advancement for their betrayals. But Charles de Gaulle was unique in saying ‘Non’ to the enemy from day one. As he conceded in an unguarded moment, ‘Life was combat.’