Abstract/Summary

Charles de Gaulle is a medium-length biography, for readers who lack the time for a blockbuster but seek a deeper understanding than available mini-studies can offer. It is meant to be dipped into. The student, or general reader, interested in a particular theme will find the relevant material easily and (mostly) in one place without getting lost in chronology. There, she, or he, should be able to confront head-on the major controversies, such as de Gaulle’s wartime relations with the Allies, or Algeria, or the Constitution, or his policies on Europe or East-West relations, or his handling of May 1968, and acquire the tools to do her, or his, own interpreting. The core material is strongly contextualised (you will find, for example, details of 1950s land ownership in Algeria, or the evolution of France’s education and defence budgets in the 1960s), but the vignettes necessary to any decent biography are kept in: de Gaulle writing, in English in his German prison camp, still waters run deep; de Gaulle, in a suit, on a beach in Brittany, his daughter Anne on his knee; de Gaulle organising literary luncheons at the War Ministry days after the liberation of Paris; de Gaulle making coffee for Louis Joxe early one morning at Colombey; de Gaulle jumping across a ditch to collect wild mushrooms, weeks before he died, fifty years ago in November 2020.