‘A Certain Idea of France: The Life of Charles de Gaulle’ by Julian Jackson

This enormous fat tome has been sitting on my bookcase since I was given a copy as a Christmas present in 2018. I have several times picked it up and started, but never managed to penetrate too far. I remember reading a biography of Charles de Gaulle (by Bernard Ledwidge) when I was at school and writing a rather pathetic extended essay about him. Much more recently I took a paperback copy of the huge biography by Jonathan Fenby on holiday with me, but ended up reading other books instead.

The impetus to read this was going to see the two films about de Gaulle in the Second World War that have recently been released in the UK – ‘De Gaulle: Resistance’ and ‘De Gaulle: Liberation’ – which blew me away. These were heavily based on the account in Julian Jackson’s book, so it was not at all difficult finally to pull it down from the shelf and dive quite hungrily into its 777 pages plus notes and illustrations.

It is quite simply one of the most admirable biographies I have ever read. Just superb in every way. Authoritative, very readable and fair to its subject, it both tells the story of his life and explains his thinking brilliantly. A classic of the genre.

De Gaulle’s life rather neatly has four main stages: the period of relative obscurity but much incident prior to 1940, the crucial years of the Second World War itself and his subsequent first presidency, the subsequent years spent out of office and then finally the return to power between 1958 and his somewhat unwilling retirement ten years later. Each is fully described and debated here alongside a great sweep of French and international history, some of which was very familiar to me (WWII, post war social revolution, 1968 troubles), but plenty not so much (Fourth Republic politics, Algeria, coup and assassination attempts). This is a serious, extraordinarily well-researched, comprehensive work. The life story of the twentieth century’s most consequential Frenchman – by a country kilometre.

I cannot write here about everything, so I am going to focus on the aspects of this book which I found most engaging and thought-provoking. First, the style of politics. It is of course doing de Gaulle a great injustice, but I kept being reminded here of Donald Trump. There was a similarity, and were it not for the fact that Trump probably has only the haziest notion of who de Gaulle was, I would not find it unreasonable to suggest that he might be a kind of role model. I am thinking here of de Gaulle’s overwhelming personal arrogance, his tendency to talk about himself in the third person and his extraordinary belief in his own unique capacity not just to govern France well, but to save her from a seemingly ever-present imminent collapse born of the incompetence and decadence of her political class. De Gaulle would never have used crude language like ‘drain the swamp’, although he was capable in private of being very rude indeed about his enemies, but the sentiment is not so different to that which de Gaulle very successfully articulated both in respect of Vichy in the 1940s and the Fourth Republic politicos in the 1950s.

Then there was de Gaulle’s studied unpredictability that so baffled and irritated other governments and led to a situation in which France under de Gaulle could never really be trusted as a reliable ally. I am thinking of his ‘empty chair’ tactics when outmanoeuvred at inter-governmental meetings, his decision to veto UK membership of the European Economic Community and his bizarre antics in Montreal when he yelled ‘Vive Le Québec Libre’ in a doomed attempt to generate support for independence from Canada. This last performance was, as Julian Jackson respectfully but firmly points out, deeply disrespectful given how many non-Quebecian Canadian lives had been lost liberating France while so many French Canadians had sided with Vichy.

De Gaulle’s absurd rants against Britain and particularly America were equally repellent in the light of the sacrifices made to defend his country and bring about the expulsion of German occupiers on two occasions in his lifetime. They seemed designed to insult and were presumably uttered to appeal to what has always been quite a significant Anglophobic constituency in France. He also sought, of course, always to perpetuate the myth that France had liberated herself in 1944-45. Hard for the rest of the world to take seriously – and they (we) did not – but these accounts in Julian Jackson’s book weirdly reminded me of the equally ridiculous nonsense Trump spouted at the United Nations in 2025 when he declared that London was preparing to introduce Sharia law, that climate change was ‘the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world’ and that ‘immigration and their suicidal energy ideas …. will be the death of Western Europe.’

There though the similarity with Donald Trump ends, because unlike the current US president, Charles de Gaulle was a very well-read intellectual who had formed doctrines and beliefs over many years in response to events and also studying history seriously. The style of interpersonal relations and political grandstanding may not always have been so admirable, but the political thinking that underpinned his actions amounted to a deeply thoughtful and coherent philosophy which remains very influential in France today, and indeed beyond.

And the sections dealing with this aspect of de Gaulle in Julian Jackson’s book were, for me, the most interesting. I learned a huge amount and found some of de Gaulle’s thinking to be attractive too. I had not appreciated, for example, how strongly he sought to articulate the need for an alternative approach for governments and societies to adopt when responding to the rise of industrial society, that was neither capitalist in nature nor socialist:

Until 1962, his energies were absorbed by Algeria, but once the war was over, he began dropping hints that he had not forgotten the policy of association. He told Peyrefitte in July 1962: ‘The social consequences of capitalism are not acceptable. It crushes the weakest. It transforms men into wolves …. Collectivism is no better: it removes from people any desire to fight. It turns them into sheep. We need a third way – between wolves and sheep.

And it was this third way that de Gaulle labelled ‘association’, and which was rooted in long-standing principles of social Catholicism which Julian Jackson introduces here and summarises splendidly:

The idea that capitalism and socialism were two sides of the same coin – rooted in the materialism of industrial civilization – was also a theme of those non-conformist thinkers whom de Gaulle had encountered in the salon of Emile Mayer.

How de Gaulle alighted upon association as his answer to the problem of modern civilisation is less clear. One influence was surely social Catholicism. The search for ‘social harmony’ … had started to preoccupy the Catholic Church in the late nineteenth century as socialist parties emerged to organize the new industrial working class. To meet this challenge Pope Leo XIII had in 1891 issued his encyclical Rerum Novarum which enjoined industrialists to show social responsibility to their workers. Rerum Novarum was the foundational text of social Catholicism, a strand of Catholicism influential among the industrial bourgeoisie of northern France – the milieu of de Gaulle’s maternal grandparents.

Reading about this here immediately sent me to the Rerum Novarum itself and to several other books about social Catholicism and its influence on European Christian Democratic politics in post-war Europe, all of which I am finding very interesting and which have already informed my teaching at my business school on three separate occasions.

The book is equally interesting on de Gaulle’s personal life and his close family relationships and happy marriage. While he was diplomatically audacious and on economic questions always prepared to be radical in his thinking, on social questions he was very conservative, being deeply unhappy, for example, with the proposal in 1967 to legalise contraception in France.

For me, naturally, another side to him which I found admirable was his immense enjoyment of reading. My favourite passage in Julian Jackson’s book comes right at the end when he was retired and close to death and he discusses books with his grandson. The range of his reading was considerable, and extraordinary in many respects when we consider how very full his public life had been for decades:

The late 1950s and early 1960s were a period of extraordinary cultural and intellectual vitality in France. This was the heyday of ‘the new novel’ in literature, the ‘new wave’ in cinema, of thinkers like Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan. While he was president, de Gaulle read two or three books a week – usually history, novels or poetry – and made a valiant attempt to keep up with contemporary literature. He always read the winners of the main literary prizes.

De Gaulle can thus in one respect be seen as a public intellectual. A man who taught himself about history, politics and diplomacy – as well as literature – through extensive reading all his life, and who then drew on this learning to formulate ideas and a philosophy that blended deep patriotism with a social conscience. And while some things he said in private showed his thinking to be out of step with much that was characteristic of his time, there were moments when I was reading this book that he made me sit up and question my own received thinking and prejudices. Here are two examples:

I know that decolonization is disastrous. That most Africans are hardly at the stage of our Middle Ages. That they are attracted by cities like mosquitos by lamps while the bush will return to its savagery. That they are again going to experience tribal wars, witchcraft, cannibalism. That fifteen years more of control by us would have allowed them to modernize their agriculture, give them better infrastructures, completely eradicated leprosy … But what can I do about it? The Americans and Russians think they have a vocation to free the colonized populations and are outbidding each other to do so. That is the only thing they have in common. The two superpowers claim to be two anti-imperialists while in fact they are the last two imperialisms.

And about Roosevelt and the USA specifically:

Describing the meeting where in 1944 Roosevelt sketched out his vision of the future of the world, de Gaulle writes: ‘As is only human, the desire to dominate was dressed up in idealism’. He goes on: ‘In affairs between States, logic and sentiment do not weigh much compared to the realities of power: that what matters is what one can take and what one can hold on to; that France, to recover her place, could count only on herself.’

Overall this was a highly enjoyable and intellectually satisfying read about a quite extraordinary life. I was entertained and engaged, but also learned a great deal and was led to further books and articles.

What more can one hope to get from reading a biography?