De Gaulle

Résumé · Charles de Gaulle, saviour of France’s honour in 1940 and founder of the Fifth Republic in 1958, 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.