When Charles de Gaulle published the first volume of his war memoirs, in 1954, it looked like an acknowledgment that he no longer belonged to the present, but to history. His achievements during the ...

De Gaulle, by Julian Jackson (Belknap Press of Harvard University, 928 pp., $39.95) Charles de Gaulle was perhaps the most thoughtful and impressive statesman of the twentieth century. His only ...

How Charles de Gaulle’s story became a collective fairy tale that the French have agreed to believe in. Picture him as a legend, Joan of Arc in drag. A great nation is conquered by its historic enemy ...

PARODYING Marshal Foch, who once observed that Communism is a disease of defeated countries, a cynic might be tempted to say that memoir-writing is a malady of defeated generals. But the experience of ...

FOR 30 years, his destiny and that of France had been inseparably intertwined. For over a decade, he had presided over France in as rare an identification of ruler and ruled as modern history shows.

While Lambert Wilson makes a convincing Charles de Gaulle, Gabriel Le Bomin's World War II-era epic feels too monotonous and self-consciously lecture-y to work as a high-stakes procedural. France’s ...

The leader must aim high, show that he has vision, act on a grand scale. —Charles de Gaulle (1932) There cannot be a couple at the head of state. Only one man can be in charge. Otherwise, the people ...