FSI Senior Fellow Joseph Joffe reviews de Gaulle biography for The New York Times

Josef Joffe, a senior fellow at FSI and the Hoover Institution and the editor-publisher of Germany's Die Zeit, reviews Jonathan Fenby's  The General: Charles de Gaulle and the France He Saved in The New York Times Book Review Sunday Aug. 19. Fenby, says Joffe, knows how to turn historical breath and depth "into enthrallment " and proceeds to prove his point.

Not just a biography of Charles de Gaulle, the book tells the story of the 20th century giant "who captivated the public's imagination while still alive" and also "traces the story of a great nation that refused to come to terms with the loss of the strategic preeminence it had once enjoyed."

"As France hunkered down behind the Maginot line after World War I, de Gaulle preached the armored offense Hitler's panzer armies would use with devastating efficiency," Joffe says. When Hitler subdued France in 1940 in a matter of weeks, de Gaulle escaped to London, where he sparred with both Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt.   With Germany's defeat finally in sight, de Gaulle returned to Paris. Yet after only a few days as head of government he resigned and went to Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises where he would spend the next 12 years.

After the chaotic years of France's Fourth Republic, where "it lost Indochina, Suez, and l'Algerie francaise," de Gaulle returned to France.  He reigned over the Fifth Republic, Joffe says, "like a latter day Sun King, forced to suffer the ornery ways of democratic politics."

The French student riots of May 1968, "the mightiest student revolt in the West," per Joffe, were to prove his undoing.  de Gaulle went to French Army headquarters then in Germany to plead for the support of the military.  Meanwhile,"the faithful in Paris rallied and de Gaulle won a huge majority in the parliamentary elections of June 1968."  But, as Joffe says, he was the nation's savior no more.  When he called for a referendum on his reforms, he lost and resigned the same day. In November 1970, just before his 80th birthday, he died in Colombey.

As Joffe concludes in his review, "There is no more fitting epitaph than Fenby's last sentence: 'The world would not see his like again.'"