The Last Great Frenchman: A Life of General De Gaulle.

On the author's telling, the greatness of Charles De Gaulle lies "in his single-minded devotion to his country, and in his skill and strength in its service." More particularly, Charles Williams--whose day job as Deputy Leader of Her Majesty's Opposition is not something "le General" would have admired or even understood--is at pains to lay out De Gaulle's defense of his ideal of France during the war. To powerful effect, Williams cites the wife of a British general attached to the Free French by Churchill. Here is Mary Boren Spears's description of DeGaulle in July, 1940.

I think he felt the dishonor of

France as few man can feel anything,

and that he had literally

taken on himself the national dishonor,

as Christ according to the

Christian faith took on himself the

sins of the world. I think he was

like a man, during those days, who

had been skinned alive, and that

the slightest contact with friendly,

well-meaning people got him on

the raw to such an extent that he

wanted to bite, as a dog that has

been run over will bite any would-be

friend who comes to its rescue.

This is all well and good but celebrating De Gaulle's "single-minded devotion to his country" is old hat. What makes Williams's book a fine study as well as a great read is that he is mindful of the ways in which De Gaulle proved his devotion--ways that "cost" him. The general once remarked that he should have chosen the royal Louvre as his official residence rather than the mundane Elysee Palace, traditional abode of the presidents of the Republic. "You don't make history from the [bourgeois] eighth arrondissement," he sighed, ruefully. A facetious remark from a man not known for humor. What is surely important is not where De Gaulle chose to live but how he chose to rule--and that was always "en Republique." The general may have emoted far more often for "la France" and "la Nation" than for "la Republique," yet his greatness in French history will always be that despite a background and personal style which spurned the Revolution of 1789, Charles De Gaulle upheld the Republican ideal and played by its democratic rules (most of the time).

He did so at the Liberation (1944) when he might well have thrown his prestige into an attempt to set up an authoritarian regime that would bar the Communists from power. Later, foiled by the Left in his attempt to create a regime different from the late Third Republic, which he despised, De Gaulle freely, albeit with bitterness, relinquished power (1945) and let "the parties" have their way. True, in 1958, he played eminence grise in a successful coup d'etat against the troubled Fourth Republic. The Socialists affect "never" to forgive De Gaulle that action, but their own imitative tenure in office under Mitterrand spoke louder than their angry words.

In short, the adjectives "Gaulliste" and "Gaullienne" may connote authority, hierarchy, and more than a little pomp and ostentation, but "monarchist" or "caesarian" or even "consular," they are not, and never were. This is no minor act of self-mastery for a man born into the general's Catholic and monarchist milieu in a country that has known as much fratricidal political bloodshed and as many violent changes of regime as France.

I, for one, had not thought the world needed another biography of De Gaulle now that Jean Lacouture's definitive one has been translated into English. But Charles Williams's book made me feel differently. A more readable, at times enthralling, single-volume take on De Gaulle you cannot hope to find. The author navigates a clear course through a thick marsh of secondary and primary sources. He is excellent on the easier questions--De Gaulle's self-perception; his early role as Petain's protege; his capacity to disobey orders; the aloof and determined nature of his leadership ("[De Gaulle] strutted 'as though he were moving his own statue'").

And he is by and large strong in addressing the hard ones. "Playing the 'Nation' card" is how Williams wonderfully describes the great Gaullist political ploy of cutting the all but indisseverable Nation-State pairing and turning "la Nation" against "l'Etat." For example, the famous June 17,1940 speech from London wherein De Gaulle declared that the French state's surrender to the Nazis "would be crimes against the nation"; or again, in 1947, when he launched his Union of the French People (RPF): "when the vast mass of the French people, rejecting sterile games and refashioning the ill-constructed framework of the state within which the nation is now going astray, will rally around France herself." In short, "playing the 'nation' card" is a way of doing political work in the name of apolitical patriotism.

Accomplished at historical analysis, Williams's hand is also fine at the biographer's art. Having cited Mary Soames, Churchill's daughter-in-law, who told De Gaulle during the war, "Mon General, you should be very careful not to hate your friends more than your enemies," Williams limns the evolution in De Gaulle's political personality toward a greater ability to deal in the politics of flattery and flexibility. He is adept at portraying the paradox between the personage and the person, contrasting "a very cold, ruthless, and proud public man" with De Gaulle's gentleness with his daughter, Anne, afflicted with Down's syndrome. (He would sit her in her place at the card table, deal her a hand, and gently play the cards for her.) Williams even speculates about the general's religious convictions, mentioning "...the streak of nihilism and pessimism in him which led at least one of his closest companions in later life to wonder whether he had any real faith at all. Nietzsche, with his contempt for Christianity, and Chateaubriand, its fervent champion, seemed to be in constant warfare in his mind."

This said, I find Williams weak on interpreting De Gaulle's relations with England and the United States. For example, the author sees only the brutality and irrationality of De Gaulle's anti-Americanism in the 1960s; he rarely if ever considers that such actions as pulling out of NATO might have held an underlying sense for a medium-sized power like France--as no less an analyst than Henry Kissinger was well aware of.

It's also time we stopped rehearsing conventional wisdom when it is plainly contains contradictions. "Favoring the fleur-de-lys," as monarchists like De Gaulle's parents did, generally did not entail favoring war for "the instant recovery of Alsace-Lorraine," as Williams asserts, nor did being "deeply, perhaps neurotically, Catholic [and] a fervent monarchist" carry with it the necessity of being "intensely patriotic," as he also states. In the early Third Republic, revanche and patriotism were by and large the political hallmarks of Republicans, not monarchists, and as for Catholics, their patriotism was of necessity mediated and moderated by their religion. Williams himself notes that Henri De Gaulle was so angry at the anticlerical regime in France that he sent Charles to Belgium to finish his studies at a Jesuit college there. "Rome was stronger than Paris," writes the author.

Finally, I agree that Joan of Arc is overworked as an analogy for De Gaulle--she was, after all, as Williams says, no rebel but a fighter for constituted authority against foreign invaders. On the other hand, to go on to compare De Gaulle to...Maximilien Robespierre!?, as the author does, calling him "a Jacobin rebel to boot" is to void the revolutionary and his party of most of their actual historical significance.

Steven Englund is a free-lance writer who specializes in French history and culture.