The General
Charles De Gaulle and the France He Saved
Jonathan Fenby’s biography of Charles de Gaulle: the junior officer captured at Verdun, the theorist of armoured warfare whose own army ignored him, the exile who declared in June 1940 that he was France and had almost nothing but a microphone to back it, the president who ended the Algerian war and built the Fifth Republic around himself. Fenby is good on the sheer difficulty of the man, the rows with Churchill and Roosevelt, the calculated aloofness. He is equally good on the private life, including de Gaulle’s devotion to his daughter Anne.
Recommended by 1 Person
Richard Harries
Another aspect this very well-written book brought home to me was how much suffering and violence the French have been through, for example in the Occupation, the Resistance, the Vichy government, the reprisals, all the killings that went on over Algerian independence, and the numerous assassination attempts on de Gaulle himself; an extraordinary period of violence which on the whole we escaped in Britain.
Interview · September 2010
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