When Emmanuel Macron posed for his official presidential portrait last June, he placed on the desk beside him an open leather-bound volume of Charles de Gaulle's “Mémoires de Guerre”. For a former Socialist minister, who had campaigned for office as “neither on the left nor the right”, the symbolism was arresting. This was a 39-year-old president claiming to be, if not quite le général's heir, then at least the modern advocate of the Gaullist vision which continues to animate the nation: the quest for greatness.
Fully 60 years after de Gaulle emerged from retirement to found the Fifth Republic, and nearly half a century after he quit the presidency following defeat in a referendum, he remains a towering figure in the French imagination, as Julian Jackson, a British historian, chronicles in his compelling and painstakingly documented biography. He has over 3,600 roads in France named after him, more than Louis Pasteur or Victor Hugo, as well as the main airport in Paris, an aircraft-carrier and the roundabout at the Arc de Triomphe.
Read Full Article »