De Gaulle

To understand today’s France, you must understand Charles de Gaulle, said David Bell in The Nation. Julian Jackson’s portrait of the French Resistance leader “will likely remain the standard biography for many years to come,” because it’s both engaging and “scrupulously fair.” De Gaulle’s “massively overweening” self-confidence clearly served him well up until he established France’s Fifth Republic in 1958. But it also blinded him to changes in France that unleashed 1968’s political unrest.