Volume 7, Number 8 · November 17, 1966
Le President Soleil
By James Joll
De Gaulle
by Alexander Werth
Simon & Schuster, 416 pp., $7.50
De Gaulle
by Jean Lacouture, translated by Francis K. Price
New American Library, 224 pp., $4.95
Sons of France: Pétain and De Gaulle
by Jean-Raymond Tournoux, translated by Oliver Coburn
Viking, 245 pp., $5.95
No Laurels for De Gaulle
by Robert Mengin, translated by Jay Allen
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 402 pp., $6.95
Four more books about General de Gaulle! It is a measure of the power of his personality that no other contemporary statesman arouses such interest or provokes such speculation about his motives and aims. His success has been due to a series of contradictions: He is single-minded and devious, a conservative and rebel in one, a man who despises the machinery of democracy, but who draws his strength from popular support and direct contact with the masses, a man, in his own words, 'who belongs to nobody and who belongs to everybody.' He is a historical hero in Carlyle's sense at a time when we are reluctant to account for historical change by the actions of individual great men, and it would be hard to explain his ideas and actions solely as the result of his social origins or economic interests. The uniqueness of De Gaulle's political style, as much as the remarkable nature of his political achievements, make it hard to judge him. Indeed, if it were not for his tangible successes—the creation of the Free French movement, the restoration of France to the rank of a great power, the ending of the Algerian war—one would be tempted to regard him as a great illusionist, a 'mountebank dictator,' as L. B. Namier described Napoleon III.
Review, 3295 words
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