Julian Jackson.
JULIAN JACKSON: DE GAULLE BIOGRAPHY
A CERTAIN IDEA OF FRANCE: THE LIFE OF CHARLES DE GAULLE (2018)
Winner of the 2018 Duff Cooper Prize.
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This 900 page biography gives an authoritative account of the life of Charles de Gaulle, who rose in the French army between the wars, led the French government in exile in London during the Second World War, and after the war became a towering figure in French politics as President of the country. Jackson describes de Gaulle’s fraught relationship with both Churchill and Roosevelt, and his handling as President of multiple crises including the withdrawal from Algeria, and the post-war conflicts in Vietnam and the Middle East. He challenged the USA by withdrawing from NATO, and twice blocked British Entry onto the European Community.
Reviewing the book in the London Review of Books, Ferdinand Mount wrote: ‘Jackson is the author of a memorable sequence of histories of 1930s and 1940s France, but this is the peak, lucid and witty from first to last, charitable where possible, merciless where necessary.’
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Julian Jackson (born 1954) is a British historian. He was educated at Peterhouse, Cambridge, where in 1982 he obtained his PhD on the subject of the Great Depression in France. After teaching for several years at the University of Wales, Swansea, Jackson moved in 2003 to the history department of Queen Mary University. He has written several books on the 20th century history of France. Two of these (his biographies of de Gaulle and Marshal Petain) have won the Duff Cooper Prize.
