Transcript
Introduction
“De Gaulle's admirers have included both Henry Kissinger and Osama bin Laden. He has been compared by admirers and detractors to French figures as diverse as Charlemagne, Joan of Arc, Henry IX, Louis XIV, and Napoleon; and to non-French figures as diverse as Bismarck, Mussolini, Mao, Castro, and Jesus Christ. The range of these comparisons reflect De Gaulle's extraordinary contradictions. He was a soldier who spent most of his career fighting the army, a conservative who often talked like a revolutionary, a man of passion, who found it almost impossible to express emotions.
In France today, Charles De Gaulle is everywhere, in memories, in street names, in monuments, in book shops. At the most recent count, over 3,600 localities had a public space, a street, an avenue, a square, a roundabout named after him. When an opinion poll in 2010 asked the French to rank the most important figures in their history, 44% placed De Gaulle at the top, far ahead of Napoleon, in second place with 14%. Throughout his career, he was a brutally divisive figure. He was reviled and idealized, loathed and adored in equal measure. Hatred went beyond words.
De Gaulle was the target of about 30 serious assassination attempts. If the lives of the French were so passionately caught up in their relationship with De Gaulle, it was because he was the central actor in France's two 20th-century civil wars. The first civil war resulted from France's defeat by Germany in 1940 when the government of Marshal Pétain signed an armistice with Hitler. Refusing to accept this decision, De Gaulle departed for London to continue the battle. His act of defiance transformed him into a rebel. Over the next 4 years, De Gaulle claimed that he, not Pétain, represented the true France. He returned to France in 1944, acclaimed as a national hero. De Gaulle challenged the way that the French thought about their history and politics.”
That was an excerpt from the book that I'm going to talk to you about today, which is De Gaulle, and it was written by Julian Jackson. And before I jump back into the book, I want to tell you why I spent so much time studying and learning about Charles De Gaulle. So this might be outside of the episode I did where I've read all of Warren Buffett's shareholder letters. This is probably the episode that took the most amount of time in preparation. So I listened to the audiobook before I read this book.