conservative and a Catholic, from a monarchist family, he restored democracy in 1944 and brought the Communists into his government. An imperialist in the 1940s, he completed France’s decolonization in the 1960s. A soldier, he spent much of his career opposing the army. Yet, as Julian Jackson shows, it was precisely because of these contradictions that De Gaulle was able to reconcile so many of the conflicting strands in French politics and, for the first time since the Revolution, provide France with a universally accepted political system.

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