Robert Tombs Robert Tombs

Getting to know the General | 14 June 2018

The general may have had ‘a certain idea of France’, but in 1940 it was unclear whether he himself was a royalist, a Christian Democrat or a proto-fascist

  • A Certain Idea of France: The Life of Charles de Gaulle

    Julian Jackson

    Allen Lane, pp. 900

When General de Gaulle published the first volume of his war memoirs in 1954, he signed only four presentation copies: for the Pope, the Comte de Paris (France’s royalist pretender), the President of the French Republic and Queen Elizabeth II. One of his associates remarked: ‘All de Gaulle’ was in that gesture.

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Written by
Robert Tombs

Robert Tombs is an emeritus professor in history at the University of Cambridge and the author of This Sovereign Isle: Britain in and out of Europe (Allen Lane, 2021). He also edits the History Reclaimed website

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