Charles de Gaulle, Julian Jackson insists in the preface of his new biography, “De Gaulle” (Harvard), is “everywhere” in modern France, its undisputed hero. This claim, like some other confident statements in the book, may strike a reader as both narrowly true and what a French thinker might call metaphysically false. His name is certainly everywhere—on the great airport outside Paris; on the Place Charles de Gaulle, once called the Étoile, where traffic streams perpetually around the Arc de Triomphe—but his example seems remote. He is more a ceremonial than a controversial figure, his work now done. In forty years of passing in and out of France, I have almost never heard him pointed to as an exemplar useful in any way for today’s crises. His name having been placed on l’Étoile is apt: the traffic goes around all day but never stops for long.

If he lives anywhere, it is in the endless flow of books about the Second World War written by Americans and Brits, in which he emerges as the biggest pain in the ass in the history of the liberal order. By alphabetical accident, the heading “De Gaulle: Personal Characteristics” in Jackson’s index gives us, in sequence: arrogance, austerity, authoritarianism, cigarette smoking, coldness, contempt for human nature. It’s quite a list. Yet, as this classically composed and authoritative (if culturally somewhat shallow) book makes clear, he remains an amazing figure.

De Gaulle had three rendezvous with history, in the old-fashioned sense he loved: in 1940, in 1958, and in 1968. On all three occasions, he saved the French state by sheer theatricality and élan. First, by embodying the French republic in retreat from the Germans; then by seizing power, in a republican mode, to end the Algerian crisis; and, finally, when he ended the potential chaos of the May revolt by massing almost a million people on the Champs-Élysées in a counter-demonstration.

It was not all theatrical élan. As Jackson, a British history professor, shows, it also involved political savvy and the quiet weighing of odds among competing factions. But he depended more on theatrical élan than did pretty much any other public man of his century. Churchill in 1940 was far from powerless. He had radar and Ultra, an intact R.A.F. and a large empire. De Gaulle had nothing except his uniform and his voice. No one has ever played a weaker hand more compellingly. His life was one long brilliant bluff, and the things that make him exasperating—his vanity and closed-mindedness; his unearned sense of superiority and egocentric blindness—were also why the bluffs worked. He convinced others, sitting at the card table with all the aces in their hands, that he might have somehow manufactured an extra ace by pure force of will.

He is, perhaps above all, a significant figure owing to the fidelity of his republicanism: from a background that in most places and circumstances would have led, in crisis, toward some form of Bonapartism, he remained a faithful believer in the norms of democracy, in oscillating governments and principled resignation. He believed in “a certain idea of France,” to use his famous phrase, but it was a republican idea of France. He embodied a reactionary and regal style of politics, completely distinct in tone from the usual “progressive” kind, but no less committed to the institutions of democracy. This was achieved only with some coaxing from his advisers at key moments (but, then, he had chosen the advisers) and with sporadic fits of spleen—but in the end de Gaulle always offered a staunch reaffirmation of republican values. His life is proof that unapologetic right-wing politics do not necessarily bend toward absolutism; they can also sometimes stiffen the spine of liberal democracy.

Before 1940, when he emerged as the voice of Free France, de Gaulle was best known as a career French military man, notable chiefly for having survived Verdun; for having written in favor of modernizing the French Army, particularly on behalf of the then daring doctrine of tank warfare; and for being very tall. Personal traits matter: people looked up to him because they had to.

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Although he insisted on his origins among the country gentry, in fact he was raised in Paris’s Seventh Arrondissement—then a place, as he put it perfectly, marked by a “military melancholy,” a sadness of grand and empty green spaces. As Jackson ably shows, his family may have been hyper-conservative and Catholic, but they did not appear to be passionate anti-Dreyfusards. His father, who taught in a lycée, was aligned with the Catholic, reactionary side of politics—but by no means with its Jew-hating or monarchist fanaticism. (De Gaulle was, unusually for a man of his background, not particularly anti-Semitic. He condescended to Jews, but then he condescended to everyone.)

De Gaulle’s reactionary politics were also humanized by a dense literary culture. “The most wonderful job in the world would be as a librarian,” he once said. He was being puckish but not entirely so. He knew Corneille by heart and could quote his plays, and this immersion, Jackson makes plain, was not merely for show. De Gaulle had absorbed the lesson of French tragedy: that most hopes are doomed, that all choices come at a cost, that enduring loss with dignity is the highest of human callings. This stoical view was married to a conscious philosophy of action. He had been exposed at length to the philosopher Henri Bergson, whom he chose to read as a kind of proto-existentialist. Intellect needed to be braced by impulse, and impulse should be valued as a kind of instinctive ethics. What you felt you should do, however irrational it might seem to others, is most often what needed to be done.

When the worst happened, and the German tank corps overran France, in the spring of 1940, de Gaulle felt not only that his talents had been misused but, worse for a Frenchman of intellect, that his theories had been ignored. “Our initial defeat,” de Gaulle, newly promoted to brigadier general, wrote in a memorandum whose effect on his desperate superiors one can only wonder at, “comes from the application by the enemy of ideas that are mine.” There’s now a lively debate among military historians about the true causes of the fall of France. For a very long time, it was widely accepted that the speed and the panache of the German Army left the French Army helpless in its entrenched and conservative defensive positions. A newer generation of military historians—for instance, John Mosier, in “The Blitzkrieg Myth”—argues persuasively that the blitzkrieg happened mostly in panicked headlines, that the German tank corps had outrun its supply lines, and that France was in no worse shape in May of 1940 than it had been in a similar moment in 1914.

The failure—and this is a view that Jackson seems to share—was political. Paul Reynaud, the Prime Minister, had plenty of room to fall back and reorganize, as the French had done successfully in the Great War. But Reynaud, crazily, chose to bring into the cabinet the defeatist generals Pétain and Weygand, and he was under the crucial influence of his equally defeatist lover, Madame de Portes. Perhaps more important, the price of the earlier comeback had been millions of dead Frenchmen, and there was simply no will to try that experiment again. The French leaders had no fight in them, or not enough.