Globalizing de Gaulle

International Perspectives on French Foreign Policies, 19581969

Contributions by Jeffrey James Byrne, Carolyn Davidson, James Ellison, Joaquín Fermandois, Carine Germond, Gadi Heimann, Mark Kramer, Piers Ludlow, Guia Migani, Marie-Pierre Rey, Yuko Torikata, Qiang Zhai Edited by Christian Nuenlist, Anna Locher, Garret Martin

Not available to order

Publication date:

27 April 2010

Length of book:

326 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

ISBN-13: 9780739142509

French President Charles de Gaulle (1958-1969) has consistently fascinated contemporaries and historians. His vision_conceived out of national interest_of uniting Europe under French leadership and overcoming the Cold War still remains relevant and appealing. De Gaulle's towering personality and his challenge to US hegemony in the Cold War have inspired a vast number of political biographies and analyses of the foreign policies of the Fifth Republic mostly from French or US angle. In contrast, this book serves to rediscover de Gaulle's global policies how they changed the Cold War. Offering truly global perspectives on France's approach to the world during de Gaulle's presidency, the 13 well-matched essays by leading experts in the field tap into newly available sources drawn from US, European, Asian, African and Latin American archives. Together, the contributions integrate previously neglected regions, actors and topics with more familiar and newly approached phenomena into a global picture of the General's international policy-making. The volume at hand is an example of how cutting-edge research benefits from multipolar and multi-archival approaches and from attention to big, middle and smaller powers as well as institutions.
This is a superb volume on postwar France, well written, thoroughly researched, and based in part on new archival material. It is centered on the person of Charles de Gaulle, whose aims and moves, though sometimes based on an effect of surprise, seem less mysterious in retrospective than they appeared to be at the time to Anglo-American leaders largely unable to comprehend, or accept,a resurrection of France that bore the ineluctable stamp of the General.