De Gaulle and the United States: A Centennial Reappraisal

by Robert O. Paxton (Editor), Nicholas Wahl (Editor)

- The first scholarly study of the entire sweep of the stormy De Gaulle-US relationship from the 1930s to 1969.- Features eyewitness accounts of Henry Kissinger and the former French Prime Minister, Pierre Messmer. This absorbing book analyses the turbulent De Gaulle-U.S. relationship from 1940, when Germany unexpectedly and swiftly defeated the French army, to 1969, when President De Gaulle withdrew from public life. Drawing on hitherto inaccessible archives, it features vivid recollections of both French and American eyewitnesses, including Henry Kissinger, the former French Prime Minister, Pierre Messmer, and many of De Gaulle's close associates. It also explores the roller-coaster of American popular feelings about De Gaulle, and addresses larger issues of American vs. European approaches to foreign policy and American scholars' current assessments of De Gaulle's long-term impact on France and the world.

320 pages, Paperback

First published December 14, 1994

About the author

Robert Owen Paxton is an American political scientist and historian specializing in Vichy France, fascism, and Europe during the World War II era. After attending secondary school in New England, he received a B.A. from Washington and Lee University in 1954. Later, he won a Rhodes Scholarship and spent two years earning an M.A. at Merton College, Oxford, where he studied under historians including James Joll and John Roberts. He earned a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1963. Paxton taught at the University of California, Berkeley and the State University of New York at Stony Brook before joining the faculty of Columbia University in 1969. He served there for the remainder of his career, retiring in 1997. He remains a professor emeritus. He has contributed more than twenty reviews to The New York Review of Books, beginning in 1978 and continuing through 2017.

Reviews

[Rebecca · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is the product of an academic conference about the relationship between the U.S. and Charles De Gaulle, and follows the process of a French academic conference style that combines papers and comments from historians and "witnesses" or participants in the events being described. That structure alone makes this a more than usually interesting read from an academic conference. The content of the book is also fascinating. It includes essays by some major scholars along with major players in US, free-French, and US foreign policy bodies, and regardless of the positions taken, reveals the difficulty of maintaining "anti-fascist" and "pro-imperial" positions both during and after WWII. It's also inteersting to see how resistant the US was to working with De Gaulle during the war, and to see the varied efforts to explain why this was.

[Ahmed Elfeky]

thank you