As France shrinks de Gaulle seems to grow. If, then, de Gaulle is now widely viewed as ‘the last great Frenchman’, where does his greatness lie? Was he, as many have argued, a great visionary? François Furet, one of those many left-wing intellectuals so viscerally hostile to de Gaulle, wrote in 1963: ‘What characterizes de Gaulle is not his ability to predict the future, it is his extraordinary capacity to be deceived by history yet to adapt to it. What makes him a great politician is not his strategy, it is his tactics.’
