He often confuses the magical power of de Gaulle’s rhetoric with the reality of his policies. For the man who came close to declaring war on Britain in 1945 because he wanted to defend the French Empire in Syria; whose government presided over a massacre of Algerian nationalists at Sétif in 1945; who then dragged the French into an unwinnable war to save French Indo-China in 1946; and who, once France had abandoned her African Empire, devised ingenious new ways of hanging on to influence in Africa, the image of prophetic decolonizer needs serious qualification.
