Globalizing de Gaulle - (Harvard Cold War Studies Book) by Christian Nuenlist & Anna Locher & Garret Martin (Hardcover)

About the Book

This book offers novel perspectives and insights into key themes of French foreign policy in the de Gaulle years (1958-69). Globalizing research on the ideas and impact of le général, the volume's 13 well-matched essays by leading experts in the field tap into newly available ...

Book Synopsis

This book offers novel perspectives and insights into key themes of French foreign policy in the de Gaulle years (1958-69). Globalizing research on the ideas and impact of le général, the volume's 13 well-matched essays by leading experts in the field tap into newly available records, ranging from Europe to the US, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The volume is the first to reassess Charles de Gaulle's foreign policies from a global angle.

Review Quotes

Fourteen essays by scholars from four continents evaluate de Gaulle's foreign policy during his decade as president. The more useful essays track his diplomacy during the U.S. era of the Vietnam war; his role in the 1958 Middle East crisis involving the civil war in Lebanon and the coup d'état in Iraq, which brought Saddam Hussein to power; his negotiations with the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) and his subsequent role in decolonizing French sub-Saharan Africa and his development efforts there on behalf of French enterprises. A chapter on Franco-German relationships makes clear that de Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer worked well together, but the 1963-66 Ludwig Erhard chancellorship was disastrous. Joaquin Fermandois provides an excellent essay on de Gaulle's triumphal, ten-country tour of Latin America in 1964, concentrating mostly on his visit to Chile and President Eduardo Frei's return visit to Paris the next year. The theme that unites these disparate foreign policy adventures was de Gaulle's perceived anti-Americanism. This had appeal for the USSR, PRC, Mexico, Vietnam, and many of the Arab states. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.


This book presents some of the best work from a new generation of historians seeking to understand the tensions between rhetoric and reality in this enigmatic statesman.

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.

This volume is a welcome addition to the literature on the diplomacy of President Charles de Gaulle. Its contributors explore de Gaulle's foreign policies throughout the 1960s in their various international ramifications. Based on recent historiography, the book appropriately seeks to move beyond the 'Gaullist' orthodoxy (or mythology) as well as the systematic rejection (or denunciation) that has long characterized 'Anglo-Saxon' appraisals.

About the Author

Christian Nuenlist is a lecturer in contemporary history at the University of Zurich and a foreign desk editor at the Swiss daily Aargauer Zeitung. He is the author of Kennedys rechte Hand (1999) and the co-editor of Origins of the European Security System (2008). Anna Locher is an independent historian and publicist. She is the author of NATO, de Gaulle, and the Future of the Alliance, 1963-1966 (2010) and the coeditor of Transforming NATO in the Cold War (2007). Garret Martin is editor at large with the European Institute, based in Washington, DC.