The definitive English-language biography of Charles de Gaulle, drawing on archives that opened only in the twenty-first century. Julian Jackson, a historian of modern France, takes on a figure who has calcified into monument and restores him to contingency. The book follows de Gaulle from a devout, conservative, monarchist-inflected upbringing through his early career as a difficult and theoretically ambitious officer, to the moment in June 1940 when a junior general with no political base flew to London and declared himself the embodiment of France. Jackson is superb on the improbability of that claim and the sheer force of will required to make the Allies accept it, documenting the exasperation of Churchill and the outright contempt of Roosevelt, who spent years trying to find an alternative. The second half covers de Gaulle's withdrawal from politics, his return during the Algerian crisis, the founding of the Fifth Republic, and the decision to grant Algerian independence, which nearly cost him his life. Jackson handles the contradictions without resolving them artificially: a nationalist who dismantled an empire, an authoritarian temperament who repeatedly submitted to referendums, a man of immense vanity whose vanity was inseparable from his usefulness. Drawing on unpublished letters and family papers, Jackson also renders the private de Gaulle, including the tenderness toward his daughter Anne, who had Down syndrome. Winner of the Duff Cooper Prize, it is a model of biographical scholarship.