The Last Emperors

Let's begin by throwing out all the facts, and insist on the truly serious things: the legends.    --Régis Debray, À demain de Gaulle (1990)

If Winston Churchill is today the icon of an American right that denounced the "appeasement" of Iraq, Charles de Gaulle is the inspiration for some of those who continue to urge European governments to resist US imperialism. In this climate, biographies of each can be easily appropriated for political purposes.

New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani claimed that he began reading Roy Jenkins's biography of Churchill on the night of September 11, 2001, when he got back to his apartment. In a recent issue of the French journal Le Débat, de Gaulle biographer Jean Lacouture imagined a conversation between the Gaullist Jacques Chirac and the ghost of de Gaulle himself about the state of France, particularly its relations with America.

British writers on the left (Clive Ponting) and on the right (David Irving) have often attacked the Churchill myth, but rarely have they paused to say much about the man behind it. John Ramsden's Man of the Century, the first book to examine Churchill's post-1945 reputation, is a reversal in the trend. (Unfortunately, despite its broad scope, the book ignores Churchill's influence on the wider culture; Ramsden finds space to quote five separate reviews of Churchill's official biography but fails to mention Howard Brenton's Churchill Play). In contrast, Eric Roussel's Charles de Gaulle is, at first glance, a more conventional portrait. But like most French works on de Gaulle--and unlike most works on Churchill--it recognizes that there can be no clear-cut separation between the "reality" of de Gaulle's career and its mythic legacy.

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