The authors of this slim volume faced a basic choice: whether to address Charles de Gaulle's ideas about foreign and domestic politics—or politics more generally—directly or to stream these ideas through narratives about France's relations with discrete states.
The authors chose the latter option. The result is a blurred and cursory rendering of de Gaulle's political testament in narratives describing France's relations with the Cold War superpowers—principally the United States—Germany, Italy, Vietnam, China, and the Arab states and Israel as well as brief chapters on French economic planning and de Gaulle's attack on the dollar. These relations are more thoroughly covered in what one recent collection of essays on de Gaulle's responses to globalization—Christian Nuenlist, Anna Locker, and Garrett Martin, eds., Globalizing de Gaulle: International Perspectives on French Foreign Policies, 1958–1969 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010)—estimates are more than 3,000 books, journal articles, and other materials evaluating de Gaulle's ideas...