'Great moral courage: The French thought they knew de Gaulle and suddenly realized they didn't'

François Picard is pleased to welcome Julian Jackson, British historian, author and, Emeritus Professor of Modern French History at Queen Mary University of London. His biography of General de Gaulle laid the foundation for France's two-part biopic "De Gaulle". And on the heels of this surprise box office hit, Jackson's book is now out in French:. "La Chute: France 1940". He returns to the occupation of Paris and extraordinary collapse of France in the summer of 1940.

Rather than treating defeat as inevitable, he focuses on all of the uncertainty gripping France as the war continued spreading across Europe. And his book fully acknowledges, "it was a disaster. It was a catastrophe. It was a dramatic military catastrophe".

And from this catastrophe, Charles de Gaulle emerged, an almost improbable figure, the man who refused to accept that France had been definitively defeated.

His evolution is inseparable from the extraordinary relationships he forged and fought over with the Allied leaders around him. With Churchill, there was admiration, rivalry and mutual dependence: two formidable personalities who needed one another but rarely saw the future in quite the same way. With Roosevelt, the relationship was even more complex. After the fall of France, the United States effectively wrote France off as a serious power, while de Gaulle insisted that France would not disappear from the map of history.

That refusal became central to de Gaulle's political identity. “We're not going to be written off,” is, in many ways, the story of his emergence: a determination to preserve France's place in the war and, ultimately, to restore its place in the postwar world. It also helps explain why de Gaulle continues to fascinate audiences today. The French thought they knew him, but the films and the renewed interest in his story reveal how much more complicated the man was than the familiar national icon. And so Jackson takes us beyond the myth of de Gaulle.

De Gaulle's subsequent role was equally uncertain. He had to persuade Britain, confront the United States, navigate his relationship with Churchill and Roosevelt, and convince a world that had largely written France off that France still mattered.

Seen from that perspective, he recounts a story about how political possibilities can survive certain defeat and how one extraordinary individual attempted to turn an apparently finished history back into an unfinished one.

Ultimately, Jackson would like us to walk away with the following understanding: History reminds us that the future is not written in advance. He firmly believes that we must resist this temptation to see the present through the certainty of hindsight, because what appears inevitable after the fact was often profoundly uncertain to those living through it: "It's hard enough to explain what happened, let alone say what's going to happen next".