Historian Julian Jackson Revisits France's 1940 Collapse and the Improbable Rise of Charles de Gaulle

British historian Julian Jackson, an emeritus professor of modern French history at Queen Mary University of London, has spent much of his career examining the most wrenching episodes in France's modern past. His biography of Charles de Gaulle provided the foundation for a two-part French biopic that became a surprise box-office success, and his latest book, now published in French under the title "La Chute: France 1940," turns to the occupation of Paris and the dramatic unraveling of France in the summer of 1940. Jackson discussed these themes in a recent television interview, offering a portrait of a nation in crisis and the almost improbable figure who emerged from it.

Rather than presenting the defeat of 1940 as an inevitable outcome, Jackson insists on recovering the uncertainty that gripped France as the war spread across Europe. The collapse, he acknowledges, was nothing less than a catastrophe on a military scale, a disaster that reshaped the country's place in the world. Yet the historian's interest lies not in hindsight's tidy verdicts but in the confusion and contingency experienced by those who lived through the events, when the future remained genuinely open.

That perspective is central to Jackson's approach to de Gaulle, a figure who refused to accept that France had been definitively beaten. With the French army routed and the government preparing to seek an armistice, de Gaulle's insistence that the nation had not been written off became the foundation of his political identity. His emergence, in Jackson's account, is inseparable from the relationships he forged and fought over with the Allied leaders around him, men whose interests only sometimes aligned with his own vision for France.

The most celebrated of those relationships was with Winston Churchill. Between the two men there was genuine admiration, but also rivalry and mutual dependence. They were formidable personalities who needed one another, yet rarely imagined the postwar future in the same terms. De Gaulle depended on British support to sustain his claim to represent a France that had not surrendered, while Churchill had his own strategic calculations to weigh.

The relationship with Franklin Roosevelt proved even more complicated. After the fall of France, the United States effectively discounted France as a serious power, a judgment that de Gaulle spent years resisting. His determination to preserve France's role in the war, and ultimately to restore its standing in the postwar world, became a defining feature of his leadership. Jackson frames this refusal to be sidelined as the essential story of de Gaulle's rise, a stubborn insistence that France would not vanish from the map of history.

De Gaulle's position throughout the war years remained precarious. He had to persuade Britain, confront the United States, manage his fraught dealings with both Churchill and Roosevelt, and convince a world that had largely dismissed France that the country still mattered. Seen from this angle, his story illustrates how political possibilities can survive even a decisive military defeat, and how one determined individual can attempt to turn what looked like a finished history back into an unfinished one.

The renewed public fascination with de Gaulle, reflected in the success of the recent biopics, suggests that the French are rediscovering a more complicated man than the familiar national icon. As Jackson observes, the French thought they knew de Gaulle, and then suddenly realized they did not. The films and the broader revival of interest in his story have revealed dimensions of his character and career that had been obscured by his monumental postwar reputation.

Jackson also draws a broader lesson about how history is understood. He argues that the future is not written in advance, and he urges resistance to the temptation of viewing the present through the certainty of hindsight. What appears inevitable after the fact was often profoundly uncertain to those living through it, and Jackson notes that it is hard enough to explain what happened, let alone predict what comes next. His book thus functions as a corrective to deterministic accounts of 1940, restoring the anxiety, doubt, and possibility that surrounded France's darkest hour.

The implications of this approach extend beyond the events of the Second World War. By focusing on the contingencies of the past, Jackson implicitly warns against reading current crises as foregone conclusions. De Gaulle's wartime trajectory, which began with a small and contested claim to legitimacy, demonstrates how leadership and conviction can alter outcomes that seemed settled. His willingness to challenge the assumptions of more powerful allies, even when his leverage was minimal, offers a case study in how a nation's standing can be defended through sheer refusal to accept decline.

Jackson's portrait also highlights the personal costs and contradictions of de Gaulle's position. The general's relations with his allies were marked as much by friction as by cooperation, and his insistence on French sovereignty often put him at odds with the very powers whose support he required. The French public, meanwhile, came to see him through the lens of later achievements, which obscured the ambiguity and vulnerability of his wartime years. The recent films have helped reopen that earlier chapter for contemporary audiences.

For readers of "La Chute: France 1940," the book offers more than a military narrative. It is an examination of how a society confronts sudden catastrophe, how individuals navigate collapsing certainties, and how the memory of such moments is later shaped into national myth. Jackson's willingness to sit with uncertainty, rather than resolve it prematurely, gives his account its distinctive force and explains why his work continues to attract both scholarly and popular attention.

Ultimately, the historian's message is one of humility about prediction and respect for the openness of the past. De Gaulle's emergence from the wreckage of 1940 was not guaranteed, and the world that followed was not the only one imaginable at the time. By recovering that sense of possibility, Jackson invites his audience to see both the general and the catastrophe that made him in a new light, reminding us that history's outcomes are rarely as foreordained as they later appear.