This book is a virtuoso performance. At stake is the trajectory of modern France and its historiography, which gives us, briefly, varying monarchic heroes from Jeanne d’Arc to Henry IV, Louis XIV, and, especially since 1789, Napoleon Bonaparte and Charles de Gaulle, along with their allies and enemies, their admirers and their critics.1 The book outlines their careers and summarizes the work of their many historians, even that of René Goscinny, the creator of the comic-book characters Astérix and Obélix. Gueniffey considers all of them from a lofty point of view. He begins with a judgment about “the end of history” borrowed from Furet—not the “end of history” from an American standpoint with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1988 but for France.2 De Gaulle’s place in history marked the end of the history for France as it been written for centuries, as “a traditional idea of the nation—[of] the Monarchy and the Revolution, together; [of the] economy and [of] consciousness.” Thus, today, “Anti-Gaullism is dead. And so is Gaullism.” To cite the title of Williams’ biography of de Gaulle, the man was The Last Great Frenchman.3We can now, today, calmly, consider all the French heroes and their commentators, from Jeanne d’Arc to Henry IV very briefly and Louis XIV briefly but to Napoleon and de Gaulle in considerable detail. This book, Gueniffey explains, is not “an essay in comparative history.” It does not aim to follow its two subjects from their cradles to their graves. The introduction proposes instead “une réflexion” on various “lines of thought,” such as the exercise of power, the centrality of writing, their deaths, their funerals, and the place in history of “great men,” as in the work of Carlyle and Nietzsche. “Through them, my subject is France itself.”4In five chapters, Gueniffey’s text considers how Napoleon and de Gaulle resolved—for themselves, for France, and for the world—their political trajectories and their political resurrections during the decisive 100 days, in 1815 for Napoleon and in the creation of the Fifth Republic in 1958 after World War II for de Gaulle. As we might expect, the two men are both similar and dissimilar: Napoleon with his war of movement and de Gaulle with his tanks, the battles of Lodi in 1796 and Abbeville in 1940 serving as mutual positive proof. The two men were also authors, de Gaulle showing himself as an admirer, inter alia, of André Malraux and Napoleon engaging in a puerile quarrel with Germaine (Madame) de Staël.Underlying all of this comparison is a troublesome problem: What happens if Napoleon was not really French (curiously, the title of the book in Paris was Napoléon et de Gaulle: Deux héros français)? At one point, Gueniffey hints at the matter, quoting Taine’s characterization of Napoleon as “a Corsican, foreign to France” (127), but later in the book, Gueniffey is more direct: “Napoleon did not know a word of French as a child.… [He] belonged nowhere and as a teenager dreamed of succeeding [Pasquale] Paoli” (214). How true. He was also, incidentally, not merely a war criminal; like Adolf Hitler (an Austrian) and Joseph Stalin (a Georgian), he used war as an excuse to silence any kind of popular and nativist opposition to his demonic activities. De Gaulle was much closer to Michelet’s Jeanne d’Arc than to Chateaubriand’s “Buonaparte.”5The style of this book is flamboyant and invariably elegant even when it occasionally turns, for effect, to mere slang—for example, when it refers to Napoleon as “un bon zigue.” The book’s translation of Zazie’s utterance “Mon cul” from Raymond Queneau’s Zazie dan la Metro (Paris, 1959) as “my ass” also seems fair enough. But should we translate the rest of her dismissal of Napoleon, “Il m’intéresse pas du tout, cet enflé, avec son chapeau à la con,” as “a bombastic swell with his stupid hat”? Probably not.
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Oct 1, 2021
Isabelle Vagnoux 
Open Access
