A perceptive journalist once said that Donald Trump should be taken “seriously but not literally”. The same could have been said about Charles de Gaulle. On the opening page of his memoirs, he wrote that his “certain idea of France” was “like the princess in the fairy tale” and there was always a sense in which de Gaulle knew that he was telling his countrymen a kind of fairy tale. For example, Paris was not, as he said in his speech of 25 August 1944, “liberated by itself”. T...
