Harvard University Press Blog

The War in Ukraine: Updated Reading List

It is inconceivable to think that a year has passed since Russia first launched its devastating invasion of Ukraine. The following books shed light on the ongoing conflict and provide a better understanding of Ukrainian history as well as the complicated, intertwined pasts of both countries as the war continues. Recent titles published by the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute also highlight the voices of Ukrainian writers through timely and harrowing narratives.

  The Torture Camp on Paradise Street
Stanislav Aseyev

Ukrainian journalist Stanislav Aseyev details his experience as a prisoner for nearly three years at a modern-day concentration camp overseen by the Federal Security Bureau of the Russian Federation in the Russian-controlled city of Donetsk. This compelling memoir offers critical insight into the operations of Russian forces in the occupied territories of Ukraine.

 The Moscow Factor: U.S. Policy toward Sovereign Ukraine and the Kremlin
Eugene M. Fishel

Eugene Fishel asks whether, how, and under what circumstances the United States has considered Ukraine’s sovereignty in its relations with Moscow. The Moscow Factor brings together for the first time documentary evidence and declassified materials, retrospective articles by former policymakers, and memoirs by erstwhile senior officials.

 The Length of Days: An Urban Ballad
Volodymyr Rafeyenko

In The Length of Days, featuring a wild cast of characters, Volodymyr Rafeyenko combines poetry and wicked humor with elements of magical realism. The novel is set in 2014, mostly in the composite Donbas city of Z—an uncanny foretelling of what this letter has come to symbolize since February 2022, when Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

 

In Isolation: Dispatches from Occupied Donbas
Stanislav Aseyev

In this collection of dispatches, Aseyev attempts to understand the reasons behind the success of Russian propaganda among the residents of the industrial region of Donbas. For the first time, an inside account shows the toll on real human lives and civic freedoms that citizens continue to suffer in Russia’s hybrid war on its territory.

 

Mondegreen: Songs about Death and Love
Volodymyr Rafeyenko

Mondegreen tells the story of a refugee from Ukraine’s Donbas region who has escaped to Kyiv at the onset of the Ukrainian-Russian war. Written in beautiful, experimental style, the novel shows how people—and cities—are capable of radical transformation and how this, in turn, affects their interpersonal relations and cultural identification.

 

The Ukrainian West: Culture and the Fate of Empire in Soviet Lviv
William Jay Risch

Months before crowds in Moscow dismantled monuments to Lenin, residents of the western Ukrainian city of Lviv toppled theirs. William Jay Risch argues that Soviet politics of empire created this anti-Soviet city, and that opposition from the periphery as much as from the imperial center was instrumental in unraveling the Soviet Union.

 

Ukraine’s Nuclear Disarmament: A History
Yuri Kostenko

Based on original and previously unavailable documents, Yuri Kostenko’s account of the negotiations surrounding the Budapest Memorandum agreement between Ukraine, Russia, and the US reveals for the first time the internal debates of the Ukrainian government, as well as the pressure exerted upon it by its international partners.

 

Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine under Nazi Rule
Karel C. Berkhoff

Karel C. Berkhoff describes how a blend of German nationalism, anti-Semitism, and racist notions about the Slavs produced a reign of terror and genocide in the Third Reich’s largest colony. He also shows how a pervasive Soviet mentality worked against solidarity, explaining why the vast majority of the population did not resist the Germans.

 

Russia: The Story of War
Gregory Carleton

Outsiders view Russia as an aggressor, but Russians see themselves as surrounded by enemies, defensively fighting off invader after invader, or called upon by history to be the savior of Europe, or Christianity, or civilization itself, often at immense cost. As Gregory Carleton shows, war is the unifying thread of Russia’s national epic.

 The Frontline: Essays on Ukraine’s Past and Present
Serhii Plokhy

The Frontline collects essays in a companion volume to Serhii Plokhy’s The Gates of Europe and Chernobyl. The essays present further analysis of key events in Ukrainian history, including Ukraine’s relations with Russia and the West, the Holodomor and World War II, the impact of Chernobyl, and Ukraine’s contribution to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The War in Ukraine

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has people wondering how we got to this point. For those looking for a better understanding of the complicated, intertwined pasts of these two countries, and to learn more about Ukrainian history, these books provide answers and shed light on the current conflict. The first two titles are being published next month by the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute and could not be more timely.

In Isolation: Dispatches from Occupied Donbas
Stanislav Aseyev

In this collection of dispatches, Stanislav Aseyev attempts to understand the reasons behind the success of Russian propaganda among the residents of the industrial region of Donbas. For the first time, an inside account shows the toll on real human lives and civic freedoms that citizens continue to suffer in Russia’s hybrid war on its territory.

Mondegreen: Songs about Death and Love
Volodymyr Rafeyenko

Mondegreen tells the story of a refugee from Ukraine’s Donbas region who has escaped to Kyiv at the onset of the Ukrainian-Russian war. Written in beautiful, experimental style, the novel shows how people—and cities—are capable of radical transformation and how this, in turn, affects their interpersonal relations and cultural identification.

The Frontline: Essays on Ukraine’s Past and Present
Serhii Plokhy

The Frontline collects essays in a companion volume to Plokhy’s The Gates of Europe and Chernobyl. The essays present further analysis of key events in Ukrainian history, including Ukraine’s relations with Russia and the West, the Holodomor and World War II, the impact of Chernobyl, and Ukraine’s contribution to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Ukraine’s Nuclear Disarmament: A History
Yuri Kostenko

Based on original and previously unavailable documents, Yuri Kostenko’s account of the negotiations surrounding the Budapest Memorandum agreement between Ukraine, Russia, and the US reveals for the first time the internal debates of the Ukrainian government, as well as the pressure exerted upon it by its international partners.

Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine under Nazi Rule
Karel C. Berkhoff

Berkhoff describes how a blend of German nationalism, anti-Semitism, and racist notions about the Slavs produced a reign of terror and genocide in the Third Reich’s largest colony. He also shows how a pervasive Soviet mentality worked against solidarity, explaining why the vast majority of the population did not resist the Germans.

Russia: The Story of War
Gregory Carleton

Outsiders view Russia as an aggressor, but Russians see themselves as surrounded by enemies, defensively fighting off invader after invader, or called upon by history to be the savior of Europe, or Christianity, or civilization itself, often at immense cost. As Gregory Carleton shows, war is the unifying thread of Russia’s national epic.

The Ukrainian West: Culture and the Fate of Empire in Soviet Lviv
William Jay Risch

Months before crowds in Moscow dismantled monuments to Lenin, residents of the western Ukrainian city of Lviv toppled theirs. Risch argues that Soviet politics of empire created this anti-Soviet city, and that opposition from the periphery as much as from the imperial center was instrumental in unraveling the Soviet Union.

The Story of an Atlantic Slave War

Our third excerpt to celebrate Black History Month comes from Vincent Brown’s award-winning Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War, which Cornel West calls “brilliant” and “groundbreaking.” This gripping account of the largest slave revolt in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic world, an uprising that laid bare the interconnectedness of Europe, Africa, and America, shook the foundations of empire, and reshaped ideas of race and popular belonging.

Only the plotters truly knew if their plans had called for a general uprising from the beginning. The colonists were guessing based on evidence garnered from torture, and historians have little more to go on than their speculations. Were the events in St. Mary’s, Kingston, St. Thomas in the East, and Westmoreland part of a general insurrection?

Something important is at stake in the answer to this question. Historians sometimes view slave-conspiracy trials as evidence of panic, projections by slaveholders upon hapless victims. Another perspective casts the slaves’ actions as mostly reactive responses to immediate circumstances and opportunities, rather than as the outcome of careful organizing. By contrast, the first named historian to interpret Tacky’s revolt, Edward Long, agreed with his fellow colonists that the rebellion had been carefully planned:

“These circumstances show the great extent of the conspiracy, the strict correspondence which had been carried on by the Coromantins in every quarter of the island, and their almost incredible secrecy in the forming of their plan of insurrection; for it appeared in evidence, that the first eruption in St. Mary’s, was a matter pre-concerted, and known to all the chief men in the different districts; and the secret was probably confided to some hundreds, for several months before the blow was struck.”

For Long, Tacky was the “chief man” at the head of the conspiracy. But Long’s account is an unreliable guide. Most importantly, he offers an erroneous chronology of events. Wanting to show an island-wide conspiracy, he depicted the events in St. Mary’s Parish as simultaneous with later events in Westmoreland, extending the timeline for the St. Mary’s uprising and making it appear to last well beyond the Westmoreland insurrection. At least one detail of the account makes this misrepresentation seem willful. Long states that it was Admiral Charles Holmes who dispatched the naval vessels to the north side of the island, despite the fact that Holmes did not arrive at Jamaica until May 13, weeks after Tacky was killed and the rebels had dispersed. Long surely knew this, but distorting the sequence of events in this way had the effect of making the whole affair seem that it was indeed Tacky’s revolt.

This theory gave the insurrection an identifiable scapegoat, whom Long could blame and belittle all at once. Acknowledging Tacky as a “young man of good stature, and well made,” he called him “handsome, but rather of an effeminate than manly cast.” Mocking and demonizing black sexuality was an important part of establishing racial hierarchy, and Long hastened to add that Tacky “had flattered himself with the hope of obtaining (among other fruits of victory) the lieutenant governor’s lady for his concubine”—that lady being Edward Long’s eldest sister. In Long’s estimation, Tacky’s elevation stemmed not from his leadership abilities or military experience but from his supposed resemblance to “some favourite leader of their nation in Africa.” Most likely, Tacky had himself been a leader in Africa, but for Long this was merely a sign of Coromantees’ credulity. He compared Tacky’s followers to some Africans who had once encountered the bronze statue of a gladiator erected on a local plantation, which “the Coromantins no sooner beheld, than they were almost ready to fall down, and adore it.” With Tacky at the head of uprising, Long had devised an intelligible narrative of the violence that conveniently discounted the strategic implications he most feared. According to him, the uprising resulted from a concerted effort, but it was doomed by Africans’ intrinsic faults. Yet, as he knew, from the attack on Fort Haldane to Tacky’s death in the rocky valley upriver from Downes’s Cove, “Tacky’s Revolt” lasted only a week.

What explains Long’s desire to subsume the entire rebellion within a chronology that elevates the primacy of the events in St. Mary’s? Other sources, too, conspired to highlight the importance of the earliest clashes. The April 14 “Letter from a Gentleman at St. Mary’s” was the first and only coherently plotted account; the ones that followed display the irregularity and confusion of the colonists’ predicament. Dread governed their experience. By May, they were growing wild with fright as they ginned up the docket of African savagery. It is difficult to tell which stories came from captured rebels and which sprang from slaveholders’ imaginations, especially when the specter of cannibalism appeared in print. Colonists read that the rebels at Ballard’s Valley “cut off the Overseer’s Head, put his Blood in a Calabash, mixed gunpowder with it, and [ate] their Plantains dipp’d in it, as they did by every white Man they killed: In short, their savage Barbarity can scarcely be paralleled.” If there had indeed been a blood sacrifice at Ballard’s Valley, this report made it seem as if the rebels were taking some holy communion, with bananas instead of bread. The story made the sacrament all the more heinous by comparing the Coromantees to Catholics—Protestant Britain’s foremost global adversaries—and contributed to the sense that the colony was besieged from within and without by enemies at once familiar and strange. With each successive discovery of new unrest, the slaveholders grew more fearful and bewildered. Suddenly the uprising seemed to be happening everywhere at once. The shocking reminder that power did not guarantee security drove colonists wild with fear.

Over the next several weeks, lasting into July, they discovered several more conspiracies. In the commercial capital, colonial officials deepened their investigation into the circumstances surrounding the war-token mahogany sword. They learned that Kingston’s Coromantees had rallied around a woman named Cubah, whom they elevated “to the rank of royalty” and dubbed the “Queen of Kingston.” Like other Africans, she claimed territory for herself and her followers in the knowledge that the boundaries of her dominion were drawn more by peoples’ loyalties than by land surveyors. At meetings “she had sat in state under a canopy, with a sort of robe on her shoulders, and a crown upon her head,” adopting the “paraphernalia of power” she might have known on the Gold Coast. Upon this intelligence, the government seized Cubah and ordered her to be transported from the island. In the Vale of Louidas in St. John’s Parish, Coromantees belonging to the speaker of the House of Assembly, Charles Price, “had agreed to rise, ravage the estates, and murder the white men there.” Three people familiar with the plan betrayed the rebels, and the “ringleaders were taken up, and upon conviction, executed; others, who turned evidence, were transported off the island thus the whole of this bloody scheme was providentially frustrated.” More plots were afoot in the parishes of St. Dorothy’s, Hanover, and Clarendon, where Edward Long owned his estate. Throughout this time Henry Moore kept martial law in effect, and the military remained on the march all over the island.

Fear transported the slaveholders into a delirious fever dream from which they would not soon recover. Possibly the experience of frightened alarm during the uprising sent some of them into a fugue state, in which linear temporality had lost some of its purchase. They had lost the plot. The narrative they pieced together at the start of the rebellion represented the most linear description they could manage, until Long sat down a decade later in London to reconstruct the sequence. Partly for this reason, and partly because of events that occurred later in the 1760s, the St. Mary’s revolt established an enduring narrative pattern, providing an intelligible origin and knowable characters, with the colonists’ actions bending a discernible story arc from beginning to end.

The slaveholders were paranoid, and their slaves really were out to get them. Sometimes, these two facts could exist independently; the events of 1760 knotted them together. The causes of the insurrection were probably more broadly distributed and far more contingent than Long and the other slaveholders knew. Even so, whether or not these revolts were the result of a single grand design, they were not disconnected from each other nor merely opportunistic. The rebels coalesced around affiliations of language, regional identification, and military verve. If each uprising had its own inspiration, each also took careful account of local conditions, potential connections, and broader opportunities. In St. Mary’s, the path of the insurgency strongly suggests a defined objective: control or destruction of the commercial zone along the rivers. Yet if what happened in St. Mary’s parish could be called Tacky’s Revolt, it was only one conflict within a larger war, an unfolding uprising itself encompassed by wars within wars.

In the cascading series of events initiated by the rebels in St. Mary’s, we see how African militancy derived from the entanglements of empire, trade, and war across the Atlantic. Tacky’s Revolt was smaller and less significant than Long and subsequent historians have supposed only because the slave war it advanced was larger and more consequential. “A more dangerous or troublesome Affair I was never engaged in, in all my life,” wrote Zachary Bayly about the St. Mary’s insurrection. And still the Coromantee War was closer to its beginning than its end.

Finding Solidarity in Others’ Struggles

As we celebrate Passover, after a year marked by protests for racial equality and social justice, Amelia M. Glaser, author of Songs in Dark Times: Yiddish Poetry of Struggle from Scottsboro to Palestine, reminds us of the Yiddish poets during the interwar years who drew on the trauma of pogroms to depict the suffering of other marginalized peoples and embraced a global community of the oppressed.

Last Spring, George Floyd gasped, “I can’t breathe,” seconds before his murder under the knee of a police officer. His plea became a metaphor for the violence of racism in America, and the months of reckoning that have followed have revealed a painful rift in America over the country’s commitment to equality. This year, many Americans have asked how it’s possible to express solidarity with, and fight for, the human rights of all groups, including those that may not be our own. In a year marked both by a deepening divide over social justice and the fear and loss due to the global pandemic, the celebration of Passover, a holiday commemorating exodus from slavery, offers an opportunity to think about how one group’s experience of injustice can help to understand another group’s pain.

I expect that this year, perhaps more than usual, many will be asking at their seder tables how Jews can translate the collective experience of trauma to speak out against racist violence in the United States. This was a burning question for the Yiddish poets who are the subject of my book, Songs in Dark Times, who found themselves between a privileged majority and threatened minority. In 1931, for example, Malka Lee, an immigrant from Galicia to New York, wrote about a Black man on a subway who described a lynching in the American south.

Now I hear his young cry on the wind

“My brother’s body’s swinging from a pine.”

He raises his fist and waves it, wild,

He sees the murderer’s portrait in every white...

The Yiddish poets I write about were not religious Jews. Nevertheless, the poetry they wrote in the interwar period is a wellspring of thought on the struggle among Jews to fight for other groups’ freedom. My book is the story of Yiddish leftist internationalist poets who, in the 1920s and ’30s, described the struggles of non-Jewish groups, including Chinese workers, Black Americans, Spanish republicans, Palestinian Arabs, and Ukrainian peasants. These writers attempted to translate the pain of others by using passwords from Jewish religious texts and collective memory. They were, in essence, changing what “we” meant—altering it from “we Jews” to “we workers of the world.” These poets were rejecting the very idea of a religious or ethnic community of Jews. But they were also drawing from a rich tradition of Jewish text and practice to make sense of a polarized world.

The Yiddish internationalist poets were drawing from a history of Jewish struggle to convince their readers to empathize with others’ struggles. For example, in keeping with the Jewish tradition of the yahrzeit (commemoration of the anniversary of a death), H. Leivick marked the occasion of a year after the execution of the Italian-born anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti in his poem “A Sacco-Vanzetti Year.” Leivick identifies the perpetrator of the crime against the two anarchists as “The same evil from accuser to accuser.” In the Yiddish original, Leivik’s “accuser” is a “kateyger,” the talmudic term for prosecutor which had come to mean, in Yiddish, “prosecuting angel.” Leivick, with this Jewish password, links the injustice against the Italian anarchists to the many historical injustices against Jews.

Esther Shumiatsher, who wrote poignantly in the late 1920s about the human suffering she observed on her world travels with her spouse, the playwright Peretz Hirschbein, wrote:

The whole world has become my comrade,—

From the Yangtze’s valleys

And the thirst of India’s hot plains.

The Soviet poet Khane Levin, who is best known for her verse about motherhood and the Revolution, weaves Biblical motifs into her poems about building a new Soviet society. In her 1928 “Crimean motifs,” Levin describes a young Jewish man named “Anaki,” a name conjuring the Biblical giants known as Anakim. Anaki, a strapping youth, must overcome the influence of his two fathers—one a Jewish peddler who “sang on the wagon” and the other the tsar who “didn’t learn to work.”

Even among these Yiddish-speaking secularists, Jewish prayer did not entirely disappear. The poet Aaron Kurtz left his Hassidic family as a teenager to join the circus and later made his way to the US where he joined the Communist Party. And yet Kurtz, writing about the Spanish Civil War in 1938, describes a Jewish volunteer for the International Brigades reciting the Kol Nidre prayer on the eve of Yom Kippur together with his comrades in arms, Pedro of Madrid and Johannes of Hamburg.

With World War II, Jewish internationalism changed. Yiddish poets in the Soviet Union, the United States, and elsewhere turned inward, mourning the genocide that had taken place in Europe. The internationalist excitement of the interwar period had faded. Those Yiddish poets who had fought the rise in fascism by binding themselves to the Soviet cause were now forced to confront Stalin’s atrocities. The radical internationalism that had become de rigueur in the 1920s and ’30s gave way to new forms of Yiddish poetry as the Jewish world mourned the horrific murder of the majority of the Jews of Europe in the Holocaust. Many of the poets who had once focused on the struggles of others now turned, in their writing, to face this indescribable loss.

And yet some writers still found ways of simultaneously mourning Jewish loss and the losses of other minorities. Two decades after World War II, following the murder of four young Black girls in a church in the Civil Rights era, Aaron Kurtz turned to the traditional Mourner’s Kaddish as a way of honoring the victims of American race violence:

I am not a Kaddish-sayer. But today mamas

The world over bitterly

Wept and mourned the four little black girls—

I responded to the rabbi’s Kaddish:

Omeyn!

Today, a year into a global pandemic, we celebrate Passover, at a time of personal and communal struggles for freedom and justice. Some may find hope in the utopian Yiddish writers who believed that a fairer world was at hand.

The Story behind Dante’s Bones

Last year, Italy decreed March 25 as National Dante Day. This year marks the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death. To honor these occasions, Guy Raffa explains how he came to write Dante’s Bones: How a Poet Invented Italy, on what some might consider to be a morbid topic.

Dante’s Bones is the most personal book I have written. In it, I tell the story of the poet's adventurous physical afterlife—how his bones have been stolen, hidden, contested, discovered, examined, and, above all, venerated—and I unravel the meaning of these events at pivotal moments in Italian history from the late Middle Ages to the present. The book’s exploration of Dante’s graveyard history reflects an obsession I have had with cemeteries and tombs—how we mourn and honor the dead—literally for as long as I can remember. I trace this fascination to my earliest memory: watching President John F. Kennedy's funeral procession with my parents on our black and white television set in 1963, when I was three years old.

Now, just past my sixty-first birthday, my memory of the slain president’s funeral feels more like the memory of a memory. I've seen those iconic images many times since that first, live experience, but one moment brings an aching pang of recognition whenever I see it on a screen or in my mind: John F. Kennedy Jr., on his third birthday, saluting his father’s flag-draped casket after it has been carried outside St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Washington, DC, and begins its slow journey to Arlington National Cemetery. Forever fixed in my memory is one three-year-old boy watching another three-year-old boy say goodbye to his father.

Forty years later, in 2003, my own father died. Dante was on my mind as I addressed family and friends at his burial in Long Island National Cemetery (Pinelawn), not far from Smithtown Pines, the town where I lived as a child. The pine trees of my young life and my father’s final resting place (my brother is also buried there) joined in my imagination with the famous pine forest—the pineta—outside Ravenna, where Dante died and was buried in 1321. The poet modeled the Terrestrial Paradise atop the Mountain of Purgatory, the most human-centered afterworld of the Divine Comedy, on this pine forest. My attachment to Dante’s Purgatory, the poetic site of loving care between purifying souls and living human beings, has grown stronger as I’ve grown older. Dante’s imagining of communion between the living and the dead is a big part of why I love reading, teaching, and writing about his Divine Comedy. This posthumous communion is also central to the adventurous afterlife of the poet’s mortal remains that my book recounts.

Personal and professional interests in Dante’s bones coincided when I learned that traces of the poet’s physical afterlife—a small packet of “Dante dust” and impressions taken of his skull—had been discovered in the National Central Library of Florence. On July 16, 1999, three days before the discovery, John F. Kennedy Jr., his wife, Carolyn Bessette, and her sister, Lauren Bassette, died when the plane he was piloting crashed into the ocean en route to Martha’s Vineyard. I had always felt an odd sense of connection to this famous Kennedy son, whom I only knew through media coverage. Similar to how he was known as “John-John” to his family, my parents had affectionately called me “Guy-Guy” to distinguish me from my father, whose birth name (Gaetano) had been Americanized as “Guy,” my given name. Reclassification of efforts to find the crash victims from “search and rescue” to “search and recovery” appeared in newspapers on July 19, 1999, the same day as the discovery of the missing Dante relics. The sad news of JFK Jr.’s death inevitably reawakened my memory of him saluting his father’s casket, while news of the “Dante dust” and cranial impressions piqued my curiosity about the fate of the poet’s physical remains. The seeds of Dante’s Bones had been planted.

Much of what I subsequently learned about Dante’s physical afterlife came to light during the 600th anniversaries of his birth (1865) and death (1921). #Dante2021 and #Dante700 are popular Twitter hashtags recognizing that 2021 is another huge year for Dante Alighieri: the 700th anniversary of the Italian poet’s death in Ravenna, where he is buried. He is thought to have died during the night of September 13-14, 1321. The year-long commemorations began in Italy on September 5, 2020, when Sergio Mattarella, the president of the Italian Republic, and Michele de Pascale, the mayor of Ravenna, presided over the opening of the refurbished chapel or tempietto (“little temple”) holding Dante’s tomb.

Celebrations of the poet’s life, works, and legacy have continued throughout the year not only in Italy but around the world, including a dynamic series of Dante-themed events in the United States—though the reality of life under COVID-19, with conferences, talks, and exhibits held remotely, has essentially erased borders and collapsed distances for the real-time dissemination of knowledge. While all-things-Dante are on the table for this milestone anniversary of his death, the occasion sparks special interest in the poet’s graveyard history, the subject of Dante’s Bones.

During World War II, the casket containing the poet’s remains was removed from the marble tomb and hidden underground to protect his bones from bombing and looting. But the last time the bones were actually taken out of the casket and examined was soon after the commemorations in 1921. It was reported last summer that plans are underway to reexamine Dante’s bones with modern scientific methods before the 700th anniversary of his death in September 2021. As you might imagine, I can’t wait to see what new light is shed on this subject that, for me, is more than just academic.

On the Bicentennial of the Greek Revolution

Greek Independence Day is celebrated on March 25th, observing the outbreak of the Greek War of Independence in 1821, which ultimately led to independence for Greece from the rule of the Ottoman Empire. Since independence, particular attention has been paid by the Greek people to the 50th, 100th, and 150th anniversaries of this revolutionary war. With the 200th anniversary approaching, it seems like an apt time to learn more about the legacy of each significant anniversary, and how the celebrations have come to represent different ways of celebrating Greek statehood. Below is an excerpt adapted from the chapter “Anniversaries” by Gonda Van Steen in The Greek Revolution: A Critical Dictionary edited by Paschalis M. Kitromilides and Constantinos Tsoukalas (being published on March 25).

In anticipation of the bicentennial of Greece’s independence, it may prove helpful to study the earlier celebrations, their main themes and agendas, the “imaginary nation” to which they appealed, and some of the images and reports they left behind. We expect to find the years 1871, 1921, and 1971 as the key anniversary dates, but we are immediately struck by an important exception: the grand celebrations of the centenary of 1921 were “postponed” due to political and military circumstances. Besides, the Greeks looked forward with great anticipation to a more wide-ranging series of events that was scheduled for 1930, the centenary of the year in which the Greek state was formed. Thus, past and present, and even the unknown but projected future, affected the making of the anniversaries of Greece as a product of a revolution and as a nation. Also, the various anniversaries offer up a potent reminder that, on each occasion, the nation’s process of becoming was yet to be completed. The year 1871 preceded the Balkan Wars (1912–1913) and the ensuing territorial gains by a few (turbulent) decades. The crisis of 1921–1922 signaled a reduction in the Greek territorial expanse and an even greater blow to Greek political and cultural self-confidence. The year 1971, which fell about halfway through the dictatorship period of 1967–1974, was used by the military regime to affirm “revolution” and “independence,” but by the anti-dictatorship opposition to question the extent to which the long-suffering state had been genuinely sovereign and democratic.

The productive but also troubled realm of Greek historical celebrations and of mass pageants has, for decades now, been central to the formation of Greek identity. For the greater purpose of instilling national sensibilities, the Greek state has put itself on display on the occasion of landmark anniversaries. The performative dimensions of anniversary parades, with their typical sequences of heroic episodes through the canonical ages of Hellenic civilization, had to model proper ideals and modes of conduct for Greece’s young people, especially. Three major events have marked the nation’s celebration history of the outbreak of the War of Independence in 1821. The domestic political culture and ideology of the three major anniversary dates—namely 1871, 1921 / 1930, and 1971—could hardly have been more different. Nonetheless, the execution as well as the objective of these jubilees of the past converged as they resorted to classicizing statues and mass pageantry to mark the Greek state’s public and formal use of history. Surveying these anniversaries has proven to be a fruitful exercise in anticipation of a critical evaluation of the bicentenary of the year 2021.

The Greeks of the three anniversaries of the revolution had not yet reached a consensus about how to present recent Greek history, but many had come to realize that the true interest of the national past lay in how it constituted and conditioned the future. Their monuments and festivals served the national interest and also the goal of political cohesion; they projected the idea of progress along a historical and cultural continuum, and they posited a survival, revival, or even resurrection of a Greek patriotic ethos. The sustained continuity model that linked the past to the present was, undoubtedly, engaged in national mythmaking. Also, this model kept suggesting a paradoxical kind of parthenogenesis of Greek culture, as if Greek culture moved forward in a controlled vacuum, from one military victory to the next, and was only ever driven by male leaders. The last jubilee of 1971, in particular, marked an intense era in Greek politics and culture when truth, authority, Greek history, destiny, and collective identity were the subjects of a public standoff that played out in the old venues. Perhaps for the last time, this jubilee tried to solidify a national master narrative that reasserted the political and socioeconomic status quo. In hindsight, it failed to once more crystallize the national myth. Let us hope that the bicentennial celebrations of 2021 will build on a critical reception of the past jubilees and will prove to be meaningfully different.

Q&A with Sharon Strocchia, author of Forgotten Healers: Women and the Pursuit of Health in Late Renaissance Italy

As part of Women’s History Month, we spoke with Sharon T. Strocchia about her new book, Forgotten Healers: Women and the Pursuit of Health in Late Renaissance Italy, which uncovers the crucial role women played in the great transformations of medical science and health care that accompanied the Italian Renaissance.

Your research demonstrates that women in Renaissance Italy played a major role in providing health care. Why have historians failed to recognize their centrality until so recently?

I would highlight two reasons why Renaissance women healers have been hiding in plain sight for so long. First, the historiography of Italian Renaissance medicine has been dominated by developments in academic medicine—anatomy, dissection, humanistic debates. Although this body of scholarship has been invaluable for understanding transformations in medical thinking, it has been less concerned with the lived experience of illness on the streets or the activities of frontline healers in households and hospitals. As a result, studies of women’s entanglements with household medicine, care practices, and the culture of experimentation on the Italian peninsula have not flourished to the same degree as elsewhere. Second, many of the care practices performed by Renaissance women have either been naturalized as “women’s work” or coded as charitable activities. The first interpretation makes women’s labor and know-how less visible, while the second often empties it of medical meaning. In addition, a persistent focus on practitioners’ official titles and occupational identities, along with the greater value assigned to cure over care, have led scholars to both undercount and undervalue the healthcare services women provided to household and community. In order to capture a more accurate, dynamic picture of medical provisioning in the early modern period, we need to redefine what “counts” as medical work.  

What was one of the most surprising discoveries you made while conducting archival research for this book?

I was amazed by the extent to which sixteenth-century Italian urban women kept abreast of market trends and new technologies for making remedies and wellness products. Religious women living in convents, for instance, kept their finger on the pulse of commercial life, in part because selling medicinal remedies represented such a vital revenue stream for their communities. Thanks to their wide-ranging information networks, they could respond nimbly to shifts in the medical marketplace, such as the globalization of new medicaments and changing consumer preferences. They also stayed connected to the knowledge circulating in local health markets by exchanging treasured recipes with friends and family and by experimenting directly with various health-giving products.

You focus on the various spaces where women practiced medicine—the household, the pox hospital, and the convent. Can you give an example of how nun apothecaries worked “at the nexus of religion, magic, and medicine”? How did they understand their work to be both sacred and scientific?

Take the case of the Tuscan nun Orsola Fontebuoni, who was active in the 1620s. This recognized charismatic seamlessly melded her spiritual gifts with naturalistic healing skills. An accomplished pharmacist, Orsola was conversant with old standbys from medieval Mediterranean pharmacopeia as well as newer additions to the European medicine chest imported from the Americas. She helped expand the convent’s pharmacy business while also attracting powerful patrons, thanks to her visions and ecstasies. Even while she was experimenting with new remedies in her workshop, she trafficked in healing relics, circulating them within local female networks that included members of the Medici court. Among her most intimate clients was the Tuscan grand duchess Maria Maddalena of Austria, to whom she provided magico-religious remedies like amulets, informed medical advice gleaned from long years of experience, and priceless consolation in the form of healing eloquence. For Orsola, these healing activities comprised an integrated whole that simultaneously tapped the powers of the natural and sacred worlds.

Your book moves between the micro and the macro in terms of historical scope, zeroing in on the lives of individual women and health practitioners to analyze the broader systems of their time. Who do you find to be one of the most fascinating figures in the book, and what do you think readers would want to know about her?

One of the most intriguing figures I encountered was the Florentine nun Giovanna Ginori. She came from a renowned local family that had deep investments in civic politics and social welfare initiatives. Giovanna entered the convent around age twelve and took vows four years later in 1517. Many of her female relatives were known for their charitable work, such as founding shelters for at-risk girls. So there was a shared family interest in helping the helpless, which probably accounts for Giovanna’s placement in the convent pharmacy at an early age. She apprenticed there for six years with an older, skilled mentor, from whom she learned her craft—how to identify and process medicinal herbs, how to prepare efficacious remedies, how to experiment with new techniques and materials. In the thirty-seven years that she ran the convent pharmacy, Giovanna also read widely in the medical literature of her day and experimented with new medical remedies in her workshop. Often working around the clock as a back-up nurse in the convent infirmary, she became a renowned pharmacist and healer. At the same time, she had a keen business sense that led her to develop innovative products, expand the pharmacy’s client base, and build its reputation. We still have several signed sales receipts written in her own hand. Gifted with skilled hands and an inquiring mind, Giovanna Ginori is proof positive that women have enjoyed a long history in medicine, science, and technology.   

We tend to focus on how far medicine has come since the 1500s, but what are some of the enduring effects or lessons of Renaissance medicine? How might we turn to the Renaissance to think about developing a culture of care and consolation?

I think there are a couple of things we can learn from these forgotten healers and their world. One is that the task of healing is complex. Renaissance medicine took a holistic view of health that wove together physical, mental, and spiritual or emotional elements. By contrast, modern biomedicine tends to divide the body into many constituent parts and to divorce human health from the broad ecosystems in which it is embedded. Renaissance notions of health and healing remind us that we’re deeply interconnected, both as individuals and as a species. I would also say that, while Renaissance medicine lacked the hallmarks associated with modern biomedicine, it was much richer in community-based resources. The importance of cultivating personal relationships with our healthcare providers as well as the crucial role played by support networks in sustaining health and well-being are lessons we’re learning over and over again.

The History of a Word

Few words are as ideologically charged as ghetto. Daniel B. Schwartz offers a fascinating account of the changing nuances of this slippery term, from its coinage to the present day, in Ghetto: The History of a Word. We asked him for a quick run-down of the word’s origin, what it described, and its modern meaning.

In the U.S., we associate the term “ghetto” with African American communities in inner cities. Could you explain how it originated in a very different setting?

In 1516, the Venetian Senate restricted all Jews living in Venice to a small island in the northern part of the lagoon city that was already known as the Ghetto Nuovo (or New Ghetto). It is generally believed that the island got its name from a copper foundry that had formerly been located there. “Ghetto” is thought to derive from the Italian verb gettare, meaning to throw or to cast, which would evoke the casting of metal for the production of ammunition at the foundry. By osmosis, the proper name Ghetto came to be associated with the Jews who now lived there, and more specifically with the phenomenon of the compulsory, segregated, and enclosed Jewish quarter. When residential segregation of Jews spread to other Italian towns and cities from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, the all-Jewish and only-Jewish areas formed came to be called ghettos. There were mandatory and exclusive Jewish neighborhoods in Europe before 1516—in Frankfurt am Main, for example, where Jews were forcibly concentrated in a particular street in 1462—but Venice is where the name “ghetto” for such neighborhoods originated.

What was life like in European ghettos at their peak? How isolated were Jewish residents?

Life in the European ghettos at their peak was in many ways paradoxical. On one hand, the ghettos had many of the drawbacks of segregated areas: because the boundaries of the ghetto typically were not extended sufficiently to accommodate the growth of population, they were often appallingly overcrowded. Ghettos featured some of the tallest buildings in the city, with seven to as many as nine floors needed to house all the people; when these tenement-like apartments were built in narrow alleys, they frequently obscured the flow of light. A saying that originated in eighteenth-century Italian, fare un ghetto, “to make a ghetto,” may have betrayed traditional stereotypes about Jewish noisiness, but it stands to reason that ghettos were clamorous, cacophonous places where sounds were intensified. On the other hand, the ghetto was also seen as a kind of haven, a walled city in miniature where Jews enjoyed a measure of protection from the outside world and, significantly, were spared the much worse fate of expulsion. It must be emphasized that the original ghettos of early modern Europe were not prisons. Though there were curfews that required Jews to be back in the ghettos by a certain hour, when the gates would be shut and locked, Jews (so long as they were wearing some distinguishing garment, typically in the case of the Italian ghettos a colored hat) were free to leave the ghetto by day to conduct business or visit gentile acquaintances. The boundaries of the ghetto were porous; there were always, at least during the permitted hours, Christians entering and Jews leaving. They were not only physically, but culturally permeable: behind the walls of the ghetto, Jews absorbed everything from the language to the folkways of the surrounding society, even if they tended also to “Judaize” them. Despite the fact Jews were forced to live apart in their own quarters, they were much less isolated than the connotations of the word “ghetto” would lead one to expect.

How did the ghettos come to an end?

Many of the ghettos of Italy and Central Europe were razed to the ground by French armies during the Napoleonic Wars, as part of their campaign to export the French revolution and its emancipation of the Jews to all the areas they conquered. In some cases, most notably in Rome, Napoleon’s defeat and the restoration of the old regime resulted in a re-ghettoization of Jews. The plight of Roman Jewry, which had been steadily impoverished and worn down as a result of papal pressure over the centuries, was a focus of a great deal of attention on the part of both Jews and non-Jews in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, by which point the fact this community was still ghettoized was seen as anomalous. Rome’s ghetto was finally dismantled in 1870, after the popes were stripped of all temporal power and the project of Italian unification was completed. It was the last of the old European ghettos to fall. Most of the European ghettos were leveled as part of urban renewal projects, so that there are only a handful that one can visit today that even somewhat resemble what they once looked like. In Venice, most of the buildings (including the synagogues) and the layout of the ghetto were preserved, so that it offers the best opportunity to see the ghetto as it was.

The dismantling of ghettos sounds like a completely good thing. But did it have any unanticipated effects on Jewish communities?

In the wake of the dismantling of ghettos, some began to express a certain nostalgia for what they believed had been lost in the process. They associated the ghetto with an entire gestalt of Jewish traditions, customs, folkways, values, and social types in the midst of disappearing. This outlook conveyed a degree of unease about modernity, which was seen as a homogenizing force that threatened to swallow any residual spaces of old-world Judaism. Later, when Zionists began to polemicize against Jewish liberal integrationists, they occasionally sought to redeem the much-derided figure of the “ghetto Jew” (associated with weakness, servility, and obscurantism) by comparing him favorably to an “assimilated Jew” they deemed rootless, inauthentic, and neurotic.

How and when did the term cross the Atlantic? When did we start to apply it chiefly to African American urban communities?

In the case of America, we can speak of two fundamental migrations of the word “ghetto.” The first was when it crossed the Atlantic and came to be applied to Jewish immigrant enclaves such as New York’s Lower East Side and Chicago’s Near West Side. This began in the final quarter of the nineteenth century, amid the groundswell of East European Jewish immigration to America, though it really gathered momentum in the 1890s. These immigrant enclaves were legally voluntary, even if Jews clustered there in part because of social and economic pressures. This use of the word “ghetto” to designate a voluntary as opposed to mandatory form of Jewish residential concentration represented a major stretching of the term, though this had already begun in Europe, where Jewish immigrant quarters such as London’s East End were also referred to as ghettos. The new application of the word, however, was not without controversy; some protested the use of “ghetto” as a synonym for “Jewish quarter” because of the negative images it conjured, and one American Jewish notable succeeded in persuading the New York Times to cease referring to the LES as the “New York Ghetto.” The second migration was the transfer of the term from Jewish to African American enclaves. Usage of the word “ghetto” to refer to the residential segregation of blacks began in the African American press in the 1910s as part of a protest against new city ordinances in the South and Midwest that forbade blacks from buying or renting a home on a block the majority of whose residents were white (and vice versa). Such zoning laws were found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1917. But residential segregation of blacks continued in the form of restrictive covenants, redlining, and the segregation of public housing (among other things)—and usage of the word “ghetto” to refer to black segregation gradually became more mainstream. That said, the term only came to be primarily associated with African Americans rather than Jews in the postwar period and in particular in the 1960s and 1970s, when the focus of the civil rights movement began to shift from Jim Crow in the South to the ghettos of the North.

How do Jewish people today think about the term?

Certainly, there are several misunderstandings that continue to prevail. Many Jews would argue that most Jews lived in ghettos prior to emancipation, despite the fact urban ghettos were generally limited to the Italian peninsula and a few Central European cities (e.g. Frankfurt, Prague) and were not, on balance, to be found in Poland, where most early modern Jews lived. Despite decades of revisionist scholarship that has challenged the notion that the original European ghettos were largely isolated, it is not clear that this has made a significant dent in popular perceptions. The fact that Jewish immigrant enclaves in this country were once referred to as ghettos has mostly been forgotten; it would probably surprise most Jews to see a postcard of the Lower East Side from the early twentieth century with a street scene labeled “The Ghetto.” When Jews think of Jewish ghettos today, it is probably the Warsaw Ghetto that comes first to mind, though the Nazi ghetto was starkly different (and much worse) than the original European ghettos that coined the term. I think Jews regard the fact the word “ghetto” has come to be primarily associated with another people with some ambivalence. On one hand, the term has mostly pejorative connotations, so that many are happy to bid it farewell. On the other hand, some view the application of the term to African American enclaves with skepticism, whether on account of the fact the de jure dimensions of black segregation in this country were typically not as overt and clear-cut as the statutory laws of early modern Jewish segregation or the Nazi segregation of Jews, or because they see the term as somehow “belonging” to Jewish history and resent its appropriation. Whatever the case, I would say that the word “ghetto” remains a keyword for Jews, one that carries a special ideological charge and is capable of evoking images and associations that exceed any dictionary definition of the term.

Julian Jackson on Charles de Gaulle (part 2)

Julian Jackson's  De Gaulle draws on unpublished letters, memoirs, and papers in the newly opened de Gaulle archives that show how this volatile and inspiring leader put his broken nation back at the center of world affairs. Following up on our last post, we had just a few more questions for Professor Jackson.  

Moral leadership is a hot button topic, especially here in the US. What can we learn from de Gaulle’s conception of political greatness and from his understanding of the qualities that make a great leader? 

JJ: Before he was a political leader after 1940 de Gaulle was a soldier but also a soldier intellectual. He wrote extensively about leadership in the inter-war years, and had reflected deeply and in a very cerebral way on what makes a great leader. In some sense he wrote the ‘script’ of leadership which he then acted out after 1940. His vision of leadership and political action was much influenced by the French philosopher Bergson. This is what he told an American journalist in the 1960s about his philosophy of action: “I was much influenced by Bergson particularly because he made me understand the philosophy of action. Bergson explains the role of intelligence and analysis. He saw how necessary it is to analyze questions in search of the truth, but intellect alone cannot act. The intelligent man does not automatically become the man of action. Instinct is also important. Instinct plus impulse; but impulse alone is also not sufficient as a basis for action. The two, intellect and impulse, must go together … Great men have both intellect and impulse. The brain serves as a brake upon pure emotional impulse. The brain surmounts impulse; but there must also be impulse and the capability for action in order not to be paralyzed by the brake of the brain.”

So for de Gaulle leadership was a balance between critical intelligence, intuition and moral courage. By moral courage he meant that it was necessary sometimes to break with all established authority: to disobey. In his book on leadership in 1932 he wrote about one British admiral of the First War: ‘He has all the qualities of Nelson bar one: he does not know how to disobey!’

In 1940, by deciding to defy the most revered figure in France, Marshal Pétain, and to take the decision to go alone to France to continue the combat, de Gaulle was taking an act of extraordinary moral courage but it was underpinned by that capacity for rational reflection that he also believed to be an essential ingredient of leadership: his ‘reason’ told him that the battle of France was only the first stage in what would become a world war which the Allies would win. But it is one thing to analyse events correctly; it is another to act on that analysis – as de Gaulle did in 1940.

You dive into the little-known fact of de Gaulle’s deep Catholic faith. How did his religious values guide his beliefs and his actions? Do you think his Catholicism played a role in his principled rejection of Nazism and of accommodation?

JJ: De Gaulle’s Catholic faith was indeed profound but it was also very personal. One must be careful about reading this into his political action. It is true that he developed a moral rhetoric in opposition to Nazi Germany and to the Vichy regime, and it true that as a Christian humanist he was revolted by Nazism. His thinking about totalitarianism in general was influenced by ‘social Catholicism’ which rejected the supposedly soulless materialism of both capitalism and socialism. But I would not want to exaggerate the importance of this in his opposition to Nazism. In the 1930s it was Germany that de Gaulle opposed because, as a conservative nationalist, he believed German expansionism was a threat to France. There is almost nothing about Nazism in de Gaulle’s warnings against Germany in the 1930s. De Gaulle was a kind of existential nationalist who believed that the struggle between nations was the eternal motor of history, and that when nations adopted certain ideologies they were always just a cloak for national ambition: so he believed that Communism was only a cloak for the traditional interests of Russia – he always preferred to talk of Russia not the Soviet Union – that Roosevelt’s liberal internationalism was just a cloak for the interest of the United States and that Nazism was just a new avatar of German expansionism. So when he opposed the collaborating Vichy regime he did in due course oppose the domestic politics of that regime – its anti-Semitism, its suppression of liberty and so on – but in the end the key to his opposition to Vichy was that it has betrayed France’s national interest by accepting German domination.

You write very movingly about de Gaulle’s relationship with his daughter Anne, who had Down’s syndrome. Tell us a bit about that relationship, and what it tells us about him.

JJ: It was indeed a strange and moving relationship. On the surface de Gaulle seemed to many people to have a certain quality of inhumanity, an inability to show his feelings. When one of his aides during the war bemoaned the fact that de Gaulle seemed incapable of showing a more human face, the reply was ‘it is impossible to make someone who is tone deaf appreciate music any more than it is possible to ask de Gaulle suddenly to develop human contact’. But his relationship with Anne shows another side to the personality – a human being under the carapace. She was very severely handicapped, unable to talk or to feed herself. But there was never any question that she would be put in an institution: for the twenty sad years of her life she was always with them – in France before 1940, in London during the war, in Algiers after 1943 and so on. And de Gaulle seemed to form an extraordinarily tender relationship with her, singing her songs, telling her stories, taking her on walks. Perhaps she was one of the few people not frightened by him.  Of course this relationship was also a testament to his deep Catholic faith. He wrote of Anne: ‘Her birth was a trial for my wife and myself. But believe me, Anne is my joy and my strength. She is the grace of God in my life … She has kept me in the security of obedience to the sovereign will of God.’  After Anne’s premature death he wrote to her elder sister: ‘Her soul has been liberated.’

When France pulled out of Indochina, America stepped in. What did de Gaulle think America should have done differently in Vietnam?

JJ: He had originally hoped to hold on to Indo-China, and the French finally abandoned the region in 1954 after a costly war. De Gaulle was no longer in power at that time. But he had learned the lessons of that conflict. As he told a visiting American in 1964: ‘I do not believe that you can win in this situation even though you have more aircraft, cannons, and arms of various kinds … I do not mean that all of the Vietnamese are against you but they regard the United States as a foreign power and a very powerful foreign power.’ An American Senator was told a year later: ‘Ho Chi Minh is a Communist but he is also a national figure, the one who expelled the French and will do the same to the Americans. This is what he is using his Communism for. He did it in the past against us, he is doing it now against you, he will do it perhaps in the future against China.’

In private he was even more brutal: ‘when they start sending thousands of boys, people will start to notice. When the coffins start coming back that will make people think. And once that combines with their problems with the Blacks and with the dollar, it will create a context of discontent which will get worse with their dirty war.’ When President Nixon (a great admirer of de Gaulle) visited Paris in March 1969, a few weeks before de Gaulle left power, he received a long lecture on the need for the Americans to give up their unwinnable war.

In all this de Gaulle was applying the lessons of his own experience. But of course all this gave him a certain Schadenfreude: he enjoyed the chance to occupy the moral high ground, to teach the Americans lesson and to use the war to position himself as a hero of the Third World.

De Gaulle continues to influence French politics. What role does he play in President Macron’s policymaking? In his stance on Syria? While the two leaders belong to very different ages, there seem to be some likenesses. Do you consider Macron to be a neo-Gaullist?

JJ: Yes, Macron is of another era and one should be careful of comparisons. But in some sense what makes Macron possible is the constitution that de Gaulle created in 1958 and which now almost all the French accept. Previously the French Republican tradition was suspicious of ‘strong’ men because of the precedents of Napoleon and of his nephew Napoleon III. So the French preferred a model of weak parliamentary politics. De Gaulle, who came from a monarchical tradition, completely changed that. He possibly even had a certain nostalgia for the monarchy while realizing – again his sense of realism! – that monarchy was impossible. What he did instead was to create what he himself on one occasion called a Republican monarchy: the directly elected French President is one of the most powerful heads of state in the world, and Macron is glorying in the possibilities that such power gives him. Macron talks of the ‘verticality’ of power and of his ‘Jupiterian’ style of leadership. All this is very Gaullist and it is surely no coincidence that Macron’s official portrait as President has him posing in front of a copy of de Gaulle’s War Memoirs!

Having said that, in many other ways Macron could hardly be more different from de Gaulle: Macron is an economic liberal and de Gaulle believed that the State needed to play a role in the direction of the economy; Macron is also a convinced ‘European’ arguing for greater European integration while de Gaulle’s vision of Europe was very different: he was viscerally opposed to European federalism.  So it is in his style of governing that Macron is most ‘Gaullist’. But Macron should also remember what happened to de Gaulle after 10 years of the jupiterian exercise of power: he was faced with the revolutionary events of May 68 which signaled the beginning of the end. France in 1968 was like a pressure cooker ready to explode. That could happen again.

 If de Gaulle could only be remembered for one thing, what should that be?

JJ: He saved the honor of France in 1940.

Julian Jackson on Charles de Gaulle

Julian Jackson has written the definitive biography of the mythic general who refused to accept the Nazi domination of France.  De Gaulle draws on unpublished letters, memoirs, and papers in the newly opened de Gaulle archives that show how this volatile and inspiring leader put his broken nation back at the center of world affairs. We asked Professor Jackson about de Gaulle and his process in writing the book. 

It’s been more than 25 years since a major biography of de Gaulle has been written. Why has he been ignored for so long? Why is now a good time to take a new look at this titanic figure?

The last major biography of de Gaulle was published in French in 2002 but since then the de Gaulle archives have been opened. While the English speaking world has been far less interested in de Gaulle than in Churchill, it is certainly not true to say that he is ignored in France: books come about him literally every week, of varying quality. In France he is a figure revered on an even greater scale than Churchill in Britain.

It is a good time to re-visit de Gaulle for many reasons. One of these is that many of the questions he posed are still relevant today, and indeed possibly more relevant than ever: He governed at the height of the Cold War but was convinced that the Cold War would not last and that it was necessary to work to achieve a stable and balanced post-Cold War order, and we are still trying to achieve that; he was seen as anti-American but in reality he was looking forward to a time when the US would not necessarily see its interests bound up with those of western Europe and NATO, and felt that Europe must organize its own affairs and its defense. In the era of Donald Trump that seems more relevant than ever. For the British, who are in the process of leaving the EU, de Gaulle’s views about Britain and Europe seem prescient in the extreme, as do his comments on the consequences for the Middle East of Israel’s occupation of the territories it conquered in 1967.

That is not to say de Gaulle was always right but the questions he posed still matter today. For me the interests in reading about him lies in exceptional nature of his career. He led a truly fascinating life at every level.

De Gaulle was, with FDR and Churchill, one of the three great leaders of the second world war. Both FDR and Churchill found him deeply difficult to work with and their opinions of him – as aloof, egotistical, prickly to a fault – have largely defined his reputation in the English-speaking world. Is that fair? Or was Churchill’s de Gaulle a terrible caricature?

De Gaulle was indeed a prickly and aloof personality who found it hard to show his feelings. But this was exacerbated during the Second War by his sense of humiliation at the defeat of France and by his ambition to re-assert France’s role as a great power. One way of doing this was to be almost obsessively vigilant in defense of France’s interests even if this meant opposing his own allies. He often bit the hand that fed him because he wanted to show that France still had teeth. In this way, he turned his own personality into an instrument of policy.

In the case of Roosevelt, de Gaulle felt justifiably bitter that the Americans continued to gamble – mistakenly – that the collaborating Vichy regime would in the end rally to the Allies. De Gaulle said this would not happen; and he was proved right. He was not an easy personality but in the end Roosevelt’s attitude towards him was almost unhinged whereas for all their quarrels Churchill did appreciate de Gaulle’s stature. I am a great admirer of Roosevelt but his treatment of de Gaulle was not one of the more glorious or perspicacious aspects of his career.

You write that during his thirty years in politics, de Gaulle was brutally divisive. Why and how?

De Gaulle found himself at the heart of two bitter civil wars and for this reason it was inevitable that he would be seen as divisive: civil wars are by their nature divisive. His ambition was in fact to unite the French – it was his obsession – but this was simply not possible.

The first of those civil wars occurred between 1940 and 1944 over whether or not to collaborate with, or resist, the Germans. Some people afterwards reproached de Gaulle for creating a national myth that all the French had resisted except for a few traitors. He knew this was false but he invented the myth to bind the French together again. The second conflict was over the independence of Algeria: de Gaulle was never forgiven by the one million white Europeans in Algeria for conceding that Algeria would be independent. It is true that de Gaulle moved towards Algerian independence in a rather zig-zag manner which led many of these people to feel he had betrayed them. But however he had done this he would have faced their bitter hatred – leading to several assassination attempts against him. One of the guiding mantras of all his political action was the need to accept reality, however painful. But these were people living in a denial of reality. De Gaulle had tried to be a teacher but they were unwilling to listen to his lesson.

What did previous biographers get right, what did they get wrong, and what new revelations does your book introduce?

Previous biographers have tended to oversimplify de Gaulle whereas my biography shows his complexity and ambiguity.  There are some new documents revealed in my biography: for example, an amazing telephone conversation between him and his ministers negotiating with the Algerian independence fighters. The conversation, which I cite in its entirety, shows de Gaulle’s desperation to end the Algerian conflict at almost any price. But overall my book is not offering lots of new revelations – the basic facts of the story are confirmed by my research in the de Gaulle archives – but more about offering a more nuanced and complex interpretation. Good history is not about ‘scoops’ but about explaining and interpreting the past.

De Gaulle is perhaps most famous in France today for his decision to pull out of Algeria. Tell us about that decision. As the leader of the Free French, he had called on the French empire to support the resistance. Was that a difficult decision for him? Why did he do it? What do you think he would make of the Iraq war—or the war in Syria?

The decision to leave Algeria was a painful one for him because it represented a defeat for France even if he tried to dress it up as a decision that he had taken of his own free will. He did it because he believed that the Algerian war was poisoning French politics and that decolonization was a necessity. He could see that the war was also turning France into a pariah in the Third World and impeding his ambition to give France a role of moral leadership against the United States. That is why he decided that Algerian independence was necessary.

There was also a rather cynical side to this. The defenders of so-called French Algeria argued for what they called ‘integration’: that Algeria should be fully integrated into France and its Muslim population become fully French citizens. This was a bit hypocritical on the part of Europeans who had done all to deny rights to Algerian Muslims for decades. But de Gaulle’s objection was a pragmatic (one might even say racist) one. As he put it once to one of his Ministers: ‘Have you seen the Muslims with their turbans and their djellabas? You can see that they are not French. Try and integrate oil and vinegar. Shake the bottle. After a moment they separate again. The Arabs are Arabs; the French are French. Do you think that the French can absorb ten million Muslims who will tomorrow be twenty million and after tomorrow forty? If we carry out integration, if all the Berbers and Arabs of Algeria were regarded as French, how would one stop them coming to settle on the mainland where the standard of living is so much higher? My village would no longer be called Colombes-les-deux-Eglises but Colombey-the-two-Mosques.”

But de Gaulle came to his views about the Empire slowly. In 1940 he did indeed hope that the Empire would rally to him, and was disappointed when it did not. He did all he could to hold on to the Empire after 1945 and part of his resentment against the British was that he believed (wrongly) they were trying to oust the French from the Middle East. He had tried to hold on to French Indo-China after 1945 and was opposed when French forces pulled out. In other words, he was not really, as he later claimed, a prophet of decolonization, but he was ultimately a realist.

It is dangerous to try and make any historical figures speak from the grave and I cannot say what de Gaulle would think about the current Syrian situation. But one thing is certain: he would not have allowed France to be dragged into the Iraq War in the wake of the United States. He would have seized the opportunity to assert France’s independent policy. When the French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin went to the United Nations in 2003 and refused any French participation in the Iraq War he sounded almost like de Gaulle speaking from the grave. De Gaulle could also have moments of really prophetic intuition which came from his deep immersion in history. This is what he said about Iraq in 1964: ‘The Sunnis with the Shias and the Kurds. These are countries destined to be divided because they contain altogether different peoples who do not have the same religion, the same past.’

(This is the first of a two-part interview)