ABSTRACT
Democracy is the unchallenged and only legitimate social and political regime and “ideal” of the modern world. To question it in any significant way is to place oneself outside the spectrum of respectable political action and discourse; it is to risk consigning oneself to the category of the reactionary or retrograde. Yet Charles de Gaulle, arguably the greatest statesman of the twentieth century, was an ambivalent democrat, one without any illusions about the strengths and weaknesses of the democratic order. We must ask, was he then a reactionary, a noble anachronism briefly interrupting the approaching end of history? Does he speak to the political condition of modern democratic man?
