From Encyclopedia to Google: Searching for De Gaulle

What was the last thing you searched for online? Why were you looking for it?

✍️Writer’s Note

This piece is both a reflection on personal memory and a reminder of the enduring relevance of history. By revisiting de Gaulle through a modern online search, I contrast the depth of books with the fleeting nature of today’s information. The piece seeks to bridge personal experience with political insight.

Letters to the Prompt

The prompt asked the question: “What was the last thing you searched for online? Why were you looking for it?”
It reminded me how much life and society have changed. As a youngster in the 1950s, I would search for information in one of the volumes of the Elsevier Encyclopedia, which was then an excellent source of knowledge.

All my life I have had a certain idea of France.”

— Charles de Gaulle

As for the question itself: the last thing I searched for was the biography of Charles de Gaulle—an intriguing figure who might remind us how prescient he was in considering the United States “an occupying state interfering in all economic, military, and political processes in the world.” In 1966, he withdrew France from NATO’s integrated command, declaring that France had taken its sovereignty back into its own hands. For Europeans like me, this raises the question: Perhaps Charles de Gaulle was right after all?

In that search, I came across Julian Jackson’s biography De Gaulle, described by Richard Norton Smith in the Wall Street Journal as:

“In crafting the finest one-volume life of de Gaulle in English, Julian Jackson has come closer than anyone before him to demystifying this conservative at war with the status quo, for whom national interests were inseparable from personal honor.”

Much has changed since the 1950s. Not everything has changed for the better, but information technology has certainly left a positive footprint. What has not changed is my preference for reading books over the sound-bite information that dominates today.

Netherlands, William J J Houtzager, Aka WJJH, October 2025

📌Blog Description

A reflection sparked by a simple prompt: what we search for online today versus where we once searched for knowledge. From childhood encyclopedias to Charles de Gaulle’s warnings about American power, this post explores how times have changed—and how some lessons from the past remain vital.