NO biographer or historian has yet quite captured the greatness of Charles de Gaulle. Daniel J. Mahoney’s De Gaulle: Statesmanship, Grandeur, and Modern Democracy (Praeger, 188 pages, $ 45) takes a new approach. It is an extraordinarily penetrating and original study of de Gaulle as political thinker.

To appreciate this book, Americans must overcome their understandable prejudice against de Gaulle. Even as we are moved by the French general’s proud resistance to Hitler in the name of national honor, we note the absurdities: During the war, de Gaulle insisted on being treated as the equal of Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin although the French contributed little to the Nazis’ defeat. And after the war, President de Gaulle’s political judgment was clouded by unrealistic pretensions for both France and himself. He grandly but foolishly denied the fact of his nation’s greatly reduced and declining place in the world, its dependence on the United States for defense and on an increasingly united Europe for its political and economic future. This posturing irritated American presidents, who saw his usefulness as an anti-Communist ally compromised by his French chauvinism and anti-Americanism.