Why de Gaulle’s historical legacy matters

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A lot of people are obsessed with a de Gaulle myth. The danger of talking too much about a myth is that we forget that there is a reality; there is an important historical legacy which really matters in France today. There are a lot of aspects to it. One that might seem very obvious, but which does need to be mentioned, is that had there not been de Gaulle between 1940 and 1944, the French people’s view of themselves after 1944 would have necessarily been very different.

By an extraordinary act of willpower and bluff, de Gaulle managed, between 1940 and 1944, to take a nation that had been utterly defeated, and end up, in 1944 and 1945, on the winning side. That is a particularly extraordinary thing. He knew perfectly well that there was an element of bluff in it. He knew that France had been liberated in 1944 by the British and the Americans, and that that would have happened without him, but he managed to insert himself into that history.

Recognition as head of State

In 1944 and 1945, France is not an occupied country. France is a country where de Gaulle is recognised by the Allies as the head of the French State. He manages to secure a zone of occupation in Germany in 1945, which is remarkable given what has happened to France in 1939 to 1940. France today has a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council.

Now, you could say that that would have happened anyway; Churchill would always have wanted France to be rebuilt as a counterweight to the Soviet Union and to Germany. That’s possible; I don’t know. It’s counterfactual history. What we know is, in a sense, it would have been much more difficult for that to have happened if there had not been in 1944 and 1945, a functioning French government under a recognised head of State: de Gaulle. It took him a while to be recognised by Roosevelt, but he got there in the end. That legacy is important and shouldn’t be neglected, even if it’s kind of impalpable today, apart from the United Nations seat.

De Gaulle and post-war reconstruction

There is a legacy of a whole series of measures that were taken by de Gaulle’s provisional government between 1944 and 1946. De Gaulle resigned from power in January 1946, but he was there at that moment of immediate post-war reconstruction.

You can compare the achievements of that moment of reconstruction with, for example, what the Labour government did in England from 1945 to 1948. In Britain, there was the building of the National Health Service, and in France there was a system of social security, what the French today still refer to as the French model of social protection. There was also the setting up of the École Nationale d’Administration (ENA), this elite training school for civil servants, which still plays an extraordinarily important part in French political culture. President Macron is a graduate of the ENA and so are most leading French politicians.

When the French talk about wanting to protect a certain modèle français, a French model, actually, that French model emerged in those two years, 1944 to 1946, when de Gaulle was in power. I would qualify that slightly by saying that de Gaulle was more the instrument of a historical moment than the promoter of it. Those reforms were largely in the air du temps, the mood of the moment, and if it hadn’t been de Gaulle, I think others would have carried them through. It was that post-war moment of rebuilding. So, de Gaulle, as it were, put his name to it, but I’m not so convinced that he was the inspiration behind it. Afterwards, he wasn’t happy about some of the measures that happened, such as nationalisations.

De Gaulle’s legacy of political institutions

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There are two key legacies of de Gaulle in modern France: one is a certain set of attitudes about foreign policy, but another is the institutions. In a sense, the institutions of the Fifth Republic, the republic that governs France today, are the creation of de Gaulle. It is a curious constitution. It’s perhaps not a perfect constitution, but it is the constitution that de Gaulle created with others. He was the dominant element in 1958 – and it is the constitution that has lasted since 1958.

For all the talk from time to time by politicians – We need a Sixth Republic; it isn’t working – it seems to me that there is essentially a consensus around that constitution. The presidential election that takes place in France every five years (it used to be every seven years) is something that really does engage the French. People might say they’re not voting as much in legislative elections or local elections, but the presidential election, which was so disputed when de Gaulle introduced it in 1962 by universal suffrage, now has a kind of consensus. So, a nation that was fundamentally divided about its political culture since the French Revolution has, for the first time since the French Revolution, achieved something approaching a consensus about its political institutions.

A builder of consensus

De Gaulle was very conscious of that as one of his ambitions. He had an extraordinary conversation as early as 1943 with Harold Macmillan, later British Prime Minister. Macmillan was at that time in Algeria as a representative of Churchill, and de Gaulle was there also. Macmillan reports this conversation where de Gaulle says, ‘The French crisis dates back to 1789.’ An extraordinary comment.

Basically, what he’s saying is that France has been politically divided since then – and he sees his role in the future as breaching that divide. He later put it in a rather neat way. He said that what he wanted to do was what he had succeeded in doing. I don’t want to heroise de Gaulle, but I think this is a genuine achievement. He said he wanted to reconcile the French left to the State, to a State that is effective, and to reconcile the French right to a nation. Or, to put it another way: he wanted to reconcile the French left to the idea that they needed strong executive authority, and to reconcile the traditions of the French right to the idea that they needed democracy, the sovereignty of the people.

I think it’s only somebody who came, as de Gaulle did, from a monarchist conservative background who could, in a sense, have effected that reconciliation of two traditions. That is a really significant legacy.

Flaws in the Fifth Republic

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Having said that, it’s not that everything works in the Fifth Republic. It is in some ways a very dysfunctional system, in the sense that it concentrates so much power in the presidency. The president is really the figure to which everybody looks. There is a prime minister and there’s a built-in structural conflict between the prime minister, who’s responsible to parliament, and the president, who is elected by universal suffrage. That is a problem with the working of that constitution.

However, the greater problem with the working of that constitution is the accentuation of a tradition of centralisation in French politics. If we take contemporary France today, when President Macron, only about 18 months after coming to power, faced that extraordinary popular uprising of the yellow vests, the gilets jaunes, that didn’t come out of nowhere. It partly came out of a frustration that people feel, in this very top-down system, that the only way to be heard is taking to the streets. So, if you had more effective transmission belts between the bottom and the top, perhaps these eruptions of anger, of populist politics, would be less frequent.

All constitutions are imperfect

My own feeling is that we must never expect that there is such a thing as a perfect constitution. Only in the fantasies of constitutionalists do perfect constitutions exist. All in all, constitutions are imperfect. When de Gaulle himself was outlining his constitutional ideas in 1946, he quoted the Greek philosopher Solon, who, when asked what the best constitution was, said: Tell me for what people and in what period.

What I would say to those who criticise, and I think justifiably, some aspects of the way that the Fifth Republic works would partly be that it was dealing with a particular problem. It was dealing with a different kind of dysfunctionality of the Fourth Republic. No politician in 1958 in France thought the situation could go on as it was when de Gaulle came back to power. Almost the entire political class of the Fourth Republic knew that something had to change. They didn’t necessarily want to change as radically as de Gaulle did, but they were aware that this was a regime where governments came and went with enormous frequency, where there was no continuity, no stability, and where there was a total sense of disillusion with the system.

Discover more about

The legacies of de Gaulle

Jackson, J. (2019). A Certain Idea of France: The Life of Charles de Gaulle. Penguin.

Jackson, J. (2003). Charles de Gaulle. Haus Publishing.

The Fifth Republic and de Gaulle's legacies in modern France