France’s hopes of preventing the re-emergence of a central German authority had failed once it became clear that America would not back such a policy. From 1949, Germany was divided by the Cold War into a Soviet puppet state in the east – which the non-Soviet bloc did not recognize – and the German Federal Republic in the west. De Gaulle realized that this development was irreversible, and his speeches from 1949 started to float the possibility of, as he put it, an accord between ‘Gauls and Teutons’
