Mauriac finally broke with L’Express in 1961 and moved his column to Le Figaro, the newspaper of bourgeois conservative opinion. Here his Gaullism sat as uneasily as it had in L’Express because the newspaper’s readers had their own reservations about de Gaulle: most were nostalgic for Algérie française, many opposed de Gaulle’s anti-Americanism because they were anti-Communist, and some harboured residual admiration for Pétain.
