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June 20 - August 31, 2025
This was a stark contrast to the failure to find a solution for Algeria. But Algeria was viewed more as an internal French problem than as a colonial one – and the drama of Algeria should not obscure the Fourth Republic’s other successes in the field of decolonization. Here again de Gaulle had precedents to build on.
Maurice Papon.
Although offering Muslims full equality with Europeans could be read as the beginning of the implementation of that idea of total ‘integration’ between Algeria and France which the pied noir activists desired, they were alarmed that de Gaulle had not uttered the magic words Algérie française.
De Gaulle would not, however, accept any compromise on the clause of the constitution (ultimately Article 16) that authorized the President to assume full powers in a national emergency.
Although the constitution did not set up a presidential system, the President of the Republic was given greater democratic legitimacy, and therefore potentially greater power, by being elected not just by two houses of parliament but by a wider electoral college including representatives of local government – a key proposal of de Gaulle’s Bayeux speech. The President also had the right to dissolve parliament, and consult the people directly by referenda.
The Consultative Committee introduced one important modification to that part of the constitution covering relations between France and her African territories. Although this soon turned out to be academic because the territories became independent, the issue aroused much passion at the time. The question was how the constitution would dovetail with the structures established by the Loi Cadre of 1956.
The conundrum whether to opt for a ‘federation’ or a ‘confederation’ was solved by inventing the term ‘Community’, a word used by de Gaulle himself in a speech on 13 July. It had the advantage of sounding generous while having no precise juridical meaning – indeed no meaning at all. In reality, the new constitution offered the African states no more than the Loi Cadre of the Fourth Republic. All key areas of sovereignty – foreign policy, defence, finance – remained with France; and the states retained the French flag and national anthems. The result was less than many African leaders wanted.
The Africans were offered the choice between accepting the terms of the Community – a ‘yes’ vote – and independence. The implication of choosing independence was that France would cut all links. This implicit blackmail was not to the taste of Ahmed Sékou Touré, the young nationalist leader of Guinea in West Africa.
The Socialist Party officially voted to support it, and this led to a faction splitting off and forming a new dissident Autonomous Socialist Party (PSA). Le Monde, barometer of progressive liberal opinion, advocated a qualified ‘yes’.
The new constitution was formally promulgated on 4 October. Parliamentary elections were set for the following month. These elections were another success for de Gaulle but not entirely as he had intended. Although there had been no official ‘Gaullist’ Party since the winding up of the RPF, Guichard, Soustelle and Chaban-Delmas set about rapidly creating one. Dubbed the Union pour la Nouvelle République (UNR), it fielded candidates in 341 constituencies, although de Gaulle ensured that none stood against any minister in his government (so Pflimlin, Mollet, Pinay and four others had no UNR
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The second surprise was that the UNR which had been created only two months earlier secured 17.6 per cent of the vote, making it the second-largest party after the Communists. The Socialists and MRP, who had been the centrist linchpins of the Fourth Republic, held up reasonably well with 15.7 per cent and 10 per cent respectively.
Several political commentators noted that the result of the elections had been to elect a chambre introuvable crammed with deputies possibly more Gaullist than de Gaulle – or at least thinking that they were.39
Ferhat Abbas
On 9 January 1959, the first government of the Fifth Republic was proclaimed. De Gaulle immediately named Michel Debré as his Prime Minister. With an ultra-loyal Gaullist Prime Minister, a near-majority in parliament and the support of public opinion, de Gaulle was in an unprecedentedly strong position to carry out the ‘resurrection’ he had announced in his press conference of 19 May 1958.
De Gaulle made other private comments in the same vein. He was sceptical about integration because his beliefs were not grounded in that progressive tradition according to which the universal values of French republicanism had created a community of equal citizens superseding racial or ethnic identities. In Algeria, that ideal had always been more honoured in the breach than in the observance, but it gave Soustelle’s commitment to integration an ideological coherence rooted in the progressive left.
Independence, however, was far down the road when de Gaulle returned to power. The second certainty about de Gaulle in 1958 is that he believed that Algeria should remain ‘French’ in some form.
For the moment de Gaulle’s policy was to wait. As he remarked to one politician in 1958: ‘The most common error of all statesmen is to believe firmly that there exists at any one moment a solution to every problem. There are in some periods problems to which no solution exists.’
This international context was the second reason for de Gaulle to act.37 Although militarily weakened in Algeria, the FLN was scoring successes on the international stage. The Arab states, which had all recognized the GPRA, began to lobby on its behalf through the General Assembly of the United Nations.
The third solution of ‘association’, now described as ‘probable’, was enveloped in a new phrase which no one remarked upon at the time: ‘An Algerian Algeria, linked to France, and uniting the diverse communities’.61
Si Salah
At the same time as the failure at Melun, another possible solution for Algeria was closed off by the demise of the post-imperial French Community de Gaulle had set up in 1958 along with the new constitution. De
Raymond Aron,
Even the more phlegmatic Pompidou was worried. Although having no official position at this time, Pompidou remained in close contact with de Gaulle. After seeing him in October, he wrote to him in terms calculated to appeal to his sense of providential destiny: ‘If Pericles had been abandoned or imprisoned, it is the Athenians one would blame: if Pericles had abandoned Athens in the thick of the Peloponnesian War, it is them that history would blame.’
usual he celebrated the army’s successes and the emergence of Muslim elites in local government. He went on to expand on his vision of the future: ‘An emancipated Algeria, an Algeria in which the Algerians themselves decide on their own destiny, an Algeria which, if the Algerians want it – as I think is the case – will have its government, its institutions and its laws.’
December 1960, de Gaulle paid his last ever visit to Algeria – his eighth since returning to power. This could hardly have been more different from the triumphal tour of June 1958. Violent clashes erupted between Europeans and Muslims; pied noir activists fought street battles with the French police; Muslims descended on the streets waving Algerian flags.
Pompidou was told that only two areas were out of bounds. First, the Sahara, with its important petrol reserves, was not to be considered part of Algeria. Secondly, if Algerian self-determination resulted in a complete break with France, the French would seek guarantees about the future of the pieds noirs.90
We do not need to imagine it. In the early hours of Saturday 22 April, elite paratrooper and Foreign Legion regiments seized key buildings in Algiers.94
Mers-el-Kébir
De Gaulle’s ‘granting’ of Algerian independence, while avoiding civil war in France, is often counted as one of his greatest achievements. This judgement needs to be qualified. He did not ‘grant’ independence: it was wrested from him. And he only partially avoided civil war.
Michel Debré
The fundamental cause of Debré’s despair was Algeria. What worried him was not only the content of de Gaulle’s policies but the way the crisis was altering the balance of power between President and Prime Minister. A shift of power from Prime Minister to President was inevitable given the force of de Gaulle’s personality, but the Algerian crisis accentuated and accelerated the process.
Georges Pompidou,
Pompidou’s admiration for de Gaulle was always tinged with a certain detached irony. He was almost the only person who sometimes permitted himself to talk of ‘de Gaulle’ and not ‘the General’. He told an American diplomat in 1962: ‘I did not want to be Prime Minister but we are living under a dictatorship and each person must do what he is ordered.’
Appointing a Prime Minister who had never held elective office and was unknown to the public was in itself a political statement, not to say a provocation. Pompidou was visibly ill at ease on his first appearance before parliament. On going up to the podium to make his first speech, he took the wrong staircase because he had never set foot in the Chamber before.
As Talleyrand remarked, treason is a matter of timing.
Pétainist nostalgia was not the only argument against de Gaulle in 1962. Defenders of Algérie française included many who had been in the Resistance or Free French.
A few months later, François Mitterrand published a fiercely polemical book entitled The Permanent Coup d’Etat, attacking de Gaulle’s regime as a ‘dictatorship because, in the end, that is what it most resembles, because it tends ineluctably towards the continuous reinforcing of personal power’.
Faced in the second round with the choice between a Communist and a Gaullist, he proposed that voters choose the Communist. This was a bombshell. Since the breakup of the Resistance tripartite coalition in 1947, the Communists and Socialists had been bitter enemies. One of the reasons Mollet rallied to de Gaulle in 1958 was that the alternative might have been a government of the left that included Communists. Mollet’s comment in 1962 brought the Communists back into the fold of respectable politics, embarrassing the centrists and conservatives in the No Cartel.
As far as ‘reason’ was concerned, de Gaulle’s starting point was the nation state, which he viewed as the fundamental reality governing human existence.
None of de Gaulle’s ideas about France and the world were unusual for a conservative nationalist of his generation.
Ernest Renan
Whatever their reservations about de Gaulle, all the ambassadors in post recognized, even if reluctantly, that he was a global superstar. On his foreign visits, they were awestruck by his physical and intellectual resilience – especially his capacity to deliver entirely from memory long speeches which he had written himself.
The man to provide that guidance was de Gaulle’s Foreign Minister, Couve de Murville. Couve had known de Gaulle since 1943 when he arrived in Algiers as a Giraudist. A formidable negotiator with an unparalleled mastery of technical detail, he was unflappable, discreet and chilly – the epitome of a French Protestant.
Kennedy, prone to hero worship, was fascinated by de Gaulle as one of the towering statesmen of the century – and after the General’s election victory in 1962 even enquired of the American Embassy in Paris if there were campaign lessons he might learn for himself70 – but essentially he admired him as a figure of the past.
Relations between the two countries sank to their lowest ebb since de Gaulle’s return to power. As his frustrations with Germany increased, the ambiguities of his German policy became more evident: he seemed to be offering partnership but not equality. What was the benefit to Germany, while the Cold War lasted, of exchanging American protection (perhaps not totally reliable but certainly effective) for French protection (worryingly close and incomparably weaker)?
China had already been recognized by several other countries – including Great Britain – but France went further by announcing an exchange of ambassadors.
For the American government, France’s recognition of China was especially inopportune in the light of the situation in Vietnam. The agreement which Mendès France had negotiated at Geneva in 1954, ending France’s presence in Indo-China, had divided Vietnam at the 17th parallel. Elections were scheduled north and south of the line to decide Vietnam’s future, but these never occurred. Tensions between South Vietnam and the Communist North gradually escalated into open conflict.
De Gaulle’s chances of making a durable impact in the world outside Europe seemed more promising in France’s former African Empire. Although the role of the African Empire in the war gave rise to the notion that he harboured a sentimental relationship with the continent, his attitude was clinically utilitarian.
Ben Bella
The most ardently Francophile African leaders needed little persuasion to rally to Foccart’s view of the world. President Fulbert Youlou of Congo had wanted to keep the ‘Marseillaise’ as the national anthem until told that this would be impolitic;
