president of the Fifth Republic. Brought to power in 1958 as a man acceptable
to the army, and to be trusted to maintain the status quo because of his vision of
French glory, he solved the Algerian crisis only by what was seen as a worse
betrayal even than Dien Bien Phu, the defeat in 1954 that ended French
involvement in Indo-China. He simply accepted all the Algerian nationalists’
demands, and gave them independence within four years of taking office. He
led the party (seeGaullism) that had fought for his ideas during the 1950s
(under a variety of names), and was a highly autocratic ruler of France until he
resigned after a referendum defeat in 1969. However, his political position had
by then been crystallized into a political ideology supported by his party, and
one of his ex-prime ministers, Georges Pompidou, won the resulting pre-
sidential election. In modern French politics for much of the time since 1945
there has been a clear ideological position usually identified as Gaullism, which
to a large extent represents a development of ‘the General’s’ views; although
Gaullist politicians still exist, their views now resembles other brands of
modern Europeanconservatism, though with more emphasis on national
independence. Initially unpopular with the French ‘political classes’ because of
his autocratic manner, his reputation is being reassessed because of the way his
successors, especially Vale ́ry Giscard d’Estaing and Franc ̧oisMitterrand, have
actually extended the presidential domain to the extent of being described as
‘royalist’ in their style. De Gaulle’s main substantive achievements were the re-
creation of French independence in foreign and military affairs, and an initial
interpretation of the constitution of the Fifth Republic which massively
reduced the power of parliament in favour of the executive. Although his
party remains enormously influential, the drift of the French centre-right away
from pure Gaullism has continued under the incumbent president Jacques
Chirac.
De Tocqueville
Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–59) was a French aristocrat who, while in some
ways regretting the passing of the Ancien Re ́gime as a result of the French
Revolution, nevertheless became one of the most sympathetic and acute
observers of Western democratic movements during the 19th century. His
two great works wereThe Ancien Re ́gime, a study of the social and political
forces at work in France immediately before the Revolution, andDemocracy in
America. The former is still a valuable contemporary document for historians,
but de Tocqueville was too close, chronologically and emotionally, to be
capable of the sustained value-free analysis that might have made it a first-class
work of political science. However, after he visited America in 1830, and
despite the fact that he was there for only eight months and visited only a few
eastern-seaboard states, he produced a massive, detailed and analytically
De Tocqueville