The importance of the conceptual distinction is that it allows a distinction
between the actual chance of someone in authority being obeyed (which
might be a matter of the number of available machine guns), and the way in
which the right to be obeyed is justified, or seen as justifiable by any chosen
audience. For example, until the official creation of the state of Zimbabwe, the
United Kingdom had hadde jureauthority in what used to be known as
Southern Rhodesia, although in fact the society had been controlled by white
Rhodesians in revolt against the UK government from 1965 until the creation
of Zimbabwe. The distinction has considerable practical effects in the world
order, because most countries would have refused to recognize thede facto
government of that country, and would have assisted in applying what the UK
took to be the legal order, as it was thede jureruler.
International lawtends to operate by its own version of the common law
rule of adverse possession, so that after enough time has passed, de facto rulers
come to be seen as having established their own legitimacy. The distinction is
probably coming to be much more important in lay discussion than in legal
analysis. A common usage would be to answer a question about who makes
rules in a community by answering, ‘Well,de factoit’s ‘‘x’’, thoughde jureit’s
‘‘y’’’. Alternatively,de factoauthority can be identified as meaning the sovereign
power in some context where no one has previously had any control. Thus the
statement ‘The German Federal Bank is thede factomonetary authority for
Europe’, if uttered before the start of the euro, might have recognized an
important fact without implying either illegitimacy or the passing from power
of some other authority.
De Gaulle
General Charles de Gaulle (1890–1970) was one of the leaders of French
resistance to Hitler in the Second World War, and President of theFifth
Republic(1959–69). He gave his name not only to a French political party
but also to a whole tradition in post-war French politics that still exercises a
very important influence. As a colonel in the French army during the 1930s, de
Gaulle was a somewhat unpopular figure who advocated modern doctrines of
armoured warfare that were largely ignored. He was the senior French soldier
to oppose theVichyregime after the fall of France in 1940, and for much of
the war headed a French government-in-exile in London. When the Allies
liberated France in 1944, de Gaulle became for a while the head of the French
government, but his ideas for a strong presidential government were rejected
by both politicians and the public, and he retired from political life. In 1958 the
crises in theFourth Republic, especially those connected with the Algerian
war, led to a widespread demand for him to take power. He accepted,
becoming the last prime minister of the Fourth Republic and then the first
De Gaulle