The concept of European "strategic autonomy" was an essential component of
Gaullism. Today, it features heavily in debates about European integration, and it is central to French President Emmanuel Macron's own vision for EU reform.
But in France, the industrial and defense industry strengthened under
Gaullism is still powerful enough to resist this influence.
It is paradoxical to 'condemn' or 'disapprove of' the USSR in August after having saved
Gaullism in June.
Chapter seven, "Rightist
Gaullism," addresses how some right-wing resisters questioned their loyalty to Petain or the Vichy government.
(20) Just as one marvels at Olson's nearprophetic awareness in the mid-1940s of a chain of events in France that would eventually lead to the revolt against
Gaullism in May of 1968, so too does one pause at the references in this 1967 notebook entry to what appear to be the twenty-first century's primary loci for the assertion and denial of US hegemony: China and the Middle East.
But there has emerged also a growing sense that this new France, redeemed, as it were, of all the provincial, nationalist, and petty racist sentiments that suffused both Vichy and
Gaullism, now threatens French Jews in very concrete and undeniable ways.
In France,
Gaullism repaired the damage to that bond after 1945, but it was ruptured anew from another direction by 1968's upheavals, which ushered in a "great withdrawal of loyalty from the community." Subsequently, France steadily dismantled its collective identity in favor of an increasingly absolute individualism, gradually ending conscription and devaluing study of the French language, literature, and history in the schools.
As Birnbaum observes, Blum was tainted by the overall failures of the interwar Third Republic, and his postwar attempt at offering a "third way" between Communism and
Gaullism quickly failed, too.
The republican-liberal opposition came into being between 1975 and 1985 in response to three convergent changes: in the economy, the end of Les Trente Glorieuses (the "thirty glorious years" of rapid economic growth that followed the end of World War II); in politics, the "implosion of
Gaullism" (which epitomized the tradition of the strong state) and the inability of the left-wing government elected in 1981 to effect radical economic change; and in intellectual life, the abrupt disappearance of once-pervasive neo-Marxist influences.
Gaullism (French: Gaullisme) is a French political ideology based on the thought and action of the then Resistance leader and later President Charles de Gaulle.