YESTERDAY, 40 years to the day after Charles de Gaulle’s death, France was reminded that the battle over his legacy remains one of the great themes in the country’s politics.
Attending a wreath-laying ceremony to mark the anniversary at de Gaulle’s grave in the village of Colombey-les-Deux-Églises, President Nicolas Sarkozy delivered a lengthy speech claiming Gaullian legitimacy for most of his own style and policies.
Seeking to reassert himself after a trying year that has left him with some of the lowest popularity ratings of modern times, Mr Sarkozy stood alongside senior ministers and paid tribute to de Gaulle as the “saviour” of France, who stood for “a higher, more demanding conception” of the nation.
“What would de Gaulle have done” is a question commonly asked in French debate. “Nobody can know what he would do today,” Mr Sarkozy conceded, before describing a Gaullian worldview that sounded uncannily like a defence of his own.
“When he said that French policy was not made on the trading floor . . . in his way, he was calling for regulation of the laws of the market,” Mr Sarkozy remarked.
Speaking as the constitutional council in Paris was giving its approval to his contentious pension reform, Mr Sarkozy pointed out that de Gaulle “never retreated when faced with the necessity to take decisions . . . because he knew that pushing back a decision meant the pain would be greater still”.
There was also a defence of his own hyperprésidence – the omnipresent, impetuous and restless governing style that his critics say contrasts unflatteringly with that of his predecessors. When he founded the fifth Republic, de Gaulle wanted a president from whom would emanate “all major decisions as well as all authority”, Mr Sarkozy said.
Forty years after his death, the resistance leader and founder of the fifth Republic bestrides modern France like a colossus. The constitution he drafted and the institutions he created in 1958 – notably the role of the president as republican monarch – have changed little.
Gaullism’s fusion of an ideology of French grandeur and independence in foreign policy with a certain pragmatism and adaptability at home still speaks to a generation of modern-day politicians. Mr Sarkozy has shifted the tone in international relations, by having France rejoin Nato’s integrated command, seeking closer ties with Washington and recently signing a major defence co-operation pact with London, for example. But the problems facing political leaders are today perhaps “more complex” than when de Gaulle was in power, Mr Sarkozy said yesterday.
On the French left, the general’s memory and his language are regularly invoked in the name of social justice and French independence of mind. Recently, socialist leader Martine Aubry contrasted Mr Sarkozy with de Gaulle in criticising his “sickening” policy towards Roma migrants.
But neither has the left forgotten its own misgivings about aspects of de Gaulle’s rule. Commenting on Mr Sarkozy’s speech, Bruno Le Roux, the president of the socialist group in the national assembly, said the president had dispensed with all that was good about de Gaulle and retained only his “authoritarian tendency”.