CHARLES DE GAULLE

De Gaulle was neither god nor devil but ... bourgeois realist, if with a leaning towards the Divine. Arguably the greatest Frenchman since Napoleon, he was not so much a revolutionary as a bourgeois reformer who, more than anyone, saved France from disintegration under the Fourth Republic, which, with its twenty-four governments in half as many years, seemed hell-bent on continuing from where the chaotic, not to say anarchic, Third Republic had left off ... before the Nazi interlude.

De Gaulle had not dedicated the War Years to fighting for and freeing France just to see it handed over to a bunch of parliamentary squabblers, whose predominantly left-wing sympathies were seriously at odds with the concept of France that the General had long cherished. If the German occupation of France had achieved anything, it was to put an end to such party rivalry and sectarian bickering, symptomatic of a materialistic decadence. With the Germans removed, however, it was up to Charles de Gaulle to ensure that nothing similar broke out again, the most obvious way being to assume power in the name of national unity as head of a provisional government, and seek to amend the Constitution in the direction of a presidential executive, with more power for the President - the sort of power that presidents of the Third Republic had manifestly lacked!

Alas, for de Gaulle, temporary power did not enable him to implement the desired reforms, the mandate for which was duly rejected by a majority of the electorate, including, needless to say, the Communists. So he felt obliged, scorning impotence, to resign from office after less than eighteen months ... to remain in the political wilderness during the subsequent Fourth Republic, until the crisis of the Algerian revolt, some twelve years later, brought him back to power on a wave of popular unrest, and the Fifth Republic was duly proclaimed, the General successfully extricating France from the Algerian quagmire and continuing to rule on the basis of his Presidential Constitution for some ten years, before the student-led riots and strikes in the summer of 1968 brought about his final downfall.

As a beacon of light in a storm-tossed sea, de Gaulle brought sanity out of madness and order from chaos, if only for the duration of his rule, which, despite its success, was always threatened by the disintegrating elements of Marxist barbarism and party-political squabbling, and ultimately succumbed to both. In spite of the gains made for the Presidency under the Fifth Republic, the current of materialist decadence continues to drag France down and away from de Gaulle's La France towards some unholy France awaiting Judgement.