The Five Crises of the Fifth French Republic

France, which has always had a masterly aptitude for converting even the portentous crises of its spirit into something charming and seductive.
                                                           —Friedrich Nietzsche

Two species of jacquerie have punctuated French life, and the nation’s image in the media, in recent decades. The first, a pattern of simmering riots in the banlieues, has its roots in the autumn of 2005, when two teenagers died while running away from the police. Since then, Parisian suburbs have erupted every other year, often after tragic encounters between disgruntled youths and careless officers. The latest iteration of this familiar script happened this summer, after a policeman shot a seventeen-year-old of Algerian descent. Like clockwork, the banlieues erupted. Disenchanted crowds set fire to their own neighborhoods. Two people died, 450 shops were looted, and three hundred banks were destroyed. The government had to mobilize 45,000 offic­ers—a fifth of France’s police force—and arrest 3,700 people, including 1,124 minors, to restore order more than a week after the first upheaval.

The second, a series of mass protests against austerity, emerged out of the neoliberal turn of the 1980s. Every time successive governments announce unpopular reforms, millions take to the streets in response. The latest movement of this kind arose five years ago, when the gilets jaunes embarked on a year of strikes after President Macron proposed an increase in fuel taxes. About three million people participated. Often peaceful, sometimes violent, the gilets jaunes blocked traffic, lit fires, and built barricades, causing more than €200 million in property damage. In total, 8,400 protesters were arrested; 1,843 protesters and 1,048 policemen were injured. Macron tamed the revolt by organizing an “assembly of citizens,” whose recommendations he ignored after months of deliberation.

These two events correspond to distinct parts of France. This summer’s riots involved young, low-income, multiracial urbanites while the gilets jaunes represented older, middle-class, mostly white workers from rural towns. Yet the two revolts point to a common sense of alienation. The teenager of the banlieues and the truck driver from the countryside are two faces of the same phenomenon. They both personi­fy decades of economic decline, cultural disunity, and political inaction. They are both children of France, the most superficially spirited country of the lethargic Old World, struggling to keep the flame of the Republic alive.

On the surface, the challenges that France faces might seem predict­able, if not banal. Once an economic powerhouse, the country has lost its industrial base after waves of liberalization. Unelected judges have gained influence, often overruling democratic majorities. Successive gov­ernments have outsourced their power to international institutions. Cultural clashes divide the citizenry, which no longer seems to consider itself a cohesive whole. These are familiar pathologies that plague most liberal democracies today. In each of these cases, France is but an unremarkable example among many.

Yet the history of the Fifth Republic, since its founding in 1958, sets the country apart. Under the leadership of Charles de Gaulle, the founders of modern France anticipated the crises that the country would confront decades before the fact. Indeed, what became known as the “Gaullist model” seems uniquely suited to our time. While the world is leaving neoliberalism behind, the French economy is built around public‑private partnerships that have survived decades of withering attacks. As democracies wrestle with unelected bureaucrats, de Gaulle envisioned the French presidency as a powerful executive, capable of serving the popular will without intermediaries. While Americans and Israelis question the power of their supreme courts, France has always opted for a weak judiciary. As liberal societies struggle to preserve their sense of citizenship without descending into nativism, France has long embraced a republican model designed to assimilate without exclusion. While Europe laments its economic and military dependence on the United States or China, de Gaulle envisioned a nonaligned continent that would act as a “third pole” between great powers. On every front, from economics to culture to foreign policy, the French model has proven prophetic.

Nevertheless, precisely at this moment when the world is converging toward de Gaulle’s ideas, France is abandoning them altogether. Instead of embracing industrial policy, France has liberalized its economy. In­stead of doubling down on republican ideals, France has weakened its conception of citizenship. Instead of celebrating judicial restraint, France has empowered judges at the expense of voters. Instead of using the presidency as a vessel of the popular will, France has weaponized the executive against the people. Instead of building a sovereign Europe, let alone a sovereign nation, France has supported European technocrats who would rather turn the continent into a mere marketplace. Each of these crises stems from a single source: France is betraying its own model at its peril. More than a tale of decline, then, the history of the Fifth Republic offers a redemptive path beyond self-betrayal. For France, as for others who share her plight, the future might lie in the recent past.

Institutional Crisis

After the Second World War, the architects of the Fifth Republic faced two challenges. First, in 1945, years of occupation had weakened the French state. Most republican institutions had crumbled, and Vichy loyalists filled the few that remained intact. Second, since the revolution of 1789, France had never achieved long-term political stability. The country had witnessed a succession of dysfunctional republics, empires, and royalist restorations, none of which had managed to stay in power. The monarchy had long lost popular support. Trapped in endless deliberations, the republics struggled to get anything done. The French state thus wandered in disarray, oscillating between the Scylla of tyran­ny and the Charybdis of parliamentary sclerosis. Neither seemed to satisfy the people.

In de Gaulle’s mind, the Fifth Republic would transcend the terms of this dichotomy, fusing the swift leadership of the monarchy with the democratic foundations of the republic. “My conception of the state,” de Gaulle wrote in his memoirs, “comes from a great synthesis of French history, which includes the Revolution, but also the Ancien Régime and Napoleon.” Only with this “great synthesis,” which would find its consummation in the Fifth Republic, would France triumph. Built around a strong executive, this republic with royalist characteristics would succeed where its predecessors failed.

To this day, the French presidency retains more power than any democratic executive in modern history. By himself, the president can appoint and remove administrators, diplomats, special prosecutors, and ministers; he can call for a referendum whose result overrides the legislature; he can also declare war unilaterally and dissolve the National Assembly at will. While these powers do not turn the presidency into an autocratic office, they do empower the executive to apply pressure on every other branch of government. Combative ministers can be re­moved, chaotic parliaments dissolved, disloyal diplomats fired, and in­efficient bureaucracies reorganized. Stewarding the ship of state, the president depends on the other branches to rule, but can act swiftly and decisively on his own.

Indeed, de Gaulle ensured that the president remains the only legitimate representative of the people as a whole. Elected via popular vote in a two-round election, the executive is the only office chosen by the nation. Other offices represent parts of France; the president repre­sents France itself. The two-round structure ensures that the president secures both a dedicated base to mobilize on demand (in the first round) and a broad appeal (in the second round). This intimate connection to the public, which far surpasses that of other offices, is another tool that the president can wield against the other branches. The president can call for protests against parliament, organize a referendum to override parliament, or dissolve parliament while asking the people to vote for different legislators. Of course, none of these mechanisms allow the president to rule by himself. But they do capture de Gaulle’s desire to build a close, direct relationship with the people. In times of corruption, inaction, or emergency, the president becomes a popular champion—an elected Caesar who, with the support of the populace, can bypass parliament when necessary. As de Gaulle put it, “the presidential election is the meeting of a man and a people.”

Alongside this strong executive, the architects of the Fifth Republic weakened parliament. First, the perpetual threat of dissolution makes the legislature vulnerable to executive pressures. Second, article 49.3 of the constitution allows the government to pass a law in the National Assembly without a majority of the votes. Whenever article 49.3 is invoked, the government “engages its responsibility,” which means that parliament can vote a “motion of censure” that would force all ministers to resign if successful. But the bar for a motion of censure is much higher than for a typical law—legislators might oppose the law in question, but refuse to risk dissolution or crisis. In practice, governments can therefore pass laws without a majority so long as they do not threaten or disrespect parliament to the point of justifying a motion of censure. Successive governments have used article 49.3 more than a hundred times since 1958. Arguably the most undemocratic provision in the French constitution, the article is yet another tool of the executive. The president appoints the government, which, in turn, can pass laws without a parliamentary majority. Once again, de Gaulle ensured that the people-president alliance would bypass the endless chit-chat of lawmakers. Seen in this light, article 49.3 does not constitute an anti-democratic measure, but a deeply democratic one designed to impose the will of the majority on a legislature that would otherwise defy it.

Since de Gaulle’s death, however, successive presidents have used their powers to betray the popular will, not serve it. France’s current head of state, Emmanuel Macron, personifies this problem more starkly than any of his predecessors. First, consider the circumstances of his election (and reelection). De Gaulle designed the two-round structure so that candidates would develop both a strong base and a broad appeal. Macron certainly has the former—the fervent support of affluent urban­ites, who represent about a fifth of the country—but has never come close to achieving the latter. A poll conducted after the 2022 election showed that 42 percent of second-round voters who chose Macron did so out of fear that his populist opponent, Marine Le Pen, would plunge the country into chaos. Further, of all eligible voters, about 30 percent of people did not vote at all—sixty times more than during de Gaulle’s election in 1958. Right before his reelection, in January 2022, Macron’s approval ratings reached 40 percent; this number has since decreased to 27 percent. These statistics paint an uncomplicated picture: far from the “meeting of a man and a people,” the presidential election has become a reluctant, by-default choice between a bad option and a worse one. Since his first campaign six years ago, Macron has never won the approval of a single demographic besides middle-to-upper-class urbanites. His rise reflects a new status quo, in which the threat of Far Right alternatives allows centrist candidates with unpopular policies to stay in power without majoritarian support. Whether this trend will last—whether Macron is playing with fire—is another matter. Irresponsible or not, Macron has defied the expectations of the Fifth Republic’s founders. He has not merely failed to develop the kind of intimate relationship with the people that De Gaulle envisioned, but has actively antagonized most voters who supported him strictly out of fear.

Even more than the circumstances of his election (or reelection), the way in which Macron has governed threatens the collapse of the Gaullist model. De Gaulle expected the executive to serve as a popular champion, and created mechanisms such as article 49.3 to that effect. Macron and his government have made extensive use of these tools; since 2022, the French government has relied on article 49.3 once a month on average, more than any other administration since the founding of the Fifth Republic. But the laws for which Macron has used the article have by no means earned the support of the public. On the contrary, the French government’s last use of 49.3 concerned a sweeping pension reform that 68 percent of voters opposed. The same pattern holds true for the other eleven cases, all of which allowed the passage of laws that an overwhelming majority of people reject. In this context, the people-president alliance that de Gaulle favored has long disappeared. Instead, de Gaulle’s successors are weaponizing the powers of the presidency to bypass parliament and act against the popular will. De Gaulle wanted the executive to fight the influence of bureaucrats, special interests, and political elites. Macron, on the contrary, is imposing austerity measures to please large companies and unelected administrators in Brussels, against the explicit will of the French.

And Macron is by no means an exception. Consider de Gaulle’s attitude toward referenda as another example. De Gaulle revered the executive’s ability to call for a referendum, which represented the people‑president alliance at its best. He used the referendum four times, and left office when the final referendum did not go his way. By con­trast, there has only been one referendum in the last twenty years, in 2005. It concerned the ratification of the European Constitution, an international agreement that would expand the reach of European institutions over national ones. At the time, President Jacques Chirac and his gov­ernment supported the treaty; 54.7 percent of people voted against it. Not only did the president not resign, but his successor and former minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, repackaged the treaty and signed it without a referendum two years later. (According to opinion polls, most people would have voted against the new treaty if asked.) In short, while de Gaulle cherished and respected the referendum, his successors have either avoided referenda altogether, or betrayed their results after the fact. This shift in attitude captures a broader drift away from the spirit of the Fifth Republic.

Judicial Crisis

For more than a decade, judicial review has come under growing criticism. In 2023, the Israeli Supreme Court lost the ability to declare Knesset legislation unconstitutional (and has subsequently ruled that change unconstitutional). In a controversial overhaul of the country’s judiciary, parliament reclaimed its right to override court rulings. While the United States stands nowhere near this sort of revolution, the American Supreme Court has also become less popular over time. Judicial restraint, once a conservative cause, is gaining momentum among progressives. In 2020, the Yale professor Samuel Moyn called “juristocracy” an “American malady,” urging his fellow liberals to abandon their faith in judges. In 2023, in another op-ed written with the Harvard professor Ryan Doerfler, Moyn exhorted the Left “not to reclaim the Constitution, as many would have it, but instead to reclaim America from constitutionalism.” While these critiques could lose their appeal should the Left regain a majority on the Court, these are not merely circumstantial arguments. The very concept of judicial review is under attack, and for good reasons. Slowly but surely, the democratic sovereign is unshackling its chains. France, meanwhile, is moving in the opposite direction.

From its inception in 1789, the French Republic has opposed the idea of judicial review, fearing the usurpation of popular power by unelected judges. One of the first laws passed after the Revolution held that “courts cannot, directly or indirectly, partake in the exercise of legisla­tive power, suspend legislative action, or forbid the decrees of the legislative body.” At the time, this measure marked an abrupt break from established traditions. For centuries, while the king retained the final say on all matters, the ancien régime relied on judges to administer justice without interference. For the revolutionaries, this practice betrayed­ the fundamental principles of popular government. In 1790, Jacques Thouret, the president of the National Constituent Assembly, argued that judges, as “mere executors of the law, must reduce their function to the mere application of the law,” as opposed to its interpretation. Robespierre went further, declaring that “the very word ‘jurispru­dence’ must be banished from our vocabulary; in a state with a legislature, ‘jurisprudence’ amounts to nothing more than stating the law.” Simply put, to the extent that the law required interpretation at all, the courts had to ask the assembly for clarification. Judges lacked the legitimacy to decide by themselves; they were, in Montesquieu’s phrase, the mere “mouths of the law.” Indeed, the figure of the judge embodied everything that the architects of the Revolution detested: unelected men in robes wielding arbitrary power over the citizenry, little tyrants hiding behind procedure. For republican leaders, if judges could override the people and their representatives, then those judges, not the demos, held the reins of power. As a result, from the Revolution to the early twentieth century, most French republicans treated judges as they treated the church—with suspicion, if not downright hostility.

Over the years, this suspicion was translated into a large body of laws. The constitution of 1791, which established the Republic, con­firmed that “courts can neither exercise legislative power nor suspend the passing or execution of laws.” Article 127 of Napoleon’s Civil Code, ratified in 1810, similarly punished all judges who “attempt to override” legislative authority. For the Jacobins, as for Napoleon, as for the founders of the Third Republic who left the Civil Code in place, judges played a necessary but dangerous role in public life. The courts did not protect the constitution; on the contrary, the constitution, championed by the executive and the legislature, protected the people from the tyranny of the courts.

This anti-judicial spirit also animated the writers of the Fifth Republic’s constitution in 1958. “Universal suffrage is the only source of power,” the document states. Echoing the language of 1789, article three holds that “national sovereignty belongs to the people, who exercise their sovereignty via their representatives or via referendum. No other section of the people, and no other individual, can exercise such power.” Every time the constitution mentions sovereign authority, it makes some reference to the presidency or parliament, but never to the courts. The 1958 document did establish the Constitutional Council, a new judicial body, but only to make sure that parliament followed its own rules. In other words, to the extent that France’s highest court could interfere with legislative decisions at all, it could not affect the substance of these decisions, but merely the process of decision-making. The founders of the Fifth Republic by no means envisioned anything resembling American-style judicial review. In fact, in an interview about the 1958 constitution, de Gaulle presented America as the ultimate counterexample: “In France,” he quipped, “the best supreme court is the people.” Others at the time cited the work of Édouard Lambert, who, in his book The Government of Judges (1921), argued that the United States had fallen under the “despotism of the courts.” In America, the founders of the Fifth Republic saw the fears of 1789 realized: a once-vibrant democracy which, because of judicial review, had become a democracy in name only. This perception of the United States as a “juristocracy” reinforced the anti-judicial character of the 1958 constitu­tion. For left-republicans, powerful courts would threaten the general will and prevent much-needed reforms; for right-republicans, powerful courts would undermine national sovereignty and restrict the scope of statesmanship. Either way, the founders of the Fifth Republic followed in the footsteps of their predecessors.

Nevertheless, after de Gaulle’s death a new generation emerged, and with them, a new judicial consensus. In 1971, Alain Poher, the president of the Senate, redefined the role of the Constitutional Council, now empowered to decide whether the content of every law conforms to the rights and liberties in the constitution’s preamble. This decision, which ran against the spirit of the constitution that it claimed to defend, marked the birth of judicial review in France. In 1974, the same man, Poher, lobbied for the ratification of the European Convention of Human Rights. The convention not only submitted French lawmakers to European courts, but also empowered French courts to enforce European laws against the legislature. The fact that the Convention explicitly betrayed the French constitution did not seem to bother anyone. If anything, for younger lawmakers—who called themselves “Gaullists” but admired the American model—the time had come to reform France’s weak, antiquated judiciary.

With the approval of the legislature, courts have since expanded their reach considerably. In 1975, the Constitutional Council allowed lower courts to decide whether French laws violate European or international commitments, giving judges de facto veto power over legislation. In 1981, President Mitterrand ratified the supremacy of the European Court of Human Rights over national courts, thereby submitting every law to the whims of unelected judges abroad. Since the early 2000s, both national and European courts have created new rights—cultural and economic—that narrow the scope of democratic authority. In his 2006 memoirs, Jean Foyer, de Gaulle’s justice minister, wrote about the trajectory of French public law: “The legislator is no longer sovereign. The people are no longer sovereign. . . . Courts weaponize the law to paralyze the legislator-Gulliver with the Lilliputians of jurisprudence, these minor ambiguities that judges exploit to rule in our name.”

This grim picture applies to France, but also to much of Europe, including the United Kingdom, which in spite of its deep common law tradition never had a supreme court until 2009. The continent’s liberal democracies have outsourced political authority to courts at home and international bodies abroad. What distinguishes France from other cases, however, is that the founders of the Fifth Republic saw these trends coming and tried to reverse them. More than anyone in the early days of the European Union, de Gaulle fought against the “government of judges.” In the end, however, these warnings and precedents did not matter. On judicial questions as on most others, French lawmakers have abandoned the Gaullist model. By choice, France has put her sovereign to sleep.

Economic Crisis

When de Gaulle returned to power in 1958, the country needed urgent reorganization. With an inflation rate of 16 percent, a 3 percent year-over-year decrease in real wages, and a public deficit at 5 percent of GDP, France faced a grave financial crisis that threatened its international credibility. The situation forced the country to borrow $130 million from the IMF, unprecedented for a developed nation at the time. Indebt­ed and unproductive, France lacked a path to renewal. Nevertheless, the circumstances also meant that de Gaulle had carte blanche to reshape the nation’s economy as he pleased. During the war, most companies had either been dissolved, placed under German control, seized by Vichy, or allowed to remain “private” under public supervision. Right after the war, de Gaulle and others pushed for the nationalization of major private firms, ensuring state control over strategic industries. They also laid the foundations of the French welfare system—public healthcare, pensions, and free universities. By 1958, despite the weaknesses of the French economy, de Gaulle could build on solid foundations: he con­trolled a state with a firm grip on the country’s productive forces.

Historians often call de Gaulle a champion of “Third Way” economics. He despised communism, which he thought incompatible with human nature. But he also lambasted capitalism, more fervently than some of his putative successors care to admit. “Capitalism is not acceptable in its social consequences,” de Gaulle wrote. “It crushes the humble and transforms men into wolves who hunt other men.” Even while in exile, de Gaulle asked his associates to prepare for the nationalization of major industries “so that France’s resources can no longer be exploited by and for the few.” Éric Roussel writes in a biography that “De Gaulle came from a milieu of Catholics, officers, and aristocrats, all of whom detested capitalism. He himself saw businessmen as selfish brutes at best, and traitors to France at worst.” De Gaulle’s economic thought therefore begins with a paradox. On the one hand, his pragmatism forced him to admit the benefits of markets, especially in times of financial crisis. On the other, his political convictions remained opposed to the spirit of capitalism, a system of self-interest that made a mockery of patriotism, honor, solidarity, and the other virtues to which he dedicated his life. More than a coherent doctrine, his economic policy consisted of a careful balancing act between these two impulses.

From these influences emerged a vision of the French economy that observers came to call dirigisme. De Gaulle defended a form of state capitalism that would operate on three levels. First, the state would build industrial giants in concert with the private sector. These public-private partnerships would cover strategic industries such as defense, high culture, and innovative sectors that would propel France forward. To this day, the state retains a stake in many of these companies: Renault, Peugeot, Citroën, Airbus, Air France, and so on. Second, the state would protect small businesses with friendly regulations, shielding local economies from the pressures of the market. While de Gaulle emphasized the need for France to build industrial behemoths, he also paid close attention to the role that restaurants, artisans, and small shops played in the country’s social fabric. If public-private giants allowed France to retain its economic might, small businesses would allow France to retain its way of life. Without large firms, France could not compete abroad; without small firms, France could not thrive at home. Each needed the other to survive. Third, de Gaulle wanted a robust welfare state to support the disadvantaged. After the war, he worked with socialists on the establishment of the French healthcare, pension, and education systems. Even after 1958, when economic circumstances forced him to limit spending, de Gaulle refused to cut social security or privatize the delivery of public services. As Roussel puts it, “the conditions of 1958 weakened De Gaulle’s anti-capitalism, but he stood firm on his most fundamental commitments: free education for all, healthcare for all, retirement at a decent age for all, strong public services for all.” Against the conservative dogmas of the time, de Gaulle also supported unions and pushed for employee representation on corporate decision-making bodies.

Combined, these commitments—public-private partnerships, net­works of local businesses, a robust welfare state, and inclusive corporate structures—formed de Gaulle’s economic doctrine, a curious compromise that delivered the Trente Glorieuses of 1945–75, a thirty-year period of high growth and full employment. Politically, the Gaullist consensus proved popular on both the right and the left. While both sides attacked the general’s policies, either for his anti-capitalist zeal or for cowering before the markets, his broad vision remained uncontested in practice. The results of de Gaulle’s tenure were clear: he had found the country in ruins, and had put it back on track.

Nevertheless, by the 1980s, the Gaullist consensus had collapsed. After de Gaulle’s death, market-friendly factions gained influence on the right; one of their chief champions, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, became president in 1974. In the name of austerity, Giscard d’Estaing liberalized the French labor market, removed trade protections, weakened the influence of the state in major companies, and raised taxes on small businesses. These measures proved unsuccessful, both to combat unem­ployment and to stimulate growth. Yet this poor performance did not stop Giscard d’Estaing from ushering in a paradigm shift on the French right. After him, no right-leaning president ever returned to dirigisme. Once the party of aristocrats, clergymen, and soldiers, the Right had turned into the party of the merchant class.

Yet the most decisive blow to the Gaullist model came from the Left. After Giscard d’Estaing’s unpopular term, French voters sought to reassert the role of the state. In 1981, after the elections of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, the French, to the bafflement of the world, voted for the first socialist president of the Fifth Republic—and indeed the first directly elected socialist head of state in the West—François Mitterrand. Not only did Mitterrand come to power in a coalition with the Communist Party, but he also ruled as a proper leftist in the first two years of his term: he nationalized dozens of major firms, increased the minimum wage by 40 percent, strengthened pensions, broadened access to social insurance, expanded workers’ rights, created a wealth tax, shortened the work week to thirty-nine hours, built social housing, and established new benefits for families. After Giscard d’Estaing’s years of liberalization, these measures constituted a muscular return to dirigisme. Yet Mitterrand changed course in 1983. The fall of the Bretton Woods system and the growing power of international finance made Mitterrand’s reforms untenable. Citing the collapse of the French currency and the inflation rate, which reached 12 percent in 1982, the president reversed many of his policies in what became known as the “turn towards rigor.” He raised taxes on consumers, cut welfare spending, and canceled nationalizations. If Giscard d’Estaing converted the Right to austerity, Mitterrand, almost against his will, did the same for the Left.

The fallout from these events continues to shape French politics today. With Mitterrand’s U-turn, France embarked on a four-decade-long process of economic restructuring. Governments of both the Right and the Left introduced liberalizing reforms. They increased the retire­ment age, lengthened the work week, cut taxes on large corporations, privatized state-owned companies, weakened unions, and so on. These reforms have not only worsened inequalities, but also failed on their own terms. Between 2000 and 2014, the French Parliament passed 165 reforms to liberalize the labor market. None of these reforms have come even close to bringing the country back to full employment—between 2008 and 2016, France lost half a million industrial jobs while Germany created 130,000 new ones. Nor have they succeeded at stimulating year-over-year growth, which has only outpaced the European average five times since 2000, all of which coincided with strong welfare spending amid the 2008 recession and during the pandemic. Similarly, every effort to make France more “competitive” has failed to stimulate exports in the long term, and every attempt to encourage “entrepreneurship” has failed to boost the creation of more start-ups. If anything, to the extent that the French economy remains viable at all, it does so thanks to public-private partnerships that destructive waves of liberalization have left intact.

Attempting to turn France into the United States, successive govern­ments have found the worst in-between possible: they have weakened the Gaullist model without providing a real alternative. Without a strong state, France has become an almost liberal economy—an economy trying to compete on liberal terms, but which remains uniquely ill-suited to do so. French politicians still speak the language of “national champions,” but their actions have moved the country away from its dirigiste roots. Marine Le Pen and Eric Zemmour, for all their talk of sovereignty, have promised to sell the state’s media empire if elected. Similarly, President Macron has recently spoken of the need to build “European champions,” but this sudden love of industrial policy runs counter to his own track record. As economy minister, Macron facilitated the sale of Alcatel-Lucent, one of France’s best tech companies, to Finland’s Nokia. As a presidential candidate, he promised to privatize €10 billion worth of public investments. Finally, as president, before the pandemic changed his mind, Macron agreed to sell a few national treasures, including Alstom, the maker of the high-speed “TGV” trains that have long been an emblem of France’s engineering prowess. Meanwhile, the United States—the country that French liber­als present as a model to emulate—is increasingly embracing industrial policy and protectionism. As the world admits the limits of the market, France continues to retreat from a model that now seems more prescient than ever.

European Crisis

As in economics, de Gaulle looked for a “Third Way” in foreign policy. In 1945, France was excluded from postwar planning by Roosevelt and Stalin, who did not invite de Gaulle to Tehran, Yalta, or Potsdam. This humiliation, which de Gaulle neither forgot nor forgave, shaped his conviction that France could not survive, let alone thrive, without autonomy from the American and Soviet blocs. After his election in 1958, he proclaimed a new “politics of grandeur” to establish France as a great power of its own.

All his major decisions focused on this singular aim. De Gaulle launched an independent nuclear program to defend France without external help. He twice vetoed Britain’s entry into the European Common Market, mostly to prevent the UK from counterbalancing France’s influence on the continent. In the 1960s, he traveled to Asia to criticize the Vietnam War, and to Latin America to preach the gospel of self-determination against American interference. He also gave speeches against the dollar as an international currency, and even met Khrushchev in the Soviet Union, where he pled for a Europe “from the Atlantic to the Urals”—that is, with the Russians and without the United States. In 1966, de Gaulle went so far as to withdraw from NATO’s integrated military command and, decorously but firmly, expel American troops from French soil, explaining in a letter to Lyndon Johnson that France, now a nuclear power, had to assert its sovereignty over its own territory. This provocation, which outraged other NATO members, captured de Gaulle’s aspiration to set France apart. He knew that no other European country could even think about such a move, since none but France had nuclear weapons. He also knew that the beginning of Détente meant that France could afford this sort of provocation without material consequences. As Julian Jackson puts it in his biography of de Gaulle, “the gesture was more symbolic than anything else, but symbols matter.”

As de Gaulle admitted later, he never doubted his fundamental preference for the Americans over the Soviets. After all, he detested communism and admired the history of the United States—as well as the role that France, “America’s oldest ally,” had played in it. Precisely because he believed that America would triumph, however, de Gaulle did everything possible to weaken the rising hegemon without handing a victory to the USSR. To the extent that he flirted with Russia or encouraged self-determination in Latin America, he did so partly out of conviction, partly out of self-interest. In principle, de Gaulle opposed American supremacy in matters economic, military, and political. He envisioned a world with Europe at its center, and with France at the center of Europe. This ambition underpinned his anti-American provo­cations, his economic orientation, and his broader view of diplomacy. One facet of this vision retains immediate relevance: de Gaulle’s conception of Europe.

De Gaulle was a European, albeit a reluctant one. He liked to call himself a “Continental,” and often mused about the shared roots of the continent. In a 1959 speech to the people of Strasbourg, he declared: “It is Europe, it is the whole of Europe, that will decide the fate of the world.” As romantic as he remained about French grandeur, de Gaulle understood that Europe would play an indispensable role in France’s political future. He by no means wanted France to cede authority to a European federation, and exalted national sovereignty above all. But he knew that France would have to leverage European power to remain a global player on its own, a third pole between the American and Soviet spheres. Only within this frame could France, independent but united with its European comrades, thrive once more.

Nevertheless, de Gaulle feared what the European Union could—and would—become. Time and again, he warned his contemporaries against the perils of technocracy. An apostle of statesmanship who “filled his soul with Plutarch,” to borrow Nietzsche’s phrase, de Gaulle could not stand the idea of supranational institutions reducing politics to mere administration. He abhorred unelected bureaucrats, and refused to turn the government of men into a technical matter. In 1966, asked about the creation of transnational agencies, de Gaulle responded that he would never let Europe “be ruled by an Areopagus of technocrats without a country, responsible to nobody. . . . France is setting against this plan, which seems to go beyond the bounds of reality.” Far from a conventional position, de Gaulle’s romantic love of nationhood ran counter to the spirit of his time. While the general mused about sovereignty, his compatriot Alexandre Kojève, the philosopher-bureaucrat who led the French delegation at the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade in 1948, envisioned the “end of history” as a reconciliation between wise men and technocracy. Kojève championed a Europe where specialists would administer the affairs of men who, once liberated from politics, would entertain themselves with art, love, thought, and play. De Gaulle, to whom Kojève sent a memo on European policy in 1945, rejected this prophetic vision of the continent as a dormant temple of leisure. For de Gaulle, to let experts rule was not merely to abdicate responsibility or to betray the national cause, but to exterminate the possibility of human greatness, of leadership, of politics in its noblest sense. In an age of economists and calculators, neither democracy nor statesmanship had said their last word.

Against this technocratic Europe, de Gaulle envisioned what he called a “political Europe” or a “Europe of nations.” Peoples and countries would remain sovereign. They would cooperate on projects across borders, coordinate on economic matters, and sometimes negotiate as a group. Yet no supranational body, especially not an unelected one, would override the will of majorities. European institutions would focus on the issues most relevant to the standing of Europe as a bloc—trade, foreign policy, innovation, and so on—and leave domestic matters alone. This way, individual countries would secure the benefits of a federation (coordination against great powers) without its drawbacks (technocratic rule).

Europe has since moved in the exact opposite direction. On the one hand, not only have supranational institutions grown in power, but their actions have increasingly focused on domestic matters. The European Court of Human Rights, for instance, does not merely override national courts, but does so on precisely those matters that De Gaulle wanted to leave untouched: immigration, institutional design, cultural issues, and so on. Similarly, the European Commission and the European Central Bank—often under the influence of Germany’s fixation on the Schuldenbremse, or debt brake—sanction countries that reach a certain level of deficit and impose their view of economic policy on recalcitrant voters. Over the years, the European Union’s standards have become more restrictive and more burdensome to ignore; the realm of national sovereignty has narrowed accordingly. Especially on economic issues, the EU is moving toward the development of a common budget whereby decisions on taxes and expenditure happen in Brussels. This state of affairs, in which successive French presidents have participated, would have baffled the founders of the Fifth Republic.

Worse, while over-supervising its members on domestic matters, the European Union has done little to avoid domination by the Russians, the Americans, or the Chinese. Omnipresent on cultural and economic questions, the EU refuses to deal with defense and foreign policy. In other words, precisely in those areas where common governance makes the most sense, Brussels leaves nation-states alone. Europe thus finds itself adrift in our time of renewed great power rivalry. The United States and China dominate the world economically, technologically, and militarily. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, to which Europe neither did nor could respond on its own, exposed the need to develop a more independent European defense. In these circumstances, the idea of Europe as a “Third Bloc,” capable of competing with the other two, seems immediately applicable.

Yet the EU refuses to act or, when it acts at all, does more harm than good. For years, European bureaucrats encouraged France to phase out its nuclear reactors, praising Germany’s energy policy. After the invasion of Ukraine, Germany’s dependence on Russian gas proved dis­astrous, while France’s nuclear program allowed the country to remain sovereign. This tragic example is but one of many. The EU has jeopardized the development of French solar panels by letting Chinese competitors flood the market without restrictions. It has also failed to support French and German automakers, who still cannot assemble electric vehicles without Chinese batteries. A few months ago, after the French company Mistral AI raised €385 million to take on American and Chinese giants, Brussels decided to ban the most promising forms of artificial intelligence. Of all instances of self-sabotage, this one best captures the current state of the EU. Faced with a new technology that could prove more important than the internet, European technocrats did not even consider that Europe might build its own companies to compete on the world stage. Instead, they opted for total retreat, delaying the inevitable and thereby letting great powers control Eu­rope’s future. This decision, as with previous decisions, relegates the continent into irrelevance. Yet the same EU that over-intervenes in domestic affairs is abdicating its main responsibility, namely, the protection of Europe’s geopolitical independence. De Gaulle’s “Europe of nations” would reverse course.

Cultural Crisis

The historian Jean-Michel Djian once wrote that “cultural policy is a French invention.” In fact, the story of France’s cultural policy begins with the autocratic rule of kings: the Collège de France, the country’s highest academic body; the Académie Française, tasked with the protection of the French language; the Comédie Française, France’s best school of drama; and similar institutions first arose under royal patron­age. The leaders of the Revolution upheld and deepened this preoccupation with national culture; as early as 1791, the Republic started building dozens of museums, conservatories, the École des Beaux-Arts, and other establishments designed to bring culture to the many. Today, France’s largest company by value is none other than the luxury conglomerate LVMH (Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy), whose Covid-era purchase of the U.S. corporation Tiffany & Co. was nixed by a letter from the French foreign minister himself.

There is, sociologist Jacques Rigaud observes, a crucial difference between French liberalism and its Anglo-American counterpart. Where John Locke and the framers of the American Constitution saw culture as a private matter, French republicans have always viewed the cultivation of culture as a necessary task of the state. While English liberals sought to protect life, liberty, and property, French republicans sought to shape men into citizens in a more substantive sense. Skeptical of civil society, French republicans relied on state schools and museums to instill civic virtue, patriotism, and solidarity. Every public institution would tell the story of the French people and bind them around a common core. The first theorists of republican education even extended the school day—French students study from eight a.m. till five p.m., with hours of home­work once they come home—to detach students from their families, churches, and communities. Against those who associated nationhood with racial or religious uniformity, French republicans championed an almost ancient view of citizenship. To live together, citizens would have to confine their ethnic, religious, or geographical loyalties to the private realm, if not abandon these affiliations altogether. Meanwhile, in the public realm, the state would build institutions to unite citizens around a civic ideal, halfway between ancient Rome and the Enlightenment. Ernest Renan captured this view of citizenship in his essay “What Is a Nation?,” which has remained a classic since its publication in 1882:

A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle. . . . The essence of the nation requires individuals to share much and forget much. . . . Man is a slave neither of his race, his language, his religion, the course of his rivers, nor the direction of his mountain ranges. A great aggregation of men, in sane mind and warm heart, create a moral conscience that calls itself a nation. As long as this moral conscience proofs its strength by sacrifices that require the subordination of the individual to the communal good, it is legitimate and has the right to exist.

This conception of citizenship animated the founders of the Fifth Republic. “All my life, I have had a certain idea of France, inspired by sentiment as much as by reason.” Behind this famous line, which opens de Gaulle’s memoirs, lies a republican account of citizenship. Throughout his career, de Gaulle believed that France needed a “roman national,” a national story around which people and institutions would coalesce. He filled his speeches with historical references, turning France’s past into the uninterrupted story of a great people. He did not merely fuse the legacies of the ancien régime, the Empire, and the Republic into an institutional settlement, but also into a cultural whole. Against the mechanistic character of modern politics, de Gaulle believed that statesmen could not reduce their task to the making of policy. Man was a political animal, that is, a story-telling creature who needs com­mon narratives to thrive. Even in his time, de Gaulle’s interventions often seemed dramatic, if not downright archaic. In many ways, they were: lamenting the death of rhetoric and the rise of technocracy, de Gaulle wanted to inject an element of romanticism into an age of cold, calculating reason. The liberal view of the state as a neutral arbiter remained foreign to him. Following a long French tradition, de Gaulle wanted the state to play a more active role in culture than other modern democracies.

In 1959, one year after his return to power, de Gaulle asked the writer André Malraux to create a Ministry of Culture. De Gaulle gave the new institution both a generous budget and an ambitious mandate. “Culture,” he declared at the Ministry’s inauguration, “is the sine qua non of our civilization.” After years of war, Malraux sought nothing less than the refoundation of the French spirit. To that effect, the Ministry worked with the finest artists of its time. The painter Marc Chagall redesigned the Garnier Opera; Brigitte Bardot, Alain Delon, and other iconic actors starred in state-funded movies; almost all publishing houses, theaters, museums, radio stations, TV channels, newspapers, fashion houses, films, and music festivals received some form of minis­terial support. The Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay, Le Monde, Le Figaro, Dior, and dozens of others would not have survived without the help of the state.

In a few years, Malraux rebuilt the country’s cultural and intellectual environment. He made culture democratic, not demotic; he broadened access without vulgarizing the content of culture. Even on television, the state’s most-watched channels would platform academic debates and artistic events. While de Gaulle’s Ministry of Education promoted poetry and philosophy in high schools, Malraux presided over the creation of more than a hundred “Houses of Culture”—local institutions that hosted free public events with well-known artists or intellectuals. From rural towns to the Paris Opera to popular TV shows, Malraux erected an ecosystem of state-sponsored creativity that persists to this day, albeit in a weaker form. In the Ministry’s founding charter, Malraux promised to “make France’s finest works and inheritance acces­sible to the largest number of Frenchmen.” At the time, this mission statement sounded fanciful, especially for a writer who lacked political experience, yet Malraux succeeded far beyond expectations. By the end of the 1950s, public TV channels would send journalists to factories, asking workers about their favorite books. The typical worker would turn around, smile, and answer “Balzac” or “Baudelaire.”

De Gaulle’s work with Malraux constituted an important part of a much larger commitment to republican citizenship. In education, de Gaulle pushed for the standardization of curricula in both public and private schools. He also ensured that the grandes écoles, France’s elite public universities, outcompeted private alternatives—and indeed fur­nished much of the French governing elite, including most of the Republic’s presidents and prime ministers since 1958. He enforced laïcité strictly, and defended mandatory military service. While de Gaulle by no means opposed the influence of civil society, he did want the state to retain control over the civic education of its citizens. All Frenchmen, especially future rulers, would learn the “roman national” and develop strong bonds with each other. De Gaulle did not see this emphasis on commonality as anti-pluralistic but, on the contrary, as a precondition of diversity. Precisely because France did not define itself around an ethnicity or a religion, the state had to turn a mosaic of disparate individuals into a cohesive whole. An officer by training, de Gaulle revered the military because it captured this ideal at its best—in uniform, strangers turn into comrades. There lay the fundamental task of the state: to make people who lived next to each other live with each other instead.

Many of France’s contemporary challenges stem from the simple fact that de Gaulle’s successors have abandoned this republican conception of citizenship. French conservatives often blame disunity on immigration, but this convenient explanation misses the mark. Indeed, the evidence suggests that France fails not only to integrate newcomers, but also to transmit its inheritance to native-born citizens. In the PISA education rankings, France’s score in mathematics has decreased by twenty-one points since 2018; both writing and reading comprehension have gone down by almost twenty points. These downward trends are concerning by themselves, but also twice as bad as the OECD average. Worse still, when it comes to moral formation, a recent study by Ipsos shows that 52 percent of French students do not “believe in the right to criticize religious beliefs or symbols,” and 16 percent either “express no condemnation towards” or “share certain motivations with” the terror­ists who attacked Charlie Hebdo in 2015. Broadly, the study concludes that “the vast majority of French students prefer American-style multi­culturalism” to the French status quo. These are not only immigrants. These are also native-born citizens who, in a country where the state once fostered republican virtues, oppose such basic ideas as freedom of expression and official secularism.

These statistics capture the abdication of the state on cultural matters, but also the fracture of the republic itself. On both the right and the left, successive administrations have done nothing but promote thinner and more procedural conceptions of citizenship. As conservatives oscillate between radical rhetoric and political inaction, French leftists have Americanized themselves away from their own tradition, embracing a brand of identity politics wholly foreign to, and wholly incompatible with, the spirit of 1789. Among recent candidates, Le Pen speaks of “republican values,” but lacks a vision of education and culture beyond the mere rejection of immigration. Mélenchon, once a fervent supporter of the burqa ban, now deems laïcité exclusionary and champions what he calls the “creolization” of France. Under attack on both fronts, Macron’s administration is experimenting with school uniforms and a national service program, but even these well-intentioned proposals will not come close to repairing the damage done. Over decades of negligence, the republican model withdrew into oblivion even as it became more necessary than ever.

The Meaning of Crisis

These trends are by no means irreversible. If anything, put in historical perspective, these are manageable problems that barely deserve the title of “crisis.” In 1945, when de Gaulle returned to France from exile, he found a country in ruins. France’s economy had collapsed, her institutions had lost legitimacy, her identity was fractured, her people scarred, and her future grim. His task seemed insurmountable; the nation would not survive without reorganization at every level. The magnitude of the challenge not only forced him to act, but to act swiftly and boldly. By contrast, France’s current position is one of comfortable decadence. France no longer has an industrial base, but living standards remain decent. France has lost influence abroad, but retains a nuclear arsenal. French courts exercise more power than ever, but do so discreetly, if not imperceptibly for most. The French government has outsourced its authority to European bureaucrats, but the illusion of sovereignty persists. The appeal of republican values has waned, but mostly among younger generations. Economically, institutionally, and culturally, France can continue to move closer to the precipice without immediate consequences. The ever-thinner remnants of the Gaullist state suffice to keep the country functioning while it drifts, ever so subtly, toward a more visible collapse. In this respect, France’s blessing is its curse.

Without fundamental changes, current trends will accelerate as they have in recent years. Living standards will deteriorate further; riots will occur more often; violence will spread beyond the banlieues; cultural divides will widen until they border on separatism. Only when the country reaches the brink of civil war will its predicament become obvious to all. De Gaulle’s carcass can keep the machine running for a while, but France is too poor, too diverse, too small, and too centralized to survive the collapse of its republican model. America, with its federal structure and its hegemonic economy, can withstand the death of its civil religion, if barely. France, whose architects feared balkanization above all, cannot.

It is in this sense that France’s situation constitutes a “crisis.” Etymologically, the word crisis means little more than a moment of choice. France faces such a moment, whose outcome depends on the political will of reformers. Unlike their predecessors, the stewards of France’s future do not have to reinvent much; the answers to most of their questions lie in the not-so-distant past. More than a foundation upon which to build, the Fifth Republic is a model to which to aspire. The principles of the Gaullist model—a strong executive, judicial re­straint, industrial policy, European independence, and republican citizenship—offer comprehensive remedies to the country’s ills, reme­dies that a vast majority of French voters support. Of course, redirecting France toward these ideals would not only require changes of policy, but also of attitude. Decision-makers would have to admit that they have made consequential mistakes, the kind of humility that one seldom encounters among people in power. For this reason alone, if not for the pressures that private interests, courts, and international institutions exert over France, the path to redemption remains tortuous. Nevertheless, likely or not, the revival of de Gaulle’s legacy would benefit France and others who confront similar predicaments. The threats of judicial overreach, deindustrialization, and cultural discord are by no means exclusive to the “country with 246 varieties of cheese.” If anything, for someone so single-mindedly French, Gaullism has best survived as a set of ideas that might travel better across borders abroad than across time at home.

This article originally appeared in American Affairs Volume VIII, Number 1 (Spring 2024): 168–89.