De Gaulle in Contemporary France

In 2020, marking the triple anniversary of de Gaulle's birth (130 years), June 18 appeal (80 years), and death (50 years), France engaged in intense debate about his relevance. President Emmanuel Macron, born seven years after de Gaulle's death, claimed his mantle while acknowledging his controversies.

Macron's Gaullist Pretensions

Emmanuel Macron's presidency consciously evokes de Gaulle. The young outsider who created a movement transcending traditional parties, promised national renewal, and embodied vertical authority follows a Gaullist playbook. His Jupiter-like presidency, international ambitions, and crisis leadership during COVID-19 channeled the general.

But parallels have limits. Where de Gaulle's authority derived from historical legitimacy, Macron's rests on technocratic competence. Where de Gaulle embodied eternal France, Macron represents globalized modernity. Where de Gaulle maintained strategic ambiguity, Macron's positions shift tactically.

The gilets jaunes crisis revealed these differences. Faced with provincial revolt against Parisian authority, Macron initially responded with Gaullist hauteur. But unlike 1968, when silent majority supported order, 2018's protesters enjoyed widespread sympathy. Macron's "great national debate" acknowledged what de Gaulle never would: that vertical authority required horizontal legitimation.

Digital Gaullism

Social media transforms political communication, yet Gaullist themes persist in new forms. Twitter's character limits suit apodictic pronouncements. Instagram's visual power echoes television's impact. TikTok's generational reach updates provincial tours. Digital sovereignty becomes the new national independence.

French attempts to create European digital champions, regulate American tech giants, and protect cultural exception online echo Gaullist resistance to American hegemony. The battle over data localization, content moderation, and algorithmic transparency replays older struggles in silicon form. "Digital Gaullism" seeks technological independence as de Gaulle sought nuclear autonomy.

But digital culture also subverts Gaullist authority. Horizontal networks challenge vertical hierarchies. Memetic mockery deflates grandeur. Global communities transcend national boundaries. The general who mastered television might struggle with platforms that democratize discourse and fragment attention.

Crisis Leadership

COVID-19 tested contemporary relevance of Gaullist crisis management. Macron's martial rhetoric—"We are at war"—echoed 1940. State mobilization, economic intervention, and scientific Manhattan projects followed Gaullist patterns. Even border closures and sovereignty assertions recalled national independence themes.

But pandemic response also revealed Gaullist limitations. Centralized decision-making proved less effective than federal flexibility. Top-down communication competed with bottom-up social media. National solutions confronted global challenges. The virus respected neither grandeur nor sovereignty.

The European recovery plan marked potential evolution beyond Gaullism. Common debt, fiscal transfers, and genuine solidarity transcended national calculations. Yet French leadership in crafting the plan, insistence on strategic autonomy, and vision of European power showed Gaullist influence adapting to new realities.

The Immigration Challenge

No issue more severely tests de Gaulle's legacy than immigration. His assumption of French cultural homogeneity confronts contemporary diversity. His famous query about "Colombey-les-Deux-Mosquées" becomes reality in suburbs hosting grand mosques alongside churches.

Right-wing populists quote de Gaulle's warnings about demographic change while ignoring his pragmatism and humanity. Left-wing activists condemn his cultural nationalism while overlooking his anti-racism and universalism. Muslims seeking to be fully French face barriers embedded in Gaullist conceptions of national identity.

The 2021 "separatism" law revealed these tensions. Defending republican values against religious extremism follows Gaullist precedent. But targeting specific communities contradicts universal citizenship. The general who proclaimed "France is not France without greatness" must confront whether France is France without cultural unity.

Environmental Sovereignty

Climate change poses ultimate challenge to Gaullist sovereignty. National independence means little on a warming planet. Grandeur counts nothing against rising seas. Yet environmental movements increasingly adopt Gaullist language about independence from fossil fuels and resistance to corporate power.

France's nuclear program, crown jewel of Gaullist independence, divides environmentalists. Some see carbon-free energy enabling climate leadership. Others condemn radioactive risks and technocratic hubris. The general who chose atomic autonomy could not foresee atoms becoming either salvation or damnation.

Green Gaullism emerges tentatively—ecological planning replacing economic planning, energy independence through renewables, European environmental sovereignty against American and Chinese competition. But tension remains between national action and global cooperation, sovereign decision and planetary necessity.

Conclusion: The Eternal and the Ephemeral

Charles de Gaulle crafted a paradox: eternal France expressed through temporal power. His achievements—Free France, Liberation, Fifth Republic, nuclear independence, decolonization—transformed history. His failures—colonial wars, social rigidity, generational incomprehension—scarred memory. His legacy shapes France even as France transcends his vision.

What endures? Institutional architecture proving remarkably adaptable. International posture combining pragmatism with principle. Political culture expecting leadership while demanding accountability. National narrative interweaving grandeur with grievance. These patterns persist across ideological shifts and generational changes.

What fades? Mystical nationalism in an interconnected world. Vertical authority in a horizontal society. Cultural homogeneity in diverse democracy. Masculine monopoly in gender-equal aspiration. These aspects of Gaullism become historical artifacts, studied but not lived.

Contemporary France remains comprehensible only through de Gaulle—not as model but as matrix. Every president defines themselves with or against him. Every crisis evokes his example. Every debate references his words. He haunts the Republic he created, prophet and prisoner of French exception.

The boy from Lille who played eternal France achieved his ambition—he became France, if only for a moment. That moment echoes still, inspiring and constraining, enabling and limiting. France searches for new greatness while carrying old grandeur. De Gaulle is dead; Gaullism is dying; but that "certain idea of France" endures, transformed but recognizable, in a nation forever marked by one man's magnificent obsession.

In the end, perhaps de Gaulle's greatest legacy is the question he embodied: can a nation maintain distinctive identity while adapting to universal challenges? France continues seeking answers, guided by his example, liberated by his absence. The general rests at Colombey, but his shadow stretches from the Élysée to the banlieues, from Brussels to Brazzaville, wherever France confronts what it was, what it is, and what it might become.# Epilogue

The morning of November 12, 1970, was raw and gray at Colombey-les-Deux-Églises. Rain had fallen through the night, turning the paths to mud. By dawn, they came—not the presidents and princes who gathered at Notre-Dame, but ordinary French people. Workers from Lorraine, farmers from Champagne, students from Paris, housewives from nearby villages. They came by car, by bus, on foot, drawn by something deeper than politics.

At the simple grave, they stood in silence. Some wept. Others saluted. Many simply stared, as if trying to comprehend that the man who had embodied France for so long was truly gone. An old resistance fighter placed a small Cross of Lorraine on the grave. A young woman left wildflowers. A child, lifted by his father, asked why everyone was so sad.

This scene—humble, spontaneous, profound—captured something essential about Charles de Gaulle and his relationship with France. He had been impossible, imperious, often infuriating. He had demanded more than seemed reasonable, promised more than seemed possible, believed more than seemed rational. Yet in his magnificent stubbornness, his refusal to accept defeat or mediocrity, he had touched something fundamental in the French spirit.

Today, as France faces new challenges—terrorism, economic uncertainty, cultural divisions, environmental crisis—the question persists: what would de Gaulle do? The question misses the point. De Gaulle's greatness lay not in providing eternal answers but in asking eternal questions. What does it mean to be French? How can a nation remain itself while adapting to change? When must one resist, and when must one transform?

His true legacy is not policy but posture—the upright stance of someone who refuses to bow to the inevitable. In our age of algorithms and globalization, of horizontal networks and fluid identities, this vertical insistence on dignity, independence, and grandeur seems archaic. Yet it also seems necessary.

France continues to seek its path between memory and possibility, between what de Gaulle made it and what it must become. The general sleeps at Colombey, but his challenge endures: to be worthy of history while making history, to honor the eternal while embracing the new, to remain France while becoming something France has never been.

This is the impossible task he set his nation. That France continues to attempt it, however imperfectly, may be his greatest victory.

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