His more down-to-earth successor Georges Pompidou made a fair job of carrying on the heritage
His more down-to-earth successor, Georges Pompidou, made a fair job of carrying on the heritage. After the pathetic wartime figure of Marshal Ptain seeking to act as a grandfather for the occupied nation, De Gaulle proved a real father figure, as appropriate for his country and his times as Franklin Roosevelt was for his.After the disarray of the Fourth Republic, De Gaulle shaped the Fifth Republic in his image, embuing the presidency with sweeping executive powers and a semi-monarchical status. For the French, being part of le peuple franais is more than a demographic fact: it is an identity statement of political belonging.If a chief is needed to hold everything together, France has not been badly served over the past half century. It is a sentiment invoked today by Mr Chirac in his calls for the defence of national republican values, a sign of how warmly his populist brand of right-wing politics has embraced the legacy of the storming of the Bastille, regicide and all. From the top came the political will of its rulers – from the Capetian monarchs and the great unifying King Louis XI through the Jacobin centralisers of the Revolution to General de Gaulle.
From below came the underlying pride of the French in being part of a great nation – a sentiment that was fanned into life by the revolutionaries of 1789, developed powerfully by Napoleon, and given new strength by victory in 1918.It is a sentiment that de Gaulle drew on throughout his career. Paris received its boost out of the Middle Ages from the stimulus of the Protestant Low Countries and Germany: the south, and much of the west, remained traditional, and largely suspicious of the industrial revolution.Two things held the nation together. What separates a French citizen in Alsace from a German across the border? A stallholder in the Nice flower market feels more kinship with an Italian basil-grower from Genoa than with a miner from the north.Nor was language a unifying force as early as it was in Germany or England. For centuries, the country was divided between those who spoke the langue d’ol in the northern half and the langue d’oc in the south.
Up on a hillside in the Alpes de Haute Provence, an old farmer still uses only his local patois as he serves his illegal home-made absinthe.Family configurations differ between the all-encompassing Mediterranean clans of Provence and the smaller nuclear patterns of the north. Unlike Britain or Spain, France is not a clearly defined geographical entity on its vital 1,000-mile-plus eastern border. The contradictions and paradoxes that run right through national life explain the need for such a father figure to reassure a perpetually worried country.The uncertainties that assail the French can be traced back to the origins of the nation. This touches on a central nerve in French society and politics.
Where else are mayors’ offices decorated with the symbol of the republican state, the bust of Marianne – now available in four different styles, modelled on Brigitte Bardot, Catherine Deneuve, a television interviewer and a model?The conclusion that Le Monde drew from its poll was that what France wanted from the presidential election was a true “chief” for a true “State”. In English, the state comes with a lower case “s”: in France, l’Etat merits capital respect.A recent poll in Le Monde reported 87 per cent support for the proposition “The state should intervene more in the economic life of our country”. In Britain, the state is only invoked to be condemned in Thatcherite terms. In France, nobody in the current presidential campaign is more lyrical about the role of the state than Mr Chirac, who professes himself a great admirer of the Iron Lady. But they also have more respect for the state than anybody else in Western Europe.