De Gaulle's Fifth Republic and May 1968
De Gaulle founds a republic built around a strong, directly elected president, and ten years later a student and worker revolt shakes both him and French society.
- A Certain Idea of France: The Life of Charles de Gaulle — Julian Jackson, Allen Lane (2018)
- May '68 and Its Afterlives — Kristin Ross, University of Chicago Press (2002)
- France — Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica
The Fourth Republic (1946–58) rebuilt France and launched European integration, but it had more than twenty governments in twelve years and broke on Algeria. In May 1958, with an army revolt in Algiers threatening to spread to the mainland, parliament called de Gaulle back. His new constitution, approved by about four in five voters in September 1958, let the president appoint the prime minister, dissolve parliament and call referendums; from 1962 the president was directly elected.
- A Certain Idea of France: The Life of Charles de Gaulle — Julian Jackson, Allen Lane (2018)
- France — Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica
De Gaulle pursued “grandeur” and independence: a French nuclear deterrent, withdrawal from NATO’s integrated command in 1966, reconciliation with West Germany through the Élysée Treaty of 1963, and vetoes on British entry to the European Community.
- A Certain Idea of France: The Life of Charles de Gaulle — Julian Jackson, Allen Lane (2018)
May 1968
Ten years later a booming but rigid society boiled over. Students at Nanterre and the Sorbonne protested over university conditions, the Vietnam War and a stifling social order; police violence turned it into street battles and barricades in the Latin Quarter on the night of 10–11 May. Then the workers joined: by late May somewhere between seven and ten million people were on strike, the largest strike movement France had known. Slogans such as “Sous les pavés, la plage” (“Under the paving stones, the beach”) captured the mood.
- May '68 and Its Afterlives — Kristin Ross, University of Chicago Press (2002)
The government conceded large wage rises, de Gaulle dissolved parliament, a huge crowd marched in his support on 30 May, and his supporters won a landslide in June. Politically the revolt failed, but socially France changed. De Gaulle resigned after losing a referendum in 1969 and died the following year.
- A Certain Idea of France: The Life of Charles de Gaulle — Julian Jackson, Allen Lane (2018)
- May '68 and Its Afterlives — Kristin Ross, University of Chicago Press (2002)
A joyful revolt against a stuffy, authoritarian society that won higher wages for workers and opened the way for feminism, gay rights and environmentalism in the 1970s.
- May '68 and Its Afterlives — Kristin Ross, University of Chicago Press (2002)
A revolt of privileged students that undermined authority in schools and families and whose individualism eroded shared values; de Gaulle's landslide in June 1968 showed that the "silent majority" wanted order. Some right-wing politicians have since campaigned on undoing its legacy.
- A Certain Idea of France: The Life of Charles de Gaulle — Julian Jackson, Allen Lane (2018)
Why it matters today
French people still live under de Gaulle's constitution, and the presidential election is the great event of national life; many complain of a "republican monarch" and call for a "Sixth Republic". "Mai 68", meanwhile, is shorthand for the moment France loosened up: less deference to fathers, teachers, bosses and priests. Whether that was liberation or the start of a lost sense of authority is still a left–right dividing line.