Gaullism

He is very respected on the world stage.

And he's carved out a kind of a Gaullist, non-American alliance on issues like Ukraine.

So you're pulling a face.

I'm pulling a face because I think that Macron and indeed now the sort of French system since the disaster of calling that snap election and it's slapping him in the face in 2024.

But I would remind you that Macron was elected as an alternative to everything you've described.

Yes.

They broke away from the traditional bloc voting of left and right, the Socialist Party or the Gaullists, and voted for Macron in order to cut through all of the structural problems of France.

The idea being that you hand a mandate to, okay, a centrist, but a centrist populist who was going to do things like raise the age of retirement, grow the economy, shift away from welfare and back towards capitalism.

I mean, it was an impossible situation for students and, and, and for, uh, and for faculty.

And as now, as in the issues now- Ah, there wasn't light at the end of the tunnel because compounding the fact that there weren't jobs, unless you were in one of the grandes écoles, that is the big fancy schools, unless you were an ENARC or one of these people in the administration school that was gonna just slide into some party post in a Gaullist government, ah, you know, what was there at the end? And you also had this, this extraordinary ambiguity, ah, you know, in thinking about this or ambivalence, because if you were basically against the sort of technological super-powered society of, of, of, of fast cars, ah, and, uh, the Americanization of, of, uh, European culture, if you believe strongly against that, you know, what kind of job is there gonna be at the end of the tunnel for you? You can't be a professional militant, you know, your entire life.

What are you gonna do? And the people, by the way, who were, who invested their careers or lost their careers in this mobilization, uh, were toast because they refused to sit for their exams, ah, and they committed professional suicide right on stage because they did it.

And it all starts with a lot of them, Daniel, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who was a militant when he was expelled from the University of, of Nanterre, ah, ah, because of, of, of his militancy.

This is what's called a class society, and it had not changed very much by 1968.

Um, and people blamed the state for the rigidity.

I have a friend, in fact, a Gaullist with whom I waited in line to get into Notre Dame for the, uh, uh, the Charles de Gaulle affair, uh, who, uh, was supposed to take, uh, he's a lawyer and he was taking an advanced degree and he, uh, st- he lived in the suburbs and he stayed in, uh, prosperous suburbs, fairly prosperous, but he, he stayed in Paris one night because the metro's closed and bus is closed.

You know, if you didn't make the 12:32, then, you know, you had a long walk, and I walked back to that suburb and hitchhiked back and all of that.

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Valérie Pécresse, who was running for the French presidency, a Gaullist, as mainstream as it can possibly get in the French Republic, gets up there and in ever so many words suggests to people that the conspiracy theory of the great replacement might be sort of true.

Big scandal at the time, but once she had said it, once she had told all her voters who think of themselves as bourgeois, centrist, responsible, moderate, you name it, that actually the far right had been right all along, these people don't say, "I wanna, you know, embrace far right populism." I simply now embrace what the center is actually telling me is sort of, is sort of correct.

Now, you would have thought that some people on the center right should have understood this le- this lesson by now.

Why did the coup fail? Perhaps the main reason was that the four generals had utterly neglected the political forces and had allowed the immediate power of the armed forces to obscure the somewhat less immediate but ultimately decisive role that they could play.

In the Gaullist coup of May 1958, the action of the military and the population of Algiers had been supported by the Gaullist infiltration of the civil service and by the steady corrosion of the will of other political groups to oppose the dissolution of the Fourth Republic.

This time, the generals had simply ignored the civilians.

De Gaulle went on television and asked for help from the population at large.

« Francais, Francais, aidez-moi! » Debert, who followed him on the screen, was more specific.

Go to the airports, convince the soldiers who are misled.

He also started to arm a militia drawn from the Gaullist party.

More important, the trade union organizations, the Communists, CGT, the Christian Democrats, CFTC, and the Force Ouvrière, all rallied around the government while most political parties did the same.

I mean, the, the his- the reason for this is after the Cold War ended, the British took this enormous peace dividend and stopped spending on their defense capabilities, in particular their nuclear deterrent.

And the French, I guess, still infected with the, you know, Gaullism and-

Force de frappe

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