Charles de Gaulle
The general who refused to accept France's 1940 defeat and spent thirty years forcing the world, and his allies, to treat France as a great power.
Charles de Gaulle was a two-star general with no army, no government, and no mandate when he arrived in London in June 1940 and declared on the BBC that France had lost a battle but not the war. A Vichy court sentenced him to death in absentia. Twenty-nine years later he left the presidency of a nuclear-armed republic he had designed himself. Nearly everything distinctive about French foreign policy since, the insistence on independence from Washington, the national deterrent, the drive for European strategic autonomy, traces to him.
Inventing France in exile
Free France began as a gesture and became a claim. De Gaulle had no democratic legitimacy, so he asserted it: he was France, because the alternative was Vichy. Roosevelt found him insufferable and repeatedly tried to work around him; Churchill defended him and complained that the heaviest cross he had to bear was the Cross of Lorraine. De Gaulle won anyway, by binding the internal Resistance to his committee and by being physically present, walking down the Champs-Elysees in a liberated Paris in August 1944 with German snipers still on the rooftops. France ended the war with an occupation zone in Germany and a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, an outcome its 1940 performance did not obviously earn.
He then resigned in early 1946 rather than preside over a constitution that gave the presidency no power, and spent twelve years writing memoirs and waiting.
The Fifth Republic
The Algerian war brought him back. In 1958, with settlers and generals in open revolt and the Fourth Republic paralyzed, he returned on his own terms and wrote a constitution built around a strong president elected, after 1962, directly by the people. Then he did the thing the men who recalled him never expected: he gave Algeria independence in 1962, surviving multiple assassination attempts by embittered officers.
With the colonial war closed, he pursued rank. France tested its first atomic bomb in the Sahara in 1960 and built the force de frappe, a deterrent aimed in every direction and controlled by nobody else, on the reasoning that no American president would trade New York for Paris. In 1966 he pulled France out of NATO's integrated military command and told the alliance to move its headquarters off French soil, while remaining a member of the alliance itself. France did not fully rejoin the command structure until 2009.
He vetoed British entry to the Common Market twice, believing London would be an American proxy inside Europe, and he built instead on reconciliation with West Germany, signing the Elysee Treaty with Konrad Adenauer in 1963. He also attacked the dollar directly, converting French dollar reserves into American gold and denouncing the "exorbitant privilege" that let the United States pay its foreign bills by printing money, one of the pressures that ended the Bretton Woods system in 1971.
The exit and the inheritance
The student and worker revolt of May 1968 shook him badly. He briefly left the country to make sure the army was behind him, won a crushing election, and then resigned in April 1969 after losing a referendum on an obscure administrative reform. He died the following year, refusing a state funeral and a place in the Pantheon.
Gaullism outlived Gaullists. The French posture it created, an independent nuclear force, a Europe that must not be a protectorate, a permanent suspicion of Anglo-American dominance, is not a party position but the default assumption of French governments left and right. When a French president talks about European strategic autonomy, or declines to follow Washington into a war, the vocabulary is his. So is the underlying insight: prestige is not a reward for power but a way of manufacturing it, and a country that behaves as if it is a great power will often be treated as one.