Word: gaullist
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...midst of an unprecedented national debate over defense policy. Long accustomed to giving he military whatever it demands, in a country where patriotism and the armed forces are nearly synonymous, Frenchmen are now questioning that practice in the face of rising budget pressures. Earlier this month neo-Gaullist Deputy Pierre Messmer, a former Defense Minister under Charles de Gaulle, led a censure motion against the Mitterrand government's defense policy in the National Assembly. Messmer attacked the "mere 15%" of public spending devoted to the military as "the weakest figure since the second World War." The Socialists used their...
...senior adviser to Reagan: "We didn't want cheese. We just wanted out of the trap." The French attempt to deny Reagan even this measure efface saving irritated British and Italian as well as U.S. officials. All regarded it as a play to French public opinion, which since Gaullist days has placed a high premium on independence from Washington...
Still, France would survive. Russian gas will represent only five percent of French energy consumption, making long-term conversion to an alternative source feasible. Gaullist planners have long envisioned a France powered by nuclear energy--it already is more dependent on its reactors than any other country except Switzerland--and natural gas is at most a stepping stone toward the realization of that goal. Despite the go-slow policies of the Socialists, by the late 1990s the new crop of reactors will make the Soviet gas virtually superfluous...
...there are more reasons than France's economic troubles. From World War II on, France has lived under the shadow of one man: Charles de Gaulle. Since the General's death, the Gaullist legacy has continued. While not, in the strictest sense, a Gaullist, Giscard seemed to many to be trying to fit the mold. By the end of his seven-year term, he had evolved from a liberal reformer to an authoritarian figure who fancied himself King, not president. In Mitterand, the French opted for a more humane and less threatening figure...
...legislative victory was also a vindication of his long-range political strategy. After winning the presidency last month with a surprise victory over Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, the center-right incumbent, Mitterrand disbanded the National Assembly, which had been controlled by Giscard's coalition, an amalgam of the Gaullist and centrist forces that had run the government for 23 years. In the campaign to elect a new Assembly, Mitterrand was threatened from two directions. If the right regained control of the chamber, France could face a constitutional crisis; the institutions of the Fifth Republic are not designed to work...