ABSTRACT
The conventional or orthodox view of the Franco-German relationship is that its quality and intensity depend critically on the engagement of the political leaders on both sides of the Rhine. According to this perspective that ‘great men make history’, the relationship has waxed and waned according to the identity or, more precisely, the foreign and European policy orientations of German chancellors and French presidents. Hence, the relationship was good and close under Adenauer and de Gaulle in the early 1960s, bad and distant under Erhard and de Gaulle in the mid-1960s, better, but still strained, under Brandt and Pompidou in the early 1970s, and good and close again not only while Schmidt was German Chancellor and Giscard French President in the second half of the 1970s, but also, save arguably for a short time during the German unification process, through most of the 1980s and early 1990s under Kohl and Mitterrand, before they cooled again with Mitterrand’s succession as French President by Chirac.1
