ABSTRACT
From 1958 to about 1967, the Fifth Republic was regularly referred to, both inside and outside France, as ‘de Gaulle’s Republic’. The Third Republic, gave France a workable parliamentary machine, consolidated her political habits and party organizations, and strengthened attitudes to the State that were, at least up to the 1930s, shared by the bulk of the population. The Fourth Republic was from the start a Republic of illusions. In fourteen years, however, Gaullism had greatly increased the difficulties in the way of any left-wing attempt to dislodge the Gaullist majority in the National Assembly. The Fifth Republic had not merely brought about changes in the political climate, but had also changed much of the context of politics. No less than under the Fourth Republic, constitutional questions were themselves matters of controversy, and what ought to have been purely political controversies were perpetually complicated by constitutional implications.
