Gaullism

Gaullism is a French political ideology developed and created by Charles de Gaulle, the World War II French Resistance leader who became the founding President of the Fifth French Republic. Its best known expression was de Gaulle's insistence that France would not be subordinate to other nations, shown when he withdrew French forces from the NATO command structure, forced the removal of allied American military bases from France and started France's own independent nuclear deterrent. Historians disagree about how to classify it. Serge Berstein calls it neither a doctrine nor a political ideology and says it cannot be placed left or right, seeing instead a pragmatic exercise of power, while Lawrence D. Kritzman describes a form of French patriotism aligned with the right yet committed to the republican values of the Revolution and to national sovereignty and unity, opposed to class struggle. Gaullism was nationalistic, and in the early post-war period Gaullists advocated retaining the French Empire before de Gaulle shifted in the mid-1950s toward federal arrangements or self-determination.