From the Fourth Republic and the wars of decolonisation through the founding of the Fifth Republic under de Gaulle, May 1968 and the alternances of Mitterrand and Chirac, the building of Europe and the bicentenary of the Revolution, the World Cup of 1998 and the rejection of the European Constitution, the terrorist attacks of 2015 and the rise of Macron, to the Notre-Dame fire and the Paris Olympics. Slide month by month through the eight decades that follow the Liberation.
After a referendum rejection in May and a second draft, the French ratify the Constitution of the Fourth Republic on 13 October by a slim 53 per cent. De Gaulle, who had resigned in January, denounces the new régime des partis from his retreat at Colombey. In its twelve years the Fourth Republic will have twenty-two governments.
From the Fourth Republic and the wars of decolonisation through the founding of the Fifth Republic under de Gaulle, May 1968 and the alternances of Mitterrand and Chirac, the building of Europe and the bicentenary of the Revolution, the World Cup of 1998 and the rejection of the European Constitution, the terrorist attacks of 2015 and the rise of Macron, to the Notre-Dame fire and the Paris Olympics. Slide month by month through the eight decades that follow the Liberation.
After a referendum rejection in May and a second draft, the French ratify the Constitution of the Fourth Republic on 13 October by a slim 53 per cent. De Gaulle, who had resigned in January, denounces the new régime des partis from his retreat at Colombey. In its twelve years the Fourth Republic will have twenty-two governments.
On 5 May, Premier Ramadier dismisses the five communist ministers from his tripartite coalition over a strike at Renault. The PCF, the largest party in France with twenty-eight per cent of the vote, will not be in a government of the Republic again until Mitterrand's victory thirty-four years later. The Cold War cuts the French political class in two.
On 9 May, in the Salon de l'Horloge at the Quai d'Orsay, the foreign minister Robert Schuman proposes — on the basis of a memorandum from Jean Monnet — to place the coal and steel of France and Germany under a common High Authority. The European Coal and Steel Community will be signed in Paris in April 1951. The seventy-year project of European integration has begun.
On 7 May, after fifty-five days of siege in the Tonkinese hills, sixteen thousand French paratroopers and legionnaires surrender to General Giap's Vietminh at Dien Bien Phu. The Geneva accords of July partition Indochina at the seventeenth parallel and end ninety years of French presence. On 1 November — All Saints' Day — the Front de libération nationale launches its first coordinated attacks across Algeria.
After Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal in July, a Franco-British-Israeli expedition seizes the canal zone on 5 November. Eisenhower threatens the pound and the franc; the operation is called off within forty-eight hours. The Mollet government's African gamble has shown the limits of independent European power in the age of the superpowers.
On 25 March in Rome, France signs with Germany, Italy, and the Benelux countries the treaty that creates the European Economic Community and Euratom. The customs union, the Common Agricultural Policy, and free movement of capital, labour, and services will follow. Europe is built on a Franco-German axis whose Saarbrücken meetings between Adenauer and de Gaulle will set its course.
On 13 May, a Committee of Public Safety led by General Massu seizes Algiers; a putsch from Corsica threatens Paris. The Fourth Republic collapses. On 1 June Charles de Gaulle is invested as the last prime minister of the Fourth Republic and the first president-elect of the Fifth, on terms he dictates. A new constitution, prepared by Michel Debré, is approved in September with eighty per cent of the vote.
On 13 February at Reggane in the Algerian Sahara, France detonates its first atomic bomb — Gerboise bleue, four times more powerful than Hiroshima — and joins the nuclear club. The same year, fourteen sub-Saharan colonies declare independence within the year known to history as the Year of Africa.
On 18 March the French government and the GPRA sign the Évian Accords. A cease-fire begins the next day; a referendum in July ratifies Algerian independence by ninety-nine per cent of the vote. Over the summer of 1962, some 900,000 pieds-noirs — the European settlers — flee to a France that had not asked for them.
After a 1962 referendum amended the constitution, the president is now chosen directly by the French electorate. To his surprise, de Gaulle is forced into a runoff against François Mitterrand by Jean Lecanuet's youthful television campaign. He wins on 19 December with fifty-five per cent — the foundation of an unchallenged presidency.
On 7 March, in a letter to President Johnson, de Gaulle announces that French forces will leave NATO's integrated command. SHAPE moves from Versailles to Mons; the Americans evacuate fourteen bases. France remains in the Atlantic Alliance but builds, with the force de frappe, an independent nuclear deterrent — the policy of grandeur and 'tous azimuts'.
From the occupation of Nanterre and the Latin Quarter in early May, the revolt spreads to the factories. By 22 May ten million workers are on strike — the largest general strike in any Western country. On 30 May, having vanished to consult General Massu in Baden-Baden, de Gaulle returns, dissolves the assembly, and calls for the Gaullist counter-march that fills the Champs-Élysées. The June elections give him a landslide.
Having staked his presidency on a referendum on regional reform and Senate revision, de Gaulle loses by 52.4 per cent No to 47.6 per cent Yes on 27 April. He resigns at midnight and retires to Colombey-les-Deux-Églises, where he dies on 9 November 1970 with the words 'I am suffering'. His former premier Georges Pompidou succeeds him.
The health minister Simone Veil — Auschwitz survivor and Jewish magistrate — carries through a hostile Assembly on 17 January the law decriminalising abortion in the first ten weeks. President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, elected in 1974 after Pompidou's death, has made the reform a personal commitment. The 'great Veil debate' had run for twenty-five hours in November.
On 10 May François Mitterrand defeats the incumbent Giscard d'Estaing and becomes the first socialist president of the Fifth Republic. The next morning the rose-bearing crowds spend the night on the Place de la Bastille. By September the death penalty — last used at Marseille on 10 September 1977 — is abolished by Robert Badinter's law of 9 October.
On 14 July, the bicentenary of the Bastille, Mitterrand presides over a G7 summit and a vast parade choreographed by Jean-Paul Goude: African dancers in the rain, Jessye Norman wrapped in the tricolore singing the Marseillaise. The Grands Travaux — Mitterrand's Louvre pyramid, the Bastille Opera, the Grande Arche de la Défense — are unveiled. The Berlin Wall falls four months later.
On 20 September the French ratify the Maastricht Treaty — the European Union, the single currency, the political pillar — by a hair: 51.04 per cent Yes to 48.96 per cent No. The petit oui exposes a deep divide between an elite consensus on Europe and a popular unease that will return in 2005.
On 16 July, the anniversary of the Vel d'Hiv round-up of 1942, the new president Jacques Chirac speaks on the site of the demolished cycling stadium. 'These dark hours forever sully our history… France, that day, accomplished the irreparable.' Fifty-three years of official silence on Vichy's responsibility ends in a single speech.
On 12 July at the Stade de France in Saint-Denis, the multi-ethnic French team of Zidane, Thuram, Henry, and Vieira beats Brazil 3-0 to win the World Cup. A million and a half people pack the Champs-Élysées. The 'black-blanc-beur' France of the trophy is the optimistic face of integration — a face whose pieces would be reassembled less easily in the years to come.
On the night of 21 April the Socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin is eliminated in the first round of the presidential election; the leader of the Front national, Jean-Marie Le Pen, finishes second. A million-strong republican front protest on 1 May; Chirac, with the support of the left, wins the runoff with 82 per cent. The euro had been introduced into purses in January; the political class had been put on notice.
On 14 February, in the Security Council in New York, the foreign minister Dominique de Villepin delivers the speech that announces France's veto of the Anglo-American resolution authorising war in Iraq. He is applauded — unprecedented in the chamber. Chirac follows with the threat of the veto on 10 March. The American war goes ahead anyway; the Franco-American breach is the deepest since Vietnam.
On 29 May the French voted 55-45 against the European Constitution. On 27 October two teenagers fleeing the police died in a power substation in Clichy-sous-Bois; the death triggered three weeks of riots that spread to three hundred suburban towns and ended in a state of emergency under a 1955 colonial-era law. The Republic's hardest questions — Europe, the banlieue, integration — could no longer be deferred.
On 6 May François Hollande defeats the incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy and becomes the second socialist president of the Fifth Republic. The legalisation of same-sex marriage by Christiane Taubira's law of 17 May 2013 — and the great counter-demonstrations of the Manif pour tous — will divide the country in the new year.
On 7 January the brothers Saïd and Chérif Kouachi force their way into the offices of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo in Paris and shoot dead twelve people, including cartoonists Cabu, Charb, Honoré, Tignous, and Wolinski. Two days later, after a hostage-taking at a kosher supermarket in Porte de Vincennes, the perpetrators are killed. On 11 January nearly four million march in cities across France in defence of free expression.
On the night of 13 November, ten ISIS operatives coordinate three suicide bombings outside the Stade de France, café and restaurant shootings in the eleventh arrondissement, and a massacre at the Bataclan concert hall. One hundred and thirty die in a single evening — the highest death toll on French soil since the Second World War. A state of emergency runs until November 2017.
On 7 May, Emmanuel Macron — thirty-nine years old, a former Hollande adviser and economy minister who founded his own movement only a year before — defeats Marine Le Pen in the presidential runoff with 66 per cent. His En Marche! (later La République En Marche) wins an absolute majority in the National Assembly in June. The Socialists and Republicans collapse.
On 17 November, three hundred thousand people in fluorescent yellow safety jackets occupy the roundabouts and toll booths of provincial France, protesting a green fuel tax. The movement, leaderless and amplified by Facebook, spreads to weekly Saturday marches on the Champs-Élysées; eleven die, hundreds are injured, and the Arc de Triomphe is vandalised. Macron responds with the Grand Débat and ten billion euros in concessions.
On the evening of 15 April, the spire of Notre-Dame de Paris — built by Viollet-le-Duc in the 1860s on a medieval cathedral — collapses in a fire that destroys the roof and the medieval timber 'forêt'. Captured live on phones around the world, the disaster brings the city into the streets. Macron promises a reconstruction in five years; nearly a billion euros is donated within a week.
On 24 April Emmanuel Macron is re-elected with 58.5 per cent against Marine Le Pen — the first incumbent re-elected in twenty years and the closest the Rassemblement national has come to power. The June parliamentary elections deny him a majority; for the first time in the Fifth Republic, a re-elected president must govern without one. The pension reform raising the retirement age to sixty-four is forced through by Article 49.3 in March 2023 amid weeks of strikes.
On 26 July, in a four-hour ceremony on the Seine in driving rain — the first opening ceremony in Olympic history held outside a stadium — Paris welcomes the Games of the XXXIII Olympiad. The cauldron is lit beside a hot-air balloon at the Tuileries. France finishes fifth on the medal table; the cleansed river hosts the triathlon; the rebuilt Grand Palais and the gardens of Versailles serve as arenas.