Modern & Contemporary France

Communists are expelled from government

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.

The Schuman Declaration

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.

Dien Bien Phu falls; the Algerian War opens

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.

The premier Pierre Mendès France, who had warned that the war was lost, finished it in five weeks. But Algeria — three French departments inhabited by a million European settlers — was claimed not as a colony but as France herself. The eight-year war that began on 1 November 1954 would kill perhaps three hundred thousand Algerians, bring down the Fourth Republic, and almost trigger a civil war in metropolitan France.

Britain, France, and Israel humiliated at Suez

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.

The European Economic Community is born

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.

De Gaulle returns; the Fifth Republic is founded

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.

The new régime gave the president a seven-year term, the right to call referenda and to dissolve the Assembly, emergency powers under Article 16, and — most importantly — the moral primacy of the man who was held to incarnate the nation. The Fifth Republic was a parliamentary system in form and a presidential one in fact. It is still the constitutional order of France today.

Gerboise bleue and the decolonisation of Africa

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.

The Évian Accords

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.

The OAS — Organisation armée secrète of die-hard French Algeria officers — fought the settlement to the end with bombs in Algiers and Paris, and tried to assassinate de Gaulle eight times. The most famous attempt, at Petit-Clamart in August 1962, was the basis of Frederick Forsyth's Day of the Jackal. The Algerian harkis — Muslim auxiliaries left behind — were massacred in the tens of thousands; the unfinished story of their families' acceptance in France would still haunt the Republic in the new century.

De Gaulle elected by universal suffrage

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.

De Gaulle withdraws France from NATO's integrated military command

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'.

Students and workers shake the regime

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.

May 68 did not bring down the Fifth Republic — and the Grenelle agreements, with their thirty-five per cent rise in the minimum wage, bought back social peace — but it did break a culture. Within a decade contraception had been legalised, abortion decriminalised, divorce simplified, the school examinations reformed, the universities decentralised, and a new generation of writers, film-makers, and feminists shaped what would be called the soixante-huitarde France.

Defeated by his own referendum

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.

Simone Veil's abortion law

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.

Mitterrand elected; the death penalty abolished

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.

Mitterrand's first government — premier Pierre Mauroy, four communist ministers — nationalised the great banks and industrial groups (Saint-Gobain, Pechiney, Thomson, Rhône-Poulenc) and gave the country its thirty-nine-hour week, fifth week of paid leave, and retirement at sixty. By 1983 the tournant de la rigueur and the European Monetary System had forced a turn to budget orthodoxy. The two cohabitations with Chirac and Balladur invented a French method of constitutional power-sharing.

The Bicentenary parade on the Champs-Élysées

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.

France ratifies Maastricht by 51 per cent

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.

Chirac recognises the French state's role in the deportation

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.

France wins the World Cup at home

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.

Jean-Marie Le Pen qualifies for the presidential second round

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.

Villepin at the United Nations

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.

The 'No' to Europe and the banlieue riots

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.

François Hollande beats Sarkozy

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.

Twelve killed at Charlie Hebdo; 'Je suis Charlie'

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.

The 13 November attacks

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.

A new movement takes the Élysée

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.

The yellow vests block the roundabouts

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.

Fire takes the spire of Notre-Dame de Paris

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.

The cathedral, restored in time for an opening Mass on 7 December 2024, was the first great national fact that the new digital France experienced together. The cause was found to have been most probably an electrical short-circuit. The restoration — Versailles oak for the roof, lead for the spire, a faithful reconstruction by the master builder Philippe Villeneuve — became a symbol of the country's capacity to make peace with its own past.

Macron beats Le Pen again, in a narrower runoff

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.

The Seine opening and the Games of the XXXIII Olympiad

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.

The Olympics closed a chapter that had opened with the bicentenary of 1989 and the new Louvre, and continued through the Stade de France and the reconstructed Notre-Dame: a quarter-century of Paris as the stage of the modern Republic. A century after the 1924 Games, France had once again invited the world to look at her. Behind the spectacle the political crisis continued — a hung parliament from the snap dissolution of June, three governments in eighteen months — and the long story of France went on.