A BRIEF HISTORY The French have always wanted to know what it means to be a French­man. Their history has been a constant quest for national identity: a conflict between strong regional loyalties and central authority. In about 2000 b.c. Celtic tribes — probably from eastern Europe — came looking for greener pastures in the areas that are now Franche-Comté, Alsace, and Bur­gundy. At the same time, migrants from the Mediterranean countries were trickling into the south. The first recorded settlement was the trading post set up by Phocaean Greeks from Asia Minor at Massalia (Mar­seilles) around 600 b.c. , followed by other ports at Hyères, Antibes, and Nice. But the Greeks developed few contacts with the interior beyond a little commerce in olives and wine with the Celts of Burgundy. When their position was threatened by Ligurian pirates at sea and warlike tribes from inland, the merchants of Marseilles called on Rome for help. From Gaul to France In 125 b.c. , the Romans came in force, conquered the “Gallic barbarians,” and set up a fortress at Aquae Sextiae (Aix-en-Provence). They took advantage of this new stronghold to create Provincia (now Provence), stretching from the Alps to the Pyrénées, in order to guarantee communications between Italy and Spain. When this province was endangered by fresh attacks from the north, Julius Caesar himself took charge, conquering practically the whole of Gaul by 50 b.c. Caesar drew Gaul’s northeastern frontier at the Rhine, taking in present-day Belgium, and warned that the Ger­man­ic tribes across the river — the Franks (after whom France is named), Alamans, and Saxons — would always threaten the security of the frontier. The Romanization of Gaul sent the most energetic warriors to defend the outposts of the empire while their families settled down to work the land or build towns such as Lyon, Orange, Arles, and Nîmes, and the first great highways between them. At the same time, merchants built up a thriving trade with the rest of the Roman Empire. The pattern for the peasantry and bourgeoisie of France was thus established. Christianity was introduced into Gaul in the first century a.d. , but was not really accepted until the late fourth century, when it became the empire’s official religion. Large-scale conversions were led by Martin de Tours, a soldier turned cleric. (Sword and cross were to form a regular alliance in French history. ) The new religion soon cemented national solidarity in the face of more barbarian invasions, this time by the Franks. Gallic unity collapsed with the crumbling Roman Empire. King Clovis, the leader of the Franks, defeated the Roman armies at Sois­sons in 486 and won the allegiance of most Gallo-Romans by converting to Christianity ten years later. With Paris as his capital, he extended his rule to the Medi­ter­ra­nean. The realm was divided up among his heirs and progressively fragmented by the rivalries of the Merovingian dynasty that battled for power over the next 300 years. Despite this fragmentation, the Franks deeply impacted the cultural and linguistic heritage of France. The Germanic traditions and language of the north became distinct from the Gallo-Roman traditions longer preserved in the Medi­ter­ra­nean basin. Spain’s Arab rulers exploited this disunity to sweep north across Gaul, controlling Langue­doc, Dordogne, and a large part of Provence, before being defeated at Poitiers in 732 by the army of Charles Martel. Even the mighty Charlemagne, king of the Franks from 768 to 814, did not manage to create an enduring national unity; his sons fought for the spoils of his empire. The Normans from Scan­di­navia took advantage of the Carolingian dynasty’s divided kingdom, pillaging their way inland along the Loire and the Seine, and plundering Paris in 845. In addition, Saracens invaded the Provençal coast from North Africa, and Magyar armies attacked Lor­raine and Bur­gun­dy. To keep the support of the nobles’ armies, the kings had to give the nobles more and more land. Con­se­quently, the realm broke up into the fiefdoms of the feudal Mid­dle Ages, precursors of the country’s classical provinces — Provence, Bur­gun­dy, Nor­mandy, Brittany, and so forth. In the central region, from the Loire Valley to Belgium, Hugues Capet succeeded in achieving a precarious ascendancy, and was crowned the first king of France in 987. As had happened at the fall of the Roman Empire, the Christian Church provided the essential element of national unity. Hugues was anointed at Reims with an oil said to have been brought to earth by the angels, thus establishing kingship by divine right for the French. Middle Ages The alliance with the Church served as the underpinning of regal authority. In exchange for the anointment, the Church was enriched with lands and the right of taxation by tithe, a percentage of the farmer’s seasonal produce. After the more sober spirituality of the Romanesque churches, the soaring Gothic cathedrals of Chartres, Paris (Notre-Dame), Bourges, and Amiens were at once monuments to the glory of God and testimony to the sheer power, spiritual and temporal, of the Roman Catholic Church. France, dubbed by the pope “eldest daughter of the Church,” took the lead in the Crusades against the “infidels” in Palestine, stopping off on the way across Europe to massacre heretics and infidels. Louis IX of France, the ideal Christian king for the justice he handed down to his subjects and for the Crusades he led to the Holy Land, was sainted after his death in Tunis in 1270. From 1309 to 1377, Avignon was the papal seat. France’s other major preoccupation was England. In 1066, Duc Guillaume of Normandy crossed the English Channel in a successful military campaign and became William the Con­queror. For the next 400 years, English and French monarchs fought over the sovereignty of various parts of France — among them Aquitaine, Touraine, Normandy, and Flanders. Between France and England ensued tangled marital alliances and military clashes more important to national morale than to resolving their perennial conflict — such as Bouvines (1214), a victory for the French, and Crécy (1346) and Agincourt (1415) for the English. Finally, a teenager from Lorraine, Jeanne d’Arc (Joan of Arc), roused the French to resist the English at Orléans. The English captured her and burned her at the stake in Rouen in 1431, but her martyrdom stirred national pride sufficiently to oust the English from France 20 years later. The disputes among nobles were not the first concern of ordinary French citizens. To the common man, wars were just another hardship, taking sons away from the farm to fight, while the armies — French as much as foreign — ravaged the land or pillaged the towns. During war and peace alike in this feudal age, the Church and the aristocracy continued to claim their respective portions of the peasants’ labor, leaving barely enough for subsistence. All too frequently a cycle of drought, famine, and plague would decimate the population. In any case, large portions of France were independently controlled by powerful dukes whose allegiance to the king was only nominal. The modern unity of France was in the making. Ancien Régime Absolute power was the dominant feature of what post-Revolutionary France called the Ancien Régime. The monarchy made noticeable gains under François I (1515–47). He strengthened central administration and abandoned an initially tolerant policy toward the Protestants. A debonair Renaissance prince and patron of the arts, he introduced a grandiose style at court. François brought Leonardo da Vinci to work at Blois, and Rosso and Primaticcio to decorate Fontainebleau. He also commissioned paintings by Raphael and Titian for the royal collections that are now the pride of the Louvre. A new opulent architecture blossomed with the châteaux of the Loire and around Paris. In foreign affairs, after he had crushed the Duke of Milan’s army at Marignano and formed a showy alliance with Henry VIII of England, François I’s European ambitions were halted by the German Emperor Charles V. François even suffered the indignity of a year’s imprisonment in Madrid, following a resounding defeat at Pavia in 1525. The bloody 16th-century conflicts between Catholics and Prot­es­tants throughout Europe centered more on political and financial intrigue than on questions of theology. The French Wars of Religion pitted the Catholic forces of the regent Catherine de Médicis against the Protestant (Huguenot) camp headed by Henri de Navarre. Their crisis came on 24 August 1572 with the infamous Saint Bar­thol­o­mew’s Day Massacre. Two thousand Protestants, in Paris for Henri’s wedding to Catherine’s daughter Marguerite de Valois, were killed. The general massacre of Protestants spread to the countryside, and by October another 30,000 had lost their lives. The conciliatory policies that painfully emerged after the bloodshed brought the Protestant Prince of Navarre to the throne as Henri IV (1589–1610), but not before he promised to convert to Cathol­icism. The enormous personal popularity of this good-natured but tough king from the Pyrénées proved vital for healing the wounds from the bitter wars. The Edict of Nantes was signed in 1598 to protect the Prot­es­tants, and five years later the Jesuits were allowed back into France. Henri maintained a reputation as a worthy and brave leader — and at the same time as an incorrigible womanizer — until his assassination in 1610 by a religious zealot. The country floundered in uncertainty under the regency of Marie de Médicis, mother of the young Louis XIII, until Cardinal Richelieu took charge as prime minister in 1624. Directing national policy until his death in 1642, Richelieu reasserted the authority of his king against both the conservative Catholics who surrounded the queen mother and the Protestant forces that were fiercely defending the privileges granted them by the Edict of Nantes. With his successful siege of the Protestant stronghold at La Rochelle, the cardinal neutralized the threat of their military strength while guaranteeing their freedom of worship. Richelieu’s major achievement was the greater centralization of royal power, laying the foundations of the strong sense of national identity that has characterized France ever since. He tightened the king’s control over legislation and taxes, enraging the Vatican by daring to impose a new levy on the Church. More powerful royal stewards were sent out to diminish the autonomy of the regional parlements, councils with judicial rather than legislative functions, dominated by the high clergy and the nobles. The cardinal also created the Académie Française in 1635 to ensure the purity and clarity of the French language through its Dictionnaire and its Grammaire. Promoting overseas trade and the founding of a navy, Richelieu also launched France on the road to empire with the colonization of Guadeloupe and Martinique in the Caribbean. In Europe, the Catholic cardinal, master of practical politics, was not above supporting the Protestant Swedish, Danish, and German forces in the Thirty Years’ War against the Catholic Austrians, Italians, and Spanish. All that mattered was that it served France’s interests. Richelieu’s protégé Mazarin, another cardinal, took over the job of prime minister during the minority of Louis XIV. The court and regional aristocracy were infuriated by the Italian-born churchman’s intimate relationship with the king’s mother, Anne of Austria. Nor did they like his astounding knack for amassing a vast personal fortune while managing, very efficiently, the affairs of state. But most of all, they despised the way he eroded the nobles’ power and smoothed the path to an increasingly absolutist monarchy. The revolts of the Fronde forced Mazarin, Anne, and the boy-king to flee from Paris in 1649. However, the royal family’s triumphant return three years later, with the rebellious nobles crushed, saw the monarchy stronger than ever. Louis XIV drew his own conclusions from Mazarin’s careful coaching in affairs of state. When he began his personal rule in 1661, at the age of 23, there was no question of a new prime minister impinging on the royal prerogative. Adopting the unequivocal emblem of the sun, Louis was to be outshone by no one. Counselors were wholly subservient. Louis never once called upon the parliamentary assembly of the Etats généraux. He moved the court to Versailles, impoverished the nobility by forcing them to contribute to the incredible luxury of his palace, and imposed as their sole function the support of the king in time of war. Versailles was truly the shining star of Europe by its architectural splendor, and most of all by the sheer hypnotic power of Louis XIV’s cult of self-glorification. In his lifetime, many petty Euro­pean princes tried to imitate Louis’s style with their own little Versailles, complete with court artists and sycophants. But Versailles was not without cost. It took French historians a long time to come to terms with the less attractive realities of what Louis’s style cost the nation. To enhance his glory, the Sun King turned to foreign conquest. The devastating military expedition he launched across the Rhineland and Palatinate, and the series of largely fruitless wars with Spain, Holland, England, and Sweden did not endear him to the European people. Moreover, these ventures left France’s once-thriving economy in ruins. At home, his authoritarian rule required a brutal police force. Taxes soared to pay for his wars, and more and more peasants had to abandon their fields when press-ganged into his armies. Influenced in later life by the Catholic piety of Madame de Maintenon, his mistress and subsequently secret wife, Louis put an end to religious freedom for Protestants by revoking the Edict of Nantes. In the face of forced conversions, the Protestant Huguenots — many of them the most talented bankers, merchants, and artisans of their generation — fled to Switzerland, Germany, Holland, England, and Scandinavia. Louis died in 1715. Having outlived his children and grand­children, he was succeeded by his five-year-old great-grandson, Louis XV. But government was in the hands of the late king’s cultured, libertine, and atheist brother, Philippe d’Orléans. After the morose twilight years of the Sun King, the societal tone changed with the satiric pen of Voltaire and the erotic fantasies of Watteau’s paintings and Marivaux’s comedies. The court moved back from Versailles to Paris. The generally lazy regent gave incompetent nobles too much of a say in the running of the state. Regional parlements obtained the right to make protest, and the monarchy gradually weakened. The easy-going Louis XV was called the Bien-Aimé (Beloved), at least in the first half of his reign. The king seemed more interested in his mistresses than in running a tight ship of state. Despite this (or perhaps because of it) the economy recovered and the middle classes strengthened. The overseas empire expanded in the East and West Indies, and arts and letters flourished in this age of enlightenment. But the new voices were a clear threat to the established order. Diderot’s Encyclopédie championed reason over traditional religion, Rousseau discoursed on the origins of inequality, Voltaire shot at everything that didn’t move. Revolution and Napoleon Louis XVI, grandson of Louis XV, found himself attacked on all sides. The stubborn aristocracy and high clergy were anxious to protect their ancient privileges; a burgeoning bourgeoisie longed for reforms that would give them greater opportunity; the peasantry was no longer prepared to bear the burden of feudal extortion; and a growing urban populace of artisans groaned under intolerable hardships. The Etats généraux convened for the first time in 175 years. It was clearly the king’s enduring absolutism rather than the throne itself that was under fire. For reactionary nobles, the king was the guarantor of their hereditary status. Liberal reformers wanted a constitutional monarchy similar to England’s, not a republic. Even the grievances drawn up by the peasants and townspeople insisted on continuing devotion to the king himself. Two months later, the blindness of the king’s conservative advisors and the king’s own weakness and vacillation led to the explosion of centuries of frustration and rage — which culminated in the storming of the Bastille, the regime’s prison-fortress in Paris. On that fateful day, 14 July 1789, the king went hunting near his château at Versailles. At the end of the day, Louis — apparently oblivious to events in Paris — wrote in his diary, “Rien” (“Nothing”). A National Assembly voted a charter for liberty and equality, the great Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. The aristocracy’s feudal rights were abolished, the Church’s massive land-holdings confiscated and sold off. Rather than compromise, the king fled Paris in a vain effort to join up with armed forces hostile to the Revolution. With Austrian and German armies massing on France’s frontiers and the forces of counter-revolution gathering inside the country, the militant revolutionary Jacobins led by Max­i­milien de Robespierre saw the king’s flight as the ultimate betrayal. A Republic was declared in 1792, and Louis XVI was guillotined in 1793. His son Louis XVII died in obscure circumstances under the Revolutionary government, probably in 1795. Under pressure from the poorer classes, who did not want the Revolution appropriated for the exclusive benefit of the bourgeoisie, the Jacobin-led revolutionary committee ordered sweeping measures of economic and social reform, which were accompanied by a wave of mass executions, the Terror, aimed at moderates as well as aristocrats. Despite his attempts to quell the extremists, Robespierre was overthrown and guillotined in the counterattack of the propertied classes. During their Directoire, a new wave of executions — the White (royalist) Terror — decimated the Jacobins and their supporters. But the bourgeoisie, fearing both the royalists and their foreign backers, turned for salvation to a Corsican soldier triumphantly campaigning against the Rev­o­lution’s foreign enemies — Napoleon Bonaparte. In between defeating the Aus­trians in Italy and a less successful campaign against the Brit­ish in Egypt, in 1795 Bona­parte re­turned to Paris to crush the royalists, and four years later he staged a coup against the Direc­toire. He was just 30 years old. In the first flush of dictatorship as First Consul, he established the Banque de France, created state-run lycées (high schools), and gave the country its first national set of laws, the Code Napoléon. The centralization dear to Richelieu and Louis XIV was becoming a reality. The supreme self-made man, Bonaparte in 1804 became Emperor Napoleon at a coronation ceremony in which he audaciously took the crown of golden laurels from the pope and placed it on his own head. He managed to simultaneously pursue foreign conquests in Germany and Austria and domestic reforms that included a modernized university, a police force, and proper supplies of drinking water for Pari­sians. During his disastrous campaign in Russia, he found time in Moscow to draw up a new statute for the Comédie-Française (the national theater), which had been dissolved during the Revolution. The nationalism that Napoleon invoked in his conquest of Europe’s Ancien Régime turned against him in Spain, Russia, and Germany. The monarchies regrouped to force him from power in 1814. Nevertheless, he made a brilliant but brief comeback the following year — before an alliance of British, Prussian, Belgian, and Dutch troops inflicted the final defeat at Waterloo. Toward Democracy At the end of the Napoleonic era, the monarchy was restored. The new king, Louis XVIII, tried at first to reconcile the restored monarchy with the reforms of the Revo­lution and Napoleon’s empire. But his nobles were intent on revenge and imposed a second, even more violent, White Terror against Jacobins and Bonapartists, including some of Napoleon’s greatest generals. Louis’s reactionary successor, his brother Charles X, was interested only in renewing the traditions of the Ancien Régime, even having himself anointed and crowned at the ancient cathedral of Reims. But the middle classes were no longer prepared to tolerate the restraints on their freedom, nor the worsening condition of the economy in the hands of an incompetent aristocracy. They reasserted their rights in the insurrection of July 1830 — the kind of liberal revolution they would have preferred back in 1789 — paving the way for the “bourgeois monarchy” of Louis-Philippe. This last king of France, heir of the progressive Orléans branch of the royal family, encouraged the country’s exploitation of the Industrial Revolution and the complementary extension of its overseas empire in Asia and Africa (Algeria had been occupied just before the 1830 revolution). But the new factories created an urban working class clamoring for improvement of its miserable working and living conditions. The régime’s response of ferocious repression plus numerous other ineptitudes led to a third revolution in 1848, with the Bonapartists, led by Napoleon’s nephew, emerging triumphant. The Second Republic ended four years later when the man whom Victor Hugo called “Napoléon le Petit” staged a coup to become Emperor Napoleon III. Determined to cloak himself in the legend of his uncle’s grandeur, he saw his own role as that of champion of the people. But he used harsh anti-press laws and loyalty oaths to quell the libertarian spirit that had brought him to power. The economy flourished thanks to the expansion of a vigorous entrepreneurial capitalism in iron, steel, and railways, augmented by overseas ventures such as the Suez Canal. Despite the emperor’s obsession with the new “Red Peril” — the 1848 Communist Mani­festo of Marx and Engels, which was being circulated in Paris — he could not prevent such social reforms as the workers’ right to form unions and even to strike. With the excessive enthusiasm that characterized the age, Baron Haussmann’s urban planning redeveloped old Parisian neighborhoods to create a more airy and spacious capital. Similarly, architect Viollet-le-Duc often went overboard restoring some of the great Gothic cathedrals and medieval châteaux in ways their original creators had never imagined. Victor Hugo, in exile in Guernsey, was writing Les Misérables, while Baudelaire was working on Les Fleurs du Mal, and Offenbach was composing jolly operettas, such as La Belle Hélène. Courbet was painting his vast canvases of provincial life, and Manet his Déjeuner sur l’Herbe. Society was optimistic. The bourgeoisie showed off its new prosperity with extravagant furnishings, silks, satins, and baubles, and in 1852 Paris opened its first department store, Au Bon Marché. France was developing a national identity of optimism, a high level of social critique, and constant pressure for improvement. But Germany had an account to settle. In 1870, Prussian Chan­cellor Bismarck exploited an obscure diplomatic conflict with France to unite the various German principalities and kingdoms into a fighting force well equipped for war. After a lightning victory over the ill-prepared French armies, the Germans marched on Paris and laid siege to the city, which finally capitulated in January 1871 in the face of dwindling food supplies. As part of the settlement ending the war, Alsace and a portion of Lorraine were ceded to Germany. The Third Republic Defeat shattered the Second Empire. While the new Third Repub­lic’s government under Adolphe Thiers negotiated the terms of surrender, the workers’ communes refused to give in. In March 1871 they took over Paris and a few provincial cities, and held out for ten brave but desperately disorganized weeks. In the end they were brutally crushed by government troops and order was restored. France resumed its industrial progress, quickly paid off its enormous war-reparations debt to Germany, and expanded its overseas empire in North and West Africa and Indochina. Rediscovered national pride found its perfect expression in the Eiffel Tower, thrust into the Paris skies for the international exhibition of 1889. In 1874, the first exhibition of Impressionism had blown away the dust and cobwebs of the artistic establishment. Novelist Emile Zola poured forth arguments against industrial exploitation. Rodin, more restrained, sculpted masterpieces such as Le Penseur (The Thinker). Leading the “repub­lican” hostility to the Church’s entrenched position in the schools, in 1882 Jules Ferry enacted the legislation that has formed the basis of France’s formidable state education system ever since. On the right, nationalist forces were motivated by a desire to hit back at Germany, seeing all contact with foreigners or any form of “cosmopolitanism” as a threat to national honor and integrity. For many, the Jews were the embodiment of this threat — Edouard Drumont’s vehemently anti-Semitic La France Juive (Jewish France) was a runaway national bestseller. It appeared in 1886, eight years before Captain Alfred Dreyfus, an Alsatian Jew in the French Army, was arrested on what proved to be trumped-up charges of spying for the Germans. In a case that pitted the fragile honor of the Army against the very survival of French republican democracy, the captain had to wait 12 years for full rehabilitation. The desire for revenge against Germany remained. And as Ger­many’s own imperial ambitions grew, competition for world markets became intense. Most of France went enthusiastically into World War I, and came out of it victorious yet bled white. With the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, France recovered Alsace and Lorraine; but 1,350,000 men had been lost in the four years of fighting. The national economy was shattered, and political divisions were more extreme than ever. In face of the fears aroused by the Russian Revolution of 1917, the conservative parties dominated the immediate post-war period, while a new French Communist Party, loyal to Moscow, split with the Socialists in 1920. France seemed less aware of the threat from Nazi Germany, allowing Hitler to remilitarize the Rhineland in 1936 in breach of the Versailles Treaty, a step Hitler later said he had never dreamt of getting away with. In the 1930s, extreme right-wing groups such as Action Fran­çaise and Croix-de-Feu (Cross of Fire) provided a strong anti­democratic undercurrent to the political turmoil of financial scandal and parliamentary corruption. The bloody 1934 riots on the Place de la Concorde in Paris offered a disturbing echo to the street fighting in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. The left-wing parties re­spond­ed by banding together in a Popular Front, which the Socialists led to power in 1936. Within the first few weeks, Léon Blum’s government nationalized the railways, brought in a 40-hour week, and instituted the workers’ first holidays with pay. But the Communists broke the alliance after Blum first failed to support the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War and then — faced with financial difficulties — put a brake on the reforms. War and Peace Blum’s government collapsed in 1938, and the new prime minister, Edouard Daladier, found himself negotiating the Munich agreements with Hitler, Mussolini, and Britain’s Neville Chamberlain. A year later, France was once again at war with Germany. Relying too complacently on the defensive strategy of the fortified Maginot Line along the northeast frontier with Germany (but not facing Belgium), the French were totally unprepared for the German invasion across the Ardennes in May 1940. With fast-moving tanks and superior air power, the Germans reached Paris 30 days later. Marshal Philippe Pétain, the hero of World War I, capitulated on behalf of the French on June 16. Two days later, on BBC radio’s French service from London, General de Gaulle appealed for national resistance. Compared with other occupied countries such as Belgium, Holland, and Denmark, France’s collaboration with the Germans is an inglorious story. Based in the Auvergnat spa town of Vichy, the French government often proved more zealous than its masters in suppressing civil liberties and drawing up anti-Jewish legislation. It was French police who rounded up the deportees for the concentration camps, many of them denounced by French civilians seeking to profit from the confiscation of property. The fighters of the underground Resistance movement were heroic, but they were a tiny minority, a few of them conservative patriots like de Gaulle, most of them socialists and communists, and also a handful of refugees from Eastern Europe. Deliverance came when the Allies landed on the beaches of Normandy on D-Day (6 June 1944). De Gaulle, with his canny sense of history, took an important step toward rebuilding national self-confidence by insisting that French armed forces fight side by side with the Americans and British for the liberation of the country, but, above all, that the French army be the first to enter Paris itself. After the high emotion of de Gaulle’s march down the Champs-Elysées, the business of post-war reconstruction, though boosted by the generous aid of the Americans’ Mar­shall Plan, proved arduous, and the wartime alliance of de Gaulle’s conservatives and the Communist Party soon broke down. The general could not tolerate the political squabbles of the Fourth Republic and withdrew from public life. Governments changed repeatedly, but the French muddled through. Intellectuals debated the existentialist merit of Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre in Paris’s Left Bank cafés. The French empire was collapsing. After France’s fruitless last stand in Vietnam, Pierre Mendès-France wisely negotiated an Indochinese peace settlement. He handed Pondicherry over to India and in the North African colonies gave Tunisia its independence, but was ousted from office as hostilities broke out in Algeria. De Gaulle returned from the wilderness in 1958, ostensibly to keep Algeria French. But he’d seen the writing on the wall and brought the war to an end with Algerian independence in 1962. His major task was to rescue France from the chaos of the Fourth Republic. The new constitution, tailor-made to de Gaulle’s authoritarian requirements, placed the president above parliament, where he could pursue his own policies outside the messy arena of party politics. However, the colonial struggles in Algeria and Morocco were to have significant impact on French national identity in later years. As the empire receded, colonized populations from North and Central Africa, Indochina, and elsewhere began to move to France and alter the French identity once more. De Gaulle’s visions of grandeur, and of a country independent of NATO and the Warsaw Pact, gave France a renewed self-confidence. One of his great achievements was a close alliance with West Germany, overcoming centuries of bloodshed be­tween the two peoples. But with self-confidence came complacency, and the French bourgeoisie was cast again onto shifting ground with the massive student rebellions of 1968. The “events of May” that erupted in Paris’s Latin Quarter and swiftly spread through the country disturbed de Gaulle enough for him to seek reassurance with his troops stationed in West Germany. In the end, people were reluctant to make a complete change until 1981, when the forces for reform gathered sufficient strength to elect François Mitterrand as the Fifth Republic’s first Socialist president. Like the Popular Front in 1936, the new government began with a quick-fire set of reforms — a broad program of nationalization, abolition of the death penalty, raising the minimum wage, and the introduction of a fifth week of holiday with pay — until the impact of the world economic crisis imposed a necessary brake. Special emphasis was placed on cultural programs, with generous subsidies for theater, cinema, museums, and libraries, and also for scientific research. Probably the most important reform was the least glamorous: the decentralization that increased regional autonomy and reversed the age-old trend of concentrating political, economic, and administrative power in the national capital. By allowing the local pride of such historic regions as Provence, Normandy, Brittany, and Langue­doc to reassert itself, France demonstrated that it was at last secure in its national identity — so secure that French citizens even began carrying European passports. As a founding member of the Euro­pean Community, France looked to a wider, continental challenge in the 1990s. Yet modern France struggles with similar identity issues as its European Union neighbors. The number of French citizens with non-French heritage is substantial, reviving nationalist sentiment in the form of the Front National. As a result, France experiences diversity and tension within cultural, social, and political spheres. The French team that won the 1998 World Cup was deemed by some unsuitable to represent France because of the mixed heritage of the players. At the same time, the team accurately reflected the social diversity that exists in France today. New corporate and fast-food cultures, along with more freedom of movement among European Union countries and a more international perspective, have further changed the social landscape. Today, the onion seller with beret and bicycle is becoming as much an anomaly in France’s urban and suburban setting as he would be in America.