[1945 - Present] The Fourth and Fifth Republics

In 1945, France was a ghost. The war had carved out its heart, leaving behind cities of rubble and a silence where over 600,000 voices should have been. Liberation was euphoric, but the dawn revealed a nation deeply scarred, not just by the German occupation, but by the internal poison of collaboration. The slate had to be wiped clean. Out of this wreckage, the Fourth Republic was born in 1946, a desperate attempt to recapture the democratic ideals of the pre-war Third Republic. Yet, it was a foundation built on shaky ground. The political landscape was a fractured mirror of competing ideologies—Communists, Socialists, Christian Democrats—none strong enough to govern alone, all too suspicious to truly cooperate. The result was a dizzying political carousel. In just twelve years, France saw 24 different governments rise and fall, some lasting mere days. This instability became the defining, and ultimately fatal, flaw of the system.

Despite the political chaos, life for the ordinary citizen was transforming at a breathtaking pace. This was the beginning of the 'Trente Glorieuses', the Thirty Glorious Years of unprecedented economic expansion, partly fueled by the American Marshall Plan. The air, once thick with the dust of collapsed buildings, now hummed with the sound of construction. Cranes clawed at the sky, erecting sleek, functional apartment blocks that replaced the bombed-out husks of the old world. Families who had known only rationing began to dream of consumer goods. The boxy Citroën 2CV, a charmingly utilitarian “umbrella on four wheels,” became a symbol of newfound mobility, sputtering along newly paved roads. Inside homes, the first refrigerators and washing machines promised to liberate women from domestic drudgery, though societal expectations would be slower to change. It was an age of contradiction: political paralysis at the top, dynamic progress on the ground.

Looming over this entire period was the colossal figure of Charles de Gaulle. The hero of the Resistance, he had briefly led the provisional government but grew disgusted with the party politics of the Fourth Republic. In 1946, he dramatically resigned and retreated to his country home, a modern Cincinnatus awaiting his nation's call. While he wrote his memoirs, the Republic he disdained began to unravel, not in Paris, but thousands of miles away in its colonial empire. The bloody First Indochina War culminated in a humiliating defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, a blow to French military prestige. But it was Algeria, legally considered not a colony but an integral part of France, that would deliver the killing stroke. A brutal war for independence erupted that same year, a conflict that tore French society apart. The violence, the torture, and the political intransigence created a crisis so profound that it threatened to spill into civil war on the mainland.

By May 1958, the Republic was on the verge of collapse. A revolt among French army units in Algiers demanded de Gaulle's return to power. The nation held its breath. With the threat of a military coup hanging in the air, the politicians in Paris capitulated. De Gaulle agreed to return, but on one condition: a new constitution, one that would create a strong, stable executive. He got his wish. The Fifth Republic was born, and its new, powerful presidency was tailor-made for him. De Gaulle's first order of business was to solve the Algerian crisis that had destroyed his predecessor. In a move that enraged the very military men who had brought him to power, he negotiated Algerian independence, finalized in the 1962 Evian Accords. He then turned his attention to restoring French grandeur on the world stage, developing an independent nuclear deterrent—the 'force de frappe'—and famously withdrawing France from NATO’s integrated military command in 1966 to assert its autonomy from the United States.

De Gaulle’s France felt stable, prosperous, and deeply traditional. The President was a paternalistic, almost monarchical, figure. But beneath the surface, a new generation was simmering. They had not known the war and were stifled by the rigid, conservative social order. In May 1968, the pot boiled over. What began as a student protest at a university in a Paris suburb exploded into a nationwide cultural revolution. Cobblestones were torn from the streets to build barricades, the air in the Latin Quarter thick with tear gas. The protests were joined by a general strike that paralyzed the country, with ten million workers walking off the job. The slogan “Sous les pavés, la plage!” (“Under the paving stones, the beach!”) captured the movement’s utopian spirit—a desire to break through the hard crust of the old society to find a world of freedom and imagination. De Gaulle was shaken. Though he ultimately weathered the political storm, the cultural one had already broken. The events of May '68 irrevocably changed France, ushering in a more liberal, individualistic society and paving the way for reforms in education, media, and personal freedoms.

After de Gaulle's resignation in 1969, his successors navigated this new France. Georges Pompidou embraced modernity, championing industrial projects and commissioning the audaciously modern Centre Pompidou, its exposed pipes and escalators a splash of color on the historic face of Paris. Valéry Giscard d’Estaing ushered in key social reforms, lowering the voting age to 18 and legalizing abortion in 1975. The most significant political earthquake came in 1981, with the election of François Mitterrand, the first Socialist president of the Fifth Republic. For many on the left, it was a moment of pure ecstasy, a feeling that a new dawn had arrived. Mitterrand abolished the death penalty, expanded the welfare state, and, like his predecessors, left his own architectural mark on Paris with the 'Grands Projets', including the controversial glass pyramid at the Louvre.

In the decades that followed, France has grappled with the complex challenges of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The national rail system's high-speed TGV trains became a symbol of technological pride, shrinking the country and connecting it more deeply to a unifying Europe. The triumphant victory at the 1998 FIFA World Cup, led by the Algerian-descended Zinedine Zidane, was celebrated as a glorious moment for a multi-ethnic “Black, Blanc, Beur” (Black, White, Arab) France. Yet, this optimistic vision has been severely tested. Deindustrialization created unemployment, social tensions simmered in the 'banlieues' (suburbs), and fierce debates over immigration and national identity, often centered on the principle of 'laïcité' (secularism), have dominated public discourse. The nation has also been rocked by terrorism, most brutally in the 2015 attacks on Charlie Hebdo and the Bataclan theatre, which forced a painful reckoning with security and the very nature of French society. From the ashes of 1945, through decades of radical transformation, France continues its restless, often turbulent, but always compelling journey, forever debating its past and reimagining its future.