Skip to main content

Charles De Gaulle

Day of the Jackal 1973 Poster.jpg

On this day in 1958, the voters of France made Charles de Gaulle the first President of their country's Fifth Republic.

Just so I will never regret never having listed them all in one place, here are the five Republics.

1. The First Republic was the creation of the Great Revolution. It was formally established in 1792 by the National Convention and it was overthrown 12 years later when Bonaparte made himself an Emperor.

Interlude. That Empire was overthrown, the Bourbon dynasty restored. Then the Bourbon dynasty morphed into a brief Orleanist monarchy, and that in turn gave way, in 1848, to ...

2. The Second Republic was the shortest-lived of the bunch. It was declared by Alphonse de Lamartine, lasting only from 1848 to 1851. Long enough to inspire satirical lithographs by Honore Daumier though, so that's something.

Interlude. The Second Republic was replaced by the Second Empire, which in turn would last long enough to be overthrown by Bismarck from without and Communards from within.

3. Third Republic began ... well, it's tricky to date it because in the chaos of the early 1870s there were only provisional arrangements for a while. These arrangements didn't organize themselves into a new constitutional system until 1875. And that system lasted until 1940, when it fell with a nasty crash.

Interlude. German occupation in the north and Vichy collaborators in the south.

4. Fourth Republic, established in the wake of the Second World War, lasted just as long as the First Republic had, 12 years. It is best remembered for the shocks administered to its system as its overseas empire collapsed, from southeast Asia to northwest Africa. In 1958 such shocks forced a constitutional crisis and (without interlude this time) the creation of ...

5. The Fifth Republic. A public referendum in October brought it into being and the election of De Gaulle 59 years ago today gave it a defining leader. It continues in our new millennium.

Now we may adjourn and watch Day of the Jackal on Netflix.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...
9 comments
Read more

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...
17 comments
Read more

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...
4 comments
Read more