The politics of national greatness practiced by France’s iconic former president has made him a model for Putin, Vance, Orban and Macron.
The French have never been shy about celebrating the life of Charles de Gaulle: Paris’s main airport, an aircraft carrier, a metro station and 3,600 roads are all named after the great man. Yet I suspect there are more to come.
The de Gaulle cult has extended from traditional Gaullist parties to both the new center and the far right. At his inauguration, Emmanuel Macron posed with a copy of de Gaulle’s war memoirs open on his desk, and he repeatedly tried to imitate his “Jupiterian style.” Marine Le Pen has abandoned her party’s visceral hostility to de Gaulle, rooted in the politics of Vichy and Algeria, and is moving toward a Gaullist approach to the European Union, strengthening the role of the nation-state but not dismantling the EU completely.