"This war is not limited to the territory of our unfortunate country,"
said an obscure French general in a London radio message to his be-
leaguered countrymen on June 18, 1940. "The war has not been de-
cided by the battle of France. This is a world war. . . . There still
exist all the means we need to crush our enemies someday." ¹. Gen-
eral Charles de Gaulle's hopes for France -- "her independence, secu-
rity, and greatness" ². -- depended on how well she enlisted the re-
sources of the world in her favor. De Gaulle resumed the task of call-
ing the world into France's employ when, after twelve years of self-
imposed exile, he returned to power in 1958 to establish the Fifth
Republic.

The immediate cause of de Gaulle's resumption of power was the
Algerian War, which had brought France to the brink of civil war
and destroyed the Fourth Republic. By ending the war, de Gaulle had
the chance to resurrect his proposal, first elaborated at Bayeux in
1946, of a republic under strong presidential leadership. The resolu-
tion of the Algerian dispute also gave France an opportunity to re-
emerge as an independent force in world politics. Once the costly
struggle was settled, de Gaulle proclaimed that France would no longer
pit itself against the tide of history in the Third World. Rather, it
would champion the principle of national self-determination as a
means to transform the bipolarity inherited from World War II into a
multipolar international order in which France would again find itself
in the first rank. No longer would France conform to the bloc politics
of the superpowers and, specifically, to the hegemonic dictates of the
United States. No longer would France be supposedly weakened by
submission to its Atlantic and European partners; it would contribute,

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