De Gaulle was Prime Minister for seven months, and then, with a new constitution approved in a referendum by a 79 per cent positive vote, President for ten years and four months. During this too-long reign his popular support varied enough for him to contemplate resignation on at least two occasions, but until 1969 it was never insufficient for survival. Although the Fifth Republic was based on a great tilt of power from the legislature to the executive there was not at first a directly elected presidency. De Gaulle was elected in December 1958 by 78 per cent of the votes in college of a few thousand notables. A month before that the new Gaullist organization had won two-fifths of the seats in the Assembly and had no difficulty in finding enough parliamentary allies to provide a majority. Then in 1962 de Gaulle decided to strengthen the presidency by moving to direct election. This was opposed by a majority of the Assembly which carried a vote of censure. De Gaulle ordered both a referendum and a dissolution of the Assembly. The former produced a ‘yes’ vote of 62 per cent, which, however, he regarded as disappointing, being not quite a half of the total electorate. The parliamentary elections none the less gave for the first time a small absolute Gaullist majority of seats.
The first presidential elections under the new system did not take place for another three years and then, ironically, gave a much less satisfactory result for its instigator than had the old system in 1959. He started in an apparently commanding position, but was placed en ballotage by the combined votes of his two opponents, Mitterrand and Lecanuet. On the first round de Gaulle got 44 per cent against 32 per cent for Mitterrand and 16 per cent for Lecanuet. On the second he got 54.5 per cent against Mitterrand’s 45.5 per cent. It was decisive but not glorious. Then in the spring of 1967 the Gaullists lost their independent majority in the Assembly.
The next significant elections were the legislative ones of June 1968. They followed the disastrous month of May, when student riots eliding into industrial unrest led to the collapse of de Gaulle’s nerve and to his putting on a very passable imitation of Louis XVI’s flight to Varennes. Louis XVI got only to the edge of Champagne by coach but de Gaulle got to Baden-Baden by helicopter, where, according to General Massu and to some extent to Lacouture following Massu, it required a bracing lecture from Massu, one of the old Algiers junta of 1958, promoted to commander of the French occupation forces in Germany, to turn him round. It was amazing in view of the far more awesome dangers de Gaulle had faced in 1940 and afterwards that he should have cracked so badly. Maybe it was a classic example of the rule that nobody is much good in his second decade of continuous office (it was actually his 120th month). Maybe Massu exaggerated his own role and de Gaulle always intended the retreat to Baden-Baden as a tactic that would give him the advantage of surprise on the rebound. Whatever the reason, he returned fortified, and with his return there was a dramatic and favourable reversal of the situation. One result of this reaction was the electoral triumph of a month later. The Gaullists moved to a substantial absolute majority, but de Gaulle himself remained wounded and vulnerable. Ten months afterwards, when he forced an unnecessary referendum on a couple of minor ill-matched and unpersuasive constitutional questions, he lost by a margin of 5 per cent and resigned within six hours.
There is no close link between the fluctuating combination of daring, vision and irresponsibility that marked de Gaulle’s performance as President and these ups and downs of electoral fortune. He was consistent in working always for the greater glory of France, but by no means predictable in the means he employed to this end. He loved coups de théâtre and the surprise of paradox. Perhaps he remained a natural tank commander who believed that the unexpected approach was half the battle. Out of government he had opposed European integration and the Treaty of Rome. In office he found that Pflimlin, the man of Strasbourg who was later to be President of the European Parliament, had sent Maurice Faure, a great orator of the European cause, round the capitals of the other five original members to warn them that France could not meet the 1 January 1959 deadline for the dismantling of customs barriers. By December 1958 he was able to reverse that policy of hesitant weakness and say that France, after all, would be ready. His devaluation and subsequent stabilization of the franc made France fit to participate in and to benefit from the Common Market.
Then he achieved an almost mystical rapprochement with Adenauer and laid the foundations of the Franco-German partnership which was to lead Europe for the next thirty years. In early 1963 he scuppered Macmillan and displeased Italy, Benelux and half the German Government, but not Adenauer, by consigning Britain to le grand large. And in 1965, with Adenauer gone, he brought the first phase of the Common Market to a juddering halt with his quarrel with Hallstein, the presumptuous (as he thought) German President of the Commission.