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Historical Overview
From World War I to World War II
World War I (1914-1918) brought great losses of troops and resources . Fought in large part on French soil, it lead to approximately 1.4 million French dead including civilians (see World War I casualties), and four times as many casualties (see World War I#Aftermath). The stipulations of the Versailles treaty were severe: Alsace and Lorraine were returned to France; Germany was required to take full responsibility for the war and to pay war reparations; the German industrial Saarland, a coal and steel region, was occupied by France.
France in the 1920 and 1930s was torn on many fronts.
The French far right expanded greatly and theories of race and anti-semitism proliferated in many quarters. Numerous conservative political groups sprang up, including the Croix de Feu which, like its larger rival Action Francaise (founded in 1898, Action Francaise supported a restoration of the monarchy and of Roman Catholicism as the state religion) advocated national integralism (the belief that society is an organic unity) and organized popular demonstrations in reaction to the Stavisky Affair, hoping to overthrow the government.
In the congress of Tours in 1920, the French Socialist Party was split in two and the left-wing of the party broke away and formed the French Communist Party. The remaining Socialist Party, led by Leon Blum, regrouped as the French Section of the Workers' International (Section Francaise de l'International Ouvriere or SFIO). In 1924 and again in 1932, the Socialists joined with the Radical Party in the "Coalitions of the Left" (Cartels des Gauches), but refused actually to join the non-Socialist governments led by the Radicals Edouard Herriot and Edouard Daladier. In 1934, the Communists changed their line, and the three parties came together in the Popular Front (1936-38), which won the 1936 elections and brought Blum to power as France's first socialist prime minister. Within a year, however, his government collapsed over economic policy and also over the issue of the Spanish Civil War.
In the 1920s, France established an elaborate system of border defences (the Maginot Line) and alliances (see Little Entente) to offset resurgent German strength and in the 1930s, the massive losses of the war lead many in France to choose a policy guaranteeing peace, even in the face of Hitler's violations of the Versailles treaty and (later) his demands at Munich in 1938; this would be the much maligned policy of appeasement. In some milieus in France, including people in the government and the army, there was also a defeatist movement which saw in Hitler's Germany not a rival that France should confront, but a force that France should accommodate.
In September, 1939 Hitler invaded Poland, and France and England declared war. Both armies were mobilized to the Western Front, but for the next 8 months neither side made a move: this would be called the "Phoney War". The German Blitzkrieg began its attack in May 1940, and in six weeks of savage fighting the French lost 130,000 (twice the number of American loses at Normandy in 1944) and the British army was routed (the Dunkirk boat lift). France surrendered to Nazi Germany on June 24, 1940. Nazi Germany occupied three fifths of France's territory (the Atlantic seaboard and most a France north of the Loire), leaving the rest to the new Vichy collaboration government established on July 10, 1940 under Henri Philippe Petain. Its senior leaders acquiesced in the plunder of French resources, as well as the sending of French forced labor to Nazi Germany; in doing so, they claimed they hoped to preserve at least some small amount of French sovereignty. After an initial period of double-dealing and passive collaboration with the Nazis, the Vichy regime passed to active participation (largely the work of prime minister Pierre Laval). The Nazi German occupation proved costly as Nazi Germany appropriated a full one-half of France's public sector revenue.
On the other hand, those who refused defeat and collaboration with Nazi Germany, such as Charles de Gaulle, organized the Free French Forces in UK and coordinated resistance movements in occupied and Vichy France.
After four years of occupation and strife, Allied forces, including Free France, liberated France in 1944. Paris was liberated on August 25, 1944. On September 10, 1944, Charles de Gaulle installed his provisional government in Paris. This time he remained in Paris until the end of the war, refusing to abandon even when Paris was temporarily threatened by German troops during the Battle of the Ardennes in December 1944.
The Post-War Period
France emerged from World War II to face a series of new problems. After a short period of provisional government initially led by General Charles de Gaulle, a new constitution (October 13, 1946) established the Fourth Republic under a parliamentary form of government controlled by a series of coalitions. The mixed nature of the coalitions and a consequent lack of agreement on measures for dealing with colonial wars in Indochina and Algeria caused successive cabinet crises and changes of government. The war in Indochina ended with French withdrawal in 1954.
The May 1958 seizure of power in Algiers by French army units and French settlers opposed to concessions in the face of Arab nationalist insurrection led to the fall of the French government and a presidential invitation to de Gaulle to form an emergency government to forestall the threat of civil war. Swiftly replacing the existing constitution with one strengthening the powers of the presidency, he became the elected president in December of that year, inaugurating France's Fifth Republic.
In 1959, in an occasion marking the first time in the 20th century that the people of France went to the polls to elect a president by direct ballot, de Gaulle won re-election with a 55% share of the vote, defeating Francois Mitterrand.
However, French society grew tired of the heavy-handed, patriarchal Gaullist approach. This led to the events of May 1968, when students revolted, with a variety of demands including educational, labor and governmental reforms, sexual and artistic freedom, and the end of the Vietnam War. The student protest movement quickly joined with labor and mass strikes erupted. At one point, de Gaulle went to see troops in Baden-Baden, possibly to secure the help of the army in case it were needed to maintain public order. However, the June 1968 legislative elections saw a majority of Gaullists in parliament. Still, May 1968 was a turning point in French social relations, in the direction of more personal freedoms and less social control, be it in work relations, education or in private life.
In April 1969, de Gaulle resigned following the defeat in a national referendum of government proposals for the creation of 21 regions with limited political powers. Succeeding him as president of France have been:
* Gaullist Georges Pompidou (1969-1974)
* Independent Republican Valery Giscard d'Estaing (1974-81)
* Socialist Francois Mitterrand (1981-95)
* neo-Gaullist Jacques Chirac (elected in spring 1995).
While France continues to revere its rich history and independence, French leaders increasingly tie the future of France to the continued development of the European Union (EU). During President Mitterrand's tenure, he stressed the importance of European integration and advocated the ratification of the Maastricht Treaty on European economic and political union, which France's electorate narrowly approved in September 1992.
Current President Jacques Chirac assumed office May 17, 1995, after a campaign focused on the need to combat France's stubbornly high unemployment rate. The center of domestic attention soon shifted, however, to the economic reform and belt-tightening measures required for France to meet the criteria for Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) laid out by the Maastricht Treaty. In late 1995, France experienced its worst labor unrest in at least a decade, as employees protested government cutbacks.
On the foreign and security policy front, Chirac took a more assertive approach to protecting French peacekeepers in the former Yugoslavia and helped promote the Dayton Agreement negotiated in Dayton, Ohio and signed in Paris in December 1995. The French have stood among the strongest supporters of NATO and EU policy in the Balkans.
Source http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_France
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