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The cult of Charles de Gaulle is growing

By Adrian Wooldridge Bloomberg

Published Oct. 30, 2025

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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.

The cult is also spreading outside France. Vladimir Putin says that he has three portraits in his office - Peter the Great, Pushkin and, the only non-Russian, de Gaulle. On winning the Hungarian election in 2010, Viktor Orban proclaimed the French general his role model and dubbed his mission "grandeur nationale." British Brexiteers made such a cult of the general that they recruited his grandson and namesake to attend some of their events. Some of the most fulsome praise came from US Vice President JD Vance: Asked by Politico if he looks to any historical figure for inspiration, he replied "de Gaulle," focusing on his skill in reviving his country's self-confidence as well as his ability to develop an independent geostrategic role.

The reason for de Gaulle's influence is that he invented the modern politics of national greatness. De Gaulle, who led the Free French during the Second World War and was president of France from 1959 to 1968, believed that certain countries, not least France, are either great or they are nothing. "France cannot be France without grandeur," as he put it. Greatness is a matter of will as much as anything else - and decline is a choice rather than an inevitability. He was so committed to saving France from decline that he revolutionized the country's constitutional system, extending the power of the presidency and neutering the political parties.

France was a wreck when de Gaulle fled to Britain in June 1940 -crushed by the German army and run by a clique of Vichy collaborators. But de Gaulle single-handedly kept alive the myth of French greatness. He insisted against all the evidence that France had never surrendered and that the Free French played the central role in liberating the country (in reality, as Churchill mischievously pointed out, more Canadians died liberating France than French people). He refused to kowtow to the victorious Anglo-Saxon powers. Let one piece of Gaullist theater stand for hundreds: When he found himself placed in the eighth row at John F. Kennedy's funeral, he simply marched to the front row and sat down.

De Gaulle was a master of nostalgia: His autobiography started by proclaiming that he had "a certain idea of France" that was rooted in the countryside and tradition. He never tired of defending that idea from cosmopolitans who argued that the nation-state was dead or socialists who argued that France (and the West in general) was complicit in imperial crimes. But he combined nostalgia with state-driven modernization, presided over by brilliant technocrats and powered by state-owned companies. France enjoyed "les trente glorieuses" from 1945 to 1975 when GDP grew at an average of 6% a year.

For de Gaulle, national greatness meant nonalignment, and nonalignment meant refusing to bend the knee to the United States. Not for him sheltering under the US nuclear umbrella or acting as a mere counter in America's Cold War against Communism. He took France out of NATO's military command structure in 1966, developed an independent nuclear deterrent and created a powerful defense industry, to the great chagrin of the US. The general did all this for a simple reason: America, being a self-interested nation-state like all other nation-states, would one day turn its back on Europe.

Arguably, we now live in de Gaulle's world far more than we live in the world of any of the more familiar architects of the Allied victory: Churchill's British Empire has crumbled, Stalin's planned economy has died and Roosevelt's Pax Americana is being dismantled. In other words, we are all Gaullists now, whether we know it or not.

A remarkable number of leaders agree with de Gaulle's philosophy of national greatness. Putin believes not only that Russia is a great power or it is nothing, but that his historical destiny is to will the Russian Empire back to life. Donald Trump believes that America has gone so far downhill that it can only be restored to national greatness if it is willing to take drastic action: Disentangle itself from global allies who have taken advantage of it and disempower progressive elites that have poisoned its culture. De Gaulle's style of state capitalism has come back into fashion after a few neoliberal decades: Putin has long since abandoned Russia's experiment with Anglo-Saxon capitalism and Trump is talking about taking equity stakes in defense and munitions companies.

De Gaulle's vision of a nonaligned world is also coming into being. Vance has cited him opportunistically: "He recognized what I certainly recognize, that it's not in Europe's interest, and it's not in America's interest, for Europe to be a permanent security vassal of the United States." But the Europeans are also beginning to realize that de Gaulle was right to warn that the Americans would eventually abandon Europe. Macron in particular is reviving de Gaulle's vision of a self-reliant Europe with his idea of "strategic autonomy." And Putin? All this talk of global realignment is caviar to the general.

What should we make of this global revival of Gaullism? Much depends on who is doing the reviving and why. It would be wonderful if Britain could recommit to national greatness given its current funk. But it would be rather less wonderful if Trump imitated de Gaulle's constitutional coup d'etat that massively increased executive power.

There are also deeper problems.

One is that de Gaulle was a far greater man than his contemporary imitators, towering over them not just physically (he was 6.5-feet tall) but morally. He understood that France's greatness depended on how well he treated his people. He combined his grand style with personal austerity, insisting on paying his own phone and electricity bills, installing a meter to record his family's consumption. And he tried to make "the spirit of the nation" as ecumenical as possible, an attempt that broke down with the "evenements" of 1968, but it was nevertheless genuine. Most of today's strong men are the very opposite of this: greedy and self-indulgent men who relish dividing their countries along cultural lines.

The other is that the US is in a very different position from postwar France. De Gaulle inherited a failed nation and acted as if it was one of the world's great powers. Trump inherited the world's most powerful country - a quarter of the world's GDP and a vast network of alliances - and regarded it as "an Empire in decline," to borrow a phrase from Vance. The prize for de Gaulle's carefully cultivated illusion was 30 glorious years of prosperity.

The prize for Trump's willful delusion may be de Gaulle's politics of national greatness in reverse.

Adrian Wooldridge is the global business columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. He was previously a writer at the Economist. His latest book is "The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World."