A very useful collection of essays by different scholars on various aspects of France in the past 30 years, with particular emphasis on the modernization of the economic realm and related changes in the politics, education and culture.
On the surface at least, the Gaullist régime in France now looks substantially stronger than before the May crisis. The June elections gave General de Gaulle and his then Prime Minister, Georges Pompidou, a massive parliamentary majority that for the next five years seemingly insures M. Pompidou's successor, former Foreign Minister Maurice Couve de Murville, against every normal political hazard-except, perhaps, the eventual loss of his master's confidence.
Three years after having signed a treaty of coöperation with Dr. Adenauer, designed to make the marriage of France and Germany the foundation for the regrouping of Europe, General de Gaulle has travelled to the Soviet Union to talk of rediscovered friendship, agreement and even "alliance" between the "new France" and the "new Russia." Now the latter, pending information to the contrary, is the principal adversary of the German Federal Republic, and the Soviet leaders do not hide the fact that they look upon the rapprochement with Paris as a means of gaining support against German "revanchism." We may therefore be permitted to question the degree of coherence in the foreign policy of the Fifth Republic and to wonder whether such changes of course-there are other examples-cannot be best explained by psychological factors, the first of them being excessive amour propre.
Franco-German relations are at once much better and much worse than is generally imagined in the United States. Better, because the frigid atmosphere and tensions of 1964-1965 obscure the solidity of the links forged between France and the Federal Republic. Worse, because these tensions are not solely attributable to General de Gaulle but are the expression of a profound divergence in perspective.
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