Charles de Gaulle killed in 1962

MrHola

Banned
Jean Bastien-Thiry led the most prominent assassination attempt against Charles de Gaulle. The group set themselves up in the Paris suburb of Petit-Clamart on August 22, 1962. De Gaulle's car, an unarmoured Citroën DS, and nearby shops were raked with machine gun fire but de Gaulle, along with his wife and entourage, were able to escape without injury.

So what-if, Charles de Gaulle was tragically killed by the machine-gun fire? What are the long-term effects on France and Europe as a whole?
 

Hendryk

Banned
the short-term consequences are interesting in themselves. The institutions of the Fifth Republic dictate that if the president dies in office, he is to be replaced by the chairman of the Senate pending new elections; and in 1962 that would have been Gaston Monnerville, a descendant of African slaves born in Guyana. So France would have been the first Western country with a nonwhite head of state.

Monnerville.jpg


The longer-term consequences are just as interesting. De Gaulle broke in many ways with the multilateralism of the Fourth Republic, implementing a more assertive foreign policy in a attempt to restore France's international prestige. This led to tensions within the EEC on the one hand and NATO on the other. From July 1965 to January 1966, the French government basically boycotted the EEC, leading to institutional paralysis, in order to prevent an expansion of the role of the European Parliament and of qualified majority voting at the Council of Ministers (instead of unanimity). The result was the so-called Luxemburg Compromise, which stalled European integration until the mid-1980s; it's probable that without de Gaulle, the other five EEC members would have prevailed over France and European integration would have proceeded. It's also likely that another French president wouldn't have decided to leave NATO's integrated command structure (incidentally leading to the organization's headquarters from Paris to Brussels).
 
But then wouldn't the assassination be the catalyst that OAS were looking for to start a coup and put their own government in charge? I have a feeling they'd like the idea of a non-white head of state even less than most ;)
 

Hendryk

Banned
But then wouldn't the assassination be the catalyst that OAS were looking for to start a coup and put their own government in charge?
No, at that point, the OAS knew that theirs was a lost cause; Algerian independence had been formally recognized the previous month and nothing they could have done had any chance of changing that. This assassination attempt was more in the spirit of, say, John Wilkes Booth's killing of Lincoln.

Still, even if Monnerville's presidency would have been a temporary one, it would have been interesting. Imagine him going for a state visit to the US at a time when part of the country still practiced segregation.
 

MrHola

Banned
WHat about the EEC? Would Britain and Ireland be allowed to enter it earlier? And who would be the next President? I'm sorry, but I don't know alot about French politics.
 

Hendryk

Banned
Would Britain and Ireland be allowed to enter it earlier?
Their second application, in 1967, would likely not be blocked by France.

And who would be the next President?
That's a more tricky question than it seems. For one thing, at that point, the institutions of the Fifth Republic stated that the President had to be elected by an electoral college rather than by direct popular vote--in OTL, that was changed by de Gaulle with a referendum held in November 1962, but obviously if he gets killed in August, that decision will remain in limbo (the decision to hold the referendum would be taken in October, over the opposition of the National Assembly). Perhaps the Gaullists would still call for the constitutional reform, but it's anyone's guess whether they would prevail.

For another, de Gaulle's prime minister was the newcomer Georges Pompidou, who had just replaced Michel Debré. Pompidou would normally be the logical choice as the Gaullist candidate, but he may have been sidelined in favor of Debré who was the better-known of the two. The situation would have been as confused on the left, with men like Guy Mollet (SFIO: French Section of the Workers' International) and Pierre Mendès France (PSU: Unified Socialist Party) competing for the votes of the mainstream left, and the Communist Party probably going for a spoiler's strategy (its candidate would have been either Maurice Thorez, who had two years left to live, or Jacques Duclos; both were hard-line Stalinists who had not-so-privately criticized Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin's crimes in 1956).

All in all, if one considers that the electoral college would have remained in place at least long enough to elect the new president, and factoring in a sympathy vote for the Gaullists, the next president would have been either Pompidou or Debré, and I'm leaning towards Debré for the aforementioned reasons. However, lacking the legitimacy and charisma of de Gaulle, his policies would have had to be more in the tradition of the Fourth Republic, and he couldn't have, as de Gaulle did, run roughshod over the National Assembly.
 

Archibald

Banned
No, at that point, the OAS knew that theirs was a lost cause; Algerian independence had been formally recognized the previous month and nothing they could have done had any chance of changing that. This assassination attempt was more in the spirit of, say, John Wilkes Booth's killing of Lincoln.

Still, even if Monnerville's presidency would have been a temporary one, it would have been interesting. Imagine him going for a state visit to the US at a time when part of the country still practiced segregation.

This Monnerville - Debré idea would really need more development, it sounds very,very interesting.

Btw never thought that each chairman of the french Senate was a "potential president" (of course there's severe limits to its role).
 

Hendryk

Banned
Btw never thought that each chairman of the french Senate was a "potential president" (of course there's severe limits to its role).
It happened twice in OTL, after de Gaulle's resignation in 1969 and Pompidou's death in 1974. Both times Alain Poher, as chairman of the Senate, stepped in as interim president.
 

Archibald

Banned
I know that! And the fact that people said to Poher
"Continue Alain, a force tu fera bien un septennat complet" (sorry but I'm totally unable to translate this into english:()
 
interesting idea for a POD indeed, what would happen to the Gaullists by May 1968 when the general strike and student protests rocked Paris? Without Gaulle, could they diffuse the situation, or would another leader see more violence or even stop the revolts before they started, fizzling out the French "hippy-left" movement
 

Hendryk

Banned
interesting idea for a POD indeed,
Back when I'd drawn a list of possible PODs in French history, I'd called that one "Fifty Magic Bullets", although the number of rounds actually fired was more in the vicinity of 150 (the shooters used automatic weapons).

what would happen to the Gaullists by May 1968 when the general strike and student protests rocked Paris? Without Gaulle, could they diffuse the situation, or would another leader see more violence or even stop the revolts before they started, fizzling out the French "hippy-left" movement
My guess is that the protests would take place regardless--1968 was a troubled year for pretty much the whole world, and even without de Gaulle the same reasons that led to the troubles would be there--but I'm not sure how the authorities would react to them. Much of the credit for things not getting too ugly goes to the Prefect of Police Maurice Grimaud, who urged the riot police to exercise restraint even if provoked by protesters; had someone with less self-control been in charge, several people would probably have been killed. However, as Daniel Cohn-Bendit himself later acknowledged, the leaders of the protest movement didn't have the faintest idea of where to go next, and after a month or so, had lost the initiative to the government, which capitalized on the population's desire for a return to normalcy. I won't go out on a limb about that, but I think another president than de Gaulle would have seen it too, and acted accordingly.
 
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Archibald

Banned
each time I register into a big forum like the one here, my first move is to browse it frantically (mainly on space and aircrafts, but also on another subjects)
I'd seen your thread at the time, lots of interesting ideas.

I think I'll drop you an e-mail on the subject of "France doesn't surrender in 1940".
I've seen no less than four interesting scenarios recently on the subject :) if you're interested...
 
each time I register into a big forum like the one here, my first move is to browse it frantically (mainly on space and aircrafts, but also on another subjects)
I'd seen your thread at the time, lots of interesting ideas.

I think I'll drop you an e-mail on the subject of "France doesn't surrender in 1940".
I've seen no less than four interesting scenarios recently on the subject :) if you're interested...

You're not the Archibald of the What If Modelling board are you?
 
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