Communist Charles de Gaulle

What if Charles de Gaulle was communist? I think this could work because even though capitalism was deeply rooted in French values, he disliked and distrusted the United Kingdom and United States and their special relationship. Would he steal the spotlight from Tito? I want to say have him be a devoted communist but he probably couldn't win the hearts of the French people if he was. Maybe if he was in secret or in protest to his Anglo-American counterparts?
 
Hahahaha ! Then he is not Charles de Gaulle. Or Charles de Gaulle is just a name on a different person that tot a completely different education and life. De Gaulle came from a catholic monarchist nationalist family, although he certainly quickly became a republican. And you hardly could find any communist officer in the french army in the years 1920 to 1940.
 
Something very drastic would have had to have happened to turn de Gaulle commie.

But if we go with that hypothetical of 'Communist France', rather than de Gaulle, then whoever took over might end up stealing the spotlight of 'communist but not Soviet' from Yugoslavia. They certainly would not have been big on the idea of NATO (which they wouldn't have been in). They would have supported Italian communists and been friendly with Franco's Spain.

Anyway, de Gaulle already proved himself to be in protest to Anglo-American relations when he pulled out of NATO, and tried to establish France and the 'Middle Power' between Washington and Moscow. He didn't need to be a communist to do that.
 
Wasn't Franco staunchly anticommunist?

Franco may have been fighting against the Soviet-backed Republicans, but the main reason that the US started to repair relations with Franco after WW2 was because Washington was scared that the USSR might be able to pull Franco into their sphere and give them influence in South Europe and the Mediterranean. I think that if an anti-Washington Paris got to Madrid first, they might have been able to make nice with them.

Its also possible that France could have pulled Portugal out of NATO as well. Portugal was 'socialist' after all.
 
Franco may have been fighting against the Soviet-backed Republicans, but the main reason that the US started to repair relations with Franco after WW2 was because Washington was scared that the USSR might be able to pull Franco into their sphere and give them influence in South Europe and the Mediterranean. I think that if an anti-Washington Paris got to Madrid first, they might have been able to make nice with them.

Its also possible that France could have pulled Portugal out of NATO as well. Portugal was 'socialist' after all.

the USSR overt allies at least paid some sort of lip service to communism, it would be impossible to reconcile this with Franco's power base which was among the ultra-catholics and conservative.

You're more likely to have France or the USSR try to undermine its regime with the goal of placing civil war era communists in a position of power after the regime falls. As the US (or more then likely the UK) would intervene to prop up Franco has they did to other dictators in south america for the same reasons, you could end up with a proxy war on the iberian peninsula.
 
What if Charles de Gaulle was communist? I think this could work because even though capitalism was deeply rooted in French values, he disliked and distrusted the United Kingdom and United States and their special relationship. Would he steal the spotlight from Tito? I want to say have him be a devoted communist but he probably couldn't win the hearts of the French people if he was. Maybe if he was in secret or in protest to his Anglo-American counterparts?

He was thoroughly bourgeois in his outlook and demeanour and the gaullist and communist resistance during WW2 were at logger head to the point of sabotaging each other at time.

The best you could expect in my mind from De Gaulle would be a *complete* break from NATO to become non-aligned and even that's a stretch unless he thought he could gain allies via a French Union that had a military component.
 
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