[1945 - 1958] The Fourth Republic and Decolonization

We begin in 1945. The war is over. The air in Paris tastes of liberation and coal dust. The Nazi flags have been torn down from the Eiffel Tower, but the scars of occupation and collaboration run deep. France is free, but it is also broken, humiliated, and deeply divided. Out of this rubble, a new government is born: the Fourth Republic. It arrives with a wave of optimism. For the first time in history, French women cast their votes. A comprehensive social security system, the *Sécurité Sociale*, is created in 1945, promising healthcare and a safety net from the cradle to the grave—a radical promise in a country picking itself up from ruin. In the cities, life slowly regains its color. The severe rationing of the war years gives way to a new, cautious consumerism. People dream of owning a refrigerator or a washing machine. The definitive symbol of this new mobility is a strange-looking little car, the Citroën 2CV. With its corrugated metal body and soft suspension, it was nicknamed the "umbrella on four wheels," designed to carry a basket of eggs across a ploughed field without breaking a single one. It was cheap, reliable, and utterly French—a sign of the burgeoning economic miracle that historians would later call *Les Trente Glorieuses*, the Thirty Glorious Years of growth. On the grand boulevards, Christian Dior’s "New Look" of 1947 explodes onto the scene, a defiant rejection of wartime austerity with its lavish use of fabric—sometimes up to 20 yards for a single dress—cinched waists, and full skirts. It was a statement: France, the arbiter of style and culture, was back. And yet, a ghost haunted the halls of this new Republic. The political system itself was the problem. Haunted by the memory of the strong-man rule that had led to the Vichy regime, the founders of the Fourth Republic created a system with a powerful parliament and a weak executive. Proportional representation meant that dozens of political parties—Communists, Socialists, Christian Democrats, Gaullists—jostled for power, forming fragile, short-lived coalitions. The result was chronic instability. France would burn through an astonishing 26 different governments in just 12 years. It was a system designed for compromise in a nation that had forgotten how. This political paralysis became fatal when confronted with the greatest challenge of the age: the end of empire. The first great wound was Indochina. Since the 19th century, this region—modern-day Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos—had been a jewel in the French colonial crown. But a powerful nationalist movement led by a man named Ho Chi Minh demanded independence. France refused. What followed was a brutal, grinding war fought in jungles and rice paddies thousands of miles away. Back home, the war was distant, a colonial affair that barely touched the lives of most French people enjoying the new economic boom. That changed in 1954. In a valley called Dien Bien Phu, the French army made a final, catastrophic stand. Surrounded and pounded by Vietnamese artillery, the garrison surrendered after a 56-day siege. The defeat was an unimaginable shock, a national humiliation. It cost over 55,000 French lives and ended France’s empire in Asia. The prime minister, Pierre Mendès France, a man of rare decisiveness, negotiated a swift exit, but the damage was done. The military felt betrayed by the politicians. This sense of betrayal would fester and explode over the second, and far more painful, colonial war: Algeria. Algeria was different. It wasn't just a colony; its northern coast was legally a part of France, divided into official *départements*, just like Normandy or Provence. Over one million European settlers, the *pieds-noirs* (literally "black feet"), had lived there for generations. For them, Algeria *was* home. But to the nine million Arab and Berber Muslims, it was a land of systemic inequality and colonial subjugation. In 1954, a nationalist group, the FLN (National Liberation Front), launched a coordinated wave of attacks, demanding independence. The French response was absolute: Algeria is France, and it will remain so. What followed was not a distant colonial skirmish, but an all-consuming national crisis. It was a war of terrorist bombings in Algerian cities and brutal counter-insurgency tactics by the French army in the countryside. The use of torture by French forces became a horrifying open secret, dividing intellectuals, families, and the nation itself. Young conscripts, boys who had been dreaming of buying a 2CV, were sent to fight in a war whose purpose grew murkier by the day. The political chaos in Paris made things worse. No government could survive the Algerian question. If they negotiated with the FLN, they were branded traitors by the right and the army. If they escalated the war, they lost the support of the left. The Fourth Republic was tearing itself apart. The breaking point came in May 1958. Fearing that the government in Paris was about to abandon Algeria, French army generals seized control of Algiers and demanded a new government in Paris—one that would guarantee a French Algeria. Paratroopers were put on alert in Corsica, ready to drop on Paris itself. France was on the brink of civil war. The politicians of the Fourth Republic were powerless. The system had utterly failed. In their desperation, they turned to the one man who seemed to stand above the chaos, the ghost who had been waiting in the wings for a decade: the hero of the Second World War, General Charles de Gaulle. They offered him emergency powers to solve the crisis, hoping he would be their savior. De Gaulle accepted, but on one condition: that he be allowed to write a new constitution and bring the dysfunctional Fourth Republic to an end. Drained and terrified, the nation agreed. The era of parliamentary chaos was over, but the painful drama of decolonization was entering its final, bloody act.