Philip Cunliffe considers the current interest in ‘Anglo-Gaullism’ among some British conservatives, and asks whether there is any prospect of a national saviour on the French model coming to the rescue of an exhausted British nation.
With the nation in the grip of palpable decay, our existing political system offers no prospect of change or meaningful improvement. After 13 years in power, the ruling Tory government continues to crumble away, now facing the prospect not only of defeat but perhaps even electoral oblivion in the general election due next year. Meanwhile the opposition Labour Party refuses to make any meaningful pledges or commitments, despite an electorate that is desperate for any expression of political hope. In these circumstances, it is worth considering political visions for national renewal that lie beyond the remit and imagination of our existing parliamentary parties.
One such vision that has allure among some of the dissidents of the British intelligentsia is that of ‘Anglo-Gaullism’. It proposes a British version of the political movement named for General Charles de Gaulle, the charismatic leader of the Free French, once prime minister and then twice president of France after having founded the French Fifth Republic in 1958. Despite being leader of a rival nation and known for his abiding political suspicion of Britain, it is striking that it is among British conservatives that de Gaulle finds his new Anglo supporters. Mail on Sunday columnist Peter Hitchens is probably the most well-known proponent of Anglo-Gaullism, but there are other significant voices who have sought to elaborate this idea, including UnHerd writers Aris Roussinos and Ben Cobley, as well as Andrew Cusack in The Critic. Anglo-Gaullism even has its proponents on the other side of the Atlantic, such as New York Times columnist Ross Douthat.
Appearing on Nigel Farage’s GB News show in 2021, Peter Hitchens defined Anglo-Gaullism as meaning ‘strong defence, patriotism, a strong welfare state, and national independence.’ Here, Hitchens captures one aspect of Anglo-Gaullism that helps explain its allure – the fact that it cuts across inherited political divides, linking together traditional elements both of British Labourism (a strong welfare state) with British Toryism (national independence). Mr Hitchens even defended this position from de Gaulle’s leading Anglophone biographer, Professor Julian Jackson. Professor Jackson took issue with Hitchens by saying that de Gaulle was too pragmatic and mercurial, and ultimately simply too darn French, for his politics to serve as anything like a coherent doctrine or to be easily transposed to the British context. In his response to Professor Jackson, Hitchens is right to say that even if there is no doctrine at its core, Gaullist-style politics nonetheless seems to offer ready-made solutions to the problems that plague us.
Patriotism stands opposed to divisive inter-sectionalism and the draining squabbles of identity politics. A generous and expansive state capable not only of militarily defending us but also guiding the economy and cohering society stands in opposition to our social decay and our crumbling infrastructure and public services. National independence certainly seems more appealing than instinctively cringing to Brussels, Washington DC, or indeed the bond markets. Classical Gaullist policies – such as withdrawing from NATO command structures and establishing sovereign control over the nation’s nuclear weapons – also have much to commend them. In short, Anglo-Gaullism would seem perfectly suited to seize that vacant territory in the political landscape where the majority of voters reside identified by Professor Matt Goodwin in his book Values, Voice and Virtue (2023): leaning right on culture and left on the economy. Yet, however appealing it may sound, there is at least one element missing from Hitchens’ account – the man himself. Gaullism was after all, named for a man, and whatever one might think of de Gaulle, there is no politician in contemporary Britain that comes close to him in national stature. Indeed, the very fact that these commentators are importing political visions from abroad – and such a distinctively French one to boot – speaks to the desperation of British conservatives.
Before it imploded, Boris Johnson’s political project was likened to Gaullism. Writing in the Financial Times in 2019 before the Tories’ crushing electoral victory of that year, John McTernan said that Johnson was more de Gaulle than Churchill, on the basis that Johnson proposed to reunite a nation riven by the process of seceding from the EU around a programme of modernisation and infrastructure spending – much like de Gaulle had in France across the 1960s following the French withdrawal from Algeria in 1962. From the vantage point of today, McTernan’s optimistic prognosis for the abortive project of ‘Johnsonism’ indicates both the appeal and limits of Anglo-Gaullism. On the one hand, the promises of ‘levelling up’ up the country were popular enough to win Johnson the election in 2019. On the other hand, such promises have come to nothing. Far from rebooting the British state for the twenty-first century as de Gaulle did for France in the last century, not only do the Tories have no leader to match Johnson’s popular appeal – let alone that of de Gaulle’s – they have been unable to sustain a dirigiste national project.
So where does this leave Anglo-Gaullism? Beyond infrastructural modernisation, the analogies to Gaullism fall flat very quickly. While Boris Johnson could certainly be said to share de Gaulle’s ambition and vanity, he has none of de Gaulle’s stoicism, intense seriousness or haughty charisma. Moreover de Gaulle’s allure stemmed from his wartime role in which he went into exile in order to provide a rallying point for those opposed to the Nazi occupation and its collaborators in France. By contrast, not only is Britain today not occupied by a foreign power, but, having seceded from the European Union, Britain now enjoys greater formal independence than it has at any other point in the past 30 years – an independence which we have thus far refused to exercise to any great effect. Then again, perhaps this is no surprise given that our political elite is more mediocre than even that of France’s Third Republic which surrendered to the Nazis.
If it was merely a question of the quality of political leadership, then perhaps we could reconcile ourselves to waiting for a national saviour on the Gaullist model to revive the state and its political cadre. But this only begs the question. What is it about a political system that generates such defective leadership, and that can only renew itself in the form of charismatic saviours? The very fact that Gaullist redemption had to be embodied in a single individual leader reflects a deeper historical problem of modern French politics, reaching back to the Bonapartist regime of the mid-nineteenth century. This was when Louis Napoleon, nephew of the Emperor Napoleon, resolved the crisis of the Second Republic by launching the 1851 coup d’état that would lead to the establishment of the Second Empire, with Louis styling himself Emperor Napoleon III via plebiscite. This was the nineteenth-century precursor of de Gaulle’s Bonapartist transformation of the parliamentary Fourth Republic into the semi-presidential Fifth Republic in 1958, with enormous new powers vested in the executive – a transformation that was again spurred by a military insurrection (albeit not one of de Gaulle’s making).
The Bonapartist tradition in France, of which Gaullism is a part, reflected the enduring crisis of French democratic representation and the social deadlocks resulting from the country’s urban-rural divide following the 1789 French Revolution. These were contradictions that were ultimately resolved by charismatic leaders – de Gaulle and Louis Napoleon – whose appeal rested on their ability to transcend party politics through plebiscitary acclaim, rather than on the basis of institutionalised representative legitimacy. Although de Gaulle’s modernisation of the French economy ultimately undid the rural peasant rump that constituted the electoral basis of Bonapartism, the institutional vestiges of Bonapartism remain embedded in French politics, as seen in Emmanuel Macron’s vision of a ‘Jupiterian’ presidentialism. In short, the fact that Bonapartism has recurred in France reflects the enduring crisis of political representation in that country. That Louis Napoleon’s regime was overthrown in 1870, and that de Gaulle’s own Fifth Republic is now reduced to a post-sovereign member-state of the European Union, indicates that Bonapartism has never resolved the issue of national democratic representation in France. In short, if Gaullism is a marker of the weakness of political authority in France, it is still less likely to succeed in strengthening the state in Britain.
The parliamentary crisis unleashed by the Brexit vote and the ensuing failure to consolidate the electoral realignment established by Johnson in 2019 indicate that Britain’s party system is no longer fit for purpose. Moreover, fully two-thirds of Britain’s electorate no longer trust the nation’s political parties to represent them. To imagine that this could be substituted by a plebiscitary regime led by a presidential leader would be to perpetuate our national crisis of representation, not to resolve it. Indeed, the creeping presidentialism of British politics that was spurred by Prime Minister Tony Blair reflects the decay of parliamentary representation mediated through parties as vessels of popular will.
Rather than vesting our hopes in imagined charismatic saviours or enhanced executive power, we must accept that the only way politically to restore the nation is to strengthen its political core: parliamentary representation. As our existing political parties are evidently incapable of doing this, this requires not only political reforms that will help to bridle existing political representatives, but also a new parliamentary system that could allow expanded representation. If we are to have national renewal, the blunt truth is that we cannot return to the past – neither our own national past of centrist technocratic parties under Blairite presidentialism, nor France’s past, of national redemption through charismatic saviours. If we are to be saved, it is we ourselves that must do it.
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