Consensus and mythology: Security alternatives in post-gaullist France

For a generation, French men and women have believed (or, rather, have chosen to believe) that their age-old security dilemmas were definitively resolved in the 1960s by de Gaulle’s far-sighted decision to develop an independent strategic nuclear capability. France, a large number of strategists (amateur and professional) claimed, was now safe both from the vulnerability of isolation and from the problematics and unpredictability of alliances. The development of a land, sea and air-based 'triad’ of independent strategic and tactical nuclear weapons would, it was widely believed, keep the Russians to the east of the Rhine (even if they elected to cross the Elbe) and, at the same time, allow Paris the luxury of non-involvement in the consequences of any military adventures launched by Washington. 'Proportional deterrence ', or la dissuasion du faible au fort created, at least in the popular imagination, an invisible shield around the perimeter of the Hexagon, a national sanctuary, the guarantee of eternal peace. So compelling was this vision that, by 1977, both the Socialist Party and the Communist Party had abandoned fifteen years of opposition to what they had disparagingly called la bombinette and, in an effort to make electoral hay while the nuclear sun still shone, embraced the Gaullist 'consensus’ with all the fervour of neophytes. Opposition to this unanimity was marginalised by the media, dismissed, pejoratively, as pacifist or condemned, more sinisterly, as pro-Soviet.