Search results

"France Votes" analyzes the French elections of 2012 in the context of a France and Europe in crisis. With regard to the economy, Irwin Wall describes the ways in which the country's adherence to the common currency in the Eurozone has stripped France of its freedom of manouver. "France Votes" shows how a European-wide economic crisis was reflected in political crisis at home and the rise of new political extremism combined with mass disaffection from politics altogether. The result of all of this, posits Wall, is that France has become a no-choice democracy

This study of French-American relations in the critical postwar period, 1945–1954, makes use of recently opened diplomatic archives and personal papers in France and the United States. Irwin Wall examines the American role in French diplomacy, economic reconstruction, military policy, politics, and the reshaping of French society from labour unions to consumer tastes and films. Particular emphasis is placed on American attempts to combat the influence of French Communism and achieve a stable, centrist regime avoiding the extremes of right and left

This essay rejects the orthodoxy of French diplomatic historiography, which states de Gaulle was the founder of a new French independence & effected a revolution in French diplomacy, after freeing himself from the Algerian yoke in 1962. Instead it argues that de Gaulle sought from 1958 to make Algeria a central plank of his diplomatic strategy. That strategy sought to transform the relationship with Algeria in order for it to become key to a neo-colonial French community, the basis for French leadership in Europe & the foundation of a new relationship of equality with GB & the US. However, largely as a result of de Gaulle's own making, this policy failed to materialize. Adapted from the source document.