The name is absent

As the present organizational bearer of the Gaullist movement, the UDR,
all criteria considered, is not easily identifiable on a Left-Right spectrum.
In good measure it is indeed, as Prime Minister Pompidou told the UNR
National Council in June, 1966, “the synthesis of the Left and the Right, of
order and movement,”¹² It is as well a blend of Statism and democracy, of
nationalism and realism. If eventually the UDR finds its home on the Right-
Center (as appears likely), French conservatism will emerge transformed.*³

III. Leaders and Voters

De Gaulle frequently is quoted as once having said that “everybody in
France has been, is, or will be, a Gaullist.” Both their quest for national
unity and their desire to preserve the Fifth Republic impose upon Gaullists
the task of seeking ever larger electoral majorities. Indeed, in the course of
de Gaulle’s long career, most Frenchmen from the extreme Left to the ex-
treme Right have found some point at which they accepted him as a cham-
pion— be it with the wartime resistance, or with the RPF against the
régime des partis, or in apparent defense of French Algeria in 1958, or
subsequently as the grantor of Algerian independence and the defender
against the Secret Army Organization.

The most consistent Gaullists, however, have been predominantly certain
of those compagnons whose loyalty dates from 1940. In an assertion of
party unity in 1963, Prime Minister Georges Pompidou characteristically
argued that “. . . our solidarity was born first from our past, from the com-
bat begun twenty-three years ago by General de Gaulle, a combat in which
we joined in order to save the honor of France, to associate her with victory,
to define the roads to salvation and finally to assume her leadership.”*'*
In his book, Le Gaullisme, Passionante Aventure, Edmond Michelet stresses
the more personal, sentimental ties of Gaullism for inconditionnels like him-
self: “I will suggest that one of the most profound reasons for our attach-
ment to the man of June 18 stems, more than from that complicity in con-
temptuous refusal of defeat which animated him and us, from that human
solidarity which was born among the first compagnons who shared his soli-
tude.”¹⁵ These are the men — like Roger Frey, Michel Debré, Jacques Cha-
ban-Delmas, Christian Fouchet, Michel Maurice-Bokanowski, André Mal-
raux, Picrre Billotte, Jacques Baumel, Edmond Michelet, Gaston Palewski,
and others — who followed de Gaullc through the war, the RPF, and into
prominent position in the Fifth Republic.

Of the 198 UNR deputies elected in 1958, 112 — slightly more than the
Assembly average — had resistance records."* In the second Assembly of
the Fifth Republic, as of April, 1965, sixteen of the 215 UNR deputies
were Compagnons de la Libération, forty-eight held the Médaille de la Ré-
sistance, and fourteen held other resistance medals, for a total of 36 percent,

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