The name is absent

Michel Debré as Finance Minister after de Gaulle’s disappointingly narrow
victory in the presidential elections of December, 1965; yet Debré must
have seemed a very modest improvement to Louis Vallon and René Cap-
itant.*^oa Minor reforms were enacted in 1965 concerning corporation law
and labor-management “enterprise committees,” but the UDT’s hopes for
reconstruction of capitalism through the “association of capital and labor”
(an old Gaullist theme) met resistance and delay at the hands of Debre and
the economically conservative Pompidou government. It was only through
de Gaulle’s personal intervention, reportedly against the desires of the cab-
inet and the bureaucracy, that a compulsory profit-sharing plan finally was
enacted into law in the summer of 1967.¹¹⁰

Often the former UDT leaders have been disappointed, as when the
Action Committee nominated only a few Gaullists of the Left alongside
numerous conservatives for the 1967 legislative elections; occasionally they
have threatened a split in order to speed up social and economic reform.¹¹¹
When the March, 1967, elections produced a reduced and more conserva-
tive Gaullist majority in the National Assembly, René Capitant first charged
in a Notre République editorial that “. . . in effect the government has con-
ducted a rightist policy in the economic and social fields . . . ,” and then
chose for himself an “attached” (apparenté) rather than a membership
status in the Gaullist parliamentary group.”² When Pompidou and the party
leadership called a congress at Lille in November, 1967, for the purpose
of reorganizing and expanding the party, Capitant and Vallon trumpeted
in a Notre République headline, “We will not go to Lille.”*¹³ Notre Ré-
publique^ formal objection was to Pompidou’s attempt “to incarcerate
the regime in a party.” One would suspect that a more Leftist-looking party
would have appeared less dangerous to Vallon and Capitant.

Although a few small Left Gaullist groups joined the Notre République
boycott, notably the Front Travailliste (led by Lucien Junillon) and the
Front du Progrès (led by Jacques Dauer), others of similar persuasion at-
tended the Lille congress, among them Pierre Billotte, Léo Hamon, PhiIippe
Dechartre (Secretary-General of the Union de la Gauche V^e République)
and Robert Grossmann (President of the Union des Jeunes pour le Progrès).
The new UD-V^c took a strong step toward reconciliation with the dissi-
dent Left Gaullists when it selected as the party’s first Secretary-General
Robert Poujade, a choice applauded by both Notre République and the
Front du Progrès.*” This latter group was eventually lured into formal af-
filiation with the UD-V^c in the spring of 1968.

The partisan loyalties of Left Gaullists were tried almost to the breaking
point during the massive strikes and demonstrations which shook de Gaulle’s
Republic in May and June, 1968. René Capitant had long predicted that
the conservative economic policies of the Pompidou government would in-

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