In France the Liberation led to the “Epuration” or purge of Vichyites. Pétain was sentenced to death, de Gaulle commuting the sentence to life imprisonment. Laval was executed after a travesty of a trial. De Gaulle, having seen off his rival, General Giraud, a Vichyite whom the Americans favoured, and having established his authority over the internal Resistance, preventing it from being taken over completely by the Communists, returned in triumph as head of a provisional government. With sublime arrogance and intransigence, he claimed to represent the authentic France and insisted that Vichy had never possessed any legitimacy. So, when Paris was liberated and, at the Hôtel de Ville, Georges Bidault, a leader of the internal Resistance,urged him “solemnly, in the name of resistant France, to proclaim the Republic before the people here assembled”, the General icily replied: “The Republic has never ceased to exist. Free France, Fighting France and the French Committee of National Liberation have each in turn embodied it. Vichy was always null and void, and it remains so. I myself am President of the Government of the Republic. Why then should I proclaim it?”

This was an enormous bluff, if a necessary one. The Republic had expired in 1940. It was necessary to recreate it. De Gaulle tried to win support for a new constitution which would strengthen the executive at the expense of the National Assembly and prevent a return to the “regime of the parties”. He failed and withdrew into private life, expecting mistakenly that he would soon be recalled. Before long he formed a new movement – the Rassemblement du Peuple Français (RPF) – as a means of returning to power and overthrowing the detested “regime of the parties”, which had resumed in much the old style. He failed again, and retired to Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises to write his memoirs and wait, like a king in exile, for the call.

It came only 12 years later, in May 1958. After the vote of June 1, which empowered him to draw up plans for a new constitution, he was approached by an old Pétainist deputy, the barrister Tixier-Vignancourt, who told him he had voted for the “full powers” but could not approve the delegation of “constituent powers” because “I would never have thought that I would be asked to delegate my constituent power twice in my life, and that the man who was asking me to do so for the second time was he who had punished me for doing so the first”; an acid reminder of the resemblance between de Gaulle’s position now and the Marshal’s in 1940.