Nevertheless de Gaulle had his way. He gave France the institutions he believed it needed: a strong executive capable of governing and a weakened assembly. If he spoke more often of the Republic than of democracy, this was because, to his mind, democracy as practised in the Third and Fourth Republics had failed France. His constitution was built to survive, and has indeed done so. His regime withstood the terrorism provoked by what some of his erstwhile supporters regarded as his betrayal of French Algeria. It was rocked by the events of May 1968 – the student riots – but survived them too, and has subsequently given France an unaccustomed stability.

He pursued Franco-German rapprochement and, though he had spoken contemptuously of this in his years of internal exile, he made France the moving force in the creation of a new European order. The shade of Laval might have smiled sardonically to see the General achieve what had been his own ambition.

Critics accused de Gaulle of “Bonapartism”. Like the two Napoleons, he used the device of a referendum or plebiscite to bypass the parliamentary body. Yet his understanding of the idea of a clear separation of the executive, legislative and judicial powers had older roots. He was a student of Montesquieu’s De l’Esprit des Lois, where the same theory was based on the author’s interpretation of the 18th-century British constitution. And indeed the powers of the President of the Fifth Republic resemble those of the 18th-­century British Crown.

François Mitterrand was de Gaulle’s most persistent critic. A member of most of the Fourth Republic governments, he denounced the Gaullist constitution as “a permanent coup d’etat”, yet stood against de Gaulle as the candidate of the Left in the 1965 presidential election and forced the General into a second round of voting. He united the Left and became in 1981 the first (and so far only) Socialist President of the Fifth Republic, even though Guy Mollet, the Socialist Prime Minister in the Fourth, fairly remarked: “When I was in government with him, Mitterrand was never a Socialist.” He was re-elected in 1988 and, despite his previous criticism of the regime, was every bit as monarchical a President as de Gaulle himself. The permanent coup d’etat suited him very well.