Fifth Republic (1958–present)

Charles de Gaulle founded the Fifth Republic in 1958 with a strong presidential system that still stands today. He ended the traumatic Algerian War (1954–1962) — France's Vietnam — and granted Algeria independence, which triggered a crisis: Over a million Pieds-Noirs (French settlers in North Africa) returned to France. De Gaulle positioned France as an independent great power with its own nuclear force (Force de frappe) and withdrew from NATO's military integration.

The May 1968 events shook the country: What began as student protests at the Sorbonne grew into a general strike with 10 million strikers and became the largest social movement in French post-war history. The events changed society profoundly — more personal freedom, more equality, less deference to authority.

Under François Mitterrand (1981–1995), Paris received its Grands Projets: the glass pyramid at the Louvre, the Opéra Bastille, the Grande Arche de la Défense, and the Bibliothèque Nationale. Jacques Chirac (1995–2007) refused to participate in the Iraq War, which strained relations with the USA but found great approval in France.

Recent history has been marked by challenges: The terrorist attacks in Paris (Charlie Hebdo and Bataclan, 2015) and Nice (2016) traumatized the country. The Yellow Vests movement (Gilets jaunes, 2018/19) highlighted the social divide between urban elites and rural populations. Emmanuel Macron, the youngest president in French history, has governed since 2017 and sparked massive protests with the controversial pension reform in 2023 — in the French tradition that political resistance in the streets is part of the democratic self-image.