General Charles de Gaulle was in Ireland in June 1969, seeking peace on a Kerry beach a few months after his resignation as French president. French voters had rejected his proposed regionalisation and senate reforms.

Well might de Gaulle have sought solace on the edge of Europe; the previous year had produced remarkable scenes of defiance in Paris and other French cities, as students and workers protested, occupied and defied. De Gaulle struggled to make sense of it all.

As the historian Tony Judt, author of the 2005 book Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, saw it, in France “the Fifth Republic had accentuated the long-standing French habit of concentrating power in one place and a handful of institutions. France was run, and was seen to be run, by a tiny Parisian elite; socially exclusive, culturally privileged, haughty, hierarchical and unapproachable”.

Yet de Gaulle was able to rally the Gaullist political movement, stressing the danger of a communist, revolutionary coup; it was a choice, he insisted, between anarchy and legitimate government. The Gaullists won the ensuing national assembly election handsomely, but the sting came the following year.

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