IT has often been said that General de Gaulle's domestic policies were all, in reality, part of and subordinate to his foreign policy. His immediate successor, M. Pompidou, devoted much less time to foreign polity issues, and when he did discuss them, aroused far less comments either hostile or approving, and far less speculation. This was partly, though not entirely, because one of the results of General de Gaulle's foreign policy had been to close a number of doors to his successor, while opening the door to increased social and economic pressures. These were politically far more divisive, and neither of the presidents who succeeded him enjoyed the particular political advantages to which General de Gaulle mainly owed his undoubted authority. These were, first, his record and personality, together with his unique style of leadership, and, second, the peculiar circumstances in which he came to power, which gave him a quite unprecedented opportunity to exercise authority. In 1958, the nation handed over to him one overriding obligation which, in its view, he alone would be able to fulfil, and so, until he had done so, he enjoyed a degree of political indispensability that few democratic political leaders have ever had in time of peace and that no French political leader had had since Clemenceau. The fact that he did, in the end, fulfil that obligation, by achieving an acceptable, if not ideal, settlement of the Algerian problem, together with the peaceful and rapid evolution to independence of all of France's overseas possessions with any conceivable chance of viability as national entities, added to his personal prestige, thus helping him to prolong this indispensability, and to go on to carry out Gaullist policies and win support for Gaullist views in the field of foreign policy. In the climate of depressed impotence that the Fourth Republic had bequeathed to the Fifth, and that General de Gaulle had characterised as the absence of any foreign policy, the kind of comforting and heady verbal magic that he dispensed was more attractive to many Frenchmen than it would have been if it had been considered purely in the light of cold reason. In spite of its contradictions, and often its unreality, it appealed to many, sometimes for internal political reasons, sometimes precisely because it was remote from realities that had been for too long intractable, unacceptable or humiliating.