French Third Republic during the Nazi-Soviet Pact and its opposition to the "imperialist war" against Germany in 1939–40). From a different perspective, Gaullists called the Third Republic a "weak" regime and argued that if France had a regime headed by a strong-man president like Charles de Gaulle before 1940, the defeat could have been avoided. In power, they did exactly that and started the Fifth Republic. Then was a group of French historians, centered around Pierre Renouvin and his "protégés" Jean-Baptiste Duroselle and Maurice Baumont, that started a new type of international history to take into what Renouvin called (profound forces) such as
Republic of the Congo of the French colony of Equatorial Africa. The Republic of the Congo was established on the 28th of November 1958 but gained independence from France in 1960. In 1970, the People's Republic of the Congo was established as a Marxist–Leninist one-party state; this lasted until 1991. The sovereign state has had multi-party elections since 1992, although a democratically elected government was ousted in the 1997 Republic of the Congo Civil War, and President Denis Sassou Nguesso, who first came to power in 1979, has ruled for 33 of the past 38 years. The Republic of the Congo has become the