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
Article 49 of the French Constitution of the President of the Republic by direct suffrage. The circumstances of that vote are quite specific, it occurred at the end of the Algerian crisis, which affected the first years of the Fifth Republic, a kind of transitional phase in its history. The vote took place during the first legislature of the Fifth Republic, and put an ends to it. The parliamentary elections of 1958 had not resulted in a clear majority, but the president and the Debré government could work with the assembly without a secured majority, because the priority was to resolve the Algerian crisis. In the