There ensued twenty-one governments in the years 1946–55, one managing to last fifteen months, while another only existed for hours

From Small Wars, Faraway Places by Michael Burleigh. Page 126.

If the Communists were one destabilizing force on the left wing of the French political spectrum, the Gaullists performed an analogous role on the right, with the major caveat that they did not take their marching orders from an alien power. Indeed most of them despised the gum-chewing and informal Americans. Like Churchill, de Gaulle lost political power soon after the war, when he dramatically resigned as prime minister of the tripartite provisional government in January 1946, flouncing out after the Socialists insisted on defence cuts. Behind that issue was a more fundamental disagreement about the relative powers of a democratic assembly dominated by political parties, each ‘cooking its little soup, on its little fire in its little corner’, as he contemptuously described it. De Gaulle’s authoritarian vision was of a strong presidential executive soaring above a bicameral legislature. ‘A military man can never adapt himself completely to the business of politics,’ said the diplomat Jacques Dumaine.

After he retreated to Colombey-les Deux-Eglises in Lorraine, there ensued twenty-one governments in the years 1946–55, one managing to last fifteen months, while another only existed for hours. These were usually coalitions, involving the Socialists, Radicals and Progressive Catholics as the nuclear elements.58 Both the Communists, dismissed from government in May 1947, and the movement de Gaulle himself founded in April 1947 (the Rassemblement du Peuple Français, or RPF) played a spoiling role by seeking to overturn the Fourth Republic’s constitution. The Stalinist Communists banked on their (inflated) wartime resistance record – the party of the 70,000 dead – while de Gaulle’s appeal was that ‘he is not like the others’.