Plagued by the bitter residue of colonial policies that France had established during the 18th and 19th centuries, the Fourth Republic witnessed the rise and fall of 22 governments and 17 premiers. Many French soldiers died on foreign soil as once-profitable colonies in North Africa and Indochina rebelled. Putting down a revolt in Madagascar cost 80,000 French lives. After a bitter defeat in 1954, France ended the war in Indochina and freed its former colony. It also granted internal self-rule to Tunisia and (under slightly different circumstances) Morocco.
Algeria was to remain a greater problem. The advent of the 1958 Algerian revolution signaled the end of the Fourth Republic. De Gaulle was called back from retirement to initiate a new constitution, the Fifth Republic, with stronger executive controls. To nearly everyone's dissatisfaction, de Gaulle ended the Algerian war in 1962 by granting the country independence. Screams of protest resounded, but the sun had set on most of France's far-flung empire. Internal disruption followed as numbers of pieds-noirs (French-born residents of Algeria recently stripped of their land) flooded back into metropolitan France, often to makeshift refugee camps in Provence and Languedoc.
In 1968, social unrest and a violent coalition hastily formed between the nation's students and blue-collar workers led to the collapse of the government. De Gaulle resigned when his attempts to placate some of the marchers were defeated. The reins of power passed to his second-in-command, Georges Pompidou, and his successor, Valérie Giscard d'Estaing, both of whom continued de Gaulle's policies emphasizing economic development and protection of France as a cultural resource to the world.
