France ceased to be not just a Great Power but even a power

In six traumatic weeks, the cardinal reference points of European inter-state relations changed forever. France ceased to be not just a Great Power but even a power, and despite De Gaulle’s best efforts in later decades it has never been one since. For the shattering defeat of June 1940 was followed by four years of humiliating, demeaning, subservient occupation, with Marshall Petain’s Vichy regime playing Uriah Heep to Germany’s Bill Sikes.

T. Judt, Postwar (2005), 113

De Gaulle represented 'mastery over oneself, which meant mastery over history'

 To Mitterrand, de Gaulle represented 'mastery over oneself, which meant mastery over history'. After the General's death, he compared him to Henri IV, the great sixteenth-century King who ended the Wars of Religion, and Cardinal Richelieu, Chief Minister to his son Louis XIII, who laid the foundations of modern Western statecraft.

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The French stateman Mitterrand most admired was the seventeenth-century Cardinal Mazarin, preceptor and First Minister of Louis XIV, after whom he named his daughter, Mazarine.

P. Short, Mitterrand: a study in ambiguity (2013), 10 and 12