Politics & Power Quote by Charles de Gaulle

Governing, de Gaulle suggests, is less about constitutions than about appetites. The line lands because it compresses a national identity into a domestic detail: cheese, stubbornly local, proudly specific, impossible to standardize. “Two hundred and forty-six” isn’t a statistic so much as a comic flourish, the kind of precision that signals exasperation while admiring the thing it pretends to condemn. France isn’t merely diverse; it’s defiantly granular.

The subtext is Gaullist to the bone. De Gaulle built his politics around the idea of a coherent France that could stand above factions, parties, and humiliations, especially after the fractures of Vichy, liberation, and the churn of the Fourth Republic. Cheese becomes shorthand for the country’s centrifugal forces: regions with their own loyalties, dialects, and traditions; interest groups that treat compromise as capitulation; a political culture where everyone is convinced their village’s way is the nation’s destiny.

It also flatters the audience while scolding it. Only a nation rich enough in tradition to cultivate hundreds of cheeses can afford this level of particularism. The joke is a critique of French governability, but it’s also an argument for why a certain kind of leadership is needed: not managerial tinkering, but a commanding figure who can speak over the din and stitch the fragments into a single story. De Gaulle frames pluralism as delicious and maddening, a heritage that resists being turned into policy.