Until recently, he had been thought unlikely to accept a post under his old Gaullist rival.
But Mr Chirac is a Gaullist too, and so a defender of French sovereignty and the nation-state.
Rashid Kaci - A French Muslim politician and leader of a faction within the ruling Gaullist UMP party.
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RPR's co-founders, Charles Pasqua, peeled off before the summer's European elections, soon to create a rival Gaullist party.
After their divorce, she settled scores by writing a lengthy autobiography in which the left-wing-novelist-turned-Gaullist-minister is presented somewhat unflatteringly.
Two years earlier, the French had voted for a similar set of promises offered by a Gaullist, Jacques Chirac.
The same demands were made by Jacques Chirac, France's Gaullist president, in Dublin.
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That such views should be expressed by a former Gaullist, at a time when the EU is unpopular, was perhaps a surprise.
But Gaullist grandees and ambitious youngsters alike have begun to speak out.
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Mr Chirac's Gaullist RPR party has run the French capital since 1977.
Look at the Rally for France: its Gaullist leader, Charles Pasqua, many times a minister, failed even to qualify as a presidential candidate.
Mr de Villepin, a romantic neo-Gaullist, biographer of Napoleon and poetic defender of his country's gloire, is also keen to reaffirm French values.
They may still be hoping that a space opens for an alternative Gaullist candidate on the right, before the mid-March deadline for submissions.
Mr Sarkozy, himself from the Gaullist family but keen to improve France's ties with America, is trying to turn this logic on its head.
Mr Sarkozy may have shared hot dogs with the Bush family while holidaying in New Hampshire, went the line, but his underlying instincts remained Gaullist.
And though farmers nowadays make up a small percentage of the population, even in France, they are a crucial part of Mr Chirac's Gaullist party's support base.
To further Gaullist ambitions, he built a network of contacts, spies, informers and friends through which he ran African policy, by-passing the Quai d'Orsay, the foreign ministry.
Mr Sarkozy undertook a prolonged charm campaign to position himself as America's new best friend, rewriting the Gaullist rules and closing a chapter of bitter Franco-America relations.
Jacques Chirac was a dyed-in-the-wool Gaullist, and La Francafrique was in its essence a Gaullist enterprise, but even Chirac paid lip-service to the notion that times had changed.
He will be joined by Michel Barnier, a conservative former minister for Europe who is loyal to President Jacques Chirac and currently a senator from his Gaullist party.
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The French always argued that their full reintegration into NATO, engineered by Mr Sarkozy in 2009 in a stunning break with Gaullist posturing, should be conditional on progress in European defence.
When someone tries to criticise the Gaullist village, they are not really trying to improve it, they are trying to infiltrate or besiege it or romanise - that is, anglicise - it.
When someone tries to criticise the Gaullist village, they are not really trying to improve it, they are trying to infiltrate or besiege it or romanize - that is, anglicize - it.
Although the 1960s might seem to have been an exhilarating time for France, there is little evidence that most ordinary French people shared the Gaullist view of history, destiny and all that.
It is part of the Gaullist world view that France has a special role in the world, a duty to stand for certain ideals, a duty to be great for the sake of greatness.
Well it's doubtful that France, with its strong Gaullist traditions, will ever surrender sufficient control over budget-making to a centralised extra-territorial authority (Brussels or Berlin, depending on where you think the power would in practice reside).
Instead of reviving the popular contact which had enabled him to beat a rival Gaullist, Edouard Balladur, in 1995, Mr Chirac became a prisoner of a Parisian political microcosm which cut him off from the nation and opened the way to the Socialists.
So the Gaullists, temporarily led by the young and ambitious Nicolas Sarkozy, the party's secretary-general, find themselves squeezed between Mr Pasqua's Europhobes, currently attracting 10-12% of the vote, and Mr Bayrou's Euro-federalists with 8-9%, leaving the main Gaullist-Liberal Democratic list with a wretched 17-20%.
Others, such as Charles Pasqua, who, as leader of the right-wing Rally for France, reckons himself truer to the Gaullist tradition than Mr Chirac, believe the quinquennat will upset the whole institutional balance and will not, in any event, rule out further periods of cohabitation when, as now, president and prime minister are from opposing parties.
His belief that Britain can hope to achieve what it wants in the world only if American power is harnessed for benign purposes is a good deal more realistic than the Gaullist yearnings of Jacques Chirac and Dominique de Villepin: without American power and the willingness to use it, there would have been no tolerably good outcomes in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan.
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