The Hexagonal Politics of Gaullist Infrastructure

In 1967, during that spring's legislative election campaign, and looking to defend its majority in the French Assemblée nationale, the Gaullist UNR party (Union pour la nouvelle République) deployed a hexagonal logo on its posters.The sche matic white hexagon denoting metropolitan France was delineated by its three land borders in red and its three maritime borders in blue.Floating off shore was a white dot representing Corsica but there was no trace of France's remaining over seas territories.Superimposed in blue on the hexagon was the phrase 'V e Répu blique', with the roman numeral dominant as if to assert the centrality of Charles de Gaulle's constitutional settlement of 1958 in giving renewed structure and shape to the nation, not just figuratively but also literally speaking.Above the logo, framing a finger pointed squarely at the viewer, came the asser tion in block capitals that 'La majorité, c'est vous'.Next to it ran the UNR's campaign message: 'Vous voulez le progrès, l'indépendance, la paix.Vous choisirez la stabilité, l'efficacité'. 1 With the logo focusing eyes, minds, and attention on the idea of the metropolitan territory as a neatly defined and selfcontained space, the implications were clear.All of those things were predicated on France's newly minted hexagonality, which could be secured and sustained only by the efficient exercise of Gaullist power.It was not simply, as the historian Nathaniel Smith observed at the time, that the hexagonal logo 'symbolized the national strength, prosperity and unity promised by the UNR'. 2 Rather, French hexagonality was emerging as both the means of Gaullism and its end.That Gaullism had gravitated towards the hexagon as a fitting motif for its political project was arguably no coincidence.Paul Virilio would suggest a few years later, drawing out the fundamental relationship between geometry and the state, that 'la géométrie est la base nécessaire à une expansion calculée du pouvoir