Justice and politics rarely coincide, but there may be poetic justice in the fact that the care of De Gaulle's testament, the Fifth Republic, has fallen to Mitterrand, De Gaulle's most dogged rival, and once the Republic's bitterest critic. Some have suggested that with Mitterrand's election in 1981, the Republic was no longer its original self — that in its place stood instead the Fifth and ½ Republic. This may have even greater plausibility today, when the anomaly of a Socialist government ruling with a right-wing constitution has been replaced by an even weirder arrangement called “co-habitation,” where France is ruled by a two-headed monster — a chief executive divided between left and right.
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John Brown Mason (1986) studied this question.