Historian Alfred Grosser wrote that the Mirage fighter-jet was “the incarnation of France in the eyes of the outside world,”8 and essayist Eric Deschodt contended that “in distant lands, France was more the country of Marcel Dassault (the maker of the Mirage) than that of Michel Foucault.”9 Both authors correctly assert that the Mirage increased the global visibility of France in the Cold War years, but relatively little has ever been written on how the Fifth Republic used aeronautical products in general and the Mirage in particular to defy U.S. foreign policy.

The Mirage was the product of a deliberate policy initiated by the Fourth Republic and inherited by the Fifth Republic to reassert France’s place among the leading technological and scientific nations of the world through the reconstruction of a competitive aeronautical industry. At the service of Charles de Gaulle, it became both an incarnation and instrument of grandeur and independence of France. One of the rare alternatives to American and Soviet military jets, the Mirage was attractive to countries who, in the image of France, wished to emancipate themselves from the influence of either superpower. It especially became somewhat of a nuisance to U.S. foreign policy and aircraft manufacturers whose designs it occasionally spoiled. In anticipation of the French president’s tour of Latin America in 1964, U.S. Ambassador to Peru John Wesley Jones rightly foresaw that the issue of supersonic fighters “may be the field in which de Gaulle’s visit to several American countries will give us most trouble.”10 In the following years, five South American countries procured over 100 Mirages from France in defiance of Washington’s admonitions and threats of retaliation.11 Within NATO, however, France met with less success when it tried to use Mirage sales to undermine U.S. leadership. European countries, wary of de Gaulle’s own ambitions, preferred security under American wings to an uncertain independence under French aegis.

The paper, relying primarily on French and American archival material, demonstrates how France used aircraft development and sales to redefine its postwar identity as a great power and to challenge the U.S. predominance in world affairs. This story continues to bear much relevance as the European aeronautical industry, in no small measure inspired by French policy and its own successes, remains the sole counterweight to American aerospace.

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8 Alfred Grosser, Les Occidentaux: Les pays d’Europe et les Etats-Unis depuis la guerre (Paris: 1978), 7.
9 Eric Deschodt, La France envolée: L’aviation et la décadence, 1906-1976 (Paris: 1977), 177.
10 Telegram, Ambassador John Wesley Jones to Secretary of State Dean Rusk, 28 Feb. 1964, National Security Files, Latin America, Vol. 1, Reel 1.
11 François Le Roy, “Mirages over the Andes: Peru, France, the United States and Military Jet Procurement in the 1960s,” Pacific Historical Review, May 2002 (71), 269-300.