Parties and Democracy in France

Parties Under Presidentialism

David Bell

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138732315
• eBook ISBN: 9781351741101
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This title was first published in 2000: The Presidency has been the principal political focus of the French Fifth Republic and the new component of French democracy. This book looks at how the Presidency has shaped political parties and party systems, as well as how they have interacted with the new institution. The Presidency has acted as a unifying force, bringing together coalitions of parties to provide a political basis for presidential power, but has also been a divisive factor. Parties draw on longstanding traditions of French political life and the Presidency can provoke destructive rivalry as well as constructive coalition-building. Presented here is a discussion of the contemporary French party system - its dynamics, successes and failures. Written in an accessible style, it is intended for students of French studies and political parties, as well as comparative politics.

1 The Impact of the Presidency

De Gaulle's contempt for the political parties and the wranglings of the party leaderships is well known and the Fifth Republic was intended to introduce politics of a new sort - a complete break with the intermediaries and a direct line to the voters. In his Bayeux speech of 1946 which set out de Gaulle's constitutional ambitions, the General depicted a head of state who is 'placed above parties' and from whom executive power would emanate (M. Harrison 1969: 28). Yet in more than one way the regime intended to displace political parties from centre stage has been dependent both on them and on a party system responding to the focus on presidential power. As a political system, the Fifth Republic can only be understood through the currents represented, political party competition and the interplay of parties and of coalitions with the presidency.

In other words, the Fifth Republic is, in its way, a 'régime des partis'. While it is true that the instability and the revolving door of government change which were to the discredit of the Fourth Republic were ended by de Gaulle (with a stability which contrasted with the previous Republic), the history of the political power of the presidency is a history of the political parties. Not the least of the ironies of the Fifth Republic is that the regime intended to sideline parties has given them the central place: far from being eliminated the parties became key to the Fifth Republic and crucial to its development. For example, the success of the Gaullist party itself has been the backbone of the politics of the conservative right since the regime's foundation and de Gaulle himself was responsible for two of the most successful political parties in French history.

Fifth Republic politics was a reaction against the instability and shifting Fourth Republic. Sartori has described the fragmented politics of the French Fourth Republic as 'polarised pluralism', meaning a system in which the fragmented centre parties were attacked from opposite ends of the spectrum simultaneously by anti-system parties (Sartori 1966:137-76).

Over its short life, the Fourth Republic was progressively weakened by highly ideological and 'irresponsible' oppositions (refusing to identify with the system). It was an enfeebled Republic, ultimately unable to withstand a series of hammer blows, the last of which, the Algerian war, brought it down. Under the Fourth Republic, the 'malaimée', multi-party politics got a bad name: it was written off by its detractors as a 'partyocracy'.

Party System Evolution

Fourth Republic politics were conditioned by France's position at the Liberation, the Cold War and the challenge from the Gaullist movement. After the Second World War, France had started in consensual mode under de Gaulle, the Fourth Republic had continued this with the so-called 'Tripartite' governments of the Parti communiste français (PCF), the socialist Section française de l'internationale ouvriére (SFIO) and the Christian democratic Mouvement républicain populaire (MRP) (Letamendia et al. 1987; Mayeur 1986; Irving 1973). At the Liberation there had been both Christian democratic and Socialist-led governments and the Communist Secretary General Maurice Thorez had been a deputy prime minister. This harmony came to an end in 1947 when both de Gaulle and the Communists moved into opposition to the regime. At the start of the Cold War with the Communist-orchestrated strike waves which started in Marseilles in November 1947, the Communist Party placed itself in a ghetto of its own making attacking the 'bourgeois' regime, Marshall Aid and French participation in the Atlantic Alliance. From 1947 onwards, the massive, efficiently organized and well-funded Communist Party which had polled 28 per cent in October 1946, was a determined opponent of the 'Republican parties' of the centre. Its 'ghettoization' had been sought by its leaders who had been pilloried for its 'parliamentary cretinism' (insufficient vigour in its attacks on the 'imperialists') at the founding meeting of the Kominform in Szklarska-Poreba in September 1947. Its commitment to the Soviet Union meant that it was an unacceptable partner to mainstream parties even after its hostility to the 'bourgeois Republic' had abated (Mortimer 1984: 361ff.; Mclnnes 1979).

Supported as it was by weak arid divided coalitions, the Fourth Republic was not expected to be able to face down the challenge from the Communists which, in the winter of 1947-48, came close to an insurrectional general strike (Graham 1993, 1994; Chariot 1983; Purtschet 1965). In April 1947, the newly established Gaullist movement of the Rassemblement du peuple français (RPF) was the stage for a conservative 'catch-all' strategy and the Gaullists had immediate and astonishing success in the local elections of 1947. De Gaulle's success deprived the centre of support at a crucial juncture but he was unable to take power (general elections were not due). Instead, de Gaulle undermined the centre and conservative parties and deprived conservatives of an important resource and of authority just when it was most needed: at a time when the Fourth Republic's legitimacy (never solid) was itself in question.

Gaullism's inability to progress introduced a paradox familiar from the nineteenth century: a disaffected aristocracy. Social classes which elsewhere in Europe were the prop to the regime in France found themselves in opposition. Mainstream politicians from the centre and left regarded the threat from the Gaullists almost as fearfully as the onslaught from the Communists. However, de Gaulle's movement stayed within the bounds of legality and refused to adventure into the realms of the coup de force and, unable to capitalize on its municipal success, its high tide of support ebbed. In 1951, the RPF polled well (21.6 per cent of the vote) and got 120 deputies elected but the threat had been beaten off. In effect, the supporters of the Fourth Republic had managed to present a front to the voters in 1951 and had been successful in keeping a majority. De Gaulle, suspicious of the loyalty of the elected deputies and despairing of making headway against the Fourth Republic, dissolved the RPF party in 1953 (Pierce 1954; Neumann 1953).

In 1953, a new threat to the centre parties emerged in the form of the seemingly marginal organization of the Union de défence des commerçants et des artisans (the UDCA or 'Poujadist movement') (Hoffmann 1956; Borne 1977; Lipsedge 1956). Led by Pierre Poujade, a shopkeeper from rural St. Cere, and starting as a tax protest, the UDCA caught a rising tide of discontent stoked by threatening social change, disillusion after the French Army's capitulation in the Indo-China war and the beginnings of the Algerian crisis. Poujade's opposition to Prime Minister Mendés was ostensibly on behalf of 'le menu peuple', but its main thrust took the form of an anti-Semitic and anti-Parliamentary rhetoric which left no doubt as to where, on the political spectrum, the movement stood. Poujadism, like Gaullism, peaked at the wrong point of the electoral cycle but it did poll 2,600,000 votes in the election of January 1956 and 53 deputies were elected and the Poujadist movement entered the Assembly. Poujadism helped to discredit the Fourth Republic, though the UDCA leadership proved startlingly inadequate and the movement soon dissipated (Williams 1970: Ch. 6).

With the parties from both political extremes represented in the Assembly, reaching a plateau of around two hundred (approximately one-third) deputies, and the centre steadily weakening, the maintenance of government support became increasingly difficult. Although they were polar opposites, the extreme parties had a common interest in undermining and (if possible) overthrowing the Fourth Republic and on occasion they found policies which they could combine to reject. Thus the proposal for a European Defence Community was defeated by the combined votes of the Gaullists and Communists, leading to the fall of the Mendés France government (the most effective in the Fourth Republic) (Aron and Lerner 1957). As the 1950s progressed and as the crisis in Algeria deteriorated, it became increasingly difficult to find majorities for positive measures but easier to find combinations to prevent action: this was 'immobilisme'. In other words, the difficulties of the Fourth Republic lay in the conjuncture and in the comportment of rival political forces, made worse by the radical phase of the Cold War and de Gaulle's own hostility (Irving 1975: 33,140).

Those parties which formed the main pro-Fourth Republic bulwark were the SFIO and the MRP along with the Radicals and minorities such as the Union démocratique et socialists de la Résistance (UDSR). Despite its loss of votes from 23.4 per cent to 15.2 per cent over the period the SFIO contingent still numbered 99 deputies in 1956 (Pierce 1957; Duverger et al. 1957). It provided much of the ministerial personnel of the Fourth Republic (apart from the conservative interlude from 1950-53) and six of its 25 Prime Ministers. Like other parties, the SFIO was subject to splits over the main questions and ultimately the Algerian crisis provoked a schism when the leadership stepped up the war. It was also continuously vulnerable to Communist pressure and was pulled away from its 'natural' reformist vocation by the fear (as its leader Leon Blum put it) 'qu'en dixa-t-on' (Communiste).

MRP, which participated in every Fourth Republic government but two, was the system's other main prop. At the Liberation it was expected that MRP would dominate the conservative right in the way that Gaullism later came to do. MRP was not a confessional party and was business friendly, although it preferred a Keynesian intervention to laissez-faire and had a strong social policy on the family, the welfare state and the social security system. It did not, of course, take its politics from the Church, but it had a moral side to its policies which led it to promote marriage laws and religious education, and to close the maisons tolerées. MRP also strongly supported European institutions and the first steps in European integration: the Christian Democrats provided political heavyweights such as Robert Schuman and the community of Christian Democrats reached across Europe to, for example, De Gasperi and Adenauer (Einaudi and Goguel 1952; Fogarty 1957). None of the Fourth Republic's social and economic policy was a subject of profound disagreement between the MRP and the SFIO, both of which shared the same post-war consensus, but the religious issue, though less acute in the Fourth Republic than in the Third, did divide them. MRP itself was split by decolonization and by the question of what attitude to take to de Gaulle. Although the biggest party to emerge from the elections of June 1946, by 1956 MRP had fallen to 11.1 per cent and 84 seats.

By 1956, the profoundly rural and small town-based Radical Party also polled respectably. It was a party which had seemed so wedded to the Third Republic and the great clashes of Church and state that it could hardly survive it (de Tarr 1993; Allen 1960; Laponce 1958; Schlesinger 1958). But the Radical Party, which never had much ideological or organizational coherence, had been torn by the antebellum issues of appeasement and social reform and had switched bewilderingly between left and right. Much the same left/right confusion for Radicals existed after the Liberation, and the attempt by Mendés France in the mid-1950s to turn the old party into a dynamic and modernizing institution almost broke it despite the promise of success if the experiment went ahead. Mendés France had hoped to capitalize on his popularity as prime minister in 1954 by turning the Radicals into a mass membership and reforming party to rival the SFIO but foundered on the resistance of the conservative notables and the lack of organization. But by a deft readjustment of alliances for electoral purposes and the consolidation of agreements with other small forces (and the UDSR), it managed to put about seventy deputies into the Assembly in the first legislature of the Fourth Republic (their affiliation was not always clear). Many of the principal figures in the Fourth Republic were Radical Party deputies and they were the ever-present ballast in all governing coalitions and all Fourth Republic Cabinets.

Usually allied with the Radicals for electoral purposes was the UDSR. This was another loose collection of personalities (mainly Resistance figures) who rejected the embrace of the main political parties; the UDSR was so undemanding that quite a few politicians were in its ranks at one time or another (Malraux, Soustelle and other Gaullists, for example, as well as progressive Catholics). Under its conservative leader, the former Finance Minister René Pleven, it leaned to the right and to the Gaullists. But even while the UDSR in the Assembly was conservative, its organization came increasingly under the control of Mitterrand and his supporters and it had close links with the left-leaning deputies from colonial Africa. UDSR was, however, like the Radicals in its ability to manoeuvre its centre position and it flourished by exploiting its brokering skills (Duhamel 1995).

On the centre right, the main conservative force was the Centre national des indépendants et paysans (CHIP) which was yet another decentralized association of rural and business notables (Boivin-Champeaux 1949; Anderson 1973; Williams 1964; Ch. 11; Smith 1965). CNIP had been organized by the conservative Senator Roger Duchet as an umbrella group to maximize the conservative vote (it absorbed the Parti républicain de la liberié). Duchet probably saved the conservative right from extinction and he was vindicated when the CNIP Assembly leader Antoine Pinay became prime minister in 1952 (Campbell 1953; Guillaume 1984). Pinay's success also helped wed the CNIP to the Fourth Republic because he showed that, contrary to what many in the CNIP imagined, it was possible for a conservative (or 'moderate' as they styled themselves) government to come to power. Pinay's government was one of the few governments of the Fourth Republic which was popular and was, with the radical Mendes France government, one of the two which left a positive impression. Pinay was credited with the mastery of inflation and the re-establishment of sound public finances; as a result he was projected into the front rank of conservative politicians where he remained until well into the Fifth Republic.

However, the CNIP's essentially local basis meant that the cohesion of the group, although it improved over the 1950s, was never good. Historic and personality differences, exacerbated by the problems of decolonization, produced splits along several dimensions into factions marked out by mutual antipathy - the party was bitterly divided by the Algerian crisis. CNIP leaders had no hold on deputies who would be returned by the local voters against the leadership and it was also challenged by Gaullism and then by Poujadism. It also had a troubled relationship with the rural 'peasant' component of the formation and this led to grumbling discontent and a breakaway by a former Minister of Agriculture Paul Antier. Yet the Assembly membership grew over the lifetime of the Fourth Republic from seventy or so to about a hundred after 1953 (when they were joined by some deputies from the Gaullist Action républicaine et sociale).

These disparate political parties were forced to stand together but found their task becoming impossible. All they had in common was that they supported the Fourth Republic, but they ranged from the far left to the far right. Governments had to find their backing from this very small number of available votes (around 250 or so for most of the 1950s), but wide spectrum of views. Issues as diverse as decolonization, economic reform, the revival of Germany and rearmament, and Europe could intrude to split the governments' coalitions at any time and almost without warning. In this situation, the SFIO was pulled to the right to support the centrist governments and to keep the Fourth Republic intact, while their main ally the Christian Democratic MRP had its electoral base undermined by conservatives and by Gaullists.

A situation also developed in which the governing coalitions became overly reliant on one or two parties, giving the impression of a carousel: whatever happened at the polls, the same politicians returned to the same ministries. Another paradox of the Fourth Republic was the rapid turnover in governments, coupled with stability in key posts (such as Foreign Affairs and the Interior). In these circumstances, die alternative coalitions (which excluded the extremes) would focus on the Radicals and the UDSR and would form only within the centre-left or centre-right ideological space - the wings were not acceptable partners. By the same token the anti-system parties - the excluded - could not be brought into government and they refused to become tainted by implication in the work of the Republic. In the Fourth Republic, the anti-system parties had little incentive to behave as 'loyal oppositions' and were free to promote illusory solutions - or to make unscrupulous attacks - because there was no possibility of their being put to the test and asked to implement solutions. Even worse could occur: when the Gaullist RPF was dissolved and its deputies did join governments, they did so to bring down the system or to block policies. As Sartori noted, the Fourth Republic's poles were 'poles apart' and the distance between them covered the maximum spread of opinion (Sartori 1976: 135ff). This was the position when de Gaulle was invited to return to power in 1958.

1958: The New System

De Gaulle's return to power changed the party system. He made a new constitution and a new Republic a condition of his return, but the institutional structure was not the major innovation. What changed was that the Gaullists, who had polled 40 per cent in 1947, were now inside supporting the structure and not outside contesting its legitimacy. This reconciled the conservative right (though not the extreme right) to the Republic and with the entry of the Gaullists into the regime, the French political system itself ceased to be an object of contention. De Gaulle's mastery of the politics also meant that the Algerian war was not available for exploitation by mass opposition. On the extreme left, there was also a development: Khrushchev's 'peaceful coexistence' had meant that the French Communist Party was looking for allies in local and parliamentary elections to get it out of its self-imposed isolation (Fejtö 1967; Rice 1973). By the Fifth Republic, adopting a policy of detente, and after a judicious switch on some issues, the Communists had become potential players in the political game and had muted their anti-system rhetoric. Hence, with the diminution of the intensity of the Cold War in Europe and the cooling of ideological passions, the Communist Party was not the pariah it once was - it was still, however, a problem for its potential allies.

French society itself had changed under the Fourth Republic. Industry was modernizing fast and the stubborn, conservative (and inefficient) peasantry was moving off the land into the developing occupations (Marceau 1978; Carré 1972). Hence the old rural and small-town France was in the process of change as the peasantry created by the Great Revolution began to disappear. It was beginning to look as if the problems which had wracked the Fourth Republic, from German political and economic revival, to economic growth and decolonization were in the process of solution. De Gaulle's Republic entered existence on the back of the most impressive economic growth in French history and did not have to face the same challenges from the outside world. But there remained the Algerian crisis (Home 1977; Droz and Lever 1982).

Algeria was administered as an integral part of the French Republic, but in effect the settler population led a privileged existence in a quasiapartheid regime which was kept in place by French military power. A few commentators pointed out that the outcome was bound to be independence for a country which would then be run by its indigenous majority but the settler problem made the Algerian insurgency particularly intractable. Politicians of the Fourth Republic, unable themselves to see the solution, had progressively devolved powers to the Army to the extent that, by 1958, the authorities in Paris had lost control. De Gaulle's takeover was, for the Fourth Republic politicians, the last possibility of retaining civilian control over the Republic in an insurrectional situation, one in which the legitimacy of the Republic had all but evaporated. In 1958, de Gaulle was formally returned to power, but had to restore the authority of government and return the troops to barracks in Algeria.

Yet it was de Gaulle's ability to reshape the party system and the creation of a new political party which crystallized the situation. Although the Gaullist party had been formally stood down in 1953, the network and its expertise had been carefully maintained (Guichard 1980). De Gaulle had an experienced team ready (led by Pompidou, who had been on the RPF Executive) and was therefore able to devolve party organization to other people. In 1947, this non-political stance had not been possible, but in 1958 it enabled de Gaulle to present the Presidency as above party intrigues. De Gaulle, who took elaborate care to appear aloof from party managers, was in fact dependent on their work and could interfere in the day-to-day running of the UNR, looking at details of its nominations, organization and so on, in a way which would have done credit to any local party boss (Foccart 1998). Of course, the UNR Gaullist party was the principal prop of the government and of the President. No matter: it was the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations and Acronyms
• Introduction: Fourth Republic to Fifth Republic: 'aller-retour'?
• 1 The Impact of the Presidency
• 2 Party System Fragmentation
• 3 Rassemblement pour la République: A Presidential Party
• 4 Union pour la Démocratie Française: The Endurance of the Temporary
• 5 Centre Politics: Force Démocrate - French Christian Democracy,'Libéralisme' - Démocratie Libérate, and the Radical Party
• 6 Front National: Renovation of the Extreme Right
• 7 French Communism: The Patriotic Reflex
• 8 French Socialism: Between Gradualism and the Great Leap Forward
• Conclusion: Parties and Presidential Democracy
• Appendix I The 1997 French General Elections
• Appendix II The RPR
• Appendix III A Note on UDF (Union pour la Démocratie Française) Structure in 1996
• References
• Further Reading
• Index