Contemporary France

Essays and Texts on Politics, Economics and Society

Jill Forbes, Nicholas Hewlett, Francois Nectoux, Nicholas LAST KNOWN ADDRESS Hewlett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138835825
• eBook ISBN: 9781317877905
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In one stimulating source this successful text provides a rigorous analysis of the political, economic and social developments in post-war France. The analysis is supported by specially selected French language texts and exercises. This text is suitable for undergraduate students of French (especially within a languages, social science, or business course) and for courses in French Studies and European Studies.

Part I
Politics in France

Nick Hewlett

Introduction

France was for a long time a country whose politics were dominated by conflict, where radicalism was prevalent and where political parties and pressure groups were often influenced by controversial ideologies. Strongly identified with a tradition of revolution and counter-revolution, class antagonism was expressed particularly clearly; Friedrich Engels commented in 1885 that Trance is the land where, more than anywhere else, the historical class straggles are each time fought out to a decision, and where, consequently, the changing political forms in which they move… have been stamped in the sharpest outlines’.¹ Between the revolution of 1789 and the end of the Second World War, all political regimes without exception had been brought to an end by revolution, coup d’état or war. In the period between the Second World War and the 1980s, France still retained its radicalism, with a strong Communist Party, frequent revolts by forces of both right and left, governmental crises and de Gaulle’s authoritarian populism which firmly left its stamp on the constitution of the Fifth Republic. In contrast to many other advanced capitalist countries during the post-1945 period, France did not see the emergence of more consensual politics where dominant parties of the left and right were broadly in agreement. The last twenty years of the twentieth century, however, stand out in striking contrast to the past. The Communist Party has been seriously weakened, as has the communist-oriented - trade union confederation, the Confédération générale du travail; Gaullism has a severe identity problem; the constitution of the Fifth Republic is now accepted by almost all forces of both left and right as the best way for France to order its formal politics; and the governmental scene has been largely dominated by a centre-oriented Socialist Party which has sought to be pragmatic and catch-all rather than to effect far-reaching transformations; centre-right governments have taken a similar approach; ‘cohabitation’ between a government of one complexion and a president of the Republic of another is now taken for granted; industrial relations in general are calmer than at any time since 1945, with trade unions suffering a serious drop in membership and a decline in rank-and-file militancy, and employers are more conciliatory than has long been their practice.

In this part we first analyse conflictual aspects of the ‘old’ political situation between the Second World War and 1981 and then go on to examine the left, the right, trade unions and foreign and defence policy, with special reference to the ‘normalization’ period of the 1980s and the 1990s. Some analysts have perhaps been over-hasty, however, in concluding that conflict, revolt and indeed class struggle are entirely a thing of the past in France. There remain some important manifestations of the old style of politics, in particular the persistence of the extreme right and a fragmentation of electoral allegiances. There is a solid, if diminished, core of support for the Communist Party, not to mention the emergence of significant support for ecology parties, but communists and ecologists have become fully part of the more moderate approach to government. In the concluding section of this part we briefly examine these exceptions to and problems with the general rale of moderation.

1945-81: instability, conflict and revolt

In order to understand the nature of French politics after the Second World War, it is necessary to look briefly at the French experience of the war itself. French defences against German military attack failed in 1940 and the occupying army entered the capital on 14 June, as millions of Parisians fled their homes and their city as best they could. Germany occupied the north and the west of France and a retired French military man, Marshal Philippe Pétain, became head of the remaining État français in the south and east, with a government based in Vichy. Pétain soon established that Vichy would pursue a policy of full cooperation with the Nazi regime and many ordinary French people supported him, particularly at first, because his apparent policy of damage limitation appeared to many to be the best way of surviving, both in a literal, personal sense and as a people.

Political reality is never that straightforward, however. Pétain and Vichy promoted an ideology of hard-right patriotism which abolished parliament in favour of a military Veterans League, dissolved trade unions and replaced the French Revolution’s watchwords Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité with the slogan Travail, Famille, Pairie, reminiscent of the philosophy of fully-fledged fascism elsewhere in Europe. Indeed, the National Revolution, as Vichy described its programme, included widespread persecution of anti-clericals, Protestants, Freemasons and above all Jews, many thousands of whom were sent to their deaths in concentration camps in Germany. In November 1942 Germany extended the Occupied Zone to the whole of France and Vichy continued to cooperate to the full; huge numbers of French workers were forcibly sent to work in Germany for the Nazi war machine and France became an important supplier of agricultural produce and industrial products, including arms, to the Reich.

An ever-increasing number of French people resisted the occupation in a myriad of different ways, ranging from passive non-cooperation with the occupying force, to passing on information concerning the struggle against German activities, to acts of sabotage and assassination of German soldiers. Charles de Gaulle, an army general who had played an important part in the First World War, broadcast an appeal from London on 18 June 1940 calling for widespread participation in the Resistance and he became one of the principal leaders of the movement. After the German attack on the Soviet Union in Summer 1941 and thus the entry of the Soviet Union into the war, the French Communist Party pined the Resistance in strength and as the years passed the movement gained more and more support.

When Liberation finally came to Paris in August 1944 de Gaulle became head of state, supported by diverse elements of the Resistance, but the massive rifts and profound bitterness which had developed between resisters and collaborators meant widespread and often summary punishment - in many cases by death - of alleged collaborators.² The bitterness and divisions live on in some communities to this day and certainly had a substantial effect on the nature of post-war politics, as we shall see.

In many advanced capitalist countries’ after the Second World War, there emerged agreements between capital, labour and the state which were, in an immediate sense at least, mutually beneficial. In return for higher wages, welfare protection, basic trade union rights and virtually full employment, labour leaders agreed to limit strike and other protest action and in general accepted that it was the right of employers to make the pursuit of profit their driving principle. This helped governments, in the meantime, to implement programmes of economic reconstruction, often following the Keynesian policy of expanding the public sector, creating jobs and offering higher wages in order to stimulate demand. This set the tone for a more consensus-oriented pattern of politics and industrial relations from then on. In France, however, attempts to establish an enduring pattern of relations along these lines were unsuccessful. From September 1944 to May 1947 there was broad-based government with the participation, among others, of Socialists, Communists and the Christian Democratic Mouvement républicain populaire (MRP), during which time communist and other trade union leaders instructed their membership to be moderate in their demands and the pursuit of these demands. But the Communists were excluded from government in May 1947 and abandoned their previous policy of not rocking the boat. The Communist Party was the most popular political party at the time and attracted well over 25 per cent of votes in national elections, in part because of its central role in wartime resistance against Nazi occupation.³

The communist-oriented Confédération générale du travail (CGT), meanwhile, was the most influential trade union confederation and from 1947 onwards held solidly class-against-class positions, which often meant a refusal to enter into negotiations with management unless terms seemed particularly favourable to the union side. The cold war climate of the late 1940s and 1950s, when the United States and its allies pursued a propaganda offensive against communist eastern Europe, meant that any party or trade union with any sympathy for the Soviet Union was treated as a pariah by other political forces, including the Socialists. French employers, meanwhile, were particularly intransigent and often refused even to embark upon negotiations with trade unionists, preferring an old-fashioned paternalistic approach to employee relations. Added to this was the more general tradition of revolt in France and a profound interclass mistrust born partly out of the war years when the employers, or patronat, were deeply involved in Pétain’s National Revolution. There was little scope for consensus.

The Fourth Republic, from 1946 to 1958, was a period of tremendous political instability, and ultimately failure, whereas the programme of economic modernization during this period was very successful. The nature of the constitution of the Fourth Republic was in part a reaction against the highly authoritarian Vichy regime and thus gave substantial powers to members of parliament (députés) over both the ministerial composition and the actual programme of government. Legislative elections were carried out using a system of proportional representation, which gave smaller parties the chance to be represented in parliament as well as larger ones, but this tended to lead to the existence of more and more parties and no single party was large enough consistently to form the backbone of governments during this period. Cabinets came and went with alarming frequency; between 1946 and 1958 there were twenty-five different governments and fifteen prime ministers, of whom only two were in power for more than a year (Guy Mollet and Henri Queuille). For much of this period it was a case of trying to find ways of governing without the more militant parties of both left and right who between them often represented a majority in parliament: the Parti communiste français (PCF), the Gaullist Rassemblement du peuple français (RPF), which was anti-parliamentary and often highly obstructive, and (for a short period) extreme-right Poujadists.

A major and highly divisive problem during the whole of this period was colonial war. After its humiliating defeat in Indo-China in 1954 France withdrew its army, only to become involved in attempting to quell the Algerian independence movement later the same year. At first there was a considerable degree of consensus over the Algerian question, with virtually all major parties in favour of defending French Algeria against independence; the Communist Party alone campaigned systematically against the war and it even voted in favour of special powers to rule Algeria in 1956, in an unsuccessful attempt to win over the Socialists to a position of ongoing joint work. As time went by and as French casualties increased (including young men doing military service and reservists), the conflict had more and more impact on domestic politics. By the end of 1957 it was patently clear that policy on the Algerian question was bankrupt and, when Prime Minister Bourgès-Maunoury resigned at the end of September that year after losing, a vote over the future of Algeria, no one was able to form a government for thirty-five days. Meanwhile the army, already humiliated and politicized by its defeat at the hands of the Germans in 1940, further defeat in Indo-China, and a fruitless attempt at asserting France’s might during the Franco-British Suez adventure in 1956, was acting more and more as an autonomous force in relation to Algeria. Frustrated with fighting for weak governments whose commitment to French Algeria they thought could not be trusted, the army in Algeria appeared t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• List of texts
• List of abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Preface to the first edition
• Preface to the second edition
• Introduction
• Part I Politics in France
• Part II The French economy
• Part III Contemporary French society
• Chronology
• Index