Contemporary France

An Introduction to French Politics and Society

David Howarth, Georgios Varouxakis, David Howarth, Georgios Varouxakis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781134659197
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

At least since the French Revolution, France has the peculair distinction of simultaneously fascinating, charming and exasperating its neighbours and foreign observers. Contemporary France provides an essential introduction for students of French politics and society, exploring contemporary developments while placing them in a deeper historical, intellectual, cultural and social context that makes for insightful analysis. Thus, chapters on France's economic policy and welfare state, its foreign and European policies and its political movements and recent institutional developments are informed by an analysis of the country's unique political and institutional traditions, distinct forms of nationalism and citizenship, dynamic intellectual life and recent social trends. Summaries of key political, economic and social movements and events are displayed as exhibits.

1

CONTINUITY AND CHANGE: THE EVER-LASTING PAST

When I consider this nation in itself, I find it more extraordinary than any of the events in its history. Has there ever been any nation on earth which was so full of contrasts, and so extreme in all of its acts, more dominated by emotions, and less by principles; always doing better or worse than we expect, sometimes below the common level of humanity, sometimes much above it; a people so unalterable in its basic instincts that we can still recognize it in portraits drawn of it two or three thousand years ago, and at the same time so changeable in its daily thoughts and tastes that it ends up offering an unexpected spectacle to itself, and often remains as surprised as a foreigner at the sight of what it has just done; the most stay-at-home nation of all and the one most in love with routine, when left to itself; and, when torn despite itself from its hearth and its habits, ready to go to the ends of the earth and risk all; insubordinate by temperament, and always readier to accept the arbitrary and even violent empire of a prince than the free and orderly government of its leading citizens; today the declared enemy of all obedience, tomorrow attached to servitude with a kind of passion that the nations best-endowed for servitude cannot match; led on a string so long as no one resists, ungovernable as soon as the example of resistance appears somewhere; thus always tricking its masters, who fear it too much or too little, never so free that one must despair of enslaving it, or so servile that it may not once again break the yoke; capable of everything, but excelling only at war; a lover of chance, of strength, of success, of fame, and reputation, more than of true glory; more capable of heroism than of virtue, of genius than of common sense, ready to conceive vast plans rather than to complete great tasks; the most brilliant and most dangerous nation of Europe, and the best suited for becoming by turns an object of admiration, of hatred, of pity, and of terror, but never of indifference?

France alone could give birth to a revolution so sudden, so radical, so impetuous in its course, and yet so full of backtracking, of contradictory facts and contrary examples. Without the reasons which I have given, the French would never have made the Revolution; but it must be recognized that all these reasons together would not succeed in explaining such a revolution anywhere else but in France. (Alexis de Tocqueville 1998:246–7)

THE FRENCH AND THEIR PAST

It is difficult to overestimate the importance of the past and of perceptions and interpretations of that past (in other words, memory) for contemporary French society, politics and culture. A grasp of collective understandings of the past is important for getting to know any contemporary society, of course. But France is a case apart. One can adduce several reasons for this, but the main reason for the peculiar significance of the past and interpretations of the past in French society is related to the French Revolution. That series of events and processes was so dramatic, so abrupt, and so influential that it imposed its shadow on French society for at least the following two centuries. A senior Chinese politician was asked once, in the second part of the twentieth century, whether he thought the French Revolution had been a good thing for human history or not. He replied that it was too early to know. In the same way, it may be too early to know whether the French Revolution’s legacy of acrimonious and often violent confrontations in subsequent French history (the guerres Francofrançaises) is over, as most analysts in France tend to think since the 1980s. But, independently of that, its legacy is deeply imprinted in French culture, society and political culture. The very terms ‘right’ and ‘left’, used to describe political forces or camps, come from the French Revolution (due to the seating arrangements in the first assemblies of the revolutionary years); so do words like ‘conservative’, ‘progressive’, ‘reactionary’, to name but a few. To cut a long story short, a disproportionately great part of French political debate during the two centuries that followed the outbreak of the French Revolution has been dedicated either to rehearsing the same battles, arguments, passions, or to interpreting them, trying to make sense of the revolutionary experience, and trying to make France a ‘normal’ country again, a country reconciled with itself, not divided by the profound cleavages and wounds left by the extraordinary experience of the French Revolution. Every political or cultural debate in France during the last two centuries has been conducted in terms containing direct references or bearing the imprints of the revolutionary experience. Thus, the first thing to remember about French politics and political culture is that this is a profoundly historicist political culture, revolving around past events and debates and interpretations thereof, much more than that of any other major western country. To put it simply, there is no way one will understand what the French are talking about today when they debate something if one does not have at least an elementary conversance with French history. Historical references constitute the very vocabulary of French contemporary debates.

Thus, in the first place, when French public figures want to make a point, they more often than not find it expedient to make it by invoking some historical example, event, parallel, or some personality from the past. A striking instance can be provided by the debate that took place among French intellectuals and politicians over the issue of the ‘Islamic headscarf’ (affaire du foulard islamique) between November and December 1989 (see also Chapter 5). Quite characteristically, both manifestos on the issue signed by intellectuals with diametrically opposed views on the appropriate course of action in this case have recourse to powerful evocative metaphors from the past in order to make a point. Thus, the first manifesto of intellectuals (including Élisabeth Badinter, Régis Debray, Alain Finkielkraut), which came to condemn the education minister’s (Lionel Jospin’s) statement that, if the students insisted, they should be allowed to wear headscarfs in the classroom, denounced what it called le Munich de l’école républicaine (Le Nouvel Observateur, 2 November 1989) (making allusion to the Munich agreement of 1938 through which, by making concessions in an attempt to appease Hitler, the western democratic powers turned out to have encouraged him to become bolder). A week later, those who disagreed with this view and argued that Muslim students should be allowed to wear headscarfs in the classroom if they wished (intellectuals including sociologist Alain Touraine), in their own manifesto, denounced what they called le risque d’un ‘Vichy de l’intégration des immigrés’ (Politis, 9 November 1989) (this time the allusion being to the intolerant and anti-Semitic extreme right-wing government of Marshal Pétain during the Second World War).

In the second place, contemporary political alignments and divisions and, even more, perceptions of these alignments and divisions, tend to be decisively influenced by references to and attitudes towards past events, divisions and personalities. We will have several instances of this in the following sections of this chapter, but an example may help illustrate the point at this stage. When, in 1998, the Socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin’s left-wing government (elected in June 1997) was in serious difficulties due to a combination of strikes, student revolts and unemployed people’s occupation of university buildings in Paris, a minister had been questioned in the National Assembly on some issue by an opposition right-wing deputy. Normally it should have been left to the minister in question to reply. However, Prime Minister Jospin took it upon himself to rejoin. Leaving the concrete issue concerned to one side, Jospin delivered a passionate attack on the conservative right in general, drawing a sharp dividing line between ‘us’, the left, who have always been on the side of progress and justice, as in the case of the Dreyfus Affair of the late 1890s (see more in Chapter 6), and ‘you’ of the right, who have always been on the side of reaction and darkness, as in the case of Dreyfus, when the right wing was in the anti-Dreyfusard camp, and so on.

Obviously, as political commentators in Britain were quick to notice, Jospin chose that topic at that particular moment in a desperate attempt to divert attention from the pressing crisis surrounding his government, and to polarise the political atmosphere along the traditional division between left and right by appealing to the French public’s traditional, historically determined, reflexes (thus hoping to lure striking workers, revolting chômeurs and students to close ranks around his beleaguered government by opposition to the common enemy, the ‘reactionary’ right). First of all, it is interesting that Jospin chose to do this, because it means he believed it might work. However, what is much more interesting is the reaction Jospin’s speech provoked. The prime minister was heavily criticised for this speech in France, but not for the same reasons for which a British politician would have been criticised. Instead of attacking him, as would be the case in Britain, for trying to divert attention from current pressing problems by invoking the phantoms of the past in an evidently tendentious way, the French press and commentators attacked him, rather, for getting his history wrong. They did not criticise the very fact of invoking events and situations of no less than a century earlier which had no obvious relevance to the issue discussed, but rather the fact that he showed himself insufficiently versed in the history of the events he referred to by mentioning Gambetta as the leader of the ‘left’, while Gambetta had died already in 1882 and he should have talked of Clemenceau instead. Also, historians immediately pointed out that the division of intellectuals between those in favour and those against Dreyfus had not been a clear-cut division of left and right as Jospin had asserted, and so on. For several weeks, magazines were dedicating articles by specialist historians to the issue, radio programmes were inviting eminent historians to comment on the prime minister’s speech, and the whole affair took on dimensions and directions that it would not have taken, for example, in the United Kingdom. This is because in France nobody questions the relevance of the past to contemporary debates in itself. Rather, disagreement arises as to what the right interpretation of the past is, and this is what feeds political debate.

As we have seen, no example of the significance of interpretations of the past is so striking as the divergent interpretations of the French Revolution which have fed passionate debates for two centuries and which were ceremoniously rehearsed on the occasion of the bicentenary of the French Revolution in 1989. And few people have exercised as much influence on political and intellectual developments in France in the last quarter-century as the historian François Furet, not least through his revisionist interpretation of the French Revolution. The examples could be multiplied indefinitely. Obviously, the thing to retain is that, in France, the past is not an affair of the past, left to historians to debate, but part of everyday discourse. As has been said of the bitter legacy of collaboration and the Vichy regime during the Second World War, it is un passé qui ne passe pas. This is the reason why contemporary France has developed a number of distinctly French political traditions.

FRENCH REPUBLICANISM

French republicanism is, if possible, even more rooted in France’s turbulent history than the other political traditions. This is because it owes its emergence to the turn of events during the French Revolution and its subsequent character to reactions to those events and divergent interpretations of them during the next two centuries or so. This is also the most complicated of French political traditions, because of the way in which what was initially the ideal of a (sometimes smaller, sometimes larger) faction or party, ‘the republic’, came to be accepted as the legitimate political regime of France, subscribed to by all mainstream political parties and forces. Due to this evolution of attitudes towards the republic, being republican means different things to different people in France today, and this was the case during much of France’s modern history. As the major historian of the meaning of the republican idea during the most crucial period of its consolidation, Claude Nicolet, has put it, république is one of the mots voyageurs of French political vocabulary, meaning different things to different people and at different periods (1982: 16–34). This protean character of ‘the republic’ makes it difficult to describe the exact meaning of republicanism even during the periods when it was the ideal or ideology of only a part of the political forces of France. Very simply, even when they were very few (in the 1830s, for instance), French republicans were never agreed as to what their ideal consisted in and what ‘the republic’ meant. Things have become even more complicated today, however, due to the fact that the republic has been accepted by nearly all political forces, including the direct heirs of its former enemies. Today parties and politicians of both right and left proudly – and sincerely, to the best of one’s knowledge – call themselves ‘republican’. Listening to politicians or political commentators speaking of the republic and republicanism today, one is at a loss to figure out what exactly it means. It seems to mean so much that it comes close to meaning nothing. This is because républicain tends to be used to describe whatever one considers to be good in politics. To provide a felicitous example used recently by historian Maurice Agulhon (1998: 128), it can happen that a minister of the interior (France’s equivalent to the Home Secretary), determined to maintain order and wishing to affirm his resolution to do so, exclaims ‘that he will re-establish order’, but it very often happens that, in order to give emphasis to his statement and be more listened to, he declares that he will ‘re-establish the republican order’. Or he may want to say that laws should be applied, but, in order to stress his statement, he is more likely to say that ‘the laws of the republic have to be applied’. As Agulhon correctly remarks, this is unnecessary emphasis, or rather tautology: in the French Republic (France’s official name) order and the laws are ‘republican’ by definition. Yet, calling them ‘republican’ is assumed to give them the power attached to the idea of citizenship. Therefore, this kind of language is used by all political camps.

But what does this republic that seems to unite all the French political forces these days stand for? Here we have to search for the minimum common denominator. Well, being republican today means, not being a monarchist, not desiring the restoration of either one of France’s two royal families (Bourbon and Orléans) or of the Bonapartist empire. It also means not being in favour of any kind of dictatorship of one person maintaining themselves in power in opposition to recognised rules. And, in the third place, it means not being anarchist either, as the republic is strongly connected with the power of the state, while the latter is anathema to anarchists. In this sense, almost all French men and women are republicans today (although this was not the case a century or so ago). The French people today accept the fundamental rules of the political game, the fundamentals of the constitutional framework of their country, which, in the case of France, is a republic, headed by a non-hereditary head of state (whereas in the UK it is a constitutional monarchy, as the head of state is a hereditary monarch, the first-born (male) of a royal family). Around this ‘republic’ have clustered a number of principles and values concerning which there is a general consensus in France today (a consensus that has grown gradually, and was not complete before the 1970s–1980s). Except for a few hundred people who assemble every year to remind their countrymen of their monarchical past, most French people accept today as legitimate the fact that their country has a non-hereditary head of state, elected by the rest of his fellow-citizens to be their president. A large majority want their state to function according to the law, without violence and arbitrary power exercised over anybody. They want power in their country to have a democratic origin, to emanate, that is, from an electoral body that is composed by all adult citizens. And they want their state to protect their freedoms (such as their right to assemble and associate), to allow a free press to operate and help citizens form opinions, and to refrain from recognising any privileges consecrated by law. In other words, French people today have come to form a consensus around the political system of what is usually called liberal democracy, whose historically consecrated form in France is the republic (Agulhon 1998). And yet, consensus on all these things does not mean that the French and their politicians are united. Despite their (real yet tacit) consensus on the basic institutions, there are French republicans who do not like at all other French republicans. On the contrary, parties of the ‘right’ and parties of the ‘left’ try assiduously to convince their supporters to fear and loath each other. Allowing for tactical motivations and individual political ambitions, one additional major reason why such political categorisations and animosities still exist in France among political forces which all call themselves ‘republican’ is that they do not all define in the same way the ‘republic’ that is their apparent common reference. The significant divergences in the definition of the republic that are conspicuously present today are due to their respective pasts, to their history. It is imperative, therefore, if we are to understand what republicanism means, to consider the way in which the idea of the republic and republicanism evolved in France during the last two centuries.

Before the French Revolution, for the educated members of French society, the republic referred to the remote historical experiences of Athens and Sparta in ancient Greece, and then of Rome. There was great admiration on the part of many Frenchmen for what they understood as the public spirit and the civic virtue that characterised those societies, where the res publica was the common concern of all citizens. To this admiration for the civic virtue of ancient republics came to be added, from 1776 onwards, fascination for the rumoured public-spirited achievements of another republic, this time modern and on a large scale: the American republic of Franklin and Washington. This admiration was not at first translated into any desire or intention to dethrone the Bourbon kings and try the experiment in France. ‘Republican’ was simply a synonym of the virtuous in politics, of the good citizen who possessed and displayed civic virtue. However, once the French Revolution broke out in 1789, and following the dethronement of King Louis XVI and the installation of a republic (the First Republic) in 1792, this was to change. By 1830, the vast majority of militant republicans were not republicans out of admiration for the ancient Greek or Roman heroes portrayed in Plutarch’s books, but rather because of direct inspiration from the First Republic of 1792–4, along with the rest of the Revolution (Agulhon 1998).

It is its close association with the legacy of, and disputes over, the French Revolution that has made the republic in France such a protean and disputed notion. For most of the last two centuries, the republic has meant much more than just a regime where the head of state is non-hereditary but rather an elected president and which possesses the main attributes of a modern constitutional liberal democracy – which is, roughly, what it can mean today to those who accept what historian Maurice Agulhon has recently called the ‘minimal’ definition of the republic in France. Because of the specific course of French history, the idea of the republic has come to acquire, in the eyes of the political left, a number of features which represent so many additions to the common-sense, minimal definition of the regime. The left has come, accordingly, to entertain what Agulhon calls a ‘maximalist’ definition of the republic (1998: 122). To understand all this, an excursion into the past is indispensable.

The republic, which was first tried in France in 1792 (First Republic) – and again tried briefly in 1848–51 (Second Republic) – was for the first time relatively consolidated at the end of the 1870s, almost a decade into the life of the Third Republic (which lasted between 1870 and 1940). In other words, it took a bit less than a century of struggles between those who wanted a republic and those who did not want one. Why was this? To understand the bitter and bloody history associated with the idea of the republic and the struggles between its supporters and enemies, we have to remember the French Revolution and its significance for subsequent French history. The French Revolution that started in 1789 was not, in...