The Government and Politics of France

Andrew Knapp, Vincent Wright

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9780415357333
• eBook ISBN: 9781134247905
• Edition: 5
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Government and Politics of France has been the leading textbook on French politics for over a generation, and continues to provide students with a comprehensive and incisive introduction to the intricacies of French politics and government. This edition updates every chapter, with the addition of a new chapter on France and Europe. Recent events necessitate a new edition, particularly the 2002 elections and the growing interpenetration of France and the EU in student programmes, as well as in the real world.
Whether covering the shifting balance within France's two-headed executive, the paradoxes of the French party politics, the power and fragmentation of France's administration, the growing assertiveness of French local government, or the newly visible world of the judiciary, The Government and Politics of France has always sought to confront established paradigms with the complex and untidy reality of French politics at the grass roots.

1 French political traditions in a changing context

A legacy of conflict
State traditions
The changing context of French political traditions
Political conflict and the state: transformations
The survival of traditions
Concluding remarks
Further reading

‘Our whole history’, proclaimed General Charles de Gaulle (1890–1970), leader of the Free French during World War II, head of the Provisional Government from 1944 to 1946, founder of the Fifth Republic in 1958, and its first president from 1959 till 1969, ‘is nothing but the alternation between the immense sufferings of a dispersed people and the fruitful grandeur of a nation rallied under the aegis of a strong state.’ Modern French history is riven by deep and often murderous political conflict in which Frenchmen killed Frenchmen and régimes were toppled by protest from the street, defeat in war, or both. These events are remembered, and referred to regularly, by contemporary politicians. But French history has also, paradoxically, been marked by the near-continuous presence, under successive régimes, of a strong, activist, often intrusive, state. The traditions of political conflict and of the strong state in France are the subjects of this chapter. It will be argued that many, though not all, of France’s traditional political conflicts are now played out; that the state tradition is under threat from transformations in the European and global economies; but that both traditions nevertheless continue to structure the French political landscape.

A legacy of conflict

France invented the terms Left and Right early in the great Revolution of 1789–94 which first limited the powers of, and then overthrew, the Bourbon monarchy. Those noble members of the first National Assembly who wished to limit the powers of the monarch moved to sit with the commoners on the left of the Assembly; those who still supported the absolutism of what was shortly to become known as the ancien régime sat on the right, as seen from the chair of the presiding officer. The modern National Assembly has a similar seating plan, with Communist Deputies on the far Left, Socialists next to them, and so on round to the racist Front National, whose very rare Deputies have sat on the extreme Right. In the nineteenth century, Left and Right were convenient shorthand expressions used by parliamentarians and few others. By 1900, however, they had passed into general political discourse. And they can be seen as useful baskets within which to place a series of political conflicts that have divided a nation on broadly bipolar lines. The French readily recognise the expressions and use them themselves. The terms should also, however, be treated with caution, for two reasons. Left and Right have meant different things at different times; and there are some political divisions, chiefly but not exclusively over France’s foreign relations, which have never fallen neatly into a Left/Right categorisation.

Table 1.1 presents, schematically, the main issues that divided Left from Right for some two centuries after the Revolution. The long-running ones have been threefold: the nature of the régime, the relationship between Church and state, and the relation between the state, the economy and society.

The régime

For most of the 170 years between the Revolution and the establishment of the Fifth Republic in 1958, France suffered from a lack of consensus about the nature of the

Table 1.1 Left, Right, and the tradition of political division in France

régime under which the country should be ruled. The result, as Table 1.2 shows, was régime instability: a dozen régimes have ruled France since 1789. Most régime transitions involved popular (often Parisian) insurrections and bloodshed. The first Revolution, for example, left 20,000 dead as a result of the Terror of 1793, and as many as a quarter of a million more through the suppression of a Catholic rebellion in the Vendée, to say nothing of the European wars that followed in its wake. The overthrow of the Restoration monarchy in 1830 caused 500 casualties. The ‘June days’ of 1848, when the Second Republic suppressed its more radical working-class elements, claimed perhaps 3,000 lives. The Third Republic’s repression of the radical Paris Commune in 1871 was bloodier still: 20,000 communards are estimated to have lost their lives. The Vichy régime enthusiastically collaborated with the German Occupation troops in fighting the Resistance forces (as well as in deporting Jews): 20,000 résistants are estimated to have fallen within France, many at the hands of the Vichy milice; some 30,000 civilians were shot or massacred. They were avenged, in part, at the Liberation in 1944, when some 10,000 collaborators were summarily executed.

The initial division between Right and Left, concerning the desirability of limiting the king’s powers, rapidly gave way to a simpler one, which lasted through the nineteenth century, between monarchists and republicans. To be a republican was automatically to be on the Left and to identify with the heritage of the Revolution, in particular its commitment to popular sovereignty and to the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. But republicanism was long the cause of a minority, failing to take root among large sections of the peasantry who represented some

Table 1.2 France: régimes since 1789

two-thirds of the mid-nineteenth-century population of France: for them, it was too readily identified, thanks to the experiences of the First and Second Republics, with urban power, particularly that of Paris, and with political instability, foreign wars and godlessness. The monarchists, on the other hand, were divided between supporters of the three different houses that had ruled France in the half-century after 1789 (Legitimists, Orleanists and Bonapartists), and weakened by the more or less disastrous record of the monarchs, culminating in the crushing defeat of Napoleon III’s imperial forces by Prussia in 1870. When the republicans scored a durable victory (and the Third Republic lasted longer than any régime between 1789 and the present), it was won in part by default, as ‘the régime that divides us least’; that expression was coined by Adolphe Thiers, who is remembered both as the butcher of the Commune and, with Léon Gambetta, as one of the Republic’s founding fathers.

A peculiarity of the French republican tradition was its intense mistrust, from the later nineteenth century, of a strong executive. This was born of bitter experience: each of the two Napoleons had assumed executive power under a Republic, only to replace the Republic by his own personal rule as emperor. Thus the major constitutional battle of the 1870s was between Thiers’s successor as president of the Third Republic, Marshal MacMahon, who sought a return to the monarchy or, failing that, a Republic with a strong executive presidency, and Republican parliamentarians who were determined to make the Chamber of Deputies the centre of political power. The Republicans had won by 1879, though at a price: to reassure rural France, they conceded significant power to an indirectly elected Senate, whose conservatism was in direct proportion to the substantial over-representation of rural areas in its ranks. By 1900 all serious hope of a restoration of the monarchy had disappeared, and the Third Republic commanded broad popular support, or at least acquiescence. When the question of the régime reemerged, in the 1930s and 1940s, it placed the mainstream republican tradition against both the enemies of democracy who sought some form of authoritarian or Fascist régime (they had their moment of success under Vichy), and more mainstream rightwingers like André Tardieu who stressed the need to reinforce the executive within the Republic. It was de Gaulle who took up this theme in his Bayeux speech two years after the Liberation (and five months after his own resignation as head of the Provisional Government). He was not heeded by the left-wing majority that controlled the National Assembly. The Fourth Republic, with its combination of a strong but undisciplined National Assembly and a weak president and premier, was the last victory of the classical French republican tradition. It was only when it had manifestly failed either to provide stable government or to deal with the challenges facing France (particularly the war of decolonisation being waged in Algeria), that de Gaulle was recalled to power and given his chance. The régime he created, which combined a republican constitution with a strong presidency for the first time in 110 years, won the support of nearly 80 per cent of the voters when submitted to referendum in September 1958. That did not prevent François Mitterrand, who emerged as one of the main leaders of the left-wing opposition, from attacking the Fifth Republic as a ‘Permanent Coup d’État’.

The Church

The Catholic Church had been the ancien régime’s most important ideological and institutional support. Tithes, and ecclesiastical corruption, had made it deeply unpopular by the time of the Revolution, at least in the less devout parts of France. It is thus not surprising that the Revolution called into question not only the Church’s privileges, but its very existence. In the most extreme, Jacobin, phase of the Revolution, Church property was confiscated, abbeys turned into prisons or arsenals, Christian services replaced by Festivals of the Supreme Being, and the Christian calendar abolished. The biggest domestic military challenge to the First Republic, the rebellion in the Catholic Vendée area, was put down with extreme savagery. These events left a legacy of enmity between Catholics and the Republic that was to last well into the twentieth century. ‘Le cléricalisme, voilà l’ennemi!’ declaimed the Republican politician Léon Gambetta, at the outset of his final confrontation with President MacMahon in 1877 – his argument reinforced by Pope Pius IX’s ex cathedra condemnation of all forms of republicanism and liberalism as incompatible with the Christian faith. Anti-clericalism (a hostility towards the Church as an institution, though not necessarily to Christianity itself) became as much a badge of the Left as republicanism. The form it took might be instrumental (believing in a secular society) or picturesquely expressive (public orgies of sausage-eating on Fridays). By the late nineteenth century the debate had centred on two main issues: the Church’s position as the established religion of France, and its control over the education system. One of the founding acts of the Third Republic after its consolidation was to give France a universal system of state education – ‘free, secular, and compulsory’. The separation of Church and state followed in 1905, after the hostility of the Church – or of its most vocal ‘defenders’ – to the Republic had been confirmed during the Dreyfus Affair. Thereafter, Church–state relations turned essentially on the issue of public subsidies to Catholic schools, an apparently limited policy question which nevertheless aroused fierce passions on both sides for half a century. The Debré Law of 1959 settled the principle of subsidy, and its main mechanisms. It did not prevent the issues of the volume of subsidies, and the degree of state control that should go with them, from mobilising impressive street demonstrations by the partisans of both secularism and of Catholic education, as late as 1994. Indeed, both survey data and electoral geography show that practising Catholics still vote on the (moderate) Right by a proportion of three or four to one – a much better correlation than that offered by class, the other major sociological variable.

The importance of laïcité or, roughly, secularism to the identity of the French Left cannot be overstated. At the centre of the French republican model is the belief, fostered by eighteenth-century critics of the ancien régime, in the power of human rationality to create a community of free and equal citizens, and to promote human well-being through scientific progress. Crucial to both of those goals is education, which should communicate verifiable truths rather than religious beliefs (or superstitions, as true anti-clericals regarded the teachings of the Catholic Church), and should offer the diligent individual an opportunity for upward social mobility. In short, the republican ideal, as well as the practice of successive Republics, involved the removal of the Church from the leading positions within the state and within the education system to which Catholics believed it had a right. The opposition between the Church and the French republican model allowed one party, the Radicals, to make anti-clericalism its main stock-in-trade throughout the first half of the twentieth century. It also helped limit the impact in France of Christian Democracy. Post-war France, like other European countries such as Italy, Germany and Belgium, did see the emergence of a Christian Democratic party, committed to democracy, reconciliation between the former belligerent powers of Europe through the construction of European institutions, the construction of a welfare state, and industrial co-operation between workers and employers, in the name of Christian social principles. But France’s Christian Democratic party, the MRP (Mouvement Républicain Populaire), though electorally successful in 1945 and 1946 because it was the only party with a Resistance pedigree which was not anticlerical, attracted mostly conservative Catholic voters, many of whom deserted to Gaullism or to the traditional conservative Right as soon as it was possible or respectable to do so. Christian Democracy in France never won the status of permanent party of government that it enjoyed elsewhere in Europe.

The politics of class

The politics of class is the single most common factor dividing Left from Right in West European political systems, with the former seeking social justice through redistributive social and economic intervention by the state, and the latter committed to defending capitalism and private property (and, it would argue, prosperity) against the threats thus posed. But the manner in which class politics is played out in each country depends both on the other social and political cleavages present, and on the national pattern of economic development.

The French Revolution was a source not only of national pride (as the bicentennial celebrations of 1989 showed) but of severe economic dislocation. Some of this was lasting: where France had possessed an economy comparable in size to Britain’s in the 1780s, the pattern in the nineteenth century was one of almost uninterrupted relative economic decline. The western half of the country was condemned to a century and a half of underdevelopment, after the prosperity of its Atlantic ports was wrecked by war and blockade. The Revolution gave France a class of independent, and inefficient, small peasant farmers, with little or no incentive to move off the land; it was a class that actually grew in the later nineteenth century, as falling land values enabled tenant farmers to realise their dreams of ownership. Nature had provided France with limited, often poor-quality, reserves of coal and iron. Not surprisingly, then, France’s industrial revolution proceeded in fits and starts, notably under the Second Empire and in the first and third decades of the twentieth century; it was only completed after World War II. In 1900 nearly half of the French population still worked on the land (compared to under 10 per cent in industrially advanced Britain). Their woeful productivity is measured by the fact that France, with twice Britain’s territory for the same population, was still not agriculturally self-sufficient. Industry, on the other hand, was still dominated by the small family firm and the small workshop, with only a handful of companies, notably in the nascent automobile industry (before Ford, France was briefly the world’s biggest exporter of motor cars), escaping the pattern.

For the Left, the major consequence of this pattern of slow growth was the relatively small number of industrial workers, their geographical dispersal, and the resulting weakness of the labour movement: in 1914, the Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière (SFIO), founded in 1905, had 75,000 members compared to a million for the German Social Democratic Party (SPD); 16.8 per cent of the vote to the SPD’s 34.8. On the Right, meanwhile, there was no very substantial constituency for a classical liberal party, committed to secularism, the extension of civil and political liberties, and free trade. The Radical Party, the pivotal force in every governing coalition for the first four decades of the twentieth century, was the nearest thing France possessed to a liberal party. But it was too rooted in provincial France, the France of the anti-clerical country schoolmaster and the small family firm or farm, to be a zealous advocate of free-market capitalism – or, for that matter, of the urban social reforms undertaken by the British Liberals in the early twentieth century. Napoleon III had briefly committed France to free trade. But tariffs were reimposed in 1871, initially to raise the revenue to pay reparations to Germany after defeat in the Franco-Prussian war, and with the Méline tariff of 1892 France reverted to full-scale protectionism, while the Radicals relapsed into anti-clericalism and abandoned concern for urban social reform. The France of small firms and small farms stayed protected until the European Economic Community (EEC) began to bring the tariff barriers down in the 1960s.

The relatively small number of big firms and of industrial workers did not, however, blunt the edge of class conflict in France. On the contrary: if social reform was slower and later than in Germany or Britain, class confrontation was fierce and often bloody. The French working class acquired a series of its own memories to add to the more general insurrectionary tradition of 1789. The Paris Commune of 1871, hailed rather misleadingly by Karl Marx as the ‘harbinger of a new society’, was not only, perhaps not even primarily, about class conflict. But the presence of both workers and socialist leaders among the communards, and the savagery of the repression by the conservative government forces, turned the Commune into a powerful and enduring legend. The formal right to join a trade union was only conceded in 1884. Its exercise remained fraught with danger: over the next thirty years, troops, and live ammunition, were used against striking workers with depressing regularity. Twentieth-century working-class memories include the Popular Front government of 1936, the wave of spontaneous strikes that greeted its election, and the reforms that followed, notably the 40-hour week and the first paid holidays. A further layer of memory was added by the Resistance (in which left-wing and working-class forces were particularly active) and by the great reforms of the Liberation, in particular nationalisations and the creation of France’s social security system.

The numerical weakness of the French socialist movement was matched by its doctrinal division and its habitual political ineffectiveness (except on the occasion of rare victories, as at the Liberation). One of the main failings of the Third Republic was its inability to achieve the political integration of the working class: for neither of the two major traditions that claimed the loyalties of workers, anarchosyndicalism and Marxism, espoused progressive reform within the capitalist system. Anarcho-syndicalism drew from the disastrous experience of the Commune the lesson that mainstream political activity offered no hope of social improvement and was best avoided altogether. Instead, it focused on militant rather than organised trade union activity, and cultivated the myth of the one great strike that would overthrow capitalism. The insistence by the main trade union confederation, the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), on its complete independence from political parties helped to perpetuate the organisational weakness of the French socialist movement compared with it...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures and maps
• List of tables
• Preface to the fifth edition
• Preface to the fourth edition
• 1 French political traditions in a changing context
• 2 From Fourth to Fifth Republic
• 3 Presidents and prime ministers: the personal factor
• 4 The sources of executive power
• 5 Executive policy-making: the variable diarchy
• 6 The French parliament Decline – and resurgence?
• 7 The Left and the Greens: the dilemma of government
• 8 The Right: Domination and division
• 9 Transformations of the party system Continuity and change
• 10 The administration Foundations, myth and changing reality
• 11 The state and the pressure groups
• 12 Paris and the provinces The post-Jacobin state
• 13 French justice and the elusive État de droit1
• 14 France and European integration
• 15 Conclusion
• Appendices
• Index