The Fifth French Republic: Presidents, Politics and Personalities

A Study of French Political Culture

Philip Thody

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780415187534
• eBook ISBN: 9781134661534
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The Fifth French Republic is a study of modern French politics and history, discussing the five presidents who span from 1959 to the present--Charles de Gaulle, Georges Pompidou, Valry Giscard d'Estang, Francois Mitterand and Jacques Chirac.

Philip Thody examines the importance of the similarities between the five men for an understanding of the general and political culture of France; the similarities and differences in the foreign policies pursued by the five presidents, including anti-Americanism; France's role in the European Union and her attitude to the Cold War; French domestic policies and administrative practices, attempts to decentralize the state, the role of the French civil service, the problem of immigration and the rise of the National Front.

1 Charles de Gaulle
The founding father

Generalities

Two crises gave Charles de Gaulle the opportunity of achieving the ambition which he described in the opening pages of the first volume of his Mémoires de Guerre, L’Appel, when he wrote of the vision of France which had inspired his early years:

Enfin, je ne doutais pas que l’intérêt de la vie consistait à lui rendre quelque service signalé, et que j’en aurais l’occasion.
(Finally, I had no doubt that life’s interest lay in rendering my country some outstanding service, and that I would have the chance to do so).

The first crisis arose in the early summer of 1940, when the armies of the Third Reich conquered France. The second became acute in May 1958, when a group of Algerian Europeans, supported by the French army, seized power in Algiers and called upon de Gaulle to assume power. The ability which he showed in solving the Algerian problem derived directly from the reputation he had won between 1940 and 1944.

It could certainly be argued, especially from the standpoint of the 1990s, that what de Gaulle did between 1940 and 1944 was more important for the myth which it created than for any long-term need which he satisfied. No other Western European country had a de Gaulle to assume the leadership of its destiny during the second world war. But all the countries of Western Europe were restored, after they had been liberated by the armies of the English-speaking democracies, to the same position in which they could order their affairs as they chose.

France alone, however, found itself in the kind of situation created in 1958 by the Algerian war, and where it could solve a major political problem only by calling on a charismatic military leader. France alone, among the countries of Western Europe freed from German occupation after 1944, went through a crisis which led to a change of constitution and a different way of making democracy work. France alone both had and needed a de Gaulle.

It is, among the countries of Western Europe, a peculiarity of French political life to have recourse to a military man at a moment of real or alleged national crisis. Neither Hitler nor Mussolini was a professional soldier, and although General Franco ruled Spain as a dictator between 1939 and 1975, it was after a bloody civil war, not after a relatively short crisis solved by the arrival of an apparently providential military leader. French military men, in contrast, take power after coups d’état which are brief and relatively bloodless. They then govern through civilian administrators, and their main achievements are in domestic rather than in foreign policy.¹

De Gaulle remained faithful to this tradition by the kind of men he appointed to serve under him, and it was in many ways his greatest triumph to have succeeded in imposing his solution to the Algerian problem on a body of professional soldiers who wanted to keep Algeria French. But in his ability, on two occasions, to use his prestige as a military leader to take charge in a crisis, and to move from a career in which he served the state as one of its salaried officials to one where he took charge of its destinies, he expresses an aspect of French political behaviour with which there is no parallel in the political culture of any other country.

1890–1940

On September 27, 1909, de Gaulle entered the cavalry school at SaintCyr, and signed on for an initial engagement of four years. He remained a professional soldier after the first world war, and had spent forty years in the army when he entered politics by leaving for London and making the broadcast on June 18, 1940, in which he declared that France had lost a battle but had not lost the war.

He served with distinction in the first world war. He was awarded the Croix de Guerre, and was three times wounded in action. After the armistice, he served with the Polish army fighting on the side of the White Russians during the civil war which followed the Bolshevik revolution of October 1917. On February 1, 1922, he came back to France and taught history at Saint-Cyr. In the concours de sortie (competitive leaving examination), at Saint-Cyr in 1911, he had come 13 out of 211, an improvement on his performance in the concours d’entrée in 1909, where he came 94th.

Considerable importance is attached in France to the place one obtains in the various concours which punctuate any respectable career in the public service. This place does not, however, always have a predictive value. Jean Bichelonne, sorti major (who came top) at the l’École Polytechnique in 1927, with the highest marks ever awarded, collaborated enthusiastically with the Vichy régime of 1940–4. He had proved to himself statistically that Germany was bound to win the second world war.²

In May 1922, de Gaulle was successful in the concours d’entrée at the École de Guerre (Staff College), where he entered 33rd out of 129, but came out lower at 52. He was beginning to show the reluctance to accept other people’s opinions which was to become such a marked feature of his personality, and Marshal Pétain had to intervene personally in order to ensure that he received the overall mention bien instead of the mention passable that the examiners were preparing to give him.

The lesson which de Gaulle’s senior officers had drawn from the first world war was that defence had become more important than attack, and was likely to remain so. It was a view which led to the decision, on December 29, 1929, to build the Maginot line along the frontier between France and Germany. In any future war, it was argued, the Germans would not come either through Belgium or the Ardennes, but would exhaust themselves by attacking this impregnable line of fortifications, and go home in despair. Or, since they could see that they could never successfully invade France, they would simply not start another war.

De Gaulle had a different vision. For him, as he argued in his major prewar work, Vers l’armée de métier, published in May 1934, the French High Command had drawn the wrong lesson from the failure of make use of the breakthrough achieved by the first use of tanks at Cambrai by the British on November 20, 1917. Because soldiers on foot had not been able to keep up with the speed of their advance, the doctrine developed that tanks should be allowed to advance only at the speed of the infantry. They were, therefore, to be used only in support, and not as a mobile striking force in their own right.

De Gaulle argued the exact opposite, and did so for political as well as military reasons. There was, he maintained, no point in France signing alliances with relatively small countries in Eastern Europe, as she had done with Poland, Czechoslovakia and Rumania in the early 1920s, since there was nothing she could do to help them if they were attacked. The decision to spend all the money available for defence on building the Maginot line was a sign to Germany that she had a free hand in Eastern Europe. Whatever she did, France would not intervene, because she had denied herself the means of doing so. If, on the other hand, France were to build a mobile striking force, she would not only be able to defend herself in any future war of movement. By her ability to use this force to attack Essen, Dusseldorf or Cologne, she could deter Germany from any aggressive action anywhere in Europe.

It was, in an early form, a version of the concept of the deterrent which President Eisenhower was to formulate more clearly in the confrontation with China over the islands of Quemoy and Matsu in 1954 when he spoke of the United States being able to carry out a policy of ‘massive retaliation at a time and place of our own choosing’. De Gaulle’s ideas might even, had they been adopted by Great Britain as well as France, have prevented the second world war from taking place, in the same way as the threat of the nuclear deterrent kept the peace during the Cold War between 1945 and 1989. But de Gaulle failed in his first attempt to play a political role, and did so both because of the nature of the society which he was trying to influence and through the defects of his own character.

Like the Great Britain of the 1920s and 1930s, France was a country which simply wanted to be left alone. She had had over 1,300,000 men killed between 1914 and 1918, and almost a million seriously wounded. She had one of the lowest birthrates in Western Europe. She still had the illusion of having won the first world war, and had not had the consequences of the war forced home to her, as Germany had, by having had part of her territory occupied, her prewar régime destroyed, her economy ruined and her currency made worthless by the financial crisis of 1923. She had, unlike Germany, no longing for revenge.

The Third Republic also had the disadvantage, especially in de Gaulle’s eyes, of being what is known as a régime d’assemblée. The president was a figurehead, and not always an impressive one at that. There were so many political parties that every government was a coalition. The principal task of the Président du Conseil des Ministres (Chairman of the Council of Ministers; the term Premier Ministre was not introduced until 1958) was to try to hold the coalition together, a situation which de Gaulle illustrated by the account which he gave in L’Appel, the first volume of his Mémoires de Guerre, of the interview which he had with Léon Blum on October 14, 1936.

Blum had recently become Président du Conseil in the Popular Front government brought to power by the victory of the left in the elections of April 26 and May 3, and was more prepared than he had been in the past to listen to de Gaulle’s arguments in favour of a mobile striking force. But during their conversation the telephone rang ten times, on each occasion presenting Blum with some urgent question of parliamentary tactics. There was no way, de Gaulle realised, that the head of a government in circumstances such as these would ever be able to do anything positive. When he eventually came to power, in 1958, nobody was allowed to telephone him. He would, occasionally, ring them, but would take no calls. There was also a notice outside his bedroom door which bore the inscription: ‘A déranger uniquement en cas de guerre mondiale’ (To be disturbed only in the event of a world war).

The Third Republic was not a perfect régime. Its collapse in 1940 exposed the French people to four years of occupation by the Germans, and to the humiliation of being the only country whose official rulers advocated a policy of collaboration with Nazi Germany. But there is more to be said is its favour than de Gaulle allows. There is also more to criticise in his own conduct than is ever suggested by the hypnotic power which the prose of the Mémoires de Guerre exercises over its readers.

The laws of 1881 and 1882, introduced by Jules Ferry (1832–93), and creating l’École nationale, gratuite, obligatoire et laïque, in many ways epitomise what the Third Republic did best. They changed France from a country in which fewer than 10 per cent of the population could read and write to one where it was highly abnormal to be illiterate. By insisting on the need to exclude the teaching of formal religious belief, they laid the foundations for a modern democratic society which neither the Roman Catholic Church nor the French monarchist movement would otherwise ever have accepted.

In his eulogy for one of the most successful politicians not to have become president of the Republic, Pierre Mendès France pointed out that Jules Ferry did more than inspire the laws of 1881 and 1882 which taught the French people to read and write. It was also to his impulsion that the French owed four other major pieces of progressive legislation: the law of 1884 giving legal existence to trade unions; the loi Naquet of 1885 authorising divorce; the central role of the mayor in their system of local government; and the law of July 29, 1881 establishing the freedom of the press, nowadays known to most people only through the frequency of its interdict inscribed on the walls of French towns in the form ‘Défense d’afficher selon la loi du 29 juillet 1881’.³ It gave the jury, and not the state-appointed judge, the authority to decide cases of alleged libel. Like the other achievements of the Third Republic, such as the winning of the 1914–18 war, or the institution by the Popular Front of 1936 of paid holidays for all workers, it is another indication of how well the Third Republic could serve its citizens, even without the strong presidency which de Gaulle regarded as essential for the successful survival of any régime in France.

De Gaulle’s failure to persuade the authorities to create the mobile striking force which might have saved France in 1940 was also due to his own personality. When he came to England in June 1940, not a single man who had served under his orders came to join him. Churchill’s comment that the heaviest cross he had to bear during the second world war was the Cross of Lorraine would also have drawn nods of approval from some of de Gaulle’s brother officers. In November 1929, they are said to have threatened to resign en masse if de Gaulle was appointed to a permanent post as a lecturer at the École de Guerre. He was therefore posted to Syria, before being brought back to Paris in 1931 and appointed to the Secrétariat général de la Défense nationale.⁴

It was at almost exactly the same time that Admiral Darlan (1881– 1943) was, by contrast, achieving great success in obtaining the credits necessary to realise his ambition of making the French navy the fourth largest in the world, immediately after those of Great Britain, Germany and the United States of America. It is an instructive example of what a sailor with an accommodating personality, and who is prepared to spend his time in the corridors of power rather than on the quarterdeck, can do for his service. Although de Gaulle had written, as early as 1932, that ‘la perfection évangélique ne mène point a l’empire. L’homme d’action ne se conçoit pas sans une forte dose d’égoïsme, d’orgueil, de dureté, de ruse’ (Evangelical perfection offers no path to empire. The man of action is inconceivable without a strong dose of egotism, pride, harshness and cunning),⁵ he was able to put this precept into practice only much later in his career.

One of the serious errors of tactics which de Gaulle had made in 1934 was to give his book the title Vers l’armée de métier (Towards a professional army). The levée en masse of August 23, 1793 had made France the first country in the modern world to require all its male citizens between 18 and 35 to do military service. But ever since the coups d’état of 1799, 1851 and 1852 by which Napoleon Bonaparte and his nephew Louis-Napoleon had seized power, the republican tradition had insisted on the desirability of a citizen army. Only by having all male citizens under arms, it was thought, could the Republic defend itself against the danger of another dictator using the army as the modern equivalent of the Praetorian guard.

If de Gaulle had adopted a French equivalent of the title under which his book appeared in English, Towards the Army of the Future, he would have encountered less resistance among les vrais républicains. But he was never the most tactful of men, and it was for political considerations of this kind that the authorities of the Third Republic did not do as the Germans did and group all its most modern weaponry under the command of one man. Had it done so, and had the High Command also realised, as Hitler did, how powerful the combination between dive bombers and tanks moving in mass formation could be, the history of the campaign of 1940, and thus of whole of the second world war, might have been very different. One of the reasons why the attack through the Ardennes in May 1940 which totally destabilised and defeated the French and British armies worked so well was that the Germans never had to worry about attacks on their supply lines. They might not have had this assurance if the French had had at their disposal an armed force of the type envisaged by de Gaulle.

This is not to say that the Germans would have been defeated. One of the themes which recurs most frequently in de Gaulle’s writings on warfare is the unpredictability of what can happen on the battle field. There was no place, in the kind of force envisaged in Vers l’armée de métier, for the use of dive bombers as mobile artillery, or indeed of air power in a tactical role at all. De Gaulle himself was so conscious of this omission that in 1944, in an edition of Vers l’armée de métier published in Algiers, he altered the original text to make up for it; only to decide to go back in the 1971 edition to what he had first written.⁶

De Gaulle did well in the battle of France. On May 28, with only 140 tanks at his disposal, he fought one of the few successful engagements of the war near Abbeville, and took 200 prisoners. He might have done even better if the rest of the French tank force, which in numbers was almost equal to that of the Germans, had not been under wraps near Toulouse. They were presumably there, if a deliberate act of sabotage is excluded, waiting to be brought into action when the German attack had been held, as it had been in 1914, and they could be used to support infantry in the way the official doctrine commanded.

1940–58

When de Gaulle went to England on June 16, his official position was that of sous-secrétaire d’État à la guerre et à la defense nationale, the equivalent of a junior minister in a British government. He had been appointed to it on June 5 by Paul Reynaud (1878–1966), who had become Président du Conseil on March 19, and under whom he would have been happy to serve if Reynaud had been able to continue in office and been willing to continue the war. But Reynaud had been seriously injured in a car accident, and there seemed to be nobody else available.

On June 17, 1940, the day before his famous broadcast, de Gaulle sent a telegram to General Coulson, minister for war in Pétain’s cabinet, asking him for orders, and on June 20 sent another telegram to Bordeaux, where the French government had sought refuge from the Germans, indicating his willingness to serve under General Weygand or ‘any other French figure prepared to resist’. He may, initially, have been a man who felt that greatness had been thrust upon him because there was nobody else to play the role which he felt compelled to assume. But it did not take him long to become the historic personage who, like Julius Caesar, spoke and wrote of himself in the third person.

Few great leaders have started off with a lower power base than de Gaulle. He had virtually no money, and was totally reliant on Churchill. Since the French ambassador to Great Britain had resigned and gone to live in Brazil, he could not even use the French Embassy. Initially, 300 or so French servicemen came to join him, including the whole male population of the Île de Sein, just off the coast of Brittany, presumably leaving the women and children to cope as best they could until the end of the war. By the end of 1940, he still had fewer than 3,000 men under his command, and except for Maurice Schumann, not a single politician, trade union le...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Glossary
• Introduction
• 1. Charles De Gaulle: The Founding Father
• 2. Georges Pompidou: The Conscientious Uncle
• 3. Valéry Giscard D’Estaing: The Ambitious Nephew
• 4. François Mitterrand: The Rebellious Brother
• 5. Jacques Chirac: The Impulsive Grandson
• 6. Conclusion
• Appendix A
• Appendix B
• Appendix C
• Notes
• Annotated Bibliography