The Presidents of the French Fifth Republic

D. Bell, J. Gaffney

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780230285224
• eBook ISBN: 9781137302847
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Europäische Geschichte

In the French Republic political leadership is normally provided by the presidency, albeit from a very narrow constitutional base. This volume examines the strengths and weaknesses of that leadership as well as the way that executive power has been established in the republican context.

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Introduction: the Presidency in the French Fifth Republic

David S. Bell and John Gaffney

Political leadership is a universal social institution, but is one of the least understood. This book is a study of political leadership using the French case. It is, therefore, a contribution to comparative political leadership studies and to the analysis of French politics (in which, in the view of these authors, leadership politics plays an almost inordinately important role). What follows is a study of the French Fifth Republic from within the field of political leadership research. Our study also deals with a series of problems related to political culture, state resources, party politics and party systems, political power, and the nature of the relationship between politics and myth. This book can be read as a contribution to the study of leadership and of Fifth Republic politics. The individual chapters, moreover, can be taken as distinct contributions to the continuing discussion of each of the Presidents, and their significance for one another, and to issues of governance. Taken together and comparatively, they constitute a presidential topography of the Fifth Republic.

In strictly constitutional terms, the President is not the head of government, but the Head of State. In practice he, (to date, only he) is, in ‘normal times’ rather like a combination of head of government and Head of State. This means that the role of the symbolic will have great political significance in the French case; and the political and the symbolic will interact constantly, and consequentially. A further consequence of this is that notions of France, its greatness, history, myths, and the symbolic role of individuals, will all be brought centre stage in political life, thus dramatically affecting and heightening political discourse and leadership rhetoric. As regards Presidents and aspirant Presidents, particularly because Charles de Gaulle was the first one, presidential rhetoric will constantly be used, further enhancing the political salience of history, culture, shared mythologies, and so on. This means that the political culture itself becomes richer, and the role of symbolism more politically consequential. It also further increases the symbolic effects of personalisation, image and presidential discourse.

It may be an exaggeration to depict the Fifth Republic (1958–) as the ‘Republic of leadership’; politics involves, inevitably, a myriad of other things, but the politics of France since 1958 has been distinguished by strong leadership. Notions of an exclusive ‘French exceptionalism’ are debatable, but France does distinguish itself at least from comparable ‘Western’ regimes of representative government through the emphasis it places on presidential power (and in the right circumstances upon the enormous power and authority the President wields). For the main part, Fifth Republic leadership has been strongly presidential, but the emergence of the focus on the presidency has had an impact well beyond the institution of the presidency itself. One could argue, in fact, that it is politically ingrained in the Republic today. France was not, traditionally, associated with a presidential-executive style of leadership; in fact the opposite is true. One of the constant themes of political writing in the Third Republic was the need for leadership at the top, and the divided and what seemed to be the unassertive nature of the Republic’s political elite. Of course, some of this criticism came from the extreme right and was a way of belittling the Republic’s response to contemporary France’s many problems (particularly, in fact, its fear of strong leadership) but the criticism went beyond this, and envious eyes were cast at the American presidency, taken – often with much lost in translation – as a Republican model.

In its origins, and today in some of its constitutional and institutional limitations, the American presidency was designed to domesticate the power of the personal, the ‘monarchic’. Ironically, it was during the time of the French Third Republic that the US presidency began to take on some of the leadership features that make France and the US comparable today, particularly in symbolic politics – strong rhetoric, national appeal, and consequential use of the media (all of this under FDR). But as with the original American presidency, French republican attitudes to strong leadership were also ‘Roman’ in their fear of ‘tyranny’. Hence French republicanism’s efforts to screen out from normal political practice all ‘imperial’-seeming claims to leadership. These efforts were, of course, redoubled after the European experience of fascism. So, from the 1789 Revolution onwards, French republicanism struggled with personal leadership; in the wake of World War II, de Gaulle’s envisioning pretensions were bound to hit the brick wall of republicanism’s assertions of impersonal power.

The Fifth Republic used to be known as ‘de Gaulle’s Republic’. This political coup was the starting point for the development of the presidential institution, a form of power that did not suit the republican temperament. Without the domination of the giant and institutionally formative figure of the General, it is difficult to imagine (in any counterfactual history) that the configuration of power would have been the same. But once the locus of power was established as the presidency, the competition to become President by winning the popular vote ensured that the Elysée was likely to remain the political focus. Had de Gaulle taken some other post – the premiership – then the supreme office would be that institution (although doubtless with very different symbolic consequences). It was not certain in 1958 that he would run for the presidency; and his greatest supporter, Michel Debré, thought that the premiership would (and should) be the focus of real power in the Fifth Republic. In strict constitutional terms, the Prime Minister is indeed the source of political authority in the Fifth Republic. In the constitution, the President is an ‘arbitrator’, or referee (l’arbitre), and has no independent powers, outside of the wholly exceptional case of national emergency. But the constitutional framework, in the way of legal strictures, has been swept aside by political developments, a process which, it should be stressed, was backed by public opinion.

In other words, the presidency is a supremely (and highly ambivalent) political institution. It has no constitutional powers beyond the limited ability to invoke other balancing forces under the constitution. This is like the previous Third and Fourth Republic Presidents who had only ceremonial functions, and who remained within that remit most of the time. The President often had transient authority in particular circumstances (foreign policy, for example), but this was not an executive function, and they could be brutally evicted from decision-making arenas (a classic example being Prime Minister Clemenceau’s sidelining President Poincaré in World War I). Thus, the exigencies of political authority require a President to bring together a majority of the public in competitive elections, but then to maintain the cohesion of that majority, as well as manage a general election victory. If they do these things they will enjoy legitimacy, power, and authority of breathtaking ambit.

Without the support of a majority in the Assembly, the Head of State becomes rather like the presidency of the Third Republic – remote but dignified and uninvolved in day-to-day politics, at best; humiliated and virtually powerless at worst. To use Giscard d’Estaing’s term, a President of one side faced by a hostile Assembly has to ‘cohabit’ with the government of another (‘cohabitation’, although not a constitutional term, has come into current usage to describe this situation). And they live with one another in a very unequal relationship. The President becomes the de facto (wary and hostile) leader of the opposition to the government over which they preside. ‘Cohabitation’ is a peculiar French arrangement and has no equivalent elsewhere in Western-type systems (the United States is a very different, although interesting comparator), but it has prevailed three times: for two years from 1986–8 and 1993–5, and for five years from 1997–2002 (a full legislative term), and it could have happened on other occasions. In these conditions, the President has to be treated with the respect due to a Head of State, but otherwise is not part of the executive. This does, however, place constraints on the government, which cannot frontally attack the leader of the opposition, and on the President, who cannot disown their government. ‘Cohabitation’ is a taut relationship and a surreptitiously conflictual one in which battles are fought by proxy or in areas where the contestants force their adversary onto what they think is impossible terrain. Two of these contests were ‘won’ by the President (in the sense that they were re-elected, in 1988 and 2002). From 1993–5, on the other hand, President Mitterrand was conspicuously in no position to run for a third term. Since the constitutional amendment of 2000, and the institution of a five-year quinquennium (replacing the traditional seven-year septennate), ‘cohabitation’ is in theory far less likely to occur.

In contrast, in what has come to be regarded as ‘normal times’, the President is the head of the majority in the National Assembly, whose destiny is linked with the President it supports. This makes the relationship between the President and the legislature’s majority similar to that between a Prime Minister and majority in other European systems. A Fifth Republic President with a majority has extensive power, but that power is an extra-constitutional growth. When the President holds this high ground they can intervene and determine any aspect of policy; there is no constitutional basis for a foreign policy and defence presidential ‘reserved domain’ (contrary to assertions), and powerful Presidents will extend their remit as they see fit. This can be the micro-management of anything from architecture to appointments, and it normally means close supervision of the ‘sovereign’ powers of foreign policy and defence.

In leadership terms, this means that the authority of the Fifth Republic President is dependent on obtaining and maintaining public support. Fifth Republic politics is politics in an open society and is about gaining, keeping and maintaining public backing for the government’s policies. Public support is democratically expressed through general elections for the National Assembly so that the President’s majority is an expression of public support. The presidency, however, is also linked to much wider notions of public support. A President’s room for manoeuvre on matters such as appointments, dominance over policy, having to respond to public pressure, or being ‘disavowed’ through, for example, losing a referendum (as happened to President Chirac in 2005), all relate the presidency very consequently to public approval in a wider sense. A popular President has a great deal more scope for action than an unpopular one. With that support, the President’s powers – relayed by the Assembly majority – are extensive. Thus, the President’s power is the exercise of political leadership on a permanent basis. All the political arts have, at one time or another, to be brought to bear on creating this support, and in persuading the public that the course of the Republic under their leadership is the correct one. Sometimes this fails and ‘cohabitation’ is the result.

For students of political leadership, therefore, the Fifth Republic forms a test bed of theories of the political art, or, to use Riker’s term, political ‘heresthetics’, second to none (Riker 1986). ‘Heresthetics’ is roughly what is meant by ‘manoeuvre’, but combined with manipulation and an eye for the advantage. However, the term ‘heresthetic’ is not pejorative, and structuring a position to gain advantage, without (if possible) that art being evident, is an inevitable part of politics in an open society. Observers of the French scene are not being given a glimpse into a uniquely depraved world, but of a milieu in which leadership manoeuvres have a presidential setting. All of the exercise of the political arts takes place in the context of a distinctive and sophisticated political culture that has its possibilities and constraints. Having said this, the highly personalised nature of such manoeuvres, the role of entourages and special advisors, the clashes of personalities, all lend to French politics an intrigue and complexity reminiscent of classical Rome or Renaissance city states.

This focus on leadership in contemporary French politics requires special analysis, and the contributors to this volume have chosen to focus on aspects of leadership using particular examples, in order to highlight the different facets of the phenomenon, as well as capturing and, where necessary, re-evaluating, the range of French presidencies. This book is therefore not a history of the politics of the Fifth Republic but an examination of salient aspects of Fifth Republic political leadership, and of political leadership more generally, and its relation to its conditions of policy development and political performance. All Presidents to date are examined, but each review of the features of their leadership will be different, according to the case studies.

Each author has decided to appraise and characterise what they feel are the most salient features of their case study. In the Fourth Republic, as in the Third, politicians in the Assembly were permanently negotiating: log-rolling, bargaining and dealing in committees. This led to an unassuming style of leadership that, coupled with the need to appeal to ordinary voters in the local constituencies, favoured, unsurprisingly, the undramatic figures who could make deals, fix things, and be relied upon both by their constituents and by their parties (as David Hanley shows in Chapter Two). Again unsurprisingly, very few of these Fourth Republic political leaders are remembered (aside from a very few personalities such as Antoine Pinay and Pierre Mendès France), but their roles enabled swaps and changes of position, as negotiations necessitated. The political figures of Henri Queuille and Pierre Pflimlin were typical: stolid political operators inoculated against flamboyancy (Williams 1964). This does not mean, contrary to assumptions, that there were no achievements: the economic growth of the 1950s, European integration and decolonisation were already well underway, and to no small degree thanks to this cohort of post-war politicians. But little was attributable to individuals, as such. Much of the work of the legislatures was done in committees away from the public gaze, where these complex bargains could be enacted in a relatively discreet manner, without claims to visionary leadership, self-promotion or narcissistic self-display.

De Gaulle introduced into the Fifth Republic a leadership of a fundamentally different order from that of the Fourth Republic. De Gaulle brought into the heart of the Republic mythologies about France and about leadership, which already existed in French society and political culture, but had been screened out, pushed to the margins of the republican tradition. It is here that the Fifth Republic is distinguished dramatically from its predecessors. Symbolic politics floods into the new regime, reconfiguring the parameters of politics itself. In the Fifth Republic, the leaders have to strike public postures and dramatise their political positions to win support across the nation. Figures like Senate Speaker Alain Poher, the modest interim President in 1969 and 1974, can be appreciated by the public, but to date have been rejected in competition with the projected self-image and more dramatic performances of ‘envisioning’ contenders (the question of which is the ‘better’ form of leadership opens a much bigger discussion, but the public, as mentioned, clearly prefers the leadership styles of the Fifth Republic). The contrast in leaderships is between the Fourth Republic’s minimalist, semi-visible style, and the more personality-driven mode of the Fifth, which seeks maximum exposure. Fifth Republic leaders, of course, depend on political party backing, and the rise and ‘nation-wide’ extension of the party as the mainstay of the presidential system is, ironically, one of the features of the Fifth Republic, however much this is denied by Gaullists, for whom the ‘party’ is anathema, because a party divides, whereas a ‘rally’ brings people together, rallies and unites (Pütz 2007; Graham 1993).

In the first section of this book, the general background to the Fifth Republic is discussed. There are the aspects of the abrupt change in leadership style from the Fourth to the Fifth Republics and the constitutional developments which accompanied that change. These are analysed by David Hanley and Jack Hayward, respectively. It is important in a study of political leadership of this nature, which deals with both culture and institutions in a comparative context, to set this framework for the subsequent studies of individual Presidents treated in the separate chapters.

In Chapter Two of Part One, David Hanley anatomises the Fourth Republic’s leadership and the forces behind it. A model of republican leadership is described and the forces making for change are outlined. This enables Hanley to demonstrate a contrast between the two Republics in what is, of course, a single country. Hanley’s is essentially a comparative empirical and theoretical exercise. This is important for what happens subsequently, and establishes the political dynamics of Fifth Republic leadership. There are many factors at work here, including the change in the Fifth Republic to move towards the bipolar party system around the left/right cleavage and the presidency. Many of these themes are investigated later in the book.

In Chapter Three, Jack Hayward goes back to the origins of the Fifth Republic Constitution and to the political culture (here, statecraft) that undergirds any written constitution. This chapter also examines attempts by academic observers like Maurice Duverger to find an appropriate model of Fifth Republic government (Duverger 1980 and 1986). As the chapter makes clear, the regime inaugurated in 1958 by de Gaulle is presidential (under certain circumstances), and, in 1958, the Algerian War, the threat of a military coup, and de Gaulle’s popularity acted as a three-line whip for the President in the Assembly. This political situation, to which de Gaulle was the key, meant that there was no initial resistance to the aggrandisement of the executive presidency; once this had been accomplished, resistance was pushed aside.

At the beginning of the Fifth Republic, the stature of the President and the political authority of de Gaulle effaced the Prime Minister (leading to Duverger’s famous remark of Michel Debré, de Gaulle’s Prime Minister: ‘M. Debré existe-t-il?’ (Duverger 1959)). This set the pattern against which the future leadership of the Republic would be measured. Duverger subsequently classified the Fifth Republic as a ‘semi-presidential system’ and placed it in a new category of presidential regimes in Europe (along with Weimar Germany and 1970s Portugal, neither particularly apt comparisons). This was disputed by many, including the jurisprudential authority Georges Vedel who argued that it was less a new regime type than a hybrid (Elgie 1995). That is to say, the institutional structure can swing from the President to the Prime Minister in the space of an election, and power moves over the river, from the presidential Palace of the Elysée on the right bank of the Seine, to the Prime Minister’s residence, the Matignon on the left bank.

As Jack Hayward argues, French presidentialism can easily move into ‘hyper-presidential’ mode in a way that is not consistent, for example, with the United States system of presidential government. Many of these overly formal interpretations of the powers of the presidency in the Fifth Republic miss the fundamental truth about the President in the Fifth Republic. The constitution does not tell us much about the presidency in reality. What de Gaulle did – ably helped by a sense of drama in 1958 – in a move seen as indispensable to re-establishing the authority of the state and solving the Algerian crisis, was to bring centre stage the role of personality and persona in the political process, and its use in recognising institutions and their salience; in this way, he rewrote the rules of the game, elevating the status of leadership and making the role of ‘persona’ and its e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Presidents and Prime Ministers of the French Fifth Republic, 1958–present
• Presidential Election Results for 2012
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction: the Presidency in the French Fifth Republic David S. Bell and John Gaffney
• Part I Republican Presidentialism
• Part II The Presidents
• Index