POLITICS AND GOVERNMENT The Government and Politics of France PDF

The Government and Politics of France
This fifth edition of The Government and Politics of France offers a fully revised,
updated and comprehensive view of the contemporary French political scene based on
the work of the leading specialist on France of his generation. It covers such events as
the dramatic presidential election of 2002 and includes a major new chapter on France
and European integration, culminating in the historic rejection of the European consti-
tutional treaty by French voters in May 2005.
Although particular attention is paid to the most recent period, the book covers the
whole of the Fifth Republic in depth, from its heroic beginnings under de Gaulle to the
period of reverses and defeats sustained by successive governments under the Mitter-
rand and Chirac presidencies. The contemporary period is placed firmly in the context
of those long-standing political traditions which have maintained their power to shape
French political behaviour to this day.
The long view supplied in this book allows a unique understanding of how the
dynamic, confident economic and political power of the early de Gaulle years has
become the more hesitant and troubled nation of the early twenty-first century – and of
the points of continuity that underlie this development.
The Government and Politics of France is the authoritative guide to French politics
and is essential for undergraduates and postgraduates with interests in French politics,
European studies and political science.
Andrew Knapp is Professor of French Politics and Contemporary History at the Uni-
versity of Reading. He is author of Parties and the Party System in France (2004), Le
Gaullisme après de Gaulle (1996), and, with Yves Mény, Government and Politics in
Western Europe (third edition, 1998).
The late Vincent Wright was Official Fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford, and one of
the world’s leading specialists on French and European Government.
The Government and Politics
of France
Fifth edition
Andrew Knapp and Vincent Wright

First published 2006
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor and Francis Group, an informa business
© 2006 Andrew Knapp & Vincent Wright
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006.
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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

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ISBN10: 0–415–35733–0 (hbk)

ISBN10: 0–415–35732–2 (pbk)
ISBN10: 0–203–40260–X (ebk)
ISBN13: 978–0–415–35733–3 (hbk)

ISBN13: 978–0–415–35732–6 (pbk)
ISBN13: 978–0–203–40260–3 (ebk)
To the memory of Vincent Wright
Contents
List of figures and maps xv

List of tables xvi
Preface to the fifth edition xvii
Preface to the fourth edition xviii
1 French political traditions in a changing context 1

A legacy of conflict 1
The régime 2
The Church 4
The politics of class 6
Le parti du mouvement et le parti de l’ordre 8
Nationalisms 10
State traditions 14
The common core 14
Liberty, equality, fraternity 16
Dirigisme 18
The state: image and reality 22
The changing context of French political traditions 24
Post-war boom: the trente glorieuses 24
Globalisation 27
Europe 29
Political conflict and the state: transformations 31
Zones of consensus 31
The dismantling of dirigisme 33
The state tradition: challenges from within 35
Redefining political conflict 37
The survival of traditions 40
The state tradition 40
Patterns of political conflict 44
Concluding remarks 46
Further reading 47
viii Contents
2 From Fourth to Fifth Republic 49
Ultimately, a failure: the Fourth Republic (1946–58) 49
The Gaullist agenda 51
Between Washington and Westminster 53
Readings of the Fifth Republic 59
The republican monarchy 59
A ‘parliamentary régime’ 61
The Constitutional Council and the État de droit 63
The constitution in flux 64
Further reading 66
3 Presidents and prime ministers: the personal factor 67

Charles de Gaulle (1890–1970) 67
Georges Pompidou (1908–74) 68
Valéry Giscard d’Estaing (1926–) 70
François Mitterrand (1916–96) 73
Jacques Chirac (1932–) 76
Prime ministers 80
Further reading 84
4 The sources of executive power 85

Constitutional resources 85
Prime minister and government 85
The president 87
Administrative resources 91
The Matignon machine 91
The Élysée 93
President and prime minister: political resources 95
Further reading 108
5 Executive policy-making: the variable diarchy 109

Presidential government 109
Presidential control of the government 110
Processes of presidential policy-making 111
Domains of presidential policy-making 112
Presidential policy-making: limitations and models 118
Contents ix
Cohabitation: prime ministerial government? 121
Cohabitation and party politics 121
Cohabitation: oiling the wheels 122
Cohabitation: patronage and policy-making 123
Models of cohabitation 127
Ministers and government 129
The role of ministers under the Fifth Republic 129
The variable nature of ministerial power 131
Institutionalised tensions and the elusive goal of co-ordination 134
Further reading 140
6 The French parliament: decline – and resurgence? 141

The constitutional assault upon parliament: the provisions 142
The separation of powers 143
Restrictions on parliamentary sessions 143
The limitation on parliament’s law-making powers 144
The passage of government business 145
A less accountable executive 147
The Constitutional Council as anti-parliamentary watchdog 149
The decline of parliament: factors unconstitutional and
extra-constitutional 149
An overbearing executive 149
Le fait majoritaire 152
Parliament’s lack of resources 153
Absenteeism and impotence 154
A resurgent parliament? 155
The survival of the Senate 155
Parliament’s institutional reinforcement since 1974 157
The loosening of parliamentary discipline 161
Obstructions, amendments and private members’ bills 162
Further reading 166
7 The Left and the Greens: the dilemma of government 168

The divided Left 171
The Parti Communiste Français (PCF) 177
The Fifth Republic and the decline of the PCF 177
The PCF’s mutation: too little, too late? 183
x Contents
The Parti Socialiste (PS) 186
Alliances 188
Factions 191
Leadership 193
Members and elites 195
Ideology and policies 196
Money 199
Electoral support 199
The far Left 202
Citoyens et Radicaux 205
The ecology groupings 207
Further reading 214
8 The Right: domination and division 216

The Gaullists 217
The search for identity: 1958–62 218
Growth, consolidation and hegemony: 1962–73 218
The loss of power: 1973–76 221
Organisational renovation, electoral and strategic impasse: 1976–81 222
Chirac’s two defeats: 1981–88 223
Disarray and victory: 1988–95 223
Victory and disarray: 1995–2000 224
The non-Gaullist moderate Right (NGMR) 227
Conflict, co-operation and the UMP 232
Other right-wing groups 236
The extreme Right: permanence and isolation of the Front National 239
The far Right’s lasting breakthrough 240
The FN in the French political system 244
Further reading 250
9 Transformations of the party system: continuity and change 252

Party configurations, 1956–2005 253
The transitional phase, 1958–62 254
Gaullist ‘dominance’, 1962–74 255
The ‘bipolar quadrille’, 1974–81 255
Socialist ‘dominance’, 1981–86 256
The challenge to ‘parties of government’, 1986–97 256
Full circle? 1997–present 257
Contents xi
Bipolar multipartism 259
Bipolarity: characteristics 259
Multipartism: characteristics 261
Institutional dynamics 262
Social developments, new issues and voting behaviour 267
Personal and party strategies 274
Further reading 279
10 The administration: foundations, myth and changing reality 281

The foundations and myth of administrative power 282
The French state at high tide: the Fifth Republic to 1986 284
The bases of administrative power 285
An omnipotent administration? 289
The administration transformed? 295
New pressures 296
A shrinking state 298
The administration and the limits to change 301
Further reading 310
11 The state and the pressure groups 312

The domination-crisis model 315
The domination-crisis model: evidence in favour 316
The domination-crisis model: objections 320
The endemic and open conflict model 322
The endemic and open conflict model: evidence in favour 322
The endemic and open conflict model: objections 328
The corporatist and concerted politics models 330
Corporatism: evidence in favour 331
Corporatism: objections 333
The pluralist model 334
Pluralism: evidence in favour 335
Pluralism: objections 337
An untidy reality 337
Mixed models 338
Determinants of group influence 339
Further reading 347
xii Contents
12 Paris and the provinces: the post-Jacobin state 349
The institutions and the actors 351
Representative assemblies and their executives 353
The prefectoral authorities 354
The local field services 356
Other local bodies 357
Jacobinism and its limits: France before decentralisation 357
The bases of central power 358
Local influences in the one and indivisible Republic 359
Decentralisation: the measures 366
The Defferre reforms 366
Defferre to Jospin 368
Decentralisation under Raffarin 371
Europe and the regions 372
Local authorities and private business 374
Assessing decentralisation: plus ça change? 377
Subsidiarity 377
Rationalisation 379
Democratisation 380
Assessing decentralisation: the local system transformed 381
Local finance 382
Local authority staff 382
Local economic development 383
Local policy-making 383
New local actors 383
Networks and local authority entrepreneurship 384
Concluding remarks: a continuing process 385
Further reading 387
13 French justice and the elusive État de droit 389

French judicial traditions: law in the service of the state 390
Main actors in the contemporary judicial system 393
The European Court of Justice (ECJ) 394
The European Court of Human Rights 395
The Constitutional Council 395
The Cour de Justice de la République (Court of Justice of the
Republic) 396
The ordinary courts 396
The Conseil d’État (Council of State) 397
The Cour des Comptes (Court of Accounts) 398
Contents xiii
The judicialisation of public policy 400
The spread of litigation 400
The reinforcement of judicial review 400
The extension of judicial intervention 402
The criminalisation of new areas 403
The internalisation of judicial constraints 403
Judges as policy-makers 403
The decline of special courts 404
The spread of quasi-judicial procedures 404
Judges as policy advisers 404
The reinforcement of judicial independence 405
Judicial activism and corruption cases 405
Explaining judicialisation 408
The État de droit: obstacles and resistance 412
Further reading 420
14 France and European integration 422

European integration: process and interpretation 423
The narrative of integration 423
Interpreting integration (1): realism, intergovernmentalism 430
Interpreting integration (2): neo-functionalism, institutionalism 432
France and the integration process 434
France and Europe: benefits and costs 435
Presidential perspectives 438
The Franco-German partnership: reconciliation, collusion – and
decline? 441
Europe, the French state and French public policy-making 446
Speaking with one voice? France and European policy-making 447
Implementation: the slow man of Europe? 451
France and European policies 453
The Common Agricultural Policy 453
France, Europe and the neo-liberal paradigm change 459
The Common Foreign and Security Policy 467
Voters, parties and Europe 472
Further reading 484
15 Conclusion 487
Slow growth, unemployment, public spending 489
The politics of constraint 491
xiv Contents
A weak régime? 493
Further reading 500
Appendices
1 Chronological table: main events from the Revolution to the collapse
of the Fourth Republic 501
2 Chronological table: main events from the foundation of the Fifth
Republic until 2005 503
3 Voting behaviour, presidential election, first ballot, 2002 514
4 Voting behaviour, legislative elections, second ballot, 2002 516
5 Voting behaviour in two referendums on Europe, 1992 and 2005 517
6 Abbreviations for French parties 518
7 Other abbreviations 520
Index 522
Figures and maps
Figures
2.1 The heart of the Fifth Republic Constitution 57
2.2 The Fifth French Republic, 1958–2005: a chronological framework 58
7.1 Votes for the Communist Party, 1956–2004 178
7.2 Votes for Socialist parties, 1956–2004 200
7.3 Votes for the far Left, 1962–2004 203
7.4 Votes for ecology movements, 1974–2004 208
8.1 Votes for Gaullist parties, 1958–2004 219
8.2 Votes for the non-Gaullist moderate Right, 1958–2004 230
8.3 Votes for the extreme Right, 1958–2004 240
9.1 The party system of the Fourth Republic: a simplified view 253
Maps
9.1 Presidential elections, 1974: Giscard d’Estaing, second ballot 269
9.2 Presidential elections, 1995: Chirac, second ballot 270
12.1 France: départements and regions 353
Tables
(see also appendices)
1.1 Left, Right, and the tradition of political division in France 2

1.2 France: régimes since 1789 3
2.1 Constitutional amendments since 1958 65
3.1 Presidents of the Fifth Republic 67
3.2 Prime ministers of the Fifth Republic 81
4.1 Presidential popularities, October 1978–June 2005 99
4.2 Prime ministerial popularities, October 1978–May 2005 99
4.3 Party and majority support for presidents under the Fifth Republic 102
5.1 Percentage of ministers without any parliamentary seat on their
appointment, 1958–2005 130
6.1 Use of Articles 44–3 and 49–3 in the National Assembly, 1958–2004 146
6.2 Amendments in the National Assembly, 1968–73 and 1997–2002 162
7.1 France: party membership since 1945 172
7.2 Results of National Assembly elections under the Fifth Republic 174
7.3 Results of presidential elections (first ballots), 1965–2002 175
7.4 Results of presidential elections (second ballots), 1965–2002 176
7.5 Party control of towns of over 30,000 inhabitants, 1971–2001 181
8.1 The growth of the right-wing ruling coalition, 1958–81 233
9.1 Bipolar multipartism: the party system of the Fifth Republic 260
9.2 The two-ballot system: alliances rewarded 263
9.3 The two-ballot system: isolation penalised 263
11.1 The strength of major trade unions in France 317
11.2 Working days lost through strikes in France, 1963–81 323
11.3 Working days lost through strikes in France, 1982–2001 323
12.1 Local budgets, 1984 and 2001 352
12.2 Notables in the National Assembly, 1978, 1988 and 2002 362
13.1 The political composition of the Constitutional Council 415
13.2 Public confidence in the justice system in Europe, 1999 419
14.1 A chronology of the EU, 1950–2005 424
14.2 Attitudes to European integration in France and Europe, 1980–2004 473
14.3 French fears of Europe, spring 2004 474
14.4 Turnout at European elections in France and EEC/EU, 1979–2004 475
Preface to the fifth edition
Much of the new material in this edition is framed by two polling days: 21 April 2002,
when France’s voters surprised themselves and the world by putting a candidate of the
extreme Right into the second ballot of a presidential election, and 29 May 2005, when
they rejected the constitutional treaty signed by twenty-five European leaders the previ-
ous year. The former is incorporated chiefly into the chapters on party politics, the
latter into an entirely new chapter (Chapter 14) on France and Europe which I had
already decided to add to the text, and drafts of which David Goldey and Wilfrid
Knapp were again kind enough to read. All other chapters have been revised and
updated to varying degrees.
France in 2005 was prey to a bout of (not wholly unfounded) pessimism about its
own long-term future, and this will doubtless appear in some of the following pages.
But it has not stopped being one of Europe’s most enjoyable countries to study; it is to
be hoped that the rest of the book reflects this too, as Vincent Wright’s earlier editions
did so well.
Andrew Knapp
Reading, July 2005
Preface to the fourth edition
‘You’ll be doing all the work, so don’t bother to put my name on the cover. This is the
last wish of a dying man – the ultimate form of blackmail!’ Thus the injunction
delivered, with a rather unsettling laugh, by Vincent Wright as we discussed the revision
of his book a few weeks before his death from cancer in July 1999. There was never any
chance that I would follow it. This is still, to a great extent, his book. The overall
structure is largely his. He wrote significant parts of the first and last chapters, which
are new. The other chapters build on the structures and the material of earlier editions.
My task of revision was a constant dialogue with a great scholar who left us far too
soon and whose work deserves to stand for a very long time.
Yet the revisions, which we planned and I implemented, have been on a large scale.
Events determined this. When the third edition was prepared, ‘cohabitation’ between a
president and a prime minister of opposed political camps could still appear as a
temporary interruption to a normal pattern of presidential power. The rise of the Front
National was still a recent event. Decentralisation had barely taken root. While the
economic U-turn of March 1983 had demonstrated the limits to France’s economic
independence, the manner in which the effects of globalisation and Europeanisation
would be diffused through the whole political system, from the executive to interest
groups, from parties to regions, from parliament to the administration, was still largely
unforeseen. The transformation of relations within the executive necessitated a major
restructuring of the relevant chapters, for the prime minister can no longer be treated,
as was still possible in the third edition, as the ‘other executive’, normally a secondary
player next to the president. The roles of France’s two executives are so closely inter-
linked, and in such complex ways, that it seems appropriate to discuss the two in
parallel throughout. A similarly large restructuring has transformed Chapter 9, where
the interplay between the tendencies to bipolarity and fragmentation within France’s
party system has been given a more synthetic treatment than would have been possible
in the former framework.
Chapter 13, on the rise of judicial power in France, is a particular case. Though new
to this book, it appeared in an earlier version, written entirely by Vincent Wright and
entitled ‘The Fifth Republic: from the Droit de l’État to the État de Droit?’, in West
European Politics, volume 22, no. 4, October 1999, pp. 92–119. This special issue of
West European Politics, including the same article, also appeared in book form as
Robert Elgie (ed.), The Changing French Political System (London, Frank Cass, 2000).
Chapter 13 has been revised by me, but contains much material from the earlier article,
which is included by the kind permission of Frank Cass Publishers.
Robert Lane Greene gave valuable assistance with bibliographical research. David
Preface to the fourth edition xix
Goldey and Wilfrid Knapp read substantial parts of the draft and made invaluable
suggestions for improvement, for which my heartfelt thanks. The responsibility for
errors lies, of course, with me; they are practically certain to have crept in since the third
edition.
Sara and Viveca Knapp, finally, allowed me to shut myself away on the second
floor more frequently than they, or I, would have preferred, over two long Auvergnat
summers; and sustained me, in an infinite number of ways, when I came downstairs.
Andrew Knapp
Reading, October 2000
1 French political traditions in a
changing context
A legacy of conflict 1
State traditions 14
The changing context of French political traditions 24
Political conflict and the state: transformations 31
The survival of traditions 40
Further reading 47
‘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 French-
men 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 trad-
itional 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, Social-
ists 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
2 French political traditions
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
Area of division Left Right
Régime (early Submit exercise of royal power to Maintain pre-1789 absolute

Revolution) consent of an elected National monarchy
Assembly
Régime (nineteenth Republicanism, including Monarchism (divided between
century) universal suffrage and civil support for Bourbon, Orléans,
liberties (press, assembly, Bonaparte dynasties)
association)
Régime (first half of Parliamentary republicanism: Moderate republicanism: power
twentieth century) political power to be vested in a of National Assembly to be
National Assembly, preferably tempered by an indirectly elected
unicameral Senate, and/or a strong executive
Church (nineteenth Laïcité: limit the Church’s role to Maintain Catholicism as official
century) matters spiritual; limit its role in state religion; maintain or
education; separate Church from reinforce the Church’s role in
state; anti-clericalism education
Church (twentieth Maintain strict separation of Reinforce the Church’s role in
century) Church and state: no state education, notably via state
subsidies to Catholic schools subsidies to Catholic schools
Economy and society Income tax to finance social Laissez-faire capitalism, plus
(late nineteenth reforms: shorter working week; protection of French agriculture
century) factory legislation and industry; no income tax or
social security
Economy and society Replacement of the capitalist Maintenance of capitalism, more
(1905–85) system by socialism, whether via or less tempered by social reforms
gradual reform or (for (after 1945) and by protection (at
Communists) through more or all times)
less violent revolution
General temperament ‘Party of movement’ ‘Party of order’
French political traditions 3
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 transi-
tions involved popular (often Parisian) insurrections and bloodshed. The first Revolu-
tion, 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 fight-
ing 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
1789–92 Constitutional monarchy: king’s powers limited by National Assembly

1792–1804 First Republic: elected National Assembly, but political power resides successively
with the Committee of Public Safety (1793–95), the Directorate (1795–99) and the
Consulate (1799–1804)
1804–14 First Empire: rule of Napoleon I, legitimised by (rigged) plebiscites
1814–30 Restoration monarchy: Bourbon monarchy of Louis XVIII and Charles X, plus a
parliament with limited powers
1830–48 Orleanist monarchy: constitutional monarchy with ministers responsible to a
parliament elected by limited suffrage
1848–52 Second Republic: both National Assembly and President directly elected by
universal adult male suffrage
1852–70 Second Empire: rule of Napoleon III, legitimised by plebiscites, with concessions
to parliamentarianism from 1869
1870–1940 Third Republic: Chamber of Deputies elected by direct universal male suffrage;
indirectly elected Senate; weak President and Prime Minister
1940–44 Vichy: personal rule of Marshal Philippe Pétain, constrained chiefly by the
German occupation of France
1944–46 Provisional post-war government: single-chamber Constituent Assemblies, elected
by direct universal adult suffrage (including women voters)
1946–58 Fourth Republic: broadly comparable to Third, with weaker Senate and women’s
suffrage
1958– Fifth Republic: President, Prime Minister and Government, National Assembly,
Senate (cf. Chapter 2).
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 (Legit-
imists, 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 deter-
mined 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 re-
emerged, 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 right-
wingers 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 abol-
ished. 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 essen-
tially 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 supersti-
tions, 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 belliger-
ent powers of Europe through the construction of European institutions, the construc-
tion 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 anti-
clerical, attracted mostly conservative Catholic voters, many of whom deserted to
Gaullism or to the traditional conservative Right as soon as it was possible or respect-
able 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 meas-
ured 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, anarcho-syndicalism and
Marxism, espoused progressive reform within the capitalist system. Anarcho-
syndicalism drew from the disastrous experience of the Commune the lesson that main-
stream 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 its British,
Belgian or German counterparts. Marxism, in its most doctrinally rigid form, became
the official dogma of the largest single French socialist party of the late nineteenth
century, the Parti Ouvrier Français founded by Jules Guesde; it largely superseded
earlier French varieties of socialist doctrine. As a revolutionary myth, Marxism was an
attractive response to the hardship of the working-class condition, to its political isol-
ation, and to the violence that was regularly visited upon workers by employers, the
police or troops. But as a programme for action for a country with a small working
class, it was deeply misguided. The socialist revolution being unattainable, at least in the
short term, reforms within the existing Republic were the only available means to
improve the workers’ condition. But the only government that might implement such
reforms would be a coalition between socialists and non-socialist forces such as the
Radicals. Such a coalition would inevitably water down reforms. Moderate socialist
reformism, however, was a force within the French Left that dared not speak its name:
the practical moderation of the SFIO was overlaid with a rhetorical commitment to
class struggle and the overthrow of capitalism. The contrast between revolutionary
rhetoric, on the one hand, and less than revolutionary practice, on the other, and the
inevitable accusations of betrayal that result, has been a constant in the history of the
French Left ever since.
The most important force sustaining the intellectual hegemony of Marxism (in its
Leninist, and then Stalinist, forms) on the Left was the Parti Communiste Français
(PCF). The PCF was founded in 1920, at the Congress of Tours, when the SFIO, like
other European socialist parties, split on the issue of whether to join Lenin’s Commun-
ist International. The Leninists actually won a majority at Tours, winning control of
the party’s assets and its newspaper, L’Humanité, for the PCF. For the next fifteen years,
the sectarian, Moscow-directed PCF lost ground steadily to the SFIO, though it still
supplied enough competition to pull its older rival leftwards. After the mid-1930s it
gathered strength first from the anti-Fascist Popular Front alliance with Socialists and
Radicals, which allowed it to gain important positions in the trade union movement,
and then from the leading role it played in the internal French Resistance after June
1941. The PCF’s own wartime record, and the prestige enjoyed by the Soviet Union
after the Allied victory in Europe, won it the loyalty of a quarter of French voters.
It was the largest party in the 1945 Constituent Assembly, with ministers in France’s
post-war governments. But the onset of the Cold War led to the ministers’ dismissal in
May 1947; the Cold War cleavage split the Left durably (with the Socialist leader Guy
Mollet saying that the Communists were ‘neither on the Left nor the Right, but on the
East’), and excluded Communists from national office for over a generation. Indeed,
the fact that the PCF remained the dominant force on the French Left for the thirty
post-war years helped to keep the Left out of power. The Socialists, without the possi-
bility of a Communist alliance, governed under the Fourth Republic with parties of the
Centre, chiefly the Radicals and the MRP, with generally unimpressive results; under
the Fifth Republic the Left was out of government altogether for twenty-three years.
Despite its political isolation, however, the PCF continued to dominate the doctrinal
debate on the Left, ensuring, for example, as a result of its rigid loyalty to Moscow, that
the stock of the Soviet Union long stood higher in France than in other Western states.
The PCF’s ideological force resulted partly from its size: no major project on the Left
could be achieved without the largest left-wing party that possessed the most members,
the biggest electorate and the toughest organisation. The PCF also benefited from its
success in attracting prestigious intellectual and artistic figures like Louis Aragon,
Pablo Picasso and Jean-Paul Sartre who, whether as party members or as ‘fellow-
travellers’, helped ensure that Marxism occupied the intellectual high ground during the
post-war generation.
Le parti du mouvement et le parti de l’ordre

The Right and the Left, it has often been claimed, are not merely coalitions of dis-
persed and at times antagonistic interests like the American Republican and Demo-
cratic parties. Rather, they are globally opposed political families, each with a distinct
set of common values, which François Goguel, the doyen of French political science,
has characterised as the ‘party of movement’ (the Left) and the ‘party of order’ (the
Right) – though of course neither Left nor Right has ever managed to unite into a
single political party. Left-wing values, according to this broad distinction, include the
belief in the power of human reason to achieve progress for the benefit of the human
race; secularism or laïcité, seen as necessary to remove the impediment to progress
represented by the institutional entrenchment of any religion; the belief in the exercise
of sovereignty by a nation of free and equal citizens through their elected parlia-
mentary representatives, and thus a mistrust of strong personal political leadership
insofar as that distanced the exercise of political power from the nation; and a belief in
the use of politics to achieve a measure of social justice to match the political liberties
and rights of the Republic. For its critics, the Left was regularly guilty of crass and
intolerant anti-clericalism, unrealistic social reformism, doctrinaire Marxism and class
hatred. The values of the ‘party of order’ include a scepticism about the capacity of
radical reforms to achieve the human well-being they seek, and a sensitivity to the anti-
competitive consequences of reforms affecting the workplace; a belief in the value of
the Catholic Church, both in itself and as an instrument of social cohesion; and a belief
that a country as prone to social and political divisions as France stands in need of
strong political leadership. For the Left, this translates as a selfish and reactionary
opposition to long-overdue measures of social justice, a wish to impose the doctrine of
the Catholic Church on the population, and a penchant for authoritarianism and
repression.
This bipolar vision of the French political landscape has many attractions. Opinion
polls show that the French have little difficulty in placing both themselves and leading
politicians at a particular point on a Left–Right continuum. Left and Right have been
regular terms of French political discourse for over a century (though for long periods,
and certainly during the post-war generation, very few politicians would openly admit
to being right-wing). But the bipolar vision needs to be qualified, in a number of ways.
• The content of Left and Right has varied over time. To be a republican was to be
unambiguously on the Left in the nineteenth century; the two became much less
closely associated in the twentieth.
• The divisions within the two families have at times been as important as the divi-
sions between them. On the Left, the Radicals tempered their love for the repub-
lican ideals of the Revolution (in which anti-clericalism was often salient) with a
cautious conservatism on most economic issues; the Socialists combined Marxist
rhetoric with reformist practice; the Communists’ claims to be the revolutionary
workers’ vanguard were long a façade for a more or less slavish obedience to
Moscow’s dictates of the moment. Political alliances between these three parties, as
occurred, for example, during the Popular Front period of the mid-1930s, were
hard to achieve, inherently unstable, and susceptible to accusations of betrayal on
all sides. The Right, too, has always included distinct currents. René Rémond
distinguishes three: a reactionary element, deeply hostile to the ideals of the 1789
Revolution; a moderate conservative grouping, committed to balanced government
and a measure of economic liberalism; and a nationalist current, standing for
strong leadership at home, with close links, through plebiscites, referendums or
direct election, between the leader and the people, and national self-assertion
abroad. To these might be added, especially during the post-war generation, the
Christian Democratic current represented by the MRP and, later, by the various
parties identified with the Centre, more liberal in politics, less laissez-faire in eco-
nomics. The Left’s mistrust of strong political leadership, it might be added, was
shared by most of the moderate Right, at least by the post-war period; while the
supposed (and, at times, real) authoritarianism of the Right was at least equalled
by the internal practice and external ambitions of the PCF.
• For many decades, the practical realities of French politics coincided hardly at all
with the bipolar vision. For much of the Third and Fourth Republics, France was
governed by coalitions of Centre-Right and Centre-Left that straddled the divide
between the two big families. Parties like the Radicals or the MRP made a virtue of
their centrist positions, claiming to offer a juste milieu between the excesses of
Soviet-style collectivism on the one hand and free-market capitalism on the other.
Many of the great survivors of twentieth-century French politics were men who
knew how to trim their policies and their alliances to circumstance: men like the
Radical Édouard Herriot (collector of ministerial offices during the Third Repub-
lic, three times prime minister between the wars, president of pre-war and post-war
National Assemblies, and mayor of Lyon from 1905 till 1957), Jacques Chaban-
Delmas (Gaullist prime minister from 1969 to 1972, and mayor of Bordeaux from
1947 to 1995), or even François Mitterrand (who first won elective office as a fierce
anti-communist in 1946, became the Fifth Republic’s first Socialist president in
1981 thanks in part to a rapprochement with the Communists, and proceeded to
ditch many of his party’s left-wing economic ideas in the face of hard economic
realities).
• Attitudes to certain fundamental political questions, including the character of the
nation, France’s role in the world, and the role of the state, largely escape categor-
isation into the families of Left and Right. These issues will be examined in the next
two sections.
Nationalisms
Nationalism was at first a left-wing ideal: against the principles of dynastic inheritance
and the divine right of kings which underlay absolute monarchy, it opposed the free-
dom of a sovereign people to choose its own government. For Jacobins, France had a
unique mission to spread the values of the Revolution, in particular those enshrined in
the Declaration of the Rights of Man, to the whole world. Perhaps the defining event
of this type of ‘civic’ nationalism was the Battle of Valmy in September 1792, when
France’s citizen army defeated the invading Prussian grenadiers – sent, in the not
altogether inaccurate popular view, by a league of European despots to destroy the
Revolution: the First Republic was proclaimed two days after the victory. A similar
nationalism was displayed by the Left in 1870, when republicanism went hand in hand
with a determination to pursue the war against Prussia even after the crushing defeat at
Sedan. The Communists, born as a pro-Soviet party opposed to all wars between
nations (though not between classes), prospered only when they captured this part of
the Jacobin legacy, first through their hostility to Nazism before 1939, and then during
the Resistance after 1941. The Jacobin conception of citizenship was a broad one: it
stressed both the rights to citizenship of all individuals born in France whatever their
parentage (a principle of nationality, the jus solis, that predated the Revolution by over
two centuries, was abandoned by the Revolutionaries themselves, but reinstated in
1889) and the duty of citizens of non-French origin to integrate into the nation, in
effect leaving their non-French origins behind them.
A more ethnic nationalism of the far Right, opposed in almost every way to the
Jacobin tradition, also took shape in France during the last fifteen years of the nine-
teenth century. Its pedigree stretches from Paul Déroulède’s Ligue des Patriotes,
founded in 1885, to Charles Maurras’s Action Française, dating from the turn of the
century, to right-wing leagues like the Croix de Feu of the 1930s, to Vichy, to the last-
ditch defenders of Algérie française in the early 1960s, to the contemporary Front
National. Resulting initially from the frustration of the Right at the consolidation of
the Third Republic, this brand of nationalism has specialised in the identification of
scapegoats to blame for France’s real or supposed ills: Protestants, Jews and Freema-
sons for Maurras, Jews and Freemasons again for Vichy, North African immigrants and
Jews for the Front National. This approach was meant to provide the popular support
that royalism and then traditional Catholicism could no longer muster from the
enemies of the Republic. Because the nationalism of the far Right has sought to separ-
ate, on more or less racial lines, the ‘true’ community of the French from the supposedly
corrupting elements within the national territory, it has been variously referred to as a
nationalisme d’exclusion, a nationalisme identitaire, or a nationalisme de repli: a national-
ism, in other words, that is far more concerned with an inward-looking attempt to
defend a supposedly true French national identity than with the more open, expansive
Jacobin tradition. Not surprisingly, the nationalism of the far Right rejects the values
of the Revolution, preferring hierarchy to equality and a muscular brand of funda-
mentalist (‘intégriste’) Catholicism to secularism. It also seeks the replacement of the
jus solis by the jus sanguinis, under which parentage rather than place of birth defines
citizenship. Initially, the nationalism of the far Right was fiercely anti-German, calling
for an early revanche for the defeat of 1870. That its only experience of government was
acquired thanks to the German Occupation of 1940–44 is one of the more piquant
ironies of French history.
The defeat of 1940, and Charles de Gaulle’s decision to call on the French to con-
tinue the struggle under his leadership, gave a new and forceful expression to a third
variety of French nationalism which had been crowded out by the extremists. In many
ways Gaullism owes more to the Jacobin tradition than to the extreme Right. Its
conception of citizenship is an inclusive one, and its preoccupation is with France’s
independence and standing in the world, and its unique contribution to human pro-
gress, rather than with a narrow conception of the national identity. But de Gaulle’s
‘certain idea of France’ transcended the values of the Revolution to take in the whole
of French history: ancien régime, Empire and Republics. And, as he stressed in the
opening pages of his War Memoirs, it was at least as much felt as reasoned. There is
more than a touch of mysticism about the images he chooses to express his love of
country: a Madonna in medieval frescos, a princess in a fairy tale, or, later, sunset on the
cathedral of Notre Dame or flags on the Arc de Triomphe – symbols more redolent of
the monarchist Right than of the republican Left.
De Gaulle liked to claim that France (and therefore de Gaulle) were beyond the
confines of Left and Right. The French did not, on the whole, agree. Voters both for de
Gaulle and for Gaullist parties have come predominantly (though never exclusively)
from the Right. In many ways this was logical. De Gaulle’s conviction that France
needed strong leadership (his own, in the first instance) placed him firmly on the Right
in the constitutional debate. A lifelong Catholic, he fully approved the Debré Law fixing
permanent subsidies for Church schools. In other ways, though, de Gaulle’s claim to
transcend has some justification. The war years placed him on the same side as the
predominantly left-wing Resistance. As head of a post-Liberation provisional govern-
ment that included Communists, he nationalised banks and basic industries (as well as
Renault) and signed the decree creating France’s social security system. That act was
perfectly consistent with a nationalism that sought to underpin France’s ambitions
abroad with political and social measures designed to appease conflicts and build
national cohesion at home. Indeed, he worried his more business-minded supporters
(not least his own prime minister and successor as president, Georges Pompidou, a
former banker) with his long-cherished ambition to ‘replace capitalism’ with some form
of ‘third way’ between the market and Soviet-style collectivism. This dream, of early
twentieth-century social Catholic inspiration, never became a project of substance. But
it illustrates the difficulty of positioning de Gaulle as a straightforward conservative.
And the Gaullist insistence on France’s independence and status in the world has taken
its place in the national diplomatic discourse, whether uttered by Gaullists, Socialists,
members of the non-Gaullist Right or even Communists.
Gaullism weakened Christian Democracy in France. On internal questions the two
had much in common, appealing notably to Catholics with a social conscience. But de
Gaulle’s intense preoccupation with strong leadership and with national independence,
his rejection of American tutelage in the world of the Cold War, and his sceptical, even
dismissive, attitude to supranational institutions, all marked him out from the Atlanti-
cist, pro-European Christian Democrats, whom he personally viewed with barely
concealed contempt.
The division between Gaullists and Christian Democrats offers one illustration of
the difficulty of placing foreign policy issues into the categories of Left and Right.
There are plenty of others.
• Jules Ferry, one of the leading statesmen of the early Third Republic, both
achieved the impeccably left-wing goal of free, secular and compulsory primary
education, and established the French protectorates in Tunisia and Indo-China.
His republican successors participated actively in the late nineteenth-century
‘scramble for Africa’, and exempted from their anti-clericalism those Catholic mis-
sionaries who furthered France’s imperial designs through their conversion of the
heathen. At the outset of the Algerian war in 1954, no major party of Right or Left
favoured independence for France’s most important, and most densely colonised,
North African territory. While groups of the far Left rapidly came to support the
independence movement, it was de Gaulle, a right-wing soldier, who finally cut the
ties between France and Algeria, as well as granting full independence to France’s
colonies in sub-Saharan Africa.
• The issue of France’s response to the rise of Nazism and Fascism in the 1930s
divided Left and Right alike. The Left found it increasingly hard to combine the
pacifist sentiments inherited from the aftermath of World War I with its opposition
to Fascism; the Right had difficulty maintaining its earlier anti-German stance in
the face of régimes that presented themselves as bulwarks against Soviet Commun-
ism. A further twist was added by the Communist Party, vigorously anti-Fascist
until the signature of the Nazi–Soviet pact in August 1939 obliged them to change
policy overnight and abstain from attacks on the Soviet Union’s new ally until
Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union on the night of 22 June 1941.
• De Gaulle’s wish to demonstrate French independence from the United States, and
his sympathetic view of the Franco-Russian alliance of his own formative years, led
him into an early policy of détente with the Soviet Union, much to the annoyance
of the Americans (who did the same thing themselves, but nearly a decade later). In
internal politics, this earned de Gaulle guarded praise from the PCF, but criticism
from the Atlanticist parties of the Centre-Left and Centre-Right.
• A similar division has regularly pertained over Europe. Under most circumstances,
Gaullists and Communists have been the most reticent towards anything smacking
of federalism, and most Socialists, all Christian Democrats and the rest of the non-
Gaullist Right being favourable to further integration. The referendum of 2005 on
the European constitutional treaty, called by a neo-Gaullist president, Jacques
Chirac, very broadly confirmed this pattern, although the opposition to further
integration was much more skewed than usual to the Left: only 41 per cent
of Socialist supporters voted yes to the treaty, compared with 76 per cent of
sympathisers of Chirac’s party, the Union pour un Mouvement Populaire.
The apogee of France’s tradition of intense political division was reached under the
Fourth Republic, when the country was typically viewed by observers at home and
abroad as an impossibly fragmented and conflictual society, rent by bitter ideological
divisions which were reflected in an unstable multiparty system. Its schismatic political
culture was contrasted with the integrated, homogeneous and consensual political cul-
ture of its neighbour across the Channel. But France was also an oddity in European
terms. The parties that formed the basis of stable multiparty systems elsewhere – mod-
erate Social Democrats, Liberals and Christian Democrats – were all singularly weak in
France. To this fragmentation and instability should be added the legacy of bitter civil
strife. The dates which figured (and continue to figure) most prominently in the French
historical consciousness – 1789, 1793, 1830, 1848, 1871, 1936, 1940 and 1944 – all recall
periods when French people were at their most bitterly divided. When a British polit-
ician invokes history it is normally to buttress an unconvincing appeal to national unity;
a French politician (unless he is president) will cite historical examples to illustrate the
perfidy of his adversaries (and, at times, his allies as well). The great political battles of
the Fourth Republic – over the European Defence Community, Algeria or state aid to
Church schools, for instance – were infused with a peculiar venom, as each released the
accumulated rancours of generations. A tendency to over-intellectualise problems, so
that concrete issues were approached with reference to abstract and intangible prin-
ciples, plus an all too ready recourse to language that was excessive and emotionally
explosive where it was not personally abusive, compounded the defects of a political
discourse that apparently left little room for dialogue or bargaining. This type of rhet-
oric, required to satisfy restive and sceptical activists and voters, was the stock-in-trade
of parliamentarians and ministers in a chronically divided Assembly. But behind it, the
politicians of the Centre knew that they had to surmount their differences so that
France might be governed and the state preserved (and controlled).
A counterpoint to the legacy of conflict, then, is the continuity of the French state. It
is a tradition less obvious to the outside observer than conflict (though all too tangible
to any foreigner in France who has had to apply for a residence permit, complete a
contract of employment as a public servant, send a child to school, or seek reimburse-
ment for medical expenses). Since the Revolution, changes of régime have left the
apparatus of the state, as well as a significant body of legislation, largely intact. The law
requiring passengers on public transport to make the appropriate connections, for
example, dates from the Revolution. The licensing laws governing every French café
date from 1942 – that is, from Vichy. More remarkably, all the judges active under Vichy
survived the Liberation. One of the greatest compliments a French politician can pay to
another is to concede that he possesses le sens de l’État. It is to the state tradition, or
rather traditions, in French political culture that we now turn.
State traditions
‘France’, as Georges Pompidou (1908–74), de Gaulle’s successor as president, put it
succinctly, ‘would not exist without a state.’ The English have (or had) a Whig tradition
that saw the struggle for, and eventual triumph of, freedom from arbitrary rule as the
dominant theme of the nation’s history. The dominant theme identified by many
French historians, usually of a conservative bent, is that of state-building, in which a
series of monarchs (Saint Louis, Louis XI, Francis I, Henri IV, Louis XIV) contrived,
through a combination of statesmanship, strategic marriage, ruse and military con-
quest, to weld a geographically and linguistically disparate collection of provinces into
a state ruled from Paris, and thence into a nation. The process was far from smooth.
The Hundred Years War of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the Wars of Religion
of the sixteenth, the Fronde of the seventeenth, all interrupted it, serving to show the
need for more or less absolute power at the centre to preserve the state and the nascent
nation. From this perspective, the great Revolution of 1789 was merely one further,
albeit spectacular and far-reaching, interruption in the state-building process; for the
great nineteenth-century political analyst Alexis de Tocqueville and his intellectual
heirs, it further consolidated the centralisation of the absolute monarchy, the two
Napoleons continuing the process. The state-builders of the late nineteenth and
twentieth centuries – Thiers and Gambetta, the two founders of the Third Republic,
Georges Clemenceau, who led France to victory in 1918, and de Gaulle himself – could
be seen as worthy democratic successors to the ancien régime monarchs.
If this broadly conservative view of French history stresses continuity, an alternative
view highlights the sharp hiatus represented by the Revolution of 1789. For much of
the Left, the Revolution represents the real birth of the French nation, because through
it, the French were able to throw off the shackles of absolute monarchy and establish a
Republic of free and equal citizens. ‘The Revolution’, argues the left-wing writer Régis
Debray, ‘is the touchstone of the (Republican) constitution.’ Its principles are set out in
the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen of 26 August 1789, which still
forms part of the preamble to the Constitution of the Fifth Republic. As we have seen,
the revolutionary tradition associates the Republic with equality between citizens; with
unlimited popular sovereignty (‘the law is the expression of the General Will’, says
Article 6 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man); with the eighteenth-century values
of rationalism and enlightenment; with secularism; with education; and with progress
towards ever greater prosperity and an ever fairer distribution of society’s wealth.
The common core

Despite the obvious differences between them, these two views of French history have
much in common – besides their tendentiousness. Both insist on the role of the state,
not merely as the tool to undertake certain functions for society (at the very least,
defence, public order and justice) but as the very creator of the nation – whether
through the gradual establishment of the royal writ throughout the land or through the
explosion of national self-consciousness embodied in the Revolution and the sub-
sequent wars. These converging views of the primal role of the state in history have also
been reflected in comparably convergent views about the state’s contemporary role, and
its autonomy and primacy in relation both to subnational levels of government and to
civil society in general.
• The kings of the ancien régime constantly sought to demolish or erode the auton-
omy of provinces within their realm, and of the nobles who made the provinces
their territorial base. The Revolution gave France the uniform scheme of départe-
ments which remain the second tier of French local administration to this day.
Napoleon I gave each département a prefect, the symbol for two centuries of an
intrusive and arbitrary central authority reaching into the most obscure corners of
the furthest provinces.
• Because the medieval corporations and the estates of the ancien régime had to be
destroyed in order to establish equality before the law and a Republic of citizens,
Jacobin mistrust of local autonomy extended to any body or group that appeared
to stand between the individual citizen and the state by representing a partial and
therefore suspect interest. However, the most notable expression of this mistrust
was a partial one: the Le Chapelier law of 1791, which banned trade unions and
other workplace associations altogether. The law survived for nearly a century,
under all régimes, until its repeal in 1884. Except during the German Occupation,
liberty of assocation has been guaranteed since 1901; but Tocqueville’s intellectual
heirs have claimed that the French are still reluctant to join associations, and tend
to refer to the state problems that would be dealt with within civil society in other
countries. Others have argued that politicised activists (for example, Catholic and
Communist trade unionists) have discouraged the less militant majority from join-
ing anything, and make co-operation between those of similar interests impossible.
• The Church, too, was subordinated to the state not only after but also before the
Revolution. The Concordat of Bologna, signed by a reluctant but impotent Pope
still reeling from his defeat by Francis I of France at the battle of Marignano in
1516, secured permanent royal control over French Church appointments. Under
Francis I’s successors, the ‘Gallican’ Catholic Church became as much of an insti-
tutional and spiritual prop for the monarchy as the Anglican Church was in
England, but without the trouble of a break with Rome. United in hostility towards
the secular Republic, French Catholics, both clergy and laity, divided over the
submission of the Gallican Church to an obscurantist Ultramontane Roman
Curia. De Gaulle’s family were a good example of the Gallican side of the divide:
loyal to the Church, but wanting it run from within France.
• The primacy of the state over its own servants is also part of the French state
tradition. The judiciary, in particular, was constrained before the Revolution by the
king’s untrammelled right to make law. After it, ordinary judges were excluded by
Napoleon from protecting citizens from the excesses of his administration (though
the Conseil d’État, the body entrusted by Napoleon with the handling of disputes
concerning the servants of the state, did soon acquire a measure of independence).
The hierarchical subordination of magistrates to the justice minister and the polit-
ical authorities’ tight control over appointments and career advancement have been
maintained, in their essentials, ever since. The view of law as something subordin-
ate to the higher interests of the state still has willing contemporary supporters on
both Left and Right, whether the Socialist minister André Labarrère who told the
right-wing opposition that ‘You are legally in the wrong because you are politically
in the minority’, or the Gaullist Interior Minister Charles Pasqua who delicately
argued that ‘Democracy ends where raison d’État begins’. The doctrine of the
separation of powers has also been used to protect the state’s servants (and thus
their political masters) from the attentions of the judiciary.
• The state, finally, was the agent of French power abroad. For some two centuries,
from 1650 to 1850, France possessed the largest and most formidable army in
Europe. Whether it was to extend French territory to include pieces of Flanders or
Savoy, in the name of frontiers spuriously considered as ‘natural’ from Louis XIV;
or to throw back the forces of the crowned heads of Europe at Valmy; or to embark
on the conquest of Europe behind Napoleon; or even, in the last quarter of the
nineteenth century, to extend France’s ‘civilising mission’ to Indo-China and
Africa, the French state was identified with military prowess – and unsurprisingly,
was shaken in the event of defeat, whether in 1815, 1870 or 1940. Not for the
French the acquisition of an empire in India by the armies of a private company.
In short, while régimes might come and go with alarming frequency, the culture
of the French state, and the powerful reality of its army and bureaucracy, remained.
The notion of the state might convey somewhat different meanings to the Right and the
Left, but neither seriously questioned its primacy, its autonomy or its power.
Liberty, equality, fraternity

To the common core should be added two more distinctly modern notions of the
French state, one built around the republican triptych of liberty, equality and fraternity,
the other the set of economic doctrines and relationships known from the
mid-twentieth century as dirigisme.
The adoption in 1880 by what was to prove France’s longest Republic, the Third, of
the most obvious Republican symbols – the Marseillaise as the national anthem and the
14th July, anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, as the national holiday – was
swiftly followed by more concrete steps to realise the ideals of liberté, égalité, fraternité.
• In the first place, the Republic was a guarantor of certain liberties, enshrined in law
between 1881 and 1885 and not rescinded wholesale since then except under Vichy.
They included freedom of assembly, of association (extended and reinforced by the
law of 1901), and of the press (in the late 1920s George Orwell was to observe that
‘Paris alone has daily papers by the dozen, nationalist, Socialist and Communist,
clerical and anti-clerical, militarist and anti-militarist, pro-semitic and anti-
semitic’); freedom for all men over 21 to vote (from 1848) and to choose between
different candidates (from 1871); the right of municipalities (except Paris) to elect
their own councils and mayors.
• Equality between citizens, at least of a formal sort, was guaranteed, in the first
instance, by universal male suffrage. Equally universal, for men, was the duty of
military service, to which few exceptions were admitted after 1870. Like other
nineteenth-century continental powers in an age when military strength depended
substantially on the ability to put large numbers of trained men into the field,
France maintained a conscript army, with 736,000 men under arms before mobil-
isation in 1914. Military service, in turn, became a rite of passage for generations:
part of the process identified by Eugen Weber by which peasants of far-flung
provinces were turned into French citizens. A third manifestation of republican
equality was to be found in universal primary schooling: the Ferry Laws offered, in
principle, an identical chance to children throughout the territory of France to
better themselves through education. The Ferry Laws and the universality they
embodied were important not only in themselves but also as a foundation, in three
senses. First, they stood as the prototype for a widening range of public services,
especially after 1945: supplied by a central state monopoly and accessible to cit-
izens throughout France’s territory on an identical basis. Second, they were the
basis of an educational cursus that combined equal chances for all (in principle)
with increasingly ferocious selection through competitive examinations. Third,
competitive examinations also served as the basis for recruitment into the service of
the state, embodying the Republican ideal of the ‘career open to talent’ (as opposed
to the noble status and patronage of the ancien régime).
• The third element of the Republican triptych, fraternity, is the most elusive. It is
perhaps best conceived as the capacity of the Republic to integrate Frenchmen of
the most diverse regional origins into a nation: a process which, in the view of
Eugen Weber, was not completed until the late nineteenth century, by which time
universal education and military service, as well as relatively cheap rail transport,
had done their work. Integration, however, extended beyond the ranks of the
native-born French to immigrants. By the late nineteenth century, sluggish dem-
ography (in 1800 the population of France, at some 27 million, was nearly three
times that of Great Britain; a century later each country had about 40 million
inhabitants) had made France – most unusually, for a West European country – a
land of immigration. The new arrivals, whose numbers peaked in the prosperous
1920s, were mostly other Europeans: Poles, Belgians and Italians in particular.
Their children born in France attended French schools and, thanks to the revival of
the jus solis in 1889, grew up as French citizens, frequently marrying a native
French spouse and becoming fully integrated with the French population within
one or at most two generations.
The relationship between state, nation and citizens expressed by the Republican
triptych differed significantly from those current in the United States or even Britain.
Associations were tolerated and enjoyed a legal status, but the state, rather than holding
the ring between plethora of competing interests, was placed above them as the expres-
sion of the general will. Tasks such as education could not be delegated to local author-
ities, because the state alone could guarantee the equality of treatment to which each
French citizen had a right. At the same time measures to limit substantive inequality,
through wealth redistribution and the creation of a welfare state, waited longer in
France than in northern European countries. No concessions, finally, were made either
to the regional or to the non-French origins of citizens; the only true community was
that of the nation. France’s state tradition has been identified by Kenneth Dyson as
something of an exception in Western Europe. It helped make France especially recep-
tive to the great expansion in the role of the state that occurred throughout the
developed capitalist world after 1945.
Dirigisme
A prime example of a state-led consensus between apparently opposed political forces
is dirigisme, the term coined to characterise the intervention of the state in the post-war
economy. Dirigisme is worth considering in some detail both because it demonstrates
the array of state institutions deployed to manage civil society, and because it will
illustrate the difficulties encountered by France in adjusting to a more globalised,
liberal world economy.
Like the broader culture of the state, dirigisme in France has roots in the ancien
régime, being especially identified with Louis XIV’s minister Colbert. The eighteenth-
century French state managed not only clearly strategic activities, such as arsenals, but
also those that were less obviously so, such as salt production (for fiscal reasons) or the
Gobelins tapestry works (for sumptuary ones). Even in the relatively laissez-faire years
of the late nineteenth century, the state raised tariff barriers and built railways. But the
biggest impulse to dirigisme was given in France, as elsewhere, by World War II and its
apparent lesson that successful economies were planned economies. Both under the
German Occupation and after the Liberation, France’s technocrats, and thence the
politicians too, rejected the relative economic liberalism of the pre-war years and
embraced the new interventionist orthodoxy. That orthodoxy included, as in other
post-war West European states, a mix of Keynesian economic policies and social wel-
farism. It also embraced large-scale industrial interventionism. Herein lay the most
specifically French manifestation of the post-war economic consensus. Dirigisme in its
developed post-war form was a complex phenomenon which may be seen as at least
nine different things.
• An ambition, an expression of national will by a traditionally active and ambitious

state. Provoked by the wounded nationalism of French elites following the defeat
of 1940, dirigisme was also moulded by a collective awareness of the opportunities
of the post-war world, and by an optimistic belief in the capacity of elites to
forecast the future, and sustained by self-interested coalitions and a supportive
public consensus. The nature of the ambition changed over time: reconstruction
after 1945; increasing productivity in the 1950s; the creation of internationally
competitive firms in the 1960s and 1970s; a break with capitalism (rather less
consensually) in 1981; modernisation and succcessful insertion into the European
open market from the mid-1980s. Each of these ambitions, though, was under-
pinned by a common set of ‘can-do’ assumptions, according to which the state
could and should be an active policy initiator in the economy, and wielded the
capacity both to plan for the long term, and to impose its will when this was
necessary to achieve its policy aims.
• A shared culture. The coalition (or unholy alliance) supporting dirigisme included
modernising technocrats with a taste for economic ‘rationality’ and ‘progress’;
Gaullists who viewed the interventionist state as a crucial agent in ensuring
France’s diplomatic and military status, as well as a stabilising and depoliticising
factor in a fractious and overpoliticised country; bureaucrats intent on maximising
their budgets; Catholics heedful of the Church’s strictures on unrestrained capital-
ism; the social engineers of social democracy; and Communists whose general
penchant for control was reinforced by the awareness of the potential that a big
public industrial sector held for them and for their trade-union satellite, the CGT.
Divided in its ideological justifications for dirigisme, the coalition still shared a
common aversion to what was called capitalisme sauvage and indeed to the market
in general, and an assumption that heroic state action, for example in financing
France’s first jet airliner, the Caravelle, in the 1950s, or the high-speed train a
generation later, was not merely justified but a positive duty of the state. The
tenacity of the dirigiste culture can be explained not only by its ability to tap
different aspirations, but also by the omnipresence of its proponents, who occupied
the senior civil service posts in all ministries, staffed the private offices of politicians
of all colours, and the boards of state-run banks and public enterprises, as well as
playing a role as opinion-formers through publications and part-time professor-
ships at Sciences Po, the nursery of the political and administrative elite from which
they themselves had, in many cases, graduated.
• An overarching strategy, defined in the early post-war period by the National Plan –
the ‘affaire de la nation’ according to its creator Jean Monnet, an ‘ardent obliga-
tion’ for de Gaulle. Starting in 1946 as a broad set of industrial objectives to make
good the damages of war, the Plan became increasingly bureaucratic in its elabor-
ation, detailed in its recommendations, and, in an ever more complex environment,
inaccurate in its forecasts. By the early 1980s, and despite the election of a Socialist
government in 1981, the Plan had suffered the worst of all fates: it was ignored.
From the 1970s, the ‘overarching strategy’ was to be sought more in the industrial
policies of successive governments: the identification and strengthening of
‘national champion’ firms in niche markets under the Giscard d’Estaing presidency
(1974–81); the vertical integration of firms through the entire range of activities in
a sector under the Socialists after 1981; the promotion of small and medium-sized
firms from the late 1980s.
• A set of state-directed policies. Through financial aid, ownership, public procure-
ment contracts, research and development assistance, and export drives, the state
rationalised large parts of French industry. The state forged alliances between
firms, or even mergers (Peugeot-Citröen in automobiles, Rhône-Poulenc in chem-
icals, Thomson-Brandt-CSF in electronics, Usinor-Sacilor in steel, Péchiney-
Ugine-Kuhlman in aluminium), and restructured entire sectors (computers, steel,
electronics, electro-nuclear, machine tools, aeronautics). It protected national
champions (Bull in computers, Renault in automobiles, Thomson in electronics,
CGE in heavy engineering) and nourished lame duck industries (shipyards, textiles,
steel, machine tools). Most distinctively, it gave birth to a series of grands projets
including Concorde (with Britain) in 1965, the Plan Calcul (for the computer
industry) in 1966, the more successful Airbus (1969), the Ariane rocket (1973),
the Surgénérateur (a French-designed nuclear reactor) in 1974, and the TGV
(high-speed train) in 1977.
• A set of policy instruments. The French state had a vast range of tools of economic
intervention at its disposal. They included one of the largest public sectors in the
Western world, created by the Popular Front government of 1936 and the Liber-
ation governments of 1944–47, and extended by the Socialist government of 1981
(as well as through the acquisition and mergers policies of the nationalised indus-
tries). By 1982, the state owned thirteen of France’s twenty biggest firms and
almost the entire French banking sector (a major contrast with Britain). The public
sector accounted for 24 per cent of employment, 32 per cent of sales, 30 per cent of
exports and, most crucially, 60 per cent of annual investment in the industrial and
energy sectors, where private investment had withered in the 1970s. The state held
monopolies in gas, electricity and telecommunications. In other sectors, including
non-ferrous metals, aerospace, mining, heavy chemicals and petroleum, over half
of annual turnover was accounted for by the state. Second, the state controlled the
monetary and credit system exercised by the Bank of France, by the Trésor division
of the Finance Ministry, and by its satellites such as the Crédit Agricole, the Crédit
National, and the Caisse des Dépôts. They fixed interest rates, controlled capital
movements, and set credit ceilings to promote modernisation and growth. Initially,
much industrial finance emanated directly from the Trésor, but from the 1960s
funding tended to come from (state-owned) banks. Bank borrowing soared at low
or even negative real interest rates – a situation which was to prove damaging to
industry when real interest rates rose sharply from the mid-1970s. By 1981 – before
the Left won power – 70 per cent of all industrial credit in France was linked in
some way to state loans, grants or guarantees – a situation perpetuated by a weak
Stock Exchange and under-capitalised firms. The state also possessed the right, by
virtue of de Gaulle’s ordonnances of 1945, to control a vast range of prices; it
constantly added to a thicket of regulations covering most branches of economic
activity including the labour market (the minimum wage dates from 1950); it used
public procurement policies, made possible by the state’s role as the country’s
biggest purchaser of certain goods, to shape the general industrial landscape, con-
trol the policies of individual firms, or favour the success of grands projets;
it deployed a variety of contractual tools, linked to financial inducements, to
promote or succour specific sectors or nationalised industries; it wielded an extra-
ordinary array of protectionist devices, whether official or unofficial, open or dis-
guised, to shield French industry and particularly the national champions; it
allowed, through inflation in the Fourth Republic and episodically in the Fifth, the
burden of state debt which had substituted for the raising of capital to be purged.
• A dense institutional architecture. A full description of the institutions involved in
French economic policy-making would require a hefty encyclopedia. At the sum-
mit, with overall responsibility for macroeconomic, fiscal and monetary policy,
were the Presidency (after 1958), the Prime Minister’s Office and the Finance
Ministry. Microeconomic policy involved the above bodies, but also the Industry
Ministry and other ministries such as Defence, Transport or Public Works, as well
as the Commissariat Général au Plan. There were also sector-specific bodies such
as the Commissariat à l’Énergie Atomique and activity-specific bodies such as
ANVAR (Agence Nationale de la Valorisation de la Recherche), as well as the
enormous publicly owned banking and industrial sector noted above. This dense
variety of institutions was given (some) horizontal co-ordination by an equally
dense network of overlapping interministerial committees, with territorial co-
ordination being ensured (in principle) by the Délégation à l’Aménagement du
Territoire et à l’Action Régionale (DATAR). Within this system, effective internal
constraints on state officials were few and weak: autonomous competition author-
ities were toothless, the Bank of France largely subordinate to the government and
generally favourable to investment and growth, and the Cour des Comptes (Court
of Accounts) inclined to reveal the misuse of public funds sporadically and late, if
at all.
• A network of interlocking state-based elites. The power of the senior officials
who made dirigisme work rested on their common educational origins and the
networking that resulted; on the job mobility of key individuals; on their self-
proclaimed (but also widely acknowledged) expertise; and on their ubiquity in the
decision-making chain. A typical top official is a graduate of one of a small hand-
ful of grandes écoles and a member of a particular administrative or technical corps
(such as the Inspection des Finances or the Corps des Mines). Such officials move
in the course of a career between mainstream civil service posts in ministries, jobs
on ministers’ staffs, and positions at the head of public and private firms or of
bodies such as the Commissariat au Plan, as well as doing stints as ministers in a
few cases. Whereas in Britain experts were supposed to be ‘on tap and not on top’,
in France the same quite small group of individuals, often known to each other,
controlled a wide range of public, para-public and even political jobs, and were
present at all points in the decision-making process, from initiation to
implementation.
• A rhetorical device. Successive governments legitimised state intervention in gen-
eral, and their own interventionist policies in particular, by associating them with
vital national ambitions and interests. Dirigisme was thus justified in the name of
reconstruction (after 1945), industrial competitiveness, especially in the face of the
‘American challenge’ (in the 1960s and 1970s), the preparation of France for the
single European market (from 1986), or social cohesion and regional development
(more or less continuously). More specifically, massive aid to France’s ailing steel
industry was justified in terms of its supposedly strategic place in the national
economy, while the Socialists’ big nationalisation programme of 1981 was sold to
the public in a variety of more or less contradictory ways, each designed to broaden
support for the measures by presenting them as a ‘national imperative’. The diri-
giste system had articulate admirers abroad: Andrew Shonfield’s influential
Modern Capitalism, written in 1965, was a brilliant apologia for the French model.
At home, where dirigisme and the economic success of the post-war generation
were linked by most commentators, a cult of heroic founding fathers (Colbert
inevitably, but also Jean Monnet, Étienne Hirsch and François Bloch-Lainé, for
example) was created and sustained by high priests many of whom held key posts
in politics and the administration.
• A tool of national cohesion. In a land prone to murderous political divisions, diri-
gisme appeared to be a positive-sum game in which everyone could win: not only
the elites who conceived and managed it but also groups that were marginalised
from the decision-making processes. The main employers’ organisation, the
Conseil National du Patronat Français (CNPF), liked the protection and subsidies
dirigisme offered to the big firms that dominated the body. Trades unions, sidelined
from industrial policy-making and often weak on the shop floor, enjoyed substan-
tial side payments in the shape of cash subsidies, privileged positions within the
institutions of the French welfare state (particularly the social security system), and
an ‘inflationary social compromise’ that allowed the minimum wage, and thence a
broad swathe of industrial wages, to rise at least in line with inflation. More
broadly, the trente glorieuses, as the French came to describe the three decades of
expansion between 1945 and the mid-1970s, saw both the heyday of dirigisme and a
social transformation of unprecedented dimensions in France: the farming popula-
tion fell from nearly a third to under a tenth of the total, large-scale urbanisation
took place, a chronic housing shortage was gradually ended, and French industry
was substantially modernised. This did not happen without widespread unrest
among both farmers and industrial workers: the near-general strike of May 1968
bore witness to the discontent of a working class too long excluded from a fair
share of the fruits of growth. But in a country as prone to political conflict as
France, such events took on a relatively minor dimension. That such massive and
rapid change took place so speedily, and with relatively little human suffering and
social dislocation, testifies in part to the success of the dirigiste model.
The state: image and reality

Both its admirers and its critics tend to cultivate an image of the state as monolithic,
tentacular and animated by a single purpose. The reality is very different. As Tocqueville
noticed in the mid-nineteenth century, the rules in France are rigid, but their implemen-
tation is often flexible. The rhetoric of the state often conceals a reality of grubby
compromises with those very interests on which the state is supposed to keep a stern
and watchful eye; the state’s own servants, far from acting as a single co-ordinated
body, often behave as a group of warring factions, with nothing to learn from the
politicians about the darker arts of their trade; while the industries under the state’s
ownership could often escape the control of their shareholder altogether.
• The centralisation of the French state, a legal certainty before the decentralisation
reforms of 1982, was nevertheless a practical impossibility. Centralisation was only
a French obsession because of the centuries-long struggle to create a state in the
face of powerful centrifugal tendencies in the provinces. In most cases, though,
local dignitaries, or notables, who represented a potential threat to the unity of the
state, were domesticated rather than destroyed. The notables exacted a continuous
price for their co-operation, in the shape of political arrangements, or even subsid-
ies, that allowed them to retain their local ascendancy and pursue their cherished
projects while practising a largely formal deference to the central authorities. Can-
didates at local elections frequently claimed to stand for the ‘defence of local
interests’, by implication against a state considered as interfering and rapacious.
The different gradations of notables – in small or large municipalities, in départe-
ments and finally in regions – and the multiplicity of state services under the pre-
fect’s notional supervision created a complex web of clientship and complicity
stretching from the small provincial mairie to Parisian ministries and the National
Assembly. The most important notables, men like Jacques Chaban-Delmas, mayor
of Bordeaux, or Pierre Mauroy, mayor of Lille, enjoyed regular access to govern-
ment members (even when they were not prime minister, as each of these two was
for three years) and commanded obedience of a more or less obsequious variety
from all in their local strongholds, including the representatives of the state: a
degree of authority that earned them the feudal nicknames of the Duke of Aquitaine
and the Count of Flanders.
• The Jacobin claim that the state represented the ‘general interest’ and remained
aloof from those ‘partial interests’, constituted by associations and pressure groups
which threatened to perturb the serene and enlightened deliberations of govern-
ment, was always based more on myth than on fact. The better-organised groups
were able to buy influence, more or less discreetly. At local level, all six Deputies
elected to the National Assembly in 1951 for the département of Calvados (famous
then as now for its apple brandy) had promised in their personal manifestos to
defend the interests of the bouilleurs de cru, the home distillers’ lobby. More tragic-
ally, the Algerian policy of successive Fourth Republic governments, whether Left-
or Right-leaning, was prey to the activities of the colonial lobby, constituted
around large farming and wine-growing interests in the fertile valley south of
Algiers, which opposed every concession to the Muslim population of Algeria until
it was too late.
• The claim to represent the ‘general interest’ was further undermined by the ten-
dency of strategically placed groups of the state’s servants to negotiate privileged
conditions of employment. Teachers, rail workers or employees of Électricité de
France (EDF), for example, won benefits in kind such as a ‘thirteenth month’ of
pay, shorter working hours, or early retirement. Observers like François de Closets
have pilloried such privileges, often unfairly: but it has sometimes been the case that
the ‘defence of French-style public services’ cited as justification of strike action by
public employees has corresponded to the defence of their own perks, or avantages
acquis.
• Even the Church has been able to impose itself as a necessary interlocutor of the
secular state. A stout anti-clerical like the Interior Minister Georges Clemenceau
felt obliged to intervene to ensure that the inventory of Church property under-
taken in the aftermath of the Separation of 1905 was done with a minimum of
respect for Catholic sensitivities. Nearly eighty years later, Pierre Mauroy’s Social-
ist government sought the Church’s agreement to his proposed reform of Catholic
schools (he sought in vain, and intense Catholic pressure sank the reform and
helped destroy the Mauroy government). The Church at local level has been a
necessary link in the networks of notables in Catholic areas.
• Dirigisme was often operated with much more flexibility than the dirigiste model
suggests. The substantial state presence in the economy should not obscure con-
tinued private involvement even in sectors considered elsewhere, at least in the post-
war period, as ‘natural’ public-sector domains. The social security system, for
instance, was officially administered by the ‘social partners’ – unions and employ-
ers – with only periodic interventions from the state (chiefly in the form of bail-out
packages, which became ever more frequent). Water was never nationalised. Local
authorities were free to choose between direct control of water purification and
distribution, a concession to a private firm, or a mixed solution; and France duly
built up world-class private water companies. Motorways, largely built by private
firms in return for toll concessions, are another example. The sociétés d’économie
mixte, firms combining public and private finance, were a commonplace in the
large-scale urban development of the post-war generation. Outside economic sec-
tors in crisis, dirigisme rarely took the form of detailed state intervention; more
frequently it took the form of a statement of ambition plus a set of financial
inducements, or even, as in the aerospace industry, simply a general framework.
• The unity of the state was a judicial fiction, not a practical reality, its effectiveness
often more mythical than tangible. At local level, for example, successive laws
reaffirming the prefects’ primacy at the head of the state’s services in the départe-
ments testified to the constant difficulty they experienced in making that primacy
effective. Industrial dirigisme, meanwhile, was constantly hindered by the density
of the institutional structure. Most major industrial policies required the interven-
tion of several ministries, the Commissariat au Plan, DATAR, the banks and
other credit organisations, and subnational field services and funding agencies.
Moreover, France’s tightly knit and expert civil service elite was often riven with
vicious rivalries between and within ministries, banks and other bodies, while the
expertise was often of the wrong sort, placing the state at a disadvantage in relation
to private industry. As to the vast public industrial sector, it became an incoherent
patchwork created by political acts but extended by the acquisition policies of
nationalised firms. It included lame ducks in need of constant and often ineffective
subsidy, but also highly profitable firms like the state-owned oil companies CFP
and Elf, or EDF, which tended to run themselves, on more or less conventional
business lines, independently from the ministries that supposedly supervised them.
The result was an industrial policy that was cumbersome, time-consuming and
politicised, as well as inconsistent both over time and between different institutions
in the process (so that the allocation of credit, for example, often bore little relation
to the priorities of the Plan). Though a handful of flagship grands projets, such
as Caravelle, succeeded, others, such as the Plan Calcul, were spectacular and
expensive disasters.
Less ubiquitous and less effective than often alleged, France’s state remained more
ubiquitous (and, much of the time, more effective) than many of its West European
counterparts. And the state tradition has been as much a part of France’s political
culture as the legacy of political division. Both, however, have been endangered, to a
greater or lesser extent, by the changing context of French, of European and of global
politics.
The changing context of French political traditions

Over the six decades since World War II, France, like most other West European coun-
tries, has sustained the impact of, first the long post-war boom, second, the complex
series of developments known as globalisation, and third, the European integration
process. Each of these developments transformed the context of political conflict in
France. The second and third also represented direct challenges to many aspects of
France’s state tradition.
Post-war boom: the trente glorieuses

The trente glorieuses is a somewhat misleading but widely used term describing the
post-war boom: it took six post-war years simply to return to the levels of production
of 1929, and the boom was over by 1975. That France experienced quite unprecedented
growth levels, however, is beyond dispute. At an average of over 5 per cent, growth was
faster than in Britain or the United States throughout the period; towards the end of
the boom it was even faster than West Germany’s. In economic terms, the trente glo-
rieuses involved three distinct processes that flowed into one another without interrup-
tion: post-war reconstruction, the completion of France’s industrial revolution, and the
beginning of a transition towards a service-based, post-industrial economy. In social
terms, the trente glorieuses wrought transformations of unprecedented scope and
speed, which had the potential to transform the bases of political alignments. These
transformations included: a drop in the agricultural population; a rise in the numbers
of almost every other occupational category, both blue- and (especially) white-collar;
the arrival of new entrants to the labour market, notably immigrants and women;
urbanisation and a generation-long housing crisis; dechristianisation; a rise in
educational attainment; and a growth in personal consumption.
• The agricultural population fell from well over a quarter in 1945 to under 10 per
cent (and falling) thirty years later, the rural population from 46 per cent to under
30. The proportion of the French who were self-employed fell from nearly a third at
the Liberation to 18 per cent in 1962 (and 12 per cent in 1982): France became,
overwhelmingly, a nation of wage- and salary-earners. The France of the small
family firm and the small family farm, fundamental bases of French politics for a
century and a half, shrank at an unprecedented rate – not without provoking
vigorous, at times violent, protests both from farm unions and from small traders
(briefly organised, during the Fourth Republic, as the Poujadist movement).
• With industrial growth, in sectors as varied as petrochemicals, automobiles, aero-
space, or building and public works, went a corresponding increase in the number
of blue-collar workers, which peaked in 1970 at just over 9 million. This growth,
though significant, was still limited: the Left in France never had a working-class
base as large as that of, say, Britain at its peak. Moreover, unskilled labour
was increasingly recruited from former African colonies, and first-generation
immigrants lacked the vote.
• The fastest-growing occupational categories were white-collar workers of all kinds,
in both public and private sectors; managers; and professionals. This development
corresponded to a threefold development in the economy; the ‘managerial revolu-
tion’ within firms; the growth of the private service sector; and the growth of areas
of the public sector such as healthcare and education. The new, salaried middle
classes became more numerous than the old ones (professionals and independent
business people) which had formed the recruiting ground for the political elites of
the Third Republic.
• Women entered the labour market in ever larger numbers, filling many of the new
white-collar jobs in both public and private sectors: some 45 per cent of women of
working age did paid work in 1970, compared with just 25 per cent a generation
earlier (the figure would rise to 80 per cent by 1999). This growing economic
integration was barely matched by progress towards political equality: women only
won the vote in 1944, and were still woefully under-represented in both parliament
and government thirty years later.
• The labour shortage that France experienced until the late 1960s was filled partly
by women, but also partly by immigrants, who often took over low-income, low-
status jobs that French people were able to refuse. In 1931, France had been home
to nearly 3 million immigrants, mostly from the Iberian peninsula, Italy and
Central and Eastern Europe. The new immigrants came from Iberia but also from
the Maghrib, the former North African colonies of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia.
At first they were working men and were expected to return to their country of
origin. But by the end of the trente glorieuses, many had been joined by their
families. Temporary immigration became permanent, adding a new element to
France’s already varied racial mix and raising the question of the integration of
immigrants and their families and their accession to at least some of the rights
of French citizens.
• The France of the trente glorieuses suffered from a chronic housing crisis, caused by
low levels of construction in the inter-war years, wartime damage, population
growth (by nearly 30 per cent, from 40.5 to 52.5 million, between 1946 and 1975)
and the rural exodus. The state’s response, as elsewhere in Europe, was to build fast
and cheap: over a generation, the Nissen huts and shanty towns that had accom-
modated poor families were replaced by habitations à loyer modéré (HLMs). Ini-
tially, this improved the quality of the housing stock dramatically: three-quarters
of French homes had indoor toilets in 1975, against a mere 40 per cent in 1962. The
cost, however, was that the HLM estates, typically built on cheap land on the
peripheries of cities, were often surpassingly ugly and disagreeable to live in, and
aged badly. If the quantitative housing crisis was over by the mid-1970s, a qualita-
tive crisis was just beginning, as some estates began to show concentrations of
delapidation, unemployment and crime of all kinds.
• As the cities and the hastily built suburban housing estates filled, the churches
emptied. While about 70 per cent of the French still consider themselves to be
Catholics, weekly attendance at Mass fell from just under 40 per cent in the
immediate post-war years to some 9 per cent by 1998. The number of priests fell by
nearly a third, from 41,000 to 28,000, between 1960 and 1982, and the average age
of those remaining rose to nearly 60. The crisis of priestly vocations reflected a
wider loss of Church influence in the wider French society, with mainstream atti-
tudes to a variety of questions, especially those relating to sexuality, increasingly at
odds with the teachings of the Church.
• The trente glorieuses were marked by a rapid general expansion of education, with
the Fouchet reforms of 1963 guaranteeing at least some secondary education for
all. As late as 1965, barely 10 per cent of French school leavers possessed the
baccalauréat, the high school certificate that guarantees entry into university. By
1975, the figure was 25 per cent. Student numbers rose from 186,000 in 1959 to
615,000 a decade later. The result, in terms of overcrowding and poor facilities in
both secondary and tertiary education, contributed to the student unrest of May
1968. But the expansion continued with barely a pause, and with little change to the
centralised model established under Ferry. In a context of full employment with a
growing number of qualified jobs available, the education system appeared to be
more than ever filling its Republican role of ascenseur social, offering growing
opportunities for upward social mobility.
• If there was less God in the France of the trente glorieuses, there was also a great
deal more Mammon, for with growth went hitherto undreamt-of levels of personal
consumption. There were a million television sets in France in 1960, for example,
but ten times that number by 1970. The fruits of growth were unevenly distributed,
but everyone got a share of sorts. The working class, therefore, was not only more
numerous than in the pre-war years; it was also, by 1970, significantly more pros-
perous. The workers whose strikes nearly toppled the régime in May 1968 could still
be placated by a larger slice of the cake – whatever the strictures of the students
who rioted at the same time against the empty values of la société de consommation.
In the 1970s, French electoral sociologists suggested that these developments opened
new opportunities for the Left: the Right’s traditional bases in farms and small busi-
nesses, or among Catholics, were shrinking fast, while typically left-voting groups, such
as schoolteachers or other white-collar public servants, were growing. Events from the
end of the trente glorieuses revealed a more complex reality: a working class whose size
and loyalty to the Left began to diminish; and a better-educated population that
showed a growing scepticism about the more ideological claims of both Left and Right,
and indeed about the notions of Left and Right themselves. As we shall see, the major
long-term effects of the trente glorieuses were to soften the old divide between Right
and Left while opening up new areas of political conflict. Those effects were accelerated
in many ways by the economic crisis that followed.
Globalisation
The West’s post-war boom was abruptly closed by the oil price rise of 1973–74. What
had initially appeared as a temporary inflationary crisis lifted the curtain on three much
more durable phenomena, which persisted long after real oil prices had returned to
their pre-1973 levels. These were, first, the end of the industrialised capitalist world’s
very high post-war growth rates along with their causes – post-war reconstruction and
the productivity gains attendant on the completion of industrialisation; second, a world
of permanently free-floating exchange rates, heralded by America’s effective destruc-
tion, in 1971, of the Bretton Woods system of fixed rates that had underpinned the
boom; and third, the intensifying worldwide capitalist competition known as
globalisation.
Globalisation may be seen as having four dimensions – technological, ideological,
commercial and cultural. All are linked, and all have the effect of diminishing the
capacity of individual nation states to implement fully independent economic policies –
especially when such policies incline to dirigisme.
• The technological dimension to globalisation, at its simplest level, means that big
reductions in transport costs have made it far cheaper to move goods around the
world. More important, perhaps, has been the revolution in information technol-
ogy which has made it incomparably cheaper and quicker to generate, access and
transfer around the world all manner of data. Five effects of that deserve to be
highlighted, since they have clearly impacted on the French economic model. First,
technology has made a major contribution to opening up the world’s financial
markets, allowing decisions to buy or sell financial products to be implemented
instantaneously across continents. Second, technology has transformed some ‘nat-
ural’ national monopolies into sectors susceptible to both domestic and inter-
national competition, undermining one of the main arguments in favour of state
control: telecommunications and electricity supply are good examples of sectors in
which barriers to competition are slowly, if reluctantly, being removed. Third,
technology has changed the perception among policy-makers of what a ‘strategic’
industry is: no longer steel but electronics, no longer ship-building but computer
software. Fourth, technology has brought far greater flexibility to formerly rigid
aspects of the manufacturing process such as car assembly lines, and facilitated the
‘outsourcing’ of any number of formerly core activities. It is now possible to envis-
age a car manufacturer that makes no cars at all, but puts out to tender the whole
succession of processes from design to manufacture, from marketing to distribu-
tion. Fifth, rapid technological change plus complacent management can quickly
transform national champions (of whatever nation) into international lame ducks,
as the painful lessons of America’s IBM, Holland’s Philips, or France’s Bull show.
• The ideological dimension of globalisation arises from the progressive rejection
by Western policy-makers, from the mid-1970s on, of the post-war Keynesian
economic consensus which favoured extensive state intervention in capitalist
economies via regulation or ownership of firms, managed exchange rates and the
use of demand management (through, for example, budget deficits) to moderate
the fluctuations of the business cycle. By the mid-1970s, Bretton Woods had col-
lapsed, state-owned firms were increasingly criticised as inefficient, and, above all,
Keynesian techniques offered no remedy to the inflation which ravaged the major
capitalist economies from 1973. The ideological paradigm shift away from Keyne-
sianism and towards neo-liberal economic policies established new orthodoxies,
each more favourable to capital than to labour. These included deregulation and
trade liberalisation (within the financial markets, liberalisation was inseparable
from the process of technological change); the encouragement by governments of
direct inward investment from abroad; prudent exchange rate policies (in a world
where the markets determine the value of currencies from day to day, with often
brutal fluctuations); stricter fiscal discipline, with a greater inclination to balance
budgets; tight controls on public spending (even at the cost of demolishing parts of
the post-war welfare state); privatisation; tax reform (often in the direction of
lowering tax rates on the wealthy and on corporate profits); more flexible labour
markets (even at the price of withdrawing elements of social protection for
employees); and wage cost containment (if necessary, via restrictions on the
activities of trade unions).
• The commercial dimension of globalisation is the outcome of the technological and
ideological changes noted above. Trade liberalisation (notably through the succes-
sive rounds of tariff reductions organised under the auspices of the General
Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT), but also the extension of capitalist trad-
ing relations to the former Communist countries of Eastern Europe and to China)
has combined with technological change to expand the volume of world trade.
Deregulation plus new technologies have rendered the financial markets busier
(in terms of the volume of transactions handled), more rapid and more powerful.
Flows of inward and outward investment have grown. And major enterprises have
been increasingly obliged to become multinational in terms of turnover, domestic
content, research alliances and production ventures – effectively shedding part or
even all of their national identity. Regulation of these processes, finally, has become
increasingly transnational.
• The cultural dimension of globalisation is closely related to the commercial one.
With the growth of world trade have come the homogenisation of consumption
patterns and the spread of world brands such as Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Levi’s or
Microsoft, as well as of world (typically American, or at least ‘Anglo-Saxon’)
products in film, TV and popular music. The growth of world trade has also
confirmed English as the international language of business, and as a necessary
tool of communication for growing numbers of non-native English speakers.
France has undergone this complex series of processes with varying degrees of will-
ingness. Successive French governments, through the intermediary of Europe since
1960, have been signatories to successive tariff-reducing GATT agreements; efforts to
route imports of Japanese video cassette recorders through an obscure customs post in
Poitiers (in 1982) or to negotiate quotas on Japanese cars (through the 1980s) had the
air of rearguard actions. Nationalised French firms – especially EDF (electricity) and
GDF (gas) bought into their privatised counterparts abroad, but retained their own
protected status until after 2002. The technological aspects have been experienced less
as an actor (aside from detours like the Minitel, a precocious but very slow French
precursor of the Internet) than as a consumer; French firms have been neither especially
quick nor hopelessly slow to apply information technologies. The cultural dimension of
globalisation is clearly perceived by many French policy-makers as a threat. Hence, for
example, the legal requirement that at least 40 per cent of songs broadcast on French
radio stations should be in French, and that proceedings of conferences and seminars
conducted on French territory should be in French; and the French government’s
readiness, in 1993, to delay or even to wreck the Uruguay Round of tariff cuts in order
to preserve the ‘cultural exception’ of film and TV from the dangers of wholly free
trade; or the heroic, if largely futile, attempts of the Académie Française to prevent the
purity of the French language from being sullied by the incorporation of English
words. The ideological paradigm shift, finally, developed among France’s administra-
tive elites from the late 1970s onwards, but was slower to affect the political elite or the
wider population. This was hardly surprising. If globalisation imposed painful adjust-
ments away from the post-war consensus on every developed capitalist economy, its
implications for France were peculiarly wide-ranging. Without a return to protection-
ism, an economic model centred on state-led projects, subsidised and undercapitalised
national champions, whether government-owned or not, and a thicket of national regu-
lations could not long compete in a world of multinational corporations, free capital
flows, acquisitions and mergers, and multilateral trade regulations; globalisation, in
other words, threatened the whole edifice of dirigisme. A return to protectionism and an
alternative national economic policy was seriously considered by President Mitterrand
during the monetary crisis of March 1983, but decisively rejected. To have done other-
wise would have been to reverse the process of European integration, the third of the
long developments that has transformed the context of French politics.
Europe
France, along with Italy, West Germany and the Benelux states, was a signatory to the
Treaty of Rome, creating the European Economic Community (EEC), in March 1957.
The ‘construction of Europe’, towards which the Rome Treaty was the most decisive
step, has been seen as an opportunity by the French in three ways. First, it has been the
framework for a new relationship with Germany. Reconciliation, after three wars in the
space of a single lifetime (in 1870, 1914 and 1939), was a major achievement,
but paralleled by two less lofty aims: the ‘containment’ of an economically resurgent
Federal Republic and the use of what became a special relationship to dominate the
EEC. Second, French governments, with some misgivings, viewed Europe and the free
trade it promised as an engine of economic growth: most obviously, as a market for
France’s burgeoning farm exports, but also as a means to force modernisation on
French industry, newly exposed to the bracing winds of competition from other mem-
ber states. Third, Europe offered France an opportunity, in de Gaulle’s (private) words,
to ‘regain the status she lost at the battle of Waterloo, as the first among nations’. If this
grandiose ambition appears fanciful, Europe has nevertheless enabled France to ‘punch
above its weight’ in diplomatic terms. Of the other two large founding members of the
EEC, Italy has not aspired to take on a role of leadership in Europe since Mussolini,
and Germany was both divided and diplomatically disabled by the legacy of World War
II: an economic giant but a political pygmy. By a process of elimination France, as one
of the victors in World War II and (from 1960) as an atomic power, could therefore
aspire to speak for the original six.
Such opportunities had a price: the partial surrender of national sovereignty. France
was more sensitive than any other original member state to this issue. The ‘ever-closer
union’ inscribed in the Treaty of Rome challenges the sovereignty of member states in
five ways. First, its institutional processes offer at least the theoretical possibility, since
the introduction in 1986 of qualified majority voting on the EEC’s chief law-making
body, the Council of Ministers, that a member state may be outvoted, thereby being
forced by ‘Europe’ to implement policies it has opposed. Second, the EU is dis-
tinguished from most other international organisations in its possession of a body of
law with a system of courts able, in principle, to sanction member states and businesses
for infringements of EU law. Third, the range of policies in which Europe now has a
hand – including, for example, regional aid, scientific research, the environment, immi-
gration and foreign policy – has forced governments to include a European division
in almost every national ministry and to take the European framework into account in
almost every major political decision. Although the extent of Europe’s involvement in
different policy areas varies (and may, in some sectors, even diminish over time), the
exercise of core EEC competences in the areas of free trade and competition has
become steadily more invasive, especially since the late 1980s. The 1992 Maastricht
Treaty on European Union represented a new threshold in this respect, when member
states (other than the UK) agreed to establish a single European currency, to surrender
monetary policy to a new European Central Bank, and to respect a constraining set of
‘convergence criteria’ aimed at limiting inflation, public debt and budgetary deficits.
Fourth, member states can no longer fix their own trade policy. Since the Rome Treaty
the European Commission has undertaken international trade negotiations, and not-
ably the various rounds of multilateral reductions under the GATT and more recently
of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), on behalf of member states. While only the
Council of Ministers can set the final seal to any such agreement, the pressures on an
individual member state, both from European negotiators and from other member
states, to sacrifice national interests to the collective good, are considerable. Finally,
while a big member state like France could be confident, in the early, small, EEC, of
defending its national interests in Europe by simple self-assertion, such a calculation is
less readily made in a European Union of twenty-five states.
All European heads of state and government, including the French, have had to
weigh the benefits of European integration against the costs. Guy Mollet, the Fourth
Republic prime minister who signed the Rome Treaty in 1957, took care to limit its
supranational provisions in order to be sure of his parliamentary support: the Treaty
was ratified by just 59 per cent of French Deputies (342 to 239). De Gaulle was pre-
pared to halt both the ‘enlargement’ of Europe (by his veto of British entry into the
EEC) and its ‘deepening’ (by preserving the national veto on all European legislation),
in order to preserve his conception of French sovereignty. His successors have been less
reserved. Each has agreed to the entry of new member states, to the reinforcement of
European institutions and to the extension of European competences. France has
not thereby been integrated into a new federal super-state, but the untrammelled
exercise of national sovereignty, viewed by de Gaulle as a central aim of policy, has
nevertheless been constrained in important ways. It was characteristic, moreover, of
much of the first half-century of European integration that the initiatives and debates
were carried on chiefly at elite level, rather than being brought into the hurly-burly of
democratic politics. When the voters were involved, however, their generally favourable
predisposition towards ‘building Europe’ often gave way to mistrust – of the specific
European measures proposed, of the politicians proposing them, or both. The refer-
endum of September 1992 on the Maastricht Treaty passed by the narrowest of
margins. That of May 2005, on the European constitutional treaty, provoked a decisive
no from the French electorate, much to the discomfiture of the president, Jacques
Chirac, who proposed it.
Together, these three large-scale developments – two successive economic transform-

ations, plus France’s integration into an increasingly supranational form of polity –
challenged the models both of political conflict and of the state with which the French
of the post-war generation had grown up. But the transformation was a partial one; one
of the tensions in contemporary French politics is between the novelty of many of the
stakes of politics and the survival of the landmarks and shibboleths of an earlier age.
Political conflict and the state: transformations

The political changes undergone by France can be summarised under three headings.
First, several conflicts inherited from the Third Republic have been laid to rest, or at
least moderated to a significant degree. Second, a variety of external and internal
factors have combined to undermine important aspects of France’s state tradition,
whether the Republican triptych or the dirigiste edifice. Third, these two developments
have meant a redrawing of the lines of political conflict, but not their complete
transformation.
Zones of consensus
France’s traditional lack of consensus on the nature of the régime was effectively ended
halfway through the trente glorieuses (though as Chapter 2 will show, this owed
more to the crisis in Algeria than to France’s economic development). The referendum
establishing the Fifth Republic, and with it a strengthened presidency, was passed in
September 1958 by 79.2 per cent of the voters. Four years later, de Gaulle’s revision of
his ‘own’ constitution, establishing the direct election of the president, was approved by
62 per cent. For a while François Mitterrand continued to refer to the régime as a
‘permanent coup d’État’; and the constitution has been revised, sometimes in import-
ant ways, sixteen times since 1962. But in retrospect, the referendum of 1962 can be seen
as a closure of debates over the fundamentals of the régime. In particular, it signalled
the acceptance, first by the electorate and then, more slowly, by the political elite
(including Mitterrand), that the Republic was compatible with a strong presidency: a
striking reversal of the older tradition that equated the Republic with a parliamentary
régime. The Fifth Republic survived de Gaulle’s resignation in April 1969. Five years
later, it survived the election of a president from the non-Gaullist Right (Valéry Giscard
d’Estaing), following Georges Pompidou’s sudden death in office. In 1981, the constitu-
tion passed the ultimate test of allowing peaceful alternation in power when François
Mitterrand led the Socialists to victories in both presidential and parliamentary elec-
tions. Constitutional debate continues, notably over questions as important as the
independence of the judiciary or the practice of multiple (national and local) elective
office-holding. But it has lost the passion and urgency it provoked in the 150 years after
the Revolution. Nearly 70 per cent of the electorate abstained at the September 2000
referendum that reduced the presidential term from seven years to five; opinion polls
found that a majority of abstentionists considered high petrol prices a more important
issue (though interestingly, it was in the debates over the European constitutional treaty
in 2005 that some of the old passions over institutional questions were revived).
The political stability afforded by the new régime contributed to the acceleration of
growth in the 1960s, but also to the (near-)resolution of the question of Church–state
relations. The Debré Law of 1959, allowing state subsidies to Church schools under
certain conditions, was, it is true, opposed by a vast petition that attracted the signa-
tures of over 70 per cent of the voters in twenty of France’s ninety-six départements.
But once passed, it stuck. Subsequent attempts to modify the delicate balance it estab-
lished between public (secular) and private (religious) education provoked mass demon-
strations on either side, notably in 1984 and 1994, and were abandoned. France’s
remaining practising Catholics went on voting disproportionately to the Right. Yet the
religious issue has lost the power to envenom political debate that it undoubtedly
possessed at the start of the twentieth century. And the notion of laïcité has been
transferred, as we shall see, to the quite different issue of headscarves on Muslim girls.
The resolution of the questions of the régime and the Church emptied France’s
Left–Right division of part of its substance. Late twentieth-century opinion polls
showed that at least three out of five of the French – 62 per cent in 1996 – thought the
Left–Right division ‘out of date’. Even the division centred on class and the manage-
ment of the economy had blurred somewhat after the great U-turn of 1983, when
François Mitterrand turned away from the Socialist policies on which he had been
elected and accepted the full implications of living in an open economy. Despite the
revival of the far Left from the late twentieth century, it is unlikely that any new
Socialist campaign would promise a ‘rupture with capitalism’; no election would be
seen, as those of 1978 and 1981 were by both politicians and observers, as entailing a
choix de société – a systemic choice between capitalism and socialism. All governments
will govern within capitalism, using their limited margins of manoeuvre in somewhat
different ways, but also in unexpectedly similar ones: by 2002 the Left, for example, had
been responsible for a greater volume of privatisations, in money terms, than the Right.
The blurring of the traditional divisions has been compounded by the unprecedented
frequency of alternance, of the handover of power between Right and Left after elec-
tions. In 1981 this was a novelty for the French. The Third and Fourth Republics saw
coalitions, usually of Centre-Right or Centre-Left, form and re-form according to the
shifting balance of parliamentary arithmetic. The Fifth Republic translated the Left–
Right division into practical politics, notably by providing for the direct election of the
president at two ballots, with only two candidates present at the run-off. But for the first
twenty-three years of the Fifth Republic the Right ruled without interruption. The
alternance of 1981, on the other hand, was the first of many: in 1986, 1988, 1993, 1997
and 2002, the voters threw out an incumbent government and replaced it with one of
the opposite political stamp. Moreover, the time lag between the presidential term of
seven years and the parliamentary one of five ensured that in 1986, 1993 and 1997, the
president and the parliamentary majority, and hence the government, were on opposite
sides: a left-wing president (Mitterrand) with right-wing governments in 1986 and 1993,
a right-wing president (Chirac) with a left-wing government in 1997. This ‘cohabit-
ation’ between president and government combined with the frequency of alternance to
render the Left–Right division banal. Despite regular skirmishes between the two sides
on each occasion, cohabitation also obliged the leaders of Right and Left to work
together from day to day over months or years. In doing so, it definitively buried the
notion of ‘civil war by other means’ which had marked Left–Right political relations,
with more or less intensity, for two centuries.
The configuration of Left–Right relations was also altered by the decline of the two
great political forces to have emerged from the years of Occupation: Communism and
Gaullism. The Communists’ share of the vote fell from a quarter to a fifth at the outset
of the Fifth Republic in 1958, but then stabilised. The real decline began two decades
later: in the 1980s the Communist electorate shrank from over 20 per cent to well under
10. The consequences reached far beyond the realm of electoral politics. Marxists lost
the high ground of intellectual debate that they had occupied – almost alone, it seemed
at times – since 1945. And the non-Communist Left was no longer obliged to accept the
limits on the range of acceptable policies imposed by an alliance with a powerful
Communist partner, a change that in turn contributed to the ideological shift away
from dirigisme discussed above. The Gaullists, for their part, lost both their hegemony
on the Right and much of their political distinctiveness after de Gaulle’s resignation in
1969. Their share of the vote halved from some two-fifths in 1968 to one-fifth ten years
later. And the necessity of alliance with the non-Gaullist Right, plus the progressive
replacement of the Resistance generation in the party leadership by younger men,
turned the Gaullists into something closer to a commonplace conservative party than
they had been in the General’s day – an evolution carried to its term with the creation
of the UMP, a party combining both Gaullists and much of the non-Gaullist moderate
Right, in 2002. Widely different causes fed into the decline of the two parties: for
example, the shrinkage of the blue-collar working class and the progressive discredit of
the Soviet model for the Communists, and the progressive diffusion of the General’s
legacy throughout the political system for the Gaullists. But there were elements in
common, too: the passing of the Resistance generation, and the rejection, after 1968, of
an authoritarian style of politics that each party, in its own way, represented. The
double decline meant not the disappearance, but the weakening, of elements that had
shaped the singularity of French politics in the post-war generation.
The dismantling of dirigisme

The decline of Communism and Gaullism was paralleled by that of the economic
structure that they had done much, between them, to create; for much of the apparatus
of dirigisme was dismantled after the turning point of March 1983. On the Left, the
emblematic figure of this policy shift was Pierre Bérégovoy, Socialist finance minister
from 1984 to 1986 and 1988 to 1992, and prime minister from April 1992 to March 1993
(he committed suicide shortly after the Left’s electoral defeat in 1993); on the Right it
was Édouard Balladur, Gaullist finance minister from 1986 to 1988, and prime minister
from 1993 to 1995. Firms nationalised by Socialists in 1981, or even in the Liberation
era of 1944–46, were first freed to manage their affairs as they wished and then privat-
ised in successive waves, under governments of the Right (1986–88 and 1993–97) but
also of the Left (1997–2002). Practically no state-owned firm remains in what had been
seen as the ‘competitive’ sector; not only industrial companies like St-Gobain or
Renault but also banks and insurance firms like BNP or UAP that had underpinned the
state’s former de facto control of credit passed into the hands of private shareholders,
many of them foreign; they became less and less tied to the state, and indeed, as they
sought and found overseas partners and shareholders, less and less national too. More-
over, under European pressure, state monopolies formerly seen as ‘natural’ had to be
progressively opened to competition: by the late 1990s that had happened, for example,
to telecommunications, electricity distribution, airlines and even, to a limited extent,
rail transport. The Paris stock market was liberalised from 1984 to allow undercapital-
ised French firms to build up their equity; the Socialists also began a steady build-down
of corporate taxation rates. Budgetary constraints as well as the increasingly vigilant
eye of Europe meant that national champions were less likely to be bailed out by public
subsidy if they turned into lame ducks; rescues, commonplace in the 1970s and early
1980s, were progressively scaled down, though not before some particularly costly cases
(Air France and Crédit Lyonnais) in the mid-1990s. The regulatory structures of the
dirigiste model were cut back: the Left ended the automatic link between the minimum
wage and inflation while the Right abolished controls on prices and foreign exchange.
Controls on hiring and firing, abandoned by the Right after 1986, were never fully
restored under the Left. Meanwhile the Plan, in decline by the mid-1970s, fell into even
greater oblivion (before being abolished altogether in October 2005). Some of the
grands projets characteristic of the dirigiste model were transferred to Europe for
reasons of cost. Within the state machine, finally, there was a reshuffling of power, with
a strengthening of the two major bastions of financial orthodoxy, the Finance Ministry
and the Bank of France (independent from 1993, though superseded in its essential role
by the European Central Bank from 1999), and the weakening of the Industry Ministry,
DATAR and, of course, the Commissariat au Plan, all of dirigiste leanings. Not surpris-
ingly, this was reflected in policy, and especially in the abandonment of the ‘inflationary
social compromise’ which had provided a safety valve for the rapid transformations of
the trente glorieuses. From 1983 the priorities of successive governments, of both Left
and Right, shifted from the maintenance of something close to full employment, and
the protection of the purchasing power of the employed, to the elimination of inflation
and the limitation of both budgetary and trade deficits.
On orthodox criteria, both the policy of ‘competitive disinflation’ and the progressive
dismantling of dirigisme were a resounding success. From 1992 to 2003, France ran a
consistent trade surplus averaging nearly 1.7 per cent of GDP. Inflation has fallen to
levels close to or below those of Germany. France under Mitterrand won praise from
the London Financial Times for the soundness of its economic policies. The value of the
franc stabilised against the deutschmark, after a last crisis in August 1992, and France’s
passage to the euro in 1999–2002 passed off smoothly. Meanwhile, French firms rose to
the challenge of liberalisation by looking abroad and diversifying. The growth in the
number and size of French multinationals has been remarkable. In 1994, France had
the largest number of multinational firms after Germany, Japan, Switzerland and the
USA, with companies like AXA (which took over its sleepy French competitor UAP) or
Total-Fina-Elf being clearly world-class. French firms have been particularly active in
the international mergers and acquisitions market: happily in the case of Renault’s
links with Nissan, disastrously in that of the takeover in 2000 of Seagram’s, owners of
Hollywood’s Universal Studios, by Vivendi, whose core business was water distribution
in France. And among major European Union countries, France was second only to
Britain, over the years 1990 to 2003, in its capacity to attract foreign direct investment,
from the Far East but also from the United States.
But the dismantling of dirigisme and the policy shift that went with it have had costs.
Chief among these has been unemployment, which doubled from just under 1.5 million
at the Left’s victory in 1981 to some 3 million by the time of the Socialist defeat twelve
years later. This record had several linked causes: slow growth resulting from the high
real interest rates required to maintain the franc–deutschmark parity; the loss of indus-
trial jobs, common to the developed world, to countries with low labour costs; the
curtailment of bail-outs; the ‘delocalisation’ of such jobs away from developed coun-
tries by multinationals; the continuing perception of France as an over-regulated, over-
taxed, high-wage-cost economy. Unemployment has now persisted at 9 per cent or more
of the workforce for nearly twenty-five years; it has contributed, along with part-time
working and fixed-term contracts, to a poverty level of some 5 million in France. And it
has been disproportionately cruel to women, immigrants, the unskilled and the young,
with between a fifth and a quarter of the workforce aged 18 to 25 out of work. That
development undermined a crucial element of the republican model, the ascenseur
social: for the rising generations, education, ever more widely available, was no longer a
guarantee of a job, let alone of upward social mobility. Opinion polls from the early
1990s on showed that for the first time since 1945, most French parents expected their
children to live no better, and possibly less well, than they did. The popularity of books
such as Viviane Forrester’s L’horreur économique illustrates a widespread sensitivity to
the threats posed by globalisation, whether to agriculture, to industrial jobs, to public
services or to non-‘Anglo-Saxon’ cultures. ‘Delocalisations’, though minor in the stat-
istics of job losses, loom large in the public imagination and invite politicians to
demand their prevention. And there is no counterbalancing discourse of comparable
popular influence in France to argue that globalisation can bring benefits, or that it is
inevitable, or even that France could adjust to it while preserving its essential values.
The state tradition: challenges from within

Under external pressure from Europe and from the markets, the French state has been
quite radically, and painfully, redefined by comparison with the recent dirigiste
past. But it has also faced internal challenges which have eroded some of its strongest
‘Jacobin’ characteristics. Three are worth mentioning briefly here.
• Decentralisation, or failing that the ‘defence of local liberties’, is an aspiration as

old as the French state itself, typically invoked by oppositions and ignored by
parties in power. The Left, condemned to twenty-three years of national oppos-
ition under the Fifth Republic but still retaining important local positions, had
ample opportunity to meditate on, and attack with more or less sincerity, the
intrusiveness of central government. Unusually, it also chose to act once in power,
after the presidential and parliamentary election victories of 1981. The decentral-
isation legislation of 1982–83 brought substantial modifications to the Jacobin
model. Directly elected regional councils were established. The powers of prefects,
both as supervisors able to accept or reject all municipal acts and as the chief
executives of the hundred départements, the middle tier of French local govern-
ment, were severely clipped. Local authorities enjoyed new freedoms to finance
their own projects without seeking project-specific grants from the state. The Right
denounced the reforms nationally but soon benefited from them locally, after a
series of local election victories in 1983–85. That helped to ensure a consensual
basis for the main thrust of decentralisation. More generally, what had in principle
(though not always in practice) been a hierarchical set of relationships with the
state, acting through the prefect and other representatives on the ground, as the
supreme arbiter of local destinies, turned into a more complex, and more equal, set
of partnerships in which the co-operation of local and regional authorities with the
state had to be sought rather than demanded or simply assumed. Subnational
government has thereby been strengthened as an economic player: certain regions
and départements and a small number of urban areas have emerged as economic
actors and arenas in their own right. In terms of service delivery, on the other
hand, subnational government continued to play a lesser role than in many other
European states. In 2003, for example, total spending by local and regional author-
ities, at about 163 billion euros, was well under half the amount spent by central
government (excluding the social security system). The Raffarin government
appointed in 2002 (Raffarin, significantly, was a former president of Poitou-
Charentes regional council) sought to engage a second phase of decentralisation.
This entailed both a constitutional amendment stating (in Article 1) that France
was not only an ‘indivisible, secular, social, and democratic Republic’, but that
it was henceforth ‘organised on a decentralised basis’, and practical measures to
transfer new responsibilities to subnational government. Justified by the govern-
ment in terms of greater flexibility and responsiveness to local needs, this move was
opposed by public-sector unions in the name of the sacrosanct uniformity of provi-
sion (they were also worried about job losses), and viewed with scepticism even by
France’s local and regional elites, who feared new tasks without corresponding
resources.
• The judiciary occupies a clearly subordinate position in the Jacobin tradition of the
state, according to which the nation and its representatives, invested by universal
suffrage with the power to make and unmake laws, rightfully take precedence over
the judiciary, whose task is merely to administer law. Any questioning of this
subordination was considered to open the road to ‘government by judges’, viewed
as a dangerous Anglo-Saxon (and more specifically American) innovation which
conferred exorbitant powers on an unelected judiciary. This, however, has begun to
change since the 1970s, as a result of several convergent pressures. One is external:
France’s increasing involvement in a network of European and international bod-
ies, including some (such as the EU and the World Trade Organisation) with a
judicial or quasi-judicial authority to resolve disputes and if necessary impose or
agree penalties on member states for non-respect of its rulings. But France has also,
like other major democracies, generated an increasing range of its own regulatory
agencies whose very raison d’être lies, in principle, in their independence from the
political authorities and thus from universal suffrage. They can only be controlled
via judicial means. A third impulse tending to diminish the subordination of the
judiciary has been the activism of the Constitutional Council, France’s (very)
approximate equivalent to the United States Supreme Court, which from 1971
incorporated the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen into the
‘bloc of constitutionality’ when it assessed the constitutionality of new laws.
Fourth, judges within the ordinary courts, and especially examining magistrates,
displayed an unwonted persistence, from the early 1990s, in investigating politically
sensitive cases which in former times would have been smothered without difficulty
by a word from the Justice Ministry. In doing so they opened an unprecedented
debate about the desirable relationship between the judiciary and the political
authorities, and prompted modifications to the law. Laurent Cohen-Tanugi, a
leading specialist in this area, has referred to these changes as a ‘silent revolution’
that has transported France ‘from the Jacobin state to the law-governed state’
(‘de l’État jacobin à l’État de droit’).
• Military service, symbol of the link between France’s citizens and the national
aspiration to a world role, was phased out between 1997 and 2002, with a dimin-
ution in the strength of France’s armed forces from 381,000 to under 240,000.
Militarily, professionalisation made perfect sense, allowing levels of expertise and
flexibility impossible in a conscript army – sixty-five years after de Gaulle had
called for an armée de métier. Politically, the call-up had ceased to exercise much of
its integrative role, not least because of the widespread exemptions for young mid-
dle-class men who, in return for teaching the children of France’s former colonies
or occupying a variety of civilian desk jobs vaguely linked to France’s overseas
interests, never saw a parade ground. But its end set a final seal on what had been a
central component of the Republican synthesis.
Redefining political conflict

The last quarter of the twentieth century saw three more or less new splits take form
within French political debate. The first, and in some ways the most familiar, turned
around issues of globalisation and liberalism. The second opposed the new libertarian
Left and the new authoritarian Right. The third concerned Europe. None reproduced
the old frontiers of Left and Right.
The debate around the globalisation issue was conducted between a part of the Right
and a part of the Left. On the Right, neo-liberalism in France (as elsewhere) fused ideas
emanating from Austrian economics, monetarism, new classical macroeconomics and
public choice theory. It was propagated by an alliance of ‘nouveaux économistes’ (such
as Guy Sorman, Jean-Jacques Rosa and Florin Aftalion), philosophers (notably Jean-
François Revel and Jean-Marie Benoist) and industrialists (notably Michel Drancourt
and Yvon Gattaz), and given influential expression by journalists, by gurus such as
Alain Minc (a somewhat unorthodox former member of the Inspection des Finances,
an elite civil service corps, directeur des finances at St-Gobain and chargé de conférences
at the École de Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales). Within politics, neo-liberalism was
particularly influential within the non-Gaullist moderate Right, helped shape the pro-
grammes on which the Right won the parliamentary elections of 1986 and 1993, and in
a more general sense was part of the ideological paradigm shift discussed above, affect-
ing even Gaullists and Socialists in varying degrees. Balladur’s account of the early
privatisations was symbolically called Je crois en l’homme plus qu’en l’État (‘I believe in
Man more than in the state’). Yet neo-liberalism never captured the whole of the Right
in France as it did in Britain. It had vigorous opponents among Gaullists like Philippe
Séguin, while the mainstream of the Chirac camp handled it with great caution, at least
after 1988. Its most committed political exponent, Alain Madelin, scored a mere 3.9 per
cent of the vote at the 2002 presidential elections.
The anti-liberal opponents of globalisation have enjoyed wider general popularity
and have made significant inroads into the political elite. France’s ‘alterglobalisation’
movement, a term coined to reconcile left-wing internationalism with opposition to the
neo-liberal globalisation process, has been centred around the Attac association
(formed in 1997 to advocate the so-called Tobin tax on international capital move-
ments, but articulating a much wider range of demands) and the Monde Diplomatique
monthly. Led by intellectuals such as its president Bernard Cassen, the editor of Monde
Diplomatique Ignacio Ramonet, and the late sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, the alterglo-
balisation movement has also attracted less cerebral figures such as José Bové, leader of
the Confédération Paysanne and tireless campaigner for real French food, and activists
from the ranks of former Communists, Trotskyists and Greens. It has been at the
forefront of such international antiglobalisation events as the World Social Forum, and
won at least the nominal support of over 100 French Deputies in 2000, while the Tobin
tax has been supported, at various times, by such mainstream figures as Jacques Chirac,
Lionel Jospin and Laurent Fabius. Attac is popular because it expresses deep-seated
French worries about globalisation (55 per cent of respondents to a poll in 2001 viewed
globalisation as a threat to French firms and jobs, against 37 per cent who saw it as an
opportunity), plus a sense of France’s universal mission for humankind, leavened with
anti-Americanism. But beyond the creation of commissions to study the feasibility of
the Tobin tax or something like it, its policy impact was slight – at least until the fusion
of the European and globalisation issues in the 2005 European referendum campaign.
The second opposition has been characterised as setting ‘universalist’ against ‘anti-
universalist’ values, or libertarians against authoritarians. Ronald Inglehart has shown
how the developed capitalist world saw the rise of a new libertarian Left from the late
1960s onwards. New movements mobilised, outside the confines of mainstream parties,
on issues hitherto at the margins of political debate: the environment, the rights of
women and of minorities such as immigrants or homosexuals, sexuality and family life
(and the right to divorce, contraception and abortion), and the defence of civil liberties.
In France, the liberties promised by the Republican triptych, as mediated by the rather
heavy-handed authoritarianism of the Gaullist régime, seemed hopelessly limited to
many activists in the wake of the upheaval of May 1968. Similarly, the formal equality
before the law guaranteed by the constitution offered little hope of real equality in the
face of discriminations on the basis, most notably, of race and sex. Finally, the frater-
nity offered by the French model of integration ignored the droit à la différence – the
right of provincial groups to preserve their own distinctive culture and language (be it
Breton, Occitan, or Corsican) from the standardising juggernaut of the French state,
and of immigrants to integrate into French society on their own terms rather than those
traditionally dictated by the Republic. In the decade after May 1968, mobilisation on
these issues was rather slow in France by comparison with other European countries,
though not negligible (France saw some large-scale anti-nuclear demonstrations). By
the 1990s, on the other hand, it had found expression both in a panoply of new social
movements and in a Green party of respectable size and support, though of divided
and quarrelsome temperament.
The new authoritarian Right, present in most West European countries by the late
1980s, has been viewed by Piero Ignazi as an equal and opposite reaction against the
libertarian Left: autocratic in its organisation, patriarchal, racist, anti-gay and indiffer-
ent to the environment. If France had been a laggard, by European standards, in the
mobilisation of the libertarian Left, it was at the forefront in the rise of the new Right:
the electoral breakthrough of the Front National in 1983–84 was an inspiration to its
European counterparts. Although the immigration issue has been the FN’s main stock-
in-trade, it has drawn support from France’s less educated, and often most economic-
ally vulnerable, voters over issues as varied as high unemployment, rising crime,
the decay of HLM estates, corruption among the mainstream parties, and what is
presented as the sell-out of French interests by remote ‘cosmopolitan’ elites.
The question of European integration, finally, has repeatedly cut across the Left–
Right division. The ratification of the Rome Treaty was supported by most parlia-
mentarians of the central governing parties: Socialists, Christian Democrats and
most Radicals and mainstream conservatives. It was opposed on the Left by the Com-
munists and a minority of Radicals and on the Right by most Gaullists and the far
right-wing Poujadists. A generation later, the referendum on the Maastricht Treaty
reproduced almost the same alignment: the treaty was opposed from the Left by Com-
munists and a small number of the Socialists, from the Right by the far-Right Front
National, most of the Gaullists and a small section of the non-Gaullist conservatives;
Socialists, Christian Democrats and a minority of Gaullists (including Jacques Chirac)
supported it. A comparable division reappeared with the 2005 referendum on the Euro-
pean constitutional treaty. The fact that it was now the Left, not the Right, in oppos-
ition, the success of the far Left and Attac in mobilising against the treaty, and the
willingness of Socialist leaders such as Henri Emmanuelli or Laurent Fabius to join
them in the no campaign, ensured that the Left’s weight in the no vote would be greater,
and the Right’s smaller, than in 1992; but the division between centre and extremes still
applied.
None of these areas of conflict is unique to France; each, though, stands in sharp
relief against past divides because of the traditional strength of the state in all its
aspects and of the Left–Right division. The weakening of old Left–Right divisions,
coupled with the appearance of other issues that divided Left and Right internally more
than one from the other, suggested a new divide within French politics from the 1990s.
The ‘parties of government’ – Socialists, the non-Gaullist moderate Right, and most
neo-Gaullists – accepted, with reservations, France’s steady integration into the world
capitalist economy, and favoured, in varying degrees, further European integration. The
forces ‘outside the system’, on the other hand, questioned or rejected both globalisation
and Europe and, in the case of the FN, placed an inward-looking nationalisme de repli,
which sought to protect the identity of France against the ‘invasion’ of immigrants, at
the centre of their electoral appeal. The division was clearest at the first round of the
2002 presidential elections, when a third of votes cast went to candidates of the far
Right or Left – and when these votes plus abstentions and spoilt ballots accounted for
over 54 per cent of the registered electorate. It has also been observed that new divisions
have generated new voter loyalties, with blue-collar workers from formerly loyal Com-
munist neighbourhoods voting massively for the FN, and so-called bourgeois bohêmes,
well-off, educated, and sensitive to libertarian Left values, supporting Socialists or
Greens where their parents would have supported the moderate Right.
This is, however, an oversimplification. Divisions over Europe, over the libertarian–
authoritarian divide and over globalisation may overlap at times, but they certainly do
not coincide perfectly. Anything relating to Islam, in particular, tends to sow confusion
in relation to both old and new boundaries. In 2005, debates over European integration
were complicated by the distinct issues of the European constitution and Turkish entry;
supporting the former did not necessarily entail accepting the latter; indeed, their Chris-
tian loyalties ensured that some of the most passionate European integrationists were
among the most vigorous opponents of Turkish entry. An even more striking example
was supplied a year earlier by the ‘Muslim headscarf affair’, the conflict over a law
banning signs of religious faith in schools and directed chiefly against the wearing of
headscarves by Muslim girls. The issue divided the French: 57 per cent of respondents
to a poll in January 2004 considered that the public display of religious affiliation
represented ‘a danger for the cohesion of the Republic’, against 41 per cent who took
the opposite view. Each side had serious arguments: the droit à la différence, the right of
young people to express a cultural identity, and pragmatic concerns about the risk of
alienating France’s four million or so Muslims, were set against the traditional principle
of laïcité and the right of young Muslim women to escape religious pressures from their
families or neighbourhood fundamentalists. The law, recommended by a committee
headed by a Christian Democrat, and supported by the conservative president Chirac,
was voted by nine-tenths of the conservative UMP Deputies – and opposed by two-
thirds of the (much smaller) Communist group, nominally more attached than any to
the principle of laïcité.
To summarise, for nearly two centuries after the Revolution, two elements dis-
tinguished France’s political traditions. First, the Left–Right division served as a mat-
rix for a variety of conflicts, particularly over the nature of the régime, Church–state
relations, and questions of the distribution of wealth and income, and gained thereby in
persistence and intensity. Secondly, France’s state tradition had its roots in the ancien
régime, but was reinforced by the Jacobins of the Revolution and above all by Napoleon.
It was underwritten by all the main political families of Left and Right, albeit for
different reasons, and gained a new lease of life with the advent of a more intervention-
ist state after World War II. Third, in the half-century after 1945, the intensity of the
Left–Right division was attenuated by the consequences of the trente glorieuses, espe-
cially dechristianisation; by the development of consensus over the nature of the
régime, the new regularity of alternance and the practice of cohabitation; by the emer-
gence of new issues that proved difficult to accommodate into the Left–Right matrix;
and by the forced reconciliation of the Left with the capitalist economy after 1983.
Fourth, the state tradition, having reached an apogee in the 1960s, with the combination
of the strong leadership supplied by the de Gaulle presidency and a near-universal
acceptance of dirigisme, was then challenged both by the constraints of globalisation
and of Europe and by challenges to the internal Jacobin tradition as it bore down on
subnational authorities and on judges. It remains to be seen how much of both
traditions has survived these multiple assaults.
The survival of traditions

France was for long considered ‘exceptional’ by foreign (chiefly ‘Anglo-Saxon’) obser-
vers by virtue of the combination of an original, complex and intense pattern of
political conflict with a powerful, intrusive state, at once depended upon and resented
by the French (‘a vulture with teats’ was how the peasants saw it, according to Gordon
Wright). Those two aspects of the French political tradition have been much attenuated
under the impact of internal and external developments. They have not, however,
disappeared.
The state tradition

The survival of France’s state tradition can be highlighted in four ways. France con-
tinues to claim the status of a world power. Individuals and groups within the French
state continue to resist the modification from within of the Jacobin model, whether by
decentralisation or through greater judicial independence. Policy-makers, whether poli-
ticians, civil servants or leaders of the private sector, have had difficulty abandoning the
habits of dirigisme. And the state’s share of GDP has remained stubbornly high, as
social spending has climbed.
France’s continued ambition to remain a world power is best illustrated by the con-
tinued extent of its military commitments. France was the last European state to cut
military budgets at the end of the Cold War, and the last of the older nuclear powers to
abandon nuclear testing – after a resumption of tests, in 1995–96, which provoked
hostility among the Pacific states nearest to the Muroroa atoll where they took place, as
well as opposition in France, to the apparent surprise of President Chirac. As of 2004,
France had 33,000 troops stationed overseas, from Afghanistan (where a French officer
took command of the international force in summer 2004) to the Ivory Coast, from
Haiti to Kosovo. France supplied the second largest contingent, after the USA, of
troops and aircraft in the 1999 Kosovo war, and is still the largest contributor to UN
peacekeeping missions. The question of France’s return to the integrated NATO com-
mand structure from which de Gaulle withdrew in 1966 has been regularly posed, and
in both the 1991 Gulf war and the Kosovo war, French troops did indeed come under
American command. For the moment, though, France remains inside the Atlantic
alliance but notionally free to deploy its defence forces independently – an aspect of the
Gaullist legacy which is hard for any French leader overtly to abandon. By comparison,
Britain, the only European nuclear power integrated into the NATO command struc-
ture, is regularly, and contemptuously, referred to in France as America’s ‘nuclear
vassal’. France was not alone among European countries in opposing the 2003 Iraq
war: it was joined by Belgium, Germany and, after the 2004 elections, by Spain as well.
But the flamboyance of French opposition can only be fully understood in the context
of the Gaullist tradition: it was intended to set an example to the world.
France also remains a ‘one and indivisible Republic’ – very far, despite the decentral-
isation reforms of the early 1980s or even those of the Raffarin government, from a
federal state on the German model. Compared with the German Länder, France’s
regions control miserable budgets and limited areas of competence. The smaller local
authorities remain heavily dependent on the state’s field services for their technical
support. A concern to safeguard the ‘one and indivisible’ Republic was revealed by the
Constitutional Council’s ruling of 1991 which required the words ‘Corsican people’ to
be removed from a bill giving greater autonomy to the island of Corsica. The European
directive setting standards for the wider use of regional languages was similarly per-
ceived, chiefly on the nationalist Right but also among sections of the Left, as a threat
to the Republic.
The Jacobin model also survives in the relations between the political authorities and
the judiciary. Despite their greater assertiveness from the 1990s, France’s judges still
enjoy considerably less independence than, say, their Italian counterparts. The promo-
tion system for prosecuting magistrates remains in the (political) hands of the Justice
Ministry; attempts to change it, at the end of the Jospin premiership in 2002, collapsed
in the face of opposition from the Senate. Cohen-Tanugi’s transition from l’État jacobin
to l’État de droit is far from complete.
Third, dirigisme remains embedded in the institutions and culture of the French state
despite the transformations of French capitalism and its context noted above. Dirigisme
survives, more specifically, in five ways.
• As a dense institutional architecture. The complex network of interministerial

committees set up to intervene in the economy at the end of the trente glorieuses is
still largely in place, albeit often with rather shorn powers. And France retains a
distinctive fiscal system, industrial relations and wage bargaining systems, labour
market regulations, educational and training systems, and financial and corporate
governance frameworks.
• As an expression of the character of France’s interlocking elites. One illustration of
the continuing hold of the civil service elite on French capitalism was supplied by
the takeover battle between the Banque Nationale de Paris (BNP) and the Société
Générale in the summer of 1999. Both of these banks had been nationalised after
the Liberation, in 1945. Both had been privatised, Société Générale in 1986 and
BNP in 1993. On the BNP side, nine of the sixteen board members were graduates
of elite civil service schools, and eight had started their careers as civil servants. For
the SG, the equivalent figures were twelve out of seventeen graduates of elite civil
service schools, of whom eleven were ex-civil servants. The conflict between the two
banks was fed, not merely by the competition between two management teams
seeking to convince shareholders of their superior ability to run a merged firm, but
by political rivalries between members of the SG board whose career paths were
closely intertwined with the neo-Gaullist party, the RPR, and those of the BNP,
whose affinities lay with the non-Gaullist Right but whose president had served on
the Socialist Prime Minister Pierre Mauroy’s staff in 1981–84. Ernest-Antoine de
Seillière, head of the MEDEF, France’s main employers’ association, is a graduate
of the École Nationale d’Administration (ÉNA) who started his career as a civil
servant; so were three out of the five captains of industry tipped as Seillière’s
possible successors. The domination of the civil service elite is not confined to the
business world: of the five prime ministers appointed since 1993, four (Édouard
Balladur, Alain Juppé, Lionel Jospin and Dominique de Villepin) have been ÉNA
men.
• As a policy style. The dirigiste policy style has not deserted France. The behaviour
of Lionel Jospin’s left-wing government after 1997 offers plenty of examples of its
rude health: the manifesto commitment to reduce unemployment by instituting a
35-hour week, and the rapid move to do this by law; the use of partial privatisations
to raise capital for the public purse, while retaining the maximum possible measure
of public control over the firms concerned; the slow and minimalist implementa-
tion of the European directive to open electricity markets to competition, con-
ceived in such a way as to offer maximum protection to the national supplier EDF;
the successful creation of a French national champion in the oil sector, with the
takeover of Elf by Total; the successful reorganisation by the Socialists of the
banking sector to favour the mutual banks; the botched attempt to produce a single
national banking champion out of the BNP–Société Générale battle. Although
Jospin admitted, after the latter setback, that in a modern, post-dirigiste economy
the state could not ‘impose its will’ on the market, his record indicated that he still
thought it worth trying. Nor was this propensity confined to the Left. When
Jospin’s conservative predecessor Juppé (another former civil servant, like Jospin,
but one who had written a pamphlet on the need for France to break away from the
state-led economy of the post-war generation) set out to tackle the gaping hole in
the finances of France’s social security system, he chose to reinforce the state’s
control. Whereas prior to 1995, the social security budget had been negotiated by
employers and trade unions, with periodic injections of state money to cover the
deficit, the Juppé plan involved the government and parliament fixing the social
security budget annually. Free-market solutions, such as partial privatisation or
even measures to encourage the development of pension funds, barely entered the
debate. Some of the Juppé government’s privatisations (notably of the arms and
electronics firm Thomson) also came to grief owing to the inclination of the gov-
ernment, and especially of the president, to treat privatisations as a means to
reward political friends. More recently, Nicolas Sarkozy as finance minister stepped
in twice in the space of a few months to recapitalise the troubled Alstom engineer-
ing firm and save it from the unwelcome embraces of Germany’s Siemens, and to
arrange a merger between two French pharmaceutical firms, Aventis and Sanofi, so
as to head off a financially more attractive bid from the Swiss firm Novartis. In
2005, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin also made clear his hostility to any
foreign takeover of food giant Danone, although less than a quarter of the firm’s
business was now done in France. These were small-scale interventions compared
to the great days of dirigisme, but indicative of a state of mind still attached to the
ideal of national champions.
• As a myth. Since the 1980s dirigisme has been depicted, at worst, as a habit that
France has outgrown and, at best, as a major contributor to the golden age of the
trente glorieuses. There appears to be a mismatch between the persistent omnipres-
ence of state officialdom with its dense institutional architecture and the dilution
and reshaping of the nature of dirigisme. There is another mismatch between the
espousals of the market and a lingering hankering after the benefits of dirigisme.
The fate of two reports on France’s economic difficulties illustrates the point. The
first, by former International Monetary Fund chief Michel Camdessus, insisted on
the need to reduce the number of civil servants and the state’s share of GDP, and
received a lukewarm reception from president and government at its publication in
October 2004. Three months later, by contrast, a very different report was pub-
lished by a second committee led by Jean-Louis Beffa, head of the St-Gobain glass
group. Its recommendations, including a state-led industrial policy, with a new
Industrial Innovation Agency and plans for new grands projets, were enthusiastic-
ally taken up by President Chirac in a speech that explicitly harked back to the
dirigiste heyday of his early political career as a model.
• By public demand. Even when the French Right’s free-market faith was at its apogee
in 1986, French opinion remained unconvinced. By the end of Chirac’s second
premiership in 1988, a majority of the French took the view that the economy
needed more state intervention, not less. Both of the two leading candidates at the
1995 presidential election, Chirac and Jospin, promised greater state intervention,
notably to tackle problems of inequality and social exclusion in France. If the
typical reflex of the American pressure group is to sue or to give money to cam-
paigns, its French counterpart is still more likely to take to the streets and demon-
strate for action (and, typically, money) from the state. In successive polls run by
SOFRES, some 46–48 per cent of respondents have stated that the state ‘does not
intervene enough’ in economic and social affairs, against 26–27 per cent who take
the opposite view. Even among right-wing sympathisers, the figures are evenly
balanced, with about 40 per cent demanding more intervention and 40 per cent
wishing for less. The crucial argument that the left wing of the no campaign
brought to bear in the 2005 referendum was that the European constitutional treaty
would rule out French-style public service monopolies or industrial policies; but it
was even more revealing that the treaty’s supporters, from Chirac down, chose to
present the Europe of the treaty as a ‘shield’ against globalisation, a sort of France
writ large.
Fourth, despite the dismantling of dirigisme, the French state of the early twenty-first
century remained larger than ever, whether in terms of the number of public employees
(between 25 and 30 per cent of the workforce, depending on where the public–private
frontier is drawn) or the share of GDP taken by the state, at central and at local level. In
1981, the French state’s fiscal revenue amounted to some 42 per cent of GDP – the
same, given the balanced budget, as government spending. By 2003, on the other hand,
fiscal revenue amounted to 46 per cent of GDP, fiscal plus non-fiscal revenue stood
at 50.4 per cent, and government spending at 54.5 per cent, thanks to a deficit of
4.1 per cent of GDP.
The paradox, therefore, is that over a period when many among France’s administra-
tive and political elites were converted to the idea of a less interventionist state and to
financial orthodoxy, the size of the French state continued to grow and the size of
France’s deficit to grow faster, while public debt rose from some 20 per cent of GDP to
63 per cent. The explanation lies largely in social spending. In 1980, France’s levels of
social spending, at 21.1 per cent of GDP, was close to the average for the EU15 coun-
tries (20.6 per cent). In 2001, by contrast, while the EU15 average had risen to 24.0 per
cent, driven in part by Europe-wide factors such as ageing populations, the French
figure had risen to 28.5 per cent and ranked third behind Denmark and Sweden. Part of
this growth was caused by the expansion of France’s excellent healthcare system.
Much, however, was spent on palliating the consequences of joblessness, via
unemployment benefits, early retirement packages (two-thirds of French workers have
retired by the time they reach the age of 60), work experience programmes and min-
imum income programmes – plus, since 1997, the 35-hour week, heavily subsidised from
public funds. Humane insofar as they spread part of the cost of joblessness away from
its immediate victims and onto the wider community, such remedies suffer from the
twin drawbacks of tying up growing amounts of scarce resources and doing so in ways
that do little to promote France’s wider economic competitiveness.
The dismantling of dirigisme, therefore, while it has rendered France’s prosperity
dependent on business performance more than on technocratic decision, has dimin-
ished neither the role of the state nor the reliance of the population, in all manner of
ways, upon its largesse. Similarly, the ‘Jacobin’ model of strong central authority at
home and assertive independence abroad, inherited from the ancien régime, consoli-
dated under Napoleon and renovated by de Gaulle, has been modified and challenged,
but remains a basic operating principle among the political and administrative elite.
Patterns of political conflict

If the vigour of the state tradition has represented one half of the ‘French exception’,
the other has consisted in patterns of political conflict that were fiercely ideological;
marked by emotional references to historic memories of bloodshed and civil strife;
structured by the Left–Right divide, but also with a tendency to fragmentation,
incoherence and government instability. Here too the changes have been substantial,
with governments lasting longer and governing more under the Fifth Republic than
under its predecessors. But the survivals are also significant.
The Left–Right division survives, if in muted form. If more and more of the French
find it outdated, polls show that they are still perfectly willing to assign a definite
position on a Left–Right axis both to themselves and to well-known politicians. The
political institutions of the Fifth Republic, which, unlike its predecessors, furthers the
bipolarisation of politics, also sustain the division, at least at the second ballot of
national and municipal elections. But the Left–Right division does not survive merely
as a function of institutions. Its traditional origins still leave traces. The tendency to
vote for the mainstream Right still increases with frequency of church attendance, even
though it is increasingly rare to go regularly to Mass. Onto this old cleavage new
divisions have superimposed themselves. Issues such as abortion liberalisation, the
rights of homosexuals, gender parity of women in politics, and ecology have mostly,
though not always, appealed more to the Left than to the Right. Similarly, the new
salience of immigration or law and order as political issues has tended to offer more
opportunities to the Right. The ‘new’ Left–Right division, therefore, might be seen as
corresponding to the more moderate bipolarisation of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ countries: no
longer the barely healed wound of a nation set against itself, but the banal division
between two clusters of interests, sharing a consensus on basic values and accustomed
to alternating in, or even sharing, government office. The problem with this view, how-
ever, is that it leaves out the persistence of less domesticated forms of political mobilisa-
tion, particularly among those who feel excluded from the French economy as it has
developed since the mid-1970s and from mainstream French politics. On the far Right,
the combination of resentment at North African immigration, burgeoning crime rates
and rising unemployment fuelled a powerful revival of nationalisme de repli from 1984,
in the form of the Front National. The growing solidity of the FN’s hold on its voters –
many of them young unqualified working-class men, who would have been strongly
left-wing a few years earlier – led specialists such as Grunberg and Schweisguth to
argue that the binary division of the French electorate had been replaced by a ‘triparti-
tion’ into Left, Right and far Right. On the far Left, the Communist Party was inte-
grated, by the late 1990s, into a broad left-wing coalition and had all but shed its
revolutionary pretensions, as well as most of its members and voters. But the vitality of
‘new social movements’, partly, but only partly, inspired by the Trotskyist far Left,
testified to the continuing strength of an insurrectionary tradition stretching back to
1789. When public-sector workers went on strike against Prime Minister Juppé’s social
security reform in December 1995, they paralysed the country, forcing countless Paris-
ians to walk several miles to work in the snow. After three weeks, a majority of the
French, albeit a narrow one, still approved of the strikes. For many private-sector
workers, unable to take industrial action themselves for fear of losing their jobs, they
were surrogates for their own discontents. As public-sector employees prepared to walk
out again in January 2005 over wages and a series of reforms proposed by the Raffarin
government, they again enjoyed the support of two-thirds of poll respondents, a typical
figure for most of the (many) intervening disputes. This campaign spilled over into the
European referendum campaign, with the most successful ‘day of action’, on 10 March,
setting the scene for a decisive shift towards a no majority. While the 1995 movement is
the most striking case, examples abound of groups of French men and women – farm-
ers in 1990, fishermen in 1994, the unemployed in 1998 – taking to the streets, causing
varying degrees of disruption, to defend more or less narrow interests, justified in terms
of the ideals of the Republic, and sometimes enjoying widespread public support.
The insurrectionary tradition, though now usually played out without bloodshed and
without threatening the régime, retains much of its force.
Two further points need to be made about the survival of distinctive political tradi-
tions in France. The first concerns the fragmentation of French parties, much noted by
observers of the Third and Fourth Republics. For such a highly politicised country –
whether one refers to the (generally high) turnout at elections, or to the tendency of
interest groups to show party-political preferences, or to the extent to which politics
permeates associative and cultural life – France has small and weak political parties.
For the first generation of the Fifth Republic, the party system appeared to be undergo-
ing consolidation into two broadly unified coalitions, on Left and Right. This is no
longer the case. In the 1990s, every French party, bar the Communists, suffered a split.
The survival of governments was not directly affected, partly because the Fifth Repub-
lic’s institutions were constructed to supply stability in government in a context of
unstable, undisciplined parties. But the splits aggravated the difficulty for ordinary
citizens to find anything in the political system with which to identify.
Second, while the Gaullist party is weakened, diluted in its ideology, and, since 2002,
merged into a wider entity, the UMP, Gaullism remains an important political reference
point. As a historic individual, de Gaulle (like the Republic) now commands a near-
universal reverence, even from those who were his bitterest enemies during his lifetime.
Both the constitution and the foreign policy which he left to France are practically
immune to frontal criticism, even if they have undergone piecemeal modifications over
the years. On the Right, Gaullists nostalgic for past glories identify the heyday of
Gaullism with national independence, dirigisme and the ‘social’ dimension of Gaullism.
This continued penchant for state control within a major force on the French Right
contrasts with the bases of the success of the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ Right in the 1980s, which
lay in an ability to wrap economic neo-liberalism in the flag of patriotism.
French political conflict, in short, is no longer the ‘civil war by other means’
(or indeed, civil war tout court) that it was, on and off, for nearly two centuries after the
Revolution. But it remains structured by its historical roots: by the Left–Right division,
partially modernised; by the tradition of insurrection, transmuted into street demon-
strations of a more or less peaceful character; by the Gaullist legacy, integral to the
persistence of the state tradition; and by the striking inability of French parties to
attract a large, stable membership or to avoid splits. Those elements often lend an
apparently impenetrable character to political conflict in France: one recent dictionary
of European parties left France out altogether for that reason. But here, as in the case
of the state tradition, change has not meant the end of French ‘exceptionalism’.
Concluding remarks
The rest of this book follows the development of France’s political traditions through
particular sections of the political system. Chapter 2 analyses the overall constitutional
framework of the Fifth Republic, and the attempts of its founders to find a synthesis
between the parliamentarianism of the republican tradition and the strong leadership
beloved of Bonapartists and anti-democrats. Chapters 3 to 5 then examine in more
detail the workings of France’s executive, through the personal contributions of Fifth
Republic leaders (Chapter 3), the resources available to president and prime minister
(Chapter 4), and their respective roles in policy-making (Chapter 5). Chapter 6 con-
siders the attempts of the French parliament to break out of the modest position
assigned it by the constitution. Chapters 7, 8 and 9 cover patterns of political conflict,
from the point of view both of individual parties and of the party system as a whole.
Chapters 10 to 13 deal with the state tradition and the challenges it faces, whether in the
new demands being placed on the administration, the new and less predictable con-
figuration of French interest groups, the transformation of central–local relations since
the decentralisation legislation of 1982, and the new assertiveness of the French judi-
ciary. Chapter 14 analyses France’s commitment to Europe, and in particular the
attempt to build a strong and activist European Union while at the same time safe-
guarding French sovereignty. If there is a common theme that runs through all these
chapters, it is of a political system that has been the repository of old, independent and
often idiosyncratic traditions being forced to reinvent itself in response both to the
evolution of French society and to external constraints. That process of reinvention,
incomplete though it certainly is, may have made French politics somewhat less
‘exceptional’. It has certainly not made it any less interesting.
Further reading
General historical and political works

Fenby, J., On the Brink: The Trouble with France, 2nd edition, London, Little, Brown, 2002.
Gildea, R., France since 1945, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1996.
Larkin, M., France since the Popular Front, 2nd edition, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1997.
Sowerwine, C., France 1870–2000, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2001.
On French political cultures

Berstein, S., Les cultures politiques en France, Paris, Seuil, 1999.
Cohen-Tanugi, L., La métamorphose de la démocratie française: de l’État jacobin à l’État de droit,
2nd edition, Paris, Gallimard, 1993.
Debray, R., La République expliquée à ma fille, Paris, Seuil, 1999.
Hazareesingh, S., Political Traditions in Modern France, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1994.
Hewlett, N., Modern French Politics: Analysing Conflict and Consensus since 1945, Cambridge,
Polity, 1998.
Jenkins, B., Nationalism in France: Class and Nation since 1789, London, Routledge, 1990.
Portier, P., Église et politique en France au XXe siècle, Paris, Montchrestien, 1993.
Weber, E., Peasants into Frenchmen, London, Chatto and Windus, 1979.
On the trente glorieuses

Cole, A. and Mendras, H., Social Change in Modern France, Cambridge, Cambridge University
Press, 1991.
Fourastié, J., Les trente glorieuses, Paris, Fayard, 1979.
Hoffmann, S., Decline or Renewal? France since the 1930s, New York, Viking Press, 1974.
Shonfield, A., Modern Capitalism, London, Oxford University Press, 1965.
On economic change since the 1980s

Cohen, E., L’État brancardier, Paris, Calmann-Lévy, 1989.
Flynn, G. (ed.), Remaking the Hexagon: The New France in the New Europe, Boulder, CO,
Westview Press, 1995.
Forrester, V., L’horreur économique, Paris, Fayard, 1996.
Hayward, J., The State and the Market Economy, Brighton, Wheatsheaf Books, 1986.
Juppé, A., La double rupture, Paris, Économica, 1983.
Minc, A., www.capitalism.fr, Paris, Broché, 2000.
Schmidt, V., From State to Market? The Transformation of French Business and Government,
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996.
On the changing boundaries between Right and Left

Boy, D. and Mayer, N., The French Voter Decides, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press,
1993.
Cautrès, B. and Mayer, N., Le nouveau désordre électoral: les leçons du 21 avril 2002, Paris, Presses
de Sciences Po, 2004.
Martin, P., Comprendre les évolutions électorales, Paris, Presses de Sciences Po, 2000.
2 From Fourth to Fifth Republic
Ultimately, a failure: the Fourth Republic (1946–58) 49

The Gaullist agenda 51
Between Washington and Westminster 53
Readings of the Fifth Republic 59
The constitution in flux 64
Further reading 66
A constitution is a set of rules governing the relationships between the various institu-
tions – most obviously the executive, the legislature and the judiciary – within a political
system, and (often through a bill of rights) between the political institutions proper and
the body of citizens. The rules are fundamental both in the sense that they govern the
basic conduct of a wide range of players and because they are harder to change than
the ordinary run of laws: amendments typically require reinforced majorities to be
passed, and possibly ratification by subnational government or even referendum. They
are usually codified (the United Kingdom is an exception in this respect), and may offer,
to the unwary, a guide to the locus of political power in a given state. They are certainly
a necessary part of any guide. But all constitutions are creatures of circumstance, and
all admit of more than one reading: it is revealing, for example, that Woodrow Wilson’s
Congressional Government and Arthur M. Schlesinger’s Imperial Presidency were about
the same country, the United States, and nearly the same constitution. The present
constitution of France is no exception to either rule. It aimed to establish the executive
leadership that the Fourth Republic had conspicuously failed to supply – a failure that
had brought the country to the brink of civil war by May 1958. By giving France not
one executive leader but two, however, it offered both limitless opportunities for debate
among constitutional specialists and a variety of possible practical applications.
Ultimately, a failure: the Fourth Republic (1946–58)

The Fifth Republic was born of its predecessor’s inability to provide France with stable
government, to implement any consistent policy towards Algeria and to command
either the support of the people or the obedience of its own servants. It is easy to sneer
at the Fourth Republic; most Frenchmen did. But it is also unjust. During the period
1945 to 1958 France achieved an extraordinary feat of reconstruction after five years
of war and enemy occupation which had destroyed much of the country’s industry
and transport system (including, for example, half of its locomotives, a third of its
merchant shipping, three-quarters of its port installations and every bridge over the
Loire downstream of Nevers), as well as large swathes of its housing and even agri-
culture. Reconstruction was followed by the start of France’s ‘economic miracle’, a
revolutionary period of modernisation (punctuated, it is true, by bouts of inflation and
of financial instability) which geared the French economy to meet international com-
petition. In the area of social policy, the Fourth Republic laid the foundations of a
comprehensive social security system and gave the working population a third week of
paid holiday, a minimum wage and a measure of trade union recognition. France was
firmly linked to Europe through the Coal and Steel Community, and, by the Treaty of
Rome in 1957, through Euratom and the European Common Market. The country was
integrated into the NATO alliance, and relations with Germany, the traditional enemy,
were much improved. Even in the colonial field, progress was made: slowly, grudgingly
and with more or less bloodshed as independence was granted to Indo-China (1954)
and to Morocco and Tunisia (1956); more smoothly, if only partially, with the Defferre
Law of 1956 which set up a framework for autonomy for sub-Saharan Africa. Only a
solution for Algeria, the most intensively settled of the colonies (with a million white
colons to 9 million Muslim Algerians) and the only one to have been organised as if a
part of mainland France, proved beyond the political capacities of the Fourth Repub-
lic. Even in the strictly political arena, the régime’s record was defensible. Its talented
and (usually) honest leaders took France through this period of unprecedented eco-
nomic and social transformation, while assailed from the Left (by the Communist
Party, subservient to Moscow) and from a Right (notably, though not exclusively, the
Gaullists) that clamoured for ‘order’ but disrupted government and fanned subversion
among settlers and the military in Algeria.
In spite of its real achievements, the Fourth Republic remained unloved – la mal
aimée. It was born of indifference: just 36 per cent of the registered electorate voted it
into being at the referendum of October 1946 (32.5 per cent abstained; 31.5 per cent
voted no). By 1951 nearly half the voters were supporting parties opposed to the
existing régime. They thereby helped to ensure the political instability that was one of
the Fourth Republic’s salient, and unpopular, features. Hemmed in within parliament
by the régime’s enemies, the parties within the ‘system’ – Socialists, Radicals, Christian
Democrats and conservatives, plus sundry minor groups – were too divided between
and within themselves to form consistent majorities or stable governments. The consti-
tution, with the weak executive and ‘strong’ parliament required by the French repub-
lican tradition, did little to alleviate the problem of weak parties and divided majorities.
The average lifespan of a Fourth Republic government was under seven months; only
two prime ministers, Henri Queuille and Guy Mollet, lasted more than a year. Minis-
terial crises, those periods between the fall of one government and the investiture of the
next, lasted longer and longer: in the final year, caretaker governments ran France for a
total of one day in four. By the time that settlers in Algiers rose in opposition to the
appointment of a new government in May 1958, the régime’s legitimacy – that
intangible yet essential ingredient of any political system – was fatally undermined: it
simply could not call upon the loyalties of its citizens.
Nor could it rely on the obedience of its own servants, whether civil or military. For
civil servants on the ground, subjected to changing or contradictory instructions from
Paris, the temptation to make their own policies was overwhelming. This was the case,
above all, in the colonies. Here, representatives of the government such as General
Leclerc and Admiral Thierry d’Argenlieu in Indo-China, Jean de Hautecloque in
From Fourth to Fifth Republic 51
Tunisia and General Juin in Morocco (each of them a French protectorate, the first
two established in the 1880s and the third in 1912) shaped policy and faced Paris
with embarrassing faits accomplis. The arrest of the Tunisian Prime Minister in March
1952, the deposition of the Sultan of Morocco in August 1953, the forced landing of
the aircraft carrying leaders of the Algerian independence movement, the FLN, and
their subsequent arrest, in October 1956, were all initiatives taken locally, often greeted
with consternation in Paris, but finally covered by the government. Civil servants dis-
patched to the colonies with a liberal, reforming brief were regularly seduced or bullied
into submission by local forces whose sole concern was the maintenance of colonial
rule. The resulting policies, and the surrounding tissue of lies, evasion and irresponsibil-
ity, were uniformly disastrous. In Indo-China, France was forced to withdraw after the
military humiliation of Dien Bien Phu, in spring 1954, had closed an inglorious war
that cost the French 92,000 dead (including 15,000 Africans and 46,000 ‘local troops’)
and 114,000 wounded (the American willingness to take over from France the protec-
tion of the pro-Western south of the henceforth divided republic of Vietnam prepared
an even greater humiliation for the United States twenty years later). The Algerian war,
which began in November 1954, claimed fewer French lives (the Algerian dead were
another matter: they numbered at least 250,000). But it was more costly in other ways,
resembling, in many respects, the American experience in Vietnam. It caused govern-
mental and financial instability; it weakened the country’s already feeble diplomatic
position; it drained the moral probity of the régime, as it became clear, for example,
that French troops were making systematic use of torture to extract information from
FLN fighters and summary execution to dispose of them. The Algerian war did more
than any other single cause to sap the bases of the French state and the loyalty of
its servants and of its citizens. Most dangerously, civil authority gradually relinquished
power to the military, with a civilian ‘resident-general’ in Algiers being replaced by a
soldier in 1957. This process accelerated in 1958. In February the French air force
bombed the Tunisian village of Sakhiet, suspected of harbouring an FLN base. The
raid killed sixty-nine Tunisians including twenty-one schoolchildren. Prime Minister
Félix Gaillard, who had been neither consulted nor informed, chose to condone
the bombing after the event, out of fear of army reactions. On 13 May, the army leaders
in Algiers went one step further. By supporting the settlers’ revolt against the appoint-
ment to the premiership of Pierre Pflimlin, who was suspected of being ‘soft’ on
Algeria, the army effectively sought to dictate the composition and the form of the
government in Paris. It was this act of open rebellion that opened the final crisis of the
régime.
The Gaullist agenda

When René Coty, second and last president of the Fourth Republic, warned in January
1958 that ‘our basic institutions are no longer in tune with the rhythm of modern
times’, he was probably expressing a consensus view. But the régime’s most persistent
and bilious critics were General de Gaulle and Michel Debré, his faithful lieutenant
whose verbal violence exceeded even that of his master. De Gaulle attributed much of
the weakness of the Fourth Republic to a lack of executive authority, which made
governments a constant prey to a divided and unpredictable parliament. Parliament
itself, the argument ran, was at the mercy of France’s many and divided parties, which
were, by their nature, the defenders of sectional interests rather than the national good
(it was partly out of exasperation at what he saw as the petty squabbling of parties that
de Gaulle had resigned as leader of the post-war Provisional Government, in January
1946). France’s parties were divided, the Gaullists went on, because French society was
so fragmented: territorial unity had been achieved slowly and painfully; the French
people as a whole carried within them ‘ferments of dispersion’ and unruly individual-
ism that made them supposedly less governable than the socially virtuous British or the
regimented Germans. The weakness of the executive translated into the inability of the
state to retain the esteem of its citizens, the respect of France’s rich variety of vocifer-
ous interest groups, or the loyalty of its own servants. The ‘reform of the state’ that de
Gaulle had demanded for twelve years (notably in speeches at Bayeux and Épinal in
1946) would therefore necessarily include the reinforcement of the government at the
expense of the legislature, and thence of the parties. Thus, the Gaullists claimed, the
authority of the state would be re-established, the nation’s fissiparous tendencies
reversed, and the obedience of the state’s servants, notably the army, enforced.
There was a further dimension to the Gaullist agenda. In many ways the formative
experience of de Gaulle the politician had been the fall of France in 1940. What had
turned a military setback into a national disaster then, in his view, was the absence of
any provision in the Third Republic’s institutions for the exercise of national leadership
in a crisis – still less at any other time. The Fourth Republic did nothing to remedy this.
De Gaulle was determined to give the authority of the state a personal embodiment in a
chef with far wider powers than those available to the consensual figures whom the
parliamentarians of the Third and Fourth Republics elected to the presidency. More-
over, if such leadership was necessary to deal with France’s pressing internal and colo-
nial problems, their resolution was itself a means to a wider end: the restoration of
France’s national independence and the reinforcement of its position in the world.
De Gaulle had waited twelve years for his moment, conscious that it might never
come (he had, after all, been born in 1890), before the army coup in Algiers. By then his
attractiveness as national saviour was almost universal, though for widely varying
reasons: as the anti-Fascist former leader of Free France (to good republicans); as the
general who had defied an illegitimate civilian authority to save France (for the army
rebels); and as the one major public figure who had said nothing about Algeria since
1954, and who could therefore be invested with the most varied and contradictory
expectations (for everybody). But if he sought reform and strong leadership, de Gaulle
insisted that it should be achieved ‘within the context of republican legality’: there
could be no recourse to vulgar dictatorship, which he abhorred for reasons based on
historical experience and on a tactical reading of contemporary French politics. What-
ever the complicity and connivance between Gaullists and some of the Algiers rebels
(notably General Massu), de Gaulle himself insisted on going through the regular
processes of forming a Fourth Republic government, and seeking, at the invitation of
President Coty, the votes of the National Assembly. These he obtained, on 1 June 1958.
His conditions of accepting the premiership, that he should be given special powers to
govern in Algeria and to draft a new constitution, became law two days later. The
constitutional text, adopted by the government on 3 September, won a ringing
endorsement from the French people at the referendum of 28 September 1958: four out
of five voters, and two-thirds of the registered electorate (nearly twice the proportion
that had supported the Fourth Republic), voted yes, and there was a majority for
acceptance in every one of the then ninety départements of metropolitan France.
Between Washington and Westminster
If the referendum result seemed clear (though many voters supported de Gaulle, or
French Algeria, rather than a constitutional text), this was more than could be said for
the document it ratified. For the various constitution-makers were, as Olivier Duhamel
observes, ‘hostile cousins brought together over a summer’s brief period of calm’, men
with conflicting views on the distribution of political power. Directly involved in the
drafting of the constitution were Debré (now justice minister, an admirer of the West-
minster system who aimed at reinforcing the prime minister and government in relation
to parliament); de Gaulle (intent on reinforcing the presidency he was shortly to
occupy); a handful of senior ministers (ministres d’État) drawn from the major Fourth
Republic parties (who saw the president as a crisis manager, to be put out to grass once
the Algerian emergency was over); and a group of parliamentarians (whose role, for the
first time in the drafting of a republican constitution in France, was a merely consulta-
tive one, but who were still, understandably, concerned to safeguard the prerogatives of
parliament). Dialogue was possible because de Gaulle, anxious to respect due process,
was still currying favour with parliament, while the parliamentarians and ministers,
with the Algerian war still threatening France, could not afford to alienate the General.
So both sides made concessions. The result, however, was not a happy compromise but
a constitutional mess. The unfortunate constitutional experts of the Conseil d’État who
assisted Debré in the drafting were called upon to juxtapose and superimpose conflict-
ing ideals, and in the resulting lengthy text confusion competed with contradiction and
ambiguity with obscurity. In essence, the lawyers were trying to fuse two ultimately
incompatible notions: on the one hand, the principle of governmental responsibility to
parliament (which implied a parliamentary régime); and, on the other, the separation of
powers with a strong head of state (which smacked of presidentialism). To schematise
somewhat, a ‘Debré constitution’, drawing on the British model, coexisted with a ‘de
Gaulle constitution’, inspired by the General’s obsession with leadership, both being
moderated by the Fourth Republic politicians whose approval was necessary to a
successful referendum.
• The ‘Debré constitution’ is most evident in the numerous articles reinforcing the
position of government and prime minister vis-à-vis parliament. While admiring
the Westminster model, Debré knew that no French premier could count on a
disciplined single-party parliamentary majority on the British pattern. He therefore
aimed to create constitutional substitutes for party discipline, drawing on some of
the principles of ‘rationalised parliamentarianism’ that had inspired the constitu-
tion of West Germany. Henceforth, the government would control the parlia-
mentary agenda. Governments would be able to refuse parliamentary amendments
to their own bills. They could only be voted out of office by a censure motion
carried by an absolute majority of all Deputies in the National Assembly. Such a
censure motion would also be necessary to refuse any specific bill that the govern-
ment chose to make into a question of confidence. Individual parliamentarians
would no longer be able to propose extra spending or tax cuts at will. The budget, if
not agreed by parliament, could be adopted by decree after seventy days of parlia-
mentary debate. Parliamentary sessions were restricted to a total of six months a
year, to be extended only by consent of president and prime minister. Limits were
placed on the (general) domains in which parliament could legislate, more specific
legal provisions being reserved for ministerial decrees. A Constitutional Council
was created, with the initial purpose of ensuring that parliament did not overstep
its new legislative powers. In order to limit parliamentarians’ appetites for govern-
mental office, ministerial posts were made incompatible with office as Deputy or
Senator. The prime minister was, for the first time, referred to as prime minister
(not, as under the Third and Fourth Republics, Président du conseil des ministres),
and given the clear role of ‘directing the work of the government’. Articles 20 to 51
of the new constitution were, in short, nails in the coffin of the French republican
tradition of parliamentary sovereignty.
• The ‘De Gaulle constitution’ appears, above all, in the fifteen articles concerning
the president of the Republic. The new head of state would no longer be chosen, as
his predecessors of the Third and Fourth Republics had been, by a joint session of
the two houses of parliament; instead, he would be elected by a college of some
80,000 parliamentarians and representatives of local councils from throughout
France and the French Community (as what remained of the empire was now
known). This provision, justified in the name of the separation of powers, was
designed to cut the umbilical cord between the president and parliament, and to
raise the quality of presidents above that of those worthy but second-rank parlia-
mentarians who had typically filled the office under the old system. The president’s
role was defined, broadly, as being to ‘ensure, by his arbitration [arbitrage], the
proper functioning of the public authorities and the continuity of the State’ and to
guarantee France’s ‘national independence, territorial integrity and observance of
treaties’. To fulfil the role as guarantor effectively, and to avoid the dispersal of
authority that had proved so fatal in 1940, the president was entitled to take sweep-
ing powers in any grave crisis (one of the relatively few constitutional provisions
included at the behest of the parliamentary consultative committee was that par-
liament should sit as of right when emergency powers were in force). The new
constitution also gave the president powers to intervene in internal politics in less
dramatic situations. The choice of prime minister was his (though at the behest of
the ministres d’État, the president enjoyed no corresponding right to sack his prem-
ier). He could dissolve the National Assembly and call new elections (and the
replacement of proportional representation by the two-ballot majority electoral
system, though adopted as a regular law rather than as an article of the constitu-
tion, increased the possibility of minor vote swings producing big changes in party
strengths in parliament). And, with the agreement of the government or parlia-
ment, he could call a referendum on questions relating to the ‘organisation of the
public authorities’ or the ratification of a treaty.
It is the juxtaposition of these two sets of rules that gives the constitution its unique,
and uniquely problematic, character. Comparative political scientists, beginning with
the Frenchman Maurice Duverger, have taken to referring to France as a semi-
presidential régime, one of a species including such European countries as Austria,
Finland, Iceland, Ireland and Portugal, as well as (more recently) Romania, Poland,
Russia, Ukraine and Moldova, as well as a number of South American, African and
Asian states. Within this general category, however, France still occupies an unusual
place by virtue of the distribution of political power within the executive. Ireland,
for example, has a directly elected but largely ceremonial president who leaves the
business of governing to the Taoiseach. In Russia, on the other hand, the president is
indubitably the nation’s political leader. But in the Fifth Republic, the central question
of any constitution – who rules? – is fudged. Is it the prime minister, who ‘directs the
operation of the government’, which itself ‘determines and conducts the policy of the
Nation’? Or is it the president of the Republic, who appoints the prime minister and
who can make a direct appeal to the voters by dissolution or by referendum? In more
detailed matters, too, the French Constitution of 1958 gives a sense of the world not of
Descartes but of Lewis Carroll. Article 15 reads ‘The President of the Republic shall be
commander-in-chief of the armed forces. He shall preside over the higher national
defence councils and committees.’ Yet Article 20 indicates that the government ‘shall
have at its disposal . . . the armed forces’, and Article 21 states that the prime minister
‘shall be responsible for national defence’. Article 13 gives the president the right to
appoint to certain military posts, while Article 21 empowers the prime minister to
appoint to others. In other words, in the crucial area of defence, powers are shared but
power is ill-defined. The constitution clearly establishes a diarchy at the top, a twin-
headed or bicephalous executive unique in Western democracies, but it does not clarify
the respective roles of president and prime minister. Such clarification was left to the
interplay of personality and political circumstance.
Some further definition, it is true, was given by the major constitutional amendment
of October 1962. This replaced, as the method of electing the president, the college of
80,000 notables with direct universal suffrage (on two ballots). Like the constitution it
amended, the change was born of a specific context. De Gaulle’s unique historical
legitimacy and the peculiar dangers of the Algerian war, far more than his election by
notables in December 1958, had established his presidential primacy during his first
three and a half years in office. Now, in the summer of 1962, he sought to perpetuate
that primacy for himself and his successors. The Algerian war was over, and with it a
sort of internal political truce: many leaders of the Fourth Republic parties were keen
to send the septuagenarian General into a retirement which he was in no hurry to begin.
The French Community had disappeared, and with it the danger that a directly elected
president would owe his position, not to metropolitan Frenchmen, but to colonials.
France’s explosion of an atom bomb in 1960 gave a terrifying new responsibility to
whoever ran the armed forces. De Gaulle’s relations with the notables of France’s local
councils had soured after the Senate, the upper house of parliament elected and
peopled entirely by such notables, had offered unexpected opposition to his policies.
The spread of television opened new possibilities for campaigning in a direct presiden-
tial election. Inspired by this combination of lofty rationales and base political calcula-
tion, de Gaulle seized the occasion offered by a botched assassination attempt (which
came close enough to success to remind the nation of his mortality, and thus of the
question of his successor’s designation) and invited the French people to adopt his
reform by referendum. They did so on 28 October 1962, albeit by a narrower margin
(62 per cent of voters, 46.6 per cent of registered electors) than in 1958. The consti-
tutional change gave no new powers to the president, but it nevertheless greatly
enhanced his power. From 1965, the date of the first direct presidential election, each
successive president could (and did) claim, through his unique position as the only élu
de la nation, directly elected by the whole French people, a democratic legitimacy at
least equal to that of the National Assembly. The political significance of the October
1962 reform cannot be overestimated, for it upset, in favour of the president, the uneasy
and ambiguous balance established in the 1958 constitution.
This was all the more the case as the following month saw the emergence of what
none of the constitution-makers of 1958 had imagined possible, a stable parliamentary
majority. A majority of Deputies of the National Assembly had opposed the 1962
constitutional revision for reasons both of substance (the Deputies rightly saw the
change as a threat to their own prerogatives) and of legality (de Gaulle was violating his
own constitution, since Article 89 requires amendments to be agreed by both houses of
parliament before referendum, rather than being submitted direct to the people). The
Deputies therefore took the most ready means of protest to hand, passing a motion of
censure against the government on 4 October. De Gaulle reacted by using his new
power to dissolve the Assembly and call new elections: he was rewarded, on 25 November
1962, with an absolute majority for the Gaullists and their allies. Stable majorities,
familiar to the British, were quite new to the French, accustomed as they were to what
David Goldey and Philip Williams have called the ‘shifting and shifty coalitions’ of the
Third and Fourth Republics. Le fait majoritaire became part of France’s ‘political
constitution’, never written into the texts but always underlying their application. And
for a quarter-century it, as much as the October amendment, enhanced presidential
power.
Crucial as they were to the subsequent workings of the Fifth Republic, the events
of autumn 1962 removed none of the possibilities of rich variation that were afforded
by the texts. Why this was so may be illustrated by reference to Figure 2.1, which
depicts the heart of the constitution of the Fifth Republic, as amended in 1962, and
Figure 2.2, which represents its electoral chronology, and presidents, prime ministers
and parliamentary majorities.
• The electorate may be asked by the president (usually in accordance with govern-
ment and parliament) to vote in referendums, of which there have been nine since
June 1958 (five of them under de Gaulle’s leadership). More regularly, voters have
two opportunities to choose their national rulers, at presidential and parliamentary
elections. But the two were not synchronised until 2000. A president, unless he
resigned (as de Gaulle did in 1969) or died in office (as his successor Georges
Pompidou did in 1974), enjoyed a septennat, a full, and indefinitely renewable,
seven-year term, longer than any comparable Western leader. A parliament, on the
other hand, lasted (and lasts) a maximum of five years (less, in the event of a
dissolution, as in 1962, 1968, 1981, 1988 and 1997). The constitutional reform of
September 2000 shortened the presidential term to five years starting from the
presidential election of 2002, and as this took place five weeks before parlia-
mentary elections, a degree of synchronisation can normally be expected in future.
On the other hand, voters will still be free in principle, as they were before the
reform, to choose whether or not to elect a president and a parliamentary majority
from the same political camp.
• The National Assembly majority may therefore be broadly supportive towards the
president (as in 1962–86, 1988–93 and 1995–97) or hostile (as in 1986–88, 1993–95
and 1997–2002). There are many lesser possibilities of variation too. A broadly
supportive National Assembly may contain a large single-party majority, as in
1968–73 or 1981–86, a deeply divided one, as in 1973–81, or no overall majority at
all, as in 1988–93. A hostile majority may be tiny, as in 1986–88, or very large, as in
1993–95.
• The prime minister and government are responsible to the National Assembly and
must therefore command a majority there (or at least, as in 1988–93, a plurality
Figure 2.1 The heart of the Fifth Republic Constitution.
sufficiently large to be able to fend off an opposition censure motion). A president

with a friendly majority will enjoy a wide choice of possible prime ministers from
his own camp. Such a premier will therefore be beholden to the president for his
appointment. Where the president faces a hostile parliamentary majority, however,
he has no choice but to appoint a prime minister acceptable to that majority –
usually the effective leader of the parliamentary opposition to himself. The parlia-
mentary elections of 1986, 1993 and 1997 therefore opened periods of uneasy
‘cohabitation’ within France’s twin-headed executive: between a left-wing president
(Mitterrand) and a right-wing premier (Jacques Chirac in 1986, Édouard Balladur
Figure 2.2 The Fifth French Republic, 1958–2005: a chronological framework.
in 1993); or between a right-wing president (Chirac) and a left-wing premier
(Lionel Jospin) from 1997. These cohabitation prime ministers, having won the job
thanks to their support within the parliamentary majority, have been politically
much stronger than their counterparts of ‘normal’ times, raised to the premiership
by the president’s choice. But once again, there is wide scope for variation within
the two categories of ‘coincidence’ and ‘cohabitation’. A president and prime min-
ister from the same camp may be extremely close, like Chirac and Alain Juppé, or
endure execrable personal and political relations, as Mitterrand did with Michel
Rocard; cohabitation, on the other hand, may see a civilised modus vivendi develop,
as it quickly did between Mitterrand and Balladur.
• The president, with his unique legitimacy as the people’s direct choice, unmovable
during his term except by trial for high treason, and able to appoint the prime
minister and call parliamentary elections (though not more than once a year) and
referendums (under certain conditions), is normally master both of France’s polit-
ics and of its policies, internal and external. Faced with a hostile parliamentary
majority, however, he ineluctably loses many of his powers (and notably the free-
dom to choose his prime minister, and control over domestic policy); and he has to
struggle to retain many of the rest, and to avoid returning to the relative impotence
of his predecessors of earlier republics.
Given the range of scenarios available on the basis of the same text, it is not surpris-
ing that the constitution itself has been subjected to different interpretations. These are
discussed in the rest of this chapter.
Readings of the Fifth Republic

Debré presented the 1958 constitution to the Conseil d’État, rather confusingly, as a
‘parliamentary régime’ in which the presidency was ‘the keystone’. For a generation,
political practice and academic commentary stressed the second half of this ambiguous
equation. Only the approach of cohabitation, in the mid-1980s, provoked a rediscovery
of the first.
The republican monarchy

The specific new powers granted to the presidency were rather few: to dissolve parlia-
ment, to appoint the prime minister (both without any countersignature), to call a
referendum (with the agreement of the government), to take emergency powers in a
crisis. Presidential primacy was not, therefore, explicitly written into the 1958 constitu-
tion; it depended, in the first instance, on what David Bell has called ‘an act of political
levitation’, and then on the revision of 1962. The principal architect of presidential
primacy was, of course, de Gaulle, whose personal determination to extend presidential
power up to, and indeed beyond, its constitutional limits was underpinned by five
political assets. First, his wartime role as leader of Free France gave de Gaulle a unique
historical legitimacy at least equal to that of his directly elected successors. Second, the
wide-ranging powers he was granted as the last prime minister of the Fourth Republic,
and which he exercised to the full from June 1958, gave him a tight grip on the reins of
the state well before his inauguration as president in January 1959. Third, the real
dangers presented by the Algerian war, which lasted till March 1962, ensured a degree
of tolerance for strong executive leadership. Fourth, the still vivid popular memories of
the confusion of the Fourth Republic offered de Gaulle corresponding opportunities to
mobilise support for himself and for the Gaullists, and against the ‘old’ parties – whose
failure to present a positive appeal to voters was well summarised by the name of the
alliance they created to oppose the direct election of the president at the October 1962
referendum: the ‘Cartel des Non’. Finally, the stable, Gaullist-led National Assembly
majority that emerged from the elections of November 1962 ensured that parliament
would offer no effective opposition to presidential primacy.
Presidential primacy meant, in essence, that the president would not only be head of
state and crisis manager, but also the nation’s chief policy-maker and its first politician.
The policy-making role was evoked early on by the president of the National Assembly,
Jacques Chaban-Delmas, in November 1959. Chaban coined the term domaine réservé
to denote those areas – Algeria, the French Community, foreign affairs and defence – in
which the government should merely ‘execute’ presidential policies. Devoid of any
official place in the texts, the domaine réservé has still acquired quasi-constitutional
status as a shorthand for the foreign policy and defence concerns at the heart of the
president’s policy-making role.
The president’s role as France’s leading politician was given striking practical dem-
onstration, often in defiance of the spirit and even the letter of the new constitution, in
1962. During the eight months following the end of the Algerian war, de Gaulle:
• sacked a prime minister (the absence of any constitutional provision for such an act
was circumvented by the ever-loyal Debré’s acceptance of the presidential request
for his resignation in April 1962);
• called a referendum, on the direct election of the president, under conditions of
more than dubious legality;
• reappointed a government that had just lost a no-confidence vote in the National
Assembly, in violation of the spirit of Article 50 of the constitution;
• dissolved parliament, exercising the right to do so granted in Article 12;
• won both the October referendum and the November parliamentary elections,
thereby extending his own primacy beyond the Algerian crisis, creating a basis of
legitimacy for his successors, and inaugurating le fait majoritaire.
De Gaulle turned the practice of presidential primacy into doctrine at his press
conference of January 1964 – days after a decree had palliated the constitutional ambi-
guities in defence questions by putting the president in charge of France’s new nuclear
deterrent. There could, de Gaulle declared, be no ‘diarchy’ at the summit of the French
state. He interpreted the profoundly ambiguous term arbitrage in Article 5 to mean,
not a neutral referee’s role suggested by the commonest use of the word arbitre, but
rather the much stronger role of arbiter of the nation’s destiny. Vested with this unique
responsibility, the president was the sole source of political authority – a reading
which, in principle, opened all domains of policy-making to presidential intervention.
De Gaulle’s assertiveness was echoed and exceeded by subsequent presidents. Pompi-
dou argued in his short book Le nœud gordien that de Gaulle’s successor would have
to be more interventionist than the General in order to preserve presidential primacy
while lacking de Gaulle’s unique legitimacy: his subsequent record in the job confirmed
his own prognosis. Giscard d’Estaing, having criticised de Gaulle’s ‘solitary exercise of
power’ while out of office, asserted his policy-making role as president by publicly
giving his governments six-monthly programmes of work. Most strikingly of all,
François Mitterrand, who had denounced the Fifth Republic in a celebrated pamphlet
of 1964 entitled Le Coup d’État permanent, admitted once in power that ‘these institu-
tions, which I did not create, suit me well enough’ – adding, more brutally, that ‘it is up
to me to decide in what areas the president should decide’. Far from being confined to
Chaban’s domaine réservé, presidential policy-making could extend to any sector.
Combining many of the powers of the American president (a secure term of office, and
for seven years not four) and of the British prime minister (a stable parliamentary
majority, and the right to dissolve), the French president appeared as more powerful,
within his own political system, than any Western leader: a ‘republican monarch’, in the
expression of French commentators.
A ‘parliamentary régime’
Debré’s presentation of the 1958 constitution as a ‘parliamentary régime’ was largely
forgotten as long as the presidential reading was confirmed by daily political practice.
Giscard d’Estaing first conceded the possibility of an alternative interpretation early
in 1978, when he reminded voters that if the Left won the elections due that March,
its programme would be applied; he could do nothing to stop it. But the Communist–
Socialist opposition aborted the experiment by losing. The issue only re-emerged
seriously after the Left itself, after its dazzling presidential and parliamentary victories
in 1981, had lost popular support and faced defeat at the 1986 parliamentary elections.
The debate then showed the absurdities to which a fully presidentialist view of
the constitution could lead. A number of commentators, citing the dubious precedent
of de Gaulle’s brusque departure after his defeat in the 1969 referendum, claimed that
the only course of action consistent with the ‘spirit’ of the constitution would be for
President Mitterrand to resign. Even the respectable former Prime Minister Raymond
Barre argued that a right-wing parliamentary majority should force Mitterrand out by
opposing any government, of whatever complexion, appointed by him. Seven years
later, as the Right prepared for its landslide parliamentary victory of 1993, similar
arguments were wheeled out: Jacques Chirac declared that Mitterrand would be
morally (though not, he conceded, constitutionally) bound to go. But curiously, Chirac
himself, once president, felt no such call of duty. In 1997 he chose to remain in the
Élysée after dissolving the National Assembly and seeing his right-wing majority crash
to defeat in the ensuing elections – a clear disavowal from the voters. By staying,
appointing a prime minister acceptable to the new majority and embarking on a period
of ‘cohabitation’, Chirac was acting consistently with both the letter of the constitution
and the practice of his predecessor Mitterrand. A parliamentary majority opposed
to the president, then, neither forces the president’s departure nor permits the continu-
ation of the republican monarchy. It therefore invites a dusting-off of the ‘parliamentary’
reading.
• The president’s role as the nation’s chief politician is severely circumscribed. His
power to choose the prime minister becomes largely formal; he is effectively obliged
to appoint the leader of the new parliamentary majority or another candidate
enjoying that leader’s support. His power to dissolve parliament, limited in any
case to once a year by the constitution, is also limited politically, since few presidents
would court two successive electoral defeats of their parliamentary supporters.
The power to call a referendum can only be exercised with the consent of the
government. Nevertheless, the president has more control than anyone else over the
political calendar.
• In domestic matters, the president’s role as chief policy-maker passes to the prime
minister. Unlike his American counterpart, France’s president has no veto: while
he can ask parliament to ‘reconsider’ a law (under Article 10), his request must have
the prime minister’s countersignature, and parliament is free in any case to vote the
same law again by a simple majority. The battery of dispositions in the 1958 consti-
tution limiting the powers of parliament now function to the exclusive benefit of
the prime minister and government. For example, the Right’s privatisations in
1986–88 and 1993–95, or the left-wing government’s laws to establish a 35-hour
week after 1997, were major domestic initiatives carried through in the face of
presidential opposition. The president may place minor technical obstacles in the
government’s path, as Mitterrand did when Chirac’s right-wing government
attempted to legislate by decree in 1986. And he may voice his disapproval in the
Council of Ministers, through the media, or both. But as long as the government’s
majority remains loyal, its domestic programme will be applied.
• The president retains a greater or lesser role in the domaine réservé, thanks notably
to his constitutional position as head of the armed forces, guarantor of the nation’s
territorial integrity and negotiator of treaties. But parliament votes the budget,
including defence spending; European affairs are a large and growing border zone
between foreign and domestic policy; and, as we have seen, the prime minister is
‘responsible for national defence’. So the domaine réservé cannot be fenced off.
Indeed, Édouard Balladur, prime minister from 1993 to 1995, redefined it as a
‘shared’ area, the domaine partagé. Despite regular disagreements between the
two heads of the executive, the broad consensus between Right and Left in France
over foreign and defence policies has prevented really damaging conflicts over
foreign or defence matters. The respective importance of president and prime min-
ister in these sectors depends very much on the political context of each cohabit-
ation. Mitterrand, for example, largely resisted Chirac’s attempted incursions,
but proved more flexible with Balladur, in part because of his own political and
physical weakness at the end of his second septennat.
• Other responsibilities, and notably the highly sensitive area of appointments to
senior posts in the civil service, the public sector and the military, are negotiated
more or less fiercely between president and prime minister.
As will be clear from the above, a ‘parliamentary’ reading does not mean a return to
an all-powerful parliament – as some Cassandras who saw the first cohabitation as a
‘return to the Fourth Republic’ predicted. Rather, it implies a partial and temporary
transfer of many presidential powers to the other chief of the political executive, the
prime minister, and to the government. How temporary depends on circumstance.
The first cohabitation was seen as a blip, an interruption to the norm of republican
monarchy. By the end of the third one in 2002, however, cohabitation represented
something more than an aberration, having accounted for nine of the Fifth Republic’s
forty-four years. The public had apparently grown more relaxed about it, too, at least
on the basis of opinion poll responses. But the experience of the first round of the 2002
presidential elections, when President Chirac and Prime Minister Jospin won a mere
35 per cent of the vote between them, suggested to the political elite that cohabitation
had damaged French democracy by blurring the lines of political conflict. And in any
case, the move to the five-year presidential term makes it very likely that voters in future
will choose their parliamentary majority in the wake of a presidential race: on each of
the three past occasions when this has happened (in 1981, 1988 and 2002), as well as in
1962, when the October referendum represented a vote of confidence in de Gaulle,
voters have opted for a legislature to support the president. On that basis, the return of
cohabitation is technically possible but politically improbable.
The Constitutional Council and the État de droit

Le gouvernement des juges is still a bogeyman in French political discourse; mistrust of
the judiciary is integral to the Jacobin tradition (Chapter 1). The terminology of the
constitution reflects that mistrust: the judiciary is referred to as an ‘authority’, not a
‘power’. Nevertheless, the constitution of 1958 did innovate by introducing into France
a body that has been compared – with, it is true, very partial justification – to the
United States Supreme Court. The Constitutional Council has the power to rule on the
constitutionality of new laws that are referred to it before they are promulgated, and to
strike down those laws found wanting. Its composition reflected its chief purpose for
the constitution-makers, which was to prevent parliament from overstepping the tight
limits for legislation set by Article 34. Of its nine members (who may be wholly political
appointments, as no judicial background is required of them), three, including its
president, are chosen by the president of the Republic, and three each by the presidents
of the National Assembly and the Senate. Only these individuals, plus the prime
minister, had the right under the 1958 constitution to refer cases to the Constitutional
Council (though it also has a standing duty to rule on the regularity of elections and on
the internal rules of the two houses of parliament).
Two developments elevated the Council from its status as the executive’s watchdog
over the parliament to a quasi-judicial authority. First, after a dozen largely inactive
early years (only nine cases were referred to it between 1959 and 1974), the Council was
seized by a momentous attack of independence. In the ‘freedom of association’ deci-
sion of 1971, it specified that it henceforth took the constitutional text, which is the
yardstick of its decisions, to include the preamble to the constitution, which itself
includes the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. At a single stroke,
it effectively incorporated a bill of rights into the Constitution of the Fifth Republic.
The second development was initiated by President Giscard d’Estaing: in 1974, a con-
stitutional amendment allowed any sixty Deputies or sixty Senators to refer a law to the
Council. The Left sneered at the measure as a réformette, although its parliamentarians
used it to refer forty-three laws to the Council during the Giscard presidency alone. By
the 1980s, it was a safe working assumption that every major law could be referred.
Those who draft laws are therefore likely to take this into account by anticipation. This
is, of course, still very far from being le gouvernement des juges. Once promulgated, a
law cannot be touched by the Council: there is no question, as there is in the United
States, of long-standing legislation arriving for a ruling after being fed upwards
through the ordinary courts. But the Council’s power to irritate the executive has
been well illustrated by the regular attacks on its supposedly ‘political’ rulings from
successive governments of both Right and Left. To this extent, therefore, no future
‘republican monarchy’ can hope to be absolute.
The constitution in flux
The rise of the Constitutional Council is one illustration of the way in which debate
over ‘presidential’ versus ‘parliamentary’ readings fails to capture the full range of
variation within the constitution. There are other examples. Chapter 1 described a
context in which the prerogatives of the strong nation state on the Jacobin or Gaullist
model are increasingly being challenged by both globalisation and Europeanisation,
while the decentralisation undertaken in 1982 has transferred some powers out of
Paris to the provinces. Theorists of multilevel governance argue that such developments
require us to replace traditional conceptions of national governments with more flex-
ible approaches based on networks and partnerships rather than sovereignty and
hierarchies. Even if their case is at times overstated, it is clear that insofar as the French
state as a whole has become less sovereign and more interdependent with European and
other partners, so the working context of the leading French players, president and
prime minister, government and parliament, has been transformed.
This transformation, indeed, has affected the constitution itself. Its revision is a
relatively simple affair, unencumbered, in the unitary state that France remains, by a
prolonged ratification process. After being voted in identical terms by National
Assembly and Senate, amendments either go to referendum or are agreed by a three-
fifths vote of the two houses of parliament meeting together in congress, for which
purpose the parliamentarians are loaded into buses and transported to Versailles. Rare
over the first three decades, these excursions have been almost annual since 1992. In less
than half a century, indeed, the Constitution of the Fifth Republic has undergone
nineteen amendments, two more than the Constitution of the United States has in the
two and a quarter centuries since the incorporation of the Bill of Rights in 1791.
Amendments can be divided into three categories (Table 2.1). The first (type a) includes
a total of four technical amendments, either adjusting France’s relations to overseas
territories and former colonies (in 1960 and 1998) or effecting minor changes to
France’s own institutions (in addition, the amendment of 1995 also removed some of
the constitution’s obsolete articles, particularly relating to the French Community).
The second (type b) consists of six adjustments to bring the constitution into line with
new international, and more specifically European, commitments. The Maastricht
Treaty on European Union of 1992, the Amsterdam Treaty of 1997 and the European
constitution of 2004 all required constitutional amendments, some of them important
(the most recent were passed by parliament in February 2005 before the text of the
European constitution was put to a doomed referendum in the following May). To
these should be added three amendments linked to a common European immigration
policy (1993), to a European arrest warrant (2003), and to France’s recognition of the
International Criminal Court (1999). The third and final group (type c) is that of nine
‘spontaneous’, and more or less substantial, changes to core institutions. Of these, the
two most significant concern the presidency – the direct election amendment of 1962
and the shortening of the presidential term in 2000. Three concern the legislative
process: the 1974 amendment referred to above, that of 1995 initiating the single par-
liamentary session and extending the possible domains of the referendum (though no
referendum has yet been held under the new provision), and that of 1996 bringing the
social security budget into the legislative domain. Two softened the contours of the
Jacobin state by acknowledging the penal responsibility of ministers (in 1993) and
constitutionalising the principle of a decentralised Republic (in 2003). One, in 1999,
Table 2.1 Constitutional amendments since 1958
Type* Date Nature of amendment
a 4 June 1960 Reforms to French Community, allowing newly independent

former colonies to retain membership
c 6 November 1962 Direct election of president
a 30 December 1963 Minor change to dates of parliamentary sessions
c 29 October 1974 Provision for 60 Deputies or 60 Senators to refer newly
passed bills to Constitutional Council for verification of
constitutionality
a 18 June 1976 Provisions in case of incapacity, resignation or death of a
president
b 25 June 1992 Provisions allowing ratification of Maastricht Treaty on
European Union (EMU, votes for EU citizens at municipal
elections, common visa policy, parliamentary resolutions on
EU legislation)
c 27 July 1993 Criminal responsibility of ministers: creation of Court of
Justice of the Republic
b 25 November 1993 Changes to asylum legislation allowing reciprocal legislation
with other (principally EU) states
c 4 August 1995 Single parliamentary session; extension of area of possible
application of referenda to include economic and social
questions
c 22 February 1996 Provision for parliament to vote law on finance of social
security system
a 20 July 1998 Transitional arrangements for vote on future government of
New Caledonia
b 25 January 1999 Provisions allowing ratification of Amsterdam Treaty (1997),
especially relating to free movement of persons between EU
states
b 8 July 1999 (a) Recognition of jurisdiction of International Criminal Court
c 8 July 1999 (b) Legislation permitted to promote gender parity in politics
c 2 October 2000 Presidential term shortened from seven years to five
b 25 March 2003 Minor adjustments allowing transfer of competences to EU
relating to European arrest warrant
c 28 March 2003 Decentralisation incorporated into constitution
b, c 1 March 2005 Provisions allowing ratification of European Constitution
and Charter of the Environment
Source: Constitutional Council.

Note
* Types a–c refer to classifications given in the text.
allowed future legislation to promote ‘parity’ of political representation between men

and women. The most recent amendment, finally, incorporates a Charter of the
Environment into the constitution, though it is uncertain to what extent its impact will
be more than symbolic.
Although the broad lines of de Gaulle’s legacy are still there, in significant ways the
constitution is no longer his. France’s institutions are in constant flux; this dynamic
character of the institutional framework constructed in a few short summer weeks of
1958 will be one theme of the chapters that follow. Change may be reversible, as with
the switch from presidential leadership to cohabitation and back again, or it may be
more permanent. It may result from constitutional amendment, from altered political
or electoral circumstance, or from developments outside France. And it is likely to be
much bound up with individual personalities – the subject of the next chapter.
Further reading
Andrews, W. and Hoffman, S. (eds), The Fifth Republic at Twenty, Albany, NY, State University
of New York Press, 1981.
Bell, D., Presidential Power in Fifth Republic France, Oxford, Berg, 2000.
Duhamel, O., Vive la VIe République!, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 2003.
Duhamel, O. and Parodi, J.-L. (eds), La constitution de la Ve République, Paris, Presses de la
Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1985.
Duverger, M., Les constitutions de la France, 9th edition, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France
(collection Que Sais-Je?), 1971.
Duverger, M., La monarchie républicaine, Paris, Robert Laffont, 1974.
Fondation Charles-de-Gaulle, L’avènement de la Ve République: entre nouveauté et tradition,
Paris, Armand Colin, 1999.
Fontvielle-Alquier, F., Plaidoyer pour la IVe République, Paris, Robert Laffont, 1976.
Horne, A., A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954–1962, London, Macmillan, 1977.
McRae, D., Parliament, Parties, and Society in France, 1946–1958, New York, St Martin’s Press,
1967.
Pouvoirs, no. 76, 1996, ‘La IVe République’.
Revue de Droit Public, special issue, May–June 1998, ‘Les 40 ans de la Ve République’.
Williams, P. M., Crisis and Compromise: Politics in the Fourth Republic, London, Longman, 1964.
Williams, P. M., French Politicians and Elections, 1951–1969, Cambridge, Cambridge University
Press, 1971.
3 Presidents and prime ministers
The personal factor
Charles de Gaulle (1890–1970) 67

Georges Pompidou (1908–74) 68
Valéry Giscard d’Estaing (1926–) 70
François Mitterrand (1916–96) 73
Jacques Chirac (1932–) 76
Prime ministers 80
Further reading 84
The Fifth Republic was attacked by its early opponents as a régime of ‘personal power’.
This was inaccurate. As Olivier Duhamel observes, the institutions have worked in
broadly the same way under very different presidents (de Gaulle and early Mitterrand,
for example), but very differently, because of the change of parliamentary majority,
under the same president (Mitterrand 1981–86 versus Mitterrand 1986–88). But neither
presidents nor (with a few exceptions) prime ministers are mere vehicles of forces
external to themselves. Their vision of their own role and of France’s future has, at
least, marked their periods in office and, at most, led to lasting institutional change.
Charles de Gaulle (1890–1970)

General de Gaulle’s political career, which he began in 1940 after three decades as a
professional soldier, was shaped by the collision between a jealous and passionate love
of his country (depicted in the opening pages of his War Memoirs as a ‘princess in a
fairy tale’ and a ‘Madonna in a medieval fresco’) and the searing experience of
France’s abject collapse in the face of Hitler’s invasion. His two fixations thenceforth
Table 3.1 Presidents of the Fifth Republic
President Dates of presidency
Charles de Gaulle 8 January 1959–28 April 1969

Georges Pompidou 19 June 1969–2 April 1974
Valéry Giscard d’Estaing 24 May 1974–21 May 1981
François Mitterrand 21 May 1981–15 May 1995
Jacques Chirac 15 May 1995–
were autorité de l’État and indépendance nationale. Their intensity was, if anything,
increased by events of the thirteen post-war years – his own acrimonious relations
with party politicians in the provisional government which he headed until his resigna-
tion in January 1946, and the Fourth Republic’s failure to provide stable government
and to handle colonial conflicts. All confirmed his view that in the absence of a strong
state and a presidency allowing the exercise of vigorous leadership, the ferments
de dispersion of the French would be given free rein and France would drift to catas-
trophe. De Gaulle’s obsession with national independence sprang from the concrete
experience, between 1940 and 1944, of having to rely totally on his British and American
allies for France’s liberation (a dependence that he forgave the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ much
less readily than he pardoned the defeated Germans for the Occupation). It led him
to withdraw France from NATO, to veto British entry into Europe, to boycott
European institutions for six months rather than see them constrain France’s sover-
eignty and to wage a battle – quixotic or visionary – against the Cold War division
of the world into two blocs. The recovery of France’s position in the world also served
domestic ends, as a goal that would divert the French from petty internal squabbles.
To further his vision, de Gaulle deployed an inflexible determination with regard
to ends, but pragmatism bordering at times on cynicism as to means; a mastery of
rhetoric combined with a willingness to resort to silence, secrecy or deceit where cir-
cumstances demanded (as they repeatedly did during the Algerian war); a grasp of the
political arts, including the basest of them, combined with constant self-presentation as
being above the political fray; a talent for theatre, shown in the broadcast call of 18 June
1940 to continue the fight against Germany, or the unannounced disappearance from
Paris at the height of the ‘events’ of May 1968; a genius for touching a responsive chord
in the national consciousness, whether by the pen or (remarkably for one born in 1890)
through the new medium of television; an elevated conception, nurtured since child-
hood, of his own historic role (he never stooped to run for any elective office below the
presidency) combined with a commitment to democratic, republican institutions. No
vulgar dictator he, as shown by the readiness, indeed brusqueness, with which de Gaulle
left office twice, first as head of the provisional government in January 1946, and then
as president after defeat at his last referendum (over reforms to the Senate and the
regions) in April 1969. The reluctance of the French to share his lofty purpose rarely
ceased to disappoint de Gaulle; the scale of the student riots and workers’ strikes of
May 1968 left him, on his own account, temporarily with no grip at all on the situation.
Yet even at his final defeat, he was still backed by a higher percentage of the voters than
have supported any British prime minister since the war.
De Gaulle’s institutional legacy includes not just the constitution of 1958, but the
major reform of 1962 and a practice, building on his own unique historical legitimacy,
which gave the presidency more prestige and more power than were explicitly provided
in the ambiguous constitutional text. Over a decade-long presidency, he lent more than
a touch of the heroic to the office. None of his successors has seriously sought to
imitate the General’s style; all, though, have been determined to preserve and build on
the institutional legacy.
Georges Pompidou (1908–74)

There was little of the heroic about the first successor, Georges Pompidou, unless it was
his manner of facing the appalling illness that was to kill him on 2 April 1974, after two
Presidents and prime ministers 69
years of painful and public suffering. Pompidou had never joined the Resistance – a
source of tension with some of his fellow-Gaullists (he later explained, rather lamely,
that he had never known the right person to ask). His three careers outside politics are
typical of the talented, ambitious, upwardly mobile elite of the Republic: the son of a
socialist schoolteacher, born in 1908 in the Cantal, one of the poorest parts of France,
he rose via his local lycée in Albi and the École Normale Supérieure in Paris to become
first a lycée teacher of Latin, Greek and French literature (in the pre-war years and the
Occupation), then a distinguished civil servant in the Conseil d’État (for a brief period
in 1946–50), and finally and most lucratively a banker with Rothschild’s. But Pompidou
was also a trusted confidant of General de Gaulle, who appreciated his discretion, his
literary ability and his managerial efficacy. He worked on de Gaulle’s staff first under
the provisional government, from September 1944 to January 1946; then, on a part-
time basis, from 1948 to 1953, in the years of the first, unsuccessful, Gaullist party, the
Rassemblement du Peuple Français; and finally as the General’s chief of staff (directeur
de cabinet) at Matignon, the prime minister’s office, during the last months of the
Fourth Republic in 1958. After de Gaulle’s move from Matignon to the Élysée (the
presidential palace) in January 1959, Pompidou returned to his bank. But he accepted a
seat on the new Constitutional Council, and carried out several confidential missions
for the new president, connected with the Algerian war.
Pompidou’s appointment to succeed Debré as prime minister in April 1962 was thus
based on a close relationship with de Gaulle of nearly two decades’ standing. For the
French, however, he was an unknown figure who had never held elective office –
something unprecedented for a prime minister of the Republic – and had barely even
spoken in public. That made his success as prime minister all the more remarkable. At
over six years, Pompidou’s tenure in Matignon was of a length unequalled in French
republican history. During this period he developed formidable political skills. He
became a convincing parliamentary orator; an able party and coalition manager, for-
ging a Gaullist-led majority which he led to victory at parliamentary elections in 1962,
1967 and 1968; a careful party organiser, winning the respect of initially sceptical
activists and steadily consolidating a leadership position that was consecrated at the
party’s Lille conference in November 1967. That, as well as his capable handling of the
May 1968 crisis, earned Pompidou the status of dauphin, the legitimate and apparently
inevitable successor to de Gaulle. For the General this was an intolerable situation; and
in July 1968 Pompidou’s resignation, proffered in a moment of fatigue, was accepted
with alacrity by the President. Pompidou spent nine months as a backbench Deputy
before de Gaulle’s resignation, when he immediately declared his own candidacy for the
presidency and won the Gaullist party’s backing. This was fitting, for Pompidou found
himself defending the institutions of the Fifth Republic against a leading opponent, the
centrist president of the Senate Alain Poher, who had made clear his inclination to
return to the institutional practices of the Fourth. Pompidou won handsomely.
Le nœud gordien, Pompidou’s highly personal volume of reflections written just after
May 1968, argued for enhanced presidential intervention by de Gaulle’s successor in
order to safeguard the General’s legacy. Once installed in the Élysée, Pompidou was
true to his text and considerably extended the presidential sphere of government –
though his attempt, a few months before his death, to shorten the presidential term to
five years failed through opposition from orthodox Gaullists (the reform was finally
passed, under the presidency of Pompidou’s protégé Jacques Chirac, in September
2000). Pompidou also shared de Gaulle’s preoccupation with the fragile and divided
character of French society, of which May 1968 was merely the latest proof. But he
differed from de Gaulle as to the remedy. Where de Gaulle sought to remind the
French of their country’s lofty mission (‘When I talk to them of France, the French
forget their divisions’), Pompidou was more down to earth, seeing material prosperity
as the key to social stability. Where de Gaulle dreamt of a ‘third way’ between the free
market and Soviet-style socialism, Pompidou possessed a banker’s certainty of the
wealth-creating virtues of capitalism: France’s transformation, by 1974, into one of the
world’s great economic powers probably owes more to Pompidou than to any other
single politician. He was not, it is true, merely a pro-business conservative: Le nœud
gordien actually cites social democratic Sweden as a social model, and his presidency
was marked by measures to spread the benefits of capitalist growth to every household.
But he was always a more orthodox right-wing politician than his heroic predecessor: a
better European (and ready, unlike de Gaulle, to allow British entry), less inclined to
attack American leadership in the West, or to seek to transcend capitalism, or to upset
the conservative instincts of his core voters. This ensured two partial reconciliations: at
home, with most of the non-Gaullist Right, and abroad, with the ‘Anglo-Saxons’
(Pompidou is the only Fifth Republic president to have enjoyed good relations with
a British prime minister, Edward Heath). Under Pompidou, in short, Gaullism was
almost normalised.
Valéry Giscard d’Estaing (1926–)

The third president of the Fifth Republic, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, comes, like
Pompidou, from the Auvergne. There all resemblance ends. Pompidou’s ancestors were
peasants; Giscard can trace his forebears on both sides to a long line of political and
industrial notables – or even, according to some ingenious genealogists, to the royal
house of France. He inherited from his family great wealth, many political contacts and
a ferocious intelligence: unusually, he is a graduate of both the two schools which form
much of France’s political, administrative and business elites, the École Polytechnique
and the École Nationale d’Administration (ÉNA), whence he followed his father into
the prestigious Inspection des Finances. The transition from the civil service to politics
was effected, as so often, via a ministerial cabinet – that is, the small, often very polit-
ical, private staff which every minister uses to help him run his department and liaise
with colleagues. Giscard’s post in the cabinet of Finance Minister Edgar Faure in 1953
opened a meteoric political ascension: Deputy of the Puy-de-Dôme in 1956 at the age
of 30 (his maternal grandfather Jacques Bardoux retired from his parliamentary seat to
make way for the ambitious young man); junior minister in the Finance Ministry from
January 1959; finance minister from January 1962. In the meantime he was building
a secure political base for himself, both locally as Deputy and as mayor of Chamalières
(a wealthy suburb of Clermont-Ferrand) and nationally as leader, after 1962, of the
newly created movement of Républicains Indépendants, the only group on the non-
Gaullist Right to support de Gaulle after the October 1962 referendum. But by January
1966, having become both an obvious scapegoat for de Gaulle’s unpopular economic
policies and a potential rival to Pompidou for the succession, he was dismissed as
finance minister – ‘like a common servant’, he complained.
It was a costly separation for the Gaullists. Without leaving the Gaullist-led major-
ity, Giscard criticised what he called the ‘solitary exercise of power’, showed no
loyalty in the May 1968 crisis, and in April 1969 helped to oust de Gaulle by
announcing ‘with regret’ that he would not be voting for the General’s referendum
proposals. In the presidential elections of June 1969 he declared for Pompidou after
some hesitation, and was rewarded with the Finance Ministry for the full duration
of the Pompidou presidency. When Pompidou died, Giscard took full advantage of
the Gaullists’ disarray, trouncing Chaban-Delmas, his Gaullist rival, at the first round
and beating Mitterrand, the left-wing candidate, by a wafer-thin majority at the
second.
Whereas the first two presidents of the Fifth Republic, though not successful in every
field, displayed considerable consistency in both aims and means, this is much less true
of both Giscard and his successors. Central to the record of the Giscard presidency is
the contrast between early reformism and late conservatism. The contrast concerns
both substance and style: between the wide-ranging societal reforms of the first year
and the authoritarian police and criminal evidence legislation of the last; between
the early promises to improve the quality of life and material well-being of manual
workers, and the austerity and rising unemployment of the closing period; between the
Kennedy-like informality of a new, 48-year-old president, and the monarchical pre-
occupation with protocol and brooding hostility to the press of the same man five or six
years later. This evolution can be explained in economic, political and personal terms.
Giscard faced a far less favourable economic situation than his predecessors: the first oil
shock had ended the West’s long post-war boom in the last months of the Pompidou
presidency. Like other Western leaders, Giscard first failed to get the measure of the
crisis and then paid a heavy price for the unpopular economic measures he finally took
(Giscard’s defeat in 1981 is paralleled by James Callaghan’s in Britain in 1979; Jimmy
Carter’s in the United States in 1980; and Helmut Schmidt’s in Germany in 1982). The
often brutal insensitivity of Raymond Barre, the prime minister who had the job of
administering the painful medicine after 1976, did not help; and the second oil price rise
ensured that by 1981, when he stood for re-election, the indicators for both unemploy-
ment and inflation were very poor. Politically, Giscard suffered from having been
elected on a reform programme but with essentially conservative backing both in the
country and in the political elite. His reforms thus often lacked support within the
right-wing National Assembly majority. The Gaullists, in particular, viewed the presi-
dent with extreme suspicion and his reforms as gimmicks: Giscard’s inability to define
an adequate relationship with them helped seal his fate in 1981. Nor, however, did his
reforming efforts win him any credit on the Left: both Socialists and Communists
remained firmly in a frosty opposition from which they emerged briefly to vote a very
few reforms (most notably the legalisation of abortion). In the end, therefore, Giscard
was condemned to follow the increasingly conservative instincts of a cantankerous
majority. As an individual, finally, Giscard suffered from a degree of both political
naïveté and personal brittleness. The view, expounded in his 1976 book Démocratie
française, that the growth of a ‘vast central group’ of French wage- and salary-earners
with stable jobs and rising incomes rendered the old dynamics of class struggle obsolete,
had a basis in the social dynamics of the recently ended post-war boom. But it flew in
the face of the deepening economic crisis, while the bipolarising institutional dynamics
of the Fifth Republic rendered Giscard’s ambition to ‘govern France from the Centre’
highly problematic. Similarly, the president’s stated commitment to a more ‘pluralist’
society was revealed to be less than total when confronted with political opposition: his
discrimination against certain politically unsympathetic pressure groups, his assiduous
use of patronage to place his own loyalists in key public-sector jobs, his surveillance of
the state media and his interference in certain press matters are proof of that. On a
more personal level, there was something rather pathetic about this impeccably well-
bred man displaying his aristocratic knees on the sports field of Chamalières or his
talents as an accordion-player in a local bar, or dining with garage mechanics and
dustmen. It was noticed and ridiculed, provoking a withdrawal into regal hauteur. More
seriously, a series of scandals in the late 1970s involving the president and his entourage
(including the gift of diamonds to Giscard from Bokassa, the mad and bad Emperor of
Central Africa) permanently soured his relations with the press. Giscard later claimed
that for seven years after his defeat in 1981, he could not bear to open a French
newspaper or watch the French television news for fear that he would happen upon a
hurtful comment about himself.
Despite Giscard’s failure to ‘break the mould’ of French politics, he left several
important legacies. The series of early reforms, paralleled by similar measures in other
Western countries but mostly refused or delayed by de Gaulle and Pompidou, brought
France’s legal framework abreast of social change, at least partially: women were given
equal rights to own and dispose of property (this change did follow on from reforms
initiated under de Gaulle), divorce was facilitated, contraception made widely available
for the first time, abortion legalised (France’s birth rate saw a rapid and spectacular
drop). The age of majority was lowered to 18 (France’s youth showed its gratitude by
voting massively against Giscard in 1981). The constitutional amendment of 1974
transformed the role of the Constitutional Council by allowing referrals by Deputies or
Senators (see Chapter 2). Parisians saw plans for the Left Bank expressway dropped
and the maximum height of new buildings in their city limited; the Montparnasse
Tower stands as a ghastly reminder of what might have been had Pompidou lived. They
were also, for the first time in over a century, partially liberated from direct rule by
central government and given a mayor like any other French city (Jacques Chirac, who
was elected to the office in 1977, found the Paris town hall an admirable base from
which to pursue a political vendetta against the president). Beyond France’s frontiers,
Giscard was a founder of the European Monetary System, the fruit of a particularly
good relationship with Germany’s Chancellor Schmidt and the forerunner, for two
decades, of monetary union. Giscard has also, despite himself, inaugurated a new role
in Fifth Republic politics, that of ex-president, for he has survived his defeat by nearly
twenty-five years. About ten of these were spent in unfruitful attempts to get his old job
back, but two of his more recent initiatives have almost as much potential significance
for French politics as anything he undertook as president. In 2000, as a simple Deputy,
he initiated the process that led to the shortening of the presidential term to five years.
The final role in a career spanning half a century was as chair, in 2002–3, of the
Convention on the Future of Europe which drafted the European constitutional treaty.
That the resulting document lacked the concision and elegance of a well-crafted
national constititution reflects less on Giscard than on the difficulty of the Conven-
tion’s task: producing a set of rules for a new type of political entity, with limited (and
therefore precisely delimited) competences, in such a way as to satisfy the Eurosceptical
British and Danes and the federalist Belgians and Luxembourgeois. That a document
was produced at all was remarkable. But the no result at the French and Dutch refer-
endums on the constitutional treaty, and the subsequent stalling of the ratification
process, suggested that Giscard would be remembered less as a European founding
father than as an actor at one of the many European turning points at which nothing
turned.
François Mitterrand (1916–96)
Giscard’s defeat, though partly his own fault and partly the result of circumstances
beyond his control, may also be explained by the presence of a viable and attractive
alternative in the person of François Mitterrand. Giscard’s senior by ten years (he
was born in 1916), Mitterrand was the last president of the Resistance generation:
like many of his contemporaries of all parties, he owed his start in politics to having
had a good war. Brought up in a middle-class Catholic family, he began a legal career
before being conscripted in 1939 and captured by the Germans in the débâcle of 1940.
He then managed not only to escape but to found a Resistance network of former
prisoners of war like himself. Over the long term, the network provided Mitterrand
with reliable friends in the most unexpected corners of French society. In the short
term, his record launched a political career; by 1947 Mitterrand, a leading member of
the small but pivotal Union Démocratique et Sociale de la Résistance (UDSR) was
minister for ex-servicemen, the first of eleven government posts he would hold under
the Fourth Republic. At the same time he honed his formidable talents as an incisive,
at times caustic, parliamentary orator, and consolidated a strong local base, becoming
president of the conseil général of the left-wing Nièvre département and mayor of the
small town of Château-Chinon. That was to stand him in good stead after 1958,
when the advent of the Fifth Republic halted his ministerial rise and deprived him
temporarily of a seat in the National Assembly. Mitterrand was unusual among poli-
ticians of the old régime in that he both rejected the Fifth Republic utterly and
understood its central dynamics very quickly. In particular, he realised that the presi-
dency was the centre of political competition, and that parties without allies were
doomed to impotent opposition. His first presidential candidacy, in 1965, neatly
expressed that understanding, as well as his considerable political skills: he won the
backing of both Socialist and Communist parties without being a member of either.
His achievement in forcing the apparently unassailable de Gaulle to a second ballot
earned him a place in the pantheon of the Left. He then used this position to pursue
two aims with great consistency: the rejuvenation of the non-Communist Left and
the negotiation of a binding electoral alliance with the Communists. In 1971 he took
over and relaunched the Socialist Party; the following year he signed a Common
Programme of Government with the Communists; in 1974 he stood again for the
presidency, backed by both big left-wing parties, and came within an ace of winning.
The road to power thereafter was more difficult. The Communists began to distance
themselves from an alliance which had done far less for them than it had for the revived
Socialist Party, provoking a quarrel that spoiled the Left’s chances of victory in
the 1978 parliamentary elections. Within his own party, Mitterrand’s strategy and
leadership were challenged, most notably by his long-term rival Michel Rocard. But
through most of the Giscard presidency, Mitterrand contrived to enhance the stand-
ing both of his party, which became the most popular in the country, and of his own
person, as he cultivated the image of a literate and humane Socialist sage in the
mould of Jaurès and Blum. Most importantly, perhaps, he managed to remain firm in
his disputes with the Communist leadership while keeping the Communist electorate
committed to the union of the Left. The firmness, and the inner self-assurance that
underlay it, lent credibility to his moderate, reassuring campaign slogan of 1981, ‘La
force tranquille’, and helped him win over the Centre voters whom he had failed to
attract in 1974 or 1965; his continued self-presentation as a man of the Left ensured
him a reserve army of some 4 million Communist voters when he needed them to
beat Giscard at the second round.
Mitterrand’s long presidency (he is the only French president to have served two full
seven-year terms) saw France undergo profound social, economic and political trans-
formations, but the changes were not always the ones he intended. The promise of
1981, to solve France’s economic problems and achieve social justice through classic
left-wing methods of nationalisation and high public spending, was dropped after the
crisis of March 1983 (see Chapter 1). Far from undergoing a socialist transformation,
France under Mitterrand saw a period of deregulation, privatisation and adaptation
to global capitalist competition, with all the widening of inequalities that such pro-
cesses involve: unemployment doubled (by 1993) to 3 million, France’s city streets
and doorways filled up with the ‘new poor’, while the stock market, liberalised under
Mitterrand’s Finance Minister Pierre Bérégovoy, offered unprecedented gains to those
with money to invest. By November 1984, the contrast between rhetoric and reality had
made Mitterrand the most unpopular president of the Fifth Republic (which he
remained until the advent of his successor Chirac); the slow recovery of his poll ratings
thereafter was not enough to prevent the Left’s defeat at the March 1986 parlia-
mentary elections. The period of cohabitation that followed saw a virtuoso display of
Mitterrand’s political genius. Posing simultaneously as the fair-minded elder statesman
(by appointing a right-wing government with apparent good grace) and the defender
of the underprivileged (in well-judged criticisms of the same right-wing government),
uniting his own camp while playing on Centre voters’ suspicions of his opponents, he
ran circles around his main adversary, the Gaullist Prime Minister Jacques Chirac, and
was comfortably re-elected in May 1988. The major ambition of the second septennat,
European integration, was more successfully pursued than the earlier aspiration to
social justice. The 1992 Maastricht Treaty on European union, above all, testifies to
Mitterrand’s determination to lock France and Germany irrevocably into the same
political and economic structure. But the European ambition, and the commitment
to the strong franc that went with it, also led to deep unpopularity: the recession that
followed German unification in the early 1990s hit France particularly hard and
combined with revelations about corruption among the Socialists to ensure a second
parliamentary election defeat for the Left in 1993. Now there was to be no comeback
for Mitterrand, who ended his presidency weakened politically by the size of the
Right’s victory and physically by age and cancer.
Mitterrand could be as monarchical as any French president. Like de Gaulle, he
cultivated distance and aloofness when it suited him, and kept one eye permanently
fixed not so much on his transient popularity as on his place in history. If left-wing
supporters gave him the familiar nickname of Tonton, those closer to the Élysée
referred to him as Dieu. Perhaps no other democratic leader has been personally
responsible for so many grandiose public buildings, from the vast library that bears his
name to the Louvre pyramid, from the Cité de la Musique at La Villette to the Bastille
opera. Yet the Mitterrand years also softened the rigid hierarchies of French society
which de Gaulle and Pompidou had perpetuated and which Giscard had only hesitantly
begun to alter. France’s noisy, anarchic midsummer music festival was as much a part
of the Mitterrand legacy as the grand monuments; so was the profusion of newly
legalised independent radio stations, and the significant relaxation of state controls
on television. The ferocious police and criminal evidence legislation passed at the
end of the Giscard presidency was repealed. The death penalty was abolished. France’s
Jacobin state also ceded powers to the localities: the decentralisation laws, referred to by
Mitterrand as the grande affaire of his first term, relaxed central government controls
over mayors and départements, and gave directly elected councils to France’s twenty-
two regions (see Chapter 12). Change also resulted from circumstance. Mitterrand’s
election in 1981, together with the parliamentary elections that followed, was in itself a
new departure: the first experience of alternation in power under the Fifth Republic,
and indeed the first time in French history that the voters had completely replaced a
governing coalition with the former opposition. Over the next twenty-one years, the
French were to overthrow their rulers, peacefully, on every available occasion: in 1986,
1988, 1993 and 1995, as well as 1997 and 2002; by voting in a right-wing government
under a left-wing president in 1986, they ensured the innovation of cohabitation, but
also demonstrated the flexibility of the Fifth Republic’s institutions. Equally significant
were the revelations about political corruption that tainted the later Mitterrand years
and the long-running debate about the justice system that resulted. Hitherto, govern-
ments had usually succeeded in managing the administration of justice so as to avoid
embarrassment to themselves; in 1990, however, faced by a newly investigative press
and a group of examining magistrates ready to press their powers to the limit, even
at the risk of official disapproval, the Justice Ministry proved unable to hold the line.
The ‘judicialisation’ of French politics (see Chapter 13) dates from the Mitterrand
presidency.
Giscard had left the Élysée unpopular; Mitterrand left it in a climate of scandal and
discredit which was only partially lifted at his death eight months later. His last years
had revealed the darkest sides of a deeply ambiguous personality. Some of the ambigu-
ities were widely known, if often forgotten. Mitterrand the apostle of the union of the
Left had been a ferocious anti-communist thirty years earlier. Mitterrand the scourge
of the Fifth Republic, author of a polemical attack on the régime entitled Le Coup
d’État permanent, used its institutions to the full. Mitterrand the crusader against
racism, who led a solemn march to condemn the desecration of a Jewish cemetery
at Carpentras in 1990, also gave significant assistance to the far right-wing Front
National, probably to embarrass the mainstream Right: he helped ensure air time for
the FN leader Jean-Marie Le Pen in 1984, and changed the electoral system to allow
FN Deputies into the National Assembly in 1986. More surprising were details of
Mitterrand’s private life, long cloaked in a secrecy that British and American politicians
might envy: he housed his mistress and their daughter at the expense of the state for
well over a decade, and published false health bulletins from the day in October 1981
when he was told of his cancer. More sinister were the large-scale, and illegal, phone-
taps Mitterrand organised from the Élysée on a wide range of journalists and political
rivals. Most damaging, though, were the revelations about his war record published
in 1994. Before becoming a Resistance hero, Mitterrand had worked for, and been
decorated by, the collaborationist Vichy régime: his handshake with the Vichy ruler,
Marshal Pétain, was immortalised by photographers. Worse, he maintained a lifelong
friendship with René Bousquet, under the Fourth Republic a banker who helped
finance Mitterrand’s party but under Vichy a police chief responsible for handing over
hundreds of Jewish children to the Germans. Mitterrand’s subsequent pleas of ignor-
ance of Vichy’s activities, or of Bousquet’s role in them, sit ill with the extraordinary
intelligence that he demonstrated over a half-century in politics.
One of Mitterrand’s fiercest critics, after his death, was his former prime minister and
long-term Socialist rival Michel Rocard. For Rocard, Mitterrand ‘was not an honest
man’; he dealt with people on the basis of ‘trickery and violence’. The French people
were more indulgent. By 1997, 53 per cent of them judged his overall record as positive,
rating him highest in those areas where his major ambitions had lain – foreign policy
and the ‘reduction of inequalities’. He was even considered, by 31 per cent, as the best
President of the Fifth Republic: a proportion only exceeded by de Gaulle.
Jacques Chirac (1932–)

Giscard and Mitterrand present a record of large presidential purposes frustrated, in
part at least, by events. In the case of Jacques Chirac, the purpose itself is hard to
discern: he has always displayed more energy in the pursuit of power than vision in its
exercise. Like Mitterrand, Chirac won the presidency, at the third attempt, in his early
sixties. Unlike him, he is a pure product of the Fifth Republic. The son of a Parisian
banker, and a graduate of ÉNA like Giscard, Chirac saw military service as an officer in
the Algerian war. Interestingly, he regards this period as the happiest of his life, and
contemplated joining the Algérie française army rebels. Instead, however, he returned
to France and took jobs in the Cour des Comptes (Court of Accounts), the General
Secretariat of the Government, and, late in 1962, in Pompidou’s Matignon cabinet.
Chirac quickly established an almost filial relationship with the prime minister, who
appreciated his formidable energy, referred to him affectionately as his ‘bulldozer’ and
groomed him for active politics.
The constituency of Ussel in the département of Corrèze borders Pompidou’s
Mauriac constituency in the Cantal, and is just as backward. Chirac’s ancestral roots
are there (within ten miles of Ussel is a village called Chirac-Bellevue). But it had a
tradition of left-wing voting. Chirac targeted the constituency from 1964, making
frequent visits, getting himself elected a municipal councillor, squaring the local (and
mostly ageing) political class, and above all showering the largess of the state, made
available through his position in Matignon, on the fortunate voters. The systematic
exploitation both of patronage and of his own considerable physical presence, energy
and human warmth have been Chirac campaign trademarks ever since. In 1967 they
won him the Ussel seat (as they did in every parliamentary election up to and
including 1993). Pompidou immediately gave him a government post as junior minister
for social affairs, a job that proved more eventful than expected: in the May 1968
‘events’, Chirac, along with the Matignon adviser for social affairs Édouard Balladur,
was part of Pompidou’s crisis team: photographs of the Grenelle negotiations that
ended the strikes show Chirac seated on the prime minister’s left. His ministerial
progress thereafter was rapid: he became agriculture minister in 1972 and interior
minister in February 1974. Barely six weeks later, Pompidou’s death deprived him of
a patron.
His behaviour in the subsequent election campaign earned Chirac a reputation for
political treachery which has never quite left him. With forty-three Gaullist Deputies,
he called for a Giscard vote at the first ballot, in preference to the Gaullist candidate
Chaban-Delmas. He was rewarded, when Giscard won the presidency, with the pre-
miership at the age of just 41. Six months later, he used his office to seize the Gaullist
party leadership from under the noses of the older Gaullist ‘barons’. The president
expected Chirac to ‘Giscardise’ the party; Chirac wanted it for his own use; the mutual
fascination that the two men had exercised upon one another turned to fierce rivalry;
and Chirac resigned as prime minister in August 1976. He spent most of the next four
and a half years preparing his first presidential bid, relaunching his party as the
Rassemblement pour la République (RPR), winning election as mayor of Paris in 1977,
and regularly attacking Giscard while never quite leaving the presidential majority.
Chirac’s second act of treachery came with the 1981 elections, when he campaigned
more vigorously against the sitting president than against Mitterrand. Then, after he
was eliminated at the first ballot, he gave Giscard the most oblique and unenthusiastic
endorsement for the run-off, contributing materially to Mitterrand’s victory.
As the vigorous leader of a still intact party, Chirac found himself in 1981 as the
effective head of France’s opposition – and, as Mitterrand’s popularity waned in 1983,
France’s most likely next president. It was the growing competition from Giscard’s
other former prime minister, Raymond Barre, that led Chirac to envisage a return
to Matignon as a way of preparing a second run at the presidency. As leader of the
first government of cohabitation, from 1986 to 1988, he began a range of liberal eco-
nomic reforms, including a large privatisation programme, before being defeated by
Mitterrand’s superior political skills in 1988. Chirac could have repeated the experi-
ment after the Right’s landslide parliamentary victory of 1993; instead he stayed out of
government to prepare his third presidential bid, leaving the premiership to his trusted
adviser and former finance minister, Édouard Balladur. Treachery now nearly worked
against Chirac, for Balladur discovered popularity and with it a presidential vocation.
But Chirac’s overall strategy was successful: starting from a marginal position in the
polls, but free to exercise his considerable campaigning talents, he overtook Balladur
two months before the first ballot, against all predictions. He then benefited from the
Left’s disarray in the late Mitterrand years to win the run-off against the Socialist
Lionel Jospin by a comfortable 53 per cent to 47.
Whereas Mitterrand was never quite what he seemed, Chirac has had trouble seem-
ing anything in particular for very long. In a political career spread over nearly three
decades before the 1995 presidential election, Chirac had been a Euro-enthusiast (as
Giscard’s prime minister), a Eurosceptic given to histrionics (attacking Giscard as the
agent of a foreign power in 1978), a Euro-enthusiast again (signing the Single European
Act with Mitterrand), and a Euro-pragmatist (deciding, reluctantly, to vote yes in the
referendum on the Maastricht Treaty). He had sung the praises of a ‘French-style
Labourism’ in 1977, and of the neo-liberalism of Thatcher and Reagan six years later.
His reliance on advisers – Pierre Juillet and Marie-France Garaud in the 1970s,
Balladur in the 1980s, and his chief of staff Dominique de Villepin after 1995 – has
been seen as compensating for the lack of a consistent personal vision. As one leading
member of his party put it, ‘Chirac is like Beaujolais: there’s a new one every year.’ He
has been most in his element as a clientelist politician in the mode of the old Radical
Party of the Third Republic, working a Corrèze cattle fair or a Parisian street market
(the most favoured group of all in Chirac’s world are corréziens living in the capital).
Paris, it should be added, was more than an excellent electoral base for Chirac. His real
dynamism over eighteen years as mayor, the greater accessibility of his administration
compared with the prefectoral régime that had preceded it, and a big public relations
budget kept not only his popularity within Paris but also his visibility outside it persist-
ently high. The town hall also offered an unrivalled source of patronage, bigger than
most ministries. Under Chirac’s stewardship, loyal supporters like Alain Juppé were
given high-level town hall jobs and attractive housing at peppercorn rents; firms were
invited to contribute to the RPR in return for municipal contracts; full-time party
workers were paid out of municipal funds; and electoral rolls were falsified – though
these practices only became widespread public knowledge, and in some instances
reached the courts, after he had left the town hall for the Élysée.
The conditions of Chirac’s victory in 1995 flawed his first presidential term from the
start. The election had split the parliamentary majority between his supporters and
Balladur’s, but Chirac attempted neither a serious reconciliation with the balladuriens
nor a fresh start through early parliamentary elections. Worse, having taken up ground
vacated by the disgraced Left in order to beat Balladur, lamenting what he called la
fracture sociale and promising to make employment his highest priority, he proceeded
to do nothing of the sort once in the Élysée. Instead, he instructed Juppé, now his
prime minister, to reduce France’s public-sector deficits in line with the economic
convergence criteria of the Maastricht Treaty. The resulting tax rises helped choke off
a timid economic recovery. Economic malaise was compounded by sleaze (as details
emerged of the rent reductions that Juppé had given himself and his son on their
Parisian apartments) and by political error, notably the sacking of most of the women
members of the government. The announcement of a major reform to the social
security system provoked strikes and completed the divorce between Chirac and
French opinion. By the end of 1995, polls showed that 71 per cent of the French
were disappointed by his record, compared with just 16 per cent who claimed to
be satisfied – a steeper, deeper drop in popularity even than Mitterrand’s in 1983.
The Chirac–Juppé tandem never recovered; and when, in 1997, Chirac seized on a
modest improvement in the polls to dissolve the National Assembly, the Right’s vast
parliamentary majority was replaced by a narrow but adequate left-wing one. Chirac
thus became the first president to face a hostile parliamentary majority as a result of
elections he had called himself.
Like Mitterrand in 1986, Chirac now faced a period of cohabitation, stretching out
to the next presidential election, with the prime minister forced on him by his majority’s
electoral defeat – in this case, his Socialist rival Jospin. Again, the leading challenger for
the presidency was widely expected to be the prime minister. But Chirac’s task was
harder than that of his old enemy Mitterrand. He had five years to wait for the presi-
dential election, not two. He faced a prime minister whose popularity, assisted at least
for three years by an unexpectedly buoyant economy, remained persistently popular.
And Chirac’s own party, the RPR, practically escaped his control in the wake of the
1997 defeat. In the face of these difficulties, Chirac owed his re-election in 2002 to four
factors. The first was the paternalistic appeal of a president under cohabitation: the
genial host at France’s 1998 World Cup victory enjoyed solidly positive popularity
ratings, precisely echoing Mitterrand’s return to favour after 1986. The second was the
lack of serious competition on the Right: Chirac’s success in undermining potential
rivals in his own camp meant that by 2001 both the RPR and most of the non-Gaullist
moderate Right had drifted back to supporting him, with more or less enthusiasm, as
the only contender with a chance of stopping Jospin. The third was Jospin’s own
difficulties, both circumstantial (the economy began to slow down, and unemployment
to rise, from mid-2001) and self-made (his campaign was a compendium of strategic
and tactical errors). The fourth was the unexpectedly strong showing by Le Pen, who,
with 16.9 per cent of the first-ballot vote in April 2002, pushed Jospin into third place,
eliminating him from the contest and leaving the French with a second-round choice
between ‘a crook (an allusion to Chirac’s stewardship of the Paris city hall) and a
fascist’. Overwhelmingly, they chose the former. No Fifth Republic president has
achieved a lower first-ballot score than Chirac in 2002 (at under 20 per cent); none,
however, has managed a better showing at the run-off (with over 82 per cent, including
well over three-quarters of all left-wing voters).
This lopsided victory proved a solid base for that of the moderate Right, largely but
not wholly reorganised in a new party, the UMP, at the parliamentary elections that
followed in June 2002. By the end of September, Chirac held a more commanding
institutional position than any of his predecessors: absolute majorities for the UMP in
both National Assembly and Senate, and a broadly supportive majority even in the
Constitutional Council. Translating institutional advantage into political momentum,
however, was another matter. Elected in 1995 on the basis of promises he could not
keep, Chirac had been re-elected seven years later on the basis of a fundamental ambi-
guity: had he won on his own moderately free-market first-ballot programme, or merely
on the ‘republican reflex’ of the vast majority of the French who preferred him to
Le Pen but who had no wish to see the state rolled back? The former interpretation
largely prevailed in the policies of Chirac and his new prime minister, Jean-Pierre
Raffarin (significantly, a figure from the non-Gaullist wing of the UMP). They set out
to reverse the hitherto almost continuous expansion of France’s civil service, to transfer
more of the state’s responsibilities onto regional and local authorities, to lengthen both
the working week (undermining a flagship Jospin reform, the 35-hour week) and the
working lifetime (by raising the years of work required to earn a full pension), and to
ration access to specialist medical care in order to reduce the social security deficit. Such
reforms made a deeply unpopular prime minister of Raffarin, and cost the Right two
heavy defeats at the regional and European elections of 2004. They also contributed to
the no victory at the 2005 referendum on the European constitutional treaty.
Summing up an as yet unfinished political career is beset with difficulties, especially
one as long as that of Chirac, whose first premiership began when Richard Nixon was
still in the White House and Harold Wilson in Downing Street. His achievements are
disparate. He moved France towards a less dirigiste economy, both as prime minister in
1986–88 and as president after 1995. But this was part of a wider general movement,
in which leaders as varied as Mitterrand, Fabius, Bérégovoy, Balladur and even Jospin
participated; it is hard to identify Chirac as a prime mover in the process, on the model
of a Thatcher or a Reagan. He announced the phasing-out of military service in 1996,
and France’s last conscripts ended their duties in November 2001. In 1997 he courage-
ously accepted the share of responsibility of France, even if represented by the dubious
legitimacy of the Vichy government, in the Holocaust. After his re-election, he placed
his full authority behind three very practical goals: a tough road safety campaign,
better treatment for cancer patients and improved facilities for the handicapped –
hardly the stuff of a visionary presidency, but policies that have already saved thou-
sands of lives (on France’s notoriously dangerous roads) and, arguably, have improved
many others. He also ensured, by sponsoring, via his Élysée advisers, the creation of the
UMP out of the remains of the RPR and a chunk of the non-Gaullist moderate Right,
that for the first time under the Fifth Republic no major party claimed to draw its
inspiration from Gaullism. And he may go down as the president who – reluctantly –
prepared France for the single currency after 1995, and who, with the support of over
two-thirds of the French public, briefly took the leadership of nations opposed to the
2003 Iraq war.
This mixed record suggests a common, and not unfounded, view of Chirac as a
superb tactician, a political survivor with no overarching vision. He has, at best,
reflected the conflicts and contradictions with which the French faced the world at the
turn of the twenty-first century. Chirac is a Gaullist-turned-European, committed to
the ‘construction of Europe’ but dismissive of smaller member states inclined to ques-
tion France’s leadership on the continent; a persistent advocate of lower taxes and
higher spending; a rhetorical environmentalist, ready to incorporate a Charter of the
Environment into the constitution but reluctant to impose constraining environmental
legislation on his own voters; a proponent of a worldwide tax to overcome Third World
poverty, but a committed defender of European agricultural subsidies that create it; a
consistent enemy of the FN, who remained capable as late as 1991 of racist lapses, quite
worthy of Le Pen, in his own discourse.
As far as the presidency is concerned, however, Chirac’s record appears reasonably
clear: he has weakened it. This is true in terms both of presidential power and of
presidential powers. In the former domain, Chirac has failed to articulate and to mobil-
ise the French behind a long-term vision of France’s future – no easy task, but one
which de Gaulle saw as essential to the presidential function. In the area of powers,
Chirac has allowed the reduction of the presidential term to five years, confirming that
the presidential function is henceforth bound to the parliamentary calendar. More
disastrous, perhaps, has been his inept use of the two new tools of presidential leader-
ship provided by the 1958 constitution. Chirac’s dissolution of parliament in 1997
(under Article 12) was rewarded with the opposition’s victory; his referendum of 2005
(under Article 11), over the European constitutional treaty, with a decisive no vote.
De Gaulle’s record suggests that either of these defeats would have prompted his
resignation; Chirac, by constrast, stayed put on both occasions. His successors will
nevertheless think twice about using Articles 11 and 12 again. This will not deprive
future French presidents of all means to exercise political leadership. But they will
probably have to use tools that are more political and less regal – the tools, in fact, of
the average European prime minister.
Prime ministers
Entrusted, according to the conventional wisdom of the Fifth Republic, with the
day-to-day running of the country, prime ministers have no call to display any personal
vision of France’s longer-term destiny. Some conform perfectly to this model. Neither
Maurice Couve de Murville, nor Pierre Messmer, nor Édith Cresson presented any
clear goal distinct from those of their masters. Of Chirac’s first, youthful, premiership
under Giscard, his adviser Marie-France Garaud later said ‘it wasn’t that you were a
bad prime minister, Jacques; you weren’t prime minister at all’. Juppé was a compar-
able, though not precisely similar, case. He enjoyed a broad delegation of powers from
Chirac, but partly because his views corresponded so closely to those of his president:
he said later that not even the most hostile observers had been able to put a cigarette
paper between them. The symbiosis between the two men is unique in the annals of
the Fifth Republic – with the result that Juppé’s lack of political sensitivity (he has
been referred to as ‘a computer without any politics software’) helped drag Chirac’s
popularity down as well as his own. Jean-Pierre Raffarin, the prime minister Chirac
chose after his re-election in 2002, lacked Juppé’s personal closeness to the president,
and was also unusual in having made his career largely in provincial France (as presi-
dent of the Poitou-Charentes regional council) rather than Paris. But he corres-
ponded, more or less, to the model of the self-effacing executant rather than the policy
entrepreneur.
Table 3.2 Prime ministers of the Fifth Republic
Prime minister Date of appointment
Michel Debré 8 January 1959

Georges Pompidou 14 April 1962
Maurice Couve de Murville 10 July 1968
Jacques Chaban-Delmas 20 June 1969
Pierre Messmer 5 July 1972
Jacques Chirac 27 May 1974
Raymond Barre 25 August 1976
Pierre Mauroy 21 May 1981
Laurent Fabius 17 July 1984
Jacques Chirac 20 March 1986
Michel Rocard 10 May 1988
Édith Cresson 15 May 1991
Pierre Bérégovoy 2 April 1992
Édouard Balladur 29 March 1993
Alain Juppé 17 May 1995
Lionel Jospin 2 June 1997
Jean-Pierre Raffarin 6 May 2002
Dominique Galouzeau de Villepin 31 May 2005
Other prime ministers, by contrast, have had the opportunity to make more of
a personal impact, for one of two reasons. Either the president – whether out of a
conception of the most effective division of labour, or because of their own political
weakness, or both – allowed them to play a significant role; or he was forced, under
cohabitation, to concede the major policy-making role to his prime minister. In the
former category, Michel Debré used the full powers of the new Republic to resolve
questions which had proved beyond the reach of his predecessors, including subsidies
to Church schools and curbs on home-distilled spirits. The central priorities of
Pompidou’s premiership, to industrialise France and to build up the Gaullist party,
both received de Gaulle’s approval, the former wholeheartedly, the latter more guard-
edly. Chaban-Delmas gave a grandiose label – the ‘New Society’ – to diverse liberalising
reform plans. That provoked the displeasure of Pompidou, who found the tone too
vague, too left-wing and too presidential; but he supported his prime minister on many
of the concrete measures involved. Raymond Barre, appointed by Giscard as ‘the best
economist in France’, made a trademark of pursuing economic orthodoxy at the
expense of popularity, and won much respect for it – retrospectively, after his policies
had contributed to Giscard’s defeat. Mitterrand’s first prime minister, Pierre Mauroy,
represented a French version of Old Labour, his uniquely good relations with the
Communists helping to tie the Communist Party into the left-wing majority of 1981.
His successor, Laurent Fabius, appointed as the Communists left government, was the
opposite: young, technocratic, a symbol of the Left’s modernity more than of its social
conscience. Michel Rocard, the first prime minister of Mitterrand’s second term, was
chosen for his apparent ability to widen the left-wing majority towards the Centre. His
approach to policy, which became known as the méthode Rocard, involved widespread
consultation and consensus politics leading to long-term reforms. It won some signifi-
cant successes, notably a settlement in the troubled Pacific territory of New Caledonia,
but was also attacked from the Left, and by Mitterrand, for its apparent timidity. Pierre
Bérégovoy was a Socialist converted to financial orthodoxy, a doctrine that dominated
his behaviour both as finance minister and, between 1992 and 1993, as premier. His
‘strong franc’ policy helped earn France the plaudits of the world financial press, not
usually prolix in its approval of socialist governments. It also laid him open to the
reproach of having lost sight of left-wing goals. That, and the more important accus-
ation that he had compromised his integrity by accepting a dubious loan from one of
Mitterrand’s lifelong associates, fuelled the depression that led to his suicide after the
Left’s defeat in 1993. Dominique de Villepin, like Bérégovoy, was appointed at a time
of great political weakness for the president: France had just voted no at the 2005
referendum on Europe. Initiatives such as tax reform, the easing of restrictions on
hiring and firing in small firms, and as an attempt to revive state-led industrial policy
and protect ‘strategic’ French firms like Danone from foreign takeover were identified
as de Villepin’s policies. The new decisiveness, even flamboyance, of the de Villepin style
(which had been most tellingly displayed in 2003, in a speech as foreign minister to the
United Nations against plans for war in Iraq) was a welcome change from his uninspir-
ing predecessor Raffarin and ensured a brief honeymoon period over the summer of
2005. How much of that popularity would survive the setbacks of the autumn – a series
of damaging strikes and the riots of November – and keep de Villepin as a credible
présidentiable – was of course uncertain.
Of the prime ministers under France’s three periods of cohabitation, the first,
Jacques Chirac, pledged himself to a wide-ranging programme of liberal economic
reforms in 1986, and was able to implement some of them. In some respects, for
example the privatisation programme, the Balladur premiership from 1993 to 1995 was
simply the continuation of this: Balladur had, after all, been in charge of economic
policy under the second Chirac government. But he also tried to conceptualise what he
called ‘le nouvel exemple français’, a way of reconciling the particularities to which the
French remain highly attached with the demands of the global marketplace.
The longest period of cohabitation corresponded to the premiership of Lionel Jospin.
With nearly five full years in office, Jospin was the Fifth Republic’s longest-serving
prime minister after Pompidou, and arguably the most powerful bar none. A Protestant
and an ÉNA graduate like Rocard, Jospin is unique among French premiers in having
made his political start in the ranks of the extreme left-wing Organisation Communiste
Internationaliste (OCI). Indeed, he first joined the Socialists as a Trotskyist mole, and
retained links with the OCI until 1987, by which time he had been the Socialists’ first
secretary for six years. But by then he had long since been turned, chiefly by Mitterrand,
into a loyal Socialist, retaining from the OCI a penchant for doctrinal rigour and auster-
ity that in any case sat well with his Protestant background. Education minister under
both Rocard and Cresson, Jospin was dropped from the government in 1992 and lost his
parliamentary seat in 1993. These setbacks proved to be blessings in disguise, dissociat-
ing him from the dark twilight of the later Mitterrand years and positioning him as a
credible candidate for the Socialists in 1995. His performance at this election – losing to
Chirac at the run-off, but nevertheless achieving a remarkable recovery for the Socialists,
with the best first-round score of any candidate – made Jospin easily the Left’s leading
politician. He used this position to build a triple alliance with Communists and Greens;
the construction of the gauche plurielle, as it was known, was sufficiently advanced to
secure victory at the 1997 parliamentary elections, with a National Assembly majority
for the Left as a whole and the premiership for Jospin.
Unlike Tony Blair, who had won the UK elections for Labour just a month earlier,
Jospin was not interested in setting out a ‘third way’ between social democracy and
neo-liberalism. Rather, he aimed to show that social democratic policies could work in
an open, globalised economy. The record of his government in this light was impressive.
It included the 35-hour working week and universal health cover, benefiting those who
had so far fallen through the social security net. Small-scale changes to the tax and
welfare system redistributed income towards poorer groups, reinforced consumption
and ensured that France benefited from the European economic upturn following 1997;
unemployment dropped by nearly a million between 1997 and 2001. While the Jospin
government sold off shares of publicly-owned companies on a large scale, sales were
often limited to a minority stake and often ceded to the mutual sector, protecting the
firms from international markets. The policy record is matched by a political one: not
the least of Jospin’s achievements lay in maintaining a sense of common purpose in a
disparate government under the abnormal pressures of cohabitation. Significant fail-
ures, however, remained: the Jospin government neither took the opportunity offered
by strong growth to tackle France’s chronic public sector deficits, nor addressed the
nation’s serious pensions overhang. Higher-income groups, not the working class,
benefited most from the 35-hour week. Environmental measures remained low on the
agenda (a bill regulating France’s ever scarcer and more polluted water supplies failed
through lack of parliamentary time). And law and order, a growing preoccupation
throughout the electorate, remained the weak suit of the gauche plurielle. But Jospin’s
elimination from the 2002 presidential election after a first-round score of just 16.2 per
cent was due less to gaps in his record than to a poor campaign in an unfavourable
context. The context was unfavourable both economically – slower growth and rising
unemployment had demonstrated conclusively, by early 2002, that Jospin had not
engineered a lasting recovery – and politically: like Chirac before him in 1988, Jospin
faced the near-impossible task of holding the solidarity of a government coalition
together in the competitive context of a presidential election, when each candidate
seeks to maximise an individual score, at the expense of coalition allies; and of convert-
ing the record of a government, chiefly preoccupied with domestic affairs, into a plat-
form for national leadership, against a president with unlimited opportunities to tread
the world stage. To these were added a campaign that combined most of the errors
available in the circumstances.
On the evening of his defeat, Jospin announced his retirement from politics. He
did not quite keep his promise, and would turn up as an ‘ordinary activist’, rather in
the manner of Aircraftman Shaw, to (usually well-reported) meetings of the Socialist
Party in the 18th arrondissement of Paris. The voters, too, were unsure whether they
welcomed his departure: indeed, successive polls from 2003 placed him as the most
credible Socialist candidate. It would take a surprising turn of events for these brief
encounters to turn into a serious presidential candidacy; or, indeed, with a five-year
presidential term, for any prime minister to govern France for five years in a compar-
able context of cohabitation. Jospin’s therefore stands as a unique premiership, flawed
certainly, but nevertheless creative in many aspects and unlikely to be matched in the
post-2000 Republic.
Concluding remarks
Raymond Aron remarked of the defeated Giscard in 1981 that he had ‘forgotten that
History is tragic’. Each president has, of course, sought to exercise his authority to the
full – to ‘go to the limits of his power’, in the words of Mitterrand at the start of
cohabitation in 1986 (and of Thucydides 2,400 years earlier). But every Fifth Republic
presidency to date has ended in public disenchantment or lassitude, physical dimin-
ution, or both; not for these men the elegantly timed departure or the serene retirement.
Presidents have been steadily less successful in achieving their goals: growing obstacles,
whether in the shape of a public opinion less inclined to be led from the front, or the
constraints of a European polity or a global economy, stand in the way of a heroic
presidency in the de Gaulle mould. Worse, they have, in times of cohabitation, had
to share the mantle of national leadership with prime ministers not of their choosing.
The relationship between presidents and prime ministers is at all times a complex one.
The elements that structure it are considered in Chapter 4.
Further reading
Bell, D., Presidential Power in Fifth Republic France, London, Routledge, 2000.
Cole, A., François Mitterrand: A Political Biography, London, Routledge, 1994.
de Gaulle, C., Memoirs of Hope, London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971.
Favier, P. and Martin-Roland, M., La décennie Mitterrand, 4 vols, Paris, Seuil, 1990–99.
Frears, J., France in the Giscard Presidency, London, Hurst, 1981.
Giscard d’Estaing, V., Deux Français sur trois, Flammarion (Livre de Poche), Paris, 1985.
Lacouture, J., De Gaulle, 3 vols, Paris, Seuil, 1984–86 (English translation, in 2 volumes,
HarperCollins, 1990).
Lacouture, J., Un destin de Français: François Mitterrand, 2 vols, Paris, Seuil, 1998.
Madelin, Philippe, Jacques Chirac, Paris, 2002.
Modern and Contemporary France, vol. 10, no. 3, August 2002: special issue on the Jospin
Government, 1997–2002.
Peyrefitte, A., C’était de Gaulle, 3 vols, Paris, Éditions de Fallois/Fayard, 1994–2000.
Pompidou, G., Le nœud gordien, Paris, Plon, 1974; Paris, Flammarion, 1984.
Roussel, E., Georges Pompidou, 2nd edition, Paris, Jean-Claude Lattès, 1994.
Williams, P. and Harrison, M., Politics and Society in de Gaulle’s Republic, London, Longman,
1971.
4 The sources of executive power
Constitutional resources 85
Administrative resources 91
President and prime minister: political resources 95
Further reading 108
The Constitution of the Fifth Republic reinforced both halves of France’s dual execu-
tive: the prime minister and government in straightforward ways, the presidency in
more complex and variable ways. These changes placed the relationship between presi-
dent and prime minister at the heart of the new executive. That relationship is an
unstable, volatile compound of competition (always), conflict (almost invariably) and
co-operation (even at the most conflictual of times). To an extent unparalleled in other
major democracies, the political situation affects the constitution’s basic workings,
and in particular the functions and the policy-making responsibilities of the two heads
of the executive. Their relationship is structured by the resources available to each:
both relatively fixed constitutional and administrative resources, and highly variable
political resources (especially the support of the parliamentary majority, or the lack of
it) which determine the usefulness of the others. This chapter will discuss the resources;
Chapter 5 will consider the results in terms of policy-making by president, prime
minister and government.
Constitutional resources
Though both president and prime minister wield power according to political circum-
stance, their powers remain grounded in the constitutional text.
Prime minister and government

The government, according to Article 20 of the constitution, ‘shall have at its disposal
the administration and the armed forces’ and ‘shall determine and conduct the policy
of the Nation’. In relation to the president, its real policy-making capacity is variable.
In relation to parliament, on the other hand, the constitution gave the government
important new powers, as outlined in Chapter 2 (p. 53). When the National Assembly
majority is not positively hostile, a Fifth Republic government, unlike its predecessors
86 Sources of executive power
of the Third and Fourth, has the means to remain in office and to ensure a relatively
smooth passage for its legislation.
The constitution also reinforces the specific powers of the prime minister, whose
title alone, as opposed to the Fourth Republic’s more modest président du Conseil des
ministres, indicates enhanced authority.
• The prime minister proposes the members of his or her government for appoint-
ment by the president (Article 8). This task involves defining the government’s size
and the shape and responsibilities of ministries, as well as the choice of men and
women.
• Article 21 establishes the prime minister’s primacy over his or her ministerial
colleagues by stating that s/he ‘shall direct the operation of the Government’.
• The constitution also gives the prime minister specific powers that designate him or
her as more than primus inter pares among ministers. According to Article 21, s/he
may deputise for the president in chairing the Council of Ministers; s/he ‘shall be
responsible for national defence’, shall ‘ensure the implementation of legislation’
and ‘have power to make regulations’, signing (with the president, in the most
important cases) the decrees that implement legislation (about 1,500 decrees and
7,000–8,000 prime ministerial orders (arrêtés) every year, according to Philippe
Ardant); and ‘shall make appointments to civil and military posts’. Under Article
61, s/he may refer a bill to the Constitutional Council before its promulgation, a
right also enjoyed by the president of the Republic, the presidents of the two houses
of parliament, and sixty Deputies or sixty Senators, but by no other government
member.
• The constitution makes the prime minister the leading manager of government
business through parliament. Aside from the parliamentarians themselves, s/he is
the only possible initiator of legislation (Article 39) and of extraordinary sessions
of parliament (Article 29). It is the prime minister, under Article 49, who asks the
National Assembly (the lower house of parliament) for a vote of confidence in the
government, or makes a specific bill a question of confidence, which the Assembly
can only reject if an absolute majority of its members pass a vote of censure. It is
the prime minister, as head of the government, who wields the battery of consti-
tutional provisions designed to curb the activities of parliament: the request for
delegated legislation under Article 38, for example, or the procedure of the vote
bloqué (Article 44), under which parliament may be obliged to vote on the govern-
ment’s version of a bill. It is the prime minister, finally, who controls the complex
procedure under which bills are shuttled between the two houses of parliament
(National Assembly and Senate) for successive readings before an agreed version
(or failing that, the Assembly’s version) is passed.
Few of these powers, it is true, can be exercised independently by a prime minister

under an interventionist president supported by a loyal parliamentary majority; some,
such as the responsibility for appointments or defence, are shared with the president in
a wholly ambiguous manner. At the same time it should be noted, first, that this is a
significantly greater array of powers, in relation both to government and to parliament,
than those granted to premiers of the Third and Fourth Republics; secondly, that under
the constitution it is the prime minister who engages directly with parliament, and
not the president (whose official communications with parliament are limited, under
Sources of executive power 87
Article 18, to messages); and, third, as we shall see below, that the prime minister’s
constitutional role in managing and co-ordinating government business is underpinned
by considerable administrative resources.
The president
Clemenceau claimed that the Third Republic presidency was as useless as the prostate
gland; of Fourth Republic presidents it was said that their main task was opening
flower shows. Like all caricatures, such views combine exaggeration with accuracy. Both
Fourth Republic presidents, Vincent Auriol and René Coty, readily voiced strong views
on policy matters, and played a key role during the régime’s frequent government crises
(Coty, indeed, was instrumental in engineering de Gaulle’s return to power, and thus his
own premature departure from the scene). But in neither Republic did a president
exercise strong executive leadership for any length of time; indeed, with rare exceptions,
the parliamentarians who elected presidents kept strong figures out of the job; and
without strong figures, the president’s formal powers, hedged about with the require-
ment for the countersignature of the prime minister, or the presidents of the two houses
of parliament, or both, were worth little.
The Fifth Republic, together with the political context and the personalities
surrounding its foundation, changed that. The president’s role was now widely defined,
by Article 5; he was given certain completely new powers; other powers were trans-
formed by the removal of the need for any countersignature; still others were trans-
formed, first by the exceptional personal status of de Gaulle, and then by the enhanced
legitimacy of a directly elected president under the constitutional amendment of 1962.
• Article 5 states that the president ‘shall see that the Constitution is observed’, and
‘shall ensure, through his arbitration, the proper functioning of the public author-
ities and the continuity of the State’. It also makes him ‘the guarantor of national
independence, territorial integrity, and observance of treaties’. Vague though much
of this article is, successive presidents have regularly invoked their role as consti-
tutional guarantors, and de Gaulle was the first (but not the last) to give an activist
interpretation to the word ‘arbitration’.
• Of the president’s completely new powers, one resulted from de Gaulle’s determin-
ation to ensure adequate crisis leadership. Under Article 16, if France’s institu-
tions, territorial integrity or even treaty commitments are under ‘serious and
immediate threat’, the president may take ‘the measures required by the circum-
stances’. Article 16 may be invoked by the president without countersignature
(though it does include some limited safeguards, notably the right of parliament
to sit and for the Constitutional Council to be consulted on measures taken).
De Gaulle was given an early opportunity to use his emergency powers by the
‘generals’ putsch’ in Algiers in April 1961. He stretched them to the limit, though,
by keeping Article 16 in force for five months (the putsch had lasted less than a
week) and by taking the opportunity to sack or transfer army officers, policemen
and civil servants suspected of supporting the rebellion, to extend detention with-
out trial to fifteen days, and to set up a military court to try offences against state
security. Before he won the presidency, Mitterrand undertook to abolish Article 16.
He did not do so. But emergency powers have not been invoked since 1961.
• The other completely new presidential power, the right to call a referendum, arose
from de Gaulle’s concern to bypass unrepresentative parties (in other words, for his
adversaries, to prepare his own dictatorship). Under Article 11 of the 1958 text,
referendums were limited to questions concerning treaties and the ‘organisation of
the public authorities’, though an amendment of 1995 allowed them to cover
social, economic and public service issues too. They have also served political
purposes: to establish a direct line of communication between president and people
(especially under de Gaulle), to reinforce the unity of the governmental coalition,
to divide the political opposition. Article 11 may be invoked without the prime
minister’s countersignature; the constitutional requirement that a referendum
should be proposed to the president by the government or parliament has often
(though not always) meant in practice that the Council of Ministers is notified of
the presidential decision. Of the ten referendums since 1958, the first four – ratify-
ing the constitution itself in 1958 and amending it in 1962, as well as agreeing first
the ‘self-determination’ of Algeria (in 1961) and then its independence (in 1962) –
may be rated successes, with turnouts of at least 75 per cent and yes votes of at least
61 per cent. The other six were less kind to their initiators. The voters rejected
proposals to reform the Senate and the regions in April 1969, provoking de
Gaulle’s immediate resignation; a wafer-thin majority ratified the Maastricht
Treaty on European Union in September 1992; turnout was too low to indicate
clear public approval of the proposals put at referenda on the enlargement of the
European Community in April 1972, on the future of the troubled Pacific territory
of New Caledonia in November 1988, and above all on the five-year presidential
term in September 2000, when barely a quarter of the electorate cast a valid vote.
The referendum of May 2005 mobilised the French public, but chiefly against the
European constitutional treaty. Nearly 55 per cent of voters rejected the treaty,
delivering a further blow to Chirac’s already troubled presidential term and dem-
onstrating to him and to his successors the considerable risks entailed by this type
of consultation.
• Less spectacular among the president’s new powers, also requiring no countersig-
nature, are powers relating to the Constitutional Council: the right to refer bills
and treaties to it, and to appoint three out of its nine members, including its
president. Presidents have eschewed referring bills, preferring more indirect
methods of challenging legislation, though they have referred several treaties
signed by themselves, including Maastricht and the European constitutional treaty
of 2004, for verification. All presidents, on the other hand, have used the power of
nomination to place their friends on the Council. Of François Mitterrand’s two
appointments to its presidency, the first was his former justice minister, the liberal
Robert Badinter, and the second his former foreign minister, Roland Dumas (who
resigned from his post in March 2000 after being placed on charges of corruption).
Similarly, Chirac appointed a ‘historic’ Gaullist, Yves Guéna, to succeed Dumas,
and a Gaullist of his own generation, Pierre Mazeaud, to succeed Guéna (unlike
Guéna, Mazeaud has a significant background as a constitutionalist). The presi-
dent enjoys a similar right to appoint, without countersignature, one member
of the Higher Council of the Judiciary (indeed, all of its members before the
constitutional reform of 1993).
• More important in many ways than the president’s wholly new powers have been
long-standing ones now exercised with no required countersignature, and thus
freely, for the first time: to appoint the prime minister (under Article 8, Clause 1)
and to dissolve parliament (under Article 12, which limits dissolutions to one a
year). In prime ministerial appointments, successive presidents have made the most
of their freedom to make surprise choices: de Gaulle with Georges Pompidou in
1962 and Giscard with Raymond Barre in 1976 (surprises because they had never
held elective office), Mitterrand with Laurent Fabius in 1984 (a surprise because he
was only 37), and with Édith Cresson in 1992 (a surprise because she was a
woman). Moreover, the choice of prime minister is a preliminary to the appoint-
ment of the whole government, officially by the president on the prime minister’s
proposals, often by the president after the briefest of consultations with his prem-
ier. Presidents have also regularly used their right to dissolve parliament: de Gaulle
in 1962 and in the crisis of May 1968, Mitterrand after his election and re-election
in 1981 and 1988, Chirac, finally, in 1997. Their purpose, to win a favourable
parliamentary majority, has usually been well served by the two-ballot majority
electoral system which, unlike proportional representation, tends to produce large
swings in terms of seats and clear parliamentary majorities. The dissolutions
of 1962, 1968 and 1981 were all resounding successes; in 1988 Mitterrand saw
his Socialists returned to government, but only with a relative majority; in 1997,
however, Chirac managed to throw away the right-wing majority he already had,
opening the way for the appointment as prime minister of the Socialist Party leader
Lionel Jospin. The coincidence, since 2002, of five-year presidential and parlia-
mentary terms makes a future dissolution on the whole unlikely. But the threat of
such action may help to focus the loyalties of wayward parliamentarians.
• The president does not set foot in parliament and, unlike his American counter-
part, has no legislative veto. Nevertheless, he has a real if indirect role in the
legislative process. He chairs the Council of Ministers (Article 9), like his predeces-
sors of the Third and Fourth Republics, and may do so more actively than they. He
may request the ‘reconsideration’ of laws passed by the parliament (Article 10),
though as a simple majority remains sufficient to carry any resulting vote, this right
is rarely invoked. He may put a legislative proposal to referendum. He signs
ordonnances (that is, primary legislation delegated to the government by parlia-
ment) and decrees (which implement primary legislation) under Article 13 – though
the constitution does not state whether he may refuse to do so. Extraordinary
parliamentary sessions are summoned by the president, at the request of the prime
minister or a majority of members of the National Assembly (Article 30). Under
Article 61, the president may refer bills or treaties to the Constitutional Council,
though, as we have seen, this right has only been used for treaties to date. The
president is also guaranteed a role in any plan for constitutional amendment. He
may initiate such amendments (as may members of parliament). He decides, under
Article 89, whether an amendment should be adopted by a joint meeting of the two
houses of parliament (where a three-fifths majority is necessary), or whether it
should go to referendum. And he has a potential right to block any amendment he
feels to be wholly inconsistent with the spirit of France’s institutions, of which,
under Article 5, he is the guarantor. Finally, he may communicate with parliament
by means of messages. Taken together, these provisions ensure that even a hostile
parliamentary majority cannot wholly ignore the president’s views.
• Other presidential powers were held by Fourth Republic presidents but have been
transformed by a more active use that de Gaulle and his successors have been able
to make of them thanks to their enhanced legitimacy and to the blanket provisions
of Article 5. The chairmanship of the Council of Ministers has already been
mentioned. Fifth Republic presidents have the right to make key appointments,
though these do require ministerial countersignatures. The constitution (Article 13)
specifically mentions ambassadors, members of the Conseil d’État, the Grand
Chancellor of the Légion d’Honneur, prefects and government representatives in
French overseas territories, rectors of academies (the heads of the state education
system in the provinces), ambassadors and special envoys, senior members of the
Cour des Comptes, and directeurs d’administration centrale (heads of divisions in
the ministries), as being appointed by the president in the Council of Ministers.
This list, though, is not exhaustive, and in practice the president may propose
candidates for a wide range of other state or public-sector posts, for example public
prosecutors, secret service chiefs, senior broadcasting chiefs or heads of France’s
remaining nationalised industries and public utilities. Few of these requests are
refused. In some cases even ministerial cabinets, in principle in the personal gift of
ministers or of the prime minister, have been subject to presidential influence.
Finally, and very importantly, presidents have expanded, through an activist
interpretation inaugurated by de Gaulle, their roles in receiving and accrediting
ambassadors (Article 14), as head of the armed forces and chairman of the
key national defence committees (Article 15), and as chief negotiator of treaties
(Article 52). These, together with the president’s responsibilities for France’s terri-
torial integrity under Article 5, are a constitutional basis for the leading foreign
and defence role played by all presidents.
• A final ‘constitutional’ resource relates to the president’s role as France’s represen-
tative on the European Council. Though initially conceived (from 1974) as a regu-
lar informal gathering of Europe’s heads of state and government, the European
Council soon acquired a more clearly defined leadership role, defined ex post facto
by the 2004 European constitutional treaty: ‘The European Council shall provide
the Union with the necessary impetus for its development and shall define the
general political directions and priorities thereof.’ Even in the most unfavourable
domestic political context, therefore, a French president participates in the setting
of the European Union’s policy framework – and thus, indirectly, in the definition
of policies and legislation which affect all member states, including France.
Jean-Luc Parodi remarks that presidential power is reinforced under the Fifth
Republic not so much by new powers considered individually as by their cumulative
effect: the combination, for example, of the legitimacy flowing from direct election
with the right to appoint a prime minister and the right to dissolve parliament. Parodi
also, however, includes the majority electoral system – a key part of the institutional
structure, but not a part of the constitutional text – in his explanation of presidential
power; for it is this that allows the president to entertain realistic hopes of a favourable
parliamentary majority when he uses the right of dissolution. That underlines the
dependence of presidential power upon such a majority. When the majority is favour-
able, the president can, as it were, manipulate the government machine from outside.
When it is not, however, his power to do so is very limited, not least because the heart of
France’s administrative machine has never been in the Élysée, but at Matignon.
Administrative resources
If more means better, then the advantage in staffing lies with Matignon, the prime
minister’s office. Matignon is at all times the centre of the government machinery. What
varies is the president’s ability to use his own much smaller staff, as well as his wider
networks of support, to penetrate it.
The Matignon machine

Every developed democracy faces two structural problems: the articulation between
politicians and bureaucrats within each ministerial department, and the central co-
ordination of the government machinery as a whole. In France, ministers run their
departments through personal staffs, or cabinets, each combining, within a total mem-
bership of twenty to thirty for a full ministry, a majority of high-ranking civil servants
and a leavening of the minister’s close political friends (the total tally of official cabinet
members for any government typically runs to about 500). Central government co-
ordination is officially ensured, at the highest level, by the Wednesday morning meet-
ings of the Council of Ministers, chaired by the president. In practice, however, the
main role of the Council of Ministers is to set an official stamp on decisions already
taken (its unofficial role, very often, is as an opportunity for both president and minis-
ters to catch up on their mail or other reading while colleagues are talking). More
important is the dense thicket of meetings that prepare and decide policy. These can be
divided into three categories, only one of which is run by the presidency.
• Conseils restreints are meetings of small groups of ministers, convened and chaired
by the president to discuss a specific issue. In the early Mitterrand years, when
presidential interventionism was at its height, there were as many as 100 conseils
restreints a year. The minimum annual figure, though, is nearer twenty.
• The prime minister chairs a small number of comités interministériels, whether
formally constituted (such as the committees on urban affairs and regional plan-
ning) or organised ad hoc to decide specific questions between a limited group of
ministers: there were 118 such meetings in 1961, 121 in 1971, 120 in 1982, 57 in
1983, 51 in 1984 but only 20 in 1985, since when the total has varied between 20 and
40. Comités interministériels are most regularly used for the prime minister to make
his final decisions on the budget before it goes to parliament.
• The bulk of the co-ordinating work takes place in the réunions interministérielles,
which are ad hoc meetings of members of ministerial cabinets. Their number grew
from 142 in 1961 to a peak of 1,836 in 1982, and ran at some 1,400 a year under the
Jospin premiership.
Both comités interministériels and réunions interministérielles are run by the two key
components of the Matignon machine: the General Secretariat of the Government,
responsible for administrative co-ordination, and the more political cabinet of the
prime minister. The General Secretariat of the Government, founded in 1935, is
manned by some forty to fifty senior civil servants, and is the rough equivalent of the
British Cabinet Office. It is headed by a secretary-general, a high-ranking civil servant
usually from the Conseil d’État. There have been just eight holders of the office since
1944, an indication of the political neutrality and continuity associated with the post
(only one, a secretary-general of declared Socialist sympathies, has been replaced
for political reasons, by Jacques Chirac when he became prime minister in 1986).
The General Secretariat prepares all ministerial meetings (even those chaired by the
president of the Republic, from the Council of Ministers down). Its members assist at
such meetings and take their minutes (for example, the so-called bleus de Matignon
which record the decisions taken, as well as those left outstanding, at each réunion
interministérielle). They supply advice on questions of administrative law, ensure that
decisions are translated into administrative action, guide their administrative passage
into law and ensure their implementation. The General Secretariat also co-ordinates the
vast array of administrative agencies (from the Atomic Energy Commissariat to the
High Council on Horses) which are under the prime minister’s direct authority.
The prime minister is also assisted by junior ministers attached to his or her office,
usually numbering three or four. Usually more important, however, is the role of the
prime minister’s cabinet. Like a typical ministerial staff, the prime minister’s cabinet is
composed of young, able, politically sympathetic civil servants with a sprinkling of
close political friends. But it is larger (at up to 100 members, including the unofficial
advisers) and has more to do. Its members are the prime minister’s eyes and ears: they
are expected to build networks around their area of specialisation, both within the
ministry concerned and in the relevant interest groups and political parties, in order to
maintain a constant supply of high-grade information. It is they who chair the réunions
interministérielles, and who maintain the day-to-day pressure on their counterparts in
ministerial cabinets to press policy forward. They prepare the ground for major policy
initiatives by the prime minister. Some of them also undertake more wholly political
tasks: speech-writing, preparing the presentation of policy, or servicing the prime
minister’s parliamentary constituency. They are headed by a directeur de cabinet, the
chief manager of interministerial co-ordination: it is he who chairs weekly meetings
of the directeurs de cabinet of all ministries, plans the programme of réunions intermin-
istérielles and chairs the most important of them, and maps out the agenda for
government bills in parliament. The directeur de cabinet usually, though not always, has
a further crucial role as the prime minister’s chief political adviser.
The growing influence of the prime minister’s cabinet was a major institutional
innovation of the Fifth Republic. As such it has been criticised as constituting a parallel
government. The style of overt, ruthless interventionism set by Michel Debré’s cabinet
has been imitated by many, though not all, of its successors of both Right and Left:
relations between individual ministers and their opposite members in the Matignon
cabinet often involve intense competition for control of policy-making. Under Chirac’s
1986–88 government, for example, the very right-wing higher education adviser, Yves
Durand, initiated, against the opposition of the higher education minister, a university
reform that provoked enormous student demonstrations and ultimately the resignation
of the hapless minister. Chirac’s successor, the Socialist Michel Rocard, recruited a
cabinet described by President Mitterrand as ‘men without pity . . . barbarians’. The
activism of Alain Juppé’s cabinet between 1995 and 1997, combined with the low
calibre of many of his ministers, helped to concentrate the burden of policy-making,
and thence the intense unpopularity of his government, on the person of the prime
minister. Olivier Schrameck, the directeur de cabinet under Jospin, wrote a book on
ministerial cabinets two years before his appointment, and came to Matignon with
rigorous ideas about how to organise them: no ‘unofficial advisers’ (Jospin’s cabinet was
limited to about fifty members, all official), a clear hierarchy (Schrameck’s ascendancy,
and role as arbiter of many second-level policy decisions, were clear from the start) and
no impinging on the political responsibilities of ministers. These laudable rules do not
appear to have been fully respected. One of the complaints of Jean-Pierre Chevènement
was that devolution plans for Corsica – the issue on which he resigned as interior
minister in August 2000 – had been prepared behind his back by Matignon insiders
such as Alain Christnacht. At the same time, however, it is unlikely that this would have
been possible if the cabinet members had not had the full backing of a prime minister
who was determined not to leave the Corsican question in the sole hands of the Interior
Ministry.
Two other important co-ordinating bodies under the prime minister’s responsibility
deserve mention. One is the General Secretariat for National Defence, numbering some
250 officials and responsible for a range of defence-related issues including the prepar-
ation of meetings of the High Council of Defence (chaired by the president), intermin-
isterial co-ordination on defence issues, strategic planning, and the management and
protection of defence secrets. The other is the secretariat for European affairs, or SGAE
(Secrétariat Général des Affaires Européennes, formerly the SGCI, or Secrétariat
Général du Comité Interministériel pour les questions de coopération économique
européenne), charged with co-ordinating France’s positions in day-to-day European
affairs and issuing instructions to the French permanent representation in Brussels.
Each of these bodies, as well as the General Secretariat of the Government, though
technically under the prime minister’s authority, are in practice responsible to the
president as well, whether because the president chairs the bodies they service (the
Council of Ministers and the High Council of Defence) or because of the key presidential
role in European affairs.
When the various administrative agencies, as well as a small military cabinet (which
does not change with the government), are added to these bodies, the total prime
ministerial staff numbers over 5,000. It serves a prime minister directly responsible for
the progress of government business and able, in principle, to intervene at every stage of
policy-making. Everything lands on the prime minister’s desk. This is not, however, an
unmixed blessing. Chaban-Delmas described his period at Matignon as ‘two hundred
weeks of work, six days a week, fifteen hours a day’. Part of this effort is certainly
entailed by the need to co-ordinate, and on occasion fight battles with, the president’s
office. It is a physically exhausting burden which makes it hard for a prime minister,
even with able assistants, to rise above the day-to-day pressure of events. The president,
by contrast, can afford to be more selective.
The Élysée
While Matignon is palpably a hive of activity surrounded by an intense traffic of people
and vehicles, the visitor to the president’s residence in the Élysée palace (the château, as
it is known to insiders) may well hear no sound louder than the crunching of his or her
own feet on the gravel as they cross the courtyard. Under the Fourth Republic, the
political staff at the Élysée numbered about ten, along with a military household of
four. De Gaulle doubled this total: an increase that in no way reflected the vast growth
of presidential power. Since 1959 the military staff, which has a specific and limited
sphere of competence, has never numbered more than thirteen, the civilian political
staff never more than forty (and at times as few as eighteen). More uncertain is the size
of the off-budget presidential staff. A Socialist Deputy, Armand Dosière, claimed in
2004 that no fewer than 714 staffers were seconded to the Élysée from ministries –
65 per cent of them from Defence and 13 per cent from Culture. The Élysée has denied
these assertions. What is certain is that no president has wanted a very large full-time
establishment. Derisory as the figures for full-time staff may appear compared to the
personnel available to the White House, they suffice to meet what are seen as limited
needs for, as we have seen, the essential work of governmental co-ordination is done
from Matignon.
The precise organisation of the civilian staff varies between presidencies, but it is
generally divided into two, the cabinet and the General Secretariat of the presidency
(not to be confused with the General Secretariat of the government). A third element,
the General Secretariat for African Affairs, was created by de Gaulle, reflecting
France’s recent colonial past, headed by the shadowy Gaullist baron Jacques Foccart,
but wound up after Pompidou’s death in 1974. The cabinet has a generally limited role,
managing the president’s diary and travels within and outside France. The General
Secretariat is therefore the largest and the most important component of the Élysée
staff. It includes three types of adviser, grouped, under Chirac, into three ‘cells’: the
politiques proper, entrusted with relations with the president’s party and its allies,
and with the president’s political and communications strategies; a small foreign
policy group, consisting (in 2000) of four diplomats; and the internal policy group,
with experts corresponding to the main ministries. The head of the Élysée staff is the
secretary-general. He is, in the first place, an administrative co-ordinator, preparing
the weekly Council of Ministers agenda in tandem with the secretary-general of the
government and managing the staff (Chirac’s secretaries-general, Dominique
Galouzeau de Villepin till 2002, Philippe Bas from 2002 to 2005, and Frédéric Salat-
Baroux since May 2005, have held daily meetings with the whole staff). He is also,
usually, a more political animal as well. Both de Villepin and his predecessor under
Mitterrand, Hubert Védrine, have been career diplomats, illustrating the combination
of political sensitivity and discretion required of the secretary-general. At the very
least, he is the final screen between the president and the outside world: the ‘eyes, ears
and arms’ of an absent president, in Jean Gicquel’s words, and the daily interlocutor of
a present one. The fact that three out of five presidents have suffered significant medical
problems – de Gaulle with a prostate operation, and Pompidou and Mitterrand with
the cancers that killed them – underlines one aspect of the secretary-general’s role. The
secretary-general is also, usually, one of the president’s three or four most important
political advisers, and has often assumed a higher profile in recent years than that of the
rather self-effacing holders of the office under de Gaulle. Since de Gaulle’s departure,
indeed, three former secretaries-general of the Élysée (Édouard Balladur, Pierre
Bérégovoy and Dominique de Villepin) have become prime ministers; four (Michel
Jobert, Jean François-Poncet, Hubert Védrine and Dominique de Villepin) have
become foreign ministers. Jean-Louis Bianco became minister for social affairs in 1992
after a decade in charge of the Élysée staff; Philippe Bas also moved to Social Affairs,
though at a more junior level, in May 2005.
Like many of their Matignon counterparts, most of the Élysée staff are both
members of the grands corps, the most prestigious divisions of the civil service, and
graduates of the highly competitive grandes écoles, which train most of France’s
administrative elite (and indeed most of the nation’s political and business elites as
well). These two qualifications are considered to guarantee quickness of mind and
familiarity with the workings of the state. They also assist networking, a practice as
essential at the Élysée as at Matignon. But the choice of Élysée staffers is also very
personal to the president: the appointments by Mitterrand of his own son (Jean-
Christophe Mitterrand, or ‘Papamadit’ as he was soon known in African capitals) as
adviser on African affairs, and by Chirac of his daughter Claude as communications
adviser, are only the most extreme instances of this. It is not surprising, then, that the
most influential advisers are not always the highest placed in the hierarchy. De Gaulle’s
foremost political adviser was not any of the three secretaries-general who served him,
but Foccart. Under Pompidou, the ultra-conservative Pierre Juillet had an official
status as a special presidential adviser outside the staff hierarchy. Under Giscard, any
one of half a dozen staffers were said to be as influential as the secretary-general.
Mitterrand’s secretaries-general, Bérégovoy (1981–82), Bianco (1982–92) and Védrine
(1992–95), had to vie for influence both with the official special adviser, Jacques Attali,
and with a variety of unofficial advisers, or visiteurs du soir as Prime Minister Pierre
Mauroy ironically called them: Roger-Patrice Pelat, the millionaire businessman who
had known Mitterrand since their days as prisoners of war together in Germany (and
who died in 1989, three weeks after being charged with insider dealing offences);
Roland Dumas, Mitterrand’s former lawyer (who became foreign minister in 1984 and
was president of the Constitutional Council from 1995 until his constrained resignation
in March 2000); or François de Grossouvre (who committed suicide in his Élysée office
after being slowly downgraded to the post of Master of the Presidential Hunts). Only
under Chirac, perhaps, did the secretary-general until 2002, Dominique de Villepin,
have the reputation of being the single most influential adviser.
While the Élysée staff are many fewer than their Matignon counterparts, they
share some of the functions of the Matignon cabinet: as suppliers of information via
well-constructed networks (in this their efforts complement the more discreet ones of
the secret services, as well as the gleanings of the illegal telephone-taps in which all
presidents have indulged), as technical and political advisers, as speech-writers and
communications consultants. The Élysée staff have also been attacked for wielding
power without responsibility. Chaban-Delmas ascribed his own removal from Matignon
in 1972 to the malign influence on Pompidou of the ‘devilish duo’, Pierre Juillet and
Marie-France Garaud (who had taken to producing regular notes on ‘How to annoy
Chaban today’). More recently, Villepin was blamed both for Chirac’s decision to
dissolve the National Assembly in April 1997 and for the president’s erratic treatment
of his own party thereafter. Such views are exaggerated. Élysée staffers have no formal
decision-making powers (their Matignon counterparts at least have a formal role in
réunions interministérielles). While they are consulted on everything, they are seldom
the only people consulted on anything; there are too few of them to be able to deter-
mine, or even affect, more than a few decisions; and their advice is not always followed
(Juillet, for example, would retire to his sheep farm in the hills of the Creuse when he
felt that his views were not receiving the presidential attention they merited). The power
of the Élysée staff also, of course, depends on their ability to engage with the govern-
ment machine; and this in turn is conditioned by the president’s possession or lack of
political resources.
President and prime minister: political resources

De Gaulle, as noted in Chapter 2 (p. 59), commanded a unique range of resources as
he moulded the institutions of the Fifth Republic in the early 1960s, including the
legitimacy procured by his wartime role as leader of Free France, the trust he com-
manded as the only man capable of handling the Algerian emergency and the lasting
discredit into which the Fourth Republic had fallen. None of his successors (still less
any prime minister) has accumulated a comparable basis of political capital. Neverthe-
less, the two heads of France’s executive wield important political resources, including
political legitimacy; the power of political communication; personal networks; and
patronage. To these should be added one that conditions all the rest: the support, or
hostility, of the parliamentary majority.
Political legitimacy is first and foremost a presidential resource. The president is
always France’s head of state, and always, since 1965, the only individual to have
been elected by the whole nation (rather than a single parliamentary constituency). As
Mitterrand declared in November 1984 (at a historically low point in his popularity),
‘the president of the Republic incarnates the nation, the state, the Republic. Everyone
should remember that more. In any case, I do not forget it.’ The president is also
France’s national leader, a role revealed above all at moments of crisis: it was President
Chirac, for example, who took the lead in broadcasting to the nation on the progress of
the Kosovo war in 1999 – despite his political weakness at the time. More routinely, the
president always heads the French delegation at major summits – the G8, the European
Council and the regular bilateral meetings organised with other EU states. The prime
minister, by contrast, is the president’s appointee, not the public’s favourite. Jean-Pierre
Raffarin, at his appointment to the post in May 2002, was an (indirectly elected) senator
but had never faced a direct election to any body more elevated than the regional
council of Poitou-Charentes. Most strikingly, neither Pompidou nor Barre (two of the
Fifth Republic’s longest-serving prime ministers) nor yet de Villepin, had ever been
elected to anything when they first stepped into Matignon. But the relationship between
president and prime minister inevitably changes under cohabitation: then, the prime
minister is effectively the people’s choice, not the president’s. Chirac in 1986, Balladur
in 1993 and Jospin in 1997 were all their respective coalitions’ acknowledged candidates
for Matignon. Each could claim a ‘fresher’ electoral mandate than the sitting president.
Even then, though, the president’s residual legitimacy remains considerable. Prime
ministers under cohabitation have always manifested respect, even deference, towards
the presidential office, partly out of consideration for public opinion, which has
always supported the president’s continuation in office, and partly out of self-interest as
aspirants to the presidency themselves.
The second political resource is the ability to communicate with the public, either
directly or via the media. De Gaulle’s monarchical hauteur and distance were para-
doxically combined with a constant wish for direct contact with the French, often in the
form of bains de foule, or walkabouts. These were the nightmare of his security staff
and of the prefects and other local officials responsible for the smooth running of the
provincial tours that took de Gaulle to every département and every major city during
his presidency, as well as to many smaller towns and villages. De Gaulle’s successors
have, each in his own style, followed his example. Chirac’s provincial visits express
an undiminished zest for election campaigns; his past as agriculture minister and as
mayor of Paris is reflected in a taste for photo opportunities in bars and at agricultural
shows (a penchant that has obliged all his political rivals to be photographed with one
or another of the farm animals gathered annually in Paris at the salon de l’agriculture).
De Gaulle also initiated the intensive presidential use of the press and broadcast media.
De Gaulle’s press conferences, effectively speeches framed around the questions of the
assembled Élysée press corps, were grandiose affairs, at which spectators were often
treated to surprise announcements such as his veto of Britain’s entry into Europe in
1963. Though he came to television late in life and used it in what would now be
considered a hopelessly theatrical manner, at his best he was unsurpassable. The appeal
to the nation after the army revolt in Algeria in April 1961, for example, was as moving
and resolute as it was effective, a rare combination of high drama and deep sincerity.
His successors, albeit in a less heroic style, have never forsaken the small screen. Not
always, it is true, with the results hoped for: de Gaulle’s televised attempt to halt the
rioting of May 1968, Mitterrand’s unconvincing exhortations to national effort in the
financial crisis of spring 1982 and Chirac’s laments over his countrymen’s ‘conserva-
tism’ in December 1996 or his attempts at ‘dialogue’ with young voters during the 2005
referendum campaign, are all well-documented presidential flops. But there have
been successes enough: the studied informality of Mitterrand’s interviews with Yves
Mourousi at Élysée garden parties on 14 July and the well-orchestrated good humour
of Chirac’s reception of France’s victorious World Cup football team at the same
occasion in 1998, both helped to portray the president in a much-needed sympathetic
light. De Gaulle was also able to rely on a broadcasting system under tight government
control, insisting (as did Pompidou after him) that television and radio should be ‘the
voice of France’ (by which they meant the president and the Gaullist party). This iron
grip has slackened, slowly after 1974, more rapidly after 1981. It remains the case that a
French president can intervene on television where and when he likes, that he can count
on a degree of deference from his interviewers that a British or American politician
could only dream of and that opposition politicians have no automatic right of reply.
If presidents use the media to remind the French of who they are, prime ministers set
out to acquire a presidential stature through their appearances. This is a more difficult
exercise: the prime minister must neither seem to usurp the presidential function nor
behave (even under cohabitation) as a mere opposition politician. Nevertheless, all
prime ministers since the mid-1980s have appeared on television at least once every
two months. For Chirac and Balladur (both under cohabitation), the frequency was
closer to once every two weeks. Chirac’s appearance after the terrorist bombings of
September 1986 and the poised, elegant interviews in which Balladur informed the
French of the parlous state of their economy from his chalet in Chamonix, were not-
ably successful exercises in the genre. Jospin innovated in the seriousness with which
he approached prime minister’s questions in the National Assembly. Although these
televised appearances often betrayed the tension (and the polemics) natural to the
exercise, Jospin placed sufficient value on them, as a means to rally his own majority
and to explain himself to a wider public, that he sometimes regretted it when important
political events occurred outside parliamentary sessions.
Third, both president and prime minister will bring a range of personal networks to
their offices. Such networks may have been built in a variety of ways: through the
Resistance (in the case of de Gaulle, Mitterrand and Prime Minister Chaban-Delmas);
through business connections (particularly important for the former banker Pompidou,
but also significant for Chirac); via ministerial office (Giscard’s solid base at the
Finance Ministry); via local office (the officials from Lille and the Nord département
who moved into the cabinet of Mitterrand’s first prime minister Pierre Mauroy in
1981, or the enormous reserve of loyal Chirac supporters in the Paris town hall, or
Raffarin’s reserve of Poitou-Charentes supporters); or through the main majority
party. A president will have to have built such networks to win election; if wise, he will
cultivate them once in the Élysée, both to diversify sources of advice beyond his staff
and to ensure more or less discreet backing for his initiatives within civil society. Prime
ministers may also have very diverse networks: Chaban-Delmas, for example, was a
leading résistant, a rugby international and president of the National Assembly before
his appointment, and he continued as mayor of Bordeaux throughout his time at
Matignon. Others may be less well endowed. Édith Cresson’s lack of networks in the
political, administrative and media communities, and her apparent indifference to
building them once appointed to Matignon, was one reason for the rapid failure of her
premiership. Dominique de Villepin was widely viewed as being handicapped by his
failure to build strong relations with parliamentarians of the conservative majority,
whom he had treated with ill-concealed contempt over the previous decade. Unlike
Cresson, he was prepared to correct this: one of the major political successes of
de Villepin’s first months in office was to build bridges with the National Assembly
president Jean-Louis Debré.
The opportunity to reinforce and extend networks is supplied by the patronage that
comes with office, the fourth political resource. Both president and prime minister
wield, jointly, very substantial powers in this area: most obviously in relation to the
government itself under Article 8 of the constitution, but also to high-ranking posts
in the military, the civil service and the shrinking but still important public sector.
Pompidou, both as prime minister and as president, assiduously created a network of
grateful clients within what became known as the ‘Gaullist state’. His successor’s
attempts to replace them with his own people explains part of the acrimony generated
between Gaullists and Giscardians. And Mitterrand was not slow to follow what had
become, by 1981, the standard practice of the Fifth Republic, provoking a spate of
articles analysing the ‘Socialist nomenklatura’. Chirac’s early presidency was dis-
tinguished from others chiefly by the fact that many of the victims were not Socialists
but right-wingers who had been imprudent enough to support his rival Balladur. Prime
ministers, outside cohabitation, have had a secondary but far from negligible role in this
area: Pompidou, Chaban-Delmas, Mauroy and Rocard were all able to place their own
in strategic state positions. During cohabitation, the prime minister has a much
stronger hand to play, and can get most of his appointments through the Council of
Ministers, though always with preliminary negotiation and the promise of suitable
alternative positions for the displaced.
Patronage extends to money as well as to jobs. For the first forty-four years of the
Fifth Republic, this included the ‘special funds’, amounting to some 45 million euros,
voted annually by parliament to the prime minister. The disposal of this money escaped
all further control. Some of it served to pay ministerial staffs: it was a curious anomaly
of the supposedly structured, formalised French state that for decades the status within
the civil service of cabinet members led to their being paid via brown envelopes full of
cash. Special funds were also used for various secret service operations; and roughly a
fifth was commonly used for political purposes. Although technically the prime minis-
ter’s resource at all times, the special funds were under the effective control of the
president outside periods of cohabitation. This changed after 2001, when the Jospin
government replaced the special funds system with a regular vote for president and
premier, and taxable salaries for staffers. Largely as a result of these changes, the
presidential budget for 2005 amounted to 32 million euros, some six times more than
the figure for 1994.
On a larger scale, patronage covers the many opportunities afforded by control of the
budget: the spending programmes that may make the reputation of a rising minister, the
constituency favours that may make the difference between defeat and re-election to a
sitting Deputy. Again, the budget, nominally determined by the prime minister and
government, is controlled in the last instance by the president outside periods of
cohabitation – and by the prime minister within them.
The fifth political resource is popularity with the electorate. Tables 4.1 and 4.2 show
average levels of support for the two heads of the French executive from 1978 to
mid-2005, based on monthly SOFRES surveys of ‘confidence’ and ‘no confidence’
(other polling institutes such as IPSOS or IFOP, asking slightly different questions, give
rather different levels of support, but with comparable trends). These averages can, of
course, mislead. The figure for Mitterrand’s first term conceals a deep trough from June
1983 to March 1986, between the buoyant periods of the early presidency and the first
cohabitation; his second term divides into two equal halves, with his popularity turning
negative in October 1991, never to recover while he was in office. Both Giscard and
Jospin had the ill luck to see sharp dips in their popularity in the last months before the
presidential elections, respectively of 1981 and 2002.
If there is one clear trend to emerge from the tables, it is that France’s presidents have
commanded more or less steadily declining levels of public support (figures for de
Gaulle and Pompidou, both popular through most of their presidential terms, would
broadly confirm this). This reflects a wider growth of distrust of political institutions
generally among electorates of all developed Western countries since the 1970s, and has
obvious implications for the capacity of presidents to reproduce de Gaulle’s ‘heroic’
style of leadership. This judgement should, however, be qualified by the much less linear
Table 4.1 Presidential popularities, October 1978–June 2005
Giscard d’Estaing October 1978–April 1981 10.53

Mitterrand I May 1981–April 1988 5.96
Mitterrand II May 1988–April 1995 −1.48
Chirac I May 1995–April 2002 −1.35
Chirac II May 2002–June 2005 −13.22
Source: average of monthly positive minus negative opinions, calculated from SOFRES website, http://
www.tns-sofres.com/archives_pol.htm
Table 4.2 Prime ministerial popularities, October 1978–May 2005
Barre October 1978–May 1981 −23.03

Mauroy June 1981–June 1984 −1.89
Fabius July 1984–March 1986 8.37
Chirac April 1986–April 1988 −0.64
Rocard May 1988–May 1991 22.14
Cresson June 1991–April 1992 −30.18
Bérégovoy May 1992–March 1993 3.00
Balladur April 1993–May 1995 22.19
Juppé June 1995–May 1997 −23.13
Jospin June 1997–May 2002 21.48
Raffarin June 2002–May 2005 −15.97
Overall average 2.57
Source: average of monthly positive minus negative opinions, calculated from SOFRES website, http://
www.tns-sofres.com/archives_pol.htm
trend observable for prime ministers. More directly linked to the grubby details of
unpopular policies, prime ministers outside cohabitation often serve to shield presi-
dents from the voters’ hostility. This has been true, for example, of Debré under de
Gaulle, of Barre for Giscard and most recently of Raffarin for Chirac. Such prime
ministers, moreover, are no masters of their term of office: presidents regularly dismiss
them when they have outlived their usefulness – and with their unpopularity intact. On
the other hand, some prime ministers have been capable of establishing their own basis
of public support independent of the presidents who appointed them. This was true
of Rocard, whose popularity matched Mitterrand’s (much to the latter’s irritation)
during his three-year premiership, and of two of the three cohabitation prime ministers,
Balladur and Jospin.
Popularity is, nevertheless, the most relative of political resources and the hardest to
convert into tangible successes. It is relative in relation both to the political opposition
(or to competitors within one’s own camp) and to the electoral calendar. To take two
recent examples, Juppé was politically paralysed within less than a year of his appoint-
ment by his deep unpopularity during a pre-election period; Raffarin, his successor but
one, though almost equally disliked by the public, survived and launched cautious
reform projects because the voters’ sanction was further off (although by the time
of his resignation in May 2005, with levels of unpopularity now matching those of
Juppé or Cresson, he was politically played out). Moreover, election results have
shown that popularity does not readily translate into votes. Of the three most popular
prime ministers in the list on Table 4.2, none even reached the second ballot of a
presidential election; Rocard never even tried the first (the legion of highly popular
non-présidentiables also includes the two health ministers Simone Veil and Bernard
Kouchner). And it was Chirac, not the ‘more popular’ Jospin, who won the 2002
presidential elections. Balladur was attacked for courting popularity too deliberately,
and postponing necessary reforms; Juppé for his indifference to public opinion in
engaging them. The issue of popularities highlights the idiosyncracies of the French
case: their embedding within both the competitive relationship of president and prime
minister (during and outside cohabitation) and an uncertain electoral calendar which
rarely left more than two or three years before allowing the voters to make a new choice.
In principle, the switch to a five-year presidential term may open the curtain on a more
conventional four-to-five-year democratic rhythm, in which a newly elected government
spends much of its early capital of support in controversial reforms, suffers mid term
setbacks, but seeks to regain the voters’ favours in time to be returned to office; but it is
now hard to fit the record since 2002 into this pattern.
The sixth political resource is the support of a majority coalition and (normally)
of the leading party within it. The links of mutual dependence that bind the president
to the parliamentary majority have been a central feature of Fifth Republic politics
before 1986, from 1988 to 1993, from 1995 to 1997, and since 2002. The president needs
the parliamentary majority to enact legislation; the majority normally looks to the
president as its political locomotive. The severance of these links, and the transfer of
majority support to the exclusive benefit of the prime minister, have defined the periods
of cohabitation, from 1986 to 1988, 1993 to 1995, and 1997 to 2002. Control of the
majority is the most decisive resource because its possession conditions the use of
virtually all others.
The constitution-makers did not foresee it thus. De Gaulle wanted a presidency
‘above parties’. Newly elected presidents display an outward respect for his wish by
shedding any party offices they may have held before polling day, the better to don the
mantle of president of all the French. The reality, though, is that a president will have
needed the solid backing of his own party to reach the second ballot of the presidential
election, and the support of a coalition beyond his own party to win. Thus Pompidou
had both built up a strong Gaullist party under his leadership, and established good
relations with some of the centrists, before his election in 1969. Mitterrand’s victory in
1981 crowned a long-term strategy based on the relaunch (under his leadership) of the
Socialist Party ten years earlier and on an alliance with the reluctant Communists.
Chirac, similarly, used a relaunched Gaullist party and an alliance with the non-
Gaullist moderate Right to further his long march to the Élysée (and a reconstructed
moderate right-wing party, the UMP, to back his re-election campaign in 2002). The
other two presidents were the exceptions that proved the rule, though in very different
ways. De Gaulle’s attempt to pitch his presidential campaign ‘above parties’ in 1965 led
to a disappointing first ballot, after which the Gaullist party entered the fray on his
behalf. Giscard won the presidency at the head of a small party, his Républicains
Indépendants. This was the only occasion on which the president’s party has been the
smaller partner within the majority coalition. The organisational and electoral weak-
ness of the RI, and Giscard’s inability to achieve a satisfactory relationship with the
larger Gaullist party, blighted his presidency and contributed to his defeat in 1981.
Table 4.3 presents the level and type of majority support available to presidents
throughout the Fifth Republic. On the most basic level, this ranges from the four
parliaments in which the president’s party has held an absolute majority (‘Type 1’) –
though even then it has always shared power in a coalition with one or more smaller
groupings – to the opposite extreme, when the parliamentary majority is opposed to the
president (Types 6 and 7). While the domination of the National Assembly by friendly
forces is certainly an important asset for any president (and its absence, as the Giscard
case (Type 4) shows, a distinct handicap), it is by no means a guarantee of an easy ride,
for neither the loyalty of the president’s party nor a forteriori that of his coalition are
automatic. Table 4.3 therefore suggests other factors affecting party support for the
president. Presidents who are expected to run for re-election command more loyalty
than those who do not; of these, presidents who are popular and expected to win attract
more support than those about whom there are doubts (in fact only one incumbent who
has sought re-election, Giscard in 1981, has failed to secure it; none has yet been
defeated by a competitor from within his own camp). At the same time, parties and
coalitions may be hard to manage, not because they become the focus of competing
presidential ambitions for the future, but because they bear the scars of the past: the
trauma of de Gaulle’s departure in 1969, for example, or that of Chirac/Balladur
competition in 1995. Fourth, the order and offensiveness of the opposition may also
affect the cohesion and loyalty of the majority. Even when these elements are taken into
account, however, the loyalty of parties and coalitions to the president is subject to
circumstance. The Algerian war and de Gaulle’s unique usefulness at a time of acute
national crisis were crucial assets in managing the disparate, shifting majorities of
1958–62. On the other hand, the big Gaullist majority returned in June 1968 was very
hard to manage. This was true in de Gaulle’s last nine months, because of the wide-
spread perception that he had managed the ‘events’ of May 1968 less well than had his
prime minister Pompidou; opposition from within the ranks of the Right lost the
General his last referendum in 1969. It was then true under Pompidou, because
many Gaullists felt an obscure sense of betrayal after the General’s departure. More
Table 4.3 Party and majority support for presidents under the Fifth Republic
President and period Parliamentary President to stand President’s Unity of majority Opposition Observations
majority for re-election? popularity party/coalition
de Gaulle 1968–69 Type 1: Overall No: de Gaulle Damaged Mediocre Weak and divided de Gaulle
National Assembly aged 75 in 1965 weakened after
majority for May 1968;
president’s party Pompidou
(but other parties appears a viable
still in majority alternative for
coalition) conservatives
Pompidou 1969–73 Type 1: Overall Uncertain Generally good Mediocre Increasingly credible Gaullists
National (Pompidou after 1972 factionalised
Assembly visibly ill from after de Gaulle’s
majority for 1972) departure and (in
president’s party 1970) death
(but other
parties still in
majority
coalition)
Mitterrand 1981–86 Type 1: Overall Probable, but Good to 1983, Socialists cohesive; Increasingly credible Left’s popularity
National Assembly parliamentary then mediocre to Communists out after 1982 dips in 1983–85,
majority for elections to poor of coalition from recovers partially
president’s party precede 1984 by 1986
(but other parties presidential
still in majority election
coalition)
Chirac 2002– Type 1: Overall Uncertain Mediocre Mediocre Credible Chirac faces
National Assembly (Chirac aged 70 in eligible younger
majority for 2002) competitor,
president’s party within own
(but other parties camp, in Nicolas
still in majority Sarkozy
coalition)
de Gaulle 1962–68 Type 2: Overall Yes (to 1965), no Generally good Good, though Divided Gaullist
majority for (post-1965) some coalition ascendancy;
president’s coalition: difficulties unprecedented
president’s party the between Gaullists/ government
‘majority of the Giscardians stability
majority’
Pompidou 1973–74 Type 2: Overall No: Pompidou’s Generally good Mediocre Credible Uncertainty in
majority for illness known view of
president’s from 1972 Pompidou’s
coalition: failing health
president’s party
the ‘majority of
the majority’
Chirac 1995–97 Type 2: Overall Probable, but Generally poor Mediocre in both Credible Majority party
majority for parliamentary majority parties divided by legacy
president’s elections to of Chirac/
coalition: precede Balladur contest
president’s party presidential in 1995
the ‘majority election presidential
of the majority’ election
Giscard 1974–81 Type 3: Overall Probable (Giscard Generally Poor, and non- Broadly credible, Increasingly
majority for aged 55 in 1981) positive, but with Gaullist moderate though divided after bitter rivalry
president’s dips in 1976–77 Right only 1977 between
coalition: and 1980–81 federated into Gaullists and
president’s party UDF in 1978 Giscardians
the ‘minority
of the majority’
Mitterrand 1988–93 Type 4: President’s No (Mitterrand Good to 1991, Poor Credible from 1991 Majority party
coalition a few seats aged 75 in 1991) then poor factionalised in
short of absolute view of
majority impending
succession to
Mitterrand
(Continued overleaf)
Table 4.3 Continued
President and period Parliamentary President to stand President’s Unity of majority Opposition Observations
majority for re-election? popularity party/coalition
de Gaulle 1958–62 Type 5: No overall Uncertain (de Good Mediocre Weak and divided Algerian crisis
majority: president’s Gaulle aged 70 in serves as cement
party strongest in 1960) for potentially
Assembly undisciplined
majority
Mitterrand 1986–88 Type 6: Narrow Probable Good Limited Credible, loyal to Impending
(Cohabitation with overall majority president presidential
Chirac) opposed to the election damages
president unity of right-
wing majority;
cohesion
maintained in
parliamentary
votes
Mitterrand 1993–95 Type 7: Clear overall No (Mitterrand Poor Good but Weak, divided, and Right-wing
(Cohabitation with majority opposed to aged 75 in 1991, declining by 1995 increasingly distant majority
Balladur) the president and illness public from president increasingly
from 1992) divided by
Chirac/Balladur
rivalry
Chirac 1997–2002 Type 7: Clear overall Probable Variable to good Fair Weak, but Cohesion of left-
(Cohabitation with majority opposed to increasingly wing majority
Jospin) the president supportive of increasingly
president tested by
impending
presidential
election
generally, therefore, although the configurations of the National Assembly majority in
relation to the president may be repeated (with four examples of Type 1, three Type 2
cases, and so on), there are no two cases in Table 4.3 where the wider configurations are
the same.
The importance of party and coalition control as a presidential asset can be gauged
from what happens when the grip loosens. De Gaulle’s post-May 1968 lame duck status
was reproduced under the obviously ailing Pompidou after 1972; the November 1973
Gaullist party congress almost openly transferred its allegiance from the terminally ill
president to Chaban-Delmas, seen by delegates as the most promising candidate for the
succession. Giscard’s failure to secure the loyalty of the Gaullists has already been
referred to. An equally clear case was that of Mitterrand, whose triumphant election to
a second septennat, in 1988 at the age of 71, immediately opened a succession struggle
among Socialists. Twice, in 1988 and 1990, the president’s preferred candidate for the
party leadership, Laurent Fabius, was blocked by rival Socialist factions, provoking the
violent internal party strife which contributed powerfully to the Socialists’ catastrophic
defeat of 1993. Chirac’s party and coalition were badly divided at his election in 1995
by the bitter rivalry between himself and his Gaullist rival, former prime minister
Édouard Balladur. His failure either to crush or to co-opt the balladuriens was to
weaken both party and majority at the 1997 parliamentary elections. The difficulties of
his second presidential term have arisen in part from the greater attractiveness to many
activists and parliamentarians of Nicolas Sarkozy, senior government minister and
then, from November 2004, leader of the UMP, as a presidential candidate for 2007.
Chirac’s defeat in the 2005 referendum and subsequent unpopularity, Sarkozy’s efforts
to secure the UMP’s loyalty to his own person, and his combination, from May 2005,
of the two posts of party leader and interior minister, compounded the president’s lame
duck status.
Hence the importance, for presidents, of working to sustain party support once
elected. Day-to-day party management is typically delegated to trusted lieutenants.
De Gaulle and Pompidou were discreet about this, using advisers, respectively Foccart
and Juillet. Their successors have had more open contact with leading party officials,
such as Michel Poniatowski for Giscard and Jospin (the Socialist Party’s first secretary
from 1981 to 1988) for Mitterrand. An important role, too, is played by the leader of
the parliamentary group of the presidential party. Mitterrand gave his role in party
management a semi-official status early in his presidency by holding weekly breakfasts
with Socialist Party leaders. Party leaders are also often chosen unofficially by the
president and ratified by the party: this was true of the Gaullist party’s secretary-
general in 1967 and 1971; of all the leaders of Giscard’s Républicains Indépendants
(which became the Parti Républicain after its relaunch in 1977); of Jospin for the
Socialists in 1981; and of Juppé, Chirac’s successor to the Gaullist party leadership in
1995. Parliamentary candidates are also vetted by presidents. Foccart’s diaries reveal
the extent of the General’s personal involvement in candidate selection: deciding dis-
puted cases, choosing the constituencies where the Gaullists’ allies would be allowed a
free run and even agreeing to find money for his own son-in-law’s campaign in the
islands of St-Pierre et Miquelon. De Gaulle’s successors have followed his example. The
majority candidacies in 1997, for example, were vetted by Chirac after being drawn up
in the music pavilion in the Matignon garden by presidential advisers and party leaders.
Rocard’s description of Mitterrand’s hold over the Socialist Party is only partially
exaggerated: he ‘was able to appoint everyone, and to control a whole pyramid of men’.
As well as choosing candidates, presidents have also, typically, been their parties’
leading campaigners in parliamentary elections. De Gaulle’s famous request, in 1958,
that his name should not be invoked by any party ‘even in the form of an adjective’
during the election campaign was a dead letter from the start. By 1962, having just won
the referendum on the direct election of the president and used his power of dissolution
against a hostile National Assembly majority, he quite logically expressed the hope that
the yes vote could be ‘confirmed’ at the following month’s parliamentary elections.
That inaugurated a regular tradition of presidential interventions in campaigns
for parliamentary elections, whether caused by an early dissolution or not. In 1973
Pompidou evoked the red peril to frighten Centre voters away from the left-wing
opposition; in 1978, Giscard, more obliquely, reminded voters that if the Left won, he
would be unable to prevent the full application of the Socialist–Communist Common
Programme; in 1986, the Socialists used the slogan ‘Avec le Président’. Indeed, the
dissociation of the president from the majority’s parliamentary campaign, as in 1993, is
a sure sign that both president and party are in trouble.
Presidents also cultivate a wider range of political support, both to maintain the
coalition that brought them to power and to diversify their political bases. Perhaps the
clearest case of this is the Parti Républicain’s federation with centrists and Radicals as
the Union pour la Démocratie Française in 1978. But Mitterrand’s channelling of
funds to the SOS–Racisme group, his contacts with the maverick businessman Bernard
Tapie and his wooing of leading Trotskyist activists – small in number, but influential
with the rising generation because of their role in student politics, and so an important
influx of new blood when they arrived in the Socialist Party in 1986 – are also import-
ant cases in point. It was also Mitterrand who decided that the Communists were a
dispensable component of the ruling left-wing coalition in 1984, and who limited the
experiment with a Socialist–centrist alliance in 1988 to the inclusion of centrist
ministers in the government rather than a full-scale coalition.
That the president enjoys majority party support does not preclude the prime
minister from doing so as well. Indeed, the first prime minister of a presidential term is
often chosen precisely because his own political base, within the president’s party or
with its allies, is expected to reinforce the presidential coalition. Debré owed his
appointment in 1959 as much to the support he commanded among the large group of
conservative, Algérie française Deputies as to his own unfailing loyalty to de Gaulle.
Chaban-Delmas, as a historic Gaullist who had built good relations with the parlia-
mentary centrists over a decade as president of the National Assembly, was an obvious
choice for Pompidou in 1969. Five years later, Chirac’s appointment was intended by
Giscard to ensure presidential control of the Gaullist party (Chirac did not see matters
in the same light). In 1981, Mitterrand chose Pierre Mauroy not only as an experienced
Socialist Party power broker, but as one of the few Socialist leaders trusted by the
Communists whom Mitterrand was determined to lock into the government majority.
At the start of his second term he chose his long-standing rival Michel Rocard as a
prime minister capable of ‘opening’ the Socialist majority towards the Centre. Chirac
appointed Raffarin in 2002 because of his strong local and regional record, supposedly
a guarantee of strong affinities with the concerns of ordinary French voters. But the
fate of each of these prime ministers illustrates the president’s political primacy and the
prime minister’s inability to use his political resources independently. Debré was dis-
carded within weeks of the Algerian war ending, Chaban dismissed when Pompidou
came to see him as a rival for control of the parliamentary majority. Chirac, having
refused to emasculate the Gaullist party for Giscard’s benefit, resigned angrily in 1976
after repeated humiliations by the president. Mitterrand let Mauroy go once the
Communist alliance had outlived its usefulness; Rocard lost his job because Mitterrand
suspected that he was cultivating the centrists (and, incidentally, his own presidential
chances) at the expense of the core Socialist electorate – a suspicion fuelled by deep
personal loathing on both sides; the politically wrung-out Raffarin left in 2005 once he
had begun to drag Chirac’s own ratings down. Alain Juppé, finally, was an unusual
choice for a first prime minister: although he had succeeded Chirac as president of the
Gaullist party when Chirac began his 1995 presidential campaign, he was more a
creature of Chirac than an independent politician with his own base, and noticeably
lacked supporters outside his own party. This relative lack of independent weight, more
typical of ‘second’ prime ministers (Pompidou at his appointment in 1962, Messmer in
1972, Barre in 1976, Fabius in 1984 and Cresson in 1991), told against Juppé; but it was
the voters, not the president, who ended his premiership by destroying the Right’s
majority in 1997.
Under cohabitation (Types 6 and 7 in Table 4.3), the distribution of political
resources is radically altered to the benefit of the prime minister. The prime minister is
appointed as the leader of the largest party in the new majority and the main winner of
the elections (Chirac in 1986, Jospin in 1997) or as his agreed delegate (Balladur, with
Chirac’s blessing, in 1993). This resource is nevertheless fragile. The prime minister
must continuously convince the majority parties that he is their best electoral asset: a
difficult task, because he faces not only the pressure of events, but also both a deter-
mined adversary in the Élysée and rivals within his own camp. Hence the considerable
efforts deployed by prime ministers under cohabitation; Chirac and Balladur held
‘majority lunches’ to clear major issues both with key ministers and with party leaders
outside the government, while Jospin took a weekly breakfast with Socialist leaders,
and all three used patronage to try and keep their coalitions onside.
A president under cohabitation can only find party support in the opposition. This is
a meagre consolation compared to the clout offered by a majority. But it must be
husbanded carefully: it is essential, in the long term, to any prospect of a presidential
comeback, and thus, in the short term, to the preservation of some vestiges of presiden-
tial authority. Mitterrand’s continuing ascendancy over the Socialists, and the percep-
tion that he had limited the damage to his party in the 1986 parliamentary elections,
preserved his chances of re-election and strengthened his hand against Chirac during
the first cohabitation (1986–88). In 1993, by contrast, Mitterrand was too old and too
ill to contemplate a third term; he had all but lost control over his party since 1988; and
the Socialists had suffered a defeat of historic proportions in 1993. That ensured an
easier cohabitation for Prime Minister Balladur, who faced more difficulties from his
own camp (and especially from Chirac) than from the Élysée. Chirac, finally, found
himself in an unprecedented position after the Right’s defeat at the 1997 parliamentary
elections: facing a cohabitation of five years, not (as in 1986 and 1993) two; widely
blamed within his own party for calling the elections ten months early; unable to keep
his own protégé Juppé at the head of his own party; and confronted by a plethora of
rival right-wing présidentiables. Chirac’s first priority from 1997 was to eliminate such
competitors. To do so, however, he practically destroyed his own party, the neo-Gaullist
RPR. Only a complex process of orchestrating supporters throughout the moderate
Right provided a substitute in the shape of the electoral network that would become
the UMP.
Concluding remarks
Early interpretations of the Fifth Republic tended to view it, whether approvingly or
not, as a ‘republican monarchy’ in which presidential primacy was assured. They also
tended to overestimate the significance, in the basis of this primacy, of permanent,
constitutional provisions, and to underestimate both the importance to presidential
power of parliamentary majority support and above all the contingent, conditional
character of that support. Hence the perplexity with which France’s political science
community viewed the approach of cohabitation in 1986, as well as the widespread
notion that a majority opposed to the president was somehow contrary to the ‘spirit’
of the Fifth Republic. The two further cohabitations, of 1993–95 and 1997–2002,
suggested that the ‘republican monarchy’ could no longer be taken as the normal
institutional practice. And even if the future possibility of cohabitation is now relatively
remote, there is a sense in which the key measure taken to render it less likely,
the shortening of the presidential term, also reduces the likelihood of a return to the
‘republican monarchy’ because the presidential term is now so closely tied to the
fortunes of a legislature.
Nor, however, should the possession or lack of parliamentary support by the presi-
dent be viewed as the only important variable in the distribution of executive power,
entailing a simple, binary model. For the resources available to president and prime
minister are varied and complex, act upon one another, and may be used or misused in
a variety of ways. The patterns of policy-making that result are equally diverse.
Further reading
See also list for Chapter 5.
Ardant, P., Le Premier ministre en France, Paris, Montchrestien, 1991.

Claisse, A., Le Premier ministre de la Ve République, Paris, La Documentation Française, 1972.
Cohen, S., Les conseillers du président: de Charles de Gaulle à Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, Paris,
Presses Universitaires de France, 1980.
Duhamel, O., Le pouvoir politique en France, 2nd edition, Paris, Seuil, 1999.
Fauvet-Mycia, C., Les éminences grises, Paris, Belfond, 1988.
Institut Charles de Gaulle, ‘L’entourage’ et De Gaulle, Paris, Plon, 1979.
Jobert, M., Mémoires d’avenir, Paris, Grasset, 1974.
Jobert, M., L’autre regard, Paris, Grasset, 1976.
Long, M., Les services du Premier ministre, Aix-en-Provence, Presses Universitaires
d’Aix-Marseille, 1981.
Massot, J., La présidence de la République en France, 2nd edition, Paris, La Documentation
Française, 1986.
Pouvoirs, no. 68, 1994, ‘Qui gouverne la France?’
Py, R., Le secrétariat général du gouvernement, Paris, La Documentation Française, 1985.
Quermonne, J.-L., Le gouvernement de la France sous la Ve République, Paris, Dalloz, 1980.
Rials, S., Le premier ministre, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1981.
Schifres, M. and Sarazin, M., L’Elysée de Mitterrand: secrets de la maison du Prince, Paris, Alain
Moreau, 1985.
Schrameck, O., Les cabinets ministériels, Paris, Dalloz, 1995.
Schrameck, O., Matignon rive gauche, 1997–2001, Paris, Seuil, 2001.
5 Executive policy-making
The variable diarchy
Presidential government 109

Cohabitation: prime ministerial government? 121
Ministers and government 129
Institutionalised tensions and the elusive goal of co-ordination 134
Further reading 140
This chapter seeks to show how policy-making powers are shared within the political
executive. The issue is complex because France has a dual executive of variable
geometry: although some of its characteristics, such as the president’s role as
France’s head of state and the prime minister’s as chief processor and co-ordinator
of government business, are fixed, others vary with political circumstance. In particu-
lar, the variable relationship between the parliamentary majority and the president
has been of crucial importance to the distribution of power. For that reason, the two
basic scenarios – a majority favourable to the president and a hostile majority – will
be treated successively. But the sharp distinction that such a treatment implies should
be qualified in three ways. First, many powers are exercised jointly by both heads of
the executive (though not always in the same way inside and outside cohabitation).
Second, variations in the resources available to the two main actors, explored in
Chapter 4, and in the use made of them, entail variations of policy-making powers
within the two main scenarios, as well as between them. Third, while attention is
primarily focused on the president and the prime minister, there are important
instances, discussed later in the chapter, where ministers have contributed substan-
tially to the policy-making process.
Presidential government
A president with the support of the parliamentary majority is both de facto head of
the governing coalition and the effective, if not the constitutional, leader of the
government. Nowhere, indeed, is the gap between constitutional theory and presiden-
tial practice greater than here. Constitutionally, the government is a collective body of
ministers, responsible to the National Assembly, which ‘determines and conducts’
national policy, and whose members are appointed by the president on the proposal of
the prime minister; in practice, outside cohabitation it has usually been an instrument
of presidential government, its members reduced to the role of advisers responsible to
the president alone. In that sense, the French government came to resemble the cabinet
of an American president.
Presidential control of the government

Presidential control of the government outside periods of cohabitation may be seen in
several ways.
• The president appoints and dismisses its head, the prime minister. To the consti-
tutional right freely to appoint prime ministers (of however unexpected a stamp,
where Pompidou in 1962, Barre in 1976 and Cresson in 1991 were concerned),
successive presidents have added the right to sack them – or rather, since the
dismissal of the prime minister appears nowhere in the constitution, to force their
departure. De Gaulle inaugurated this practice by requiring undated letters of
resignation from his nominees to the premiership. His successors have continued
it, usually without resorting to such crude methods: given their ascendancy over
the parliamentary majority, a simple request is enough. Seven prime ministers –
Debré, Pompidou, Chaban-Delmas, Mauroy, Rocard, Cresson and Raffarin –
have lost their jobs in this way. Rocard, for example, was asked to go by Mitterrand,
at 9.30 a.m. on 15 May 1991; the resignation letter was sent by noon on the
same day, directly after the meeting of the Council of Ministers (which was kept
completely in the dark about the matter). Although prime ministers since Cresson
have fallen to the voters, not to the president (with the partial exception of
Raffarin, who was blamed for defeats at the regional and European elections of
2004, and the referendum of 2005, but was under no obligation to resign), there is
no doubt that Chirac could freely dispose of Dominique de Villepin as and when he
wished.
• The president determines the size and shape of the government. However much
discussion takes place between president and prime minister over the composition
of the government, the president has the last word. Pompidou’s creation of
an environment ministry, Giscard’s appointment of junior ministers for penal
reform, ‘the feminine condition’ and immigrant affairs were examples of new
posts fitted to presidential priorities. The unwieldy size of Rocard’s government
in 1988, of Juppé’s in 1995 and of Raffarin’s in June 2002 resulted more from
the wishes of presidents Mitterrand and Chirac to pay the debts of the presidential
elections (and, in the latter case, to open up the government to more women and
to representatives of ‘civil society’) than from a direct concern with effective
policy-making.
• The president intervenes directly in the choice of individual ministers. Pierre Messmer
records in his memoirs that all three of the governments he headed were in large
measure chosen by Pompidou. Chirac’s first government, in 1974, was concocted
by Giscard and his henchman Michel Poniatowski in a manner almost calculated
to displease his Gaullist party; Giscard’s habit of presenting ‘his’ governments
on television, and reshuffling them, as he did in 1975 and 1976, without even
pretending to consult his prime minister, merely extended and made more open the
practice of his predecessors. Rocard, in 1988, was allowed to include a handful
of his own protégés like the Health Minister Claude Évin, but was also forced
to accept the old guard of Mitterrand loyalists, such as Roland Dumas, Louis
Executive policy-making 111
Mermaz, Pierre Joxe or Michel Charasse. Raffarin was quoted in May 2002 as
telling a right-wing parliamentarian anxious for preferment that it was not he,
but Chirac, who was forming the new government. It was Chirac who ruled that
ministers should not hold major executive office at local level (a continuation
of a practice established under Jospin, to which a certain number of exceptions
were allowed); Chirac again who negotiated Nicolas Sarkozy’s place in each of
the Raffarin governments, who ruled in 2004 that Sarkozy could not combine
ministerial office with the presidency of the UMP, and who decided in May 2005
that, after all, he could.
• The president determines the political balance of the government. The inclusion of
only four Gaullists, none of them heavyweights, in the 1974 Chirac government was
clearly the choice of Giscard and Poniatowski, rather than of the prime minister. It
was Mitterrand who, in 1981, decided to include Communists in the government
and who determined the representation of the various factions of the Socialist
Party in it. The exclusion of all but two Balladur supporters from the 1995
Juppé government was Chirac’s decision (influenced, in the case of one unhappy
balladurien, by the new president’s wife).
• The president treats the government not as a collective body responsible to the
National Assembly, but as a group of individuals responsible to himself. Indeed,
General de Gaulle in his Memoirs was specific on this point: ‘when one is a minister,
it is to de Gaulle and to him alone that one is responsible’. Pompidou, Giscard
d’Estaing and Mitterrand never failed to act upon that unconstitutional assump-
tion. More than his predecessors, Chirac delegated some of this responsibility to
his prime minister Juppé (though not to Raffarin), but the effect was broadly
similar.
As we have seen, the president’s official powers of patronage extend well beyond
the political executive. While the existence of a fully developed spoils system has
been limited by the requirement for continuity and experience in top posts, presidents
enjoying the support of the parliamentary majority have routinely used these powers
to reward the faithful, tempt the waverers, punish the recalcitrant and the hostile,
and get rid of the embarrassing. De Gaulle cleansed the army of dissident elements,
and purged the Quai d’Orsay of diplomats suspected of being too pro-European or
pro-American; Pompidou rewarded younger followers; Giscard removed recalcitrant
Gaullists; Mitterrand created the ‘Socialist nomenklatura’; Chirac rewarded his loyalists
within the RPR after 1995 and punished the hapless balladuriens.
Processes of presidential policy-making

Master of the parliamentary majority and the government, and to a significant extent
of the administration, the president is also the nation’s chief policy-maker. In the first
place, he may intervene at all stages of the policy-making procedure.
• The president determines the overall programme of the government. The overall
shape of government policy is determined by the president, a fact of which the
public is left in no doubt. To take two recent examples, Prime Minister Raffarin’s
general policy declaration of July 2002 took as its starting point, not the Right’s
victory at the June parliamentary elections, but the programme on which Chirac
had been re-elected to the presidency the previous May. Again, the Military
Programme Law for 2003–8 was explicitly based on Chirac’s presidential commit-
ments. Presidents periodically remind governments publicly of presidential election
pledges, whether via regular ‘directive letters’ (as under Giscard), or through
Mitterrand’s and Chirac’s more periodic instructions.
• The president fixes the agenda and timetable of the Council of Ministers. From week
to week, the president fixes, via orders passed through the secretary-general of the
Élysée to the secretary-general of the government, the agenda of the Council of
Ministers and the timetable of government business.
• He is in regular direct and indirect contact with ministers, whether on formal
occasions, such as conseils restreints, or informally through personal meetings,
meals, telephone calls (much favoured by Chirac, though not by his predecessor) or
outside visits – undermining the fragile collective identity of the government.
• He acts as a final court of appeal, over the prime minister’s head, on policy issues
(and particularly questions of resources). Rocard’s careful budget calculations, for
example, were often upset by the last-minute appeals for more money made to the
president by ministers such as Jack Lang or Pierre Joxe who were particularly close
to Mitterrand.
• He signs the decrees essential to the implementation of government legislation.
Though the prime minister and ministers both control implementation documents,
the arrêtés, the major decrees, are signed by the president as well as the prime
minister in the Council of Ministers.
• His advisers extend his personal policy role. Crucially, Élysée advisers attend inter-
ministerial meetings to transmit presidential wishes and to verify compliance. They
also liaise with parliamentary majority leaders and committee chairmen to ensure
that if parliamentarians do amend or distort governmental projects, they do so
only in ways approved by the Élysée.
• He may also meet with leading representatives of pressure groups – ‘interme-
diary’ organisations viewed with deep mistrust by de Gaulle but more openly
accommodated in the policy process by his successors.
• The president has regularly played a role of government spokesperson, most fre-
quently on television, defending governmental policies and criticising those of the
opposition.
Domains of presidential policy-making

The president is the master of the substance as well as of the processes of policy-
making. This was first acknowledged in November 1959, when Chaban-Delmas
invented the domaine réservé over which the president had more or less exclusive con-
trol. Chaban was seeking chiefly to deflect criticism within the Gaullist party of de
Gaulle’s moves towards Algerian independence. His term is political; it lacks any con-
stitutional status. But it has stuck, and has been taken to include foreign affairs, defence
matters and questions relating to the French Community – or, more recently, to the
vestiges of empire in Africa. In practice, though, the president controls as much or as
little of policy-making as he wishes: when Mitterrand observed in 1983 that ‘it is up to
the president to decide which policies should be decided by the president’, he was
merely echoing his old enemy de Gaulle’s claims of 1964.
Imperial and post-imperial matters
Presidential supremacy in this area was quickly established: de Gaulle had, after all,
returned to power in order to end the Algerian crisis. This he did, with little regard
either to the government or to parliament, by imposing his policies on a rebellious
army, a divided parliament and a deeply reserved Gaullist party. The Council of
Ministers was consulted only once, in August 1959, and Prime Minister Debré, a strong
Algérie française supporter up to his appointment, was constantly bypassed, and dis-
missed as soon as the war was over. When the president appealed to the French people
for support on the issue, he always stressed the personal nature of his policies. Just as
personal, but without the popular consultation, has been the conduct of African affairs
by both de Gaulle and his successors: policy has typically been decided by the president
himself, by close personal advisers with their own networks (Foccart for de Gaulle,
Pompidou and even, until his death, for Chirac; his own son Jean-Christophe for
Mitterrand) and by the heads of the client states concerned. This extends to the use
made of the troops France has stationed in several of its former colonies of sub-
Saharan Africa since their accession to independence in 1962. Neither de Gaulle’s
despatch of troops to save the Bongo régime in Gabon in 1964, nor Giscard’s use of
paratroopers to pacify Zaïre (a former Belgian colony, but increasingly a French sphere
of influence) in 1978, nor the interventions of French forces in the Chad civil wars of
the 1980s under Mitterrand were discussed by the government. The same was true of
Chirac’s intervention against an army mutiny in Central Africa in 1997. The obscurity
surrounding African policy has fuelled claims that behind a façade of development aid
and the promotion of Francophone culture lurked more sinister practices: the pillage of
mineral resources by an alliance between French firms, backed by the French state,
and local dictators; or money-laundering through the scandal-ridden Elf oil company.
African affairs came to haunt one president, Giscard d’Estaing, whose re-election cam-
paign in 1981 was damaged by the revelation that he had accepted a gift of diamonds
from Jean-Bedel Bokassa, the tyrant whose lavish coronation as Emperor of Central
Africa had been financed by France. By the 1990s, however, there was every sign that
time was running out for such highly personalised relations, as states of the former
empire found other foreign sponsors, notably the United States. Symbolically, it was
Chirac, heir to de Gaulle and Pompidou, who announced an end to interventionism
and a scaling-down of France’s military presence in Africa from 8,500 to 5,000 men. It
was Chirac, too, who managed France’s troubled relations with the Ivory Coast, and
the use of the French military force there, after civil war broke out in 2003.
Foreign policy
Foreign policy in the wider sense has also been part of the ‘reserved domain’ (indeed,
there were precedents for presidential foreign policy activism under earlier Republics,
notably that of Raymond Poincaré in 1913–14, but they were of brief duration).
Among de Gaulle’s many personal acts were his policy of détente with the Soviet bloc,
his recognition of Communist China in 1964, the decision not to sell arms to Israel, the
outrageous proclamation about ‘free Quebec’ in 1967, or the decisions that progressively
extracted France from NATO between 1959 and 1967. Giscard travelled to Warsaw to
discuss the Afghan crisis with the Soviet President Brezhnev in 1980 – a much criticised
visit that was only announced to the foreign minister after the President’s personal
emissary had settled all the details. Mitterrand disconcerted his two first prime ministers
by receiving visits from two pariah leaders, South Africa’s P.W. Botha and Poland’s
Wozzeck Jaruzelski, and undertook secret trips to meet Morocco’s King Hassan II and
Libya’s Colonel Kadhafi; no one disputed his right to engage in this type of personal
diplomacy. When Mitterrand consulted his government on the issue of French partici-
pation in an international force to be sent to the Gulf after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait
in 1990, the great majority of ministers were opposed; the president immediately com-
mitted French troops to the force. Chirac’s personal initiatives include an offer to take
France back into NATO if a European could be given the alliance’s southern command
– a move quickly rebuffed by the Americans. He has also attempted to improve France’s
economic relations with China, Japan and the Pacific Rim states, and like Mitterrand
has often included cohorts of French business executives in his delegations on overseas
visits. Though he was the first European leader to visit New York after the attacks of
11 September 2001, Chirac also made France’s refusal to countenance the 2003
invasion of Iraq very much his own.
European affairs
Presidential supremacy has been equally manifest here as long as the president has been
supported by the parliamentary majority. The so-called ‘Fouchet plans’ for European
political union were really de Gaulle plans. De Gaulle announced his first veto of British
entry into the Common Market at a press conference, just three days after his own
foreign minister had assured the British negotiating team that ‘no power on earth’ could
prevent a successful outcome to their efforts. His decision to boycott European institu-
tions for six months in 1965 was equally personal, a fact underlined by the timing of the
eventual compromise (just after de Gaulle’s re-election). President Pompidou reversed
several of de Gaulle’s European policies, ‘relaunching’ Europe at a summit in The
Hague in December 1969 and lifting the veto on British entry, but the methods remained
the same, with the decisions largely escaping ministerial scrutiny. Giscard’s major
European initiatives – the creation of the European Council, the European Monetary
System and direct elections to the European Parliament – owed more to his close
relationship with the German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt than to any discussions with
government ministers. Similarly, Mitterrand’s major European legacy, the Maastricht
Treaty, arose above all from his personal conviction, shared with Chancellor Kohl, that
reunited Germany must be irrevocably attached to Europe, and that the best way to
achieve this was the single currency; specific points such as the role of the European
Central Bank were managed personally by Mitterrand, who took assistance from his
foreign and finance ministers but excluded his prime ministers. Chirac, though a less
constant European than either of his two predecessors, has overseen the negotiation of
no fewer than three European treaties – Amsterdam in 1997, Nice in 2000 (when he was
chiefly remembered for his fierce defence of France’s parity of voting rights on the
Council of Ministers with Germany) and the European constitutional treaty of 2004.
He also took the ill-fated decision to submit the last of these to a referendum.
Defence policy
The president’s constitutional position as commander-in-chief and chairman of the
National Defence Committee ensures a central role in defence policy at all times,
especially but not exclusively when he occupies his normal political position as head of
the executive. This applies equally to major strategic initiatives and to the budgetary
choices that ensure their implementation. De Gaulle’s pursuit of the full panoply of a
nuclear deterrent, including bombs, warheads, missiles and submarines, as independent
as was possible from NATO, was the most striking early instance of this. It set a frame-
work for de Gaulle’s successors over a generation. The defence decisions taken by
Mitterrand shortly after his election, to continue work on France’s neutron bomb, to
retain the length of military service at one year, to replace the old generation of ballistic
missiles by a new one and to build a seventh nuclear submarine, were all presidential
choices, announced from the Élysée. In 1992, when the end of the Cold War had placed
the issue of future defence postures before all Western nations, the announcements that
France would sign the nuclear test ban treaty and declare a moratorium on nuclear
tests signalled a move away from the gaullien defence posture, but was still a wholly
presidential move. Chirac’s resumption of testing in 1995, albeit for a brief period, was
announced in characteristic Gaullist fashion, at a press conference, and provoked reac-
tions in the world comparable to those that greeted the General’s more extravagant
initiatives. But Chirac was also responsible for two more lasting changes, both visible in
the 1997–2002 Military Programme Law: the professionalisation of the armed forces,
ending a two-centuries-old tradition of compulsory military service, and the downgrad-
ing of France’s nuclear deterrent from over 31 per cent of the defence budget to under
20 per cent. The creation of a Rapid Reaction Force in Bosnia, finally, though announced
by the Defence Minister Charles Millon, was very much the president’s work.
Economic, financial and industrial policy

These core sectors of internal policy-making fall less obviously in the president’s
‘reserved domain’. Even here, though, few really major decisions do not bear the
presidential stamp. The currency reform and austerity package that opened the de
Gaulle presidency, though inspired by the orthodox economics of Jacques Rueff, were
decided by the president in conseils interministériels. So was the unpopular economic
‘stabilisation’ plan of 1963. It was de Gaulle’s decision that the Bank of France should
sell dollars and buy gold in order to challenge American monetary hegemony, and that
France should build Concorde (for prestige, and for the supposed spin-off onto the rest
of French industry) and develop a home-grown computer industry: such matters were
the economic face of de Gaulle’s foreign policy, and as such adjacent, at least, to the
‘reserved domain’. The presidential refusal, in November 1968, to devalue a franc made
weak by the events of the previous May astounded not only the financial world but also
the prime minister and government: it is significant that the last pages of de Gaulle’s
unfinished memoirs are taken up by an almost lyrical apologia for monetary orthodoxy.
When Pompidou reversed the General’s decision and devalued in August 1969, he kept
his Prime Minister Chaban-Delmas completely in the dark. He regularly arbitrated
between the Finance Ministry and the spending departments in disputes over the
budget; his view that France should seek high growth even at the price of (modest)
inflation, and that major French private firms should merge to constitute national
champions both marked the economic record of his five-year presidency. Giscard, a
former finance minister at a time of great economic and financial instability, was more
interventionist than either of his predecessors. The French franc’s periodic entries to
and departures from European monetary structures during his presidency were decided
by him, as was the controversial capital gains tax bill of 1976. While the appointment,
in August 1976, of Raymond Barre as prime minister and minister for economic affairs
signalled a distancing of the president from direct involvement in these questions, in
practice Barre’s prescription of neo-liberal remedies for France’s economic ills often
ran up against Giscard’s electorally motivated veto, particularly when jobs were at risk:
the late Giscard years were especially active ones for the interministerial committee
responsible for bailing out lame duck industries. Mitterrand’s relative ignorance of
economic affairs compared with his predecessor did not prevent him from intervening
extensively. The non-devaluation of May 1981, and the three devaluations that followed
over the next two years, were his choices – including the last one, in March 1983, with
the sea change in economic policy implied by his decision to keep the franc in the
European Monetary System. It was Mitterrand who decided that the nationalisations
that launched his first septennat should cover 100 per cent of shares of the firms
involved, and not 51 per cent as ministers like Rocard had suggested; Mitterrand who
announced a policy of neither nationalisation nor privatisation for his second term, and
who then agreed to partial exceptions, picturesquely referred to as the ‘breathing of the
public sector’; Mitterrand again who took responsibility for the major restructuring of
the steel industry in 1984. Mitterrand also intervened in budgetary matters, requiring
taxation to be kept to no more than 43 per cent of GDP in the 1985 budget (a demand
made without the consent of either finance minister or prime minister, which meant
that some 80 billion francs, or 12 billion euros, suddenly had to be ‘found’). In his
second term, Élysée advisers were despatched to verify that Mitterrand’s priorities of
education, overseas development and research were being respected in the 1990 budget,
and to ask Prime Minister Rocard for an extra 300 million francs for the gendarmerie.
A year later, in the face of demonstrations by secondary school students, Mitterrand
threw out the careful balance of Rocard’s 1991 budget by demanding an extra 4.5 billion
francs (686 million euros) for education. Above all, perhaps, the ‘strong franc’ policy of
the second septennat might not have survived without Mitterrand’s backing for Finance
Minister Bérégovoy. Chirac’s first set-piece intervention in this area came in his televi-
sion broadcast of 26 October 1995, when he reaffirmed France’s commitment to the
euro, and thus to the Maastricht convergence criteria, at the expense of his own election
promises. Thereafter, he was less openly interventionist, though always ready to fly
rhetorically to the aid of his increasingly beleaguered government. Behind the scenes, it
is clear that Chirac took particular interest in the privatisation programme, though not
with very conclusive results: the sale of Thomson, for example, needed the capable
(Socialist) touch of Jospin to be carried through. Chirac’s second term was marked by
his insistence that election promises to cut income taxes were (more or less) kept, even at
the cost of flouting France’s commitment to European requirements to keep public-
sector deficits down to 3 per cent of GDP.
Cultural and broadcasting questions

These areas too have been an object of interest for four presidents at least. Here again,
de Gaulle set a framework, appointing France’s first culture minister, the novelist
André Malraux, who was given a respectable budget with which to promote Maisons de
la Culture that would dissipate the obscurity of the philistine provinces. Pompidou
paved the way for the national museum of modern art that bears his name; Giscard
did the same for the nineteenth-century museum in the former Orsay railway station.
Mitterrand both backed his flamboyant minister, Jack Lang, and pressed ahead with his
own ambitious and expensive grands chantiers which have changed the face of Paris.
Only Chirac, despite personal cultural interests ranging from primitive art to Japanese
haikus, has given the sector relatively little attention, appointing second-rank ministers
and allowing budget cuts. Broadcasting has also witnessed direct presidential interven-
tion, such as de Gaulle’s decision to allow advertising on France’s two public television
channels in 1967. Both de Gaulle and Pompidou saw radio and (in particular) television
as the ‘voice of France’, and demanded favourable coverage for themselves and their
governments: Pompidou notably stalled Chaban-Delmas’s attempts to liberalise the
sector. Giscard broke up the state broadcasting monopoly in 1974, giving the three
stations and the production company a (modest) measure of autonomy. Mitterrand
delivered on electoral promises to allow private radio stations and to create an arm’s-
length broadcasting authority, took the final decision on who should appoint the
members of the new body, the Haute Autorité de l’Audiovisuel, opened two television
channels to private operators and was instrumental in choosing those operators (one of
whom was Silvio Berlusconi, the future right-wing prime minister of Italy).
Political reforms
These have always been, in varying degrees, a presidential concern. The referendum on
a constitutional amendment allowing direct election of the president was announced by
presidential broadcast in 1962; and if de Gaulle left office in 1969, it was because the
reform of the Senate and the regions proposed in his last, unsuccessful referendum was
a presidential project. Pompidou too suffered a setback when he had to abandon his
plan to shorten the presidential term to five years owing to opposition within parlia-
ment. Giscard left a more lasting legacy with the liberalisation of conditions in prisons
and barracks, the lowering of the age of majority to 18 and the reform giving parlia-
mentarians the right to refer bills to the Constitutional Council. Mitterrand’s early
years were marked by a vast range of political changes, including the decentralisation
reforms, the abolition of the death penalty and the detested State Security Court set up
by de Gaulle, and the repeal of some of his predecessors’ more repressive criminal
justice legislation. Although the president did not present all of these reforms as his
own initiatives, he ensured backing for them by arbitrating publicly, usually on the
liberal side, in disputes between his ministers. Chirac, as well as accepting several con-
stitutional changes during his cohabitation with Jospin, pressed for decentralisation to
be given constitutional status through the amendment of 2003, and was identified
personally with a constitutional ‘charter’ that aimed to guarantee a right to a decent
environment for all. This reform, of symbolic appearance but with far-reaching impli-
cations if broadly interpreted, aroused such grave suspicions within the UMP majority
that it had to await a final parliamentary vote until February 2005.
Circumstantial interventions
In addition to the policy sectors outlined above, there remain countless examples
where presidential interventions have been provoked by a specific political context.
Such a context may result from disputes within the government: President Mitterrand’s
decisions to abandon the military camp at Larzac and the planned nuclear power
station at Plogoff are cases in point. Or a decision at the highest level may be needed to
face down entrenched interest groups, as when de Gaulle decided to move the wholesale
meat and vegetable markets from Les Halles in Paris to the wind-swept wastes of
Rungis, or Giscard forced a recalcitrant École Polytechnique from the fifth arrondisse-
ment of Paris into the suburbs, or Mitterrand chose to locate a major nuclear research
installation at Grenoble, not Strasbourg. The president may also get involved in issues
that are, or threaten to become, politically explosive. This has repeatedly been the
case with education. De Gaulle had to give strong personal backing to his Education
Minister Edgar Faure’s plans to liberalise French universities in the wake of the
May 1968 ‘events’, since the reform plans faced strong opposition within the Gaullist-led
parliamentary majority. Giscard intervened in the drafting of the 1975 Education Act,
which aspired to promote social equality in education in a manner that many of his core
middle-class electorate would have found suspect. Mitterrand appeared on television to
announce the withdrawal of his government’s controversial bill on private education
which had brought hundreds of thousands of Catholics onto the streets. In doing so, he
provoked the resignation of Education Minister Alain Savary, whom he had told of the
decision an hour before going on air, and indeed of the whole Mauroy government. But
the situation was defused. Chirac, too, intervened more than once after 2002 to ‘advise’
his education ministers, Luc Ferry and François Fillon, on concessions to make to
demonstrators opposed to education reforms; and he placed his personal weight behind
the reform of 2004 banning the wearing of religious signs or garb at school. Finally,
presidents may intervene because of their personal attachment to a particular policy
area, or because they judge their intervention to be necessary in order to fulfil election
pledges or to react effectively to a new situation. Many of Giscard’s interventions fall
into these categories. He gave his strong backing to the early measures of social liberal-
isation – the legalisation of abortion and the facilitation of contraception and divorce.
He reacted to the 1973 energy crisis by backing a nuclear power programme of
unprecedented scope, and to the architectural excesses of the de Gaulle and Pompidou
eras by demanding, and getting, the incorporation of much tighter environmental
criteria into France’s building regulations. But, while Giscard expanded presidential
intervention into hitherto unexpected areas, he is not wholly alone in this. The example
of culture has already been mentioned. The concern of Pompidou and, more recently,
Chirac, with agricultural policy, for example, has been proverbial.
Presidential policy-making: limitations and models

Presidential government does not mean, and cannot mean in the French context, that
the president governs alone. The sheer volume of government business, and the small
numbers of the Élysée staff, see to that. Nor does it mean that the president decides
alone. Before the economic U-turn of March 1983, for example, Mitterrand spent nine
days not only reflecting in private but also holding numerous meetings with advisers
and ministers (though these never ran to a formal round-table discussion in the Council
of Ministers). Nor yet does it mean that the prime minister is marginalised. As the
articulation between the president and the government and between the government
and its majority, as the chief presenter of government policy in parliament and as the
individual most responsible for ensuring the implementation of that policy by the
administration, the prime minister is at the very least a presidential tool of the first
importance. It was, for example, Mitterrand who committed French forces to the
Gulf war, but Rocard who had to ‘sell’ the war to a deeply sceptical National Assembly;
it was Chirac who signalled the need to bring France into line with the Maastricht
criteria, but Juppé who conceived, developed and announced an unpopular rationalisa-
tion of the social security system. Similarly, the major reforms of Chirac’s second term,
covering pensions and the rollback of the 35-hour week, though followed closely by the
president, were developed by Prime Minister Raffarin and the ministers directly con-
cerned. And the prime minister is usually more than merely the president’s man. In
areas where the president has no pressing personal interest, prime ministers may feel
free either to drag their feet (as Pompidou did over de Gaulle’s dream of workers’
‘participation’ in industrial management) or to develop their own policies (as Rocard
did, with partial success, in his attempts to reform France’s public services). In that
sense, policy-making may be said to be ‘segmented’, with some sectors being run dir-
ectly by the president, others by the prime minister, and others still by individual
ministers. But there are two important qualifications to this view. The president may
take direct control of any sector at any time that he chooses. And the prime minister
may be dispensed with at any time, and notably when he becomes either unpopular
enough to drag the president down with him, or, worse, successful enough to be a
political rival to the president.
Presidential power should not be confused with presidential activism. The economic
and financial interventions of de Gaulle, for example, were rare, but crucial. Otherwise
he left much of economic policy-making to Pompidou, subjecting him to periodic
grillings in the Council of Ministers. Giscard, on the other hand, as well as taking large
decisions like the franc’s entry into the European monetary snake, was more inclined to
detailed interventions as well – the specifics of subsidies to particular firms, or the level
of value- added tax on certain products. But it is far from certain that Giscard was
thereby more in control of policy than de Gaulle.
Variations in the level of presidential activism, indeed, could be said to delineate
different models within the overall pattern of presidential government. Three such
models may be identified for the years since 1981. The first corresponds to the highly
interventionist period of the early Mitterrand presidency – itself both a continuation of
the Giscard period in this respect, and the result of the lack of governmental experience
suffered by all but two ministers. During this period, Élysée advisers were frequently
present at interministerial meetings, where they spoke regularly: at meetings to prepare
the nationalisation legislation, for example, they expressed suspicions of ministers, and
especially of civil servants, whose commitment to the expropriation of the capitalists
they doubted. The drawback of such interventionism was that Mitterrand, like his
predecessor, was held responsible for policy failure: Prime Minister Mauroy’s popular-
ity (according to SOFRES polls) went negative in September 1982, Mitterrand’s nine
months later. Under the second model, on the other hand, the president is more distant
from much of the policy-making process. Under the Rocard government (1988–91) for
example, Mitterrand usually, though not always, kept to his stated resolution to inter-
vene less. Élysée advisers were less present, and less vocal, in interministerial meetings,
and both Matignon and individual ministries were less inclined to seek advice from the
Élysée. However, this period was also marked by the intense and growing mistrust
between president and prime minister, and at times by a lack of presidential backing for
government policies, and by continued presidential interventions in sensitive areas.
Individual ministers sought and sometimes obtained changes of policy by appealing to
the president over the prime minister’s head; the same was even true of pressure groups,
as when Mitterrand insisted more money for education after receiving protesting lycée
students in November 1990. The third model corresponds to the Juppé premiership
(1995–97). Here, too, the president had promised institutional self-restraint – the ‘mod-
est presidency’ of Chirac’s campaign. Here, too, Élysée staff were discreet at interminis-
terial meetings. On the other hand, relations between president and prime minister were
exceptionally close, to the point of being symbiotic. Chirac tried to concentrate on the
traditional ‘reserved domain’, left Juppé a freedom of action such as very few prime
ministers have enjoyed, save under cohabitation, and backed his prime minister against
critics from both opposition and majority. Again, though, the Chirac–Juppé tandem
encountered major difficulties. The relatively low calibre of many of Juppé’s ministers
led their cabinets to seek direction from the Élysée. Worse, the strike wave of late 1995
inevitably drew the Élysée into policy-making, establishing the link between the
presidency and policy failure that Chirac had sought to avoid.
It is tempting to discern a pattern to the different models of presidential government.
After the establishment of presidential prerogatives under de Gaulle, a growing range
of policy challenges caused a crescendo of presidential activism till approximately
1984. This was followed by a degree of disengagement as first Mitterrand, then Chirac,
sought, with only partial success, to distance the presidency from day-to-day policy-
making and the unpopularity associated with it in times of economic difficulty. As
suggested in Chapter 4, generally declining levels of popularity since the 1970s may act
as a political constraint on presidents. The room for ‘heroic’ leadership, quite extensive
in the 1960s, shrank in the more complex environment of the 1980s and 1990s, leading
to a system characterised by Olivier Duhamel as ‘rationalised presidentialism’. Such a
linear view should, however, be treated with caution because other elements affect the
working of France’s executive tandem; the variables outlined in Table 4.3 do not change
in any linear manner.
Chirac’s relationship with the Raffarin governments of his second term offers an
illustration of Duhamel’s argument and its limitations. On the one hand, France’s
economic position was mediocre, with slow growth and stubbornly high unemploy-
ment, while the government was more or less obliged to enact unpopular reforms,
notably to pensions and healthcare, in order to rein in what had become structural
public-sector deficits. None of this invited heroic presidential leadership; on the con-
trary, it suggested that the president, while allowing himself heroic gestures in the
‘reserved domain’ of foreign affairs, for which opposition to the 2003 Iraq war offered
ready opportunities, should maintain an arm’s-length presidential relationship to a
government doomed to lose voter support (as indeed it did, most clearly in the regional
and European elections of 2004 and the following year’s referendum). On the other
hand, unpopularity was only one of the government’s problems. Others included
Raffarin’s failure to establish his own personal authority over it as prime minister, the
political ineptitude of two high-profile ministers chosen from ‘civil society’ to run
Education and Finance, and Sarkozy’s open use of his ministerial office to grab media
attention and establish his personal credentials as a présidentiable. All of this required
Chirac to become more directly involved in policy-making than he might have wished.
For example, Education Minister Luc Ferry suffered the humiliation of having the
introduction of his bill on university reform delayed in June 2003 after an announce-
ment by a member of the Élysée staff. And at the start of 2005, Chirac used a series of
New Year’s messages to outline the government’s programme for the year – a return,
albeit in a somewhat more relaxed style, to Giscard’s six-monthly instructions of thirty
years earlier. In other words, while the economic and international contexts may have
reduced (though not ended) the scope for presidential leadership, unpredictable
domestic developments may reinforce the need for presidential interventionism.
Cohabitation: prime ministerial government?

Faced with the prospect – eventually unrealised – of a left-wing victory in 1978,
President Giscard d’Estaing publicly contemplated retreating to the presidential resi-
dence at Rambouillet, outside Paris. In practice, he would quickly have found such an
internal exile constitutionally impossible and politically suicidal. Even presidents who
lack a supportive parliamentary majority, as in 1986–88, 1993–95 and 1997–2002,
remain a vital part of France’s system of government. President and prime minister
require each other’s countersignatures for many important acts, including appoint-
ments and the promulgation of laws. Without a majority, the president remains both
commander-in-chief of the armed forces and a central foreign policy player, but cannot
exercise either role without reference to the prime minister. The prime minister, for his
part, has no interest as a presidential aspirant in assaulting the institutions of which he
hopes, eventually, to become the guarantor. The two heads of the executive need each
other to function, and both know that the French public would be inclined to penalise
any attempt to upset the delicate institutional balance that became known, after an
anticipatory article by Balladur in 1983, as cohabitation. These points highlight the
difference between the situation of a French president without a supportive National
Assembly majority and that of an American president facing a hostile Congress. In the
United States, thanks to the separation of powers, the challenge to the president is to
prevail over the legislature: an acute version of what is a delicate task under the most
favourable conditions. In France under cohabitation, by contrast, the fault-line runs
within the executive itself. It has never resembled a grand coalition or a government of
national unity; it has never been used as an opportunity to undertake large-scale
reforms on which all parties broadly agree. For despite the constitutional requirement
of a minimum of co-operation, especially clear in foreign and defence policy, and
whatever the public’s perception (especially strong in early 2002) of complicity between
the two heads of the executive, cohabitation remains fundamentally adversarial.
President and prime minister are therefore obliged to learn new roles, different in
many ways from those used when the majority supports the president. Under the new
division of labour, the president is always obliged to concede much enhanced powers to
the prime minister both in appointments and in policy-making. But the constitution
ensures a partial segmentation of policy-making, with the president retaining a signifi-
cant role in foreign and defence policy. And the three experiences of cohabitation have
all been quite dissimilar in some respects, showing how the political resources possessed
by the two major actors affect the division of power between them.
Cohabitation and party politics

By definition, cohabitation arises from the leadership of the parliamentary majority
passing from the president to the prime minister. For the president, this intensifies the
characteristic ambiguity of his role, as the ‘president of all the French’ who is also a
party politician. The partial resolution of this ambiguity in ‘normal’ times, whereby
president and majority alike could be identified with state power and thus, in the
French political tradition, the ‘general interest’, no longer works. To have any chance of
retrieving his fortunes and winning a further presidential term, the president under
cohabitation must be the clear leader of the opposition; yet he must also give promin-
ence to his other role, defined by Article 5, as impartial guarantor of France’s institu-
tions. These two roles were most successfully combined in 1986–88 by Mitterrand.
Enjoying more or less unanimous support within the Socialist Party, he cloaked fiercely
partisan criticisms of the Chirac government in the rhetoric of statesmanlike impartial-
ity, and went into the presidential elections of 1988 enjoying all the advantages of
incumbency with none of its dreary responsibilities. Seven years later, on the other
hand, having largely forfeited his leadership of the Left and with no prospect of a third
term, Mitterrand largely concentrated on his consensual role as head of state. Chirac,
as a cohabitation president from 1997, clearly planned for his own re-election in 2002.
His task was, however, complicated both by the length of the cohabitation period – five
years not two – and by his partial loss of control over the RPR following the 1997
election defeat. Chirac’s struggles to reassert his leadership over his own party, and over
the right-wing opposition generally, chimed badly with his attempts to play the role of
‘president of all the French’; his criticisms of the Jospin government (as when he
referred to legislation for the 35-hour week as a ‘dangerous improvisation’) ran the risk
of appearing both partisan and impotent. Nevertheless, his identification, during his
traditional 14th July interview in 2001, of law and order as the government’s weak suit
adroitly combined the partisan and (at least apparently) statesmanlike roles, helping to
set the agenda for April 2002.
The prime minister’s partisan role in times of cohabitation is scarcely easier. As
leader of the government and of the parliamentary majority, the prime minister must
keep together a diverse coalition within which groups and individuals will demand a
price for loyalty. But as a presidential candidate in waiting (as all three prime ministers
under cohabitation have been) the prime minister may have to engage in pre-campaign
competition with at least one other member of that majority. Both Chirac in 1986–88
and Balladur in 1993–95 hoped to win the presidency on the strength of their govern-
mental record; both faced serious competition from within their own camp (Chirac
from Barre, Balladur from Chirac); both found it physically very difficult to combine
the burdens of the premiership with the rigours of campaigning; neither won the
presidential election following his premiership. The position of Jospin from 1997 was
somewhat easier: there were five years, not two, to establish a governmental record; his
party dominated the government majority; and within that party, he had no rival in
sight. That, however, encouraged complacency on Jospin’s part: assuming (like almost
all observers of the presidential election) that he was guaranteed to face Chirac at the
run-off ballot, he neglected to develop a vigorous partisan strategy for the first round,
aimed at maximising his own vote at the expense of his coalition partners’. This stra-
tegic oversight contributed substantially to Jospin’s elimination from the race on the
night of 21 April 2002.
Cohabitation: oiling the wheels

The political necessity of cohabitation for the two main partners involved has ensured
the development of procedures that contain their mutual hostility and ensure the
relatively undisturbed running of the state machinery. This lends predictability to the
day-to-day processes: Balladur even wrote that he and Mitterrand had ‘a mutual com-
mitment not to take each other by surprise’. Where the president is not involved in
policy-making, for example, he is at least informed of it. The bleus de Matignon – the
records of decisions taken at interministerial meetings – are still sent to the Élysée.
So are copies of the intense diplomatic correspondence, much of it electronic, received
by the Foreign Ministry (an early interruption in these in 1986 led to vigorous
protests by Mitterrand, and a swift resumption of the normal service; by 1993, the
president had taken the necessary technical measures to ensure they reached him
automatically). Certain rituals, too, continue more or less unchanged under cohabit-
ation. The secretary-general of the government visits the Élysée every Monday, when he
meets successively the Élysée secretary-general, the assistant secretary-general and
finally the president, putting the final touches to the agenda for that week’s Council of
Ministers. The president holds weekly meetings with the prime minister on Wednesdays
before the Council of Ministers, as well as with the defence minister on Mondays
and the foreign minister on Tuesdays. Informal contacts function in addition to these
formal routines. Balladur’s directeur de cabinet Nicolas Bazire recalls daily telephone
conversations and generally good relations with the Élysée secretary-general Hubert
Védrine during the second cohabitation. Working relations between their two successors
from 1997 to 2002, Olivier Schrameck in Matignon and Dominique de Villepin in the
Élysée, were comparable, despite an often more politically charged context. Schrameck
has observed that cohabitation depends dangerously on the ability of a small number
of people to act sensibly. So far, though, they have.
Cohabitation: patronage and policy-making

Despite this general commitment to civilised procedures, there is no concealing the fact
that when the parliamentary majority is opposed to the president, a sizeable part of
power within the executive tandem crosses the Seine from the Élysée to Matignon. This
is obvious, in the first place, in the area of appointments. However much presidents
faced with a hostile majority may attempt a show of considering several candidates for
the post of prime minister, they have effectively had no choice, as the appointments of
Chirac in 1986, Balladur in 1993 and Jospin in 1997 show. The president also has no
effective voice in the choice of other ministers: although Chirac claimed, in 1986,
that Mitterrand had vetoed both Jean Lecanuet for the Foreign Affairs portfolio and
François Léotard for Defence, this ‘veto’ was wielded with the connivance of the prime
minister, who was himself lukewarm about both appointments but found it convenient
to blame the president for the two men’s disappointed ambitions. No such controversy,
real or apparent, over the choice of individual ministers troubled the formation of the
Balladur government in 1993 or that of Jospin in 1997. Nor has the president any way
of circumventing the constitution in order to sack his prime minister – except by
dissolving the National Assembly in the hope of a changed majority, something that no
president has yet attempted in time of cohabitation. In negotiating the wide range of
other appointments, in the administration or the public sector, which the two heads of
the executive constitutionally share, the president may have to accept the displacement
of his own men by the prime minister’s choices. Strictly speaking, as Olivier Schrameck
observes, the president can veto appointments but cannot propose his own candidates.
Under the Jospin premiership, these appointments were negotiated between the Élysée
and Matignon, typically as packages involving concessions on either side: the most
difficult cases involved public prosecutors and the security services. Presidents have
also, and usually with success, insisted that suitable alternative employment is provided
for persons displaced for political reasons. It is true that the prime minister’s hand in
appointments during cohabitation is less free than the president’s is in ‘normal’ times.
In particular, the prime minister’s dependence on the parliamentary majority makes it
indispensable to lock in the support of the party leaders within that majority, which can
most obviously be done by giving them ministerial office. The prime minister’s power of
patronage at all levels is nevertheless vastly enhanced by cohabitation.
The president’s policy-making role is also, not surprisingly, much curtailed. This is
clear, in the first place, at the level of procedures. More than ever, the Wednesday
Council of Ministers is a formality: during Chirac’s 1986–88 government, Mitterrand
spent the meetings perusing catalogues of rare books (but never for very long: one of
the ministers timed a meeting at just twelve minutes). Matignon both fixes the agenda
and settles the decisions well in advance. This is done both at a party level (the
breakfasts and lunches with party leaders referred to in Chapter 4) and within the
government as a whole (through regular meetings of the whole government without
the president, to which Jospin added fortnightly government ‘seminars’, lasting from
10 a.m. till 3 p.m., at which wide-ranging discussion was allowed). Underlying the
different techniques is a common concern to establish a collective sense of responsibil-
ity and to lock the president out of the discussions and disputes that typify any policy-
making process. Outside the Council of Ministers, contacts beween individual ministers
and the president are rare and, in principle, all are channelled through Matignon.
Presidents may try to circumvent the rule by inviting ministers on official trips, and
may even get on friendly terms with individual ministers, as was the case between
Mitterrand and Charles Pasqua or, more recently, Chirac and Education Minister
Claude Allègre; but in no case can a president under cohabitation become an alterna-
tive focus of ministerial loyalty, still less a court of appeal against prime ministerial
decisions. The presidency is also largely disconnected from the Matignon machine.
Élysée advisers are kept out of interministerial meetings, except for a minority con-
cerned with foreign and defence policy (and even there, the advisers remain silent).
Contacts between officials pass between the secretary-general of the government and the
prime minister’s directeur de cabinet on the one hand, and the Élysée secretary-general
on the other. In many respects, therefore, Matignon functions freely and independently.
Policy-making under cohabitation is typically segmented – that is, divided by sector
between different parts of the executive. This happens because the actors’ resources
vary between sectors. In the whole vast area of domestic policy – taxation, spending
(with the partial exception of the defence budget), borrowing, private and public
ownership of industry, industrial relations, education, the environment and social
policy – the prime minister is, by and large, the supreme arbiter. Thus the Chirac
government of 1986–88 launched France’s first major programme of privatisations,
tightened immigration legislation, reformed the broadcasting sector (privatising one
station and changing the supervisory body) and restored the two-ballot system for
parliamentary elections after the brief experiment with proportional representation in
1986 – all against the president’s more or less explicit opposition. Balladur continued
broadly the same range of policies. Jospin gave France the 35-hour week, a huge youth
employment package, universal health cover and the Civil Solidarity Pact (PACS), a
lightened version of civil marriage available to homosexual as well as heterosexual
couples, against presidential opposition that varied from the explicit (for the 35-hour
week) to the muted (for the PACS). Such measures corresponded to clear manifesto
commitments which neither president was in a position to block. Indeed, Mitterrand
defined the president’s domestic role as that of a ‘notary’, doing no more than recording
the government’s decisions and promulgating its laws. In practice it is rather more than
that, as Mitterrand’s own record demonstrates: as we have seen, the constitution offers
the president some expedients, especially when a government in a hurry resorts to
special procedures. Mitterrand used the ambiguity of Article 13 to refuse to sign the
delegated primary legislation (ordonnances) which parliament had allowed the Chirac
government to draw up in 1986, on the ground that questions as important as privatisa-
tions and a change in the electoral law required a parliamentary debate (the ordon-
nances were abandoned, but the legislation went through parliament in the most rushed
way imaginable). The following year, Mitterrand refused to call an extraordinary session
of parliament to modify the legal status of the Renault car firm; in 1993, he agreed to
an extraordinary session, but insisted that it should only discuss bills referred to in
manifesto commitments (as prime minister, Jospin only used ordonnances after getting
preliminary clearance from Chirac).
In the general run of domestic affairs, however, the president can do little but make
solemn pronouncements, inside or outside the Council of Ministers, about the dam-
aging character of government policy, or engage in the sort of gesture politics that led
Mitterrand to invite striking railwaymen to his Mediterranean residence in 1986, or
Chirac to refuse (before bowing to Jospin’s insistence) to put reforms to the legal status
of Corsica on the agenda of the Council of Ministers. Such interventions may serve
to highlight policy differences between president and government, but they cannot be
described as participating in policy-making.
Two partial exceptions can be cited to prime ministerial supremacy in domestic policy.
One concerns those domestic policies which are shaped by Europe, and where the presi-
dent’s role as a member of the European Council may come into play. The reform of
European and French agriculture after 1999, in which Chirac successfully fought for the
commercial interests of France’s major cereal farmers, is a case in point. A second
partial exception is represented by the area of institutional reforms, as the president
holds a potential veto over any constitutional amendment (Chapter 4, p. 89). This
institutional position is enhanced, in the case of a right-wing president, by the perman-
ent right-wing majority that has existed in the Senate since 1958, allowing effective
obstruction not only to amendments but also to new ‘organic laws’. These govern such
issues as size of and eligibility for the Senate and the National Assembly, and must be
voted in identical terms by both chambers if they affect the Senate. Presidential
behaviour towards institutional reform projects has been varied. None arose in 1986–88
(other than the reform of the parliamentary electoral system, a matter dealt with by
ordinary law in France). In 1993, Mitterrand was able to effect a modest softening of the
Right’s constitutional amendment concerning asylum seekers. Between 1997 and 2002,
Chirac gave his co-operation to two amendments, one on male–female parity (with
every appearance of willingness), the other on the reduction of the presidential term to
five years (clearly unwillingly, but faced by such broad public and parliamentary sup-
port for the change that it would have been costly to obstruct it). On the other hand, the
Jospin government’s attempts to ban parliamentarians from holding important execu-
tive offices at local level (for example, as city mayors or presidents of regional councils)
fell foul of the Senate’s refusal, while a planned constitutional amendment to remove
the appointment of public prosecutors from the control of the Justice Ministry, agreed
to in principle by Chirac in the summer of 1999, was withdrawn in the face of Senate
opposition – orchestrated, according to Schrameck, from the Élysée.
It is in foreign and defence policy, however, that the constitution guarantees an
important role for the president in all circumstances (as guardian of France’s territorial
integrity, as commander-in-chief and chair of France’s national defence committees, as
negotiator of treaties and accreditor of ambassadors), and politics normally indicate
that he insist on his own primacy in this ‘regalian’ domain of his office. But the
prime minister also has constitutional prerogatives in this area: he is ‘responsible for
national defence’ and leads a government that ‘determines and conducts the policy
of the nation’. There is also a political incentive for the prime minister, as candidate-
in-waiting, to acquire a presidential stature by asserting these prerogatives. One of
Chirac’s major innovations on entering Matignon in 1986 was to create a ‘diplomatic
cell’ responsible to the prime minister: he even called back de Gaulle’s former éminence
grise, Jacques Foccart, as an adviser. In no area, therefore, does cohabitation appear to
contain more potential for conflict. In practice, however, conflict is rare: the traditional
‘reserved domain’ becomes, in Balladur’s expression, a ‘shared domain’, but only
occasionally a disputed one. The reasons are threefold. First, there are clear disincen-
tives to public bickering over foreign and defence policy: loss of credibility abroad and
of respect among opinion at home. For the prime minister, the supreme office to which
he aspires would be diminished by a public victory in this area at the president’s
expense. Second, the measure of consensus over foreign and defence policy in France is
considerable – far greater, for example, than existed in Britain or Germany in the 1980s.
Third, the widespread acceptance, within the defence and foreign affairs policy com-
munities, that ‘France should speak with one voice’ at all times has generated insti-
tutional mechanisms by which initiatives can be co-ordinated and conflicts defused. In
European affairs, for example, the SGAE (Secrétariat Général des Affaires Euro-
péennes, formerly the SGCI) plays a crucial co-ordinating role, and reports both to the
president and to the prime minister. In the area of defence, a comparable role is played
by the General Secretariat for National Defence. As we have already seen, the regular
presidential meetings with both foreign and defence ministers, and the presence of
members of the Élysée staff at interministerial meetings on foreign and defence matters,
constitute exceptions to the general isolation of the presidency from the processes of
government. Perhaps the clearest symbol of continuing co-operation at the top of the
executive, even in times of cohabitation, are the regular conseils interministériels held
in the Élysée, normally just after the formal Council of Ministers. These meetings
typically include the president and prime minister, the foreign, defence, European
affairs, and overseas development ministers, as well as the chief of the defence staff, the
secretary general of the national defence committee, and Élysée advisers. The govern-
ment side of this group normally meets to co-ordinate its positions on the previous
day. But unlike the Council of Ministers, these conseils interministériels are more than
rubber stamps, and offer the chance for real discussion. Issues of urgent military
importance always become the object of such conseils interministériels (during the third
cohabitation, they covered the crises in Iraq, Kosovo, East Timor and Central Africa).
So, frequently, does Europe: every meeting of the European Council has been preceded
by a conseil interministériel.
For the outside world, the most visible sign of cohabitation is the joint appearance of
president and prime minister at major summits, ever since Chirac sought to establish a
precedent by accompanying Mitterrand to the Tokyo G7 meeting in 1986. Jospin, it is
true, preferred (as Balladur did) to leave G7 (or G8) meetings to the president and the
foreign and finance ministers, after taking part in the preparatory meetings to define
the French position. However, Jospin (again like Balladur) was more assiduous in
attending the regular European summits, and the periodic bilateral meetings with
major European partners. More importantly, prime ministers have managed significant
areas of foreign policy. It was Chirac who, by somewhat questionable methods, obtained
the release of the French hostages in Lebanon in April 1988, as well as playing a
significant role (with Foccart’s help) in African policy and in the promotion of France’s
foreign trade. Balladur and his government managed both the European monetary
crisis of summer 1993 (for which they received Mitterrand’s public congratulations)
and the world trade negotiations of the same year, with rather little intervention from
the Élysée. On a day-to-day basis, the means for Matignon to influence policy exist in
the budget (particularly important, of course, in the area of defence, even though the
president’s interest in this area is still regarded as legitimate even in periods of cohabit-
ation), in the European ‘cells’ that now exist in every ministry, in the links between
Matignon and the SGAE, and through personal links to other European and inter-
national leaders. Both president and prime minister have from time to time used
symbolic occasions, such as speeches to the Higher Defence College, to set out their
own doctrines and to assert their own primacy in specific areas. Where conflict has
occurred, it has generally been resolved by the maintenance of the status quo ante. For
example, Balladur was unable to overturn the moratorium on nuclear testing declared
by Mitterrand in 1992 (though the Defence Ministry budget contained provision for
tests, conveniently for Chirac when he entered the Élysée in 1995).
Models of cohabitation
While the constitution clearly determines the contrast, under cohabitation, between the
‘shared domain’ of foreign and defence questions and the great autonomy of prime
minister and government in domestic policy, it only determines the general workings of
cohabitation, not the detail. And indeed, there have been very significant variations
between the three periods of cohabitation according to the circumstances and the
political resources controlled by the two main players.
• The first cohabitation, from 1986 to 1988, was the period in which the president’s
residual power was at its greatest. Mitterrand’s personal popularity, already
recovering by the time of the Left’s defeat in March 1986, was increased dramatic-
ally by his observance of the forms of fair play vis-à-vis Chirac’s new government.
The president was also still in firm control of France’s strongest single party.
By turns falsely emollient and (as when refusing to sign ordonnances) genuinely
combative, he successfully drew benefits both from his own legitimacy as head of
state and from the discomfitures of Chirac and his government, particularly the
student unrest and the strikes of late 1986. Chirac, by contrast, was handicapped
by his majority’s extreme narrowness (just three seats), and by divisions within it
that grew as the presidential election approached. Too many of Chirac’s decisions,
especially in the crisis of late 1986, which did enormous damage to his government,
were defined by the need to hold his coalition together. His personal capacities
within his new role were also questionable. One minister later described Chirac as
‘an amateur playing against a professional’. Mitterrand claimed that his relations
with Chirac were ‘all right, except that he would lie to me so often’. The television
debate between the two men five days before the second round of the presidential
election revealed a mutual hatred that had built up during two years of intense
competition.
• The second cohabitation, from 1993 to 1995, was in many ways the opposite of
the first. The Right’s victory in 1993 had been a landslide, with 497 right-wing
Deputies to 57 Socialists and 23 Communists. Mitterrand was 76 years old, sick
and discredited by revelations about his Vichy past. He had no prospect of a third
term and minimal control over his own party, and was increasingly preoccupied by
merely surviving to the end of his second septennat. Relations between the two
heads of the executive were undisturbed by future electoral competition and gener-
ally good, in the retrospective estimation of both men. As well as handling the 1993
franc crisis and the world trade negotiations, Balladur and his government were
active in African policy, taking the decision to devalue the currency of France’s
former African colonies, which is linked to the franc, and managing – not necessar-
ily to their credit – the Rwandan crisis with Mitterrand. France’s policy on former
Yugoslavia was also jointly managed: Balladur claims to have created the European
contact group, ordered changes in troop deployments and conceived the idea of a
European stability pact. Mitterrand, in short, allowed the prime minister an almost
unprecedented freedom of action, even in the ‘shared domain’, but on two condi-
tions: that his own decisions taken before 1993 were not reversed, and that his
outward prerogatives were respected.
• The third cohabitation, which began in 1997, differed from the other two in being
relatively open-ended, with the possibility of five full years before the elections of
2002. Both protagonists had incentives to play a long game. Jospin wanted as much
time as possible to establish a convincing governmental record. President Chirac,
widely blamed within his own camp for provoking the Right’s defeat with his
dissolution of parliament in April 1997, needed time to rebuild his own credibility
before seeking re-election. This longer timescale discouraged early or open confron-
tation between the two men. Jospin was in any case more concerned with applying
an ambitious programme of domestic reform than with carving out a foreign policy
role (his rare attempts to do so were marked by some memorable reverses, as when
he was chased by stone-throwing Palestinians after an ill-calculated speech at Bir
Zeit university). The Kosovo war in spring 1999 provided the clearest case of
joint management of a crisis: interestingly, the fairly close identity of views in this
area between Chirac and Jospin contrasted with the reservations expressed openly
by several government ministers, notably the Communists. Cohabitation also, on
this third occasion, became almost normalised, having accounted for nine of the
twenty-one years after Mitterrand’s election in 1981. In 1987, most of the French
public had hoped that cohabitation would be a short-term episode in politics: in
1998, by contrast, two-thirds of poll respondents considered cohabitation a positive
experience, and over half hoped it would have lasting effects.
Looking back towards the end of the Jospin government, Olivier Schrameck
observed two advantages to cohabitation: it forced a consensual approach to France’s
relations with the world, and it allowed the presence of checks and balances within a
political system that had too few of them in normal times. These advantages, however,
were outweighed by the drawbacks: the amount of time wasted in both the Élysée and
Matignon on mutually hostile political manoeuvres, whether offensive or defensive, and
the lack of accountability or clear alternatives for voters. There was a risk, argued
Schrameck, that the appearance of consensus on the two sides of the executive and by
extension on the two sides of the mainstream political spectrum would leave dis-
contented voters to seek solace at the political extremes – a forecast amply fulfilled at
the first round of the 2002 presidential election. Having come close to ‘normalisation’,
the experience of cohabitation may now, thanks to the five-year presidential term, be
viewed as of largely historical interest.
The dichotomy of ‘presidential’ government in ‘normal’ times and ‘prime ministerial’
government during cohabitation is an oversimplification, for a number of reasons. Even
when the parliamentary majority supports the president, Matignon has a considerable
role to play. Even under cohabitation, the president retains important powers. More-
over, each of the two major configurations allows for substantial variation. Relations
were at times more strained between Mitterrand and Rocard, for example, than they
were between Mitterrand and Balladur – a state of affairs that prompted Pierre Servent
to observe that ‘cohabitation is merely a tougher version of what happens usually’.
Government, finally, or even the operation of the political executive, cannot be reduced
to the tandem at the summit; there are other ministers than the first one.
Ministers and government

The concentration of power within political executives in the hands of their leaders
has been almost as widely observed as the transfer of power towards executives and
away from parliaments. The ever-increasing need for co-ordination within a complex
government machine, both to achieve ‘joined-up government’ at home and to present a
common position to partners abroad (for example, within Europe), is the most obvious
reason. In France, the change of constitution also furthered this reinforcement of chief
executives at the expense of ministers.
The role of ministers under the Fifth Republic

Under the Fourth Republic, many ministers were appointed for the party support they
would bring with them to the government. They were more or less indispensable
because their resignation would weaken or even bring down governments. As Deputies
or Senators, they retained strong parliamentary and local power bases. And the prime
minister, designated only by the term président du conseil – a curious term, as François
Goguel has pointed out, since the premiers of the Third and Fourth Republics almost
never chaired a Council of Ministers – was often no more than primus inter pares.
Under the Fifth Republic, on the other hand, the president and prime minister enjoy far
greater freedom in their choice of ministers: indeed, as Table 5.1 shows, between a
quarter and a third of most ministries have consisted of ministers without parlia-
mentary office at their first appointment. The emergence of stable parliamentary
majorities ensured that, other than in exceptional circumstances (such as the 1986–88
Chirac premiership), no minister was indispensable because no ministerial resignation
would threaten a government’s survival. The incompatibility between governmental
and parliamentary office, enshrined in Article 23, was intended to cut ministers off
from merely parliamentary politics. And the prime minister was given a clear hier-
archical superiority over his colleagues. In relation to the president and prime minister,
therefore, the constitution appeared to cut ministers down to size.
It also, however, reinforced their powers in other respects, and especially in relation to
Table 5.1 Percentage of ministers without any parliamentary seat on their appointment,
1958–2005
Year Prime minister % Year Prime minister %
1958 Debré 37 1986 Chirac 27

1962 Pompidou 27 1988 Rocard 39
1968 Couve de Murville 3 1991 Cresson 29
1969 Chaban-Delmas 2 1992 Bérégovoy 28
1972 Messmer 6 1993 Balladur 3
1974 Chirac 33 1995 Juppé 14
1976 Barre 29 1997 Jospin 17
1981 Mauroy 23 2002 Raffarin 31
1984 Fabius 31 2005 Villepin 34
Sources: O. Duhamel, Le Pouvoir Politique en France (Paris, Seuil, 1999); Le Monde (for 2002); official site of
the Prime Minister (for 2005).
parliament. Fifth Republic governments have lasted longer than their predecessors.
While this does not always mean greater longevity for individual ministers (especially as
some ministers of the Third and Fourth Republics held the same portfolio through
several governments), on balance there is a greater chance of stability and thus of
achieving something in office. Ministers are much less vulnerable to parliamentary
interpellations, their bills less prone to disappear in the quicksands of parliamentary
committees, their time therefore freer – in principle – for policy rather than politics. And
even if they cannot threaten to bring governments down single-handed, some ministers
are still appointed, and retained, because of their political weight, especially during
periods of cohabitation; the strictures of Article 23 have not, in practice, cut ministers
off from their own political bases; and even those with no parliamentary seat at their
appointment may acquire independent political weight by running for local or national
office.
Profiles of the ministers of the Fifth Republic before 1981 revealed few surprises:
like their counterparts elsewhere in Europe, they were overwhelmingly male, married,
middle-aged, bourgeois (with a sprinkling of aristocrats) and well educated (generally
at the Paris Law Faculty or the Institut d’Études Politiques), and they had good links
with established political, administrative and economic elites. Socialist ministers since
1981 have been very similar in many respects, although they have tended to be less
wealthy, more southern in origin and less connected with the financial elites. The 1990s
saw attempts at the ‘feminisation’ of governments, with the appointment of France’s
first woman prime minister in 1991 (Cresson, a less than successful choice), of a strong
contingent of middle-ranking women ministers in the May 1995 Juppé government
(most were sacked the following autumn) and of nine out of twenty-nine women in the
Jospin ministry, including several of its key members (Martine Aubry at Labour and
Social Affairs, Élisabeth Guigou at Justice and the Green Dominique Voynet at
Regional Planning and Environment). Women represented a quarter of the June 2002
Raffarin government (they included France’s first female defence minister, Michèle
Alliot-Marie) – though the figure for Villepin’s government of 2005, just 16 per cent
women, does not suggest an irresistible tide of feminisation.
Compared with ministers of the Fourth Republic, those of the Fifth have lacked
parliamentary experience. As Table 5.1 shows, some have had no parliamentary experi-
ence at all, and although the late 1990s saw a fall in the number of these ‘technician’
ministers, this does not appear to represent a trend. Just as important, though, is the
number of ministers who, while holding elective office at their appointment, have come
to politics from a civil service background. Of prime ministers since 1981, this has been
true of Fabius, Chirac, Rocard, Balladur, Juppé and Jospin, as well as of leading
ministers like Jacques Delors and Jean-Pierre Chevènement on the Left, and Jacques
Toubon, Dominique de Villepin, Dominique Perben and Hervé Gaymard on the Right.
French ministers tend to view their role more in individual than in team terms. As
prime minister in July 1995, for example, Alain Juppé claimed to have inherited a
‘catastrophic’ financial situation from the previous government – of which, as foreign
minister, he had been a senior member just weeks before. Collective responsibility is
generally no more highly valued within Fifth Republic governments than collective
decision-making. Two other factors reinforce ministerial individualism. One is the fairly
segmented policy structure of the French government, in which individual ministries
(and indeed individual directorates of ministries) are jealous of their independence and,
in some cases (such as Agriculture), the centre of a policy community which regards the
ministry, and the minister, as in some sense its property. The second factor is the varying
loyalty of ministers. A French government outside cohabitation, as well as being a
coalition, is typically composed of president’s people first and prime minister’s people
second, plus, possibly, some from a necessary coalition partner. President’s people are
not invariably bound by any sense of loyalty to the prime minister. During the 1974–76
Chirac government, for example, several giscardien ministers made openly patronising
comments about the prime minister, with the president’s support. It was no secret that
many senior members of the Rocard government were imposed on the unwilling prime
minister by Mitterrand, to whom they would regularly pay (individual) visits at which
they acted practically as informers. Cohabitation did little to reinforce ministerial soli-
darity. Both the Chirac government of 1986–88 and the Balladur government were
divided within weeks of their formation by the preferences of individual ministers for
one or another right-wing candidate for the rapidly approaching presidential elections.
To prevent these loyalties tearing their governments apart, both prime ministers had to
allow ministers considerable freedom to express individual views about government
policy, however negative they might be. As interior minister in 2005, de Villepin thought
aloud, in public, about the need for a ‘bolder, more decisive’ government to take over
from Raffarin’s after the European referendum of 29 May; after his appointment to
succeed Raffarin, he had to cope with the public disagreements of his own interior
minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, over immigration quotas and a range of other subjects.
The variable nature of ministerial power

Under the Fifth Republic, then, it would be misleading to refer to the power of the
government, since, in practice, it exercises no collective power at all. Yet individual
ministers can exercise considerable power, whether as policy-makers or as wielders of
patronage. First, a minister will normally have the primary responsibility for drafting
his ministry’s legislation. Secondly, ministers usually control the implementation of
laws, especially the décrets d’application without which so much legislation remains a
dead letter. Third, they may have significant powers of patronage, putting forward
names for directeurs in their ministries, or for the holders of important posts both in the
provinces (for example the recteurs of the different académies of the state education
system) and in organisations associated with ministries (such as France’s remaining
nationalised firms). They may also have subsidies to distribute in the sectors of their
concern. None of these powers may be exercised in complete independence. President,
prime minister, their staffs, or other ministries intervene in the course of interministe-
rial meetings over bills or even decrees; the proportion of a budget which is not already
allocated to ongoing programmes is usually minute; appointments to the most senior
posts are usually the object of bitter negotiations with other parties, including Matignon
and the Élysée. Nevertheless, ministerial office offers opportunities to those able to seize
them. Their success in doing so depends upon the interplay of several factors:
• The degree of interest displayed by the president or the prime minister in the affairs of
the ministry. The existence of a ‘reserved domain’, or indeed the ‘shared domain’
under cohabitation, ensures that foreign and defence ministers are rarely policy-
makers in their own right. Even Couve de Murville suffered the humiliation of
assuring the British of the imminent success of their application to enter Europe
on a Friday, only to hear de Gaulle veto British entry on the Monday. Presidents
have intervened to keep Latin in school syllabuses (Pompidou) and to stop urban
road plans (Giscard). But there have also been important cases when ministers
have enjoyed considerable freedom in working to their brief. Peyrefitte’s penal
reform under Giscard and Barre and Defferre’s decentralisation legislation under
Mitterrand and Mauroy, and the 35-hour week managed by Aubry under Jospin
were among such instances.
• The support of the president or prime minister. Some ministers have clearly enjoyed
a special relationship with the president. Both de Gaulle and Mitterrand had a
faible for their ministers of culture, respectively André Malraux (who initiated the
large-scale clean-up of France’s ancient façades, and created a network of Maisons
de la Culture to enlighten what was then the cultural desert of provincial France)
and Jack Lang (under whom the culture budget doubled as a share of national
income, the new money being spread between small, neighbourhood-scale projects
and Mitterrand’s grands chantiers). Edgar Faure’s education reforms of 1968 and
Simone Veil’s legalisation of abortion in 1974 would never have passed the right-
wing majorities of the day without support from the top. Justice Minister Badinter
enjoyed the Élysée’s full support in his abolition of the death penalty. Chirac gave
full backing, and considerable freedom, to Balladur as his minister for the economy
and finance between 1986 and 1988, much to the chagrin of Balladur’s many
enemies. As prime minister, Balladur established especially close relations with the
youthful Nicolas Sarkozy, who enjoyed a key position as both budget minister and
government spokesman. The importance of personal links should not be over-
estimated, however. Jospin’s closeness to Interior Minister Jean-Pierre Chevène-
ment, Finance Minister Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Education Minister Claude
Allègre did not prevent the resignation of all three men before 2002 – Strauss-Kahn
over his (undeserved) implication in a financial scandal in 1999, Allègre as a
result of opposition from education unions in 2000 and Chevènement over a
disagreement on Corsican policy later the same year.
• The minister’s conception of his/her role. Some ministers view their role as essen-
tially technical and managerial, and become the faithful and faceless executors
of the presidential will. In foreign affairs they have rarely had much choice, and
the job has tended to suit the self-effacing professional diplomat more than the
rising politician (in this de Villepin was an exception, as a flamboyant professional
diplomat, whose speech at the United Nations in 2003 gave eloquent expression to
Chirac’s opposition to the invasion of Iraq). Other ministers, however, have left
reputations as able and active reformers, and a determined and skilful minister
with an ambitious programme can easily establish a reputation. Such cases include
Pisani at Agriculture or Faure at Education under de Gaulle, Defferre at Interior,
Badinter at Justice and Fabius at Industry under Mitterrand. Under Jospin, Aubry
came to Labour and Social Affairs, and Guigou to Justice, with ambitious reform
plans as well as the prime minister’s backing.
• The political weight of the minister. Giscard’s influence as minister of finance arose
not only from the fact that he did a technically brilliant job in a key ministry for a
long time (four years under de Gaulle and five under Pompidou), but because of his
leadership of the Républicains Indépendants, a small but important group in the
governing coalition. Interior ministers like Raymond Marcellin, Gaston Defferre,
Charles Pasqua, or Jean-Pierre Chevènement have also been political heavyweights.
The case of Nicolas Sarkozy after May 2005 is unique: no other government minister
has combined this post with the leadership of the principal majority party exer-
cised in his own right, with the declared intention of running for the presidency in
less than two years. By contrast, non-parliamentary ministers lack this sort of
political punch, and have often come to grief as a result: Claude Allègre under
Jospin, or Francis Mer and Luc Ferry under Raffarin, all lost office in part because
of their lack of political networks and skills. Survivors among non-parliamentary
ministers tend to overcome an initial reluctance and seek election.
• The minister’s tenure of office. Successful policy-making often goes with ministerial
longevity. Here too, Malraux and Lang were fortunate, each occupying the Culture
Ministry for ten years (Malraux from 1959 to 1969, Lang from 1981 to 1993 with a
break in 1986–88). Marcellin left an indelibly nasty impression in his five years at
Interior under de Gaulle and Pompidou, while Bérégovoy managed, during a total
of six years at Finance, to become a symbol to the money markets of the Socialists’
conversion to financial orthodoxy. Rather less, on the other hand, is remembered
of the four industry ministers from the short (though crucial) 1981–83 period, or of
the four women – Corinne Lepage, Françoise de Panafieu, Élisabeth Hubert and
Colette Codaccioni – appointed by Juppé in May 1995 and brutally ejected by
him the following November. And the considerable continuity at Finance of the
Mitterrand presidency’s first eleven years (with just three ministers, Delors, Balladur
and Bérégovoy) has given way to much less stable times since 1992, with eleven
ministers in thirteen years. Of these, several (Michel Sapin, Edmond Alphandéry,
Alain Madelin and Jean Arthuis) made a limited impression and one (Hervé
Gaymard) lasted only three months in post; by way of comparison, the British
and German finance ministers in early 2005 had been in their jobs for eight and
six years respectively.
• The prestige and power of the ministry. Certain ministries, notably Interior, Foreign
Affairs, and Justice, enjoy a very high reputation and confer upon their political
head an undeniable prestige. Finance is in a class of its own, the power of the
purse being critical in all routine affairs at least. Other ministries suffer from a
weak or non-existent administration, low budgets, an ill-defined scope of action
and the scepticism of other ministries. Urban Affairs and the Environment both
represent pressing policy concerns; neither ministry has been able to attract the
resources and clout that correspond, or indeed to establish a strong institutional
identity. In between are well-established ministries with big budgets, graveyards
for some politicians but springboards for others: Agriculture, for example (occu-
pied by Chirac from 1972 to 1974), or Education (a good ministry for Jospin in
the Rocard and Cresson governments, a much less happy one for Jospin’s protégé
Claude Allègre a decade later or for Luc Ferry or François Fillon in the Raffarin
governments).
• The strength of the ministry’s administrative services. The administrative services of
some big ministries are strong and resistant to changes they dislike. Finance, for
example, succeeded for forty years in evading requests from ministers for a simple
list of the ministry’s senior officials with their salaries and bonuses. Agriculture and
Education are both heavily infiltrated by the powerful unions in their sector (which
helped to explain the removal of Cresson from Agriculture in 1983 and of Allègre
from Education in 2000). Such administrations may be powerful opponents of
ministerial plans for reform; it requires a minister with ambition, ruthlessness and
longevity to impose policies upon these ministries. On the other hand, administra-
tions may be equally strong allies in defending the ministry’s long-term interests.
One key to Juppé’s largely successful record as foreign minister from 1993 to 1995
was his ability to establish good working relations with directors at the Quai
d’Orsay through weekly meetings; these helped him undertake significant adminis-
trative reform there. At the other extreme, the rudimentary administrative services
accorded to the Environment Ministry in over three decades of its existence have
been a handicap to any minister seeking to make a serious impact in this area.
• The efficiency of the ministerial cabinet. A well-organised, determined and sensitive
cabinet may be a powerful support for a minister, in achieving co-ordination within
the ministry’s services, in representing the minister effectively in interministerial
meetings, and in building and maintaining networks with other ministries and with
interest groups. Successful ministers usually have strong cabinets: another incentive
to political experience and ministerial longevity.
Institutionalised tensions and the elusive goal of co-ordination

Early accounts tended to characterise the Fifth Republic as a ‘monocratic’ regime
characterised by overwhelming presidential power. This description contained an
element of truth compared both with preceding French Republics and other democra-
cies. Security in office, significant constitutional powers, plus party and parliamentary
support, afford French presidents outside periods of cohabitation an enviable freedom
to intervene at all levels of policy-making. They have also contributed to executive
crimes. The blowing-up of the Greenpeace vessel Rainbow Warrior in Auckland har-
bour, New Zealand, in 1985 testifies at the very least to failures in co-ordination
between president, prime minister, the defence minister, and the secret services and
defence staff. The behaviour of an ‘anti-terrorism’ unit in the Élysée, which undertook
widespread illegal telephone taps (always knowingly denied by Mitterrand) in order to
protect not France from terrorism but the president from political embarrassment,
reflected the culture of impunity associated with great power.
But the ‘monocratic’ accounts always underestimated the degree to which that power
depended on a favourable parliamentary majority, as cohabitation was to reveal. That
the voters thrice refused to supply an incumbent president with a supportive parlia-
mentary majority weakened the presidency both temporarily, for obvious reasons,
but on a more lasting basis by helping to desacralise the president. The republican
monarchy was welcome in the context of 1958; nearly five decades later, the spectre of a
‘return to the Fourth Republic’ has lost much of its power to frighten.
Despite the improbability of any recurrence of cohabitation since the shortening of
the presidential term to five years from 2002, few would be ready to bet on a return of
the republican monarchy in all its Gaullist splendour. In the first place, the president’s
‘reserved domain’ is increasingly subject to constraint: globalisation and European
integration have both limited France’s ability to pursue independent economic, indus-
trial, fiscal, trading and monetary policies in the manner of de Gaulle (see Chapter 1).
The fact that the European Council enhances the policy-making role of heads of state
and government within the EU, does not, on balance, compensate for this. Within
France, a range of developments, some very actively shaped by the executive (decentral-
isation, and the shrinkage of the public sector and of the opportunities for patronage
that go with it) and some less so (the increased activism of the Constitutional Council)
have conspired to limit the untrammelled exercise of power from the top downwards.
To some extent these are developments that affect the whole executive, prime minister
as well as president. Nevertheless, just as the president’s power under the Fifth Republic
has been more visible than that of the prime minister, so has its diminution. The voters,
too, have helped limit presidential power, and not only by inducing cohabitation. They
appreciate presidents less: Giscard in 1976 and 1980, Mitterrand in 1984 and 1993, and
Chirac in late 1995 and mid-2005 all reached depths of unpopularity unknown to de
Gaulle or Pompidou; the overall decline is clear from Table 4.1. The referendum,
once the ultimate tool of heroic presidential leadership, was transformed by the voters,
successively, into de Gaulle’s nemesis in 1969, a damp squib in 1972 and 1988, a near-
disaster for Mitterrand and for Europe in 1992, a collective snub to the whole political
class in 2000. Though Chirac successfully obtained a constitutional amendment to
extend the area of application of referendums, he eschewed their use during his first five
years in office, only bringing the issue of the five-year term before the people after
outside pressure. Practically in a class of its own in the series was the 2005 referendum
on the European constitutional treaty. This had three main purposes: to rally French
voters behind a European project, to demonstrate presidential leadership and to split
the Socialist opposition. It achieved the third aim so well that it produced a no vote of
nearly 55 per cent, wrecking the constitutional treaty project and doing possibly fatal
damage to Chirac’s credibility as president. It seems unlikely that future presidents will
rush to use a constitutional tool that, in practice, only worked to its user’s benefit in the
early de Gaulle presidency.
This record gave rise to the (exaggerated) comment by Georgette Elgey and Jean-
Marie Colombani in 1998, that ‘the president is becoming one actor among others’. But
other available models of executive power, as Robert Elgie observes, give partial and
therefore inadequate accounts of the French case. The ‘segmented’ government model,
under which president and prime minister each govern distinct, complementary areas
of policy, fails to take account of the president’s ability to intervene, outside periods of
cohabitation, in any sector. The model of ‘executive co-operation’ between president
and prime minister leaves out the often fierce political competition between the two,
particularly during cohabitation. ‘Prime ministerial government’ is at best a partial
account of cohabitation, and no account at all of the Fifth Republic at other times. The
‘ministerial’ government model, emphasising the control of individual ministers over
their departments, will not do for a system in which this control is very uneven indeed.
‘Bureaucratic co-ordination’, finally, certainly exists within and between ministries, but
is deeply imperfect (with, for example, a culture of information-sharing that is patchy at
best), susceptible to intervention by politicians, and thus quite inadequate as a general
account of the French case.
It is more convincing to characterise executive power in France as a system of
institutionalised tension, a system encouraged, either actively or tacitly, by successive
presidents and prime ministers. This tension, which may be amplified or muted by
individuals in what remains a highly personalised system of government from the
president down, manifests itself at a minimum of five different levels:
• Between the president and the prime minister. Even outside cohabitation there
have been well-publicised differences between the two heads of the French execu-
tive. Debré had deep reservations – expressed privately – both about de Gaulle’s
Algerian policy and about his somewhat cavalier interpretation of the constitution.
Pompidou dragged his feet over de Gaulle’s dreams of ‘participation’, threatened
resignation in order to save a general involved in the 1961 army putsch in Algeria
from execution and committed the ultimate crime of lèse-majesté by appearing as a
viable successor. As president, he clashed with Chaban-Delmas over the form and,
in part, the content of the ‘New Society’ programme, and accused Chaban of
neglecting the Gaullists’ conservative core in a bid for Centre-Left votes. Chirac, as
prime minister after 1974, reproached Giscard with the same strategic error,
engaged in a bitter struggle with the president over the leadership of the majority in
general and the Gaullist party in particular, and finally became the only prime
minister to date to resign of his own accord, stating publicly that he had not been
given the means to do his job properly. Mitterrand’s relations with Rocard were
notoriously bad: the president (again) reproached his prime minister for neglecting
core voters, in this case left-wing ones, in favour of centrist ones, and for cultivating
his own popularity as a présidentiable at the expense of tough decisions, while
the prime minister resented the president’s habit of overturning government
decisions after appeals by individual ministers over Rocard’s head. Perhaps the
most harmonious relations between the two heads of the executive were between
Chirac and Juppé, but this did Chirac little good as Juppé was widely detested
within his own majority.
• Between the prime minister and the ministers. The history of the Fifth Republic
has also been punctuated by unseemly squabbles between the prime minister and
his ‘subordinates’, especially when the latter have been not his nominees but the
president’s. Tense relations between Pompidou and Giscard during de Gaulle’s first
term, for example, arose, characteristically, from multiple causes: ‘turf’ (the respect-
ive roles of finance minister and prime minister in the control of economic policy),
policy (Pompidou found Giscard’s economic policy too restrictive) and personal
rivalry (both men hoped to succeed de Gaulle). Both Chirac in 1974–76 and
Rocard in 1988–91 had reason to complain that they were being bypassed and
indeed undermined by ministers who enjoyed the confidence of the president.
Juppé sacked Alain Madelin, his independent-minded finance minister, three
months after appointing him, although Madelin was an important figure in
Chirac’s majority coalition. With his other ministers, Juppé’s relations were simple:
he held all of them in contempt, and said so publicly. Most recently, Nicolas
Sarkozy, successively interior minister and finance minister between 2002 and 2004,
used his energy and his talent for publicity, as well as his popularity within the
right-wing coalition and the wider civil society, to promote his own stature as a
présidentiable, within but not quite of the Raffarin government. This, unsurpris-
ingly, was the source of constant tensions with his fellow ministers, especially the
first among them. The same pattern seemed likely to intensify after Sarkozy’s
reappointment in the de Villepin government, in a period that would be dominated
by the approach of the 2007 presidential elections.
• Between the prime minister’s cabinet and the ministers. There is always institutional
tension between ministers and members of the Matignon cabinet who follow
their work. Philippe Séguin once claimed that his main achievement as Chirac’s
social affairs minister from 1986 to 1988 was having blocked the initiatives of
Marie-Hélène Bérard, the right-wing Matignon adviser for his sector. Jean-Pierre
Chevènement’s disagreements with members of Jospin’s cabinet were one reason
for his resignation.
• Between individual ministers. Ministerial rivalries develop even as a government is
being formed: the precise attributions of ministries, the junior posts and even in
some cases the premises that go with them, are the object of hard-fought battles.
As has been underlined, too, there is no tradition of collective solidarity and
responsibility within Fifth Republic governments. Clear disagreements with govern-
ment policy do, it is true, sometimes lead to resignations: de Gaulle’s Algerian and
European policies provoked the early departure of several ministers, Rocard
resigned from the Agriculture Ministry over Mitterrand’s reform of the electoral
system; Chevènement left the Industry Ministry in opposition to Mitterrand’s
economic policy in 1983, the Defence Ministry through opposition to the Gulf war
in 1991 and the Interior to protest against Jospin’s Corsican policy in 2000.
A handful of ministers have also been dismissed, whether because of verbal
imprudences (Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber over nuclear testing in 1974, Alain
Madelin over civil service numbers and employment conditions in 1995) or because
they faced criminal charges (Bernard Tapie in 1992, Alain Carignon, Gérard
Longuet and Michel Roussin in 1994, Dominique Strauss-Kahn in 1999). In gen-
eral, though, Chevènement’s dictum that ‘a minister shuts up or resigns’ has been
but imperfectly applied, and ministers have often felt free to stay in government and
talk out of turn. Some disputes between ministries run on regardless of who is
minister, because they reflect structural competition for the leading role in specific
policy areas. The many clashes between Justice and Interior have involved issues as
various as the seizure of La gangrène, a book depicting the spread of torture in
Algeria (1959); the degree of autonomy allowed to judges (1975); identity controls
(1982); and the reform of the justice system (1999). Under the post-1981 Socialist
governments, some disputes reflected the political heterogeneity of a government
ranging from Communists to mild Social Democrats. They included social security
coverage, the financial extent of nationalisations (51 per cent was seen as adequate
by moderates, but nothing less than 100 per cent would do for hardliners), the
successive wage and price freezes, the de-indexation of public servants’ pay, and the
issue of France remaining in the European Monetary System in 1983. Divisions
within Chirac’s 1986–88 government were accentuated by rivalries between
présidentiables and their respective supporters. Séguin and Balladur clashed over
the long-running problem of the social security deficit; Albin Chalandon, the just-
ice minister, and Michèle Barzach, the health minister, over the criminalisation of
drug addiction. François Léotard, the culture minister, referred to his RPR
colleagues as ‘soldier-monks’, while Michel Noir, the foreign trade minister, said it
would be better for the Right to lose the elections than to lose its soul through any
form of deal with the far Right. Perhaps the most spectacular display of internal
governmental disagreement was over the handling of the students’ revolt of
November–December 1986: the open demand by Léotard and Madelin that the
university reform bill that had provoked the demonstrations be withdrawn left
Chirac ‘foaming at the mouth’ (according to Léotard’s account) but unable to sack
either minister for fear of bringing down the entire government.
• Between ministers and their junior ministers, and within ministries more generally. A
further complication in the debacle over the 1986 university reform arose from the
notoriously poor relations between Education Minister René Monory, his junior
minister for universities, Alain Devaquet (who ultimately had to resign), and the
Matignon adviser on universities, Yves Durand. The problem was partly a struc-
tural one: similarly acrimonious relations had prevailed a decade earlier between
Education Minister René Haby and his junior minister for universities, Alice
Saunier-Seïté. More broadly, difficulties often arise from the fact that ministers and
their juniors are not necessarily chosen for their capacity to work in harmony;
indeed, many junior ministers are appointed in order to ‘mark’ a minister who,
whether because of different party origins or other reasons, is distrusted by the
president or the prime minister. Personal relations may also come into play: as
finance minister in the 1986–88 Chirac government, Balladur humiliated both of
his junior ministers, Juppé and Noir, in ways that were minor but damaging to their
working relationship. The Balladur–Juppé relationship was to some extent
smoothed over by close collaboration between their respective cabinets, which
allowed the privatisation programme to proceed relatively smoothly. Just as often,
however, conflicts at ministerial level may be reproduced or compounded by
long-running bureaucratic feuds, as competition for scarce resources takes place
not only between ministries but between directions within the same ministry.
As the republican monarchy has declined, so the other tensions within France’s
executive, though present from the start, have become more visible and thence more
damaging both to the image of the governing team and to effective co-ordination in
policy-making. The outcome can make the policy outcomes of the Fourth Republic
appear as a model of stability: for example, according to one study undertaken by the
École Nationale d’Administration, French employment policy ‘changed doctrine each
year for the last ten to fifteen years’. More generally, as Hayward and Wright have
observed, policy co-ordination tends to focus on routine conflict avoidance more than
on strategic planning; there is, in general, too little time, too little political will, too
few established and effective instruments to overcome entrenched conflicts and long-
established habits. Perhaps the most sustained effort to overcome these tensions was
made under the Jospin premiership from 1997. Jospin was in no position to lessen
tensions between president and prime minister, embarking as he was on a long period
of cohabitation with a president who would rather have kept Juppé. But with his
directeur de cabinet Olivier Schrameck, Jospin did attempt to limit the impact of the last
three sets of tensions – between prime minister and ministers, between ministers, and
between ministers and their juniors. Their remedies were threefold: the appointment
to key ministries of political heavyweights (Chevènement to the Interior, Strauss-Kahn
to Finance and Economic Affairs, Guigou to Justice, Aubry to Social Affairs); the
delegation to them of considerable autonomy and thus relative immunity from inter-
ventions by Matignon advisers, freeing the prime minister from much involvement in
policy detail; and the use of fortnightly government meetings (including, on alternate
occasions, junior ministers) to ensure co-ordination and, crucially, to air and resolve
disputes. It was a formula that resembled, in outline, a traditional view of cabinet
government; applied, albeit imperfectly, it helped reinforce the cohesion of Jospin’s
disparate ministerial team. Government cohesion was, however, also helped by com-
mon opposition to President Chirac at a time of cohabitation, by the government’s
popularity under favourable economic conditions and by Jospin’s own unchallenged
status as its leader and political ‘locomotive’. Its success, in retrospect, appears brief,
and dependent on personalities: by March 2001, with Strauss-Kahn, Chevènement and
Aubry all out of government for diverse political reasons, the bases of the Jospin
formula looked much less solid.
More generally, as Hayward and Wright’s study observes, policy co-ordination
was never as effective as it looked in the early Fifth Republic, and has become less so
since. In the first place, they argue, France’s highly centralised administration was
increasingly Balkanised as it took on the full range of post-war peacetime activities
during the trente glorieuses, with some crucial policy areas, such as the social security
system, escaping it partially or totally. The pyramidal model of government idealised in
France since Napoleon and beyond was ill-adapted to these complexities, to which
duplication and overlapping, however untidy, were intrinsic and even healthy as failsafe
mechanisms.
Secondly, policy co-ordination has become more difficult since the de Gaulle
presidency, not only because of the type of political factor outlined above, but also for
reasons intrinsic to the nature of policy-making in a contemporary West European
state. Some of these have been considered in Chapter 1. The policy agenda has become
more complex, both because of the addition to it of new priorities (the environment,
food standards, and the curtailment of racial and sexual discrimination, to name three)
and because of a growing awareness of the interrelatedness of different policy issues.
That ought to encourage more co-ordination, but at the same time a number of devel-
opments have made decision-making more diffuse and a traditional state-centred policy
approach, which came readily to the (many) Jacobins among France’s politicians
and civil servants, harder to sustain. Privatisations coupled with globalisation and
Europeanisation have generated new independent regulatory agencies, not only nation-
ally but also at the European and international levels. Meanwhile many of the traditional
props of an older style of government, such as political parties, have become weaker as
relays of public opinion, while traditional networks and interest groups have mutated
or (in some cases) collapsed under the impact of multinationalisation and competition
from other activists; and the cracks in the traditional structures of the state have
become harder to paper over as French journalism has become less deferential and
more investigative.
It is time to move beyond France’s political executive to the world that surrounds it:
the other branches of government and France’s parties, interest groups, and bureau-
cracy. We begin with the deeply flawed but still indispensable forum for connecting
government to the wider civil society, the French parliament.
Further reading
See also list for Chapter 4.
Antoni, P. and Antoni, J.-D., Les ministres de la Ve République, Paris, Presses Universitaires de
France, 1976.
Balladur, E., Deux ans à Matignon, Paris, Plon, 1996.
Cohen, S., La monarchie nucléaire, Paris, Hachette, 1986.
Cohendet, M.-A., La cohabitation: leçons d’une expérience, Paris, Presses Universitaires de
France, 1993.
Elgey, G. and Colombani, J.-M., La Ve République, ou la République des phratries, Paris, Fayard,
1999.
Favier, P. and Martin-Rolland, M., La Décennie Mitterrand, 4 vols, Paris, Seuil, 1990–99.
Foccart, J., Journal de l’Élysée, 3 vols, Paris, Fayard/Jeune Afrique, 1997–2000.
Giroud, F., La comédie du pouvoir, Paris, Fayard, 1977.
Hayward, J. and Wright, V., Governing from the Centre: Core Executive Coordination in France,
Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002.
Institut Charles de Gaulle, Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, De Gaulle et ses Premiers
ministres, Paris, Plon, 1990.
Nay, C., La double méprise, Paris, Grasset, 1980.
Peyrefitte, A., C’était de Gaulle, 3 vols, Paris, Fayard/de Fallois, 1994–2000.
Pfister, T., La vie quotidienne à Matignon au temps de l’Union de la gauche, Paris, Hachette, 1985.
Pfister, T., Dans les coulisses de pouvoir: la comédie de la cohabitation, Paris, Albin Michel, 1987.
Pompidou, G., Pour rétablir une vérité, Paris, Flammarion, 1982.
Prate, A., Les batailles économiques du Général de Gaulle, Paris, Plon, 1978.
Schneider, R., La haine tranquille, Paris, Seuil, 1992.
Schrameck, O., Matignon rive gauche, 1997–2001, Paris, Seuil, 2001.
Servent, P., Œdipe à Matignon: le complexe du premier ministre, Paris, Balland, 1988.
Tuppen, J., Chirac’s France, Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1991.
6 The French parliament
Decline – and resurgence?
The constitutional assault upon parliament: the provisions 142

The decline of parliament: factors unconstitutional and extra-constitutional 149
A resurgent parliament? 155
Further reading 166
One of the most striking characteristics of the Fifth Republic is the relatively weak
position of parliament. Indeed, it has been argued that from its all-powerful position
during the Third and Fourth Republics parliament has now been relegated to a position
of total impotence. Such a view is misleading. In the first place, the decline of the
French parliament dates not from 1958 but from some four decades earlier. Secondly,
while the decline of the French parliament cannot be denied, its weakness should not be
exaggerated: in some respects the ‘decline’ resembles a convergence towards a more
general European model of a parliament neither supreme nor insignificant. Third,
weakness at the start of the Fifth Republic has since been followed by a partial recovery
of parliamentary influence as a result both of institutional reforms and of changing
political practice.
Most historians distinguish four phases in the evolution of parliamentary power in
France. The first, starting with the restoration of the monarchy in 1814, was marked
by the sporadic but apparently inexorable extension of parliamentary power, culminat-
ing in the establishment of the ‘republican Republic’ after the elections of October
1877. During the second phase, from 1877 to 1914, parliamentary supremacy was
entrenched, becoming a core component of the republican tradition. The government
was reduced to the role of a mere committee whose main task was to implement
parliament’s decisions. Within parliament, individual members exercised great power:
weak party discipline allowed them to create havoc with governmental proposals,
and to badger unstable governments into budgetary concessions in favour of their
constituencies. Parliamentary initiatives delayed the adoption of the budget and all too
often compromised the balance between revenue and spending. It was small wonder
that one critic (Gaston Jèze) could describe the parliamentary assemblies as ‘wasteful,
incompetent and irresponsible’.
The third period, 1918 to 1958, was characterised by parliament’s progressive
decline. The impact of foreign and colonial wars, of military occupation, of the
growing weight and technicality of legislation and the rise of well-organised pressure
groups all had their impact, reducing parliament’s capacity to initiate or effectively
control legislation. After World War I, important policies in foreign affairs, defence and
economic planning often completely escaped parliamentary attention. This develop-
ment was facilitated on the specific occasions, from 1924 onwards, when parliament
formally granted the government powers to legislate by decree in certain areas. But
while conceding a government’s right to legislate in its place, parliament still questioned
the political responsibility of the executive. Powerful, specialised parliamentary com-
mittees harassed ministers and earned a status as alternative governments. And none of
the well-intentioned constitutional devices introduced in 1946 by the makers of the
Fourth Republic were able to break the habits of generations.
While steadily abdicating many of their positive policy-making capacities, the par-
liaments of 1918–58 retained all their power to question and obstruct the workings of
government, for parliamentary sovereignty continued to be recognised in important
ways. Parliament had complete control of its own rules and agenda; it had the
exclusive right (though it often chose to delegate it) to legislate in any domain; it
enjoyed a near-monopoly on supplying ministers; its members enjoyed power and
prestige at the local level. Parliament frequently paralysed governments by denying
them its support. In other words, parliament was a declining yet ultimately all-
powerful body, while governments, though powerful in certain circumstances, were
generally short-lived. In these conditions neither parliament nor the government had
real power.
The fourth and final phase in the development of the French parliament opened in
1958 as parliament was first put in a subordinate place by the framers of the new
constitution and then kept there by the political practice of successive Gaullist-led
governments. Curiously, Michel Debré called the Fifth Republic, of which he was
the prime architect, a ‘parliamentary régime’. He had in mind a ‘true’ parliamentary
régime, on British lines, in which parliament could control but not destroy or supplant
executive power. In Britain, party discipline supplies the restraint necessary to this
balanced state of affairs. As a Gaullist, Debré believed that to be impossible in
a country like France, where deep social divisions were reflected in an unstable multi-
party system. Hence the notion of rationalised parliamentarianism: the idea that new
institutional arrangements should compensate for the traditional absence of a parlia-
mentary majority. The Fifth Republic is a parliamentary régime insofar as any govern-
ment needs the goodwill of the National Assembly, the lower house, to survive. But its
constitution also contains a battery of provisions designed to reduce the parliament’s
powers, prerogatives and prestige.
Since 1958, parliament has been both more and less subordinate than Debré envis-
aged. It has been more so because the unexpected appearance of a stable majority
reinforced his constitutional restrictions. It has been less subordinate, especially since
the 1970s, because a reaction in favour of parliament has enabled it to recover a little,
though far from all, of its old institutional power and political assertiveness.
The constitutional assault upon parliament: the provisions

Among the least ambiguous passages in the constitution of the Fifth Republic are those
that limit the powers of parliament. Most, though not all, have been activated by the
executive.
The French parliament 143
The separation of powers
The framers of the new constitution sought a rigorous separation of executive and
legislative powers. This separation was inspired by de Gaulle himself, and included
in the constitution (Article 23) against Debré’s advice. De Gaulle had always insisted
that ‘executive power should not emanate from parliament . . . or the result will be a
confusion of powers which will reduce the government to a mere conglomeration of
delegations’. The separation of legislature and executive has been underlined by the
regular appointment of ministers from outside parliament: over a third of the total in
some governments (see Table 5.1). Article 23, moreover, requires any parliamentarian
who becomes a minister to relinquish his or her seat, which passes to a replacement
(suppléant), who has been elected, along with full parliamentarians, at the legislative
elections. This ‘incompatibility rule’, it was thought, would curb the appetites of those
parliamentarians, common under earlier republics, who overthrew governments in the
hope of winning office for themselves (they would now have to sacrifice their parlia-
mentary seats for a portfolio); it would also make temperamental ministers think twice
before leaving the government (they could face a long wait, possibly till the next general
election, before returning to parliament).
The practice of Article 23 has never, it is true, worked as intended. De Gaulle himself
positively encouraged his extra-parliamentary ministers to enhance their legitimacy by
standing at parliamentary elections in 1967 and 1968. Only his culture minister, André
Malraux, resisted; many of the others needed little prompting, since they saw the
attractions of a secure constituency, and delegated members of their cabinets to culti-
vate support on the ground. Moreover, newly resigned ministers wishing to return to
parliament easily found ways to persuade their suppléants to stand down and provoke
by-elections. On the other hand, Article 23 did break parliament’s stranglehold over
ministerial recruitment. Prime ministers Pompidou (1962–68) and Barre (1976–81) had
never been elected to parliament when they were appointed. The same is true of de
Villepin, appointed on 31 May 2005. Both Couve de Murville and Messmer had served
for several years, as foreign and defence minister respectively, before they first stood for
the National Assembly (unsuccessfully on the first occasion, in both cases). No longer is
a parliamentary apprenticeship a necessary preliminary to winning a portfolio; a suc-
cessful period in a ministerial cabinet may do just as well, or better; nearly half the
ministers appointed between 1958 and 1974 had been in a cabinet. Even among those
who held parliamentary seats before being appointed to government, the cabinet route
is common. Jacques Chirac offers an excellent illustration of this: his conquest of the
Ussel seat in Corrèze, though striking, was a mere staging-post between five years in
Pompidou’s cabinet at Matignon (1962–67) and nine years of continuous ministerial
and prime ministerial office (1967–76).
Restrictions on parliamentary sessions

The new constitution drastically reduced the time parliament was allowed to meet.
Previous republican constitutions guaranteed a minimum period for parliamentary ses-
sions; that of the Fifth Republic imposed a maximum period: two ordinary sessions,
one in autumn and one in spring, for a total of no more than five and a half months
(Fourth Republic parliaments had sat for ten months on average). Special sessions were
limited to a fortnight, and only to debate a specific agenda. When a majority of the
National Assembly demanded a special session in 1960, de Gaulle turned them down,
in violation of his own constitution according to most jurists. A similar request was
accepted by Giscard in 1979, but in terms that underlined that he could have refused.
Usually, special sessions are called by governments unable to find time in ordinary
sessions to enact their programme. Socialist administrations have been particularly
prone to this: there were nineteen special sessions from 1958 to 1980, but seventeen
under the Mauroy and Fabius governments between 1981 and 1986, and thirteen under
Rocard, Cresson and Bérégovoy between 1988 and 1993.
The limitation on parliament’s law-making powers

The new constitution severely curtailed parliament’s monopoly on law-making. Article
34 defines the area of law (i.e. legislation which has to be passed by parliament) in
two ways.
• Parliament determines the rules on a range of specified subjects, which include

fundamental liberties, civil status and civil rights, liability to taxation, conscription,
penal procedures and electoral laws.
• It also lays down the general principles and the framework of laws relating to
another range of subjects, comprising local government, education, property rights,
trade union law, social security and finance bills. The detailed implementation of
such laws is left to the government.
Any area not covered by these two categories is left to the discretion of the government
(Article 37), which may rule any parliamentary bill or amendment out of order (Article
41), subject to confirmation by the Constitutional Council, if it falls into this ‘regula-
tory domain’. The constitution limited parliament’s law-making monopoly in two
further ways: the referendum provision in Article 11, and the formalisation, in Article
38, of Third and Fourth Republic practice allowing the government to ask parliament
for powers to legislate by decree (ordonnance).
In principle, the constitutional restriction of the law-making domain represents a
massive breach of parliamentary sovereignty, a central component of the British trad-
ition that Debré was apparently trying to emulate. The application has been somewhat
less spectacular. Bills or amendments have been ruled out of order in the Assembly on
the basis of Article 34 just 41 times, all but two of them before 1981 (on the most recent
occasion, in January 2005, the industry minister used it to refuse some 11,000 oppos-
ition amendments to a government bill revising legislation on the 35-hour week, tabled
more to cause delay than as a serious attempt to amend). Rulings of the Conseil d’État
and the Constitutional Council in this area have proved more liberal than restrictive.
The referendum has been used on only 10 occasions. On the other hand, Article 38 was
used 15 times from 1958 to 1981, 11 times from 1981 to 1997 and 6 times during the
1997–2002 parliament; de Villepin revived it, largely as a public relations device, to
effect changes to employment law after his appointment in 2005. Perhaps the most
important routine implication of Articles 34 and 37 has been that laws need decrees –
décrets d’application – before coming into force, enhancing the possibility of delay and
distortion of the legal text.
The passage of government business
The government acquired new and draconian means under the constitution to ensure the
speedy passage of its own business. Parliaments of the Third and Fourth Republics
often relegated government bills to the bottom of the agenda, buried them in commit-
tee, amended them out of recognition, or, if all else failed, defeated them. The Fifth
Republic, by contrast, gives governments the procedural means to get most of their
measures enacted in the form they choose. These include their mastery of the agenda;
the limitation of the power of parliamentary committees; the right to override and
ignore amendments; the right to turn any bill into a question of confidence; the control
of the ‘shuttle’ procedure by which bills pass between the two houses of parliament;
and special provisions for finance bills.
• The agenda. Article 48 of the 1958 constitution gave government measures priority
on the parliamentary agenda. Other business, including private members’ bills
(propositions de loi) and the (necessary) election of officials of the two houses of
parliament, not least the president (speaker) and vice-president of each, was left to
a ‘complementary’ agenda, to be discussed only if time was available. Usually it
was not: in the first twenty-five years of the Fifth Republic, the ‘complementary’
agenda occupied barely four days a year on average. The main casualty was private
members’ bills, whose share of total legislation enacted fell from nearly a third
under the Fourth Republic to an average of 13 per cent between 1958 and 1981.
And the French opposition, unlike its British counterpart, technically has no right
at all to time in which it can determine the nature of parliamentary business.
• Committees. Committees in the French parliament consider bills, and amendments
to them, before they are presented for general debate. They therefore have the
chance to define the terms of that debate, to approve some amendments and to
reject others. The nineteen specialised National Assembly committees under the
Fourth Republic tended to savage government bills beyond repair; they also moni-
tored the activities of a particular ministry with a zeal often enhanced by the chair
coveting the portfolio he was controlling. Debré did away with these ‘permanent
anti-governments’. Indeed, he envisaged that in the new régime most bills would
be sent for consideration by non-specialist ad hoc committees, analogous to the
Standing Committees of the British House of Commons, provided for in Article 43
of the new constitution. This did not happen; both the National Assembly and the
Senate (the upper house) preferred most bills to be sent to the permanent commit-
tees. But Article 43, crucially, allows only six such committees in each house. The
National Assembly now has four committees of 72 members (Defence; Finance;
Foreign Affairs; and Legal and Administrative Matters) and two of 144 members,
described as ‘two big dustbins in which the least prestigious areas of parliamentary
activity are thrown’: Production and Trade, and Cultural, Social and Family
Affairs. Less specialised, more unwieldy than their Fourth Republic predecessors,
these new committees are far less capable of detailed interference in legislation.
Moreover, the government’s mastery of the agenda means that it fixes the time
available to a committee to discuss a bill. Not surprisingly, many parliamentarians,
including successive presidents of the National Assembly, believe that there is far
too much legislation for too few committees. But no proposal to increase their
number has yet come close to adoption.
• Amendments. Both Deputies (members of the National Assembly) and Senators
may propose amendments to legislation, but under Article 44–3 the government
may, at any time, insist on a single vote on the whole bill with only such amend-
ments as it has proposed or accepted. This ‘package vote’ (vote bloqué) procedure
has been invoked, on average, more than 7 times a year in the National Assembly
since 1958, with peaks under the de Gaulle presidency (114 times in ten years), the
Chirac government of 1986–88 (43 times in two years) and the minority Socialist
governments of 1988–93 (82 times in five years) (see Table 6.1).
• The question of confidence. Under Article 49–3 of the constitution, the government
may also make any bill a question of confidence in the National Assembly, halting
parliamentary discussion. To defeat it, the bill’s opponents must table a motion of
censure against the government within twenty-four hours and vote it by an absolute
majority of all members of the National Assembly (currently 289 out of 577). This
last provision means that abstentions count, in effect, as votes for the government.
If no censure motion is voted, the bill is considered as passed. If such a motion is
carried, on the other hand, the government must resign; a dissolution of parlia-
ment will probably follow. In effect, the use of Article 49–3 invites Deputies to back
the government’s measure, whether explicitly or tacitly, or overthrow the govern-
ment and face the uncertainties of a general election. It is the ultimate weapon in
the government’s armoury, conceived for parliaments without stable majorities.
Under the Fifth Republic there have been two such parliaments, those of 1958–62
and 1988–93: between them, they account for 45 of the 81 occasions to 2005 on
which Article 49–3 has been invoked (see Table 6.1). Major issues have sometimes
been at stake: the funding of France’s atomic weapons programme (under Debré)
and the Contribution Sociale Généralisée, an unpopular but necessary measure
to shore up the social security system under Rocard, are two measures that owe
their passage to this Article 49–3. Rocard, Cresson and Bérégovoy all used it
(as had Barre before them) to adopt the budget. But Article 49–3 was also used
to accelerate procedure by governments with secure majorities – by Mauroy over
Table 6.1 Use of Articles 44–3 and 49–3 in the National Assembly, 1958–2004
Article 44–3 (vote bloqué) Article 49–3 (question of confidence)
Times used (all readings) Times used Bills concerned
1958–62 23 7 4
1962–67 68 0 0
1967–68 17 3 1
1968–73 13 0 0
1973–78 17 2 2
1978–81 18 6 2
1981–86 3 13 9
1986–88 43 8 7
1988–93 82 38 19
1993–97 24 3 3
1997–2002 13 0 0
2002–4 6 1 1
Total 327 81 48
Source: Assemblée Nationale.

nationalisations after 1981, and Chirac over privatisations five years later (both had
previously been delayed by the Constitutional Council). No censure motion tabled
under Article 49–3 has succeeded, though two, one under Chirac in 1986 and one
under Rocard in 1990, came within five votes of the majority.
• National Assembly and Senate. All bills pass through both the National Assembly
and the indirectly elected upper house, the Senate. In the last resort, the National
Assembly vote may override the Senate’s. Before this happens, however, the bill
is shuttled between the two houses for at least one reading; in case of disagreement,
a joint committee of Deputies and Senators tries to reach a compromise which is
then debated again by both houses. The government is master of this complex
procedure. It may choose whether to present a bill in the Senate or the Assembly
(though finance bills must go to the Assembly first); whether to make a bill a matter
of urgency (shortening the shuttle procedure, something done no fewer than 272
times between 1958 and 1981 and 35 times between 1999 and 2002); and whether
to include Senate amendments in a revised bill or give the National Assembly the
last word.
• Finance bills. Two constitutional provisions restrain what had been the proverbial
propensity of Deputies to hold up the budget so as to extract concessions from
a desperate and precarious government. Article 40 bans private members from
proposing measures that would entail an increase in government spending or a
drop in revenue. A total of 415 private members’ bills were ruled out of order
between 1958 and 1981 by virtue of this provision. Under Article 47, parliament
must debate and vote the budget in seventy days, failing which the government has
the right to impose it by ordinance. No government has used this provision, largely
because other articles rendered it unnecessary: the vote bloqué was used in every
budget from 1959 to 1970, except for 1961, while Article 49–3 was invoked to close
budgetary debates on 27 occasions between 1958 and 2004.
A less accountable executive

The new constitution severely limited parliament’s opportunities to call the executive to
account. In the first place, the real de facto head of the executive became (outside
periods of cohabitation) the president, who is no longer responsible to parliament: it is
tempting to wonder how long either President Mitterrand or President Chirac might
have survived persistent parliamentary questioning, the former about his war record,
the latter about his stewardship of the Paris town hall. But the explicit provisions of the
Fifth Republic constitution also limit parliament’s ability to call the government, which
theoretically remains responsible to it, to account. It became more difficult not only to
overthrow governments, but also to question them, and to scrutinise their performance
through committees of enquiry.
Votes of censure and of confidence

A Fifth Republic government may be overthrown in one of three ways. It may fall to a
motion of censure under Article 49–3, as outlined above. It may fall to a vote of censure
put down spontaneously in the Assembly, under Article 49–2. Such a vote also needs
an absolute majority of Deputies to pass – and, moreover, requires signatures of one-
tenth of all Deputies to be tabled. The signatories could not then, under the 1958
constitution, table another vote of censure during the same session of parliament – a
significant restriction if opposition Deputies were few. Parliament may also, finally,
defeat a government’s request for a vote of confidence on a general policy declaration,
under Article 49–1, under which motions are decided by a simple majority of those
voting. But Fifth Republic governments, unlike their hapless predecessors of the
Fourth, are under no obligation to request the National Assembly’s confidence in this
way: the Messmer government, for example, was in office for three months after being
appointed on 5 July 1972 without parliament even sitting. Governments may request a
vote of confidence to discipline their majorities: Mauroy with his Communists in 1982,
for example, or Chirac during the first cohabitation. They will not do so, however, if
they risk losing. Thus Rocard and Bérégovoy, with no absolute majority, limited their
requests for confidence to relatively consensual foreign policy issues where their support
transcended the narrow confines of the Socialist Party.
Only one government since 1958 has been brought down by parliament: that of
Pompidou on 4 October 1962. What followed was the most successful month for the
executive in the history of the Fifth Republic (cf. Chapter 2, p. 60): the victorious
referendum on the direct election of the president on 28 October, and the emergence of
a stable Gaullist-led majority at the parliamentary elections in November. Pompidou,
reappointed as soon as he had resigned, remained at Matignon for another sixty-seven
months; parliament fell under the new constraint of stable majorities.
Questions
At least as important, under the new system, as changes to the procedures of formal
censure votes (which had never brought down Fourth Republic governments anyway)
was the limitation of opportunities to question the government. The restrictions were
both quantitative (Article 48 of the 1958 constitution limited questions to one sitting a
week) and qualitative (questions lost their power to threaten the government). Under
the Third and Fourth Republics the procedure of interpellation had allowed questions
to be followed by a debate and a vote at which the Deputies could record their dissatis-
faction at the government’s answer. A government defeated on an interpellation,
though not constitutionally required to resign, often felt politically bound to go. There
were 316 interpellation debates under the Fourth Republic; they brought down five
governments (ironically, the practice, long the sole preserve of the lower house, was
introduced and regularly used in the Senate by Michel Debré). Interpellations in this
form were banned in June 1959; National Assembly Standing Orders state that they are
considered as equivalent to, and subject to the same rules as, votes of censure. The
Deputies were left with two procedures, both cumbersome and lacking in the element
of speed and surprise needed to catch a minister off balance: oral questions – put down
in advance in the Assembly’s agenda for a Friday morning, and answered, if at all,
weeks later and at the rate of half a dozen per sitting; and written questions, typically
answered by members of ministerial cabinets and thus useless as a means of holding a
minister personally to account.
Committees of enquiry
Under the Third and to a lesser extent Fourth Republics, the creation of special parlia-
mentary committees of inquiry, especially on issues relating to political scandals, could
destabilise governments. However, a government decree of November 1958 specified
that no committee was to work for longer than four months; proceedings were to be
held in secret; and they were to be halted in the event of a judicial inquiry: all powerful
disincentives to vigorous public investigation.
The Constitutional Council as anti-parliamentary watchdog

The constitution’s anti-parliamentary provisions were given teeth by the creation, in
Article 56, of a new body, the Constitutional Council (see Chapter 2, p. 63), with the
explicit task of reviewing new legislation for constitutionality. It meant, for example,
that successful private members’ bills, or amendments to government bills, could be
referred to the Council by the prime minister or president and ruled unconstitutional
on the basis of Article 37 (limitation of the domain of parliamentary legislation) or
Article 40 (the ban on parliamentarians proposing higher spending or lower taxes).
That the Council was set up, above all, to restrain parliament is also indicated by the
obligation placed on both assemblies to refer their own standing orders to it before
bringing them into force. That measure was used, for example, to ban interpellations
in 1959.
These provisions added up to what has been described as a ‘constitutional corset’
designed to restrict parliamentary initiative and control. As Professor François Goguel
pointed out, the framers of the constitution created a form of parliamentary régime
without parliamentary sovereignty. And its restrictions were compounded by more
political factors.
The decline of parliament: factors unconstitutional and

extra-constitutional
Tight though it was, the corset left some margins of manoeuvre available for exploit-
ation by a resolute parliament. But the parliaments of the early Fifth Republic were far
from resolute in their opposition to the executive. Locked, from 1962, into newly stable
majorities which made the whole notion of ‘opposition’ to government on the part of
parliament as an institution (as distinct from left-wing opposition parties within par-
liament) deeply problematic, cowed by presidents and governments that often treated
them with arrogance and contempt, and hamstrung by their lack of technical resources,
many Deputies chose to be assiduous in their constituencies but docile (even when
present and awake) in the Palais-Bourbon, seat of the National Assembly.
An overbearing executive
Parliament has suffered from cavalier treatment at the hands of successive presidents
and governments, especially as few early leaders of the executive were inclined to
redress the new constitutional balance in favour of parliament. De Gaulle had never
belonged to parliament, and blamed it for many of the shortcomings of earlier repub-
lics. Pompidou sat as a Deputy for a total of one autumn session between his stints at
Matignon and the Élysée; aside from honing his debating skills during his prime minis-
terial visits to the Palais-Bourbon, he treated parliament with benign indifference.
Among the early prime ministers, only Chaban-Delmas, president of the National
Assembly for a decade before entering Matignon, showed sympathy towards his
former parliamentary colleagues, and even this was largely cosmetic. Debré, although
(or perhaps because) he was a former parliamentarian, treated the institution with
barely disguised impatience; Messmer was apprehensive, Chirac petulant and Barre
patronising, didactic and irritable.
The cavalier treatment of parliament consisted in a combination of spectacular
affronts – de Gaulle’s refusal of a special session in 1960, or his bypassing of the Senate
in the constitutional reform proposals of 1962 and 1969 – and routine humiliations.
The latter included the regular use of the vote bloqué and urgency procedures outlined
above, and, to a lesser extent, of Article 49–3. Parliaments also had to endure the
bunching of bills into the ends of sessions: on 23 and 24 June 1970, for example,
the Senate sat for 24 hours and 40 minutes, almost as long as it had sat in the whole
of the previous April (such practices were not confined to the early years: of the 134
texts adopted in 1994 by the National Assembly, 60 were passed in December).
Bills delivered late in sessions were typically sprawling, hold-all texts, with such
informative names as diverses mesures d’ordre social; others were poorly drafted and
incorporated last-minute flurries of government amendments. Parliamentarians have
also seen government bills stuffed with detailed regulation, in violation of Articles 34
and 37. Needless to say, the quality of legislation suffered.
Three areas illustrate the government’s behaviour to parliament especially well: the
gap between laws and their implementation; the annual budget; and the government’s
responses to questions.
Implementation
Fifth Republic governments – and not only the early ones – have often rushed legisla-
tion through parliament, and then waited months or even years to implement it.
Contraception, for example, became legal in 1967, but only available when the decrees
were published in 1974. In another egregious case, decrees instituting a new penalty
system for driving offences were hurriedly watered down in June 1992 after causing
a lorry drivers’ strike, a crisis that might have been avoided had parliament been
given time to debate the law properly during its passage (under the urgency procedure)
in July 1989. Prime Minister Rocard once estimated that a third of all laws were without
their décrets d’application six months after their adoption, and a tenth were never
implemented at all – quite aside from those repealed when the parliamentary majority
changed. In October 2003, the secretariat-general of the government noted that only
10–15 per cent of décrets d’application had appeared for laws voted since the start of
the legislature in 2002; moreover, some pre-2002 legislation voted under the Jospin
government, including, for example, a law on joint ownership of residential property
that affected 6 million people, still lacked the necessary decrees to bring it into force.
Rarer, but no more satisfactory, is the opposite case illustrated by the Juppé govern-
ment: it decided to abolish military service in 1996, and advertised the rendez-vous
citoyen, a substitute patriotic rite of passage for young men, before parliament had even
debated the changes.
The budget
The government takes nine months to prepare the annual budget, producing a finely
balanced product of economic forecasts (which have the genius of being invariably
wrong), rationally quantifiable models (whose ‘rationality’ often disguises some very
irrational political choices) and nice calculations of party and pressure group interests.
Parliamentarians have then been given three months to debate it. They have suffered
both from an overload of information (receiving each year over 120 separate official
budget documents representing some 30,000 pages, as well as 9,000 pages of reports
and opinions produced by themselves) and a dearth of it (all too often crucial data, like
year-on-year comparisons, transfer of unused credits from one year to the next, match-
ing funds from elsewhere, or transfers between ministries, have not been available;
the budget’s 850 chapters, organised under headings such as personnel, information
technology, or jobs by corps and grade, have made it impossible to read or assess
programmes). Few governments have looked kindly upon parliamentary amendments
to their delicately tuned document. The debates on the budget for 2000, for example,
changed the disposal of just 7.6 billion francs (1.2 billion euros) out of a total of 1,500
billion (229 billion euros). Even then, it should be borne in mind that most budget
amendments have originated with the government (one recent study showed that gov-
ernment spokespersons regularly exceeded their allotted time in the finance committee
by over 100 per cent), and that the government has always been free to invoke the vote
bloqué procedure, or even Article 49–3. Implementation of the budget has largely
escaped parliament. Changed circumstances could lead ministers to alter important
details of their expenditure. Credits might be frozen or cancelled by the Finance Minis-
try. Significant spending items have been ‘debudgetised’, or moved to external bodies.
Parliament’s control over these, and over France’s still numerous public and semi-
public enterprises (numbering over 600 at their peak in the 1980s), has been largely
fictitious. While reforms to budgetary procedures initiated in July 2001 will change
many of these arrangements, parliamentary scrutiny of the budget over the first
half-century of the Fifth Republic will have been very limited indeed.
Questions
The attitude of early Fifth Republic governments reinforced constitutional barriers
to effective questioning of the executive. Of the 1,416 ‘oral questions without debate’
– the commonest type of oral question – tabled between 1967 and 1973, for example,
just 323, fewer than a quarter, received any reply. A question about the Ben Barka
affair (the leader of Morocco’s left-wing opposition, kidnapped in broad daylight
in Paris, then murdered with the complicity of elements in the French secret services),
put down in November 1965, received an answer (as the government euphemistically
described it) in May 1967. Ministers’ routine disrespect for questions was illustrated
by the appearance, on 28 November 1975, of the junior minister for housing to reply,
perfunctorily, to parliamentary questions concerning atomic energy, the French car
industry, the crisis in the textile industry and the speed limits of heavy lorries.
The appropriate ministers were not in parliament, despite rules stipulating that they
should be.
Domaine(s) réservé(s)
Even in comparatively uncontentious matters like professional training or regional
health funds, parliamentarians have faced obstacles in seeking information from gov-
ernments. More sensitive areas, including almost anything linked to foreign or defence
policy, are treated as off-limits to parliamentary scrutiny. Sixty per cent of all treaties
signed by France are ratified without any parliamentary debate at all. This was true,
for example, of defence agreements signed with Togo in 1963 and Cameroon in 1974,
as well as the agreements to ‘maintain order’ in Côte d’Ivoire, Gabon and Chad
between 1961 and 1963. Parliament has often been told of France’s periodic military
interventions (notably in former African colonies) only after the event, when it is
presented with the (financial) bill.
Parliament was also, initially, excluded from any discussion of European legislation,
which came to represent a direct constraint on its activities and a breach on its legisla-
tive monopoly as important as anything in the constitution. The Gaullist position,
which remained effective for twenty years, was that all European legislation amounted
merely to implementation of the 1957 Treaty of Rome, and was therefore no concern
of parliament’s.
Le fait majoritaire
The existence of stable majorities greatly enhanced the executive’s control over
parliament. Indeed, their appearance from 1962 meant that the basic premiss on which
the constitution was framed – a fragmented and undisciplined legislature – proved
unfounded. Majorities have ranged from the precarious (1967–68, 1986–88) to the
comfortable (1962–67, 1973–78, 1978–81, 1997–2002) or the massive (1968–73, 1981–
86, 1993–97, 2002–). For governments lacking a majority, as in 1958–62 and 1988–93,
the constitutional safeguards were a necessity of survival. For the others, they have
been a convenience. The real opposition under the Fifth Republic (typically of a
parliamentary régime) has not been between the executive and legislative branches
but between party majority and party opposition.
This has been so because majorities have not only existed; they have generally
been disciplined. That was not automatic. Parliamentary groups had been notoriously
weak under the Third and Fourth Republics, especially on the Right and Centre. The
Gaullists broke with this tradition and gave the new Republic its prototype disciplined
majority group. Their cohesion had five bases: rules requiring discipline on major
votes; the fact that most Gaullist Deputies owed their seats to the party ticket; the
removal, with the end of the Algerian war, of the one critical issue that had divided
them; the Gaullist political culture, receptive to strong leadership and, now, mindful
that indiscipline had nearly destroyed Gaullism under the Fourth Republic; and the
patronage of a government in a secure position to offer the chance of office, constitu-
ency favours (the budget includes a small ‘parliamentary reserve’ to accommodate
these) or even a small amount of liquid cash, from the prime minister’s ‘special funds’,
to help with election expenses. The group chairman was elected by a show of hands
(and often unopposed), took his orders in the Élysée from Jacques Foccart, derived a
part of his legitimacy from his status as the General’s anointed and won obedience
from the Gaullist Deputies in consequence. And the Gaullists, with 233 seats out of 482
in 1962, could generally dominate their Giscardian majority allies, who had 35 seats.
The Socialists, the Fifth Republic’s other great majority party, have always been more
open to discipline than the Right. Their rules require absolute voting discipline: indeed,
no group member may table a motion, an amendment or even a question without
obtaining the permission of the group’s governing bureau. In 1999, their group litera-
ture stated that ‘the primary role of Socialist Deputies is to get government bills passed,
in accordance with commitments made to the French people’. This was reflected in
their behaviour in the 64 roll-call votes taken during the 1997–2002 National Assembly,
when an average of 94.7 per cent of Socialist Deputies voted with the group position,
5.1 per cent abstained or stayed away, and only 0.2 per cent opposed their comrades.
This was nothing exceptional: the overall average support for the group position within
all six parliamentary groups, majority and opposition, in 1997–2002 was 92.9 per cent.
Debré had expected governments to discipline parliament from without, with new
constitutional powers; but disciplined majority groups allowed governments to colonise
parliament from within. Deputies backed by president or government have won election,
not only as majority group leaders, but also to the presidency of the National Assembly
(Edgar Faure under Giscard, Louis Mermaz under Mitterrand and Jean-Louis Debré
under Chirac are good examples) and to committee chairmanships. This control of key
posts in the National Assembly is all the more important because neither the constitu-
tion nor parliamentary standing orders ensure a formal status or safeguards for the
opposition. The National Assembly president remains clearly identified with the major-
ity, unlike the politically neutral speaker of the British House of Commons; and he
may, in some conditions, rule bills and amendments as unconstitutional and thus out of
order. The Conference of Presidents, which makes key decisions about the agenda (such
as which private members’ bills and even, in some cases, which questions are discussed),
has a built-in majority because the group chairmen who sit on it, with the president and
vice-presidents of the National Assembly, have block votes in proportion to the size of
their groups. Taken to its limits, therefore, the fait majoritaire has the potential to allow
government control, not only of legislation, but even of how governments are held to
account by parliament.
Opposition clearly offers more opportunities to criticise the government, which is
why many Deputies have preferred it. But there are frustrations here too: without a
formal status, for years the opposition disposed of no allocation of days in which it
could decide business and lead debates. Group discipline, moreover, applies here too,
and the meagre opportunities available for opposition politicians to shine are often
monopolised by party ‘tenors’, however unbriefed, at the expense of backbenchers,
however expert. Even more than in other parliaments, the opposition risks being
confined to a role of impotence and negativity.
Parliament’s lack of resources

Parliament has generally lacked the technical means to act as an effective check on
government, despite improvements since 1958. It is true that between 1956 and 1995,
the staff of the National Assembly grew from 602 to 1,260. The number of senior staff
– directeurs, administrateurs and administrateurs adjoints, highly competent officials,
recruited, like senior civil servants, by a fierce competitive examination – rose from 150
to 266. Parliamentary groups are funded from the National Assembly budget, which
reached 2.5 billion francs in 1995 (the Senate budget was 1.4 billion francs). Individual
Deputies have had their own offices since the early 1970s. Their monthly pay is now
comparable to that of a fairly senior civil servant: 5,231 euros in 2004, in addition to
a staff allowance of 8,511 francs, enough to employ a secretary and one or two
researchers, and general expenses of over 7,000 euros.
French parliamentarians are thus much better provided for than British Members
of Parliament. But they remain poorly off in relation to their American or even
German counterparts and, crucially, in relation to their tasks: the passage of sixty-seven
laws a year on average since 1958, as well as budgets, scrutiny of a growing volume of
European legislation, and whatever attempts are made to monitor government per-
formance. Above all, their capacity to obtain high-quality information independently
of the executive departments they seek to monitor is both slight and uncertain. Parlia-
mentary staff tend to possess legal skills (suitable for drafting legislation) rather than
social or economic ones. And their numbers are still few. In 1990 the president of the
committee for cultural, family and social affairs complained that for an area of
responsibility covering education, training, culture, broadcasting, employment, social
security, pensions, health, family and children’s affairs, and youth and sport – about a
third of the Assembly’s total agenda – he had just seven administrateurs at his disposal:
about a quarter of a single ministerial cabinet.
Absenteeism and impotence

Parliamentarians’ absenteeism has compounded parliamentary impotence. When
Jacques Chirac met the newest Deputies of the huge right-wing majority elected in
1993, he told them to look after their constituencies first and attend sittings second.
Every parliamentarian has to balance roles as national legislator and as constituency
factotum; Fifth Republic parliamentarians have had every encouragement to confine
themselves to the latter. High levels of absenteeism were facilitated for over thirty-five
years by the non-enforcement both of Article 27 of the constitution, which states
that all parliamentary votes are made in person, and of the parliamentary standing
orders setting financial penalties for repeated absences from votes. The National
Assembly regularly presented the unedifying spectacle of group leaders and their
assistants clambering over benches to turn the keys at literally scores of empty desks,
thereby registering the electronic votes of their absent colleagues, illegally but with
impunity.
A further encouragement to absenteeism has been the practice, unique to France in
its scope and extent, of multiple office-holding – the cumul des mandats. Most of
France’s national politicians are local politicians as well. In every Assembly since 1958,
about half of all Deputies have also been mayors – some of villages and country towns,
others of major cities, including (in Chirac’s case) Paris (see Table 12.2). About half
have been councillors for the départements or the regions (of which there are respect-
ively ninety-six and twenty-two in metropolitan France). As many as a quarter have
held their parliamentary seats at the same time as two major local offices. For a Deputy,
local office, especially as mayor, offers a concentration of the scarce goods politicians
crave: a high profile in the constituency; a reserve of loyalty (opinion polls regularly
show that the public places far more confidence in mayors than in national politicians);
the chance to make a larger personal impact than most legislators can; local patronage
(town halls are major employers and control access to much low-cost housing as well);
and a car, an office and expenses. The cumul des mandats has also been seen as a
counterweight to France’s traditional centralisation, giving well-established local
figures the chance to intercede directly in Paris on behalf of their localities. But neither
the decentralisation laws of 1982 nor the modest limitations placed, from 1988, on the
cumul have diminished its attractions. In 1990 Laurent Fabius, president of the
National Assembly, denounced its ‘absurd and paralysing’ effects and claimed that
too many parliamentarians saw national office as a mere complement to their local
functions. Fabius himself nevertheless ran, successfully, for the post of mayor in the big
Rouen suburb of Grand-Quevilly at the next municipal elections, in 1995.
The clearest consequence of the cumul is that many Deputies are in their constituen-
cies from Thursday evening till Tuesday at lunchtime. Meanwhile the benches in the
Chamber are empty, as a few examples from the early 1990s – all relating to issues that
had raised high levels of public interest – illustrate: 12 Deputies at Interior Minister
Joxe’s presentation of a reform of immigration law, 10 when Education Minister Jospin
outlined the government’s policy on the wearing of Islamic veils by schoolgirls, 17 for
an important debate on the nuclear industry. The cumul also encourages Deputies
to cultivate good relations with the government in the hope of constituency favours
rather than using the opportunities available to them to question the government’s
performance; or to concentrate questions on matters of local concern rather than
broader issues. As one observer claimed with some exaggeration, ‘La Ve République a
infantilisé le Parlement.’
A resurgent parliament?
The weakening of parliament written into key provisions at the heart of the 1958
constitution now appears irrevocable. Even among Deputies, according to a poll in
1990, a clear majority wanted to keep the vote bloqué and Article 49–3. Public demand
for parliamentarians to assume a greater legislative or policy-making role has been
slight: only 17 per cent in a 1985 poll. Yet there has been a reaction against the corseting
of parliament under the early Fifth Republic; and polls show a continuing demand,
among Deputies and voters, for parliament to be more active in holding the government
to account.
The reaction against the weakening of parliament under the Fifth Republic opened
with the Senate’s defeat of de Gaulle’s attempt to reform it out of existence at
the referendum of April 1969. Parliament was strengthened by important reforms
under Giscard; since 1988, that process has been furthered by the independence and
determination of two National Assembly presidents, the Socialist Laurent Fabius
(1988–92 and 1997–2000) and the Gaullist Philippe Séguin (1993–97). Parliamentarians
now show greater freedom in blocking, amending and even initiating legislation, and
they have become bolder in monitoring the performance of governments.
The survival of the Senate

Through most of the Fifth Republic, the Senate has been a conservative, curmudgeonly
institution (second in this respect only to the British House of Lords), resistant to the
reforming energies of Gaullists and Socialists alike. The Senators, whose number rose
from 273 in 1962 to 321 in 1989, were chosen (for a nine-year term, a third of the Senate
being renewed every three years) by an electoral college of approximately 150,000
delegates from among France’s half-million regional and local councillors. The gross
over-representation of rural areas among local councillors and Senators alike gave the
upper house an impressive contingent of farmers and the reputation for representing
la France du seigle et de la chataigne (literally, the France of rye and sweet chestnuts): a
Senator for the rural département of Creuse represents 62,000 inhabitants, while a
Senator for Seine-St Denis, in the grubbier Paris suburbs, represents a population of
230,000. With a minimum age for Senators of 35, and a leisurely pace of deliberation,
the Senate has never been a youthful body: Alain Poher, its president from 1968 to 1992,
left his post at the age of 83.
Recent reforms, accepted with more or less good grace by the Senators, have altered
this picture somewhat. A law of 2003 reduced the senatorial term to six years and the
minimum age to 30, as well as providing for a modest reapportionment of seats which
will bring the total membership to 346 by the time implementation of the reform is
completed in 2010. Parity legislation has also reached the upper house: the Senate of
2004 included 56 women, or 17 per cent of the total, compared to 12.7 per cent for the
National Assembly. The ranks of the more obviously rustic Senators have dwindled: the
28 farmers and 8 veterinary surgeons of 2004, though still a generous proportion by
comparison with their place in the working population, were massively outnumbered
by over 80 teachers of various descriptions. The Senate has also tried to dynamise its
image both by building links with business leaders and by organising art exhibitions,
jazz concerts and operatic productions.
These changes, however, fall far short of what Jospin had in mind when he referred to
the Senate as an ‘anomaly’ in a democracy. And in two respects there is rather little sign
of change. First, the Senate remains a fairly elderly body: 198 senators, or 60 per cent,
are aged 60 or over; 65, or 20 per cent, are 70 or over; there are 7 octogenarians; and the
average age is 62. Second and more importantly, the Senate has never seen a left-wing
majority; indeed, right-wingers typically outnumber the Left by about two to one. This
does not ensure the Senate’s passive compliance with the designs of right-wing govern-
ments, for the Senators tend to behave more independently than their colleagues in the
National Assembly. It does mean, however, that the upper house will generally present
greater difficulties for governments of the Left.
The constitution-makers of 1958, seeing rural notables as potential allies against an
unruly National Assembly, gave the upper house back the name, and some of the
prerogatives, that it had lost under the previous régime. The ungrateful Senators, urged
on by their president, Gaston Monnerville, responded by leading resistance to the 1962
reform providing for direct presidential elections. De Gaulle’s delayed rejoinder was the
1969 referendum proposal. This envisaged a Senate confined to a merely consultative
role and including representatives of economic and social interests. The French voted
no at the referendum, de Gaulle resigned and the Senate survived. Thereafter, as the
Gaullists’ reforming energies ebbed, their positions in both local government and the
Senate grew; their reconciliation with the upper house was sealed in 1998 with the first
election of a Gaullist (Christian Poncelet) to its presidency.
Governments are not responsible to, and therefore cannot be overthrown by, the
Senate. But Senators can affect legislation in significant ways. They can, notably,
block constitutional change: according to Article 89 of the constitution, constitutional
amendments must be voted in identical terms by both houses of parliament, and then
passed either by referendum or by a three-fifths majority of a Congress composed of
both houses. De Gaulle deliberately ignored these provisions by proposing referenda
directly to the voters in 1962 and 1969; but according to the letter of the constitution,
the Senate’s blocking powers are absolute. Parliamentary (chiefly senatorial) opposition
has torpedoed a number of cherished presidential projects, some of them quite radical:
under Pompidou, the reduction of the presidential term to five years, in 1973; under
Mitterrand, the extension of the area of application of the referendum, in 1984, the
extension to private citizens of the right to refer bills to the Constitutional Council, in
1990, and the inauguration of referenda by popular initiative in 1993; under Chirac, the
independence of prosecuting magistrates (opposed by conservatives in both houses) in
2000. The Senators have also been able to block organic laws (laws of a semi-
constitutional status, entailing special conditions of debate and requiring the Senate’s
consent in any matters relating to itself) aimed at radically reforming the inequitable
system under which they are elected, and at limiting the cumul des mandats.
Over ordinary legislation, the Senate has more limited control: it may refuse bills
or propose amendments, but can be overridden by the National Assembly. It has used
its powers in two different ways. Under the left-wing governments of 1981–86, it
practised a systematic, politicised opposition, obstructing bills, referring them to the
Constitutional Council, or both. The National Assembly overrode the Senate over
38 bills under the de Gaulle presidency, 17 under Pompidou, 6 under Giscard – but 140
between 1981 and 1986. At other times, however, it has acted as a less political ‘chamber
of second thoughts’. No government persistently disregards the Senate’s views. Even in
the 1981–86 parliament, 46 per cent of Senate amendments were retained in legislation,
and the National Assembly overrode the Senate on only a quarter of bills (under the
Jospin government, corresponding to the 1997–2002 parliament, the lower house had
the ‘last word’ on 68 bills, out of a total of 432 texts voted). Other governments have
been notably friendly to the Senators: under Balladur, for example, half of government
bills were debated in the Senate before the National Assembly, and 87 per cent of Senate
amendments were retained.
Parliament’s institutional reinforcement since 1974

The partial revival of parliament owes much to two waves of institutional reforms,
initiated first by Giscard d’Estaing, the Fifth Republic’s first non-Gaullist president,
and then, since 1988, by the two National Assembly presidents, Fabius and Séguin. The
reforms have not affected the core of the 1958 constitution: the government can still
control most of the parliamentary agenda, and use the vote bloqué and Article 49–3.
But the changes have gone some way to redressing the balance.
Parliament and the Constitutional Council

Giscard’s constitutional reform of October 1974 extended the right to refer bills to
the Constitutional Council (limited under the 1958 constitution to the prime minister
and the three presidents of the Republic, the Senate and the National Assembly) to
sixty Deputies or sixty Senators. This change transformed the Constitutional Council
from a government weapon against an unruly parliament, as envisaged in 1958, to a
tool of the parliamentary opposition. Deputies and Senators are now responsible
for almost all referrals of bills; and though only about one bill in ten is actually referred,
most of the rest are drafted with the constraint of the Council’s scrutiny in mind
(see below, Chapter 13).
Questions
The procedure of ‘questions to the government’ was initiated in 1974 with Giscard’s
blessing, on an informal basis without being included either in the National Assembly’s
standing orders or the constitution (an anomaly not corrected in the constitution till
1995, and still unresolved in the Assembly’s standing orders). It differs from the older
‘oral questions’ formula in four respects: it is more spontaneous (with ministers being
informed of questions just two hours in advance), quicker (with shorter time limits on
both questions and answers), less controlled by the Conference of Presidents (which
allocates time to the different groups, but does not select questions) and better publi-
cised (being televised, and timetabled on a Wednesday afternoon, unlike oral questions,
which continue on Friday mornings). The first year of operation saw ministers who
had never deigned to answer oral questions in person appearing to face the Deputies.
Interestingly, the greater consideration attached to the new format increasingly
appeared to extend to the old ones as well: where fewer than a quarter of the 1,091 ‘oral
questions without debate’ tabled during the 1968–73 parliament had received any
response at all, the proportion rose to over 90 per cent in the 1981–86 parliament.
As National Assembly president, Séguin further reinforced the characteristics of
‘questions to the government’ in 1994 by splitting them over two one-hour sittings,
ending advance notice of questions, and limiting the time for both questions and
answers to two and a half minutes. Their number has therefore risen. From an annual
average of 250 during the Giscard presidency, they reached 668 per year during the
1997–2002 parliament, thirty-eight of them answered by the prime minister; questions
took up nearly 12 per cent of the 4,615 hours that the National Assembly sat. Like
question time in the British House of Commons, ‘questions to the government’ are
criticised as ritualistic confrontations. But they are an indisputable improvement on
what passed for questions before.
Monitoring and evaluation

Fabius, as National Assembly president from 1988 to 1992, sought to extend parlia-
ment’s role in the evaluation of policy and of its implementation. Changes to standing
orders allowed National Assembly committees to set up their own missions d’évaluation,
charged with monitoring the implementation of laws, and to hold public hearings. The
regularity with which National Assembly committees now call government members
directly to account may be indicated by the fact that during the 1998–99 session, they
held 84 hearings with ministers, 13 of them in public, as well as 118 hearings (32 in
public) with other individuals. Perhaps the most spectacular case was the mission set up
in 1998 by the foreign and defence committees to examine France’s role in the Rwanda
genocide of 1994. However cautious the committee’s conclusions were, the fact that it
interviewed 88 people in public over such a sensitive issue, including Édouard Balladur
and François Léotard, respectively prime minister and defence minister at the time of
the massacres, and obtained access to confidential documents, illustrates the growth in
this area of parliamentary activity since de Gaulle’s time. Another mission, on the
prison system, was set up in 2000 and promised to be just as controversial: Deputies
undertook to make unannounced visits to prisons, as the government inspectors
notionally responsible for the penal system had conspicuously failed to do. Committees
have also won the right to give a consultative opinion on décrets d’application of laws
before they are published. Both Fabius and Séguin sought to palliate the lack of expert-
ise available to parliament by formalising links with the Cour des Comptes (Court of
Accounts) (whose role in monitoring public finances is specified in Article 47 of the
constitution) and by setting up evaluation offices, with regular access to panels of
experts, on a model inspired by the US Congress. The first of these, the Office Parle-
mentaire d’Évaluation des Choix Scientifiques et Technologiques, had been set up as
early as 1983, and has conducted studies into such issues as ozone depletion and the
disposal of radioactive waste. It was followed in 1996 by the Office d’Évaluation
des Politiques Publiques and the Office d’Évaluation de la Législation, both grouping
Deputies, Senators and experts, and in 1999 by the Mission d’Évaluation et de Con-
trôle. These offices did not make a striking debut on the political scene: they lacked the
resources of their American counterparts, and their reports, on subjects such as the
situation of French cinema, public-sector pensions, on incentives to inward investment,
passed relatively unnoticed. It remains to be seen whether, like many other institutions
of the Fifth Republic, they will acquire importance only after a number of years; or
whether the relationship with the Cour des Comptes, headed since 2004 by Philippe
Séguin, a former president of the National Assembly, will be reinforced.
The importance of formal committees of inquiry has also grown. They were allowed
to sit over six months, instead of four, in 1977, and to conduct public hearings from
1991; in 1988, under the first Fabius National Assembly presidency, opposition group
leaders were given ‘drawing rights’ to one committee of inquiry a year. Both houses
have been bolder in appointing committees: there were 14 for the National Assembly
(and 8 for the Senate) in the first two decades of the Fifth Republic, but 36 for the
National Assembly (and the same number for the Senate) from 1979 to 2002. In the
2002–3 session, subjects of inquiry included Pyrenean wolves, decision-making in pub-
licly owned firms, maritime transport, the troubled airline Air Lib and the vexed
question of the wearing of religious symbols in schools. There are certainly limits on
what they will do: for example, both the Socialists and the Right have too much to lose
to agree to an inquiry into the use of the former state-owned oil company Elf for
purposes of political funding. But the committees have uncovered a range of other
scandals, including property speculation in Paris, the lucrative but unpatriotic practices
of the Dassault aircraft company, the financial black hole of the Crédit Lyonnais and
the corrupt management of France’s bankruptcy courts.
Private members’ bills

These have been facilitated by the constitutional reform of 1995, under which one
sitting a month is reserved for parliamentary, not government, business, in addition to
sittings devoted to questions. As in the British parliament, time is short (213 hours out
of 4,615 in 1997–2002, or 5 per cent of the total sittings), and inconveniently placed
(typically on a Friday); majority Deputies have had the lion’s share of it (especially
before 1997 and since 2002, when the majority has been large). The government may
plant potentially controversial bills with private members (the Juppé government did
this with a bill to limit liability to prosecution for misuse of company funds, the Jospin
government with the civil solidarity pact (PACS), Raffarin with reforms to the 35-hour
week). And bills generally need the government’s support to survive the shuttle pro-
cedure between National Assembly and Senate. Nevertheless, the new provision,
enshrined in Article 48–3 of the constitution, allowed for the passage of twenty bills in
its first two years. And it was a striking reversal of the constitution-makers’ priorities:
Michel Debré had firmly refused such a reservation of time for private members’ bills
in 1958.
Parliamentary amendments
One of the priorities of Séguin’s presidency of the National Assembly was to make
more time for committee work, ensuring a fuller scrutiny of a text between its tabling
and the final vote, if necessary at the expense of plenary debates. The 1994 changes
to standing orders ensured that committees were allowed to sit outside parliamen-
tary sessions, and recommended that at least one committee a week held a public
hearing with a minister. They also allowed the authors of amendments to present their
amendments to committees, whether or not they belonged to the committee themselves.
The single parliamentary session and personal voting

The constitutional amendment of 1995 replaced the two three-month parliamentary
sessions established in 1958 by a single nine-month session lasting from October till
June. Total parliamentary time was not extended, as the new Article 28 of the constitu-
tion sets a maximum 120 days of sittings within the single session (the number of hours
sat actually fell from 1,015 in 1993–94 to an average of about 930 between 1995 and
2002). But the single session both limits the parliamentary recess, when government is
free of any immediate control, to three months in the summer, and allows most sittings
to be held on midweek days when most Deputies and Senators are in Paris. The reform
also allowed individual Deputies to sign up to three censure motions a year instead of
two as under the 1958 constitution.
The corollary of the single session was that Deputies, whose attendance in parlia-
ment it facilitated, should really be there. To this end Séguin insisted, much to the
irritation of Deputies, that parliamentary votes should be personal, as the constitution
requires. Séguin admitted, after the first single session (1995–96), that absenteeism was
still too high. But the new arrangements did at least end the dishonest practice under
which proxies cast, and recorded for the Journal Officiel, hundreds of votes for their
colleagues.
Extended competences
Parliament’s competences have also been extended by two institutional reforms. First,
control over European questions has been modestly reinforced: in 1979 by the creation
of a parliamentary delegation for European affairs in each house, and in 1992 and
1999, more importantly, by constitutional amendments under which parliament, under
Article 88.4 of the revised constitution, gives its opinion on proposed European legisla-
tion in a formal report and resolution before the government expresses its position to
the European Council of Ministers. Although such resolutions are not binding on
governments, they have generally taken account of them – not least because they can be
presented by France’s representation in Brussels as a national constraint that limits
their ability to make concessions to European partners.
Secondly, the amendment of 1996 allowed a parliamentary debate, for the first
time, on the annual budget for the social security system, notionally financed by
contributions negotiated between employers and employee representatives, in practice
increasingly heavily subsidised out of taxation. Both of these changes established, at
least notionally, an element of parliamentary control in important areas where there
had previously been practically none.
Parliament’s legal and material capacities, then, were substantially greater in the year
2000 than they had been at the outset of the Fifth Republic. It was better able to
monitor the government’s performance, whether through questions (more numerous
and better publicised), missions d’information or committees of inquiry; better able,
thanks to the 1974 reform, to challenge the constitutionality of government measures;
better able, too, to propose and amend legislation. Just as important has been a
reinforcement of independent behaviour.
The loosening of parliamentary discipline

There has been no return to the anarchy of the Fourth Republic, as the figures (p. 153)
for roll-call votes in the 1997 parliament show; but few parliamentary groups have quite
matched the discipline of Gaullist Deputies at the height of the de Gaulle presidency.
The non-Gaullist moderate Right and Centre have always retained the relaxed habits of
earlier régimes. The Gaullists themselves now inflict no penalties on their own dissi-
dents (Roselyne Bachelot incurred vicious sarcasm, but no formal sanction, from her
fellow Gaullists when she supported the Socialist PACS bill in 1999). The formerly
monolithic Communist group had become so (relatively) lax by early 2000 that its
president Alain Bocquet was able to quip that ‘exceptionally’, they would all vote
together on one government bill. Even Socialists, though still subject to strict and
(broadly) enforced discipline, have been prone on occasion to absenteeism (as, notably,
in a key vote on the PACS in 1998) and, above all, inclined to negotiate their support
rather than concede it without question. For Socialists as for others, the ultimate sanc-
tion for dissent, deselection at the next election, is difficult to apply to incumbents with
the strong implantation that goes with local office – an asset possessed by the great
majority of Deputies and Senators.
Presidents of parliamentary groups typically emerge, no longer from a show of
hands, but from elections held by secret ballot and often fiercely contested. Matignon
or the Élysée may affect the result (Jean-Marc Ayrault, president of the Socialist
group in the 1997 parliament, was an early Jospin supporter, while his Gaullist coun-
terpart, Jean-Louis Debré, was close to Chirac); but group presidents’ long-term
authority depends less on blessings from above than on an ability to address Dep-
uties’ constituency problems, to listen to their policy concerns and to balance com-
peting factions within the group. That in turn implies the capacity of Deputies of the
majority to establish the parameters of government action. The thwarting of much
of Chaban-Delmas’s ‘New Society’ programme, for example, was as much the work
of the conservative Gaullist parliamentary majority as of the Élysée. Mitterrand’s
preference for a return to proportional representation for parliamentary elections
after 1988 was blocked by the Socialist Deputies, who disliked the enhanced depend-
ence on party that would have resulted. If French governments have so far failed to
apply the European directive on bird conservation, it has been because of parlia-
ment’s tendency to bow to pressure from the bird-shooting lobby. Junior groups in
the majority, moreover, may require attention as strategic partners: the Jospin gov-
ernment’s reluctance to apply certain European measures relating to competition in
electricity or rail markets, for example, resulted in part from the reservations of the
Communist group. Finally, cohabitation, while placing a premium on majority soli-
darity in the face of presidential hostility, also requires the prime minister to be very
attentive to his majority. Balladur, for example, recalls fortnightly meetings with
each of the two majority groups (UDF and RPR), as well as visits to the Senate’s
majority intergroup.
A final indication of the moderation of discipline has been the behaviour of recent
National Assembly presidents. The poor relations between Laurent Fabius and Prime
Minister Rocard, or between Philippe Séguin and both Balladur and Juppé, ensured
that they were far from compliant links in a disciplinary chain stretching from govern-
ment to individual Deputies; Jean-Louis Debré, president of the National Assembly
since 2002 (and son of Michel Debré), has showed a concern to respect and to reinforce
the rights of parliament (including the opposition) that bely his past record as a highly
partisan minister. Their independence both served as an example to Deputies and
helped to press forward the institutional changes to parliament outlined above.
Obstructions, amendments and private members’ bills

Despite the threat of the vote bloqué or Article 49–3, parliament has made increasing
use of its powers to obstruct and delay legislation. These include a variety of procedural
devices: points of order of several types, filibustering and, above all, the right of
amendment. The tabling of parliamentary amendments has exploded since the de
Gaulle presidency: as Table 6.2 shows, nearly five times as many amendments were
tabled during the 1997–2002 parliament than in that of 1968–73. Oppositions have
regularly used amendments to slow down government measures since 1980, when the
Socialists fought a pitched battle against Peyrefitte’s repressive Sécurité et liberté law.
The Right responded in kind with the nationalisation legislation of 1982; under
Rocard, right-wing and Communist oppositions joined to put down 4,703 amendments
to a bill changing the legal status of Renault with a view to facilitating its partial
privatisation. Although such tactics can be halted by the use of Article 49–3, they may
gain in effectiveness when the bill in question is under fire from within the parlia-
mentary majority as well. Giscard’s capital gains tax bill of 1976, for example, was so
amended by the more conservative elements in his majority that it was finally promul-
gated in a form that was emasculated and unworkable. The Socialist Culture Minister
Catherine Trautmann’s broadcasting bill was so disliked by the left-wing majority that
it ran into the sand in parliament in 1998 and had to be reintroduced in amended form.
Her colleague Dominique Voynet’s bill implementing a European directive on the
shooting calendar provoked intense hostility in the hunting lobby and enough absentee-
ism among Socialist and Communist Deputies to be defeated. Such instances are, it is
Table 6.2 Amendments in the National Assembly, 1968–73 and 1997–2002
Amendments Amendments Amendments Success rate of

proposed by tabled passed amendments (%)
1968–73 1997–2002 1968–73 1997–2002 1968–73 1997–2002
Government 1,329 3,141 1,104 2,682 83.1 85.4

Committees 4,425 12,405 3,041 10,784 68.7 86.9
Deputies 4,829 35,305 814 3,334 16.9 9.4
Total 10,583 50,851 4,959 16,800 46.9 33.3
Source: Assemblée Nationale.

true, rare. But they show that governments hesitate to use their panoply of consti-
tutional powers to force through measures which have aroused real hostility among
their own supporters.
But obstructionism only partly explains the explosion of amendments. If the indi-
vidual Deputies of the 1997–2002 parliament were putting down amendments at over
seven times the rate of their forebears, they were also getting more passed, at least in
absolute terms. And the Deputies’ amendments passed in 1998–99 included 313 put
down by the opposition (in parliaments where they are or may be necessary to form a
majority, the centrists are especially influential, with success rates for amendments
exceeding 50 per cent in both 1967–68 and 1988–93). Committees have also become
more active. While not free from party discipline (Socialist Deputies, for example, may
not sign a committee amendment without their group’s approval), they are less prone to
party confrontation than the full sittings of the Assembly. Amendments adopted in
committee often have cross-party support, and, as Table 6.2 shows, a high and growing
success rate. Of the 94 bills passed by the Assembly in the 1997–98 and 1998–99
sessions, only 19 went through without amendment; 48 incorporated between one and
fifty amendments, and 27 included over fifty amendments. The importance of this
aspect of parliamentary business gives the rapporteur, the committee member respon-
sible for presenting a bill and its amendments to the Assembly, a particularly sensitive
role in consulting with interest groups, parliamentarians and ministerial cabinets and in
deciding which amendments to favour: a careful rapporteur can make a significant
difference to legislation.
Many amendments, it is true, are of little real importance; but not all. Robert Elgie
has documented the debate on the 1987 budget, during the first cohabitation, in which
the Giscardian Michel d’Ornano extracted a substantial reduction of the local business
tax from the government. He was able to do this thanks to his post as chairman of the
Assembly’s Finance Committee, to his strategic position as a senior UDF Deputy able
to influence support for Chirac at the presidential election and to a political context
particularly favourable to tax cuts. The mirror image of that instance was the Commun-
ists’ success, in 1999, in winning changes to the implementation of a European directive
opening the electricity market to competition: they obtained tighter controls on when
electricity can be cut off, and reduced charges for the worst-off, again thanks to their
strategic position in the majority and a broadly favourable ideological climate.
Parliamentarians are, finally, increasingly able to get their own bills passed, even
though the two major caveats – that some private members’ bills are disguised govern-
ment bills, and that government co-operation is usually needed for a bill to survive –
still apply. Parliamentarians’ share of legislation has risen: six out of 90 texts passed, or
7 per cent, in 1988–89, but nineteen out of 93 texts, or 20 per cent, ten years later: a
figure comparable to that of the German Bundestag, rather than to the British House
of Commons where the share is generally under 10 per cent. The rise has been due in
part to the 1995 reform reserving a sitting a month to parliamentary business. Such laws
are not confined to minor issues. France’s main law against incitement to racial hatred
was put down by Jean-Claude Gayssot, a Communist Deputy, during the Rocard
government; the banning of political contributions from businesses, after a brief period
of legality, was Séguin’s initiative, and was initially treated with reluctance by the
Balladur government. Perhaps most important for France’s institutions, however, the
July 2001 reform of budgetary procedure was a joint initiative of the National
Assembly and the Senate. This law, to be implemented over a three-year period from
2005, will facilitate scrutiny by reducing the previous 850 budgetary chapters to
some 150–200 programmes, which will include year-on-year comparisons and may
themselves be pluriannual. It will also enhance the role of parliament by requiring
government adjustments to budgetary commitments to be agreed by the relevant
parliamentary committees, and by setting up an Evaluation and Control Mission in
parliament.
Concluding remarks
When, in 1988, new limitations on the cumul des mandats obliged roughly 150 politi-
cians to resign one or more elective posts, only one chose to leave the National
Assembly (and he sought re-election in 1993). The politically eminent, if kept out of
government, still seek important parliamentary posts, such as the National Assembly
presidency or committee chairmanships: in 1997 Foreign Affairs, the most prestigious
committee (which meets rarely but travels often), included a former president (Giscard)
and four former prime ministers (Balladur, Fabius, Barre and Juppé); former culture
minister Jack Lang succeeded Giscard as chairman in 1997 before becoming education
minister in 2000; the committee of 2002, though somewhat less lustrous, was still
chaired by Balladur and included Fabius and Lang among its distinguished members.
Parliament, and more specifically the National Assembly, remains central for French
politicians because it retains significant powers and high visibility. It is a significant
transformer, and occasionally initiator, of laws. It defines at least some of the limits of
what governments can do. It serves, still, to reveal political talent: a whole generation of
right-wing leaders, including Philippe Séguin and Alain Madelin, won their spurs
opposing left-wing government bills round the clock in 1981. Moreover, a political
consensus has come to favour parliament’s rehabilitation and reinforcement after the
corset years of the early Fifth Republic. That consensus includes heirs of de Gaulle like
Chirac or Séguin; only a handful of surviving first-generation Gaullists (such as the
former president of the Constitutional Council, Yves Guéna) oppose it. It has enabled
parliament to regain some of its lost prerogatives: enough, certainly, to render the term
rubber stamp as inappropriate in the twenty-first century as it was plausible in the
1960s. Developments such as a reform of the parliamentary committee system (sought
by Jean-Louis Debré), or a growth in the activities of parliament’s evaluation offices,
would extend the process further. The five-year presidential term could have a large
impact on the context of parliament’s work. The near-continuous institutional reform
in which France has been engaged since the late 1980s, to the disquiet of observers like
Guéna, shows few signs of halting. And it has tended, on balance, towards the
reinforcement of parliament.
If parliament is central for politicians, however, it seems less so for the wider popula-
tion. No parliament can hope to be a mirror image of its voters; all, in Western demo-
cratic countries, give undue space to middle-class, middle-aged, white men. But the
French National Assembly is especially unrepresentative. The proportion of women, at
10.9 per cent in 1997 and 12.7 per cent in 2002, was barely above that of Greece, and
only 6 per cent higher than the level reached in France in November 1946. The 2002
figure was despite recent legislation setting out penalties (in terms of public funding) for
parties that failed to ensure gender parity among candidates: while minor parties
respected male–female parity quite carefully, for the sake of the financial reward, the
major ones sought to maximise their parliamentary representation (which in their
view required the reselection of almost all sitting male Deputies who wished to run),
and took the penalty for ignoring the law. Again, the growing population of second-
generation immigrants is entirely left out: just one black Deputy represented a main-
land French constituency in 1997, a number that fell to zero when he was beaten in
2002. The National Assembly’s composition is further skewed by the generous facilities
enjoyed by public employees to swim in and out of careers according to electoral
fortune; hence, in part, the over-representation of teachers – and the very low numbers
of blue-collar or even white-collar workers. Many of France’s most eminent politicians,
moreover, are products of the senior civil service, who use parliament merely as a transit
point between ministerial cabinets and government office.
The unrepresentativeness of parliamentarians might matter less if the electorate
appreciated their work. But voters are far from unanimous in doing so. Fifty-two per
cent of respondents to a poll in 1989 considered that Deputies did not do their jobs
conscientiously; two years later, 43 per cent thought that parliament in general was
not doing its job well, against 37 per cent who took a more positive view. Deputies
themselves were unsure: according to a survey in 1990, 69 per cent thought that the
parliament was not adequately filling its function of calling the executive to account.
In part, the public’s view reflects the fact that, despite recent reforms, parliament
has lost powers (and power) since the advent of the Fifth Republic and of the fait
majoritaire. The executive retains, and still uses, formidable means with which to get its
own way (in January 1996, the Juppé government invoked Article 49–3, decree powers
under Article 38 and the accelerated legislation procedure of Article 48 at the same time
in order to enact controversial reforms to the social security system). The president of
the Republic, head of the executive outside periods of cohabitation, is beyond parlia-
mentary scrutiny unless accused of high treason. And, crucially, the uniquely French
phenomenon of the cumul des mandats still encourages parliamentarians to neglect
their role as national legislators for a more rewarding one as local barons.
Both a cause and a consequence of the public’s dissatisfaction with parliament has
been its loss of ground, as a major forum of political debate, to the media and, more
recently, to the judiciary. In all the big crises of the de Gaulle presidency – the ‘barricades
week’ in Algiers in 1960, the ‘generals’ putsch’ the following year and the ‘events’ of
May 1968, parliament was reduced to the role of impotent spectator. Mitterrand’s
economic U-turn of 1983, in many ways the economic turning point of the post-war
half-century, was done without any reference to parliament. The 1991 Gulf war pre-
sented a notable contrast between the frequent appearances of generals and govern-
ment officials before congressional committees in Washington, and the absence from
the Palais-Bourbon of their French counterparts, who preferred the television studios.
The rise of the extreme right-wing leader Jean-Marie Le Pen is also a revealing case in
this respect. His appearance on a flagship television interview programme early in 1984
greatly increased both his recognition and his approval ratings. By contrast, his two
years at the head of the Front National group in the National Assembly made little
difference to public perceptions of him. More generally, ministers are more likely to
announce policy initiatives in interviews or press conferences than in parliament;
governments do not even have to justify policy in the ritual of a Queen’s Speech debate,
still less in the rigour of a congressional hearing. And their adversaries in opposition
are at least as likely to rush to the television studios to reply. Parliament’s continuing
shortcomings as a forum within which to hold the government to account have also
meant that the judiciary has taken over part of its role as exposer of scandals, most
notably in the political funding cases that became all too numerous from the late 1980s.
The French parliament, despite recent reforms, is neither an arena for aggressive ques-
tioning of the executive, on the model of the British House of Commons, nor a ‘work-
ing’ parliament (arbeitsparlament) dedicated to the serious processing of legislation,
like the German Bundestag.
Finally, while parliament has certainly regained some power within a strictly French
context, the outside world has not stood still in the meantime. The growth of European
law has restricted parliament’s role as law-maker more than the formal provisions of
Articles 34 and 37 of the constitution. Europe decides questions ranging from the
amount of permissible state aid to Renault to the specifications of automobile motors,
or the levels of competition required in the electricity or rail industries. Parliament’s
legislative role is thereby limited and constrained – despite the opportunities for scru-
tiny of European legislation provided by Article 88–4 of the constitution. The Jacobin
notion of law as a sovereign act establishing universal obligations binding on citizens,
still plausible in 1958, has been increasingly open to question. Both the sources of law
(Europe and judges, as well as parliament) and its applications (as one part of an
interlocking framework of obligations between institutions, for example) have become
more complex.
The French parliament’s further recovery will still require it to reinforce its position
vis-à-vis the executive, as a proposer and amender of legislation and, above all, as a
body able to call the executive effectively to account on any issue. For it to fulfil these
functions requires both legal and technical means, and a change of focus which would
be best achieved by the further limitation of the cumul des mandats. Even if it achieved
this, it could not hope, in a more polycentric structure of government, to recapture
the ‘centrality’ it enjoyed under earlier Republics. But the competent fulfilment of
more limited functions might regain a respect and interest on the part of voters that
it currently tends to lack.
Further reading
Abélès, M., Un ethnologue à l’Assemblée, Paris, Odile Jacob, 2000.
Ameller, N., L’Assemblée Nationale, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1994.
Avril, P., Les Français et leur parlement, Paris, Casterman, 1972.
Baguenard, J., Le Sénat, 2nd edition, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1996.
Belorgey, J.-M., Le parlement à refaire, Paris, Gallimard, 1991.
Camby, J.-P. and Servent, P., Le travail parlementaire sous la Cinquième République, 4th edition,
Paris, Montchrestien, 2004.
Cayrol, R., Parodi, J.-L. and Ysmal, C., Le député français, Paris, Armand Colin, 1973.
Chandernagor, A., Un parlement pour quoi faire?, Paris, Gallimard, 1967.
Chrestia, P., ‘La rénovation du parlement, une œuvre inachevée’, Revue française de droit
constitutionnel, 30, 1997, pp. 293–322.
Duhamel, O., ‘Députés sondés’, in SOFRES, L’état de l’opinion 1991, Paris, Seuil, 1991,
pp. 163–80.
Frears, J., ‘The French parliament: loyal workhorse, poor watchdog’, West European Politics,
13(3), July 1990, pp. 32–51.
Jan, P., Les Assemblées parlementaires françaises, Paris, La Documentation Française, 2005.
Kimmel, A., L’Assemblée Nationale sous la Cinquième République, Paris, Presses de la Fondation
Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1991.
Mastias, J., Le Sénat de la Cinquième République, Paris, Economica, 1980.
Maus, D., Le parlement sous la Ve République, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France (collection
Que Sais-Je?), 1996.
Pouvoirs, no. 34, 1985, ‘L’Assemblée’; no. 44, 1988, ‘Le Sénat’; no. 64, 1993, ‘Le parlement’.
Revue Française de Science Politique, 31(1), February 1981, special issue on ‘Le parlement
français sous trois présidents, 1958–1980’.
Smith, P., The French Senate, 2 vols, Lampeter, Mellen Press, 2005.
Williams, P., The French Parliament, 1958–1967, London, George Allen and Unwin, 1969.
The National Assembly (126, rue de l’Université, 75007 Paris) publishes a series of
booklets entitled ‘Connaissance de l’Assemblée’, with titles including Les principales
étapes de la procédure législative (1997), L’Assemblée Nationale et les relations interna-
tionales (1998), L’Assemblée Nationale et l’Union européenne (1998), Les questions à
l’Assemblée Nationale (1997), Le statut du député (1997), as well as the Assembly’s own
rules of procedure (in French and English).
The National Assembly’s website, at http://www.assemblee-nationale.fr, posts an
annual statistical review of parliamentary activity (Bulletin de l’Assemblée Nationale,
Statistiques), as well as a recapitulation for each parliament, from which most of the
statistics in this chapter are drawn. It also supplies biographies of individual Deputies
and links to the progress of specific bills.
7 The Left and the Greens
The dilemma of government
The divided Left 171

The Parti Communiste Français (PCF) 177
The Parti Socialiste (PS) 186
The far Left 202
Citoyens et Radicaux 205
The ecology groupings 207
Further reading 214
For de Gaulle, ‘Le régime des partis, c’est la pagaille’: a party-dominated régime meant
a mess. Parties might, at best, represent partial, sectional interests in society with more
or less integrity. By definition, however, they could never be trusted with the national
interest. Indeed, he blamed the failures of the Third and Fourth Republics – govern-
mental instability, policy immobilism and, in 1940, national collapse in the face of the
German invasion – on the unchecked power of parties. Notwithstanding an attitude
that varied from barely concealed mistrust to active contempt, in 1958 he was prepared
– not least in order to reassure those who saw him as a dictator preparing to suspend all
normal political activity – to include a grudging constitutional guarantee of their free-
doms. Article 4 of the 1958 constitution (the first such passage to appear in a French
constitutional text) states that: ‘Political parties and groups shall play a part in the
expression of universal suffrage. They shall be formed, and shall carry on their activ-
ities, freely. They are obliged to respect the principles of national sovereignty and
democracy.’
Little that has happened since then has made French party politics any less messy.
This makes France a difficult environment for the study of political parties and elect-
oral behaviour, but also an attractive one. France offers an almost unrivalled range, for
a single country, of what Klaus von Beyme called familles spirituelles: the far Left,
Communists, Socialists, Greens, liberals, Christian Democrats, conservatives and the
extreme Right are all present, more or less, in force. It is true that France has no
agrarian party and that regionalist parties, in such areas as Brittany, Corsica, Alsace
and Savoy, tend to be electorally very weak; on the other hand these lacunae have been
compensated by the presence of other political forces, whether sublime (Gaullism) or
ridiculous (the birdshooters of Chasse, Pêche, Nature, Traditions (CPNT)) that are
more or less recalcitrant to von Beyme’s broad classifications. To the interest offered by
this varied political bestiary should be added the liveliness of political polemic, the wide
The Left and the Greens 169
range of organisational types, the diversity of electoral competition and the paradoxes
that this complex environment throws up.
The tendency of the French to articulate political argument in strongly ideological
terms has been noted in Chapter 1; although its intensity has decreased since the Fourth
Republic, it may still lend a vigour to polemic that is lacking in other political systems,
as the referendum campaign of 2005 demonstrated. The range of different types of
party organisation deserves closer attention. It was a French political scientist, Maurice
Duverger, who pioneered the classification of parties into organisational types by draw-
ing a contrast between ‘mass’ and ‘cadre’ parties. The mass party, in Duverger’s profile
(dating from 1951), is a highly structured entity with a large, regular, dues-paying
membership, strong discipline (applying notably to its elected officials) and a large and
not very flexible body of (usually left-wing) doctrine. The cadre party, on the other
hand, is a very loose network of elected officials, with no rank-and-file membership to
speak of: though their political views may be broadly similar, the elected officials are
unconcerned with the fine points of doctrine, and enjoy considerable independence
from the (rudimentary) party organisation thanks to their personal, localised, bases of
support. Two other archetypes may to be added to Duverger’s. The ‘catch-all’ party,
theorised in the 1960s by the American Otto Kirchheimer and, as the parti d’électeurs,
by the French political scientist Jean Charlot, combined the discipline and structured
organisation of the mass party with the doctrinal flexibility of the cadre party – and
added both a broad electoral appeal to a very wide range of social groups and a fixation
on the personal qualities of the party leader. Finally, the ‘cartel’ model outlined by Katz
and Mair in 1995 highlights the growing material dependence of parties on the state,
especially through the spread of public financing of parties and elections; the weaken-
ing, not only of ideological confrontation, but of the roots of parties and politicians in
civil society; and the inability of parties to offer the voters more than a choice of very
similar managerial options for public policy-making. Each of these models corres-
ponds to one or more parties or aspects of party competition in Fifth Republic France.
However, because French politics is often localised and personalised, parties that seek a
large membership, structure and discipline may nevertheless find themselves subject to
a sort of gravitational pull towards the cadre model.
The diversity of electoral competition in France is structured by the diversity of
electoral systems. There are six levels of direct electoral competition in France:
European, presidential, parliamentary, regional, cantonal and municipal. To these
should be added the indirect elections to the Senate (via the electoral college of 150,000
local and regional councillors) and referenda. French electoral laws, which have fre-
quently been changed in the course of the twentieth century (usually as a function of a
narrow but inept calculation of self-interest on the part of the incumbent parlia-
mentary majority), have generally selected one of two main options, the two-ballot
system or proportionnelle départementale. The two-ballot system, with single-member
constituencies, has been used for every parliamentary election of the Fifth Republic
except that of 1986. A wide range of candidates stand at the first ballot, which is only
decisive if one of them wins both an absolute majority of votes cast and the votes of at
least a quarter of registered electors. If (as is usually the case) no candidate achieves
such a first-round win, then a second ballot is held a week later, which is won by the
leading contender as in a British first-past-the-post election. In practice, many victori-
ous candidates at this run-off ballot win by an absolute majority, because they have
fewer opponents than at the first round. Some first-round candidates are eliminated by
the electoral law: the run-off is open only to candidates who have obtained a set number
of votes at the first ballot, fixed by law at 5 per cent of votes cast in 1958 and 1962, 10
per cent of registered voters in 1967, 1968 and 1973, and at 12.5 per cent of registered
voters from 1978. Moreover, most parties narrow the field further by concluding pre-
election agreements providing for mutual withdrawals of candidates after the first bal-
lot in favour of better-placed allies; the system therefore rewards parties that conclude
such alliances and penalises those (usually on the political extremes) that do not. A
variant on the two-ballot system is used for cantonal elections (to the councils of
France’s 100 départements) and for direct presidential elections: at the latter, only the
two leading contenders are present at the run-off and the interval between ballots is two
weeks instead of one. At regional elections, however, and at a single parliamentary
election (in 1986), proportionnelle départementale has applied. This is a single-ballot
proportional list system, under which each département is a multi-member constitu-
ency. Seats are shared out proportionally to the score of each list within the département
(with some majoritarian correctives in the detailed rules, and an extension of constitu-
encies to cover whole regions in 2004). A variation of this system is used for European
elections, but the constituency base is different. From 1979 to 1999, the whole of France
was a single constituency for the election of the nation’s MEPs; in 2004 the country was
divided into eight super-regions to elect French MEPs, who currently number seventy-
eight. Finally, a hybrid two-ballot system is used for municipal elections in France’s
towns and cities, combining sufficient safeguards to ensure a clear municipal majority
with a ‘dose’ of proportional representation to allow an opposition voice on the council.
The relationship of the electoral system to the configuration of parties is a complex
one in any state. What is clear in the French case is, first, that the various electoral
systems in force allow the space for multiparty competition (to a far greater extent than
does the British system) and, secondly, that the coexistence of several systems at differ-
ent levels of election have led to differing patterns of competition and co-operation
between parties: for example, proportionnelle départementale does not include the same
incentives as the two-ballot system for pre-election alliances between parties. The situ-
ation is further complicated when a referendum is called, for then the question at issue
may cut across party divisions – especially if it concerns Europe. This was true of the
referendums held in 1972, 1992 and (especially) 2005.
The position of parties in France is paradoxical in two senses. In the first place, they
are simultaneously ubiquitous and weak. De Gaulle’s ambition to create a presidency
‘above parties’, to be won by direct competition before the voters between individuals
free of partisan ties, was quickly revealed as an uncharacteristically naive dream. The
first direct presidential election in 1965 quickly became an occasion for partisan con-
frontation; the presidency has been the object of party (as well as personal) strategies
ever since. Moreover, as is shown in Chapter 11, party divisions pervade (and thereby
weaken) a very wide range of French interest groups, from trade unions to anti-racist
groups to lawyers’ or doctors’ professional associations. If it is unsurprising that no
aspect of politics is a party-free zone, it is more remarkable that parties have penetrated
to other aspects of society where in other countries their intrusion would be considered
unwelcome. In other ways, however, French parties can be considered weak. In the first
place, parties command little respect among a public that is generally inclined to share
de Gaulle’s view of them. Successive surveys since 1985 have found between 18 and 24
per cent of respondents trusting ‘parties in general’, compared with ratings of 44–52
per cent for parliamentarians, 49–59 per cent for the civil service, 67–77 per cent for
mayors – and even 25–32 per cent for ‘politicians in general’. Anti-party sentiment was
an important factor in the dramatic first ballot of the 2002 presidential elections, when
candidates representing the mainstream ‘parties of government’ of Left and Right were
supported by less than 46 per cent of the registered electorate between them, compared
with 20.5 per cent for the extremes of Right and Left and 30.8 per cent for abstentions
and spoilt ballots. This result allowed the far Right candidate (and fierce critic of
established parties) Jean-Marie Le Pen to win a place at the run-off ballot. Secondly,
parties are bad at attracting members (Table 7.1) – and worse at keeping them. Member-
ship density in France (the ratio between the total number of party members and the
total number of registered voters) has been among the lowest in Europe for half a
century: a comparative study by Mair and van Biezen, based on figures from the late
1990s, put France, with a density of 1.3 per cent, nineteenth out of twenty European
countries – ahead only of Poland, behind the UK, and well behind countries such as
Germany (with a membership density of 2.9), Spain (3.4), or Italy (4.1). With the
exception of the Communists, no French party has sustained a membership of over
200,000 on anything but an ephemeral basis; few have managed much over 100,000 for
very long. All parties have difficulty sustaining activity among those members that they
have. And even the Communists were known as a parti-passoire, a ‘colander party’, for
the speed at which members passed through and out after the first flush of idealism.
The third aspect of party weakness in France is electoral. Parties structure political
competition, but they do not monopolise it: dissidents with local roots, who might be
crushed by party machines elsewhere, may thrive in France. Finally, and partly for this
reason, parties are impermanent. Splits and mergers occur with a regularity and an
unscrupulousness that recall the world of business. Of all French parties in 2005, only
the (much weakened) Communists could boast an unbroken existence since the fall of
the Fourth Republic in 1958; all the others had either been founded for the first time
since then (like the Greens, or the Front National) or relaunched one or more times
(like the Socialists, the Gaullists, and the various incarnations of the non-Gaullist
moderate Right). This instability exasperated Katz and Mair to such an extent that they
chose simply to leave France out of their 1992 data book on party organisations in
Western democracies.
A second paradox is that the untidiness and instability that characterise the land-
scape of French political parties coexist with a remarkable stability of the division
between Left and Right. The ideological parameters of this division, and its limitations,
were discussed in Chapter 1; some of its electoral dimensions will be considered in
Chapter 9. The Left–Right divide is still easily recognised and readily used by the
French when they talk about politics; it has shaped the successive alternances of differ-
ent political forces in government since 1981; it will therefore structure the main
division between the chapters on parties.
The divided Left

The defining event in the twentieth-century history of the French Left took place in
December 1920 at Tours on the Loire. Here, at its first congress since World War I,
France’s Socialist Party (the SFIO, or Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière),
which had been created out of several different socialist organisations just fifteen years
earlier, split on the issue of whether to affiliate to Lenin’s Communist International. A
minority of the delegates (but a majority of parliamentarians) voted to remain in the
Table 7.1 France: party membership since 1945
Communist Socialist Green Centrist Non-Gaullist moderate Gaullist Euro- Extreme Right Est’d Total as
Right sceptic (Front National) total* % of
Right electorate
Claimed Estimated Claimed Estimated Estimated Claimed Estimated Claimed Estimated Claimed Estimated Claimed Claimed Estimated
late 1940s 1,000,000 800,000 340,000 125,000 50,000 400,000 1,675,000 6.7
late 1950s 425,150 300,000 85,000 60,000 40,000 10,000 280,000 20,000 430,000 1.7
early 1960s 420,000 330,000 74,000 55,000 40,000 20,000 7,500 150,000 86,000 498,500 1.8
late 1960s 380,000 84,000 60,000 25,000 15,000 180,000 160,000 615,000 2.2
early 1970s 450,000 146,000 25,000 3,000 238,000 100,000 724,000 2.4
late 1970s 632,000 520,000 200,000 17,500 145,000 8,500 760,347 160,000 900 906,900 2.6
early 1980s 600,000 380,000 200,000 180,000 43,000 12,500 60,000 10,000 850,000 200,000 65,000 10,000 792,500 2.8
late 1980s 604,285 330,000 180,000 49,000 20,000 142,113 50,000 771,113 2.1
early 1990s 220,000 150,000 125,000 12,500 25,000 148,000 48,000 578,500 1.5
late 1990s 210,000 100,000 148,795 10,000 40,000 33,000 10,000 80,424 33,000 60,000 42,000 464,200 1.3
post-2000 133,767 120,027 8,525 44,000** 180,858† 15,000 60,000 562,177 1.4
Sources: C. Ysmal, ‘Transformations du militantisme et déclin des partis’, in P. Perrineau (ed.), L’Engagement politique: déclin ou mutation? (Paris, Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1994), pp. 48–9; A.
Knapp, Le Gaullisme àprès de Gaulle (Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1996), p. 391; Y. Mény and A. Knapp, Government and Politics in Western Europe (3rd edition, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 55; P. Bréchon, Les Partis
politiques (Paris, Montchrestien, 1999), pp. 107–8; Le Monde, 23 November 1999, 23–24 January 2000, 22 February 2000, 18 October 2004, 22 November 2004, 28 November 2004, 22 January 2005; http://www.pcf.fr (results of
members’ vote for 32nd congress, dates 28 February 2003); http://www.u-m-p.org/site/index.php, visited 13 July 2005; http://www.frontnational.com; press office, Mouvement pour la France.
Notes
* Annual totals are calculated on the basis of estimates where available, and of claimed figures where no estimates have been made.
Years for data
Communist: 1947, 1959, 1964, 1969, 1974, 1978, 1984, 1987, 1990, 1998, 2003
Socialist: 1946, 1958, 1963, 1968, 1974, 1978, 1983, 1988, 1992, 1999, 2004
Green: 1999, 2004
Centrist: 1946, 1958, 1962, 1968, 1974, 1979, 1983, 1986, 1992, 1997, 2005 (**New UDF)
Non-Gaullist moderate Right: 1947, 1958, 1961, 1970, 1979, 1983, 1986, 1992, 1999
Gaullist: 1947, 1958, 1963, 1969, 1973, 1978, 1985, 1989, 1994, 1999, 2005 (†UMP)
Euro-sceptic Right: 1999 (RPF), 2005 (MPF)
Front National: 1979, 1985, 1992, 1999, 2004 (claim for members ‘and sympathisers’).
old SFIO. Attached to a certain Marxist discourse about class struggle, but also steeped
in the French republican tradition and respectful of the democratic rules of ‘bourgeois’
politics, they did not carry internationalism to the point of taking orders from Moscow.
The majority of the delegates (though a minority of parliamentarians), on the other
hand, voted for affiliation, and formed the Communist Party (Parti Communiste
Français, or PCF). Though often unaware of the full implications, they were voting to
become a Leninist party, and soon a Stalinist one: subordinate to Moscow’s directives,
contemptuous of ‘bourgeois’ political systems and freedoms, committed to creating a
disciplined, hierarchical revolutionary vanguard organisation, and ready to use both
open political processes and clandestine activities to smash the bourgeois capitalist
state and replace it by a socialist republic of workers’ councils.
For nearly half a century, the most important originality in the configuration of
France’s left-wing parties was the coexistence and competition of a Communist Party
and a Socialist Party of something close to comparable strength, split by deep ideolo-
gical divisions which have made alliances invariably problematic. Their stormy relation-
ship has varied between fierce enmity (1920–34, 1939–41 and 1947–62); minimal,
tactical alliances (1977–81 and 1984–96); and co-operation, more or less close (1934–38,
1941–47, 1962–77, 1981–84 and 1996 to the present). One major theme of this chapter
is the struggle for predominance, inside and outside alliances, between these two frères
ennemis of the Left. That struggle, as well as the fear of Communism among moderate
voters in the context of the Cold War, helped to keep the Left out of power from the
foundation of the Fifth Republic until May 1981. Both were attenuated (but not ended)
by that year’s victories and by the catastrophic decline of Communism thereafter, first
within and then, from 1989, beyond France.
Even in a close and credible alliance, however, the Socialist and Communist Left has
rarely commanded an electoral majority. In order to win elections, other, albeit smaller,
elements have usually been necessary. Some votes, at second ballots, have come from the
various Trotskyist and far left-wing groupings which between them have commanded
anything up to 10 per cent of the vote, though usually a much lower figure (Tables 7.2
to 7.4). Support has also come from more moderate sources: from anti-clerical
Radicals, the remains of the great governing party of the Third Republic; from left-
wing Catholics, some of whom gravitated to the little Parti Socialiste Unifié; or, most
recently, from the ecology movements. Such support is usually, though not always,
secured via inter-party agreements. The most recent example of this is the gauche
plurielle alliance which won the 1997 parliamentary elections and carried the Socialist
leader, Lionel Jospin, to the premiership: it incorporated a relatively new player, the
Greens, into the established party system, but with a cost in additional intra-coalition
rivalries that were to lose Jospin his place at the second ballot of the presidential
election in 2002.
A third theme, far from unique to France, concerns the difficulties of left-wing
parties in delivering on their promises in an international capitalist context which has
rarely been favourable. This was as true in 1936, when the Socialist Léon Blum took
office at the head of a Popular Front coalition of Socialists, Communists and Radicals,
as it was in 1981 when Mitterrand brought a comparable coalition to power with a
particularly heavy burden of hopes and promises. The favourable economic context of
the first four years of the Jospin premiership, including, briefly, an embarrassment of
unexpectedly high tax receipts, was unusual. But even this benign environment did not
dispel a tension between the need to meet voter expectations on social issues (and, for
Table 7.2 Results of National Assembly elections under the Fifth Republic1
Date Extreme Communists Socialists Other Greens Non- Gaullists Extreme Others Total Total Total Total Total Valid Blank
Left moderate Gaullist Right Left moderate Right moderate votes and
Left2 moderate including Left Right cast spoilt
Right3 Greens ballots
% of seats % of seats % of seats % of seats % of seats % of seats % of seats % of seats % of seats % of seats % of seats % of seats % of seats % of seats % of total
vote vote vote vote vote vote vote vote vote vote vote vote vote vote electorate
1958 0.0 0 18.9 10 15.5 43 10.9 39 n.c.5 0 31.1 172 20.6 216 2.6 1 0.5 0 45.2 92 26.4 82 54.3 389 51.7 388 100.0 481 75.2 2.0
1962 2.0 0 21.9 41 12.4 66 7.4 44 n.c. 0 23.0 98 32.4 233 0.8 0 0.0 0 43.8 151 19.9 110 56.2 331 55.4 331 100.0 482 66.6 2.1
1967 2.2 0 22.5 73 18.9 123 0.0 0 n.c. 0 23.7 91 32.1 200 0.6 0 0.0 0 43.6 196 18.9 123 56.4 291 55.8 291 100.0 487 79.3 1.8
1968 4.0 0 20.1 34 16.5 58 0.0 0 n.c. 0 20.8 102 38.0 293 0.1 0 0.5 0 40.6 92 16.5 58 59.0 395 58.9 395 100.0 487 78.6 1.4
1973 3.2 0 21.4 73 19.1 102 2.1 3 n.c. 0 29.0 129 24.6 183 0.5 0 0.0 0 45.8 178 21.2 105 54.1 312 53.6 312 100.0 490 81.3 1.8
1978 3.3 0 20.6 86 22.8 115 3.5 0 2.0 0 23.9 136 22.8 154 0.8 0 0.2 0 52.2 201 28.4 115 47.5 290 46.7 290 100.0 491 81.6 1.6
1981 1.2 0 16.1 44 36.1 289 2.2 0 1.1 0 21.7 70 21.2 88 0.3 0 0.0 0 56.7 333 39.3 289 43.2 158 42.9 158 100.0 491 69.9 1.0
4 4 4
1986 1.5 0 9.7 35 30.8 212 2.0 4 1.2 0 44.6 136 155 10.1 35 0.1 0 45.2 251 34.0 216 54.7 326 44.6 291 100.0 577 75.1 3.4
1988 0.4 0 11.3 25 34.9 275 2.6 5 0.3 0 21.3 141 19.2 130 9.8 1 0.2 0 49.6 305 37.9 280 50.3 272 40.5 271 100.0 577 64.7 1.4
1993 1.7 0 9.1 23 17.8 57 2.4 13 11.1 0 23.8 227 20.3 257 12.9 0 0.3 0 42.7 93 31.8 70 57.0 484 44.1 484 100.0 577 65.8 3.7
1997 2.6 0 9.9 36 23.8 250 4.0 26 6.9 8 20.7 116 15.4 140 15.3 1 1.2 0 47.3 320 34.8 284 51.4 257 36.2 256 100.0 577 65.1 3.3
2002 2.8 0 4.8 21 24.1 141 3.8 13 5.7 3 10.13 303 33.36 3696 12.7 0 2.7 0 41.2 178 33.6 157 56.1 399 43.4 399 100.0 577 63.0 1.4
Sources: Based on A. Lancelot, Les élections nationales sous la Ve République (3rd edition, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1998); Le Monde, 12 June 2002, for 2002.
Notes
1 All figures for votes are given as a percentage of the first-ballot vote in metropolitan France only, except those for 2002, which include overseas départements and territories. All figures for seats are total numbers, including seats for both metropolitan France and for overseas
départements and territories (except for 1958, where Algerian seats have been excluded). Deputies not registered with any parliamentary group (normally between ten and twenty in an average Assembly) are classified in the table according to nearest partisan proximity.
2 ‘Other moderate Left’: chiefly Radicals and ‘various Left’. Radical candidates were part of the Socialist-led federation in 1967 and 1968, and their votes are classified under the Socialists’ for these years. From 1973 to 1993, Radicals ran under their own colours but joined the
Socialist parliamentary group. For 1997, ‘Other moderate Left’ includes the Radicals and Jean-Pierre Chevènement’s Mouvement des Citoyens, which together with the Greens formed the Radical-Citoyen-Vert group.
3 Up to 1973, this classification includes both the Centrists outside the Gaullist-led majority and those other groups of the non-Gaullist moderate Right that supported the government, chiefly Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s Républicains Indépendants and, for 1973, the majority
Centrists. From 1978 to 1997, the non-Gaullist moderate Right consists of the UDF and ‘various Right’. For 2002, it includes all moderate right-wing candidates not bearing the endorsement of the Union pour la Majorité Présidentielle.
4 The 1986 elections, unlike all others listed here, were run on a proportional list system with a single ballot. Gaullists and UDF ran joint lists in most départements, making their respective votes impossible to separate. The 44.6 per cent under non-Gaullist moderate Right
therefore includes the whole of the moderate right-wing vote, Gaullist and non-Gaullist.
5 No candidates.
6 The 2002 figures are for the Union pour la Majorité Présidentielle, a broad right-wing group with the RPR as its core component, but including substantial forces from the non-Gaullist moderate Right as well.
Table 7.3 Results of presidential elections (first ballots), 1965–2002
Extreme Communist Socialist Other Greens/ Total Non- Gaullist Other Extreme Others Total Total
Left moderate Ecology Left Gaullist moderate Right moderate Right
Left including moderate Right Right
Greens Right
1965 n.c. n.c. 31.7 n.c. n.c. 31.7 15.6 44.7 1.7 5.2 1.2 62.0 67.2
1969 1.1 21.3 5.0 3.6 n.c. 31.0 23.3 44.5 1.3 n.c. n.c. 69.1 69.1
1974 2.7 n.c. 43.3 n.c. 1.3 47.4 32.6 15.1 3.7 0.8 0.4 51.6 52.4
1981 2.3 15.4 25.9 3.3 3.9 50.8 28.3 21.0 n.c. n.c. n.c. 49.3 49.3
1988 4.5 6.8 34.1 n.c. 3.8 49.1 16.5 20.0 n.c. 14.4 n.c. 36.5 50.9
1995 5.3 8.6 23.3 n.c. 3.3 40.5 18.6 20.8 4.7 15.0 0.3 44.1 59.1
2002 10.4 3.4 16.1 7.6 5.3 42.3 12.6 19.9 1.2 19.2 4.2 33.7 52.9
Sources: Based on A. Lancelot, Les élections nationales sous la Ve République (3rd edition, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1998); Le Monde for 2002.
Note
n.c. = no candidate.
Table 7.4 Results of presidential elections (second ballots), 1965–2002 (all figures as percentage of votes cast, including overseas départements and
territories)
1965 1969 1974 1981 1988 1995 2002
Left 44.8 n.c. 49.2 51.8 54.0 47.4 (Jospin) n.c.

(Mitterrand) (Mitterrand) (Mitterrand) (Mitterrand)
Centre-Right n.c. 41.8 (Poher) n.c. n.c. n.c. n.c. n.c.
Right 55.2 (de Gaulle) 58.2 50.8 (Giscard) 48.2 (Giscard) 46.0 (Chirac) 52.6 (Chirac) 82.2 (Chirac)
(Pompidou)
Extreme Right n.c. n.c. n.c. n.c. n.c. n.c. 17.8 (Le Pen)
Sources: Based on A. Lancelot, Les élections nationales sous la Ve République (3rd edition, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1998); Le Monde for 2002.
Note
n.c. = no candidate present at second ballot.
the Greens, on environmental ones as well) while establishing credibility as economic
managers – ‘managers of capitalism’, in Communist parlance – which has inevitably
fuelled conflict and competition both between and within the parties of the Left.
The Parti Communiste Français (PCF)

With a quarter of the vote and the status of France’s biggest party under the Fourth
Republic, a fifth of the vote for the first twenty years of the Fifth Republic, but under
10 per cent at almost every election since 1984, the PCF has undergone such an acceler-
ated decline that it now requires an effort of imagination to recall the attraction it held
for former generations of French men and women, and its critical importance within
the French party system. It owed its attractiveness to five main elements. First, the PCF
succeeded early on in adapting its Marxism-Leninism to a more home-grown French
revolutionary tradition, thereby winning the support of ‘red peasant’ areas of France,
where the vote had always gravitated towards the far Left. Second, this reconciliation of
the Moscow-led PCF with French tradition was greatly reinforced by the PCF’s own
role as the major force in the French internal Resistance, and from the Soviet Union’s
role in the defeat of Germany in World War II. The Soviet Union’s prestige lasted far
longer in France than in Britain, America or Germany; a large swathe of the left-wing
intelligentsia contrived to be wilfully ignorant of the existence of show trials and labour
camps until the 1970s. Third, for its main target group, the French working class, the
PCF offered not only a mythical Communist future free of the familiar daily round of
poverty and exploitation, but also an alternative present, with associations (anything
from the Communist-led trade union, the Confédération Générale du Travail, to the
Union des Femmes Françaises, the Secours Populaire, the Mouvement de la Jeunesse
Communiste, the Fédération Sportive Générale du Travail, or Tourisme et Travail, a
Communist-run travel operator specialising in trips to the Soviet Union and Eastern
Europe) and political activities that gave self-respect or simply affordable enjoyment to
those who participated in them, as well as a chance of upward social mobility for the
most gifted through party or union organisations. Fourth, the Communists’ local
elected officials, and especially mayors in working-class suburbs, won support, in the
words of Denis Brogan, ‘by methods that recalled Joseph Chamberlain in Birmingham
rather than Lenin in Petrograd’: they showed dynamism, honesty and competence in
getting housing, schools, and health and leisure facilities built and properly run at a
time when such achievements were novelties. Finally, the creation during the 1920s, at
Moscow’s insistence and almost certainly with Moscow’s money, of a hard-core revo-
lutionary vanguard, able to operate openly or underground, combined with an expand-
ing base in civil society and in local government to give the PCF France’s only real mass
party organisation. At its peak in the immediate post-war years, it probably attracted
some 800,000 members; under the Fifth Republic it oscillated between a quarter and a
half million, at least until the early 1990s.
The Fifth Republic and the decline of the PCF

The PCF opposed the Fifth Republic and suffered for it: its vote dropped from 25.9 per
cent in 1956 to 18.9 per cent in 1958 (see Figure 7.1), while the two-ballot system and
the party’s lack of electoral allies ensured that the number of Communist Deputies fell
from 150 to just ten. The next two decades, however, saw a modest recovery, with the
Figure 7.1 Votes for the Communist Party (% of votes cast, first ballot in two-ballot elections),
1956–2004.
party settling to a steady 20-plus per cent of the vote (see Table 7.2). The electoral
decline under the Fifth Republic only started after 1979. Four sets of figures illustrate
its dimensions. First, in the parliamentary elections of 1978, the PCF attracted 5.8
million voters, or 20.6 per cent of the vote; by the 1997 parliamentary elections both
figures had more than halved, to 2.5 million voters or 9.9 per cent of votes cast; five
years later, at the parliamentary elections of June 2002, they had halved again, to 1.26
million, or 4.8 per cent. At the presidential election of the same year, the Communist
candidate Robert Hue had attracted fewer than a million voters, and a vote share, at 3.4
per cent, lower than that of two of his three competitors from the extreme (Trotskyist)
Left. Second, whereas in 1978 the PCF won over 20 per cent of the vote in forty-five –
nearly half – of the ninety-six départements of metropolitan France, in 1997 it reached
this figure in just three départements. By the 2002 parliamentary elections, not only did
it fail to win 20 per cent of the vote in even one département; it was obliged, in order to
keep the handful of seats needed to form a parliamentary group, to enter into
unprecedented swaps of constituencies with Socialist and Green allies from the first
ballot. Third, whereas in 1978, with 39 per cent of the blue-collar vote (more than any
other party), the PCF could still justify its claim to be the party of the working class, by
1997 its share of the blue-collar vote had shrunk to 15 per cent, barely half that of the
Socialists – and two-thirds that of the far right-wing Front National. In 2002, Hue was
supported by fewer workers than was Jean St-Josse, the candidate of Chasse, Pêche,
Nature, Traditions; even at the June parliamentary elections that ensued, the PCF share
of the blue-collar vote was a mere 6 per cent, a fifth that of the Socialists. Finally,
although the sharpest drop occurred in the six years after its score of 20.8 per cent in
1978, with Georges Marchais, the party’s secretary-general since 1972, managing just
15.4 per cent as a presidential candidate in 1981 and then leading the party’s list at the
European elections of 1984 to a mere 11.2 per cent, the decline has continued since
1984, and even steepened between 1997 and a modest and partial recovery in 2004. The
party has been increasingly thrown back on its most resilient bastions, often sustained
by control of municipal office; even here, it is now threatened, and dependent in most
years on support from Socialists and even Greens.
Many of the sources of the Communists’ decline are to be sought in the reasons for
the party’s success. They may be discussed under six headings.
The passing of the Resistance generation

The prestige that its role in the Resistance brought to the PCF was inevitably a wasting
asset. It affected, above all, the age cohort that underwent its formative political experi-
ences – normally in early adulthood – at the time of the Occupation. By the late 1970s,
that generation was a minority nearing the upper end of the age pyramid. Newer voters,
baby-boomers born after 1945, were less sensitive to the appeal of anciens résistants.
The same applied to the Communists’ elected officials: again by the late 1970s, a gener-
ation of men (and women) whose popularity with voters had been founded on their
Resistance role was nearing retirement. Equally appealing successors were at times hard
to find. The other great party of the Resistance, the Gaullists, also experienced the
difficulties of generational change in the 1970s.
The numerical decline of the party’s core electorate of workers

and peasants
By the late 1970s, the PCF’s electoral reserves – blue-collar workers, especially if union-
ised and in big firms, and, on a more regional basis, small peasants – had begun to
shrink. The numerical decline of the peasantry is easily demonstrated: the number of
French men and women working on the land fell by two-thirds between 1954 and 1982.
The issue of blue-collar workers is more complex: the absolute decline of the whole
class, from about 8 million to about 7 million since the 1970s, counts for less than the
shrinkage of the big battalions of industrial workers with stable jobs in large enterprises
(such as steel plants), unionised and long favourable to the PCF, plus the replacement,
in some of the worst-paid or least attractive jobs, of French people by immigrants who
did not have the vote. In addition, a declining proportion of voters retained a subjective
identity as members of the working class. These slow social changes, like the passing of
the Resistance generation, did not signal the PCF’s inevitable eclipse; but they did
require the party to appeal to new groups and generations.
The collapse of the prestige of the Soviet Union (and then of the Soviet
Union tout court)
The PCF’s defining characteristic at its foundation was its subordination, as the ‘Section
Française de l’Internationale Communiste’, to orders from Moscow, determined by the
interests of the ‘international workers’ movement’ – in other words, of Soviet foreign
policy. Maurice Thorez, party leader from 1930 till his death (on holiday by the Black
Sea) in 1964, and the generation who surrounded him at the top of the PCF, had been
hand-picked from Moscow. To a greater extent than the leaders of almost any other
Western Communist Party, they were Stalinists and proud of it. Their reaction to
Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin in 1956 was one of stunned disbelief. When first
China and then Italy challenged the claims of the Soviet Union to lead the world
Communist movement, the PCF energetically backed the Russians.
A slow and discontinuous process of de-Sovietisation of the PCF nevertheless
opened after Thorez’s death. Party leaders, and the PCF daily L’Humanité, cautiously
criticised the crushing of the ‘Prague Spring’ by Warsaw Pact forces in August 1968,
and voiced disapproval of the treatment of selected Soviet dissidents over the ensuing
decade. The PCF leadership stopped referring to the Soviet Union as a model, instead
claiming their attachment to un socialisme à la française and stressing the independence
of their own policies from Moscow’s dictates (which probably had an element of truth,
if only because the Soviet leadership had long since renounced any dreams of revolu-
tion in Western Europe and was quite comfortable with de Gaulle, Pompidou and
Giscard, none of whom was precisely pro-American, in the Élysée).
But for the party leadership, de-Sovietisation was always a tactical, and therefore
reversible, choice. As both international détente and the alliance with the Socialists in
France turned sour at the end of the 1970s, the old Soviet links were reaffirmed. At the
PCF’s Twenty-third Congress in 1979, Marchais declared the overall record of the
Soviet bloc to be globalement positif; early the following year, he proclaimed his support
for the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan on live television from Moscow; the year after
that, the French Communists declared their support for the military coup against the
Solidarity movement in Poland. The timing could not have been worse, for the Soviet
Union was speedily losing what credit it had among the French, and even among PCF
sympathisers. A survey in December 1972 showed 28 per cent of respondents, and 62
per cent of the PCF’s own supporters, agreeing with the globalement positif view of the
Soviet achievement; ten years later, the figures had fallen to just 11 per cent overall and
35 per cent of PCF sympathisers. Marchais, in other words, succeeded in reviving the
Communists’ reputation as Moscow’s men at precisely the moment when such a reputa-
tion had become electorally fatal. Nor did the softer image of Gorbachev’s Soviet Union
improve matters, for the PCF was noticeably reserved about the Gorbachev reforms.
Not surprisingly, the end of the Soviet Union forced the PCF into an independence
for which its ageing leadership was wholly unprepared. In a broader sense, too, the
discredit into which Marxism fell meant that the PCF lost its ideological bearings.
The decline of counter-societies and subcultures

In its heyday, roughly from the mid-1930s to the mid-1960s, the PCF was able to lock
some at least of its supporters into what Annie Kriegel called a Communist ‘counter-
society’, a subculture in which the party’s press and wide range of satellite associations
took care of the dedicated Communist’s every free moment. Control of local govern-
ment helped too, especially in working-class bastions in the suburbs of Paris and other
cities, with their rues Lénine, their avenues Maurice-Thorez or their centres sportifs Youri
Gagarine. But from the 1960s, the counter-society began to fall apart under the impact
of a wider society that was more individualist and more consumerist – and where, with
10 million televisions in France (as there were by 1970), the ‘dominant’ (capitalist)
culture could be beamed into almost every living room. By the late 1980s, L’Humanité
was seeking, like any other daily newspaper, to cut costs and make do with fewer
journalists, while the party’s provincial press had almost ceased to exist. The Commun-
ist subculture was not alone in fading away in this manner; it was paralleled by the
withering of a whole range of Catholic organisations, which had still been thriving in
the 1950s among groups ranging from students to farmers.
The changing stakes of urban governance

‘Municipal Communism’ reached a peak in 1977, when the party elected or re-elected
mayors to 72 out of France’s 221 biggest towns. No major town had been lost to the
PCF since 1959. But in the municipal elections of 1983, 1989 and 1995, 33 of the
party’s major municipalities were lost (Table 7.5). This reversal of fortunes is partly
linked to the PCF’s overall decline. But it also resulted from the changing demands
being made on local government. While at a time of more or less full employment,
Communist mayors were purposeful and competent at building housing, schools,
clinics, sports halls and cultural centres, they were far less successful at delivering the
economic development that became the key voter priority as joblessness rose in the
1980s. Many Communist mayors, moreover, lost patience with what they saw as their
party’s lack of realism in its attitude to local government: some, like Robert Jarry of Le
Mans or Fernand Micouraud of Vierzon, left the PCF altogether, while others like
Jacques Rimbault of Bourges, maintained a ‘semi-detached’ existence. In either case,
the PCF’s reputation as a supplier of good local government had been badly damaged
by the mid-1980s.
The decline of authoritarian organisational models

At Moscow’s behest, the PCF of the 1920s adopted the Leninist model of party organ-
isation known as ‘democratic centralism’. Based on the cell in the factory or neigh-
bourhood, the section in the firm, town or canton, the federation in the département,
and the central committee, bureau politique and general secretariat at national level, the
system was highly centralist and hardly at all democratic. It had three major principles:
the presentation at elections to party office, at all levels, of a single candidate for each
Table 7.5 Party control of towns of over 30,000 inhabitants (total number 221, at 1977 population
figures) after local elections, 1971–2001
Mayor’s party 1971 1977 1983 1989 1995 2001
PCF 50 72 53 45 39 28
PS 46 81 60 72 68 65
Other Left 7 6 2 8 13 10
Les Verts 0 0 0 0 0 1
Total Left 103 159 115 125 120 103
Gaullists 35 16 44 43 47 55
Non-Gaullist moderate 83 46 42 44 42 42
Right (UDF from 1983)
Other Right 0 0 20 9 11 20
Extreme Right 0 0 0 0 1 0
Sources: P. Martin, Les élections municipales en France (Paris, La Documentation Française, 2001); Le
Monde.
post, vetted (and usually chosen) in advance by the immediately superior level of the
party; a ban on all horizontal contacts between, for example, two cells or two sections
without reference to the superior level, ensuring the effective isolation of dissidents; and
the presentation of a single policy text for discussion at the party’s congresses. The
party’s dissidents in the 1940s and 1950s were subjected to ritual humiliations remin-
iscent of Stalin’s show trials. For a dedicated full-time party official, the punishment of
expulsion, though less severe than the gulag or the bullet, entailed loss of livelihood
and, frequently, psychological trauma. Perhaps more than anything else, this rigid style
of organisation cut the PCF off from the young revolutionaries of May 1968. From the
1970s, though, dissidence began to lose its terrors and was embarked upon by increas-
ing numbers of leading party members, including Jean Elleinstein, official historian of
the party, Henri Fiszbin, head of the Paris federation, Claude Poperen, emblematic
figure of the Renault workers, and Pierre Juquin, official party spokesman from 1976 to
1985. And at a time when the PCF was trying to demonstrate its democratic credentials
in other areas (for example, by abandoning another Leninist concept, the dictatorship
of the proletariat, at the Twenty-second Congress in 1976), democratic centralism was
regularly used as evidence by opponents seeking to deny the sincerity of the party’s
commitment to real democratic values. By the early 1980s, in short, the PCF’s authori-
tarian style of organisation had become an electoral liability without even fulfilling its
main function of ensuring a single party line. Once again, the PCF was not alone in this
case. The Gaullist party, also described by its own more mischievous members as func-
tioning on the democratic centralist model, had difficulty, from the 1970s, in adapting
to the open and public expression of several different viewpoints.
In all of these respects, then, the bases of the PCF’s earlier strength became sources of
weakness by the late 1970s or early 1980s. But two other causes of decline should also
be added.
The new strategic environment of the Fifth Republic

The new constitution, which the PCF opposed in 1958, placed the Communists in a
hostile institutional environment. The loss of 140 out of 150 Deputies in the November
1958 parliamentary elections was a brutal demonstration of the dangers of isolation in
a two-ballot electoral system. Moreover, it became clear that, against the cohesive
Gaullist-led coalition, the opposition would need an equally cohesive programme.
Those two factors pushed the PCF towards alliance with the only possible partners, the
Socialists, in a slow, discontinuous process beginning with second-ballot withdrawal
agreements in the 1962 parliamentary elections, and culminating in the signature of the
Common Programme of the Left a decade later, in June 1972.
Unlike earlier alliances of the Popular Front or Liberation periods, the union of the
Left benefited the Socialists more than it did the PCF. It did so for two reasons. First,
the PCF was handicapped by direct presidential elections. Everyone knew that no
Communist had a chance of winning the support of over half the voters at a run-off
ballot. Communists implicitly acknowledged this fundamental disqualification in 1965
and again in 1974: on both occasions they backed François Mitterrand from the first
round. Second, Mitterrand himself managed to establish a revived Socialist Party (of
which he became first secretary in 1971) as the more credible and more modern partner
in the union, and thereby succeeded in his (openly expressed) ambition of using the
union of the Left to poach 3 million of the PCF’s 5 million voters. His supreme
political achievement was to lock the PCF into a dynamic of union, despite the party
leadership’s growing misgivings; to establish the Socialists as the larger party of the
Left as early as 1974 (for the first time in over three decades); and thereby to create the
bases of the left-wing victory of 1981. These developments were observed with dismay
by the PCF leadership, which tried to get out of the union while placing the blame on
their allies. But the hunger for change among Communist as well as Socialist voters,
after two decades of right-wing government, prevented this. After the PCF leadership
demanded the radicalisation of the Common Programme in 1977, and effectively
sabotaged the Left’s chances at the 1978 parliamentary elections, Mitterrand therefore
simply relied on the voters’ support and behaved as if the alliance still existed. The
result was that at the first round of the 1981 presidential elections, not only did
Mitterrand win 3 million more votes than Marchais, he had also ensured that he would
get the second-round support of Marchais’s voters. After 1981, the Communist leader-
ship faced two possible strategic choices, neither of them palatable: to join the Social-
ists, as they did from 1981 to 1984, as the junior partner in government, masters of
none of the major choices (and especially not of the 1983 economic U-turn); or to leave
government, as they did in 1984, but maintain the minimal tactical alliance necessary
to safeguard at least some parliamentary seats and town halls.
Leadership failure
No West European Communist Party prospered in the last quarter of the twentieth
century. And many of the causes of the PCF’s decline listed above, such as sociological
and institutional change or the discrediting of the Soviet Union, may be seen as beyond
the party’s control. Equally, however, it is clear that Marchais himself accelerated the
PCF’s decline, notably by reinforcing rather than severing the umbilical cord with
Moscow, and by failing either to drop the liability of democratic centralism or to pitch
the party’s appeal to a wider range of social groups as core social bases of Communist
support shrank. In particular, the party’s apparent inability, in the generation after
May 1968, to win the loyalty either of women or of second-generation immigrants –
two groups who suffered quite disproportionately from the onset of recession from the
late 1970s on, at the same time as their capacity for mobilisation and political expres-
sion grew – can be ascribed at least partly to leadership failure. When the 73-year-old
Marchais relinquished the post of secretary-general to Robert Hue at the Twenty-
eighth Congress in 1994, he was handing over a party damaged almost as much by his
own leadership as by outside circumstances.
The PCF’s mutation: too little, too late?

Hue, though very much a Marchais protégé, rapidly embarked on a process of party
‘mutation’ (which he detailed, characteristically for a French party leader, in a book).
This at least attempted to address the causes of the PCF’s decline.
Democratic centralism
This was abandoned officially at the Twenty-eighth Congress, and to a significant extent
in practice over the years after 1994. A series of top-level changes spread over the
following decade saw the party secretary-general replaced by the national secretary, the
bureau politique by the executive committee, and the central committee by the national
council, while the party secretariat disappeared. At the same time the cell structure at
the base of the party, which was functioning with steadily greater difficulty as activism
declined, gave way at Hue’s behest to ‘thematic networks’. Such changes were not
merely cosmetic. Activists were invited to comment on the texts for discussion at the
Thirtieth Congress, held in March 2000, not within the confines of their cells or
through the carefully vetted columns of L’Humanité, but on the party’s website; at the
Thirty-second Congress in 2003, members were, for the first time, invited to vote for
competing motions (that of the leadership won, but with a fairly modest 55 per cent of
the vote). Factions – a European wing led by the economist Philippe Herzog, the
refondateurs who considered that change had not gone far enough and orthodox groups
of varying degrees of conservatism – were tolerated as quasi-autonomous organisa-
tions, some even claiming public party funding in their own right; Communists opposed
to the ‘mutation’ held their own public meetings to attack it and the new leadership,
and went unpunished. Well-entrenched local officials chose often ambiguous relation-
ships with the party, discreetly downplaying or even dropping their party affiliation,
demanding the PCF’s endorsement of their electoral candidacies, but being prepared to
run against official Communist candidates if necessary; one PCF dissident even ran in
June 2002 against an incumbent Communist in the Paris suburb of Aubervilliers. The
former iron cohesion of the PCF’s parliamentary group has crumbled, with several of
the Jospin government’s bills, such as the 35-hour week, provoking deep controversy.
Hue was in no position to impose the old disciplines on parliamentarians like Maxime
Gremetz or Alain Bocquet, president of the National Assembly group, who had served
for many years under Marchais and retained a significant following in the party. But he
did succeed, at the Thirtieth Congress, in achieving a (relative) liberalisation of the
party’s structures while at the same time weeding out the more Stalinist office-holders
in its middle and upper ranks, and replacing them with younger members and more
women. Two-thirds of the forty-six members of the executive college elected in March
2000, for example, were new to high party office (and two-fifths were women, a propor-
tion that roughly reflected the membership as a whole). At the same time there was
always an element of window-dressing about the end of democratic centralism: what-
ever the changes in the PCF’s leading bodies, dissidents claimed that nine-tenths of
them still consisted of full-time officials beholden to the leadership. A true gauge of the
PCF’s democratisation might be a wholesale purge of the top leaders responsible for its
dismal electoral performance. This has not happened.
The record of the Soviet Union

The Soviet experience was now described as globalement négatif and past ‘errors’ in this
area were officially acknowledged. The timing of these discoveries, however, was hardly
such as to restore the PCF’s credibility (especially given the dissent of the Stalinist
minority). And Communists still had difficulty coming to terms with the full extent of
the crimes committed under Soviet rule.
The ‘revolutionary’ label
The PCF has virtually dropped its identity as a revolutionary party and now claims
merely to seek a peaceful and progressive evolution to a more just society (the neolo-
gism révolutionnement was briefly used in 2000 to express this); Hue went on record as
saying that ‘Communists are not adversaries of the market’, appeared in a dinner suit
among the glitterati of the Cannes film festival – a brief but powerful symbol – and
hired out the party’s headquarters, built in the prosperous 1970s, for smart fashion
shows. These excesses have been abandoned since the defeats of 2002, but without any
serious return to the ‘revolutionary’ label.
The special relationship with the working class

The prime revolutionary class for Marxists, still the fixation of the PCF in the late
Marchais era, has also been effectively abandoned. Party documents prefer the term
salariés (meaning wage- and salary-earners) to ‘workers’. And blue-collar workers now
count for barely a quarter of those party members who are economically active. At the
same time, the party under Hue began to pitch for support among groups often left out
by the old workerism, including second-generation immigrants, women, sexual minor-
ities and (to judge from the enthusiasm of the PCF’s support for protests against high
petrol taxes in September 2000) motorists.
The alliance with the Socialists

The union of the Left was effectively revived in a series of negotiations following the
1995 presidential election, and came to fruition in the victory of the gauche plurielle in
June 1997. The PCF was rewarded with two middle-ranking ministries in the Jospin
government, Jean-Claude Gayssot at Transport and Marie-Georges Buffet at Youth
and Sport, as well as a further junior post. They were popular ministers in their respect-
ive spheres, in particular Buffet when she spearheaded a campaign against doping in the
Tour de France. And whereas in 1981–84 Marchais had remained highly critical of the
Socialist-led government, even when it included four Communist ministers, Hue was
noticeably moderate in his reservations; the PCF remained a gauche plurielle partner,
and the ministers stayed in office, until the electoral defeats of 2002. Jospin responded
with the necessary appropriate gestures on details of policy-making, ensuring, for
example, that Communist views were taken into account when France’s electricity
market was partially opened to international competition. Even Hue’s presidential
campaign of 2002, while clearly differentiated from Jospin’s (it was more Eurosceptical,
more focused on the defence of French public services and on new legislation to prevent
redundancies), was not noticeably critical of the government’s record.
The group’s preservation was also due to incumbency, whether local or national; the
PCF’s sitting Deputies and local office-holders, all of them elected at second ballots
with Socialist votes, accounted for the totality of the increase of a quarter of a million
votes in the PCF’s June 2002 score against Hue’s presidential support two months
earlier. The withdrawal of Socialist co-operation, therefore, would remove Communists
from national and local elective office – depriving the party both of the nationwide
presence and visibility that office procures, and of income: vital assets that (for the
moment) distinguish the PCF from a small far-left grouping.
Hue’s initiatives quickly improved the PCF’s general popularity: the percentage of
poll respondents declaring a ‘good opinion’ of the party, and of its leader, rose from the
mid-teens (under Marchais) to the high twenties. The Communist vote, on the other
hand, continued to drop like a stone. Hue not only registered a record low presidential
result in April 2002; he lost his parliamentary seat the following June, and moved
to a dignified retirement at the Senate, leaving the party leadership to Buffet at the
Thirty-second congress in April 2003.
Buffet’s PCF, predictably after an electoral defeat, was inclined to return to its
traditional values, the defence of jobs and public services, and critical of the Jospin
government’s record. In 2005, Buffet found the campaign against the European consti-
tutional treaty a perfect issue on which to mobilise, centred as it was on core concerns
(opposition to a free-market Europe) and full of opportunities both to highlight differ-
ences with the Socialist leadership and to bring Socialist ‘dissidents’ into the Commun-
ist orbit. The soundness of her instincts was confirmed when some 95 per cent of
Communist supporters who voted said no to the treaty. But the PCF had competitors
for the anti-capitalist, Eurosceptical, anti-globalisation, left-wing vote both in non-
party groups like Attac and in the Trotskyist parties, long dismissed by the PCF leader-
ship as irresponsible groupuscules. In purely electoral terms, indeed, the party that
Buffet inherited was hardly more important than the Trotskyist organisations, now
courted as comrades as well as competed against as rivals.
In other respects, however, the party remained something more. It has a unique place
in France’s political culture that the Trotskyists lack – though this is both ambiguous
and hard to turn to electoral advantage. More importantly, it retained, in 2005, 21
Deputies, 11 Senators and 3 MEPs, as well as a significant number of mayors and other
local elected officials, something resembling a nationwide organisation with several
dozen full-time employees, and L’Humanité. The difficulty for the PCF, however, is that
these assets are shrinking – as is shown by the repeated rounds of redundancies among
the party’s officials and the falling circulation of L’Humanité, which has had to call in
capitalist shareholders like Bouygues or Lagardère to bail it out. Worse, these assets
depend to a significant degree on the PCF’s ability to win elective office and to attract
the public finance that goes with it, as well as the contributions it has usually been able
to extract from those elected on the Communist ticket. Winning elective office requires
allies, and bigger ones than the Trotskyists; and material survival depends on the PCF’s
willingness to keep its radicalism within bounds acceptable to such allies. The Com-
munists’ political strategy, in short, is framed by their state of dependency on the
goodwill of their much larger partner in the former gauche plurielle, the Socialist Party.
The Parti Socialiste (PS)

The Socialist Party at the outset of the Fifth Republic was small, ageing, divided and
discredited. Membership of what was still called the SFIO had fallen from a peak of
335,000 in 1946 to some 70,000, most of them elderly mayors or local councillors. The
party’s share of the vote fell from 23.4 per cent in November 1946 to 15.5 per cent in
1958 and 12.4 per cent in 1962. Wedded, in principle, to Marxist ideas of class struggle,
the Socialists showed no haste, in practice, to smash capitalism, and based much of
their left-wing self-image on an archaic and insular anti-clericalism, itself rendered less
credible by the ‘Third Force’ governing alliance with the Catholic Mouvement Répub-
licain Populaire (MRP). No party was more tainted than the SFIO by the compromises
and chaos of the Fourth Republic. The SFIO leader, Guy Mollet, won the premiership
in 1956 on a platform of peace in Algeria, but promptly escalated the war by sending
conscripts to fight. Dissent on the Algerian issue, and on the question of support for the
new constitution, led a minority to leave the party in September 1958 to form the Parti
Socialiste Autonome (which united with other small groups to form the Parti Socialiste
Unifié (PSU) in 1960).
Yet the late twentieth-century Socialists could make some claim to be France’s
‘natural’ governing party. For fourteen of the twenty-one years after 1981, the
refounded Parti Socialiste was in government (1981–86, 1988–93 and 1997–2002). For
fourteen years too, a Socialist was in the Élysée (Mitterrand’s second term ended in
1995). The PS overtook the PCF vote in the 1970s, has dominated the Left throughout
the period since 1981, and for most of it has also been France’s largest single party.
However, as Tables 7.2 and 7.3 show, the Socialists’ fortunes since 1958 have been
extremely varied. Chronologically, they can be divided into six periods.
• The 1960s, a decade of internal conflict and confusion, at the end of which the
Socialist presidential candidate, Gaston Defferre, achieved barely more than 5 per
cent of the vote.
• The 1970s, a period of revival, as the newly refounded PS renewed its organisation
under the leadership of François Mitterrand and won increasing electoral support,
overtaking the PCF and ultimately winning the presidency and a parliamentary
majority in 1981.
• The 1980s, when the PS established itself as a party of government, staying
in power for the whole decade (except for two years of cohabitation between
Mitterrand and a right-wing government in 1986–88) but failing to achieve its
ambitions to transform France’s economy and society.
• The early 1990s, when a combination of scandals and recession drove the Socialist
vote below 20 per cent, the PS out of office and the defeated Prime Minister Pierre
Bérégovoy to suicide, in 1993.
• The later 1990s, when a partial electoral recovery secured the Socialists’ return to
government, with Communist and Green allies and under the leadership of Lionel
Jospin, in 1997.
• The period since 2002, when the PS, now in opposition, won significant electoral
successes (notably at the 2004 regional and European elections) against the incum-
bent right-wing government, but without developing a coherent strategy for a
return to government or avoiding its most damaging split since 1971 over the
referendum of 2005.
The pivotal figure in this chequered record remains Mitterrand. In the crucial early
1970s, he fixed a clear alliance strategy, built a majority out of the Socialists’ endemic
factional strife, gave the party the leadership required to win power, renewed its
membership and elites, transformed its ideology and policies, placed its finances on a
sound (but unfortunately illegal) footing, and enhanced its electoral appeal. These
seven themes remain central to understanding the development of the PS over the past
thirty-five years.
Alliances
The non-Communist Left of the 1960s was troubled above all by its search for an
alliance strategy to oppose what was the quite new phenomenon (for France) of a stable
governing majority. One line, represented by Gaston Defferre, former minister and
mayor of Marseille, was to revive the ‘Third Force’ alliance with the MRP and the
Radicals but not the Communists. The other strategy was advocated by François
Mitterrand, initially a member, not of the SFIO, but of a small Centre grouping, the
Union Démocratique et Sociale de la Résistance (UDSR). Mitterrand, though an early
opponent of the Fifth Republic, understood its logic quickly enough to see that no left-
wing victory at a presidential or parliamentary second ballot was possible without the
Communists. In the mid-1960s, Mitterrand’s strategy prevailed. He sidelined Defferre
at the 1965 presidential election and ran with the support of the PCF, the SFIO and
other small left-wing groupings, winning 31.7 per cent of the first-ballot vote and
forcing the seemingly invincible de Gaulle into a run-off ballot, at which he won a
respectable 45 per cent. Mitterrand brought together an alliance of the non-Communist
Left, the Fédération de la Gauche Democrate et Socialiste (FGDS), that included the
SFIO, the Parti Radical, the UDSR and a number of political clubs formed to promote
the renewal of the Left, including his own Convention des Institutions Républicaines
(CIR). The FGDS delivered significant gains, both in votes and in seats, for the Com-
munist and the non-Communist Left at the 1967 parliamentary elections. But it fell
apart the following year under the impact of the ‘events’ of May 1968: the FGDS had
signally failed either to make any connection with the workers’ and students’ movement
or to prevent a right-wing landslide at the following month’s snap elections, while
Mitterrand had temporarily discredited himself by an ill-judged offer to lead a ‘pro-
visional government’ at the height of the crisis. His eclipse, and de Gaulle’s sudden
resignation from the presidency in April 1969, opened up Defferre’s chance for a presi-
dential bid. But Defferre had the support of neither the Communists, nor the Centre,
nor even the whole SFIO; he won a humiliating 5 per cent at the first ballot, just 1.4 per
cent ahead of the PSU candidate Michel Rocard and over 15 per cent below both the
Communist Duclos and the centrist Poher.
Defferre’s rout put the Mitterrand strategy back onto the agenda. Mitterrand
became First Secretary of the re-founded PS at the Épinay congress in June 1971; the
Common Programme with the Communists was signed barely a year later, and
attracted the support of the left wing of the Radicals shortly afterwards. Mitterrand’s
fight for an alliance with the PCF was not, however, motivated by any fellow-feeling for
Communists: on the contrary, he openly declared his aim to use the Common Pro-
gramme to attract 3 million of the 5 million PCF voters over to the PS. He knew that
while the PCF was necessary for electoral victory, such a victory could only be secured
with a weakened PCF that had ceased to frighten the moderate Centre-Left voters
whose support was also vital.
The goal of an electable Left with a weakened PCF was achieved by 1981. At the
1974 presidential election, Mitterrand reinforced his personal credibility by carrying
the colours of the united Left and coming within less than 400,000 votes of beating the
right-wing candidate, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, at the run-off. By September 1974, by-
elections showed that the Socialists were overtaking their Communist allies. That
inevitably strained relations between the two parties. The Communists had no wish to
take office as junior partners in a Socialist-led government, and spoiled the Left’s
(initially quite good) chances at the 1978 parliamentary elections after the quarrel over
the ‘updating’ of the Common Programme. But the Communists were, at least tempor-
arily, locked into the alliance by their need for the Socialists’ second-ballot support to
win parliamentary seats and town halls, and by their own voters’ wish to see the Left
win. Hence Marchais’s declaration of support, however reluctant, for Mitterrand after
the first round of the presidential election in April 1981, and the entry of four Com-
munist ministers into Pierre Mauroy’s government the following June. At the 1981
presidential elections, Mitterrand was over ten points ahead of Marchais; at the June
parliamentary elections, the gap between the two parties was over twenty points. The
Socialists’ leadership of the Left was definitively established in 1981, and was not called
into question even during the very bad period of the early 1990s. By the time that the
Communists left the government in 1984, after growing tensions over policy, they had
permanently lost over half their 1978 electorate. Relations between the two left-wing
parties again became acrimonious, with the briefest periods of co-operation for
elections.
The Socialists’ problem, however, was that Mitterrand had succeeded almost too well
at weakening the Communists, whose voters not only gravitated to the PS, but also
dispersed towards abstention, spoilt ballots and even the far-Right Front National.
These electors were lost to the Left as a whole, depriving the Socialists of reserves
needed to win second ballots; as Tables 7.2 and 7.3 show, the Left, even including its
most extreme fringes, has never won 50 per cent of the vote at the first round of a
parliamentary or presidential election since 1981. In his second presidential term,
Mitterrand therefore attempted to replace the union of the Left with a new majority
alliance – something resembling the Third Force coalition he had prevented in the
1960s. His first attempt was the bid to bring the centrists into the majority after his
second presidential victory in 1988; it foundered on the reluctance of most centrists to
change sides so rapidly, as well as on extreme suspicion of such a move within the PS.
Other alternative allies included ecologists (hence the inclusion of Brice Lalonde, ecol-
ogy candidate in 1981, in the Rocard and Cresson governments) and dissidents from the
PCF. Mitterrand’s attempts at diversification were, therefore, largely a failure and an
irritant to the PS. The groups he targeted tended to prosper in proportion to the
Socialists’ weakness (the various Green movements never did so well as in the Social-
ists’ black years of 1992 and 1993). And as allies, they were needed in addition to the
Communists – not instead of them.
The gauche plurielle coalition that Jospin led to victory in 1997 responded to this
arithmetic. Its bases were laid after the 1993 defeat at a series of meetings grandly
named assises de la transformation sociale. The basis of alliance was common interest,
especially from 1994: the Socialists needed all the allies they could get; the short-lived
pretensions of ecology groupings to replace the Socialists as the main force of the non-
Communist Left had been punctured by their insignificant result at the 1994 European
elections; and Marchais had handed the PCF leadership to the more conciliatory Hue.
Jospin’s strong performance at the 1995 presidential elections (and the poor ones of
Hue and of the Green candidate, Dominique Voynet) re-established the Socialists’
claim to lead a left-wing coalition; the relative success of joint lists at the 1995 muni-
cipal elections enhanced the credibility of such a coalition. Further discussions led to a
Socialist–Green agreement in January 1997 (with a view to parliamentary elections
expected in 1998) and to an accord with the PCF at the outset of the 1997 election
campaign. There was no official common programme, but the Socialist programme
contained enough elements – the 35-hour week, better job opportunities for the young,
changes to immigration laws passed by the right-wing government and a moratorium
on the construction of new nuclear power stations – to win the support of the two
partner parties. The gauche plurielle also included two other small groups, the Left
Radicals (close allies of the Socialists since 1972) and the Mouvement des Citoyens
(MDC), a former current of the PS led by Jean-Pierre Chevènement, who had left the
party in 1993.
The dynamic of the gauche plurielle differed from that of the old union of the Left.
The Socialists’ status as the strongest party was uncontested, but the smaller allies
remained indispensable to any left-wing victory. Where Mitterrand had used the union
of the Left to poach Communist votes, Jospin’s PS needed to maintain the strength and
credibility of its allies – so long as they remained within the tent. Indeed, a major asset
of the gauche plurielle was its ability to offer voters both choice and the coherence and
credibility of a united coalition. This was, inevitably, hard to do over a long period; the
interest of each partner in the coalition’s overall victory was balanced by its own
interest in maximising its own distinctiveness, and thence its own electoral audience, at
its allies’ expense.
This ambiguity was central to Jospin’s first-round defeat in the 2002 presidential race.
Practically all observers and participants in the election took it as a foregone conclusion
that Jospin would go through to the run-off ballot as the Left’s candidate against
Chirac. In the meantime, therefore, each component of the gauche plurielle could afford
to run its own candidate, stressing its own individuality with a view to securing the
strongest possible bargaining position within the coalition: Hue for the Communists,
Noël Mamère for Les Verts, Chevènement for the MDC and Christiane Taubira for the
Left Radicals. Between them, these four won 16.3 per cent of the vote, to Jospin’s 16.1;
the Left’s support was further split by the 10.4 per cent of votes that were spread
between the three Trotskyists, Laguiller, Besancenot and Gluckstein. The total score,
for all eight candidates, of under 43 per cent would in any case have ruled out a left-
wing victory at almost any imaginable run-off. What pushed Jospin into third place
behind Chirac and Le Pen, and thus, under the rules for presidential elections, out of
the run-off, was the insouciant fragmentation of the left-wing vote.
Something resembling the gauche plurielle will be needed if the Left is to govern France
again. The alliance was indeed reconstituted, on a partial and tactical basis, for the June
2002 parliamentary elections and the regional elections of 2004. While Chevènement
effectively chose to stay out (and lost his parliamentary seat as a result), the Socialists,
Left Radicals, Communists and Greens were able to share out candidacies well enough to
limit the damage in 2002 and to win a striking success in 2004, when twenty out of the
twenty-two regions of metropolitan France elected a left-wing majority.
Much more difficult, however, will be the building of a credible coalition aimed at
governing France. Such an alliance would have to overcome the long-standing tension
between those forces that seek to reaffirm a strong left-wing identity, if need be against
both European and global constraints, and those that accept the global capitalist econ-
omy and an integrated Europe as part of the environment within which they must
work. This division widened into a yawning gulf during the 2005 referendum campaign
on the European constitutional treaty. To some extent, this tension corresponds to
party divides and sets the ‘revolutionary’ Communists and Trotskyists against the
‘reformist’ Socialists. But it also reflects the struggle of ideas, and the continuing
vivacity of factional strife, within the PS.
Factions
The PS as it emerged from the congresses of Issy-les-Moulineaux, which began the
process of refoundation in 1969, and Épinay in 1971, was a conglomerate of factions.
The largest of these was the now defunct SFIO, initially divided between followers of
Mollet (who died in 1975) and of Pierre Mauroy, mayor of Lille. Mauroy served as
prime minister from 1981 to 1984, and as first secretary of the PS from 1988 till 1992,
having played a pivotal role at the congresses of the 1970s, generally in support of
Mitterrand. This core was joined by the various left-wing clubs associated with Alain
Savary (first secretary of the PS from 1969 to 1971) and Jean Poperen, and the CERES,
led by Jean-Pierre Chevènement, a ginger group of left-wing intellectuals, former mem-
bers of the SFIO, which formed the most pro-Communist wing of the party. At the
Épinay congress in 1971, Mitterrand joined the new PS with his CIR, and indeed
wrested the post of first secretary from Savary; by dint of skilful and shifting alliances
with other groups, he made the mitterrandiens into the party’s dominant faction. Three
years later, Michel Rocard led a contingent of former members of the PSU into the PS.
Despite their left-wing origins, the rocardiens represented, within the PS, a moderate
faction, sceptical about the alliance with the Communists in the 1970s, mindful of
the constraints imposed by the market economy, less confident in the transforming
possibilities of the Jacobin state and more aware of those within civil society.
Each faction or courant, alone or in alliance with others, has the right to compete
for members’ support by presenting a motion for consideration at the congresses held
by the party about every three years. Members’ votes on the different motions then
determine the composition of the Socialists’ 300-member National Council, and thus
indirectly that of its top leadership, including the first secretary. Factions tend to have
strong territorial bases, based on control of the federations (the party organisation in
each département), itself often a function of the preferences of a powerful party figure
in the locality.
From 1974 to 1981, Mitterrand maintained his majority in the party, in a sometimes
difficult environment (notably the aftermath of the 1978 defeat) by playing off rocardi-
ens against chevènementistes and vice versa. Largely suspended after 1981 (when almost
everyone became a mitterrandien out of reason if not sentiment), factional activity
broke out again, with a vengeance, after 1988, with the succession to Mitterrand as the
main prize. Since then, the PS has been divided between a left-wing minority and a
mainstream majority, each of which in turn is often divided. On the Left, CERES and
the poperénistes were complemented, in the late 1980s, by the Gauche Socialiste, a
group of former Trotskyists who emerged from the student and anti-racist movements
of the mid-1980s under the leadership of Julien Dray; with Chevènement out of the
party after 1992 and the poperénistes in steady decline, the Gauche Socialiste was
the dominant left-wing faction for a decade until it split in September 2002, with Dray
joining the mainstream. After 2002 two left-wing factions, the more traditionally
left-wing Nouveau Monde under the leadership of former party treasurer Henri
Emmanuelli and former chevènementiste Jean-Luc Mélenchon and the more innovative
Nouveau Parti Socialiste led by Arnaud Montebourg and Vincent Peillon, opposed the
Socialist majority, winning 31 per cent of the votes between them at the Dijon congress
in 2003 and controlling seventeen federations. From 2004 onwards, however, they
faced competition from Laurent Fabius, who had cast himself in the role of left-wing
opposition leader. In the general switch of alliances that followed, Nouveau Monde
disappeared while the Nouvau Parti Socialiste attracted the support of Emmanuelli
and won 24 per cent of the members’ votes during the preparations for the November
2005 Le Mans congress – better than Fabius’s 21 per cent, but less than half the number
backing the First Secretary François Hollande.
The party mainstream, meanwhile, has always been dominated by the various Social-
ist présidentiables, potential presidential candidates. One of these has been Laurent
Fabius: born in 1947, Mitterrand’s young prime minister from 1984 to 1986, first
secretary of the PS from 1992 to 1993, finance minister from 2000 to 2002, Fabius is in
principle eminently présidentiable – and will only turn 60 in 2007. He is also mistrusted
within and outside the party as being too ambitious, too tactical and too clever by half,
and for a long period – at least until cleared in court – was damaged by a scandal over
the distribution of HIV-contaminated blood to haemophiliacs during his premiership.
Whether openly or within a broad majority tent, the Fabius faction has existed since the
Rennes congress of 1990. The non-fabiusiens in the mainstream were dominated first by
Rocard – prime minister from 1988 to 1991 and first secretary from 1993 to 1994, but
out of front-line national politics since the humiliating defeat of the Socialist list he led
at the 1994 European elections – and then, from 1995 till 2002, by Jospin. Once installed
in Matignon from 1997, Jospin left the day-to-day care of the party to his protégé
François Hollande, who took over as first secretary in 1997 and who retained the post
at the congresses of Grenoble in 2000 and – after Jospin’s eclipse following the 2002
defeats – Dijon in 2003 and Le Mans in 2005.
The Hollande majority, incorporating (until 2005) the supporters of Fabius, who had
been in no position to contest Jospin as prime minister even indirectly, won 61 per cent
of the votes at Dijon – a respectable tally for a party majority that had just suffered a
major electoral defeat, and one that owed something to Hollande’s patience, good
humour and penchant for consensus-building. Hollande’s run of successes continued
with strong Socialist results at the regional and European elections of 2004. The same
year, however, saw the reappearance of serious intra-party strife. The immediate cause
of this was Chirac’s announcement in mid-2004 of a referendum on the European
constitution. Within the PS, the no camp centred on the supposed free-market bias of
the text and was led not only by the left-wing factions but by Fabius, hitherto con-
sidered a right-wing, modernising pro-European. Although an internal PS referendum
of December 2004 resulted in a yes victory of 56 to 44 per cent of party members, the
no leaders, and especially Emmanuelli, Mélenchon and Fabius refused to be bound by
it; their campaign continued up to polling day, when some 59 per cent of Socialist
supporters voted no. The fierceness of the campaign exchanges underlined, not only
strongly-held views about Europe, but also a renewed struggle for control of the party
against the backdrop of future elections. The National Council meeting following the
referendum result saw Fabius’s dismissal from his post as the party’s no. 2, and his
reconstitution of an independent faction called Agir à Gauche.
Preparations for the Le Mans congress of November 2005 thus saw Hollande fight-
ing for his political life against a possible union of the opposition forces that had
backed the no vote. This failed to materialise. The alliance between Nouveau Parti
Socialiste and Emmanuelli became the main opposition force with the support 24 per
cent of members, the fabiusiens attracted 21 per cent, but Hollande kept his majority
with 53.7 per cent. Sufficient for Hollande to keep control of the party in the short term,
this result would probably not be enough to prevent a damaging fight for the Socialist
presidential candidacy in the run-up to 2007.
Factionalism has been part of the price paid by the Socialists for federating disparate
tendencies. Voting by factions at party congresses offers several advantages in principle.
It helps to structure debate, since the various motions offer different views on key
questions such as alliances with other parties, the role of the state in society and
electoral strategy. It enables each faction to take stock of its position. And it allows the
party’s National Council (formerly comité directeur), elected in proportion to votes for
each motion, to represent the shifting balance of views in the party – even though the
party secretariat is firmly controlled by the majority. However, factionalism has always
been about interest as much as about principle. Mitterrand, for example, enlisted the
support of CERES in 1979, and invited Chevènement and his friends to write a very
left-wing programme for the PS, in order to marginalise the rocardiens. And from 1988
factional competition increasingly appeared as an unprincipled struggle for control of
the party in succession to the ageing Mitterrand. The nasty spectacle of the fabiusiens
and their opponents squabbling live on television over party jobs at the Rennes congress
in 1990 was perhaps the low point of this, and contributed significantly to the party’s
lack of credit in the following years; it also reached down into every federation,
demoralising activists (though sometimes artificially increasing their numbers, as votes
were rigged with cards issued for non-existent members). The Socialists’ organisational
difficulty in the aftermath of the 2005 referendum will be not only to manage their
serious internal differences over Europe and, more generally, over their relationship to
an open capitalist economy, but also to ensure that the exercise of party democracy
does not appear merely as an unseemly scramble for jobs.
Leadership
A great part of the Socialists’ success in the 1970s was due to Mitterrand’s leadership.
His talent as an organiser and as a negotiator, as well as a boundless ambition served by
long experience (he first won ministerial office in 1947), enabled him to grasp the party
leadership at Épinay in June 1971 and to see off all challenges (notably from Rocard in
1979) thereafter. This was also, however, made possible by his credibility as a presiden-
tial candidate after the respectable defeats by de Gaulle in 1965 and Giscard in 1974. A
stature unequalled by any Socialist leader since Léon Blum in the 1930s helped him to
dominate the Communists within the left-wing alliance and to win the presidency in
May 1981. Within the PS, he earned the nickname of ‘the Prince’ and ‘the Pope’; after a
few years in the Élysée, he was promoted simply to Dieu.
Once elected to the presidency, Mitterrand ceased to hold any party office. But he
continued to dominate the PS, both through the positioning of his own people in key
jobs (as first secretary from 1981 to 1988, Jospin showed unwavering loyalty), and
because he himself remained an excellent ‘locomotive’ for his party. It is doubtful, for
example, whether the Socialists would have salvaged a respectable 30.6 per cent at the
long-expected defeat of 1986 had not Mitterrand campaigned in their support. There
were differences between president and party during Mitterrand’s first term: the party
was uneasy about the deflationary economic policies adopted in 1983–84, unhappy
about the withdrawal of the 1984 Savary bill designed to integrate (Catholic) private
schools more closely into the state system and troubled, in 1985–86, by the continued
nuclear testing in the South Pacific. But there was never any serious question, once
Mitterrand had declared his intention of seeking a second term, that the party would
not rally to his support and campaign for him.
After 1988, however, relations between president and party became more strained.
The septuagenarian Mitterrand, who had fought his last election, had less need of the
party, while the party took to fighting over the succession. During his second septennat,
Mitterrand’s political interventions in the life of his own majority were more irritating
than inspiring to many Socialists: the botched attempt to open out his majority to the
Centre in June 1988; the persistent support for the elevation of Fabius to the party
leadership, which contributed not a little to the disaster at the Rennes congress in 1990;
the attempt to engineer a return to proportional representation for the 1993 legislative
elections (blocked by the Socialist parliamentary group); the flirtation with Brice
Lalonde’s ecologists; and the behind-the-scenes backing for Bernard Tapie’s Radical
list at the 1994 European elections, which helped bring Rocard’s Socialist list to dis-
aster. Motivated partly by a genuine wish to diversify the Left’s sources of support in
changed times, but also by a long-standing enmity for Rocard (which Rocard’s stint as
prime minister from 1988 to 1991 only reinforced), and an old man’s reluctance to see
any stong successor emerge, these initiatives damaged the party Mitterrand had done so
much to create. Finally, the revelations about Mitterrand’s war record were deeply
troubling to all but the most unconditional Mitterrand loyalists.
Jospin’s emergence as a successor occurred largely by default in the first instance, as
the party cast around for a presidential candidate for 1995. Rocard was disqualified by
the abysmal election result of 1994, Fabius ruled out by the contaminated blood scan-
dal and Emmanuelli was under investigation for corruption during his period as party
treasurer. Jacques Delors, Mauroy’s finance minister from 1981 to 1984, and then
president of the European Commission for a decade, was briefly seen as a saviour in the
autumn of 1994; but he decided not to run. That left Jospin, who had built up personal
networks during his seven years as first secretary, and had had the sense to stay out of
the political limelight during the Socialists’ bad years since 1993. With the choice of
candidate open to individual members, diminishing the power of the Fabius organi-
sation, the rank-and-file chose Jospin against Emmanuelli by a two-to-one majority.
Despite a general lack of charisma, Jospin was brought to life by his own campaign in
1995, insisting on the Socialists’ right to criticise the negative elements of the Mitterrand
record as well as applauding his achievements, and he succeeded in projecting an image
of integrity, a commodity seen by the voters to be in short supply after the scandals of
the late Mitterrand years. His stylish presidential defeat (particularly his leading pos-
ition at the first ballot) restored the credibility of the PS, making the 1997 victory
possible; Jospin himself was unassailable as leader (even with Hollande in the formal
post of first secretary) for seven years, until the evening of his defeat in April 2002 and
his abrupt withdrawal from politics.
Jospin’s departure did not leave the PS leaderless, at least not in formal terms.
Hollande proved a good party manager in the difficult aftermath of 2002. His unremit-
ting cheerfulness coupled with his determination to bounce back from every reverse
won him real affection among members. As a présidentiable, however, he suffers from
serious handicaps. He has never held ministerial office, has so far lacked charisma and
has never articulated a clear presidential vision of France’s future. These are serious
drawbacks, especially compared with as determined a right-wing probable adversary as
Nicolas Sarkozy. Hollande also faces a plethora of potential competitors within the
PS. These include his own long-term partner Ségolène Royal, president of Poitou-
Charentes regional council and the candidate most favoured by opinion polls late in
2005; former finance minister Dominique Strauss-Kahn; the eternally popular (but
rather lightweight) former culture minister Jack Lang; the mayor of Paris, Bertrand
Delanoë; and, above all, the most experienced and most determined (if not, for the
moment, the most popular) contender, Laurent Fabius. No major French party can do
without a leading présidentiable: the challenge to the PS in the period before 2007 will
be to agree on one without tearing itself apart.
Members and elites

The PS organisation of the 1970s was probably a more dynamic force than at any time
since the immediate post-war period. Membership more than doubled, to over 150,000,
between the Épinay congress and 1975. Since then it has fluctuated between 100,000
and 200,000, leaning more to 100,000 in the twenty-first century. Many of the new
members of the 1970s were young, middle-class (the proportion of blue-collar members
fell by half, to 19 per cent, in the two decades to 1973), imbued with a soft version of the
ideals of May 1968, and active. They were the pool from which the party’s elite was
completely renewed. Already under Savary’s leadership (1969–71), 70 per cent of the
secretaries of local federations had been replaced; the average age of the holders of
these posts fell by twenty years. At the Nantes party congress in June 1977, over half of
all delegates were under 40, only a quarter had belonged to the pre-1969 SFIO, and over
half had university degrees. Renewal was also seen among mayors and local councillors,
and in the National Assembly, where half the Socialist Deputies elected in 1978, and
again in the big contingent of 1981, were newcomers.
Three decades on, the PS membership was still marked by the generation of 1970. In
1998, just 7 per cent of PS members were under 30, compared with 40 per cent who
were over 60. Only a quarter were women (a small improvement on 1985, when the
figure had been a fifth). Only a quarter had joined since 1985. With age had come
diminished activism (indeed, Mitterrand tended to discourage activism outside election
campaigns after his election in 1981): by 1998, 64 per cent of members gave five hours
or less to the party every month – the time for one or two meetings. Similarly, the
(former) young elite remained and aged. Of delegates to the Rennes congress of 1990,
four-fifths were men, two-thirds were over 40; only a quarter had joined since 1981;
two-thirds had at least one university degree; over half came from the liberal or higher
managerial professions. The main difference between this comfortable assembly of
middle-aged men and a party of the Right was the Socialists’ strong links with the
public sector.
This picture of a stagnating turn-of-the-century party deserves some qualification.
In particular, some elite change was discernible by the late 1990s under Jospin’s leader-
ship. The inner circle of jospinistes, constituted between 1988 and 1994, was younger
than the generation of 1970, had risen (often through ministerial cabinets) during the
1980s, included some particularly able and senior women like Martine Aubry, Élisabeth
Guigou and Ségolène Royal, and was drawn from a wide range of currents. One in
three secretaries of federations were changed at the Brest congress of November 1997.
Of PS parliamentary candidates in 1997, 60 per cent were new and 30 per cent, an
unprecedented figure, were women.
But in the defensive context of June 2002, the 30 per cent figure was not exceeded,
despite parity legislation; the PS preferred to keep its sitting, mostly male, Deputies,
even at the cost of a penalty in public finance, than approach male–female parity. More
generally, the Socialists have failed to renew and replenish their membership as they
would have wished. The brief surge of members in the aftermath of the 2002 defeat was
of short duration; and the attempt, early in 2005, to attract ‘adhérents du programme’,
registered sympathisers paying minimal dues in return for an opportunity to be con-
sulted on the future party programme, testified to a breakdown in conventional party
recruitment and activism. That was common, to a degree, with all parties, but owes
something too to the Socialists’ lack of a self-renewing organisational reservoir. Unlike
Britain’s Labour Party, the PS has no organic links with the trade union movement (in
1998, the proportion of blue-collar workers among party members was just 5 per cent).
Relations with groups such as feminists or ecologists have remained generally distant
and suspicious. So were links with the various social movements, whether related to
housing rights or the unemployed or immigrants ‘without papers’ which gathered
momentum in the second half of the 1990s. With second-generation immigrants, while
organisations close to the PS, such as SOS–Racisme, existed, they were frequently
accused of being the party’s tools within ethnic minority communities. And except in a
handful of industrial areas (notably in the Nord–Pas-de-Calais region), the PS has had
few links with the subcultures that made up the natural terrain of great parties else-
where. The PS could still, therefore, become as old, sclerotic and out of touch with
voters as the SFIO of the 1960s. One ambition of leaders of the no campaign in 2005 in
the aftermath of the referendum result was to reverse that, and to transform the very
real public mobilisation against the European constitutional treaty into lasting activism
within a rejuvenated PS committed to left-wing policies and alliances – something
similar, in fact, to Mitterrand’s party of the early 1970s.
Ideology and policies

SFIO policies in the early Fifth Republic were an unappealing package of negatives:
anti-Gaullism, in the name of a strictly parliamentary view of the Republic; anti-
Communism, inherited from the early Cold War; anti-clericalism, inherited from the
early struggles of Socialist and Republican parties against the Right at the turn of the
century. These appeals to doctrinaire loyalties reinforced the SFIO’s image as an ageing
and increasingly irrelevant party. It was the achievement of the relaunched PS to supply
a more positive vision; and it did so largely by giving full rein to the young, radical, left-
wingers who filled its ranks in the wake of May 1968. Mitterrand himself, indeed,
declared in 1971 that ‘anyone who does not accept . . . a rupture with capitalist society
cannot be a member of the Socialist Party’. The party’s National Convention in May
1972 adopted a new programme – Changer la vie – whose title revealed both its ambi-
tion and its naïveté. More or less soft varieties of Marxism, together with New Left
ideas like autogestion (workers’ self-management), continued to dominate the policy
debates of the 1970s. Solid tactical reasons, as well as the spirit of the age, also pulled
the party leftwards. The main doctrinal deal in the Common Programme signed with
the PCF in 1972 was that the Communists should accept the basics of Western ‘bour-
geois’ democracy while the Socialists committed themselves to large-scale nationalisa-
tions. Autogestion served to show up the authoritarian and hierarchical view of society
that still prevailed in the PCF. And Mitterrand’s tactical alliance with the CERES
faction against the rocardiens inspired the radical Projet Socialiste of 1979.
Mitterrand therefore won the 1981 elections burdened not only with his own, fairly
restrained, ‘110 propositions’, but also with the background of his party’s more revo-
lutionary commitments and expectations. The collision with economic reality was
painful for the Socialists: the spirit of the campaigns of the 1970s was increasingly left
behind as unemployment was allowed to rise and ailing firms to go bankrupt, while
business taxes were reduced, the purchasing power of households stagnated and the
‘new poor’ appeared, lacking either jobs or benefit entitlements and reduced to begging
on the streets.
Any party of the centre-Left in Western Europe faces the challenge of reconciling
ideals of social protection, full employment, equality of opportunity and decent living
standards for all both with the reality of a global economy that thrives on competition
and inequalities, and with the constraints of EU membership. But the Socialists’
doctrinal debates since the 1980s have also been shaped by the strongly anti-capitalist
tradition of a current of French socialism and by the apparent victory of that current in
the years just before the conquest of power. The reluctance of activists to engage in any
root-and-branch modernisation was demonstrated at the Toulouse and Lille congresses
of 1985 and 1987; even at the La Défense congress of 1991, where much anti-capitalist
and workerist baggage was dumped, the contours of the Socialist project remained
vaguely defined by references to ‘humanism’ or a ‘critical relationship’ to capitalism. It
was also noticeable that doctrinal disputes did not, on the whole, correspond to divi-
sions between currents, with the exceptions of the left-wing gauche socialiste and the
poperénistes. The Socialists’ return to office in 1997 owed less to any major ideological
advances than to a new impression of modesty and integrity combined with the deep
unpopularity of the ruling conservative coalition.
During his five years in power, Jospin tended to avoid doctrinal controversy, beyond
general claims to accept a ‘market economy but not a market society’, concentrating
instead on concrete measures: the 35-hour week, the emplois-jeunes (creating govern-
ment-assisted jobs for under-25s), the provision of universal health care (taking in, for
the first time, those whose contributions did not qualify them for healthcare under the
social security system), the re-examination of the cases of immigrants left ‘without
papers’ as a result of the previous government’s immigration legislation (and the grant-
ing of leave to remain in France for about a third of them), and the Civil Solidarity Pact
(see above, p. 124) served two related functions. First, they sought to anchor the Jospin
government’s left-wing credibility and reputation for integrity (the later left-wing
governments of the Mitterrand presidency, under Cresson and Bérégovoy, had been
viewed as short on both). Secondly, they allowed the government to pursue, without
any very substantial opposition, a number of policies more congenial to the markets
than to the Left’s activists: a greater financial volume of privatisations than under the
Chirac, Balladur and Juppé governments put together, and the progressive opening to
competition, with considerable prodding from Europe, of a number of traditionally
protected public service enterprises.
By most standards, the Jospin government’s achievements were impressive: most of
the programme was fulfilled and a million jobs were created in four years, bringing the
jobless total briefly to just 9 per cent, after a peak of over 12.5 per cent in the mid-1990s.
As the basis of a future programme, however, it suffered from the fact that too few of
the benefits had reached the working-class and routine white-collar categories who
could, in the past, have been expected to support the Left. Indeed, many among these
groups suffered negative effects from the shorter working week: less convenient working
hours, tougher production targets and stagnant or falling purchasing power. Such
grievances were compounded when Jospin argued his inability to stop unemployment
creeping back up from mid-2001, and the campaign focused on law and order, one of
the Socialists’ weaker suits but an important issue for many working-class voters. Jospin
then dug himself a deeper hole by announcing, in a bid for centre voters at a future
second ballot, that although his political loyalties were Socialist, his manifesto for 2002
was not – a statement that encouraged the increasingly widespread perception that
there was little to choose between the Jospin and Chirac programmes. The widespread
availability of alternative candidates who claimed to offer more, in terms either of job
protection or security from crime, completed the dispersal of the left-wing vote at the
first round and led to Jospin’s elimination.
Jospin claimed to offer a ‘realism of the Left’ – a policy package in which the necessities
of France’s insertion into a global capitalist economy were acknowledged but avowedly
left-wing objectives such as full employment, strong public services and wealth redistri-
bution were still pursued. Critics like Henri Rey, on the other hand, turn this argument
inside out. The contemporary PS, in their view, falls between two stools. On the one hand,
it has not embraced the market in a Blair-style third way, abandoning key Socialist
shibboleths like monopoly public services owned and managed by the state, posing
difficult questions about the aims of state intervention, drawing reform lessons from
other developed countries, and if necessary challenging the vested public-sector inter-
ests within what remains of the core Socialist electorate in the name of the wider
benefits Jospin outlined. On the other, however, it has not embarked on a radical left-
wing path, aimed at mobilising the Left’s historic supporters among the working class
and modifying the European and international constraints that supposedly tie the
hands of French policy-makers. The party, argue its critics, is therefore thrown back
on essentially defensive positions, themselves vulnerable to the constraints of office,
about shielding ordinary wage-earners (and pensioners) from the worst effects of
unrestrained capitalist competition – an uninspiring mix, especially for those (often
younger) voters already left unprotected for lack of a stable record of employment and
social contributions.
While somewhat exaggerated (Jospin’s record was better than merely defensive),
this view highlights the continuing difficulty of the PS, even out of office. The party’s
opposition to the Raffarin government’s conservative reform programme, which aimed
to empty the 35-hour legislation of much of its substance and to prolong the working
lifetime via pension reforms, certainly contributed to a partial recovery at the regional
and European elections in 2004. But the PS remained vulnerable to attack both from
the Left, which claimed it had done too little when in office, and from its own right-
wingers, such as Rocard, who argued that on issues such as pensions a Socialist
government would have had to engage comparable reforms to Raffarin’s.
In 2005, the debate over the European constitutional treaty became a matrix for
the Socialists’ dilemma. The leadership and the majority of party members were
ready to accept the treaty in order to maintain the forward march of Europe, to
which the Socialists had generally been favourable in the past. The party’s left wing,
joined by Fabius, protested that the text locked Europe into a neo-liberal economic
future, and refused to be bound by the majority after the party’s internal referendum
held in December 2004. In the ensuing campaign, the dissenters compared Hollande
and the leadership to the Socialist Deputies who had signed over full powers to
Pétain in 1940, while their adversaries accused the no camp of xenophobia. The
venom of these exchanges is to be explained not only by the power of Europe to
mobilise and to divide, but also by the fact that this debate was in part a cipher for
something older – the tension between a culture of government and a culture of
activism, mobilisation and opposition which has troubled the Socialists since the
earliest days of the SFIO.
Money
With neither a mass membership nor trade union backing, the Socialists lacked stable
sources of lawful income before the public finance of parties was introduced in 1988.
They were not alone in this (only the Communists have had a membership exceeding
200,000 during the Fifth Republic); and like other parties, they resorted to business
funding, which was illegal. They attracted (or extracted) money from firms by the time-
honoured method of levying percentages on public works contracts signed with the
local authorities – cities, above all – that they controlled. Unlike other parties, however,
the Socialists limited the freedom of their mayors and councillors to raise and use such
cash as they saw fit. They created a national system, run through a front organisation of
‘planning consultants’ called the Urba group, which ensured the delivery of false
invoices for cash raised and channelled some of it to the party’s central office. This
both ensured some central financial control on local office-holders (although parallel
systems on a smaller scale were soon funding the party’s different factions) and pre-
vented, at least in principle, the use of these illicit funds to fill individual pockets rather
than party coffers. Reinforced by the big municipal victories of 1977, the Urba system
gave the PS a sound financial underpinning for its campaigns up to and beyond 1981, in
a world of increasingly sophisticated and expensive political communication tech-
niques. But in such a centralised structure, the discovery of a part could readily reveal
the existence of the whole. This happened between 1989 and 1991, when examining
magistrates investigating false invoices cases first in Marseille, and then in Le Mans,
found trails leading straight to the PS central office. Although elected officials of all
parties had been found to be involved in corrupt financial practices, the PS was alone in
having had its national funding system revealed as illegal in this way. This was a disaster
for a party that had always taken the moral high ground when discussing this type of
issue, and it contributed much to the Socialists’ ‘disgrace’ in the early 1990s. From 1995,
however, the taint of corruption was transferred from the PS to its opponents on the
moderate Right. Although two recent investigations, one involving payments for plan-
ning decisions to allow the construction of hypermarkets and another concerning the
student insurance firm run by the (Socialist-controlled) Union Nationale des Étudiants
Français, involved PS personalities, neither uncovered clear proof. For the present,
thanks to the generous (and legal) public subsidies, the PS appears to be living within its
means and within the law.
Electoral support
By the 1960s, the SFIO’s electorate had not only been shrinking for nearly two decades,
but was increasingly limited both socially and geographically: the typical Socialist
voter was a male, middle-aged, anti-clerical teacher or other public employee, living
in the south-west. It was the indispensable achievement of the renewed party both
to halt the overall decline and to diversify its electoral audience. The overall recovery,
shown in Table 7.2 and Figure 7.2, began with the score of 19.1 per cent at the
1973 parliamentary elections; five years later this had risen to 22.8 per cent – ahead of
the PCF. At the 1981 presidential elections, Mitterrand put 10 percentage points
Figure 7.2 Votes for Socialist parties (% of votes cast, first ballot in two-ballot elections, not
including allies), 1956–2004.
between himself and the Communist candidate Marchais: at no national election

since, except for the disastrous parliamentary elections of 1993, has the gap been less
than this.
A diffuse public sympathy accompanied this electoral recovery: except for the periods
1983–85, 1991–95 and a few months in the aftermath of the 2002 defeats, the PS, alone
among French political parties (until the Greens were included in surveys), has enjoyed
a consistent majority of positive over negative poll ratings. And the earlier sociological
and geographical shrinkage was corrected. Mitterrand had particularly sought to give
the party a solid base among the growing numbers of white-collar workers in both the
public and the private sectors, many of them women, and this goal was achieved; in
June 1981, the PS won 45 per cent of the vote among white-collar workers and middle
managers. The gender gap was also narrowed (and closed completely in 1986). But the
PS had also successfully challenged the Communists in their working-class heartlands
(with 44 per cent of the blue-collar vote), and attracted the young (45 per cent of the
under-35s); it even made progress among upper management (38 per cent) and Catholics
(often through contacts in the Catholic-influenced trade union confederations); only
among farmers and self-employed artisans and shopkeepers did it remain weak. More-
over, far from being confined to traditional bastions of the south-west, the PS of June
1981 was the biggest party in twenty-one of France’s twenty-two regions (all except
Corsica), and in seventy-nine of the ninety-six metropolitan départements, while in only
four départements did its vote fall below 30 per cent; it had built strength in areas like
Brittany and Alsace, which had hitherto been almost impregnable strongholds of the
Right. Like the Gaullists of the 1960s, the Socialists of 1981 attracted the votes of a
cross-section of the population. To use Otto Kirchheimer’s term, it had succeeded in
becoming a ‘catch-all’ party.
This was a remarkable and unprecedented achievement for a Socialist party in
France; it was one in which the leader and the party had helped each other to victory in
remarkable complementarity; and it was more or less repeated in 1988, though this time
with an incumbent president whose popularity depended rather less on his party. Yet
the Socialists’ electoral ascendancy has always been brittle. PS support at European
elections has only once (in 2004) risen above 24 per cent. In 1994 Rocard’s European list
sank to 14.5 per cent, a result that came at the worst point of the Socialist ‘disgrace’,
brought on by a combination of the dreadful image offered at the 1990 Rennes con-
gress, economic recession, the Urba scandal and revelations about Mitterrand’s war
record. It was the third disaster in three years, after a mere 18.3 per cent at the 1992
regional elections and 17.7 per cent at the 1993 parliamentary elections (a loss of
4 million out of 8.4 million votes, and 215 out of 282 seats compared with 1988).
The recovery under Jospin, though effective at winning office, was limited in purely
electoral terms: 23.2 per cent at the 1995 presidential elections, 23.8 per cent at the
parliamentary elections two years later; in only 25 seats out of 577 did Socialists win
over 40 per cent of the vote. Jospin’s 16.2 per cent in 2002 may charitably be considered
as below the Socialist norm, the two most recent scores – in June 2002 and June 2004 –
as defining the typical range of the PS, in the mid- to high twenties. By way of com-
parison, Tony Blair’s New Labour won the British May 1997 election with 43.2 per cent
of the vote, in 2001 with 41.7 per cent and even in 2005 with 37 per cent, while Gerhard
Schröder’s SPD returned to power in Germany in September 1998 with 40.9 per cent.
The PS vote, in other words, is low for a European social democratic party; even if the
vote for the Socialists’ closest allies, the Left Radicals and the Greens, against which
they ran no candidates in selected constituencies, is included, the total in 1997 was still
barely 30 per cent.
Moreover, the ‘catch-all’ composition of the Socialist vote may be a handicap as
well as an asset. No social group, and no region, is wholly impenetrable for the PS: in
its weakest region (Alsace) and its most difficult social groups (the self-employed
and practising Catholics), the Socialist score is in the 15–16 per cent range. Conversely,
though, there are few groups or regions where the Socialist hegemony is unchallenged.
In particular, the PS inherited the Communists’ special relationship with the working
class on a fleeting basis, essentially confined to the period from 1981 to 1988.
Mitterrand’s blue-collar vote at the first round in 1988, at 42 per cent, exceeded his
average by 8 points; Jospin’s in 1995, at 25 per cent, by 2 points only; in 2002, Jospin’s
share of the blue-collar vote was 13 per cent, or 3 points below his average. The same
applies, albeit to a somewhat lesser degree, to routine white-collar groups at presidential
elections and to the blue-collar vote at legislative elections – a good 6 points clear of the
national PS average in June 1988, but between 2 points below and 3 points above in
1993, 1997 and 2002. That the Socialists have made inroads since 1988 into professional
and executive groups – where they now do as well as or better than their average score –
scarcely compensates for losses elsewhere, for these gains still count for less in terms of
absolute numbers of votes.
In a bad year, the PS leaks votes on all sides: to abstention, to the far Right (the Front
National has been the leading party among blue-collar workers since 1993), to the
moderate Right, to the Greens, to the extreme Left. Moreover, a catch-all party needs to
satisfy a wide range of groups. For a West European social democratic party, this may
mean a difficult balancing act between the wishes of its blue-collar voters (conservative
on many societal issues, less than enthusiastic about Europe, anxious to defend the
welfare state and fearful of unemployment) with those of more cosmopolitan sup-
porters in professional and managerial groups (pro-European, liberal on societal issues,
resistant to high taxation). The referendum of 2005 illustrated the gulf that could open
between those groups. Polls taken in its aftermath, on the Le Mans congress in
November 2005, illustrated the party’s loss of credibility. On a whole range of domestic
policy issues, including the reduction of social inequalities, education, housing, the
environment, public services, purchasing power, law and order, or unrest in France’s
suburbs, respondents who thought a Socialist government would do better than de
Villepin and the Right were clearly outnumbered by those who considered it would do
no better, or even worse. Fifty-nine per cent of respondents, and 50 per cent of Socialist
sympathisers, considered that the party was doing its job as an opposition force poorly
or very poorly. If the Socialists appear certain to retain their hegemony on the Left,
therefore, their role as France’s ‘natural’ party of government appears much less secure.
For a party as electorally modest as the PS, winning and retaining office will always
require allies, but the dynamics of alliances may themselves help to pull the PS in
opposite directions.
The far Left

If the French Left as a whole is divided, the far Left is splintered into a profusion of
warring factions, clans and groupuscules, among which unity (especially among the
working class) is proclaimed as vital in principle yet frequently eschewed as opportunist
in practice.
For three decades, the most original grouping of the far Left was the PSU (Parti
Socialiste Unifié), founded in 1960, a mixture of Marxists, disillusioned Socialists,
left-wing Catholics and followers of the Fourth Republic Prime Minister Pierre
Mendès-France. Composed chiefly of intellectuals, the PSU supplied some of the Left’s
more innovative ideas, but was also prone to byzantine internal disputes. It fielded two
presidential candidates: Michel Rocard won 3.6 per cent of the vote in 1969 (the high
point of the PSU’s influence was just before and just after May 1968) and Huguette
Bouchardeau managed just 1.1 per cent in 1981. Weakened by the departure of Rocard
and his associates to join the PS in 1974, and uncertain about its relationship with
Mitterrand’s majority after 1981, the PSU finally disbanded in 1990.
The far Left has also included anarchist groupings (the Fédération Anarchiste being
the strongest) and Maoists (the Parti Communiste (Marxiste-Léniniste), then the
Gauche Révolutionnaire, then Pour une Alternative Communiste). More important
have been the various Trotskyist groups, descendants of movements attached to (or
split from) the Fourth International founded by Leon Trotsky in 1938. Of these, the
‘Lambertiste’ tendency, successively incarnated as the Organisation Communiste Inter-
nationaliste (OCI), Parti Communiste Internationaliste (PCI), Mouvement pour un
Parti des Travailleurs (MPPT) from 1985, and most recently Parti des Travailleurs, has
been long-lived but electorally weak. Its leader Pierre Boussel won a mere 0.4 per cent at
the 1988 presidential elections; fourteen years later, Daniel Gluckstein did better – with
0.5 per cent. The Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire (LCR) is led by Alain Krivine, a
veteran of May 1968 who ran in two presidential elections, winning 1.06 per cent in
1969 and 0.4 per cent in 1974. It recruits its members (2,000 are claimed) and voters
Figure 7.3 Votes for the far Left (% of valid votes cast, first ballots in two-ballot elections),
1962–2004.
chiefly among teachers and students in universities and schools. The LCR’s profile, and
vote, were raised in 2002 when it presented France’s youngest presidential candidate.
Olivier Besancenot, a personable 27-year-old postman, won an unprecedented 4.25 per
cent for his party (and 9 per cent among French students) – more than Robert Hue for
the PCF – and over the next three years steadily eclipsed Krivine. Lutte Ouvrière (LO),
on the other hand, is perhaps the only Trotskyist party to attract significant numbers of
‘ordinary French people’, typically white-collar public-sector workers but also, in 1995
and 2002, blue-collar workers in traditional industries. Its spokesperson, the indefatig-
able Arlette Laguiller, is the only candidate to have run in all five presidential elections
since 1974, and has won over 5.2 per cent at the last two (including over 10 per cent of
the blue-collar vote – just 3 points behind Jospin – in 2002).
Far Left voters are a mixed group, far from all of them convinced Trotskyists: fully 16
per cent of them switched their vote to Chirac at the run-off in 1995, and nearly one in
twenty appears to have supported Le Pen in the Chirac–Le Pen run-off of 2002. Elect-
orally, the far Left vote is able to surprise, but also prone to collapse: most strikingly,
from the 10 per cent plus (spread over the three presidential candidates) of 21 April
2002 to below 3 per cent at the parliamentary elections seven weeks later. This suggests
that many, perhaps most, far Left voters seek to express their disappointment with
other parties (especially with the mainstream Left) rather than their attachment to
Trotsky (or indeed to Besancenot). All of the far Left’s best scores have been achieved
with the Socialists in power.
Though they are capable of inspiring levels of membership activism that put other
parties to shame, the far Left groups are disdainful of, and correspondingly bad at,
electoral strategy. Both doctrinal differences and very distinct organisational cultures –
counter-cultural and non-conformist for the LCR, dour and sectarian for LO – have
helped keep the Trotskyists divided. Their achievement at the 1999 European elections,
when LO and the LCR ran a joint list that won 5.2 per cent of the vote and propelled
Krivine and Laguiller into the Strasbourg parliament for five years, was unique; far
more typical has been squabbling before elections (typically over the issue of whether to
withdraw at second ballots in favour of Socialist candidates) and disunity during cam-
paigns. Small wonder, then, that Krivine and Laguiller lost their seats in 2004, and that
the far Left has almost no seats on local and regional councils.
Despite this weakness at the crucial local level, the far Left retains a threefold
importance for French party politics. First, its electoral significance, though small, is far
from negligible; 5 per cent at a parliamentary or presidential election could make the
difference between victory and defeat for the Left, if transferred into second-ballot
votes. Second, the far Left has supplied activists to the mainstream of French politics.
This is true of the left-wing press (many of the brightest journalists on Le Monde,
Libération, or public-service radio have seen service with one or another of the far Left
groups) and of parties, especially the PS: some of the latter have been ‘moles’, planted
by far Left groups into mainstream parties, who then repudiate their Trotskyists origins.
Julien Dray and much of the gauche socialiste came out of Trotskyism via SOS–
Racisme. Jean-Christophe Cambadélis, the Socialists’ deputy leader from November
1997 till 2002, led a whole group of lambertistes over to the PS in 1985 after direct talks
with Mitterrand; they were a highly attractive catch for the PS as they controlled the
Union Nationale des Étudiants Français. Henri Weber, another senior PS leader (and a
Senator since September 1995), is a former leader of the May 1968 students’ movement.
The Socialists’ biggest single prize, however, was Jospin himself – a lambertiste infiltra-
tor when he joined the PS in the early 1970s, still technically a member of the MPPT
while serving as first secretary of the PS, but definitively a mainstream Socialist from
about 1987.
Third, the far Left has been both active (its supporters being few but committed) and
influential at the grass roots of left-wing politics. In the early 1970s, its campaigns
achieved an unexpected degree of mobilisation over issues which the mainstream Left
was reluctant to touch – the living conditions of soldiers, abortion, prison reform,
the plight of immigrant workers and the eviction of tenants by property speculators.
Trotskyists have also been active in SOS–Racisme and in the two big student move-
ments of December 1986 and autumn 1995. They have an audience in some academic
circles (the late sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, while not a member of any far Left group,
was considered a guru) and in pockets of the (otherwise staid) Force Ouvrière union.
And the far Left has been very well implanted (far better than the PCF) in France’s
many social movements since the mid-1990s – the Paris squatters’ movement of 1994–95,
the big strikes of December 1995, the sans-papiers movement, the unemployed move-
ment of 1997–98 and the succession of protests against the Raffarin government’s
reforms since 2002. That capacity to mobilise was also evident during the 2005 refer-
endum campaign, when Besancenot held meetings alongside Buffet for the PCF and
Mélenchon for the no camp in the PS – and was by no means a second-rank speaker.
The Trotskyist groups, in short, have been able to play the role of the Left’s radical
conscience, always ready to outbid their mainstream competitors: a living link
with France’s centuries-old tradition of protest and insurrection, and a standing (and
self-righteous, and quite possibly utopian) reproach to those on the Left who consider
that achieving left-wing goals requires the acceptance, however unpalatable, of the
constraints of government.
Citoyens et Radicaux
The left-wing majority returned in 1997 consisted of three parliamentary groups:
Communists, Socialists and a motley assortment called Radicaux-Citoyens-Verts
(RCV). One component of the latter was Jean-Pierre Chevènement’s Mouvement des
Citoyens (MDC), the successor to the Socialisme et République current (itself a succes-
sor to CERES) which Chevènement had led out of the PS in 1993. Chevènement’s
successful political career after 1993 (including three years as Jospin’s interior minister
from 1997 until his resignation in 2000) was an excellent illustration of the capacity of
individual politicians with strong local bases (in Chevènement’s case, Belfort) to survive
and even prosper outside major party organisations. The Marxism of the early CERES
had increasingly given way, from the 1980s, to an old-fashioned left-wing Jacobinism,
allergic to transfers of sovereignty to Europe, deeply suspicious of Greens and posi-
tively apoplectic about plans for further decentralisation to Corsica announced in 2000.
The fact of being too few to form a parliamentary group on their own was almost the
only thing the seven MDC Deputies had in common with their Radical and Green
colleagues.
As it developed towards 2002, however, the Chevènement case illustrated something
further: the destructive centrifugal potential of a presidential campaign. Half detached
from the gauche plurielle after 2000, Chevènement as a presidential candidate became
much the bitterest critic of Jospin on the Left, using the names Chirpin and Josrac to
underline his claim that little differentiated the president and the prime minister as
candidates – and that both wanted to sell France out to multinational business, Europe,
or both. Early in the campaign, with the FN still partially disabled, this made
Chevènement attractive to voters of the far Right, and he was briefly credited with over
12 per cent of voting intentions. In the event, most of the far Right voters returned to
Le Pen, but Chevènement still managed to mobilise enough disgruntled, Eurosceptical
Socialists with a leavening of Gaullists to attract over 5 per cent of the vote on 21 April
2002. Disappointing compared with initial expectations, this was still more than
enough to keep Jospin out of the second ballot. Unlike the other groups of the gauche
plurielle, Chevènement refused to return to the left-wing fold after the presidential
defeat. At the June 2002 parliamentary elections, MDC candidates were therefore in
outright competition with Socialists – and lost: not even Chevènement kept his seat.
Renamed the Mouvement Républicain et Citoyen, the chevènementistes retain a distinct
identity and organisation, and receive public party finance, and were active in the no
campaign for the 2005 referendum. But with no parliamentarians and few other elected
officials, they gave every impression of being a spent force; in alliance with the PCF
and the Left Radicals at the 2004 regional elections, for example, they were easily
outdistanced by the Socialists even in Chevènement’s (former) stronghold of Belfort.
The Parti Radical, the great governing party of the Centre under the Third Republic,
was reduced by 1958 to a small group commanding under 10 per cent of the vote and
uncertain whether to join forces with the Gaullists or the Left or to try to maintain a
central position between them. Left-wing Radicals, known from 1972 till 1994 as the
MRG (Mouvement des Radicaux de Gauche), as Radical from 1994 to 1996, as the
Parti Radical Socialiste (PRS) from 1996 to 1998 and as the Parti Radical de Gauche
(PRG) since 1998, are the group that chose to sign the Left’s Common Programme in
July 1972. Most of the MRG’s history was played out as a satellite of the PS, though its
first leader, Robert Fabre, defected in 1978 to accept the post of Mediator from
Giscard. Fabre’s successor Michel Crépeau always acknowledged that his 1981 presi-
dential candidacy (which won 2.2 per cent of the votes) was chiefly designed to bring
moderate voters into the Mitterrand camp. When the MRG tried more independent
action, its results were not encouraging: 3.3 per cent at the 1984 European elections in
alliance with some ecologists and dissident centrists, and a miserable 0.25 per cent of
the national vote for its lists in the 1986 parliamentary elections (though it did manage
to negotiate ten safe places on the Socialist lists as well). But the Left Radicals have
been an asset to the Left, because their voters are geographically rather concentrated. If
the Socialists leave them a clear run in selected towns and constituencies in the south-
west and Corsica, the Left Radicals are therefore capable of electing mayors (for
example, Crépeau in La Rochelle until his death in 1998), local councillors and a
handful of Deputies, who have usually (though not in 1997) chosen to join the Socialist
parliamentary group.
This picture was complicated by the irruption onto the political scene of Bernard
Tapie, a flamboyant self-made millionaire businessman, owner of the Olympique de
Marseille football club, who had led the non-Communist left-wing list at the 1992
regional elections in Bouches-du-Rhône. Tapie was briefly minister for urban affairs in
the 1992 Bérégovoy government before being forced to resign in the face of imminent
bankruptcy proceedings. Temporarily undeterred by these, he joined the MRG, and
won election as Deputy for Marseille in 1993. He then bought his way into the party’s
leadership, aiming at Marseille town hall, the Strasbourg parliament and even the
Élysée itself. In this he was probably encouraged by President Mitterrand, who admired
Tapie’s energy and was seeking an alternative left-wing force to Michel Rocard and
the demoralised Socialists. Tapie’s, and the Radicals’, high point came at the 1994
European elections, when their list attracted over 12 per cent of the voters, most of
them discontented Socialists, especially from the ranks of blue-collar workers alienated
from the PS since 1992. But Tapie’s plans for a presidential candidacy foundered after
an avalanche of legal proceedings were initiated against him for offences ranging from
fixing a football match to failing to declare his private yacht to the tax inspectorate;
he went, not to the Élysée, but (albeit briefly) to prison. Under Jean-Michel Baylet’s
leadership the PRG resumed the MRG’s more tranquil course, with one middle-
ranking and one junior minister in the Jospin government. Like all the other
components of the gauche plurielle, the PRG ran a presidential candidate; Christiane
Taubira, Deputy for French Guiana, was the first black woman to contest the presi-
dency. She did so in a much less aggressive manner than Chevènement, and won
660,000 votes, or 2.3 per cent, including a significant black ethnic vote in the Paris
suburbs. Again unlike the chevènementistes, the Left Radicals have retained their close
ties with the Socialists. Most of their nine Deputies elected in June 2002 enjoyed Social-
ist support from the first ballot; seven sit as associate members of the Socialist group,
the other two as independents.
The ecology groupings
Like their counterparts elsewhere in Europe, France’s ecologists have had to grapple
with three structural problems. First, there is an intrinsic electoral problem, because the
benefits of Green policies tend to be very long-term, or localised, or costly, or all three.
Diffuse voter concern with the environment, readily expressed in opinion polls and (to a
lesser extent) at ‘inconsequential’ European and regional elections, rarely extends to a
readiness to put Greens into government. Secondly, they have an organisational prob-
lem, arising from the reluctance of many ecology groupings to accept the hierarchical
structures and clearly identifiable leaders of conventional political parties, and the loss
of effectiveness and media impact that has tended to follow from more collective styles
of decision-making. Third, ecology movements, like any new entrants into a party
system, face a strategic choice between remaining isolated and impotent or joining
alliances and risking unacceptable compromises. Indeed, although ecology voters have
always been more inclined to support the Left than the Right at second ballots, it is only
since the mid-1990s that Les Verts, the main ecology grouping, could be said to have
joined the left-wing camp by entering into the gauche plurielle alliance.
There has been an ecology candidate at every French presidential election since
Friends of the Earth supported René Dumont in 1974; only in 2002, however, did one
attract more than 4 per cent of the vote (Table 7.3). Results of ecology groupings in
parliamentary elections were no better (Table 7.2 and Figure 7.4), until 1993 (when they
won 11.1 per cent) and 1997 (with 6.9 per cent). Ecology candidates have done best at
European elections and regional elections (2.8 per cent in 1986, but 13.9 per cent in
1992) – both held on proportional representation and both considered relatively
unimportant for national policy-making. In 1992, some 200 regional councillors (out of
a total of 1,700) were elected among ecology candidates. Crucially, however, and with
the two important exceptions of the 1989 and 1999 European elections, the allegiances
of ecology candidates have been divided – between at least three groupings in 1993,
for example, and two in 1997.
The history of the (political) ecology movement since 1974 can be divided into four
periods corresponding, roughly, to presidential terms.
• During the Giscard presidency, the ecologists’ electoral audience was low (the peak
was 4.4 per cent in the 1979 European elections). They were handicapped by the
fact that neither the French Friends of the Earth, nor the Mouvement Écologique,
created in 1974, nor the Mouvement pour l’Écologie Politique, founded five years
later, resembled a structured party; indeed, most ecologists were allergic to the very
notion. Brice Lalonde’s 3.88 per cent in the first ballot of the 1981 elections owed
more to his own falsely naive charm than to the solidity of his campaign organisa-
tion, Aujourd’hui l’Écologie. After some hesitation and some vague promises from
the Socialist candidate to re-examine the nuclear energy issue, Lalonde’s backers
supported Mitterrand for the second ballot.
• Mitterrand’s first term showed Lalonde’s relative success in April 1981 to be short-
lived, and ecology candidates achieved a negligible score at the June 1981 parlia-
mentary elections. Moreover, the foundation in 1984 of Les Verts, a serious attempt
at an ecology party, drove Lalonde into dissidence. This was perhaps the most
important division within the movement for the next decade: the 1984 European
elections confirmed the split between the ‘neither Right, nor Left’ line of the
Figure 7.4 Votes for ecology movements (% of votes cast, first ballot in two-ballot elections),
1974–2004.
official Verts and the opportunism of Lalonde, who formed a joint list with Michel
Crépeau of the MRG and a dissident former Gaullist, Olivier Stirn. Each of the
two lists won some 3.3 per cent of the vote, but the two 1986 elections (regional and
parliamentary) left Les Verts disappointed and in debt. At the 1988 presidential
elections a new Green candidate, the somewhat dour Antoine Waechter, won 3.8
per cent of the vote – a creditable score as he was competing against a dissident
Communist, Pierre Juquin, who had sought to create a ‘Red–Green alternative’
federation but achieved only 2.1 per cent.
• Mitterrand’s second term saw both a new electoral peak and a strategic impasse for
the ecology movement. The run of good election results, all over 10 per cent, in
1989, 1992 and 1993, appeared at the time as a breakthrough into mainstream
politics. In fact they were flawed, for three reasons. First, they depended, like Green
results elsewhere in Europe (especially in 1989), on an ephemeral public interest in
the environment, speedily overshadowed by the onset of recession in the early
1990s. Second, in both 1992 and 1993, ecology candidates attracted votes from
discontented PS supporters at the time of the Socialists’ ‘disgrace’. The Socialist
recovery, when it came, was at the expense of ecology candidates. Third, the move-
ment was still divided. Waechter still insisted on the absolute independence of Les
Verts from both Right and Left; Lalonde, on the contrary, was junior environment
minister from 1989 till 1992 and founded Génération Écologie in 1990 with the
blessing of Mitterrand, who hoped for a Green ‘satellite’ for the PS. The cost of
division was clear in March 1993, when the more sanguine Greens had hoped to
replace the discredited PS as the major party of the ‘non-Right’ in France. Despite
an electoral alliance between Les Verts and Génération Écologie, the two parties
won a mere 8 per cent of the votes between them (4.1 per cent for Les Verts, 3.7 for
Génération Écologie, to which were added votes from more dubious ecology and
animal-lovers’ candidates, some of them close to the far Right). On this basis, they
failed either to win any seats or even to count for much in the second-ballot result.
Both the Waechter and the Lalonde strategies seemed to lead nowhere, and the
movement fragmented further: in the mid-1990s, some ten different groups com-
peted for the support of ecology-minded citizens. Within Les Verts, the fallout of
the 1993 elections saw Waechter placed in a minority by Dominique Voynet, a
former far Left activist. But Voynet’s result as a presidential candidate in 1995
(3.3 per cent) showed no obvious sign of a Green recovery.
• The Chirac presidency saw the ascendancy of Voynet in the Green movement and
the breakthrough of Les Verts into parliamentary and ministerial office. Voynet
survived her indifferent presidential result to confirm the change of strategy she
had embarked upon before 1995: neither the opportunism of Lalonde nor the
austere isolation of Waechter, but a negotiated alliance with the Left, with con-
stituencies reserved for Les Verts and some joint policy commitments. Such a
national agreement was reached with the PS in January 1997, with twenty-nine
constituencies ‘reserved’ for Les Verts at the first round, in exchange for first-ballot
support from Les Verts for 77 Socialist candidates; and on the strength of 3.7 per
cent of the vote the following May, Les Verts won 8 parliamentary seats and a post
for Voynet as minister for regional planning and the environment (a junior minis-
terial post for the party would follow). That eclipsed the other components of the
disparate ecology movement, led by former presidential candidates, which
accounted for a further 3 per cent of the vote: Waechter’s Mouvement pour une
Écologie Indépendante, and Lalonde’s Génération Écologie (Lalonde’s promi-
scuity after the presidential election had drawn him close first to President Chirac and
then to the free-market conservative Alain Madelin). In April 2002 Noël Mamère, a
former television presenter and mayor of Bègles, achieved the best ever result for an
ecology candidate at a presidential election, but his score of 5.3 per cent was still
below the heightened expectations of Les Verts. At the parliamentary elections two
months later, back in harness with the Left (94 Socialists, as well as 12 Communist
and 4 Left Radicals, were supported from the first ballot by Les Verts, who in turn
benefited from Socialist backing in 59 seats and from backing of all gauche plurielle
parties in 4 more), Les Verts lost all but 3 of their Deputies, including Voynet – but
remained an indispensable part of the Left.
The two decades since the foundation of Les Verts have thus seen their partial
integration into the political mainstream. By the end of 2004, the party could boast
47 mayors (mostly of smallish suburban municipalities), 168 regional councillors, 25
councillors for départements, 23 Paris councillors, 6 MEPs, 3 Deputies and – thanks to
their alliance with the Socialists and the beginnings of their local implantation – 4
Senators (including Voynet). Limited compared to the record of the German Grünen,
this still represented a foothold in the system. Les Verts should not, however, be viewed
simply as a party of government; their experience of office within the gauche plurielle
alliance has been at best a partial success, hotly debated after the event. They had rather
little direct impact on government policy. It is true that convergence with the PS on
institutional measures produced the five-year presidential term, gender parity, justice
reforms and partial limitations on the cumul des mandats (significantly frustrated by the
Senate), while Les Verts were also strong supporters of the 35-hour week. On the other
hand, the only two major decisions in favour of the environment, the shutdown of the
Superphénix nuclear reactor and the cancellation of the Rhine–Rhône canal, were
already in Jospin’s 1995 presidential programme. And a range of other measures, such
as the continuation of the motorway programme and the abolition of the car licence
fee, the re-opening of the Mont Blanc road tunnel after the disaster of 2000, the failure
to raise taxes on diesel fuel, the announcement of a third airport for Paris, as well as the
ambiguous attitude to genetically modified foods, went against the spirit of the 1997
agreement with the PS. Jospin’s France still had one of Europe’s worst records on
implementing European environment directives, and was notably remiss on anything
relating to the shooting season, thanks to the fear – or sympathy – inspired by the gun
lobby among Socialist parliamentarians. Voynet’s personal record as a minister was
undistinguished, that of her successor (after 2000) Yves Cochet practically invisible;
neither used the available opportunities to further the green cause.
Unsurprisingly in these circumstances, the experience of government has not
reinforced the unity of Les Verts; even before the defeats of 2002, the party’s endemic
factionalism had led one Green Deputy to refer to Les Verts as a party of ageing and
over-argumentative hippies, while Voynet remarked in private that ‘our rules are daft,
you have to head off a psychodrama every two years’. An inevitable result of this was
weak leadership. At the November 2002 congress Voynet lost her post as national
secretary to Gilles Lemaire, who had only joined Les Verts in 1999 and whose roots
were with the far Left; in January 2005 Lemaire himself had to hand over to Yann
Wehrling, a 33-year-old with no experience of elective office, who candidly described
himself as the ‘lowest common denominator’ between the four factions that had fought
the party to a near stalemate at the December 2004 congress. The party found it no
easier to agree on the European constitutional treaty than on the leadership: while the
membership of Les Verts supported the treaty by a narrow 53 per cent to 47 per cent in
an internal referendum in February 2005, Green voters said no by 64 per cent to 36 at
the real referendum three months later.
What would bring Les Verts greater leverage within the French Left would be the
introduction, at least partial, of proportional representation to the legislative electoral
system. This was one of the party’s major goals, early in 2005, as it undertook initial
moves towards the negotiation of a joint programme with the PS for the elections of
2007. Its achievement would depend on clear leadership, consistency of purpose and
electoral muscle. Whether these were any more available than in the past among Les
Verts, however, was open to question.
Concluding remarks
Even when out of national office, the Left has still held various forms of power. As
Table 7.5 shows, Communists and Socialists have typically run half or more of France’s
major towns under the Fifth Republic. Nantes, Rennes, Grenoble, Lille and Le Mans
all have left-wing mayors; they were joined by Paris and Lyon in 2001. The excellent
results at the regional and cantonal elections of 2004 won the Left control of half of the
ninety-five provincial départements of metropolitan France (a high level given the rural,
conservative bias inherent in cantonal representation) and, in a striking reversal of
earlier fortunes at the regional level, the presidencies of twenty out of twenty-two
regions. At the national level, even with the Right in power, the Left has also retained
sympathisers in government, within ministerial cabinets (it was Jacques Delors, for
example, who drafted much of the ‘New Society’ speech with which the Gaullist
Jacques Chaban-Delmas opened his premiership in 1969, while his daughter Martine
Aubry became a Socialist labour minister three years after leaving the cabinet of a
Gaullist social affairs minister) and even among ministers (Edgard Pisani, de Gaulle’s
agriculture minister, and Michel Jobert and Léo Hamon, both ministers under
Pompidou, all subsequently joined the Left; Jean-Louis Borloo, Chirac’s social affairs
minister, would be at home in any centre-Left government in Europe). Indeed, it could
be argued that left-wing sympathies, at least in some policy areas, penetrated to the very
highest levels. De Gaulle’s foreign policy was interpreted as dangerously pro-Soviet and
Giscard’s early societal reforms won the bulk of their popular support (as well as their
parliamentary support in several cases) from left-wing sympathisers; the campaigns
that elected Chirac in 1995, and to a lesser extent in 2002, had a distinct (if tactical) left-
wing tinge, and his opposition to the Blairite agenda for Europe is well entrenched. The
Left has also retained much of its ideological ascendancy. The alarming domination of
much of France’s intellectual life by Marxists and their fellow-travellers that reached a
peak in the 1970s has, it is true, ended. It is also possible, as it was not before 1981, for
politicians to declare their right-wing loyalties openly without being classed as Fascists.
‘Conservative’, on the other hand, remains a term of abuse in the French political
lexicon, and the Left also retains a hold on the hearts and minds of the French in more
substantial ways. The Gaullists, the largest current on the French Right both before and
after the merger of the Gaullist party with part of the non-Gaullist moderate Right,
has never fully sloughed off its penchant for a strong, interventionist state. The domin-
ant ethos in a range of pressure groups, not only the obvious ones like the major trade
unions, but others such as women’s organisations, consumer groups or sports clubs, is
progressive, egalitarian and leftish. The same is true of environmental groups, of
influential sections of the press, of many Catholic lay organisations, and to a greater or
lesser extent of economic planning agencies and of policy communities surrounding
such areas as education, social security, health and housing. Finally, the remarkably
wide sympathy inspired by rebelling students, striking railwaymen, or wider masses of
wage-earners who challenged right-wing governments in 1986, 1995 and 2003–4, by the
ideals of equality in education, the defence of the social security system and the preser-
vation of public services that they claimed to stand for, has been a powerful brake on
attempts to reform France’s very large public sector. When a section of the Left con-
sidered that the European constitutional treaty threatened these ideals, it campaigned
against it and won. That the treaty would be opposed by the nationalist Right and the
extreme Left was a foregone conclusion. It was the size of the opposition within the
mainstream Left, and particularly the PS, that set France’s Socialists apart from their
counterparts elsewhere in continental Europe and ensured a majority no vote on
29 May 2005.
The problem of the left-wing parties has always been to translate the diffuse
sympathy they command into useful votes at the right moment. Only twice under the
Fifth Republic, at the parliamentary elections of 1978 and 1981, has the Left com-
manded a first-ballot majority at a national election. On three occasions, moreover, the
Left has won the support of fewer than a third of the voters: 31.7 per cent in the
presidential election against de Gaulle in 1965; 30.9 per cent against Pompidou in 1969
(when no left-wing candidate survived to the second ballot); 30.8 per cent at the 1993
parliamentary elections, during the Socialist ‘disgrace’. At another five parliamentary
elections, in 1958, 1962, 1967, 1968 and 1986, and at the presidential election of 1995,
the Left’s first-round score has been so low (45 per cent or less) as to preclude any
serious prospect of victory (the same would also have been true of the presidential
elections of 2002, had Jospin not in any case been eliminated at the first ballot). And
even François Mitterrand’s presidential victories were preceded by at least relative
right-wing majorities at the first round.
This record raises the question of how the Left has won power at all. The answer lies
in a performance that usually (though not invariably) improves at second ballots, owing
to five main elements, most readily discernible in the transfers of votes between ballots
at presidential elections.
• The Left’s ‘republican discipline’ at second ballots. As the left-wing alliance took
shape from the mid-1960s, most voters of the two big left-wing parties grew accus-
tomed to supporting one another’s candidates. Even when relations between them
were poor, as in 1981, 1988 and 1993, Communist voters overwhelmingly sup-
ported Socialists at the second ballot. Socialists were somewhat more reluctant to
vote for Communists, but about three-quarters of them could still usually be
expected to do so.
• Absentionists. At some second ballots the Left has mobilised significantly more
first-ballot abstentionists than the Right. At the 1981 presidential elections, for
example, a number of left-wing voters, disenchanted by the Left’s squabbling and
pessimistic about the outcome of the election, stayed away at the first round, but
rallied to Mitterrand at the second.
• Ecologists. Both Mitterrand in 1981 and 1988, and Jospin in 1995, attracted a clear
majority of first-round ecology voters at the run-off, without any formal agreement
with Les Verts or any other group, at a time when ecology groupings were formally
situated, by themselves and by electoral statisticians, as neither Right nor Left.
Many of such voters, indeed, especially in the early 1990s, were disappointed
Socialists who could be expected to return to the PS at the decisive round. In the
2002 parliamentary elections, with Les Verts fully integrated into a left-wing dam-
age limitation strategy, as many as 89 per cent of their voters backed left-wing
candidates at the second ballot.
• The moderate Right. The Left has sometimes been the beneficiary of splits and
quarrels within the mainstream Right. Mitterrand was elected in 1981 with the help
of about an eighth of Chirac’s voters from the first round. Seven years later, a
similar proportion of Barre supporters helped him beat Chirac. And some 9 per
cent of Balladur voters switched to Jospin in 1995.
• The far Right. The willingness of some far right-wing voters to support a left-wing
candidate at second ballots was clear from the presidential election of 1965, when
many voters who had supported the far Right candidate Jean-Louis Tixier-
Vignancour chose to back Mitterrand at the run-off in order to punish de Gaulle
for his ‘loss’ of Algeria. Similarly, as many as a quarter of Le Pen’s voters switched
to Mitterrand in 1988 and to Jospin in 1995. However, this is more likely to happen
at presidential elections, where only two candidates go through to the run-off, than
at parliamentary ones, where the Front National always keeps as many candidates
as possible in the running for the second ballot. Some analysts have argued that the
survival of 76 Front National candidates to the second round in 1997 ensured the
Left’s victory; for 61 of these constituencies were won by the Left.
Between them, these elements give the Left a somewhat better chance of victory than
the usual level of its first-ballot support would suggest. But two conditions also have to
be met at the first ballot: a PCF too weak to frighten away crucial Centre voters at the
run-off, and a score within striking distance of a majority (over 45 per cent). The first of
these conditions, insuperable for the Fifth Republic’s first two decades, has been ful-
filled at every election since 1981. The second, on the other hand, has been met under
the two-ballot system on just five occasions since then: the presidential elections of
1981 and 1988 and the parliamentary elections that followed in each case, and the
parliamentary elections of 1997.
The Left’s return to government in 1997 bore witness to a remarkable restoration
both in the strength of the PS and in the credibility of the left-wing alliance after the
disasters of the early 1990s; it therefore suggested the possibility of a similarly rapid
recovery under the widely unpopular rule of Chirac and Raffarin. But the defeats of
2002 offer two harder lessons. The first is the Left’s difficulty in retaining (winning back
might now be more accurate) what went almost without question for half a century –
the support of the bulk of the French working class. Whatever the Jospin government’s
achievements, it failed to convince enough of this still large and crucial group either
that it could deliver its historic goal of a radical transformation of society (that had
been abandoned in 1983), or that it could even reform capitalism in accordance with the
Left’s values of equality and of economic and social as well as political citizenship. The
deep divisions of the Left, and especially the Socialists, over the European consti-
tutional treaty should be understood in this light. Supporters saw the treaty as a means
to reinforce the position of Europe (including its social model) in the world. For many
of its opponents, by contrast, the treaty’s adoption would have closed off the prospects
of serious left-wing reform for the forseeable future; the Left would thereby be perman-
ently cut off from its natural constituency. France’s no vote of May 2005, on the other
hand, seemed (to them, though to few others) to hold out the hope of a Europe-wide
mobilisation in favour of a renegotiated treaty.
The second lesson of Jospin’s, and then the Left’s, defeats, might be called catch-
2002. It is that the Left needs to be as inclusive and diverse as possible, to compensate
for the PCF’s catastrophic decline and the failure of the PS either to retain working-
class support or even to win 30 per cent of the vote on a lasting basis; but that inclu-
siveness and diversity have a cost, in terms of coherence, which risks pulling the whole
alliance apart at the crucial moment. A succession of studies, most recently by Daniel
Boy and others, have underlined the presence of rather different cultures – the ‘worker-
ist’, the ‘pragmatic’ and the ‘post-materialist’ – within the Left. These are regularly
projected into a context of intense party competition within the alliance by party
leaders mindful of their home bases, and prove difficult to manage in consequence. This
poses the question of leadership. And from that perspective, not the least achievement
of François Mitterrand, despite his failings, was to allow the Left to transcend its long-
standing differences for long enough to win.
Further reading
Amar, C. and Chemin, A., Jospin & Cie. Histoire de la gauche plurielle, 1993–2002, Paris, Seuil,
2002.
Bell, D. S. and Criddle, B., The French Socialist Party, 2nd edition, Oxford, Clarendon Press,
1988.
Bell, D. S. and Criddle, B., The French Communist Party in the Fifth Republic, Oxford, Clarendon
Press, 1994.
Bergounioux, A. and Grunberg, G., Le long remords du pouvoir: le Parti socialiste français
1905–1992, Paris, Fayard, 1992.
Boy, D., Platone, F., Rey, H., Subileau, F. and Ysmal, C., C’était la gauche plurielle, Paris, Presses
Bréchon, P. (ed.), Les partis politiques français, 2nd edition, Paris, La Documentation Française,
2005.
Clift, B., French Socialism in a Global Era, London, Continuum, 2002.
Cole, A. and Doherty, B., ‘France: Pas comme les autres – the French Greens at the crossroads’, in
D. Richardson and C. Rootes (eds), The Green Challenge: The Development of Green Parties in
Europe, London, Routledge, 1995, pp. 45–65.
Courtois, S. and Lazar, M., Histoire du Parti communiste français, 2nd edition, Paris, Presses
Universitaires de France, 2001.
Duverger, M., Political Parties: Their Organisation and Activity in the Modern State, London,
Methuen, 1964.
Evans, J. (ed.), The French Party System, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2003.
Hazareesingh, S., Intellectuals and the French Communist Party, Oxford, Clarendon Press,
1991.
Hewlett, N., French Politics since 1945: Conflict and Consensus, Cambridge, Polity, 1998.
Johnson, R. W., The Long March of the French Left, London, Macmillan, 1981.
Katz, R. S. and Mair, P., ‘Changing models of party organization and party democracy: the
emergence of the cartel party’, Party Politics, 1(1), 1995, pp. 5–28.
Kirchheimer, O., ‘The transformation of West European party systems’, in J. LaPalombara
and M. Weiner (eds), Political Parties and Political Development, Princeton, NJ, Princeton
University Press, 1966, pp. 177–200.
Knapp, A., Parties and the Party System in France: A Disconnected Democracy?, Basingstoke,
Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
Kriegel, A., The French Communists, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1972.
Lancelot, A., Les élections nationales sous la Cinquième République, 3rd edition, Paris, Presses
Lavabre, M.-C. and Platone, F., Que reste-t-il du PCF?, Paris, CEVIPOF/Autrement, 2003.
Mair, P. and van Biezen, M., ‘Party membership in twenty European democracies, 1980–2000’,
Party Politics, 7 (1); January 2001, pp. 5–21.
Nick, C., Les Trotskistes, Paris, Fayard, 2002.
Perrineau, P. (ed.), L’engagement politique: déclin ou mutation?, Paris, Presses de la Fondation
Pingaud, D., La gauche de la gauche, Paris, Seuil, 2000.
Portelli, H., Le Parti socialiste, 2nd edition, Paris, Montchrestien, 1998.
Rey, H., La gauche et les classes populaires, Paris, La Découverte, 2004.
Sainteny, G., L’introuvable écologisme français?, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 2000.
Schain, M., French Communism and Local Power, London, Frances Pinter, 1985.
Touchard, J., La gauche en France depuis 1900, Paris, Seuil, 1991.
von Beyme, K., Political Parties in Western Demoracies, Aldershot, Gower, 1985.
Ware, A., Political Parties and Party Systems, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1996.
Party websites
Parti Communiste Français http://www.pcf.fr/accueil/php
Parti Socialiste http://www.parti-socialiste.fr
Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire http://www.lcr-rouge.org
Lutte Ouvrière http://www.lutte-ouvrière.org
Les Verts http://lesverts.fr
8 The Right
Domination and division
The Gaullists 217

The non-Gaullist moderate Right (NGMR) 227
Conflict, co-operation and the UMP 232
Other right-wing groups 236
The extreme Right: permanence and isolation of the Front National 239
Further reading 250
On the Left, the major division can be dated from the Socialist–Communist split at
Tours in 1920. No equivalent point of separation can explain the divisions between
Gaullists, the non-Gaullist moderate Right and the far Right. René Rémond, however,
has related them to three separate traditions running through the French Right since
the Revolution, corresponding to the dynasties that competed with the republicans for
control of the régime in the nineteenth century. These are: the ‘ultra’ Right, which
rejected all republican values and sought to restore the pre-revolutionary Bourbon
monarchy; the moderate, ‘Orleanist’ Right, ready to compromise with moderate repub-
licans, and attached, in the nineteenth century, to the British virtues of moderate consti-
tutional monarchy and free trade; and the ‘Bonapartist’ Right, which stressed the virtues
of strong leadership with direct links to the mass of the people, a strong state and an
assertive foreign policy. In contemporary terms, Rémond suggested, the inheritors of
the ‘Orleanists’ were the non-Gaullist moderate Right, while the heirs of Bonaparte
were the Gaullists; others have cast the Front National in the role of the latter-day
‘ultra’ Right. The reality is much less tidy. The sources of policy division have been
transformed; and the French tradition of Christian Democracy (weaker than in
Germany or Italy, but still significant) finds no easy place in any of the categories. But
Rémond’s triad remains a useful reminder of the different temperaments, repeatedly
encountered among right-wing parties and leaders, which help to explain their recurrent
failure to unite.
Linked to, but distinct from, ideological traditions are traditions of party organisa-
tion. In the France of 1900, nearly half the active population worked on the land. Rural
networks and hierarchies marked much of the country well after the emergence of
universal suffrage and free elections in 1871. They, not the emerging industrial mass
society, shaped the organisation of right-wing parties. In Duverger’s terms (see
Chapter 7), they were ‘cadre’ parties, formed essentially of local notables and with little
or no formal membership. Social changes and the institutions of the Fifth Republic
The Right 217
(notably the direct election of the president) have encouraged more structured, nation-
wide forms of party organisation. But politicians of the Right remain divided between
those who value the flexibility and independence found in the cadre party, and those
(chiefly among the Gaullists) who value a more disciplined organisation and clearer
leadership, whether within a ‘mass’ or a ‘catch-all’ party.
The two moderate components of the French Right are also divided because
France’s various electoral systems allow space for competing forces on the Centre–
Right. The failure of merger attempts between the moderate Right’s two main com-
ponents, Gaullist and non-Gaullist, in the late 1980s did not prevent the comfortable
electoral victories of 1993 and 1995; when a merger did take place, with the formation
of the UMP, it followed rather than preceded the victories of 2002, was incomplete and
did not prevent major setbacks in 2004. In a broader political sense, however, the
moderate Right has repeatedly been damaged by its own internal divisions and rivalries.
These were compounded, from 1984, by the challenge posed by the rise of the Front
National. This chapter first covers the Gaullists and the non-Gaullist moderate Right
(NGMR), and their partial merger in the UMP in 2002, before turning to the problems
posed by the extreme Right.
The Gaullists
Though Gaullism has always attracted conservatives, it did not start life merely as a
variety of conservatism. De Gaulle’s central concern with France’s place in the world’s
affairs; his insistence on strong leadership and robust institutions as the necessary
conditions of France regaining and keeping its rightful ‘rank’; his readiness to engage
the power of the state, often in a manner that could only be described as dirigiste, to the
same end; his refusal to compromise on his conception of national sovereignty, but his
readiness to be pragmatic, and often radical, about much else (including Algeria); all of
these marked him apart from the dominant, Orleanist, conservative current of the time.
Indeed, the General’s three decades in politics were replete with clashes with conserva-
tives of every stamp. The founding act of Gaullism, the refusal to accept France’s
defeat in 1940, was a gauntlet thrown down as much to the conservative elites who fell
in behind Marshal Pétain in the collaborationist Vichy government as it was to the
occupying Germans. De Gaulle clashed with conservatives on the constitution both in
the immediate post-war period and in 1962, when he engaged the constitutional reform
on the direct election of the presidency; his relations with France’s Christian Demo-
crats were at best chilly and at worst, notably over European issues, downright hostile.
And it was his final challenge to the conservative France of local notables, in his plans
for Senate and regional reforms, that led to de Gaulle’s downfall in the referendum of
1969. The quirkiness that set Gaullism apart from mainstream conservatism led Klaus
von Beyme, in his classification of Western Europe’s political families, to place it in a
category almost of its own – shared only with Ireland’s Fianna Fáil.
De Gaulle always claimed for himself personally a special relationship with France,
and argued that as France was beyond Right and Left, so he was above parties. It is
therefore one of the great ironies of the Fifth Republic that General de Gaulle endowed
France with its first great organised, disciplined party of the Right. The Union pour la
Nouvelle République developed, unusually, from the top downwards: on de Gaulle’s
return to power in 1958, the Gaullists enjoyed the benefits of office while barely existing
at all as a party. For that reason, many observers forecast the party’s imminent demise
218 The Right
once its creator was out of the way. These expectations (or hopes) were confounded.
De Gaulle’s resignation, in April 1969, and his death, in November 1970, came and
went; Pompidou died in April 1974, and a non-Gaullist succeeded him in the Élysée; the
premiership was lost in 1976, and all remaining government positions in 1981. But the
party refused to disappear. Its survival depended ultimately on building the internal
organisation which it had lacked at the start of the Fifth Republic. Chirac’s election in
1995 as the first president in twenty-one years to claim allegiance to the Gaullist family
testifies to both his and his party’s success at doing this. But the process, neither smooth
nor easy, involved a progressive surrender of the ‘pure’ Gaullist identity. Indeed, the
Gaullists changed their official party name six times under the Fifth Republic (for the
sake of convenience, all the party’s incarnations – given in full in Appendix 6 – before
the party adopted the RPR label in 1976 are referred to here simply as the Gaullist
party, even though the word ‘party’ aroused such loathing among Gaullists that it
appeared in none of the titles), until they merged, in 2002, into a new party without any
open Gaullist reference, the UMP (Union pour une Majorité Présidentielle from
May to November 2002, Union pour un Mouvement Populaire since then).
The vicissitudes of Gaullism under the Fifth Republic, and its progressive dissolution
into a wider conservative identity, were spread over seven distinct phases.
The search for identity: 1958–62

It was in this period that the party transformed itself from a small group of Gaullists
scattered amid the ruins of the Fourth Republic into a centralised organisation.
Pro-Algérie française elements were purged, and the party became a subservient
instrument of the president of the Republic. After the referendum and elections of
autumn 1962, it had become an indispensable one too. But the party membership
remained small, partly to prevent Algérie française infiltration and partly because de
Gaulle had mistrusted mass organisations ever since the unsuccessful experience of the
first big Gaullist party, the Rassemblement du Peuple Français (RPF), between 1947
and 1953.
Growth, consolidation and hegemony: 1962–73

The decade between the referendum and elections of autumn 1962 (see Chapter 2,
p. 60) and the March 1973 parliamentary elections, just a year before Pompidou’s
death, can be counted the Gaullists’ golden age, during which they enjoyed a position
of dominance unequalled under any French republican régime. This dominance in this
period rested on six pillars.
• The propagation of a set of doctrines, a form of Gaullism for the masses, based
on the primacy of national unity and a denial of the Marxist notion of class
struggle; the defence of a powerful state and a strong executive authority, as written
into the new constitution; the creation of a modern industrial economy; and the
assertion of national independence in foreign and European affairs. To the doctrines
corresponded policy outputs that voters valued and appreciated. These included
peace and reconciliation after the Algerian trauma; political stability; economic
growth; and an agreeable sense of France’s renewed stature in the concert of nations.
• The party’s symbiotic relationship with the president made it the buttress and
The Right 219
guardian of the presidency, and the main defender of presidential policies in par-
liament and in the country, especially at election times. This role was a subservient
one; the party’s secretary-general, for example, was effectively a delegate of the
president, who also vetted its parliamentary candidates. At the same time de Gaulle
found he needed the party’s support, notably to ensure his own re-election to the
presidency in 1965.
• The penetration of the state apparatus. The party’s reward for loyalty to the presi-
dent was the lion’s share of the patronage available to the executive: not only the
premiership and most government portfolios, but also the key posts in ministerial
cabinets, in the state broadcasting networks and in nationalised industries and
banks went to Gaullists. This tentacular spread of political patronage led the vis-
ceral anti-Gaullist Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber to coin the phrase ‘l’État-UDR’
– the Gaullist state.
• Electoral strength. At the start of the Fifth Republic, the Gaullists relied almost
wholly on their association with General de Gaulle for their electoral support. But
in later parliamentary elections, as Figure 8.1 (and Tables 7.1 and 7.2) show, their
level of support converged with de Gaulle’s own: a fifth of the voters in 1958, over a
third in 1962 and 1967, and nearly two-fifths in June 1968, when a conservative
reaction against the (perceived) Communist threat of the previous month secured
the Gaullists 293 out of 487 seats – the first single-party parliamentary majority
in the history of the Republic. Gaullists always claimed to represent a cross-section
of the electorate – ‘the rush-hour crowd on the Paris metro’, as André Malraux
Figure 8.1 Votes for Gaullist parties (% of votes cast, first ballot in two-ballot elections), 1958–
2004.
220 The Right
put it. This was always less true of the party than of the General himself, and also
less true as time went on and the Gaullist ranks swelled with traditionally conserv-
ative groups – the elderly, women, higher income groups and practising Catholics.
But it remained more socially representative than most earlier right-wing parties: a
‘parti d’électeurs’ in Jean Charlot’s term, a ‘catch-all’ party in Otto Kirchheimer’s.
• The domination of the presidential majority. Outside the unusual circumstances of
1968–73, the Gaullists depended on allies – notably, from 1962, on Valéry Giscard
d’Estaing’s Républicains Indépendants – for their parliamentary majority. They
shared out the government ministries with Giscardians and, from 1969, with
Jacques Duhamel’s Centre Démocratie et Progrès. But they were the dominant
partners. One indication of this was the Gaullists’ share of the majority’s parlia-
mentary candidacies. These investitures were shared out between the different com-
ponents of the majority before each election, often after long negotiations, but
according to a general rule that sitting Deputies faced no competition from other
majority candidates. The Gaullists, with plenty of sitting Deputies from the elec-
tions of 1962 and then 1968, dominated the investitures, to a degree which opinion
polls suggested was disproportionate to their support in the country by 1973.
• Organisational strength. De Gaulle’s reservations about creating a big, structured,
party organisation were balanced, from 1965, by an awareness that he needed such
an organisation to revive his sagging presidential campaign. In 1966, he therefore
allowed his prime minister Georges Pompidou to take the party in hand. By the
time of de Gaulle’s resignation, many leaders and cadres of Resistance pedigree
had given way to a newer generation, and party membership had probably doubled
since the early 1960s (to about 160,000, many of them recruited in reaction to May
1968). It would take an indulgent observer to call this a ‘mass’ party, but it was still
considerably more structured than the cadre model typical of earlier parties of the
Right. Its existence helped save the party during l’après-de Gaulle. It also, of
course, helped elect Pompidou to the presidency, with a record 58.21 per cent at the
second ballot against the centrist Poher.
Jean Charlot argued that in the ‘parti d’électeurs’, the Gaullists gave France a new
kind of party, free of attachments to particular ideologies or interest groups, which won
elections by delivering policy goods the voters wanted. He also claimed that Gaullism
changed the multiparty landscape of the Fourth Republic into a ‘dominant-party sys-
tem’ during the 1960s. Comparison with other democracies makes such claims look
overstated; all democratic parties must satisfy voters, after all, and a party that wins a
string of elections over fifteen years, though impressive, has no more created a ‘dominant-
party system’ than Thatcher’s Conservatives in Britain or Kohl’s Christian Democrats
in Germany. But when the comparison is with the parties and party system of the
Fourth Republic, Charlot’s analysis does indeed point up a dramatic contrast.
Other observers compared the Gaullists to the Radicals, the quintessential governing
party of the Third Republic, pointing to their pragmatic doctrine, their solid, durable
position in parliament and in ministries, their electoral spread south of the Loire where
Radicals had always done well, their steadily growing local roots. True, there were also
differences: the Gaullists’ love of strong leaders, anathema to the Radicals; their
assertiveness in foreign policy, an area which had left the Radicals indifferent; their
imperviousness to the anti-clericalism which animated so many Radicals. But the most
striking resemblance was that by 1972, the Gaullists appeared to many, as the Radicals
The Right 221
had in the 1930s, as a party that had grown fat on patronage and been in power
too long.
The loss of power: 1973–76

By 1972 it was clear that the Gaullists were in serious difficulties. Discipline, tradition-
ally their strength, had declined since 1969. Deputies had criticised the ‘opening’ of the
majority, and had found Pompidou’s first prime minister, Jacques Chaban-Delmas, too
liberal. Gaullist dissidents had helped turn Pompidou’s 1972 referendum on enlarge-
ment of the European Community into a damp squib; in 1973, they would sabotage his
plan for a constitutional amendment to limit the presidential term to five years. Prop-
erty development scandals had engulfed several leading Gaullists and passed close to
several more. The March 1973 parliamentary elections saw the party’s support fall back
to a quarter of the voters, a drop of 2 million and a lower percentage than in 1962
(see Table 7.2). That meant a loss of over 100 Deputies. Although Gaullists held on to
two-thirds of the majority’s parliamentary seats, this was largely thanks to their con-
tinued hold on the majority’s investitures rather than to their inherent electoral
strength. Opinion polls suggested that their real support in the country was now no
greater than that of their allies, the Centrists and Giscard’s Républicains Indépendants.
The special relationship with the whole of France, the essence of de Gaulle’s style of
politics, had largely vanished; the Gaullists had become simply the largest component
of a conservative coalition.
Pompidou’s illness, visible by mid-1973, prompted the Gaullists to look for a succes-
sor. Perversely, they adopted Chaban-Delmas, whom they had mistrusted before Pom-
pidou had sacked him as prime minister in 1972, as the rightful heir. But they were still
caught unprepared by Pompidou’s death on 2 April 1974 – unlike Giscard, who had
chosen not to run in 1969 but was now swift to seize this opportunity. Chaban’s poor
electoral showing accelerated rather than contained his party’s decline; he was elimin-
ated at the first round of the presidential elections, with less than half of Giscard’s vote.
Defeat was rendered all the more bitter for the Gaullists by the ‘treason’ of Interior
Minister Jacques Chirac, who, with forty-three other leading Gaullists, had cam-
paigned for Giscard from the first ballot (and whose reward, once Giscard was safely
elected, would be the premiership). A handful of left-wing Gaullists called for a Mitter-
rand vote at the run-off in 1974, and joined the Left. Michel Jobert, who could not
stomach Giscard, left the Gaullist party in 1975 to found the Mouvement des Démoc-
rates. But for those Gaullists – the vast majority – who refused to throw in their lot with
the Left, support for Chirac was the only viable option. His treachery towards Chaban,
and his complicity with the liberal, reforming president inspired unease; but at least he
offered leadership, especially from December 1974, when he took over the top party
post of secretary-general in a spectacular coup. Chirac’s equally spectacular resigna-
tion, in August 1976, came as a relief to many Gaullists as it cut the link with Giscard.
But it also ‘lost’ the premiership to the party, and thus completed the severance of that
close association between president, prime minister and the dominant party in the
parliamentary majority which had been such an important cement during the Fifth
Republic’s early years.
222 The Right
Organisational renovation, electoral and strategic impasse: 1976–81
To compensate for their loss of power the Gaullists then attempted to build a mass
party, relaunched as the RPR in December 1976. Chirac was elected, with Soviet-style
ease (96.5 per cent of the votes), to the new post of party president. Grossly inflated
membership figures were claimed: 550,000 at the end of 1977 and 750,000 (with 776
workplace sections) a year later; but if the true figure was probably nearer the 160,000
recorded after May 1968, this still brought the party back to its best levels of the Fifth
Republic. Party elites were renewed. Chirac’s election as the first twentieth-century
mayor of Paris in March 1977 (after a law of 1975 had relaxed the former tight central
government control over the capital) equipped him with a powerful logistical base,
better in many ways than the premiership, or than a mass party organisation. In the
parliamentary elections of March 1978, with 22.8 per cent of the votes cast and 154
Deputies elected, Chirac could still, just, claim to head France’s largest party. Survival
was no longer in serious doubt – as it clearly had been in 1974.
But the 1978 vote was still lower than that of 1973, and much lower than those of
1962, 1967 or 1968. The Gaullists were also in a strategic impasse: since joining forces
with the Left was unthinkable, they had no choice but to stay in Giscard’s majority – as
long, that is, as Giscard was president. Before 1981, Chirac’s (frequent) attacks on
Giscard were thus reminiscent of a Caesar who repeatedly rushed his troops at the
Rubicon, only to tell them to take out their fishing-rods. Above all, the Gaullists never
voted a motion of censure against the government; voters would not have forgiven such
an act of open complicity with Communists. Chirac was less restrained, however, at the
campaign for the 1979 European elections, when he practically accused the Giscardians
of being agents of a foreign power. And at the 1981 presidential election the need for
Gaullist self-restraint applied not at all; a defeat for Giscard here would allow the
Gaullists to regain their leadership on the Right.
Chirac’s first-round vote in 1981, at 18 per cent, though insufficient to reach the run-
off, was nearly three points ahead of Chaban in 1974 and thus respectable, especially as
he had faced two dissident Gaullists, his own former adviser Marie-France Garaud and
de Gaulle’s first prime minister Michel Debré, who polled 3 per cent between them. But
his charge that ‘a change of policy requires a change of president’ also mobilised pent-
up Gaullist discontent against Giscard, legitimised the attacks of the more dangerous
challenger, the Socialist François Mitterrand, and thus helped to destabilise the incum-
bent president. The Right’s total first-round vote, at 49.8 per cent, was nearly three
points down on 1974 (with Giscard himself dropping nearly four points from 32.6 per
cent to 28.8). Giscard therefore needed all the right-wing votes he could get at the run-
off. Chirac helped ensure he would not have them by declaring that while he himself
would cast his ballot for the incumbent, his voters should follow their own consciences.
Small wonder that Giscard, having lost the run-off by 48.24 per cent to Mitterrand’s
51.76, accused Chirac of ‘premeditated treachery’.
May 1981 saw the Right’s first defeat in a national election under the Fifth Republic.
June 1981 saw the second: at the parliamentary elections called by the newly elected
Mitterrand, the Right lost 132 out of its 287 seats – and thus its majority. But the right-
wing alliance continued. Among voters, while a quarter of Chirac’s supporters had
either abstained or voted Mitterrand at the run-off, the other three-quarters had loyally
supported the incumbent. And the Right’s leaders, after Giscard’s temporary removal
from the scene, made some effort to limit the impending disaster of the June elections
The Right 223
by backing a joint candidate in 385 out of 487 constituencies, compared with 158
in 1978.
Chirac’s two defeats: 1981–88

The defeats of 1981 left Chirac as the effective leader of the right-wing opposition and
obliged him to reverse his political strategy. Since 1976 he had pursued a ‘first-ballot’
strategy, seeking to survive by highlighting his differences with his Giscardian ‘allies’ of
the UDF in every possible way. Now he needed a ‘second-ballot’ strategy to secure the
UDF’s support for any future presidential bid. He therefore sought reconciliation with
the wounded UDF, treating it as an equal partner in all pre-election negotiations. He
undertook a major revision of the Gaullists’ programme, and included elements of
the New Right agenda – privatisations, business deregulation, law and order, as well as
a degree of support for the Atlantic alliance and for Europe that would have been
unthinkable four or five years earlier; these then became the basis for the joint RPR–
UDF platform of 1986. Before 1981, it had still been possible to make a clear distinction
between Gaullist policies (more attached to national sovereignty, more Eurosceptical,
more dirigiste on the economy, more authoritarian, more inclined to dramatise politics)
and those of the NGMR (more liberal on social issues, less dirigiste, more pro-
European, Atlanticist within limits). From roughly 1983 onwards, this distinction was
blurred, as the RPR converged on (and even overtook) its allies’ neo-liberal economic
positions. Meanwhile Chirac led a crusade against the ‘Socialo-Communists’ with as
much gusto as he had recently employed in his attacks on Giscard. Elections in muni-
cipalities and départements brought big gains for the Right, allowing the Gaullists to
reinforce their positions in local authorities and the Senate – both traditionally weak
points. These successes left little doubt as to the outcome of the 1986 parliamentary
elections, which produced a victory for the RPR–UDF coalition, with the Gaullists
winning 155 seats to the UDF’s 131, and won Chirac a second stint as prime minister.
Despite a respectable economic record, this second premiership failed in its purpose
of convincing enough voters of Chirac’s presidential qualities. Chirac was working
under very difficult political conditions: a parliamentary majority of three, his most
dangerous opponent (Mitterrand) still in the Élysée, pressure on the majority coali-
tion’s Right from the FN and on its moderate wing from Raymond Barre, who divided
the coalition’s loyalties – and two years to show a convincing record before the 1988
presidential elections. Chirac’s failure to reach 20 per cent at the first ballot, and his
46 per cent at the second, were a humiliation. At the parliamentary elections that
followed, the Gaullists even lost their majority of right-wing seats, with 130 Deputies to
the non-Gaullist moderate Right’s 131.
Disarray and victory: 1988–95

These defeats plunged the Gaullist party into a three-year post-electoral crisis, in which
the party’s elite aired grievances and doubts which had been building since 1981. The
leadership was attacked for aligning itself too readily on the UDF’s positions and
straying too far from historic Gaullism. The very acceptance of cohabitation could be
viewed as contrary to de Gaulle’s vision of how the Fifth Republic should work. The
dismantling of part of the apparatus of dirigisme was attacked as a betrayal that
favoured the interests of a narrow elite but neglected those of the nation; Édouard
224 The Right
Balladur, finance minister from 1986 to 1988, was an emblem of this embourgeoisé
Gaullism, remote from the reflexes of the party rank and file. The RPR’s response to
the threat from the FN was also questioned, though Gaullists disagreed as to the best
solution, with some arguing for a rapprochement with the far Right, and others seeking
a more aggressive attitude drawing on the anti-Fascist legacy of the Resistance. Finally,
voices suggested that the Gaullist party had been sacrificed on the altar of Chirac’s
presidential ambitions and that past policy errors might have been avoided by a greater
tolerance of internal debate and dissent than the party’s autocratic structures had
permitted. Some dissidents, indeed, began to refer to the RPR as ‘the last Stalinist party
in France’.
Underlying each of these questions was an unspoken doubt about Chirac’s leader-
ship and electability. The February 1990 congress saw a dissenting motion (a novelty in
itself) presented jointly by Charles Pasqua on the party’s Right and Philippe Séguin on
the Left in the name of a return to Gaullist values: it lost by a two to one margin,
probably rigged, but showed that the leadership could not take the rank and file for
granted. The Pasqua–Séguin duo went on to supply the backbone of the no campaign
for the referendum of 1992 on the Maastricht Treaty; they won the support of two-
thirds of RPR voters, placing Chirac in a minority in his own party and highlighting his
distance from traditional Gaullist values (de Gaulle had viewed currencies as central to
the exercise of national sovereignty; the Maastricht Treaty spelt the end of the French
franc). Despite this detour, however, Chirac’s own leadership was not in doubt after
1991, and the prospect of a handsome win in the 1993 legislative elections was a force
for cohesion.
Chirac could have embarked on a third premiership after the moderate Right’s land-
slide victory (in terms of seats, more than of votes) in 1993. Instead, he left this job to
Balladur and concentrated on preparing his presidential campaign for 1995, expecting
Balladur’s support when the time came. This did not materialise; Balladur’s meta-
morphosis, in 1993, from understated prime minister into a credible presidential candi-
date ensured that Chirac’s third presidential candidacy would divide the Right, and
even the RPR. Competition with Balladur also dictated the conditions of Chirac’s
election: a vicious first-round battle where none had been expected, and a campaign
that combined, with scant regard for any sort of coherence, the free-market, anti-tax
rhetoric of Alain Madelin (Chirac’s leading supporter from the ranks of the UDF)
with Séguin’s Gaullist discourse on social solidarity (Séguin claimed that the key phrase
of Chirac’s 1995 campaign, la fracture sociale, referring to the need to eliminate social
exclusion, was his own). If that helped ensure Chirac’s first-ballot lead of over two
points over Balladur and thus, practically, to guarantee victory at the run-off, it also
gave hostages to fortune for the Chirac presidency.
Victory and disarray: 1995–2000

By mid-1995 the elements of the Gaullists’ lost ‘dominance’ – the presidency, the prem-
iership (Alain Juppé became Chirac’s first prime minister) and the largest group in a
huge right-wing majority in the National Assembly – had fallen back into place. RPR
membership, at about 140,000, was comparable to post-1968 levels: low compared with
European conservative parties, but quite respectable in the French context, and big
enough to represent a real national organisation. The party was good at attracting
business money in the brief period in the early 1990s when business funding was legal
The Right 225
and open (and probably also in all other periods, when it was neither). The Gaullists’
local positions, moreover, with the presidencies of 7 out of metropolitan France’s
22 regions and 28 out of 96 départements, as well as the control of Paris and 47 out of
the 221 largest towns, were incomparably stronger than in the 1960s. The Senate, a
persistent thorn in the side of de Gaulle, now contained 92 Gaullists out of a total of
321 Senators – nearly three times as many as in the General’s time; they won enough
allies, in September 1998, to win the presidency of the Senate for the first time under the
Fifth Republic.
Yet, despite appearances, the equation of the 1960s no longer applied. First and
foremost, the Gaullist electorate had shrunk. The victories of 1993 and 1995 were based
on levels of first-ballot support for the RPR of about 20 per cent – little over half what
it had been thirty years earlier. The ‘catch-all’ party of the 1960s had lost its (signifi-
cant) working-class support to the rising forces of the Left after 1968, while many of
the dynamic elements of the earlier electorate – the forces vives beloved of de Gaulle –
defected to Socialism or the UDF. Chirac became president with a lower first-ballot
score than any of his four Fifth Republic predecessors, and parts of this electorate – the
young people attracted by the discourse on the fracture sociale – had grown disil-
lusioned by 1997. His victory was flawed in other respects, too. The battle with the
balladuriens created a lasting rift in the right-wing coalition generally and the RPR in
particular which Chirac did nothing to heal. The promises of the campaign, lower taxes
and an end to the fracture sociale, were dumped within months in the name of the
Maastricht convergence criteria. Of the two pillars of the campaign, Séguin was sent
back to his old job as president of the National Assembly, while Madelin was sacked as
finance minister within three months of his appointment. When Juppé ran into political
difficulties, he had few sure supporters, and Chirac had no alternative prime minister.
The disastrous dissolution of 1997 was at least in part a bid to find a way out of a
situation which the very logic of the 1995 campaign had rendered impossible.
The defeat of 1997 not only cost the Gaullists office and nearly half their 257
Deputies; it also plunged the party into its worst crisis since 1958. But the crisis had
long-term roots, which can be summarised under three headings.
President and party

Relationships between presidents and their parties under the Fifth Republic have never
been straightforward. Thanks to the Gaullist myth of a head of state ‘above parties’,
the president cannot afford to be seen to be a party leader. He must be a party leader in
order to manage his own support in the country; but he can only be so covertly. Presi-
dential parties tolerate this as long as the president is a ‘locomotive’ for his party, as de
Gaulle and Pompidou were. But Chirac in 1997 was a locomotive in reverse, whom
many leading Gaullists considered had lost any right to support at the presidential
elections due for 2002. Hence Chirac’s temporary loss of control over the RPR in 1997:
the party elected Séguin, whom Chirac had never trusted, as its president, and Séguin
appointed Nicolas Sarkozy, Balladur’s budget minister and presidential campaign dir-
ector, as his secretary-general. The following two years saw a curious struggle as Chirac
sought to destabilise Séguin as RPR leader while Séguin tried to undermine Chirac’s re-
election prospects – with neither daring to fight openly. Chirac won: Séguin resigned
from the party leadership in the middle of the 1999 European election campaign, and
Sarkozy, who took his place on a temporary basis, also left his party office after the
226 The Right
poor result of the European list he had led. By the year’s end the RPR had its first
woman leader in Michèle Alliot-Marie, not Chirac’s first choice but sufficiently weak
politically to be increasingly dependent on him. But Chirac’s victory had a cost in terms
of the demobilisation of his party; by the end of 1999, the RPR counted an official
total of 80,000 members – a drop of nearly half in five years.
A longer-term problem was the broader question of leadership in the party. More
than any other political force, Gaullism had lived in symbiosis either with an incumbent
president (de Gaulle and Pompidou) or with an aspiring one (from Chirac’s relaunch of
the party as his own instrument in 1976). From the 1980s, however, this link had been
loosened by the Gaullists’ stronger local positions, and by the fact that individual RPR
politicians had to make their own way without any of the perquisites that may come
from being the country’s governing party. Political circumstances, as well as the insti-
tutional changes that attenuated the presidential character of the ‘one and indivisible
Republic’ since 1958, had also ‘depresidentialised’ the RPR. The party’s viability as a
tool of Chirac’s re-election ambitions, in terms both of loyalty and of organisational
muscle, was badly damaged.
Ideology and policies

What Gaullism stood for was relatively clear in the 1960s: support for de Gaulle and for
the (still controversial) Fifth Republic Constitution, for a state that was strong at home
and assertive and independent abroad. Within those general perspectives, Gaullists
could take pride in their pragmatism and diversity, describing their party as ‘a move-
ment of Frenchmen from a wide range of political horizons, agreed on a few essentials
and sharing a common ideal of France’. That allowed the cohabitation between differ-
ent Gaullisms: the Gaullism of the Resistance generation, loyal above all to ‘the man of
18 June 1940’; a gaullisme de gauche focused on the General’s social preoccupations; a
gaullisme droitière, first seen in the RPF days under the Fourth Republic, steeped in a
virulent anti-Communism; a gaullisme pompidolien, of which Balladur became the sali-
ent latter-day representative, obsessed by France’s need to adapt to an increasingly
competitive world while preserving social peace; and later a gaullisme chiraquien
(mark 1), which revelled in the aggressive, populist, anti-European, anti-free-market
rhetoric of the late 1970s (some of which was given a further outing in the 1995
campaign), and a gaullisme chiraquien (mark 2), inspired by the aggressive pro-free-
market rhetoric of the mid-1980s. At all epochs, too, the party has had its opportunists,
conservatives for whom it represented the best organised expression of their views and
interests at a given moment. The party has harboured economic liberals and economic
dirigistes, social liberals and social conservatives, and pro- and anti-Europeans.
This unity in diversity, however, became increasingly hard to sustain. First, none of
the General’s successors has had de Gaulle’s ability to bind people to him; leadership is
no longer the same counterweight to diversity. Secondly, the core Gaullist values of the
1960s began to appear either banal (loyalty to the Fifth Republic Constitution, now
accepted in its broad outline by all parties) or problematic (a vigorous independent
foreign policy, or an interventionist state). It was far harder to say what Gaullism was
for in 2000 than it was in 1960; in 1999, indeed, polls indicated that 63 per cent of the
French thought of Gaullism as ‘a notion that no longer means much today’ – a view
shared by 57 per cent of RPR supporters. Within the party, the most divisive issue was
Europe. For Gaullist diehards, the transfers of sovereignty to which Chirac consented
The Right 227
in the treaties of Maastricht and of Amsterdam were breaches of the essential Gaullist
value of national independence. Hence, in part, Pasqua’s departure from the RPR in
1999 to form the Rassemblement pour la France, as well as the distancing from the
party of many survivors of the Resistance generation.
Paris
For eighteen years between 1977 and 1995, Paris was Chirac’s showcase and his power
base, his international platform and the bastion on which he fell back in the event of
defeat. Judicial investigations have also shown that it was the centre of much illegal
activity. Full-time RPR officials were on the municipal payroll, housing distributed on a
clientelistic basis, tenders for municipal contracts rigged in return for cash payments to
the party, electoral rolls tampered with. After 1995, these scandals engulfed Jean Tiberi,
Chirac’s uninspiring successor as mayor, and France’s capital elected a Socialist mayor
in 2001. But senior party figures, including Juppé, were also placed under investigation.
From an incomparable asset, Paris became a symbol of the RPR’s rotten heart.
Chirac himself remained remarkably untouched by the stench of corruption emanat-
ing from his former bastion. The courts extended his constitutional immunity to pros-
ecution for acts committed as president to his activities before his election. Moreover,
polls two years before the 2002 elections showed that he had at least an even chance of
beating his expected opponent, Jospin – and that no other right-wing candidate would
come close. Under the Fifth Republic, however, it is axiomatic that a successful presi-
dential candidate requires the solid backing of a party. The RPR, with its shrunken
electoral support, its uncertain ideological base and its dislocated organisation, and its
sleazy public image, scarcely seemed to meet this requirement.
The non-Gaullist moderate Right (NGMR)

If Gaullists trace their origins to de Gaulle’s London broadcast which launched the
Free French movement in 1940, their allies of the NGMR have a less heroic pedigree:
their ancestry may be sought in the parties of the Right and Centre that ruled France
for most of the Fourth Republic. The Parti Radical, the Christian Democrats of the
MRP and the conservatives grouped in the Centre National des Indépendants et des
Paysans (CNIP) all supported de Gaulle in 1958; all, however, had fallen out with him
by the end of 1962, with the exception of Giscard and his Républicains Indépendants
(RI), who stayed in the Gaullist-led majority. Defeated in that year’s elections, squeezed
between the Gaullists and the Left, most of the ‘old’ parties’ members and leaders
gravitated slowly towards Giscard, joining the federation launched as the Union pour la
Démocratie Française (UDF) in February 1978.
The sluggishness of this process, which spread over fifteen years, was due to the
difficulties of the parties concerned in adapting to the politics of the Fifth Republic.
Although the MRP had tried to recruit a mass membership in the 1940s, it and the
other groups of the non-Gaullist Right were really cadre parties. Their ‘members’ were
notables whose support derived as much from their own networks in constituencies,
towns and départements as from party labels and whose recalcitrance towards strong
party discipline or leadership was legendary. Even Giscard preferred a ‘light’ party
organisation – or rather two: on the one hand the RI, credited in 1970 with just 3,000
members (mostly mayors and local councillors), and on the other the select Clubs
228 The Right
Perspectives et Réalités, half-party and half think-tank, which he had founded in 1965.
These were the tools with which he had won the presidency. In tranquil times he would
probably have stuck to them, negotiating electoral agreements with partners as neces-
sary. But from 1976 onwards, the continued strength and growing hostility of the
Gaullists (notably their relaunch as the RPR, and Chirac’s dramatic capture of the
Paris town hall), as well as the real danger of a left-wing victory, offered powerful
incentives for more formal structures. The name given to the new federation left little
doubt as to the source of its inspiration: Démocratie française was the title of the book
in which Giscard had laid out his political credo two years earlier.
The president’s own party was also the largest single component of the UDF, and
supplied half of UDF Deputies from 1978 to 1997. From 1962 the RI played two roles:
as one of Giscard’s own political networks, and as a ‘place of welcome’ for conserva-
tives (not all of them fervent Giscardians) who wished to join the Gaullist majority
without submitting to the discipline of the Gaullist party. Its structures and organisa-
tion remained rudimentary. In May 1977, however, the competition from Chirac’s
Gaullists prompted a change of style. The RI, renamed the Parti Républicain (PR),
began actively to recruit members. Successive secretaries-general (Jean-Pierre Soisson
from 1977 to 1978, Jacques Blanc from 1978 to 1981, François Léotard after the defeats
of 1981) sought to project an image of youth and energy, as opposed to outmoded
provincialism of the traditional notables or the brutalism favoured by the RI secretary-
general Michel Poniatowski. Preposterous membership figures were claimed for the PR
– as many as 145,000 in 1979. Outside estimates indicated 10–12,000 members in the
early 1980s, and perhaps 20,000 ten years later: less than a fifth of the Gaullists’ total.
But it was still a more structured organisation than the RI of the 1960s, and incorpor-
ated other Giscardian groupings, for example its well-heeled youth and student move-
ments (the Mouvement des Jeunes Giscardiens, the Mouvement Génération Sociale et
Libérale and the Collectif des Étudiants Libéraux de France) – though the Clubs
Perspectives et Réalités remained outside the new party, Giscard preferring some diver-
sity among his supporters. Both names changed in the 1990s. In September 1995, Hervé
de Charette, foreign minister in the Juppé government, converted the Clubs Perspec-
tives et Réalités into the Parti Populaire pour la Démocratie Française (PPDF). And
when the former finance minister Alain Madelin took over the PR from Léotard in
1997, he relaunched it as Démocratie Libérale (DL).
The second party to join the UDF was the Centre des Démocrates Sociaux (CDS),
headed by the Deputy and mayor of Rouen, Jean Lecanuet, who also became president
of the whole UDF. Lecanuet had run for the presidency against de Gaulle in 1965, and
won a respectable 15.6 per cent of the vote, with backing from the MRP, the CNIP and
some Radicals. On the strength of that he formed a new ‘centrist’ party, the Centre
Démocrate, to group these supporters. From 1969 to 1974 these centrists were split
between Jacques Duhamel’s Centre Démocratie et Progrès (CDP), which had backed
Pompidou and joined the majority after his election, and Lecanuet and the rest of the
Centre Démocrate, who stayed in opposition. But Giscard’s election led to the
incorporation of both Centre parties inside the enlarged presidential majority. Their
reunification as the CDS followed, with the encouragement of Giscard’s factotum
Poniatowski, in May 1976. Unlike the PR, the centrists have not claimed a large mem-
bership: the modest official figure of 30,000 members claimed in both 1979 and again in
1997 was probably double the real total – a tiny exaggeration by French standards. As
the successor to the MRP, the CDS represented the Christian Democratic tradition in
The Right 229
French politics; it accounted for between a quarter and a third of the non-Gaullist
moderate Right Deputies from 1978 to 1993; and among the main components of the
UDF, it was the most hesitant (particularly after Mitterrand’s second victory in 1988)
about its position in the alliance of the Right. The Education Minister François Bayrou
relaunched the CDS as Force Démocrate in 1995.
The UDF’s third component, the Parti Radical, had been France’s most important
party from its foundation in 1901 till the defeat of 1940. Though much diminished
under the Fourth Republic, the Parti Radical retained its pivotal role, but both shrank
and split under the impact of the Fifth, acquiring the status, and the fragility, of a
historical relic. Its opportunists joined the Gaullists; its left-wingers formed the
Mouvement des Radicaux de Gauche (MRG) and signed the Socialist–Communist
Common Programme in 1972; the rest sought salvation in the mercurial leadership of
Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, co-founder and editor of L’Express and the party’s
president from 1969 till 1978. He rallied to Giscard at the second ballot in 1974, and to
the UDF in 1978, but was unable to stem his party’s decline. By the eve of their
centennial year, the Radicals had become a regionalised party with a few thousand
members at most and three Deputies, centred on a few localities including Nancy
(where Servan-Schreiber had been Deputy). They were also susceptible to the influence
of Jacques Chirac: two successive presidents of the party, Didier Bariani and Yves
Galland, were Chirac’s assistant mayors in the Paris town hall.
Several very small groups or parties also joined the UDF. The Carrefour Social
Démocrate consisted of left-wing centrists, the Mouvement Démocrate Socialiste of
right-wing anti-Communist Socialists. They were to join the Parti Social-Démocrate
(PSD), which voted in 1995 to join the centrists in Force Démocrate. Finally, the group
of adhérents directs included members of the UDF who eschewed links with any of its
individual components.
The UDF started well: the amalgamation of the weak, the unimportant and the
plainly derisory produced something more than the insignificant. With 20.6 per cent of
the first-round votes and 123 Deputies in the 1978 parliamentary elections, and 27.5 per
cent in the 1979 European elections (the highest score of any list), the confederation
could challenge the Gaullists’ claim to be the Right’s largest party. As well as these
positions the UDF had many councillors in France’s municipalities, départements and
regions, and thus in the Senate (local office-holding has always been the non-Gaullist
Right’s strong suit), while the leadership of the president of the Republic offered pat-
ronage and even financial backing. But the UDF lacked the Gaullists’ organisational
muscle, and when Giscard sought re-election in 1981 he preferred to organise his cam-
paign through his Élysée staff and personal ‘support committees’ in the country, in an
attempt to downplay his links with any one party.
Giscard’s defeat was nevertheless a traumatic blow to the party he had founded. Not
that the UDF vote collapsed (Figure 8.2): the drop in the 1981 parliamentary elections,
from 22 per cent to 20.6, was hardly catastrophic (though the loss of 57 out of 120
Deputies was more serious). More important was the fact that the three main constitu-
ent parties had come from quite different traditions – the Radicals’ heritage of anti-
clericalism versus the centrists’ Christian Democracy, the PR’s free-market leanings
versus the Centrists’ concern for ‘social’ goals – and were held together largely by
support for the president of the Republic. An ex-president was a much less effective
cement. From 1981 until its breakup in 1998, the UDF accordingly fell prey to constant
divisions over policies, strategy and personalities.
230 The Right
Figure 8.2 Votes for the non-Gaullist moderate Right (UDF from 1978; % of votes cast, first
ballot in two-ballot elections), 1958–2004.
• Policy divisions centred, in the first instance, on the Right’s economic programme.
While the Parti Républicain, and especially the bande à Léo – François Léotard and
his two lieutenants, the former extreme right-wing activists Alain Madelin and
Gérard Longuet – was in the vanguard when it came to incorporating ‘New Right’
themes such as privatisation into the opposition’s agenda in the 1980s, the centrists
of the CDS were much less sure. As ministers in the second Chirac government, on
the other hand, Léotard, Madelin and Longuet were among the most sympathetic
to protesting students in December 1986, lacking all solidarity with René Monory,
the CDS education minister who had prepared the reform the students were pro-
testing against. A more surprising split came later, in 1992, when the UDF,
hitherto seen as the most solidly pro-European element on the Right, split over the
Maastricht referendum, with a minority under Philippe de Villiers campaigning
against the treaty and eventually leaving the UDF altogether.
• Strategic divisions concerned, in the first instance, the wisdom or otherwise of
‘cohabitation’ between a government supported by a right-wing majority and
President Mitterrand in 1986. Raymond Barre, Giscard’s second prime minister,
opposed such an experiment in the name of a more Gaullian interpretation of the
constitution than the Gaullists themselves adhered to, until events overtook him.
Other strategic divisions centred on relations with other parties, notably the FN. A
minority of leaders in the PR, notably the arch-conservative Alain Griotteray as
well as Gérard Longuet, periodically suggested ending the ‘quarantine’ of the far
Right; and the UDF’s leader in Marseille, Jean-Claude Gaudin, co-operated with
The Right 231
the FN to save a handful of seats from the Socialists in the parliamentary defeat of
1988. By contrast, the centrists, led by Pierre Méhaignérie after Lecanuet gave up
the CDS leadership in 1982, appeared genuinely tempted by an alliance with the
Socialists in 1988; they formed a separate group from the UDF in the National
Assembly, and helped keep Rocard’s Socialist government in office by supporting it
on a number of key votes – though they returned to the main UDF group in 1993.
A final strategic division concerned relations with the Gaullists, whose superior
organisation has always inspired a mixture of admiration and resentment in the
UDF. This was especially apparent as the 1995 presidential elections approached.
The UDF was torn between support for a candidate from within its own ranks
(Giscard and Barre, as well as the president of the UDF parliamentary group,
Charles Millon, all suggested they might run, before being dissuaded by a glance at
the opinion polls); support for Balladur, the line which won a majority in each of
the UDF’s three main parties and was actively promoted by government ministers
including Léotard, Longuet and Simone Veil; and support for Chirac, voiced
openly by Madelin and by Hervé de Charette, President of the Clubs Perspectives
et Réalités, and more discreetly by Giscard. For a major party in a ‘presidentialised’
system, the UDF in late 1994 presented an extraordinary picture of disarray.
• Personalities and their competing ambitions inevitably lay behind disputes over
policy and strategy. Giscard, in particular, cast a long shadow, embarking on what
he may have hoped was a long road back towards his old job, via the council of his
département of Puy-de-Dôme (in 1981), the National Assembly and the presidency
of the regional council of Auvergne (in 1986), and the European Parliament in
1989. He also took over the presidency of the UDF in 1989, and reinforced its
central institutions. But except during a brief period between 1989 and 1992, Giscard
never appeared in the polls as a serious presidential contender. The chief effect of
his continued influence was therefore to help spoil the chances of his rivals in the
UDF, especially Barre and Léotard. The Chirac–Balladur battle divided the UDF
almost as much as it did the RPR. It completed the breakup of the bande à Léo, as
Léotard and Madelin ended up on different sides, and left a legacy of division well
beyond 1995. A prolonged struggle for control of the CDS in succession to Pierre
Méhaignérie was waged through the early 1990s between Dominique Baudis and
Bernard Bosson; the Education Minister François Bayrou, one of the rare bal-
laduriens to survive Chirac’s victory, defeated both of them in October 1995.
These three sources of division – policies, strategy and personalities, combined with
the lack of an adequate organisation to contain them – caused the breakup of the UDF,
twenty years after its foundation, over the FN’s proposal of alliance after the 1998
regional elections. This offer was especially tempting to the UDF, a federation of cadre
parties for which local and regional office had always been very important. Four
regional presidents chose to accept FN votes: two were former secretaries-general of
the Parti Républicain, Jean-Pierre Soisson and Jacques Blanc, while Millon had been
the UDF’s leading parliamentarian. They were condemned by the UDF president
François Léotard, but enjoyed widespread sympathy among rank-and-file UDF elected
officials. At the same time the leaders of the UDF’s two component parties used the
occasion to further their own ambitions. François Bayrou, leader of Force Démocrate,
called for ‘a renovated party of the Centre and Centre-Right, refusing any alliances
with the FN’ – headed, presumably, by himself. That turned the debate over alliances
232 The Right
with the FN and penalties against the four regional presidents into a debate about the
future of the UDF itself and led to the departure from the confederation of Bayrou’s
main rival Alain Madelin, and of his party, Démocratie Libérale. The old UDF was
liquidated at the end of May 1998, leaving an unedifying trail of debts and judicial
investigations. By the year’s end, Bayrou had formed a new UDF under his leadership:
it included Force Démocrate, the Parti Populaire pour la Démocratie Française and the
Parti Social-Démocrate, all now fully merged, as well as the Parti Radical, which main-
tained a separate identity chiefly in order to be able to celebrate its centenary in 2002.
There is a sense in which what has been the main strength of the non-Gaullist
moderate Right has also been its main weakness. Through most of the Fifth Republic,
it has been able to conserve its local positions despite national reverses. This is reflected
in the fact that, although very much the junior partner of the moderate Right nation-
ally, the UDF on the eve of its breakup still had 727 members of conseils généraux
against the RPR’s 670, and 32 presidencies of conseils généraux, against the RPR’s 21.
The result was that the non-Gaullist moderate Right remained under the domination of
its local, and especially rural, elected officials, who were independent-minded and
resistant to strong party organisation. That characteristic weakness of the cadre party
was compounded by ideological diversity: probably no greater than that within the
RPR, but without any central myths or symbols to bind the various elements together.
In that context, the conquest of the presidency by Giscard in 1974 appears quite
exceptional, the result of the Gaullists’ divisions after Pompidou’s death. The UDF’s
choices in 1995 were especially revealing of a party unable either to run a presidential
candidate of its own or even to unite behind one of the two Gaullists on offer.
The split of 1998 was in some ways a clarification. France now had a free-market
party of the Right in DL and a post-Christian Democratic party of the Centre-Right in
the new UDF. Their leaders, Madelin and Bayrou, were open rivals for the presidency
of France. But the breakup has also brought further weakness: surveys in 2000 showed
the two candidates together attracting the support of barely 10 per cent of the voters –
about 7 for the UDF and 3.5 for DL. For conservatives seeking a candidate to prevent a
Jospin presidency and prepare the way for a restoration of the Right’s parliamentary
majority, neither man appeared remotely as credible as the incumbent.
Conflict, co-operation and the UMP

For most of the Fifth Republic, relations between the moderate right-wing parties have
been closer than those between their adversaries of the Left. They have differed on the
specifics of policy more than on fundamentals of doctrine; and since 1981 they have
agreed on a single common parliamentary candidate in most constituencies.
Their greatest differences were early in the Republic. The government of national
unity formed by de Gaulle on his return to power in June 1958, which included mini-
sters from all non-Communist parties, suffered progressive defections over the next four
years: the Socialists in January 1959 over budget-balancing austerity measures, the right
wing of the conservative CNIP over Algeria by March 1962, the MRP over Europe the
following May, and all remaining allies bar the Giscardians over the October 1962
referendum on the direct election of the president. The Gaullist victories of autumn 1962
saw 62.3 per cent of voters approve the constitutional reform, and the emergence of a
stable parliamentary majority, with 233 seats for Gaullists and 35 for their Giscardian
allies, out of a total of 482. The ‘Centrists’ – the remnants of the CNIP and the
The Right 233
MRP – were out of the majority, but not with the left-wing opposition either, for the
rest of the decade, and more.
Table 8.1 charts their progressive return to the right-wing majority: first at the presi-
dential election of 1969, when Pompidou persuaded Jacques Duhamel’s group of
centrists to support his presidential candidacy, then five years later, when the whole
of the NGMR supported Giscard at the second ballot, and finally in 1978, when almost
the whole of the NGMR grouped under the UDF umbrella. The closing point in
this evolution may be placed at 1981, when the RPR and the UDF, in the wake of
Mitterrand’s election, chose common candidacies in most constituencies and a joint
programme to minimise damage at the June parliamentary elections. They lost anyway,
but the habits of close co-operation remained, surviving victories and defeats.
In this context it may be wondered why the moderate right had not merged into a single
big conservative party by, say, 1984. Four reasons may be given. First, as we have
observed, the Gaullists and the NGMR differed significantly, at least till the early 1980s,
over policy, especially over Europe, sovereignty and the role of the state in the economy.
Second, their organisational styles were radically different. The Gaullists, who aspired
to build a mass party and loved a leader, derided what they saw as the disorganised
character of the UDF parties, as well the effete, well-mannered character of its well-to-
do elites; UDF activists returned the compliment by comparing the RPR, with its
propensity to mass rallies, to a fascist movement. Third, the RPR and the UDF were
used as vehicles for présidentiables whose ambitions clashed, and who preferred to take
their chances with the voters at first ballots of real elections than to submit to the
nomination rules of a hypothetical new party. Fourth, and most simply, the electoral
benefits of a merger were not obvious: the institutions allow room for two parties of the
Right (and of the Left) to compete against one another, so long as they conclude a
working second-ballot alliance.
Each of these sources of division, however, except for the last, had diminished in
Table 8.1 The growth of the right-wing ruling coalition, 1958–81
Legislative elections 1958 Gaullists (UNR)

Legislative elections 1962 Gaullists (UNR-UDT) +
Républicains Indépendants (RI)
Presidential election 1969 Gaullists (UDR) +
Républicains Indépendants (RI) +
Centre Démocratie et Progrès (CDP)
Presidential election 1974 Gaullists (UDR) +
Républicains Indépendants (RI) +
Centre National des Indépendants et des Paysans (CNIP) +
CDP +
Centre Démocrate (CD) +
Radicals
Legislative elections 1978 Gaullists (RPR) +
CNIP +
Union pour la Démocratie Française (UDF): made up of Parti
Républicain (ex-Républicains Indépendants) + Radical Party +
Centre des Démocrates Sociaux (CDS, a fusion of CDP and CD) +
Mouvement Démocrate et Socialiste de France + Clubs Perspectives
et Réalités
234 The Right
importance by 2000. Few serious policy differences separated the RPR from the
remains of the UDF. While such differences remained in plenty within the moderate
Right, they barely coincided any more with party divisions. The gap in organisational
culture, though still present, had narrowed as the RPR tended to become a collection of
fractious notables. Presidential rivalries remained, but for the first time since 1965 a
single candidate dominated the ranks of the Right: Chirac was over ten points ahead of
any possible rival from the right-wing camp. As the only possible right-wing winner of
the 2002 presidential election, Chirac wielded considerable attractive power, and not
just for the elites of the RPR.
The realisation of a big and (more or less) united right-wing party was nevertheless a
project that required deliberate action and not a little arm-twisting, especially between
December 2001, when an RPR congress saw the party’s star orators queue up to declare
that the Gaullist movement ‘did not want to die’, and September 2002, when the RPR
pronounced its own dissolution. Part of the initiative came from (mostly young) RPR,
UDF and DL Deputies on the ground, such as Renaud Dutreil or Hervé Gaymard,
who launched a succession of associations – first France-Alternance, then Alternance
2002, and from April 2001 the Union en Mouvement – deliberately aimed at creating a
party that would replace the RPR and the UDF and monopolise the moderate Right’s
share of public political finance. Chirac did not endorse this initiative personally, and
kept his own options open till the last minute; but the role played by senior members of
his staff, notably Jérôme Monod, by a handful of senior figures from the RPR, DL, and
the UDF, and by Juppé, indicated both that the project was taken seriously by the
Élysée and that it could be activated at short notice. What precipitated the creation of
the UMP was the result of the presidential first ballot on 21 April 2002. Chirac had
confirmed his dominant position on the moderate Right, with 19.9 per cent of the vote
to Bayrou’s 6.8 and Madelin’s 3.9. His defeated rivals were in no position to bargain or
hesitate over their support for Chirac at the run-off, because Chirac’s second-ballot
opponent was not Jospin but Le Pen. And Le Pen’s performance led to a perception,
misplaced but real, among commentators and candidates that the FN would be in a
position to decide the results of the June parliamentary elections in many constituen-
cies – a consideration that brought many sitting Deputies of every stripe to seek the
shelter of a broad chiraquien umbrella. Within two days of the first ballot, Juppé was
therefore able to state terms, in what amounted to his founding act as provisional
president of the UMP: at the parliamentary elections, the new party would endorse a
single candidate in each constituency, who would be committed in return to sitting in
the UMP group in the National Assembly – thus ensuring that the lion’s share of the
Right’s political finance went to the UMP, not to the old parties. Two weeks later, with
Chirac safely returned to the Élysée, and the parliamentary election campaign just
beginning, the great majority of the Right’s candidates were using standardised
campaign material, featuring the UMP ticket and the new Prime Minister Jean-Pierre
Raffarin (significantly a figure from DL, not a Gaullist).
With the newly elected Chirac and the newly appointed Raffarin as its locomotives,
the UMP proved remarkably successful in the short term. With over eight million votes
– a third of the first-ballot total – at the June 2002 parliamentary elections, it elected
369 out of 577 Deputies – nearly two-thirds of the National Assembly, and only the
third-ever absolute majority in a Republic (after the Gaullists in 1968 and the Socialists
in 1981). Of these, 205 had come from the RPR, 57 from DL and 77 from the UDF.
This strong vote and representation would ensure a regular income from the state of
The Right 235
some 30 million euros, or about 45 per cent of all public funding for parties. By
November, moreover, 166 of France’s 321 Senators had joined the UMP group, reflect-
ing the extent to which the Right’s local elected officials had gravitated to the new party
and giving a breadth of institutional dominance, at both national and local levels, that
even the Gaullists of the 1960s had not achieved. September 2002 also saw the dis-
solution of the RPR and DL; while the UDF continued an independent existence under
Bayrou, it had the aspect of a rump party, with just 4.2 per cent of the first-ballot vote
in June, 30 Deputies, and only one minister (Gilles de Robien at Transport).
These early triumphs were short-lived. Within two years of its creation, the UMP
had paid a heavy price for the slump in popularity of the Raffarin government after
August 2003, losing 11 out of its 13 regions in March 2004 and achieving just 16.6 per
cent of the vote in the European elections of the following June – just half the vote
share of two years earlier. Bayrou’s UDF, by contrast, had adopted an increasingly
critical view of Raffarin, and reaped the benefits; its 11.9 per cent at the June 2004
European elections – nearly three-quarters the UMP’s level – was an impressive result
for what had appeared as a residual party two years earlier.
Electoral setbacks were compounded by organisational weakness. Juppé’s explicit
ambition had been a big conservative party on the British, German, or Spanish models,
a broad church with a big membership and a culture of debate. But the membership
remained stubbornly close to the 100,000 mark – barely more than the RPR in the
1990s, for a party with a supposedly much greater political coverage. The so-called
‘movements’ within the UMP, initially announced as the framework for intra-party
debate, were never set up. And no agreement was reached on the mechanism for choos-
ing the UMP’s presidential candidate when the time came. The original sins of French
right-wing parties – low membership and weak institutionalisation – were not, there-
fore, ended with the launch of the UMP. And they were compounded by leadership
problems. Juppé had been given the party presidency as a proxy for Chirac, the initial
focus of the UMP’s loyalties. But Juppé, never a very appealing politician nationally,
was convicted in January 2004 for his role in financing RPR officials on the city of Paris
payroll and banned from public office for ten years. Although an appeal reduced the
length of this penalty, Juppé progressively withdrew from public political activities over
the following year. The leadership contest opened by his impending departure attracted
Sarkozy, the most popular minister in the Raffarin government and an open contender
for the succession to Chirac.
Sarkozy won the succession to Juppé at the head of the UMP in November 2004 with
the support of 85 per cent of the party’s voting members, and quickly launched a drive
to take membership above the 200,000 level (it claimed 180,858 by July 2005). His
energy, gift for self-publicity, talents as a media performer and relative youth (born in
1955, he is Chirac’s junior by twenty-two years) made him the favourite even of the
long-standing activists, many of who preferred him to the sitting president; of the new
members, younger and more right-wing than their elders, most were unequivocal
sarkozystes. Sarkozy’s control of the big UMP budget, of the development of a party
programme and of the choice of parliamentary candidates, could all be used, not as
supports for an incumbent president as under the traditional Gaullist model of the
Fifth Republic, but as tools to promote his own future candidacy. His public visibility
was also promoted by his position, held from May 2005 in addition to the party leader-
ship, as interior minister. It was far from certain, on the other hand, that Chirac, even in
his weakened state of mid-2005, would depart quietly. His personal interests outside
236 The Right
politics are few; and his immunity from prosecution over his stewardship of the Paris
city hall would end with his presidential term. Even if Chirac heeded the voice of
reason and gave up on a third term, he would be more likely to back the more loyal de
Villepin for the succession than to concede it to his turbulent interior minister.
The creation of the UMP did not, therefore, succeed in its aim to break the mould of
politics on the moderate Right and create a single big party within which policy could
be debated, and personal rivalries canalised, within a structured environment. The
UMP of mid-2005 had failed to absorb the whole of the UDF and remained unpopular
with the general public, with 55 per cent of negative opinions to only 29 per cent of
positive ones according to SOFRES polls (the equivalent figures for the PCF were
hardly different, at 58 and 25). This was a sort of RPR mark 2, with Sarkozy in the role
of the aggressive leader that Chirac had played a generation earlier. But Sarkozy,
paradoxically, was also France’s most credible presidential candidate, enjoying a clear
polling lead over all possible left-wing and right-wing rivals (with the single exception
of Jospin). Whether he could use his polling advantage and his control of the party to
supplant the incumbent without wrecking the Right’s chances in a renewed bout of
internecine warfare remained, however, uncertain.
Other right-wing groups

The UMP and the UDF do not have a monopoly of support in the moderate Right.
Five other groups deserve brief mention.
• The Centre National des Indépendants et Paysans (CNIP) lingered on, despite the
loss of Giscard’s RI group in 1962 and of other leading members to the centrists. It
was led initially by an ageing generation of Fourth Republic politicians, notionally
independent but increasingly marginal. A flurry of renewal from the late 1980s
came to an abrupt close in 1992 when the aircraft carrying the party’s new young
leader Yvon Briant flew into a Corsican cliff. In the mid-1990s it counted ten
parliamentarians, mostly Senators. The CNIP’s leaders had conceived the party’s
role as forming a bridge between the FN and the moderate Right, since unlike the
RPR–UDF coalition, the CNIP never banned alliances with Le Pen’s party. But a
succession of leadership difficulties (Briant’s successor but one, the poultry king
Gérard Bourgoin, resigned after being placed under judicial investigation) dimin-
ished its ranks: by the time the party joined the UMP as an associated movement in
October 2002 it had no national elected officials and claimed members in just forty
départements.
• The divers droite. Some politicians, chiefly but not exclusively on the Right, go
without party labels, especially if they have a strong local base. Some of these divers
droite candidates are temporary dissidents who later return to a party loyalty.
Others feel no need at all to belong even to a cadre party. At parliamentary elec-
tions, their numbers are small but not negligible: 4.5 per cent and thirteen seats in
1993, 1.6 per cent and seven seats in 1997. The divers droite Deputies were even
necessary to the Right’s overall majority in 1986. At local level, the divers droite are
more powerful. This is especially true in France’s ninety-six départements, where
some 600 of the 3,857 conseillers généraux are divers droite. Their survival testifies
to the continuing relative weakness of France’s party structures, especially in
France’s rural cantons; it is still possible for a small rural département like Cantal to
The Right 237
be run by a divers droite majority. The divers droite have also tended to prosper in
proportion to the unpopularity of the main right-wing parties. For this reason the
late 1990s and the municipal and cantonal elections of 2001 were especially fruitful
in (often successful) divers droite candidacies. In June 2002, divers droite candidates
won over 10 per cent of the vote in over a hundred parliamentary constituencies,
and carried the Right’s colours at the second ballot in a dozen of them, winning in
six; although they joined the UMP parliamentary groups once elected, their ability
to win without the party label testifies to the vigour, at least in some constituencies,
of a personal vote.
• Chasse, Pêche, Nature, Traditions (CPNT). This group, the shooters’ rights party,
has run candidates in the European elections since 1989, at regional elections since
1992, as well as at the presidential and parliamentary elections of 2002 and at
cantonal elections in a handful of cantons. CPNT started out as a single-issue
group par excellence, seeking to frustrate the 1979 European directive limiting the
bird-shooting season both by electoral means and by more or less rowdy demon-
strations. Aided by proportional representation and at times high abstention rates,
it had a significant electoral impact in the late 1990s: with 5 per cent of the vote at
the 1998 regional elections, it held the balance of power in four regions (and used it
to keep the Right in office); its 6.8 per cent at the following year’s European
elections secured five members at the Strasbourg parliament. Just as important, in
areas where they enjoyed support, such as the Aquitaine region or the département
of the Somme, they were able to frighten Deputies from the mainstream parties, of
whatever political stripe, into backing their cause. CPNT has been termed the
‘rural Front National’, and while it claims to have drawn support from people of
the Left as well as the Right, the frequent brutality of its methods recalls the far
Right all too well. These have largely achieved its central aim, at least for the
moment: France has never properly implemented the 1979 wildfowl directive.
CPNT proved less successful when it turned into something resembling a polit-
ical party. It did this after its founding president, André-Henri Goustat, was
convicted in 2000 of illegally diverting public money derived from the sale of
shooting licences to further its campaigns. Deprived of this convenient source of
income, CPNT constituted itself as a party in order to benefit from public finance.
To do this, it had to run candidates at the June 2002 parliamentary elections, and to
win a national audience for the party, Goustat’s successor since 1999, Jean Saint-
Josse, ran for the presidency. His campaign widened the earlier exclusive focus on
shooting to take in wider issues of ‘rurality’ – notably the preservation of rural
public services and the dangers of rural ‘desertification’. This served him reason-
ably well at the presidential election: with 4.2 per cent of the first-ballot vote, Saint-
Josse won nearly a quarter of a million more votes than Hue managed for the
Communists. At the June 2002 regional elections, however, CPNT’s lack of local
elected officials or experienced candidates told against it: although it contributed
to the defeat of at least two Socialist Deputies of whom it disapproved in the
Somme, its overall vote share fell to just 1.7 per cent. The elections of 2004 spelt the
near-annihilation of CPNT’s elected positions: its refusal to join other parties in
second-ballot alliances under the new system for regional elections ensured the
elimination of all thirty-two CPNT regional councillors; it was left with just
three conseillers généraux for France’s départements out of a total 3,857; its low
score of 1.7 per cent at the June European elections removed it from the Strasbourg
238 The Right
parliament; and even at the referendum on the European constitution in 2005,
which might have been the occasion for a revival, CPNT failed to win a leading
position in the victorious no campaign. Claims that it represents a revival of an old
urban–rural cleavage in France therefore appear overstated; but it retains an appar-
ent veto over any serious attempts to protect migrating birds ill-advised enough to
stray into French airspace.
• The Eurosceptical Right. The most consistent defender of a Eurosceptical Right is
Viscount Philippe de Villiers, former UDF minister and political boss of the con-
servative, Catholic département of Vendée. De Villiers campaigned actively for a no
vote at the 1992 Maastricht referendum (as he would thirteen years later against the
European constitutional treaty) and left the UDF to form his own Mouvement
pour la France (MPF) in 1994. His best electoral performances since then have
been at European elections: 12.4 per cent in 1994; 13 per cent (in tandem with the
Gaullist renegade Charles Pasqua) in 1999; and 6.7 per cent (enough to win three
seats in the Strasbourg parliament) in 2004. The MPF is more than merely Euro-
sceptical; it articulates a rural, Catholic conservatism characteristic of de Villiers’s
home base. But neither de Villiers (who won less than 5 per cent at the 1995
presidential election, and did not stand in 2002) nor his party has converted these
successes into a sustained national presence. La Droite Indépendante, the alliance
formed with divers droite and CNIP candidates in 1997, performed indecisively in
what was in any case a bad year for the Right. The alliance of 1999, despite its
success at the polls, was complicated by the fact that Pasqua had hoped for a
‘sovereignist’ grouping of Eurosceptics of both Right and Left; only lack of inter-
est among left-wing Jacobins had forced him into the arms of de Villiers in the first
place. The two leaders of the Rassemblement pour la France quarrelled almost
from the moment of its creation in the aftermath of the 1999 poll: over the political
alignment (which de Villiers wanted to be firmly on the Right, against Pasqua’s
wishes), over jobs for their respective protégés and over the party’s debts of 7–10
million francs. These split the Rassemblement pour la France in June 2000.
Although clearly stronger than the Pasqua group (which retained the RPF label,
but only scored 1.7 per cent in the 2004 European elections), the MPF remains
massively dependent on its leader’s local base: of its five national parliamentarians
(three Deputies and two Senators), four represent the Vendée. One of the para-
doxes of the 2005 referendum on the European constitutional treaty was that while
the Vendée, along with six other départements of the Catholic west, was one of only
thirteen metropolitan départements out of ninety-six to vote yes, Villiers had used
the no campaign to make a national comeback. With the Front National playing an
unwontedly discreet role in the campaign and the UMP’s Eurosceptical wing torn
between hostility to the treaty and loyalty to the president and government, the
leadership of the right-wing no vote was de Villiers’s for the taking. More than any
other leader of the no camp, he linked the treaty to the separate question of
Turkey’s entry to the EU, no doubt calculating that this would appeal not only to
his own conservative Catholic voters but also to xenophobic FN voters. Whether
the 2005 campaign would allow the Viscount to make serious inroads into the FN’s
electorate in time for 2007 was, however, uncertain.
• The Catholic Right. Two other late twentieth-century groups have been just
as marked by Catholic traditionalism as the MPF, without the same degree of
Euroscepticism. The Droite Libérale et Chrétienne was launched (initially just as
The Right 239
La Droite) by Charles Millon after he had accepted FN support as president of the
Rhône-Alpes regional council in 1998 and left the UDF. Still tainted by the contro-
versy over the FN deal, Millon is an embarrassment to Chirac, who hoped to
remove him to Rome by appointing him to the Food and Agriculture Organisation.
Millon, however, has remained active in Lyon politics, with a view to running for
mayor, though he has failed to build a national organisation. Another grouping,
the Forum des Républicains Sociaux, was formed by Christine Boutin, a right-wing
Catholic UDF Deputy who made a national reputation by filibustering the
National Assembly debate on the Pacte Civil de Solidarité with a Bible in her hand.
Boutin won 1.2 per cent of the vote at the 2002 presidential elections, merged her
Forum with the UMP the following June, but was active in the no campaign in
2005.
The extreme Right: permanence and isolation of the

Front National
France’s far Right has a rich history, though one that has rarely been either successful
or respectable. For much of the nineteenth century it was a shrinking band which
remained loyal to the pre-1789 ancien régime. From the Dreyfus Affair of the 1890s,
however, it emerged as a more ‘modern’ force, not just anti-republican but also nation-
alist and anti-Semitic. After a partial eclipse during World War I and the following
decade, ‘French Fascism’, as authors such as Robert Soucy and Zeev Sternhell have
called it, enlarged its audience during the crisis of the 1930s. In June 1940 the occupying
German forces found French people who were ready to collaborate with them not only
for reasons of expediency, but also out of conviction. Discredited at the Liberation,
then briefly rallying to the RPF’s visceral anti-Communism, the far Right found
two main outlets in the later years of the Fourth Republic: the Poujadist movement of
small traders threatened by economic progress, and support for France’s increasingly
hopeless colonial wars.
De Gaulle’s return to power in 1958, provoked by a putsch by Algérie française
groups in Algiers, was thus presented by the Communists and others as a Fascist
victory. In fact, the far Right was progressively marginalised during the first generation
of the Fifth Republic. Algérie française supporters lost the political argument and
either made their peace with de Gaulle’s régime or took to armed struggle before
dispersing into prison, exile or oblivion. Their last sally was the presidential candidacy
of Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour in 1965; he won 5.2 per cent of the first-ballot vote,
much of it from discontented pieds noirs, former white settlers who had left Algeria at
independence. Thereafter the extreme Right went into rapid decline, torn by bitter
rivalries. There was no far Right candidate in the 1969 presidential elections. In 1974,
Jean-Marie Le Pen, a former Poujadist Deputy who had founded the Front National
(FN) two years earlier, ran for the presidency and won just 0.7 per cent of the vote. His
second candidacy, in 1981, was even less successful; he failed to obtain the 500 signa-
tures of mayors and councillors necessary to stand. FN candidates in the June 1981
parliamentary elections won a mere 0.3 per cent of the vote. Accounts of French
politics written in the aftermath of Mitterrand’s election to the presidency (including
an earlier edition of this book) could therefore afford to neglect the extreme Right or
dismiss it as a spent force.
240 The Right
The far Right’s lasting breakthrough
Thereafter, however, the far Right’s rise was very fast (Figure 8.3): local breakthroughs
at municipal elections in 1983 were followed by a score of over 11 per cent at the 1984
European elections. From then until 1998, it won between one-tenth and one-seventh of
votes at every election. FN candidates scored a consistent 15 per cent of the vote at the
1995 presidential elections, the 1997 parliamentary elections and at the 1998 regional
elections. After setbacks due to a major party split in 1998, discussed below, Le Pen
achieved a record 16.9 per cent at the 2002 presidential election, against his rival Bruno
Mégret’s 2.3 per cent. These were the best ever results for an extreme right-wing party in
France: sufficient to establish the FN as more than a ‘flash’ party on the model of the
Poujadist movement of the 1950s, and an inspiration to its counterparts elsewhere in
Europe. In 2002, indeed, Le Pen won over 15 per cent in sixty out of ninety-six metro-
politan départements, and over 20 per cent in twenty-five of those; in only three dépar-
tements did he win under 10 per cent. It is true that the far Right did less well in 2002
parliamentary elections and at the European elections of 2004. Nevertheless, the
regional results of the same year testified both to the continuing attraction of the party
as well as its leader, and to the FN’s increasingly nationwide appeal.
Any explanation of the sudden awakening of France’s far Right must not only take
into account the general conditions that helped generate and sustain support, but con-
sider why the far Right, which had been available and active for decades, achieved a
breakthrough in 1983–84 rather than earlier or later.
• Economic causes included, most obviously, the rise of unemployment. This had, it
is true, been an issue through most of the Giscard presidency, which was also the
flattest period in the far Right’s history. But it was rather more than a mere ‘back-
ground’ factor in that during the three years from early 1981 to early 1984 it rose by
Figure 8.3 Votes for the extreme Right (% of votes cast, first ballot in two-ballot elections),
1958–2004.
The Right 241
half, from 1.5 million to 2.25 million. That enabled the FN to suggest, with implac-
ably faulty logic, that the deportation of an equivalent number of immigrants
would create enough vacancies to end joblessness among the French.
• Social change also favoured the rise of the FN, in a variety of ways. Immigration
itself must be considered as a ‘background’ element. It was significantly slowed by
the banning of primary immigration of workers from outside Europe in 1974, and
the number of foreigners on French soil remained fairly stable, at about 4 million,
through the 1980s. The Socialists’ decision to give residence permits to some
130,000 clandestine immigrants in 1981 was certainly opposed on the Right, but
did not constitute a qualitative change. But the perception of immigrants altered as
men were joined by families and a second generation (the ‘beurs’) was born in the
1970s and 1980s, and as ‘immigrants’ (or people of North African origin) were seen
to compete with native-born French for increasingly scarce goods: jobs and toler-
able housing (it is notable that new low-cost housing construction fell sharply in the
1980s, at the same time as the vast estates built since the mid-1950s fell increasingly
prey to physical as well as social decay). The fact that France’s second industrial
revolution had merged without transition into economic crisis from 1974 meant
that by the 1980s French society had seen an unprecedented transformation lasting
almost half a century. Other social factors included the weakening of subcultures
which had given a framework to political activity in previous decades: the Catholic
(with the decline in religious practice) and the Communist (with the spread of
television and the disappearance of traditional working-class jobs). Both had gen-
erally inhibited xenophobia and assisted the ‘integration’ of immigrants. The FN
also probably benefited as the experience of Nazi Occupation, and its links with the
French extreme Right, faded into history.
• Leadership has also been crucial to the FN’s success. Jean-Marie Le Pen was prob-
ably the West European far Right’s ablest leader during the late 1980s and early
1990s. By 2000 his political longevity was greater than that of any active French
politician except Giscard. First elected to the National Assembly in 1956 on the
Poujadist list, a vociferous defender of Algérie française both in the Assembly and
as a paratrooper, campaign manager to Tixier-Vignancour in 1965, founder of the
FN in 1972, he had no major rival on the far Right for a generation until the
(ultimately ineffectual) challenge from his lieutenant Bruno Mégret in 1998. After
choosing, in 1972, to use legal methods to advance his cause rather than the vio-
lence to which the far Right had had ready recourse in earlier years, Le Pen made
himself a master of the baser political arts. His speeches are direct, truculent,
simplistic and plausible, spiced with humour, home-spun aphorisms, and the occa-
sional learned reference or unexpected allusion (in 2002, he quoted from Martin
Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’ speech). He is also just as ‘good’ in the more
intimate setting of the television studio as on a platform in front of his own sup-
porters. Adept at exploiting fear and racial bigotry, he still makes a point of suing
anyone who calls him a racist (and has sometimes won). Above all, he has been
successful in polluting the political mainstream with ‘his’ issues (above all immigra-
tion) and his ‘solutions’, blurring the distinction between his party and its competi-
tors and creating a corner of political debate in which his party is an obligatory
reference point. Yet Le Pen’s leadership talents are inadequate as an explanation
for the FN’s sudden success; they went unnoticed, after all, by the French public for
over a decade after the party’s foundation.
242 The Right
• Political factors, however, hold most of the immediate explanations for the break-
through of 1983–84. The Left’s victory in 1981 was clearly one of these. It dis-
qualified the Communists as a protest party by putting them (however briefly) into
government. It all but exhausted the governmental options available under the
Fifth Republic, without any of them bringing a significant reduction in unemploy-
ment; the FN was attractive as a solution that had not been tried. It radicalised
elements of the Right, just as the Gaullists were becoming less populist, less
nationalistic, more bourgeois and more European; their decision, at the 1984
European elections, to join the list led by Simone Veil (female, Jewish, liberal and
responsible, as health minister ten years earlier, for legalising abortion) was seen as
offering a large political space for Le Pen to fill. Chirac’s 1986–88 premiership, on the
other hand, disappointed the hard Right, which had expected at least a significant
change to the nationality law.
If these political elements were all more or less ‘accidental’, the rise of the FN
was also assisted by the active complicity of other political players. President Mit-
terrand contributed materially to the FN’s transformation into a party of respect-
able appearances: he was responsible both for the enhanced television coverage
given Le Pen from 1984 and for the change to proportional representation, allow-
ing the election of FN Deputies in 1986. While these moves succeeded in their
apparent goal of wrongfooting the moderate Right, they also helped create some-
thing the president had no means of controlling. Moreover, once the breakthrough
had occurred, the mainstream parties responded to it ineptly. The moderate Right’s
indecision over the question of alliances is a good illustration. Established politi-
cians of all parties spoke on Le Pen’s issues in terms reminiscent, on occasion, of
Le Pen’s own. In a television debate in 1985, for example, the Socialist Prime
Minister Laurent Fabius vied with Jacques Chirac to prove that he would be more
effective in expelling illegal immigrants. During a few months in 1991 another
Socialist premier, Édith Cresson, declared that she would happily hire charted
aircraft to deport illegal immigrants en masse, Giscard spoke of a foreign ‘invasion’
of France, and Chirac claimed that immigrant households smelt. Opinion poll
evidence suggests that such pandering to racism was counterproductive, since
racists would always end up preferring the ‘genuine article’, Le Pen himself. Since
then, mainstream politicians have treated the race issue with greater care. On the
other hand, Chirac’s decision to bring law and order (a weak suit for the Left) to
the forefront of the 2002 presidential campaign almost certainly benefited Le Pen
more than any other candidate.
The electorate attracted by the FN since 1984 differs radically from that of the
mainstream Right. Where the map of mainstream right-wing support still resembles
that of Catholic France, with strong points in Brittany, Alsace and the south-west, that
of the FN has typically been a combination of Mediterranean départements (home to a
sometimes explosive combination of pieds noirs and Algerian immigrants) and old
industrial regions, where demand for unskilled labour had attracted immigrant popula-
tions; hence the concentration of the FN’s best départements east of a line running
from Le Havre to Perpignan. The suburbs of industrial France, in the Rhône valley and
around Paris, with high-rise housing estates and big immigrant populations, inspired
fear and loathing among small individual homeowners in surrounding zones; they
proved among the firmest FN supporters in the 1990s. Yet to characterise the FN vote
The Right 243
as ‘eastern’ is to underestimate its dynamic character. Some of Le Pen’s biggest gains in
2002 were outside the traditional eastern areas of strength, in more western, often rural
départements where older loyalties of conservative Right (Vendée) or Left (Aude and
Ariège), and low levels of immigration, had hitherto minimised the FN’s appeal.
The FN electorate is as socially distinct from that of the mainstream Right as it is
geographically. Six out of ten of its voters are men. Traditionally conservative categor-
ies like the liberal professions or practising Catholics or the retired were attracted in
1984, but are now under-represented. Indeed, the list of social groups most resistant to
the appeal of the Le Pen and his party contains more typically ‘right-wing’ categories
(the elderly, the retired, regularly practising Catholics, the wealthy) than ‘left-wing’ ones
(such as trade unionists). The FN electorate has usually included disproportionate
numbers of small traders and artisans, the categories who gave birth to the Poujadist
movement. They have been complemented, since the late 1980s, by blue-collar workers,
typically from the private sector, often young, with few qualifications and vulnerable to
unemployment. Indeed, with between 20 and 30 per cent of the votes of both blue-collar
workers and the unemployed, Le Pen and his party have repeatedly held the leading
position among these groups – the single most striking distinction between the FN
electorate and that of the mainstream Right. Traditionally, such male working-class
voters had provided the backbone of the Communist Party’s rank-and-file support.
While there is scant evidence of direct transfers of voters from far Left to far Right, it
does appear certain that working-class voters who in an earlier generation would have
been natural Communist supporters, but who reached voting age in the 1980s or early
1990s, immediately gravitated, not to the PCF, but to the FN. Some working-class FN
voters retain a residual left-wing loyalty, which led analysts to coin the term ‘gaucho-
lepénistes’. In 1995, for example, 28 per cent of Le Pen’s voters switched to Jospin at the
second ballot, against 21 per cent who abstained and 50 per cent who supported Chirac.
Similarly, between 25 and 30 per cent of first-ballot FN voters at the 1997 parlia-
mentary elections supported the Left at the run-off. Again, however, to highlight the
FN’s working-class vote at the expense of other groups is to miss its diverse and
changing character; in 2002 the FN made headway among older voters, often retired,
prosperous and quite remote from the threat or reality of joblessness that motivated its
blue-collar supporters. The FN’s spread across classes and social groups, now probably
better than that of any other party, is likely to be a durable source of strength.
Individuals attracted to the FN are a similarly mixed group. The hard core are
ideologically motivated: monarchists still fighting against 1789; Catholic fundamental-
ists, loyal to the Latin Mass and the memory of Joan of Arc; wartime collaborators and
others nostalgic for Hitler’s ‘new order’ (Le Pen himself ran a publishing house special-
ising in recordings of German marching songs of World War II); veterans of the
Algérie française struggle, and even of the Organisation Armée Secrète (OAS); skin-
heads who have found in FN activities the inspiration to attack and kill men of the
‘wrong’ colour (although the FN is committed to legal methods, its membership, and
especially its ‘Protection and Security’ service, have been found to contain members of
smaller, more violent groups). A larger number of FN supporters, however, without
having any very strongly articulated extreme right-wing views, have resented the
economic and social evolution of France since the 1980s (especially rising crime and
unemployment), despaired of the established parties’ ability to address their problems
and (in many cases) blamed them on immigrants. Their economic priorities are sharply
opposed: support for free-market solutions for the self-employed and professionals in
244 The Right
the FN electorate, but a continuing sympathy for dirigisme and state-run public services
for Le Pen’s blue-collar supporters. Two shared concerns of FN voters stand out,
however: law and order and immigration. On law and order, Le Pen’s voters found
themselves close to the mainstream in 2002, when the issue – unusually – was at the
centre of the presidential campaign: 74 per cent of them thought law and order a very
important stake of the election, compared to an average of 58 per cent for all voters –
but 73 per cent for Chirac supporters. On the other hand, they were highly distinctive in
their concern over immigration: this was cited as a very important election issue by
60 per cent of Le Pen voters, against an average figure of only 18 per cent.
These priorities are reflected in the the FN’s discourse. Le Pen and his lieutenants
claim to have a general political platform. They have sought, at various times, to abro-
gate the Maastricht Treaty, to abolish the European Commission, to create a Europe des
patries with the most minimal EU structures, or, during the 2002 campaign, to with-
draw from the European Union; to lock up AIDS sufferers in institutions (Le Pen has
now relented on this score, and has even moved on to express support for homosexual
marriages); to punish the corruption that has tainted the other parties; and to create a
‘Sixth Republic’ with proportional representation, or stronger executive powers, or
both; to apply free-market solutions to the economy, but to protect France’s small
businesses from ‘unfair’ competition. They opposed France’s participation both in the
1991 Gulf war (arguing that Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait was part of the normal process
of nation-building) and in the 1999 Kosovo conflict, as well as (like everyone else) the
2003 Iraq war. But these concerns have been incidental to the main themes: more
powers for the police, harsher prison sentences, the death penalty for murderers and
drug dealers; and above all, ‘La France aux Français’, the application of ‘national
preference’ in employment and social services, and in due course the forced ‘repatri-
ation’ of 3 million ‘immigrants’. Sending immigrants ‘home’, it is claimed, would at a
stroke solve the problems of unemployment, of crime and of the costs of the welfare
state. The logistics of this vast round-up and airlift of unwilling populations (equivalent
to six jumbo jets daily for two years) are no more considered than the morality of the
exercise. But the FN deals less in practical policies than in the designation of enemies
and scapegoats. As well as immigrants (particularly those from North Africa), it is
against intellectuals, bureaucrats, Eurocrats, liberal Catholics, mainstream journalists,
judges, drug addicts, social ‘do-gooders’, trade unionists, Communists and (though not
openly) Jews. This lengthy litany of dislikes and hatreds has fuelled the protest against
established parties which is a key to the FN’s growth.
The FN in the French political system

Le Pen’s FN is an anti-party party, within the French political system but not of it.
This is true of the public’s view of its policies and of the party itself; of its electoral
implantation; and of the party’s own strategic perspectives.
Although FN voters are unusual in placing their resentment of ‘immigrants’ at the
centre of their political preoccupations, the FN’s views on its own core issues neverthe-
less win acceptance well beyond the FN’s own electorate. Polls in May 2002, for
example, showed over three-quarters of respondents supporting the propositions that
the police should have greatly enhanced powers, or that the justice system was much too
lenient with petty criminals. Two-fifths stated that they ‘agreed with Le Pen’s ideas’ on
law and order and justice, and a similar proportion that the death penalty should be
The Right 245
restored. Even Le Pen’s views on immigration have consistently attracted support
beyond the FN electorate: the high point of 38 per cent in 1991 has not been reached
since, but even the lower figure of 23 per cent in November 2003 exceeded the FN’s
voting strength. At the same time, however, Le Pen remains France’s most unattractive
politician. The simplest indication of this is the fact that in the straight second-round
contest of May 2002 between Chirac, a deeply objectionable candidate for left-wing
voters, and Le Pen, the incumbent president won by 82 per cent to Le Pen’s 18. Simi-
larly, the FN is France’s most repulsive party. In poll after poll since 1985, nearly
two-thirds of poll respondents have regularly claimed that the FN is a danger for
democracy; between two-thirds and four-fifths say they could never in any circum-
stances vote for it; and unfavourable opinions of the FN exceeded favourable ones by
an average of 67 percentage points in monthly polls between 1984 and 2003. No party,
not even the PCF at the height of the Cold War, has done worse than this.
This combination of support and rejection is reflected in the FN’s electoral perform-
ance. The core FN electorate, perhaps 7 per cent of France’s voters, is extremely loyal,
and the FN vote, aside from the dip of the late 1990s, has been among the more stable
in France. At elections held under proportional representation, the FN has won seats.
At the one parliamentary election under the Fifth Republic held under proportional
representation, in 1986, the FN secured thirty-five Deputies. The FN has had European
parliamentarians in Strasbourg since 1984 (the total in 2004 was seven). In 1998 it won
275 out of France’s 1,722 regional council seats – a figure that dropped to 156 in 2004,
thanks not to any drop in support but to a change of electoral system that had been
designed to penalise it. However, at the (more important) elections held on two-ballot
majority systems, the FN had been unable to win seats because of its isolation. Just one
FN Deputy was elected in 1988 and 1997, none were in 1993 or 2002. There have been
no FN Senators, and there were just two FN conseillers généraux for France’s départe-
ments in 2004, out of 3,857. Even the municipal victories of 1995 in Toulon, Marignane
and Orange, though much commented on, did not reflect the FN’s influence in the
country as a whole (among towns of over 30,000 inhabitants, the FN has only kept
Orange).
Even if the FN’s isolation cut it off from office, its nuisance value, to the mainstream
Right in particular, has been considerable. In its good elections – 1993, 1995, or the
parliamentary elections of 2002 – the mainstream Right has been confident of victory
by virtue of a comfortable first-ballot lead over the Left. At more evenly balanced
elections, however, there has been a perception that the FN’s support or hostility could
decide between victory or defeat for the Right as a whole. This was claimed in 1988 (at
both presidential and parliamentary elections), and above all in 1997 (when the FN
maintained candidates at the second ballot against the mainstream Right in 76 con-
stituencies, and the Right lost in 47 of them – enough, it was claimed, to destroy its
National Assembly majority). Worse, where the FN could win seats – at the 1998
regional elections, for example – it held the future of right-wing council presidents in its
hands. The RPR and the UDF effectively banned local and national deals with the FN
from 1988 (not least on the ground that such arrangements would alienate vital centre
voters) – a policy which, though not fully respected, was sufficient to keep the FN in
effective quarantine. Not surprisingly, the mainstream Right’s standard-bearers in
areas of FN strength have been the most vocal in demanding that their parties consider
an alliance with Le Pen’s party. We have seen how the issue effectively split the UDF in
1998; it may still return to haunt the mainstream Right in a future difficult election.
246 The Right
But if the FN’s isolation presents difficulties for the mainstream Right, it also has
considerable costs for the FN itself. The resulting tensions led to the split of 1998, and
will almost certainly be an issue in future leadership struggles. They arise, above all,
from the frustration of some members of the FN elite at their party’s continued dis-
tance from office. Le Pen has usually tended not to seek accommodations with the
mainstream Right, or at least, not on terms other than his own. His opponents have
argued that he simply does not want to break into government, preferring to maintain
the FN, in permanent opposition, as a family enterprise in which nepotism and favour-
itism are rife and the barrier between the party’s money and that of the Le Pen family is
distinctly porous. The split of 1998 was caused by conflicts over this issue, over party
organisation and strategy, envenomed by a bitter personal dispute between Le Pen and
his lieutenant Bruno Mégret.
The FN’s structure has always reflected Le Pen’s concern not to encumber himself
with a potential successor: ‘in the Front National’, he has said, ‘there is no Number 2 or
Number 3, only a Number 1’. In particular, the coexistence, below the party presidency,
of a secretary-general and a delegate-general, was designed by Le Pen as a tool to divide
and rule; and the bureau exécutif, entirely appointed by Le Pen and described by the FN’s
press service as the ‘most important body’ in the party, was for a long time left out of
the organisation chart. Mégret challenged this autocratic style. He had several assets in
his favour. In 1997, after the annulment of a municipal election in the southern sub-
urban town of Vitrolles, Mégret (himself temporarily banned from running for public
office) secured the election of his wife as mayor, against the Socialist candidate.
The Mégrets had been the darlings of the FN’s congress, held at Strasbourg in March
1997 – much to Le Pen’s annoyance. And while Le Pen was 70 in 1998, Mégret was still
under 50.
The background to Mégret’s challenge was the relative strategic impasse in which the
FN found itself by early 1998: its vote appeared to have flattened out at 15 per cent, and
the FN was still frozen out of the political mainstream. This situation was far more
frustrating to Mégret and his like, who had joined the FN in the mid-1980s in the
expectation that it would soon win a share of power, than it was to Le Pen, who had
spent decades as a political outsider. Hence the different strategic lines backed by the
two men, with Le Pen seeking to destroy the mainstream Right from without, and
Mégret wishing to join alliances the better to subvert it from within. In the spring of
1998, Mégret’s rising star forced Le Pen to accept, against his own preferences, his plans
for minimal regional alliances with the mainstream Right. That further damaged
Mégret’s standing in the eyes of the party leader – especially as both men knew that, for
mainstream right-wing politicians, Mégret, the former École Polytechnique student and
son of a conseiller d’État, was altogether more acceptable as a possible alliance partner
than the unpredictable Le Pen.
The casus belli between the two men concerned the leadership of the FN list at the
1999 European elections. Le Pen had led the lists in 1984, 1989 and 1994, and was
expected to do so again; but he had punched a female Socialist candidate in the face in
1997, and risked being banned from elective office as a result. Le Pen announced that if
he did not stand, his wife would take his place; Mégret claimed that the party’s official
bodies (where he had strong support) should meet and choose the candidate; by the end
of 1998, Mégret was out of the FN and disputing the ownership of the FN’s funds, name
and logo with Le Pen in the courts. Le Pen won, leaving Mégret to call his new party the
Mouvement National Républicain (MNR) and to seek cash wherever he could.
The Right 247
Mégret took with him most of the FN’s middle-ranking cadres, as well as its more
well-heeled and more ideological voters. There was little to choose between the pro-
grammes of the MNR and FN, and certainly no question that the MNR was more
‘moderate’. What became clear within three years at most, however, was that the poli-
shed, well-spoken Mégret was no match for his former boss; the 2002 presidential
elections condemned the MNR to political marginality. The qualities that make Le Pen
an impossible ally – his unpredictability, boorishness and brutality – have also made
him the greatest asset for voters who want their party to stand outside the norms of
mainstream politics.
This victory did not, however, resolve the FN’s longer-term strategic problem. The
party still contains those who, like Le Pen himself, appear to enjoy its pariah status.
Le Pen has regularly reinforced this by referring to the Holocaust as a ‘detail’ of World
War II, or by referring (in January 2005) to the Occupation of France, including the
role of the Gestapo, as ‘not especially inhuman’; Mégret’s successor as crown prince,
Bruno Gollnisch, has also regularly espoused ‘revisionist’ views on the period, earning
a suspension from his chair at Lyon University in 2004. Such declarations undermine
the work of those in the party elite who would like to see the FN move closer to the
mainstream. They include Le Pen’s own youngest daughter, Marine, a member of the
bureau exécutif and an MEP. Her association Générations Le Pen aims precisely at
‘dediabolising’ the FN, establishing its credentials as a respectable ‘party of govern-
ment’, attractive in particular to women voters who have so far tended to withhold their
support. A further split is unlikely as long as Le Pen remains at the helm. Biology,
however, suggests that this is unlikely to continue much beyond the elections of 2007.
Concluding remarks
In or out of national office, France’s right wing has well-established sources of power
and influence. Throughout the Fifth Republic, it has held a comfortable majority in the
Senate. It has controlled most of France’s ninety-six départements except for a brief
period in the late 1970s, and ran the great majority of regions from the first direct
elections in 1986 until the defeats of 2004. It has held major cities such as Bordeaux and
Toulouse for decades (the loss of Paris and Lyon in March 2001 was balanced by
victories in other major cities such as Strasbourg, Blois and Orléans). Some of the most
influential pressure groups in the country can be counted on to propagate right-wing
ideas, despite periodic squabbles with right-wing politicians: they include the MEDEF
which represents the business community; the FNSEA which is the main farmers’
union, the UNAPEL which protects Catholic schools, and the PEEP, which defends a
rightist viewpoint in the state school sector. France’s intellectuals, more or less in thrall
to Marxism during the post-war generation, now count fashionable right-wingers
among their number; belief in any early replacement of capitalism by a socialist system
has been marginalised, since the early 1980s, among politicians and political commen-
tators alike. The Right has committed supporters in the administration and, as a con-
sequence of pantouflage (see Chapter 10, p. 287), in key posts in business. Although its
control of the state broadcasting system was broken after 1981, the Right is still influen-
tial both among private broadcasting stations and above all in the press; the late Robert
Hersant, founder of the Hersant group which owns Le Figaro and a string of regional
dailies, was a former RPR Deputy.
Despite these assets, the record of the French Right since the 1980s has been
248 The Right
unimpressive compared with those of many foreign counterparts. In opposition for
sixteen of the twenty-five years from 1981 to 2005, the Right often seemed hesitant even
when in office. It has been no more able than the Left to secure the re-election of an
incumbent parliamentary majority. And while it has (like the Left, though in a different
manner) engaged in large-scale privatisations, in other respects it has been slow to aim
at what right-wing governments elsewhere might view as obvious targets. The Right’s
record on eliminating France’s chronic public-spending deficits (they rose in Raffarin’s
first two years), or on reducing the overall level of public spending (still in excess of
54 per cent of GDP), has been weak; targets for reducing civil service numbers are timid
compared with those of Britain’s New Labour; reform of the labour market, and of a
taxation system which (especially at local level) actively penalises employment, has been
slow; changes to an education system that is both prodigal (in terms of surplus school-
teachers paid not to teach unwanted subjects) and starved (of funding for universities)
have been virtually non-existent.
One reason for this uncertain performance has been institutional. For much of the
Fifth Republic, the superposition of a seven-year presidential term onto five-year par-
liaments has meant electoral cycles of two to three years, too short for unpopular
reforms (such as those indicated above) to show benefits in terms of competitiveness,
growth and jobs. Governments looking to the next election are thus well advised to
tread softly on reform. That difficulty should, in principle, be resolved by the likely
synchronisation of presidential and parliamentary terms over five years. But the Raf-
farin government’s reforms to pensions, health, taxation and the working week were
more prudent than bold – despite his command of five clear years. Other reasons for
this cautious record should therefore be sought – in the Right’s electoral weakness, in
its ideological predilections and in its internal divisions.
The mainstream Right’s relative electoral weakness is most simply illustrated
by the contrast between the period from 1958 to 1974, when the parties or candidates of
the moderate Right always won over half of all first-ballot votes at presidential and
parliamentary elections, and the years since 1978, when they have never done so. Victories
since the 1980s have been won with shares of the first-round vote that fell far short of
the comfortable majorities of old: 43 per cent in 1986, 44.2 in 1993, 20.8 per cent for
Chirac in 1995 and 19.9 per cent in 2002, 43.7 per cent in the 2002 parliamentary
elections. Defeats have taken the moderate Right to hitherto unimaginably low levels:
36 per cent in 1997. The most obvious reason for this step change was the rise of the
FN, which rendered permanent what might initially have been viewed as the moderate
Right’s temporary loss of vote share in 1978–81. The FN’s presence meant that a
significant proportion of the total right-wing vote was practically unavailable to candi-
dates of the moderate Right at the decisive second ballots of elections. Hence, in
part, the paradox of a right wing (including the FN) commanding a consistent overall
majority of first-round votes but staying so long out of power. It also meant that the
moderate Right has regularly had to fight a war on two fronts. In doing so, it has
conceded something to the FN agenda on law and order and immigration – but also
something to the Left’s defence of the public sector (indeed, on this issue Chirac and his
prime ministers have appeared distinctly to the left of Blair’s New Labour).
The French Right’s hesitancy to engage in ambitious neo-liberal reforms also has
ideological reasons, which electoral weakness compounded. Right-wing commentators
castigate the Left’s continuing ideological hegemony, exemplified, for example, by the
widespread support for public-sector strike movements in 1995 and after 2002. To an
The Right 249
extent, they were right. The view of the state as an active promoter of social equality
has been current on the Right as well as the Left, especially among Gaullists and
Christian Democrats. In 2002, some 40 per cent of Chirac’s and Bayrou’s voters did not
accept the proposition that the number of public employees should be cut. When, at the
same time, Alain Madelin gave the French the chance to vote for an unambiguously
neo-liberal candidate, he was rewarded with under 4 per cent of the vote. A further
difficulty is that neither of Chirac’s presidential victories could be said to offer a clear
mandate in favour of change from the Right. In 1995, his campaign was marked by a
phrase – la fracture sociale – and a leftish, Statist, tonality, intended to contrast with
Balladur, which appeared to offer a return to the interventionism of the de Gaulle
years. In 2002, his re-election to the presidency was helped by the (anti-Le Pen) demon-
strations and by millions of left-wing votes; the Right’s parliamentary victory in June
was assisted by the voters’ wish to avoid any repetition of cohabitation and by
Raffarin’s emollient promises to listen to la France d’en bas (the France of ordinary
working people). Little in these campaigns presaged any radical rollback of the state.
France’s right-wing parties have also, finally, suffered from their divisions. They have
drawn on different traditions, and have had different patterns of organisation and (to
some degree) different electorates. They have argued about money (notably the prime
minister’s ‘special funds’), about policies and about political strategy (and notably how
to handle the FN). Yet many of these divisions had narrowed by 2000; they are prob-
ably not too deep to be accommodated within a single, diverse, right-wing party such as
the UMP aspired to be. Perhaps harder to contain have been the divisions caused by
presidential rivalries. The contests between Giscard and Chirac in 1981, or Chirac and
Barre in 1988, though not sufficient on their own to ensure Mitterrand’s two victories,
did deny the leading right-wing candidate votes at the run-off. The damage at parlia-
mentary elections was more limited; parliamentary seats could, after all, be shared out
in a way that the (one) top job could not. Even here, though, the division between
Chirac and Balladur supporters poisoned the right-wing majority between 1995 and
1997. More indirectly, however, the querelles des chefs caused widespread disenchant-
ment with moderate right-wing parties among right-wing voters, rendering other
options – for example the FN – more attractive and thus further increasing the moder-
ate Right’s handicaps. Hostilities between Sarkozy and Chirac, more or less open
within weeks of the 2002 victories, have the potential to be similarly damaging in 2007 –
unless, of course, they are supplanted by an equally bloody confrontation between
Sarkozy and de Villepin.
Personal rivalries are the stuff of politics and it would be surprising not to find them
on the French Right. The openness with which they are pursued is perhaps more
remarkable; French politicians tend to stab one another in the front as well as in the
back. What is most striking, however, is how bad the party organisations have been at
containing such conflicts and canalising them to produce strong party leaders and
election-winning candidates. No party of the moderate Right has an agreed procedure
for making these choices that has operated regularly between several contenders. One
result has been an often messy pattern of competition, regularly involving the most
demagogic varieties of outbidding, at presidential elections: four candidates on the
moderate Right (Giscard and three Gaullists) in 1981; two Gaullists but no UDF
candidate in 1995; five candidates of the mainstream Right in 2002. Another has been
the relative immunity of party leaders to sanction from below. Few parties in any
democracy have hung onto so many unsuccessful leaders for so long. The problem of
250 The Right
French parties, notwithstanding De Gaulle’s critique of their role under the Fourth
Republic, is not that they are not too strong; it is that they are too weak.
Further reading
For general studies on French and European parties, see Chapter 7.
Anderson, M., Conservative Politics in France, London, George Allen and Unwin, 1974.
Bastow, S., ‘Front National economic policy: from neo-liberalism to protectionism?’, Modern and
Contemporary France, 5(1), February, 1997, pp. 61–72.
Berstein, S., Histoire du gaullisme, Paris, Perrin, 2001.
Betz, H.-G., Radical Right-Wing Populism in Western Europe, Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1994.
Birenbaum, G., Le Front National en politique, Paris, Balland, 1992.
Bresson, G. and Lionet, C., Le Pen, biographie, Paris, Seuil, 1994.
Camus, J.-Y., Le Front National: histoire et analyses, Paris, Olivier Laurens, 1996.
Cathala, J. and J.-B. Prédall, Nous nous sommes tant haïs. 1997–2002. Voyage au centre de la
droite, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 2002.
Charlot, J., L’UNR: étude du pouvoir au sein d’un parti politique, Paris, Armand Colin, 1967.
Charlot, J., The Gaullist Phenomenon, London, George Allen and Unwin, 1971.
Chebel d’Appollonia, A., L’extrême droite en France de Maurras à Le Pen, 2nd edition, Brussels,
Complexe, 1996.
Constanty, H., Le lobby de la gâchette, Paris, Seuil, 2002 (on CPNT).
Davies, P., The National Front in France: Ideology, Discourse, and Power, London, Routledge,
1998.
Davies, P., The Extreme Right in France, 1789 to the Present, London, Routledge, 2002.
de Gaulle, C., Memoirs of Hope: Renewal and Endeavour, New York, Simon and Schuster, 1971.
Dély, R., Histoire secrète du Front national, Paris, Grasset, 1999.
Dolez, B. and A. Laurent, ‘Quand les militants RPR élisent leur président’, Revue Française de
Science Politique, 50(1), 2000, pp. 125–46.
Faux, E., Legrand, T. and Perez, G., La main droite de Dieu: enquête sur François Mitterrand et
l’extrême droite, Paris, Seuil, 1994.
Fysh, P. and Wolfreys, J., The Politics of Racism in France, London, Macmillan, 1998.
Giscard d’Estaing, V., Démocratie française, Paris, Fayard, 1976.
Haegel, F., ‘Faire l’Union: la refondation des partis de droite après les élections de 2002’, Revue
Française de Science Politique, 52(5–6), October–December 2002, pp. 561–76.
Hainsworth, P. (ed.), The Politics of the Extreme Right: From the Margins to the Mainstream,
London, Pinter, 2000.
Hanley, D., ‘Compromise, party management and fair shares: the case of the French UDF’, Party
Politics, 5(2), 1999, pp. 171–89.
Kitschelt, H., with A. McGann, The Radical Right in Western Europe: A Comparative Analysis,
Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1997.
Knapp, A., Gaullism since de Gaulle, Aldershot, Dartmouth Publishing, 1994.
Madelin, P., Les gaullistes et l’argent, Paris, L’Archipel, 2001.
Marcus, J., The French National Front, London, Macmillan, 1994.
Martin, P., La montée du Front National, Paris, Fondation Saint-Simon, 1996.
Massart, A., L’Union pour la Démocratie Française (UDF), Paris, L’Harmattan, 1999.
Mayer, N., Ces Français qui votent Le Pen, 2nd edition, Paris, Flammarion, 2002.
Perrineau, P., Le symptôme Le Pen: radiographie des electeurs du Front National, Paris, Fayard,
1997.
Rémond, R., Les droites en France, Paris, Aubier Montaigne, 1982.
Sirinelli, J.-F. (ed.), Histoire des droites en France, vol. I, Paris, Gallimard, 1992.
The Right 251
Souchard, M., Wahnich, S., Cuminal, I. and Wathier, V., Le Pen: Les mots, Paris, Le Monde
Éditions, 1997.
Touchard, J., Le gaullisme, 1940–1969, Paris, Seuil, 1978.
Traïni, C., Les braconniers de la politique, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 2003 (on
CPNT).
Tristan, A., Au Front, Paris, Gallimard, 1987.
Party websites
CNIP http://www.cnip.asso.fr
CPNT http://www.cpnt.asso.fr
Front National http://www.frontnational.com
MPF http://www.mpf-villiers.com/
UDF http://www.udf.org/index.html
UMP http://www.u-m-p.org/site/index.php
9 Transformations of the
party system
Continuity and change
Party configurations, 1956–2005 253

Bipolar multipartism 259
Further reading 279
A party system in any democratic state consists of three sets of relationships. The first
of these concerns the parties themselves. How many parties are there? Are there
extreme parties of Right and Left, or is the ideological distance between the various
parties small? And is there a pattern of alliances between the parties? Secondly, a party
system is shaped by the relations between parties and society – by levels of membership,
by public attitudes towards parties, but above all by levels of electoral support. A third
aspect is the relationship of parties to government. Which party or parties govern? Do
they do so alone or in coalition? And is there regular alternation in power, or does a
single party or coalition monopolise governmental office over an extended period?
The time dimension is crucial because a party system is not just a snapshot of the
configuration of political parties at a given moment – just after a major election, for
example. On the contrary, the purpose of analysing party systems is to reveal long-term
dynamics and continuities beyond the contingencies of any single electoral result, how-
ever dramatic. The analysis of party systems does not ignore change, whether involving
the emergence, splitting or disappearance of parties, gains and losses in party support,
or the conquest or loss of governmental office. But it does seek to place these things in a
long perspective. Analysis of the British system, for example, sets the varied events of
the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries – the vicissitudes of the Conservative
and Labour parties, the rise of centre-party politics, or the development of Welsh and
Scottish nationalisms – within a more general context in which one or other of the big
parties can normally be expected to win a House of Commons majority and occupy
government office alone.
Such an exercise presents obvious problems in the case of France. The two previous
chapters have demonstrated that French parties are numerous (no fewer than nine lists
won 5 per cent of the vote or more at the European elections of 1999, and seven at those
of 2004); that in the course of the Fifth Republic the level of electoral support of each
of them has either halved (in the case of the Gaullists) or quartered (in that of the
Communists) or both doubled and halved (in the case of the Socialists, Les Verts and
the Front National (FN)); that most have split, in more or less dramatic ways, at least
once, and some have merged; and, confusingly, that all except the Communists have
Transformations of the party system 253
changed their names at least once. No two post-election snapshots of the configuration
of parties resemble one another very closely. With French parties as numerous, and
their support as variable, as they are, it should be no surprise to find that the party
system has defied any neat classification. Moderate pluralism, a dominant-party sys-
tem, imperfect bipartism, the bipolar quadrille and a two-and-a-half party system are
all expressions that have been applied to it during the Fifth Republic. At times, indeed,
and especially since the 1980s, observers have come close to detecting a new party
system with each election. Such successive characterisations are a useful reminder of
how the configuration of parties has changed in the course of the Fifth Republic, and
this chapter will start with them. But they miss out the longer-term dynamics, which is
why an attempt at a more synthetic view of the party system over the full course of
nearly five decades will follow.
Party configurations, 1956–2005

The party system of Fourth Republic France (Figure 9.1) presented an almost perfect
case of what the Italian specialist Giovanni Sartori called polarised pluralism. This was
a volatile and unstable mix of six major characteristics.
• The presence of strong and irresponsible ‘anti-system’ parties of the Left (the
Communists) and the Right (the Gaullists in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the
Poujadists thereafter), determined to bring down the régime, or at the very least to
sow confusion among its supporters, hampered all attempts to find a coherent
governing majority in parliament. The proportional electoral system allowed such
parties to win parliamentary seats (a minimum of 100 for the Communists) without
committing themselves to any form of alliance.
• Political conflict was fiercely ideological, even on issues that in other systems
might have been resolved by negotiation and compromise (Chapter 1). The four
main political forces which broadly supported the régime, and from which govern-
ments might be drawn, were themselves divided, in two different ways: on the
clerical/anti-clerical issue which had traditionally separated Right from Left in
France, and on issues of state intervention, taxation and spending. New issues that
confronted the politicians of the Fourth Republic, notably European integration
Figure 9.1 The party system of the Fourth Republic: a simplified view.
254 Transformations of the party system
and decolonisation, also divided the governing parties. All parliamentary majorities
were thus quarrelsome and precarious.
• Most parties, especially those of the Centre and Right, had difficulty in command-
ing the loyalty of their parliamentarians, rendering major votes in parliament
unpredictable.
• Governments were therefore unstable, lasting an average of six months and a
maximum of seventeen.
• The link between votes and the composition of the political executive was tenuous
to the point of appearing non-existent. The composition of governing coalitions
was determined not so much by election results as by negotiations between party
leaders behind closed doors.
• Electoral competition led parties to outbid their competitors, including those with
which they would later enter governing coalitions, on key policies at election time.
In government, however, parties invariably disappointed their supporters because
they were obliged to make compromises in coalition, and because few governments
had the time to enact any major policy before losing office. Voter disappointment
with parties led to disappointment with the political system as a whole.
The transition to the Fifth Republic between 1958 and 1962 offered an equally classic
case of institutional change leading to party system change. The new constitution gave
governments new safeguards against attack from parliament; it gave the president both
new powers, including the right of dissolution and the right to call a referendum, and
reinforced power, through the 1962 reform instituting direct presidential elections. The
replacement of proportional representation at parliamentary elections by the two-
ballot majority system with single-member constituencies, though not part of the
constitution, was nevertheless a major institutional change. Polarised pluralism disap-
peared. But the new party system did not settle down to a pattern as predictable as
those of, say, Britain or the Federal Republic of Germany. On the contrary, six different
configurations of French parties can be observed since 1958. They may be read in
conjunction with Figure 2.2, which shows the relationship between presidential terms,
governments and parliamentary majorities under the Fifth Republic.
The transitional phase, 1958–62

The 1958 elections cut the Communists’ parliamentary representation from 150 to ten,
and gave the Gaullists much the biggest parliamentary group, with 216 Deputies, on the
strength of just 20.2 per cent of the first-ballot vote (Table 7.2). But no group or
alliance had a stable majority. The first government of the Fifth Republic, under Michel
Debré, included conservatives and Christian Democrats, but lost support from Algérie
française elements of both parties. In votes on Algerian policy, it depended, in part, on
support from the Socialists, who opposed Debré on every other issue. This lack of a
stable majority, and the use of different coalitions for different votes, resembled the
politics of the Fourth Republic, though the government’s new constitutional powers
and the gravity of the Algerian crisis gave Debré greater staying power than his pre-
decessors. From a post-1962 perspective, this period appears as a transition from the
polarised pluralism of the Fourth Republic to the stable parliamentary majorities of
the Fifth. But to representatives of what de Gaulle was to call the ‘parties of yesteryear’,
it appeared as a mere interruption in the normal conduct of parliamentary government
as it was carried on under any Republic. With the Algerian war over, Debré replaced by
the inexperienced Pompidou, and de Gaulle’s challenge thrown down in the shape of
the constitutional referendum proposal on the direct election of the president, the old
parties moved quickly to oppose the emergence of a new régime. Hence the motion of
censure, which they won, and the 1962 elections that followed the referendum, both of
which the old parties lost, laying the Fourth Republic finally to rest.
Gaullist ‘dominance’, 1962–74

The November 1962 elections gave the Gaullist–Giscardian coalition 36 per cent of the
first-round vote and 268 out of 482 Deputies. They gave French voters that link
between electoral choice and the composition of the executive which had been so
conspicuously lacking under the Third and Fourth Republics. They gave France the
first stable parliamentary majority in the history of any Republic: Pompidou lasted a
record six years as prime minister, and commanded parliamentary forces sufficiently
disciplined for him not to need the most draconian power in the constitutional
armoury, Article 49–3, during the whole of the 1962 parliament (see Chapter 6). For
Jean Charlot, the Gaullists of the de Gaulle and Pompidou presidencies represented
France’s ‘dominant’ party. In a French context this term is comprehensible, so remark-
able was the contrast with the Fourth Republic, in terms of voting patterns, of the
conduct of parliamentary business, and of the concentration of ministerial posts and
patronage in the hands of one party. But as observed in Chapter 8, the Gaullists’
‘dominance’ was still relative. Their 44 per cent of the vote at the first ballots of
presidential elections (de Gaulle in 1965 and Pompidou in 1969), and between 33 per
cent and 38 per cent at parliamentary elections, were strong results, but no more indica-
tive of ‘dominance’ than those of the German CDU or either of the big British parties.
This was not Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party or Japan’s Liberal Democrats.
Moreover, the dilution of the Gaullists’ positions in the parliamentary majority of
1973, and above all the very poor result of their candidate Chaban-Delmas in the first
round of the 1974 presidential elections, drew a fairly speedy close to what had been the
hegemony of little more than a decade. At least as important as the Gaullists’ (partial)
dominance was the slow process of bipolarisation of the party system, as the left-wing
parties understood that, to beat the Gaullists, they needed an alliance at least as coher-
ent as the governing coalition. Hence the signature of the Left’s Common Programme
in 1972. At the same time the centrists felt increasingly squeezed between the Gaullists
and the Left.
The ‘bipolar quadrille’, 1974–81

The election of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing to the presidency opened a period which
differed in two respects from the de Gaulle and Pompidou years. First, once the oppos-
ition centrists had rallied to Giscard at the run-off of the presidential election, practic-
ally the whole range of political forces had been absorbed into one of the two great
coalitions of Left and Right; bipolarisation appeared complete. Second, within each of
these coalitions, no single party was dominant. Each of the four parties – on the Left
Communists and Socialists, on the Right Gaullists and the non-Gaullist moderate
Right federated by Giscard into the UDF in 1978 – could hope to win between a fifth
and a quarter of the vote. This ‘bipolar quadrille’ could appear as the natural product,
in terms of the party system, of the institutions of the Fifth Republic, once the
exceptional personality of de Gaulle had faded from the scene and the Communists and
Socialists had become allies. But interparty conflicts within Left and Right were never
so fierce as when the parties concerned were of roughly equal strengths. They rendered
the ‘bipolar quadrille’ inherently unstable: for each of the two weaker parties –
Communists and Gaullists – overall victory against the opposite camp became less
important than regaining a dominant position against allies. The bipolar quadrille did
not survive 1981.
Socialist ‘dominance’, 1981–86

The collapse of the Communist vote in 1981, amplified at the European elections
of 1984, established the Socialists as the dominant party within the Left. This they
have remained ever since, even at their low point of 1993 – a critical break with the
Communist hegemony on the Left characteristic of the three post-war decades. Indeed,
the PS could briefly appear as France’s dominant party, for the June 1981 parlia-
mentary elections brought them 36 per cent of the first-ballot vote and a single-party
majority (the second out of three in French republican history) at the run-off. At the
presidential elections of 1988 and 1995, and at the parliamentary elections of 1981,
1986, 1988 and 1997, the Socialists had the highest vote of any single party. But ‘dom-
inance’ supposes, at the very least, governmental office, and the Socialists lost this to the
Right in 1986.
The challenge to ‘parties of government’, 1986–97

In fact, 1981 led not to Socialist ‘dominance’ but to a period of instability without
precedent under the Fifth Republic. Alternation in power, unknown from 1958 to 1981,
suddenly became normal: the voters changed president, parliamentary majority, or
both, in 1981, 1986, 1988, 1993, 1995, 1997 and 2002. Only Mitterrand, who survived
two seven-year presidential terms and left the Élysée as a moribund 78-year-old in 1995,
and Chirac, who won re-election under exceptional conditions in 2002, resisted the
trend. Having rid themselves of Giscard and the Right in 1981, the French voted
the Right back into government (though not the presidency) in 1986, inaugurating the
experience of cohabitation between a president and a government of different camps.
In 1988, the voters re-elected Mitterrand to the presidency, and when Mitterrand dis-
solved parliament, they duly removed the Right from government (though without
giving the Socialists an absolute majority). Five years later, the Right’s landslide
victory at the 1993 parliamentary elections opened the second cohabitation, between
Mitterrand and Balladur. But when Balladur attempted a presidential bid in 1995 he
failed; it was Chirac who won the succession to Mitterrand. Chirac proceeded to sack
his rival from the premiership and replace him with his own protégé Alain Juppé. But
Chirac himself suffered a major reverse in 1997 when he called parliamentary elections
a year early; Jospin’s left-wing coalition won, opening a third period of cohabitation
which lasted until a further reversal of fortunes at the parliamentary and presidential
elections of 2002.
As the mainstream parties of Left and Right pursued each other in a revolving
door leading in and out of office, they came to resemble one another to a degree
unprecedented under the Fifth Republic. All became fixated (though not always to
great effect) by the tedious goals of low budget deficits and low inflation at home and
monetary stability abroad. All allowed unemployment to rise, with a brief pause in
the late 1980s. All incurred the voters’ displeasure – at their record on joblessness
above all, but also on issues relating to France’s urban malaise, including crime and
immigration, and to corrupt political finance. The periods 1983–85 and 1991–93 for the
Socialists, and 1995–97 for the Right, saw record levels of public dissatisfaction with
governments and with parties. Frequent alternation in power was the most obvious
expression of public disappointment. Another was falling party membership: total
estimated party membership dropped from some 900,000 in the late 1970s to barely
half that twenty years later, with the three major membership parties (Communists,
Socialists and Gaullists) all struggling to keep their totals above 100,000. A third mani-
festation of disappointment was falling turnout, as abstentions at major elections
rose by roughly half, from some 20 per cent of the electorate to 30 (see Table 7.2). A
fourth manifestation was protest voting, or at least voting for parties that showed no
aspiration to join a coalition with one of the mainstream parties of government.
Traditionally, one party had been good at canalising working-class protest and oppos-
ition to ‘the system’: the Communists, who had left government in 1984 and returned to
positions of truculent, workerist (and pro-Soviet) opposition, only contracting the
most minimal electoral agreements with Socialists to save their parliamentary seats and
town halls. But the Communists’ credibility as a protest party, badly damaged by their
period in office, was never revived by the return to opposition. To a significant degree
the PCF was supplanted as a force of protest, after 1983–84, by the FN; the FN’s vote
rose from 10 per cent during most elections of the 1980s to 15 per cent in 1995, 1997
and 1998. Also outside the system were the ecology groupings, which won 10.7 per cent
at the 1989 European elections; and the shooters’ rights party (Chasse, Pêche, Nature,
Traditions (CPNT)), which achieved at least 4 per cent at European and regional
elections in the decade after 1989.
These parties won seats in the European Parliament and the regional councils (both
elected by proportional representation) but not in the French National Assembly. The
only exceptions were the 1986 Assembly, elected by proportional representation and
including thirty-five FN Deputies, and those of 1988 and 1997, which included one FN
Deputy each. Otherwise France’s parliament consisted entirely of Communists, mod-
erate Left and moderate Right, just as it had done in the 1970s, and in no way reflected
developments among the voters. The resulting gulf between votes cast and seats won
reached its widest point in the 1993 parliamentary elections. Of the total registered
electorate then, 34 per cent abstained or spoilt their ballots; 23 per cent voted for a
party outside the ‘system’ – the FN, the PCF or one of the various Trotskyist or
ecologist groupings; 14.4 per cent supported the non-Communist Left; while just 29 per
cent was enough to ensure the ‘landslide’ of the right-wing coalition, which took 80 per
cent of the parliamentary seats. The ‘parties of government’ were supported by fewer
than 44 per cent of the electorate. Some observers therefore suggested that the real
division in French politics was no longer between Right and Left, but between parties
of government and parties outside the system.
Full circle? 1997–present

The closing years of the twentieth century, on the other hand, appeared to demonstrate
the integrative power of the Fifth Republic’s party system. This was most obvious on
the Left, where the gauche plurielle coalition of Communists, Greens and Socialists,
constructed in the aftermath of Jospin’s honourable defeat at the 1995 presidential
elections, proved victorious in 1997. Both Communists and Les Verts, in other words,
came in from the cold and became parties of government, albeit junior ones. For
the Communists, the process was facilitated by the fall of the Soviet Union and by the
leadership change of 1994; the PCF was rewarded with three posts in government, the
first in thirteen years. Les Verts, in alliance for the first time with the Socialists and
benefiting from their first-round support in twenty-nine constituencies, won seats for
eight of their candidates and a ministerial portfolio for Voynet. Even after the defeats
of 2002, it seemed probable that something resembling the gauche plurielle coalition
would line up for future battles – as indeed it did, with considerable success, for the
regional elections of March 2004.
Meanwhile the split of the FN in 1998–99 appeared to signal the retreat of protest
politics on the Right. As we have seen in Chapter 8 (p. 246), the intense personal rivalry
between Le Pen and his lieutenant Bruno Mégret that occasioned the split was under-
pinned by a strategic difference about possible alliances with the mainstream Right. In
a sense, the FN split and the entry of the PCF and Les Verts into the gauche plurielle
had a comparable underlying cause: the difficulty for a Fifth Republic party to exist
outside one of the main coalitions of Right or Left. These coalitions continue to
dominate political representation at all levels in France, with some 90 per cent of
seats on regional councils and among France’s MEPs and nearly 100 per cent in
municipalities, départements, National Assembly and Senate.
Yet these developments cannot be seen as signalling a return to any of the earlier
party configurations of the Fifth Republic. No party is dominant: the Socialists,
France’s largest party before 2002, had an audience of some 25 per cent; the UMP,
though enjoying an enviable hold on France’s institutions since 2002, remains too
electorally vulnerable (as its results in 2004 showed) to claim even the watered-down
‘dominant’ status often accorded to the Gaullists at their zenith. The ‘bipolar quadrille’
is rendered impossible both by the hegemony of the Socialists on the Left and the
Gaullists (and then the UMP) on the mainstream Right, and by the proliferation of
parties and candidacies. Above all, protest parties still count. The FN recovered from
its split, against many expectations, propelling Le Pen into the second ballot of the 2002
presidential election. The Trotskyists have attracted hundreds of thousands of new
voters, unfamiliar with Marxism-Leninism but lacking confidence in the mainstream
Left’s ability to address their concerns. At the first ballot of the 2002 presidential
election, a third of the vote went to anti-system candidates (far Right, far Left and
Saint-Josse for CPNT). This was an extreme, so far unique, case, but even at the lower
levels seen since (about a fifth at June 2002 parliamentary elections and the 2004
European elections, a quarter at the 2004 regional elections), a significant bloc of voters
(to which may be added the growing ranks of non-voters) remains outside the
mainstream of Left–Right politics.
The referendum of 2005 (more fully described in Chapter 14) suggested something
more: a division between extremes and centre, already seen in the Maastricht refer-
endum of 1992 but intensified over the intervening thirteen years, and now skewed
leftwards by the circumstances of the campaign (it was a right-wing president who had
called the referendum) and its character (focused on the supposed neo-liberal thrust of
the constitutional treaty). Observers in 2005 saw a durable division opening up between
the Left’s extreme wing (Trotskyists, Communists, and the large number of Socialists
and Greens drawn into their orbit by the no campaign) and left-wing moderates (the
rest of the Socialists and Greens). If sustained, this division would match that between
moderate and extreme Right. The resulting party system would have four blocs (mod-
erate and extreme Left, moderate and extreme Right), but would differ from the bipolar
quadrille because of the extreme difficulty of forging alliances on Left or Right. Indeed,
it would be closer to the polarised pluralism of the Fourth Republic. The outcome, of
course, would not be identical. The institutions of the Fifth Republic would probably
guarantee stable government, at least in formal terms. But governments would lack
legitimacy, and thus that power of effective decision that de Gaulle so prized, because
so many of the voters would have supported parties ‘outside the system’ on the far Left
and the far Right. Moreover, there was no guarantee at all that the ‘accident’ of 2002
would not recur; indeed, the 2005 referendum result provoked speculation that the
second ballot of the next presidential election, in 2007, might be held between Le
Pen and the Trostkyist Besancenot. While such an analysis probably overstates the
short-term divisions caused by the referendum, it tallies with the growing range of
issues that cut across Left–Right barriers, and with the growing disenchantment of
many voters with mainstream politics.
To understand these six stages, however, is not to understand the party system.
Though an analysis by stages is necessary to appreciate the frequency and extent of
change in party configurations, such an analysis characteristically lacks a long time
span and therefore leaves us with too little comprehension of underlying dynamics.
Understanding these requires an attempt at a more synthetic model of Fifth Republic
party politics.
Bipolar multipartism
The salient feature of the French party system under the Fifth Republic, as presented in
Table 9.1, is the balance between forces tending to bipolarisation, coalition and (rela-
tive) simplicity, and forces tending to multipolarisation, fragmentation and complexity.
Both types of force exist in almost any party system, but most systems are marked by
the predominance of one or the other: the British system is overwhelmingly bipolar,
for example, while the French Fourth Republic or pre-1992 Italy incorporated few
restraints to balance the forces of fragmentation and multipolarity. In the contempor-
ary French case, on the other hand, both types of force are almost equally strong. Such
relatively small variations in the balance as occur may therefore produce quite marked
effects in the configuration of parties from one election to another – in other words, the
changes over time noted above. The term bipolar multipartism attempts to capture this
balance while remaining sufficiently loose-fitting to accommodate these variations.
Bipolarity: characteristics
The party system of the Fifth Republic can be characterised as bipolar, first, on the
basis of the parties’ relationship to government. The great unexpected development of
the Fifth Republic was the emergence, from 1962, of the fait majoritaire – of stable
majorities in the National Assembly, of either Right or Left, capable of sustaining a
government in office for a whole parliament. Stable majorities have encouraged the
development of more or less stable oppositions, capable at least of some measure of
Table 9.1 Bipolar multipartism: the party system of the Fifth Republic
Bipolar characteristics Multiparty characteristics

• The norm of government is a stable coalition • Failure of ‘2-party system’ to emerge
in office, supported by a clear majority for the (single-party majorities rare; all govts. are
whole duration of a parliament. coalitions).
• Alternation in power results from • Up to 5 or 6 ‘relevant’ parties (> 5% of
competition between Left and Right blocs, vote), 1997: PCF, PS, (Greens), UDF,
not, for example, from Centre parties RPR, FN.
changing partners: individuals may change • Some relevant parties outside the two
sides, parties do not. main coalitions (Centrists before 1974,
• No ‘grand coalitions’. FN from mid-1980s).
• Shrinking vote share of ‘parties of
government’ from 1980s.
• New entrants (Greens, FN, CPNT).
• Party splits: PS/MDC, UDF/DL, RPR/
RPF, FN/MNR.
Bipolarising dynamics Centrifugal dynamics
Institutional Institutional
• Direct presidential elections, second ballot. • Wide available choice at first ballots of
• Single-member two-ballot majority system at parliamentary and presidential elections.
parliamentary elections penalises isolated • The coming of proportional
parties. representation (new: 1979, 1983, 1986):
• Constitution stabilises parliamentary the ‘accordion effect’.
majorities (Article 49–3, etc.). • Localism (and cumul des mandats) lowers
Voter-related costs of dissidence, weakens parties.
• Right and Left are a readily accessible Voter-related
framework for French voters (1996: 37% Left, • Old suspicions within Left and Right.
32% Right, 24% don’t know), which • Voter perception of failure in government
corresponds to party allegiance. (new).
• TV and ‘nationalisation’ of politics • Voters believe Right and Left distinction
reinforced presidentialism. out of date (62%).
Party- and candidate-related • Divisive new issues: immigration, crime,
• Competitive strategies deployed by parties Europe, environment.
and presidential candidates to meet • Social change (e.g. decline of working
institutional constraints class).
— construction of presidential coalitions Party- and candidate-related
— 2nd-ballot discipline • French parties’ weak organisation causes
— programmatic alliances difficulty in destroying new competitors,
— exclusion of FN at least in short term.
— absorption of Greens. • Parties’ competitive strategies within
Right and Left.
co-ordination both within the Assembly and at the approach of elections. Governments
do not fall, as they had under the Third and Fourth Republics, on the whim of a single
party or even of a fraction of a party within the governing coalition. The departure of
the MRP ministers in 1962, for example, led to no more than a reshuffle. On the
contrary, alternation in power under the Fifth Republic has always been the outcome of
competition between left-wing and right-wing blocs. These blocs have remained rela-
tively stable. Although a handful of individuals, such as the former Giscardian minis-
ters in 1988, may change sides, whole parties do not; the Centre – with the partial
exception of the 1988 parliament, the only one since 1962 where there was no overall
majority – has never played the pivotal role it enjoyed under the Third and Fourth
Republics. Nor has the Fifth Republic seen a grand coalition, grouping socialists and
conservatives (as, for example, the CDU–SPD coalition in West Germany from 1966 to
1969). De Gaulle’s government of 1958 resembled one, but it fell apart as the new
constitution came into force. Cohabitation involves an element of power-sharing by a
president and a prime minister of opposed political camps, but the two heads of the
executive are always in open competition and never present, as coalition partners do, a
set of agreed policies and objectives. Nor have governments sought to negotiate a
consensus on economic reforms with political adversaries and social partners. Serious
competition for state power, then, is dominated by the two forces of Left and Right.
Bipolarity has therefore also been manifest at elections, especially at second ballots.
Of the seven direct presidential elections under the Fifth Republic, five have produced
what Jean Charlot called a ‘great simplifying duel’, a straight Left–Right fight at the
second round (the exceptions were 1969, when Pompidou faced the centrist president of
the Senate, Alain Poher, at the run-off, and 2002, when Chirac defeated Le Pen by a
record total of over 82 per cent of the vote). At parliamentary elections, in those
constituencies where no candidate won at the first round, the run-off was a straight
fight between Left and moderate Right in 94 per cent of cases in 1988, 73 per
cent in both 1997 and 1993, and 80 per cent in June 2002. At local level, although the
Socialist–centrist alliance, so characteristic of the Fourth Republic, lasted longer on
many city councils than it did nationally, joint Socialist–Communist lists have been run
against the Right in 90 per cent of towns of more than 30,000 inhabitants since 1977.
Multipartism: characteristics
Yet France is also rather obviously a multiparty system, in four respects. The first
concerns the number of parties. Despite periods of consolidation, nothing resembling a
two-party system has ever emerged under the Fifth Republic. If, by rough rule of
thumb, a party is said to be ‘relevant’, or to have the potential to affect the complex
set of relationships that makes up a party system, when it has 5 per cent of the vote,
then at the 1997 parliamentary elections there were five ‘relevant’ parties: Communists,
Socialists, UDF, RPR and FN; the ecology groups, which won 6.4 per cent of the vote
but did so partly thanks to the Socialists’ goodwill, might conceivably be considered as
a sixth, especially given Dominique Voynet’s appointment to the government. The
number fell to three (Socialists, UMP and FN) in June 2002, but it would be hasty
to view this as an inexorable movement towards concentration: three other parties
(Communists, Greens and UDF) all won over 4.5 per cent in June 2002, and moved
back above 5 per cent at the European elections two years later. Moreover, the number
of parties and candidates has tended to increase. The 1978 record figure of 8.9
candidates per constituency was comfortably exceeded in 1997, when the number was
11.5, and again in June 2002, when it reached 14.6. Almost as striking has been the
tendency to inflation in presidential candidacies: six in 1965, seven in 1969, twelve in
1974, ten in 1981, nine in 1988 and 1995, and fifteen in 2002.
Second, some ‘relevant’ parties have remained outside the blocs of Left and Right:
this was true of all the centrists between 1962 and 1969, and of most of them till 1974.
It was half-true of the Communists between 1984 and 1997, since their links to the rest
of the Left took the minimal form of second-ballot withdrawal agreements. More
importantly, it has been true of the extreme Right since its electoral breakthrough in
1983–84. The ability of the FN to keep candidates in the running at second ballots was
the main reason for the drop in the number of straight contests between Left and
moderate Right in the parliamentary elections of the 1990s; its relatively poor first-
ballot performance in June 2002 explains the rise in the number of straight Left–Right
run-offs then. Whatever the position inside the National Assembly, a situation where, as
in 1993 (or at the first ballot of the 2002 presidential elections), one-third of those
voting supported forces outside the mainstream parties of government, it is hardly a
manifestation of perfect bipolarity.
Third, the French party system leaves some room for new entrants. The period since
1980 has seen four such new forces emerge. Two, or possibly three, promise to have a
significant long-term impact. CPNT affected the balance of power on four regional
councils after 1998, qualified for ‘relevance’ at the 1999 European elections with a score
of 6.8 per cent and exceeded the PCF score at the 2002 presidential elections, though its
record has been much less impressive since this high point. Philippe de Villiers’s
Mouvement pour la France has occupied a conservative, Eurosceptical niche for over a
decade and survived its brief, doomed merger with Charles Pasqua’s dissident Gaullists
as the Rassemblement pour la France between 1999 and 2000. The FN, with its 10–15
per cent of the vote, brought race, in the guise of the immigration issue, to the centre of
political debate, posed serious strategic difficulties for the mainstream Right and to a
lesser extent for the Left, and contributed at least partially to the mainstream Right’s
defeats in 1988 and 1997 – even before Le Pen’s surprise result of April 2002. Les Verts,
finally, contributed to the Left’s victory in 1997 and now appear as indispensable
partners in any future winning left-wing coalition.
Fourth, the French party system leaves some room for existing parties to split. The
Communists maintain an uneasy relationship with their own organised dissidents, half
in and half out of the party. The Socialists lost Jean-Pierre Chevènement and his
Mouvement des Citoyens after 1992. The UDF lost de Villiers in 1994, Démocratie
Libérale in 1998, and finally most of its Deputies and other elite groups, to the UMP in
2002. The RPR lost Pasqua to the Rassemblement pour la France. The FN suffered the
departure of Mégret to form the Mouvement National Républicain. Each of these
splits left room, at least for a limited period, for the original and the schismatic parties
to coexist.
France is therefore characterised both by a simple, bipolarised form of party com-
petition – within the National Assembly, or at the second ballots of (most) presidential
elections and of parliamentary elections in the great majority of constituencies – and by
an extremely untidy reality of parties on the ground. This Janus face of the French
party system is shaped by two opposed sets of dynamics. Party systems are determined
by the institutional framework; by the voters – both the composition of the electorate
and its relationship to parties and politics; and by the choices and strategies developed
by parties and candidates. On each of these dimensions, France has been pulled in
opposite directions.
Institutional dynamics
The institutions of the Fifth Republic secure a measure of bipolarisation in four
important respects. First, although the constitution, in limiting the second ballot of a
presidential election to the two leading candidates, does not quite enforce bipolarity (as
was made clear by the elimination of the left-wing candidates in 1969 and 2002), it at
least strongly encourages it. Second, a parallel to the second rounds of presidential
elections is provided by the elimination from second ballots of parliamentary elections
of all candidates who have won less than the votes of 12.5 per cent of registered voters.
In each case the voter, having chosen freely at the first round, is firmly invited to vote for
the candidate (s)he finds least undesirable at the second.
This deserves close attention because the effect of the electoral law on the second
ballots of parliamentary elections is not merely arithmetical. Agreements between
parties lead to withdrawals by candidates who could legally stay in the race. Two sim-
plified hypothetical cases, each referring to a single constituency, illustrate how the two-
ballot system rewards alliances (Table 9.2) and penalises isolated parties (Table 9.3). In
the first example, four candidates are present, but only those on the Right have a sec-
ond-ballot withdrawal agreement. At the first round, both the Communist and the
Socialist candidate win more votes than either of the right-wingers. As none wins a first-
ballot majority, however, a second ballot is held, at which all candidates may be present
(each has won the votes of over 12.5 per cent of registered voters). But the candidate of
the non-Gaullist Right stands down in favour of his better-placed ally, leaving just three
candidates present at the run-off. At this second round no absolute majority is needed
to win, and the seat goes to the Gaullist, who has rallied the whole of the right-wing
vote (40 per cent) to his cause, rather than to the Communist or the Socialist – although
the Left as a whole has a clear arithmetical majority in the constituency. This type of
scenario provided a powerful incentive for the union of the Left from the 1960s.
Table 9.2 The two-ballot system: alliances rewarded
Left (no alliance) Right (alliance)

First ballot Communist Socialist Non-Gaullist Right Gaullist
35% 25% 17% 23%
Between ballots Both left-wing candidates stay in the Non-Gaullist candidate drops out
race and retain all their first-round and calls for Gaullist vote: Gaullist
votes candidate attracts all the Right’s
first-round votes
Second ballot 35% 25% – 40%
Result Left loses with 60% of vote Gaullist wins with 40% of vote
Table 9.3 The two-ballot system: isolation penalised
Left (alliance) Right (alliance) FN

First ballot Communist Socialist Non-Gaullist Gaullist FN
Right
18% 22% 12% 23% 25%
Between Communist candidate drops out and Non-Gaullist candidate is FN
ballots calls for Socialist vote eliminated and calls for candidate
Gaullist vote stays in race
Second – 40% – 35% 25%
ballot
Result Socialist wins with 40% of vote Gaullist loses with 35% of FN loses
vote with 25% of
vote
Table 9.3 shows why the FN found it almost impossible to elect any Deputies. Here,
the FN candidate, with 25 per cent of the vote, has a first-ballot lead on the four
candidates of the mainstream parties. But whereas both Left and moderate Right
operate second-ballot withdrawal agreements, allowing the leading candidate in each
case to add to his or her first-round support, the isolated FN candidate has no way of
improving on the first-ballot result, and comes in a poor third at the run-off. Table 9.3
also shows why the FN has posed difficulties for the moderate Right in many constitu-
encies: without an FN candidate, the Gaullist might have expected to win most of the
overall right-wing vote of 60 per cent in the constituency, and thus the seat.
The two-ballot system may, of course, be grossly distorting. In 1958, for example, the
Communists, with 18.9 per cent of the first-ballot votes, won only 2 per cent of
National Assembly seats; the Gaullists, with barely 1 per cent of the first-round votes
more than the Communists, won 41 per cent of the seats. The Socialists in 1962 lost
votes but increased their number of seats by well over half. In 1993 the right-wing
coalition secured 80 per cent of the seats with 44 per cent of the first-ballot votes; in
2002, the UMP won a third of the first-ballot votes but nearly two-thirds of the seats.
One reason for these apparent anomalies is widely varying constituency sizes. The
largest constituency was four times as large as the smallest one in 1978. That was partly
remedied by the redistricting law of 1986, but by 2003 the Constitutional Council
underlined the need for another law by observing that the 34,374 people living in the
second constituency of Lozère were well over five times better represented than the
188,200 inhabitants of the second constituency of Val-d’Oise. Another crucial source
of distortion was the different capacities of parties to win second-ballot votes on top of
first-ballot support – which will depend on their alliance capacity, noted above, but also
on their wider acceptability to voters. That, for example, explained the Gaullists’
remarkable successes in 1958 or 1962; they were the second-ballot choices of many
Socialists as well as of right-wingers. This factor also helps explain why the Communists,
in both June 1968 and June 1981, saw a relatively modest drop in their first-ballot vote
(2.5 points in 1968, 4.5 points in 1981) but lost roughly half their seats despite having a
working alliance with the Socialists: in either case, the Communists were especially
unpopular (as a result of the May events in 1968, and of their Soviet links in 1981) and
this hampered their ability to rally extra votes at the run-off.
A third institutional encouragement to bipolarisation was the two-ballot majority
system used for municipal elections in towns and cities of over 30,000 inhabitants from
1965. At municipal elections, lists led by a mayoral candidate, with as many candidates
as there are council seats, compete for control of town halls. Under the 1964 law, the
winning list, on an absolute majority at the first ballot or a relative majority at the
second, took all the council seats. Lists could drop out between ballots but they could
not merge. This was a powerful incentive for parties to enter alliances and to run joint
lists from the first round. The Left did this in a growing number of towns from 1965,
and in 200 out of 221 of them in 1977, when its candidates won two-thirds of France’s
town halls. It is true that a new electoral law, applied to all municipalities of over 3,500
inhabitants from 1983, moderated the iron discipline of the earlier system. Lists were
allowed to merge between ballots, and a minority of council seats was conceded to
candidates from the losing lists – allowing extreme and isolated parties to win minority
council representation. But both Left and Right have generally presented joint lists for
elections since 1983, in order to give the impression of political harmony in each camp
and avoid the need for potentially destructive last-minute haggling between ballots.
Finally, France’s institutions encourage bipolarity in parliament as well as at elections,
for the constitution includes a series of articles designed to force the behaviour of
parliamentarians into a clear majority–opposition divide. The right of a government,
under Article 49–3, to declare any bill a question of confidence, which may be rejected
only by the vote of a motion of censure, is merely the most formidable of several
possible means to compel compliance from a reluctant majority (see Chapter 6).
It should be emphasised, though, that the constitution and electoral laws do not
produce any automatic bipolar outcome. Indeed, the broadly similar two-ballot electoral
system used for most of the Third Republic produced a quite different result: unstable
governments of the Centre. Much, therefore, depends both on the way in which the
various institutional elements interact (there was no direct election of the president
under the Third Republic) and on the behaviour of the voters and the political elite.
Moreover, the position is complicated by the fact that the institutional framework
also tends to fragment politics in five ways. First, the constitution conceives presidential
elections as a confrontation between individuals and the voters. Despite the require-
ment, in force since 1981, that candidates must have the signatures of 500 mayors (out
of over 36,000 across France) before running, first ballots are crowded occasions:
Chirac’s campaign team claimed to have known, before the first round in 2002, that he
was unlikely to win much more than 20 per cent of the vote (in fact he won less) simply
because of the competition from fourteen other candidates, about ten of them national
figures. Although it is normally necessary to have the backing of a major party in
order to win (Giscard being the main exception to this rule), no party has a long-
established institutional mechanism for choosing its candidate. The choice of Jospin,
in 1995, by the Socialist Party on a one member, one vote basis, was an innovation;
the UMP’s arrangements for choosing a candidate are still obscure. Potential candi-
dates, présidentiables, tend to plan their campaigns in highly personal terms, and some-
times run against competitors from their own party. The supposedly disciplined
Gaullists, for example, have split their support at three out of the seven presidential
elections: in 1974, when Chirac’s friends supported Giscard against the official candi-
date Chaban-Delmas; in 1981, when three candidates, Chirac, Debré and Garaud, all
claimed a Gaullist pedigree; and in 1995, when both Chirac and Balladur did so. The
experience of 2002 showed that even very closely allied political allies, ready to negoti-
ate share-outs of candidacies at any other election, will still back their own candidate
for the presidency. This relative chaos at the first ballot is not automatically trans-
formed into bipolar order at the second; indeed, in 2002 it skewed the whole system
away from its ‘normal’ bipolar pattern. While the expectation of most observers, and of
most polling institutes, was for a classic Left–Right second ballot in 2007, there was no
guarantee that the ‘normal’ pattern would reassert itself.
Second, the two-ballot system for parliamentary elections provides the conditions for
fierce first-ballot competition between ‘allied’ parties. The period of the ‘bipolar
quadrille’ offers edifying examples of this on both Right and Left. Third, the first
ballots of parliamentary elections also offer opportunities for candidates outside the
control of major parties. Such candidates can hope for the support of voters prepared
to make a fanciful first-round choice, or to address a ‘warning’ to the established
parties, secure in the knowledge that they will still be able to cast a ‘serious’ or ‘useful’
vote at the run-off. Candidates from outside the main parties may also be assisted by
the localism still prevalent in French politics, and especially by the phenomenon of
multiple elective office-holding, the cumul des mandats, an extremely effective tool in
constituting a personal local political base. A well-established local figure may do suf-
ficiently well to reach the run-off ballot, and either seek final victory or bargain the
price of their withdrawal with better-placed competitors. An outstanding example is
Jean-Pierre Chevènement, who left the PS in 1994, converting his Socialist faction into
a mini-party, the Mouvement des Citoyens (MDC), running his own Eurosceptical left-
wing list at the 1994 European elections, and winning 2.55 per cent of the vote. In other
systems, the political demise of a Chevènement and of his party would soon have
followed. In France, however, the MDC’s handful of strong local bases, notably in
Chevènement’s eastern stronghold of Belfort, pointed to an arrangement with the PS.
Of the seven successful MDC candidates at the 1997 parliamentary elections, none had
faced an official Socialist opponent; Chevènement, instead of sinking into oblivion,
became Jospin’s Interior Minister – until he resigned again, in August 2000. Even then,
it was only Chevènement’s destructive presidential candidacy of 2002, and his refusal to
return afterwards to the fold of the gauche plurielle, that prevented his continuing his
career as a relative independent allied to the PS.
Fourth, fragmentation has been encouraged financially. The introduction of public
finance for political parties since 1988, and above all the party finance law of 1990 as
amended on instructions of the Constitutional Council, guarantees state aid to any
party able to field at least 75 candidates at parliamentary elections. Although the
lion’s share of this sum (which exceeded 80 million euros in 2000) goes to the biggest
parties, because the share-out is determined by electoral support and by parlia-
mentary representation, there remains enough to keep smaller groups afloat. During
the 1997 parliament, for example, the taxpayer covered 60 per cent of the FN’s
budget, while Lutte Ouvrière received some 700,000 euros annually, or nearly a quar-
ter of its annual income, from the bourgeois state. It is reasonably clear, moreover,
that CPNT chose to fight parliamentary elections in 2002 precisely in order to regain
the regular financial underpinning that it had lost when the courts stopped it from
using the product of hunting licences. Other so-called parties, such as the ‘Nouveaux
Écologistes du Rassemblement Nature et Animaux’, which received 97 per cent of its
income (about 23,000 euros annually) from the public purse, were almost certainly
founded with the sole purpose of siphoning off a share of the largesse. Public finance
is the single most important cause of the proliferation of parliamentary candidacies
since the 1980s.
Finally, while early Fifth Republic France employed two-ballot majority electoral
systems at all levels, national and local, this has been diluted since 1979 by proportional
representation. European elections were first held in France on a national list system
with proportional representation in 1979. A somewhat more ‘majoritarian’ variety
of proportional representation, using each of France’s ninety-six départements as a
multimember constituency, was introduced both for parliamentary elections and for the
new regional elections in 1986. While the parliamentary electoral law was switched back
to the two-ballot majority system for 1988, proportional representation – incorporating
a majority element since 2004 – is still used for regional elections. A dose of pro-
portional representation, finally, is also present in the list system used for municipal
elections since 1983. Alain Lancelot has written of the ‘irruption of a proportionalist
logic’ from 1979, which ‘encouraged centrifugal tendencies and led to the return of
division and instability’. This assigns too strong an influence to what is only one part of
the overall institutional framework. More subtle is Jean-Luc Parodi’s use of an impec-
cably French image, the ‘electoral accordion’, to describe the contrast between the
majority system used for the most important elections – presidential and parliamentary
– and the proportional representation used for elections regarded by the French as
secondary – European and regional: a dispersed, multipolar distribution of votes at
elections held on proportional representation (when the ‘accordion’ is open), versus a
more disciplined, bipolar pattern at those held on majority systems (when it is closed).
Parodi goes on to argue, though, that the habit of dispersal gained at European and
regional elections may stick, so that the accordion becomes more difficult to close,
encouraging long-term fragmentation in the system. There is no more striking illustra-
tion of this than the first round of the 2002 presidential election, when the proliferation
of candidacies and the dispersal of votes resembled a European election more than a
presidential contest.
Social developments, new issues and voting behaviour

If the institutional dynamics of the Fifth Republic point both towards bipolarisation
and (especially since the partial introduction of proportional representation) towards
dispersal, the same is true of developments within the electorate (cf. Appendices 3–5).
On the bipolar side of the balance, three points are worth highlighting. First,
the division of politics into Left and Right is not an artificial creation of the Fifth
Republic’s institutions. On the contrary, they are notions with which the French are
fairly comfortable: polls showed 73 per cent of respondents in 1981, and 69 per cent in
1996, willing to place themselves in one or the other category. Second, when invited to
make a second-ballot choice between a left-wing and a right-wing candidate, the great
majority of voters transfer their support to a party or candidate in a manner consistent
with their first choice. Thus even when relations between Communists and Socialists
were at their most strained, at the March 1978 parliamentary elections, two-thirds of
Socialist voters supported a Communist at the run-off in those constituencies where
a Communist was the leading left-wing candidate. In the 1981 presidential elections,
95 per cent of Communists voted for Mitterrand at the run-off, despite their party’s
incessant campaign against him since 1977 – a remarkable indication of the dynamic
created within the electorate by the union of the Left. Just as striking in 1981 was the
support for Giscard of an estimated 71.5 per cent of first-ballot Chirac voters, despite
the Gaullist party’s evident dislike of the sitting president. Moreover, polls taken after
presidential elections show how support for the principal new entrants has fallen, albeit
imperfectly, into the Left–Right framework. Of the ecology candidates, an estimated
68 per cent of Antoine Waechter’s voters supported Mitterrand at the second ballot in
1988, and 75 per cent of Voynet’s supporters preferred Jospin in 1995. Even sym-
pathisers of that most problematic of new entrants, the FN, fitted in to some degree. An
estimated 65 per cent of Le Pen’s voters in 1988, and 51 per cent in 1995, supported
Chirac at the run-off; even the lower figure was roughly twice as great as the level of
support for Jospin, given that a quarter of Le Pen’s voters also preferred abstention; in
June 2002, 48 per cent of FN voters went on to support candidates of the mainstream
Right, against 43 per cent who abstained – and only 9 per cent who switched to the Left.
The much-noted phenomenon of gaucho-lepénisme should not, therefore, obscure the
fact that most supporters of the far Right who voted were ready to support the main-
stream Right as a second choice. At the other extreme, 60 per cent of far left-wing
voters at the first ballot in June 2002 backed left-wing candidates at the run-off, com-
pared with 33 per cent who abstained and 7 per cent who supported the Right. Among
all other groups of first-ballot voters, at least 85 per cent made second-ballot choices
consistent with their vote at the first round.
Third, for much of the Fifth Republic, there has been a certain consistency in the
sociological bases of left-wing and right-wing support. Giscard in 1974, for example,
enjoyed the backing of a disproportionately large number of women, the elderly, the
wealthy, the well-educated and the religious, as well as of upper-managerial, profes-
sional and commercial groups and farmers. Chirac in 1995 also did particularly well
among the over-65s and the retired, among top income groups and practising Catho-
lics, among heads of firms and the self-employed, and among the ever-dwindling
ranks of French farmers. Similarly, Mitterrand scored heavily in 1981 among manual
workers (winning 72 per cent of their votes), lower managerial groups and white-
collar workers; in 1988 he drew his support disproportionately from the unemployed
(a group that the polls had only recently begun to notice), the working class, public-
sector workers, the young (especially those between 25 and 34 years old) and the
irreligious. These social bases of voting are paralleled by geographical ones. The two
maps of right-wing voting, spread across twenty-one years – Map 9.1 representing
second-round support for Giscard in 1974, and Map 9.2 showing second-round votes
for Chirac in 1995 – show very broadly consistent areas of strength and weakness for
the Right and Left. The Right is especially strong in Brittany and the ‘inner west’
belt of départements running from Manche in the north to Vendée in the south, in
Alsace, in the south-eastern Massif Central, and in the Basque country in the far
south-west; the Left has done best in the north and in central and southern France
(except for the Basque country). Expressed numerically, comparisons between second
ballots show high levels of correlation from one election to another: 0.97 (out of a
possible maximum of 1) between 1974 and 1981, for example, or 0.96 between 1988
and 1995.
It has also been suggested that the bipolar patterns of voting behaviour observable
during much of the Fifth Republic were assisted by the transformations of French
society since the Fourth Republic, which tended to the simplification of political divi-
sions. The decline of the farming population and of religious practice were two such
major developments in the course of the post-war generation. Hopeful left-wing obser-
vers took these developments, among others, to augur a ‘sociological majority’ for
the Left, and to celebrate its political expression with the Left’s victory in 1981. This
was largely wishful thinking (as contemplation of Mrs Thatcher’s 1979 victory in
irreligious, urbanised Britain might have suggested). Another change was the spread of
television from the 1960s, said to ‘nationalise’ the stakes of politics, taking it out of
the hands of local notables and placing it in the hands of national parties. While the
reality of these developments is unquestionable, their political impact in terms of bipo-
larisation is less clear. It is more certain, on the other hand, that several of the most
politically divisive issues of the Fourth Republic either disappeared or lost a part of
their importance. Decolonisation, the question that killed the Fourth Republic, was
itself laid to rest after 1962. The problem of the régime, which had periodically exer-
cised the French since 1789, was sufficiently settled by the referenda of 1958 and 1962
for all the major parties to agree to work peacefully within the Constitution of the Fifth
Republic, however critical they might be of certain of its aspects. The partial thaw in
the Cold War in the 1960s rendered the East–West conflict in French politics less acute –
a necessary, though not a sufficient, condition for the rapprochement between Com-
munists and Socialists. All these issues, it should be noted, had created divisions within
Map 9.1 Presidential elections, 1974: Giscard d’Estaing, percentage of votes cast at second ballot
(overall result in metropolitan France: 50.67%).
the Right, the Left, or both. Their removal therefore had the potential to clear away
some of the obstacles to a straight confrontation between Left and Right – at least if
the politicians, who had been so ready to accentuate and dramatise political divisions
under the Fourth Republic (see Chapter 1), allowed them to.
An equally strong case, however, can be made for the Left–Right cleavage among
voters being undermined, especially since the 1980s, by developments within the elect-
orate. Paradoxically, although voters may still be willing to position themselves as
left-wing or right-wing, most have come to consider the distinction to be out of date.
Only 33 per cent of poll respondents had taken this view in 1981, against 43 per cent
who believed that Left and Right were still valid categories; by 1988 the figures were
48 per cent and 44 per cent respectively; in 1996, 62 per cent considered the distinction
was out of date, against 32 per cent who thought it still useful – and 70 per cent agreed
with the proposition that ‘whether it’s the Right or the Left in government, you always
get the same thing’. The transfer of first-ballot to second-ballot votes, though broadly
consistent with the Left–Right cleavage, is less so than in the 1970s, thanks largely to
the impact of the FN. That can be illustrated, at the simplest level, in the variations of
right-wing votes between first and second ballots. In the 1981 presidential election, the
Right’s total first-ballot vote was 49.3 per cent; Giscard’s total at the run-off was 48.2, a
drop of 1.1 per cent. Seven years later, Chirac, with 46 per cent at the run-off, dropped
4.9 per cent against the Right’s first-ballot vote; in 1995, his share of the second-round
vote, at 52.6 per cent, was 6.6 per cent lower than the Right’s first-round potential.
Survey results since the 1990s have also showed a blurring in the social bases of left-
wing and right-wing support. The religious variable, it is true, still operated; Chirac’s
Map 9.2 Presidential elections, 1995: Chirac, percentage of votes cast at second ballot (overall
result in metropolitan France: 52.69%).
and Jospin’s votes at the second ballot in 1995 varied in direct proportion to the
frequency of religious practice. But because there are fewer practising Catholics (rather
fewer than 10 per cent of the adult population, against 40 per cent in 1945), religion
counts for less in the overall shaping of voting behaviour. And in almost every other
respect, old voting patterns had faded or even disappeared by the turn of the millen-
nium. The tendency of women, who only won the right to vote in 1944, to support
the Right had been considered as an immutable fact of electoral behaviour during the
post-war generation; Mitterrand would have become president in 1965 with an all-male
electorate. Yet this gender gap disappeared in the 1980s; in both 1988 and 1995, con-
tenders at the second ballots of presidential elections won almost identical levels of
support from men and women. Another gender gap had appeared in the meantime:
among far Right voters, men outnumber women in a ratio of about six to four.
The most striking changes, however, have concerned the pattern of class voting. Blue-
collar workers, among whom Mitterrand had exceeded his average vote by 20 per cent
in 1981, were much less solidly behind Jospin in 1995, when the gap was only 10 per cent
(with public-sector workers showing stronger left-wing support than those in the
private sector). At the first round in 2002, a mere 13 per cent of blue-collar workers
voted for Jospin. This was below Jospin’s overall vote (16.2 per cent), below his level of
support among professional and executive groups, no better than Chirac’s share of the
blue-collar vote, and barely half of Le Pen’s 24 per cent share in this group. Even at the
June 2002 parliamentary elections, when many electors reverted to bipolar patterns of
voting, 47 per cent of the blue-collar vote went to the Left (including the extreme
groups), compared with the moderate Right’s 32 per cent and the far Right’s 16 per
cent (as well as 4 per cent for CPNT); the split among professionals and managers was
48 per cent for the Left, 42 per cent for the moderate Right and 9 per cent for the FN
and MNR. The difference between the two groups, in other words, lay less in the overall
shares of Left and Right than in the distribution of votes between moderate and
extreme Right. Among routine white-collar workers in June 2002, the Right as a whole
had a clear predominance: only 39 per cent voted for the left-wing parties, compared
with 38 per cent for the moderate Right and 20 per cent for the FN and the MNR. This
process of class dealignment does not mean that different social classes have begun to
vote in more or less the same way. Blue-collar workers, for example, are more likely than
other groups to abstain altogether, and to vote for the FN. Within broad class categor-
ies, there are also important differences: the left-wing vote has held up better among
blue-collar workers in the public than in the private sector, in large plants more than in
small firms, and in manufacturing more than in, say, the building trade. Nevertheless, a
rather clear tendency has emerged since the late 1980s: the Left can no longer count on
the allegiance of the blue-collar and white-collar working class as it broadly could over
the four post-war decades, but has won partial compensation in increased support
among professionals and managers, at the expense of the moderate Right. The result of
the 2005 referendum (Appendix 5) was a revelation in this respect. With 81 per cent of
blue-collar workers and 60 per cent of white-collar workers voting no, but 62 per cent
of professional and managerial groups voting yes, the class cleavage could be said to
correspond better to the divide over Europe – although it cuts across the Left–Right
division between existing parties – than to the Left–Right division itself.
Similarly, the geography of left-wing and right-wing support, though still recognisable,
has altered. Already from the 1970s the Left had been making inroads into the Catholic
west and east, as well as the traditionally conservative regions of Burgundy, Lower
Normandy and the Franche-Comté; this was evident in Mitterrand’s results in 1981
and, even more, in 1988. On the other hand, Mitterrand lost support after 1981 in
traditionally left-wing south-eastern départements. This development, even more pro-
nounced in 1995 than in 1988, represents the largest single divergence from the classic
Left–Right distribution observed in Map 9.1 which shows Giscard’s 1974 vote. The
statistical comparisons tell a similar story. Pierre Martin has shown how geographical
correlations between left-wing support in one presidential election and the next are
unusually low for the 1981–88 pair: 0.76, compared with 0.97 between 1974 and 1981,
for example, and 0.96 between 1988 and 1995. He cites this as evidence that a realign-
ment in French party politics, driven by the collapse of the PCF and the rise of the FN,
took place during Mitterrand’s first septennat. That explains some, though not all, of
the phenomena noted above: the drop in the Left’s share of the working-class vote, for
example, or the Right’s gains in the south-east, where the PCF had been strong, and the
FN became so.
In short, what had seemed, in the 1970s, as a pattern of support for Left and Right
that was fixed in terms both of voters’ opinions and of their electoral behaviour
came to appear much less settled. A growing number of voters, moreover, opted out
of the electoral process by abstaining or spoiling their ballots. At the six parliamentary
elections between 1958 and 1978, the proportion of abstentions and spoilt ballots only
once exceeded 30 per cent – in 1962, a year when voters had already gone to the polls at
two referenda. At the six parliamentary elections between 1981 and 2002, on the other
hand, the proportion of abstentions and spoilt ballots only once fell below 30 per cent
(see Table 7.2); and that was in 1986. Although presidential elections offer a less striking
example, the proportion of abstentions and spoilt ballots at the second round in 1995,
at 25.1 per cent, was a record, aside from the exceptional case of 1969, when the absence
of a left-wing candidate at the run-off demobilised many voters. And the presidential
first ballot of 21 April 2002 saw abstentions plus spoilt ballots exceed 30 per cent for the
first time. Figures for municipal elections were comparable, while turnout at European
elections fell below 50 per cent for the first time in 1999, and dropped below 43 per cent
in 2004. Voting at the September 2000 referendum on the five-year presidential term
reached a record low of just 30.3 per cent.
Yet the willingness of the French to place their trust in the ballot box, however
diminished, might be considered high in the light of the growing disenchantment with
politics and politicians that they manifested in the 1980s and 1990s. Surveys revealed
that 64 per cent of respondents in 2000 believed that politicians were ‘generally corrupt’
(the figure had been 38 per cent in 1977); that 70 per cent considered that they person-
ally were ‘not well represented’ by a party or a political leader in 2000, compared with
half ten years earlier; that 81 per cent of respondents in 1997 (against 42 per cent in
1977) believed that politicians were ‘not concerned with what ordinary people thought’.
In a succession of polls since 1990, respondents asked to say which ideas they associate
with politics have cited ‘mistrust’ twice as often as ‘hope’ (‘boredom’ and ‘disgust’ are
also favoured choices). In this light, turnout at the referendum of 2005 – at 69.3 per
cent, the highest level at any referendum since 1969 – could be viewed as the exception
that proved the rule: the exceptional opportunity to give a resounding no to the consti-
tutional treaty, and through it to the full range of mainstream politicians, mobilised
unusual numbers of voters.
Two distinct though related phenomena, then, could be said to have weakened bipo-
larisation among voters since the 1980s: a generalised pessimism about politics, and a
weakening of Left–Right loyalties. Social developments can be plentifully cited to
explain both. The continuing decline of religious practice and the falling number of
blue-collar workers (but above all, the falling numbers of blue-collar workers employed
in big, unionised plants and identifying themselves as workers) helped to weaken
the two classic variables of religion and class in the determination of the vote. Both
pessimism and the desertion of old Left–Right loyalties were also furthered by mass
unemployment. With a brief pause in the late 1980s, joblessness rose relentlessly from
its 1981 rate of 7 per cent to 12.5 per cent in 1996; among under-25s, it was twice this
level. The fear of unemployment, according to poll data, affected 35 per cent of the
French in 1982, but 54 per cent in 1992. Even when the jobless total dipped between
1997 and 2001, voters gave politicians little credit for it; its renewed rise thereafter (it
topped 10 per cent in March 2005, for the first time in five years) produced renewed
levels of pessimism among voters. This perception of the failure of successive govern-
ments to deal with a problem that affected, directly or indirectly, as a reality or as a fear,
the majority of French households, was the single most important reason for the defeat
of successive incumbents since 1981 noted above. It also contributed powerfully to
the disenchantment with politics, especially when coupled with other developments
damaging to the image of parties and politicians, such as the corruption revelations of
the 1990s (themselves renewed, early in 2005, by a big trial on corrupt tendering for the
renovation of lycées in the Paris region and by a minor property scandal that forced
the resignation of Finance Minister Gaymard).
At the same time the political debate between Right and Left was disturbed by three
new bundles of issues. The first of these was race and immigration, used briefly by the
Communists shortly before the 1981 presidential campaign and again by the main-
stream Right in some cities during the campaign for the 1983 municipal elections. From
1983 the race issue both fed and was fed by the rise of the FN; it was also linked by
the FN to the malaise of France’s 1960s high-rise estates, where the deterioration of the
built environment coincided with rising levels of crime (which rose by some 60 per cent
between 1981 and 1993) and unemployment. These were former Communist heartlands
in what had until recently been the ‘red belt’ suburbs of Paris and other cities; the
neighbourhoods bordering the estates now gave the FN some of its best results.
Researchers such as Nonna Mayer have shown how the 1980s and 1990s saw the emer-
gence of a distinct electorate whose political choices were shaped by ‘ethnocentrism’, a
combination of racist, nationalist and authoritarian views. The constitution of this
electorate is the strongest reason for scepticism about any possible disappearance of the
far Right from French politics, despite the tensions within the FN linked to the issue of
the succession to its leader.
The second group of issues related to what the American observer Ronald Inglehart
called the ‘Silent Revolution’, the rise of ‘post-materialist’ values among the more
educated citizens of the baby-boom generation which came of age just before or shortly
after May 1968. Such values included sexual tolerance, anti-racism, civil rights and the
defence of the environment. They not only provided a base – more modest in France
than in other European countries such as West Germany – for the rise of ecology
groupings; they also divided both Left and Right, to some degree, between liberals and
conservatives on societal questions.
Third, European integration emerged as a divisive issue as early as the enlargement
referendum of 1972. This reproduced, among voters, the division observed within the
National Assembly during the ratification votes on treaties during the Fourth Republic:
not Left versus Right, but the Centre against the extremes on both sides. Twenty years
later, the referendum of 1992 on the Maastricht Treaty saw how voters in one of
Western Europe’s two great old nation states began to doubt the wisdom of new
transfers of sovereignty. The supporters of every major party, especially the Gaullists,
split into pro- and anti-Maastricht camps. The 1992 referendum also served as a
catalyst for the alienation, noted above, of much of the blue- and white-collar working
class from the Left, and especially from the Socialists, who were strong supporters of
the treaty their president had negotiated. The referendum of 2005 on the European
constitutional treaty showed the potential of European questions to rekindle the
same divisions, giving a neat, if left-skewed, extremes-versus-Centre pattern of voting
(Appendix 5) and incidentally tearing the PS apart. It should be added that these three
bundles of new issues had plenty of space to develop. The economic differences between
Right and Left, which had turned in the 1970s on the very ownership of the heart of
France’s economy, had narrowed dramatically after the Left’s forced reconciliation
with capitalism from 1983: in the early twenty-first century a right-wing president
(Chirac) could insist on the need to preserve the French model of social protection,
while a left-wing finance minister (Fabius) could demand tax cuts.
From the late 1980s, the impact on the electorate of these changes in the political
debate led commentators such as Philippe Habert to discern the emergence of a ‘new
voter’, cut loose from old loyalties and inclined to behave as a consumer, voting on
particular issues and switching between parties from one election to the next. Other
observers were more inclined to stress the growing number of alienated voters, often
with a minimal interest in politics but an increasing inclination to protest voting or
abstention. Three figures illustrate the growing gulf between the voters and political
representation in France. First, on 21 April 2002, the total ‘protest’ vote (for presiden-
tial candidates of far Left, far Right and CPNT), when added to the total number of
abstentions and spoilt ballots, reached 54.3 per cent of the total electorate. Second, the
‘protest’ parties, whose candidates had attracted a third of votes cast on 21 April, won
not a single seat in the National Assembly the following June. Third, while nearly 90 per
cent of France’s Deputies and Senators voted in favour of changes to the French
constitution occasioned by the European constitutional treaty in February 2005, 55 per
cent of France’s voters rejected the treaty itself three months later. Perhaps unsurpris-
ingly, the correlation between the protest vote in April 2002 and the no vote three years
later was rather high, at 0.725.
Personal and party strategies

Candidates and parties, finally, have adopted a variety of political strategies which have
reinforced both bipolarisation and multipartism at different times.
Presidential candidates have responded to the obvious incentives contained in the
electoral system to build coalitions of Right and Left. This is most obviously true of
second ballots. De Gaulle, it is true, appears genuinely to have considered that he could
win, and win well, in 1965 with neither any semblance of a campaign nor active party
support; it was only with some reluctance, and after failing to win at the first round,
that he agreed to a series of three television interviews and accepted the open support
of the Gaullist and Giscardian parties that formed the parliamentary majority. None of
his successors, however, has had much hesitation about campaigning, or about accept-
ing party support. Pompidou, in the first of two elections where a left-winger failed to
reach the second ballot (he faced the centrist president of the Senate, Alain Poher, at the
run-off), negotiated hard to secure the backing of Jacques Duhamel’s group of cen-
trists, the future Centre Démocratie et Progrès, in addition to the support that Gaullists
and Giscardians had already guaranteed him. At the second ballot in 1974, Giscard
had the support of every significant party of the ‘non-Left’: his own Républicains
Indépendants, the Gaullists whose candidate he had roundly defeated at the first ballot
(after negotiating Chirac’s support), and the centrists of every stripe, the right-wing
Radicals and the right-wing Socialists who were to join the UDF in 1978. Mitterrand in
1981 was similarly endorsed by the whole Left: by his own Socialists, by the Commun-
ists, the Left Radicals and the Parti Socialiste Unifié, and even by the Trotskyist Arlette
Laguiller. He also made enough greenish gestures to pick up most of the voters
who had supported Brice Lalonde, the ecology candidate, at the first round. In 1988
he attracted the votes of nearly all of the first-round left-wing voters (bar a small
proportion of the extreme Left), a majority of Greens, and a minority of the centrist
supporters of Giscard’s second prime minister Raymond Barre (whose votes he had
deliberately courted) and of Le Pen’s voters (whose valuable support he had not openly
sought). Chirac, finally, attracted most of the mainstream right-wing supporters of
Balladur and de Villiers without any difficulty; just over half of Le Pen’s voters also
rallied to him (without any encouragement at all from Le Pen); and this, given the
continued unpopularity of the Left as a whole among voters, was sufficient.
Successive presidents have also deliberately polarised opinion prior to second ballots
(whether prior to their election, in parliamentary elections during their term of office,
or in re-election campaigns), implying a division over one basic issue that transcended
all other cleavages. De Gaulle presented every election, and all five of his referendums,
as a choice between him and his régime on the one hand and ‘chaos’ on the other.
Under Pompidou, the electors were asked to choose between ‘peaceful change’ and
‘revolutionary adventurism’ in no less Manichaean a fashion. Giscard confronted the
electorate with a choice between his pluralistic, liberal, democratic, socially just and
quietly reformist style of rule and the revolutionary, collectivist, bureaucratic, illiberal
and undemocratic régime he associated with the Left. François Mitterrand presented
the choice of 1981 as between social justice and the defence of the narrow, selfish
interests of a privileged class that had failed the country; in 1988 it was between the
consensual values of a united country and the sectarian designs of a partisan minority
– Chirac and the RPR. In some respects the 1995 election was an exception: the second-
round television debate between the two remaining candidates – a tradition since 1974 –
was a low-key affair, with no dramatic moments that crystallised the opposition
between the two men. Chirac’s main aim was to highlight the (numerous) failures of the
Socialist administrations between 1981 and 1993 and to convince the voters that social
justice – a stronger theme of his 1995 campaign than in 1988 – had been and would be
poorly served by a Socialist president. It remains to be seen if the elections of 2007 will
see a return to an earlier style; in 2002, at Chirac’s insistence, no debate took place
between the incumbent president and Le Pen.
Bipolarisation has also been furthered by parties at different junctures. During
the first thirteen years of the Fifth Republic, Socialists and Communists moved
from outright enmity (in 1958) to partial co-operation at the second ballots of parlia-
mentary elections (in 1962) to common support of Mitterrand as presidential candidate
(in 1965) to a national second-ballot withdrawal agreement (in 1967) and to the
Common Programme of government (in 1972). The Communists contributed sub-
stantially to this process, especially through their remarkable endorsement of Mitter-
rand from the first ballot in 1965 (and again in 1974). In the late 1970s, Mitterrand’s
tenacity in keeping the Socialists’ commitment to the strategy of left-wing unity, in
spite of their own misgivings and the open hostility shown by the Communists
from 1977, was crucial in maintaining the bipolar dynamic. After 1996, the creation
of the gauche plurielle, rebuilding the Socialist–Communist alliance and co-opting
Les Verts for the first time, represented a comparable strategy of building a credible
left-wing governing coalition. It should be added that the Left’s Common Programme
of 1972 set a precedent whereby, at most parliamentary elections, the main opposition
forces produced a joint programme of government with which to oppose the
incumbents, highlighting a bipolar majority–opposition divide. This was true,
for example, of the mainstream Right in both 1986 and 1993, while in 2002 the process
was carried a stage further with the merger of the RPR and most of the UDF into
the UMP.
The mainstream parties have also sought, if at times indirectly, to preserve bipolari-
sation through the strategies they have deployed to deal with new entrants. One such
strategy was to freeze them out. The moderate Right’s ban on alliances with the FN
after 1988 was crucially important in ensuring that FN Deputies did not return to the
National Assembly to upset the duopoly there of moderate Right and moderate Left;
it also contributed to long-term tensions within the FN that contributed to the split
of 1998. Changes to the electoral laws governing European and regional elections in
2003 were designed to reduce the ability of extreme parties to win seats. The opposite
strategy was to draw a new entrant into an alliance, as the Socialists did with Les Verts
from 1997 – after over a decade of practically ignoring them.
Other party strategies, however, have been much less calculated to further bipolarisa-
tion. First ballots of elections are often viewed by parties and candidates as an
opportunity to measure their strength, and possibly to acquire bargaining power in
relation to larger allies. This was certainly true of many of the candidates at the first
ballot of the 2002 presidential election, whose presence indirectly helped Le Pen to the
second ballot. First rounds may, indeed, generate a dynamic of destructive competition
capable of doing lasting damage to alliances or even to individual parties. The period of
the ‘bipolar quadrille’, in particular, faced each of the four major parties with the
choice between dominating its partner or facing junior status within the alliance and
possible marginalisation. For the leaders of the most threatened parties, Communists
and Gaullists, that stark alternative suggested that if the price of avoiding marginalisa-
tion was overall electoral defeat, it was a price worth paying. Hence the unacknow-
ledged, indeed covert phenomenon of ‘objective alliances’ across the Left–Right divide
that developed at the presidential elections of 1981. Although the Communist Marchais
endorsed Mitterrand for the run-off ballot, and the Gaullist Chirac reminded his voters
of the dangers that a Mitterrand victory would entail for France, neither did so with
any great conviction, and each tolerated, if they did not actively promote, activities
designed to favour the opposite candidate. The most trusted Communist Party mem-
bers were instructed to vote for Giscard, while a leading left-wing Gaullist was allowed
to mail every RPR member to call for a Mitterrand vote. Objective alliances did not end
with the 1981 result. President Mitterrand actively, though quietly, favoured the emer-
gence of the FN by encouraging television networks to give greater coverage to Le Pen
and his party from late 1983, and by using proportional representation for the 1986
parliamentary elections in order to embarrass the resurgent right-wing opposition.
It should be added, finally, that party strategies decided in Paris are not always
fully applied on the ground, as the defiance, in 1998, by four right-wing presidents of
regional councils of the Right’s ban on alliances with the FN illustrated. At national
level, established parties may see a new entrant as an enemy to be excluded and des-
troyed; at the grass roots, however, the weakness of established parties may lead their
local representatives to see the new entrant as a necessary ally to be courted. And vice
versa.
Concluding remarks
In each of these areas – institutions, developments among voters, and candidate
and party strategies – the party system of the Fifth Republic is underpinned by a
complex mixture of dynamics, some promoting coherence and bipolarity, others
furthering fragmentation. Bipolar multipartism is thus a finely balanced party system.
Since 1981, the balance has shifted from bipolarity towards multipartism. The intro-
duction of proportional representation at European and regional levels, the weakening
of older social cleavages of class and religion, the appearance of issues that cut across
the boundaries of Left and Right, the (usually unwitting) promotion of the FN by
mainstream politicians, all contributed to this. Many of the factors that contributed to
the upheavals of the 1980s and 1990s were lasting rather than contingent: proportional
representation at some elections, tensions over crime and race and divisions over
Europe. There are therefore no reasons to expect an early return to the almost fully
bipolarised configuration of the 1970s; the results of the 2002 presidential election and
of the 2005 referendum offer ample evidence of that.
Nevertheless, the bipolar dynamic remains rooted enough in France’s institutions to
give a continuing structure to the whole system. So far at least, only the parties of
moderate Left and Right that form the core of the two big coalitions – PS, UMP and,
with some difficulty, the non-Gaullist moderate Right – have been able seriously to
aspire to the presidency; the second round of the 2002 presidential election, when
Chirac, an unpopular president especially on the Left, nevertheless won over 82 per
cent of the vote against Le Pen, is a good illustration of that. The parties of government
have also, since 1981, controlled at least 90 per cent of all seats in both the National
Assembly and the Senate, as well as the great majority of France’s départements, towns
and cities. If the Communists and the Greens chose to join the gauche plurielle, and
if first Bruno Mégret and more recently Marine Le Pen have sought to make the
Front National an acceptable partner for the mainstream Right, it is because the Fifth
Republic has offered a simple choice: either participation in one of two coalitions
aimed at the conquest and exercise of state power, or political marginalisation or at
best confinement to regional councils and the Strasbourg parliament. Some party
leaders and activists will always prefer purity and marginalisation. Parties that prosper,
however, will also attract others with an ambition to join the bipolar mainstream.
The bipolar dynamics discussed above, though much assailed, are therefore unlikely to
disappear altogether from France’s political system.
The conditions thus remain for the continued uncertain balance of bipolar multipart-
ism. But beyond the question of the party system lies the broader issue of the relationship
between the French and party politics. Developments such as the rise of abstentionism
and of protest voting, the drop in party membership, or the deterioration in the public’s
opinion of politicians (which had never been high in the first place) have led observers
such as Janine Mossuz-Lavau to argue that France since the early 1990s has been experi-
encing a political ‘crisis of representation’ of a similar gravity to the economic crisis.
This argument should be set in a wider context, in three ways. First, the level of
political mobilisation should not be confused with the health or stability of a political
system. Party membership and activism were never stronger than in the Popular Front
era of the 1930s, or in the five years after the Liberation; but the political climate was
close to one of civil war. Secondly, France is far from unique in experiencing wide-
ranging popular disenchantment with politics. A succession of comparative studies
indicates that a comparable malaise has affected developed democracies from the
United States to Italy and from Sweden to Japan. Third, whatever the difficulties of the
French (and other nations) with political parties, they do not extend to a general
disenchantment with democratic values. Successive polls suggest a vigorous attach-
ment, especially among the young, to the basic rights and processes of democracy, in
France and elsewhere. In France, the 2005 referendum expressed not only the public’s
alienation from the mainstream political system but also a concern that the political
process was escaping democratic control and that the constitutional treaty would
accelerate this tendency. With all of these caveats, however, it remains the case, in the
most basic sense, that French parties, and governments, represent the French less well
than in the recent past: the French say, in polls, that they do not feel represented, and
fewer of them vote for parties that aspire seriously to government. These tendencies
have survived Jospin’s promise of a ‘rehabilitation of politics’ after 1997, and Raffarin’s
of his concern for La France d’en bas.
To the extent that political disenchantment is (even) more marked in France than in
other democracies, this may be ascribed to a variety of French exceptions: in particu-
lar, to the long-term weakness of French parties outlined in earlier chapters, or to the
collision between the unusually high expectations of politics that marked the first
alternance of 1981 and the measures that followed the economic U-turn of 1983. What
is certainly unique to France, however, is the institutional framework, outlined above,
into which the relationship of citizens to parties feeds. On one interpretation, the
framework provides both safety valves for protest parties (for example, the opportun-
ity to win seats at European or regional or municipal levels) and the near-certainty
that France will be governed by a clearly accountable majority with a clearly defined
and responsible opposition. On a less optimistic view, however, the institutional
framework in the context of wide-ranging disenchantment with parties has made
France unusually difficult to govern. Abstentions and votes for anti-system parties
mean that governments represent a declining proportion of the electorate, and thereby
find it harder to mobilise a consensus, or even a solid majority, behind difficult policy
decisions. As they lose popularity, the available scope for party fragmentation allows
ample room for outbidding. This is encouraged by the personalisation of politics at all
levels, from the presidency down. Personalisation offers plenty of scope for outbidding
within each coalition and even each party, and favours, even more than other political
systems, the presentation of politics as a contest for office between individuals rather
than a confrontation of programmes, contributing further to the alienation of voters
from the political process. The potential for fragmentation and outbidding further
limits the government’s freedom to manoeuvre and to reform, and it goes on to
lose the elections by disappointing its own supporters. The opposition wins office,
but more on the strength of a rejection of the opposite camp than on a positive
appreciation of its own merits, and a further cycle is opened, leading to further disap-
pointment, to a reinforced perception that there is nothing to choose between the
mainstream camps of Right and Left, and to renewed protest voting. From this point
of view, the result of 21 April 2002 was not an ‘accident’ resulting from the voters’
erroneous belief that they could afford to vote for minor candidates, because Jospin
and Chirac were certain to be present at the run-off of the presidential election; on the
contrary, it was a logical expression of the political system’s development, and could
readily recur.
Constitutionalists of a (usually) Gaullist bent have regularly warned, since 1969, of a
possible ‘return to the Fourth Republic’ – especially, but not exclusively, in times of
cohabitation, when a part of the executive power moves from the Élysée to Matignon.
This is perhaps to miss the point. The greater stability of the Fifth Republic has
rested as much on the emergence of stable parliamentary majorities, underpinned by
rejuvenated political parties, as it has on the new institutions. Stable majorities have not
disappeared (there is little suspense about the voting behaviour of individual Deputies
in the National Assembly), but part of their party underpinning has. Some familiar
traits of the Fourth Republic – the presence of anti-system parties, the habit of outbid-
ding – were visible in the Fifth in the early twenty-first century; but they appeared more
in the country than in the Chamber, and hampered policy-making rather than bringing
down governments. There is a sense in which this contemporary malaise is more
dangerous than that of half a century ago. It is less susceptible to institutional reform;
and the administration, often credited with holding France together through the Fourth
Republic, is now far less able to fulfil the same role.
Further reading
For studies on individual parties and on the party system, see Chapters 7 and 8.
Bon, F. and Cheylan, J.-P., La France qui vote, Paris, Hachette, 1988.
Boy, D. and Mayer, N. (eds), L’électeur français en questions, Paris, Presses de la Fondation
Boy, D. and Mayer, N. (eds), L’électeur a ses raisons, Paris, Presses de Sciences Po, 1997.
Bréchon, P., La France aux urnes: soixante ans d’histoire électorale, 4th edition, Paris, La
Documentation Française, 2004.
Broughton, D. and Donovan, M. (eds), Changing Party Systems in Western Europe, London,
Pinter, 1999.
Capdevielle, J., Dupoirier, E., Grunberg, G., Schweisguth, E. and Ysmal, C., France de gauche,
vote à droite, Paris, Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1981.
Cautrès, B. and Mayer, N. (eds), Le nouveau désordre électoral, Paris, Presses de Sciences Po,
2004.
Cole, A. and Campbell, P., French Electoral Systems and Elections since 1789, 3rd edition,
London, Pinter, 1988.
Dalton, R., Flanagan, S. and Beck, P. (eds), Electoral Change in Advanced Western Democracies:
Realignment or Dealignment?, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1984.
Faux, E., Legrand, T. and Perez, G., La main droite de Dieu: enquête sur François Mitterrand et
l’extrême droite, Paris, Seuil, 1994.
Gaffney, J. (ed.), Political Parties and the European Union, London, Routledge, 1996.
Gaffney, J. (ed.), The French Presidential and Legislative Elections of 2002, Aldershot, Ashgate,
2004.
Grunberg, G., Mayer, N. and Sniderman, P. (eds.), La démocratie à l’épreuve: une nouvelle
approche de l’opinion des Français, Paris, Presses de Sciences Po, 2002.
Habert, P., Perrineau, P. and Ysmal, C. (eds), Le vote éclaté: les élections régionales et cantonales
des 22 et 29 mars 1992, Paris, Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1992.
Habert, P., Perrineau, P. and Ysmal, C. (eds), Le vote sanction: les élections législatives des 21 et 28
mars 1993, Paris, Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1993.
Lancelot, A. (ed.), 1981, les élections de l’alternance, Paris, Presses de la Fondation Nationale des
Sciences Politiques, 1986.
Lancelot, A., Les élections sous la Cinquième République, 3rd edition, Paris, Presses Universitaires
de France, 1998.
Lewis-Beck, M. (ed.), How France Votes, New York, Chatham House, 2000.
Lewis-Beck, M. (ed.), The French Voter: Before and After the 2002 Elections, Basingstoke, Palgrave
Macmillan, 2003.
Leyrit, C., Les partis politiques: indispensables et contestés, Paris, Marabout, 1997.
Mair, P. and Smith, G. (eds), Understanding Party System Change in Western Europe, London,
Frank Cass, 1990.
Martin, P., Comprendre les évolutions électorales, Paris, Presses de Sciences Po, 2000.
Mayer, N. and Perrineau, P., Les comportements politiques, Paris, Armand Colin, 1992.
Michelat, G. and Simon, M., Classe, religion, et comportement politique, Paris, Presses de la
Michelat, G. and Simon, M., Les ouvriers et la politique: Permanence, ruptures, réalignements,
Paris, Presses de Sciences Po, 2004.
Mossuz-Lavau, J., Les Français et la politique, Paris, Odile Jacob, 1994.
Penniman, H. (ed.), France at the Polls: The Presidential Election of 1974, Washington, DC,
American Enterprise Institute, 1978.
Penniman, H. (ed.), The French National Assembly Elections of 1978, Washington, DC, American
Enterprise Institute, 1980.
Perrineau, P. (ed.), L’engagement politique: déclin ou mutation?, Paris, Presses de la Fondation
Perrineau, P. and Ysmal, C. (eds), Le vote de crise: l’élection présidentielle de 1995, Paris, Presses
Perrineau, P. and Ysmal, C. (eds), Le vote surprise: les élections législatives des 25 mai et 1er juin
1997, Paris, Presses de Sciences Po, 1998.
Perrineau, P. and Ysmal, C. (eds), Le vote de tous les refus: les élections présidentielle et législatives
de 2002, Paris, Presses de Sciences Po, 2003.
Pharr, S. and Putnam, R. (eds), Disaffected Democracies: What’s Troubling the Trilateral
Countries?, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2000.
Salmon, Frédéric, Atlas électoral de la France, 1848–2001, Paris, Seuil, 2001.
Sartori, G., Parties and Party Systems: A Framework for Analysis, Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, 1976.
Williams, P., Crisis and Compromise: Politics in the Fourth Republic, London, Longmans, 1964.
Websites of polling institutes

BVA http://www.bva.fr/new/index.asp
CSA http://www.tmo.fr
IFOP http://www.ifop.com/europe/index.asp
IPSOS http://www.ipsos.fr
SOFRES http://www.tns-sofres.com/archives_pol.htm
10 The administration
Foundations, myth and
changing reality
The foundations and myth of administrative power 282

The French state at high tide: the Fifth Republic to 1986 284
The administration transformed? 295
Further reading 310
The prime target of Jacques Chirac’s 1995 presidential campaign was what he called a
‘technostructure’, which had ‘confiscated power’ in France and ‘co-opted its members
onto the shifting frontiers of the civil service, ministerial cabinets, and major public and
private firms’. Behaving ‘like a fashionable club, out of touch with reality’, it paralysed
France with a ‘single mindset’ (la pensée unique) favouring orthodoxy over creativity,
safety over enterprise, budgetary balances over jobs. This was both a barely veiled
attack on his arch-rival Édouard Balladur and an echo of his own political mentor
Georges Pompidou, who a generation earlier had added his voice to a chorus of protest
against the ‘arrogant and inhuman dictatorship’ of the administration.
On the face of it, Chirac seemed to be tapping into widely felt resentments. A
SOFRES survey in September 1999, for example, found that only 20 per cent of
respondents considered that the state ‘acted in the general interest’; just 8 per cent
considered the state ‘effective’; 12 per cent thought it ‘just’. The share of GDP spent by
the state in France (including the social security system and local authorities) averaged
53.3 per cent from 1987 to 2003. The figure for 2003 (54.5 per cent) was financed by
borrowing (4.1 per cent of GDP), non-tax receipts (4.4 per cent), but above all by taxes
(46 per cent of GDP, up from 35 per cent in 1970). Within the EU15, such figures are
only exceeded in Belgium, Austria and Scandinavia; even such relatively high-spending
countries as Germany, Italy or the Netherlands are some 2–3 points below the French
level; the UK is lower by 7–8 points. And over 40 per cent of public spending is
accounted for by the wages and salaries of France’s public servants. Their number
amounted to some 6 million in 2003, or a nearly a quarter of all employment in France
(compared with 14 per cent in the UK): 2.5 million for central government (up from
1.75 million in 1975), 1.4 million for local and regional authorities, 860,000 for France’s
public hospitals and other health services, and a further 1.2 million in quasi-public
services with public-employee status such as energy (Électricité de France–Gaz de
France), rail (SNCF) or telecoms. It has been estimated that 57 per cent of the French
either work for the state, broadly construed, or are the spouse, child, or parent of
someone who does.
Not only do France’s civil servants (aside from a significant minority on short-term
contracts) enjoy near-total job security, much envied at a time of high unemployment;
at the very highest levels they have also enjoyed a unique range of opportunities to
colonise the worlds of both business and politics (Chirac himself being a prime
example of the latter). Yet there is no consensus for ‘rolling back the state’. The same
September 1999 poll found clear majorities of respondents claiming that the state ‘did
not intervene enough’ in a wide variety of sectors, including the economy (53 per cent),
employment (80 per cent), education (65 per cent) and agriculture (55 per cent). Surveys
in 1995 showed that a general view (73 per cent) of ‘the state’ as remote did not prevent
a positive appreciation (63 per cent) of the notion of ‘public services’ in general, or
clear majority satisfaction with the performance of key services such as health and
education, the post or the rail network. Agreement or dissent with the view that ‘the
number of civil servants should be reduced’ was one of the clearest separators of left-
wing and right-wing voters in April 2002, but a substantial minority (roughly 40 per
cent) of right-wing supporters still disagreed with the proposition. When Chirac’s first
finance minister, the free-market-minded Alain Madelin, dared to suggest that there
was ‘surplus fat’ to be cut away from France’s administration and public services, he
was soon sacked; his presidential bid in 2002, built on a neo-liberal platform, was
rewarded with 1.1 million votes – under 4 per cent. There is a striking contrast between
public reactions to Britain’s public-sector strikes of early 1979, which helped ensure
both Margaret Thatcher’s election victory of May that year and widespread support
for her subsequent attacks on trade unions and on the public sector generally, and the
French experience of late 1995, when striking public-sector workers retained the sym-
pathy of a majority of the population. If there is a consensus about the French state, it
is neither favourable nor hostile, but schizophrenic.
These ambiguous relations of the French with their state, their administration and
their public services have been shaped by two main elements. The first has been the
persistent tension between the state’s mythical status as the impartial embodiment
of the nation through successive régimes, as the guarantor of the equality dear to
republican values, and, more recently, as an agent of national regeneration during
the trente glorieuses (issues discussed in Chapter 1), and the messy reality, daily
encountered, of an unwieldy bureaucracy that appears neither impartial nor particu-
larly rational. Secondly, the challenges posed to the French model both from without
(Europeanisation and globalisation) and from within (budgetary constraints) have
raised the stakes, prompting attempts to safeguard the ‘French exception’ at all costs, or
to reform and adapt, or to accelerate liberalisation. It should be added, finally, that ‘the
administration’ in France, even more than elsewhere, consists of two radically different
universes: on the one hand, the vast majority of lower-level public employees, rule-
bound, geographically and professionally rather immobile, and often provincial; on the
other, the small policy-making and policy-influencing minority of perhaps 8,000
women and (mostly) men at the peak of the civil service, largely Parisian (but with
increasingly European and international horizons), enjoying considerable freedom to
move between the administration proper, ministerial cabinets, business and politics.
The foundations and myth of administrative power

The French administration has its roots in the institutions of the pre-1789 ancien
régime. But it was systematised by Napoleon I, as Consul (1799–1804) and Emperor
The administration 283
(1804–14). The Napoleonic administration was intended as the embodiment of state
power and of the general interest in a divided nation: disinterested, dispassionate,
distant and depoliticised. Its top officials were France’s best and brightest, attracted by
generous pay, splendid residences, grand titles and elaborate uniforms. Technicians
among them were trained in one of the specialised schools created under the ancien
régime (the École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées) or the Revolution (the École
Polytechnique). Generalists received training within the grands corps de l’État: the pre-
fectoral corps, the Cour des Comptes (Court of Accounts), the Conseil d’État (Council
of state); all of them Napoleonic creations, but with roots in the ancien régime. The
Napoleonic administration was hierarchical and highly centralised, both within each
Parisian ministry and territorially: the prefects, the senior representatives of the state in
each of France’s ninety départements, were powerful in their localities but movable by,
and subject to orders from, the interior minister in Paris. It was uniform, with a single
organisational model for all public services and identical powers for each subnational
authority, whatever its size. It was, finally, subject to stringent internal regulation,
through a fierce disciplinary code, legal verifications from the Conseil d’État and audits
by the Cour des Comptes; but immune from all other controls (in particular from the
judiciary).
In principle, then, the Napoleonic model resembled a classic Weberian bureaucracy:
hierarchical, impartial, rational, predictable, self-contained. It proved highly influential,
not only in France but also in those European countries over which Napoleon cast his
imperial shadow. But the practice never matched the model. To begin with, the adminis-
tration was never separated from politics. From the start, it had to play at least two
highly political roles: repressing the enemies of successive régimes (a role undertaken,
with admittedly limited success, by the Justice, Defence and Interior ministries) and
integrating outlying, and not very French, provinces such as Brittany, Savoy and
Corsica. The most senior civil servants were always vulnerable to political replacement.
In the nineteenth-century merry-go-round of French régimes, successive rulers sought
politically reliable servants at the top: no fervent Catholics, for example, for the
resolutely secular early Third Republic. Indeed, under the Third Republic political
replacements in the most sensitive posts began to occur with each major change of
government – though at the same time pressures within the civil service led to a spread
of impersonal recruitment procedures in the other ranks. Moreover, civil servants
themselves, especially under the Restoration and the Orleanist monarchies (1814–48),
openly sought and won political office as parliamentarians; only in the Third Republic
were rules of incompatibility introduced. This simultaneous politicisation of the civil
service and bureaucratisation of politics belong to a French tradition with a long
pedigree, though of variable intensity.
Uniformity was no more respected than political neutrality. Tocqueville’s famous
dictum that ‘the rule is rigid, the practice flexible’ summed up the behaviour of count-
less French officials bending rules to the diversity of local situations. Moreover, the
growth of ‘big government’ – the extension of state and local authority activities to
new fields such as education, labour legislation or the first urban utilities, and then the
vast expansion, following the two world wars, into economic intervention, social wel-
fare and the direct ownership and management of financial and industrial activities –
strained the Napoleonic ideal further, in three ways. First, the unity of purpose inherent
in the Napoleonic model became ever more impossible to achieve, as the bureaucracy
expanded into a huge Balkan empire, its squabbling components each intent on
establishing its own internal rules, grades, career structures, relations with client groups
in society, and legitimacy, at the expense both of competitors within the administration
and of any central direction. The development of co-ordinating structures merely dis-
placed the problems and eroded the pyramidal organisation on which the model was
based. Second, the civil servants began to act as an interest group within the state,
unionising and winning an overarching statute in 1946. Third, the clear, sharp divide
between the public and the private sectors became blurred as administrations (such as
the Agriculture Ministry) developed symbiotic relationships with client groups, as spe-
cific activities (such as transport or water distribution) were conceded to the private
sector, as ‘mixed’ public–private companies were created, as joint ventures were con-
cocted between publicly owned and private firms, and as senior civil servants discovered
the joys of pantouflage, temporary or permanent departures from the administration to
manage nationalised or even private businesses.
The French post-war administration was thus both less and more than the Napoleonic
model. It had lost – indeed, had never fully possessed – the clarity of structure and
unity of purpose envisaged under the First Empire. But it had gained enormously
in substance. In addition to its traditional missions as defender of the nation’s boundar-
ies, dispenser of justice and guarantor of public order, it had become a manager
and moderniser of the economy, an owner of banks, utilities and industries, a guaran-
tor of its social welfare. In little more than a century, the number of state employees
(including teachers, who have civil service status in France, but not local government
officials, hospital staff or employees of nationalised industries) had more than dec-
upled, from 140,000 in 1839 to 1,500,000 in 1950. Moreover, the administration had, if
anything, gained in legitimacy. In part this was for reasons common to most Western
democracies, where the extension of the state was widely accepted by the post-war
generation and brought a measure of economic citizenship to previously marginalised
groups. In part, too, it was for reasons specific to France. Economic intervention,
including large-scale nationalisations, appeared to work, bringing – or coinciding
with – unprecedented growth. And the contrast between the unstable governments
of the Fourth Republic and the permanent and predictable activities of the admin-
istration appeared to confirm the latter’s role as guardian of the national interest
beyond political contingencies. This legitimacy was to reach its peak in the early
years of the Fifth Republic, a regime initially dedicated to reinforcing the role of the
administration.
The French state at high tide: the Fifth Republic to 1986

La République des fonctionnaires – the ‘civil servants’ Republic’ – was a term assigned,
with no great benevolence, to the Fifth Republic almost from its creation. On some
criteria it suited France better in 2005 than at any previous moment: never had the
state’s share of national income or the number of state employees been higher. But by
that time the state had already been selling off its enterprises and shedding its powers to
control the economy for some twenty years. Different aspects of the so-called République
des fonctionnaires, therefore, have applied more or less well at different times. In
most respects, the high tide came in the first generation of the Fifth Republic. The
administration was ubiquitous, widely believed in and powerful – but within limits
resulting both from the politicians’ resolve to keep it under control and from its own
internal weaknesses.
The bases of administrative power
Three main arguments supported the view that Fifth Republic France had become an
‘administrative state’: the powerful economic role played by the state; the backing given
by the régime’s founders to the extension of the administration’s activities; and the
capacity of civil servants to colonise powerful positions well outside the administration
sensu stricto.
The state’s economic role

The economic role of the state is encapsulated in the term dirigisme, which has been
discussed in some detail in Chapter 1. It rested on seven foundations: ownership of
firms, credit control, price controls, planning, loans and research grants, state purchas-
ing policy and sectoral investment policies. In the first place, France had one of the
biggest public sectors in the Western world after the nationalisations of 1981–82, and
the one that was most directed to industrial activities of a purely competitive nature.
Governments regularly used nationalised firms to pursue their own objectives, whether
to ward off recession through increased investments, as in 1974, or to limit regional
unemployment by keeping particular industries (such as steelworks or mines) running.
Second, with an ownership of the banking and insurance sectors that was predomin-
ant by 1946 and almost total by 1982, it was relatively easy for governments to practise
encadrement du crédit – the direct control of the money supply through limits on
increases in loan volume. Third, price controls, which de Gaulle installed by decree
during the wartime penury of late 1944, were still in force four decades later, only
partially and temporarily reduced under the Barre governments of 1976–81 (though
ineffective as a control on inflation, they still demanded much time and paperwork
from firms seeking price adjustments). Fourth, ‘indicative’ planning, instituted under
the leadership of Jean Monnet (head of the new Commissariat au Plan from 1946
until 1952, when he left to run the European Coal and Steel Community), was widely
credited, inside and outside France, with post-war economic success. It worked best in
the early years, when the Commissariat was a small group of youngish, talented civil
servants, and there was basic reconstruction work to be undertaken, with the help of
Marshall aid, in a context of post-war shortages. By the 1960s, though de Gaulle
referred to the Plan as an ‘ardent obligation’, it was past its peak: the Commissariat,
now somewhat bureaucratised, was unable, in a more complex context of growth,
to make reliable forecasts of economic trends, still less of political events such as
the Algerian war which had serious budgetary and economic consequences. Fifth,
loans and investment or research grants were made available to private industry
through public bodies such as the Crédit National, the Caisse des Dépôts and the
Crédit Agricole. Sixth, state purchasing orders became large enough to protect specific
industries for years if needed. The French tended to preach liberalisation of purchas-
ing policies in Brussels but to practise the protection of home firms from Paris.
Finally, economic development in every sector and every region was promoted by a
dense network of institutions (cf. Chapter 1), including the Commissariat au Plan;
DATAR (the Délégation à l’Aménagement du Territoire et à l’Action Régionale),
the regional development agency set up in 1962; certain key divisions of the Finance
Ministry (notably the Budget and Forecasting); innumerable specialised funds and
agencies; and several interministerial committees such as the CIASI (the committee for
industrial restructuring) whose notional purpose was to give the system some degree
of co-ordination.
The extension of the administration’s activities

This was the corollary of the limitation of the powers of parliament discussed in
Chapter 6. Articles 34 and 38 of the constitution, by limiting the domain of law-
making, in which parliament has at least a notional role, correspondingly extended that
of decrees, in which the administration’s role is critical. Many important laws became
so-called lois d’orientation – broad-brush legislation which left the administration to fill
in the details. Civil servants suffered less harassment from prying Deputies (pursuing
constituency or pressure-group interests); their projects became more likely to survive
unscathed. More than ever, the administration found it could exercise its influence
before a piece of legislation was presented, through its role in drafting, during its presen-
tation, through advice to ministers on the desirability of concessions to parliament, and
after the passage of legislation, through its role in implementation. The frequent delays
between the passage of legislation and the publication of the décrets d’application
necessary to its coming into force reflected the administration’s powers of obstruction.
The Agricultural Act of December 1968 which still awaited full implementation nine
years later, was just one example. After 1981, some of the difficulties of implementing
the Left’s programme were ascribed to the administration, with more than one Socialist
Deputy demanding a purge of the ‘wreckers’ in the civil service.
The founders of the régime sought not only to extend the administration’s activities
and powers, but also to increase its efficiency. Michel Debré, de Gaulle’s first prime
minister and his constitutional alter ego, was one of the rare politicians to understand
the importance of the administration: it was he who created, in 1945, the École Nationale
d’Administration (ÉNA), the elite civil service school whose annual output of 50–100
graduates (known as énarques) has steadily filled many of the elite posts within, and
indeed beyond, the French administration. In his book La mort de l’État républicain,
published in 1947, Debré insisted on the need to ‘rationalise’ and ‘depoliticise’ the
administration, to halt the incrementalism and the concessions to special interests
characteristic of the Third and Fourth Republics – to return, as it were, to the Napo-
leonic ideal. Since 1958, the efficiency of the administration has been the object of
countless and constant reforms. A Ministry for Administrative Reforms was created in
1962, to complement (the critics said duplicate) the work of older bodies; though
dropped in 1968, it has been regularly revived ever since. One innovation of the Fifth
Republic was the multiplication of ‘missionary’ administrations – small groups of high-
fliers brought together either to address a structural issue neglected or blocked because
of interministerial rivalries, or to resolve a specific problem, if necessary by bypassing
the traditional administrative structures. The prototype for this type of team was the
Commissariat au Plan itself. Its regional equivalent, DATAR, was headed by one of de
Gaulle’s closest lieutenants, Olivier Guichard. Paul Delouvrier, meanwhile, headed a
team entrusted with the administrative restructuring of the Paris area. The economic
development of specific regions was also confided to horizontally organised missions,
those of Aquitaine and Languedoc-Roussillon being the best known, and the tackling
of specific problems, such as the growing threat to the Côte d’Azur from pollution and
property speculation, or the encouragement of a solar energy programme, was confided
to other missions which were to cut through the entanglements of the traditional
administrative jungle. Another example was the Mission de la Mer founded in 1978 to
remedy the administrative deficiencies revealed after the Amoco Cadiz disaster had
caused widespread coastal oil pollution (the pollution caused twenty-one years later by
the wreck of the Erika suggested that not all of the lessons had been learnt). At
government level, the régime’s obsession with administrative co-ordination and effi-
ciency explains the founding of new ministries, the periodic creation of super-ministries
(such as the Ministry for Regional Planning, Public Works, Housing and Tourism
(MATELT) headed by Guichard in 1972), the internal reform of almost all ministries,
the increase in the number of interministerial committees and the introduction of
‘rationalised’ budgeting procedures in the 1960s. Some of these reforms added confu-
sion to an already complex administration, and ensured that problems that had hitherto
merely been difficult became insoluble. And the newest, most advanced agencies often
had a hand in some of the early Fifth Republic’s most spectacular administrative
blunders – the commercial disaster of Concorde, the ecologically and economically
catastrophic petrochemical complex at Fos-sur-Mer, the utter failure of the Plan Calcul
to create an independent French computer industry, the ultra-modern meat marketing
complex at La Villette which was torn apart and converted into a museum without ever
serving its original purpose. What is certain, on the other hand, is that these innovations
testified to a faith, even at the highest political level, in the usefulness of administrative
change and the leading role of the administration in the task of national regeneration
and modernisation.
The colonisation by the civil service of areas beyond the confines of

mere administration
The Fifth Republic’s founders, largely insensible to liberal notions of a clear separation
between politics and administration, encouraged and accelerated the administration’s
tendency to move into new sectors and reinforce its hold on existing domains. This was
true of the Élysée staff and of ministerial cabinets, which the civil service dominated as
never before, accounting for over 90 per cent of their members between 1958 and 1972.
And it was the civil servants in the cabinets who were the most frequent participants
in the réunions interministérielles that constitute the daily round of executive decision-
making in France. Civil servants also staffed the growing number of ad hoc and
permanent specialised bodies – 500 councils, 1,200 committees, 300 commissions by the
mid-1960s – created to link the organs of the state with the major pressure groups.
Little of the above is very remote from the habitual tasks of the civil servant in any
developed state. More remarkable, however, was the move of civil servants into business
and politics. As a consequence of pantouflage, virtually every nationalised industry –
and there were many – was headed by a civil servant; most large private firms also had
ex-civil servants on their boards. By 1970, 12 per cent of all énarques held jobs in
business (a proportion that had risen to 17 per cent twenty years later). Viewed from the
opposite perspective, the figures are even more striking. In 1984, 37 per cent of the
heads of France’s 200 largest firms were graduates of ÉNA or the École Polytechnique
– schools created to train civil servants; 28 per cent were members of the grands corps.
In few other countries is a civil service background seen as particularly suitable for
senior positions in the automobile industry; in France it became practically a require-
ment for Renault, the state-owned firm (headed by men such as Pierre Dreyfus and
Raymond Lévy, and, in its semi-privatised form, Louis Schweitzer), and common even
outside the nationalised sector (Jacques Calvet, head for some years of Peugeot-
Citröen, was an énarque, a member of the Cour des Comptes, and the former head of
Giscard’s cabinet at the Finance Ministry). These practices established a widespread
network of complicities, vastly tighter than Oxbridge or the Ivy League, within which
instructions and wishes can be transmitted from government to business on a purely
informal basis.
Equally striking was the move of civil servants not just into politically sensitive
posts on staffs but also into politics proper – parliamentary or ministerial office and
positions in local and regional government. This is facilitated by the liberal rules
under which civil servants may leave their administrative (or teaching) posts on a
temporary basis, and return to them later, if they wish, without any loss of seniority
(the contrast with Britain, where a civil servant must resign his or her post before even
standing for parliament, could not be greater). At the last pre-war election, in 1936,
17.3 per cent of Deputies were civil servants or teachers. Over the post-war gener-
ation, their number reached about a quarter: 23.5 per cent in 1946, 20 per cent in
1951, 22 per cent in 1956, 19.5 per cent in 1958, 22.7 per cent in 1967, 29 per cent
in 1968, 26 per cent in 1973. Thereafter, the proportion rose steeply: 33 per cent in
1973, 38.8 per cent in 1978, 50 per cent in 1981, 42 per cent in 1986, 41.4 per cent in
1988 – figures that look more like a throwback to the July monarchy than a character-
istic of a modern democratic state. Since the vast majority of national politicians
are also local politicians, it is hardly surprising that civil servants also figure promin-
ently among France’s city mayors, and among the presidents of the twenty-two
regional councils and of the councils of the ninety-six départements. In government
the concentration of civil servants is still higher. Over half the ministers who served
de Gaulle and Pompidou were recruited directly from the civil service (see Table 5.1),
or had been civil servants. Under Giscard and Mitterrand, the proportion approached
two-thirds. Six ministers in Mauroy’s left-wing government of June 1981 were énarques;
so were thirteen members of Chirac’s 1986 government – a third of the total. The most
senior posts were particularly affected. Between 1959 and 1988, 80 per cent of foreign
ministers and defence ministers, 75 per cent of finance ministers and 70 per cent of
education ministers hailed from the civil service. And all Fifth Republic prime ministers
until 1991 had spent part of their careers in the civil service: Debré, Pompidou and
Fabius had been members of the Conseil d’État; Chaban-Delmas, Couve de Murville
and Rocard started their careers in the Inspection des Finances (the most prestigious of
the grands corps, despite having been founded more recently than the others, in the
nineteenth century); Messmer is a former colonial administrator, Chirac is a member of
the Cour des Comptes, Barre had been a university professor before becoming one of
France’s European Commissioners, and Mauroy left the teaching profession to become
a full-time politician. It became hard, under the Fifth Republic, to know where the civil
service ended and the government began.
The growing power and spread of this ubiquitous civil service caused widespread
disquiet. The title of a popular book, L’administration au pouvoir, contained a warning,
confirmed a popular prejudice and purported to state a fact. And there is no doubt
that certain parts of the civil service and certain civil servants exercised a discretion
bordering on the autonomous exercise of power (for their critics, in other words, they
became a law unto themselves). Such individuals would include, for example, Jérôme
Monod, head of DATAR from 1968 to 1975 (and thereafter secretary-general of the
Gaullist party, and head of one of France’s two biggest water companies, the Lyonnaise
des Eaux, before becoming an Élysée adviser from 2000 to 2005); Pierre Massé, the
planning commissioner from 1959 to 1966; François Bloch-Lainé, head of the Caisse
des Dépôts from 1952 to 1967; or Gérard Théry and Jean-Pierre Souviron, directors-
general respectively of communications and industry during Giscard’s presidency.
The power of certain corps, whether ‘generalist’ like the Inspection des Finances or
technical like the mining engineers or the highway engineers (the Corps des Ponts et
Chaussées), is well known and well founded. Well-documented studies showed that
some civil servants retarded and distorted the 1960s reforms to regions and départe-
ments, while others, on the contrary, furthered the development of the electro-nuclear
programme. The train à grande vitesse (TGV) was a typical product of the state railway
engineers – a technical triumph, achieved at a cost that saddled France’s rail network
with unsustainable debts (covered, eventually, by the taxpayer), and starved smaller
lines and other sectors (such as rail freight) of investment. The independent behaviour
of heads of nationalised firms also exasperated their political ‘masters’: the clashes
between Albin Chalandon, Gaullist ex-minister and head of Elf-Aquitaine, and his
‘supervising’ minister, André Giraud at Industry, more than once provoked Giscard’s
presidential intervention; the Socialist Finance Minister Jacques Delors attacked
the heads of France’s nationalised banks (for having the impertinence to act like
private bankers) on the same day that Prime Minister Mauroy was claiming that the
nationalisation of the remaining private banks would strengthen the state’s grip over
credit.
The interpenetration of France’s political, administrative and corporate elites also
attracted attention, not all of it favourable. The American observer Ezra Suleiman
noted that a single summer garden party at the prime minister’s Matignon residence
sufficed to bring together almost everyone who counted in France – a far cry from
the greater geographical and social fragmentation of elites in the United States. A
more sinister interpretation of the same phenomenon was that the blurring of fron-
tiers between politics and administration, local and national politics, and business
and administration, had perpetuated the absence in France of a notion of conflict of
interest – as Yves Mény argued in a book significantly entitled La corruption de la
République. It did not help that some commonly accepted top civil service practices,
such as the payment of cabinet members via envelopes of banknotes, rather obvi-
ously flouted the normal standards expected of ordinary citizens, and appeared to
symbolise a tendency, observed by Jonah Levy, to bypass normal political channels,
and to capture state resources and privileges through old boy networks and covert
dealings.
An omnipotent administration?
That the administration, especially at its high tide, was powerful, few doubted; that
links between the nation’s elites were unhealthily close, many conceded; but the
omnipotence implied in such expressions as L’administration au pouvoir or La Répub-
lique des fonctionnaires was (and is) open to question. It was so for four reasons: the
propensity of civil servants to leave the administration proper; the determination of the
founders of the Fifth Republic to subordinate the administration to politics; the deep
internal divisions within the administration; and the administration’s apparent inability
to perform some of its most basic tasks.
The propensity of civil servants to leave the administration
The corollary of their colonisation of the worlds of business and politics is that
civil servants readily desert their jobs as civil servants. In 1968, for example, a young
inspecteur des finances would stay an average of sixteen years in the administration
proper (the period halved in the ensuing generation: it is now not unusual to leave at
30). This eagerness to depart, among the cream of France’s administrative elites,
denotes either a habit of collective self-abnegation without parallel in French history or
a realisation that greater rewards, more power, or both, may be found outside. The
switch to business is easily comprehensible on financial grounds. Politics, on the other
hand, offered no such material advantages: its attractiveness suggests that civil servants
saw it as offering opportunities for the exercise of power that the administration lacked.
For such individuals, a return to the administration was rarely an upward move: it was
more likely to result from a political setback, and to precede either a further move
outside, or retirement.
The determination of the founders of the Fifth Republic to subordinate the

administration to politics
This, paradoxically, was the corollary of their wish to reinforce the administration.
The Gaullists subscribed to the (half-true) legend that the real government of the
Fourth Republic had been, not the changing, immobile and pusillanimous ministers,
but the omnipresent and omnipotent administration. They were resolved to end the
‘administrative state within the state’ and to secure the loyalty and subordination of
civil servants to a strengthened political executive: the government ‘has at its disposal
the administration’, as Article 20 of the constitution puts it. Their determination was
reflected in the 1959 revisions to the civil service charter of 1946; in the 1964 decree
regulating relations between the state and the French radio and television network
personnel; in (fairly slight) limitations on the right of state employees to strike; and
in tightened control over nationalised industries, the police and the prefects – quite
aside from the measures needed to bring the army into line in the aftermath of the
Algerian war. Conflict was inevitable between civil servants who believed they were
defending an impartial view of the national interest against politicians prey to the
demands of parties, pressure groups or voters, and politicians who saw themselves as
the embodiment of democratic legitimacy against antediluvian, lethargic, obstructive
civil servants whose attachment to the status quo was equalled only by their appetite for
new privileges for themselves. There were some epic struggles under the Fifth Republic
between civil servants and politicians; between Debré (as defence minister from 1969 to
1972) and the defence chiefs; between the Education Ministry under Giscard and two
successive higher education ministers (one of whom used methods described as those of
a ‘Gauleiter in occupied territory’); between Jacques Delors and the leaders of the
nationalised banks; between Mitterrand’s Interior Minister Gaston Defferre (and
above all, his liberal Justice Minister Robert Badinter) and the police. The civil servants
did not invariably get the better of such scraps.
Moreover, their political vulnerability was enhanced. Fifth Republic governments
became increasingly willing to use constitutional powers of patronage to replace polit-
ical foes with friends in the most sensitive posts. This did not entail an American-style
spoils system. Posts circulate within a pool of eminently qualified civil servants; the
happy appointees always had more than merely political qualifications; the victims of
political change suffered no worse fate than confinement in a ‘golden closet’ – a fake job
in an obscure corner of the administration. But jobs began to change hands, and in
quite large numbers. Members of the Élysée staff and of the cabinets of the prime
minister and ministers (between 450 and 650 individuals, ‘unofficial’ appointments
aside) almost all change with their political masters. In addition, about 500 senior civil
service posts are also liable to be filled, and forcibly vacated, for political reasons: most
frequently in certain especially exposed ministries like Finance, Education, the Interior,
Foreign Affairs and Justice. In the end, the senior officials in every ministry – notably
the 220 or so directeurs d’administration centrale – are all vulnerable. So are key posts in
the field services, especially the prefects and the recteurs of the Education Ministry’s
regions, over three-quarters of whom can expect to be moved within two years of
a change of government. So are those at the top of a whole series of para-state organ-
isations ranging from radio and television to nationalised firms to utilities to urban
development organisations. The practice of political appointments, never wholly absent,
was certainly intensified under the Gaullists: the result was soon termed the État-UDR,
after the then name of the Gaullist party. The État-Giscard soon followed, as the Fifth
Republic’s third president sought to replace loyal Gaullists with his own men (a practice
that became a major bone of contention within the pre-1981 Right). After 1981 it gave
way to the État Socialiste managed by the elite rose: the Socialists changed two-thirds
of directeurs d’administration centrale. Then the Right replaced over 80 per cent of
them in 1986 – and so on, with each incoming government proclaiming its intention to
halt or limit such political appointments before succumbing to the temptation more or
less extensively. This politicisation of the civil service is the mirror image of the bureau-
cratisation of politics. Keenly felt, and sometimes resented, by the civil servants whose
jobs became more exposed as alternation in power became more frequent, it suggested
quite the opposite of an all-powerful administration.
Relations between civil servants and ministers are not always conflictual, though. In
the first place, they may share the same views: the financially orthodox Giscard d’Esta-
ing ruled for a total of nine years over a Finance Ministry inclined to financial ortho-
doxy. One of his successors, Michel Sapin, observed with some exaggeration that ‘Bercy
[the shorthand for the Finance Ministry since its move away from the rue de Rivoli in
1988] is never so powerful as when it is led, never so happy as when it obeys’. Second,
civil servants may be passive, weak or largely managerial: the Quai d’Orsay, for
example, seems to have done little to resist the foreign policy changes of the early Fifth
Republic despite reservations about Gaullist positions within the ranks of the diplo-
matic corps. Third, a strong minister may be appreciated by his civil servants, whatever
their political differences, simply for his or her effectiveness in representing the minis-
try’s interests within the government. Fourth, a skilful and determined minister can
usually (though not always) get the better of recalcitrant civil servants: such was the
case of Edgar Faure, who got his mildly liberal educational reforms past an administra-
tion which considered them positively Maoist, and of Gaston Defferre, who imposed
his decentralisation reform upon an equally sceptical Interior Ministry. Finally, many
examples of administrative ‘obstructiveness’ turn out to have arisen in cases where the
political executive has itself been divided and indecisive. The reform of subnational
government in the 1960s, for example, was plagued by the government’s inability to
decide whether it wanted to render the administration at territorial level more efficient,
more subordinate or more democratic. Debré, the first prime minister, anathematised
any proposals as threatening the centralised state on which, in his view, the nation’s
existence depended; Pompidou cast a prudent electoral eye on the reaction of estab-
lished local notables; but Jeanneney, the left-wing Gaullist responsible for preparing the
1969 referendum on Senate and regional reforms, believed he had a brief to increase
public participation in decisions. The result was an unhappy series of compromises, and
the first lost referendum of the Fifth Republic. And without a consistent political will
among ministers, no amount of administrative tinkering will produce a consistent
result. The assignment of responsibility for industrial decentralisation to the newly
created DATAR in the 1960s, for example, quite failed to prevent the piecemeal inter-
ventions of staffs and officials from the Élysée, the prime minister’s office, and the
ministries of Finance, Interior, and Housing and Public Works. Under these conditions,
DATAR turned into just one more interested party, complicating the problem it was
intended to solve.
The administration’s internal divisions

Internal divisions have also rendered the administration considerably less than omnipo-
tent. Robert Elgie’s account of the economic U-turn of March 1983, for example,
shows the administration behaving not as a bloc but as a divided set of actors, putting
forward different policies, with the president taking the final decision. There may, some-
times, be a Finance Ministry view or an Industry Ministry view; there is never an
‘administration view’. Most of the evidence points to the administration’s diverse and
fragmentary nature (well expressed in the title of François Dupuy and Jean-Claude
Thoenig’s book L’administration en miettes – ‘The administration in smithereens’). The
interplay of the resulting divergent interests is often open, unlike in Britain, where
differences are masked behind a screen of courteous yet apprehensive anonymity.
Moreover, fragmentation is increased by the multiple and overlapping divisions within
the administration. These divisions fall into five main areas.
First, the apparent uniformity of outlook of top civil servants is belied by the fierce
group loyalties generated during and just after their education. The uniformity of
background is certainly striking. Members of the civil service elite come mostly, and
increasingly, from comfortable upper middle-class families (often including several gen-
erations of senior civil servants). They are still, overwhelmingly, men: as recently as
1998, women represented 44.6 per cent of the active population, 56.9 per cent of public
servants, 13.2 per cent of the senior civil service, and just 7.7 per cent of directeurs
d’administration centrale. They are frequently products of the top Parisian lycées, and
almost all of one or another of the grandes écoles – the highly selective higher education
institutions that channel the ablest students away from France’s democratic and under-
funded university system. The background, it is often argued, produces a common, and
technocratic, language, and a certain uniformity of approach based on values of prag-
matism, scientific rationalism, efficiency and apoliticism, and on a shared belief in the
virtues of state interventionism. At the same time, however, the education process
produces diversity and is rooted in merciless competition. Those of a scientific bent
take a highly competitive examination to enter the École Polytechnique, and another
one to leave it; they then progress to a specialist school such as the École des Ponts et
Chaussées (for highway engineers), the École des Mines (for mining engineers) or the
École de Génie (for military engineers). Generalists, meanwhile, pass an examination to
go to the Institut d’Études Politiques, another, more competitive one, to enter ÉNA,
and a third to win a place in ÉNA’s passing-out order. New entrants to the civil service
join a corps, according to their educational background and their success in examin-
ations. In the early 1990s there were no fewer than 1,790 corps, 190 of which had
stopped recruiting and were destined for extinction. The elite corps for generalists are
the Inspection des Finances (with a total of just 237 members in 1990), the Conseil
d’État (296 members) and the Cour des Comptes (359 members); their specialist coun-
terparts include Ponts et Chaussées and Mines. Each has its own peculiar rites, norms
and prejudices. The process of education and civil service entry may therefore produce
both a number of common attitudes and many more particular loyalties, networks and
rivalries generated by different grandes écoles and corps. It should be emphasised,
furthermore, that corps cut across ministerial divisions. This may assist co-ordination
between, for example, members of the same corps in a ministry, the prime minister’s
cabinet and a state-owned firm. But it may also be a source of division as rival corps
seek to build empires by colonising particular posts: frontier disputes between the
Mines and the Ponts et Chaussées over jobs in or linked to the Industry Ministry, for
example, have been many and bitter. When Jean-Yves Haberer was called before the
inquiry into the disastrously expensive collapse of the Crédit Lyonnais (for which, as
the bank’s chief, he was in great measure responsible), he found it quite natural to
question the competence of his successor, Jean-Philippe Peyrelevade, on the grounds
that he was not an inspecteur des finances, not even an énarque, but a mere polytechnicien,
and so obviously unsuitable. Such animosity helps to explain why the French bureau-
cracy suffers from a reluctance to share information, with many projects viewed as a
zero-sum game between administrations, not a positive-sum game for the public good.
Second, the outlook of individual civil servants may be affected by factors largely
independent of education or corps. The fact that governments of both Right and Left
are able to find politically sympathetic civil servants to fill key posts indicates the
existence of varying political views, of at least a semi-public nature, within the adminis-
tration. That has led some governments to accuse sections of the administration of
political bias. The Conseil d’État, for example, incurred the lasting hostility of Gaullists
by opposing two of de Gaulle’s referendums on (well-founded) grounds of unconsti-
tutionality – and doing so, moreover, by leaking its comments to the press. It was
therefore hailed by the Left as a ‘bastion of republican defence’ – until, with a Left-wing
government in office, it insisted on changes in several government bills. In fact, within
the administration political views, more or less strongly held, combine in varying
degrees with independence, institutional loyalty, commitment to apolitical service and
opportunism. Quite different factors may also affect outlook and even behaviour. For
example, some observers have noted the presence within the civil service of a gay
network – rarely active in policy formulation, but ready to mobilise over issues of direct
concern (Interior Minister Charles Pasqua’s attempt to ban the leading homosexual
magazine Gai pied was nipped in the bud).
Third, Ezra Suleiman has shown that one determining factor in differentiating the
views and behaviour of civil servants is the function or role they perform. One such
difference of perspective may occur between the permanent staff of a ministry and
the minister’s cabinet. The cabinet members have the minister’s backing (usually)
and the task of co-ordinating the ministry’s activities. In doing so they may make
impossible or conflicting demands on the permanent staff, or demand innovations
which the latter see as impossible, or as damaging to the ministry’s long-term interests.
But the permanent staff have well-tried techniques of obstruction at their disposal,
notably the manipulation of information and the reliance on rigid procedures. If the
cabinet is dominated by mobile high-fliers from the generalist grand corps or the
major technical corps, and the permanent staff by senior civil administrators and
middle-ranking bureaucrats who spend a lifetime in the same division of the same
ministry, this will not assist mutual comprehension. Ministries also dislike the admin-
istration’s internal controls that are periodically visited upon them: the unannounced
swoops of the Inspection des Finances, the legal supervision of the Conseil d’État,
the audits of the Cour des Comptes. The so-called ‘missionary’ administrations are
resented by the more established ministries, which resent the loss of some of their
more interesting and prestigious tasks. The Finance Ministry, for example, waged
unremitting war on the work of the Commissariat au Plan, whose policies it regarded
as financially dubious and intrinsically inflationary, and created its own forecasting
service to second-guess the planners’ work (the ministry’s final victory over its enemy
was sealed by the post-1983 economic climate). Many of these enmities are entrenched
and last for decades. But it is also noticeable that changes of function among members
of the mobile elite corps may lead to changes of attitude. A member of a grand
corps who takes up a position in a ministry frequently adopts the norms and prejudices
of his or her new home (professional success may require it); prefects who are promoted
to the Conseil d’État are often zealous and knowledgeable critics of the administrative
malpractices of their erstwhile colleagues; a member of the litigation (contentieux)
section of the Conseil d’État who joins a ministerial cabinet may become usefully
inventive in circumventing the Conseil’s tiresome and legalistic supervision of his or her
minister’s activities (often having been recruited to the cabinet to do just that).
The fourth source of fragmentation, conflicts between ministries, is common to all
developed systems of government. Between Finance (more particularly the Budget
division, the watchdog of the nation’s wallet) and the spending ministries there is
continuous struggle. The Interior Ministry has clashed with the Justice Ministry over
the rights of immigrants, and with the Health Ministry over the treatment of drug
addicts. The Environment Ministry has regularly opposed both Industry and Agri-
culture over issues relating to pollution (and has often, as a fairly young and small
ministry, come off worse). Culture, a small but prestigious ministry, has fought
running battles with Public Works over the preservation of historic monuments (and
had great difficulty in shifting Finance from its long-held wing of the Louvre to its
new, purpose-built, but less central premises at Bercy).
Conflicts within ministries, finally, are no less frequent, for most are large and
compartmentalised federations of fiercely independent divisions. This is true, for
example, of Education and Industry, while Finance in 1978 had 170,000 employees
and 102 divisions, scattered between the Louvre and no fewer than thirty-four
annexes: according to one observer, it is easier to turn a soldier into a sailor than it
is to transfer from one of the Finance Ministry’s divisions to another. Problems are
compounded by the fact that no ministry, except for Foreign Affairs, Defence and
(since 2000 only) Finance, has a single administrative head on the model of the
British permanent secretaries: such figures are redolent, in the French political trad-
ition, of the anti-democratic institutions of the Vichy régime. Conflicts also occur
between the ministries in Paris and their field services in the provinces, responsible in
many areas for implementation of laws and decrees on the ground: the field services
often resent the central divisions’ lack of contact with the grass roots, while the
Parisians mistrust what they see as their provincial colleagues’ tendency to ‘go native’
(though they may defend them stoutly against attacks from other ministries). Too
often, as Olivier Duhamel remarks, civil servants ‘attack each other, not the problem
in hand’.
The administration’s inability to perform some of its most basic tasks

This weakness resulted in great part from the vast area and depth of administrative
intervention and made itself felt both at elite level and in the front-line delivery of
services. Thus the economic intervention service of the Finance Ministry, at the very
centre of French economic decision-making in the 1970s, was too overburdened with
work to deal in any depth with the mass of matters that clamoured for its attention; the
administration’s apparently wide discretionary powers are often reduced to nothing by
the constant effort to keep a minimum of administrative order in the face of an endless
stream of laws, decrees, directives, circulars and instructions; parts of the labour code
were rarely implemented because of the lack of inspectors, while illicit price-rings in
industry flourished because of inadequate supervision. For, contrary to popular myth-
ology, important parts of the administration were undermanned. That in turn added to
the difficulty of effective administrative reforms on the ground: in the absence of
adequate staffing, the unionised rank and file of the French administration proved
deeply suspicious of any reorganisations likely to increase their own already excessive
workload.
The myth of the French administration’s omnipotence at high tide is fairly easy to
understand. It attracted the ablest men (and a few – too few – women) of their gener-
ation. It contributed to France’s impressive and (relatively) painless post-war mutation
from a predominantly agricultural and rural to a largely urban and industrial society. It
spread outwards to the worlds of business and politics, constituting the centre of a
remarkable network or, rather, a series of interlocking networks. In some respects,
though, it was a giant with feet of clay. It was constrained by politicians, on whose
initiative the civil servants usually depended. It was divided, uncoordinated, deeply
attached to precedent and at times staggeringly inefficient in delivering services. In the
cases of several individual ministries, it was dominated and colonised by strategically
placed interest groups. It could obstruct, but rarely initiated. It was perhaps the gulf
between the administration’s potential and alleged power and its effective power that
contributed to a malaise in its ranks that was clearly apparent by the 1970s. The eco-
nomic changes that followed widened the gulf, presented the administration with
unaccustomed challenges and deepened the malaise.
The administration transformed?

Like other West European countries, France faced a number of unfamiliar pressures
from the mid-1970s and even more from the 1980s: globalisation, faster European
integration, slow growth and budgetary tightening, and an ideological shift away
from the post-war consensus favourable to state intervention (cf. Chapter 1). By 2000,
these pressures had transformed the shape of the French state in a number of ways.
Changes to the French administration, on the other hand, were considerably less
radical.
New pressures
Georges Pompidou was one of the earliest political leaders to grasp the potential
impact of globalisation: in 1969 he told a business audience that ‘when you have chosen
international liberalism, you must also opt for internal liberalism’, that ‘the state must
therefore diminish its hold over the economy instead of perpetually seeking to direct
and control it’, and that the state’s control over foreign exchange and credit was a
‘transient necessity’. The internationalisation of markets, combined with technological
change and pressures from international organisations such as the General Agreement
on Tariffs and Trade (since 1993, the World Trade Organisation), would make it hard to
sustain France’s post-war edifice of autarchic public sectors, protected national cham-
pions and restrictions on capital movements. But both Pompidou himself and Giscard’s
second prime minister Raymond Barre (who had voiced similar views) were restrained
by a cautious electoralism from translating their free-market discourse into more than
fairly limited measures (Barre’s deregulation of bread prices produced a furore). The
large-scale liberalisation of the French economy had to wait until after the economic
U-turn of March 1983.
The acceleration of European integration, and in particular the Single European
Act of 1986 and the Maastricht Treaty of 1992, also furthered liberalisation. The
development of an activist competition policy led the European Commission to cast a
newly critical eye on subsidies lavished by French governments on national industrial
champions or on electorally sensitive lame ducks. It also threatened monopolies in
public services such as telecommunications, gas and electricity, or rail transport.
Indeed, the very notion of public service, and the exceptions to competition policy that
it might entail, went unacknowledged in Europe’s founding treaties – though the 1997
Amsterdam Treaty went a little way (partly as a result of French pressure) towards
remedying this. In addition, the integration process affected France in ways that were
not purely economic. The primacy of European law over the law of member states,
asserted in a series of rulings by the European Court of Justice, was finally acknowl-
edged in a series of decisions by the Conseil d’État between 1989 and 1992. That,
and the widening range of European legislation, required a closer attention to the
harmonisation of French law with the directives, decisions and rulings emanating from
Brussels. In 1992, as Hayward and Wright observe, 22,445 EU regulations were directly
applicable in member states and 1,675 directives had to be translated into states’ law.
This task of implementation fell onto the civil service. Meanwhile, employment in
France’s public services, long restricted to nationals, was opened (in principle) to other
European citizens in 1991. Finally, integration began to erode the structure of relations
between the French administration and its client interest groups; institutional changes,
and especially the qualified majority voting that the Single Act of 1986 established as a
reality, led growing numbers of such groups to lobby in Brussels as well as in national
capitals.
The dramatic slow-down of economic growth from the mid-1970s also entailed new
pressures, especially on the comfortable incrementalist assumptions of the trente
glorieuses: no longer could ministries expect steadily rising budgets. These pressures
were largely eluded during the Giscard presidency, when the public sector grew much
faster than the economy and tax revenues as a share of gross domestic product rose by
6 per cent, to 42 per cent. The Left, on coming to power in 1981, both extended the
frontiers of the state’s intervention with its nationalisation programme and recruited
100,000 new state employees. Here again, the major turning point came after 1983 – and
in particular, when Mitterrand insisted in 1984 that total taxation should not exceed
43 per cent of GDP in the following year’s budget. Budget restrictions meant competi-
tion between and within ministries for stagnant or diminishing resources; they also
made governments more reluctant to spend heavily to save ailing industries.
The ideological shift away from state interventionism in France had in common with
the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ countries both a growing mistrust of the state’s capacity to manage
firms and a new interest in delivering public services, not through the procedure-
oriented structures of old bureaucracies, but by the methods of private business. Like
the ‘Anglo-Saxons’, France had its free-market ideologues. As early as 1979, Gérard
Longuet, who had come to Giscard’s party from the extreme Right, proposed hiving
off 1,600,000 central state employees to autonomous agencies, leaving a core of just
400,000. Four years later, in more measured tones, Juppé argued that France should
turn away, not only from the post-1981 left-wing ‘experiment’, but from the whole post-
war interventionist consensus. Longuet’s alter ego Alain Madelin, on being appointed
industry minister in 1986, said he would prefer to rename his ministry the ‘Grenelle
consulting group’ and maintain a staff of about twenty. Another argument used by the
Right in France as elsewhere in the mid-1980s was that the state had spread itself too
thin, and should concentrate more on its traditional, ‘regalian’ domains, especially law
and order. In the longer term, though, the ideological shift went beyond the confines
of the Right. Even the Left of the 1970s, attached as it was to an extension of the
public sector, had reservations about central government: out of national office for a
generation, but managers of growing numbers of local authorities, Communists and
Socialists became steadily more committed to decentralisation. In addition, a signifi-
cant current within the PS, initially associated with Michel Rocard, questioned the
Jacobin assumptions of the post-war generation that the state could and should act as
an enlightened agent of progress, if necessary against what was regarded as a conserva-
tive and narrow-minded civil society; for this deuxième gauche, to ignore civil society
was to condemn the state, sooner or later, to impotence and sclerosis.
The relationship between the state, the public services and French society also
changed in many ways. Where ministries had formerly been able to rely for successful
implementation of policy either on their own democratic legitimacy or (more fre-
quently) on a long-standing relationship with a very limited number of client groups,
they now found themselves facing a greater variety of demands from a growing number
of actors within society. The aftermath of May 1968 saw a spread of left-wing and
ecological protest movements of all kinds, some of them taking as targets such tangible
manifestations of the state’s heavy hand as the extension of the Larzac military camp
or the construction of the Creys-Malville nuclear plant. From the 1970s on, the multi-
plication of associations of all kinds (not all of them extreme or even left-wing), com-
bined with the decline in such traditionally stable groups as trade unions, required
ministries to take on a wider range of interlocutors. At the same time not only groups
but also politicians placed new demands on public services, despite budgetary con-
straints. The SNCF was required not only to transport passengers and goods, but to
contribute to regional development and environmental policy. Teachers were asked not
merely to teach but to provide ‘safe havens’ in violent neighbourhoods or to compen-
sate for the growing inequalities in the society around them. For the state’s rank-and-
file servants, the resulting strains were compounded by changes in public attitudes to
them as their performance was judged more critically (especially, perhaps, in the case of
the teaching profession) while their job security became the object of desire and envy
among the growing proportion of the French who feared for their own employment.
A shrinking state
Within a decade or so of its Gaullist apogee, in short, the French state was undermined,
from within by the conduct of some of its own servants and from without by a bizarre
combination of global corporations, intergovernmental organisations, Eurocrats,
right-wing zealots, left-wing mayors, Socialist intellectuals, eco-activists and others. Its
contours changed as a result, in six ways.
• Many of the tools of macroeconomic intervention established during the post-war

generation were abandoned. Foreign exchange controls, briefly tightened in 1982–83,
were progressively lifted between 1984 and 1988. With them went the encadrement
du crédit, since firms could now raise money on international capital markets (and
many French credit institutions were soon privatised). Controls on prices, which
had in any case become less and less effective, were ended in 1986. The automatic
linking of wages to the price index had been ended two years earlier. The Plan, de
Gaulle’s ‘ardent obligation’ of the 1960s, became not merely unreliable but even
irrelevant in an unpredictable global environment. The Commissariat au Plan was
increasingly invited to produce, not five-year plans for the whole French economy,
but long-term briefs about the future of labour markets or pensions policy. The de
Villepin government finally abolished it in October 2005, promising to replace it
with an umbrella organisation linking other strategic analysis groups set up in
previous years.
• France carried through a vast privatisation programme, and liberalised the manage-
ment of the remaining state-owned firms. Despite its dirigiste tradition, France was
second only to Britain, and ahead of the rest of continental Europe, in the speed
and scope of its privatisation programme. The total value of firms and stock sold
between 1986 and 1997, largely by right-wing governments, was some $40 billion.
After 1997 the Left raised a more than equivalent value, though with less fanfare.
The privatisations were, it is true, marked by the dirigiste tradition. Initially they
involved industrial and commercial concerns only, and not services and utilities
(except for water, which had never been a public monopoly: indeed France’s world-
class private water companies were enthusiastic buyers into privatised British
firms). Initially, too, privatisation made rather little difference to the management
structure of the firms, which were still run by the same caste of énarques, while the
noyaux durs or golden shares of privatised firms preserved the interlocking share-
holdings characteristic of what the Communist Party used to call state monopoly
capitalism. Moreover, governments had other motives than revenue-raising in mind
as they planned the sales. The Gaullist RPR was regularly accused, especially in the
first wave of privatisations between 1986 and 1987, of selecting its own supporters
to head privatised firms. No fewer than four ulterior motives have been discerned in
Jospin’s sell-offs after 1997: encouraging international alliances while retaining a
controlling share for the state; establishing cross-shareholdings between leading
French firms (such as Bouygues, Vivendi/Générale des Eaux and Alcatel); offering
shares to the workforce on attractive terms; and, especially in financial services,
reinforcing France’s mutual sector.
It remained the case, though, that by the late 1990s almost no state-owned com-
panies remained in what used to be considered as the competitive sector of the
economy, except for one or two defence firms like Snecma or GIAT. Even Crédit
Lyonnais was brought to market in 1999. Almost all the privatised firms were
seeking international links (such as Renault’s effective takeover of Nissan) and
facing at least the possibility that this global integration would generate ‘Anglo-
Saxon’ concerns about management performance among shareholders. The few
remaining publicly owned firms were being run on a private-sector logic. The once
popular habit of cross-subsidies has been ended (the fate of Air Inter, absorbed by
Air France in 1996, illustrated the dangers of such practices); the near-military
structure of the SNCF has been reformed. Even public-sector utilities were begin-
ning to feel the pressure, as the notion of a ‘natural monopoly’ began to disappear;
the reform to the status of EDF-GDF, the electricity and gas monopoly, was
undertaken in 2004 with a view to its partial privatisation the following year. At the
local level, the concession of key public services to private or mixed public/private
firms, widespread before 1939, enjoyed a significant return to favour.
• European integration had dramatically curtailed some of the most characteristic
habits of French dirigisme by the century’s end. The grands projets like Concorde, so
characteristic of the Gaullist era, were fewer and more likely to be undertaken at
the European, rather than the national, level: examples include Airbus, the Ariane
missile and, less successfully, high-tech projects such as Euram, Race, Eureka, or
Jessi. Bail-outs of ailing firms, whose multiplication in the 1970s led the economist
Élie Cohen to refer to the ‘stretcher-bearer state’, were increasingly limited by the
combination of European competition rules and budgetary constraints (though
Air France and Crédit Lyonnais in the 1990s, as well as Alstom in 2003, constituted
striking exceptions). Competition rules also led to steps, more or less fiercely
resisted, to deregulate former public-service monopolies. Some fifty firms now
sell telephone services in France; air transport has been very grudgingly deregu-
lated; rail (especially freight services) is also under pressure to open markets; the
European energy charter has forced competition even in gas and electricity produc-
tion, and thus change to EDF-GDF. Similar treatment for the postal service, on the
other hand, has been fiercely resisted in Brussels by national governments, includ-
ing the French. Competition regulations had also made some inroads into France’s
traditionally protectionist public-sector purchasing policies: in late 1999 it was even
announced that some French police officers were to drive Fords.
The years following the Single European Act were also a period in which almost
the whole of the French administration began to take European issues seriously.
Previously such concern had been confined to ministries most obviously concerned
with the earliest European policies, such as Agriculture. Now almost every minis-
try, indeed most divisions of every ministry, had a European ‘cell’. The SGCI or
Secrétariat Général du Comité Interministériel pour les questions de coopération
économique européenne (renamed Secrétariat Général des Affaires Européennes
(SGAE) in October 2005), an organisation set up in 1948 to ensure the co-
ordination of France’s European policy under the responsibility of the prime
minister, grew significantly in importance in the 1980s: Élisabeth Guigou, its head
from 1985 to 1990, was a close personal adviser to President Mitterrand, and
both grands corps and ministerial divisions increasingly sought to have ‘their’
representatives on it.
• The administration was subjected to an increasing range of controls. The Napoleonic
model provides for internal controls on the administration by such bodies as the
Cour des Comptes or the Conseil d’État. Though the Cour des Comptes is unable
to impose penalties directly, its annual report, an illuminating survey of the year’s
administrative malpractices and blunders, has received growing publicity in recent
years. Some attempts have also been made to create forms of outside control. These
include the Mediator, a complaints authority accessible to citizens via parlia-
mentarians, created in 1973 and analogous to the British or Swedish ombudsman.
The growth of the Mediator’s caseload, from 2,000 to 43,500 cases between 1974
and 1996, indicates the strength of demand for his services, and he now heads a
nationwide network of delegates who have often been able to resolve disputes at the
local level. The public’s rights vis-à-vis the administration were also reinforced by a
law of 1978, which provided a limited right of access to administrative documents
and limited the purposes for which files on individuals could legally be used. The
Commission d’Accès aux Documents Administratifs was set up to implement this
legislation, while another independent commission set up the previous year, the
Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés (CNIL), aims to prevent
abuse of computer data by administrative or other authorities. Planning pro-
cedures now include a wider range of consultation procedures and impact studies,
and where decisions (for example in planning issues) go against individual citi-
zens, the administration is also required to provide reasons to the losing party.
Finally, the various parliamentary evaluation offices set up in the 1990s (the Office
d’évaluation des politiques publiques and the Office d’évaluation de la législation,
as well as the Mission d’évaluation et de contrôle) clearly aimed at restoring some
of the power to control the administration that parliament had lost since 1958.
• Governments have created a growing number of autonomous agencies, seeking to
ensure that the performance of certain tasks is not entrapped in the meshes of the
administration. A few such agencies are relatively old: the Commission de Contrôle
des Banques dates from 1941, the Commission des Opérations en Bourse (COB),
which supervises the Stock Exchange, from 1967 (it was merged with the Conseil
des Marchés Financiers into the Autorité des Marchés Financiers in 2003). Most,
though, have been created since the late 1970s. Two, the Commission d’Accès aux
Documents Administratifs and the CNIL, have already been mentioned. Others
include the Conseil de la Concurrence (1986), which monitors, not always very
effectively, monopolies, illicit cartels, price-fixing and other restrictive practices; the
Conseil Supérieur de l’Audiovisuel which supervises the political minefield of radio
and television broadcasting; the Commission des Sondages (1977), which investi-
gates complaints about opinion polls; the Commission des Infractions Fiscales
(1977), the Commission de la Sécurité des Consommateurs (1983), the Commission
de la Privatisation (1986), the Commission de Contrôle des Assurances (1989) and
the Commission Nationale de Contrôle des Campagnes Électorales, whose titles
clearly define their role. These bodies often handle questions of great political
sensitivity, and exercise a discretionary power outside the control of the adminis-
tration. For example, it was the food safety agency created in 1999, the Agence
Française de Sécurité Sanitaire des Aliments (AFSSA), which led the Jospin
government to maintain, against its political inclination, the ban on British beef.
Another development has been the increasing resort to committees of sages
(wise men and women) and independent experts, especially in the most politically
controversial areas such as the reform of the nationality laws, the financing of the
social security system, the future of pensions and the freedom of the media. These
two developments represent a further balkanisation and autonomisation of public
policy-making and reduce the power of the traditional administration.
• A large-scale decentralisation programme was undertaken under President Mitter-
rand from 1982, and relaunched, with some difficulty, under the Raffarin govern-
ment twenty years later. Its details are discussed in Chapter 12. Its impact on the
state administration has been variable: some ministries were affected not at all
(Defence, Foreign Affairs), some very little (Labour and the Interior), some slightly
(Housing and Public Works transferred about 7–8 per cent of its personnel to local
authorities) and one (Health and Social Security, which saw many of its tasks
become the responsibility of départements) quite considerably.
The administration and the limits to change

The environment within which the French administration operates has therefore
changed in important ways. The French state is smaller, thanks to privatisations; it is
less able to intervene at will; it is more fragmented, both territorially (thanks to
decentralisation) and functionally (thanks to independent agencies); it is more subject
to controls, both national (slightly) and European (considerably). The transformation
was less radical, on the other hand, within the administration itself, whether within the
elite or at rank-and-file level.
The elite
The decision of the Chirac government in 1986 to cut the following year’s intake to
ÉNA by half, to about fifty, appeared to signal a long-term reduction in the size, if
not the role, of the top-level administration. But the change was reversed after 1988.
The Cresson government’s attempt to move ÉNA physically from Paris to Strasbourg
was fiercely resisted, with the result that the school was split between the two cities – a
messy and expensive compromise that lasted some fifteen years before the final move to
Strasbourg was made. More radical proposals, for example to cut the automatic links
between ÉNA, Polytechnique and senior administrative posts, have not been adopted.
Nor are they very likely to be, given the strength of the two schools’ networks. The
French administrative elite remains highly resilient: though it has faced significant
challenges, its members have also sought to adapt by conquering positions in new
domains.
The classic cursus honorum of a high-flying énarque in the early Fifth Republic – a
ministerial cabinet followed by entry into politics or private business – still exists but is
less typical than formerly. Ministerial cabinets have opened up somewhat to the rest of
society: since 1984 only 80 per cent of their members have been from the public sector
in its widest sense, compared with over 90 per cent between 1958 and 1972, and over
85 per cent under earlier republics. The proportion of cabinets occupied by members of
the grands corps has declined more sharply, from 34 per cent between 1958 and 1972 to
16 per cent between 1984 and 1996 (though they still supplied nearly half of all direct-
eurs de cabinet). The prefectoral corps and the Inspection des finances have been par-
ticularly inclined to disengage, though the phenomenon has extended to the Conseil
d’État and the Cour des Comptes. The difficulty experienced by Laurent Fabius in
recruiting a suitable ‘dircab’ on his appointment as finance minister in March 2000
testifies to the relative loss of attractiveness of these positions. In the National
Assembly, while the public sector generally is still over-represented (at 46 per cent of
Deputies in 1997, and 35 per cent in 2002), roughly half their number consisted of
teachers. Only 6.4 per cent of the 1997 Assembly, and 5.9 per cent in 2002, were
énarques, only 4 per cent from the grands corps – a figure that had fallen steadily from
14 per cent in 1978, 11 per cent in 1981, 13 per cent in 1986, 10 per cent in 1988 and
8.6 per cent in 1993. By way of comparison, some 45 per cent of 1997 Deputies had a
background in industry, banking or the liberal professions. Only the administration’s
colonisation of the government appeared undiminished. The three prime ministers who
governed from 1993 to 2002 were all énarques: Balladur a conseiller d’État, Juppé an
inspecteur des finances, Jospin a member of the diplomatic corps. Raffarin, it is true, has
a business education and worked as as marketing executive for Cafés Jacques Vabre; but
he compensated for this by appointing nearly a third of his ministers from a civil service
background, including énarques such as Renaud Dutreil, Dominique Perben, Hervé
Gaymard, Henri Plagnol, Pierre-André Wiltzer and Jean-François Copé, as well as
Dominique de Villepin. The appointment of Villepin, another énarque and diplomat,
to succeed Raffarin in 2005 was a return to the dominant tradition.
At the same time the stability of senior jobs within the ministries diminished with the
increasing regularity of alternances: 83 per cent of directeurs d’administration centrale
changed in 1986–87, 46 per cent in 1988–89, 56 per cent in 1993–94, 43 per cent in
1995–96. As the requirements of the administration became more politicised, some
senior civil servants sought to diversify their activities. A good example of this is the
European Union, which members of the grands corps have seen as an opportunity and a
challenge as much as a constraint since the mid-1980s. The challenge may be seen as
one of gaining as much control as possible over the definition of France’s policies in
Europe; over the elaboration of European policies in Brussels; and over the implemen-
tation of European decisions and directives in France. It entails the representation of
the corps not only on the SGAE, within France, but also within the European adminis-
tration. Hence the contributions of inspecteurs des finances to European decisions on
banking and single currency issues, as well as to European audit processes; of ingénieurs
des ponts et chaussées to transport policies, of ingénieurs des mines to environmental
policy, of prefects to ‘Schengen’ regulations on immigration and frontiers, of conseillers
d’État to the work of the European Court of Justice. Luc Rouban observes that the
French administration has acquired a European reach; that it has understood the
potential importance for French industry of the definition of European product norms;
and that these activities have placed it in a strategic relationship with French firms,
many of which have been only dimly aware of the significance for their activities of
decisions taken in Brussels.
A further avenue is business, which has become, if anything, more attractive to senior
civil servants since the first wave of privatisations. Four phenomena encouraged this.
First, private-sector pay outstripped that of the civil service by increasingly spectacular
margins from the 1980s (indeed, according to one estimate, senior civil servants’ pur-
chasing power dropped 14 per cent in the fifteen years after 1982). Second, the content
of ÉNA courses was increasingly oriented towards private business, leading experts like
Michel Bauer to ask if ÉNA had not simply become a business school. Third, once
privatised, firms were less likely to ‘parachute’ civil servants without business experience
into their very top management positions; there was an incentive to acquire that
experience at somewhat lower levels. Fourth, this incentive to leave from lower levels
was reinforced, from 1995, by new restrictions placed on more senior civil servants
moving to private business in cases where conflicts of interest might result. In 1980, the
proportion of énarques of any given year who had worked in a firm was between 15 and
20 per cent; ten years later, the proportion was between 25 and 35 per cent. Whereas a
young inspecteur des finances in 1968 could expect to stay sixteen years on average in his
or her administration, this period had dropped to seven years by 1994.
The visibility of senior civil servants at the head of publicly owned, soon-to-be-
privatised, or privatised businesses has become more pronounced since the 1980s
because of the number of individuals involved; because the firms involved, even when
they are still in the public sector, can no longer be viewed as extensions of the state;
because their integration into the world economy gives their heads an international
profile; and because some have been involved in spectacular crashes, with more than a
scent, in some cases, of corruption.
Of the boards of major French groups in 2000, 45 per cent (rising to 71 per cent
for Société Générale, 80 per cent for Elf and 100 per cent for Vivendi), were polytech-
niciens or énarques; of the 290 inspecteurs des finances in 2002, 122 had senior positions
in the private sector. Some of these have performed respectably: Michel Pébereau
(BNP-Paribas), Daniel Bouton (Société Générale), Louis Schweitzer (Renault), Henri
de Castries (Axa insurance), Jean-Marc Espalioux (Accor hotels), or Marc Tessier
(France-Télévisions) have turned in honourable results for their firms, and sometimes
better (though it is noticeable that no French banks are among the world’s top ten).
Others, especially inspecteurs des finances, did spectacularly less well. François
Heilbronner lost 6 billion euros for the GAN insurance group between 1986 and 1994,
Chirac’s school friend Jacques Friedmann a more modest 300 million euros at UAP
from 1993 to 1997 (UAP was then taken over by Axa). Georges Bonin lost 1.7 billion
euros as the head of the Crédit Foncier de France (the bank was a casualty of the
liberalisation of the economy, since over decades it had lived from commissions on
state aids distributed, but Bonin had done little to end the extreme archaism of its
management). These losses were dwarfed, in the mid-1990s, by the crash of Haberer’s
still-nationalised Crédit Lyonnais, which only survived thanks to three salvage plans
and contributions from the taxpayer totalling 16 billion euros. Michel Bon resigned
from France-Télécom in November 2002 leaving a deficit of 20.7 billion euros (the
equivalent of the total state budget for housing, infrastructure and transport), a total
debt of 70 billion euros and a share value which had fallen from 27.7 euros at the firm’s
partial flotation in 1997 to 6 euros in September 2002. The same autumn saw the
departure of Jean-Marie Messier, an inspecteur des finances who had discovered the
virtues of capitalism when handling privatisations in Balladur’s cabinet in the 1980s,
from the water-to-media group Vivendi Universal, leaving 60 billion euros of debt and
shares which had also lost three-quarters of their value. Six months later, Pierre Bilger
left the heavy engineering firm Alstom; its shares, valued at 31.25 euros when floated in
1988, were selling at 1.5 euros in March 2003.
This succession of failures not only demonstrated that inspecteurs des finances were
not always very good at business (significantly, almost no non-French firms hire them),
but also raised questions about collusion within the French elite. Thus Jean-Yves
Haberer and the officials in the Bank of France and the Treasury division of the
Finance Ministry who should have monitored his activities at Crédit Lyonnais more
closely were all inspecteurs des finances who had previously worked closely together at
the Trésor division of the Finance Ministry. Thus, too, the Commission des Opérations
en Bourse (an inspection preserve since 1984) failed to observe that Messier was illegally
using money earmarked for investments in public water concessions to cover losses on
property deals. Such episodes occasionally led to the courts: in 2002, one inspecteur des
finances in eight was involved in a judicial investigation of some sort. These events,
however, are in some ways of secondary importance next to what was perhaps the most
disturbing of all French scandals of the 1990s, involving the (formerly) state-owned oil
company Elf and a complex web of corruption, money-laundering and political fixing
that drew in Elf managers, senior civil servants, French politicians of both Right and
Left, and African heads of state. Elf’s unfinished business was still dragging through the
French courts in 2005. Both this and the Crédit Lyonnais episode went some way to
delegitimising the interlocking elites formerly identified with the successes of the post-
war interventionist model; by 1995, 40 per cent of respondents to one SOFRES survey
considered that France’s elites were ‘totally bankrupt’.
The adventures in the private sector of senior civil servants, especially the elite of the
elite, should not obscure the fact that most – 81 per cent of the 5,000 or so énarques
active in 1999 – continued to serve the state. But if part, at least, of the administrative
elite was increasingly seduced by the charms of managing the private sector, it proved
comparatively immune to the attractions of management within the administration
itself; indeed, management per se is not a skill imparted at ÉNA. Luc Rouban’s
research into the attitudes of civil servants towards the adoption, within the administra-
tion, of skills imported from the private sector has shown that members of the grands
corps were the most likely to be indifferent or even hostile to such changes and to see
them as irrelevant to administrative skills and norms built up over decades or centuries.
That lack of interest at the top goes some way to explain the slow pace of change,
despite a rapidly changing context, in the ranks of the administration.
The rank and file: reform

Every developed state has faced the challenge, since the 1980s, of making its public
services more cost-effective and more responsive to the complex and unpredictable
demands emanating from civil society. The palette of measures from which most have
selected their responses bears the label New Public Management. NPM may include
management by objectives, contracts and targets (and the use of audits to verify their
achievement); the formulation of performance charters and service standards, with the
possibility of redress for users in the event of failure to achieve them; the use of
information technology to strip out middle-management jobs and improve inter-service
co-ordination; the deconcentration of executive tasks into independent agencies run
on private-sector lines; the market testing of divisions and agencies, and its potential
corollary, public–private partnerships or even the concession of core public services to
private firms under more or less rigorous public supervision. Two essential principles
underlie NPM: first, that as in the private sector, the cost and effectiveness of any given
activity could and should be evaluated; second, that benefits, in particular greater flexi-
bility in service delivery, will accrue if the state manages to be more of a regulator or
facilitator and less of a doer.
French governments have not been oblivious to such ideas. As early as 1969, Chaban-
Delmas proposed a type of management by objectives in the form of ‘progress con-
tracts’ with public-sector firms and public services (he deeply shocked traditional
Gaullists, who took the view that such contracts placed the state on an equal footing
with its own employees, and thus on a sure road to decadence). After the Left’s heavy
recruiting, under a Communist minister for public services, between 1981 and 1983, the
Socialists committed themselves, from 1984, to public-sector ‘modernisation’, in par-
ticular by experimenting with contracts in relations between central government and
the local and regional authorities, recently granted new powers under decentralisation.
Between 1986 and 1988 the right-wing ministers Camille Cabana and Hervé de
Charette concocted ambitious neo-liberal reforms, though these were prudently
shelved. But between 1988 and 1991 the Rocard government engaged in perhaps the
most ambitious programme of public-sector reform yet attempted under the Fifth
Republic. Promising the renewal of public services via a transition ‘from a procedural
administration to a responsible administration’, Rocard required modernisation pro-
grammes from each minister, and sought to devolve administrative and budgetary
responsibility, to buy in management and professional training from the private sector
and to place customer service at the centre of reforms. The Rocard programme did
achieve successes in some areas: the postal and telecommunications sectors were thor-
oughly restructured, while observers like Luc Rouban or Lionel Chaty found that
branches of the core administration responded positively to unfamiliar notions like
responsibility centres and quality circles. Although it fell victim to Rocard’s fall and to
the financial constraints of the early 1990s, the programme began a dynamic. After
Rocard, reform might be slow, discontinuous, messy and punctuated by confrontation
between political actors and interest groups within the administration (which the inter-
est groups often won), but it never fell off the agenda. Broad initiatives in the 1990s
included the Citizen’s Charter à la française drawn up by Rocard’s successor Édith
Cresson shortly before her enforced resignation in 1992, and Balladur’s plans to ‘reform
the state’, based on the highly ambitious Picq report, a shopping-list of measures
(better training in customer reception, planned training periods, shorter administrative
response times), but which lacked overall vision and the means of implementation.
Some of the more innovative developments have taken place in the articulation
between central and local government. Under the contrats de ville, for example, minis-
tries and local authorities define a global plan for an urban area, taking in such
domains as urban development, education and training, employment, health and cul-
ture. The Education Ministry, the biggest employer in France (1.3 million of France’s
public servants, a million of them in the schools system and the rest in the tertiary
sector) has also been targeted for reform, notably by Jospin’s Education Minister
Claude Allègre. Allègre sought to give the ministry’s field services across France
(the académies) greater financial autonomy, with globalised budgets; to decentralise the
complex procedures for moving staff between schools; and to demolish some of the
more rigid barriers within the ministry (for example, between divisions dealing with
primary and secondary schooling). It is now common practice for contracts to set out
objectives agreed mutually between the ministry in Paris and its field services, and at a
lower level between the académies and schools, and for each school to have to develop
its own project, in liaison with local authorities as well as the académie.
More generally, the dynamic of reform is likely to be maintained by three factors:
budgetary constraints which no government will escape; the window of opportunity
afforded as large numbers of public servants retire between 2005 and 2015; and the major
reforms to budget procedures introduced from 2005 (see Chapter 6, p. 163), which should
afford Deputies and Senators a clearer idea of the real cost of public-sector programmes.
The rank and file: rigidities
If the process of reform has changed the working lives of many of France’s public
servants, the fonction publique as a whole remains recognisably the same entity, with
many of the same rigidities, as in the 1970s. State employees with the status of fonction-
naires still enjoy, de facto if not de jure, a lifetime guarantee of employment, aside from
a few cases annually of professional misconduct. The number of fonctionnaires con-
tinued to rise under Jospin, by about 120,000, and even under Raffarin, though by a
much more modest 4,500 in 2003; they are expected to drop by some 17,500 in 2005
thanks to the non-replacement of departing staff. Recruitment procedures remain
based on general competitive examinations rather than aptitude tests for specific jobs;
appraisal and reward structures favour rigorous equality of treatment between person-
nel at the same grade, and promotion on seniority, regardless of performance. Behind
the façade of a unified public service, divisions between corps remain, among the rank
and file as much as at the top. The 25,000 employees of France’s prison service are
divided into fifteen corps, the 18,000 staff of the Culture Ministry into forty, and
France’s 5,000 university librarians into seven. Different training, qualifications and
career structures of the various corps hinder mobility within and between ministries, as
do the different bonus systems, vital complements to what are often low basic wages.
The drawbacks and rigidities of centralisation, in other words, are not compensated by
any very notable responsiveness to the centre.
These rigidities are important because they make it hard to transfer limited resources
where they are most needed. The needs in some areas are enormous. The Labour
Inspectorate, for example, has a staff of 900 to cover the health and safety of some
14 million private-sector workers. France is the only country in Europe where the
annual cost of a university student (6,590 euros) is less than that of a high-school pupil
(7,880 euros). Some of the old ‘regalian’ functions of the state have been relentlessly
squeezed: the judicial system is clogged, the diplomatic service subjected to cuts which
hamper the ambition of successive governments for France to play a world role
(France’s diplomats even went on strike for a day in 2004). As a result, at least in part,
of underfunding, the politique de la ville has so far met with limited success in its
attempt to salvage France’s worst suburban housing estates from crime, poverty, drugs
and (most recently) Muslim extremism. The research staff who demonstrated early in
2004 were fighting low pay and staffing cuts in what government officially considers a
key area for France’s future.
By contrast, surpluses may at least be surmised in the Agriculture Ministry, where
employment rose by 17 per cent, from 28,000 to 32,850, between 1970 and 1998, a
period when two-thirds of farm jobs were lost; or in the Industry Ministry, which grew
by a quarter as a fifth of industrial jobs disappeared. The Finance Ministry, privileged
through its direct control of revenue and spending, has become a byword for arcane and
often expensive practices concocted without reference to either its political masters or
its administrative controlling bodies. Ghislaine Ottenheimer has observed that in
1999, the Bank of France employed a total staff of 15,918, compared with 2,700 at the
Bank of England. With the switch to the euro that year, the Bank of France’s mission
might be considered to have ended; it was therefore given the task – for which it was
not obviously suited – of assessing requests for assistance from over-indebted house-
holds. Meanwhile the Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee went on meeting regularly,
with generous allowances for its members but nothing to decide, well into 2002. The
assessment and collection of taxes is divided (except for large firms, whose political
clout has secured them a one-stop service) between the 90,000 employees of the Tax
Directorate (which calculates all taxes, and collects VAT and wealth tax) and the 55,000
staff of the Public Accounts Directorate (which collects income tax and corporation
tax – as well as local taxes, which are then redistributed to local authorities); the
computer systems of the two are not integrated. Not even the Ministry’s impressive
communications service (680 staff) can quite hide the fact that this is one of Europe’s
most costly tax systems to administer. Finance Minister Sautter’s attempt to reform it
in 2000 provoked a strike which saw managers locked in their offices and files thrown
out of windows, before Sautter resigned and his successor Fabius abandoned the pro-
ject. Even Francis Mer, who came to his post as Raffarin’s first finance minister (of four
in the three years after his appointment) imbued with the private-sector practices of the
Sacilor steel firm (and the irreverance for finance of a polytechnicien) stayed away from
this explosive area, though he did undertake a number of less spectacular but useful
reforms, including clear targets for services to taxpayers.
The fate of the Sautter reforms is far from unique. His colleague Claude Allègre also
lost his job in the spring of 2000 as a result of union opposition to his plans for changes
to teaching methods and school governance and plans to decentralise the employment
of technical staff. Five years earlier, Juppé’s attempt to reform public-sector pensions
had led to the strike wave of late 1995 and the terminal discredit of his government.
Raffarin sought to draw the lessons of these experiences in his own government’s
reform projects, which included modifications to the 35-hour week (for all wage-
earners), the raising to forty years of the pensions contribution requirement for public-
sector workers and restrictions on the right of patients to consult medical specialists
without the intermediary of a general practitioner. In each case he proceeded with
limited objectives, went through the motions of consulting unions (as Juppé did not)
and kept concessions in reserve to buy off or split opposition. On the other hand, he
kept away from the most explosive areas, like his minister Mer: the special pension
systems for groups such as rail drivers, for example, have been left untouched ever since
Juppé’s setbacks. Possibly Raffarin’s patient and cautious approach is the only one
possible, but his critics claim that its scope is not of a measure with the size and urgency
of problems such as France’s pensions overhang or the widening deficit of public health
insurance. And Raffarin still managed to provoke a wave of discontent among public-
sector workers that spread to other groups in the spring of 2005 and set a climate that
favoured the no vote at the referendum of 29 May.
The failure, near-failure, or half-success of so many relatively mild attempts at reform
contrasts sharply with the implementation of considerably more brutal programmes in
Britain and the United States, and suggests structural rather than merely circumstantial
causes. Seven can be cited. The first is the industrial power of a workforce that is all but
impossible to sack, with a level of unionisation, at nearly 20 per cent, that is four to five
times higher than in France’s private sector, and willing to strike to defend established
pay and working conditions: in six out of the seven years from 1995 to 2001, over 55 per
cent of working days lost through strike action were in the fonction publique. The
second is cultural. It is not just that France’s public services continue to enjoy a high
level of legitimacy, despite criticisms levelled at one or another of them. It is that this
legitimacy extends to a certain model of public service, including uniformity of provi-
sion and thus a central role for the state, and the unrestricted right to strike. Even the
suggestion that some public-service workers might be required by law to provide a
‘minimum service’ in case of strikes has received lukewarm support in the polls. This
capital of sympathy for ‘French-style public services’ was shown dramatically in the
high levels of approval for the 1995 strikes, and for a succession of actions since then
involving railwaymen, teachers, hospital workers, public research staff. Third, the legit-
imacy of the public services is backed by law, in the form of a protective civil service
statute. Radical reform of France’s public services would therefore require the political
battle entailed by primary legislation. Fourth, under these conditions no government
has been inclined to take the political risk of a radical reform – or even of pressing a
moderate reform to its full extent. The Left always risks its own core electorate (public-
sector employees have been consistently more left-leaning than their private-sector
counterparts). The Right in government was never, from 1981 till 2002, more than two
years away from an election – with the exception of the hapless Juppé. Fifth, the
political reluctance of national governments is often reinforced by that of local politi-
cians (who may also be national ones) when faced with threats to local public services.
Sixth, it is extraordinarily hard to get agreements that will satisfy all parties. This is not
only because public-service unions are attached to their own entrenched positions
within ministries, but also because they are divided: thus one Finance Ministry union
could claim, in March 2000, that its rival union in the tax division ‘has our destruction
as its main aim, and is ready to accept any structural change in order to achieve that
aim’. Finally, reforms have rarely had the full and enthusiastic backing of the public-
service elite, many of whom have shown little interest in public-service management. All
too often the énarques imposed changes in working practices on subordinates without
applying them in their own cabinets.
For the public this means that the most hard-pressed services – often in poorer areas
that need them most – remain underfunded. For the public servants themselves, it
means that posts offering working conditions of bucolic languor (in some of the quieter
rural tax offices) coexist with others requiring superhuman resistance to stress (school-
teachers in the rougher Paris suburbs, nurses in many Parisian hospitals), with little if
any pay differential. Staff shortages have been palliated by recruitment of personnel
on temporary contracts without fonctionnaire status (their numbers exceeded a million
in 2000, of whom 700,000 were direct state employees); and low pay by bonuses
awarded on the basis of arcane and often spurious criteria (and amounting to over
half the total remuneration of some Finance Ministry officials). Both expedients
may be useful short-term correctives, but risk damaging both quality of service and
transparency over time.
Concluding remarks
Élie Cohen has argued that France’s industrial decline from the mid-1970s on derived
partly from the fact that economic tools that had served the nation well during the
trente glorieuses – grands projets, dirigisme, a permanent tax on savings through infla-
tion, periodic devaluations – became useless, indeed positive handicaps, in a changed
economic environment. A comparable argument could be attempted for the administra-
tion and the public services. As France, with its long history of political instability and
conflict, underwent a period of unprecedented social transformation during the trente
glorieuses, their contribution to the nation’s cohesion was remarkable. Education
offered upward social mobility for many (some of whom would realise that mobility
within the public sector itself). A formerly rural population was housed in towns (with
some delay) and given access to an unprecedented array of public services. Growing
private affluence was matched, on the whole, with rising standards in such areas as
public transport or health or cultural facilities. A technocratic elite enjoyed undeniable
social prestige and significant political power thanks both to traditions stretching back
to the ancien régime and Napoleon and to a more recent record of success.
The mission of national cohesion has been less obviously well performed in the more
difficult times since the mid-1970s. Three failures stand out. First, neither the education
system – despite its expansion – nor the administration provide the same opportunities
for social mobility: at the outset of the twenty-first century, adult illiteracy stood at
12 per cent, 160,000 unqualified men and women were entering the labour market every
year, youth unemployment stood at 26 per cent and poverty among young people at
17 per cent. An underfunded university system continues to fail half its annual intake at
the end of their first year of studies – and even after such a ferocious weed-out, still
produces graduates whom employers do not rush to hire. The administration itself
recruits overqualified staff, who block the opportunities available to those of more
modest educational achievement. Second, the desperate state of many of France’s
suburban public housing estates, where many public services operate with extreme
difficulty or not at all, bear witness both to the longer-term costs of quick remedies to
the post-war housing crisis and to the failure of public action to remedy the equally
striking failures of the market. Third, both elite and rank-and-file public servants have
suffered a more or less severe crisis of identity. For the elite, this has been linked to
politicisation and the effects of alternation in power; to the very much more uncertain
role of a grand commis de l’État in an open liberal economy and an integrated Europe;
and to the corrosive effects of scandals in which senior public servants have appeared as
self-interested, cliquish, incompetent and immune to sanction. The rank and file, accus-
tomed to the simple delivery of services in conditions defined either unilaterally by the
state or in liaison with a single client group, faced a new range of demands relating to
quality of service, relations with user groups and efficiency – and in a context of
budgetary uncertainty. The periodic calls from (mostly but not exclusively right-wing)
experts and politicians for a reduction in the number of public servants may appear as
positively insulting to the hard-pressed suburban schoolteacher, the nurse in a Parisian
casualty ward, or the employee of a rail network which has lost two-thirds of its staff in
fifty years. In this context, the defence of avantages acquis – the particular terms of
employment that make life more tolerable for specific groups of public servants – may
acquire the status of a struggle to protect public services generally, or even the Republic
itself. That link was made particularly strongly during the campaign for the 2005 refer-
endum on the European constitutional treaty, considered by its opponents to represent
a direct threat to the French public-service tradition.
Not that the ‘output’ of France’s administration and public services is particularly
poor. In many ways and in many contexts they prevent public squalor from coexisting
with private affluence. They often offer standards of medical care and public transport
that can make their English counterparts appear barely civilised. The French remain
attached to the public services they encounter from day to day, even when they consider
that abstractions such as ‘the state’ or ‘the administration’ do not always operate in
their interests. France still provides one of Europe’s ablest groups of top civil servants.
But France’s public sector is capable of slipping. The death of fully 15,000 old people,
many of them in the care of public retirement homes, in the summer heatwave of 2003
cast a shadow over the reputation of France’s health system (as well as triggering a dive
in the Raffarin government’s ratings from which it never recovered). And it is increas-
ingly expensive: one report by the Commissariat au Plan in 1999 claimed that by 2015
an extra 26 billion euros would have to be found annually simply to cover future
pensions plus the long-term costs of the Crédit Lyonnais and SNCF debts. This limits
the room both for tax cuts (promised but massively underdelivered by Chirac after
2002) and for improvements in funding for priority areas such as research.
Private-sector methods are not invariably appropriate for public services. But it is
clear that the size and structure of France’s administration and public services are
and will remain a pressing policy issue. Large-scale and productive (and accepted)
public-sector reform appears, however, to demand an unusual window of opportunity:
an election-free political outlook; strong economic growth to release the extra funding
necessary to ease any transition; widespread public agreement on the necessity of
reforms; as well as the co-operation both of the civil service elite and of the rank-and-
file unions. This seems an unlikely prospect. But the early twenty-first century appears
to offer as good a chance for renewal as any – not least because nearly half of all the
state’s employees are due to retire by 2015. Whether this opportunity can be used
productively will be a major stake both of Chirac’s presidency and of his successor’s.
No domestic issue is likely to be more important for French governments of the early
twenty-first century; and none will be more pregnant with political dangers.
Further reading
Armstrong, J., The European Administrative Elite, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1973.
Birnbaum, P., Les sommets de l’État: essai sur l’elite du pouvoir en France, Paris, Seuil, 1977.
Bodiguel, J.-L. and Rouban, L., Le fonctionnaire détrôné?, Paris, Presses de la Fondation
Bourdieu, P., La noblesse d’État: grandes écoles et esprit de corps, Paris, Éditions de Minuit, 1987.
Brachet, P., Du commandement au management: l’administration française entre souveraineté et
service public, Paris, Publisud, 1995.
Chagnollaud, D., Le premier des ordres. Les hauts fonctionnaires, XVIIIe–XXe siècles, Paris,
Fayard, 1991.
Chaty, L., L’administration face au management: projets de service et centres de responsabilité dans
l’administration française, Paris, L’Harmattan, 1997.
Cohen, E., L’état brancardier: politiques du déclin industriel (1974–1984), Paris, Calmann-Lévy,
1989.
Cole, A., ‘The Service Public under stress’, West European Politics, 22(4), October 1999,
pp. 166–84.
Cour des Comptes, La fonction publique de l’État: Rapport public particulier, Paris, Les éditions
des Journaux officiels, 1999.
de Baecque, F. and Quermonne, J.-L. (eds), Administration et politique sous la Cinquième
République, Paris, Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1981.
Duhamel, O., ‘Les Français et l’État’, in SOFRES, L’état de l’opinion 2000, Paris, Seuil, 2000,
pp. 137–44.
Dupuy, F. and Thoenig, J.-C., L’administration en miettes, Paris, Fayard, 1995.
Esprit, no. 236, October 1997, ‘Les elites de la République sur la sellette’.
Fauroux, R. and Spitz, B. (eds), Notre État, Paris, Robert Laffont, 2001.
Fauroux, R. and Spitz, B. (eds), État d’Urgence, Paris, Robert Laffont, 2004.
Gohin, O., Institutions administratives, 3rd edition, Paris, Librairie Générale du Droit et de la
Jurisprudence, 1998.
Julliard, J., La faute aux elites, Paris, Gallimard, 1997.
Kessler, M.-C., Les grands corps de l’État, Paris, Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences
Politiques, 1986.
Olivennes, D., ‘Les Français et l’État’, in SOFRES, L’état de l’opinion 1997, Paris, Seuil, 1997,
pp. 149–59.
Ottenheimer, G., Les intouchables: grandeur et décadence d’une caste: l’Inspection des finances,
Paris, Albin Michel, 2004.
Pfister, T., La république des fonctionnaires, Paris, Seuil, 1990.
Pouvoirs, no. 40, 1987, ‘Des fonctionnaires politisés?’; no. 53, 1990, ‘Le ministère des Finances’.
Rainaud, J.-M., La crise du service public français, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1999.
Rey, H., La peur des banlieues, Paris, Presses de Sciences Po, 1996.
Rouban, L., Le pouvoir anonyme: les mutations de l’État à la française, Paris, Presses de la
Rouban, L., ‘Les énarques en cabinets, 1984–1996’, Cahiers du CEVIPOF, 17, Paris, 1997.
Rouban, L., La fin des technocrates?, Paris, Presses de Sciences Po, 1997.
Rouban, L., The French Civil Service, Paris, La Documentation Française, 1998.
Rouban, L., ‘La politisation des fonctionnaires en France: Obstacle ou nécessité?’, Revue
française d’administration publique, no. 86, April–June 1998, pp. 167–82.
Sadran, P., Le système administratif français, Paris, Montchrestien, 1992.
Schifres, M., La désertion des énarques: du pantouflage en République, Paris, Stock, 1999.
Schrameck, O., Les cabinets ministériels, Paris, Dalloz, 1995.
Suleiman, E., Politics, Power and Bureaucracy in France: The Administrative Elite, Princeton, NJ,
Princeton University Press, 1974.
Suleiman, E., Elites in French Society: The Politics of Survival, Princeton, NJ, Princeton
Suleiman, E., Les ressorts cachés de la réussite française, Paris, Seuil, 1995.
Suleiman, E. and Mendras, H. (eds), Le recrutement des elites en Europe, Paris, La Découverte,
1995.
Thomas, Y., Histoire de l’administration, Paris, La Découverte, 1995.
11 The state and the pressure groups
The domination-crisis model 315

The endemic and open conflict model 322
The corporatist and concerted politics models 330
The pluralist model 334
An untidy reality 337
Further reading 347
The political culture of Jacobinism, as inherited from the French Revolution, has even
less use for interest groups than for parties. Jacobins opposed the narrow, ‘particular’
(and inevitably selfish) interests represented by the groups to the ‘general interest’ which
only the state could incarnate. The Le Chapelier Law of 1791, whose effective ban on
such organisations as trade unions was confirmed in 1810 by Napoleon’s penal code,
was the legislative expression of the Jacobin view (Napoleon’s code also helpfully
banned gatherings of over twenty people). It was a view that contrasted with those of
the more liberal ‘Anglo-Saxons’, less ready to attribute god-like qualities to the state
and more inclined to limit its role to holding the ring between competing private inter-
ests whose social role was viewed as broadly beneficial. Even the much more liberal laws
of 1884 and 1901, which conceded the principle of freedom of association, placed
groups firmly within a framework defined by the state. The smallest club de pétanque
still refers to itself as an Association loi 1901, while larger groups may apply to the
Conseil d’État for the privileges associated with being recognised as d’utilité publique.
Not that government in France has remained impervious to the blandishments of
well-organised interests. Under the Fourth Republic, for example, the home distillers’
association was blamed for its energetic (and successful) defence of its members’ right
to destroy the livers of thousands of alcoholic French people each year, while the
powerful colonial lobby was certainly guilty of encouraging the régime’s more viciously
inept policies and of obstructing the more enlightened ones in Indo-China and North
Africa. In the light of these experiences, it was logical that as De Gaulle and Debré set
out to ‘restore the state’ after 1958, they should make a point of affirming the Fifth
Republic’s independence from the ‘feudal forces’ which, in Debré’s view, had colonised
the Fourth: a law to phase out home distilling was passed as early as 1959. De Gaulle
rejected any claim of groups to determine policy, on the ground that even the most
representative of them ‘is nevertheless, from the legal point of view, bereft of authority
and political responsibility’ – unlike the state, which is ‘an instrument of decision,
The state and the pressure groups 313
action, ambition, expressing and serving only the national interest’. At the same time,
as numerous events showed (notably his reinforcement of the the Fourth Republic’s
Conseil Économique as the Conseil Économique et Social, and his ill-fated attempt
to incorporate this body into a reformed upper chamber of parliament in the 1969
referendum), he readily conceded the right of groups to be consulted.
In doing so, de Gaulle was acknowledging that some form of exchange between
groups and the state is essential to the working of a modern democracy. Groups look to
government to provide a variety of goods: direct material benefits (subsidies for farmers
or miners, pay rises for teachers, or protection or tax breaks for business); non-material
policy benefits which may have substantial material consequences (such as rights at the
workplace for unions, or tighter or looser regulation of health and safety, or competi-
tion, or environmental practices); or (what is normally a precondition for the other two)
simple recognition as a valid interlocutor. Successful groups also, however, offer some-
thing in exchange. Businesses seeking an economic environment favourable to them-
selves claim that this contributes to job creation and general prosperity. Groups may
also argue that only they, and not civil servants or ministerial cabinets, command the
expertise necessary to ensure the technical viability of a particular complex policy, or
the grass-roots political knowledge to assess the extent of opposition to a proposal.
They may thus claim that the government needs their co-operation for the successful
implementation of its policies. Groups able to cause disruption, notably in the trans-
port sector, suggest that their own contentment is a condition of ‘social peace’. All
groups may offer political support to governments, and money to parties (which may
or may not be legal) and to individual politicians (which is almost invariably not).
Above all, perhaps, governments in modern democracies have looked to groups to help
legitimate their policies within civil society.
In any democracy, therefore, dialogue between government and at least some groups
is intense and continuous. Its forms vary: informal contacts between group leaders and
politicians (who may themselves be former group representatives, from business, farm-
ing or trade unions), or between group leaders and civil servants (a frequent form of
dialogue for established groups); formal negotiations through official consultative
committees; or, for ‘outsider’ groups with no access to government, street demonstra-
tions, strikes or other forms of direct action. Which patterns of exchange are most
common varies between political systems. The nature of these relations can reveal
much, not only about the degree of integration of groups within a given system but also
about the location of power within the state’s institutions.
Analysing the relationship (or rather, relationships) between the state and the groups
is, however, fraught with difficulty. There is, first of all, the problem of where groups stop
and parties start. The Greens have evolved since the 1970s from a pressure group into a
party. More surprisingly, the shooting lobby has been fighting both European and
regional elections as Chasse, Pêche, Nature, Traditions (CPNT) since 1989. Second,
pressure on government may be exerted not just by groups or associations, but also by
individual firms. Renault, for example, with 44,500 employees, eight assembly plants
and ten components plants in France, as well as 5,000 suppliers depending on its orders,
hardly needs to belong to an association to talk to ministers or civil servants; nor does
Serge Dassault, head not only of the aircraft firm that bears his father’s name but also
of Socpresse, which owns L’Express and Le Figaro among other titles. Third, networks
such as the Freemasons have been seen by parts of the French press as more influential
than duly constituted groups. To some extent this is the stuff of conspiracy theory. But
the Masons were quite openly influential under the Third Republic: 155 Masonic lodges
participated in their own right in the first Radical Party Congress in 1901. Under the
Fifth Republic they have been active in the PS (including men as close to Mitterrand as
Roland Dumas and Charles Hernu, plus as many as 100 Socialist Deputies in 1986) as
well as the RPR, and, in too many cases, as participants in the Elf scandal. Other
networks remain an important, if ill-defined, part of group activity. Chapter 10 has
outlined the significance of those linked to the grandes écoles and grands corps.
Research has also indicated the existence of networks as varied as those of former
résistants, former activists of the far Left or far Right, Left Catholics and proctériens
(former Procter & Gamble (France) managers).
Fourth, the shifting boundaries between the state and the private sector since 1981,
and the interpenetration between the two, have posed particular problems. When
Ambroise Roux, former head of the Compagnie Générale d’Électricité, created the
Association Française des Entreprises Privées (AFEP) in 1982, he underlined the fact
that most of the big firms represented in the main employers’ organisation, the Conseil
National du Patronat Français (CNPF), were now nationalised, and thus in a sense part
of the state. But a frequent pattern under the Fifth Republic has been a complex pattern
of cross-shareholdings between public and private business, whether resulting from the
acquisition of shares in private firms before 1981 or, more recently, from partial privat-
isations (France Télécom or Air France, for example) under the Jospin government.
The fifth problem in analysing state–group relations follows from the fourth: pressure
groups are also constituted by parts of the state machine, which defend their own
corporate interests in competition or rivalry with other parts. The French nuclear
energy programme of the 1970s was strongly backed by the nationalised electricity
industry (EDF), the Commissariat à l’Énergie Atomique, the privately owned Creusot-
Loire company, and the Communist-dominated trade union, the CGT. It was opposed,
unsuccessfully, by the nationalised coal industry, the newly created state agency respon-
sible for solar energy and the Socialist-leaning trade union, the CFDT. Public-sector
banks and petroleum companies were also, in practice, powerful actors enjoying great
autonomy and a capacity to pressure the state they were supposed to serve. The finan-
cial scandal of Crédit Lyonnais and the institutionalised corruption of Elf suggest that
they were also resistant to the most elementary control by their main shareholder.
The sixth problem in studying state–group relations concerns the Europeanisation
and internationalisation of the French economy. In many decisions, neither the French
state nor the groups may be the ultimate arbiter. Farm policies are fixed in Brussels by
the EU, or in Geneva by the World Trade Organisation. Employment prospects in the
Alpine town of Annecy depend to a large degree on Gillette, a foreign multinational. In
these circumstances a complex triangular relationship replaces the traditional dual one:
the state is both a pressure group and a pressured group.
A final difficulty concerns the general approach to the subject of government–group
relations. There has been, in France, an important Marxist school which produced
valuable empirical research in areas relating to urban development and to the inter-
nationalisation of the French industrial and capital markets. Its theoretical under-
pinnings, however, have tended to the simplistic. Stressing the role of the state in preserving
the long-term interests of the bourgeoisie and ensuring the optimal social conditions
for the development of capitalism, the Marxists left little clue as to the behaviour of
individual political actors, the diversity of groups within the bourgeois and working-
class camps or the variations in policy outcomes within France. Similar shortcomings
hamper the functionalist approach, in which the actions of the state and its agents
are interpreted as a series of responses to needs – generally the needs to balance and
to integrate divergent interests in the name of social harmony or consensus. The
functionalists resemble the Marxists in that their overarching theory largely fails to
apprehend the awesome complexity of many political situations.
Within the literature on state–group relations in the Fifth Republic (which is still
somewhat sparse, despite work by American scholars such as Wilson, Keeler, Ambler
and Schmidt, or French ones such as Barthélemy, Mouriaux, Offerlé or Weber), four
general models of state–group relations in France deserve closer attention. For the sake
of convenience they may be called the domination-crisis model, the endemic conflict
model, the corporatist model and the pluralist model. Each has supporters who root
their analyses in aspects of French political behaviour as well as in a general theoretical
approach; each has some justification; but each is, ultimately, partial and inadequate in
its explanations. Taken together, though, their analyses help to portray some of the
complex reality and to answer some of the problems raised above.
The domination-crisis model

This model is largely associated with Michel Crozier and Stanley Hoffmann, who
together, though from somewhat different viewpoints, reformulated in a more system-
atic fashion the views and prejudices of a long line of observers stretching back, at the
least, to the great nineteenth-century political observer Alexis de Tocqueville. Those
views are anchored in an analysis of French attitudes to authority and change, and may
be briefly summarised as follows.
• The French fear face-to-face relations, and very readily have recourse to
impersonal, highly formalised, distant and hierarchical rules imposed from above
to govern social intercourse: only such rules are likely to prevent arbitrariness.
Hence a powerful and centralised bureaucracy exists to enforce the rules.
• French political culture is characterised by both ‘limited authoritarianism’ and
‘potential insurrection against authority’, and the French oscillate between a normal
servility towards authority and sporadic rebellions against it. Closely associated
with this idea is the Tocquevillian view, echoed by Michel Poniatowski and many
others, that ‘France is a profoundly conservative country which dreams of revolution
but rejects reform’.
• In a highly individualistic, atomised and anomic society, associative life is weak, for
a French person fears the loss of liberty and individuality which results from
belonging to groups. Those groups that do exist are fragmented, egotistical and
generally anomic, and reject the principle of fruitful interdependence. In other
countries, groups bargain and compromise with each other and with the state. Each
French group, on the other hand, ferociously defends its rights against other
groups, and resists any attempts by the state to impose change which might be
prejudicial to its acquired interests: the term droits acquis is one of the most emo-
tive in the French language, approximating either to fundamental and intangible
rights or to illegitimate and exorbitant privileges depending on who is using it.
• Since the groups defend the status quo, change within society must be imposed by
the bureaucracy: there is thus a gulf between a modernising administration and its
highly conservative administrés.
• The state is viewed with mistrust by the ill-organised groups, since it threatens to
impinge upon their droits acquis. Authority must, therefore, be resisted. This ‘per-
petual resistance’ to authority found philosophical justification in the interwar
writings of Alain – the pseudonym of Émile Chartier – who told his countrymen to
build themselves ‘barricades’ against the encroachment of the state: the first rule in
the handbook of government, he contended, was ‘heroic idleness’. The result of the
unremitting and obscurantist resistance is stalemate – La société bloquée, as the
title of Michel Crozier’s influential 1970 book had it.
• The state authorities view the groups as ‘delinquent communities’ (Jesse Pitts), as
‘subservient clients’ (Jack Hayward), which may be treated with authoritarianism
(because of their normal servility) and with contempt (because of their obscurant-
ism). Yet their droits acquis must be respected, because of their predilection for
revolt.
• In this political culture, dominated by fear, suspicion and a ‘perpetual resistance to
the ruling elites’, change can be brought about to break the stalemate not by
peaceful means but only by more or less violent upheavals. But these ‘functionally
innovative crises’ which introduce reforms are then followed by long periods in
which the traditional rules of the game reassert themselves. In the domination-
crisis model, the state dominates the groups and imposes its directives upon them in
authoritarian fashion. But, fearful of insurrection, it is unable to impose radical
reforms except during a crisis.
The domination-crisis model: evidence in favour

There is evidence in plenty to support the points outlined above. Groups are often weak
and divided; the state has often intervened in an authoritarian manner; there are
examples of the defence of droits acquis resulting in stalemate; and France has had
more than its share of dramatic social crises.
Weak groups
The weakness of French groups is best illustrated by their low membership density –
that is, their inability to recruit more than a small proportion of their total potential
membership. The most obvious case in point is trade unions. Their membership density
under the Fifth Republic peaked in 1975, at a mere 24 per cent of the workforce,
compared with over 50 per cent at the time in the UK, and over 80 per cent in some
Scandinavian countries. By the late 1990s the figure in France had slipped to about
8 per cent, or roughly 2.5 million, where it has since stagnated. Some 60–70 per cent of
all union members are in the remaining public enterprises or in the public services; large
swathes of the private sector, by contrast, are virtually union-free, with half of all wage-
earners lacking any union representation at all within their firms. Trade unions are an
extreme case, but a far from unique one.
Fragmented groups
The fragmentation of French groups, often on political lines, has been a constant of
French social life ever since secularising republicans set up their own parallel networks
of self-help organisations to break what had been the Church’s monopoly on social
welfare. Among trade unions (Table 11.1), the leading position of the venerable Con-
fédération Générale du Travail (CGT), founded in 1895 and dominated by Communists
since 1945, has been contested by the vigorously anti-Communist Force Ouvrière (FO),
which split off from it at the start of the Cold War; by the anarcho-syndicalist Con-
fédération Nationale du Travail (CNT), which split from it in 1946, was little more than
a groupuscule for decades, but claimed 10,000 members in 2005; by the Confédération
Française Démocratique du Travail (CFDT, of left-wing Catholic inspiration, which
deconfessionalised in 1964, backed the vogue for workers’ self-management in the wake
of May 1968, and was more or less close to the Socialists until Mitterrand’s victory of
1981, when they distanced themselves from the left-wing government); by the Catholic
Confédération Française des Travailleurs Chrétiens (CFTC, the union of Catholics
wishing to maintain a confessional identity); by the now defunct Confédération Fran-
çaise du Travail (CFT, the creature of the pre–1981 right-wing majorities) and, among
managerial staff, by the Confédération Générale des Cadres (CGC). Agriculture is an
unusual sector where membership density has traditionally been high, and relatively
concentrated. The dominant organisation, the conservative Fédération Nationale des
Syndicats des Exploitants Agricoles (FNSEA), claims a membership of 600,000, or
over half of all farmers (and won 52.4 per cent of votes in the 2001 elections to
Chambers of Agriculture): a lower density than for the British National Farmers’
Union, where the figure is nearer 90 per cent, but still high for France. But it has faced
challenges not only from the Centre National des Jeunes Agriculteurs (CNJA, which
the FNSEA absorbed in 1961), but also from groups on the Right and Left. The former
have included the Fédération Française de l’Agriculture (FFA), founded in 1969, and,
since the early 1990s, the Coordination Rurale, close in many respects to the far Right,
which won 12.5 per cent of votes at the 2001 Chambers of Agriculture elections. On the
Left, the Communist-affiliated Mouvement de Défense de l’Exploitation Familiale
(MODEF), was joined in 1987 by the ecology-minded Confédération Paysanne; these
two movements, which have co-operated locally, together won 31 per cent of the vote in
2001. Even employers’ organisations have lacked the unity associated with their counter-
parts elsewhere. The MEDEF (Mouvement des Entreprises de France, called the
Conseil National du Patronat Français (CNPF) until 1998), itself a very decentralised
body, has an often uneasy relationship with its affiliate the Confédération Générale des
Petites et Moyennes Entreprises (CGPME), which many smaller business people prefer,
Table 11.1 The strength of major trade unions in France
Union Results at elections to industrial tribunals (councils of prud’hommes) Total

confederation (% of votes cast) members
claimed
1979 1982 1987 1992 1997 2002 2004
CGT 42.4 36.8 36.3 33.3 33.1 32.1 650,000

FO 17.4 17.7 20.4 20.4 20.5 18.3 800,000
CFDT 23.1 23.5 23.1 23.8 25.3 25.2 865,528
CFTC 6.9 8.4 8.3 8.5 7.5 9.7 250,000
CGC 5.1 9.6 7.4 6.9 5.9 7.0 140,000
Others 4.6 3.7 4.3 6.9 7.5 7.7 n/a
Sources: Le Monde (elections) membership figures are those declared by the unions to the European Trade
Union Confederation; while figures for most unions are fairly reliable, independent estimates put the true
membership of Force Ouvrière at under 400,000.
and has faced competition both from the more militant Syndicat National des Petites et
Moyennes Industries (SNPMI), from the more or less extreme CID-UNATI, and from
Ambroise Roux’s AFEP. Comparable divisions can be observed among the profes-
sional middle classes. For example, while most doctors belong to the Confédération des
Syndicats Médicaux Français, this organisation is divided between an apolitical major-
ity and a socialist minority; in addition, a few wealthy consultants who initially refused
to enter the social security system are members of the Fédération des Médecins de
France, and a few left-wing general practitioners have joined the Syndicat de la Méde-
cine Générale. Lawyers are divided between the left-wing Syndicat de la Magistrature,
the moderate right-wing Union Syndicale des Magistrats and the Association Profes-
sionnelle des Magistrats, sympathetic to the hard Right. Regionalist and nationalist
movements, too, are similarly fragmented. Even a sector such as former deportees to
Germany during the Occupation possesses several groups, prone to competition if not
to unseemly squabbles.
Moreover, these groups are themselves divided. Both trade unions and employers’
groups are federations of local and sectoral organisations, each more or less attached to
its own traditions and autonomy. The CGT is divided between the Communist majority
and the Socialist-leaning minority (and, now, between old-style and new-style Com-
munists); FO between an anti-Communist majority and a Trotskyist minority; the
CFDT between realists and those still attached to the ideals of May 1968. The FNSEA,
once described as a ‘battleground of feudal warlords’, faces obvious difficulties recon-
ciling the interests of large and small farmers, of different regions, and of different
types of product – though it is better than most groups at uniting its forces, at least
against an outside threat. The MEDEF’s leadership has often been divided between
factions representing smaller and larger firms, and between more and less ideological
stances vis-à-vis governments. The election of Laurence Parisot to its presidency in
2005 was remarkable not only because Parisot is a woman at the head of a traditionally
male-dominated organisation, but also because, as head of the IFOP polling institute,
she represents the service sector rather than the mining and manufacturing interests
long at the heart of the patronat.
Nor has time, or the end of conflicts linked to the Cold War, done much to heal these
divisions; quite the contrary. For example, the Fédération de l’Éducation Nationale
(FEN) was an umbrella organisation which united the major teachers’ unions (the
Syndicat National des Instituteurs (SNI) for primary schools; the Syndicat National de
l’Enseignement Secondaire (SNES) for the secondary sector; and the Syndicat National
de l’Enseignement Supérieur (SNESup) for universities) and the vast majority of union-
ised teachers, independently of the CGT and the other big confederations, for nearly
half a century after the Liberation. But the FEN split in 1992 between a majority that
supported the Socialists and a Communist-leaning minority who left to form the
Fédération Syndicale Unitaire (FSU) – which soon overtook the truncated FEN in
support. Among mainstream unions, although the CGT has distanced itself from the
Communists (Bernard Thibault, its secretary-general since 1997, is the first CGT chief
since 1945 not to have any official position in the PCF) and FO has dropped its earlier
links with right-wing parties, the rapprochement was limited to common action at
largely symbolic events such as May Day rallies. And when the CFDT moved to a
‘realist’ line of negotiations with employers in the late 1980s, its militant minority
departed to create a new union, SUD (Solidaires, Unitaires et Démocratiques); SUD
members, often close to Trotskyist parties, are strong in key public-sector branches such
as the railways and postal services. Another case of recent divisions is the anti-racist
movement, which grew in the 1980s thanks to the challenge of the far Right and the
coming of age of a class of second-generation immigrants. It remains divided between
the old Ligue des Droits de l’Homme, founded at the time of the Dreyfus Affair; the
Communist-linked Mouvement contre le Racisme et pour l’Amitié entre les Peuples
(MRAP); SOS–Racisme, set up in 1984 with verbal and financial backing from Presi-
dent Mitterrand and still close to the Socialists; and the Trotskyist-led Ras l’Front – as
well as smaller organisations connected to Socialist personalities or anarchist groups.
Such divisions not only reflect a lack of social cohesion; they also perpetuate it, and
ensure that almost no group is able to aggregate the whole range of demands within its
sector. Moreover, fragmentation often leads to increased verbal militancy, since several
groups are competing for the same clientele. The gulf between the expectations raised
by such militancy and the results delivered then engenders disillusion and a further
weakening of the groups. For governments, the obvious consequences of such fragmen-
tation are the absence, in most sectors, of a single, stable, representative negotiating
partner, and the near-impossibility of reaching agreement on any given subject with the
whole range of possible partners. Faced with this situation, ministers may resort to one
of four strategies: to pick one sympathetic group as an ‘official’ partner and ignore the
rest – which will almost certainly leave at least a substantial minority of groups in the
cold; to play upon the divisions between groups in order to impose government measures
– which may demobilise opposition, but is unlikely to win much positive support; to
attempt to build a consensus, which is time-consuming and may not work; or to ignore
groups altogether. Each of these strategies involves the risk that discontent will be
turned into extra-institutional channels. May 1968 can be explained partly in terms of
the choices of partners made by the Pompidou governments: not the Communist-
leaning Union Nationale des Étudiants de France (UNEF), but a students’ union, the
Fédération Nationale des Étudiants de France (FNEF), that they had practically
created themselves; not the CGT, but solidly pro-capitalist CFT, one-twentieth the size.
The authoritarian state

A more or less authoritarian policy-making style on the state’s part has been noted by
countless observers. Jack Hayward, and Vivien Schmidt after him, have referred to a
‘heroic’ style of policy-making, in which the state is an actor and initiator, and consult-
ation with groups is limited or non-existent. ‘Heroic’ policy-making has a pedigree
going back to Louis XIV’s chief minister Colbert. In some areas, it was even possible
under the Fourth Republic because the parliament conceded some of its financial
powers to the planners. But the possibilities were greatly increased with the reinforce-
ment of the executive after 1958. Most of de Gaulle’s and Pompidou’s industrial policy
initiatives could be placed in the ‘heroic’ category. So could Barre’s 1976 anti-inflation
plan, a characteristic example of the iron fist in the mailed glove. So could the Social-
ists’ 1982 nationalisations or, more recently, Juppé’s 1995 social security plan, or the
Jospin government’s 35-hour week.
Société bloquée
The société bloquée in which groups frustrate change in the name of their own droits
acquis is a convincing interpretation of at least some aspects of state–group relations in
France. The teaching unions’ defeat of Education Minister Claude Allègre in the spring
of 2000 is merely the most recent case in point (though to be fair to the teachers, they
believed Allègre’s reforms to be damaging to education as well as to themselves). The
deeply hostile relations between most trade unions and much of business in France
since 1945 were another facet of the same problem, and contrasted with the more
co-operative behaviour prevalent across the Rhine.
Social crises
Dramatic social crises have marked France more than once under the Fifth Republic.
The prime example is May 1968, which led directly to greater trade union rights and
educational reforms (and was followed by a period of stifling and routine-ridden con-
servatism, as the reforms were whittled away by the employers and the academic estab-
lishment respectively). The runner-up is probably constituted by the December 1995
strikes (though these did serve to block reforms – Juppé’s social security changes –
which were obviously against the interests of the strikers, rather than furthering or
facilitating any social advances). It is notable that neither of these crises was in any
sense engineered by the trade unions. Rather, the strikes broke out more or less spon-
taneously, and often not even through the actions of union members, and the unions
were then constrained to follow the movements, and to regain control of them as best
they could – if more militant, grass-roots ‘co-ordinations’ had not got there first. For
France is the land par excellence of the unforeseen and often unforeseeable mobilisa-
tion, not only of the usual suspects (students and farmers being regularly effervescent
in their own different ways), but also of previously tranquil groups such as nurses in
1991 and the unemployed in 1998.
The domination-crisis model: objections

There is enough in the above to lend continued persuasiveness to the domination-crisis
model, even more than a generation after its formulation. Yet it provides an incomplete,
and at times misleading, view of the behaviour of the French, of the groups, of the state
and of social crises in France.
The spread of associations

France’s vibrant associative culture belies generalisations about the French ‘fear of
face-to-face contact’. American observers in the 1950s noted disapprovingly that the
French were not ‘joiners’; this is no longer the case. France at the start of the twenty-
first century had between 800,000 and 1 million associations, with some 62,000 new
ones being registered each year – three times the level of 1960. Total membership of
associations in France – roughly 20 million, or 49 per cent of men and 40 per cent of
women – is comparable to the European average. They mobilise as many as 12 million
volunteers (for example, the 43,000 helpers who distributed some 66 million meals
to the destitute for the Restos du Cœur charity in the winter of 2004–5) and have
1.5 million full-time or part-time employees. Certainly, membership of parties, trade
unions and professional organisations accounted for a rather small proportion of the
total, about a fifth (sporting clubs had perhaps twice as many members). Nevertheless,
the flourishing of environmental movements, free radio stations, cultural associations
of all kinds, and groups supporting the rights of immigrants, the unemployed, the
homeless, women, AIDS victims and any number of humanitarian causes (Médecins
sans Frontières being a notable example) suggests that French society is no longer as
pathologically individualistic as the domination-crisis model claims.
Associations and innovation

The existence of progressive and innovative associations demonstrates that the state has
no monopoly on modernisation and reform. The CNJA, for example, led by the charis-
matic Michel Debatisse, played a crucial role in the modernisation of French farming
in the 1950s and 1960s. More recently, the MEDEF launched an aggressive campaign in
2000 to renegotiate the whole basis of France’s social security system. This was a highly
controversial undertaking, opposed by all the major trade unions except the CFDT and
viewed with deep misgivings by the Socialist government. In many ways it resembled
the programme of a political opposition more than of an interest group. But it could
not be characterised either as a simple defence of droits acquis or as a demagogic call to
arms in the name of impossible goals or ideological slogans. It is also the case, as has
been shown in Chapter 10, that the French bureaucracy is not invariably an engine of
bold reforms, even when ministers would like it to be: civil servants are as attached to
their own droits acquis as anyone, and more effective than most at safeguarding them.
State–group consultation
The widespread, regular and unspectacular consultation between the state and groups
that does go on is overlooked or undervalued by the domination-crisis model. As
Schmidt observes, the French may often be Jacobins at the formulation stage of policy-
making, but when it comes to implementation, they are Girondins, ever ready to find
accommodations to spare the interests or sensibilities of important groups. The prin-
ciple of the 35-hour week, for example, was imposed by law, with very little discussion,
on employers and unions – but the latter were consulted extensively on the detail.
Similarly, the domination-crisis model tends to ignore the dense network of committees
and joint negotiating bodies, from the Conseil Économique et Social down, which exist
for the precise purpose of consultation between the administration and the groups.
Peaceful reform
The reality of peaceful reform also has little place in the domination-crisis model. The
argument that crises breed reforms in France is borne out by the great transformations
of the Liberation era, to a lesser extent by the change of régime in 1958, and arguably
by May 1968 as well. But the claim that reforms require crises ignores the persistent and
pragmatic changes undertaken since 1945 without such extreme pressures. The social
and political reforms introduced by Giscard d’Estaing, which profoundly affected both
the individual and the family, emerged, not from a revolutionary spasm, but from the
normal and healthy electoral fears of a narrowly elected president. The Socialist reform
programme introduced after 1981 may have corresponded to a ‘heroic’ model of policy-
making, but it was occasioned by a presidential election: a perfectly normal political
event, not a ‘functionally innovative crisis’. The steady deregulation of the economy
that has taken place since the mid-1980s has certainly responded to external events, but
not to anything more dramatic than the normal range of pressures in a globalising
economy. Raffarin’s programme of reforms to France’s pensions and welfare systems,
which achieved some limited but undeniable successes, is predicated on the view that
governments can engineer change on a step-by-step, unspectacular basis, and seek to
carry at least some of the relevant groups with them. And the notion that France is a
société bloquée appears steadily more questionable as one measures the immense
changes, for the most part peacefully elaborated and equally peacefully implemented,
which have taken place in France since 1945.
The permeable state–groups barrier

The complexity of interactions between the state and society is also largely ignored
by the domination-crisis model. The rather strict separation between state and society
that it assumes underestimates both the presence and intensity of divisions within the
bureaucracy, and the existence, via pantouflage and all manner of old boy networks, of
close lines of complicity that cross the state–groups barrier. Similarly, the separation
between the state and groups overlooks the fact that a number of the biggest conflicts
of recent years, especially under the Juppé and Raffarin governments, took place
between the state’s political masters and its rank-and-file servants.
The domination-crisis model, in short, provides useful insights, especially into the way
many associations behave, but is not a convincing total explanation. Like most models,
it raises more questions than it answers, and it is too neat and too selective in its choice
of facts to convey the full complexity of the situation.
The endemic and open conflict model

This model is linked with, but distinct from, the previous school of thought. It shares
assumptions about the authoritarian nature of the state, the fragmented nature of the
groups and the impact of revolutionary crisis as a creative and reforming force. But it
differs from the domination-crisis model in that its assumptions rest less on a view of
the innate characteristics of French society than on an argument about the functioning
of the political institutions of the Fifth Republic. It is maintained that with the decline
of parliament, the natural safety valve of the Third and Fourth Republics, and the
growth of a disciplined pro-governmental party coalition, the political leverage of the
groups has been severely limited. Decreasing influence has led to increasing frustration.
And frustration has led to mounting pressure of an extra-institutional and often violent
nature. Such pressure has become endemic and has taken the form of open conflict, and
this pressure has been instrumental in wresting concessions from governments. Accord-
ing to this school, the groups in their relations with the state are less quiescent clients
than belligerent defenders of their interests.
The endemic and open conflict model: evidence in favour

Supporters of this thesis can point to the extra-institutional pressures of all kinds to
which Fifth Republic governments of every stripe have been subjected. Such pressures
may be considered under four headings: strikes, demonstrations, illegal obstruction and
violent confrontation.
Strikes
Whereas in an average year Blair’s Britain saw fewer than half a million working days
lost to strikes (the figure of 900,000 for 2004 was exceptional), the comparable total for
a typical year in France is anything from two to four times as high (Tables 11.2 and
11.3). They have involved not only blue-collar workers, but also groups as diverse as air
traffic controllers, airline pilots, university and lycée students, doctors, lawyers and
architects (in many cases, middle-class groups resorting to a proletarian weapon to
stave off what they see as their own impending proletarianisation). The near-general
strike of May 1968, with nearly 150 million working days lost, is the outstanding case.
The strikes of 1995, though nowhere near as extensive (fewer than 6 million days lost),
were still remarkable in a European context in which labour disputes had become much
Table 11.2 Working days lost through strikes in France, 1963–81 (000s: excluding Fonction pub-
lique de l’État)
1963 5,991 1970 1,700 1977 3,665

1964 2,497 1971 4,400 1978 2,200
1965 973 1972 3,800 1979 3,656
1966 2,502 1973 3,914 1980 1,674
1967 4,203 1974 3,380 1981 1,495
1968 150,000 1975 3,869
1969 2,200 1976 5,010
Source: Ministère des Affaires Sociales.
Table 11.3 Working days lost through strikes in France, 1982–2001 (000s)
Fonction Private and Total Fonction

publique de nationalised publique de
l’État firms l’État as %
of total
1982 126 2,327 2,453 5.1

1983 333 1,484 1,817 18.3
1984 975 1,357 2,332 41.8
1985 341 885 1,226 27.8
1986 853 1,042 1,895 45.0
1987 785 969 1,754 44.8
1988 686 1,242 1,928 35.6
1989 2,322 904 3,226 72.0
1990 574 694 1,268 45.3
1991 239 666 905 26.4
1992 218 491 709 30.7
1993 389 533 922 42.2
1994 227 521 748 30.3
1995 3,763 2,121 5,883 64.0
1996 686 448 1,134 60.5
1997 383 455 838 45.7
1998 684 353 1,037 66.0
1999 752 574 1,325 56.8
2000 1,650 810 2,460 67.1
2001 1,115 692 1,807 61.7
Source: Ministère des Affaires Sociales.

rarer. The Raffarin reforms to the public-sector pensions system and to the status of
auxiliaries in schools caused a further, if smaller, wave of strikes in the second quarter
of 2003, with ten ‘days of action’ (strikes and demonstrations) in the spring and early
summer. The big one-day strike of 10 March 2005, in which unions from both public
and private sectors joined in an across-the-board fight for pay, is credited with helping
to create the climate for the no victory at the May referendum.
Demonstrations
Mass demonstrations have been frequent under the Fifth Republic in virtually all eco-
nomic or political climates. In 1975, not a particularly troubled year, there were 612
demonstrations in Paris, of which 312 necessitated the mobilisation of the police. Sarah
Waters puts the annual number of demonstrations in the early twenty-first century at
10,000, of which about 1,000 take place in Paris. Under the early Fifth Republic,
the Algerian war triggered off massive demonstrations in favour of peace, two of
which were repressed with murderous ferocity by the police. May 1968 was, in this as
in other respects, in a class of its own, with left-wing students in Paris, Bordeaux,
Nantes, Strasbourg and other big university towns mounting enormous carnavalesque
processions – and finally giving way, in Paris on 30 May, to a gigantic tricolour-waving
pro-Gaullist rally. For demonstrations are not confined to left-wing groups. Even more
picturesque than May 1968 was the farmers’ tour de force in September 1991, when the
Champs-Élysées was transformed into a wheatfield for a weekend. Demonstrations
have brought out doctors, nurses, professors in gowns and, once in 1993, employers
from the textile industry, complete with blazer-clad stewards specially hired for the
day. Probably the largest demonstration held in Paris since the Liberation, on 24 June
1984, gathered 1.3 million defenders of Church schools against the Socialist govern-
ment’s reform projects; just under a decade later, some 600,000 supporters of secular
education came out against the Balladur government’s plans to raise subsidies to
Catholic schooling. Numbers in excess of 100,000 have also rallied in Paris around
causes as varied as the future of French farming (almost every year from 1982 to 1991),
the social security system (at the CGT’s behest, in 1987 and 1990), anti-racism (in 1990,
after an attack on the Jewish cemetery at Carpentras by a group of skinheads close to
the FN), health issues (in 1991), the education budget (in 1990), the Raffarin pension
reforms (in May 2003, when the organisers claimed two million demonstrators across
France and the police conceded half that number), the defence of the 35-hour week
(in January 2005) and Alain Devaquet’s plans to allow universities to select students
and charge fees (in late 1986). Unlike most of the others, the anti-Devaquet demonstra-
tions did not pass off peacefully, due to troublemakers among the demonstrators and
poorly commanded and ultimately violent riot police, who beat one demonstrator
to death.
What is most remarkable about the continuing predilection among the French for
strikes and demonstrations is the amount of public support they generally enjoy. The
CSA polling institute has shown that of fifty nationwide conflicts involving strikes,
demonstrations, or both between 1995 and 2005, and taking in an impressive roll-call of
groups as varied as truckers, hospital staff, the police, farmers, factory workers,
researchers, teachers, university and high school students, doctors, actors, tobacconists
and the unemployed, fully forty-five enjoyed the support or at least sympathy of over
half of all respondents, while twenty-five were supported by two-thirds of respondents.
The conflicts concerned included disruptive strikes by teachers and railway workers
(though strikes by railway workers alone, as well as Air France pilots in 1998, were
among the minority without public approval). Similarly, the ‘minimum service’ on
public transport in the event of a strike, though considered attractive as an idea by
three-quarters of poll respondents, is rejected by the same proportion as a proposition
to be enforced by law; hence, no doubt, the refusal of successive right-wing govern-
ments, despite the calls from their own exasperated Deputies, to use legislation to
achieve this. This relative solidarity on the part of the public distinguishes the French
case from, for example, Britain in the late 1970s, where endemic strike action played
into the hands of a deeply anti-union Conservative Party.
Direct action
Illegal activity – usually undertaken by groups staring ruin in the face, or believing they
are – has taken various forms. Steel workers during the crisis of the late 1970s disrupted
the Tour de France, burnt down public buildings and held managers hostage; lorry
drivers have blocked motorways, or driven along them very very slowly (a practice known
as opérations escargot); farmers have regularly tipped unsold artichokes, tomatoes,
peaches and apples, or (far worse) liquid manure onto the streets – slowing down even
French drivers. The ecologically minded also have blocked the sites of proposed
motorways, closed down ports to protest against oil pollution (when they were not
closed by truckers or by fishermen protesting against high prices for diesel or low ones
for fish) and, in Brittany, have invaded proposed atomic energy stations. In 1993 Act
Up, the militant gay rights group, placed a giant condom on the obelisk in the Place de
la Concorde. A favourite target of direct action is the local prefecture or subprefecture,
still the physical representation of state authority in the provinces. The cause célèbre of
the century’s end was the August 1999 attack on a McDonald’s restaurant (its perpet-
rators called it a ‘dismantling’) in the provincial town of Millau by a group of Con-
fédération Paysanne activists. Led by the charismatic José Bové, they were protesting
against punitive American duties on Roquefort cheese and, more generally, against the
globalisation of the food industry. Bové’s trial the following July brought some 50,000
supporters back to Millau.
Violence
Violence, whether premeditated or simply as an escalation of more peaceful forms of
protest, has been a frequent feature of the politics of the Fifth Republic. According to
official figures, there were about a hundred attentats a year in the 1960s and early 1970s,
rising to 480 in 1976, 555 in 1977 and over 600 in 1978. Some attentats, such as the
bombs in the rue de Rennes in September 1986, which killed six, or in the regional
metro in July 1995, which left four dead, have been the work of North African or
Middle Eastern terrorists. But there has been plenty of home-grown violence too, with
origins in political extremism, national separatism or sectoral desperation.
Political extremism on the Left found its most violent expression in Action Directe,
whose tiny handful of members carried out several killings in the late 1970s and 1980s.
They were finally arrested in February 1987, some three months after having murdered
Georges Besse, the head of Renault. More extensive, however, is the record of the far
Right, starting with the Organisation Armée Secrète (OAS), the paramilitary wing of
the supporters of French Algeria. Over a mere four months in the summer of 1961, the
Interior Ministry recorded 726 attentats in France, almost all of OAS origin; this figure
does not include either the countless terrorist outrages committed by the OAS in
Algeria, or the dozen or so attempts to assassinate de Gaulle. Later groups on the far
Right have been responsible for attacks on the homes of left-wingers and on Jewish
offices and synagogues; and the Front National has regularly attracted individuals for
whom casual murder is a logical extension of their racist beliefs.
Violence of a nationalist nature has taken place in Savoy and in the Basque country
(the Basque separatist group Iparetarak committed some sixty attentats between 1973
and 1986, when it was officially dissolved), but more especially in Brittany and Corsica.
In both of these places, moderate autonomous groups have been flanked by more
extreme and more unruly paramilitary factions. Thus in Brittany, the legal Union
Démocratique Bretonne, which has fought elections and won seats on local councils
since 1964, had to compete against the Front de Libération Bretonne–Armée Républic-
aine Bretonne, which specialised in armed attacks on state property in the late 1970s.
Since then, the Breton nationalist cause has taken largely peaceful channels, thanks in
part to a relatively enlightened policy of cultural concessions from successive govern-
ments; it is significant that a violent attack on a McDonald’s restaurant, which killed a
waitress in April 2000, was roundly condemned by all established Breton nationalist
groups. Corsica, on the other hand, has all the ingredients of an insoluble territorial
problem: an underdeveloped and isolated peripheral region; resentment of property
development and other incursions by the mainland French; a clan-ridden local political
class which has used corrupt electoral practices for generations; a ‘law of silence’
(omertà) deeply rooted in local traditions; and a nationalist movement that is violent,
able to command widespread passive sympathy or silence, closely linked to organised
crime and thus well-funded, but also highly fragmented. Legal movements here, such as
the Union du Peuple Corse or Corsica Nazione, are likely to be fronts for, rather than
competitors against, the illegal ones, of which the most important has been the Front
de Libération Nationale Corse (FLNC), banned in 1983. The FLNC split in 1989 into a
canal habituel and a canal historique, groups which in turn have been prone to splits.
None of this has halted the violence; there were an estimated 3,366 political attentats
attributed to Corsican groups between 1975 and 1995, including forty-seven murders;
early twenty-first century observers put the figures at 300 attentats and about thirty
political murders a year (though these include the considerable number of crimes com-
mitted by Corsican groups against one another). The Corsican question was put most
firmly on the agenda when nationalists assassinated the regional prefect Claude Érignac
in February 1998 (the prime suspect was able to hide for five years on the island before
being arrested in 2003). Government policy has vacillated between neglect (in effect
turning a blind eye to a corrupt local system), reform (the new local government system
for the island brought in by Interior Minister Joxe in 1991), covert negotiation covered
with apparently culpable laxity (the Juppé government’s readiness to allow armed and
hooded terrorists to give a press conference announcing a so-called truce) and ill-
planned repression (after the Érignac murder). The Jospin initiative of early 2000,
involving negotiations in Matignon with all the political forces on the island, had the
merit of being open and direct, but it still failed after being attacked for the recognition
it appeared to give to political organisations supporting terrorism. So did the Sarkozy
plan to unify Corsican political representation into a single authority, narrowly
defeated in the referendum on the island in July 2003.
Of a rather different nature is the violence that results from mass demonstrations or
illegal protests which run out of control. Here, damage to property (such as the destruc-
tion by fire of the MEDEF offices in La Rochelle during the 2003 pensions reform
protests) may be deliberate, but is not always planned, and very rarely executed with
bombs or the other tools of the terrorist; loss of life may occur (whether on the side of
the police or of the protesters) but is not intended. Like the illegal activities of which it
is an extension, it usually involves groups facing marginalisation or ruin: small farmers
or fishermen crippled by debts (a characteristic feature of the modernisation of these
industries) which falling prices make it impossible to pay. For Breton fishermen in 1994,
the historic fourteenth-century parlement building in Rennes was an obvious target:
they burnt it down. The FNSEA has always tolerated its members’ ‘commando’-type
actions against ‘unfair’ foreign imports, such as Italian wine or British sheep (some
lorryloads of which they burnt alive in 1997). FNSEA members have also attacked
individuals of whom they disapprove, especially women. In 1982 Agriculture Minister
Édith Cresson was forced to flee a crowd of angry peasants by helicopter; in 1999 they
sacked the offices of their favourite bête noire, Environment Minister Dominique
Voynet. Another group of disgruntled rustics, the bird-shooters of CPNT, have also put
a minister to flight (in 1999), and regularly issue implicit threats to turn their guns on
the authorities if the shortening of the shooting season is enforced. The small busi-
nessmen of Gérard Nicoud’s CID-UNATI were active in the intimidation of tax
inspectors and destruction of tax files in the 1970s. The steel workers of Longwy and
Denain, whose jobs were directly threatened by the restructuring of their industry from
the late 1970s, regularly brought catapults and ball-bearings to demonstrations (the
police, of course, responded with baton charges and tear gas). More recently, workers in
a private firm scheduled for closure tried to enlist the support of the Labour Ministry
by threatening to dump toxic chemicals in a nearby river. The early years of the ecology
movement were also marked by violence on the part of its extremists, who blew up part
of a nuclear power station at Fessenheim in Alsace in 1975, and the atomic energy
authority offices in Tours the following year. Confrontation with the police at the site of
the proposed nuclear power station at Creys-Malville in August 1977 ended in tragic
deaths; the Larzac plateau, which was being turned into a vast military camp, and
Plogoff in Brittany, site of another planned nuclear power station, were the two great
(and sometimes violent) rallying points for Greens in the 1970s.
The newest form of open defiance to the authority of the state, however, has come not
from interest groups at all. This is the rise in urban violence, typically but not exclusively
concentrated in modern working-class suburbs and caused by young unemployed men,
frequently of North African or sub-Saharan African origin: vandalism, the theft and
burning of cars, and crimes against the person. This endemic unrest has been played
out against a background of urban deprivation, the chronic neglect of ill-designed and
ill-serviced estates, educational underachievement, widespread drug trafficking, and a
perception that for young men with the wrong name, or skin colour, or religion, the
opportunities of France’s supposedly egalitarian Republic are closed. In 1997 it was
estimated that fifteen young people had been killed and nearly 2,000 wounded as a
result of this type of violence; official figures showed that some 28,000 cars were
torched in the first ten months of 2005. That the state is challenged is shown by the
difficulty the police have had in intervening against crime: many such suburbs became
places where the police appeared either en masse or not at all. They have also been
places where central and local government, even with the necessary funds to improve
matters, have often had difficulty finding widely recognised local groups to talk to.
Hence, in part, the nationwide rioting that followed the accidental deaths of two
teenagers, apparently fleeing what they took to be pursuing policemen, in November
2005. This was France’s worst outbreak of civil unrest since May 1968; it affected the
outskirts of almost every major city in France, causing the destruction of some 10,000
cars, as well as numerous public buildings, in the space of two weeks; and provoked the
de Villepin government into a characteristic mix of concessions (measures in favour of
the suburbs that should have been taken without the encouragement of riots) and
repression (the revival of a law dating from the period of the Algerian war allowing
mayors to impose selective curfews in their towns).
Supporters of the endemic and open conflict thesis not only assert, with Alain Peyre-
fitte, that ‘rioting is the national sport’; they also claim that direct action works – that
it is an essential, if not the characteristic, form of group representation. Group repre-
sentatives themselves appear to believe in the efficacy of direct action: 60 per cent of
Frank Wilson’s (admittedly quite small) sample considered that it could influence
policy-making – though most also preferred other methods. Evidence that extreme
activity can pay may be garnered from every period of the Fifth Republic. Strikes by
miners in 1963, by wholesale fruit and vegetable suppliers in 1973, by doctors in 1983
and by train drivers in 1986–87, all forced an apparently resolute government to make
major concessions. The big student demonstrations of 1986 led the Chirac government
not only to withdraw its university reforms but also its planned (restrictive) reform of
the nationality laws. The lycéens’ movement of 1990 won an extra 4.5 billion francs for
the Education budget – a week after the budget had been officially voted, and on the
direct orders of Mitterrand, who had received the lycéens’ leaders at the Élysée. The
1982 and 1991 reforms to the government of Corsica would not have occurred without
the actions of a violent minority. The antics of farmers have regularly been met not
only with indulgence (FNSEA membership virtually guaranteeing immunity from
prosecution) but with concessions from government, such as the temporary bans on
Italian wine imports imposed in the 1970s in flagrant breach of EC regulations. Direct
action by fishermen won 45 million francs in subsidies in 1993. Supporters of Catholic
schools in 1984 and of secular ones in 1994 helped ensure, by demonstrating, that the
status quo was maintained against the reforming ambitions of governments of Left and
Right. Truckers in September 2000 won 35 centimes a litre off the price of diesel fuel –
and a host of European emulators. Demonstrations by the unemployed succeeded in
reversing planned cuts in benefits early in 2004. And, as we have seen, the rioters of
November 2005 obtained a package of measures in favour of their rundown suburbs –
though it is far from clear that this was what they were asking for.
The endemic and open conflict model: objections

The endemic and open conflict model, while usefully underlining an important aspect
of state–group relations, suffers on five main counts.
• Extra-institutional means have often been wholly ineffective in forcing concessions.

The OAS, for example, only succeeded in accelerating Algerian independence. The
assassins of Action Directe are behind bars. The truckers’ strike of October 1997,
or the mouvement des sans-papiers, calling for the granting of residence permits to
several hundred thousand immigrants who had lost their right to residence in
France after restrictive reforms to immigration legislation by right-wing govern-
ments, or protests by the unemployed in winter 1997–98, produced limited conces-
sions. The short-term victories of farmers, fishermen, steel workers and small
traders have done little or nothing to halt the longer-term decline of all these
groups: in less than half a century, for example, the agricultural sector shrank from
a quarter of the working population to a twentieth.
• The tradition of direct action is much older than the Fifth Republic. In the half-
century before 1958, the years 1908, 1920, 1934, 1936, 1944, 1947 and 1953 stand
out as especially conflict-ridden and/or violent. And such bucolic pursuits as the
tarring and feathering of tax collectors who had the effrontery to demand tax
payment stopped, not started, with the Fifth Republic.
• Political violence is far from unique to France. The FLNC and its offshoots are
minor players compared to ETA in Spain or to the IRA in the UK; the forty-seven
Corsican murders over a twenty-year period hardly bear comparison with the 2,000
or so deaths in Northern Ireland over the same years. Similarly, Action Directe had
nothing like the impact, whether in terms of the body count or of the social malaise
caused, of the Italian Red Brigades or even of the West German Red Army
Faction. The fact that Spain, Britain, Germany and Italy all have rather different
régimes from France also suggests that the link between direct action and the
institutions of the Fifth Republic is tenuous or non-existent.
• The endemic and open conflict model, like the domination-crisis model, understates
the amount of peaceful and fruitful dialogue that does occur between groups
and the state.
• Finally, the model misinterprets the real nature of extra-institutional activities.
Demonstrations are not always all-out confrontations with the state (indeed, their
organisers usually negotiate the route with the renseignements généraux, France’s
equivalent of the Special Branch). They often attract mainstream (usually oppos-
ition) politicians who aspire to wield state power themselves through due electoral
process; the big Gaullist demonstration of May 1968 was led by former Prime
Minister Debré and Culture Minister André Malraux; the anti-racist demonstra-
tion after the 1990 Carpentras outrage included the president himself. French
strikes rarely last long because they lack the organisation and funding that only
strong unions can provide. In 1983, for instance, only 6 per cent of industrial strikes
lasted longer than fourteen days, and only 2 per cent more than a month. With
some notable exceptions (such as the conflicts of 1995, or the strike by security
guards in May 2000 which left France’s cashpoints without banknotes for a fort-
night), they tend to be brief, ritualised affairs, often lasting no longer than a day or
even a few hours. Such pressures may be simply part of an overall strategy of
pressure which also includes highly institutionalised forms of bargaining. The
deliberate dramatisation of a negotiation may enable a group not only to extract
concessions from the sponsor ministry; it may also be exploited by both the group
and the ministry in bringing pressure to bear on the government as a whole.
Occasionally such dramatisation may help the government to persuade taxpayers
that concessions are vital or, in the case of the farmers, to convince its European
partners that without concessions revolution would be imminent.
The corporatist and concerted politics models
If the two previous models of state–group relations lay stress upon the conflictual
nature of those relations and emphasise the generally authoritarian and insensitive
nature of the organs of the state, the corporatist and concerted politics models describe
the relationship as one of partnership, constant, permanent and mutually beneficial.
Concerted politics, writes Jack Hayward,
stresses the interdependence of the government and the interest groups, and the
interpenetration of ‘public’ and ‘private’ decision-making characteristic of a mixed
economy in which an increasing measure of state intervention has to be reconciled
with an increasing measure of interest group intervention in all spheres of social
activity.
The concerted politics model is both descriptive and prescriptive: it sees the state–group
partnership as both desirable and inevitable. Indeed, for many proponents of this
model, which was fashionable in the 1950s and 1960s, relations between the state and
the groups were to take place ‘within the framework of social justice’, provided by the
planning of the French economy.
Underlying the attempt to direct state–group intercourse into institutional channels
was the search for consensus and for ‘rational’ decision-making. But the search proved
illusory, for it was based on the myth that the alchemy of concertation could produce
decisions acceptable to all interests. Concerted politics implicitly denied the primacy
and inevitability of politics and the intrinsically conflictual nature of decision-making.
One protagonist of concerted politics even proclaimed the need ‘to depoliticise the
major policy options of the nation’. In a country so ideologically divided this was a
pious and foolish aspiration. The organs of concertation may have provided useful
forums for airing grievances and occasionally played a useful educative role; but they
were less the instruments of concertation than the institutionalised agents of muted
conflict. This was gradually recognised, even by the economic planners: one of the later
planning commissioners, Jean Ripert, discreetly abandoned the concept of concertation
in favour of consultation.
If concerted politics was a fashion in some French governing circles in the 1950s and
1960s, corporatist politics became an academic mode of the 1970s and early 1980s. The
two models are closely linked, since both emphasise the non-neutral nature of the state
and the closeness and durability of the links between the state and the groups, and both
insist upon the importance of consensus-building and conflict management as integral
elements of the relationship. Finally, both point to the institutionalisation of the state–
group dialogue. But there are differences between the two models: the corporatist
model introduces notions such as hierarchy, integration, discrimination and privilege
which are absent from the concerted politics model.
Philippe Schmitter has famously defined corporatism as
a system of interest intermediation in which the constituent units are organized

into a limited number of singular, compulsory, non-competitive, hierarchically
ordered and functionally differentiated categories, recognized or licensed (if not
created) by the state and granted a deliberate representational monopoly within
their respective categories in exchange for observing certain controls on their
selection of leaders and articulation of demands and supports.
Very briefly, the corporatist model envisages the incorporation by the state of a few
powerful monopolistic groups (normally peak organisations, each federating smaller
groups in its own sector) into permanent institutionalised arrangements. Each group is
expected to implement fully all agreements reached with the state, coercing and discip-
lining its members if necessary; in return, it enjoys an exclusive right to represent its
sector’s interests to the state, as well as other privileges which may strengthen it even
further. Rival groups, if any, may be discriminated against, thus weakening them and
rendering them less attractive – which is a source of further weakness.
Corporatism: evidence in favour

If the two previous models were developed to explain a specifically French pattern of
relations, corporatism was initially used as a framework in quite other European coun-
tries: Austria, the Netherlands, Sweden and, to a lesser extent, Germany – all countries
where, for example, three-way bargaining between government, unions and employers,
leading to binding agreements, is common. In the light of some of the characteristics of
French groups mentioned above – and notably their fragmentation and their frequent
inability to control their members – France would seem to be a non-starter as a corpor-
atist system. However, theorists of corporatism have cut their cloth to suit all comers,
using the terms meso- or micro-corporatism to refer to instances where they consider
patterns of corporatist policy-making to be present in particular sectors. The question,
therefore, is not so much whether France is a full-blown corporatist system – it clearly is
not – as whether the corporatist paradigm might help us to understand elements of
state–group relations in France. Such elements might include the institutionalisation of
state–group relationships; the privileges granted to officially recognised groups; the
co-management by groups and the state of significant slices of public funds; the pattern
of state–group relationships in particular sectors; and the relations between political
leaders and groups at the local level.
• The institutionalisation of state–group relationships is at least 200 years old.

Napoleon organised the major economic interests of his day into Chambers within
each département: to this day, the Chambres de Commerce et d’Industrie, the
Chambres d’Agriculture and the Chambres des Métiers command the compulsory
membership of individuals and firms within their sectors, and have the power to
tax them to finance local projects. Consultative organisations within the state have
proliferated since the Liberation era. The 231 members of the Conseil Économique
et Social, whose consultative role is conserved in the Fifth Republic Constitution,
include delegates of trade unions, employers’ associations family associations and
mutual groups, as well as government appointees. Even in 1971, towards the apogee
of the ‘heroic’ Gaullist state, some 500 councils, 1,200 commissions and 3,000
committees served as fora for state–group consultations. Current government esti-
mates of the number of such bodies run to 20,000, including 645 national councils.
In addition, important sectors of labour relations have been subject to arbitration
in labour tribunals (conseils des prud’hommes) that bring officially elected represen-
tatives of capital and labour together under the state’s aegis.
• The privileges granted to officially recognised groups entail obvious collusion between
the state (or, at local level, regions, départements and municipalities) and these
groups. Such privileges include the automatic right to representation on official
consultative bodies; subsidies to train and pay for full-time officials; and in some
cases the use of civil servants on secondment, and the right to co-manage certain
social funds. These are open even to groups opposed to the government of the day.
There are some indications, too, that official practices are paralleled by unofficial
ones: for example, the very wealthy comité d’entreprise of EDF is a CGT stronghold
that according to one account has siphoned off, chiefly through overbilled con-
tracts, as much as 4 million euros annually for the union (and, indirectly, for the
PCF), without being brought to book (hence, in part, the CGT’s extreme reluctance
to see EDF privatised). These privileges do not automatically guarantee full ‘insider
status’ to their beneficiaries; the Coordination Rurale, for example, which won
official recognition in June 2000 on the strength of having won 15 per cent in the last
elections to the Chambers of Agriculture and having functioned for over five years
in at least twenty-five départements, will never be on the same footing as the FNSEA
in the foreseeable future. Nevertheless, recognised groups are always more
‘incorporated’ than rivals, having to rely simply on their ability to mobilise activists
in order to win any kind of access. And representative status, once won, is rarely if
ever lost, however steeply a group’s real support may decline.
• The co-management of public funds by groups and the state applies most obviously
to the enormous social security budget. This was administered for half a century by
representatives of employers and unions without any parliamentary scrutiny at all.
When parliament was given the right to vote on the social security budget in 1996,
it was only after over a decade in which the taxpayer had had to cover the deficit
without exercising control. The negotiations launched by MEDEF early in 2000
show how important the role of the ‘social partners’ in this sector still remains; they
actually produced results over the next four years, in terms of a new agreement on
vocational training and a new jobseeker’s package that raised unemployment pay
in return for evidence that the recipient was actively seeking work and would accept
reasonable job offers. Other co-managed areas include in-service professional train-
ing (the preparation of the two major laws on training, passed in 1971 and 1991,
was virtually subcontracted to the joint employer–union body responsible) and
family allowances, where the Union Nationale des Associations Familiales has
played a significant role since its creation just after the Liberation.
• The pattern of state–group relationships in particular sectors comes close to the
corporatist paradigm. In agriculture, the FNSEA, with the CNJA, now its own
young farmers’ branch, dominates most Chambers of Agriculture and stretches
into every French village and hamlet, not only through its 32,000 local unions and
forty product-specialised associations (for cereals, wheat, beets and so on), but also
via its hold on the Crédit Agricole, on farmers’ social insurance schemes, and on a
range of advice centres, mutual organisations and lycées agricoles, managed on
behalf of the state. These ensure that farmers have every interest in keeping up their
FNSEA membership, reinforcing the FNSEA’s dominant position. At the summit,
agriculture ministers throughout the Fifth Republic have had a regular Tuesday
meeting with representatives of the FNSEA, CNJA and Chambers of Agriculture;
in 1986, indeed, the FNSEA leader, François Guillaume, moved directly into the
job of minister. The FNSEA was strong enough both to prevent the Socialists from
diversifying their range of partners in the sector after 1981, and to force Édith
Cresson’s departure (she was replaced in 1983 by the more conciliatory Michel
Rocard). French farming as a whole came under unaccustomed pressure in the early
1990s as the Uruguay Round of international trade negotiations demanded freer
trade in farm products. But although the Uruguay Round did lead to an agreement
(which the FNSEA leader Raymond Lacombe would have preferred to prevent
altogether), the reductions to farm subsidies and protection were very much less, as
well as considerably later, than had been hoped at the beginning: a testimony, in
part, to the FNSEA’s continuing influence, even in a fast-shrinking industry.
The other sector where analysts have observed corporatism at work has been that
of education. Here, too, the main union (the FEN, before its split) established a
symbiotic relationship with the ministry, which was if anything reinforced by
attacks from outside (such as the battle with the Catholic school lobby in 1984).
Thus the management of promotions and transfers within France’s highly central-
ised teaching profession is largely handled, for the ministry, by union officials. The
power of the teachers’ unions to block education reforms altogether, or to erode
their impact during the implementation phase, is all the greater as it is exercised
from within: teachers on the ground are managed by teachers in their unions and in
the educational administration, who may themselves count on the support of
teachers in the National Assembly. They are still capable of undermining and even
destroying ministers who seek to bypass them, as the fall of Claude Allègre in
March 2000 illustrates.
• The local level, finally, may also present a form of corporatist behaviour. Here, it is
frequent for local authorities, and especially mayors, to enter a collusive relationship
with local associations; subsidies and buildings, but also responsibility for the man-
agement of specific local services, may be conceded to such associations by mayors
and councils, in return for involvement in local policy-making and electoral support.
Corporatism: objections
Agriculture and education, however, are very much the exceptions. The extreme div-
ision of groups alone would make corporatism appear quite inadequate as a general
model of state–group relations in France. To this general point may be added four more
specific objections to the model.
• The division of groups is often compounded by their inability to command the

long-term loyalty of their members – a vital feature of corporatism because such
loyalty is what ensures that deals reached at the summit will be accepted at the grass
roots. In trade unions in particular, but also to some extent in farm groups and
business organisations, there is a growing gap between full-time officials, often
living off state subsidies, and the rank-and-file membership: hence, in part, the
spread of more or less ad hoc ‘co-ordinations’, better trusted by ordinary members
than regular unions at times of strong mobilisation.
• Many of the consultative organisations mentioned above are routine bodies which
have little substantial effect on policy-making. Recent research on Chambers of
Commerce, for example, has indicated a decline in influence over recent decades,
with leadership positions in such bodies often taken by the least dynamic members
of business communities.
• Whereas in fully corporatist systems (in Scandinavia or Austria), the relationship
between groups and state practically excludes street protest, in France the one
complements the other. Farmers are both France’s most corporatist lobby and the
one most prone to direct action. Such action is at the same time a means for
farmers to exert additional pressure and a safety valve which the FNSEA tolerates
and even encourages to prevent defections of militant peasants to competing
unions. Similarly, teachers, despite their unions’ solid positions in the rue de
Grenelle ministry, are readier than almost any group (except for farmers – and
students) to protest on the streets.
• The corporatist model, with its stress on consensual policy-making between the
state and at least the ‘insider’ groups, does not acknowledge the possibility that
the state – politicians and civil servants – may, at certain points, cut groups right
out of policy-making. This, however, has often happened in France. Thus France’s
negotiating position in the closing stages of the Uruguay Round was fixed by Prime
Minister Balladur and a small group of ministers (Foreign Affairs, Agriculture,
Industry and the Budget) and officials from the SGCI, without bringing in the
FNSEA; this was a reform that the FNSEA did not want, but more than merely
agricultural interests were at stake. By 1999, indeed, the FNSEA had lost its status
as the Agriculture Ministry’s exclusive partner, even if it continued to enjoy
a privileged position. Other examples include the crucial days in March 1983 when
Mitterrand consulted advisers and ministers, but not interest group representatives,
before deciding on his historic change of economic policy; Juppé’s social security
plan of 1995; and the Jospin government’s decision to use legislation rather than
negotiation to move to the 35-hour week. Jean-Pierre Raffarin and the minister,
François Fillon, who at Education and Social Affairs was responsible for his most
unpopular reforms, both praised the virtues of consultation with groups, and
undertook consultation before proceeding to legislate; this did not, however,
prevent the groups from complaining that the consultation had been purely
formal. The ‘autonomy of the state’, in other words, is as much of an obstacle as
the fragmentation of groups to the application of the corporatist model to the
French case.
The pluralist model

The pluralist model, like corporatism, was developed for systems other than the
French. The classical theorists of pluralism – A. F. Bentley, David Truman and Robert
Dahl – were Americans describing their own country. Such theorists stressed the right
of groups to organise as an essential democratic freedom. That right was the basis for
free competition between groups, analogous to the free competition between political
parties – or between businesses. Pluralism, they argued, helps to optimise political
outcomes, because whenever one group wins excessive influence, it becomes open to
criticism and attack, provoking the creation of other groups, ending its dominance, and
thus ultimately ensuring responsiveness of government to citizens. Against the back-
drop of interests in constant and inevitable conflict, the state’s role is rather passive. Far
from seeking to dominate the groups, it aims to ensure fair competition and dialogue by
providing an institutional framework for the struggle. Decision-making is seldom
‘heroic’, and only rarely results from the imposition of rationally calculated policies; it
involves rather the negotiation of small, incremental adjustments to the status quo.
Pluralism necessarily precludes major shifts in policy: they could be offensive to certain
groups and could jeopardise the harmony of social institutions. In short, governments
buy peace in the search for social harmony. Political elites are mediators or arbitrators
in a vast and endless bargaining process in which coalition-building has to take place
between groups with incomplete and overlapping memberships.
Pluralism: evidence in favour

Three sets of arguments can be cited to support the pluralist thesis. The first, already
mentioned above, is the existence in France of a dense and varied network of associ-
ations. The avant-garde of the general tendency for the French to ‘join’ more than in the
past has consisted of so-called new social movements (NSMs), many of them mobilis-
ing on a range of issues thrown up for the first time in the upheaval of May 1968.
Although initially rather slow to form in France (for a variety of reasons, including the
strong mobilisation around political change in the 1970s) NSMs have gathered
momentum over the past two decades. Observers such as Andrew Appleton and Sarah
Waters have identified over half a dozen major areas of NSM interest, all somewhat
distinct from the concerns of older French groups.
• The antiracist movements, however divided, have pursued and harrassed Le Pen and
the FN over two decades; their nationwide protests in the spring of 2002 probably
helped limit Le Pen’s second-ballot presidential vote. They were also instrumental
in bringing the sans-papiers issue to the attention of governments, with partial
success.
• Women’s movements have been active both in promoting parity legislation and in
attacking the ‘Mediterranean’ sexism which they see as still endemic in French
society.
• The anti-globalisation movement (its activists prefer the more internationalist term
alter-globalisation) is centred on Attac, France’s association of supporters of the
Tobin tax on capital movements. It has supplied the biggest European delegation to
the World Social Forums at Porto Allegre, organised a European Social Forum
(welcomed by Raffarin) in Paris in 2003, caught France’s imagination with José
Bové’s anti-Macdonald’s protests and attracted the endorsement, more or less
sincere, of 100 French parliamentarians as well as Chirac. Attac supplied some of
the most effective grass-roots activists for the campaign against the European
constitutional treaty in 2005.
• France’s gay rights movement has promoted the Pacte Civil de Solidarité (PACS)
and organised the highly successful Gay Pride parades in Paris (to which party
politicians have begun, prudently, to associate themselves).
• ‘Solidarity’ movements have championed the swollen ranks of the socially excluded
in France both through fierce criticism, from associations such as Droit au
Logement, of government policy, and also via organised practical solidarity through
groups such as the Restos du Cœur.
• The unemployed movement has marked up significant successes, notably in 2004, for
a traditionally very difficult social group to mobilise.
• Environmental activists, where they have not turned to political activity via Les Verts,
have penetrated local and regional government, raising environmental awareness
and focusing on practical, grass-roots measures.
Although these movements are often divided, sometimes politicised (with Trotskyists
and former Communists being especially active), and periodically maximalist, their
reluctance (usually) to lose their independence to parties or to the state, their readiness
to press achievable demands and their ability to undertake concrete activities within
civil society sets them somewhat outside either the domination-crisis or the corporatist
models. Hence Waters’s claim that they articulate a new form of (post-Jacobin)
citizenship.
Secondly, the ideological position of governments has become steadily more sympa-
thetic to groups and more distant from the Jacobin standpoint outlined at the start of
this chapter. The position set out in a circular issued by Chirac during his first premier-
ship in 1975, stating that ‘the state and the public authorities do not have the monopoly
of the public good’ and that groups should be encouraged and, where possible, assigned
appropriate tasks by the state, has been reiterated by most governments since. The
performance of the Juppé government in 1995, in drafting a large-scale reform not only
without consultation, but in conditions of extreme secrecy, and then justifying it
in terms of the government’s exclusive democratic legitimacy, was in this respect
the exception that proved the rule; given Juppé’s fate, it is unlikely that any future
government would attempt reforms in quite the same manner.
Third, and more generally, groups constantly affect policy-making in non-crisis
situations, through normal, legitimate bargaining, without the benefit of either mass
demonstrations or corporatist collusion. The 1980 bill on workers’ participation in
industry, for example, was substantially modified under pressure from employers.
Group pressure in 1982 led the Socialist government to decide against allowing adver-
tising on the newly legalised local radios. The revenu minimum d’insertion, brought in by
the Rocard government in 1988 to assist the growing numbers of unemployed deprived
of any income at all under the existing benefits system, was the product of years of
consultation between government and local authority officials, associations active in
the field of urban poverty and the Conseil Économique et Social. The Jospin govern-
ment’s provision that firms with under twenty employees could wait until 2002 before
adopting the 35-hour week was a clear concession to employers. The withdrawal of
plans to reform public-sector pensions in March 2000 followed a clear refusal from the
major unions; the delicate question of the revision of legal conditions for police inter-
rogation, including the presence of lawyers and recording of interviews, was handled in
close consultation with police and magistrates’ associations. Under Raffarin, plans to
ease legal restrictions on employers’ right to sack staff to safeguard the competitiveness
of their firm were watered down in October 2004 after protests from unions and the
Left. Moreover, the mere listing of such well-documented episodes certainly under-
estimates the routine involvement of groups in policy-making. Not all consultation
prior to the publication of a bill is visible. The implementation phase of policy-making,
as Schmidt points out, is particularly fertile in arrangements with groups – which may
distort or even subvert the initial spirit of the law. Moreover, the implicit exercise of
group influence may suffice to define the area in which a government feels free or able to
act. Any government knows that there are political no-go areas: limits that cannot be
transgressed, conventions that cannot be violated and rights that cannot be trampled
upon, and that those limits, conventions and rights are established and protected, often
unconsciously, by the groups.
Pluralism: objections
Like the other three models considered above, pluralism offers important insights into
state–group relations in France; and, like them, it presents serious shortcomings as an
explanatory model.
• Some objections, far from being unique to France, were formulated in criticism of
pluralist theory generally. The perfect competition between groups of classical
pluralist theory is no more a reality than the perfect market beloved of classical
economists. Some groups are strong, rich and well-organised – enjoying, in a few
cases, hegemonic or even monopolistic positions. Others are none of these things:
the unemployed movement, which achieved quite a small proportion of its goals in
1997–98 but scored at least a defensive success in 2004, was the first serious attempt
at organisation of this group in a generation of joblessness that directly concerned
between 1 and 3 million people. The unequal power of different groups to influence
policy is as fundamental to state–group relations in France as it is elsewhere.
• More specifically French objections may be guessed from earlier sections of this
chapter. In the first place, the state in France does not, or does not often, conform to
the rather modest role allotted to it in the pluralist paradigm. Indeed, for Frank
Wilson, ‘the most important difference between French politics and the pluralist
model is the activist role of the state’. Several examples have been noted above of a
‘heroic’ style of policy-making, in which governments have practically ignored
group representations, at least in the policy formulation stage. Governments may
also impose their will on groups by exploiting their (often numerous) divisions. Even
when they do not ignore groups or divide and rule, governments have some freedom
to choose which groups to listen to and which to exclude. The Pompidou govern-
ment had cut itself off from the mainstream union movement so thoroughly by the
time the May 1968 crisis broke that when the junior social affairs minister (Jacques
Chirac) arranged a first, tentative contact with the CGT, he went to the appointment
armed. On the other hand, groups traditionally supportive of the Right – business
and farmers – felt unwontedly neglected in the early years after the Socialists’ victory
in 1981. Not surprisingly, executive dominance after 1958 reinforced this (partial)
independence of the state. It is easier to exclude certain groups when government
and administration are dominated by a more or less homogeneous majority than in
the unstable parliament-centred system of the Fourth Republic.
• A final objection is the frequency with which the interplay between the different
groups, or between groups and the state, has failed to conform to the rather orderly
and civilised pattern assumed by the pluralist model. In some cases, especially before
1981, groups such as the CGT and the government simply did not see eye to eye on
the basic rules of the game. Even within a single sector, contact between groups and
each other, or between groups and the government, could be non-existent. More-
over, as we have seen, extra-institutional forms of pressure, for which the pluralist
model concedes at best an exceptional role, are commonplace in France.
An untidy reality
Each of the four models outlined above raises serious objections when applied to the
French case; there is no overall pattern. The state may, on occasion, ignore groups more
or less completely; it may have more or less exclusive, corporatist relationships with
particular groups; or it may allow more pluralist patterns of representation to develop.
It may react to direct or even violent action by repression, or it may choose to ignore
it, or even cave in to it altogether. Groups tend, in general, to be fragmented and,
frequently, to be internally divided as well – apart from the (rare) cases, such as the
notaries, that are monopolistic and cohesive. Groups may seek cosy, collusive relation-
ships with government, but even after achieving this may still resort to street protest.
This pattern is untidy, despite the simplicity that the centralisation of the French state
might be supposed to impart; as Ezra Suleiman has noted, ‘centralisation mainly con-
centrates jurisdictions. It does not concentrate effective power.’ Two sets of remarks,
however, may serve to render appearances somewhat less chaotic. They concern models
of state–group relations that accommodate more diversity than those discussed above,
and the range of factors that affect the capacity of groups to influence policy-making.
Mixed models
Vivien Schmidt’s account of relations between business and government in France since
the 1970s contrasts two styles of policy-making under the Fifth Republic. The ‘heroic’
style, she argues, has typically been used by governments making economic and industrial
policy: with a long tradition of dirigisme behind them to justify their interventions, and a
determination to achieve quite radical goals – modernisation under de Gaulle and
Pompidou, reinforced state control in the early Mitterrand years – governments formu-
lated policy with minimal input from interest groups. Groups were eventually allowed
their say, but only at the implementation stage. In other policy areas, on the other hand
(Schmidt mentions education, centre–periphery relations and agriculture), a more
‘everyday’ style prevails. Groups (teachers’ unions, local elected officials, farmers’
unions) are involved in the formulation as well as the implementation of policy. Their
blocking power may make certain reforms impossible. Schmidt’s dichotomy should not
be taken rigidly; policy-making has not always been ‘heroic’ in economic and industrial
affairs, nor always ‘everyday’ in other areas. It should, on the other hand, be valued for
two insights. First, although policy formulation without groups may be possible on
occasion in France, policy implementation is not. Second, while French governments
may have a capacity for ‘heroic’ action – and thus a greater independence than sug-
gested by the pluralist model – the French state cannot be ‘heroic’ in everything all of
the time; it must decide in which areas (if any) this mode is most appropriate, because it
can never ignore all groups. To these may be added a third point: the state’s diminished
capacity for heroics after it remodelled itself in the 1980s and after, in what Schmidt
characterised (in reference to privatisations and deregulation) as the ‘heroic dismantling
of heroic capability’.
A second, complementary, mixed model may be derived from the literature on policy
networks which has become an important and growing feature of the study of state–
group relations since the 1980s. The policy networks approach typically takes a policy
sector, rather than a national pattern of state–group relations, as its main field of study:
that is, it is concerned with the whole range of participants in a particular area of
policy-making, the relationships between them, and between them and the outside
world, and the way in which those relationships affect policy outcomes. A typical policy
network will include, for example, civil servants, representatives of producer interests,
experts involved in a particular sector and key legislators. Beyond that, though, networks
may vary a great deal. In particular, they may be rather open to a wide and shifting
range of participants (in which case they are often known as issue networks); or, on the
contrary, they may be limited to a few participants who are able to exclude unwelcome
intruders (a pattern referred to as the policy community). The range, openness and
predictability of policy outputs is likely to vary with the number of policy-makers
involved. The policy networks approach is not without its shortcomings. It is often
better at describing configurations of policy-making in a given sector than at explaining
why they came to be open or closed, or precisely how the set of relationships involved
affected policy outcomes. It is also better at explaining stability in policy-making within
a sector than at accounting for the radical changes that do occur. But its attractions
remain considerable for the French case. In particular, it can accommodate several quite
different configurations of state–group relations within a single national system. The
coexistence of a close-knit, exclusive policy community in, say, the farm sector, with a
very much looser set of relationships (and therefore less predictable policies) in the area
of women’s rights, poses no difficulties for the policy networks approach. Moreover,
under certain circumstances actors within the state may seek to reconfigure policy
networks within their sector to further the acceptance of a reform programme, as was
clearly the case with agriculture in the 1990s. Finally, policy networks may form in
localities or regions too – and reflect different alignments from those prevalent at the
national level. In Le Havre, to take one example, the Communists and the CGT co-
operated with a coalition led by the right-wing mayor that aimed to improve the port
infrastructure in order to reinforce Le Havre’s competitive position against rival ports
like Antwerp, thus creating or safeguarding jobs; in this they were opposed by the local
Greens and by groups within the local Socialist Party. The policy networks approach
certainly does not provide a simple model of state–group relations in France; but it does
make a minimum of sense out of the apparent chaos.
Determinants of group influence

Another way to make sense of the extremely diverse patterns of state–group relations in
France is to ask what makes individual groups influential with governments, or what
makes governments listen to some groups and not others. Nine answers can be sug-
gested. They have the merit of highlighting both the unequal power of groups and the
variations over time in their influence.
Access
Access to decision-makers is both a consequence and a cause of a group’s power. This
may be seen as a continuum, moving from the most marginal groups that lack any form
of official recognition and rely entirely on their own resources; to groups that have won
such recognition and the right to sit on official (but possibly powerless) consultative
committees that goes with it; to the groups of all kinds that have built up strong and
institutionalised links with the legislature (whether thanks to political links, such as
those of the CGT with Communist parliamentarians, or to a more all-party appeal, via
the many amicales parlementaires covering a wide variety of sectors); to those groups
that enjoy regular official and unofficial access to the executive. Access to the executive
will always be assisted by informal networks. Chirac’s excellent relationship with the
Dassault aircraft firm goes back to the days when his father had been Marcel Dassault’s
banker. Polytechniciens, énarques or other graduates of grandes écoles may be attractive
employees for firms (including the French branches of foreign multinationals) not just
for their qualifications or their intellects but for the doors they can open. There is also
every reason to suppose that in France as elsewhere, help with campaign finance can
improve access to decision-makers at central or local level. It is notable that many of the
building, public works and utilities firms that generously (and, for once, legally) sup-
ported candidates in the 1993 parliamentary elections hedged their bets by spreading
their money between candidates of all parties. The best forms of access, finally, are
multiple because they allow their beneficiaries to exploit the many divisions within
the state apparatus: this is borne out, for example, in Cohen and Bauer’s analysis of
relationships between the state and the major firms in the early 1980s.
Strategic importance
The perceived strategic importance of a group in the social and economic life of
the nation inevitably affects its leverage (or lack of it) with the authorities. This
is the foundation of the power of the FNSEA in the post-war period: it not only
represented France’s premier industry (in terms of workers if nothing else), but also
determined the nation’s ability to feed itself – a critical argument when food shortages
were fresh in every memory. For similarly obvious reasons, neither business in general
nor very large individual firms can be ignored for very long; their bargaining power has,
if anything, been reinforced by Europeanisation and globalisation. The case of Renault
was cited at the beginning of this chapter. Other world-class firms like Bouygues (build-
ing and public works), the arms-to-publishing group Matra-Hachette, Dassault, which
dominated France’s military aviation industry for the half-century after 1945, Alstom
(heavy engineering), or the two water firms, Générale des Eaux (now Vivendi) and
Lyonnaise des Eaux (now Suez-Lyonnaise) could be added. If Crédit Lyonnais was able
to attract over 100 billion francs of taxpayers’ money, it was because the bankruptcy of
a major (and nationalised) bank would have had effects too catastrophic for the politi-
cians to contemplate. Other groups may also command attention due to their strategic
positioning: railway and metro drivers, air traffic controllers, water plant workers or
truckers wield more leverage in this respect than the relatively powerless university
teachers.
Such strategic importance may ensure a hearing, but in no way guarantees govern-
ment compliance with a group’s wishes. The steel employers of the Chambre Syndicale
de la Sidérurgie Française, for example, were very successful at extracting financial and
other concessions in the 1970s, in an expanding market and at a time when it was a
government axiom that ‘France needs a steel industry’. But in 1978 the government
brought the loss-making industry under effective state control; in 1981 the Socialists
nationalised it; and later in the 1980s the flow of cash stopped. More generally, even if
its strategic position ensures the influence of ‘business’ in general, governments may still
have to make choices between different businesses. The uncertain path that led to the
privatisation of Thomson defence electronics, for example, saw the Juppé government
choose Matra as Thomson’s future partner, then drop the privatisation plan altogether;
when the sell-off was finally effected, the Jospin government chose Alstom instead.
Electoral clout
Electoral importance also lends a group influence. The fact that women represent over
half the total electorate was clearly one factor in the decision of the Jospin government
(and, more surprisingly, the right-wing majority in the Senate) to back a constitutional
revision and legislation in favour of parity in political offices between men and women.
But electoral importance is not the same as sheer size. The number of farmers, for
example, has fallen sharply under the Fifth Republic; their electoral importance has
diminished, but less rapidly. It is protected by rural over-representation in the councils
of the départements, in the National Assembly and, above all, in the Senate; by the key
social position farmers still occupy, even though they are a minority in most rural
communities; and by the increasingly competitive character of national politics,
making rural constituencies vital for the Right to win. Farm policy was considerably
more cautious in the 1970s than in the 1960s, although there were fewer farmers. The
bird-shooters of CPNT terrorised numerous Deputies – and even more Senators – from
sensitive départements like the Gironde or the Somme into voting against the law short-
ening the season in 2000, although the law merely implemented a European directive.
Another recent example concerns the homosexual vote – not large, and above all not
homogeneous in national terms, but important enough in some marginal constituen-
cies, notably in Paris, to be courted by the Socialists in 1997. That contributed to the
legal recognition given to same-sex relationships by the PACS in 1999.
Public support
The backing of public opinion, though not essential, may be useful to a group. Groups
with wide public support have forced right-wing governments into humiliating climb-
downs about once a decade: miners in 1963, students in 1986, public-service workers in
1995 (in the latter case, although public support was far from unanimous, it was in a
majority, and government-inspired efforts to engineer citizen indignation at the para-
lysed transport network got nowhere). The counter-example is that of Air France staff,
whose threat (quickly withdrawn in the face of public disgust) to strike as France
prepared to host the 1998 World Cup was a memorable public relations disaster.
Certainly all groups consider public opinion important enough to court it. Pharmacists
defend their exclusive right to sell non-prescription medical and paramedical products
at extortionate prices on the grounds of a high-minded insistence that users of such
products should have access to the best possible advice. Schoolteachers are always
motivated by their touching concern for the interests of children, of education and of
equality of opportunity. The FNSEA identifies the narrow interests of its members
with those of the broader community by claiming that ‘il n’y a pas de pays sans
paysans’.
The social, economic and political context

Social, economic and political circumstances can also enhance or damage a group’s
influence. The general point about unemployment weakening the unions has already
been made. More specific developments also diminished the power of working-class
groups. In 1996, for example, the chill winds of European competition led dockers, a
once feared group, to accept with little protest the end of the privileged contractual
status which they had enjoyed since the Liberation and which had led to chronic over-
manning. To do anything else would have forced several French ports to close
altogether and handed the business to European rivals. The economic and European
environments also changed what business could hope to gain from government. Bail-
outs of loss-making firms had been commonplace in the 1970s, and the Socialists made
large capital injections into the firms they nationalised after 1981. But from 1983, such
help to ‘lame ducks’ was increasingly seen as expensive and ineffectual; governments
became more concerned to control inflation and the budget than to save jobs. European
competition rules also made such capital injections more difficult: they became, if not
impossible (the Crédit Lyonnais and Air France bail-outs in the early 1990s, and that of
Alstom in 2003, testify to that), at least rarer. At the same time, however, business was
more successful, in the new environment, at lobbying for better general conditions of
operation: thus corporate taxation was steadily reduced from 50 to 33 per cent between
1985 and 1993, under governments of both Left and Right. A final example concerns
farmers, where the inclusion of agriculture in the Uruguay Round transformed the
political environment of the CAP, and ensured that henceforth the interests of the
FNSEA, while not ignored, would be weighed more rigorously against those of other
economic groups.
The political context also affects the fortunes of groups. The régime change of 1958
transformed both the structure of the state and the relationship of groups with it –
although the close relationship established between large firms and the civil servants
who ran the Plan changed little. Ten years later, May 1968 convinced right-wing gov-
ernments of the need to keep lines of communication open to the union movement. The
Socialists elected in 1981 listened to trade unions, including the CGT (notably over the
Auroux laws on workers’ representation in the workplace), as well as to the left-wing
farmers’ unions, more than their right-wing predecessors had; and to the CNPF, the
FNSEA and the representatives of Catholic schools they listened less. The Right’s
victory in March 1986 opened the way for the application of proposals developed by
the CNPF for the four previous years. The Left’s victory in 1997 clearly furthered the
causes of gay rights and the shorter working week, despite opposition from Catholics
and from the CNPF, who usually find readier listeners on the Right. The contrast,
though, is very far from total. Before 1981, for example, the Barre government, while
maintaining close relations with the CNPF on an institutional and a personal level, still
increased the social charges of firms; after 1983–84, even left-wing governments felt
obliged to heed those partners they had hitherto shunned – while little of the economic
policy of the 1980s was to the liking of unions. From 2002 till his retirement in 2005, the
MEDEF’s president Ernest-Antoine Seillière seemed to do little but complain of the
Raffarin government’s failure to attend sufficiently to the needs of business.
Government policy
Policy changes decided by the government may propel hitherto ignored groups into the
limelight. After the damaging electricians’ strike of 1969, and against the background
of May 1968, the Chaban-Delmas government introduced a politique contractuelle
designed to put industrial relations on a more coherent and peaceful footing. The
politique contractuelle was based on agreements binding for a specified period, on guar-
antees of real wage rises and on close collaborative relations with unions (much to the
shock of traditional Gaullists – even though the CGT chose not to participate). A more
recent, though in the end unsuccessful, example concerns Jospin’s decision, late in 1999,
to take the Corsican problem in hand and negotiate directly with all parties, including
for the first time Corsica Nazione, the political wing of an armed nationalist movement,
in the process that led to the (doomed) Matignon agreements of 2000.
The ministerial view

The attitude of individual ministers may help to legitimise certain groups – and to shut
others out. As the education minister responsible for a controversial university reform
in the wake of May 1968, the politically shrewd Edgar Faure multiplied his contacts
with a wide range of university groups so as to prevent hostility from within the sector
fuelling the very real opposition to reform within the Gaullist majority. Thirty years
later, on the other hand, another education minister, Claude Allègre, openly boasted of
his success in facing down the teachers’ unions and in breaking what he saw as
their stranglehold on France’s centralised education system. After the unions had
forced Allègre’s resignation in March 2000, his successor, Jack Lang, moved to rebuild
bridges with them, and particularly with the FSU, the strongest union in the secondary
sector – even at the price of scaling down several of Allègre’s planned reforms.
Countervailing forces
The power of countervailing forces also affects the influence of groups over policy-
making. For example, the Union Nationale des Associations des Parents d’Élèves de
l’Enseignement Libre (UNAPEL), the vigilant defender of Catholic private schools, is a
powerful, well-organised group in its own terms, but is unable, even under right-wing
governments, to achieve all of its aims because the Comité National d’Action Laïque
and the Ligue Française de l’Enseignement are just as well organised and equally fierce
in their defence of secular education. The result, as the events of 1984 and 1994 show,
tends to be a stand-off. Environmental groups, while enjoying widespread general sym-
pathy, have provoked fierce and often effective reactions from farmers, bird-shooters
and the roads lobby. If the small shopkeepers of CID-UNATI failed to halt the decline
in their numbers and support (0.72 per cent in the employers’ college at the prud’hom-
mes elections of 2002), it was partly because of opposition from the more discreet but
no less effective Fédération Nationale des Entreprises à Commerces Multiples, which
looks after the interests of the supermarkets; the commissions set up in the 1970s, under
pressure from CID-UNATI, to vet applications for new hypermarkets, regularly agreed
to the proposals, often under the influence of thinly disguised bribes. A counter-
example concerns the issue of parity in political representation between men and
women: the organised support for the reform was relatively weak, and public opinion
favourable but not overwhelmingly so – but the organised opposition was non-existent.
The group’s own resources

A group’s own resources, finally, may have a crucial effect on its capacity to influence
policy. These resources include representativeness, internal cohesion, technical expertise,
money and the ability to mobilise their members. Trade unions are weak on most of these
counts: unrepresentative of the working population, both individually and collectively;
internally divided; lacking, despite their full-time employees, both in any particular
technical expertise and in anything resembling a serious strike fund; frequently unable
to mobilise members for more than symbolic ‘days of action’, yet intermittently taken
unawares by sudden outbreaks of militancy, as in 1968 or 1995. The CNPF/MEDEF
has often appeared little different, prone as it is to feuds within its own elite, the object
of competition from other groups, and only episodically able to control or mobilise
more than a handful of the 800,000 firms it claims as its membership. The FNSEA is
stronger: about half of the farming community are members; its internal divisions are
more or less controlled; its specialised branches command significant technical expert-
ise; it is well financed (including, as it does, the wealthiest farmers in the land as well as
poor peasants, and enjoying a symbiotic relationship with such bodies as the Chambers
of Agriculture and the Crédit Agricole); it has repeatedly demonstrated its ability to
mobilise members for a wide range of activities, legal and (less frequently) illegal. The
most enviable situations, however, are those of groups enjoying monopolies in their
sector. The infamously antediluvian and reactionary Ordre des Médecins, created by
the Vichy régime in 1940 and granted a monopoly by de Gaulle in 1945 as the doctors’
professional association, is still able to insist on membership as an absolute condition
of practising the medical profession. Other closed-shop middle-class professions, able
when necessary to defend the indefensible to government, have included architects,
auctioneers and notaries (the subject of a characteristically perceptive study by Ezra
Suleiman). The CGT’s affiliated unions among printers and dockers have enjoyed simi-
larly enviable positions – though even these, as we have observed in the case of dockers,
have not protected them indefinitely against competition from outside France.
Three final remarks should be made about these internal resources of groups. First,
they vary over time. Thus fears provoked by the Socialist victory of 1981 allowed the
CNPF to mobilise its troops with a facility not seen before or since, holding a mass
meeting of 20,000 heads of firms in 1982. Second, groups tend to overcome their
divisions most readily in opposition to plans from government: hence the criticism that
many groups are reactive not proactive, able to oppose but not propose. Third, strong
internal resources are no guarantee of success. For example, the immensely wealthy
Union Nationale de la Propriété Immobilière and Fédération Nationale des Agents
Immobiliers, representing the building industry and estate agents, were unable to pre-
vent a new Tenants’ Rights Act in 1982 which they viewed as an ‘intolerable revolution’.
The highly restricted circle of French stockbrokers were forced to surrender their mono-
poly position by the liberalisation of the stock market initiated under the Socialist
Finance Minister Bérégovoy in 1984, and continued by his right-wing successors. Even
the most entrenched French groups have been forced to make concessions to the forces
of European integration and competition. To the case of the dockers, already men-
tioned, may be added, for example, that of the auctioneers, now facing unaccustomed
rivals from outside France (notably from Britain).
No single one of the nine factors listed above ensures a group’s capacity to influence
policy-making to its advantage. Groups that enjoy good access to government, are
strategically placed in the economy and society, wield electoral leverage and enjoy
support from the public and at least one minister, have priorities compatible with the
broad thrust of government policy, are threatened by no strong opponents, and are
representative of their sector, cohesive and prosperous, enjoy influence. Those that lack
any of these assets are unlikely to – aside, that is, from those cases in which private
interests thrive on public incompetence, as has been true of firms trading on the weak
enforcement of government competition legislation to develop informal cartels.
Between the two extremes, however, is the great majority of groups that possess some
but not all of the advantages outlined, and whose influence is therefore variable and
unpredictable. The picture is, of course, equally varied from the government’s point of
view. Some groups are largely domesticated and function practically as agents of the
administration; others, on the contrary, colonise their sponsor ministry or division
within the ministry which they transform into something close to ‘institutionalised
pressure groups’ (Henry Ehrmann). Both the FNSEA and the major teaching unions
display a fine mixture of public disgruntlement and private collusion, engaging in mili-
tant action on occasion while still participating in the running of – and even the making
of policy within – their sponsor ministries. The violence of FNSEA farmers has usually
been tolerated more readily than that of militant trade unionists – or that of the
FNSEA’s rivals from the Confédération Paysanne. So has the impunity with which the
activities of the pig-farming community have polluted two-thirds of France’s water
tables with slurry. That illustrates the attitude of apprehensive and embarrassed toler-
ance taken by governments towards the activities of certain groups – turning a blind
eye, for example, to tax evasion by small businessmen, shopkeepers and hoteliers as well
as farmers. In other situations the state may favour some groups within a sector and
maintain minimal links, or none at all, with their rivals. Between domination of the
groups by the state and its opposite, in other words, there is a wide variety of situations.
Concluding remarks
At the beginning of this chapter, it was shown that the founders of the Fifth Republic
sought to restore the state’s dominance over the groups after the weakness of the
previous régime. To a degree they succeeded in this: Wilson, for example, considers
the régime change of 1958 to have had a radical impact on group behaviour in France.
The downgrading of parliament dried up formerly fruitful avenues of co-operation
between groups and important Deputies or Senators. Because groups like to ‘shoot
where the ducks are’, many turned their attentions to the newly powerful executive –
which colluded with some while shutting out others. But change in the structure of the
French state did not stop in 1958; on the contrary, it has accelerated since the 1980s,
and has been paralleled in the configuration of French groups.
On the state side of the balance, political changes have been threefold: the surrender
of parcels of sovereignty to Europe; the emergence of a more independent judiciary;
and decentralisation. All are considered more fully in other chapters. All, on the prin-
ciple of shooting where the ducks are, have encouraged groups to mobilise in new areas
– Brussels, the courts, local and regional authorities – without, however, abandoning
Paris. Europe, moreover, threatened the potential break-up of entrenched policy com-
munities if their basis was purely national, especially as competition policy began to bite;
and it introduced an alien culture of implementation, less tolerant of the Tocquevillian
tendency to bend rules to specific cases. All of these developments weakened the
Jacobin state of de Gaulle’s day. So did the retreat from dirigisme, which meant it could
no longer steer the French economy as it had still been able to in the de Gaulle and
Pompidou presidencies. So did slower growth and higher unemployment, which meant
greater social demands on the state and (relatively) less money to address them. So did
the wider disenchantment with France’s economic, administrative and business elites
by the 1990s, all of them more or less tainted with scandal and economic failure. The
Juppé episode in 1995 showed how unreceptive the French had become towards heroic
leadership. Governments came to need groups more – to legitimate policy – but because
of their straitened circumstances had less to offer them in exchange.
The state’s loss of power vis-à-vis the groups did not automatically entail the groups’
gain. Indeed, traditional mass groups, unions in particular, were affected as much as the
state and political parties were by declining public trust in almost any big established
organisation. A survey in 1989, for example, showed that only 29 per cent of respond-
ents trusted an established union to defend their interests at work. The collapse of
communism also had an impact on unions. In particular, it deprived the CGT of a
central mobilising myth, and damaged it as the PCF tried – to the annoyance of
members and increasingly of leaders too – to use it as an organisational prop.
In the longer term it also meant that Wilson’s view, formulated in the early 1980s, about
the absence of basic consensus among groups about the rules of the game (especially
the legitimacy of capitalism) became somewhat less true, although revolutionary aspir-
ations have not wholly disappeared from France’s interest groups. In addition and
rather obviously, rising unemployment weakened the bargaining power of unions in the
private sector (though not in the job-secure fonction publique) – and increased that of
private business, the necessary provider of the jobs on which the election prospects of
any government since the 1980s have come to depend.
It would be quite false, however, to conclude on the basis of the above that an
enfeebled state is matched by anaemic groups. We have observed, in particular, how
vigorously associations in France have expanded and proliferated, and how new social
movements have mobilised, especially since the 1980s, on a variety of new fronts and
with some success. Other studies have elucidated some of the nature of this mobilisa-
tion. It has, in many cases, taken the place of support for and membership of political
parties, which have declined continuously for some twenty-five years; political activism,
especially among the young, is undiminished but finds different outlets. And as
researchers like Jacques Ion have shown, in a more individualistic society, styles of
activism have changed. Group membership is not a lifetime commitment. Rank-and-
file group members demand more consultation from leaders, and tend to mobilise for
shorter periods on more specific and concrete causes, the importance of which has been
clearly demonstrated to them.
Typical traits of all four models outlined above may be discerned in France, but in
different proportions in different sectors. Like the rest of government, the relationship
between the fragmented state and the no less fragmented groups during the Fifth
Republic is complex, intrinsically untidy and constantly changing. At the same time
there are signs that developments since the 1980s have tilted the balance of state–group
relations in France in the direction of pluralism. It is pluralism with a difference, or
rather several. First, as in other societies, it is an asymmetrical pluralism in which
business and its organisations, without getting all they want, still wield disproportion-
ate strength. Second, it is unusual in the (partial, but still significant) blocking power
held by public-sector unions, seen repeatedly over the decade beginning in 1995. Third,
all parties may still bring much older habits to the pluralist table. The distinctive traits
so persuasively noted by Tocqueville, though never amounting to the whole picture,
have had a way of reappearing across generations in very different environments. The
state authorities can still be high-handed and oblivious to group demands to the point
where they are accused of ‘autism’. Groups, new and old, can still be maximalist,
fragmented and ideological. The assumption that any successful negotiation must be
preceded by a large-scale, often disruptive, show of strength remains deeply ingrained
among the groups and widely supported among the population as a whole. Groups that
seek, like the CFDT, to acknowledge real but unpalatable difficulties (such as the exist-
ence of a potential pensions crisis) and to negotiate on that basis, will always find rivals
ready to outbid them. Thus while the supposed weakness of civil society in France,
central to Tocquevillian models, is at least questionable, the capacity for positive
engagement between civil society and the state remains very uneven. Groups, for that
reason, are hampered in their capacity to build effective links between the French public
and their government (and indeed may not aspire to do so). These tendencies pose
rather obvious problems for French public policy. As Ezra Suleiman remarked in 1995
and as the polls cited at the beginning of Chapter 10 show, the French state has never
been so condemned by its citizens, or so much in demand. Without the effective support
of at least some bodies within civil society, whether among groups or parties, it is
doomed to disappoint.
Further reading
Adam, G., Le pouvoir syndical, 2nd edition, Paris, Dunod, 1983.
Adam, G., Les relations sociales année zéro, Paris, Bayard, 2000.
Appleton, A., ‘The New Social Movement phenomenon’, in R. Elgie (ed.), The Changing French
Political System, London, Frank Cass, 2000.
Archambault, E., Le secteur sans but lucratif: associations et fondations en France, Paris,
Economica, 1996.
Aubert, V., Bergounioux, A., Martin, J. and Mouriaux, R., La forteresse enseignante: la Fédéra-
tion de l’Éducation Nationale, Paris, Fayard, 1985.
Bard, C., Baudelot, C. and Mossuz-Lavau, J. (eds), Quand les femmes s’en mêlent, Paris, La
Martinière, 2004.
Barthélemy, M., Associations: un nouvel âge de la participation?, Paris, Presses de Sciences Po, 2000.
Bauer, M. and Cohen, E., Les grandes manœuvres industriels, Paris, Belfond, 1988.
Berger, S., Peasants against Politics: Rural Organizations in Brittany, Cambridge, MA, Harvard
Capdevielle, J. and Mouriaux, R., Les syndicats ouvriers en France, Paris, Armand Colin, 1973.
Cerny, P., Social Movements and Protest in France, London, Frances Pinter, 1982.
Cerny, P. and Schain, M. (eds), French Politics and Public Policy, London, Methuen, 1980.
Cerny, P. and Schain, M. (eds), Socialism, the State, and Public Policy in France, London,
Methuen, 1985.
Cohen, E., L’État brancardier: stratégies du déclin industriel, Paris, Calmann-Lévy, 1989.
Colas, D. (ed.), L’État et les corporatismes, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1988.
Coulomb, P., Delorme, H., Hervieu, B., Jollivet, M. and Lacombe, P., Les agriculteurs et la
politique, Paris, Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1990.
Crettiez, X., La question corse, Brussels, Complexe, 1999.
Crettiez, X. and Sommier, I. (eds), La France rebelle: tous les foyers, mouvements et acteurs de la
contestation, Paris, Michalon, 2002.
Duhamel, O. and Méchet, P., ‘Une grève d’opinion’, SOFRES, L’état de l’opinion 1996, Paris,
Seuil, 1996, pp. 33–48.
Duyvendak, J.-W., The Power of Politics: New Social Movements in France, Boulder, CO,
Westview Press, 1995.
Ehrmann, H., Organized Business in France, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1957.
Favre, P. (ed.), La manifestation, Paris, Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques,
1990.
Geay, B., Le syndicalisme enseignant, Paris, La Découverte, 1997.
Giuliani, J.-D., Marchands d’influence. Les lobbies en France, Paris, Seuil, 1991.
Hayward, J., The State and the Market Economy, New York, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1986.
Ion, J., La fin des militants?, Paris, l’Atelier, 1997.
Jobert, B. and Muller, P., L’état en action: politiques publiques et corporatismes, Paris, L’Harmat-
tan, 1987.
Keeler, J., The Politics of Neocorporatism in France: Farmers, the State, and Agricultural Policy-
Making in the Fifth Republic, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1987.
Kesselman, M. and Groux, G. (eds), Le mouvement ouvrier français: crise économique et
changement politique, Paris, Editions Ouvrières, 1984.
Labbé, D., Syndicats et syndiqués en France depuis 1945, Paris, L’Harmattan, 1997.
Lamarque, G., Le lobbying, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1994.
Levy, J., Tocqueville’s Revenge: State, Society, and Economy in Contemporary France, Cambridge,
Mass., Harvard University Press, 1999.
Marie, J.-L., Agriculteurs et politique, Paris, Montchrestien, 1994.
Mouriaux, R., Les syndicats dans la société française, Paris, Presses de la Fondation Nationale
des Sciences Politiques, 1983.
Mouriaux, R., Les syndicats face à la crise, Paris, 1986.
Mouriaux, R., Le syndicalisme en France depuis 1945, Paris, La Découverte, 1994.
Mouriaux, R., Histoire de la CGT, Brussels, Complexe, 1995.
Mouriaux, R., Le syndicalisme en France, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1997.
Mouriaux, R., Crises du syndicalisme français, Paris, Montchrestien, 1998.
Nelkin, D. and Pollack, M., The Atom Besieged: Extra-parliamentary Dissent in France and
Germany, Cambridge, MA, 1982.
Neveu, E., Sociologie des mouvements sociaux, Paris, La Découverte, 1996.
Offerlé, M., Sociologie des groupes d’intérêt, Paris, Montchrestien, 1994.
Ottenheimer, G. and Lecadre, R., Les Frères invisibles, Paris, Albin Michel, 2001.
Rand-Smith, W., Organizing Class Struggle in France: Grassroots Unionism in the CGT and the
CFDT, London, Macmillan, 1986.
Rand-Smith, W., Crisis in the French Labour Movement, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 1987.
Reece, J., The Bretons against France: Ethnic Minority Nationalism in Twentieth-Century Brittany,
Chapel Hill, NC, University of North Carolina Press, 1977.
Schmitter, P., ‘Still the century of corporatism?’, Review of Politics, 36 (1974), pp. 88–102.
Segrestin, D., Le phénomène corporatiste: essai sur l’avenir des systèmes professionnels fermés en
France, Paris, Fayard, 1985.
Shackleton, M., The Politics of Fishing in Britain and France, Aldershot, Gower, 1986.
Suleiman, E., Les notaires: les pouvoirs d’une corporation, Paris, Seuil, 1987.
Waters, S., Social Movements in France: Towards a New Citizenship, Basingstoke, Palgrave
Macmillan, 2003.
Weber, H., Le parti des patrons. Le CNPF, 1946–1990, 2nd edition, Paris, Seuil, 1991.
Wilson, F. L., Interest-Group Politics in France, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987.
12 Paris and the provinces
The post-Jacobin state
The institutions and the actors 351

Jacobinism and its limits: France before decentralisation 357
Decentralisation: the measures 366
Europe and the regions 372
Local authorities and private business 374
Assessing decentralisation: plus ça change? 377
Assessing decentralisation: the local system transformed 381
Concluding remarks: a continuing process 385
Further reading 387
Relations between France’s capital city and the provinces have often varied between
uneasy coexistence and open warfare. Traditionally, Paris was depicted as the malevo-
lent centre of revolution which, in 1789, 1814–15, 1830, 1848 and 1871, disturbed
the contented and peace-loving provincials. It was also portrayed as the diabolic pur-
veyor of those modish doctrines and timeless temptations which undermined the
austere virtues of provincial life, and as a harlot whose mindless frivolity had brought
the country at least once (in 1870) to the brink of humiliating disaster. Paris was, in
short, a politically turbulent Babylon, resented all the more because of its political,
administrative, intellectual and cultural dominance over the rest of the country.
But the Jacobins who fashioned the First Republic and who bequeathed most of
their institutions and many of their attitudes to later régimes did not view the capital in
this lurid light. They saw it as an island of culture, a city of enlightenment, a torch-
bearer of progress assailed by oafish – and reactionary – rural clods, the ignorant
troops of the Church and the chateau. Like the monarchs of the ancien régime, they
imposed centralisation as their means of strengthening the régime against both internal
opponents and external enemies. Napoleon perfected and future régimes consolidated
the centralising work of the Jacobins. Each was uneasily aware not only of its own
fragility but also of the very precariousness of the French national fabric. France is
a country of great geographical and cultural diversity and was created by bringing
together (with the persuasion of axe, sword and musket) peoples as distinct as the
Basques and the Bretons, the Béarnais and the Burgundians, the Alsatians and the
Auvergnats, the Normans and the Provençals. Parts of France such as Nice and Savoy
are recent acquisitions (they were annexed in 1860), and Alsace was twice in the
twentieth century (in 1918 and 1945) taken back from the Germans. Eugen Weber has
estimated that as recently as the 1860s, only half the population of what is now France
spoke French as their mother tongue (though universal primary schooling, military
service and railways were to change that after the advent of the Third Republic in
1870). Autonomous sentiments have always been regarded with obsessive suspicion
and crass insensitivity because it was felt that they could lead to the temptation of
secession if allowed to flourish. Centralisation was also the instinctive reaction of
governments to the invasions and military occupations entailed by successive wars, in
1814–15, 1870–71, 1914–18 and 1940–45.
Centralising tendencies were accentuated during the first three-quarters of the twen-
tieth century, for four reasons. First, industrial development, hitherto dispersed in the
provinces, came to Paris and its suburbs. The tertiary sector followed, especially with
the modernising of France’s industrial and financial structures, and the revolution in
communications and the media, after 1945. The capital’s economic, demographic and
cultural dominance was thereby enhanced. By 1975, the Paris region (Île-de-France),
which covers just 2.2 per cent of the territory of mainland France, housed a fifth of the
nation’s population, 35 per cent of its business headquarters and 60 per cent of its
research scientists (as well as almost all of its actors and its few decent musicians).
Second, the brief experience of rule from outside Paris – in 1940–44, when the German
occupiers shifted the seat of France’s residual government to the little spa town of
Vichy – provoked a reaction in favour of the capital among the framers of the Fourth
Republic’s Constitution, for whom Vichy innovations like regions smacked of
collaboration with the enemy. Third, the post-war rise of big government led the French
state both to grow at the centre and, partly out of respect for the egalitarian aspirations
of France’s political culture, to impose minimum standards in politically sensitive
areas such as education, housing and health on the localities responsible in various
ways for administering them. Fourth, the Gaullists who shaped the Fifth Republic were
at least as Jacobin in their instincts as the Socialists and Christian Democrats who had
founded the Fourth. For President de Gaulle’s first prime minister, Michel Debré,
centralised state authority was essential to combat not only powerful ‘professional
feudalities’, those major groups which threatened the ‘general interest’ by the pursuit
of their selfish, particular goals, but also provincial threats to the ‘one and indivisible
Republic’.
Yet even at its Gaullist High Noon, French centralism met with resistance, in four
forms. The first of these was the local political system itself, increasingly stable, well
rooted and largely impervious for a century or so to the convulsions that periodically
seized France’s national polity. The second was the vogue for self-management (auto-
gestion), and the corresponding disillusion with central state planning, that were part of
the fallout of May 1968. The third was the regionalist movements in such areas as
Brittany and ‘Occitania’ (roughly, south-western France), which turned leftwards at the
same period after flirting with Fascism and collaboration a generation earlier. The
fourth was the left-wing parties. The Communists and Socialists, out of office nation-
ally for a generation after 1958, but increasingly powerful at local level, unsurprisingly
discovered the virtues of local and regional autonomy in relation to an invasive Parisian
bureaucracy. Perhaps slightly more remarkable was that François Mitterrand, having
led his Socialists into office in May 1981, placed these concerns at the heart of his first-
term plans. Decentralisation was not only proclaimed as la grande affaire du septennat;
as early as March 1982, what became known as the Defferre Act opened a cascade of
measures which gave it far-reaching, concrete, legislative form.
Decentralisation remains Mitterrand’s major institutional legacy. However, the
Paris and the provinces 351
pre-1982 system was rather less centralised than was often claimed, and his decentral-
isation reforms did not set free the localities quite as much as is often supposed.
Hence the widespread assumption that there remained unfinished business, and the
announcement by Prime Minister Raffarin of ‘Decentralisation Act II’, beginning with
a constitutional amendment in 2003. The debate about decentralisation and local
government in France is not, however, merely about institutional tinkering, or the
ancestral mistrust (however lively) between Paris and the provinces. It touches on
some of the most critical issues confronting contemporary French policy-makers: how
to attract international investment and to encourage small and medium firms to grow
and innovate; how to improve education and training within a knowledge economy;
how to reclaim rundown and lawless suburbs for the local and national community;
how to breathe new life into France’s emptying countryside; how, finally, to place
regional development within a European context. Before considering these points in
more detail, it is worth looking briefly at the main institutions and the actors at local
and regional level.
The institutions and the actors

Local government in France presents a particularly rich and varied tapestry. It is organ-
ised, unusually for a unitary state (and in common with only four other EU25
members), at no fewer than three levels: regions, départements and communes or muni-
cipalities. The number of units is very large: France has 38 per cent of the EU25’s
subnational authorities for 13 per cent of the population. In metropolitan France (the
mainland plus Corsica) there are 22 regions, 96 départements (divided into 320 adminis-
trative arrondissements and 3,872 electoral districts or cantons) and 36,564 communes
(each with its own mayor and municipal council). The far-flung Départements et
Territoires d’Outre-Mer (DOM-TOM), which will not be discussed in detail here,
include another 214 communes, 4 départements, 4 regions, 4 territories and 2 ‘collect-
ivities of special status’, spread out across the globe from Guadeloupe and Martinique
to New Caledonia, from Réunion to St-Pierre et Miquelon. In 2001 metropolitan
France had over half a million elected local officials, 514,519 of them municipal
councillors.
The communes date from 1789 but are based on the parishes of the ancien régime;
the départements, created in 1790, resemble the old dioceses. The regions, on the other
hand, are a creation of the Fifth Republic (they were envisaged by an ordonnance of
January 1959, created in June 1960 and given their present shape in March 1964, July
1972 and March 1982). The size of the various territorial units varies widely. In 1999,
15.5 per cent (9,038,000) of France’s metropolitan population lived in the 36 communes
with over 100,000 inhabitants, and half (29,529,000) in the 874 communes with more
than 10,000 inhabitants, while 26 per cent (15,142,000) lived in the 31,927 communes
with fewer than 2,000 inhabitants and 12 per cent (6,833,000) in the 24,720 communes
with a population of below 700. Also in 1999, 25 départements had a larger population
than the whole Limousin region, while 15 regions had a smaller population than the
single département of the Nord. Inevitably, there is a wide diversity of resources
between the various types of territorial unit and within each type. In 1994 Paris (admit-
tedly a unique case, as it has the double status of département and commune) had
a budget of 33.5 billion francs and over 35,000 employees, whereas the vast majority
of communes had minuscule budgets and personnel to match – often one part-time
secretary. The budgets of the départements and the regions also vary enormously. Yet
despite this extreme diversity, each type of territorial unit – region, département and
commune – has, with rare exceptions such as Paris and Corsica, the same internal
structure and the same legal powers.
In law, the relationship between the three types of local authority is not a hier-
archical one (a principle shared only by the Danes among EU nations). That, plus the
overlapping jurisdictions inevitable in all policy-making, has led to duplication, com-
petition and rivalry. Councils of départements and municipalities are often deeply
suspicious (like their counterparts in Italy or Spain) of attempts by the regions to co-
ordinate their activities. Of the three types of local authority, the most important in
terms of resources is the commune, and the weakest the region. This is reflected in
terms both of personnel (of the 1,665,737 local authority employees in 2001, 1,076,809
were employed by the communes) and of budget size (Table 12.1). It is worth noting,
however, where the fastest growth took place between 1984 and 2001: whereas the
budgets of communes and départements approximately doubled in real terms, those of
regions, and of the various forms of groups of communes, such as urban communities,
which increasingly manage a range of municipal functions, have approximately
quadrupled.
Decision-making takes place at all three of these levels, as well as in the groups of
communes. Local decision-makers belong essentially to four categories of institution:
the representative assemblies and their executives; the prefectoral administration; the
provincial field services of the Paris ministries; and non-institutional actors such as
local pressure groups, professional associations and major private firms.
Table 12.1 Local budgets, 1984 and 2001 (in billions of euros, constant at 2001 levels)
Communes Départements Regions Groups of Total

(1) (2) (3) Communes (1, 2, 3, 4)
(4)
1984 2001 1984 2001 1984 2001 1984 2001 1984 2001
Income
Taxes 20.9 38.7 11.5 21.7 2.0 7.4 2.5 10.4 36.9 78.1
Loans 6.8 7.3 2.6 3.5 0.6 1.8 2.4 3.1 12.5 15.7
Grants 18.6 22.0 11.0 12.6 0.8 4.1 5.1 10.4 35.5 49.1
Other 6.4 9.0 0.8 1.2 0.1 0.4 3.4 7.3 10.6 17.9
Total 52.7 77.0 25.9 39.0 3.5 13.7 13.4 31.2 95.4 160.8
Spending
Current 35.0 51.5 18.6 24.3 1.3 6.2 6.4 18.6 61.3 100.5
(including 4.1 2.9 1.3 0.8 0.2 0.4 1.9 1.0 7.4 5.1
interest
on loans)
Investment 16.1 25.6 6.2 14.9 2.0 7.6 6.5 12.7 30.8 60.7
(including 2.7 7.8 1.1 6.0 0.1 2.0 0.8 3.3 4.7 19.1
capital
repayments)
Total 51.1 77.0 24.8 39.2 3.3 13.7 12.9 31.3 92.1 161.3
Source: Calculated from Ministère de l’Intérieur, Les collectivités locales en chiffres, 1987 and 2004.
Map 12.1 France: départements and regions.
Representative assemblies and their executives

Representative assemblies exist at all three levels of local government. At the regional
level there are two assemblies. The more important of them, the regional council,
ranges in size from 43 to 209 members, and has been directly elected, since 1986, on a
modified proportional representation system based on the départements. Alongside it,
and playing a consultative role, is the regional economic and social council (known as a
committee till 1992), composed of representatives of businesses, trade unions and other
pressure groups within the region. The powers of both assemblies are defined in acts of
1972, 1982, 1992 and 2003–4, and in the implementing decrees that followed. Since
1986, the region’s chief executive has been the president of the regional council, chosen
by the councillors after each regional election.
The council of the département (conseil général) varies in size from 25 (for Lozère, the
smallest département, with 73,500 inhabitants) to 163 (for Paris, with 2.1 million). Like
members of the regional councils, the conseillers généraux are directly elected for a
six-year term. They differ in that only half are renewed at a time, every three years; and
they are elected on a two-ballot majority system in single-member districts (the can-
tons). The functions of the conseils généraux, essentially as servicing agencies for the
state, were outlined in an act of 1884. They were considerably expanded, however, by
the Defferre Act of March 1982, which enshrined the president of the conseil général,
chosen by the councillors after each partial renewal, as the chief executive of the
département, and extended the powers of the département in such areas as social assist-
ance and education, as well as in the provision of subsidies and technical assistance to
small, rural communes.
In each of the 36,564 French communes, there is a municipal council, directly elected
every six years. It elects a mayor, and exercises powers defined in acts of 1871, 1884 and
1982. Like the département, the commune is both a servicing agency of the state, incur-
ring obligatory expenses, and a local authority able to intervene in other areas not
specifically forbidden by law. Like the départements too, the communes saw their
powers substantially extended in 1982 – notably in the areas of economic intervention
and town planning. By ‘communes’, however, one can often understand ‘mayors’: for it
is no very great exaggeration to claim that in most cases, the task of the 514,519
municipal councillors is to elect the 36,564 mayors and to ratify their decisions. The
mayor has two main official roles. First, as the representative of the state in the com-
mune. As such, he or she promulgates and ensures the implementation of laws, regula-
tions, circulars and instructions emanating from Paris. The mayor is also the official
registrar of births, deaths and marriages, and is responsible for drawing up the electoral
list and for compiling official statistics (such as census figures) for the state. Second, the
mayor is the executive officer of the municipal council and represents the commune in
judicial proceedings, is the head of all communal staff, implements the decisions of the
council, supervises its accounting and manages its revenues. The mayor has official
responsibility for the commune’s order, safety, security and sanitation. Just as import-
ant as these official tasks is the mayor’s political role, taken in the widest sense of the
term: for in marked contrast to his or her British counterpart, the French mayor is an
important, influential personality. Almost all mayors remain in office for at least one
full six-year term: most are re-elected for at least one further term. The French know
who their mayors are (to a far greater extent than they can identify their Deputies, for
example), and despite a spate of municipal scandals since the early 1990s, still tend to
trust them; since the 1970s, a succession of polls has shown levels of confidence in
mayors running at 75 per cent, compared with roughly 50 per cent for Deputies – and
well under 30 per cent for ‘politicians in general’ or ‘parties in general’.
The prefectoral authorities

The prefectoral corps is composed of regional prefects, prefects of the départements,
and subprefects (one in each arrondissement).
• The regional prefect is a recent creation, dating only from 1959. His headquarters is
in the principal town of the region’s main département, and he remains the prefect
of that département. His powers were defined in measures enacted in June 1960,
March 1964, July 1972, March 1982 and February 1992. His main task is to give
cohesion to administrative planning, particularly in the area of economic planning.
To that end, he must co-ordinate and direct the work of the prefects in each dépar-
tement. He is helped by a regional mission, a group of young civil servants who
advise him and execute his decisions, and a regional administrative conference
which brings together, about every month, the prefects of each of the region’s
départements, the regional representative of the Finance Ministry, and appropriate
members of the field services of the Paris ministries. Although he lost his role as the
region’s chief executive to the president of the regional council in 1986, he may
address the regional council with the agreement of its president or at the request of
the prime minister.
In principle, the regional prefect, together with elected officials, has lent a
regional coherence and rationality to local investment policies. The Joxe Act of
February 1992, for example, required him to co-ordinate government policy across
the region in the areas of culture, the environment, rural development and urban
policy. In practice, he has often become one of the main agents for articulating the
grievances of the départements and for transmitting to Paris economic packages
bearing the marks of traditional incrementalism – though repeated legislation has
gone some way to enhancing his authority over notional subordinates.
• A prefect is appointed for each of France’s ninety-six metropolitan départements,
and a subprefect for each arrondissement. Though the prefect can trace his ancestry
to the intendant of the ancien régime, he is essentially a creation of the Napoleonic
era, and his official roles have not changed dramatically since then. They may be
considered under four headings.
First, the prefect is the representative of the state in the département, the
personification of state authority, the living embodiment of the one and indivisible
Republic. He has an official uniform, a sumptuous official residence (the hôtel de la
préfecture) in the main town of the département, an official car and sometimes
princely living expenses (a partial compensation for a salary which prefects
consider meagre by private-sector standards). He is assisted by a cabinet and by
a prefecture staff numbering anything from 100 to 800, depending on the size
of département. He receives all visiting dignitaries and presides over all major
ceremonies, and represents the state in its dealings with the local authorities.
Second, he is the representative of the government in the département, with the
task of supervising and co-ordinating the work of the field services of the Paris
ministries (with the exception of some parts of the work of Defence, Justice,
Finance, Education and Labour, which escape his official jurisdiction) and he
ensures that law and governmental directives are implemented. His role as the
‘overlord’ of the field services in the département was laid down in unambiguous
terms in acts of March 1964, March 1982 and February 1992.
Third, he is the main agent of the Interior Ministry in the département, and, as
such, is responsible for taking action against local authorities guilty of illegality or
financial abuses. He also directly supervises those field services of the Interior
Ministry responsible for the maintenance of law and order. He has the right to ban
a film, a demonstration or a procession if he feels it is likely to be prejudicial to
public order. Finally, the prefect organises elections. He was formerly seen as the
main electoral agent of the minister of the interior in particular and the governing
majority in general, and although there is no doubt that this aspect of his work has
declined, his post remains politically charged. Like an ambassador, the prefect is
expected to write regular reports on the political situation in his posting. He may
also give advice, information and warnings to pro-governmental candidates. And
the regular game of prefectoral musical chairs (with some prefects, inevitably, end-
ing up unseated) that has followed the major changes of government since 1981
testifies to the political sensitivity of the post: as many as fifty prefects were moved
on within a year of the Right’s return to power in 2002. But the overt intervention
in election campaigns typical of earlier years is now recognised as personally
imprudent and politically counterproductive.
Until March 1982, the prefect was also the chief executive officer of the conseil
général of the département, a role he has now lost to the president of the council.
But the prefect retains a key position in the local political and administrative
systems, at the intersections between centre and periphery, between national and
local politics, between politics and administration, and between different territorial
branches of the state services. This makes his co-operation essential for the plans of
the conseil général and its president to be furthered. It is also revealing that several
local authorities have recruited members of the prefectoral corps to head their
administrative services.
The local field services

The state’s authority in the département rests not only on the prefect but also on the
field services of the several ministries. The five most powerful state officials outside the
prefecture in most regions or départements are the Treasurer and Paymaster General
(TPG, the main agent of the Finance Ministry), the Director of Infrastructure (direct-
eur de l’Équipement), the Director of Labour, the Director of Health and Social Affairs
(directeur des Affaires Sanitaires et Sociales) and the Director of Agriculture. The
Defence Ministry is represented by a general in each region and département (respon-
sible for the local gendarmerie among other things), the Ministry of Education by a
rector, the Ministry of Justice by a state prosecutor. One of the major effects of the
March 1982 act was the transfer of many state officials to the départements, and to a
lesser extent to the regions. The field services, and their heads, have remained, albeit
in often diminished form; while some of the officials, especially those belonging to
highly prestigious technical corps with their own national networks of influence,
remained powerful figures in their own right even when in the employ of the region or
département rather than the state.
One state service, finally, was created by the Defferre Act of March 1982. This
set up a court of accounts (chambre régionale des comptes) in each region, staffed by
irremovable magistrates, who may be (and indeed must be, in the case of the president
of each regional court) directly recruited from the prestigious Court of Accounts
(Cour des Comptes) in Paris. The role of the regional court is to make regular
assessments of the accounts of all the local authorities (or dependent bodies) within
its area of jurisdiction, and it plays a crucial part in the more flexible financial control
exercised by the prefects over the local authorities since 1982. It may also comment
on the financial prudence (or lack thereof) with which local authorities run their
affairs.
Other local bodies
Other influential local decision-makers include a wide range of bodies more or less
closely related to the private sector. Official bodies such as the Chambers of Commerce
and Industry, of Agriculture, and of Crafts (métiers) play a greater role than their
British equivalents (if a lesser one than their counterparts in Germany). All firms, for
example, must belong to a Chamber of Commerce and Industry. Each Chamber elects
its own leadership group and has the power to tax members and to use this revenue for
a variety of purposes, including building roads and bridges (both of the major bridges
over the Seine estuary, for example, were Chamber of Commerce projects). Major
players in the areas of housing and urban planning and regional economic develop-
ment, and in the management of major social and cultural facilities, are the sociétés
d’économie mixte (SEMs), para-public bodies grouping public and private capital and
often wielding rights of compulsory purchase conceded to them by local authorities for
specific projects; the number of local SEMs exceeded 1,400 by the mid-1990s. In many
areas, individual private firms have played a major role, whether as major employers or,
increasingly, as purveyors of a widening range of privatised urban services. Most of the
major national pressure groups have local branches, although some groups, notably
in the areas of culture and city planning, are exclusively local in character. Other,
public, bodies may also play an important local role; the investment plans of the port
authority, for example, may well be crucial to the development of towns like Le Havre
or Marseille.
Mayors and other elected officials are obliged to establish a working relationship
with at least some of these groups. In Bordeaux, for example, Jacques Chaban-Delmas
built up a complex power network linking the Chamber of Commerce, old Protestant
families who ran much of the wine trade and rugby clubs (in the late 1940s he was
both mayor and a rugby international himself). In Le Havre, the class loyalties of the
Communists who ran the city for a generation did not prevent them from cultivating
good relations with the port authority and the Chamber of Commerce. In Lyon, the
internecine conflict within the local right-wing parties may be seen at least partly as a
struggle for influence between rival pharmaceutical laboratories. More generally, no
right-wing list at election time can consider itself safe if it does not include a representa-
tive of the local Chamber of Commerce. It is also clear that in many rural départements
both the biggest agricultural pressure group, the Fédération Nationale des Syndicats
d’Exploitants Agricoles (FNSEA), and the Chamber of Agriculture enjoy easy access
to, and influence with, local officials – as well as the means, if necessary, to bypass them
and use direct access to Paris or Brussels. Most prefects, finally, still chair numerous
consultative committees involving such groups; indeed, this role as a broker for a wide
variety of local interests increased as the prefects’ traditional legitimacy as the state’s
representatives was dented by decentralisation.
Jacobinism and its limits: France before decentralisation

If 1982 appears as a turning point in central–local relations in France it is because they
really were transformed, in legal terms, by the flurry of decentralising legislation that
opened within months of the Socialists’ winning power. The political picture, however,
is more complex, and presents important elements of continuity as well as the impact of
forces quite outside the centralisation/decentralisation dichotomy. This section seeks to
assess the bases of centralisation under the pre-1982 régime, and the sources of local
autonomy which were already undermining it.
The bases of central power

The political bases of central power before 1982 were, it was argued, fivefold.
• The statutory weakness of the local authorities was complemented by an obsessive

control exercised by Paris and its provincial agents, the prefects and the technical field
services. The prefects’ role as chief executives of regions and départements
reinforced such controls at these two levels, for the prefects both prepared all
the essential deliberations of the assemblies and managed the administrations
that were to implement them, leaving the elected officials (who were not even
directly elected, in the case of the pre-1986 regions) with few real resources to act as
a counterweight. The acts of municipalities, where the mayor rather than a
state-appointed official was the chief executive, still required a priori prefectoral
approval – that is, the prefect’s signature was necessary before they came into force.
If any local authority wished to beg or borrow, add a new tax or change the basis
of an existing one, build a new school or even name a street after someone, the state
authorities could, and often did, intervene. Parisian control was all the more effect-
ive because the central government agents were omnipresent in the provinces,
busily executing tasks that in Britain were left to local authority staff.
• The archaic nature of local government structures rendered local government espe-
cially powerless. France has retained, largely intact, the local government structures
of a rural age in which social and economic expectations were non-existent.
Perhaps nine out of ten communes were too small to meet the new demands placed
upon them in an era of big government (though it is true that a hundred or so very
small communes cleverly circumvented the problem by having no inhabitants at
all). France’s vast municipal mosaic reflects no contemporary demographic, occu-
pational or economic realities. Incentives to merge communes (notably under the
1971 Marcellin Act) abolished fewer than 3 per cent of the total number – and
some of these returned after de-mergers. The Guichard Report of October 1976,
which envisaged consolidation of most functions into ‘only’ 4,350 local authorities,
was shelved after fierce opposition from rural mayors. The mosaic remains.
• The profoundly conservative nature of local elites deprived them of legitimacy in their
dealings with state officials. The chronic rural over-representation characteristic of
France’s fragmented local government system ensured that local government elites
were profoundly unrepresentative: the big battalions of mayors and conseillers
généraux came from the ranks of farmers, small business or the liberal professions;
few, on the other hand, were managers or blue- or white-collar workers. Four-fifths
of mayors and conseillers généraux (by the mid-1970s) were over 50; over 97 per
cent were men. Such individuals were often unsympathetic to the moods and needs
of a more modern France, and technically ill-equipped to meet its challenges. This
reinforced their dependence on the expertise and the initiatives of the state services.
• The financial dependence of the local authorities was virtually complete. Local
government finance, as Mrs Thatcher discovered in 1990, has always been a politic-
ally explosive issue, chiefly because of the difficulty of matching resources to needs
in each locality. Such inequities were reinforced by the combination of extreme
local authority fragmentation with the rapid urban and industrial growth of the
trente glorieuses. Many local authorities faced ever greater calls on financial
resources that remained limited, despite tax rises running steadily ahead of infla-
tion. For new investment projects, most local authorities had to turn to the state
for subsidies and to state-run credit institutions for loans – which in turn entailed
extensive technical, financial and legal controls by the various field services, sanc-
tioned in the fullness of time by the signature (or non-signature) of the prefect.
Procedures for allocating such loans and subsidies were in any case of a byzantine
complexity. A senatorial report of 1973 enumerated no fewer than 150 kinds
of subsidy available to local authorities, channelled through seventeen different
agencies (after simplification, a mere 50 remained). Mastery of such complex pro-
cedures combined with the competing needs of local authorities afforded the state
great financial leverage. This it readily used, whether as an instrument of macro-
and microeconomic policy, by regulating local investment levels or directing local
authorities’ budgetary choices; as a means of promoting the reorganisation of local
government; or as a way to reward the politically sympathetic and buttress their
electoral chances.
• The centralisation of most political, economic and financial actors complemented
that of the state. The federalism of states like the USA or Germany has always
been underpinned by a territorial diversity of activity, and particularly by the
separation of political from financial and industrial centres. Italy, too, is marked
by the contrast between the political weight of Rome and the north’s economic
importance. Even the United Kingdom includes, in Scotland, a territory with a
distinct legal identity and a cohesive, largely home-grown elite. France, however,
appeared as comprehensively centralised: Paris et le désert français, the evocative
title of a book written in the 1940s by Jean-François Gravier, was still, despite
efforts by Gaullist governments to decongest the capital by creating new towns
and to divert activities towards provincial centres, a dominant image thirty years
later. Economic realities simply mirrored the constitutional and administrative
facts that made Paris, as the seat of executive, legislative and judicial authority,
the ‘natural’ centre of administration. French elections were increasingly con-
ducted as national competitions, whether they were national, local or, from 1979,
European. And the political culture of France was steeped in the ‘central value
system’, to use Shils’s term, of Jacobinism, which structured mentalities, expect-
ations and actions as relations between the state and local authorities were played
out. Small wonder, then, that major local politicians had to spend much of their
time in Paris.
The pre-1982 picture thus appears a sombre one, with innocent and virginal prov-
inces assailed and violated by a brutal and insensitive capital. In truth, however, the
situation was much less melodramatic, and infinitely more complex.
Local influences in the one and indivisible Republic

Even before 1982, the rigours of centralisation were tempered by factors which ensured
that local decision-makers were not the inactive spectators of their own collective fate.
There were eight such factors.
The state’s de facto dependence on the localities
The state depended on the localities in several important respects. Even before March
1982, the local authorities employed 850,000 people, raised nearly a fifth of the total
taxes, accounted for some 60 per cent of non-military public investment projects, acted
as a vital servicing agency for the centre, and played a direct and initiatory role in areas
such as primary schools, crèches, housing, transport, culture, urban planning, local
roads, traffic control, sanitation and sports facilities. The investment and employment
policies of local authorities could therefore have an enormous impact on the financial
and economic policies of the central government. The successful implementation of
such policies required the co-operation of local authorities, as anyone tempted to
bypass the periphery soon discovered. Local state officials, far from being the agents of
enlightened national economic rationalism, often acted as spokespeople for local inter-
ests. Even DATAR (Délégation à l’Aménagement du Territoire et à l’Action Régionale),
the regional planning unit set up in the prime minister’s office in 1963, carried out its
job of industrial decentralisation with one eye on economic imperatives and the other
on the polling booths; it was therefore obliged to seek the co-operation of local elected
officials, even at the price of concessions that detracted from the goals of ‘rational’
planning.
The fragmentation of the central administration

Provincial elites were able to exploit differences in the central government bureaucracy.
‘The state’ is no more a homogeneous entity in its relations with the provinces than it is
in Paris; it is merely a convenient shorthand term (even if the French like to invest it
with a quasi-mystical quality) embracing a vast variety of political, administrative,
public and semi-public agents. And between these decision-makers, conflict was (and is)
endemic and sometimes bitter. All was not sweetness and light between, for example,
the ministries of the Interior and Finance, between the Ministry of Infrastructure and
DATAR, or between the Ministry of Finance and the Caisse des Dépôts. Astute local
notables could frequently exploit such endemic feuds. Rivalries also existed between the
various field services, which tended to avoid conflict by avoiding each other, thereby
minimising co-ordination; between the locally entrenched field services and their
superiors in Paris, who played what Jean-Claude Thoenig has called ‘an elaborate
game of hide and seek’, in which a local elected official was often the only link; and
between the field services and the prefects, whose attempts to play their legal role as
co-ordinators were liable to run into the sand without outside help.
The symbiosis between state officials and localities

State officials were often sensitive to local requirements. Unlike their British counter-
parts, top civil servants in France are allowed to stand for local (as well as national)
office, and many do so, often under well-defined political labels. Many Paris officials
have family roots in the provinces and wish to retain and even strengthen them by
serving their local community. No conseil général is complete without at least one top
civil servant based in Paris, and the ranks of French mayors also include members
of the Paris administrations, of ministerial cabinets and of the grands corps. Such
individuals could speak on equal terms with the prefect, bring pressure to bear upon
him through Paris or even bypass him completely, thereby winning patronage for their
own communes or cantons.
State officials in the field services were also susceptible to local influences, to the
point, after a certain time lapse, of ‘going native’. Enjoying some discretion in interpret-
ing directives from Paris, they would often display great inventiveness in ignoring,
modifying or violating them. The length of time that such officials stayed in given
localities and were exposed to their pressures (generally much longer than prefects) goes
some way to accounting for such behaviour. Another reason was money. Three-fifths of
the work of the state field services was for the local authorities, which requested and
paid for their help in the initial preparation of projects, and later in their implementa-
tion. Since the field services were also involved in verifying the legality of such projects
and their compliance with technical norms, they were thereby placed in a dubious
moral position. But moral convictions tended to disappear under the deadening weight
of established practice and the anaesthetising effect of the percentage paid for work.
The practice underlines the mutual dependence of elected and non-elected officials: the
technical dependence of the former created and then sustained the financial dependence
of the latter.
The power of the notables

The position of locally elected notables was much more powerful than the texts
suggested. This observation, according to historians, was true as early as the July mon-
archy (1830–48). The position of local notables was reinforced by their justifiable claim
that unlike the prefects and many other officials, their local roots were deep and strong:
almost to a man, they lived in the localities they represented, and had usually been born
there. Second, most elected notables showed great institutional longevity. A handful of
mayors have served half a century: Édouard Herriot, mayor of Lyon from 1905 till
1957, and Jacques Chaban-Delmas, mayor of Bordeaux from 1947 to 1995, are two
illustrious examples. Others have handed on local office from father to son like a family
heirloom. Very many more have served, as mayors of villages or cities, or as conseillers
généraux, for two to three decades. The notables thus had ample evidence for their claim
to know local people and problems better than the prefects, who typically lasted just
two or three years in any single post before disappearing from the département with the
inevitability of Puccini heroines.
The third factor which strengthened many local notables in their relations with state
officials was the phenomenon of the cumul des mandats, multiple office-holding. These
offices may be purely local: many mayors are also conseillers généraux, and chair a
number of local bodies, whether public housing authorities, hospital boards, sociétés
d’économie mixte or associations. But offices may also be national in character. The
extent of the cumul in the National Assembly over two decades is shown in Table 12.2.
At any given time, and with great consistency, about half of the Deputies also held
office as mayors, about half as conseillers généraux, and about a quarter as both.
Multiple office-holding among Senators was, if anything, more widespread, since the
members of the upper house were themselves elected by local elected officials. Looked
at from the local angle, over half of the presidents of councils for the départements and
regions have regularly been members of parliament. The dominant political figures of
the Fifth Republic who have held or hold local office have included presidents Giscard
d’Estaing, Mitterrand and Chirac: all of the prime ministers appointed by Pompidou
Table 12.2 Notables in the National Assembly, 1978, 1988 and 2002 (metropolitan France only)
Offices held at election 1978 1988 2002
no. % no. % no. %
Mayor 235 50 262 47 280 50

Mayor: commune of over 98 21 96 17 103 19
20,000 inhabitants
Assistant-mayor (adjoint) 21 4 63 11 65 12
Conseiller général 256 54 279 50 189 34
Mayor + conseiller général 145 31 147 26 131 24
Regional councillor n/a – 141 25 83 19
Mayor + conseiller général n/a – 24 4 13 2
+ regional councillor
Any two local offices 164 35 298 54 271 49
Any one local office 363 77 490 88 490 85
Incumbent Deputy 292 62 380 68 284 51
Total in any of above 424 89 537 97 523 94
categories
Total Deputies in National 474 100 555 100 555 100
Assembly
Source: National Assembly.
and his three presidential successors were or later became local elected officials. The two
Socialist mayors, Mauroy of Lille and Defferre of Marseille, who coined the term ‘le
régime des préfets’, were themselves known to their critics as the Count of Flanders and
the Duke of Provence. As (respectively) prime minister and interior minister after 1981,
they would work to give institutional expression to the very great quasi-official powers
that they and their like had accumulated (to the extent, indeed, that Defferre gave his
name to the first wave of decentralisation reforms).
For there is no doubt that such grands notables were very powerful men indeed. Their
standing might be enhanced by governmental office. Under Pompidou’s presidency, for
example, the most influential individual in the département of the Morbihan was not
the prefect but Raymond Marcellin, president of the conseil général – and minister of
the interior (the prefect’s hierarchical head). But grands notables could just as easily be
opposition politicians; no prefect could overlook the fact that Mauroy was the political
boss of the Nord département, Defferre of Bouches-du-Rhône, or François Mitterrand
of the Nièvre. Their power rested to a great extent on the cumul, and on the resulting
opportunities to intervene at all levels of the administration, from the commune
through départements and regions right up to Paris. This allowed the grand notables not
only to attract resources to their own town or canton, but also to build networks of
clients who would also benefit from their interventions. Such clients might be local
elected officials of their own party, but might also be mayors or councillors from other
parties, or even members of the administration. This meant that, if the support of a
grand notable did not guarantee the success of an undertaking, his hostility almost
invariably spelt its failure.
The limitations on prefectoral power
The power of the prefects was exaggerated and its nature misunderstood. Before 1982,
a prefect exercised, in theory, regulatory and discretionary powers which enabled him to
supervise the activities of local authorities closely. In practice, however, his power was
always circumscribed in several important ways. First, his freedom of initiative and
discretion were increasingly limited by a network of rules and regulations devised in
Paris and by a body of administrative law, evolved under the guardianship of the
Conseil d’État. Second, most prefects had neither the time, the technical expertise, the
qualified staff nor the inclination to supervise the work of the field services. The March
1964 reforms, designed to assert the prefect’s authority as ‘overlord’ of the administra-
tion in départements, therefore proved largely ineffective. Third, the prefect had little
control over many pressure groups or big industrial concerns which had their head-
quarters in Paris and negotiated with the bureaucracy there. Fourth, rapid prefectoral
turnover, fuelled by political rivalries in Paris (for example, by Giscard’s wish to weed
out Gaullist sympathisers) but also by the prefects’ own ambitions to move on to more
lucrative and prestigious postings, meant that a typical prefect was perpetually caught
in a revolving door, with little time to become acquainted with local people and prob-
lems. Fifth, all of these factors diminished the prefects’ authority in dealing with locally
entrenched notables. Local patronage had long since been expropriated by the notables,
particularly those who also sat in parliament. In the absence of a strong party system,
governments in Paris bought parliamentary favour by granting individual Deputies and
Senators the right to distribute local manna to their constituents. The notables were also
consulted over the appointment, promotion and dismissal of prefects in their constitu-
encies – a fact that few prefects were allowed to forget. In relation to such individuals,
the array of formal controls exercised by prefects, for example over local budgets,
remained all but unusable.
The relative financial autonomy of local authorities

The financial dependence of the local authorities, though real, should not be over-
estimated. Financial control exercised by the centre over the provinces in the alloca-
tion of grants of various types was unquestionably strong, but its extent should
not be exaggerated. French local budgets, though smaller than those in Sweden,
Denmark, Germany or Great Britain as a proportion of total public spending, also had
to pay for significantly fewer compulsory services. If real disposable income is the
criterion, French local authorities enjoyed a degree of financial autonomy close to that
of their European counterparts. And the central government funds on which the local
authorities were dependent did at least enable poorer areas to develop services or
implement projects the cost of which was beyond their limited resources; indeed, from
this point of view, complete financial independence for local authorities would be a
disaster, ensuring wide and growing inequalities of resources between authorities.
Moreover, the strings attached to central government grants, as well as to the loans
that were tied to them, tended to become fewer during the 1970s, as reforms in
1972 and 1979 began to move money from project-specific to block grants. That was
combined, under Giscard’s last interior minister, Bonnet, with the allocation of new
rights for communes to determine the rate of the four main local taxes, allowing
them, within limits, not only to fix the amount of the total tax take but also to place
heavier or lighter burdens on businesses, landlords, owner-occupiers, or tenants as
they saw fit.
The rise of urban France

There was an increase in the number, the size and the autonomy of big towns. In 1975,
68.8 per cent of the French population was defined as urban – the same percentage that
was represented by the rural population in 1872. Of particular significance for local
government was the increase in the number and size of big towns. By March 1977 there
were 221 communes with over 30,000 inhabitants, compared with 193 in 1971, 159 in
1965 – and 47 at the beginning of the Third Republic, when the act which largely
defined the powers of local authorities was passed. Among these large communes, the
1982 census identified 39 with a population of over 100,000 and 107 with over 50,000.
There has always been a tradition of jealous autonomy in certain cities such as
Toulouse, Lyon and Marseille: facilitated by distance, their independence was often fed
by political enmity. Here and in many other large towns, independence had increasingly
solid material underpinnings: substantial tax bases that lessened their financial depend-
ence on the state; strong bureaucracies, with technical services to rival those of the state,
led by a secretary-general who was often an official of great ability and experience;
growing experience, and scope for initiative, in important areas such as town planning
(by the judicious use of building permits and land pre-emption and expropriation),
housing and public transport, the creation of industrial zones, and social and cultural
matters. Moreover, such towns often enjoyed the dynamic leadership of powerful, long-
serving, paid, professional and full-time (as far as the cumul des mandats permitted)
mayors. Defferre in Marseille, Chaban-Delmas in Bordeaux, Crépeau in La Rochelle,
Dubedout in Grenoble, Pradel in Lyon, Pflimlin in Strasbourg, Fréville in Rennes,
Médecin in Nice, Mauroy in Lille, Lecanuet in Rouen and Duroméa in Le Havre were
among the many important mayors who determined the programmes and shaped the
priorities of their towns, often giving them a particular image. Bordeaux, Strasbourg
and Grenoble opened breaches in the reputation of provincial France as a cultural
desert. La Rochelle offered its inhabitants the free use of bicycles to limit city-centre
congestion. Pradel covered Lyon in concrete (a generation later, his Socialist successor
Gérard Collomb would emulate La Rochelle’s bicycle experiment). Such mayors made
full and large-scale use of the status of elected local autocrats which a generous reading
of the legal texts afforded them. A special case was that of the city of Paris itself,
transferred, in 1977, from rule by a prefecture to a status comparable to that of other
communes (with the added quirk of being simultaneously a département in its own
right). That the capital’s first mayor in over a century was Jacques Chirac ensured a
high profile for the change. His enterprising, dynamic style of leadership, and his sys-
tematic use of the patronage opportunities afforded by a town hall machine, were
crucial in preserving and furthering his national political career in often difficult
circumstances.
The rise of local authority co-operation

The fragmentation of French local government was attenuated by increasing co-
operation between local authorities. Few communes were persuaded to merge; a
significant number, though, used a growing range of opportunities available for
intercommunal co-operation. The simplest of these were voluntary syndicates allowing
communes to co-operate on one or more tasks specified by themselves and run for the
purposes of these tasks by a bureau composed of the main elected officials. By 1977
there were 1,893 SIVOMs (syndicats intercommunal à vocation multiple) involving
18,437 communes, and covering anything from technical services like water distribution
or rubbish collection to strategic questions like town planning. Urban areas were offered
more ambitious forms of co-operation: urban districts (provided for, like the SIVOMs,
in an ordonnance of 1959) and urban communities (set up by a law of December 1966)
controlled a wide range of services, including housing, fire-fighting, school construction
and maintenance, water, rubbish disposal, cemeteries, public transport, town planning
and public works, and disposing of a significant independent budget as well as a council
composed of representatives of the councils of the constituent communes. By 1982
there were 154 districts, grouping 1,348 communes with a population of 5,580,000, and
9 urban communities, grouping 252 communes with over 4 million inhabitants. The
only element of compulsion in the co-operation process was the creation of the first
four urban communities (in Lyon, Strasbourg, Lille and Bordeaux). The voluntary
character of this co-operation, and the resistance of local authorities to anything
resembling mergers, contrasts with the record in Britain and other European states,
where local authorities were reorganised, regrouped and in many cases abolished, by
central government fiat in the 1960s and 1970s.
The structure of central–local relations before 1982 was a complex one, with much
scope for variation on the ground between different local authorities according to
relations between individual notables, state technical services, prefects and Parisian
ministries; the size of the communes, départements and regions concerned; the quality
of the technical services under the control of each player; and the electoral stakes of
individual issues. The legalistic view, characterised by a dominant central state and
subordinate localities, was challenged from the 1960s by observers like Jean-Pierre
Worms, who analysed the relationship between the prefect and ‘his’ notables as one of
mutual interdependence. If the mayor needed his prefect’s co-operation to further his
projects, the prefect also needed that of the mayor to help avoid local unrest and ensure
a successful tour of duty and thus subsequent promotion. The two often shared defen-
sive roles, especially in their relations with the field services, the pressure groups and the
Paris bureaucracies. And each might need the other as a scapegoat to explain lack of
success. Scholars like Jean-Claude Thoenig then extended the analysis beyond the
mayor–prefect duo, and depicted the various actors as linked in a ‘honeycomb struc-
ture’, characterised by mutual interdependence and ‘conflictual complicity’, with no
player holding all the cards, and each being obliged to seek conciliation and comprom-
ise to fulfil his aims. Since there were also incentives to seek intervention and arbitration
at a higher level, the system was underpinned by a centralist logic. While this model
captures the subtlety of the system as it developed, its tendency to stress immobility and
blocages passes by three of the more attractive features of the French local system. The
first of these was the relatively healthy state of local democracy, to judge by voter
turnout – at least 74 per cent for every municipal election from 1945 to 1977, and 65 per
cent or more for cantonal elections. Second, even at its most ‘centralist’, the system
offered both unrivalled opportunities for participation in local government (roughly
one French adult in eighty is a local councillor) and a visible, accessible, channel for the
transmission of grievances, in the person of the mayor. Third, the notion of blocages
was belied by the dynamism and energy displayed by members of France’s local elites
in the 1970s – who not only complained about excessive centralisation, but also
intelligently circumvented the phenomena they denounced.
The decentralisation reforms reflected their criticisms, and swept aside texts that had,
at least on paper, enshrined local subordination. But the reforms also bore the marks of
the practices the notables had developed before 1982. In that sense, they also showed
important elements of continuity with the past.
Decentralisation: the measures

The reform of relations between the state and local and regional authorities has pro-
ceeded in three phases under the Fifth Republic: an ambitious package of institutional
reforms at the outset of the Mitterrand presidency, a series of complementary measures
between 1986 and 2002, and a further large (and so far unfinished) package under the
Raffarin premiership.
The Defferre reforms

Although 1982 is the best date to attach to decentralisation, the act of 2 March of that
year was merely the start of a legislative avalanche: Jacques Baguenard has calculated
that over fifty acts and over 350 decrees were devoted to central–local relations over the
following decade. Many of the most important of the reforms have been alluded to
above. They can be summarised under ten headings.
• Executive responsibility in départements and regions was transferred, respectively,

from the prefect to the president of the conseil général (from 1982), and from the
regional prefect to the president of the regional council (from 1986). Thus work
such as convening the councils, preparing budgets and agendas, and supervising the
implementation of decisions – and the real substance of executive power in each
case – passed from an appointed state official to a chief executive chosen by an
elected assembly.
• Regional councils were to be directly elected every six years instead of being drawn,
as they had been since 1972, from Deputies, mayors and conseillers généraux. The
first direct regional elections were held on 16 March 1986.
• The prefects’ a priori control over the activities of communes was ended. Local
authority acts, including budgets, came into force within two weeks of their being
received by the prefecture. Building permits may be freely signed by mayors where
an approved land use plan exists, without the scrutiny of the direction départemen-
tale de l’équipement or the prefecture. Prefectoral control over budgets and other
acts is now a posteriori: that is, a prefect may refer his objections to regional courts
of accounts (just as he may refer objections to other local authority acts to the local
administrative courts). Such referrals, though sometimes successful, are very few:
between 0.2 and 0.4 per cent of all local authority acts, depending on the year.
• An act of January 1983 explicitly shared out the respective responsibilities of
communes, départements and regions as distinct blocs de compétences, and gave
new responsibilities to each level. Town planning and housing were identified as
tasks for communes, which also won the explicit right to intervene in local eco-
nomic affairs; the départements had important new responsibilities in the area of
social affairs; and the regions were to play a major role in regional planning
(aménagement du territoire) including regional economic development and regional
transport networks, in the preservation of the regional environment, especially
parks, and in apprenticeships and vocational training, and in research funding.
Each level was also given responsibility for a different set of school buildings:
nursery and primary for the communes (as hitherto), middle schools (collèges) for
the départements, and high schools (lycées) for the regions.
• The financial freedom of local authorities was enhanced by an accelerated move
away from project-specific state grants and towards block grants, with annual allo-
cations for current and investment budgets (the dotation globale de fonctionnement,
the dotation globale d’équipement and the dotation générale de décentralisation,
as well as the reimbursement to local authorities of their very substantial VAT
receipts). In addition, the fiscal resources of local authorities were modestly
enhanced, with taxes on vehicle licences and on electricity going to the départe-
ments, a tax on driving licences being allocated to the regions, and taxes on
property transactions being shared between the two.
• The acts of 1984 and 1987 upgraded the career structure and status of the terri-
torial civil service, creating the grade of administrateur territorial at a comparable
level to that of many senior civil servants of central government. Servants of
the state were also seconded to local authorities, particularly the regions, or trans-
ferred as (more or less) whole services to the control of the départements. The
most striking example of this was the social services: most of the substance
of the directions départementales de l’action sanitaire et sociale was transferred
to the control of the départements. But other services, notably the directions
départementales de l’équipement (infrastructure) were also affected.
• Decentralisation was complemented by administrative deconcentration, as certain
tasks previously carried out in Paris were transferred to the state’s field services.
The 1982 act also declared the prefect’s pre-eminence as ‘overlord’ of these services.
Both of these points were reaffirmed by the Joxe Law of 1992.
• City councils were modestly democratised. The municipal elections of 1965, 1971
and 1977 in communes of over 30,000 inhabitants had been run on a two-ballot
majority list system: all lists of candidates had to be formed before the first ballot;
no lists could merge between ballots; and the winning list took all the council seats.
The electoral law of November 1982, which applied to all towns of over 3,500
inhabitants, preserved the majority principle but allowed a chance for minority
representation. The list that emerged victorious (whether by winning an absolute
majority of votes at the first ballot or simply the most votes at the second) would
gain 50 per cent of the seats, while the remainder would be shared out proportion-
ally between all the lists, including the winning one. This system was designed
to allow the municipal opposition a platform, while ensuring the election of a
coherent majority on the council.
• The cumul des mandats was limited by an act of December 1985. Henceforth,
elected officials would have to choose just two of the major offices: Deputy,
Senator, Member of the European Parliament, regional councillor, conseiller
général, mayor of a commune of over 20,000 inhabitants, assistant mayor (adjoint)
of a commune of over 100,000 inhabitants.
• A number of measures, finally, made provision for special cases. These included
the regions of Île-de-France, which was given particular responsibilities (and
resources) for transport planning in the Paris region. The towns of Paris, Lyon and
Marseille were given elected councils in each of their arrondissements by a law of
1982, initially aimed (unsuccessfully) at undermining Chirac’s dominance in the
capital.
The Socialists showed great determination and not a little courage in their decentral-
isation programme, which was pursued despite pressing priorities elsewhere and a busy
parliamentary agenda. Moreover, local election results ensured that the Right would
benefit first from decentralisation: the RPR–UDF alliance won 31 towns of over 30,000
inhabitants from the Left in 1983, and 14 presidencies of conseils généraux (bringing
their total to 69 out of 96) over the two cantonal elections of 1982 and 1985. Aside from
the short-term damage to the Socialists, however, these results had a longer-term
advantage: decentralisation, which the Right had fought in the parliamentary debates
of 1981, rapidly became the object of a cross-party consensus, at least on the general
principles. It also reinforced the local and regional authorities as lobbies. If the Associ-
ation of French Mayors is a venerable and widely respected institution, it was now
flanked by associations for city mayors, rural mayors, and the presidents of councils for
the départements and regions. Such associations did not always see eye to eye with one
another. In particular, there has been a continuing debate between traditionalists, anx-
ious to reinforce the established authorities of communes and départements, with the
state at the peak, and modernists, whose attention is more concentrated on regions and
on intercommunal structures, with a livelier attention to the opportunities offered by
neighbouring states and by Europe. But the associations had two things in common.
One was excellent links, thanks to the cumul des mandats, with parliament and govern-
ment. The other was a general view that decentralisation was unfinished business, in
need of further adjustment if not of new wide-ranging reforms.
Defferre to Jospin
The further reforms undertaken between the Left’s victories in 1986 and its defeats in
2002 clearly fall into the category of adjustment rather than wide-ranging reform. In at
least one case, however, the effects have been far-reaching.
• One series of initiatives can be viewed as going against the spirit of decentralisa-
tion, especially in the areas of finance and urban planning, and posed the dilemma
of the intrinsic value of local autonomy in the face of what are viewed as important
national objectives. The national priority in question was the desperate situation
of France’s deprived urban areas, with a sometimes explosive combination of
unemployment, rundown housing, racial tension, drug-dealing and other crime,
which was seen both as having an intrinsic national dimension (threatening the
disintegration of France’s social fabric) and as being beyond the power of the
communes concerned, often dormitory suburbs with exiguous tax bases, to tackle.
With scarce resources to underwrite what was known as the politique de la ville (but
was in fact more directed to rundown suburbs), the Socialist governments of the
early 1990s introduced measures to redistribute resources between richer and
poorer municipalities (a reform accepted with ill grace by mayors who saw their
communes’ wealth as a sign of their own fiscal virtue). In addition, the 1991 Loi
d’orientation sur la ville provided for 400 priority action zones: these were selected
in Paris, and the task of setting up multidisciplinary action teams there was given
to subprefects. But significant parts of the 1991 law remained without implementa-
tion decrees. Similar urban policy concerns therefore also prompted the Jospin
government, in 2000, to pass a Loi sur la Solidarité et la rénovation urbaine, which
obliged all communes to ensure that at least 20 per cent of housing units on their
territory were HLMs (subsidised low-cost units). It also built in financial penalties
for communes that failed to have a plan to achieve this goal ready within three
years, and even allowed prefects to curtail the rights of those that had not co-
operated to exercise their right of pre-emption on local land. Again, what was
viewed as a national problem – the housing shortage in many major cities – was
seen as justifying the curtailment of the freedom of mayors to plan a housing mix
as they saw fit.
• One of the major lacunae of the Defferre laws, in the view of some (though quite
rarely of mayors) was the lack of provision to enhance direct public participation
in local government. A very partial remedy to this was attempted in a law of 1992,
which allowed local authorities to hold referenda on a purely consultative basis. On
the whole this was an embarrassment: of the few that were held, several concerned
the presence of immigrant populations or the construction of mosques. A further,
if partial, reinforcement of local democracy came with a law passed three months
before Jospin’s defeat in 2002 that required all communes of over 80,000 inhabit-
ants to set up a network of neighbourhood councils and a public services users’
committee, both of them consultative.
• There were also repeated attempts to handle the intractable Corsican problem. A
law of 1991 transformed the island from an ordinary region into a ‘territorial
collectivity of special status’ with somewhat broader powers. The July 2000 agree-
ment on the island’s future, which attracted a broad consensus of support in the
Corsican assembly, allowed some limited rights, on an experimental basis till 2004
(after which they would be confirmed by a constitutional amendment), for the
assembly to adapt national legislation to the island’s ‘specificities’. The agreement
also provided for the teaching of Corsican in the island’s primary and secondary
schools, as well as for generous subsidies and tax concessions to compensate for
what is claimed to be Corsica’s backwardness in transport and other infrastructure.
Widely criticised outside the island as representing concessions to the terrorists
who had assassinated the regional prefect of Corsica as recently as 1998, and as a
threat to the French language and to the unity of the Republic, the Matignon
agreements also fell foul of the continuing violence on the island and then of
the Left’s defeat. Raffarin’s first interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy attempted
another line of reform that would have simplified the top level of Corsican gov-
ernment into a single assembly. This project also failed, after a narrow no result in
the referendum of 2003. With its 260,000 inhabitants, Corsica therefore retains its
territorial assembly and two départements, as well as 960 communes.
• The Jospin government also enacted a further limitation to the cumul des mandats,
on the principle first that with decentralisation, local and regional leaders did not
need to be parliamentarians as well to make their views felt, and secondly that
above a certain level, a single elective office amounts to a full-time job. Opposition
from the Senate prevented measures as wide-ranging as the government would have
wished, but the law of 2000 bans Deputies and Senators from being MEPs at the
same time; from holding more than one executive office (as president of a region or
a département or as mayor); nor can they hold more than one post as a councillor
(for a region or a département or a commune of over 3,500 inhabitants).
• Probably the most important legislation to come out of this intermediate period,
however, was the encouragement given to intercommunal co-operation by laws in
1992 and 1999. They instituted a permanent committee on intercommunal co-
operation in each département, and, more importantly, created new and more
ambitious intercommunal structures. By the early twenty-first century, the fastest-
growing forms of grouping were those with the broadest delegation of powers and
a common business tax: the communauté urbaine for large urban areas (there were
14 by 2003, 9 of them in conurbations of over 100,000 inhabitants); the com-
munauté d’agglomération for medium-sized towns (of which 143, grouping 2,441
communes, were set up in the four years after legislation created this type of group-
ing in July 1999); and the rural communauté de communes, of which 2,195, taking in
26,907 communes, existed at the beginning of 2003. By this stage, some 29,754
communes, with a total of nearly 49 million inhabitants – 84 per cent of the
population of France – had joined one of these types of intercommunal grouping.
These were more constraining than the old syndicates formerly favoured by most
communes. To join a communauté d’agglomération, for example, contracting com-
munes had to exercise powers jointly in economic development, planning and
transport, housing and social policy, as well as in at least three of a further basket
of policy areas including roads and parks, water, rubbish disposal, culture and
sport, and the environment. The spread of intercommunality was partly due to the
financial incentives offered by the state: from 27 euros per inhabitant for a com-
munauté de communes to 72 euros for a communauté urbaine, or additional funding
in excess of 15 per cent. It was also seen by local actors as a pragmatic answer to
problems of local government fragmentation. Most remarkably, perhaps, the new
groupings involve joint taxation. In 934 of them, representing 35.4 million inhabit-
ants at the start of 2003, the taxe professionnelle was pegged at an identical
level across the contracting communes within each community. This had the obvi-
ous advantage of preventing mayors from engaging (as they had in the past) in
beggar-my-neighbour policies, offering unduly low local corporate taxes to attract
all-important businesses.
Intercommunal co-operation has been a practical answer to some of the difficul-
ties entailed by excessive local authority fragmentation. Within that general per-
spective, as Hervé Michel remarks, different actors have tried to use it for a variety
of strategic purposes: to extend and control territory (for large central towns); to
acquire financial security (for hard-pressed dormitory suburbs); to seek security in
numbers under the leadership of the conseil général (for rural communes). Interest-
ingly, a small number of mayors, like Alain Lamassoure of Anglet or Martin
Malvy of Figeac, have chosen to resign from their mayoral office in order to com-
mit themselves to the presidency of their communautés – a clear sign of where they
felt the substance of municipal power to be gravitating.
These more or less piecemeal reforms did not alter the widespread view that
decentralisation remained incomplete. It was in this context that the Jospin government
commissioned one of the architects of the 1982 laws, the mayor of Lille (and former
prime minister) Pierre Mauroy, to suggest possible future measures. Mauroy’s report,
from which the right-wing minority on his commission dissented, covered four main
areas: the direct election of the councils that run intercommunal groupings; the possible
consolidation of France’s regions into ten or a dozen larger units; the replacement of
the two main local taxes, the taxe d’habitation on households and the taxe profession-
nelle on firms, by sources of revenue that were fairer than the former and less punitive
to business than the latter; the clarification of the respective competences of France’s
three levels of subnational government, with a view to avoiding the confusion of
responsibilities that had prevailed since 1982. This would probably have been the
agenda for a Jospin presidency. Chirac and Raffarin had somewhat different priorities,
but were equally committed to a broad new decentralisation initiative.
Decentralisation under Raffarin

Raffarin was unusual in coming to the premiership with more of a regional than a
national reputation. A Senator and a former junior minister, the fact that he was best
known as president, not only of the Poitou-Charentes region, but of the Association of
Presidents of French Regional Councils, testifies to a certain continuity with the earlier
handling of decentralisation by the grands notables Mauroy and Defferre.
The Raffarin reforms are remarkable for the contrast between the grand manner in
which they were initiated – a constitutional amendment – and the relatively technical
character of their substance: nothing in them is as spectacular as the creation of new
directly elected assemblies, or the clipping of the prefects’ wings, in the Defferre
legislation.
The constitutional amendment of March 2003 both set out an agenda and ensured
that further legislation would be less vulnerable to censure by the Constitutional
Council. More specifically, it specified that the organisation of the (still ‘indivisible’)
French Republic was ‘decentralised’; gave constitutional status to the regions for the
first time; constitutionalised a form of subsidiarity principle (under Article 72, ‘terri-
torial units may take decisions in all matters that are within powers that can best be
exercised at their level’); allowed, across the whole of France, the sort of experimental
derogation from national legislation which had earlier been so controversial in the case
of Corsica; and extended provisions for local referenda, both by allowing them to be
held by popular initiative rather than mayoral decision and by allowing them, under
certain circumstances, to be decisive rather than merely consultative. The constitutional
amendment also contained financial provisions: it promised both that local taxes and
other own resources would represent a ‘decisive share’ of the income of local and
regional authorities, and that responsibilities transferred from central to local or
regional government would carry with them an adequate transfer of resources.
Over the next eighteen months, a series of laws put flesh on the bones of these
amendments. All subnational authorities were allowed to run new services and/or
develop new structures on an experimental, and temporary, basis; and all were allowed
to hold referenda on issues relating to their areas of competence. Above all, legislation
set out a transfer of competences: départements were given extended responsibilities for
roads (and more kilometres to look after), rubbish disposal, healthcare and (already
one of their major areas of concern) social assistance; regions saw their role reinforced
in the areas of economic development (including grants to firms), vocational training
and infrastructure. To go with them, they received – in the government’s view –
appropriate new resources, in terms of finance and personnel (150,000 employees,
chiefly in the areas of health and social services, were transferred).
Full implementation of these provisions will not take place until 2006. But the
Raffarin reforms shared one contextual characteristic with Defferre’s: they preceded a
big defeat at local level for the government majority, leaving much of the implementa-
tion to be done by local elected officials of the national opposition. The Left’s victory at
the 2004 regional elections was greatly amplified by a change of electoral system
(pushed through by the government with the use of Article 49–3 of the constitution,
against opposition from all sides) designed to favour the emergence of clear majorities
on regional councils (and prevent the FN from holding the balance of power). This aim
was so well achieved that Socialist presidents were elected in twenty out of the twenty-
two metropolitan regions (all except Alsace and Corsica); the Left also did well in the
traditionally conservative départements, controlling about half. Predictable squabbles
about the transfer of resources broke out as the regions increased taxes for their 2005
budgets, claiming they had no choice, and the government and the UMP accused them
of profligacy. Beyond the political point-scoring, there were real anxieties among
elected officials of the Right as well as the Left about the budgetary implications of
decentralisation. Before we turn to these, however, and to a more general assessment of
the decentralisation laws, it is important to examine two other contextual elements,
European integration and economic change.
Europe and the regions

European integration presented France’s local authorities, and particularly the regions,
with both new constraints and new opportunities. The constraints arose in part from
the effects of economic integration, which penalised some (mostly peripheral) regions
and rewarded others. They also came from the new corpus of law associated with the
Single European Act (SEA) of 1987 which established the single market. European
public procurement directives, for example, which came into force in 1989 and 1990,
required formal advertising of public supply and maintenance contracts worth 130,000
euros and public works contracts worth 5 million euros, and outlawed discrimination
against non-national firms. These thresholds were well within the range of local author-
ity spending. Similarly, like any public- or private-sector organisation, French local
authorities were bound by new labour and environmental standards, technical norms
and health and safety requirements. Moreover, European competition rules increas-
ingly handicapped traditional state-led regional policies, and required such policies to
be integrated in a European framework: as Sonia Mazey notes, in the late 1980s the
French government was forced by the European Commission to withdraw development
grants from twenty départements which did not meet EU guidelines for regional
assistance.
That framework was provided, in part, by the development of the European
Regional Development Fund, transformed in 1988 from a channel of European finance
to individual infrastructure projects into an instrument of the EU’s commitment to
economic and social cohesion. The most obvious opportunities offered by Europe to
local authorities, therefore, are financial. Between 1989 and 1993, European regional
development funds doubled in money terms, and rose from 19 per cent to 25 per cent
of the EU budget. The use of the funds, however, had to be transparent, and matched
(at least) by funds from the member states and regions that benefited. In this sense,
Europe has actually encouraged and provoked European regional reform, since these
conditions are most likely to be met by well-organised, dynamic regional authorities
(even when the regions themselves are poor). In France, the pluriannual planning con-
tracts signed between the state and the regions (the contrats de plan État–région) include
European money. Of 33.5 billion euros earmarked for the contracts for 1994–99,
12 billion euros came from the state, 14 billion euros from the regions and other local
authorities, and nearly 9 billion euros from European funds; for the 2000–6 plans,
Europe was expected to supply 7 billion euros, the state 16 billion euros – leaving
18 billion (three years’ worth of new investments) for regions. This largess, however, had
some strings attached. Regional aid was increasingly tied to European objectives, which
might be linked to specific regions (such as assistance to industrial restructuring in
declining industrial regions, or to promote development of the most backward rural
areas) or ‘transversal’ (such as fighting long-term unemployment). Regions were
required to draw up regional plans as a framework for their applications for EU subsid-
ies. And since only central government can present formal applications for EU regional
funds, the potential remained for central government to impose its priorities on the
process: the contrats de plan État–région have been negotiated at the regional level
under the authority of the regional prefect and finalised nationally in a body called the
Conseil National pour l’Aménagement du Territoire, chaired by a minister and includ-
ing representatives from DATAR as well as regional and local elected officials. At the
same time, however, the contrats de plan have triggered a process of institutional learn-
ing comparable to that provoked within France by decentralisation. Only 5 out of the
22 regions succeeded in preparing their own detailed strategic plans for the first round
of contrats, running from 1984 to 1988; the figure had risen to 14 for 1989–93; by the
2000–6 round, all the regions had done so. The process has favoured close partnership
with the state, other local authorities, European representatives, and other local bodies
such as chambers of commerce (the process appears to have varied from sweetness and
light in Brittany to acrimony in Rhône-Alpes); and it promoted a culture of regular
evaluation, obliging subnational authorities, and particularly regions, to lend at least an
apparent coherence and conviction to projects which might otherwise have lacked both.
By the end of the third round of contracts, however, there were signs of disenchant-
ment among regions. Part of this related to the behaviour of state authorities, seen as
too ready (for example, in the case of the Infrastructure Ministry) to push their own
agenda and ask the regions to pick up the bill, and too slow to pay their share. A Senate
report complained in 2003 that only 70 per cent of credits for the third (1994–99) round
of contracts promised by the state had actually been paid, that the level for the 2000–6
round could be as little as 60 per cent, and that ‘the realisation of the contrats de plan
therefore appears more and more virtual’. Finally, regional authorities are aware that
with the 2004 eastern enlargement, less EU regional development money will come to
France. The likelihood, therefore, is that while the contracts have brought valuable
infrastructure (as well as habits of partnership and evaluation) in the past, they will
hold a less central place in future policy-making. The generally disappointing record of
the EU’s Committee of the Regions, a consultative body set up by the Maastricht
Treaty largely at the insistence of the German Länder, would appear to confirm this.
The EU has also, by instituting competition for funding of various types, encouraged
regional lobbying. By the early 1990s, seventeen out of the twenty-two regions of
metropolitan France were represented, either directly or through a grouping, in
Brussels. The more adventurous départements and cities were also following the same
path – as much to be close to sources of information and to spot possible funding
opportunities early as to engage in direct lobbying with European officials for a specific
local interest. The SEA also offered encouragement to the cross-border interregional
associations which had been explicitly recognised by the 1982 Defferre Act five years
earlier. Such associations include the Association of European Frontier Regions (dat-
ing from 1971), the Conference of EC Maritime Regions (1973), the Conférence des
Régions de Tradition Industrielle; SAARLORLUX (Saar–Lorraine–Luxembourg) and
the neighbouring grouping of Alsace with Baden-Württemberg, Rhein-Pfalz and the
cantons of Basle; the Kent–Nord–Pas de Calais grouping formed to take advantage of
opportunities offered by the Channel Tunnel; and the ‘four motors’ association of
Rhône-Alpes, Catalonia, Lombardy and Baden-Württemberg. This too has provoked
imitation by other local authorities: in August 2000 the mayor of Nantes and former
minister Edmond Hervé inaugurated a Conference of Atlantic Arc Cities, including
Porto, Cork and Glasgow as well as Nantes, Rennes and Bordeaux.
The development of a European regional policy has not realised the hopes of
enthusiasts for a ‘Europe of the regions’, who imagined subnational authorities co-
operating directly with one another and negotiating with Brussels without needing to
refer to an increasingly irrelevant nation state. Europe has not emancipated France’s
local and regional authorities from the state’s tutelage. It has, however, made available
new sources of funding in ways that favour somewhat less hierarchical forms of co-
operation than have been usual in the French politico-administrative system. And it has
established that cross-frontier co-operation (and competition) is no longer solely a
regalian function of a sovereign state, but may be a legitimate concern of subnational
authorities as well.
Local authorities and private business

In opposition in the 1970s, the Socialists presented decentralisation as ‘one of the most
powerful levers for the break away from the capitalist system’. The irony of the Left’s
arrival in power in 1981 preceding a large-scale paradigm shift (described in Chapter 1)
in favour of the liberal economy was as heavy at the local level as it was nationally: freed
from (some of) the constraints of central government, local authorities were left
increasingly unprotected from the rigours of the global market, and became more
dependent for their prosperity on the investment decisions of large firms. The post-war
expansion of French local government had taken place in a context of fast growth when
the central problem was to deliver the infrastructure, housing, schools and other facil-
ities to underpin rapid industrialisation. The jobs came more or less by themselves, so
long as an industrial zone with a rudimentary level of utilities was provided. Left-wing
municipalities disliked the idea of giving ‘presents’ to capitalists; right-wing ones,
influenced by established local firms, were often disinclined to go looking for more
companies that might compete for still scarce labour. But little of this applied by the
late 1970s, and major towns began to seek ways – at the margins of the law – of
intervening to ensure the survival of major local firms.
Decentralisation legalised such interventions: henceforth not only towns, but also
départements and regions, made it their top priority to attract or retain firms. One
way of doing this was direct aid to firms in difficulty, but this practice had largely
disappeared at local level by the late 1980s, as it had (more or less) nationally (and for
the same reasons of cost-effectiveness and competition legislation). Instead, local
authorities increasingly aimed at creating a broad package, including local, national
and international transport links by road, rail and air; financial concessions, including
local tax holidays or loan guarantees; a range of services for firms including security
surveillance, vocational training for workers and access to research institutes; proximity
to local small and medium firms in the relevant sector; and an environment considered
attractive for company managers (hence, in part, the rise in cultural spending by many
authorities, as well as the burgeoning verdure of municipal golf courses in some of the
most unlikely localities). The old industrial zones were replaced by new technology
parks (technopoles), such as Grenoble’s Europole, or Lille’s EuraLille, which aimed to
offer some or all of these advantages. Local authorities also sought to sell themselves
much more aggressively, through mushrooming ‘communication’ budgets and inter-
mediary associations for economic promotion, often run jointly with Chambers of
Commerce and Industry or local employers’ groups such as the Centres des Jeunes
Dirigeants. All of these things were done in a more or less orderly fashion by the whole
range of local authorities, since the decentralisation laws allowed economic interven-
tion, in one form or another, by communes, départements and regions, and since jobs
were, understandably, the prime concern of French voters in the last quarter of the
twentieth century. Sufficient co-ordination between local bodies (and a sufficiently
attractive region to begin with) could ensure significant success: such was the case in
Rhône-Alpes, which includes the cities of Lyon and Grenoble. On a broader canvas,
however, as Jonah Levy has shown, the efforts of French local authorities have too
often taken the form of a proliferation of initiatives that are underfunded and overlap-
ping, rather than focused and co-operative (as between, for example, different local
authorities, business associations, and the state). This is especially true when it comes,
not to the attraction of international investors, but the encouragement of local small
and medium enterprises. This is a field where well-organised action by local authorities
should play a critical role; in fact, well-implanted central government bodies such as
the Agence Nationale de la Valorisation de la Recherche (ANVAR) have made most of
the running.
There is another respect in which local authorities have become dependent, to a
degree, on large firms: they have had increasing recourse to the private sector to run
their services. The private management of local services in France has a long history
which, as Dominique Lorrain has pointed out, has meant that much of the heat gener-
ated in British debates over the merits of privatisation has been absent in the French
local context. Before 1982, it is true, right-wing local authorities tended to farm out
services to private groups, and left-wing ones tended to manage them directly; but the
numerous exceptions on either side indicated that most mayors and councillors took a
pragmatic approach to the issue. Pragmatism appeared, however, to point in the direc-
tion of private-sector solutions at least from the early 1980s to the early twenty-first
century. Thus Lorrain has noted that municipal water services were privately managed
in some 60 per cent of cases in 1983 but 75 per cent a decade later. Sewage and rubbish
disposal, and public transport, are among the other basic services often conceded
to private firms. Local authorities have also resorted increasingly to public–private
partnerships in the form of sociétés d’économie mixte. Formerly used chiefly for large-
scale building projects, SEMs are now commonly used to spread the risks inherent in
managing major social and cultural facilities.
Many of the incentives to privatise are common to local authorities throughout the
developed world, driven to reduce costs in order to control spending levels or to release
money for other purposes. Few local authorities in France or elsewhere accumulate
substantial savings available for investment (and the fact that, in France, such reserves
must be deposited in the Treasury at zero interest is scarcely an incentive to build them
up). It may be easier for the private sector than for a town, département or region to
absorb high short-term investment costs: in cases where such costs are not incurred, a
private firm seeking a water contract, for example, may be willing to pay the town
concerned an initial lump sum, which can then be invested elsewhere. Productivity gains
through recent technological advances in the area of urban services have strengthened
the hand of large firms, which increasingly compete in a global market. Such firms have
also constantly sought new customers, whether for very large-scale new projects such as
the metro systems built by Matra and Alstom for Toulouse and Lille, or the more
modest range of luminous display boards, bus shelters and public toilets supplied by
Decaux to towns all over Europe.
Specifically French factors have also been at work. Achieving cost competitiveness
with the private sector is especially difficult for France’s fragmented local authorities.
France’s private firms in the urban sector, on the other hand, are often of world class,
such as the Générale des Eaux (part of the ill-fated Vivendi group) or Suez-Lyonnaise
des Eaux for water provision, or Bouygues, Spie-Batignolles and Eiffage for public
works. The concentration of technical expertise and financial leverage wielded by such
firms (several of which have now also diversified into sectors as remote as television and
film) is greater than anything a city could aspire to. They are also increasingly related to
one another: a subsidiary of the Générale des Eaux, for example, took over the major
transport firm CGFTE in 1987. Finally, where before decentralisation, French local
authorities were obliged to borrow from lending organisations linked, in one way or
another, to the public-sector Caisse des Dépots et des Consignations, they have increas-
ingly had access to the private banking sector (which has in any case grown owing to
privatisations). This allows the local authorities greater flexibility in financial manage-
ment, but also ensures that the banks keep a watchful eye on their accounts. However,
there were some signs in the early twenty-first century that the love affair of at least
some local authorities with private-sector service suppliers was cooling off; indeed,
rising costs of contracts with private firms convinced a number of mayors to turn back
to direct management of water services.
A third element in the relationship between French local authorities and private firms
has been corruption, usually for the purpose of political funding. Some cases have been
proven in spectacular trials. The mayor of Grenoble, Alain Carignon, for example, was
convicted and imprisoned after receiving large sums (used to finance his election
expenses and use of private jets) from subsidiaries of the Lyonnaise des Eaux in return
for the contract to manage the city’s water supply. Carignon’s case, though spectacular,
was far from unique; plenty of evidence suggests that the problem was structural and
widespread. At the parliamentary elections of 1993, held during the brief period
(1990–94) when business donations for purposes of political finance were legal, a quar-
ter of all such donations came from four large groups (Bouygues, Lyonnaise des Eaux,
Générale des Eaux and Eiffage) closely involved in the provision of urban services or
public works. The inevitable suspicion (confirmed by anecdotal evidence from politi-
cians and business executives) was that these legal donations were merely the continu-
ation of a long-standing illegal practice, and that they were made in return for, or in the
hope of, contracts. What is certain is that they did not stop when legal avenues for
business donations to parties were closed down from 1995. In the four years from
January 2000, seventy-nine local elected officials, mostly mayors, were convicted of
corruption-related offences, many of them involving personal profit. A quarter of
metropolitan France’s ninety-five presidents of conseils généraux were under judicial
investigation in January 2004. Scandals involving the city of Paris, and possibly Jacques
Chirac, have already been mentioned (above, p. 227). Closely linked to them was
a further investigation, involving commissions paid to all of the major political
parties, into building projects (especially the renovation of lycées) in the surrounding
Île-de-France region. That trial opened in March 2005.
Whatever the precise mix of expected managerial efficiency and political sleaze
involved in the privatisation of urban services, the importance of private firms in the
local policy process has undoubtedly grown since the early 1980s, to the extent that in
some cases private firms may act not merely as the executors of policies decided by
central or local government, but as policy-makers in their own right, both conceiving
and implementing major urban projects. This raises the question of whether the diver-
sity of local policy outputs promised by decentralisation has in fact been stifled as local
authorities fall under the tutelage, no longer of the state, but of large private suppliers
of services, for whom standardisation is the natural corollary of cost competitiveness.
Such an interpretation seems exaggerated in the French case: as Patrick Le Galès points
out, French towns display a wide range of relationships between public and private
sectors, and private-sector actors are by no means invariably dominant or even very
united.
Assessing decentralisation: plus ça change?

Paradoxically, decentralisation is the object both of a wide-ranging consensus, in that
no party seeks to restore the status quo ante, and of a growing chorus of criticism.
Commentators such as Albert Mabileau or Bruno Rémond argue that the manner in
which decentralisation was undertaken introduced damaging incoherences into the sys-
tem of central–local relations (which had never been short of incongruities in the first
place). It did so because the pursuit of its major objectives was hindered by their own
incoherence, by the incrementalism of many of the reforms and by a lingering central-
ism. The objectives can be grouped under three headings: subsidiarity (to borrow a
term from the politics of the EU), rationalisation and democratisation.
Subsidiarity
Subsidiarity – the redistribution of decision-making to the lowest possible level of
government, to ensure proximity of decisions to the people affected by them – was
achieved partially and was vulnerable to legislative reversal. Indeed, observers such as
Yves Mény have argued that for its main beneficiaries, the mayors of big cities,
decentralisation did no more than give official blessing to the unofficial but widespread
practices of the pre-1982 era (perhaps unsurprisingly, since the major architects of
decentralisation, Gaston Defferre and Pierre Mauroy, were both city mayors). The
mayors of small rural communes, on the other hand, lack the financial and technical
resources to take advantage of their new freedoms; few communes of 800 inhabitants
can run to more than four employees in total. Such communes often rely on state
officials to prepare their budgets (indeed, the Trésorier-Payeur Général was given the
duty in 1988 of vetting and passing the accounts of communes of under 2,000 inhabit-
ants); they refer their acts to the prefecture in advance of publication to verify their
legality, having no legal services to do this themselves; they rely on outside technicians
(though these may now come from the département, rather than the state) to prepare
investment projects, and on project-specific subsidies from state, département and
region to implement them. When, as has happened, ministerial field services are shrunk
in the name of decentralisation, the local authorities that depend on them are likely to
suffer.
It has also been argued that what appears to be one of the most tangible signs of real
decentralisation – the fact that local authorities control more money (see Table 12.1) –
may be seen as no more than the acceleration of a tendency, dating from the 1960s, for
France’s central government to place additional financial burdens on local authorities.
According to Interior Ministry figures, the transfer to départements of responsibility for
social assistance and for the upkeep of middle schools (collèges) added some 87 billion
francs (13.26 billion euros) to their annual burden of compulsory spending between
1984 and 1995; the regions’ new role in building and maintaining lycées and managing
vocational training had entailed the transfer of 29 billion francs’ (4.42 billion euros’)
worth of expenses to them over the same period. In other words, an increased role in
implementation did not necessarily mean greater autonomy. The implementation of the
minimum social assistance benefit (revenu minimum d’insertion, or RMI) decided by the
Rocard government in 1988, for example, entailed significant new spending commit-
ments which many départements were reluctant to take on. Similarly, while the expense
of maintaining and building schools has been transferred to the local authorities, crit-
ical aspects of education policy, such as curriculum and staffing, remain firmly in the
hands of central government. Paris may close a rural school, but it is the département
which must then organise and pay for school buses for the children concerned to be
educated further from home. In the area of vocational training, the regions have
had great difficulty in breaking into a policy community that remains dominated by
Education Ministry officials. Most recently, local elected officials have been worried by
announcements from Raffarin’s social affairs minister Jean-Louis Borloo on the need
to expand apprenticeship opportunities, fearing a rise in charges for what is explicitly
marked as a regional responsibility. It might be added that higher spending levels after
decentralisation, though certainly significant, still left France’s regions quite lacking the
financial muscle of their German or Italian counterparts: in 1994 Hesse, Germany’s
fifth largest Land, was spending the equivalent to 19 billion euros, over double the
combined total for all French regions.
If the state still imposes new constraints on local authorities, it also preserves at least
some of the means to ensure local implementation of priorities defined in Paris. The
prefects, though dispossessed of crucial powers as chief executives of départements and
regions, retain other sources of authority and influence. They may require départements
to engage spending to further the objectives of the RMI, or to prepare plans for the
sorting and recycling of household waste; they may, under the law of 2000, order
recalcitrant communes to build low-cost housing units to meet the minimum require-
ment of 20 per cent. More importantly, perhaps, they remain the key point of
articulation between regional planning and the state, with a crucial role in preparing the
contrats de plan État–région. Their responsibilities in the area of local economic devel-
opment increased as governments’ concerns with unemployment grew – and as prefects
themselves came to see this as a promising area in which to recover some of their lost
influence. Regional prefects chair a Comité Régional de Restructuration Industrielle,
and may recommend fiscal incentives to restructuring projects such as mergers; prefects
of départements also chair a Comité Départemental d’Examen des Problèmes de
Financement des Entreprises; they must be consulted by TPGs if a heavy tax bill
threatens to bankrupt a major local firm (and may suggest rescheduling of outstanding
tax debts in consequence); they also dispose of (limited) discretionary funds to assist
local associations for job creation. Subprefects in areas of high unemployment convene
a Comité de Développement Industriel Local. Other state officials in the localities have
also retained important roles. The transfer of ministerial field services has been one
of the slowest aspects of decentralisation to be implemented; ministries that have
remained relatively untouched include not only Finance and Defence (because of their
regalian functions) but also Education and even Culture.
Rationalisation
Rationalisation of local and regional authorities and their competences has been left
largely unachieved because of the incrementalism of the reforms. First, decentralisation
in itself did not address the issue of the fragmentation of France’s communes, and the
resulting weakness of those suffering from depopulation in rural areas, or from the
strains of a worsening urban crisis in many poorer suburbs. Mayors have proved as
allergic as ever to the idea of mergers. The intercommunal solutions outlined above
have certainly proved a useful palliative. But they also pose awkward questions as they
stand. Should they not, to be more effective, control a greater share of their constituent
communes’ resources – whatever the worries of mayors who resent intercommunal
encroachments on ‘their’ tax base? And if they are given, as is now the case, the power
to tax, should they not be directly elected? And if they are directly elected, are the
communes and councils that make up the grouping not superfluous, politically and
administratively?
Second, the reforms have failed to choose between the département and the region;
many commentators viewed the preservation of three tiers of local government as
wasteful of time and resources, especially when a hierarchical relationship between
them is specifically excluded (the 2003 constitutional amendment merely said that for
specific projects, one type of authority may take a lead role on a case-by-case basis).
One of the weaknesses of the Raffarin reforms is said to have arisen from the conflict
(perpetuating the refusal to choose) between a regionalist prime minister and a dépar-
tementaliste president. Nor was there any attempt to remodel boundaries of local
authorities to fit economic or demographic realities: hence the anomalies noted earlier
in the populations of regions and départements. The regions, though reinforced by the
reforms, remained both weak compared with their counterparts elsewhere in Europe
and vulnerable to pressures from big towns and powerful départements on their own
territory. This weakness was compounded by the lack of stable majorities on many
regional councils, owing to their election by proportional representation, giving FN
councillors significant leverage over policy in a number of cases – though this was
remedied (to the Left’s short-term advantage) by the 2003 electoral law. Third, the clear
distribution of responsibilities between different tiers of local government into distinct
blocs de compétences, which was the main justification for the refusal to grant any one
type of local authority hierarchical superiority over the others, has never materialised.
The classic example was that of building and maintaining schools, where municipalities
were supposed to be responsible for the primary level, départements for middle schools,
regions for lycées, as well as for the long-term planning of middle schools, and the state
for universities. In fact, the interrelated nature of educational decisions (and often
buildings), certain refinements to the rules, and the inclination of all players to
intervene as and when they saw fit, meant that the allocation of tasks was no clearer
than before. Similar examples could be found in the areas of culture and, above all, of
economic development, where communes, départements and regions are all engaged,
thanks to a generous interpretation of the texts; the result, instead of the comple-
mentarity the reformers hoped for, is often an unseemly and competitive free-for-all.
Fourth, decentralisation was not accompanied by any structural reform of France’s
notoriously archaic local taxation system, which manages to combine gross injustice
(taxes on built and unbuilt land, and above all the taxe d’habitation) with economic
masochism (the taxe professionnelle). Left-wing governments considered replacing the
taxe d’habitation with something more equitable, or at least reassessing its basis, but did
neither, partly from the knowledge that reform would create losers as well as winners.
Raffarin has done rather more about the taxe professionnelle, phasing out its most
objectionable, payroll component as a preliminary to getting rid of it altogether; local
and regional authorities are worried that the receipts from petrol taxes that they
have been promised as compensation will not be enough. Fifth, the major financial
innovation of decentralisation (albeit one begun in the 1970s), the replacement of pro-
ject-specific subsidies by block grants from the state to local authorities, was eroded
after 1990 both by the reappearance of project subsidies and by the redistribution of
funds between local authorities.
Some of the constraints placed on local authorities by central government since 1982
should be interpreted in the light of these failures to reform. The politique de la ville was
necessitated in part by the continued fragmentation of local authorities, while the
piecemeal redistribution of resources between communes and regions palliated the
absence of any serious reform of local finances. These are, in other words, lacunae in
the decentralisation process that invite more action by central, not local, government.
Democratisation
Democratisation, which was presented as an essential justification for the decentralisa-
tion project, has been a marginal element in its implementation. In the first place, local
elites have changed rather slowly. Interior Ministry figures showed that over 60 per cent
of mayors elected in 1989 were over 50 years old (and nearly a third were over 60); the
thinning ranks of farmers (39.5 per cent in 1977, 18 per cent in 2001) were compensated
by the growing numbers of the retired (15.3 to 29.7 per cent over the same period).
Blue- and white-collar workers, over 31 per cent of the adult population, accounted for
less than 9 per cent of mayors. The proportion of women – 10.7 per cent of mayors in
2001, and 10.4 per cent of conseillers généraux – remains derisory, although where
parity legislation has forced it, there has been change in some areas, with 31.6 per cent
of women on municipal councils and 47.6 per cent on those of the regions. A certain
complement of new blood was, it is true, provided at the urban and regional level by
councillors elected from the ranks of educated, salaried professionals, but while this
was a change from France’s traditional local elites, it would be hard to present it as
diversification.
Second, an obstacle to the diversification of elites was the timid limitation placed on
the cumul des mandats by the 1985 act. Table 12.2 testifies to the continued addiction
of France’s politicians to multiple office-holding. Moreover, major notables soon
learnt to circumvent even the modest restrictions of the act by keeping mayoral and
parliamentary positions themselves and ensuring that lesser offices were held by their
own political dependents (including wives in several cases). And thanks to the Senate, the
reform of 2000 left the core combination of parliamentarian and mayor largely intact.
Third, decentralisation did little to democratise the inner workings of local and
regional authorities. Indeed, the new powers given to city mayors and to the presidents
of regional councils and conseils généraux led several observers to note that the Fifth
Republic’s original sin – excessive executive dominance – was now reproduced at local
level. The title of Jacques Rondin’s book Le sacre des notables translated a view that
decentralisation merely reinforced the power of those who already had it. The role of
the mayor as the commune’s chief executive, administrative head, majority leader and
assembly president is hardly a recipe for municipal collegiality: it has now been
reinforced by the removal of prefectoral controls, and reproduced at the level of dépar-
tements and regions. Local and regional oppositions have been, with a few exceptions,
ineffective to the point of marginality: none, with the partial exception of Les Verts in
Paris and Île-de-France, has played a major role in uncovering the numerous scandals
that have tainted the record of local government since 1982.
Fourth, decentralisation failed to engage at all promptly with the issue of direct or
neighbourhood democracy that had inspired many urban social movements prior to
the Left’s victory in 1981. Local-level associations, while numerous and growing in
number since 1982, have often suffered from the authorities’ tendency (mirroring that
of the central state) to divide them into two categories: the worthy and subsidised (but
ultimately cannibalised by the local authority) and the untouchable – a practice that
hinders, though has not prevented, the emergence of a vigorous local pluralism. It
remains to be seen how much the two laws of 2002 and 2004 on local consultation will
do to promote it, and the more open and freely debated style of decision-making that
should, in principle, go with it.
Finally, the poor fit between local and regional authorities and their electoral bases
was, if anything, reinforced by decentralisation. The election of conseils généraux by
halves every three years, in cantons still marked by rural over-representation, has
helped to perpetuate low turnout in cantonal elections. The electoral system for regions
hindered the emergence both of stable regional majorities and of strong regional
political identities, at least from 1986 to 2004. That in turn, coupled with the relative
institutional weakness of regions, may help to explain why the major interest groups
have been quite slow to build strong regional-level organisations.
Two symbols, finally, may serve to reinforce the sceptical view of at least the earlier years
of decentralisation. One is the mess made of Édith Cresson’s attempt to transplant
the École Nationale d’Administration from Paris to Strasbourg, which was suspended
after stout resistance from the association of énarques, with the school being split
between the two cities at great expense for over a decade. The second is the architectural
legacy of François Mitterrand, the main artisan of decentralisation: it consists of five
monuments – the Louvre pyramid, the Bastille opera, the arch at La Défense, the
François Mitterrand library, the La Villette music centre – all of which are in Paris.
Assessing decentralisation: the local system transformed

The sceptical view of decentralisation is a useful reminder of its limits. France has
not turned into a federal state overnight, or even in the space of two decades.
The reforms, and the continuing behaviour of major actors (central government, but
also local authorities in relation to associations), retain the stamp of a Jacobin past.
Decentralisation has nevertheless had a profound impact on central–local relations in
France. In some respects, for example the freedom of départements and regions to
choose their own executives, this impact follows directly from the texts. Other changes,
however, are less obvious.
Local finance
The financial position of local authorities has changed radically, despite the failure to
reform local taxation, in three main ways. First, Table 12.1 testifies to the rapid real-
terms growth of local and regional authority spending. This was considerably faster
than that of the national budget. If local and regional spending rose notably but
unspectacularly from 5 per cent of GDP in 1982 to nearly 7 per cent in 1995, the local
and regional authorities’ share of total non-military public investments in France –
arguably more important in terms of their power to shape the future – grew from some
60 per cent in the late 1970s to 75 per cent twenty years later. The results, in terms of
new administrative buildings, theatres, opera houses, cultural centres, festivals and
orchestras, are visible (and audible) in every French city. Second, the (partial) move
away from project-specific grants and, above all, the greater freedom to borrow from
banks rather than state-run credit institutions have provided incentives for financial
management of considerably greater sophistication in local authorities. The new free-
dom to borrow could have disastrous consequences: the Socialist mayor of Angoulême
had run his city into virtual bankruptcy by 1991. More typical, though, are cases
such as that of Chalon-sur-Sâone, which reduced its working capital needs from the
equivalent of three months’ spending in 1983 to just twenty-four hours’ worth in 1990
(a useful achievement given that local authorities’ spare cash must be deposited in
the Treasury at zero interest), or the thousands of other communes now enabled to
renegotiate old loans or to shop around for the most favourable conditions for new
ones. Third, local and regional authorities increasingly subsidised one another, with
communes more often seeking subsidies from regions, départements and intercom-
munal groupings as well as from the state. Fourth, joint financing has often been set
within a pluriannual, and global, contractual process, a contrat de ville or a contrat de
plan, somewhat on the model of the contrats de plan État–région, involving mutual
commitments to a linked series of projects.
Local authority staff

The staffing and expertise available to local authorities have substantially increased.
The number of local authority employees grew from 21.7 per cent of the total fonction
publique in France in 1976 to 29.5 per cent of the total fonction publique at the start of
2002. Again, the increase should be accounted for in part by the transfer of new
responsibilities to local authorities; and in any case, four-fifths of the total consisted of
routine administrative or manual staff. Nevertheless, local authority leaders have also
used their new freedoms, and the reform of the status of their employees, to recruit
high-level staff. Luc Rouban, for example, notes that by the end of 1993, sixty-nine
members of the prefectoral corps were working for local authorities. More than ever,
cities, départements and regions could command levels of expertise comparable to those
of the state’s services. Mayors and the presidents of départements and regions also
constituted cabinets modelled on ministerial staffs. In town halls, this perturbed what
had been a fairly strict demarcation between a political mayor and a largely depoliti-
cised administration. Local administrations became more political as local authority
leaders sought to surround themselves with politically sympathetic brains trusts; at the
same time, however, elected officials became more administrative as mayors and presi-
dents of départements and regions found themselves obliged to take an interest in the
technicalities of policy. Moreover, the impossibility of a single elected official monopol-
ising such technical competence has lent new prominence to second-ranking officials
such as assistant mayors (adjoints), whose possession of such expertise may enable them
to carve out their own quasi-independent policy sectors in close collaboration with
senior local authority employees.
Local economic development

Local authorities at all levels have intervened to promote economic development. As
outlined earlier, the inclusion of economic development among the responsibilities of
local authorities under decentralisation coincided with a growing awareness of the
efforts necessary to retain and develop local employment prospects. By 1992, local and
regional authorities were spending (in roughly equal proportions for the three levels)
over 2 billion euros on economic development, and had guaranteed 40 billion euros of
loans. Levy’s somewhat pessimistic view of the ineffectiveness of local authority inter-
ventions may simply reflect the early stages of a learning curve. It is clear, in particular,
that intercommunal solutions are designed in part to palliate precisely the difficulties –
unproductive competition between fragmented communes – that he identifies.
Local policy-making
There is, quite simply, almost no area of domestic policy in France that does not
require, in one form or another, the mobilisation of local and regional authorities.
Often this goes beyond what is planned by legislation. Universities, for example, were
intended to remain under national control under the Defferre laws. In practice, regions
and even towns became increasingly involved. This was partly because central govern-
ment sought to expand the system without financing expansion fully (student numbers
rose by four-fifths during the Mitterrand presidency), but also because local and regional
authorities sought to attract higher education to their territory. The Universities 2000
programme, initiated by Jospin as education minister in 1991, involved local and
regional authorities; the contrats de plan included universities. No initiatives on sustain-
able development, or agriculture, or training, or industrial policy, or tourism, or
policing or even counter-terrorism can afford to ignore local and regional authorities.
New local actors

Decentralisation has encouraged the emergence of new local actors. The obvious cases
are the presidents of the regions and départements, vastly more powerful than their pre-
decentralisation predecessors. To these should be added the presidents of the various
types of intercommunal grouping (who are not invariably the same as the mayors of the
largest communes concerned); assistant mayors and vice-presidents of conseils généraux
and regional councils with important sectoral responsibilities; and the heads of the
profusion of sociétés d’économie mixte and the representatives of private firms, to
which local and regional authorities have increasingly delegated their activities.
Networks and local authority entrepreneurship

Decentralisation has transformed the behaviour of local actors. Although the pre-1982
system was less centralised and hierarchical than it appeared on paper, it was still
structured around a central armature of state power, from ministries and cabinets in
Paris to prefectures and field services in the départements. Relationships within the
‘local politico-administrative system’ described by authors such as Worms, Grémion
and Thoenig depended above all on access to and influence within the state and its
services in the départements. Decentralisation ended this: prefects and directions dépar-
tementales remained important players, but important among others. A complex and
highly fluid network of competition and interdependence between local actors has been
shaped by this partial retreat of the state and by a variety of other factors discussed
above, including the arrival of new actors in the local system; the spread of intercom-
munal co-operation; the lack of clear separation between the competences of the
different local and regional authorities; the growth of cross-subsidies between local and
regional authorities; and the availability of European money. At the same time, the
changing economic environment has required local actors to promote local economic
development and to sell their localities in France and abroad with far more vigour than
in the past. If the local notable of the pre-1982 mould was a discreet mediator, using his
influence within the state apparatus to get rules bent or subsidies granted, his successor
is more likely to be an aggressive political and economic entrepreneur. It would be
wrong, however, to present such individuals as autocrats; for they face constant com-
petition on their own territory from other actors, whether representatives of the state or
other local elected officials. In this context, the cumul des mandats is as much of an asset
as it was before 1982, albeit for rather different reasons; but the limitations placed on it
since 1985 – partial and subject to circumvention though they are – have diminished
the power of a single local boss to control a whole département or region. The
most successful notables are therefore those who manage to establish networks of
co-operation – forced or otherwise – with other local actors.
A coherent model of the post-decentralisation local system has proved extremely hard
to produce, so much does it resemble a Hobbesian competition for the control of
territory, with few landmarks or fixed rules. One helpful distinction is between different
types of local system: the urban, centred on big municipalities, enjoying considerable
autonomy thanks to their large budgets and numerous, technically competent and
specialised staffs; the rural, centred on small communes lacking such resources and
dependent on outside help; and possibly also an intermediate system, centred on
medium towns, neither wholly dependent on outside partners nor wholly autonomous.
Second, within each system will be found varying patterns of conflict and co-operation.
Mayors of major cities, for example, may vie for regional supremacy with presidents of
regional councils – but each side may depend on the other’s co-operation to realise a
major project. Small rural communes may solicit the co-operation of the state’s field
services to escape the technical tutelage of the département, or vice versa, or may seek
the prefect’s support against both, or the support of all three against the ambitions of
city mayors. Rural communes may also be courted by leaders of regions anxious to
extend their sphere of influence. In all of these cases, intercommunal co-operation
arrangements and their leadership have been an increasingly important stake.
Third, the pattern of conflict and co-operation varies from region to region, depend-
ing on rivalries that may be traditional (as the centuries-old conflict between Le Havre
and Rouen), economic, political (with notables of the same party typically being the
worst enemies) or even personal. Fourth, no account of the local system that stops at
these institutional actors is complete. Analyses of local and regional economic devel-
opment have increasingly used the concept of governance: the local system, they argue,
is not merely about elaborating and applying legal norms, but is rather a complex
structure of vertical and horizontal sets of relations between a range of actors, includ-
ing public institutions, associations and private firms, each of which possesses a differ-
ent type of power (with the state and local authorities monopolising the force of legal
obligation, while the private sector wields the strongest financial resources). This is
not, of course, wholly new: local authorities maintained and developed relations with a
wide range of actors, including private firms, well before 1982. But decentralisation and
the increased salience of issues linked to economic development have enhanced the
appropriateness of governance models to a wider range of authorities. Other accounts
have focused on the growing segmentation of local and regional policies as decentralisa-
tion has enhanced the professionalisation and specialisation of local actors: local policy
networks, again grouping a wide range of elected and non-elected actors from central
and local government and from interest groups and experts within civil society, have, it
is argued, been able to win significant autonomy from the control of any one institution
within the local system. Finally, the local system is still characterised by great fluidity,
the product of its own incoherences and contradictions, of the learning experiences of
the actors, and of a process of institutional reform that is manifestly incomplete.
Concluding remarks: a continuing process

Any local or regional government system is a patchwork of compromises. How to
reconcile the self-government of local communities with, for example, national stand-
ards of public service? Or the freedom of local authorities to tax and spend as they see
fit with the inevitable need to share local tax revenue between poorer and wealthier
communities, with greater and lesser needs, or to ensure that firms are not deterred from
investing where they are most needed? There are no correct answers to such questions.
Each state resolves them, on terms that may be more or less permanent, as a function of
the political priorities of governments, but also of the weight of historically entrenched
institutions and the political cultures that go with them. For France, part of the histor-
ical legacy is Jacobinism. But as we saw at the start of this chapter, even in the 1960s the
image of the top-down, Jacobin state was about as good a reflection of the realities as
that of the ‘monolithic’ French bureaucracy. It is not the least paradox of such a
formally centralised state to have secreted a local system that has both encouraged a
form of grass-roots democracy (ensured by the sheer number of local councillors) and
allowed local elected officials to be seen by voters as accessible and trustworthy defend-
ers of their interests. Part of the French problem in addressing decentralisation was
inventing ways for central government to let go safely, and enough. Another, though,
has been remedying the extreme fragmentation of local government without changing
urban mayors simply into technocratic professionals, or transferring powers from
smaller mayors to more remote intercommunal groupings, both of which, however
administratively rational, would risk destroying a major institutional asset.
It was the virtue of Mitterrand, Mauroy and Defferre – and the outcome of deliber-
ate political decision, rather than economic necessity – to turn from a period of prudent
experiment with decentralisation to one of bold action. The Defferre reforms did not,
of course, resolve every aspect of relations between the French state and the localities.
They engendered much wasteful spending and not a little corruption. They were too
inclined to superimpose new structures onto the old, rather than replacing anything.
They were less than effective at checking, let alone resolving, some of the most pressing
local problems, especially the decay of working-class suburbs and remote rural areas.
But they still initiated a period of optimism and institutional learning as local elected
officials engaged with new responsibilities, took on more, and developed more col-
laborative, less hierarchical habits of work. Few considered the decentralisation process
complete. But the genie was seen as definitively out of the bottle.
That was the background to the Raffarin reforms. The decision to enshrine decentral-
isation in the constitution was a symbolic as well as a practical step, a sign that the
process had come to maturity. Within months of that March 2003 amendment, how-
ever, decentralisation appeared to have lost part of its consensual appeal. A poll in
1997, for example, had shown 56 per cent of respondents agreeing that ‘decentralisation
should be developed further’. By November 2003, however, this figure had dropped to
34 per cent, while the proportion who thought it had gone far enough or too far rose
from 32 per cent to 57 per cent – a near-reversal of the figures in the space of six years.
This disaffection was also reflected, with a time lag, among mayors, among whom a poll
in November 2004 found that the proportion considering that decentralisation ‘was on
course’ had dropped from 61 per cent to 35 per cent in a single year, while those saying
it ‘was going in the wrong direction’ had risen from 28 to 43 per cent. It was perhaps
unsurprising that Raffarin received the chilliest of receptions at that month’s congress
of the Association of French Mayors.
Part of Raffarin’s difficulty was party political: he retained the support of most
right-wing mayors, lacked it among those of the Left and was the object of vilification
by the new Socialist regional council presidents. But there were wider concerns too.
One concerned the loss of rural public services. This was spectacularly highlighted in
October 2004 when 263 local elected officials of the Creuse, a rural département with
125,000 inhabitants (against twice that in 1900), resigned their positions in protest
against post office and other closures. Again, most of the elected officials were left-
wing, and the far Left came out in force to a rally held to mark the occasion. But over
half the mayors polled the following month said they had little or no confidence in the
government’s ability to safeguard such services (Raffarin was later constrained to
announce a moratorium). A second concern was budgets and taxation. Despite the
constitutional guarantee that transferred responsibilities would be matched by trans-
ferred resources, a growing number of local elected officials have expressed their dis-
belief in such promises: even if they were formally respected, they argued, the money
would be insufficient to cover new needs, or else the central government would, without
any formal transfer of competences, announce new policies with spending con-
sequences for local and regional authorities, or cut funding in areas (such as subsidies
to associations) where the victims would quickly turn to communes and regions. Similar
disquiet prevailed over taxation: the phasing out of two of the four main local taxes (on
land and businesses) announced by the government would surely lead to further rises in
taxes falling on households. Underpinning these worries, on the Right as well as the
Left, was the familiar concern that central government was merely dumping its own
responsibilities onto local and regional authorities. And underlying those was the more
widespread inclination among the French, in a difficult context, to seek the protection
of the central state rather than risk the dangers of institutional innovation. It was the
somewhat improbable figure of de Gaulle who said in 1969 that ‘the centuries-long
centralisation of the French state no longer has any raison d’être’. The lasting signifi-
cance of an autumn of discontent across France’s town halls and village mairies cannot
be rapidly judged. But it would be ironic if the view of the ‘Jacobin’ de Gaulle should
lose currency, a few years after its general acceptance, on the initiative of local notables
who on the face of it had most to gain.
Further reading
Ashford, D., British Dogmatism and French Pragmatism, London, George Allen and Unwin, 1982.
Becquart-Leclercq, J., Paradoxes du pouvoir local, Paris, Presses de la Fondation Nationale des
Sciences Politiques, 1976.
Bernard, P., Le préfet de la République, le chêne et l’olivier, Paris, Economica, 1992.
Blanc, J. and Rémond, B., Les collectivités locales, 3rd edition, Paris, Presses de la Fondation
Borraz, O. and Le Galès, P., ‘France: the intermunicipal revolution’, in B. Denters and L. Rose
(eds), Comparing Local Governance: Trends and Developments, Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2004.
Castells, M., The Urban Question, London, Edward Arnold, 1977.
Castells, M., City, Class, and Power, London, Macmillan, 1978.
Cole, A. and John, P., Local Governance in England and France, London, Routledge, 2001.
CURAPP/CRAPS, La démocratie locale: représentation, participation et espace public, Paris,
Presses Universitaires de France, 1999.
Dion, S., La politisation des maires, Paris, Economica, 1986.
Dolez, B. and Laurent, A., Le vote des villes: les élections municipales des 11 et 18 mars 2001,
Paris, Presses de Sciences Po, 2002.
Dupoirier, E. (ed.), Régions: la croisée des chemins, Paris, Presses de Sciences Po, 1998.
Fontaine, J. and Le Bart, C. (eds), Le métier d’élu local, Paris, L’Harmattan, 1994.
Gaudin, J.-P. (ed.), La négociation des politiques contractuelles, Paris, L’Harmattan, 1996.
Gilbert, G. and Delcamp, A., La décentralisation dix ans après, Paris, LGDJ, 1993.
Gleizal, J.-J. (ed.), Le retour des préfets?, Grenoble, Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 1995.
Godard, F. (ed.), Le gouvernement des villes, Paris, Descartes, 1997.
Grémion, P., Le pouvoir périphérique, Paris, Seuil, 1976.
Hardy, J., Les collectivités locales, Paris, La Découverte, 1998.
Institut de la décentralisation, La décentralisation en France, Paris, La Découverte, 1996.
John, P., Local Governance in Western Europe, London, Sage, 2001.
Kesselman, M., The Ambiguous Consensus: A Study of Local Government in France, New York,
Alfred Knopf, 1967.
Lacorne, D., Les notables rouges, Paris, Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques,
1980.
Lagroye, J., Société et politique: Jacques Chaban-Delmas à Bordeaux, Paris, Pedone, 1973.
Lagroye, J. and Wright, V. (eds), Local Government in Britain and France, London, George Allen
and Unwin, 1979.
Le Galès, P. and Lequesne, C. (eds), Regions in Europe, London, Routledge, 1998.
Levy, J., Tocqueville’s Revenge: State, Society, and Economy in Contemporary France, Cambridge,
MA, Harvard University Press, 1999.
Mabileau, A. (ed.), Les facteurs locaux dans la vie politique nationale, Paris, Pedone, 1972.
Mabileau, A., Le système local en France, 2nd edition, Paris, Montchrestien, 1994.
Machin, H., The Prefect in French Public Administration, London, Croom Helm, 1977.
Meissel, R., Décentralisation et aménagement du territoire, Paris, Le Monde/Marabout, 1995.
Mény, Y., Centralisation et décentralisation dans le débat politique français, 1945–1969, Paris,
LGDJ, 1974.
Ministère de l’Intérieur, Direction Générale des Collectivités Territoriales, Les collectivités locales
en chiffres, Paris, La Documentation Française, 2004.
Ohnet, J.-M., Histoire de la décentralisation française, Paris, Librairie Générale Française
(Le Livre de Poche), 1996.
Perrineau, P. (ed.), Régions: la baptême des urnes, Paris, Pedone, 1986.
Pouvoirs, no. 24, 1983, ‘Le maire’; no. 60, 1992, ‘La décentralisation’; no. 73, 1995, ‘La
démocratie municipale’.
Rémond, B., La région, 2nd edition, Paris, Montchrestien, 1995.
Rémond, B., La fin de l’état jacobin?, Paris, Librairie Générale de Droit et de Jurisprudence, 1998.
Rey, H., La peur des banlieues, Paris, Presses de Sciences Po, 1996.
Rhodes, M. (ed.), The Regions and the New Europe, Manchester, Manchester University Press,
1995.
Rondin, J., Le sacre des notables, Paris, Grasset, 1985.
Schain, M., French Communism and Local Power, London, Frances Pinter, 1985.
Schmidt, V., Democratizing France: The Political and Administrative History of Decentralization,
Schrameck, O., La fonction publique territoriale, Paris, Dalloz, 1996.
Sharpe, L. J. (ed.), The Rise of Meso-Government in Europe, London, Sage, 1993.
Smith, A. and Sorbets, C. (eds), Le leadership politique et le territoire, Rennes, Presses Universi-
taires de Rennes, 2002.
Tarrow, S., Between Centre and Periphery, London, Yale University Press, 1977.
Thoenig, J.-C., L’ère des technocrates: le cas des Ponts et Chaussées, 2nd edition, Paris,
L’Harmattan, 1987.
Tobin, I., Le préfet dans la décentralisation, Paris, L’Harmattan, 1997.
Vital-Durand, E., Les collectivités territoriales, Paris, Hachette, 1994.
13 French justice and the elusive
État de droit1
French judicial traditions: law in the service of the state 390

Main actors in the contemporary judicial system 393
The judicialisation of public policy 400
Explaining judicialisation 408
The État de droit: obstacles and resistance 412
Further reading 420
Politics as a profession is adjacent to law: many politicians inside and outside demo-
cratic systems have legal training, and most spend part of their time legislating. In
France, the discipline of political science is entwined with that of law: political science
departments are often outgrowths of the facultés de droit. Law plays a central role in
political institutions. It is a framework of public and private action, a medium of
conflict avoidance and resolution, a means of aggregating and channelling political
preferences to render them operational and enforceable. Yet political scientists, even
in France, were for long relatively uninterested in the relationship between the justice
system, the legal profession and politics. That is now changing; the law has acquired the
power to fascinate political scientists. One reason has been the growing judicialisation
of institutions and public policy – a widespread phenomenon in Western Europe, but
one felt particularly in France, where it threatens long-held traditions.
Judicialisation will be a central theme of this chapter. It has been driven by Eurocrats
and intellectuals, by public-spirited legislators, by courageous judges and (unintention-
ally) by corrupt politicians, as well as by the wider developments observed elsewhere in
this book – the changing relationship between the state, civil society and the market.
Because it upsets traditions, judicialisation has provoked a debate in France about the
emergence of an État de droit – a state bound by, and respectful towards, the rule of law
and due process. That debate has also highlighted the lack of confidence of the French
in their justice system, and in particular in its impartiality; for the État de droit in
France is more embryonic than is fully realised. However, before turning to these
themes it is necessary both to consider the judicial tradition inherited by the Fifth
1 An earlier version of this chapter appeared in West European Politics, volume 22, no. 4, October 1999, and
in book form in Robert Elgie (ed.), The Changing French Political System, London, 2000 (Courtesy of
Frank Cass).
390 French justice and the État de droit
Republic (and now endangered by the État de droit), and to present the major judicial
actors of today.
French judicial traditions: law in the service of the state

For Jacobins, a powerful judiciary, independent of the representatives of the sover-
eign people, was no more palatable than freely organised interest groups or strong
local government. Jacobinism, however, was only one (albeit a very important one)
of a number of traditions anchored in the French judicial system by the time of the
proclamation of the Fifth Republic and drawn, with imperfect consistency, from
Montesquieu, Rousseau and a host of lesser-known but influential legal thinkers and
practitioners. The system incorporated features acquired from the ancien régime,
from the Jacobin Revolution and from the régimes of the two Bonapartes (but more
especially the first), as well as from the Third Republic – features distinct yet inter-
connected, jostling uncomfortably with one another. They may be summarised as
follows.
• The formal equality of citizens before the law. With two exceptions, this funda-
mental principle has never been formally called into question since its establish-
ment in 1789. The first exception was the Vichy régime, which established a special
Statut des Juifs as early as October 1940. The second concerns the periodic creation
of tribunals with exceptional powers, under the impact of traumatic political
events. Such tribunals (whether of military or mixed judicial and military char-
acter) behaved (as they were meant to) with repressive zeal, disregarding the most
basic rights of the defence.
• The ubiquity of law. In France as elsewhere in Europe, a growing number of
sectors came to be regulated and bureaucratised by legal stipulations – a process
characterised in Germany as ‘legal pollution’ (Verrechtlichung).
• Law established and policed by an ‘imperial state’. This Étatisation du droit was
one of the major legacies of the Revolution and of Napoleon. Pursued by all
successive régimes, it was rooted in that deep mistrust of autonomous self-
regulating institutions observed elsewhere as being characteristic of Jacobin tradi-
tions. Regulation and control should be a monopoly of the state, which alone
represented the ‘general interest’ and was therefore legitimately invested with
superior rights.
• An ingrained disrespect for the constitution. Despite the rhetoric of jurists and
politicians, whichever constitution was in force was viewed (perhaps unsurprisingly,
as none before 1958 lasted longer than two decades, with the single exception of the
Third Republic) as a mere rule in the wider game of politics: a means of regulating
conflict rather than the foundation of political order.
• An instrumental view of law. Anglo-Saxon, and especially American, traditions
have seen law as a mechanism for managing a diverse and pluralistic society, apply-
ing to individuals, groups and public authorities alike. The notion of a ‘general
will’ standing outside such pluralistic interests was neither admitted nor much
considered. In France, on the other hand, law was seen precisely as the expression
of such a ‘general will’, which arbitrated between the interests in contention. It was
also viewed as a mobiliser and legitimiser of the socio-political system. Far from
being neutral, it was instrumental and output-oriented, intimately involved in
French justice and the État de droit 391
social guidance and social engineering, a tool for ensuring, among other things,
social integration (based on a legally constructed concept of citizenship), political
centralisation and even economic dirigisme.
• An inquisitorial system of justice. These different notions of law had practical
consequences in the courtroom. In Anglo-Saxon systems, justice and truth are
served by the adversarial clash between prosecution and defence, with the judge as
referee and, in serious cases, the jury as final arbiter of the outcome. If, on the other
hand, law is seen as the expression of the ‘general will’, and the state authorities as
the representatives of the sovereign people, as in France, then the state, manifested
as the Justice Ministry, has both the right and the duty actively to seek out the truth
of each case. Hence the more active role of French judges, employed by the Justice
Ministry, both in bringing cases to the courts and in participating in the courtroom
proceedings (for example, in questioning witnesses and the accused).
• An enduring hostility, both ideologically and politically inspired, towards ‘judge-
made’ law and judicial review. The 1804 Civil Code (Article 5) specifically forbids
judges from using their adjudication of individual conflicts to create jurisprudence
– that is, to make decisions of a general character that would bind later courts.
According to the Jacobin and imperial visions, legal sovereignty lay with those
authorities (parliament or executive depending on the régime) invested through
election or referendum as the legitimate embodiment of the popular will. As the
expression of that will, law was seen as, by definition, neither perfectible nor con-
testable. A profound practical suspicion of the judiciary as political actors also
inspired this implacable hostility to judicial review. Lawyers and magistrates had
played a major role in undermining the ancien régime. After 1789, once they had
won (for many revolutionaries came from the legal profession), they set out to
demolish the wrecking potential of their own profession. Bonaparte agreed with
the revolutionaries on this point; so did all subsequent rulers. The problem was
compounded by France’s chronic régime instability between 1789 and 1958 (see
Chapter 1): two empires, two monarchies and four republics, each a target for
anti-régime attacks. The rulers of each new régime, instinctively suspicious of the
judiciary they inherited, both purged the magistrature and mistrusted those
remaining judges whom they had spared. An early but lasting expression of this
mistrust of the judiciary was given in the celebrated proclamation of August 1790,
which insisted on the separation of judicial and administrative power.
• A dual system of law separating administrative and ordinary jurisdictions. Both the
ideological factors noted above and the suspicion of judges that was its practical
corollary militated against any possibility that judges of the ordinary courts might
be allowed to perturb the activities of administrative bodies or to call such bodies
to account. From 1790, indeed, for the ordinary courts to interfere in the adminis-
tration was officially a criminal offence. Instead, an internal system of justice,
headed by the Conseil d’État (Council of State: see under the next section) was set
up to try alleged illegalities within the administration. Theoretically, under such a
system the state is simultaneously the alleged offender, judge and jury: hence the
revulsion felt towards the dual system of justice by freedom-loving French liberals,
and by British constitutionalists like Dicey who believed in ‘the equal subjection of
all classes to the ordinary law of the land administered by the ordinary law courts’.
In practical terms, however, the administrative law courts did slowly begin to
generate rights against the abuses committed by state officials.
• A subordinate and politicised judiciary. In the practice of the separation of powers,
the judiciary was considered, not as a power (pouvoir) on an equal footing with the
executive and the legislature, but as a mere ‘authority’ (autorité) – a term clearly
indicative of its lower ranking. Some practical expressions of this subordination
were the hierarchical supremacy of the Justice Ministry over part of the judiciary;
the requirement, common in the nineteenth century, that prosecuting magistrates
(procureurs) become electoral agents for the régime and keep a close and punitive
eye on its enemies; the inclusion of members of the judiciary in special tribunals
established to try political ‘crimes’ (which included, in 1851, defending the consti-
tution); the persistent political interference in judicial appointments; and the
constant pressure on prosecuting magistrates to close the files on politically
embarrassing cases.
• Judicial self-restraint. Judges might be active participants in the courtroom, but
within their profession they were socialised into a role of discretion. Judicial cre-
ativity or activism, anything that smacked of an attempt to establish jurisprudence,
or to question the doctrines of state supremacy and political sovereignty, was
frowned upon.
It would be exaggerated but not wholly untrue to argue that the characteristics noted
above – the state-based, instrumental and inquisitorial character of law, the widespread
disregard for the constitution, the absence of judicial review, the dual civil and adminis-
trative legal systems, the mistrust, subordination and politicisation of the judiciary, and
judicial restraint – flowed inexorably from a Jacobin conception of the role of the state
and its relation to society. In practice, the system was more complex than that. The
separation of powers was almost as frequently violated as it was invoked, for example,
and practical political authority did not always lie where it was legally supposed to: thus
parliamentary sovereignty in the late Third Republic was undermined by the executive’s
increasing use of décrets-lois. The fraught process of defining what was often an
uncertain borderline between civil and administrative law led to regular disputes
between ordinary and administrative judges, and ultimately to the creation of the
Tribunal des Conflits in May 1872 to settle such disputes. More significantly, judges
played a much more important role as policy-makers than official texts and doctrines
suggested. The Conseil d’État was vital in this respect: it slowly transformed itself into a
fairly impartial (if politically sensitive) administrative court, capable (in most circum-
stances) of protecting French citizens against the illegalities of state officials and its
own members from dismissal. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw a
steady narrowing of the area within which the Conseil d’État was prepared to treat
executive acts as non-justiciable (or not subject to the law). During this period too, the
two bases of administrative law, the recours pour excès de pouvoir and the régime de la
responsabilité administrative, were established, refined and extended. They not only
provided the citizen-plaintiff with the right to seek the annulment of an act or decision;
they also enabled the Conseil d’État to fly in the face of Jacobin principles and create a
substantial and important jurisprudence. The scope of this judge-made law covered
almost all the law concerning the public administration and its officials: the rules,
regulations, procedures and responsibilities of the administration, as well as the basic
ideas of what constituted service public, a public agent and the public domain (concepts
which were to become critical in the privatisation debates of the 1980s and after). The
Conseil went further than that: well before 1958, it had begun to define a general set of
constitutional principles – ‘fundamental general principles of law’ – that could be cited
in court cases. These included conveniently elastic concepts (allowing judges a certain
interpretative latitude) such as ‘equality before the law’, ‘freedom of conscience’, ‘non-
retroactivity’ or ‘individual freedom’. At the same time, the direct impact of this juris-
prudence should not be exaggerated. In particular, the Conseil d’État specifically stated
that it could not test the constitutionality of the law, which was the expression of the
general will.
At the beginning of the Fifth Republic, then, the constitutional and political trad-
ition of the country were permeated far more by an Étatisation du droit – law in the
service of the state – than by an État de droit. And for those who favoured the latter,
the Fifth Republic had unpromising beginnings. The constitution itself was scarcely
reassuring: the Conseil d’État was not mentioned as an administrative judge (though
its consultative role was strengthened); the newly created Constitutional Council was
made up exclusively of political appointees, and its role defined as a policeman of the
executive–legislative spheres of competence rather than as a judge; the guarantor of
the independence of the judiciary was to be the president of the Republic, while the
Conseil Supérieur de la Magistrature (Higher Council of the Judiciary) was allowed
only to advise on appointments. Constitutional practice was hardly less alarming, for
de Gaulle regularly infringed both the letter and the spirit of the constitution (see
Chapter 4). Moreover, the early years of the régime saw a number of disturbing
incidents that specifically concerned the judiciary. Several appointments to key posts
were flagrantly political. The government and the Conseil d’État engaged in public
rows: over the Conseil d’État’s clearly expressed view that the 1962 referendum on the
direct election of the president was unconstitutional; over the sacking (an extraordi-
nary step) of one of the Council’s own members, André Jacomet, who, as a senior
official in Algeria, had openly opposed the government’s policy of self-determination;
and, most spectacularly, over the Canal affair in which the Council, in emergency
session, saved the life of an individual who had been condemned for treasonable
activities in Algeria by a special military court. Political pressure on the judiciary led
to several highly dubious affaires being hushed up: the Ben Barka affair (involving the
assassination of the leader of the Moroccan opposition, with the connivance of the
French secret service, in December 1965 as he prepared for a personal meeting with de
Gaulle); the mysterious murder of the Prince de Broglie, a politician of illustrious
ancestry and grubby social contacts, in 1978; the no less curious discovery of Robert
Boulin, labour minister and leading Gaullist, dead in 2 feet of water in 1979 (the
verdict, contested by his family, was suicide); and the Canard Enchaîné affair, which
concerned the bugging of France’s leading satirical and (more importantly) investiga-
tive weekly. Little of this could have inspired confidence in the reinforcement of a state
ruled by law. Yet over the succeeding generation France took an unexpected number
of steps towards an État de droit. This was thanks to a wide range of judicial actors,
both French and European.
Main actors in the contemporary judicial system

The French legal establishment embraces a plurality of institutions each, in principle,
functioning within an apparently well-defined sphere. The major institutions are as
follows.
The European Court of Justice (ECJ)
The European Court of Justice in Luxembourg was created under the treaties that
established the European Coal and Steel Community of 1952 and the European
Economic Community of 1957. By the mid-1990s the Court’s main principles of
supremacy, direct applicability and, to a lesser extent, direct effect of European law had
been firmly entrenched, and largely tolerated by French administrative and judicial
elites, even if some politicians remained suspicious. The early decision of the ECJ that
the European Community ‘constitutes a new legal order . . . for the benefit of which the
states have limited their sovereign rights, albeit in limited fields’ initially provoked
hostility and resistance in some French judicial quarters, notably in the Conseil d’État.
Indeed, well after the Court of Cassation, the supreme civil court, had accepted the
supremacy of European law (and the ECJ) in the landmark Jacques Vabre case of
24 May 1975, the Conseil d’État stubbornly continued to reject the doctrine. However,
in a series of landmark decisions between 1985 and 1992, the Conseil d’État reversed its
earlier hostility, accepted and then propagated the supremacy of European law, and
extended its scope. The Constitutional Council, the supreme constitutional body in
France, initially more reluctant than hostile to becoming involved in the issue of
sovereignty, was eventually, in April 1992 (arrêt Maastricht I) to declare that France
‘can enter – under the condition of reciprocity – international agreements in order to
participate in the creation or development of permanent international organisations,
possessing a judicial personality, and that in consequence France, as other states,
accepts the transfer of competences’. Thus agreements reached at European Union
level are now enforceable directly in France, and the Union, in conjunction with
French courts, can strike down national legislation and policies which conflict with
EU law. This position has now been constitutionalised by a ruling of the Consti-
tutional Council. Under the Treaty of Rome, national courts were not envisaged as the
principal enforcers of European law. But the ECJ, through its case law jurisprudence,
has created a new role for national courts as critical mediators of the European legal
system – and this role of national courts has helped legitimise European law at
domestic level. The extent of ‘judicial dialogue’ between the ECJ and national courts
may be seen both in the frequency of preliminary references to the ECJ from French
national courts (486 between 1972 and 1994), and the frequent interaction between
judges, lawyers and scholars in Luxembourg and France. Access to the courts is nor-
mally reserved to the member states and the Commission (acting on its own behalf or
on that of an injured party) but it is also available, in some circumstances, to national
courts and even individuals. Critically, under the transformed preliminary ruling pro-
cedure, individuals can raise cases based on EU law in national courts and may require
the application of ECJ decisions. The ECJ tries cases relating to competition law, but,
more generally, by its jurisprudence, it has tolerated or encouraged the slow expansion
of the EU’s competence: those EU powers not explicitly enumerated are given a
generous interpretation; it has interpreted loosely the doctrine of implied powers,
invoked under Article 235; and it has introduced a doctrine of pre-emption – a mem-
ber state is precluded from introducing legislation once the Union has acted on that
particular issue.
The European Court of Human Rights
The European Court of Human Rights, which is part of the structure of the Council
of Europe not the European Union, has the mandate to interpret the European
Convention on Human Rights and thus set normative human rights standards across
Europe. It is the only court with the power to review national legislation concerning
alleged violation of human rights in politically delicate areas such as immigration
and asylum, and discrimination based on gender or sexual orientation. France ratified
the European Convention by a law of 31 December 1973. By an additional protocol of
2 October 1981, the new Socialist government, which reformed several aspects of the
judicial system, gave citizens direct access to the Court of Human Rights.
The Constitutional Council

The Constitutional Council was one of the most significant innovations of the Fifth
Republic, even though its full significance was unintended and unsuspected, and in its
early practice unpromising. Indeed, the intention of the framers of the constitution was
to create not a real judge but a consultative body and a protector of the prerogatives
of a reinforced executive against a seriously weakened parliament. It comprises nine
members (and the ex-presidents of the Republic, of whom only Giscard has availed
himself of the right), three each appointed by the president of the Republic (who
also appoints the the Council’s president), the president of the Senate, and the president
of the National Assembly. Members of the Constitutional Council hold their posts
for nine years on a non-renewable basis. The powers of the Constitutional Council
are threefold. In the first place, it has certain formal competences: it must be consulted
if the president of the Republic decides, under Article 16 of the constitution, to exercise
emergency powers; in the event of the president of the Republic being incapable
of carrying out his functions, the Constitutional Council declares the office vacant
(Article 7). Second, the Constitutional Council oversees the regularity of referenda and
of elections to the presidency, and to the two houses of parliament, and rules on
contested cases arising out of parliamentary elections (Articles 58 to 60). Finally, the
Constitutional Council is a constitutional referee. Thus, it polices the executive–
legislative boundary, with the initial intention that the latter did not impinge upon the
former: it delimits the areas within which parliament is entitled to legislate, leaving all
other matters to be governed by administrative enactments. Furthermore, any proposed
law of a constitutional character (loi organique) and any new parliamentary standing
order require the assent of the Constitutional Council. Most importantly, the constitu-
tion (Article 61–2) provided that the conformity to the constitution of any treaty or
government act may, before its promulgation, be tested before the Constitutional
Council. Once petitioned, the Council possesses the power to invalidate, in part or in its
entirety, any law on the grounds of unconstitutionality. A law, once referred, can be
promulgated only after the Council has given its assent. Its decisions are not subject to
appeal.
For the first ten years of the Fifth Republic, the Constitutional Council carried out
its task as a self-effacing guard dog of the executive and its prerogatives. A number of
reasons explain this situation. First, the intentions of the framers of the constitution
were clear: the preamble of the 1958 constitution declares the solemn attachment of the
people to the preamble of the 1946 constitution (which contains a set of rights), but the
framers, fearful of government by judges and sensitive to the need to protect statutory
sovereignty, insisted that neither preamble enjoyed constitutional status (i.e. the status
of an enforceable supra-legislative body of norms). Second, access to the Council was
limited to the president of the Republic, the prime minister, and the presidents of the
Senate and of the National Assembly, and for most of the early years of the régime the
first three belonged to the same Gaullist party, and the fourth was a moderate right-
winger deeply attached to parliamentary sovereignty and equally deeply suspicious of
the ‘government of judges’. Third, the capacity for judicial review was limited by the
constitutional provision that once a law was promulgated it was immune to judicial
review – it was constitutionally pure – even if the Constitutional Council had not been
asked for a ruling. Fourth, the judges themselves, political appointees to a man, dis-
played a less than assertive attitude in their judgements. The impact of this combination
of factors was unsurprising: the Council was asked to rule on only seven cases, and on
each occasion did so in favour of the executive, and it displayed great restraint when
presented with an opportunity to expand its interpretative powers. On only one occa-
sion was the Council specifically asked to rule against the executive – to invalidate
President de Gaulle’s attempt, in 1962, to amend the constitution (in order to introduce
direct election of the president) by way of referendum – a procedure not provided for in
the constitution. The Constitutional Council and the Conseil d’État, when consulted,
were against de Gaulle’s project, but in November 1962, after the referendum had
endorsed de Gaulle’s proposal, the Constitutional Council, ruling on a petition from
the president of the Senate (a bitter opponent of de Gaulle) declared that it had no
jurisdiction to control a law passed directly by the people. How the Constitutional
Council came to expand its role and became a major actor in policy-making is examined
later in this chapter.
The Cour de Justice de la République (Court of Justice of the Republic)

This court was created by the constitutional reform of 1993. Its duty is to judge members
of the government accused of committing illegal acts in the exercise of their ministerial
functions. It is composed of members elected by the National Assembly and the Senate,
and of magistrates of the Court of Cassation (see below) elected by the court itself.
The ordinary courts

The ordinary courts, and the purely judicial magistrates (juges judiciaires) are organised
in a network of Parisian and provincial courts and headed by the Court of Cassation
(Cour de Cassation), which is the final court of appeal for civil and criminal justice.
Magistrates (6,000 of them in 1997, of whom a quarter were women, and of whom the
vast majority were graduates of the École Nationale de la Magistrature in Bordeaux) are
divided into two groups. On the one hand, there are the sitting magistrates (magistrats
du siège) who are independent, free from most political pressures and protected by a
range of measures including irremovability. This group is further divided into presiding
judges, as in Britain, and investigating or examining magistrates (juges d’instruction, of
whom there were 728 in 1996). All magistrates in this group are appointed after the
advice of the Conseil Supérieur de la Magistrature (Higher Council of the Judiciary).
On the other hand, there are the prosecuting magistrates (magistrature du parquet or
magistrature debout, since they stand in court while prosecuting) who form what is
known as the ministère public. Comprising, in hierarchical order, general prosecutors
(procureurs généraux), prosecutors and sub-prosecutors, the magistrature debout is
under the hierarchical control of the minister of justice. These magistrates are appointed
from a list provided by the minister of justice, who can remove them from a particular
post (by transfer or promotion), and who can, and does, give instructions to them. They
play a crucial role in the justice system, since they supervise the preliminary police
investigations. The official investigating magistrate (juge d’instruction) cannot proceed
with a case until it has been referred by the parquet, and cannot expand its scope to take
account of new evidence unearthed without the parquet’s further authorisation.
The Conseil d’État (Council of State)

The Conseil d’État (Council of State) is the supreme French administrative body (it
heads a network of regionally based administrative tribunals), and has a host of super-
visory and judicial functions. It is also one of the most prestigious of the grands corps
and a major nursery for the French public and private, political, administrative and
industrial elite. The Conseil d’État is hierarchically structured: it is presided officially by
the prime minister, but in practice by its own vice-president (a political appointee, but
non-removable and drawn from the Conseil’s more eminent members), and run by
the presidents of the various sections of the Conseil (each shadowing two or three
ministries) who are also political appointees though invariably chosen from among the
conseillers d’État. The latter are mainly promoted on a seniority basis, from the ranks
of the maîtres de requêtes (the next rank down) who, in turn, are recruited, on a
seniority basis, from the lowest ranks of the Conseil d’État, the auditeurs who are all the
products of the École Nationale d’Administration (ÉNA), seedbed of the administra-
tive elite. The government has the right to appoint the vice-president, the presidents
of the sections, and a number of conseillers and maîtres de requêtes. Although its
origins may be traced to the ancien régime, the Conseil d’État was officially founded by
Napoleon Bonaparte (Article 52 of the constitution of 13 December 1799) with the
general remit of resolving problems arising from administrative affairs. From early on,
it had two main tasks. The first was to judge the abuse and misuse of administrative
action: Bonaparte, like the revolutionaries of 1789, mistrusted judges from the ordinary
courts, and decided that judicial review of administrative acts should be left to adminis-
trative judges, to be appointed by himself. The second function was legislative, and
involved the scrutiny of all bills. Throughout its chequered history (it was dissolved or
radically purged on several occasions) the Conseil d’État preserved its principal activity
as administrative judge, even though its role as conseiller du Prince was greatly dimin-
ished. It also slowly built itself a reputation for impartiality, created a set of safeguards
for its own independence (in practice, if not in law, members of the Conseil d’État
cannot normally be dismissed, though there were purges in 1879, 1940 and 1944,
while the Canal episode noted earlier (p. 393) stands as an exception within the Fifth
Republic), and established, in 1872, the important principle that it rendered justice
déléguée (i.e. decided in its own right) and not justice retenue (decided in the name of
the executive). It also, and most significantly, by a series of ingenious and sometimes
audacious legal decisions, progressively extended the scope of judicial review of state
administrative activities. During the Fifth Republic, the essential judicial role of the
Conseil d’État has remained largely intact even though it has become even more a court
of appeal: it takes decisions relating to very important issues, and acts as a court of
appeal for contested decisions of the subordinate administrative courts. Initially, the
latter were the thirty-three administrative tribunals (twenty-six in metropolitan France)
which had been set up in 1953. However, the second Chirac government, in an attempt
to relieve an overloaded Conseil, created, by the law of 31 December 1987, five provin-
cial administrative courts to deal with appeals against the decisions of the thirty-three
administrative tribunals.
The Conseil d’État has two principal jurisdictions. In the pleine juridiction it
considers cases in which a complainant alleges the infringement of a right by an
administrative body, and seeks compensation. In making a decision, the Conseil d’État
applies its own case law (which is broadly in line with civil law). The second jurisdic-
tion is juridiction d’annulation: on pain of annulment at the suit of anyone with a
sufficient interest, the Conseil d’État insists that all administrative acts should con-
form not only to the enacted law or decree, but also to ‘the general principles of law’
which the Conseil, through its case law, has defined and which provide extensive
protection for the individual against the abuse of administrative power. The consulta-
tive and advisory role of the Conseil d’État has been strengthened during the Fifth
Republic. The constitution of 1958 defines the cases in which it must be consulted: all
government bills (Article 39); all proposed ordonnances covered by Article 38 (which
allows the government to seek parliamentary approval to take, on its own, measures
normally requiring primary legislation and hence explicit parliamentary approval);
all government decrees (which do not require parliamentary approval) which modify
texts of a legislative nature (which do require such assent) adopted before the promul-
gation of the 1958 constitution. To this list has been added, since 1992, all European
Union acts having a legislative character in France. In this consultative role, the
Conseil d’État scrutinises proposals for their constitutionality, and for their consistency
with existing statutes. It may also make recommendations to the government on the
implications of its proposals. Although the Conseil d’État must be consulted in all
three cases outlined above, its advice is not binding. The government may (there is
no obligation) also ask it to give advice on particular issues: there are thirty or so
such requests each year, although in 1993 the figure rose to fifty-eight. Finally,
the Conseil d’État may undertake, at the request of the prime minister or of its own
vice-president, a major study of a particular issue or problem. A new section within the
Conseil was eventually established to carry out this function: between 1969 and 1991,
sixty-three such studies were undertaken, several becoming the basis for subsequent
legislation (see below).
The Cour des Comptes

The Cour des Comptes (Court of Accounts), established by Napoleon in an act of
16 September 1807, was given constitutional status in 1946. The essential task of the
court is to help the government and parliament in controlling the legality of the use of
public funds (including, since 1976, those of public enterprises). It is structured hier-
archically and comprises some 200 members: the lowest rank of the hierarchy, the
auditeurs, are all recruited from ÉNA, while the other ranks have been promoted
internally on a seniority basis, or chosen from outside the court in the government. By
the act of 2 March 1982, a court of accounts (chambre régionale des comptes) was
established for each of the twenty-two regions and given the legal right to scrutinise the
use of local authority funds (see Chapter 10). Their decisions are subject to appeal
before the national Cour des Comptes. If the court decides that there has been a misuse
of public funds, the relevant official may be declared personally responsible. The
decisions (arrêts) of the court may be challenged in the Conseil d’État, which acts as the
final court of appeal. Apart from this official role, the Cour des Comptes has a wider
administrative role: in its annual report it draws public attention to waste, irregularities
and abuses in the use of public money. Some of the more dubious (and hilarious)
financial escapades of public officials are exposed in the popular press. Officials found
guilty of personal financial impropriety or management incompetence leading to
misuse of funds may be brought before the Cour de Discipline Budgétaire et Financière
and heavily fined.
There are, therefore, courts of a European as well as national constitutional, adminis-

trative and civil character. There is also a vast range of courts and quasi-judicial bodies
of a more specialised nature (children, commerce, social security) which regulate the
activities of their members in specific sectors, or even on specific issues. Technically, the
latter are not juridictions, although they exercise a quasi-judicial character, either
because their decisions are often penal in nature or because their procedures are heavily
juridified. Several other bodies create ‘soft law’ or what some legal scholars describe as
‘officially sponsored indigenous law’. Others exercise a magistrature morale, defining
the ethical limits of the bodies they control. They include the independent administra-
tive agencies (IAAs), the first of which – the Commission de Contrôle des Banques –
dates back to 1941. The number of IAAs has multiplied under the Fifth Republic; some
of the more important of them are listed in Chapter 10, p. 300.
One of the most interesting of the IAAs is the Médiateur, an institution created by
the act of 3 January 1973, and designed to ease relations between citizens and their
parliament. The Médiateur is appointed for six years, non-renewable, and is totally
independent. His task is to deal with complaints concerning the central administration,
local government, any public establishment or any body carrying out a ‘public service
mission’. Since 1976, he has been able to make general recommendations to the
incriminated body, even though such recommendations are always triggered by specific
complaints. Members of parliament directly or indirectly on behalf of affected indi-
viduals have the sole right to raise a complaint with the Médiateur – and only after the
incriminated body has been contacted and has refused to act upon the point at issue.
The Médiateur has the right to put written questions, to summon an official for ques-
tioning, to ask for any document relating to the complaint, to carry out an inquiry or
ask a state body to carry out such an inquiry. Some 45,000 complaints are currently
addressed to the Médiateur, who is assisted by a central staff of thirty or so and a
delegate in each département. The Médiateur also has the task of arbitrating in the
dispute, and while over three-quarters of all cases are considered either inadmissible or
answerable on a purely informative basis, a core of some 15 per cent of the total does
nevertheless receive an effective ruling.
Soft law is also created by other kinds of regulatory bodies – the Agence Nationale
des Fréquences (which deals with radio frequencies) and the Autorité de Régulation des
Télécommunications, created in January 1997, charged with regulating the newly liber-
alised and shortly to be privatised telecommunications sector. Finally, there is a range
of special tribunals, such as professional disciplinary bodies (e.g. for doctors or archi-
tects) whose decisions may be quashed, on appeal, by the Conseil d’État (executing a
juridiction de cassation).
The judicialisation of public policy
The judicialisation of public policy has taken several forms, each distinct and triggered
by a somewhat different mix of factors.
The spread of litigation

There has been a quantitative leap in litigation in all branches of law – constitutional,
administrative, civil and criminal. The number of suits brought before the Courts of
Appeal and the Court of Cassation, and before the administrative tribunals and the
Conseil d’État, for example, approximately tripled between 1968 and the early 1990s. As
the number of judges has not grown anything like as fast, an ever-longer backlog of
cases has resulted, delaying (and thus in some degree denying) justice. This is by
no means a uniquely French phenomenon; legal scholars have referred to the ‘legal
pollution’ currently affecting Europe.
The reinforcement of judicial review

The process of judicial review has increasingly established the parameters of public
policy as a result of challenges in the Conseil d’État, and, more significantly, in
the Constitutional Council, to decisions of public authorities on the grounds of
unconstitutionality. The Conseil d’État has, in its judicial capacity, continued to
develop its jurisprudence in the light of ‘general principles of law’, framed by the
wider context of republican legality. Crucial decisions by the Conseil d’État have
established the supremacy of European Union law, have defined fundamental human
rights (for example, the right of foreign citizens to bring their families to France,
and the conditions surrounding the expulsion of illegal immigrants), and the rights
of public officials (for example, the rights of pregnant women) and of their clients
(such as hospital patients). The outcome of Conseil d’État litigation was officially
recognised, in two important decisions of the Constitutional Council in 1980 and
1987, as having constitutional status (although it had already acquired this status in
practice).
The reinforcement of the Constitutional Council’s role as the setter of parameters in
public policy has been even more striking – and controversial. The transformation of
the Council from the quietist body of the early Fifth Republic to its current active
self has two foundations. The first was the landmark Constitutional Council ruling of
16 July 1971. This struck down an act that would have required the prior approval of a
prefect to register an association – a major break with the (relative) freedom of associ-
ation enshrined in the law of 1901. In itself, the Council’s majority verdict (obtained by
a vote of six to three) was an unwonted act of defiance towards the executive. What
gave the verdict its critical importance, however, was the grounds on which it was
based. For the Council invoked ‘fundamental principles recognised by the laws of the
Republic’, embedded in the Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1789 and the Pre-
amble of the 1946 constitution. In effect, the Council was incorporating these two
documents, which guaranteed a range of (not always consistent) citizens’ rights, into
the bloc de constitutionnalité against which all future legislation would be judged. The
Council was, it is true, building on an established legal tradition, going back to a
Conseil d’État decision of 1936 which invoked ‘principles enjoying constitutional
status’. But the 1971 ruling was nevertheless both historic and in direct contradiction to
the intentions of the constitution’s framers.
The second foundation of the Constitutional Council’s greater activism was a
constitutional reform. In 1974, the newly elected president of the Republic, Giscard
d’Estaing, sensitive to the need to provide a limited counterweight to the executive’s
dominance of the régime (a sensitivity inspired in part by his own inside experiences of
executive power – but also by the awareness of how narrow his own victory had been,
and of how helpful safeguards might be against a future government of the Left),
pushed through a constitutional amendment which allowed any sixty Deputies or sixty
Senators to refer a bill to the Council. Left-wing opposition leaders, who had dismissed
the change as a ‘réformette’ (François Mitterrand had earlier called the Council ‘de
Gaulle’s errand-boy’), soon found it to be one of the most useful weapons in their fight
against the governments of the Giscard presidency. The number of referrals in the seven
years after the reform was five times greater than in the preceding fifteen years: 9 laws
were referred between 1959 and 1974, but 47 (45 of them on the initiative of parlia-
ment) between 1974 and 1981. The rhythm was especially intense in the 1980s: 92 laws
were referred during the first Mitterrand presidency and 49 of them were wholly or
partly annulled (66 referrals and 34 annulments under the left-wing governments of
1981–86, 26 referrals and 15 annulments under the 1986–88 Chirac government). Not
surprisingly, this was the period of some of the Constitutional Council’s most contro-
versial decisions, including the total annulment of the Socialists’ 1981 nationalisation
bill on grounds of insufficient compensation to shareholders (the government was
forced to reintroduce the bill after arranging for a larger payment). Today, most legisla-
tion of a seriously controversial character (between a tenth and a fifth of the total) and
sections of all annual budgets are referred to the Council. Not surprisingly, therefore,
the content and implications of the Council’s rulings have been wide-ranging. It has
continued, as before 1974, to monitor the executive–legislative boundary (but in a more
balanced way) as well as exercising its function as electoral referee. Its jurisprudence has
provided a framework for other branches of law – administrative, electoral (including
the specification of guidelines for redrawing constituency boundaries), penal, fiscal
and budgetary. Some of the Council’s most visible rulings have confirmed its role as
a key actor in protecting public freedoms. It has limited police powers to search cars
(12 January 1977) and to detain suspects (9 January 1980 and 3 September 1986) as well
as protecting the freedom of association (16 July 1971), the inviolability of domicile
against the tax authorities (29 December 1983), the freedom of education (23 November
1977), the independence of university professors (20 January 1984), the right to strike
(25 July 1979), the independence of magistrates (9 July 1978) and the freedom of press
and communications (29 July and 18 September 1986). Its key decisions on asylum
and immigration issues have strengthened the rights of immigrants and have ensured
that magistrates (and not just policemen) are involved in expulsion proceedings.
Some of the Council’s decisions have provoked an instant political outcry: its ruling
on abortion in January 1975; its generosity to the expropriated shareholders of the
firms nationalised by the Socialists in January 1982; its hostility, in 1984, to the condi-
tions surrounding the Socialists’ attempt to dismantle the media empire of Robert
Hersant (a press baron who might be described as France’s Rupert Murdoch, but more
right-wing and less scrupulous); its rejection, in 1986, of major provisions of a series of
laws inspired by Charles Pasqua, the hard-line Gaullist interior minister, and designed
to restrict the rights of the accused, to lengthen sentences for certain crimes, and to
extend the discretionary powers of the police; its annulling, in January 1984, of several
elements in the Savary Act on Higher Education; its renewed attack, in 1993, on the
illiberalism of Pasqua, who during his second stint at the Interior Ministry tightened
the rules on immigration and nationality (the decision caused a public row between the
government and the president of the Constitutional Council); its insistence, in January
2003, that the government’s revision of the electoral law for regional and European
elections be modified. The Council has also made important rulings on the consti-
tutionality of treaties: the 1976 treaty on direct elections to the European Parliament,
the 1985 Convention on protecting fundamental rights and freedoms, the Maastricht
Treaty, and the European Constitutional Treaty of 2004. In the case of Maastricht, the
Council objected, in a decision of 9 April 1992, to the single currency, to common visa
rules for non-EU citizens, and to the rights of citizens of other member states to vote
and stand in French local elections. These objections led to constitutional amendments
being introduced before parliament (which amended the bill further), passed by a joint
sitting of the National Assembly and the Senate at Versailles, and finally submitted
to the people at a referendum, in September 1992, which the yes vote won by a mere
half-million majority. With the European constitutional treaty, the Council effectively
set out, in February 2004, how the French constitution would have to be amended to
bring it into line with the European document. The amendments were duly effected a
year later – whereupon the French voters rejected the treaty itself.
This near-systematic character of referrals has affected the behaviour of the Council
itself, of the parliament from which the vast majority of referrals now originate, and of
the executive. The Council has taken on a quasi-legislative role: it is capable, not merely
of striking down bills in whole or in part, but of specifying in its verdicts what changes
would suffice to render the proposed legislation constitutional. In many cases, these
passages have simply been copied word for word into the revised bill. The Council has
also extended its range by verifying the constitutionality of acts (even those passed
under earlier Republics and therefore outside its purview) where these are amended by
new legislation. For parliamentarians, their right of referral signalled the beginning of a
new assertiveness observed since the 1970s (cf. Chapter 6); the motion d’irrecevabilité
(because of non-conformity to the constitution) tabled by opposition Deputies in major
parliamentary debates is usually a warning that the bill in question will be referred.
For the executive, the strong possibility of referral, and the obvious concern to avoid
annulments wherever possible, led to self-restraint in the drafting of legislation. The
1986–88 Chirac government, for example, openly admitted that certain public-service
monopolies would escape privatisation because of the likely reaction of the Consti-
tutional Council, and the inevitable self-interest that attended its redrawing of France’s
constituency boundaries in 1986 was limited by the certainty of the Council’s scrutiny.
The extension of judicial intervention

Intervention by courts and by judges has increased at the expense of politicians and
administrators. This process has involved either the courts rendering policy issues justi-
ciable (subject to the law) or the transfer to judges of decision-making power in new
policy areas hitherto regulated by government, parliament or the administration. The
late 1980s and early 1990s, for example, saw the juridification of competition law. This
was driven both by the European Union (there have been some high-profile affairs
dealing with supermarkets, book price-fixing and civil aviation liberalisation), and by
the activism of the Conseil de la Concurrence, many of whose decisions have led to
legal appeals (in 1996 it fined thirty-six firms for price-fixing and other anti-competitive
practices in public-sector projects). Even the European Court of Human Rights, usu-
ally considered a weak body, has helped to bring administrative decisions under judicial
control: France has been condemned by this Court several times, over issues as varied as
irregular detention, slow procedures before an administrative court, telephone tapping,
customs controls and discrimination against transsexuals.
The criminalisation of new areas

Activities previously outside the scope of the law have been criminalised. Within
society at large, there has been a reinforcement of repression in areas such as juvenile
delinquency and immigration policy, while financial market malpractices have been
criminalised. Within the machinery of government, political and administrative offi-
cials have increasingly been held personally responsible, since the mid-1980s, for their
acts, and subject to criminal proceedings in cases of negligence. Civil service anonymity
and political responsibility for errors, the traditional defences of the negligent public
servant, have become less and less respected (or respectable). Thus, when part of a
Corsican football stadium collapsed, and when an ill-regulated camp site was swept
away by a flash flood (along with many of the campers), the prefects in question were
placed under formal judicial investigation and faced possible prison sentences (by the
end of 1996, six prefects or subprefects were under investigation for negligence). Simi-
larly, the Director General of the Health Ministry, who was implicated in the transfusion
of HIV-contaminated blood to haemophiliacs, was tried and imprisoned. The Court
of Justice of the Republic, established by constitutional reform in 1993, was quickly
given three cases: the contaminated blood scandal (a deeply emotional affair which
involved both the ex-health minister and the former prime minister Laurent Fabius);
a sordid financial fraud allegedly perpetrated by the former junior minister for the
handicapped; and the Noir–Botton affair, a complicated matter involving the mayor of
Lyon, former minister Michel Noir, his son-in-law Pierre Botton and large-scale financial
improprieties that drew in a number of media celebrities as well as politicians.
The internalisation of judicial constraints

Public officials have increasingly internalised judicial constraints. Governments are now
sensitive, as a matter of course, to possible future rulings of the Constitutional Council.
Within the administration, French civil servants who in the past might have ignored or
circumvented judicial constraints, counting on the slowness and leniency of any actual
penalties, or on the fact that responsibility for making amends lay with an anonymous
state, have been given pause for thought by the growing personalisation of responsibility.
Judges as policy-makers
Judges have played an increasing role outside the judicial arena as public policy-makers.
The British tradition of asking judges to chair ad hoc commissions on specific policy
issues has spread to France. Marceau Long, a distinguished vice-president of the
Conseil d’État, was a ubiquitous policy-maker, chairing several important commis-
sions, including one established on the vexed question of citizenship rights (especially
sensitive in relation to second-generation immigrants). The new independent adminis-
trative authorities also recruit members of the Conseil d’État as members – or, indeed,
as chairpersons: in 1995, the Commission des Opérations en Bourse, the Commission
Nationale d’Informatique et des Libertés, the Commission d’Accès aux Documents
Administratifs and the Commission des Sondages were all chaired by members of the
Conseil d’État. Another, Paul Legatte, held the post of Médiateur from 1986 to 1992.
Administrative judges are also ubiquitous within the executive and legislative branches
of government. Pompidou was a conseiller d’État, Chirac entered Pompidou’s cabinet
from the Cour des Comptes; among prime ministers, Michel Debré, Pompidou,
Laurent Fabius and Édouard Balladur have all been conseillers d’État; members of the
grands corps in general and of the Conseil d’État in particular have penetrated the
Council of Ministers, the National Assembly, the Senate, the General Secretariat
of the Government, and the ministerial cabinets, as well as major posts in public
and private business. Members of the Conseil d’État have also chaired many of the
disciplinary sections of the various professional self-regulating bodies.
The decline of special courts

Questions previously dealt with by exceptional bodies have been passed to judges: thus,
in 1981 and 1982, Mitterrand and his Socialist government abolished a number of
military tribunals, including the Court of State Security (Cour de Sûreté de l’État).
The spread of quasi-judicial procedures

Judicial methods have spread outside the judicial province proper. There are many
examples of this process. The rights of the defence have been increased; the presence of
a judicial authority has been required in cases of expulsion of allegedly illegal immi-
grants. The Constitutional Council has obliged independent administrative authorities
to juridify their procedures, while their decisions are now subject to appeal before either
the Conseil d’État or the Court of Cassation.
Judges as policy advisers

Judges have taken on a growing role as policy advisers. The constitutional requirement,
strengthened under the Fifth Republic, for the Conseil d’État to be consulted on a
range of legislative issues, has already been noted. Consultation has also been required,
since 1992, on all European Union acts with a legislative character – no fewer than
946 bills or decrees in the first year alone. The Conseil d’État’s advice, though not
binding on the government, is almost always followed; an unfavourable and ignored
opinion may easily be leaked to the press, exploited by hostile pressure groups, and used
by opposition parliamentarians to justify a referral to the Constitutional Council. The
Conseil d’État may also be consulted by a government in need of advice. The govern-
ment has done this on some thirty occasions each year, on issues ranging from the price
structure of tickets for the TGV (high-speed train) to the status of France Télécom
employees when their enterprise was scheduled for partial privatisation, to the rights
of asylum seekers or the right of young Muslim girls to wear a headscarf at school
(a highly publicised issue that was left to schools and courts to manage from 1989 till
the issue was made the object of legislation in 2004). Finally, the prime minister or the
Conseil d’État’s own vice-president may request general studies from the Council. Such
studies, generally two or three a year, are undertaken by the section du rapport et des
études, and often serve as a framework for future legislation. They have covered a variety
of administrative and judicial issues including the impact on France of European Union
law, questions surrounding information technology, bioethics and urban planning.
The reinforcement of judicial independence

The judiciary has displayed a growing independence in its behaviour. The constitution
of 1958 reasserted the independence of magistrats du siège (see p. 396): they cannot be
dismissed, transferred or even promoted without their consent. The constitution also
established the Conseil Supérieur de la Magistrature, whose nine members, all appointed
by the president of the Republic, were charged with protecting the independence of the
magistrats du siège and submitting proposals for appointments. The constitutional
reform of 19 July 1993 changed both the composition and the remit of the Conseil
Supérieur de la Magistrature. Appointments to it were henceforth to be shared by the
presidents of the Republic and of the two houses of parliament, and by the judiciary
itself; and its responsibilities were extended to allow some limited right to give opinions
on appointments to magistrats du parquet. Several important laws and Constitutional
Council rulings (notably the decision of 22 July 1980 and the law of 6 January 1986)
have reaffirmed the independence of judges, and extended the status of judge to mem-
bers of the Cour des Comptes, and to members of administrative courts and tribunals.
The Constitutional Council has made it clear that neither the legislature nor the execu-
tive can censure the decisions of the courts, or attempt to shift the exercise of their
competences to other bodies. Successive presidents of the Republic have expressed
respect for judicial independence. President Chirac even intensified the debate over the
links between the parquet and the Justice Ministry by setting up an independent com-
mission to examine the question, with a view to weakening or cutting the umbilical cord
between the two (though a constitutional reform to this effect was sabotaged in 2000 by
Chirac’s own party).
Judicial activism and corruption cases

Activist judges have been increasingly inclined fully to implement the law, despite (or
sometimes because of) pressure from politicians, the media and pressure groups. Two
aspects of this tendency may be highlighted. First, the implementation of new legal
norms, whether recent EU directives or national laws and decrees, is more assiduously
monitored (though implementation is certainly far from perfect). Thus one section of
the Conseil d’État has the task of tracking implementation performance; the results are
published in its annual report.
Second, not only is legal redress increasingly sought; the law is also increasingly
active in punishing wrongdoers, in cases whose political sensitivity would formerly have
led to a discreet closure of the file. One example of this, the prosecutions for negligence
of officials (in the ordinary courts) and of ministers (by the Cour de Justice de la
République), has already been mentioned. Another is the last set of prosecutions linked
to France’s war years. The trials of Paul Touvier, a zealous collaborator with the
Gestapo in Lyon, pardoned by President Pompidou but tried for crimes against human-
ity in 1994, and of Maurice Papon, secretary-general of the Gironde prefecture under
the Occupation, Paris Prefect of Police in the early 1960s, budget minister under
Giscard, convicted in 1998 for sending Jews by rail on the first leg of their journey to the
concentration camps, were exemplary in this respect (with the one exception that Papon
benefited from early release on grounds of illness).
The largest group of cases of this type, however, concerns the corrupt activities of
politicians and business executives, too often swept under a politicially negotiated car-
pet in the past but now brought under the full glare of publicity, and sometimes (not, it
is true, always) heavily penalised. If political corruption has become one of the favour-
ite themes of the French press (and of the far Right, which claims, not very credibly, to
be clean in this respect), it is partly because of the prominence of the individuals
concerned. The list of convicted politicians includes Bernard Tapie, a flamboyant self-
made businessman and, briefly, a minister in the Socialist governments of 1992–93,
whose misdeeds ranged from large-scale tax evasion to football fraud, and who charac-
teristically agreed to play himself in a film on his release from prison; Michel Noir,
mayor of Lyon from 1989 to 1995 and former RPR trade minister (who also discovered
a brief thespian vocation after his disgrace); Michel Gillibert (ex-minister for the
handicapped); Jean-Michel Boucheron (whose extravagances bankrupted the city
of Angoulême, of which he was mayor before his precipitate flight to Argentina);
Jacques Médecin (the right-wing former minister for tourism and mayor of Nice, who
had to be extradited from Uruguay to face well-founded allegations of fraud and
embezzlement of city funds); Jean Bousquet (the former mayor of Nîmes, sent to prison
in December 1996 for using municipal funds to maintain his private chateau); Alain
Carignon, mayor of Grenoble, whose case has been mentioned in Chapter 12; and
Maurice Arreckx, president of the conseil général of the Var, who tried to justify his
misappropriation of public funds by the need to provide financial security for his family.
These are the more colourful cases. More important, perhaps, is the fact that, at least
before the laws of 1988 and 1990 which regulated political finance for the first time, all
political parties and most candidates lived by corrupt means, and some have done so
since then as well. The unhealthily close relationship between parties and firms in
building, public works and the urban utility sector was illustrated during the brief
period from 1990 to 1994 when business funding of parties and electoral campaigns
was authorised and (relatively) transparent: it was estimated that some three-quarters
of all business funding at the 1993 elections came from firms liable to bid for contracts
with local authorities run by party politicians. In one (probably not unique) corruption
case, that of the school renovation contracts signed by the Île-de-France region, it
appears that kickbacks paid by the contractors were shared out between majority and
opposition parties on the regional council. Its president, the influential Gaullist notable
Michel Giraud, also used regional funds to pay his domestics at home. He and other
defendants stood trial from early 2005 (over a decade after the original offences).
As a party, however, the Socialists were the first to be found out, partly because the
Urba network, a nationwide front organisation they had set up to cover and channel
the kickbacks paid by firms in return for contracts with the municipalities they con-
trolled, was relatively easy to unravel. The Urba scandal was in part responsible for the
Socialists’ political disgrace in the early 1990s; and when Henri Emmanuelli, former
president of the National Assembly, was convicted and temporarily removed from his
parliamentary seat, he was atoning for the sins of the whole Socialist Party in his
capacity as its treasurer. But the Socialists (whose troubles began again, in a modest
way, in the late 1990s, with the revelation that their members had mismanaged the
Mutuelle Nationale des Étudiants Français, the insurance fund of the main students’
union) have not been alone. In 1996 Robert Hue, the national secretary of the
Communist Party, and his predecessor Georges Marchais (who died the following year)
were placed under formal investigation as part of the inquiry into a consultancy firm,
the Sicopar (a subsidiary of Gifco, an urban services group close to the party), and the
Compagnie Générale des Eaux (now Vivendi), which had siphoned some 15 million
francs into the coffers of Sicopar between 1984 and 1994. Charges against Hue were
dropped for technical reasons. The UDF and its constituent parts, notably the CDS and
the Parti Républicain, were altogether more complex matters, involving individual local
elected officials (such as Pierre-Yves Tenaillon, president of the conseil général of the
Yvelines département just outside Paris) and an intricate series of offshore accounts; but
they too were under investigation in the 1990s. Investigations into the RPR, finally,
increasingly centred on what was Jacques Chirac’s former stronghold of Paris, by far
France’s biggest and wealthiest municipality. Chirac’s successor as mayor, Jean Tiberi,
and his former assistant mayor in charge of the city’s finances, Alain Juppé, were found
to be using the city’s private housing stock to favour their families (a revelation which
made Juppé’s honeymoon period as prime minister in 1995 especially short). Cases of
officials on the municipal payroll working full-time for the RPR (including senior
members of Juppé’s private office in his time as party secretary-general) have been well
documented. The electoral register of the fifth arrondissement (where Tiberi is, and
Chirac was, elected as a Paris councillor) have been found to have been tampered with
at least since 1989, the year Chirac won his second ‘grand slam’ municipal election
victory in all arrondissements. The management of the Paris HLM office, which con-
trols over 100,000 low-cost housing units in the capital and its suburbs, has been found
to be opaque both in its award of tenancies to candidates from a long waiting list and in
its attribution of maintenance contracts (curiously, the head of the office, who resigned
suddenly in 1995, was also the mayor of Meymac, a commune in Chirac’s parlia-
mentary constituency in Corrèze). The Paris investigations, finally, have ramifications
that spread out into the whole Île-de-France region: thus Xavière Tiberi, Jean Tiberi’s
wife, was found to have been paid 200,000 francs for a worthless 36-page report by the
conseil général of Essonne, whose RPR president Xavier Dugoin was sent to prison for
corruption. As of 2005, Tiberi had faced a series of charges, none of them successful;
Juppé’s political career had been broken, or at least badly damaged, by his conviction
for his role in paying party officials from the municipal payroll; and Chirac was pro-
tected – in theory, only as long as he remained in the Élysée – by presidential immunity.
Revelations of political corruption inevitably went hand in hand with investigations
into corrupt business practices; it takes two to tango. The scale of corruption outdid
even the most sensational predictions, and – especially at a time, in the mid-1990s, when
the French were suffering rising unemployment and being treated to sermons on the
need for budgetary rigour – fed public demands for exemplary punishments. From the
late 1980s a growing list of captains of industry were placed under investigation in an
unprecedented anti-corruption clampdown by the judiciary: by early 1997, the heads of
nearly a quarter of the companies in the CAC 40 stock market index were being
formally investigated for one or another infringement. They included such pillars of the
business community as Martin Bouygues, head of France’s biggest construction group,
and Patrick Le Lay, head of TF1 (the privatised television station owned by Bouygues),
whose use of corporate funds included false invoices and the channelling of money, via
Swiss bank accounts, to Pierre Botton, son-in-law of Michel Noir; the chairmen of
Matra-Hachette (Jean-Luc Lagardère, a personal friend of Chirac), of Saint-Gobain
and of Alcatel-Alsthom (Pierre Suard, who was charged with using company funds to
pay for 4 million francs’ worth of building work in his Paris mansion and his country
estate). The place of the oil company Elf-Aquitaine (merged in 1999 with Total-Fina)
deserves particular attention. Its head in the early 1990s, Loïc Le Floch-Prigent (known
as Pink Floch owing to his Socialist connections), was accused of using the company’s
credit card to buy some 500,000 francs’ worth of personal items for himself and his wife
and spending nearly 4 million francs on his private residence. These, however, were
relatively minor items in the vast catalogue of corporate wrongdoing, including bribes
paid to heads of several African states (notably Gabon) and to Germany (for the
purchase of an East German refinery), with the knowledge and approval of President
Mitterrand. A further aspect of the Elf affair was the company’s role as an intermedi-
ary in persuading the Socialist government of the early 1990s to support the sale of
frigates to Taiwan, a deal to which it had been opposed for political reasons. The affaire
des frégates drew in the former foreign minister Roland Dumas, accused of accepting
indirect bribes from Elf via his mistress, an Elf employee. Dumas was ultimately acquit-
ted, but not before these accusations had led, in March 2000, to his resignation from the
end-of-career post to which Mitterrand had appointed him five years earlier – as presi-
dent of the Constitutional Council. The prosecution of eminent public officials in high-
profile corruption cases was not the only aspect of judicialisation in French politics and
policy – but it was certainly the most spectacular.
Explaining judicialisation
The growing judicialisation of French public policy may be explained by a range of
factors, some specific to France and others common to several European countries. But
there is a fundamental distinction to be made between elements that increase the scope
of law, and elements that reinforce the role of judges in determining and interpreting
law. Distinctions are also necessary between policy sectors: competition policy and the
treatment of juvenile delinquents may both have been judicialised, but for quite differ-
ent reasons. And there are different types of judicialisation: there is little direct relation
between the causes of the judiciary’s growing assertiveness and those of the extension
of soft law and regulatory agencies. A final distinction should be made between
the different types of law (constitutional and administrative, civil and criminal), and the
different agents and motives that inspired their separate growth.
The quantitative growth of judicial activity is easily explained. Despite rhetoric to the
contrary, government activity has grown; privatisation, liberalisation and even deregula-
tion have tended to produce more, not less, regulation. Deregulating the labour market,
for example, demands a sustained legislative and legal effort. And the political agenda
of the 1980s and 1990s – law and order, immigration, environmental and consumer
protection, and issues of gender and sexuality – has required the state, and the law, to
move into new areas. Society has also become judicialised because it has become weaker:
both traditional modes of social regulation – deference to ‘betters’, trust towards equals
within a clearly identifiable community – and traditional institutions such as the family
and the Church, have been seriously eroded, in France as in other Western societies.
A more complex task is to account for the growing role of judges and judicial
processes within the overall increase in legal activity. This involves a wide variety of
often complex factors, which are listed below.
• The Europeanisation of French law, though limited, has had four clear effects. First,
it has furthered the judicialisation of certain policy areas such as immigration and
competition policy. Second, it has allowed judges a degree of interpretative free-
dom as it is generally drafted in terms less specific than those of French law. Third,
it has arguably accustomed judges to the idea that parliamentary statutes can be
overridden by a higher judicial authority. Fourth, it has allowed individuals, firms
and groups to invoke European law (and thus the higher judicial authority) in the
national courts, offering pro-EU constituencies a new avenue through which to
press for the promulgation and implementation of EU law.
• Ideological changes referred to in Chapter 1 have tended to replace a paradigm
based on collective goods, the public interest and citizenship by one that stresses
private goods, individual rights and consumerism. Rights-based political cultures
entail a questioning of authority and thus tend to increase demands for arbitration
of a legal character.
• Economic change has also fed judicialisation. One economic translation of the
ideological shift noted above was the replacement of traditional dirigisme by privat-
isation and arm’s-length regulation; but the latter necessitates a new judicial
armoury. As elsewhere in Europe, areas such as telecommunications are to be
regulated not by ministers but by a regulatory agency, generating a massive need for
a quasi-legal sort of indirect regulation. At the same time, the social problems
caused by long-term mass unemployment – family breakdown, rising crime rates,
and racism and xenophobia – have all triggered demands for legislative, and thence
ultimately judicial, action. Immigration, for example, has been the object of often
wide-ranging government bills in every parliament since 1973, not least because it is
often considered a cause of unemployment. Its increasing regulation has tended
to criminalise offenders; an economic problem has become a social and political
problem, and finally a legal one.
• Managerialism, also closely linked to the ideological paradigm shift, has several
implications for judicialisation. The delegation of state power to autonomous
agencies; the attempt to make public services more consumer-driven (and hence to
give the ‘users’ of services enforceable rights); and the increasing use of private
firms to deliver public goods (especially at local level, where much service delivery
is done), entailing contractual relations between the authority responsible for the
service and the company that provides it: all offer plenty of scope for litigation.
• Cultural factors have also contributed to the judicialisation of certain issues. As the
capacity of the one and indivisible Republic to integrate all of its citizens through
traditional methods – universal laws, a secular state education system used by all
or nearly all, and military service – has diminished, so recognition of the growing
diversity and multiculturalism of French society has grown. That entails problems
which politicians long found it expedient to transfer to the courts. Is the headscarf
worn by a Muslim girl at school, for example, an acceptable expression of cultural
otherness, a symbol of women’s subjection under Islam, or a badge of religious
identity to be excluded from a secular school? As education minister in 1989,
Lionel Jospin preferred to leave the answer to the Conseil d’État. Even when
Chirac faced the question of legislating on the issue in 2003, he took care to
appoint an all-party committee, chaired by the centrist Bernard Stasi, to give a
formal report first.
• Technological change has generated judicial activity by raising urgent ethical issues
related, for example, to the flow of pornography and racist material across national
frontiers on the Internet, biotechnology, data protection and copyright.
• Political initiatives have, in some cases, deliberately sought to strengthen the role
and the autonomy of the judiciary. Examples include Giscard’s opening of access
to the Constitutional Council to parliamentarians in 1974, mentioned above; the
juridification of procedures in areas such as planning, the environment and immi-
gration; the increasingly tight regulation of political funding; the reforms of the
1980s which strengthened the personal responsibility of public officials for their
acts; and the replacement of the prefects’ a priori control of local government acts
by the a posteriori control undertaken by the regional courts of accounts. Most
recently, a reform passed in 2000 protected the rights of the accused – not only of
those in high-profile political cases but also of the 400,000 or so individuals
arrested each year, 95 per cent of whose cases are never scrutinised with the (rela-
tive) neutrality of an examining magistrate but dealt with by the parquet and the
police. To relatively minor reporting restrictions (such as a ban on publishing
photographs of suspects in handcuffs) were added innovations such as the video
recording of police interviews (initially only for minors) and the presence of a
lawyer from the first hour of preventive detention: the beginnings of a judicial
framework that countries more progressive in their treatment of accused and
convicted prisoners had adopted years before. That said, this record was partly
reversed, and the rights of the accused significantly reduced, by the Perben legisla-
tion passed after the 2002 elections in a climate highly favourable to law and order.
• Democratic demands have increasingly been channelled through the courts as
well as by more traditional methods of political organisation or demonstration.
Pressure groups may find satisfaction from the courts where they have failed to
obtain it at the political level – especially when, as is the case in the Conseil d’État,
pursuing a case is both cheap and surprisingly simple. Citizens have also used the
justice system to seek to punish corruption: thus well-organised citizen groups were
instrumental in pressuring the authorities into judicial activity against the mayors
of Cannes, Angoulême and Grenoble, while the Green opposition in Paris has
played a major role in promoting investigations into corruption in France’s biggest
town hall. Public opinion, moreover, generally backs greater judicial autonomy –
and ferocity towards public officials. According to a 1997 survey, large majorities
of the French considered that the French justice system was lenient with senior civil
servants and politicians, as well as too expensive, too slow, too partial, too easily
influenced by political authorities, too old-fashioned and lacking the material
means to do its job properly. Despite (and because of) these criticisms, 71 per cent
of the sample declared for greater independence of the justice system.
• Media support for the activities of the judiciary has grown, though it remains far
from universal. The Canard Enchaîné, a venerable exposer of sleaze on the part of
politicians, industrialists and public officials, has been joined by other newspapers,
notably Le Monde and Libération, in the encouragement of investigative journal-
ism. A more liberal broadcasting régime (France has, fortunately, moved on from
the days of the de Gaulle presidency when the information minister used to give
daily instructions to television chiefs on the content of their prime-time news pro-
grammes) has allowed television and radio to follow, or at least to publicise the
findings of the print media. In one respect, indeed, the press has been an important
ally of the judges. For examining magistrates, fearful of having their investigations
quietly sidelined by a procureur acting on instructions from the Justice Ministry,
have repeatedly allowed their findings to be leaked in order to create a fait accompli
that places an unacceptable political cost on any move to close the file. When a key
witness in the electoral fraud case in Paris told a juge d’instruction that the mayor,
Jean Tiberi, had personally supervised the cooking of electoral registers, details of
his statement appeared in the Canard within forty-eight hours. It is also thanks to
leaks that we know, from an initialled letter, that Jacques Chirac as mayor of Paris
recommended the promotion of employees on the city’s payroll whom he knew to
be working full-time for his party, the RPR. The media’s support for judicial activ-
ism is not, it is true, universal: the right-wing journalist Éric Zemmour expressed
his opposition to the process in a polemical work entitled Le coup d’État des juges.
But the development of judicial independence, particularly in corruption cases,
would have been very much more difficult without media backing.
• The judges’ own collective demand for autonomy and independence has grown. The
Conseil Supérieur de la Magistrature has been openly critical, in recent reports, of
the government’s appointments policy. And during the 1997 election campaign,
over a hundred senior magistrates (of all political persuasions) addressed a petition
in favour of greater autonomy to President Chirac.
• Organisational expansionism has also, at times, favoured greater judicial independ-
ence. Like any organisations, courts, and especially relatively new institutions like
the European Court of Justice, the Constitutional Council, or the independent
administrative agencies, often seek to establish and then expand their areas of
activity and influence. Both co-operation and competition between courts may
further this. The ECJ, for example, both made allies of the national courts by
providing them with a new capacity for judicial review, and reinforced its own
authority as a court of final appeal owing to competition between higher and lower
courts and between the civil and administrative supreme courts of member states.
Individuals, too, can play important roles: Guy Braibant, a highly influential mem-
ber of the Conseil d’État, Robert Badinter, the Socialist former justice minister
whom President Mitterrand made president of the Constitutional Council in 1986,
and who left a potent jurisprudential legacy, and Adolphe Touffait, a strongly
pro-European member of the Court of Cassation, are all cases in point.
• The spread of corruption has also been a factor in the spread of juridification. This
is hard to quantify: corruption was a commonplace under the Third, Fourth and
early Fifth Republics, as several high-profile court cases confirmed. Nevertheless, it
has been argued that several elements rendered it even more pervasive from the
1980s. These included the sharpening of political competition at all levels, as
alternance succeeded alternance after 1981; the more capital-intensive nature of
political campaigning, as opinion pollsters and image consultants and designers of
all stripes sought to sell their wares to politicians and parties; and the greater
freedoms afforded to local elected officials by decentralisation after 1982 to spend
local budgets as they saw fit. Certainly the perception among France’s elites (begin-
ning, in 1987, with President Mitterrand and Prime Minister Chirac, who agreed to
call a special parliamentary session to consider the matter) that corruption had got
out of hand, and was threatening to discredit the whole political class, was instru-
mental in juridifying the previously unpoliced area of political finance, via the laws
of 1988, 1990, 1993 and 1995. Among the public, too, the perception of corruption
has given rise to demands for judicial retribution. Political sanctions for corruption,
though potentially powerful (as witness the Socialists’ post-1991 disgrace), are
uncertain: parties hesitate to extract the maximum political benefit from their
opponents’ embarrassment as a result of corruption cases, because they know that
it may be their turn soon.
• The courage of individual judges (usually examining magistrates, like Thierry
Jean-Pierre, Éric Halphen, Renaud van Ruymbeke, Patrick Desmure and Eva Joly)
in pursuing particular cases of wrongdoing, resisting political pressure, bypassing
their own hierarchy and appealing directly to public opinion, has raised the profile
of the administration of justice as an issue, and helped render public the unaccept-
able and justiciable practices that had been concealed, connived at and practically
immune from prosecution.
Numerous factors, therefore, running in parallel yet uncoupled, explain judicialisa-

tion. Some, such as political reforms, are direct, purposeful and top-down; others
are indirect, unwitting and bottom-up. Judicialisation is a multi-pronged process. It
combines imposition (the role of the ECJ), political will, spillover from new public
management or new modes of regulation, internal dynamics of an individual and
collective nature, and pressure from journalists, polls, judges and even street protest.
But judicialisation is far from an all-conquering force. Although it has not found an
immovable object in the Jacobin state, it has certainly encountered powerful resistance.
The État de droit: obstacles and resistance

Increasing judicialisation has undoubtedly been a major development in French politics
since the 1980s. Courts have been drawn into highly contentious and politicised issues
in areas such as race relations, asylum policy, environmental (or anti-environmental)
projects, police powers, medical ethics and (within a very short space of time) both
nationalisation and privatisation. Competition policy is just one of several policy areas,
formerly immune from the attentions of judges, which have been brought within the
purview of courts or of regulatory bodies. The ‘legal state’ has undoubtedly been
reinforced. There is more law; the courts are playing a greater role in its creation,
interpretation and even enforcement; decision-making procedures in many areas have
become less arbitrary and more juridified; judges have been emboldened to assert their
autonomy and independence. Such developments have had a multiple impact on
policy-making. Specific laws or decisions have been struck down by judges. Policies or
procedures underlying certain acts have been modified or reversed. New policy devel-
opment has been constrained, both by explicit guidelines issued by judges and by the
anticipation of judicial challenge on the part of policy-makers. And the moral and
ideological parameters of public and private action have become increasingly bounded
by general principles rooted in one or another form of constitutionalism.
All of this runs counter to the Jacobin and imperial concepts of the popular execu-
tive or parliamentary sovereignty outlined earlier in this chapter. Many recent devel-
opments have been anathema to such traditions: they include the acceptance of the
supremacy of European law, the general (though not universal) support for ‘govern-
ment by constitution’, with its inevitable corollary, the judicial review of political
action; the growing role of courts as policy-makers; the spread of diverse sources of
‘soft’ law via independent regulatory agencies; and even the criminalisation of public
officials for negligence or of politicians for corruption. It is less clear, however, that such
changes have shaken the Jacobin edifice to the ground and replaced it with an État de
droit, a state in which all the actors, including the political elite, respect and uphold the
accepted normative order, the hierarchy of laws, and the independence and autonomy
of the judiciary. There are five main reasons for scepticism about the existence of such
an entity in contemporary France.
The first of these is constituted by the continuing restrictions on the power of the
courts. The annual report of the Cour des Comptes, for example, almost invariably
contains revelations, by turns depressing and hilarious, about the misdeeds and
incompetence of public officials, but corrective action follows its findings far more
rarely. Similarly, the Conseil d’État lacks the effective means to enforce its decisions,
and, despite some recent tightening up, administrative miscreants are often extremely
slow to take remedial action. Where the Conseil d’État can annul an abuse, it can only
do so ex post facto – and, inevitably, after delay: which may be too late for individuals
such as asylum seekers. And while the Conseil d’État has the right to be consulted on all
government bills, its advice may be (and has been) ignored by governments; and it has
no right to examine either amendments to bills on which it has already been consulted
or private members’ bills. The effective jurisdiction of the Constitutional Council is
even more restricted. Laws once promulgated are off-limits: this category includes all
legislation passed before the 1958 constitution came into force unless new legislation
amends it, and all legislation which is not specifically referred to the Constitutional
Council (including some highly sensitive texts, such as the acts authorising medical
experimentation on handicapped persons (1988) or forbidding the public denial of the
Holocaust (1990)). The principle of abstract, a priori control means that the Council
has absolutely no powers to correct those defects of a law which may only appear in its
concrete application to specific cases. And the Constitutional Council’s procedures are
rather less than transparent, unlike those of the Supreme Court of the United States,
with no dissenting opinions being published in the (normal) case of a majority decision.
It should be added that determined governments have at least the potential means to
override or circumvent rulings by the Constitutional Council. They may be overridden
by constitutional amendment, which requires the text to be voted in identical terms by
both houses of parliament and then voted either by referendum or by three-fifths of a
joint meeting of the two houses of parliament: serious hurdles, but not impossible ones,
especially for a right-wing government with the usual right-wing majority in the Senate.
It has so far happened only once, on 29 November 1993, when a Constitutional Council
ruling against an immigration law was overturned by an amendment to Article 53–1 of
the constitution. The Constitutional Council may also, in principle, be circumvented: it
will not give a ruling in cases where the sovereign people has made its own direct
decision on a law, by referendum. In theory, since the constitutional amendment of
31 July 1995 widening the scope of the referendum, a wide range of matters could be so
treated, though the political risks attached to referenda are such as to make their use
extremely sparing.
A second obstacle to the development of the État de droit has been the stout resist-
ance in the legislature to its extension. Two failed constitutional amendments illustrate
this. In 1989 Robert Badinter, the president of the Constitutional Council, proposed
that individual citizens should have the right to refer existing laws to the Council – in
effect, both greatly widening access and relaxing the ban on a posteriori control by
allowing laws to be referred after their promulgation. He convinced both President
Mitterrand and Prime Minister Rocard, and a reform proposal passed the National
Assembly; but the Senate, whose agreement is necessary to any constitutional reform,
voted so many amendments to the proposal (including its limitation to laws passed
before 1974) that the government preferred to withdraw the project altogether. Ten
years later, the Justice Minister Élisabeth Guigou attempted to increase the role of the
Conseil Supérieur de la Magistrature in the appointment and promotion of magistrats
du parquet, and to prevent ministers giving instructions to these prosecuting magis-
trates. In this she was supported not only by the Socialist government of which she was
a member, but also, initially by President Chirac, who had created a commission to
study the question in 1996. But the proposals were too much for (right-wing) Jacobins
in the National Assembly and above all in the Senate, for whom the political control of
judges remained a guarantee of democracy and popular sovereignty. Quite possibly
Chirac too changed his mind. At all events, the opposition, centred on the RPR (Chirac’s
party), mustered enough votes to block a constitutional amendment, and Chirac
cancelled the parliamentary Congress that was to have voted it in January 2000.
The emergence of an État de droit has been limited, third, by the regular practices
of some politicians, civil servants and even judges. The Conseil d’État’s scrutiny of
government bills, for example, is weakened by the government’s tendency to submit
them in a hurry, late in the parliamentary cycle, thus giving the Council (and, for that
matter, the parliament) very little time to consider them properly: a point which has
provoked repeated complaints from the vice-president of the Conseil d’État. At the
local level, the activities of the Regional Courts of Accounts have been limited by the
reluctance of many prefects to refer cases to them; the prefects often prefer pre-
litigation negotiation (négociation précontentieuse) with the local authority concerned.
In most years, fewer than 0.5 per cent of the acts of local authorities are referred to a
court, a number that has diminished since 2000, and many of these cases are dropped
before a decision is reached. Politicians have also regularly tried to halt potentially
embarrassing judicial investigations. The efforts of Charles Pasqua’s Interior Ministry
to discredit judge Éric Halphen early in 1995 were worthy of the Keystone Cops; their
comic potential, though, was exceeded a year later when the RPR justice minister
Jacques Toubon tried to halt one of the many investigations into the city of Paris by
chartering a helicopter to seek a countermanding signature from the Paris procureur
général, who was on a mountaineering holiday in the Himalayas at the time. More
surprising have been the periodic obstacles placed by judges in the way of the develop-
ment of the État de droit. One example was the extraordinary decision of the Court of
Cassation, on 6 February 1997, which overturned a previous ruling of 1992 and
restricted the area in which firms can be taken to court (in effect ruling that bribes did
not constitute a misuse of company funds if the company received something in
return). Another was the decision of the Constitutional Council, on 22 January 1999,
that the president of the Republic enjoys complete immunity during his term of office
from all prosecutions, excluding only impeachment on charges of high treason before
the Haute Cour de Justice, for which a special vote of parliament would be necessary: a
ruling that went well beyond the president’s immunity covering acts committed in
office, specified in Article 68–1 of the constitution, to encompass (in Chirac’s case) his
whole period as mayor of Paris between 1977 and 1995. The Constitutional Council
ruling has since been confirmed by a number of ordinary courts, which have claimed
that for the president to be prosecuted would ‘violate the principle of the separation of
powers’. The one partial qualification to it was a ruling by the Court of Cassation that
on the expiry of his term, the president would become liable to prosecution for all
outstanding offences, however long ago they had been committed. A constitutional
amendment designed to settle the question of presidential immunity was pending early
in 2005 (and had been so for over a year). Meanwhile the more zealous UMP Deputies
were proposing that former presidents should become members of the Senate – and
thus immune to prosecution – for life.
Fourth, the growing independence of the judiciary has not freed it from its continued
politicisation (itself an entrenched violation of the principle of the separation of
powers). Part of this has perfectly formal, constitutional bases. The constitutional
guarantor of the independence of the judiciary, the president of the Conseil Supérieur
de la Magistrature, is the president of the Republic. In the Conseil d’État the govern-
ment has the right to appoint all the presidents of the working sections, one third of
the conseillers d’État, and a quarter of the lower-ranked maîtres de requêtes (some
appointments to the Conseil in the early Mitterrand years provoked a mixture of
incredulity and hilarity); discussions of the Conseil d’État’s general assembly are open
to ministers, who may vote on matters within their competence. All members of the
Constitutional Council, too, are openly political appointees; the composition of the
Council thus follows the vicissitudes of electoral politics, but (given the nine-year
tenure of members) with a certain time lag, allowing a left-wing government to be
confronted with a right-wing Council, and vice versa (Table 13.1). Important politicians
or presidential advisers have been chosen on several occasions, though membership of
the Constitutional Council has always been incompatible with ministerial or parlia-
mentary office, and, since January 1995, with other elective offices as well. Presidents of
the Republic, in choosing the president of the Constitutional Council, invariably select
sympathisers of their own political camp: Léon Noël, a former Gaullist Deputy, in
1959; Gaston Palewski, former Gaullist Deputy and minister, in 1965; Roger Frey,
former Gaullist Deputy, minister and Senator, in 1974; Daniel Mayer, president of
the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme and lifelong left-wing sympathiser, in 1983; Robert
Badinter, Mitterrand’s justice minister, in February 1986 (a choice that was considered
Table 13.1 The political composition of the Constitutional Council
Date Left Right
1981 0 9
1983 2 7
1986 4 5
1987 3 6
1988 3 6
1989 5 4
1992 6 3
1993 6 3
1995 5 4
1996 4 5
1997 4 5
2000 3 6
2005 2 8*
Note
* Includes Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, who from 2004 exercised his right as an
ex-president of the Republic to sit as an ex officio supernumerary member
of the Council.
especially political, because it was precipitated by Mayer’s premature departure, just
weeks before parliamentary elections which the Right was expected to win, and because
Badinter moved straight to his new post from the Justice Ministry); Roland Dumas,
Mitterrand’s former foreign minister and long-term personal friend and confidant, in
1995; Yves Guéna, former Gaullist Deputy, minister and Senator, in March 2000 after
Dumas’s resignation; Pierre Mazeaud, another former Gaullist Deputy and minister, in
February 2004. Members of the Constitutional Council, it is true, often display con-
siderable independence, thanks in part to their nine-year non-renewable term. Such is
not always true, on the other hand, of the magistrats du parquet, the prosecuting magis-
trates who remain hierarchically attached to the minister of justice, who can move or
promote or transfer prosecuting magistrates at will (and is also the vice-president of the
Conseil Supérieur de la Magistrature). Jacques Toubon’s appointment, in 1996, of his
own former directeur de cabinet Alexandre Benmakhlouf to the key post of procureur
général in Paris, just as investigations into the Paris city hall were gathering momentum,
was an outstanding but not exceptional example of such a political nomination. Justice
ministers still enjoy the right to issue formal and informal instructions to magistrates:
with the exception of Élisabeth Guigou, Jospin’s minister from 1997 to 2000, who
publicly declared her intention to issue no such instructions, they have used this power
in order to slow down or bury politically embarrassing cases. Indeed, Henri Nallet,
justice minister when the Urba affair broke in 1990 (and also a key fundraiser for
Mitterrand’s 1988 campaign), was criticised by his ministerial colleagues in private for
his inability to ‘control his judges’ – considered hitherto an essential part of a justice
minister’s job.
This kind of ‘top-down’ politicisation is compounded by the activities of many
judges. For members of the Conseil d’État to stand for elective office, or accept a
ministerial post, is to declare openly partisan convictions; to accept a post in a minis-
terial cabinet may, depending on its sensitivity, entail the same; yet on quitting their
political, or quasi-political, posts, they invariably take up their judicial posts in the
Conseil again, as the law permits. A change of parliamentary majority and government,
therefore, sets up a sort of merry-go-round as some members of the Conseil d’État
return from political postings while others more in sympathy with the new majority
depart. Within the civil judiciary, politicisation takes the different, but equally clear,
form of union membership: judges who join a professional trade union (and many do)
have the choice between the left-wing Syndicat de la Magistrature, the moderate
right-wing Union Syndicale des Magistrats and the Association Professionnelle des
Magistrats, sympathetic to the more muscular Right. Governments appointing to sensi-
tive judicial posts therefore find it relatively easy to recognise their political friends.
In the case of Thierry Jean-Pierre, the examining magistrate whose enquiries first
unravelled the Urba affair, his reputation for impartiality suffered a blow when he was
elected as an MEP on the right-wing de Villiers list in 1994; the reputation of Éric
Halphen was not enhanced when, in 2002, he left the judiciary and came out in support
of Jean-Pierre Chevènement’s presidential candidacy.
The fifth limitation to the État de droit in France is one that lies at the base of the
other four: a continuing cultural aversion to the rule of law. This phenomenon affects
many groups: the ordinary citizens who evade and avoid taxation or pull strings to get
out of fines or threatened legal proceedings; the drivers responsible for France’s ghastly
toll of road deaths (which, for a comparable population and despite recent laudable
steps to cut it, exceeds that in the UK by 130 per cent); the interest groups, whether
farmers, lorry drivers or bird-shooters, who use illegal and sometimes violent tactics but
are rarely brought to book for doing so; the businessmen who berated the examining
magistrate Eva Joly for her obtuseness in failing to realise that ‘the whole of French
capitalism is built on insider dealing’; the state officials who manifest their contempt for
the ‘legal pedantry’ of judges. The press denounces illegalities but treats suspects as
guilty long before they are tried, giving extensive publicity not only to the charges
brought but to selected pieces of evidence, in violation of the principle of the presump-
tion of innocence. If their more important and influential targets usually have the
means to answer back, the less well-known ones accused of everyday crimes on the
inside pages of the regional press do not, and it is far from certain that the 2000 law on
the presumption of innocence has done much to change this. At the same time, what
would elsewhere be politically scandalous facts, such as President Mitterrand’s use of a
publicly owned apartment to house his mistress and their daughter gratis, may remain
both concealed to the public for years and open secrets to reporters in the know,
anxious not to compromise their access to the Élysée. Magistrates who leak confidential
documents about sub judice cases to the media may be seeking to escape from, or
reverse, political pressures on them to abandon their enquiries; but they are still violat-
ing the rule of law. Politicians, however, are among the worst offenders in this respect.
The Left’s protests against the Constitutional Council’s striking down of clauses of the
nationalisation law of 1981, and the Right’s response to the Council’s treatment of the
privatisation law five years later, have an ironical symmetry to them; both were attack-
ing the very legitimacy of rulings that went against them. The Right’s outrage at the
decision on the 1993 immigration laws verged on the hysterical. Various attempts were
made by parliamentarians in the 1970s to limit the power of the courts, and especially
of the ECJ and the Constitutional Council; as late as 1986, the justice minister pro-
posed measures to limit what he called the Council’s ‘vast discretionary power’. Politi-
cians have regularly hindered legal investigations by invoking considerations of
national security (secret défense), or blocked judges’ investigations by withholding
police assistance. A remarkable instance of the latter was the refusal of Olivier Foll,
head of the Paris judicial police, to assist the examining magistrate Éric Halphen who
was seeking to search the apartment of Jean Tiberi, mayor of Paris. Foll was openly
backed by the interior minister Jean-Louis Debré, who was publicly rebuked by the
Court of Cassation – but supported by President Chirac, who as well as being the
constitutional protector of the judiciary was Tiberi’s predecessor as the capital’s mayor.
Chirac’s attitude to the judiciary, though, was hardly more cavalier than that of his
predecessor François Mitterrand, whose ‘anti-terrorist’ cell in the Élysée illegally
tapped the telephones of some 150 people, including judges, politicians, lawyers and
journalists, with the president’s knowledge and approval – often with the purpose of
keeping Mitterrand’s many sexual peccadilloes from prying eyes and ears. The Péchiney
affair of 1988–89 revealed the penchant for insider dealing of several of the president’s
friends, under Mitterrand’s cynical eye. The Rainbow Warrior affair of 1985, in which a
Greenpeace boat tracking French nuclear testing activity in the Pacific was blown up by
French agents in Auckland harbour, causing one death, created much more stir abroad
than in French political circles (the main worry of the right-wing opposition was that
French prestige had been damaged because the agents had been found out). And execu-
tives of both Right and Left have tolerated the activities of the Renseignements
Généraux (the police special branch), which is effectively exempt from normal judicial
restraints such as search warrants and which has compiled secret files on politicians,
business people, journalists, trade union officials and even (or perhaps especially) other
police units. Equally remarkable, however, is the public’s high threshold of tolerance.
The widespread cynicism about politicians, considered to be ‘generally corrupt’ by a
majority of the population, has the paradoxical result that individual politicians sus-
pected or even convicted of being so are still regarded as fit for office because they are
assumed to be no worse than the rest; hence Chirac’s ability to head the poll in April
2002 despite the gravity of the accusations against him.
It may be added, finally, that judicial policy in Chirac’s second term appeared intent
on reversing some of the gains made over the previous decade in the independence of
the judiciary and the safeguards in judicial procedure. First, two major laws on criminal
procedure greatly reinforced, in the name of fighting organised crime, the powers of the
police to hold suspects without charge (for up to four days) and to limit their access to
legal representation, as well as the powers of the parquet to order telephone taps and
invasive search procedures. Their passage through parliament was punctuated by dem-
onstrations by lawyers in full robes in front of the Justice Ministry. Second, another
major innovation of this legislation, the opportunity for a suspect to plead guilty and
avoid a lengthy trial, rapidly ran into serious difficulties of implementation, largely
because the secrecy of the new procedure was in direct contradiction with the principle
of open and public trials. Third, the Conseil Supérieur de la Magistrature’s advice on
appointments to the parquet, some of it based on the competence of the candidates
concerned, was repeatedly ignored. Fourth, Dominique Perben, the justice minister
from 2002 to 2005 (and author of the new legislation), returned to an active policy of
issuing instructions to prosecutors, which his Socialist predecessors had eschewed.
Fifth, within this new context the Paris prosecution service, which handles most of the
politically sensitive cases, took renewed care in keeping the activities of examining
magistrates on a very tight rein. The cumulative effect of Perben’s period in office was
the return, at least partial, of a climate in which the subordination of the judiciary
to the political executive, and of the individual to the powers of the police and the
prosecuting service, were viewed as acceptable and even necessary.
Concluding remarks
In a context where the highest in the land regularly display indifference or contempt for
the rule of law, it is perhaps unsurprising that the French lack confidence in their justice
system. Among EU nations, indeed, only the Belgians, who have been treated to a series
of grotesque judicial and political scandals since the mid-1990s, are more mistrustful of
their judges (Table 13.2). Among French institutions, the justice system is regularly
voted in surveys as among the least trustworthy – less so, for example, than parliament.
Not only is the system considered to favour the wealthy; it is viewed as too much in the
pocket of politicians in power. Hence the overwhelming public support for reinforcing
the independence of the justice system.
As the previous sections show, France has certainly moved closer to being an État de
droit than it was at the outset of the Fifth Republic. Despite the record of 2002–5
outlined above, some of these processes, such as the embedding of European law or the
internalisation of legal constraints by policy-makers, are likely to continue.
But it would be wrong to see the État de droit as a point at which France is sure to
arrive given time. Both material and cultural obstacles stand in its way. A critical
difficulty is the chronic underfunding of the justice system. As Olivier Duhamel has
Table 13.2 Public confidence in the justice system in Europe, 1999
Country No confidence Confidence
Denmark 25 70
Austria 28 61
Finland 30 61
Luxembourg 28 59
Netherlands 35 59
Greece 42 55
Sweden 36 53
Germany 40 52
Ireland 37 49
UK 40 48
Portugal 45 42
Spain 52 40
Italy 53 36
France 56 35
Belgium 72 22
Source: Eurobarometer.
pointed out, when demonstrations by lycée students won an extra 4.5 billion francs for
the education budget in 1990, they were obtaining a sum equivalent to 30 per cent of
the total budget of the Justice Ministry. The consequences of this underfunding are all
too predictable. The courts, in President Chirac’s words, have reached the point of
asphyxiation. A serious criminal case takes thirty-nine months on average (and often up
to five years) to go through the courts. With 40 per cent of the 55,000 inmates of
France’s jails on remand awaiting trial, France has one of the highest levels of prevent-
ive detention in Europe; the Dickensian squalor in which such (technically innocent)
inmates are kept is hardly compatible with the notion of an État de droit. The Service
Central de Prévention de la Corruption created by the Justice Ministry in 1998 to
investigate large-scale fraud, money-laundering, corruption and other financial crime
was described by one of its members, Eva Joly, as ‘window-dressing to give the impres-
sion that something is being done’. It employs just thirteen examining magistrates, each
with some 40–80 cases; poor pay and a heavy workload make each of them all too
susceptible to the temptations offered by large private firms who can turn their knowl-
edge of financial legislation to corporate rather than public use and double or triple
their salaries. The head of the service left for the private sector late in 1999; other
examining magistrates, such as Joly and Halphen, have left the profession, worn down
by years of fruitless labour punctuated by administrative bullying, hostile press cam-
paigns and death threats. It has also been claimed that lack of resources prevented any
major drugs case coming to trial in France between 1995 and 2000. To be capable of
punishing large-scale corporate offenders as readily as it locks up suspected petty crimi-
nals, the justice system requires a massive injection of funds – and thus enough politi-
cal will on the part of government to defend the allocation of such funds to Justice
rather than to other ministries more likely to produce direct and tangible benefits to the
taxpayer. In the most literal sense, a truly strong and independent justice system has a
price tag; it is far from certain that the French are willing to pay it. There is also a more
figurative cost to an État de droit, in terms of a cultural shift towards respect for the law,
among both elites and ordinary French men and women. Such a shift would, for
example, entail judges feeling sufficiently free from political intervention not to need to
leak details of sub judice cases to the press – and the press being sufficiently respectful
of due process and the presumption of innocence not to seek to print such details. This
is still a long way off.
Nor is every increase in judicial power an unalloyed good. Some of the objections
raised by the sceptics in the debate on the État de droit are highly pertinent. No dem-
ocracy can be ruled by judges. Judges are unelected (in France at least), unaccountable
either to the public or (if secure in their posts) to any political masters, and as affected
by their own beliefs and prejudices as any other public figures. The record of the United
States Supreme Court in the 1930s demonstrates the capacity of judges to sabotage the
policies of a democratically elected government in the name of a tendentious interpre-
tation of the constitution. One cost of a truly independent justice system is that the
opinions of judges may be radically at odds with the views of the wider public. Even
given an independent, impartial and value-free judiciary, an excess of judge-made law
poses serious practical problems for public policy-making. Judges may be oblivious of
the consequences of their decisions, whether in terms of public spending commitments,
or of the delicate political bargains essential to public policy formation, or of the wider
implications in distant but related policy areas, or of the real possibilities of implemen-
tation. Judicial proceedings, often lengthy, always reactive and unpredictable, perturb
and therefore damage medium- to long-term policy planning – the more so as judges,
and therefore courts, may and do disagree with one other. And (even more than
politics) they tend to favour the well-off, the educated and the informed.
The costs and benefits of judicial independence should be situated in a wider set of
trade-offs between market forces, social regulation and mobilisation, efficient processes
of government and judicial review. To build a successful État de droit requires a recogni-
tion that judicialisation is a complex, diverse process, and that some elements, but not
all, need strengthening. For while litigation serves an essential role in public policy, it
can never be its only basis. One does not need to be a Jacobin, or to subscribe to a
mystical concept of the general will or to inflated notions of ‘parliamentary’ (often, in
practice, executive) sovereignty, to take the view that a coherent vision of the public
interest is not always best served by jurisprudence resulting from courtroom confronta-
tions between particular interests. Government in France would certainly benefit from
the consolidation of those beginnings of an État de droit observed since 1958. But even
competent and independent judges are no substitute for general laws that produce an
authoritative and legitimate allocation of goods based on electoral assent and political
accountability.
Further reading
Avril, P. and Gicquel, J., Le Conseil constitutionnel, 4th edition, Paris, Montchrestien, 1998.
Bell, J., French Constitutional Law, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1992.
Bernard, C., La justice entre soumission et émancipation, Paris, Le Monde/Marabout, 1998.
Braibant, G. and Stirn, B., Le droit administratif, Paris, Presses de Sciences Po, 1997.
Brown, N. and Jacobs, F., The Court of Justice of the European Communities, London, Sweet and
Maxwell, 1989.
Canard Enchaîné, Le, L’horreur judiciaire, Paris, Les Dossiers du Canard, 2005.
Charon, J.-M. and Furet, C., Un secret si bien violé: la loi, le juge et le journaliste, Paris, Seuil, 2000.
Chevallier, J., L’État de droit, Paris, Montchrestien, 1992.
Cohen-Tanugi, L., Le droit sans l’État, 3rd edition, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1992.
Cohen-Tanugi, L., La métamorphose de la démocratie Française: de l’État jacobin à l’État de droit,
2nd edition, Paris, Gallimard, 1993.
Colas, D. (ed.), L’État de droit: travaux de la mission sur la modernisation de l’État, Paris, Presses
Colliard, C.-A. and Timsit, G., Les autorités administratives indépendantes, Paris, Presses
Costa, J.-P., Le Conseil d’État dans la société contemporaine, Paris, Économica, 1993.
Dehousse, R., La Cour de justice des Communautés européennes, Paris, Montchrestien, 1994.
Fanachi, P., La justice administrative, 4th edition, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1995.
Favoreu, L., La politique saisie par le droit, Paris, Économica, 1988.
Favoreu, L., Le Conseil constitutionnel, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1991.
Favoreu, L. and Philip, L., Les grandes décisions du Conseil constitutionnel, 6th edition, Paris,
Sirey, 1991.
Garapon, A., Le gardien des promesses: justice et démocratie, Paris, Odile Jacob, 1996.
Garapon, A. and Salas, D., La République pénalisée, Paris, Hachette, 1996.
Gentot, M., Les autorités administratives indépendantes, Paris, Montchrestien, 1995.
Guédon, M.-J., Les autorités administratives indépendantes, Paris, LGDJ, 1991.
Haenel, H. and Frison-Roche, M.-A., Le juge et le politique, Paris, Presses Universitaires de
France, 1998.
Halphen, E., Sept ans de solitude, Paris, Denöel, 2002.
Hamon, L., Les juges de la loi: naissance et rôle du Conseil constitutionnel, Paris, Fayard, 1987.
Joly, E., Est-ce dans ce monde-là que nous voulons vivre?, Paris, Éditions des Arènes, 2003.
Kessler, M.-C., Le Conseil d’État, Paris, Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences
Politiques, 1965.
Lochak, D., La justice administrative, 3rd edition, Paris, Montchrestien, 1998.
Massot, J. and Marimbert, J., Le Conseil d’État, Paris, La Documentation Française, 1988.
Mathieu, B., Renoux, T. and Roux, A., La Cour de Justice de la République, Paris, Presses
Minc, A., Au nom de la loi, Paris, Gallimard, 1998.
Pouille, A., Le pouvoir judiciaire et les tribunaux, Paris, Masson, 1985.
Pouvoirs, no. 92, 2000, ‘La responsabilité des gouvernants’.
Rassat, M.-L., La justice en France, 5th edition, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1996.
Robineau, Y. and Truchet, D., Le Conseil d’État, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1994.
Roussillon, H., Le Conseil constitutionnel, Paris, Dalloz, 1994.
Soulez-Larivière, D., L’avocature, Paris, Seuil, 1995.
Soulez-Larivière, D., Grand soir pour la justice, Paris, Seuil, 1997.
Stirn, B., Le Conseil d’État: son rôle, sa jurisprudence, 2nd edition, Paris, Hachette, 1994.
Stone, A., The Birth of Judicial Politics in France: The Constitutional Council in Comparative
Perspective, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1992.
Stone Sweet, A., Governing with Judges: Constitutional Politics in Europe, Oxford, Oxford
Taisne, J.-J., Institutions judiciaires, 3rd edition, Paris, Dalloz, 1992.
van Ruymbeke, R., Le juge d’instruction, 3rd edition, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France,
1996.
Vernier, D., La justice en France, Paris, La Découverte, 1992.
14 France and European integration
European integration: process and interpretation 423

France and the integration process 434
Europe, the French state and French public policy-making 446
France and European policies 453
Voters, parties and Europe 472
Further reading 484
Over more than half a century, France has been both an ardent promoter of European
integration, and the fiercest of defenders, within European institutions, of national
interest narrowly construed. Of course, all member states have sought in different ways
to maximise the benefits of integration while minimising its constraints: to have their
cake and eat it. In the French case, however, the tension has been especially acute. On
the one hand, France’s conception of Europe, as articulated by Christian Democrats,
many Socialists and even some Gaullists, has been very ambitious, whether in political,
social, or economic terms. On the other, there has been a reluctance, most readily
expressed by Communists and some Socialists, Gaullists and the far Right, to accept
the transfers of sovereignty that would give Europe the means of fulfilling such ambi-
tions. The process of European integration can be divided into two periods, each cor-
responding to different resolutions of that basic conflict: a Europe of fairly limited
scope, but with equally limited delegations of sovereignty from member states, until the
mid-1980s; a Europe of wider ambitions and more substantial transfers of sovereignty
since then. This second Europe, though not a little of France’s making, has posed more
serious dilemmas to French policy-makers than the first, threatening both a loss of
French influence within European institutions and painful political and economic
adjustments at home. That in turn has increased – though episodically more than
continuously – the salience of European integration as a political issue within France,
cross-cutting existing party divisions.
The integration process, vastly more complex than the diptych suggested above, is
briefly narrated in the opening section of this chapter. Because the question of what
drives the process – its own internal forces or the decisions of the member states – has
both divided academics and informed most analysis of European affairs, the major
interpretations of integration are also outlined. The second section deals with French
approaches to Europe, and in particular the view of benefits and costs that France’s
policy-makers have applied to the integration process and how they have changed over
France and European integration 423
time. An important element of any such view is France’s special relationship with the
Federal Republic of Germany, seen both as one of the benefits of integration and as a
tool to help promote French interests within Europe. The second section also explores
the dynamics of this relationship, as well as highlighting the distinctive approaches to
integration of successive presidents. A third section discusses how France engages with
the European policy process. Arrangements for policy co-ordination in Paris and for
the promotion of French policy priorities in Brussels reflect a Jacobin desire that
France should ‘speak with one voice’ in Europe, an approach which has drawbacks as
well as advantages in terms of legislative or regulatory outcomes; the fact that some
outcomes have not suited France is reflected in the reluctance, also covered in this
section, with which France has implemented some European legislation.
The fourth section considers the substantive results, for France, of European policy
developments in three areas: the Common Agricultural Policy, Economic and Monet-
ary Union and the economic paradigm shift surrounding it, and the Common Foreign
and Security Policy. Each, in different ways, reflects France’s capacity to win lasting
acceptance for its own policy priorities at the European level. For a long time a ‘permis-
sive consensus’ among publics in France and other European states allowed govern-
ments to pursue their priorities without much reference to the voters. This is less and
less the case. As the fifth section observes, French voters share many of their elites’
ambiguous views about the costs and benefits of European integration, and have been
increasingly divided over the really hard European questions, with at times disruptive
effects on France’s parties and party system. These divisions were most dramatically
expressed in the May 2005 referendum on the European constitutional treaty.
European integration: process and interpretation

European integration has progressed in fits and starts, rather than the smooth process
suggested by the term ‘ever closer union between the peoples of Europe’ enshrined in
the Rome Treaty of 1957. The process has been simultaneously economic and political.
It has been driven by the deliberate actions of Europe’s nation states, but also by the
dynamics of European institutions, and by the leaders of both. It has involved great
leaps forward, barely perceptible shuffles, and even steps back; unexpected bargains and
the incremental consolidation of institutional relationships. The account given below,
though compressed, therefore remains complex; the academic interpretations of the
process, outlined below it in simplified form, have been varied, subtle and hotly
contested.
The narrative of integration

To a significant degree, as Table 14.1 and the following account show, the history of
European integration is that of its big bargains – both successful and not.
• The European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), proposed on 9 May 1950 by
France’s Foreign Minister Robert Schuman, signed by the six original member states
(France and Germany in the first instance, joined by Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg
and the Netherlands, with the blessing of the United States) at the Paris Treaty of
April 1951, was operational by February 1953. The ECSC created a common
market in coal and steel, but its institutions were more ambitious than anything
Table 14.1 A chronology of the EU, 1950–2005
1950 (May) Robert Schuman proposes the European Coal and Steel Community
(ECSC).
1951 (April) The Six sign the Treaty of Paris, creating the ECSC.
1952 (May) The Six sign a second Treaty of Paris, establishing the European Defence
Community (EDC).
1953 (February) The ECSC comes into force.
1954 (August) French National Assembly rejects ratification of the EDC treaty: Gaullist
and Communist opposition, reinforced by many Socialists and Radicals,
overcomes Christian Democrat-led support for the treaty.
1955 (June) Messina Conference between the Six: agreement in principle to create an
Economic Community; a committee led by Paul-Henri Spaak is charged
with drafting specific proposals.
1957 (March) The Six sign the Treaties of Rome, establishing the European Economic
Community (EEC) and Euratom.
1958 (January) EEC and Euratom come into force.
1958 (June) De Gaulle returns to power in France.
1958 (September) De Gaulle–Adenauer meeting at Colombey-les-Deux-Églises.
1959 (January) Common Market comes into force with first round of tariff reductions.
1961–62 Fouchet Plan for political co-operation proposed by de Gaulle, but
ultimately rejected by France’s partners.
1962 (January) Agreement of the Six on key principles of Common Agricultural Policy.
1962 (May) De Gaulle’s ‘Volapük’ speech attacks European federalism.
1963 (January) De Gaulle vetoes UK entry to EEC, but France and Germany sign the
Élysée Treaty promising friendship and co-operation.
1965 The Merger Treaty, joining the institutions of the three communities from
July 1967, is signed by the Six; France boycotts EC institutions in the
Empty Chair crisis.
1966 (January) The ‘Luxembourg compromise’ ends the Empty Chair crisis, and preserves
effective unanimity on Council of Ministers.
1967 (November) De Gaulle vetoes EEC enlargement a second time.
1968 (July) The EEC’s customs union fully operational with elimination of last tariffs.
1969 (December) Summit at The Hague: agreement to ‘complete, deepen, and enlarge’ the
EEC.
1970 (April) ‘Own resources’ for EEC budget, and greater oversight of it by the
Parliament, established under Luxembourg Treaty.
1972 (April) The ‘Snake’ established by the Six to limit exchange rate fluctuations
between European currencies.
1972 (April) France votes yes (by 68.3 per cent of votes, 36.4 per cent of registered
electors) in a referendum on enlargement of European Communities.
1973 (January) Denmark, Ireland and the UK enter the Communities.
1974 (December) Regular summit meetings of EC heads of state and government – the future
European Council – launched; agreement on direct elections to the
European Parliament.
1979 (March) Establishment of European Monetary System, successor to the Snake,
agreed in 1978.
1979 (June) First direct elections to the European Parliament (they are held at 5-yearly
intervals, so in 1984, 1989, 1994, 1999, 2004 . . .).
1981 (January) Greece joins the EC.
1984 (June) Fontainebleau summit: resolution of the issue of British budget
contribution clears the way for further development of the Community.
1985 (January) Jacques Delors President of the European Commission.
1986 (January) Spain and Portugal join the EC.
1986 (February) Signature by the twelve member states of Single European Act (SEA),
providing for the creation of a single market by 1 January 1993.
1988 (June) European Council at Hanover committed to drafting proposals for
Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) within one year.
1989 (November) Fall of Berlin Wall signals the impending reunification of Germany and
withdrawal of Central and East European states from Soviet bloc.
1989 (December) European Council at Strasbourg agrees to intergovernmental conference to
achieve EMU, and adopts plan for a European Social Charter.
1990 (June–July) France, Germany and Benelux countries sign Schengen agreement to
remove border controls. In July, liberalisation of capital movements within
the Twelve.
1991 (June) Mitterrand calls for a European Confederation, expecting a period of
‘decades’ before Central and East European states join EC.
1991 (December) Maastricht summit on EMU, and on political union.
1992 (February) Signature of Maastricht Treaty on European Union.
1992 (September) French referendum on ratification of Maastricht Treaty passes by
51–49 per cent.
1993 (January) Single Market comes into force.
1995 (January) Austria, Finland and Sweden join the EU.
1997 (October) Signature of Amsterdam Treaty.
1998 (June) Agreement on the founding members of EMU.
1999 (January) Exchange rates between EMU countries irrevocably fixed in preparation for
transition to the euro (single currency).
1999 (March) Resignation of the Commission after fierce criticism from Parliament over
accounting practices, centred on French Commissioner Édith Cresson.
1999 (December) Luxembourg summit recommends immediate opening of enlargement
negotiations with Central and East European states, Malta and Cyprus.
Turkey’s official candidacy recognised.
2000 (December) Signature of Nice Treaty.
2002 (January) Euro banknotes and coins come into circulation.
2002 (February) Creation of Convention on the Future of Europe, chaired by Valéry
Giscard d’Estaing.
2003 (July) Convention submits draft European constitutional treaty.
2004 (1 May) Entry into EU of Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia,
Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia.
2004 (18 June) At Brussels summit, EU leaders adopt a modified version of the
constitutional treaty.
2004 (14 July) President Chirac promises referendum on the European constitutional
treaty to be held in 2005.
2004 (December) EU begins negotiations on Turkish entry.
2005 (29 May) French electorate votes no by 54.7 to 45.3 per cent in referendum on
European constitutional treaty.
required by a mere trade agreement. They included a supranational High Authority,
headed from 1952 to 1954 by Jean Monnet, the French Planning Commissioner
who had inspired the initial project; a Council of Ministers delegated by member
states; a Court of Justice designed to ensure full and fair application of ECSC
decisions; and a Common Consultative Assembly composed of delegates from
national parliaments. The scope of these institutions, which would constitute the
basis for the future European Union, reflected the double purpose of the ECSC: an
economic organisation, it was also intended for a political purpose – to ensure that
Germany’s industrial recovery was put to peaceful use and to lay the foundations
for long-term Franco-German reconciliation and European peace. Britain, at the
time Europe’s largest steel producer, stayed out of the project.
• The project for a European Defence Community (EDC) was a big bargain that never
was. In effect an integrated West European army, and a framework for rearming
Germany, with a European Political Community associated to it, EDC was pro-
posed by French Prime Minister René Pleven in October 1950, signed by the Six in
May 1952, but killed by a negative French ratification vote in August 1954.
• The Rome Treaties, signed by the Six in March 1957, created the European Atomic
Energy Community (Euratom) and the much more important European Economic
Community (EEC). Under the EEC treaty, the Six agreed to eliminate all customs
barriers between them within twelve years from 1958, to apply a common external
tariff to non-member states, to negotiate international trade agreements jointly,
and to set up a Common Agricultural Policy (CAP): a package quickly known as
the Common Market. The EEC was given very similar institutions to those of the
ECSC (which which, indeed, they were merged in 1967): a Commission which took
the role of the High Authority (enjoying the monopoly of legislative proposals,
though with fewer independent decision-making powers), a Council of Ministers
with the last word on all Community legislation, a Court of Justice and an
Assembly of the European Communities (renamed the Parliament in 1980). On the
other hand, the treaty’s general aim of ‘ever-closer union’ was paralleled by other
relatively vague commitments: no specific arrangements were made in the treaty to
set up the CAP, or to implement a promised common transport policy, while the
dates by which the Council of Ministers might abandon unanimous decision-
making in favour of majority voting, or when the Assembly might be directly
elected, were left deliberately uncertain.
• The de Gaulle presidency could be viewed as a phase of implementation of the
previous big bargain, with the realisation of a Common Market (completed in
1968, eighteen months ahead of schedule) and the start of the CAP from 1967. It
was also, in at least one way, a turning point where nothing turned. The so-called
Fouchet Plan, de Gaulle’s ambitious project for an intergovernmental European
political confederation (by implication, under French leadership) was rejected by
other member states, and particularly the Benelux countries, in 1962; its residue
was the Élysée Treaty of January 1963, formalising processes of friendship and co-
operation between France and Germany but failing to distance Germany from
the American orbit as de Gaulle had hoped. In the so-called Empty Chair crisis of
1965–66, de Gaulle prevented the move towards majority voting in the Council of
Ministers which had been anticipated in the Rome Treaty; the unanimity rule on the
Council was effectively safeguarded by the so-called ‘Luxembourg compromise’ of
January 1966. He also twice blocked attempts by other European states – Denmark,
Ireland and above all the UK – to join the EEC. The 1960s could thus be seen as an
illustration of what the determined leader of one member state could do to shape –
and, in many ways, to stall – Europe’s development.
• The agreements reached at The Hague in December 1969 by the heads of state and
government of the Six – and above all by Pompidou, elected French president in
June, and Willy Brandt, elected West German chancellor in October – served to
‘relaunch’ Europe after de Gaulle’s departure. Though not a new treaty, the sum-
mit conclusions served both to ‘complete’ earlier undertakings, and to set an
agenda for the EEC’s ‘deepening’ and ‘enlargement’. ‘Completion’ referred chiefly
to the CAP, now set on a permanent footing and financed through its own
resources – a share of receipts from VAT and from taxes on imports to Europe from
outside the Six – rather than more politically vulnerable national contributions.
‘Enlargement’ meant the opening of the EEC to new member states, hitherto kept
out by de Gaulle’s veto. Denmark, Ireland and the UK joined the EEC in 1973
(and would be followed, after other negotiations, by Greece in 1981; Spain and
Portugal in 1986; Austria, Sweden and Finland in 1995; and the Czech Republic,
Slovakia, Hungary, Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Slovenia, Malta and
Cyprus in 2004). ‘Deepening’ covered two initiatives: European Political Co-
operation (EPC), or attempts to co-ordinate foreign policy, and the setting-up of a
team chaired by Pierre Werner, prime minister of Luxembourg, to report into
prospects for European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). Each had more
limited short-term effects than expected, but set a longer-term agenda. EPC proved
quite insufficient, for example, to formulate a European response to the energy
crisis of 1973–74, but laid the foundations for a future Common Foreign and
Security Policy (CFSP). EMU took three decades to achieve, not one as initially
hoped, but the Werner Report was the basis for the ‘Snake’ (1972–76) and the
European Monetary System (EMS) of 1979–99 – both initiatives undertaken to
achieve a measure of monetary stability in Europe during the turbulent period
following the collapse of the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates in
August 1971.
• The Giscard presidency, though not a period of intense institutional activity, saw
both the two steps towards monetary co-ordination noted above and two signifi-
cant institutional developments. From December 1974, the EEC heads of govern-
ment (or, in the French case, the president) agreed to meet at least thrice yearly, in
summits which were to be known as the European Council, hosted by whichever
country held the six-monthly rotating presidency of the Council of Ministers. And
the first direct elections to the European Parliament were agreed in principle in
1974 and held in June 1979.
• The Single European Act (SEA), signed in 1986 and ratified in 1987, was a major
treaty revision of both economic and institutional importance. Economically, it
committed member states to eliminating non-tariff barriers to trade, and imple-
menting on the ground the free movement of persons, goods, capital and services
throughout the EEC by 1992. While barriers to trade were, first and foremost,
variations in national norms and standards (some of which served clearly pro-
tectionist purposes for member states), the SEA also placed certain practices of
governments – non-competitive tendering for contracts and subsidies to favoured
firms – in the Commission’s sights as obstacles to effective competition. The
implementation of the Single Market therefore involved a much more complex and
invasive reappraisal of national economic policies than the mere dismantling of
customs duties provided for by the Rome Treaty. Meanwhile, the major insti-
tutional change, the adoption of Qualified Majority Voting (QMV) on the Council
of Ministers, for Single Market questions, was adopted to remedy the obstacle
represented by the de facto unanimity rule on the Council of Ministers to the
achievement of a Single Market within a reasonable timescale. QMV gave each
member state a number of votes on the Council of Ministers in (very) approximate
proportion to its size, and fixed a minimum number of votes – typically about
70 per cent of the total – necessary for a proposal to be carried. The adoption of
QMV for SEA matters meant the beginning of the end for unanimity on the
Council of Ministers as preserved by the Luxembourg compromise. The SEA also
provided for two lesser, but still important, institutional changes in the direction of
supranationality. The European Parliament’s role, hitherto almost entirely con-
sultative, was reinforced for Single Market issues by the new co-operation pro-
cedure of legislation; and a Court of First Instance was created to lighten the
burden of business in the Court of Justice – a significant acknowledgement of the
growing importance (and caseload) of the European judiciary.
• The Treaty on European Union (TEU), signed at Maastricht in 1992 and ratified
by all signatories by 1993, committed most member states to phased steps leading
to Economic and Monetary Union – a single currency to complement the single
market (the UK, and then Denmark, opted out of EMU). Exchange rates of
participating member states were irrevocably fixed in 1999, after a period of
economic convergence marked by strict financial discipline (or at least the appear-
ance of it) on the part of governments and central banks; Europe’s single currency
– the euro – has circulated since January 2002. While EMU was the centrepiece of
Maastricht, it was far from the only component. The single currency was to be
flanked by the bases – at least minimal – of a common social policy, in the Social
Protocol, linked to the Treaty but not, at British insistence, included in it. Insti-
tutional reforms within the EEC included a modest extension of QMV on the
Council of Ministers to new areas; a further strengthening of the Parliament, now
empowered to vet an incoming Commission as well as to censure an incumbent
one, and, under the new co-decision procedure, to block legislation on certain
issues; and the creation of a (consultative) Committee of the Regions, reflecting a
greater recognition of Europe’s regions that had also found expression in a doub-
ling of regional aid since 1988. And the EEC itself was complemented by ‘Political
union’, represented by two distinct areas of co-operation, for which the unanimity
rule would apply to decisions in the Council of Ministers: the Common Foreign
and Security Policy (CFSP) and Justice and Home Affairs (JHA). These three
‘pillars’ – the EEC, the CFSP and JHA – would together constitute the new
European Union. At the same time, however, the principle of ‘subsidiarity’ – that
Europe should handle only those tasks that were best addressed at the European
level rather than at those of states or subnational authorities – was formally
incorporated into the TEU.
• The Amsterdam Treaty of 1997 was the first of three treaty changes designed to
adapt the EU’s institutions to new responsibilities and to the perspective of
enlargement to a total of at least 25 member states following the end of the Cold
War. The fact that this took three treaty modifications in seven years illustrates the
difficulty of the task, and especially the reluctance of large member states to
surrender their traditional leading role in a bigger EU. Amsterdam saw an exten-
sion and simplification of the co-decision procedure and a corresponding
enhancement of the power of the European Parliament (significantly, the Parlia-
ment chose to flex its muscles in 1999 by provoking the collective resignation of the
whole Commission over allegations of corruption and nepotism; five years later, it
would reject Italy’s nominee for the Commission on the grounds of his reactionary
religious and social views, forcing a recasting of the whole Commission). It created
a limited institutional opening for ‘flexibility’, or enhanced co-operation on specific
issues between some but not all member states. It moved some provisions on immi-
gration and asylum questions, linked to issues of the free movement of people
between member states, from the EU’s third (Justice and Home Affairs) pillar to
the first, and thereby subjected these policies to QMV. Amsterdam also created a
‘Monsieur PESC’ – a High Representative for Europe’s foreign policy, alongside
(and not always in perfect harmony with) the Commissioner for External Affairs. It
put the Maastricht convergence criteria for EMU on a permanent footing, with the
new name of the Stability and Growth Pact. But many critical issues, in particular
how to bring European institutions closer to Europe’s peoples and how to adapt
Europe’s decision-making procedures, initially designed for the Six, to a much
larger membership, were barely addressed. Even the cap of 700 on the membership
of the Parliament was broken in 2004, when MEPs numbered 732. Indeed, the
Commissioner who presented the Amsterdam Treaty to the public expressed his
dissatisfaction by calling it ‘an impenetrable and complex Treaty, timid in the most
sensitive areas such as the common foreign and security policy and weak on the
institutional aspects’.
• The Nice Treaty of December 2000 appeared to achieve one, albeit limited, step
towards rationalising Europe’s decision-making by fixing the new voting strengths
of each member state, and the new Qualified Majority, for a Council of Ministers
in a future 27-member EU, as well as by limiting the number of future Commis-
sioners appointed by each state to one from 2005, even for the five larger states
hitherto accustomed to two. The Treaty also extended QMV on the Council into
new (though mostly uncontentious) policy areas. In addition, the Nice summit
approved a European declaration of fundamental human rights, though at
Britain’s insistence this was not given treaty status. By the time of its signature,
however, the Nice Treaty already appeared inadequate and outdated, in the face
of calls for a much more comprehensive constitutional settlement, emanating
from European parliamentarians, government ministers such as German Foreign
Minister Joschka Fischer and, much more guardedly, from Chirac.
• The European constitutional treaty of June 2004 offered the promise of closing the
cycle of enlargement-driven reforms. Pressures for a long-term constitutional
settlement had led the Laeken EU summit of December 2001 to set up a Conven-
tion on the Future of Europe to be chaired by former French president Giscard
d’Estaing. The Convention presented its draft constitution in July 2003. In some
respects it simply consolidated earlier treaties and existing institutional tendencies:
for example, the co-decision procedure (defining the respective roles of Parliament,
Commission and Council of Ministers) and QMV (for voting in the Council of
Ministers) were to become the norm for most EU legislation, with the Parliament
achieving full status as a co-legislator with the Council of Ministers in most areas.
The Charter of Fundamental Rights of the Union, joined as a simple declaration
to the Nice Treaty, became an integral part of the constitutional treaty. Inevitably,
the Convention produced uneasy compromises; it was, after all, attempting to
streamline the EU’s institutions, and especially its executive, without producing a
fully federal project, which would be unacceptable to most member states, and
certainly to Britain and France. Thus the question of a single executive head of the
Union was avoided by proposing a dyarchy between the president of the Commis-
sion and a president of the European Council, now to be elected for two-and-a-half
years, replacing the six-monthly rotation of the presidency between member states.
The post of European foreign minister was created, to replace both the external
relations commissioner and the newer ‘Monsieur PESC’. The new official would
have the office of a vice-president of the Commission but would be appointed (and
revocable) by the European Council. Among the most controversial among the
Convention’s proposals, however, was the replacement of the complex Nice formu-
las for QMV with a much simpler rule: legislation would pass in the Council of
Ministers if supported by at least half the member states representing at least three-
fifths of the population. This readjustment, which reduced voting rights of some
states (especially Spain and Poland) by comparison with Nice, wrecked Italian
Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s plans for the constitution to be agreed in
December 2003 in a second Rome Treaty. Only the election of a new government in
Spain in March 2004 opened the way for the compromise including the raising of
the thresholds to 55 per cent of member states and 65 per cent of the EU’s popula-
tion, which allowed a revised draft to be signed in Brussels in June 2004. It
remained for member states to ratify the treaty, whether via national parliaments
or, in a number of states including France, by referendum by the choice of President
Chirac. On 29 May 2005, after a bitterly fought campaign, the French said a
resounding no to the treaty by a margin of nearly 55 to 45 per cent of valid votes
cast. Three days later the Dutch made the same choice by the even greater margin
of 62 per cent to 38. At the Brussels summit the same June, Europe’s leaders, under
pressure from Britain, suspended the ratification process.
It should be stressed that even if it were ratified (an eventuality which appeared
unthinkable by mid-2005), the term ‘constitutional treaty’ would not make the EU into
anything approaching the superstate of Eurosceptical fantasy. The EU budget amounts
to barely 1 per cent of GDP, compared to over 40 or even 50 per cent in most member
states. Many key attributes of state sovereignty have escaped the EU, partly or wholly.
The common stuff of politics in every member state – taxation, education, healthcare,
social security, defence, policing and justice – remains overwhelmingly under national
control. Despite the ambitions of federalists for a much stronger European defence
force, or for tax harmonisation, this was not about to change. Hence the difficulty of
analysing the EU: although it is more than an intergovernmental organisation and
possesses some state-like qualities, its development is still very much shaped by complex
deals between member states that retain the attributes of sovereignty.
Interpreting integration (1): realism, intergovernmentalism

The complexity and unevenness of the integration process has been reflected in the
academic interpretations that have developed in parallel with it. To simplify greatly, these
can be divided into two main camps: those that draw inspiration from international
relations and see Europe as an arena of competing nation states, and those that view
Europe as a polity in its own right, whose government and politics have their own
internal dynamics which may be compared with those of any developed democracy.
Within each of these, in turn, two main perspectives can be identifed.
International relations perspectives on European integration focus, perhaps
unsurprisingly, on Europe’s big bargains, on the decisive steps forward in integration –
as well as on its failed opportunities, those turning points in recent European history at
which nothing turned. These were the moments when the leaders of Europe’s nation
states took the most obviously decisive roles. On this view, therefore, the EU and its
preceding bodies are best seen as rather elaborate international organisations, providing
an arena within which the crucial actors, nation states, play out their rivalries, conflicts
and alliances. ‘Realist’ approaches to integration, identified with such veteran Europe-
watchers as Stanley Hoffmann, see nation states as unitary actors of unequal strength
and more or less permanent geopolitical interests, competing for hegemony, or for a
privileged relationship with a leading power, within a region and the wider world sys-
tem. European integration is the product of inter-state bargaining, with a leading role
cast for the two most powerful of the founding states, France and the Federal Republic
of Germany. But the institutions it has created – the EEC or, more recently, the EU –
have little autonomy; they are the precarious outcomes of a particular, and temporary,
regional balance of forces.
A number of the strictures laid by realists against the Euro-optimists of the early
1960s ring true forty years later. The integration process has suffered from a lack of
clarity (even among its advocates) about finalities and from a lack of citizen identifica-
tion either with a strong European project or with Europe’s institutions. Much of the
negotiation of the big bargains outlined above has been marked less by a common sense
of European purpose as by bad-tempered and drawn-out haggling among representa-
tives of member governments, of which the meetings at Nice in 2000, at Rome in 2003,
or Brussels in June 2005 are only the most recent examples. Whenever integration has
moved from (relatively) painless areas such as the removal of tariff barriers towards
core attributes of sovereignty – the currency, immigration, defence, or even taxation, for
example – it has encountered opposition from member states and deep misgivings
among their populations; in the case of EDC, this happened as early as 1954. The
naked assertion of national interest in the European arena by de Gaulle (in the Empty
Chair crisis, for example) or Thatcher (over the budget) has been paralleled by the more
discreet pursuit of national objectives by every other member state. Despite this range
of evidence to confirm their case, however, the realists face an obvious difficulty in
accounting for the forward motion that has taken place: for surrenders of sovereignty
under Mitterrand and Chirac that would have been unthinkable under de Gaulle,
and even for the resilience of European institutions and their growth, over time, into
something considerably more than those of an alliance or an intergovernmental
organisation.
Liberal intergovernmentalists such as Andrew Moravcsik share many of the realists’
perspectives, insofar as they approach Europe from an international relations perspec-
tive, and are sceptical of the importance and autonomy of supranational institutions.
Like the realists, they focus on a Europe of big inter-state bargains. But they are less
inclined to view states as unitary actors acting as a function of more or less permanent
geopolitical interests. Rather, they see government preferences as more plastic, reflecting
shifting balances of economic and political forces. They bring ‘low politics’ into the big
bargains, placing significant emphasis on interest groups, and especially business
groups, national but also transnational, in shaping the preferences of governments. In
the EMU debate, for example, German policy-makers were continually pulled between
the sound-money preferences of Germany’s powerful central bank (and of public opin-
ion, still marked by memories of the currency collapses that followed both world wars)
and their industrialists’ wish for a competitively valued currency to assist exports. And
Moravcsik’s account of de Gaulle’s European policy pays at least as much attention to
the General’s relationship with the French farm lobby as to the grander and more
frequently analysed geopolitical concerns. Liberal intergovernmentalists have the cap-
acity to explain movement in the integration process both through the changing world
economic context (for example, the currency instability caused by the American aban-
donment of Bretton Woods in 1971, or European worries about the slowing-down of
international trade and member states’ growth prior to the Single Act of 1986) and
through changing balances of forces within member states. But European integration is
not, for liberal intergovernmentalists, driven by its own momentum, structures, or lead-
ers. Rather, they see European institutions – the Commission and the Court of Justice
in 1957, the European Central Bank forty years later – as artifices devised to ensure that
inter-state deals are respected once struck. The artifice may need to be permanent; but
in the end, for liberal intergovernmentalists, the principals in the process remain states,
while European actors are merely agents, created to do their bidding, whose freedom of
action remains limited. Convincingly argued where the big (and very substantially
intergovernmental) bargains are concerned, this case suffers from its relative neglect of
the more humdrum activities of Europe, in which everyday patterns of co-operation are
established, institutions bedded down, new needs discerned, apparently trivial but
potentially far-reaching laws and regulations drafted, and significant bodies of case law
built up by successive judgements of the European Court of Justice.
Interpreting integration (2): neo-functionalism, institutionalism

Neo-functionalists, by contrast, break with the international relations perspective to
view the European Union as a nascent polity, an infant federal state. At times they have
stressed the autonomy of the integration process to a degree that almost relegates the
nation states to the background. The key concept of early neo-functionalists, such as
Haas, was spillover. As European institutions are given new tasks, they argued, the need
to perform the task well will draw them into seeking new, often unforeseen, areas of
control, thus moving the integration process further along still. Among elites, moreover,
the educative process of working together facilitates further extensions of European
competence. Many events in the integration process may be considered typical of spill-
over. For example, following the completion of the Common Market in 1968, many
states tried to protect powerful domestic lobbies by imposing non-tariff barriers on
imports, a form of protectionism by stealth; that practice generated pressure for the
Single Market, with its new array of common European norms designed to phase out
non-tariff barriers, along with the new European institutional procedures that their
elaboration entailed. The Single European Act, in turn, was viewed as incomplete
without monetary union. Although partly autonomous, spillover is not automatic; it is
helped along, in the neo-functionalists’ view, by leadership from those European
institutions with most to gain from the integration process. This is true in particular of
the Commission, an institution that becomes increasingly powerful and entrepreneurial
as integration progresses, of the European Parliament (EP), and of the European Court
of Justice (ECJ). With Jacques Delors, Commission president from 1985 to 1994, the
Commission reached its ideal neo-functionalist type, entrepreneurial and ready to use
the many opportunities available to press its own federalist agenda. Perhaps the most
obvious evidence in support of the neo-functionalist case for European integration as
a steady, incremental process is the fact that the process has never been turned back:
no treaty has significantly reversed any provision of previous treaties. The neo-
functionalists’ problem, however, is how to explain those periods, like most of de
Gaulle’s presidency, when European integration has been stalled; when the Commis-
sion has been powerless to bully or cajole any further concessions of sovereignty
from the states; or, most recently, when the Commission has even lost much of its
agenda-setting power.
Institutionalists, finally, share with neo-functionalists a focus on the internal forces
driving the integration process. However, where neo-functionalists have tended to view
Europe as a unique institutional experiment, institutionalists are readier to draw on
perspectives of comparative politics, and to conclude that while the EU is not itself a
state, the study of state systems, and particularly those of federal states, can shed
valuable insights in to its functioning. At the very least, argue the institutionalists, the
institutions of the EU ‘matter’, and the integration process cannot be adequately ana-
lysed without taking into account the path dependency arising from their existence:
states are not free to conclude the bargains they wish. Indeed, European institutions,
even if initially constructed on an inter-state basis, have acquired a life of their own
which plays a crucial role in determining how Europe’s business is done. For analysts
like Hix, Europe is neither an artifice of inter-state bargains nor a process sui generis,
but rather a polity which, while far from identical to a nation state, shares enough
characteristics – legislative, executive and judicial functions, a party system of sorts, an
intense and thriving arena of interest group activity, a complex and active bureaucracy
– to be compared with one. A profusion of studies of European policy-making, in areas
ranging from telecoms to transport to agriculture, have focused on the complex processes
of interaction between national and European policy-making systems, and (often) on
the newness and malleability of the networks established. Other users of comparative
politics approaches, such as Marks, have focused on the idea of governance – the messy,
complex, networked process of running a polity, contrasted with older models of gov-
ernment stressing hierarchy and command – and stress the ‘multilevel’ character of
most European policy-making, ranging from the EU to national to regional to local
levels. This, argue multilevel governance theorists, tends to weaken the nation state by
transferring some of its responsibilities upwards to Europe and others downwards to
local and regional authorities, leaving national authorities ‘hollowed out’ to a greater or
lesser extent. The difficulty with institutionalism, on the other hand, is that its argu-
ments about institutions shaping particular balances of power and patterns of path
dependency can be turned two ways; it may just as well be argued that these are even
truer of nation states, all of which are older than the EU, and that these should be
(re-)placed at the centre of analyses of European policy-making.
None of these approaches offers an exhaustive account of the development of what has
probably become the most complex polity in human history. To some degree, indeed,
they – or at least the liberal intergovernmental and the institutional perspectives – are
complementary. Liberal intergovernmentalism offers a stronger account of the big
bargains, struck at summits or intergovernmental conferences, which have periodically
accelerated the integration process – as of the stalemates which have almost as regularly
blocked it. Here, national players, in the form of heads of government (or, in the French
case, the president) are most directly responsible for the outcome. European institu-
tions, and in particular the Commission, may play a role as agenda-setters, but take a
secondary role in the negotiations themselves. By contrast, the more humdrum business
of European governance may be much more profoundly affected than the big bargains
by European institutional actors – not only the Commissioners who table proposals to
the Council of Ministers and who oversee their implementation, but the Commission
officials who draft proposals, the parliamentarians whose power to amend them has
grown since the 1980s, the European justices who rule on compliance issues, as well as
the ever-growing constellation of interest groups that find it worth their while to lobby
at European rather than, or at least as well as, at national level. Moreover, it is at this
level, in the detailed fleshing out of policies on agricultural markets, or competition, or
environmental protection, that the pressures build that may generate demands that spill
over towards further economic and political integration.
Such a division of labour – intergovernmentalist approaches for big bargains and
neofunctionalism or institutionalism for the day-to-day workings of the EU – is, of
course, an oversimplification. European actors, especially activist Commissioners and
Commission presidents, have played major roles as agenda-setters for the major bar-
gains. Governments, on the other hand, have a significant input at the day-to-day level,
with their instructions flowing in a near-constant stream to the member states’ perma-
nent representations in Brussels, and working groups composed of national civil servants
monitoring the activities of the Commission and forming a steadily more important
underpinning of the Council of Ministers.
A final point about approaches to European integration is that they are not merely
academic analyses. The ‘Monnet method’ of European integration – a paced succession
of limited but practical steps, agreed between elites without excessive publicity,
rather than a grander, more comprehensive, more public, but possibly unachievable
programme – was practically predicated on spillover, and indeed on the creation of
strong European institutions, explicitly with a federalist bias ‘above’ the concerns of
nation states. Similarly, an intergovernmental Europe, with the role of European
institutions downgraded to a merely technical and administrative one, leaving member
states firmly in charge both of the integration process and of the day-to-day running of
the Community, has been the strongly preferred goal of member states and politicians
sceptical of the notion of supranationality. Such a member state, for much of the
integration process, has been France.
France and the integration process

France’s role in the integration process has been one of initiation (from the launch
of the ECSC onwards), of acceleration (for example, of the customs union), of
co-operation (notably with Germany) but also of obstruction (most obviously over
institutional questions during the de Gaulle presidency, and most recently over the
constitutional treaty) and of fairly consistent opposition to a fully federal project. The
French have been Europeans, but of an intergovernmental stamp. The Janus face
presented by France to the European project can be explained most simply in terms
of a national view, fairly consistent over time, of benefits and costs; in other words,
something close to a realist account. While such an account is not sufficient, for reasons
that will be explained below, the consistencies in the French design on Europe remain
important. That the French have been able to realise a substantial part of their
goals was due, in part, to their special relationship with Germany. The dynamics of that
partnership have changed since 1989, representing a corresponding challenge
to France’s role in Europe.
France and Europe: benefits and costs

France’s often decisive support for European integration may be explained, in simplified
terms, by four motives: two geopolitical and two economic.
Of the geopolitical considerations, none has been more important than France’s
relations with the Federal Republic of Germany. The European project sought to
break, not only with France’s brief post-war preference for the permanent dismember-
ment of Germany, but also with the diplomacy of the preceding half-century, when
attempts to contain France’s eastern neighbour via more or less adversarial alliances
had failed, both in 1914 and in 1939. For Europe’s founding fathers – for Robert
Schuman, whose native Lorraine had been transferred from French rule to German
and back again twice in a single war-torn lifetime – European integration, from the
Coal and Steel Community on, served to render another Franco-German war materi-
ally impracticable. Their approach was new in that it was centred on practical rather
than merely diplomatic reconciliation. Since then, the Franco-German couple,
reinforced by the Élysée Treaty of January 1963, has been a crucial motor of integra-
tion, as well as, more occasionally, an obstacle to European reforms. But if Franco-
German reconciliation has been an important leitmotif of European integration,
French policy-makers have still been anxious to contain a Germany whose economic,
diplomatic and even potential military strength have remained a source of concern. For
German leaders, meanwhile, Europe in general and the alliance with France in parti-
cular have served as a means to engineer their country’s slow reintegration into the
(Western) international community after 1945, a framework within which to pursue
national goals without national assertiveness. The relationship, which will be con-
sidered in more detail in a later section, has never lacked critics on both banks of the
Rhine, and has never been immune from breakdowns; yet it has clearly survived –
sometimes to the dismay of other member states – well into the third millennium.
The second geopolitical use of Europe for France has been as a diplomatic lever.
France’s past great power status had been based, first on its position as the largest state
in Europe with the biggest population and army, and then on her possession of the
world’s second largest colonial empire. By the early 1960s both of those assets had been
lost. If France remained a great power, it was due to the legacy of the past, materialised
in a permanent seat on the UN security council, and to the possession of a very small
quantity of atomic, and then nuclear, weapons. In that context, Europe offered France
what de Gaulle called a ‘lever of Archimedes’. With Britain turned, until the early
1960s, largely towards its Atlantic and Commonwealth relationships, Germany both
divided and diplomatically disabled by the legacy of World War II, and Italy too
disorganised and the Benelux countries too small to aspire seriously to a leading role,
the diplomatic leadership of Europe was France’s for the taking. If only the Economic
Community could be transformed into a political alliance, argued de Gaulle privately to
his minister Alain Peyrefitte in discussing the Fouchet Plan, France might hope to
‘regain the status she lost at the battle of Waterloo, as the first among nations’, at the
head of an ‘imposing confederation’ that would be dominated neither by the Soviet
Union nor (crucially) by the United States. The French ambition of a strong European
diplomatic and military identity, friendly towards but independent from the United
States and with France playing a – indeed the – leading role, has punctuated the
development of Europe and won a new lease of life with the end of the Cold War.
But for France to have embraced European integration for geopolitical reasons
would have made no sense without the incentive of economic gains. The most tangible
of these has been the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). As Europe’s biggest agri-
cultural producer, whose farmers had, thanks to productivity improvements since
1945, been producing more and more food even as their numbers diminished, France
has been the CAP’s principal beneficiary, and farm exports a significant part of
French foreign trade. The CAP has been more and more the target of attacks on the
grounds of its expense, its remoteness from market disciplines, its environmental costs,
and the fact that it has benefited large farmers not small, producers not consumers,
and the agricultural industry to the detriment of the environment. France remains,
however, a vociferous defender of the CAP, with the generally consistent, if less and less
enthusiastic, support of Germany. The details of France’s addiction to the CAP, and
the policy’s partial transformation since 1990, will be covered later in this chapter.
Altogether more controversial within France has been the broader free-trade thrust
that has been central to European integration from the ECSC onwards. This has
entailed a progressive break with France’s protectionist traditions. Successive French
leaders since 1957 have used the economic liberalism at the heart of the European
project as a lever for economic modernisation within France. De Gaulle’s decision to
implement the provisions of the Treaty of Rome, signed fifteen months before he
returned to power in 1958 and ratified over the opposition of most Gaullist Deputies,
was motivated in part by a simple equation: no great power status without a world-class
economy; no world-class economy as long as French firms remained, as they had
been since the 1890s and beyond, sheltered by tariff barriers. Pompidou, on the eve of
his election in 1969, stressed that France, having opted to liberalise trading relations
with Europe, had no choice but to liberalise the internal economy as well. For Giscard,
the monetary disciplines of the EMS were a necessary backdrop to Prime Minister
Barre’s economic austerity programmes aimed at restoring France’s budgetary and
trade balances while safeguarding the franc’s value against the deutschmark. For
Mitterrand, Europe replaced socialism as the central presidential project after the
economic U-turn of March 1983: as an accepted economic discipline, and as a justifica-
tion for sacrifices imposed. The Single Market, and then the single currency, would
offer a stable environment within which French business could thrive, and a framework
for the construction of a European economic superpower to rival the United States.
Nor was this merely a matter of government rhetoric: by the 1990s, 62 per cent of
French exports went to EU countries, which also held 65 per cent of France’s foreign
direct investments. No member state has a more intense economic relationship with its
EU partners.
Each of these benefits has been amply realised. Europe has given France a strong
and predictable relationship with Germany, an enhanced role on the world stage,
a subsidised market for farm exports, and a regulatory, monetary and ideological
framework for economic modernisation. None, however, has come without a price tag.
The most obvious cost of Europe, from the French viewpoint, is the affront that it
represents to a long-standing tradition of national sovereignty reinforced by great
power status. In this France resembles the UK, another old-established state, another
former first-rank power. The contrast could hardly be greater, on the other hand, with
the case of Germany – a newer state, but above all one with a post-war tradition of
limited sovereignty, defined by division, foreign occupation and federalism. For
Germany, the integration process has coincided with the progressive recovery of much
of the sovereign status lost in 1945. For France, on the contrary, it has proceeded at the
price of sometimes painful surrenders of sovereignty, which French politicians –
beginning with Mollet in the negotiations preceding the Rome Treaties – have sought to
resist or limit.
European institutions are, moreover, quite alien in many ways to France’s dominant
state tradition. Jacobinism supposes a state that is unitary, hierarchical and powerful.
There is little place in it for the checks and balances represented in other polities by an
active judiciary, by a vibrant tradition of local and regional government with embedded
constitutional rights, or by vigorous group representation within civil society. In the
Jacobin scheme, as we have noted in earlier chapters, there is little place for judicial
review; interest groups are regarded with suspicion; and clear chains of command reach
from an all-powerful centre to citizens in the most remote periphery. Although the
practice has been somewhat different, the power of the pervading myth should not be
discounted, especially as Jacobinism reached its Gaullist apogee. Against this, Europe
represents an impossibly (and increasingly) untidy picture: a conglomerate of interlock-
ing and interdependent institutions, an exuberant hothouse of interest group activity, a
world of messy compromises, package deals, side payments, activist and politically
adept judges, and ad hoc coalitions.
These political challenges are compounded by an economic one: Europe’s free-trade
ethos has represented not only a spur to modernisation but also, by the same token, a
powerful threat to the two French economic traditions, outlined in Chapter 1, of pro-
tectionism and dirigisme. The Common Market put an end to the one; the Single
Market sounded the knell of the other. The losers (real, potential, or imagined) in each
case, were not slow to draw attention to their plight: small businesses in the early 1970s,
unemployed miners and steelworkers from the late 1970s, all manner of public-sector
workers from the 1990s, and small farmers and fishermen throughout.
In France’s European heaven, these costs would be minimised even as the benefits
were reaped in full. France’s farmers would export ever-growing amounts of food
with the subsidies of (other, mostly German) European taxpayers. The opportunities of
the Single Market would in no way threaten the protected status of France’s public
services or industrial national champions; indeed, French practices in these areas,
as well as in social protection or taxation, would be uploaded to the European level.
The single currency would ensure monetary stability and low interest rates, ending
the old upsets of the franc–deutschmark fluctuations, but France’s fiscal freedom
would be unconstrained by the Stability and Growth Pact. The core attributes of
sovereignty – defence, foreign policy, justice and home affairs – would remain under
national control, but other member states would accept French leadership in forging
a European identity clearly distinct from an American-led ‘West’ or an ‘Atlantic
community’. Infrequent big bargains would keep the integration process firmly under
the control of heads of state and of government; the Council of Ministers would
continue to run routine decision-making; spillover would be reined in; and Europe’s
characteristically supranational institutions – the Commission, the Parliament and the
Court – kept weak. In short, as observers such as Menon have argued, France typically
seeks a strong Europe – in the sense of having ambitious policies, whether internally or
in relation to the rest of the world – but with weak institutions: the central ambiguity of
French approaches to Europe.
This is not, however, to say that French leaders have always made European policy in
the same way. They have not, for three reasons. First, European policy-making is played
out in a wider international context – one which has made the ambiguity harder to
sustain since the 1980s. Second, they have been beholden to different domestic con-
straints and constituencies, increasingly critical of the European project in the name of
French sovereignty. Third, however, they have not, as individuals, been the passive tools
of circumstance. As we have seen, French presidents when not constrained by cohabit-
ation enjoy greater margins of manoeuvre than almost any West European executives
to place their own stamp on foreign, including European, policy.
Presidential perspectives
Alone among Fifth Republic presidents, de Gaulle viewed European integration, as
defined in the Rome Treaty, as ultimately expendable. The phase of vigorous European
activism of the first four years of his presidency achieved two significant goals – the first
tariff reductions and above all agreement on the launch of the CAP. But having failed
to secure clear French diplomatic leadership via the Fouchet Plan, he shifted his focus
to the wider world stage, and his actions from 1963 served to slow both deepening
(the Luxembourg compromise) and widening (the vetoes on UK entry). In private, he
stressed his indifference to the future of the EEC, and would state in his memoirs that
he had threatened to withdraw France and thus wreck the whole Community if a
satisfactory arrangement on the CAP were not found. For Pompidou, such hauteur was
an impossibility. As a presidential candidate in 1969, he had claimed to offer an ‘open-
ing’ to Europe. In part this was for electoral reasons – he had to attract the support of
pro-European centrists to win – but his reasoning was not merely tactical. As president,
more sensitive than his predecessor to his country’s internal and external vulnerability,
he viewed Europe as a means to protect France’s position in the world, as the necessary
setting for the economic modernisation which, carried to a successful conclusion, could
save France from a repetition of May 1968; UK entry as a means to counterbalance the
growing economic power of West Germany; Economic and Monetary Union as a tool
to protect the CAP from the impact of currency fluctuations. For Dyson and Feather-
stone, Pompidou was a ‘European of the head’, a prudent, reasoned supporter rather
than an outright enthusiast for the European project. This did not prevent him from
sharing much of the traditional Gaullist antipathy to supranational institutions (a view
always encouraged by traditionalists within his own party) and refusing any strengthen-
ing of the Commission or the Parliament; nor from rowing back from monetary union
as its more unpalatable institutional and economic consequences became clearer.
By contrast, Dyson and Featherstone view both Giscard and Mitterrand, unlike their
Gaullist predecessors, as ‘Europeans of the heart’, supporters of the European project
for its own sake. Giscard and most of the non-Gaullist moderate right-wing groups that
he coralled into the UDF were always less prickly than the Gaullists about transfers of
national sovereignty. As finance minister, Giscard had favoured moves to monetary
union as early as the mid-1960s, and the EMS stands as one of the major integrationist
moves of his presidency. His second prime minister, Raymond Barre, had been a
European Commissioner. Neither of the two institutional reforms of his presidency,
direct elections to the European Parliament and the launch of the European Council,
would have been possible under Pompidou. The former was blocked by the reluctance
of Gaullists (including the president) to give a European institution the legitimacy of
universal suffrage. The notion of regular summits suffered from suspicion from
France’s European partners towards anything resembling a big power directory or a
revival of the Fouchet Plan – a suspicion that was much moderated once France had a
non-Gaullist president. And Giscard’s post-1981 record, especially his chairmanship
of the Convention for the Future of Europe in 2002–3, testifies to his continuing
European credentials. At the same time it would be quite false to present Giscard as an
out-and-out federalist. With the exception of direct elections to the EP, the advances
made in European integration during his presidency were either outside the scope of
treaty institutions altogether, or of an intergovernmental stamp (the European Council,
itself only recognised in a European treaty in the Single European Act, twelve years
after its creation). The Giscard presidency saw neither a strengthening of the Commis-
sion nor any challenge to the Luxembourg compromise. Moreover, the president was
operating under greater constraints than his predecessors. Giscard’s main European
partner, Helmut Schmidt, had little time for supranational European institutions; the
wider political environment, in the aftermath of the first oil crisis, did not favour new
European initiatives that would tie the hands of national governments; and the Gaullist
partners in Giscard’s right-wing coalition were quick to attack any perceived sell-out to
Brussels. Even a fully federalist president, therefore, would have faced difficulties
advancing the integrationist project much further.
François Mitterrand’s support for European integration, though underplayed during
his 1981 election campaign, represented one of the few consistencies of opinion in the
course of his career. He had, for example, backed the EMS project in 1978. And it is
hard to imagine a de Gaulle or a Pompidou saying, as Mitterrand did in 1986, ‘France
is our patrie, but Europe is our future’. Mitterrand’s creativity in accepting a large-scale
liberalisation of France’s economy (and in doing so, following a conservative-liberal
consensus which had been growing in the Finance Ministry since the late 1970s), but
harnessing it to a European project that was given the stamp both of neo-Gaullism
(Europe as an economic pole independent of the United States) and of social dem-
ocracy (Europe as a model of the social market economy) transformed an economic
constraint into a political opportunity. At the very least, it was an impressive sleight
of hand; arguably it was the major achievement of his presidency. Mitterrand also had
accomplices. Helmut Kohl, throughout a long chancellorship (1982–98), explicitly
linked his ambitions for Germany to the development of Europe, and sought thereby
to make them as non-threatening as possible. Jacques Delors had left his post as
Mitterrand’s finance minister to become the longest-serving president of the European
Commission (1985–94). Determined to make Europe a model of economic growth and
of social justice, Delors was also keen to use the opportunities offered by the European
agenda – notably the Single Act and EMU – to reinforce the standing of the Commis-
sion generally and of his office in particular. Mitterrand did not share the quasi-
federalist views of Delors, and in common with other European leaders was careful, in
the Maastricht negotiations, not to link Europe’s new areas of competence to big
increases in the Commission’s powers (hence the intergovernmental character of the
second and third pillars of the new EU). But Delors was an important ally because of
his ability to bend European rules in France’s favour on occasion, his skill at reinforcing
French networks in the Commission, and the reassurance he offered the public that
integration was a French project. Like Delors, Mitterrand was in no doubt of the
historic importance of what he was attempting. Of detractors who criticised him for
tying the hands of future generations, he answered ‘They understand perfectly. That is
exactly what we have tried to do; to arrange matters so that no-one will ever be able to
turn the clock back.’
There is a sense in which the Chirac presidency, in relation to Europe, has been
everything that Mitterrand’s was not. The first president of Gaullist family since
Pompidou, Chirac had distinguished himself during the first direct European election
campaign, in 1978–79, by a histrionic attack on the Giscardians as agents of a foreign
power (by implication, Germany). This did not mean that Chirac’s European views
were a throwback to those of the General; indeed, he fought the 1984 European elec-
tions in tandem with the same Giscardians he had denounced five years earlier, sup-
ported the Single European Act, and after much hesitation threw his weight behind a
yes vote for the Maastricht Treaty (which, given the narrowness of the result, might be
said to have saved the whole project). It would be more accurate to say that Chirac has
approached Europe, like most political issues, as a tactician without excessive regard for
consistency, but always with one eye firmly fixed on domestic politics, in sharp contrast
to de Gaulle. In the 1995 presidential campaign, that meant setting himself apart from
his orthodox rival Balladur by espousing a form of left-wing Euroscepticism, question-
ing France’s obligations under the Maastricht Treaty and even calling for a further
referendum before the final transition to the euro. No such referendum was held after
Chirac’s victory, and within six months he had effectively adopted the balladurien
sound-money policies that he had attacked in the spring. With fewer fixed views, Chirac
also lacked comparable partnerships to those of his predecessor. Kohl was politically
weakened towards the end of his chancellorship, and would lose power in 1998 to a
Social Democrat, Gerhard Schröder, for whom Europe was a lower priority. The
replacement of Delors by Jacques Santer as Commission president, meanwhile, sig-
nalled the reining-in of the Commission as a leading actor, a tendency that would be
confirmed when the Santer Commission resigned in 1999 after being investigated by the
Parliament over corruption allegations.
There were many reasons why the treaty negotiations of the 1997–2004 period –
Amsterdam, Nice and the constitutional treaty of 2004 – were more ill-tempered and
nationally competitive than the SEA or Maastricht. They included the inherent dif-
ficulty of institutional reform to accommodate a much larger EU, France’s long
cohabitation of 1997–2002 and the rise of Euroscepticism among many European
electorates in the post-Maastricht period; but to these should probably be added the
absence of a mutually trusting and confident core group of integrationist European
leaders. Chirac’s priorities were often defensive: preserving France’s (near) parity of
representation with Germany on the Council of Ministers, despite Germany’s greater
population (he achieved this, at the cost of much ill feeling, at Nice, though not in the
2004 treaty); ensuring that a Frenchman, Jean-Claude Trichet, would be the second
governor of the European Central Bank; resisting Schröder’s attempts, in the frame-
work of the Agenda 2000 initiative, to cut Germany’s net budget contribution; safe-
guarding the CAP, at least for a few more years. The opening of the debate on a
European constitution, in 2000, saw both Chirac and indeed his Socialist Prime Minis-
ter Jospin cut very cautious figures by comparison with the more radical Germans,
especially Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer. The one area in which Chirac might be
identified as an innovator was in the Common Foreign and Security Policy, where he
seized the opportunity presented by the British acceptance of an EU-linked defence
structure to promote the constitution of a 60,000-strong Rapid Reaction Force dedi-
cated to peacekeeping and peacemaking tasks in Europe. The CFSP remained, how-
ever, on a strictly intergovernmental footing, and the experience of the 2003 Iraq war,
while it found Chirac deeply in tune with most European publics in his opposition to
war, was also a striking display of continuing foreign policy divisions between France
and Britain, the two leading European powers in terms of defence capability. But
Chirac will be remembered above all as the president who called the referendum of May
2005 on the European constitutional treaty, again largely for tactical reasons, and lost it
owing to a combination of an unfavourable context (rising unemployment and an
unpopular government), a vigourous no camp (given the unexpected reinforcement of
Laurent Fabius and a large wing of the PS) and a poor yes campaign that alternated
between silence and arrogant claims that the no supporters were irresponsible and
anti-European.
French presidents vary in their commitment to European integration, but their free-
dom to translate such commitment into practice has also depended on context and on
the backing of other member states. Even de Gaulle’s refusal of supranationalism
during the Empty Chair crisis won the tacit connivance of other governments, reluctant
to see a too-powerful Commission. Presidents who have sought to further integration
have always acted in partnership. Of the partners available, none has been more
important than Germany. That relationship, though now less kind to France than in the
past and less powerful itself in a larger EU, remains crucial to France’s position in
Europe.
The Franco-German partnership: reconciliation, collusion – and decline?

There are three reasons for the centrality of the Franco-German alliance to the process
of European integration. The first arises, simply, from the size and population of the
two countries: with over 60 per cent of the inhabitants of the Six, any Franco-German
partnership was bound to be the dominant one in the original EEC. Even in 2004,
France and (united) Germany still had a very substantial 31 per cent of the EU25’s
population. The second reason is that the partnership represents a union of opposites:
compromises that satisfied these two states would usually (though not, as we shall see,
always) be acceptable to most of the others too. Their oppositeness has had three
dimensions. In terms of institutions, France’s Jacobin tradition has tended to favour
European policies that are intergovernmental and nationally minded, while the
Germans’ federalism at home, combined with the need, under the post-war Federal
Republic, to share sovereignty in order to regain a parcel of it, has left them more
comfortable with notions of federal government and divided or shared sovereignty at a
European level. In terms of international relations, French governments have viewed
Europe as an asset but also a possible constraint in their efforts to maintain France’s
rank in world affairs; for Germany, for most of the history of the EU, Europe has been
a means to regain lost status. France sought to escape dependence on the United States
during the Cold War; for Germany, geography made such dependence both inescapable
and vital. Geography continued to differentiate perspectives in the two countries after
1989, with the Germans more obviously ready than the French to promote stability to
the East by welcoming the countries of Central and Eastern Europe – Germany’s
historic backyard – as soon as possible, and the French more reticent. In economic
terms, finally, French dirigisme contrasted with German ‘ordo-liberalism’: that is, a
form of capitalism in which the state is expected to play a regulatory role, and firms to
accept their social responsibilities, while employees expect to be involved and trusted,
but where state ownership and planning à la française have little place. The German
obsession with price stability, born of experiences of currency collapse after both world
wars and reflected in the charter of the Bundesbank, guardian of the deutschmark,
differed sharply from France’s relatively high tolerance of inflation before the 1980s.
German industry demanded not only European outlets but relatively free world
markets, since non-EU countries absorbed nearly 60 per cent of German exports in
1993; French agriculture demanded protection and subsidy. Any compromise on these
wide-ranging political and economic differences, therefore, would usually represent a
broad enough tent to accommodate the preferences of most other member states.
The third reason for the importance of the Franco-German partnership was that
despite their profound and wide-ranging differences, the two countries have established
and nurtured a special, bilateral relationship within, but distinct from, the structures of
Europe. The symbolic and emotional underpinning of that relationship – reconciliation
– and the fact that each was indispensable to the other for a peaceful and prosperous
Europe, were complemented by other, distinct purposes for each country. For France,
the ‘axis’ meant not only harnessing Germany’s economic power to promote French
leadership of Europe, but also the ‘containment’ of its eastern neighbour, the assurance
that Germany would neither return to its old expansionism (a remote prospect), nor try
to carve out a new sphere of influence in Eastern Europe, nor drift into neutralism or an
accommodation with the Soviet Union. On the German side, the alliance was the
means to achieve a discreet return to the international arena, an avenue to make
proposals without arousing the suspicions of other European partners, a balance to
Germany’s all too dependent relationship with the United States, an assurance that
France would not engage a full-scale rapprochement with the Soviet Union (with which
de Gaulle had signed a treaty of friendship in December 1944).
What Haig Simonian called the ‘privileged partnership’ was enshrined in the 1963
Élysée Treaty. This included provisions for consultation in foreign policy and defence,
on the model of the Fouchet Plan: defence ministers were to meet every three months,
military chiefs of staff every two months, and the president and the chancellor every
six months at least. These institutional arrangements were complemented by the cre-
ation of the Franco-German Economic Council and Defence and Security Council in
1988; from 2003 the two countries even began holding joint full government meetings.
The treaty also provided for reinforced cultural co-operation, from which tens of
thousands of exchange students on both sides of the Rhine have benefited. In 2004,
three Germans even graduated from ÉNA and joined the French civil service, while
Chirac agreed with Schröder to reinforce the teaching of German in French secondary
schools and vice versa in order to resist the growing popularity of English as an EU
language.
The importance of the Élysée Treaty needs qualifying in five ways. First, the institu-
tions have been less important in themselves (indeed, neither the two councils created in
1988 nor the joint programmes on specific policies supposedly linked to the joint
government meetings have worked with the expected regularity) than as the basis for
more informal relationships and networks, both at the civil service level and at the
summit. Second, while this quite weakly institutionalised partnership has never been
seriously endangered since 1963, its vitality has varied greatly according to both
personalities and the international and economic contexts. The latent potential for
Franco-German conflict, noted above, has surfaced most readily during the chillier
relationships between the French president and the German chancellor – de Gaulle/
Erhard, Pompidou/Brandt, or Mitterrand/Schmidt, or to a lesser extent Chirac/
Schröder – and in times of economic difficulty. The failure of EDC in 1954 or of the
Snake in 1976, or the setback of the Empty Chair crisis (with de Gaulle retrospectively
accusing Commission President Hallstein of using his office to promote German inter-
ests) are all cases of such breakdowns. Third, it is also the case that determined opposi-
tion from other states may still block a Franco-German project: the Fouchet Plan was
initiated by France, backed by Germany, and torpedoed by the Benelux countries.
Fourth, it is even true that an excessive focus on the Franco-German tandem ignores
the agenda-shaping capacities of other actors – smaller states (which made much of the
running in early negotiations leading to the Treaty of Rome), or (in the case of the
Single Act), business, transnational networks and even the Commission. Finally, within
Europe, the Franco-German couple has no conventional, institutionalised power; it
neither makes rules nor distributes money.
Despite these caveats, the most successful Franco-German partnerships at the top
have been extremely creative in terms of policy achievement: the implementation of the
customs union and launch of the CAP for de Gaulle and Adenauer (chancellor from
1949 to 1963); the launch of the European Council, directly elected parliament, and the
EMS for Giscard and Schmidt (chancellor from 1974 to 1982); the Single Act and
Maastricht for Mitterrand and Kohl, who met on an almost monthly basis from 1982.
This string of successful joint initiatives testifies to the power of the couple, however
informal, to shape Europe’s agenda and institutions. Hence the (exaggerated) view that
the partnership is an unstoppable motor of integration: that Franco-German initiatives
always succeed. A more modest, and more realistic, version of the same view is that
while the partnership cannot invariably dictate to Europe, it often can; and it also
wields a veto power over major projects, such as large-scale reform of the Common
Agricultural Policy. Either way, France’s special relations with Germany have provided
a formidable lever with which to exercise European leadership.
Relatively uncontentious for the first thirty years or so after the Treaty of Rome, this
view of the Franco-German partnership has been open to challenge since, approxi-
mately, German unification. Three arguments may be suggested: that France’s influence
in the couple has declined; that the couple itself has diverged politically since 1989; and
that the capacity of the couple (as well as of France) to promote its own agenda and to
sideline unwelcome initiatives has therefore diminished.
The decline of French influence within the couple is hard to dispute, at least in
principle. Before 1989, as we will see in a later section, France had already been forced
to make adjustments towards a German low-inflation economic model. German unifi-
cation and the end of the Cold War provoked a more radical shift, to France’s dis-
advantage, in the balance of Franco-German interests noted at the start of this section.
This was not just a matter of Germany’s greater post-unification population, which
would translate in due course into greater representation in the European Parliament
and, under the draft constitution, the Council of Ministers. More important was that
with sovereignty as well as unity recovered at the closure of the post-war European
order (the last Russian troops left the East German Länder on 31 August 1994, and on
8 September the forces of the Western allies left Berlin), Germany had less use for
France as a partner for a return to the international community, and less of the pre-
1989 republic’s need to share sovereignty in order to regain it. In addition, France’s
nuclear weapons were of no very obvious relevance in the post-Cold War world, their
possession therefore a trump card of dubious value, and French claims to European
diplomatic leadership correspondingly less credible. Finally, it could be argued that the
Germans, burdened as they were by the absorption of their own Eastern Länder,
were no longer prepared to pay for the privilege of being led by bankrolling the EU
budget and, in particular, by subsidising French farmers through the CAP. Each of
these points, though, needs qualifying. If France was no longer the only political
heavyweight in the duo, it remained Germany’s main European partner, bound by
decades of close co-operation and – still – by the fact that Germany can not behave
quite as if it was simply Europe’s most powerful member state. In the short term,
German unification – despite Mitterrand’s initial but short-lived public misgivings –
provoked an accelerated convergence between the two countries that gave much of its
shape to the Maastricht Treaty. Chancellor Kohl was persuaded by Mitterrand into a
definite commitment to EMU as part of the price of winning European (and especially
French) acceptance of unification. And Mitterrand himself was readier to accept the
political union sought by Kohl as a means of securing Germany’s links with Western
Europe. A decade later, German attempts to shift the burden of CAP finance through
the Agenda 2000 discussions in 1999 could still be outmanoeuvred by the French, with
strong leadership from President Chirac. Even in 2000, France was still not behaving as
a junior partner.
There are also, however, arguments – aside from the budgetary point made above – to
suggest divergence between the two countries in many policy domains. In foreign policy,
a newly assertive Germany was quick to recognise and then to back Croatia in the
Yugoslavian wars of the early 1990s; France’s lingering sympathies initially remained
with Serbia. Germany, concerned to ensure stability beyond the new eastern border of
the Oder–Neisse line, supported early eastward enlargement; France, alarmed at the
budgetary implications, dragged its (or Europe’s) feet, helping delay the start of serious
negotiations with Central and Eastern Europe till 1999. French attempts to give greater
substance to a ‘social Europe’, based on the Social Protocol signed at Maastricht,
received limited backing from Germany in the 1990s. At Amsterdam, attempts by the
newly elected Prime Minister Jospin (with rather little support from President Chirac)
to build an ‘economic government’ into EU institutions to offset the power of the
European Central Bank were all but rejected by Chancellor Kohl, aside from the
face-saving device of a ‘jobs summit’ later in 1997. More generally, the half-baked
character of the Amsterdam and Nice treaties testified to the failure of the two coun-
tries to reach a strong joint position in advance of the intergovernmental conferences.
At Nice, Chirac let it appear too readily that his main objective in negotiating pre-
enlargement adjustments to EU rules was to preserve French parity with Germany on
the Council of Ministers; he succeeded, but at the cost of bullying Chancellor Schröder
in ways that did much to discredit the Treaty and the French presidency that had led
up to it. The Germans’ bête noir of 2004 was French finance and industry minister
Nicolas Sarkozy, described by Schröder as ‘incredibly nationalist’ for his refusal of
a partnership between Siemens and the troubled French engineering firm Alstom, and
for his support of a raid by the French firm Sanofi against the Franco-German
pharmaceutical giant Aventis. Sarkozy, for his part, took to musing in public about ‘re-
thinking the central core’ of an enlarged EU, and stressing multilateral relations with
other big European states, especially Britain, rather than the face-to-face dialogue with
Germany.
The divergence argument, though, can also be exaggerated. The Franco-German
couple is built, not on perfect harmony on all issues, but on the mutually beneficial
transcendence of conflicts. From that point of view, the Sarkozy affair was no more
than the usual stuff of trans-Rhenish dialogue (of which one variety is name-calling for
the benefit of a domestic political audience). Contrasting diplomatic postures in the
1990s had been resolved with French acceptance of enlargement, military co-operation
between the two countries in the Balkans (notably in Kosovo and Macedonia), and the
common promotion of the CFSP. France and Germany were notably at one in their
opposition to the Iraq war of 2003. The summoning of a constitutional convention in
2002 was preceded by a public dialogue, over the summer of 2000, between French and
German leaders over the future ‘final state’ of Europe’s institutions. Even the two
countries’ budgetary policy converged, in 2003, when they both recorded budget and
public sector deficits of over 4 per cent of GDP, 1 per cent in excess of the limit set by
the Stability and Growth Pact of 1997. Finally, the central institutional reforms of
the draft constitution – the election of a Commission president by the European
Parliament, the election of a European Council president for two-and-a-half years, the
creation of a single post of European foreign minister – arose from a Franco-German
proposal, itself a characteristic compromise between French intergovernmentalism and
German federalism. Whatever the ultimate fate of the treaty, this is not the behaviour
of two countries that are cutting their mutual ties.
Evidence can also be presented for the declining power of the couple. Their bid to
include ambitious provisions for ‘strengthened co-operation’ (or, effectively, a multi-
speed Europe) at Amsterdam was watered down by smaller member states, anxious to
avoid a Franco-German directory in the EU. Six years later, the flagrant disregard of
both Germans and French of their obligations under the Stability and Growth Pact in
2003 led to their censure, first by the Commission and then by the European Court of
Justice. At almost the same moment, the provision in the Convention’s initial draft
constitution that a vote on the Council of Ministers would be carried by a double
majority of 50 per cent of member states and 60 per cent of the EU’s population,
provoked fierce opposition from Poland and Spain, which claimed that the two ‘big
countries’ were downgrading their effective voting rights against the Nice Treaty. After
the failure of the Rome summit in December 2003, it took the election of a new
government of Spain in March 2004, and the raising of the thresholds to 55 per cent of
member states and 65 per cent of the EU’s population, for the revised draft to be
accepted in June 2004. Under this arrangement, the Franco-German couple would
need, to carry a proposal on the Council of Ministers, to win the support of twelve
more states representing a population of 154 million in addition to their own. Similarly,
the veto power of the Franco-German couple should not be overstated; their joint
support for the CAP, under strain in the 1990s, could not prevent its substantial (if
belated) reform from 1999 on. More critically, perhaps, the EU’s liberalising thrust, in
the areas of both competition policy and regulatory policy, challenged both dirigisme
and German ordo-liberalism, more than the leaders of either country could have
expected when they signed the Single European Act and the Maastricht Treaty. From a
neo-functionalist perspective, this is relatively easy to understand: the unanticipated
energies released by the Single European Act, in particular, and channelled by succes-
sive competition commissioners in alliance with powerful transnational business
groups, were too powerful even for the Franco-German couple to resist. With enlarge-
ment, the prospects of doing so will recede further because of the free-market public
policy leanings of the post-Communist entrants of Central and Eastern Europe. Once
again, though, this vision of a declining couple can be exaggerated. It is noticeable, for
example, that the Commission’s strictures on their infringement of the Growth and
Stability Pact were only backed up by a minority of the ministers of the euro zone, and
that the ‘penalty’ paid by France and Germany was not the fine threatened by the
Amsterdam Treaty but the setting-up of a committee aimed at rendering the Pact more
flexible. And the high content of Franco-German ideas in the draft Constitution hardly
speaks of a couple in process of marginalisation.
Compared with the view of a near-omnipotent Franco-German ‘motor’, the current
power of the tandem to shape the future of Europe is indeed limited. It is also the case
that as Europe has enlarged, both France and Germany have engaged in dialogue with
a wider range of partners (France with Britain over defence questions, for example, or
Germany and the Eastern countries over trade). Given their diminished weight in the
Council of Ministers, they could hardly do otherwise, and this greater promiscuity will
complicate the Franco-German relationship. The centrality of that relationship is not
about to disappear, but its continued resilience will depend more than ever on a strong
joint leadership sometimes lacking in recent years. It will also need to rely on both
partners’ success in coalition-building, both at the summit and at the day-to-day
administrative level. It is to the apparatus for the co-ordination and furtherance of
French public policy in Europe that we now turn.
Europe, the French state and French public policy-making

It was, ironically, Chirac who, as Giscard’s young prime minister in 1974, declared that
‘European policy is no longer part of our foreign policy.’ Even thirty years later, he
was not quite right. European high politics remain – fully in ‘normal’ times, and to a
significant extent even under cohabitation – part of the presidential domaine réservé,
and the Quai d’Orsay, France’s Foreign Ministry, still plays a leading role in much of
France’s European diplomacy under the watchful eyes of the Élysée. But France, like
other EU member states, has faced a relentless process of adjustment to Europe: of
creating the tools for adequate representation of the French position in European
institutions and for the transposition of European directives into French law; of
mobilising, not only the structures of central government, but also regional and local
authorities and even interest groups to respond to and shape the widening spread of
European interventions; of negotiating (and where possible limiting) the adjustments
to French public policies required by European legislation. To some extent, this is a
task of co-ordination, of ensuring that ‘France speaks with one voice’: not straight-
forward, but hardly new either to the énarques at the heart of the French executive. In
other respects, however, effective policy advocacy in Brussels demands the honing of
less familiar skills: not only the forceful expression of a coherent national viewpoint,
but the construction of wide-ranging, often loose, coalitions straddling networks in
the Council of Ministers, the Commission, the European Parliament, even the Court
of Justice, as well as the ever-growing number of lobbyists and interest groups
attracted to the European capital. This untidy process poses a challenge to officials
steeped, still, in France’s Jacobin tradition. The policy outcomes, moreover, now
include directives that are less than enthusiastically received by policy-makers within
France; hence, in part, a record of European policy implementation among the slowest
in Europe.
Speaking with one voice? France and European policy-making

Europe’s institutions positively encourage fragmented, sectoralised policy-making. The
Commission, though small compared with almost any national bureaucracy (about
25,000 civil servants), has regularly been described as a collection of baronies rather
than a close-knit organisation; its directorates have often been inclined to deal, if they
can, directly with the officials and interest groups that concern them directly in each
member state. Moreover, while the Commission still enjoys (almost) exclusive rights
to initiate legislation, the legislative role is shared by the Council of Ministers and,
increasingly, the European Parliament, which is itself notably sectoralised. The lack of
congruence in sectoral responsibilities as between the Commission, the Council of
Ministers, the European Parliament and member states is a further problem.
France enjoys clear advantages in negotiating this quagmire. The Republic remains,
despite decentralisation, one and indivisible; subnational authorities play a modest –
though not negligible – role in European affairs compared to some of their European
counterparts. Detailed parliamentary, or indeed press, scrutiny of the executive’s for-
eign policy performance is very limited. Once the presidency has put its weight behind a
policy proposal, no significant voices of dissent are likely to be heard within the govern-
ing majority, at least outside periods of cohabitation. Hence the French talent for grand
European initiatives: they come more easily from Paris because the French president
has greater freedom of action in this area than the prime ministers of most parlia-
mentary democracies. It is true that France’s core executive, like that of any member
state, suffers from interministerial and intraministerial conflicts that are both structural
and contingent, and that these are compounded in France by the twin-headed nature of
the executive, by tensions between officials and cabinets, and by the often difficult
relations between the ministers of Foreign Affairs and of European Affairs, especially
when the latter has a direct line to the Élysée. On the other hand, the machinery of
co-ordination at the summit of the executive, in both the Élysée and Matignon, is well-
oiled and, as we have seen in Chapters 4 and 5, usually works. Even at times of cohabit-
ation, whatever the adversarial relationships between staffs (especially in 1986–88),
presidency and government found a modus vivendi that allowed presidents to attend
European summits in tandem with their ‘adversaries’ from the government – prime
minister or foreign minister – without betraying significant disagreements to their
European partners, whether on the European Council or at the more important of the
meetings of the Council of Ministers. The French ambition – to be at the avant-garde
of integration, but on French terms – is underpinned at the highest levels by reasonably
effective arrangements for policy co-ordination.
Much European policy, of course, is not decided at the summit. Europe’s key legisla-
tive institution (though subject to competition, since the Maastricht Treaty, from the
Parliament) remains the Council of Ministers. However, a mere 10–15 per cent of the
business of the Council of Ministers is really transacted by ministers (and even this
total does not exclude meetings of the Council of Ministers to which one or more
member states, including France, send their most senior diplomat in Brussels, the
Permanent Representative, instead of a minister). The rest is decided, either at meetings
of Europe’s Committee of Permanent Representatives (COREPER), whose meetings
account for some 15–20 per cent of Council business, or at working groups within the
COREPER structure (some 70 per cent of Council business). It follows that the quality
of a member state’s input into Europe will depend significantly on the quality of its
permanent representation in Brussels, and on that of the instructions and briefs that the
permanent representation receives from the member state.
Here, too, France possesses some of the technically strongest machinery of co-
ordination in Europe. France’s permanent representation in Brussels, at some 160
people including 60 Grade A administrators, is one of Europe’s largest – equal to that
of the United Kingdom, smaller only than Germany’s, and staffed with high-level Quai
officials interspersed with experts from each of the technical ministries and, since 1989,
attachés for relations with business. The permanent representation receives most of its
Parisian instructions and briefs from the SGAE (Secrétariat Général des Affaires Euro-
péennes, formerly the SGCI). Established in 1948 with the initial purpose of organising
co-operation with other European states receiving Marshall aid, the SGAE operates
under the responsibility of the prime minister (although the minister for European
affairs reports to the foreign minister) and is the central government organ of co-
ordination of EU business at a day-to-day level. With some 180 staff in 2000, the SGAE
deploys an impressive mix of senior officials from every ministry and corps, though
usually led by diplomats from the Quai (turnover is high, but SGAE high-flyers usually
move on to influential posts elsewhere in the civil service). Its primary task is to supply
officials and ministers in Brussels with negotiating briefs. More precisely, it involves
monitoring the opportunities and threats inherent in upcoming legislation; elaborating
negotiating strategies; assessing possible trade-offs with other member states; ensuring
that French positions are agreed in time for the Council or COREPER meetings con-
cerned, and possibly arbitrating between different positions, with or without the prime
minister’s help, or that of his cabinet, depending on the importance of the issue; and
foreseeing the national legal implications of Court of Justice proceedings. In 1992,
according to Anand Menon, a daily average of five conflict-resolution meetings took
place at the SGCI, preceded by lengthy telephone calls. The SGAE’s divisions cover the
whole gamut of European business (Economy and Finance, the Common Agricultural
Policy, juridical and institutional issues), in addition to others such as documentation,
energy, regional transport, social affairs, trade and relations with Mediterranean
countries.
For the French, therefore, effective European policy-making depends to a great
extent on the success of the SGAE at ensuring that French priorities are clearly formu-
lated and uploaded as effectively as possible to the European level. The SGAE–
permanent representation model for doing this is a centralised one – as are those of the
British and Danes but not, for example, the much less co-ordinated Germans, or other
states like Austria, Belgium, or the Netherlands where the lead ministry on each issue is
responsible for delivering a national position. In France, co-ordination is at a premium,
and most observers agree that the SGAE–permanent representation tandem does its job
well, at least in a technical sense. French positions are, in general, clearly formulated
and consistent across ministries. The permanent representation works to its briefs from
the SGAE – and the SGAE takes account of views from the permanent representation in
formulating them. French officials in the permanent representation have a reputation
as tenacious negotiators, with a preferred tactic of stating and restating the French
position until partners are worn down.
That said, there are eight respects in which the French system has been open to
criticism. First, co-ordination is good but not perfect. The ministries with the best-
established European roles – Agriculture, Finance, Transport, or Foreign Trade – also
have the best informal Brussels networks in Commission, Council and Parliament, and
deal directly with them (informal networks helped keep the system going during
the first cohabitation, when the Chirac government sought to bypass the SGAE that
Mitterrand had left in place, and above all its highly political chief, Élisabeth Guigou).
Individual ministers are also prone to take initiatives without sufficient consultation
within the government. That prime ministers from Debré to Juppé have felt it necessary
to send circulars stressing the requirement that all official French contact with Brussels
should pass through the SGAE indicates the extent to which this rule is honoured in the
breach.
Second, co-ordination is less well underpinned than in the UK by a culture of
information-sharing between and within ministries, meaning that early warnings of
impending measures are sometimes missed. Third, although the SGAE works to the
prime minister, it sometimes lacks the authority to produce a real synthesis between the
positions of different Parisian players. Sometimes, indeed, it simply reproduces them in
microcosm. Disagreements may be resolved by splitting the difference rather than
thinking strategically, or by producing a fairly general brief rather than the more
detailed instructions normally expected in the British representation.
A fourth difficulty is the downside of the French interest in speaking with one voice.
Several observers have remarked that France’s smooth and co-ordinated system of
representation, though very focused on the issues at hand, may lead to inflexible
positions, in which opportunities for coalition-building with other member states, and
the linkage of different sectors to produce package deals, is lost. These practices have
become increasingly important with the spread of QMV on the Council, and with
enlargement; no longer can the Franco-German axis be counted upon to carry the
day; a close knowledge of other states’ negotiating positions, at least, is of great
importance. Paradoxically, the open, flexible, pragmatic and consensus-seeking style of
the Germans, Dutch, or Swedes, however poorly co-ordinated compared to that of the
French, may work better when it comes to building winning coalitions. A series of events
in the early 1990s, including the McSharry CAP reform of 1992, the de Havilland
incident (when a Franco-Italian consortium was prevented, by the Commission and in
the name of competition, from aquiring a competitor), the attempt to agree ‘voluntary’
quotas on Japanese imports in 1991, or the reform of the Common Fisheries Policy in
1993, all showed the weakness of the traditional French style of negotiation. Inflex-
ibility, moreover, is mathematically more effective at obstructing (by constituting a
blocking minority against a proposal) than at achieving (bringing together a qualified
majority); it is therefore unsuited to a country seeking to carry a positive proposal, as
France sometimes does.
Fifth, the French have been criticised as excessively reactive in their approach to
European legislation. Instead of seeking to influence the (often relatively junior) offi-
cials who draft legislation in the first place, French officials in the past tended to engage
with a legislative proposal only after it had taken official form, by which time it had
been on the legislative agenda for weeks or months: too late to secure significant
changes. The same is even truer of the implementation stage. The notion that ‘a phone
call to Jacques Delors can solve everything’, common in the early 1990s among French
officials and their business interlocutors, was probably unrealistic even during Delors’s
Commission presidency, and has certainly become so since.
The sixth area of concern lies in the apparent difficulty of the French in making
strategic linkages. Neither the SGAE nor the European Affairs Ministry possesses a
strategic planning group. The traditional division (especially marked during cohabit-
ation) between routine affairs, channelled through the SGAE, and sensitive political
questions treated by the Élysée, has meant the needless exclusion of the undoubted
expertise of the SGAE in the highest-level negotiations, as well as a lack of sensitivity to
cases where a multitude of low-level negotiations may point to a larger political issue.
This is probably compounded by the lack of frequency – monthly not weekly – with
which France’s Permanent Representative in Brussels reports home to Paris. The low
level of involvement of the SGAE in the Amsterdam inter-governmental conference,
especially at the early stages, has been held up as an explanation for the uncertain
French performance there.
Seventh, it is argued that although the French are good at winning high-level posts in
international organisations generally, and the Commission in particular (a Frenchman,
for example, has headed the Commission’s Agriculture directorate since 1958), they
have been less effective at securing influence in the lower levels of the Commission, to
say nothing of other EU institutions like the Parliament, where other member states
such as Britain and Germany have been considerably more active. There was also, for a
long time, a lack of synergy between France’s Commission officials and the administra-
tive elite in Paris; indeed, it was only in 1990 that ÉNA began to give its future high-
flyers a serious grounding in European affairs. This has changed somewhat in recent
years: for example, France’s permanent representation now has an official dedicated to
the job of maintaining good relations with French staff working in the Commission
(including via a newsletter) and, in liaison with Paris, of securing promotions for them
at the right moment. But experience in Brussels is still less valued than experience in
Paris for promotion purposes within the French administrative elite.
Finally, the French have been slow, not least because of a traditional Jacobin mistrust
of ‘partial’, intermediate interests, to involve interest groups in their European negoti-
ations This has had two drawbacks: the French negotiators bypass not only the expert-
ise, but also the access to Europe-wide policy communities that the groups may have to
offer; and the groups feel no sense of responsibility for any legislation on which they
have not been consulted. Again, there are signs that this has changed, notably with
Prime Minister Édith Cresson’s creation of a Cellule Entreprises et Communication
(CEC), and at the local level of Groupes d’Études et de Mobilisation, including senior
civil servants, interest group representatives, and local elected officials, with the aim of
improving France’s poor record on mobilisation of interest groups concerned with
business relations from the 1990s, but this is not as far as some other member states
have gone.
In short, there is a case for arguing with Menon that France, having been highly
effective at shaping the early European Community to its own requirements, has been
much less successful in adapting to the more complex business of policy-making in the
newer Europe. Here, systems centred on member states have been complemented – even
swamped – by a plethora of new players, whether from the Parliament, the lower levels
of the Commission, the bureaucracy that has developed around the Council of Minis-
ters, and above all interest groups, which national governments have had to incorporate
as best they can into shifting networks and alliances. In this Europe, to speak with one
voice is no guarantee of a favourable outcome.
Implementation: the slow man of Europe?
If the French appear to have lost influence, or at least their former preponderance, in
the day-to-day making of European policy, they have not distinguished themselves
in its implementation at the national level either. This is despite France’s system of
government undergoing a process of ‘Europeanisation’ comparable to those of other
member states. Until the late 1970s, Europe was the business of a handful of ministries
only: Foreign Affairs, Foreign Trade, Finance, Agriculture. Since then, all French minis-
tries (except for the ex-servicemen’s ministry, which has no counterpart anywhere in the
EU) have acquired European sections, whether as divisions in their own right within the
ministry (Foreign Affairs has had a Direction de la coopération européenne since 1993, as
well as a ranking ministre délégué since 1984), or as a spread of units within a range of
existing divisions (Finance may send as many as eight different representatives to SGAE
meetings). When the SGAE gives formal notification of upcoming European legislation
to relevant ministries and (under legislation of 1990–94) to both houses of the French
parliament, it opens a process of debate in which issues of transposition – the reformu-
lation of general European directives into national legislation – are immediately raised
and discussed, with a view to facilitating implementation once the European legislation
is adopted. The SGAE now holds regular meetings with parliamentarians.
Despite these developments, France’s record on the implementation of European
policy is, to say the least, undistinguished. At the end of April 2004, France ranked
fourteenth out of fifteen member states for notification (to the Commission) that
national measures implementing European directives had been taken: only Greece had
a poorer record, while Eurosceptical member states like the UK and Denmark were
among the best implementers. This was, moreover, after French efforts to catch up:
some twenty directives were quickly transposed into French law by decree in January
2004, after a package of fifty had received the same treatment under the Jospin
government in 2000.
The significance of France’s rank order in itself should not be exaggerated; the
difference between an average level of notification of European directives of 98.43 per
cent of the total and France’s, at 97.57 per cent, is after all slight. But five other factors
confirm an impression of French reluctance to implement European law. First, as we
have seen in an earlier chapter, France’s courts were slow to recognise the full import of
the European treaties: it took the Cour de Cassation seventeen years to agree that
European law had primacy over national law, in 1975 (in the Cafés Jacques Vabre case);
the Conseil d’État waited until the Nicolo case of 1989 to come to broadly the same
conclusion. Second, France’s record has been consistently poor since the 1990s. Only
Italy, over the five years from 1998 to 2002, received more formal notices of infringe-
ment of European directives from the Commission than France. No other member
state, over the same period, was referred so often to the European Court of Justice for
infringements: indeed, the total number of French referrals, at 138, stood at two-and-a-
half times the EU average. Third, the French record of implementation has been poor-
est in core areas of EU activity: it is in the fields of competition policy and the Single
Market, the environment (where France has hardly legislated at all without being told
to by the EU, and then only late and unwillingly), and employment and social affairs,
that France’s record has been the furthest below the European average. Fourth, some
at least of the failures to implement have been highly political. The 1979 European
wildfowl directive remained without any satisfactory translation into French law for
two decades because of pressure from the bird-shooters’ lobby and its political wing,
CPNT. There were also delays in liberalising the telecoms and energy markets, in both
of which French public-sector monopolies had reigned supreme for half a century. The
EU directive opening the market for electricity distribution was transposed into French
law in February 2000, a year after the official deadline, and envisaged a fully competi-
tive market for domestic users only in 2007. Even then, the French legislation cushioned
the position of the national monopoly, EDF, by requiring firms operating in France to
respect French public-sector salary and benefit rules. None of this prevented subsidiar-
ies of EDF from competing for shares of the energy market in member states that had
liberalised earlier: in 1998, 48 per cent of nuclear-produced electricity consumed in the
EU was of French origin. Legislation on telecoms liberalisation was only put onto the
French parliamentary timetable in February 2004, years after France Telecom had
purchased the British mobile telephone operator Orange. Indeed, Maire McLean has
argued that French firms have systematically benefited from late liberalisation, exploit-
ing opportunities offered by early liberalisers abroad while resisting deregulation at
home. Fifth, slowness to implement has been paralleled by an occasionally cavalier
attitude to European commitments freely entered into by France, the most extreme
example being the Stability and Growth Pact. In September 2003, as France crashed
through the 3 per cent ceiling on public-sector deficits specified in the pact, Prime
Minister Raffarin stated that ‘My first duty is to French jobs, not to producing account-
ing equations or to solving mathematical problems in order to satisfy some office in
some other country’. Four months later, the Commission referred France, along with
Germany, to the Court of Justice for infringement of the pact.
France’s leaders have regularly presented their country as being at the forefront of
European integration. France disposes of one of Europe’s most impressive (though by
no means unproblematic) bureaucracies at the domestic level and at the domestic–
European interface. French governments enjoy an enviable capacity to legislate at speed
when they want to. Moreover, both politicians and senior officials in Paris have periodi-
cally seen Europe as a lever with which to impose modernisation on what they see as
France’s antiquated state structures – while being able to blame the costs for affected
groups on Brussels. Despite this, France’s record of engagement with the day-to-day
realities of European policy-making often appears more characteristic of a weak state
passively accepting, with ill grace, measures imposed from outside. One reason for this
is that the liberalising thrust of much European legislation since the Single European
Act directly challenges the dirigisme to which successive French governments, both of
the Left and (less intensely, but with a weather eye to public-sector unions) the Right, as
well as large sections of the voters, remain attached. Ideologically, the French notion of
public service can be seen as an expression of Jacobin beliefs in equality through
uniformity: the equality of citizens as users of public services is guaranteed, in prin-
ciple, by the same services being available from a single provider across the national
territory. Doubtless such ideological attachments would wear thin if France’s public
services were believed to have performed poorly. Such has not, however, been the case;
polls in 2001 recorded satisfaction levels of 74 per cent or more for hospitals, postal
services, and EDF and France Télécom. And the penetration of foreign markets by
French public-service monopolies is more often a source of satisfaction than a subject
for political debate in France. In this context, French governments have embraced some
liberal legislation (in the case of the SEA) or accepted it from a minority position (in
the case of some later competition legislation), but have rarely – with the exception of
the Right in 1988 – presented it as a positive good. Nor have they – or French MEPs –
been successful in creating a European rampart against further liberalisation by pro-
moting le service public à la française as official European policy. Attempts to persuade
either the Commission directly or the Parliament to adopt a standard European frame-
work for public services that would allow competition to be limited and subsidies to be
freely given have so far proved inconclusive, as have similar efforts to include precise
notions of public service in the draft constitution.
Discernible in the implementation record, in short, is the impression of a European
agenda escaping France. This impression is considered in more detail in the next section.
France and European policies

Controlling the European agenda is valuable for a member state because it offers the
chance to upload national policies to Brussels – to transform national policy into a
universal model for Europe. To achieve this, as Yves Mény argues, the successful state
will need to be able to engage with the policy at the earliest moment of formulation; to
sell a policy paradigm capable of widespread recognition to the point of dominance;
and to demonstrate a competitive advantage in its own way of doing things. The main
attraction of such uploading is that it is other states, and their companies, that bear the
costs of adjusting to Europe in the policy area concerned. France has successfully
uploaded in the past; it has had more difficulty since the mid-1980s.
This section considers France’s ability to secure Europe-wide acceptance for a
French agenda in three policy areas: agriculture, the complex series of changes involved
in the Single European Act and Economic and Monetary Union, and the Common
Foreign and Security Policy. It opens with the Common Agricultural Policy, a prime
example of successful uploading for France. The CAP corresponded to the interests of
France’s strongest agricultural constituency, the larger farmers who controlled the
FNSEA, and to a French policy model. By the 1990s, however, that model was chal-
lenged and then largely discredited both outside Europe and by many of France’s
partners. French success, with German help, in keeping the CAP alive in its old form
beyond 2000 should not obscure the policy’s longer-term vulnerability. France’s rela-
tionship to the Single Act and Economic and Monetary Union was more complex:
both were sought actively by Mitterrand and his governments, although both arguably
opened up unanticipated and unwelcome consequences for France. The third case, the
Common Foreign and Security Policy, is a case of a policy central to France’s view of
the proper (ambitious) role of Europe, but one in which the French have so far had
great difficulty in imposing their views.
The Common Agricultural Policy

If anything could justify the German description of the EU as ein Französicher Garten
(a French garden), it is surely the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). The Rome
Treaty of 1957 has sometimes been described as a bargain between Germany’s indus-
trial exporters and France’s agricultural ones. That is partly true, though with the
important rider that the CAP, and especially the subsidies central to it, were fixed at a
high level in order to accommodate politically influential German farmers, whose effi-
ciency was lower than that of many of their French counterparts. What is crucial,
however, is that the Mollet government was determined to secure the inclusion of a
common market in farm produce in any treaty (the CAP appears in articles 32–38), and
that de Gaulle was equally resolved on the implementation of such a market. As the
General argued in the memoirs of his presidency, France had enough farmland to feed
twice its population and therefore needed export markets; but for farmers to export at
world prices while simultaneously enjoying a decent standard of living would require
subsidies that no French government could afford to pay alone. Hence the ‘relentless
efforts’ deployed by France in the early years of the EEC – including threats to sabotage
the whole EEC project – in order to secure acceptance by the Six of a common market
in foodstuffs within which the burden of farm subsidies would be shared – in other
words, a Community which maximised France’s advantages as an agricultural producer
while spreading the costs among all member states.
If France’s success in achieving this owed much to de Gaulle’s persistence, it was also
due to the widespread recognition within Europe that agriculture was a unique type of
economic activity, for four reasons. First, memories of wartime and post-war privations
served as reminders of the unique importance of secure food supplies. Second, the rural
world remained both central to the identity of most European states and politically
over-represented in all of them. Third, the market in farm produce is intrinsically
unstable because supply is dependent on the weather and demand is inelastic; this leads
to extreme price fluctuations, with the attendant risks of ruin for farmers or penury for
consumers, unless the market is regulated. Finally, the multitude of small producers
typical of the farm sector cannot respond quickly to changes in demand, of which they
might in any case be only barely aware. For all of these reasons there was a European
consensus that agriculture required intervention to stabilise markets sufficiently for the
necessary investments to be attractive to farmers. Added to that was a liberal argument
that a European market for farm produce would both be more stable than national
ones, and better guarantee improved productivity. This was a highly favourable context
for French negotiators to press for a French-style subsidised and protected agriculture
to be uploaded to the European level. They also found a strong ally in Belgian Foreign
Minister Paul-Henri Spaak, who chaired the committee that drew up the initial
Common Market proposals.
The declared aims of the CAP in the Rome Treaty were to increase agricultural
productivity through technical progress, to ensure decent living standards for farmers
and farm workers, to stabilise markets, to ensure secure food supplies for Europe and to
bring food at reasonable prices to the tables of consumers. The mechanisms were
underpinned by three principles: market unity (farm produce could circulate as freely
within the Community as industrial goods), Community preference (or protectionism
vis-à-vis non-EEC producers) and solidarity (the Guarantee Fund would be Europe-
wide, not national). The last two principles were victories for France, which effectively
required other member states to provide markets for French produce and to pay for the
privilege. The essential mechanisms of the CAP were, first, a system of price-fixing for
each product, centred on the notion of a target price (set sufficiently high for less
efficient farmers to make a living) and an intervention price (a floor at which surplus
produce would be bought up with money set aside for the purpose in a European
Agricultural Guarantee Fund); secondly, a system of variable import levies, corres-
ponding to the difference between the costs of imports and the intervention price,
ensuring that imports could not compete on price; and third, subsidies that would allow
EC producers to export at world prices (usually lower than European ones) while
receiving the same income as if they had sold into Europe.
As it came into operation for cereals in 1967–68, and for a range of other products
(rice, milk, butter, sugar beet, sunflower oil, beef, olive oil, wine) shortly after, the CAP
had significant merits. Above all, it gave European farmers the incentives to modernise
and raise productivity to such an extent that the Six were self-sufficient in most food
products by the early 1970s. The objectives of improved productivity, stabilised markets
and secure supplies were thus rapidly achieved. Moreover, the CAP was for a long time
the only truly common European policy. As such it offered a source of hope for federal-
ists frustrated at the progress of integration, an opportunity for European governments
to collaborate on a day-to-day basis, albeit in one sector, and a paradigm for how joint
European policies might look in other areas.
Yet the dysfunctions of the CAP became equally clear over the decade following its
launch. In the first place, productivity improvements rapidly led to overproduction
uncorrected by market mechanisms: the open-ended promise of the CAP meant that
surplus production was simply bought up by the Guarantee Fund and stored, at the
taxpayer’s expense, in what became known as wine lakes and butter mountains. Sec-
ondly, consumers also subsidised farmers by paying prices above world rates for their
food; in this sense, the CAP objective of bringing food to consumers at reasonable
prices was not achieved. Third, the principle of the single market in farm produce was
undermined by the impact of currency fluctuations and the measures taken to adjust
for them. The notion of single Europe-wide prices for farm products was inevitably
threatened by the devaluation of any member state’s currency, beginning with that of
the franc in August 1969. The corrective mechanisms adopted – ‘green’ currencies, with
different values from those of the everyday currencies they shadowed, for the calcula-
tion of farm prices, and monetary compensatory amounts payable when goods passed
between member states – hampered the free movement of goods, and vastly compli-
cated the working of the CAP, raising its administrative costs and leaving the true
volume and distribution of subsidies unclear to all but specialists. Fourth, the opacity
of the policy’s workings were an invitation to a series of grey practices or straight-
forward fraud under which Community produce was subsidised twice, or imports were
disguised as European goods, in order to attract guarantee money.
The fifth problem lay in the sheer size of CAP funding, which ran at some three-
quarters of the total EEC budget through the 1970s, with no clear indication as to how
it would be controlled as long as subsidies were linked to production and production
was limited neither by market mechanisms nor by regulation. As the budgetary con-
straints faced by member states grew in the 1970s, the open-ended nature of CAP
finance attracted growing criticism. But the EEC’s agricultural spending still doubled –
and more – between 1975 and 1990, against a 48 per cent growth in member states’
GDP. Sixth, the predominance of the CAP in the EEC budget enshrined a system of
unequal financial returns from the EEC. Big agricultural producer countries, especially
France, were net beneficiaries of the EEC budget. Industrial nations tended to be the
biggest net contributors. Within the original Six, this meant West Germany first and
foremost. For the Germans, this was long relatively uncontroversial, once the negoti-
ations of the 1960s had been completed, because of the other benefits that the Federal
Republic drew from the EEC. The British, by contrast, were less tolerant, and Margaret
Thatcher sought a rebate on the UK net contribution within a year of coming to office
in 1979, obtaining it on a lasting basis by 1984. Seventh, the distribution of CAP funds
was as unequal between producers as it was between nations. As long as subsidies were
directly linked to production, the CAP would favour the largest farmers: in the 1980s,
the Commission estimated that about 20 per cent of Europe’s farmers received some
80 per cent of subsidies under the CAP. Poverty among small farmers persisted, com-
promising the farm income objective of the CAP. While farm populations fell through-
out the EEC, Commissioner Sicco Mansholt’s proposal, made in 1970, to redirect
subsidies away from production towards income support for farmers leaving the land
was only minimally followed (just 7 per cent of the CAP budget was allocated to this
‘guidance’ fund in 1995). Indeed, critics of the CAP such as Wyn Grant have argued
that the policy is of less benefit to most farmers than to those in ancillary occupations:
to suppliers of farm goods (machinery, fertilisers and pesticides), to financiers of farm
debts, to owners of food storage facilities, to food processors and last but not least to
professional frauds. Eighth, the CAP increasingly distorted world trade in foodstuffs.
Third World countries, backed by left-wing friends in Europe, attacked the destructive
effects on their economies of agricultural dumping through export subsidies. Europe’s
developed rivals, especially the United States, complained of the CAP’s combination of
export subsidies and internal protectionism. At the opening of the Uruguay Round of
world trade talks in 1985, the United States placed agriculture firmly on the agenda for
tariff reductions, as it had not been in previous rounds of the General Agreement on
Tariffs and Trade (GATT). European resistance to this demand risked wrecking a new
round of reductions and depriving European industrial and service firms that stood to
benefit from freer world trade. The final criticism of the CAP, of which consumers and
green groups became increasingly aware in the 1980s, was of its environmental and
health impact. The ‘productivism’ inherent in the CAP rewarded intensive, high-volume
agriculture with large inputs of fertilisers and pesticides and the attendant ills of torn-
up hedgerows, destruction of animal habitats and exhaustion or pollution (or both) of
water supplies; payments to tobacco growers and vineyards subsidised lung cancer and
alcoholism.
France has been a staunch defender of the old-style CAP. The broad economic
reasons appear obvious. The CAP had enabled France to become the world’s second
exporter of farm produce, processed and not, with exports equivalent to some 75 per
cent of those of the United States by the early 1990s, most of them in subsidised
products such as wheat, meat, butter, or milk powder. It had encouraged the develop-
ment of a world-class food processing industry in France, of which the dairy giant
Danone was the emblem. And even in the 15-member Europe of 1995–2004, France
attracted nearly a quarter of all guarantee revenues, for 15 per cent of the EU’s popula-
tion. But there were other, more political reasons as well. The quasi-corporatist rela-
tions between the FNSEA and French governments – unsuccessfully challenged by the
Left between 1981 and 1984 – and the domination of the FNSEA by large producers,
long ensured France’s devotion to a productivist, high-input model of agriculture that
rewarded large-scale units. Finally, Jacques Chirac’s symbiotic relationship with the
FNSEA, dating from his period as agriculture minister between 1972 and 1974, ensured
that the leading farm union had a more or less unconditional advocate in one of
France’s two leading right-wing politicians.
France could not, of course, carry Europe alone in its commitment to the old CAP.
The Germans, with their own marginal farmers, well-organised in a politically pivotal
lobby, were the key partners, but Spain (the third major beneficiary after France
and Germany), and even efficient and export-driven countries like Denmark and the
Netherlands, also gave frequent support to French positions – or at least, were not
consistent supporters of reform. Of course, the old CAP did not exclude modest
adjustments under pressure. Thus the Fontainebleau summit of 1984 settled the most
pressing concerns by setting up a long-term rebate on the UK budget contribution, and
by limiting production for the first time through the introduction of dairy quotas. Four
years later, a special European Council meeting in Brussels fixed future increases in
agricultural funding at 74 per cent of the overall increase in the European budget, and
greatly expanded non-agricultural regional spending, ensuring that the CAP’s share of
the total European budget would fall to ‘only’ half in the 1990s and roughly 40 per cent
by 2005. Neither reform, however, changed the CAP’s essential characteristics: in the
late 1980s, Europe’s farm policy still appeared locked into a pattern largely dictated by
de Gaulle a generation earlier.
It was unlocked in 1992–93, largely under pressure from the Uruguay Round of
world trade talks organised under the auspices of the General Agreement on Tariffs
and Trade (GATT). At France’s insistence, agriculture had been left out of all previous
GATT rounds of tariff reductions. By the early 1990s, however, it had become clear that
Europe’s trading partners would make significant reductions in agricultural subsidies a
condition of any new GATT agreement. That determined the 1992 reforms to the CAP,
bearing the name of Agriculture Commissioner Ray MacSharry, which in turn allowed
an eleventh-hour Uruguay Round agreement the following year, incorporating a reduc-
tion of 36 per cent in export subsidies over six years. The events of 1992–93 were a
turning point for the CAP, less because of their short-term consequences for European
farmers (indeed, the CAP budget rose and most French farmers enjoyed a significant
rise in incomes up to the mid-1990s) than in two political breaches that were opened. In
the first place, the MacSharry reforms uncoupled some farm subsidies from production
for the first time, by establishing payments to farmers who set aside a proportion of
their land from production. Such direct payments to farmers, it was argued, distorted
trade much less than price subsidies. Necessary to a GATT agreement, this step created
a dangerous precedent for the old CAP, for subsidies once dissociated from the price
mechanism became more transparent and more vulnerable to political attack. Second,
the GATT negotiations, despite the concessions won by the Europeans at French behest
(the Americans drastically scaled down their demands for cuts in farm subsidies from
90 per cent to a third), ensured that European agriculture would no longer be the
preserve of a small and largely autonomous agricultural policy community. Henceforth
a wider group of stakeholders, including European heads of state and government and
commissioners for trade and industry, were to consider agricultural policy as part of
their legitimate concerns insofar as it affected their wider political objectives. Finally,
the French agricultural policy community, if not precisely sidelined, was left fighting a
rearguard action against reforms that it had neither wanted nor shaped nor even really
prepared for. The MacSharry reforms, in other words, could be identified as the
moment when the farm policy successfully uploaded by France to Brussels some thirty
years earlier became officially open to challenge from all sides.
The mismatch between France’s attachment to the old-style CAP and the changing
priorities of France’s European partners continued for much of the 1990s. Post-
Uruguay Round Brussels began to consider a wider variety of approaches to agri-
culture, ranging from the liberalism of countries like the UK, chiefly preoccupied with
cheap food for the consumer, to a range of more recent concerns such as food quality
(a growing worry in the aftermath of a series of food crises of which BSE was by
far the most serious), animal welfare and ‘multifunctionality’, a notion that embraced
the social and environmental role of agriculture. Meanwhile the FNSEA, and to a
significant extent French governments before 1997, remained attached to a traditional
view of the CAP and above all to France’s share of the guarantee budget, and sceptical
of new objectives. The French ability to veto change in farm policy, however, was
somewhat reduced, for three reasons. First, as institutional views of the EU would
predict, what was possible for a single large state in a Europe of six, or even nine or ten,
and unanimous voting became more difficult in a Europe of fifteen where a qualified
majority could change the policy. Second, France’s allies in defence of the CAP were
less reliable, whether because of concerns to limit the policy’s cost before the big eastern
enlargement of the EU or, in the case of Germany, because of a wish to limit contribu-
tions to the EU budget, and an interest in the notion of ‘renationalising’ CAP payments
to do so. Third, France’s own FNSEA-led policy community became significantly
weaker in the 1990s, both because there were fewer farmers (of the 1,017,000 French
farms of 1988, only 664,000 survived in 2000, a drop of a third in twelve years) and
because the FNSEA was weakened within the sector. Support for the alliance between
the FNSEA and the CNJA (the young farmers’ confederation) at elections to Cham-
bers of Agriculture dropped from 62 per cent in 1989 to 56 per cent in 1995 and 52 per
cent in 2001, while votes for the left-wing Confédération Paysanne, the farmers’ union
most critical of productivist agriculture, rose from 18 per cent in 1989 to 27 per cent
twelve years later. At the same time the FNSEA also faced criticism from within its own
ranks without precedent since the 1960s, and from a CNJA increasingly reluctant to
play the role of the FNSEA’s youth branch. Inside the FNSEA, the larger cereal and
dairy producers, increasingly allied to the food-processing industry in a system of
vertical integration, have seen their hegemony questioned by smaller farmers, ready to
contemplate a greater emphasis on quality products with higher added value, and on
environmental protection. These tensions have spilt over into the FNSEA’s links with
right-wing parties, now somewhat more distant than in the earlier days of the policy
community.
This contributed to a period of remarkable fluidity both in Europe’s agricultural
policy and in France’s relationship to it. At the European level, a series of reforms,
undertaken in 1999 and 2003, and planned for 2005, have had a common thrust: to
uncouple subsidies from production, thus rendering the CAP compatible with the
world trade agreement expected to emerge from the Doha Round of talks begun in the
new millennium; to align European prices progressively on world prices, maintaining
only a (low) European floor price for each product; to compensate farmers for losses of
sums received as price supports; but to replace these compensation payments progres-
sively by payments to sustain projects such as rural development, conversion to organic
farming, or the switch of agricultural land to forestation or permanent meadows; to
make subsidies dependent on the fulfilment of environmental conditions; and to give
member states more autonomy in the application of this new ‘second CAP’.
The relationship of French governments to the new CAP divides partly, but only
partly, on Left/Right lines. The Jospin government’s 1999 loi d’orientation agricole
embraced the multifunctional thrust of the new policy, seeking a speedy build-down of
compensation payments and the conclusion with farmers of contrats territoriaux d’ex-
ploitation that would include socio-economic and agro-environmental objectives to be
achieved over five years in return for subsidies. Jospin’s agriculture ministers, Louis Le
Pensec and Jean Glavany, also succeeded (where their left-wing predecessors of the
early 1980s had failed) in ending the FNSEA’s de facto monopoly on dialogue with the
government and broadening access to include the Confédération Paysanne, consumer
groups and even environmental campaigners; significantly, too, the loi d’orientation
won the support of the CNJA, despite its former allegiance to the FNSEA and the
Right. Even Raffarin’s right-wing government, though it quickly suspended the con-
trats territoriaux d’exploitation in favour of a cheaper alternative, accepted a measure
of environmental conditions for farm subsidies, and a transfer of some aid to rural
development; nor has there been any return to the old FNSEA monopoly. At the same
time Chirac, both during and after the 1997–2002 cohabitation, was capable of inter-
vening in European agricultural policy, using traditional methods – deals with the
German chancellor – to secure more traditional French aims. At the first of these
meetings, in 1999, he both succeeded in limiting Chancellor Schröder’s budget-cutting
ambitions and reduced the scope in the revised CAP for the build-down of compensa-
tion payments (and also, therefore, the money available for ‘multifunctional’ priorities).
At the second, in 2002, the Chirac–Schröder tandem agreed, much to the irritation of
Prime Minister Blair, that the CAP should be perpetuated at current levels of finance
until 2013 and that new member states should be admitted to a full share of its benefits
only gradually.
From one point of view, France has maintained an impressive grip on agricultural
policy. The CAP budget remains undiminished (even as the number of farmers, French
and European, continues to fall); France’s share of it remains at a quarter, with East
European farmers being admitted gradually; the scope of innovative provisions for
‘multifunctionality’ has been limited, with the most prosperous farmers in France
retaining the bulk of national income from subsidies even after the basis of those
subsidies changed. Two things, on the other hand, have been lost, in ways that point to a
longer-term transformation. One, at the European level, is the automatic character of
the old CAP; its successor is open for renegotiation every five or six years, in funda-
mental aspects including its overall size and purpose, as well as mere details. At the
national level, meanwhile, the policy community which underpinned the old CAP has
been eroded, whether in terms of the numbers of farmers or the FNSEA’s unity and
hegemonic position. Despite Chirac’s best efforts, therefore, the old elites of the
FNSEA cannot be expected to dominate France’s agricultural policy-making indefin-
itely, nor can France expect to do the same within Europe. France in future years will
face choices over both alliances (the Franco-German tandem, or a more varied group
of agricultural countries including new member states like Poland or Hungary), and the
strategies deployed by such alliances (retaining as much as possible of the old CAP, or
embracing the social and environmental goals of multifunctionality, or accepting the
liberalisation sought by the OECD or the World Trade Organisation (WTO)). The
nature of the choices made will not only determine the shape of French agriculture but,
given that one half of France’s farmers are due to retire by 2015 and may not be
replaced, whether France will retain a significant agricultural population at all. The
outcome will also reflect France’s ability to maintain, under a new form, what was
always the clearest reflection in Brussels of French economic priorities.
France, Europe and the neo-liberal paradigm change

A major external source of transformation of the CAP was the neo-liberal paradigm
shift observed in all developed Western nations from the early 1980s onwards and
outlined in Chapter 1. This change affected France’s whole economy, not just its
farmers. More unpredictably, it transformed France’s relationship to Europe.
Under the first three presidencies of the Fifth Republic France succeeded to a signifi-
cant degree in squaring the European circle. Although the Fouchet Plan had failed,
France’s diplomatic role in Europe, underpinned by the special relationship with
Germany, was second to none, with European political co-operation an opportunity
rather than a constraint. In institutional terms, the Europe of the 1960s and 1970s
remained overwhelmingly intergovernmental. Walter Hallstein’s activist Commission
of the early 1960s had been successfully reined in by the Empty Chair episode. The
Luxembourg compromise safeguarded unanimity on the Council of Ministers. Though
Giscard was the ‘most European’ of the first three presidents, the development of the
European Council during his presidency had given a further intergovernmental tilt to
the institutional balance, only partially compensated by the direct election of the Euro-
pean Parliament. France’s own institutions remained relatively unaffected by Europe.
The EEC remained a division of foreign policy, and the primacy of European law over
the law of member states was not yet fully recognised within France. For most of the
French, this was a low-impact Europe. Over its first generation, Europe’s direct effect
was felt in few lives outside the thinning ranks of French farmers, in few ministries
outside the Quai d’Orsay and Agriculture.
The EEC’s economic record, too, conformed broadly to French objectives. The CAP,
which suited France’s governing elites very well, was the only truly European policy.
More broadly, the disappearance of customs barriers had furthered the type of eco-
nomic modernisation which the Gaullists would have sought anyway. What was
important for de Gaulle, and above all for Pompidou both as prime minister and as
president, was to marry France’s dirigisme to the new European economy: to accelerate
the construction, often through state-sponsored mergers, of ‘national champion’ firms
that would compete at the highest level in a tariff-free Community and in the wider
world.
By 2004, on the other hand, France had accepted or even actively promoted a series
of transfers of political sovereignty and of economic autonomy that would have been
unthinkable to the policy-makers of the Gaullist era. Europe’s institutions had been
given a significant supranational tilt by the general extension of QMV on the Council
of Ministers, and of the co-decision procedure involving a greater role for the European
Parliament; and France’s long-standing parity of representation with Germany in the
Council of Ministers had been signed away (subject to ratification) in the European
Constitution of 2004. The core attributes of sovereignty into which France had
accepted extensions of European intervention included immigration and asylum policy
under the Maastricht and Amsterdam treaties; and the invasive competition policy of
the Single European Act, pregnant as it was with dangers to France’s public services
and nationalised industries. EMU embodies the surrender of monetary sovereignty; a
measure at least of budgetary autonomy was lost with the Stability and Growth Pact.
France’s supreme judicial bodies, the Cour de Cassation and the Conseil d’État, had
both accepted the primacy of European over national law. The low-intensity, inter-
governmental Europe of the first generation gave way to a Europe whose impact on the
government machine was no longer limited to the ministries of Foreign Affairs,
Finance, and Agriculture, but extended to every government department and to
regional and local authorities as well; a Europe that engaged French interest groups,
divided parties and even, on occasion, mobilised citizens, permanently upsetting the
delicate equilibrium hitherto achieved. This qualitative leap in the integration process
from the mid-1980s had multiple causes, including the neo-liberal paradigm shift; the
end of the Cold War and the resulting transformation of France’s diplomatic position,
and especially of Franco-German relations, noted above; successive enlargements; and
– for the constancy of French policies should not be overstated – the decisions of
France’s own leaders since the 1980s, all of whom have drawn inspiration from the
Gaullist approach to Europe rather than following it in every detail.
But the process would be inconceivable without the fallout from the economic crises
of the 1970s. These crises had two main origins: the release of inflationary pressures
resulting (largely but not wholly) from the oil price rises of 1973–74 and 1979–80; and
the break-up, in August 1971, of the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates
between the currencies of the developed capitalist world. These developments called
into question France’s dirigiste model, and brought in their train a switch to economic
orthodoxy that found expression in the European initiatives of the 1980s.
Dirigisme had served France well for most of the post-war boom years of the trente
glorieuses. French GDP growth regularly exceeded rates in the UK and the United
States by 1 or even 2 per cent, the OECD average by a smaller one, and even (narrowly,
at the end of the period) Germany’s. But two characteristics of dirigisme made France
especially vulnerable to the crisis. The first was what Élie Cohen has called the inflation-
ary social compromise. France’s growth in the trente glorieuses was, in a real sense,
financed by inflation, as state-controlled banks paid negative real interest rates to savers
and supplied cheap capital to firms whose debts then shrank from year to year in real
terms. The loss of competitiveness resulting from inflation triggered periodic monetary
adjustments within the Bretton Woods system: there were eight devaluations between
1944 and 1958, and while de Gaulle held the franc’s value for a decade, the higher wage
costs conceded in May 1968 forced him into desperate measures (including tough
exchange controls) to hold its parity the following November before leading to a new
devaluation under Pompidou in August 1969. Secondly, Cohen has characterised diri-
giste France as ‘capitalism without capitalists’. France’s national champions, whether
state-owned or not, were seriously under-capitalised by Anglo-Saxon standards. They
prospered thanks to the efforts of the state, which paid for research in publicly owned
laboratories, supplied low-interest loans (to favoured firms) through the big publicly
owned banking sector, placed domestic orders with attractive advances (through state-
owned firms such as Air France for Concorde, the SNCF for the high-speed train, or
Électricité de France for the nuclear industry), prospected foreign markets through the
Quai d’Orsay, guaranteed major export deals such as arms contracts or big civil engin-
eering projects, and – in the crisis years after 1974 – stood ready with a bail-out for
champions in trouble. Meanwhile, the tissue of small and medium-sized firms, increas-
ingly important to the economies of Germany or Italy, had suffered underdevelopment
under dirigisme. Officially viewed as backward and narrowly protectionist, they were
increasingly marginalised from government policy-making and from its benefits (hence,
in part, the attraction of militant small business groups like Gérard Nicoud’s
CID-UNATI); by the late 1970s, France’s small and medium firms (with fewer than
500 employees) received a total of 3.5 per cent of state subsidies for research and
development.
Third, as a country without significant natural energy resources of its own, France
immediately suffered the consequences of oil price rises in terms of inflation (up to
15 per cent in 1974), the balance of external trade (a surplus of $773 million in 1973
became a deficit of $3.9 billion in 1974), and the demand for public spending (which
rose from 35 per cent to 43 per cent of GDP in the Giscard presidency). Fourth,
devaluation became a vastly riskier tool of economic adjustment to inflation, both
because, in the post-Bretton Woods world, exchange rates were fixed by markets rather
than by governments, and because any devaluation would further increase the cost of
imported oil and gas, which was paid in dollars, with the risk of a self-perpetuating
spiral if no effort was seen (by the markets) to be made to bring inflation under control.
Fifth and finally, in the aftermath of May 1968, governments were highly reluctant to
place additional burdens on wage-earners. The effect of May 1968 was compounded by
Giscard’s very narrow victory over the Left in 1974, and by the poor relationship
between the two major parties of the Right – each keen to blame the other for
unpopular measures – thereafter. Real wages continued to rise through the Giscard
presidency, with the costs of adjustment being borne by business (employers’ social
security costs rose by the equivalent of 3.7 per cent of total French GDP), and by the
unemployed.
An obvious life raft in this newly dangerous environment was improved monetary
co-ordination with European partners, already planned in the 1971 Werner Report on
monetary union. The attraction of the Snake and, later, of the EMS, was that by
linking European currencies to one another, with modest room for fluctuation, they
offered some of the security of Bretton Woods, albeit in a single region of the
developed capitalist world. Their drawback, noted by Pompidou as early as 1971, was
that they tied the French franc to Europe’s strongest currency, the deutschmark, and
thus to a monetary guardian, the Bundesbank, whose constitutionally defined anti-
inflationary mission was at the polar opposite to France’s post-war economic practices.
The cost of (relative) exchange rate stability, therefore, would be the partial or total
subordination of French economic and monetary policy to Bundesbank requirements:
in other words, a concerted attempt to tackle inflation even at the price of high real
interest rates, low or zero growth and rising unemployment with the political
unpopularity that would result. The reluctance of France’s governments to go down
this road is illustrated by France’s erratic record in the Snake, with the French franc in
at the start in 1972, out in January 1974, back in in July 1975, and finally out in March
1976. France’s record in the EMS was more consistent, but Barre’s attempts to bring
inflation down after 1978, although they brought him, and ultimately Giscard,
unpopularity in plenty, were undermined by the political legacy of the inflationary
social compromise.
The crisis of March 1983 was caused by the collision between the French tradition of
inflation and devaluation – accelerated but not initiated by the Socialists’ victories of
1981 – and the German-dominated anti-inflationary logic of the EMS. With the franc
under intense pressure from the markets, despite two devaluations in 1981 and 1982,
Mitterrand faced a stark alternative, to leave the EMS or to seek another monetary
realignment within it. Each choice entailed much broader implications. Advocates of
an exit from the EMS suggested a whole alternative economic strategy based on pro-
tectionism, for example by invoking the emergency clauses of the Rome Treaty that
allowed temporary protectionist measures in the event of a balance-of-payments crisis.
In the long term, this would barely have been compatible with continued EEC member-
ship. The choice (which Mitterrand eventually favoured) to devalue but to remain
within the EMS, on the other hand, effectively required convergence with West German
economic and monetary policy. This was all the more the case when Mitterrand sought
France’s third monetary realignment in three years, as he aimed to achieve this by a
small devaluation of the franc (limiting the franc’s fall against the dollar, and thus the
rise in imported energy prices) coupled to a revaluation of the deutschmark and other
strong European currencies like the Dutch florin. The Kohl government’s conditions
for accepting such a realignment were that France should adopt effective measures on
interest rates and public spending that would reduce inflation and limit the need for
further devaluations. The outcome of the March 1983 crisis – reinforcing, it is true, a
growing neo-liberal conviction among France’s administrative elite, starting with the
Trésor division of the Finance Ministry – was to develop a consensus, across parties
and governments of Left and Right, in favour of low inflation and a strong franc. But
cutting inflation removed one of the key motors of France’s post-war economic system
by depriving major French firms of their old sources of inflation-fuelled finance.
Henceforth they would begin to seek capital on international markets – with the
encouragement of governments, concerned to keep their own spending down. Reforms
to the (formerly sluggish) Paris bourse were undertaken within a year of the March
crisis to facilitate this; the privatisations undertaken by the 1986–88 Chirac govern-
ment, though still effected within a highly controlled, statist framework, represented a
big rapprochement between French firms and international capital markets.
The developments in France’s European policies that followed from the 1983 crisis
were both greater and slighter than might have been expected from the immediate
turning point. They were greater because Mitterrand chose to embrace Europe, instead
of socialism, as the centrepiece of his policy: no member state was more instrumental
than France in accelerating the pace of integration in the decade after 1983. They were
slighter because, although the anti-inflation policy removed one mainspring of diri-
gisme, no government attempted or wished to sweep the whole structure away. No
member state was more concerned than France to preserve state-owned monopolies in
public services, or to retain the power to bail out major firms in difficulty, or to head off
moves towards a fully federal Europe.
French priorities in Europe under Mitterrand, in short, remained as ambiguous as
those of earlier presidencies. But in the changed post-1983 context, the stakes of treaty
modifications to achieve further integration were higher. Among possible projects, the
Single Market was the idea for a relaunch of Europe that commanded the widest
support among member states in the mid-1980s, certainly more than Delors’s ideas
about Social Europe. General European concerns about non-tariff barriers were com-
plemented by more specifically French ones about German barriers squeezing out
French goods, as well as by a belief that a unified European market would reinforce the
position of European-based multinationals against American competition, and a wish
to further free trade in financial and other services – this in the name both of French
exports and of French access to capital markets. Remarkably, Mitterrand’s government
supported the goal of QMV on internal market matters, an acknowledgement of the
slow progress made on the Single Market since it was first tabled in the EEC in 1968. In
order to achieve these goals, however, the French had to accept encroachments on
political and economic sovereignty. Institutionally, the most obvious change was
the introduction of QMV, which itself set in train a significantly more supranational
legislative process with a greater role for the European Parliament. Economically, the
280-plus Single Market directives adopted by the end of 1992 included restrictions on
common, long-standing French practices – state-promoted mergers producing monop-
oly firms, government subsidies to national champions, anti-competitive public
procurement policies. The SEA provisions did not, it is true, affect everything: tele-
communications and energy, for example, were initially left out. And there was always
room for exceptions; with the SEA in force for a decade, EU member states were still
subsidising economic activities – industry, services, agriculture, transport and mining –
to the tune of 49 billion euros for the year 2002. But this figure had dropped by
27 per cent in five years, as the Commission scrutinised aid projects and cut them,
refused them, or subjected them to conditions. The agreement in 1995 to a French
government subsidy to Air France was given on the understanding that there would be
no more. The historically large Crédit Lyonnais bail-out package of 1996 was made
conditional on the bank’s privatisation. In 2004, partly in response to the government
help given to the troubled engineering firm Alstom (in the shape of the purchase of 31.5
per cent of Alstom’s shares by the state), the Commission fixed as a general rule that
any major firm should pay half the cost of any restructuring package itself before
government aid became acceptable. In the long run, then, the existence of a competition
policy with teeth, the inevitable corollary of the Single Market, represented a direct
challenge to dirigisme.
Maastricht was at the same time a logical extension of the Single Market, with
monetary union supported from the late 1970s by a small but influential intellectual
community; a more specifically French initiative aimed at softening some of the rigours
of the EMS; and a German project intended to reassure European partners in the wake
of unification, even at the sacrifice of the deutschmark. Like the SEA, it entailed
substantial costs and adjustments for France. For post-1983 French governments, EMS
membership had meant being tied to the anti-inflation mission of the Bundesbank (or
Buba). The Buba translated its mission into policy with an eye, not to wider European
conditions, but to events in Germany – which meant, after 1989, a fierce struggle to
master the highly inflationary consequences of unification and of the Kohl govern-
ment’s political decision to accept East German marks at parity with the deutschmark.
And where the Buba led, notably in the matter of interest rates, other, weaker, curren-
cies of the EMS had to follow – with an added premium on the rate to ward off a new,
and always unpredictable, attack from the markets. According to the leading French
economist Jean-Paul Fitoussi, real French interest rates ran at 5–8 per cent for over a
decade. This was a formidable constraint on investment, growth and employment. For
eighteen years after 1983, joblessness never fell below 9 per cent of the French labour
force. It was the voters’ main worry and the single most important cause of their
propensity to throw out governments whenever they had the chance. If only, reasoned
Mitterrand and his Finance Minister Bérégovoy, French bankers could sit alongside
German and other colleagues at the table where Europe’s monetary policy was decided,
the verdict would be given with at least some thought to conditions in France. But that
could only be achieved by monetary union. And the Germans would not concede
monetary union – the dilution of post-war Europe’s most successful currency
with others of distinctly less promising pedigree – without stringent conditions. The
European central bank, like the Bundesbank, must be quite free from political control.
And to adopt the single currency, member states would need to respect the Maastricht
convergence criteria – ceilings on inflation, interest rates, public-sector borrowing
(no more than 3 per cent of GDP in any one year) and public-sector debt (not more
than 60 per cent of GDP in total) – and its perpetuation as the Stability and Growth
Pact at Amsterdam in 1997.
From the French point of view, then, the two big European initiatives of the 1980s,
the Single Market and EMU, were part of a wider process of adjusting to the new,
liberal, political economy as it took shape in the world of the late 1970s and beyond.
For that reason it is hard to separate the specific effects of European policies from what
might in any case have been undertaken at national level to respond to the constraints
of a global marketplace. That process has not been the disaster predicted by its gloomi-
est opponents. Indeed, the remarkable improvements in French business competitive-
ness over the period since 1983, analysed in detail by observers such as McLean and
Schmidt, is reflected in a number of economic indicators. Over the eleven years preced-
ing the entry into force of the Single Market on 1 January 1993, France had run an
average trade deficit equivalent to 0.93 per cent of GDP; the eleven years from 1993
to 2003, on the other hand, saw an average trade surplus of 1.79 per cent. If this does
not prove a relationship of cause and effect (falling oil prices also helped), it at least
indicates that France was capable of holding its own in a free-trade Europe. Similarly,
France enjoyed three years of unusually strong growth – above 3 per cent – in the
period immediately before and after the final fixation of European exchange rates in
January 1999.
It is also clear that an element of flexibility was in practice built in both to many
Single Market provisions and to the Stability and Growth Pact. We have already noted
that the tendency of the Commission has been to bear down steadily on anti-
competitive practices rather than to halt them at a stroke. Its rulings have certainly
affected individual cases (though the Commission has never forced a major French firm
into bankruptcy by refusing an aid package), but since French governments had them-
selves taken a much more restrictive attitude to bail-outs after 1983, it is uncertain that
the Commission had a major impact on the policy in general. Competition policy has
also, as noted above, had a limited effect on French public services, with France comply-
ing late but benefiting from open markets in other member states. Similar remarks can
be made about the overall impact of the Maastricht convergence criteria and then the
Stability and Growth Pact. In the eleven years from 1981 to 1992, France’s public-
sector debt grew from 21.8 per cent of GDP to 39.6 per cent; by 2004, it had reached
64.7 per cent of GDP. In the Maastricht negotiations, the French had ensured that any
decision to fine a member state for infringement of the criteria would be politically
determined; when (with Germany) they infringed the criteria (on both deficits and debt,
in 2003), they duly escaped the fines. If Maastricht has acted as a straitjacket on
government borrowing, it has been a rather loose one – probably not much tighter than
basic financial prudence would have imposed.
Despite this record, there are three reasons why the SEA and Maastricht signalled a
transition from a low-impact Europe to an EU which was seen to have a direct – and
often negative – effect on the lives of all French citizens. The first is the economic
climate in which the two measures bedded down as central components of French
economic policy. Between 1990 and 1997, French growth rates averaged a mere 1.4 per
cent, including negative growth (−0.9 per cent) in 1993. Over the same period, France
lost half a million jobs; even after the good years 1998–2001, total employment growth
over the thirteen years 1990–2003 was a modest 6.8 per cent. In industry, employment
fell from 4.3 million in 1990 to 3.6 million in 2003, an almost continuous fall amounting
to 16 per cent. This record had a variety of causes, including a world recession in the
early 1990s, affecting Britain and the United States as well as the euro zone states, and
the long-term tendency of developed Western states to shed industrial jobs and to
replace them with employment in the tertiary sector. Nevertheless, France’s economy
suffered all the more because this transition towards the euro was marked by a
paroxysm of the franc–deutschmark relationship, as the Bundesbank imposed high
interest rates on Germany to damp down the inflationary consequences of unification
and the other central banks of the future euro-zone had to follow, with a further
premium, or risk devaluation and the destabilisation of the euro project. It was this
setting of real interest rates, in the name of the franc fort, at levels without precedent
since 1945, and the resulting low growth and high unemployment, that fixed the associ-
ation between Europe and the gloom of the French economic climate in the early to
mid-1990s.
The second reason for the wider impact of the SEA and Maastricht was political.
The attacks on EMU of left-wing and right-wing Eurosceptics are resumed in a single
phrase, Jean-Pierre Chevènement’s claim that ‘the choices of Maastricht are the choices
of unemployment’. Chirac’s announcement, in October 1995, that France required an
austerity plan to cut deficits ‘if only to be able to join the single currency, to which we
are committed’ was an equally striking example of the unenthusiastic endorsement of
EMU by a notionally ‘favourable’ leader (who had, it is true, run a distinctly Euroscep-
tical presidential campaign six months earlier). In both cases, ‘Brussels’ was trans-
formed into a foreign scapegoat for domestic austerity policies – as it was by Raffarin
in 2003.
Third, the neo-liberal constraints of the SEA and Maastricht were never balanced to
any commensurate degree by the ‘social’ Europe, or indeed the European industrial
policy, sought by French governments, especially of the Left. This is not to say that
neither has existed. EU regulations, especially under the European Social Charter,
launched in 1989 and incorporated into the Treaty of Amsterdam in 1997, cover a range
of employee concerns including health and safety, maternity benefits and parental
leave, the organisation and limitation of working time, and the rights of temporary,
disabled, and young employees. But the social policy has been very far from generalis-
ing the French provisions on the working week, the minimum wage, social protection,
or redundancy provisions at the European level. Indeed, the European Council’s special
meeting on employment at Lisbon in March 2000 set out an agenda for raising
employment levels in the EU that reflected neo-liberal (especially British) approaches in
both form and content: not regulation but loose voluntary co-operation between mem-
ber states, not ambitious programmes of European public works, a favourite theme of
Delors, but the emphasis on training and labour market flexibility preferred by the Blair
government. European industrial policy has suffered a similar fate. True, an array of
European-level research projects has been set up with French backing – Eureka and
Race (advanced telecommunications), Euram and Esprit (information technology),
Brite (industrial technology). Airbus, the Toulouse-based aerospace giant, is a prime
case of a ‘European champion’ firm able to confront its American rival Boeing on equal
terms. But Airbus is a unique case: no other enterprise, nurtured (and subsidised) by the
public authorities on the French model, has risen to carry the torch of national cham-
pions to a European level. The research programmes have failed to create or safeguard
any future for a European electronics or computer industry. And European competition
policy has on occasion infuriated the French by preventing (in the case of de Havilland,
where a Franco-Italian aerospace consortium was prevented from making a further
acquisition in 1991) or hindering the development of major European groups.
Like the earlier treaties, the SEA and Maastricht were agreements by European
leaders to tie their hands. Both were new departures in the firmness of their commit-
ments. Both were also, however, in close continuity with earlier policies. The SEA was a
deepening of Common Market provisions in a changed context. The EMU project had
been discussed since the 1960s and was a extension of France’s attempts to escape from
the worst constraints of linking the franc to the deutschmark. Both had consequences
that were substantially unforeseen or at least underestimated at the moment of agree-
ment: the competition policy for the SEA, and the combination of high German-led
interest rates and a world recession with the implementation of the convergence criteria
for Maastricht. Neither was flanked by the type of social or industrial policy that the
Social Charter or the various research programmes had appeared to promise, despite
the attempts to further them of successive French governments, especially of the Left.
As the EU impinged on the lives of the French in the 1990s, therefore, it was in a highly
restrictive role, as an entity that enforced competition policy or demanded government
spending cuts or tax increases in the name of an abstract liberal orthodoxy that was
easy for its opponents to attack and hard for its advocates to justify. Europe as the
creator of new social rights or the motor of new world-class industries was far less
visible, either on the ground or in political discourse. Nor did the EU offer a focus of
loyalty for its ability to cut a distinctive European figure in the world; the early steps
towards a European foreign policy remained deeply hesitant.
The Common Foreign and Security Policy

French governments have consistently aspired, certainly under the Fifth Republic and
even, to a degree, under the Fourth, to a measure of strategic independence from the
United States. This is most readily explained in terms of a desire never to repeat
France’s total dependence, during World War II, on American military power for the
liberation of national territory: an experience that contrasts radically with the British
experience of partnership with the United States, albeit on increasingly unequal terms,
over the same period. The notion of a ‘Euro-Atlantic world’, common currency in
Britain or Germany, has enjoyed only minority recognition in France. France’s aspir-
ation to independence found expression in the launch of an atomic bomb programme
in 1954, and its amplification into the development of a full, if small, nuclear arsenal
during the de Gaulle presidency; and in the progressive withdrawal from the NATO
integrated command between 1959 and 1966.
The most potentially attractive framework for the furtherance of France’s aspiration,
however, was Europe. Even a nuclear-equipped France could never expect to rival the
superpowers’ military strength. But a European defence structure led by France might
reasonably aim to stand up to Washington (and to Moscow). This was the sense of the
Fouchet Plan of 1961–62: a European foreign and security policy, centred on and led
from Paris, linked to the Atlantic alliance but with a stronger and more independent
voice within it. The plans were rejected by France’s partners for two (well-founded)
reasons: they (and especially the Benelux countries) feared both a Franco-German
directorate over the nascent EEC and (especially with the continued exclusion of the
UK) a loosening of Western Europe’s ties with NATO. Even the residual treaty with
Germany, signed in 1963, was only ratified by the Bundestag with a rider (included after
vigorous lobbying from the United States) that the treaty would in no way affect
Germany’s commitment to NATO; for the West Germans, placed in the front line of
the Cold War, the United States would always be preferred to France as an insurance
policy against a Soviet move West.
The setback over the Fouchet Plan meant, not that de Gaulle scaled down his aspir-
ation to independence, but that Europe henceforth formed no part of it. As a nuclear
power outside the NATO integrated command (though within the Atlantic Alliance,
and maintaining basic working relations with NATO through the Ailleret-Lemnitzer
agreements), with permanent membership of the United Nations Security Council,
good relations with non-aligned states, and a sphere of influence in its former African
colonies, France under de Gaulle and after was still able to play a unique world role:
as frequent critic of American foreign policies as they affected the Third World, as
occasional broker between East and West (the Vietnam peace talks opened in Paris in
May 1968) and as robust supporter of the United States at moments of Cold War
confrontation – over Berlin in 1961, over Cuba in 1963 and over Euromissiles in the
early 1980s. To this world role, Europe was of secondary importance. This was true
even after the foundations of European political co-operation (EPC) were laid at The
Hague in 1969 (significantly, after de Gaulle’s resignation). Tested in the Yom Kippur
War and the 1973 oil crisis that followed, EPC was wholly unable to prevent European
states from scrambling to secure their own oil supplies with whatever means lay to
hand, and with little more than formal reference to a joint European policy. When
President Giscard d’Estaing met the Soviet President Brezhnev in Warsaw in 1980
during the last downturn of the Cold War, he barely informed his own foreign minister,
let alone his European partners.
The end of the Cold War changed this largely ornamental status of political co-
operation. The events of 1989–91 presented Western Europe with a series of opportun-
ities and threats that appeared to point, in many ways, to the type of European foreign
and defence policy that France had long sought. In the first place, the end of the Soviet
threat removed acute dependence on the United States of the West European countries,
West Germany first among them, for their security; indeed, the ensuing decade would
see the American troop presence in Europe drop from 300,000 at the height of the Cold
War to 100,000. Europeans could henceforth envisage, in principle, an independent
future for defence and foreign policy. There was even an organisation apparently ready
to take on this role: the Western European Union (WEU), created in 1948 as an alliance
between the UK, France and the Benelux countries, eclipsed by NATO the following
year, briefly revived in 1955 as a vehicle to accommodate West German rearmament,
but largely dormant from then till the mid-1980s. For some Europeans, the WEU
appeared an altogether more attractive organisation for collective security than NATO,
whose purpose might be seen to have ended with the Soviet threat; and it was altogether
too easy, in the aftermath of 1989, to underestimate the extent to which the United
States, victors of the Cold War and the only remaining superpower, was committed to
the reinforcement and extension, rather than the liquidation, of NATO. Second, among
Germany’s European partners, especially the British and French, German reunification
generated a (largely misplaced) alarm and a desire to tie Germany in to Western Europe
to ensure a continuation of Germany’s stable and non-assertive foreign policy. Chance-
llor Kohl was broadly willing to accept such demands as a means of winning acceptance
for reunification, claiming that he wanted a ‘European Germany, not a German
Europe’. Third, the end of the Iron Curtain raised the question of the future of former
Communist states and their relations with Western Europe. One aspect of this was the
question of their future entry into the EU. However, the question of the EU’s Eastern
approaches was posed with the greatest urgency in 1991, when civil war broke out
between the central Yugoslav authorities in Belgrade and the secessionist states of
Croatia and Slovenia (and, later, Bosnia-Herzegovina) – the first war on Europe’s
mainland since 1945. Each of these elements highlighted the glaring absence of a
common European approach: Helmut Kohl’s rapid recognition of Croatia and Slov-
enia, for example, provoked Mitterrand’s public disapproval.
This was the context for the inclusion (strongly supported by France) of the CFSP as
the new, second pillar of the Maastricht Treaty. But the early CFSP was an extremely
weak institution, little more than a codification of EPC, for two main reasons. First,
there was a general consensus that it should be wholly intergovernmental rather than
communautaire, with unanimous voting, no role for the Commission and almost none
for the Parliament. This view was shared as much by the French, reserved about surren-
dering core attributes of sovereignty, as by the British, who rejected outright any Euro-
peanisation of foreign or defence policy. Second, the Franco-German concept of a
CFSP linked to a European defence framework constituted by the WEU was not real-
ised; other member states, especially the Atlanticist British and Dutch, were alarmed by
any prospect of a transformation of the EU into a defence organisation that might seek
to rival NATO. The Maastricht Treaty merely suggested that the CFSP ‘might in time
lead to a common European defence’. In the meantime, however, the CFSP’s role was
limited to joint actions varying from humanitarian assistance to political or economic
sanctions, election monitoring and the formulation of ‘common positions’ – unani-
mously decided – on zones of instability such as Sudan, Haiti, or Rwanda. The nucleus
of a possible European defence force existed in the Franco-German brigade formed in
1987, and expanded into the Eurocorps – officially 50,000 strong from 1992, and includ-
ing troops from Spain, Belgium and Luxembourg; but this had no treaty status.
The poor practical record of the early CFSP was most evident in the case of former
Yugoslavia, where European actions proved uncoordinated and, aside from some
humanitarian assistance, largely ineffective; only the military and diplomatic engage-
ment of the United States (through NATO, for the military strikes) secured a peace
settlement in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1995. Against that, the successful EU monitoring
of Russian elections was a relatively minor achievement. Nor were habits of consult-
ation between member states noticeably improved by the CFSP; President Chirac’s
unpopular decision to resume French nuclear testing in May 1995 was taken without
any consultation with European partners. In retrospect, however, a failure at least as
great as the EU’s inability to secure peace in the Balkans without American help was its
incapacity to engage rapidly and closely with its Eastern neighbours. De Gaulle’s rhet-
orical flourish about ‘Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals’ was belied by considerable
French reluctance, once the opportunity was there, to welcome the countries of Central
and Eastern Europe into the EU. President Mitterrand had set the tone in June 1991,
when he had offered a rather ill-defined European Confederation to the countries of
central and eastern Europe but insisted that their full incorporation into the EU would
take ‘decades and decades’. Europe’s foot-dragging over enlargement, in which France
(far more than Germany) played a leading role, contrasted sharply with the actions of
NATO, of which Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary became full members in
1999. The fact that the United States was quicker than the EU to organise the return of
the countries of central and eastern Europe into the ranks of the developed Western
nations was to have a lasting impact on the loyalties of these states even after EU
enlargement finally took place.
The outcome of the Bosnian conflict effectively set the seal on this first phase of the
CFSP by establishing that NATO would continue to be the central arbiter of European
security and that any attempt to set up a rival European security organisation was
doomed to failure. From the mid-1990s, therefore, the French aspiration to a stronger
European defence role became centred on the development of a ‘European Security
and Defence Identity’ (ESDI) within NATO, not on the building up of a more or less
independent WEU linked to the CFSP (indeed, the WEU was finally dissolved in 2000).
That supposed a rapprochement between France and NATO, which was effectively
engaged after the election of Chirac to the presidency in May 1995 (Chirac quickly
announced, for example, that France was resuming its full place at meetings of NATO
Defence Ministers whenever they were held). The high point of the early ESDI was the
1996 Berlin summit of NATO, at which the United States gave its blessing to Combined
Joint Task Forces (CJTFs) in Europe – military forces that could operate in Europe
under NATO auspices but without full NATO participation. But the Berlin summit was
slow to produce concrete results, for three reasons. First, it was long on principles but
short on ways and means of constituting the CJTFs. Secondly, Britain, with France the
strongest military power in Western Europe, still refused to contemplate a serious
defence role for the EU. Third, France’s rapprochement with NATO was short-lived.
Negotiations expected to lead to the return of Chirac’s France to the integrated com-
mand were mishandled on both sides and ended in disagreement over whether a French
officer should be given NATO’s southern command. In this context, the creation, under
the Amsterdam Treaty of 1997, of a ‘Monsieur PESC’, a high representative for the
CFSP who would also be secretary-general of the EU’s Council of Ministers, still
appeared to be more about style than substance, even if the first appointee, Xavier
Solana, was a former NATO secretary-general.
What gave the CFSP and the ESDI a minimum of consistency was a change of
British policy after the Labour victory of 1997. Tony Blair’s conversion to a defence
role for the EU within a year of his election stemmed chiefly from his alarm at the lack
of autonomous European resources to handle even a limited European crisis such as
the one that developed in Kosovo late in 1998, as well as from the British defence
industry’s need for a viable partner outside the United States. It found expression, in a
Franco-British summit at St-Malo in December 1998, in a joint declaration calling for
‘a full and rapid implementation of the Amsterdam provisions on the CFSP’ and
stressing ‘the responsibility of the European Council to decide on the framing of a
common defense policy of CFSP’ and the need for ‘the Union [to] have the capacity for
autonomous action, backed up by credible military forces and the means to decide to
use them . . . to respond to international crises’. The St-Malo summit, endorsed by the
whole European Council at Cologne the following June, also agreed that the EU should
possess a Rapid Reaction Force, based on the Eurocorps, deployable within sixty days,
and capable of undertaking a range of tasks including ‘humanitarian and evacuation
missions, missions for maintaining peace and missions using combat forces in crisis
management, including missions for the establishment of peace’; the target level of the
force was set at the Helsinki summit of December 1999 at 50,000–60,000 troops, 4,000
aircraft and 100 ships. The momentum was continued by the Nice Treaty of 2000,
which established, within the Council of Ministers, new permanent political and mili-
tary structures: a Political and Security Committee and a Military Committee, as well
as a staff of military experts seconded by the member states to the Secretariat of the
Council of Ministers. This institutional panoply and the existence of what looked
like an embryonic European army might appear to lay the foundations of a more
independent foreign and security policy for Europe.
Four problems, however, stand in the way of such a full-fledged policy being
developed. The first concerns the military means available, especially by comparison
with the world’s leading military power, the United States. At the end of the Clinton
presidency in 2000, the United States defence budget stood at nearly 300 billion dollars,
or four times the combined budgets of France and the UK. The gap widened dramatic-
ally under George W. Bush; with European budgets already under strain from the
burden of ageing populations, there is no realistic prospect of its being significantly
narrowed. Moreover, the spending disparities underestimate the difference in military
might: the Americans have the advantage of standardisation, a long experience of
projecting military power across the globe, and a larger share of total military spend
devoted to research and procurement (and less on men in uniform). Thus according
to François Heisbourg, the Europeans in 2000 mustered less than one-fifth of the
Americans’ airlift capacity and less than one-tenth of their strength in strategic recon-
naissance and in precision-guided air-delivered weapons. These differences have prac-
tical consequences. In the 1999 Kosovo war, American aircraft delivered 80 per cent of
the weapons dropped. The credibility of any independent security policy must be
limited as long as the Europeans lack the capacity to take on an adversary the size of
Serbia without help. One might add that important items in France’s military budget –
a fifth of which (down from nearly a third in the 1990s) is still spent on the nuclear
deterrent – appear redundant to most of the threats Europe is likely to face. Though
Europeans are increasingly aware of many of these difficulties and are making
progress in such areas as common defence procurement policies, Europe remains an
underdeveloped military power.
Second, the relationship of European defence to NATO remained largely unclear.
For Jospin’s defence minister Alain Richard, the development of the ESDI opened
the possibility of three types of European military operation: fully NATO-run, as in
Kosovo; European-led but with NATO planning, logistical and other support; or fully
European, without NATO support (and implicitly not requiring NATO approval).
Quite aside from the question of means, however, France’s enthusiasm for such a ‘third
option’, and thus for a genuinely independent European defence capability, found
limited echoes elsewhere in Europe. Again, the issue has practical consequences. Mak-
ing a ‘third option’ workable would mean developing an independent European defence
planning capability alongside that of NATO, a project that would be certain to generate
tensions with the United States and which, for that reason, has been less than warmly
welcomed by France’s European allies.
The third difficulty in the way of a common foreign and security policy lies in the
flagrant inability of the European powers to define a common position in relation to
the 2003 Iraq war. The EU included both America’s most acerbic opponent in the
developed world in Chirac’s France, supported by Belgium and, crucially, by Germany,
and its staunchest ally in the UK, backed by Spain (until the 2004 elections), Italy and
most of the Eastern accession countries. That difference, famously defined by Secretary
of State Rumsfeld as ‘old’ versus ‘new’ Europe, reflected attitudes not only to the war
but also to the United States of George W. Bush. To that extent they were likely both to
last and to spill over into a wide range of foreign policy issues.
Finally, the structure of the CFSP lacks the institutional leadership necessary to
overcome such divisions. Centred on the European Council (and thus depending on the
six-monthly rotating presidency), requiring unanimity among member states, placing
each member state on a footing of formal equality (and thus ruling out any possibility
of a ‘directory’ of larger states), excluding the Commission as a force of proposition,
dividing EU responsibilities between a Commissioner for foreign relations and the High
Representative, the structures of the CFSP are too cumbersome to permit anything like
the swiftness of diplomatic decision-making in a member state. The draft EU Constitu-
tion, upgrading the post of High Representative to that of foreign minister (who would
simultaneously be vice-president of the Commission), as well as stabilising the Euro-
pean presidency, would certainly address some of these issues. Whether they would
suffice to overcome the formidable difficulties noted above and develop a CFSP that
was more than rhetorical remains uncertain.
As Jacques Chirac cajoled and bullied Europe’s leaders into accepting the voting
rights on the Council of Ministers enshrined in the Nice Treaty, a German diplomat
complained that ‘Europe is the continuation of France by other means’. Recent devel-
opments in European policy do not, on the whole, bear this out. The CAP, the most
thoroughly French-inspired of European programmes, has been slowly prised away
from its former impregnable position, in particular with the progressive uncoupling of
subsidy from production; Chirac’s skilful defence of the policy’s main past beneficiaries
has every appearance of a rearguard action. The CFSP, a French aspiration for nearly
half a century, has barely advanced beyond a rudimentary, rhetorical existence;
Chirac’s observation that the Eastern European countries supportive of United States
policy in Iraq had ‘missed a good opportunity to shut up’ reflects a sense of frustration
at this outcome. Comparable arguments could be advanced for other policy areas. The
social charter has lacked the scope of Europe’s competition policy and the strict dead-
lines and requirements of EMU. Demands, articulated especially by the Jospin
government in 1997, for an ‘economic government’ to counterbalance the European
Central Bank’s role in managing the single currency, found expression in regular
meetings of the euro-zone finance ministers, but left the ECB’s independence intact.
And as we have seen, Europe’s competition policy has been resisted by France, with
some consistency, by means of delays in transposing directives into French law. Part of
this reflects a liberal turn in European affairs which the French helped effect but for
which they were not fully prepared; part, too, France’s central EU dilemma: ambitious
goals for a proactive Europe in social, industrial, economic or foreign affairs require,
for their realisation, more supranationalism than France has traditionally been ready
to accept. The ambiguity applies not only to politicians, but also to ordinary French
voters.
Voters, parties and Europe

In many ways the behaviour of governments towards European issues reflects the views
of the French electorate. In some ways these views are unremarkable. French public
attitudes towards integration are situated close to the European average: the French
are neither curmudgeonly Eurosceptics like the British or Danes, nor unconditional
Euro-enthusiasts like the Italians or Spanish. In over two decades of Eurobarometer
polls, French answers to the questions of whether their country’s membership of
Europe was a ‘good thing’ or a ‘bad thing’ never varied from the European average by
over 10 percentage points; the variation has more frequently been 5 points or less (Table
14.2). The general movement of backing for integration has been comparable in France
and across Europe: a steady rise in support during the 1980s, peaking in the second half
of the decade (Eurobarometer recorded 74 per cent of the French taking a positive view
of their country’s EEC membership in 1987) before dropping sharply in the post-
Maastricht period of the early 1990s. While the popularity of integration, in both
Table 14.2 Attitudes to European integration in France and Europe, 1980–2004 (answers to
questions: ‘Is your country’s membership of the EEC/EU a good thing/bad thing?’
and ‘Has your country benefited from EEC/EU membership?’)
Good thing Bad thing Neither good nor bad
France EEC/EU France EEC/EU France EEC/EU
1980–84 55 54 8 14 30 25
1985–89 69 63 5 10 23 22
1990–94 59 62 11 11 26 23
1995–99 50 52 15 14 31 27
2000–4 47 51 15 14 34 29
Has benefited Has not benefited Don’t know
France EEC/EU France EEC/EU France EEC/EU
1986–89 58 54 22 29 20 18
1990–94 48 51 31 30 21 19
1995–99 46 46 34 34 21 21
2000–4 49 48 30 31 21 20
Source: Eurobarometer.
France and the rest of Europe, has varied somewhat with the economy, the brief
recovery towards the turn of the millennium was short-lived, and never brought sup-
port back to the levels of the late 1980s. Thus while at least half of French respondents
took a positive view of EEC/EU membership in every poll from 1981 to 1995, the figure
reached 50 per cent in only one-third of polls between 1996 and 2004. Heroic leadership
in Europe in the late 1980s corresponded to a degree of public optimism; for political
leaders to attempt the same a decade later would be much more hazardous. At the same
time, support for European integration varies, in France as in the rest of the EU,
both with age and with levels of education and income (Euro-enthusiasts thus tend to
be young and educated, or else elderly – having known the war years – and retired).
Better-educated respondents are likely to be more informed about and more supportive
towards the EU; they are also somewhat more likely to be better-placed on the emp-
loyment market and less personally vulnerable to the risks of heightened competition
entailed by integration.
But it is where French opinions diverge from European averages that the ambiguities
of France’s role, discernible among the political elite, are most clearly reflected among
the public. Like their leaders, the French take a more ambitious view of Europe,
in some respects, than other European citizens. This is notably true of questions of
defence and foreign policy. As early as 1987, 20 per cent of French respondents, against
an EEC average of 9 per cent, said they thought of the EEC’s international role when
they thought of Europe. In 2004, 52 per cent of French respondents, against 45 per cent
across the 25-member EU, supported defence decisions being taken by the EU, and
not national governments or NATO. On a wide range of measures linked to the CFSP,
including the need to reach common foreign policy positions, to have a single European
foreign minister, and even to move to a single European representative on the
UN Security Council, French support for integration was higher than the European
average. At the same time French respondents remained more worried than the Euro-
pean average by a whole series of concerns closely linked to the French economic and
social model: job losses to cheap-labour East European countries, the downgrading of
social benefits, or new difficulties for farmers (Table 14.3). These concerns helped make
the French public more opposed than any in Europe to Eastern enlargement, and while
these misgivings had moderated by the spring of 2004, they remained more intense than
among most of France’s partners.
On the face of it, therefore, it appears that there is a more or less perfect fit between
voter attitudes and the behaviour of mainstream French politicians in relation to Euro-
pean integration – grandiloquently warm towards the principle, deeply cautious about
the material implications. The impact of Europe on French politics is, however, less
predictable than such an observation would suggest. Europe has affected French
politics and even the French party system, but in largely indirect ways.
In the first place, the French, like other Europeans, are not actively engaged with
Europe from day to day, and this inevitably affects their behaviour at European elec-
tions. Only 12 per cent of French poll respondents in 2004 took the view that the
European parliament had a substantial effect on them personally, against 34 per cent
for the French government and 28 per cent each for the National Assembly and their
regional council. This fairly dismissive attitude to the EP again reflects that of French
politicians, who tend to treat European elections as a beauty contest for political parties
and personalities rather than as a process designed to give some 700 MEPs a demo-
cratic mandate to legislate. By 2004, thanks in part to their habit of multiple office-
holding, French MEPs had a worse attendance record than those of any other EU
country. Almost every senior French politician, including Chirac and Juppé, Hollande
and Fabius, has won election at one time or another to the European parliament, in
order to achieve a good personal or party score, only to resign a few weeks after the
poll; with limitations on the cumul des mandats in force, a town hall and a National
Assembly seat have almost invariably proved more vital assets than a seat in Strasbourg
(Bernard Tapie, the exception that proved the rule, hung onto his Strasbourg seat so as
to claim parliamentary immunity and stay out of prison). Rare, too, have been the
mainstream parties that have campaigned on European rather than national issues.
This is an invitation to voters, themselves uncommitted to the institution of the Euro-
pean parliament, to vote with their spleen or not at all. French turnout at European
elections (Table 14.4) has followed a fairly steady downward path, usually at levels
2–4 per cent below the (similarly declining) European average.
Table 14.3 French fears of Europe, spring 2004 (% agreeing in each case)
France EU15
Fear loss of power of nation states 51 41

Fear increase in own country’s budget contribution 68 57
Fear loss of social benefits 64 46
Fear European economic crisis 57 45
Fear job losses to cheap-labour countries in EU 83 69
Fear greater problems for farmers 73 58
Confident that EU can control effects of globalisation 21 27
Opposed to the 2004 enlargement 47 40
Source: Eurobarometer 61, 2004.

Table 14.4 Turnout at European elections in France and EEC/EU, 1979–2004, as % of registered
voters
1979 1984 1989 1994 1999 2004
France 60.7 56.8 48.8 52.7 46.8 42.8

EEC/EU 62.4 60.7 56.2 56.7 49.6 44.2
Secondly, as we have noted in Chapter 9, the behaviour of those of the French who
do vote at European elections differs from that of French voters at most presidential or
legislative elections; and proportional representation ensures that this is reflected in the
results. Although the first European elections, in 1979, gave an outcome roughly within
the framework of the bipolar quadrille (though with an unprecedented showing for an
ecologist list, which won over 4 per cent of the vote), every vote since then has produced
surprises. These have included:
• in 1984, the emergence of the FN at over 10 per cent of the national vote, and a big
new fall in support for the PCF, on top of that of 1981;
• in 1989, a rebellion of younger politicians of the mainstream Right (the rénova-
teurs) during the campaign; the success of Antoine Waechter’s Verts in winning
over 10 per cent of the vote; and the first electoral outing of the Chasseurs;
• in 1994, the historically low score of the PS with a mere 14 per cent; the zenith of
the Radicals under the mercurial leadership of Bernard Tapie; and the emergence,
for once on European themes, of the Eurosceptical Left (under Chevènement,
whose list achieved a mere 2.5 per cent) and the Eurosceptical Right (under
Philippe de Villiers, who managed a more impressive 12.4 per cent);
• in 1999, the split and defeat of the mainstream Right, with the Eurosceptical
Pasqua/de Villiers list winning 13.1 per cent against a mere 12.7 for the ‘official’
Sarkozy/Madelin list; the split and defeat of the Front National; strong perform-
ances for both the Chasseurs of CPNT and their enemies Les Verts; and the arrival
of the Trotskyist far Left in the Strasbourg parliament;
• in 2004, under a more restrictive regionalised semi-proportional system, the defeat
of the governing UMP, reduced to a mere 16.6 per cent of the vote and flanked by
competitors of the Centre (the UDF) and the Eurosceptic Right.
More generally, European elections have tended to produce very fragmented results;
in 1999, for example, twenty lists ran nationally, of which nine passed the 5 per cent
threshold to win seats. To some extent these results should be treated as inconse-
quential, a ‘rite of passage before serious business starts’, as the UMP Deputy Pierre
Lellouche described European elections. Or as Philippe Méchet observed in 2000,
‘Every five years, France becomes Italy, but always returns straight afterwards to the
specificities of its own system.’ Yet the dispersal of votes that this type of election has
encouraged has tended, with time, to spill over into electoral behaviour at national
elections, most obviously to the presidency in 2002 (see above, p. 267).
The French electorate has also had the chance to affect Europe’s future more directly,
in the three referendums of 1972 (on enlargement), 1992 (on the Maastricht Treaty) and
2005 (on the European constitutional treaty). Each referendum has seen an unexpect-
edly good mobilisation of the Eurosceptical camp. In 1972 this led to a strong yes result
but high abstention, largely due to the Socialists. In September 1992 the yes won by
barely half a million votes – 51 per cent to 49 – despite having led the polls by 69 per
cent to 31 the previous June. In May 2005 the yes camp, having led by the same margin
six months earlier, was in a minority of barely 45 per cent on polling day.
One reason for these unexpected results is that the fuzzy pro-European sentiments of
some voters have not withstood exposure to the more concrete stakes of Europe as
presented in the referendum campaigns: as we have seen, Europe has become the focus of
many French fears. Another reason has been that the presidents who initiated each
referendum have done so, at least in part, for reasons of narrow and above all ill-
calculated political advantage. Each was intended to place the president centre-stage and
enhance his standing with a victory at the polls – in Pompidou’s case in order to refocus
attention on himself rather than his prime minister Chaban-Delmas, in Mitterrand’s and
Chirac’s to recover from a period of deep unpopularity. In no case did they succeed in
this. The yes vote at the referendum of 1972 was too lukewarm to help Pompidou, that of
1992 too close to reinforce Mitterrand, while Chirac saw his popularity plummet to new
lows after his defeat in 2005. On the other hand, each referendum was also meant to split
the opposition, and in this respect presidents have met with growing, but increasingly
dangerous, success. In 1972, the Socialists and Communists agreed to differ (the Com-
munists voted no, the Socialists abstained), and simply resumed their march towards the
Common Programme after the poll. Twenty years later, the Gaullist RPR rebelled
against Chirac’s support for the Maastricht Treaty: Charles Pasqua and Philippe Séguin
mobilised some two-thirds of RPR voters against it. But the right-wing opposition
regrouped within a fortnight of the poll, going on to win a resounding victory in the
March 1993 parliamentary elections. Similarly, when Chirac announced on 14 July 2004
that the European constitutional treaty would be submitted to a referendum he certainly
aimed to divide the left-wing opposition, and especially the Socialists, who had scored
impressive victories at elections in March (to regional councils) and June (to the Stras-
bourg parliament). In this he was probably more successful than he wished; it was the
unexpected opposition to the treaty of clear majorities of Socialist and Green voters
(Appendix 5) that handed victory to the no camp.
Underpinning these presidential strategies has been the fact that the positions of
French voters, and indeed of French parties, over European issues cut right across
habitual party divisions. Whereas some West European countries, like the UK since the
late 1980s, have a broadly pro-European Left and a more Eurosceptical Right, and
others, especially the Scandinavian countries, are more Eurosceptical on the Left than
on the Right, the French graph of support for Europe against the Left–Right division
is (like those of Belgium or Germany) an inverted parabola. The far Left opposes
European integration because of a deep-seated suspicion of the economic liberalism
central to the European project. The far Right opposes it for nationalist reasons, out of
hostility to anything resembling a transfer of sovereignty. Most parties between centre-
Left and centre-Right support integration, but, elements of them may be persuaded to
join the Eurosceptical extremes depending on the context.
This pattern, and its variable nature, were clear from the parliamentary votes on
ratification of the European treaties of the 1950s. Thus the ECSC, carried in 1951
by the mainstream parties of the Fourth Republic – Socialists, Christian Democrats,
Radicals and most conservatives – was unsuccessfully opposed by Gaullists, Commun-
ists and a minority of conservatives. These usual Eurosceptical suspects were joined in
the 1954 EDC vote by a further contingent of conservatives, the Jacobin left wing of the
Socialists, half the Radicals and even a handful of Christian Democrats, the most
consistent pro-Europeans on the French political spectrum; a combination big enough
to sink EDC for good. Forty years later this distribution was reproduced, approxi-
mately but by voters not Deputies, at the Maastricht referendum. The FN had replaced
the Gaullists on the far Right of the spectrum, and the yes vote was skewed leftwards
(and the no rightwards) because it was Mitterrand who had called the referendum. But
the resemblances to the pattern of the early 1950s remained striking. The no won
majorities among supporters of the PCF (84 per cent), the RPR (69 per cent), the FN
(93 per cent) and those with no party preference (64 per cent); the yes vote was concen-
trated chiefly among supporters of the PS (76 per cent) and to a lesser extent among
those of the two Green parties (57 per cent) and the UDF (59 per cent).
These figures pose the question of the emergence of a ‘European cleavage’ in French
politics that durably structures the behaviour of parties and voters. The answer to such
a question should probably be negative, for two reasons. First, voters’ rejection of
Europe has tended to go hand in hand with a wider opposition to the political estab-
lishment generally, and with a range of ‘anti-universal’ (ethnocentric and authoritar-
ian) values: Euroscepticism (or for that matter Euro-enthusiasm) has proved hard to
isolate from these other traits. Secondly, there is little evidence that a European cleavage
is a powerful structuring agent in election after election, in the same way as the Left/
Right distinction clearly is. In March 1993, for example, when the French returned to
the polls to elect their Deputies just six months after the Maastricht referendum, the
Left/Right pattern fell back into place, with plenty of help from France’s institutions:
the RPR and the UDF, despite European differences, ran joint candidates in most seats
and even Socialists and Communists cobbled together a second-ballot withdrawal
agreement.
Nevertheless, even if the notion of a cleavage should be rejected, it is clear that
European issues have affected the French party system. They have led to splits, albeit
limited ones, within the PS and the UDF (both in the aftermath of Maastricht) and the
RPR (after the Amsterdam Treaty). They also highlighted long-term fault lines even
within the surviving big parties. Within the PS, for example, there had always been
tensions between the statist, Jacobin wing of the party and the more Girondin, reform-
ist wing, long led by Rocard and more inclined to delegate state power to Europe,
regions and civil society. A similar division operated on the moderate Right, coinciding
partly but not perfectly with the division between the UDF (with its big contingent of
Christian Democrats) and the neo-Gaullist RPR. While the Eurosceptic parties that
emerged from these splits tended to be small or ephemeral, they were not negligible
either: Chevènement’s presidential candidacy, for example, could certainly be said to
have cost Jospin, if not the presidency itself, then at least his place at the run-off in
2002. Moreover, if Europe did not establish a new and distinctive cleavage pattern, it
still demonstrated a capacity to modify electoral behaviour durably. This is indicated
most tellingly, perhaps, by the loss of PS support, after the Maastricht referendum,
among those social groups – the less educated, and blue- and white-collar workers –
which had constituted significant electoral reserves for the PS but which were among
the most reluctant to vote for the treaty signed by Mitterrand. The PS voter of the
1990s and after had an increasingly bourgeois aspect, embarrassingly for a party that
aimed to redress inequalities in society.
This was the context of the campaign for the 2005 referendum. Both history and
circumstance made it wholly predictable that the treaty would be opposed by the FN
(Le Pen had campaigned for France to leave the EU in 2002), by the ‘sovereignist’ wing
of the moderate Right (de Villiers, but also a fraction of the UMP led, since Pasqua’s
and Séguin’s effective withdrawal from politics, by Nicolas Dupont-Aignan), by the
PCF (whose leader, Marie-Georges Buffet, saw an opportunity to regain some of the
radical credentials her party had lost in government before 2002), by the far Left and by
the much reduced Chevènement forces. What was crucial, though, was the capacity of
the no camp to attract personalities and voters from the parties of the centre. This was
assisted, first, by the nature of the treaty itself. Though much simplified by comparison
with the European treaties it was intended to replace, the document distributed to the
voters was, at 448 articles and over 80 close-packed pages (plus as much again in
annexes and additional protocols) distinctly longer, more technical and more obscure
than the constitution of, say, the Fifth Republic. Easy to pick at and criticise, it was
much harder to present as offering an attractive vision for Europe’s future.
On the Right, objections to the document itself focused chiefly on the end of the
Maastrichtian distinction between the economic ‘pillar’ of the EU, governed by quali-
fied majority voting on the Council of Ministers, and the other two pillars, covering the
regalian branches of state activity (justice, home affairs, foreign policy, defence) and
still requiring unanimity for legislation to be adopted. If the treaty came into force,
justice and home affairs would now, with few exceptions, fall under the qualified major-
ity régime, and a range of policies on asylum, immigration and citizenship would be
decided at European rather than national level. At least as important as this, however,
was the way in which the debate on the treaty itself was paralleled – or polluted – by
another, on the admission of Turkey. This was premature. Although Turkey began
formal negotiations for entry to the EU in December 2004, the European Commission
had made it clear that Turkey would enter, if at all, only after a decade and more of
negotiations and convergence – a long delay for a country that had been an associated
state of the EEC from 1959, and an official entry candidate since 1987. And the adop-
tion, or not, of the constitutional treaty would not affect the Turkish issue one way or
the other. But Chirac, conscious of public misgivings, had promised that once Bulgaria
and Rumania (due to join in 2006) had entered, France’s acceptance of any further EU
members (meaning Turkey among others) would be conditional on a yes result in a
referendum. This provoked an immediate debate in the National Assembly in October
2004, and a rash of opinion polls. The political debate blurred not only traditional
party boundaries but also France’s normal divisions over Europe. As early as 1963, de
Gaulle, no enthusiast for enlargement in general, had spoken of Turkey’s ‘European
vocation’ (in a rather more welcoming tone than he used for Britain in the same year);
forty years later, his successor Chirac was one of Turkey’s foremost advocates. By
contrast, the UDF, the most ‘European’ party but also the most attached to Europe’s
Christian legacy, was largely opposed; while the Communists, outright opponents of
Maastricht in 1992 and of the Constitution in 2004, still favoured Turkish entry on
grounds, officially, of internationalist solidarity. Whatever the party divisions, however,
the French voters were full of misgivings, with between two-thirds and three-quarters
of poll respondents ready to vote no at a (distant) referendum on Turkish entry. That
reflected a widespread view that Turkey was too big, too poor, too Asian and too
Muslim to be a comfortable European partner; it was a favoured theme of de Villiers,
whose campaign linked it clearly, and misleadingly, to the constitutional treaty.
But it was from (some of) the ranks of the Left that the loudest objections were raised
in the months after the European Council adopted the Constitution in June 2004.
These objections were far from unanimous: for some, including François Hollande,
Lionel Jospin, Michel Rocard, Élisabeth Guigou or Martine Aubry, the EU offered
the world’s best chance to resist an unrestricted ‘Anglo-Saxon’ capitalism, and the
constitution, whatever its faults, offered an indispensable reinforcement for Europe’s
institutions. For others even within the PS, for left-wingers like Henri Emmanuelli and
Jean-Luc Mélenchon but also for former ministers like Paul Quilès, Pierre Joxe and
above all Laurent Fabius, the constitution was ‘incompatible with socialism’. Its long
series of articles (III-130 to III-166) systematising long-standing European bans on
most imaginable obstacles to free trade and fair competition, contrasted with a much
shorter sequence (III-167 and III-168) setting out possible exceptions (such as public
subsidies for disaster areas, underdeveloped regions, or major joint European projects).
Meanwhile, the industrial relations and worker protection policy set out in the constitu-
tion was defined in general terms, and explicitly excluded minimum wage levels, or the
rights of association, the right to strike, or the right to lock workers out – making any
‘levelling up’ of worker protection impossible, according to the constitution’s left-wing
critics, and encouraging a ‘race to the bottom’ between European states from which
French wage-earners would suffer. The notion of public services, with their indispens-
able guarantee of equal access to all, received only brief and general mention in the
text. As Olivier Duhamel (a Socialist member of the Convention, and a vigorous
supporter of the constitution) wrote, getting public service into the text at all was a
struggle, won at the price of abandoning any reference to what services should be
covered or what principles should govern them.
For Duhamel, Hollande, or Jospin, this was better than nothing and certainly no
worse than the status quo of the existing treaties, from which most of Part III had in
any case been drawn, at the insistence of the governments of member states. But a key
argument among Socialist opponents of the draft constitution was that by supporting a
text that contained so few of the guarantees of jobs, public services and social protec-
tion that they had sought, the PS would cut itself off permanently from those groups –
the blue and white-collar working class, especially in the public sector – which were
central to its identity as a left-wing party. By refusing a constitutional treaty proposed
by Chirac on the basis of a draft submitted by a convention chaired by Giscard, on the
other hand, the PS would be putting clear water between itself and a right-wing, and
highly unpopular, president and government, and sending a clear message to workers
that their support mattered.
Among PS members, the yes camp won the argument, by a margin of 56 to 44 per
cent, at the internal party referendum on the treaty held in December 2004. This,
assumed most observers from Chirac down, would guarantee the solidity of the pro-
treaty forces at the centre – PS, UMP and UDF – and thus a successful referendum.
Three elements proved them wrong. First, the leaders of the no camp in the PS took no
account of their party’s vote and went on campaigning against the treaty, some (like
Mélenchon) in open and effective partnership with the PCF and the far Left. Their
party leader Hollande, no doubt wishing to hold the PS together, did nothing to stop
them. Second, the no camp made the most of a wave of industrial unrest, linked to pay
demands and to government measures to introduce ‘flexibility’ in the application of the
35-hour week, that affected France during the first quarter of 2005. Third, the so-called
Bolkestein directive (known after the Dutch commissioner responsible for it) on the
single market in services added further grist to the no camp’s mill, as it suggested that
suppliers of services across the EU could work under the labour laws of their country
of origin, not of the state where the services were supplied. This allowed the treaty’s
opponents to conjure up a mythical image of the ‘Polish plumber’, who would take
advantage of the directive (and of the treaty) to undercut his French competitors on
their home ground. Chirac’s sudden message to the Commission that the directive was
‘unacceptable in its present form’ (he had signed it without misgivings in 2002) was too
late and too tactical; the damage was done. The second week of March 2005 saw both a
big demonstration on pay and the 35-hour week and the peak of the controversy over
the Bolkestein directive. Within days the yes camp’s lead in the polls had evaporated. Its
fate was sealed by the ineptitude and disorganisation of the yes campaign, which alter-
nated between quietism, arrogance (the claim that it was impossible for pro-Europeans
to vote no) and incomprehension (a disastrous television broadcast in which Chirac
faced the hostile questions of a group of young people); and by the attempts of the
Raffarin government to suppress a public holiday, Whit Monday, just a fortnight before
polling day.
The salience of these concerns about social protection, and the fact that it was a
right-wing president who had called the referendum in the first place, gave the no vote a
leftward skew. The extremes – 95 per cent of PCF voters and 96 per cent of FN
supporters – were solidly, and symmetrically, against the treaty. The moderate Right
was kinder to it than it had been to Maastricht: both UMP and UDF supporters voted
yes by a margin of three to one. More remarkable, however, was the rejection of the
treaty by a clear majority of the moderate Left – 64 per cent of Green voters and 59 per
cent of Socialists. Most striking of all was that class, an increasingly poor predictor of
voting on the Left–Right spectrum, became a rather good one for the referendum. The
no camp attracted 81 per cent of the blue-collar workers who voted, 60 per cent of the
white-collar workers, 55 per cent of the small business vote, and 54 per cent of techni-
cians and lower management; managers and professionals, voters with a university
education and the retired were the only groups that showed a majority in support of the
treaty (Appendix 5). Compared with Maastricht, all categories moved towards the no
camp (except for small business owners, who remained stable); the strongest shifts were
among the old blue-collar working class, and among public-sector wage-earners –
favourable to Maastricht, and believing their jobs secure, in 1992, but hostile to the
constitutional treaty, which they viewed as a threat to their livelihoods, in 2005.
The previous no majority at a French referendum had signalled the end of an era; de
Gaulle was gone within less than 24 hours of the result, true to his belief that office
without the voters’ support was not worth keeping. Chirac, for his part, merely sacked
his prime minister. This did not prevent the president, as well as Raffarin, from being a
casualty of the referendum; his poll ratings dropped to a record low in the following
weeks. He could take some consolation from the damage done to the PS and in particu-
lar to its leader François Hollande, whose successful record in 2004 was wholly eclipsed
by the referendum result; but not from the reinforcement of Sarkozy, who had remained
discreet in the referendum campaign and who was now invited to combine party and
government office. Beyond France, the no vote produced few of the results its sup-
porters had hoped for. In particular, the chances of a renegotiation of the treaty to
include more of the social provisions dear to the French left, held out by the no
campaign as a real possibility, appeared more remote than ever a month after the
referendum. France’s role in Europe was damaged, temporarily at least; at the Brussels
summit that followed the debacle Chirac was not even, quite, able to rally twenty-three
more states against the British budget rebate. The EU, meanwhile, though not thrown
into crisis – the Nice, Amsterdam and Maastricht treaties remain its framework of
governance – suffered a lowering of horizons, comparable to that of the later de Gaulle
period: able to continue on a day-to-day basis, but hardly to progress, still less to lead.
Concluding remarks
Having influence in Europe matters. It matters partly for geopolitical reasons, as a
multiplier of national influence on the world stage, but above all, as Anand Menon has
observed, for the economic advantages of being able to upload national policy to the
level of Europe, with its market of 400 million.
Yet if Europe, as Mitterrand said, is France’s future, it appears to be a future of
declining French influence. We have already noted several signs of this. The CAP has
been dethroned from its pre-eminent place among EU policies. The CFSP has not so far
furthered a European foreign policy, still less a substantial defence capability, enjoying
any great degree of independence from the United States: the French stance on Iraq,
though shared by several governments (notably the German and Belgian) and by a
majority of European citizens, was still not a European policy, rather to Chirac’s frus-
tration, and the chances of reinforcing France’s political identity in world affairs were
badly damaged by the defeat of the constitutional treaty. The French tradition of
public services is threatened by competition policy, France’s predilection for deficits by
the Stability and Growth Pact. Disputes with the Commission over subsidies and mer-
gers, and over the size of the French deficit, as well as France’s slowness to transpose
European legislation into national law, testify to a difficulty, or reluctance, to adjust
even to EU measures consented by France. Three other signs, of a more trivial kind,
can be mentioned.
• The achievements of France’s European presidencies. France’s presidencies of the

European Council in 1984 and 1989 were both sumptuous (the latter especially,
coinciding with the celebrations for the bicentenary of the 1789 Revolution) and
successful. The 1984 presidency achieved a settlement to long-running budget dis-
putes, opening the way to the relaunch of Europe in the mid-1980s. That of 1989, in
many ways the high point of mitterrandien European leadership, agreed the Social
Charter and the convening of an intergovernmental conference on EMU for the
following year (both decisions, significantly, reached against British dissent). By
contrast, the 1995 presidency, cut in half by the French presidential election,
accomplished little, and that of 2000 achieved the widely derided Treaty of Nice,
besides giving the French on both sides of cohabitation, and especially European
Affairs Minister Pierre Moscovici and Chirac himself, a reputation for amateurism,
arrogance and bullying.
• France’s Commissioners. Although Commissioners take an oath to shed national
loyalties and represent only European interests once in office, the capture of
important positions on the College remains a focus for intense competition, linked
to prestige, among member states. France has boasted some of Europe’s most
illustrious Commissioners, including two presidents (François-Xavier Ortoli, and
above all Delors) as well as leading figures such as Pascal Lamy, Delors’s former
chief of staff and Foreign Trade Commissioner from 1999 to 2004. The appoint-
ment to the rather lowly Transport portfolio in the 2004 Barroso Commission
of Jacques Barrot, a Christian Democrat of solid national rather than European
reputation, was widely seen in France as a setback – the price of Chirac’s refusal
to re-appoint Lamy – especially as 2004 saw large countries limited to just one
Commissioner for the first time.
• Language. For its first fifteen years, the EEC was above all a French-speaking
organisation. The entry of two anglophone member states – Britain and Ireland –
signalled the end of that predominance. By 2002, 29 per cent of documents pro-
duced by the Commission were drafted in French, against 57 per cent in English. In
the Council of Ministers, a mere 18 per cent of documents originated in French in
2002, against 42 per cent in English as recently as 1997. The Commission’s eco-
nomic studies are only published in English, while in the European Parliament
English has acquired the status of a lingua franca. Only the minutes of Commis-
sion meetings and the decisions of the Court of Justice remain as strongholds of
French expression; but not necessarily for long.
While France remains one of the leading players, as a founder state and one of the
four largest countries, it has indubitably lost the pre-eminent position it enjoyed until
the early 1990s. One obvious interpretation of this decline is that all member states
taken individually, France among them, have seen their influence diminish with the
reinforcement of the EU. As the EU has taken on a more constraining and state-like
role, adopting QMV in more areas, strengthening the role of the Parliament, and
reinforcing a legal order headed by the Court of Justice so all national sovereignties
have been eroded, as they were meant to be. And as the EU has accepted successive
enlargements, its early clubbish style has given way to altogether more rule-bound and
bureaucratic operating procedures; the Permanent Representatives’ lunch, for example,
traditionally an excellent informal setting for settling differences between member
states, has now succumbed, as it was bound to beyond a certain size, to the usual
paraphernalia of interpreters and microphones. The difficulty with this view, however,
is that other states, notably the UK, appear, on the contrary, to have gained European
leverage as the EU has enlarged. The explanations of France’s decline lie rather in the
change in the balance of power and policy preference within the new EU, and the
manner in which different member states have reacted to them.
Three external constraints, all dating from the early 1990s, go some way to account-
ing for France’s changed position. The first is the changing balance of Franco-German
relations after 1989. The enhanced position on the European and world stages that
France drew from the ‘privileged partnership’ always depended on Germany’s accept-
ance of a politically subordinate status that was at variance with growing German
economic strength. A consequence of the defeat of 1945 and of the Soviet threat, and
thus inevitably temporary, this political subordination was (largely) thrown off, with
unexpected speed, after unification and the break-up of the Soviet Union.
The second external development that worked to France’s disadvantage was
spread of the neo-liberal world economic order which has taken shape in parallel with
European integration. Not only has trade liberalisation been central both to the EEC
and to the EU; both have constantly interacted with global trade liberalising measures
ever since the Commission negotiated in the name of all the member states in the
Kennedy Round of tariff reductions undertaken within the framework of the GATT in
the mid-1960s. What has changed since 1989 has been the acceleration of this process,
as outlined in Chapter 1, with the disappearance of a Communist bloc and the con-
sequent arrival of new countries within the global trading system and the WTO, the
diminution of technical obstacles to free trade, and the extension of the range of
economic activities within the WTO’s purview. This had inevitable consequences for the
EU: most directly, the increased pressures on the CAP. More broadly, given the impos-
sibility of opting out of the world trading system (unthinkable for France after the
decisions of 1983, let alone for the UK, Holland, or Germany), it required the EU
countries to adapt to a vastly more competitive environment. For France, as a country
with a long-standing preference for dirigisme and protectionism, ready to liberalise but
at a measured pace, this posed particular problems of adjustment.
The third and most recent development has been the eastward shift of the EU’s
centre of gravity with the admission of the states of the former Eastern bloc in 2004.
This is likely to prove more than a mere geographical shift. Most of the new members
were vigorously Atlanticist and supported the 2003 Iraq war, much to Chirac’s irrita-
tion; most were also strong supporters of Thatcherite neo-liberalism; and most were
historically part of an Austro-German sphere of economic influence to which they
returned after 1989. The position in the EU of countries like France, which sought
independence from the United States abroad and safeguards for social protection at
home, was correspondingly weaker.
France’s loss of influence, however, has also arisen from national difficulties in rising
to these challenges. Two in particular are worth highlighting. One is that France’s
traditional approaches to interacting with partners have been much less effective in the
‘new’ Europe of the 1990s and after than they were in the old one. An American
observer, Charles Cogan, has argued that French negotiators tend to value the forceful
exposition of their own position, and the wearing-down of the opposition, rather than
systematic attempts to understand and test the opposition’s viewpoint and to work
towards compromises from an early stage. Effective in a small European Community in
which unanimous voting was still the norm, it becomes a much less helpful approach,
even to the single member state practising it, in a larger EU where all action requires the
patient building of coalitions and where the national veto is the exception not the rule.
Similarly, the petits arrangements, the gentle rule-bending with which the French have
regularly softened the sharper edges of the Jacobin state at home, and which Delors
applied to European policy during his Commission presidency, have been harder to
secure in the larger and more rule-bound Europe of the 1990s and beyond.
A second French difficulty, noted at the start of this chapter, lies in the long-standing
ambiguity at the heart of French preferences for a strong Europe with weak institu-
tions. This contrasts with, for example, the readiness of German governments to accept
greater concessions to supranationality for the sake of an activist Europe, or the British
reluctance to see either a reinforcement of European institutions or an extension of
Europe’s spheres of activity.
Yet it can be argued that the art of French presidential leadership in Europe – a
leadership less politically constrained, at least outside cohabitation, than that of any
other European head of government – has consisted, precisely, in finding a point of
balance on the ambiguous French continuum, and in articulating it clearly. This was
done rather restrictively by de Gaulle, more pragmatically by Pompidou and in
altogether more ambitious terms by Mitterrand until 1993. Chirac has so far been
unable to achieve such a balance. To do so would not have been easy. The president was
more or less shackled for five years by cohabitation, and has faced an electorate prone,
since the Maastricht referendum, to accesses of euro-pessimism and unwilling, as the
strikes of 1995 demonstrated, to accept sacrifices in the name of the convergence criteria
or the Stability and Growth Pact. Some of Chirac’s difficulties, though, arise from his
own long-term tendency to see European issues through the same tactical prism with
which he views domestic politics, and thereby to lose sight of longer-term goals. He
followed his referendum defeat of 2005 with a vigorous attack on the British budget
rebate combined with an equally fierce defence of the CAP: these were old and tried
values for the president’s home voters, but hardly an exercise in European leadership.
Further reading
Alter, K. J., ‘The European Court’s Political Power’, West European Politics, 19(3), July 1996,
pp. 458–87.
Association Georges Pompidou, Georges Pompidou et l’Europe, Brussels, Complexe, 1995.
Axtmann, R., Globalization and Europe, London, Cassell, 1996.
Bitsch, M.-T., Histoire de la construction européenne, Brussels, Complexe, 1996
Boniface, P., La France est-elle encore une grande puissance?, Paris, Presses de Sciences Po, 1998.
Boussard, I., Les Agriculteurs et la République, Paris, Économica, 1990.
Cerny, P., The Politics of Grandeur, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1980.
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15 Conclusion
Slow growth, unemployment, public spending 489

The politics of constraint 491
A weak régime? 493
Further reading 500
The political aims of the founders of the Fifth Republic were clearly stated: to destroy
the weak and despised régime of the Fourth Republic, which had been undermined by a
defective constitution, by unstable and short-lived governments, by a parliament which
was omnipotent in theory but impotent in practice, by divided and undisciplined par-
ties, by a ubiquitous and powerful administration, by a resentful and disobedient army
and by overactive pressure groups. The new Republic was to be both strong and
respected, underpinned by a constitution which strengthened the powers of the execu-
tive and ensured the president’s pre-eminence in all matters affecting the nation’s long-
term future; parliament, the parties, the administration and the pressure groups – as
well as the army, the immediate cause of the Fourth Republic’s downfall – were to be
relegated to their proper, and subordinate, place.
The founders achieved many of these goals. In dramatic contrast to its predecessors,
the new régime quickly won a degree of consensual support, or at least acceptance,
among elites and people alike. The powers of parliament were effectively curbed. The
antics of small and undisciplined parties no longer dominated the political scene. Voters
were offered a new clarity of electoral choice within a bipolarised party system. Prime
ministers enjoyed longer periods in office, and governments the appearance of stability.
The change of régime had a salutary effect, too, on policy outcomes. Difficult policy
decisions were taken, and stuck despite opposition from large and sometimes powerful
minorities of the electorate: the spending cuts of 1959, the generalisation of subsidies
to Catholic schools, the opening of the French economy to European competition and
above all the withdrawal from Algeria. The army, the ‘State within the State’ during the
previous régime, was reduced to silent obedience to the civil authorities. Diplomatically,
France quickly ceased to be the object of international derision that it had been before
1958. In the newly stable political environment, with the disruption of ruinous colonial
wars removed and the opportunities afforded by European integration added, an extra
point was added to France’s economic growth, which averaged 4.5 per cent from 1950
to 1960 but 5.5 per cent from 1960 to 1973. And growth was no longer disturbed, as it
had been under the Fourth Republic, by periodic crises involving inflation, the trade
balance, government finances, or all three at once.
488 Conclusion
Perhaps the most important, and certainly the most striking, political change in the
years after 1958 was the emergence of the presidency as the major focus of political
decision-making in France. The reasons for the growth of presidential power in the
early Fifth Republic have been analysed at length in this book: the desire of successive
presidents to extend the scope of their powers; their use and abuse of the 1958 constitu-
tion; the strengthening of their electoral legitimacy by the reform of October 1962; the
reinforcement of the Élysée staff; the transformation of ministers into political ser-
vants; the largely unexpected emergence of the fait majoritaire, giving presidents the
backing in parliament of a sympathetic and disciplined party coalition; the weakness
and divisions of the political opposition in the early period when the régime was taking
shape; and the exploitation of propitious political circumstances. Personal, consti-
tutional and political factors combined, therefore, to ensure presidential supremacy.
Before March 1986, that supremacy was demonstrated on innumerable occasions. For
instance, de Gaulle’s unilateral decision not to devalue the franc in the autumn of 1968
was matched by Giscard’s personal decision to halt the extension of the Paris left-bank
motorway in the summer of 1974, and Mitterrand’s personal decision to withdraw the
Savary education bill in 1984. Moreover, the general guidelines of important policy
areas bear the unmistakable personal imprint of successive presidents. France’s foreign,
European and defence policies were shaped by de Gaulle; industrial policy bore the
Pompidou hallmark; the liberalising measures in the social field taken between 1974
and 1976 owed much to the personal determination of President Giscard d’Estaing; the
spate of reforms of the 1981–83 period, whether ephemeral (nationalisations) or more
lasting (territorial decentralisation and political liberalisation), were very much inspired
by the preferences and priorities of Mitterrand. In some respects, therefore, it is not
totally misleading to describe the French political system as ‘presidential’. Certainly,
the presidency was perceived as the major focus of decision-making by the general
public, by the political and administrative elite, and by the pressure groups. Abroad, the
combination of security of tenure (à l’américaine, but with seven years not four, until
the reform of 2000 reduced the French figure to five) and an apparent ability to control
parliament (à l’anglaise) made the French president appear the most powerful head of
the political executive in any Western democracy.
The newly salient presidency of the Fifth Republic had its ideological opponents,
Mitterrand among others at first. They attacked it as too personal, too far removed
from the parliamentary traditions of the French Republic, too Caesarist. More prac-
tical critics also focused on the personalisation of power. Would the Republic survive
its founder? or the Gaullist ascendancy in French politics? or a full alternance? In fact,
the Fifth Republic proved robust enough, and flexible enough, to do all three, and more.
De Gaulle’s resignation was followed, not by chaos or régime change, but by a straight-
forward presidential election. So was Pompidou’s death. The Gaullists’ loss of the
presidency to Giscard precipitated no ‘return to the Fourth Republic’. Alternation in
power, long despaired of by the Left, was peacefully achieved in 1981. The election of a
parliamentary majority opposed to the president, while it certainly entailed a radical
change to the location of political power within the Fifth Republic, produced, not the
expected constitutional crisis, but the equipoise of cohabitation – delicate but still
workable.
This régime’s adaptability extended beyond mere survival. It could also be discerned,
arguably, in the transformation of the local government system, described in Chapter
12, and in the dialectical relationship to Europe, at once shaping and being shaped by
Conclusion 489
the construction of the EU. Above all, perhaps, it could be seen in the responses –
however delayed – to the more difficult economic environment of the late twentieth
century. France under Mitterrand resolved to squeeze inflation out of France’s econ-
omy, even at the cost of low growth and unpopularity. Nationalised industries were first
allowed to behave like private businesses (and thus to lay off workers) before being sold
off in what was for long Western Europe’s biggest privatisation programme, engaged by
the Right but followed, albeit with rather less enthusiasm, by the Left. Exchange con-
trols were removed. France’s Stock Exchange, once one of the sleepiest in Europe, was
revolutionised. This ‘heroic dismantling of heroic capability’, in Vivian Schmidt’s
words, pursued by Right and Left alike, made of France, once the land of state-owned
national champions (some more accurately described as lame ducks), home to some of
the world’s largest international businesses. The Forbes list of the world’s 2,000 biggest
companies featured 61 French-based firms in 2005, more than for any other country
except for the United States, the UK, Japan and (narrowly) Germany. The top 50
included Axa, the world’s largest insurer by sales; Total, the world’s fourth oil com-
pany; and two French banks (BNP Paribas and Société Générale). Renault, recently a
national producer as prone to losses as its cars were to rust, became the main share-
holder of Nissan in 1999, able to impose both a managing director and a ferocious cost-
cutting programme on the Japanese firm; the Renault-Nissan group is the world’s
fourth car producer, with plants in over thirty countries (and France, unlike Britain, has
preserved a home-based motor industry). France’s water companies have moved suc-
cessfully into the UK and other markets. France’s Carrefour retailing group achieved
sales equivalent to those of Britain’s Tesco and Sainsbury’s combined. French house-
hold names in the Forbes list also include Danone in dairy products, Bouygues or
Lafarge in the construction industry, Michelin in tyres, or L’Oréal, Dior and LVMH in
the more traditional luxury goods sector.
France was also one of the world’s most attractive locations for foreign direct
investment, ranking fourth among OECD countries across the four years 2000–3. This
was due in part to size and geographical location, but also to the ability of successive
governments to preserve some of the best features of the Jacobin state at it had
developed over the post-war generation: a level of infrastructure (motorways, urban
transport systems, the high-speed train) and public services (notably health) that were
second to none. France has at least limited that combination of private affluence and
public squalor which J. K. Galbraith identified half a century ago as a characteristic
feature of modern liberal capitalism. And the resources of the Jacobin state have been
mobilised to ensure that the cost of the late twentieth century’s economic upheavals
does not fall solely on their victims.
Yet this benign view of France’s régime and of its successes in policy terms, while not
false, represents splashes of sunlight in what has become, in other respects, a more
sombre picture. The weaknesses both of France’s domestic policy record and of
its political structures suggest the need for a more radical transformation than any
undertaken since 1958.
Slow growth, unemployment, public spending

France’s policy record by the early twenty-first century displayed three rather obvious
weaknesses, alluded to in earlier chapters. The first, common to much but not all of the
euro area, was slow growth. Over the ten years from 1994 to 2003, annual growth in
490 Conclusion
France averaged 1.7 per cent – higher than reunited Germany and (marginally) than
Italy, but lower than every other country in the EU15. The second was mass
unemployment, lasting (so far) across a whole generation. Since 1981, joblessness has
fluctuated between 8.9 and 12.6 per cent; after a brief drop between 1997 and 2001, it
resumed its upward trend and again exceeded 10 per cent by March 2005 – with the
total reaching over a quarter among the 18–25-year-old age group.
Low growth and high unemployment are of course closely linked. Left-wing
employment policies have tended to focus on sharing out what was believed to be a
limited overall amount of work available, most obviously through provision for earlier
retirement and longer holidays (after 1981) and a shorter working week (after 1997).
The apparent success of the 35-hour week in promoting job creation between 1998 and
2001 seemed to confirm this view. But the costs in government subsidies to the scheme
of various types were high, and France’s economy did not weather the world downturn of
the early twenty-first century better than others. Though less active in the promotion of
work-sharing policies, the Right long did little to question the underlying assumption –
and its corollary, that when the baby-boom generation began to retire, from about 2005,
unemployment would fall as the labour force shrank. By the early twenty-first century
France had one of the lowest levels of labour market participation in the developed
world. French workers, though among the world’s most productive, entered the labour
force late (at over 20 on average, and often at 25, after completing higher education),
left it early (at 57 on average) and worked fewer hours during their active years. Only
from 2002 did a right-wing government move simultaneously (and cautiously) to
lengthen the working week and the working lifetime. It was given intellectual backing in
2004 in a report from a committee chaired by the former International Monetary Fund
head Michel Camdessus, which argued that France’s unusually low labour market
participation held back growth rather than stimulating it.
A third area of weakness concerned public finance. Public spending in France – by
central government, local authorities and the social security system – now runs at some
54.5 per cent of GDP, a level only exceeded in Scandinavia. High public spending does
not necessarily entail economic weakness, as the contrast between strong Scandinavian
growth rates and Japanese lethargy from the early 1990s indicates. The difficulty arises
from the sources of spending and the uses to which it is put. In France it has proved
unsustainably sourced, economically ineffective (in part) and socially unjust.
French public expenditure has exceeded receipts in every year since 1981 – by 4 per
cent of GDP in 2003, and nearly that much in 2004. Public-sector debt as a proportion
of GDP has more than tripled, from 20 to over 64 per cent, since 1981. Both deficit and
debt exceed European Stability and Growth Pact limits. Annual interest payments
are equivalent to 14 per cent of the state budget, or, in 2005, roughly the totality
of France’s (admittedly quite low) income tax receipts. The burden on tomorrow’s
taxpayers will be heavier.
Economically unproductive expenditures coexist with colossal unfulfilled needs in
other areas. In the former category could be placed, in addition to the interest payments
noted above, the cost of the 35-hour week (estimated at 1.2 per cent of GDP); or the
cost of tax collection; or the revenu minimum d’insertion, a dole which keeps its recipi-
ents just short of destitution but which has not so far been complemented by serious
measures to assist them to return to work; or the usual run of abortive public projects
skewered annually in the reports of the Cour des Comptes. Against such items, by
contrast, should be set the chronic underfunding of France’s university system (French
Conclusion 491
university students are less well funded than those in secondary school; half fail their
second-year examinations at the first attempt), and to a lesser extent of vocational
training, and the underinvestment of the public sector in research, especially in new
technologies. If left uncorrected, according to the Camdessus report, the combination
of low labour force participation and low research spending risk dragging France’s
growth potential permanently below 1.8 per cent from 2015.
French public spending is also rather ineffective at achieving the social cohesion that
the French rightly value. Perhaps the best symbol of this are the big rundown public
housing estates on the outskirts of most major French cities, with their concentrations
of crime and unemployment and the absence or degradation of public services.
France’s social spending is comparable to Sweden’s (at 28.5 per cent of GDP to
Sweden’s 28.9 and the OECD average of 20.3) but French child poverty is twice as high
(at 7.3 per cent of the population under 18, against Sweden’s 3.6 and an OECD average
of 12.1). Moreover, as analysts such as Timothy Smith have argued, French social
spending favours older white men against younger people, especially if they are women
or first- or second-generation immigrants, and protects workers in permanent jobs to
the detriment of the three million on short-term contracts or in part-time work, or the
2.5 million unemployed. The juxtaposition in the same society of large numbers of
comfortable pensioners with unemployed or underemployed young people is not an
obvious recipe either for social cohesion or economic success in the long term. It is all
the more dangerous when combined with the racial tensions arising from France’s
failure to integrate a large proportion of second-generation immigrants: in that light,
the riots of November 2005 could be viewed as a sign of worse to come.
If this (very summary) diagnosis is founded, it follows that – even without cutting tax
revenues from their current level of 46.5 per cent of GDP – there is an urgent need both
to reduce public spending (to remedy France’s structural deficit) and to redirect part of
it towards areas that do more to promote future prosperity and to reinforce social
cohesion. Such action has taken place, but to a limited degree; successive governments
have failed to bring public finances under long-term control. This failure suggests that
nearly half a century after its foundation, the features most readily valued in the Fifth
Republic – its decisiveness and authority – have weakened, while those most frequently
criticised – its tendency to authoritarianism and its difficulty in engaging with civil
society – have persisted. The problem is less that France’s governments operate under
constraints (all governments do, as the next section outlines) as that they have become
less effective at operating within them.
The politics of constraint

Any government faces constraints of at least half a dozen types. Perhaps the most
obvious, discussed above, is budgetary. Another is external, especially in the economic
and monetary domains. This has a long pedigree. It was a monetary crisis that signalled
the downfall of both the Cartel des Gauches, in 1925, and Léon Blum’s Popular Front
government, in 1937. But we have argued at length in Chapter 1 that external con-
straints intensified from the 1970s, in ways that have taken the umbrella name of
globalisation. To this may be added, as we have suggested in Chapter 14, the EU, which
binds its member states even if they themselves tie the knots. A third set of constraints
arises from the configuration of voter and party support on which the government rests,
from the power and mobilisation of parties and factions within the ruling coalition,
492 Conclusion
from the proximity of elections, and from the government’s popularity with voters. A
fourth lies in the machinery of government itself. Governments need bureaucracies to
function. Bureaucracies generate every type of irrationality, from budget-maximising
competition to turf disputes to the capture of parts or the whole by forces or groups in
civil society. Attempts to co-ordinate bureaucracies may themselves create problems of
co-ordination, especially in a large, complex and centralised state like France. The
journey from political decision to results on the ground is often, therefore, long and
hazardous. A fifth type of constraint arises from civil society, from those (usually
organised) groups whose active co-operation or passive acceptance governments
require for the successful conception and implementation of policy. Sixth, constitutions
are an obvious constraint on governments – even if that of France is comparatively easy
to amend, and even if it has been violated with impunity on a small number of occa-
sions, chiefly by de Gaulle. The seventh type of constraint is constituted by the range of
political and institutional norms and prejudices usually labelled as political culture.
Political culture, however slippery a notion, is what best explains why a dissolution of
parliament to suit the government’s political convenience, though acceptable in Britain,
is viewed as suspicious or downright dishonest in France (hence, in part, the Right’s
defeat in 1997).
The final constraint, common to all states but unique to each, is the past. Yesterday’s
commitments are today’s enforced priorities; yesterday’s mistakes are today’s pre-
occupations. The Fifth Republic, in spite of claims to the contrary by its apologists,
inherited a great deal from its predecessor. After May 1958 the upper part of the
political superstructure may have been modified, but there was no upheaval in the
social, economic and political substructure. Nor did basic cultural traits disappear with
the waving of a Gaullist wand. The same social forces remained intact, the same eco-
nomic interests continued to strive for superiority, the same administrative machine still
functioned, and no one dismantled the vast and complex web of committees, commis-
sions and councils which had proliferated since the end of World War II. The Fourth
Republic bequeathed much to its successor: a booming economy and a rapidly chan-
ging occupational structure; a vague yet pervasive ideology rooted in a not always
consistent series of traditions such as the primacy of universal suffrage, ‘republican
legality’, the (relative) independence of the judiciary, the legitimacy of governmental
interventionism within the framework of a mixed economy, and respect for free speech
and association; its basic institutional framework; most of its political and administra-
tive elite (the departure from politics of the last two Fourth Republic ministers, Mitter-
rand and Chaban-Delmas, had to wait till 1995); a jumble of political norms and
conventions (such as the usefulness of the cumul des mandats described in Chapter 12)
that could be transgressed only with the utmost caution; a wide-ranging series of
domestic, diplomatic and defence commitments (for example, to an extensive system of
social welfare, to the North Atlantic Alliance, to the European Economic Community);
a tangle of social and economic expectations (full employment and rising living stand-
ards were taken for granted, practically for the first time in French history); a welter of
established rights and privileges involving many powerfully placed groups; a number of
seemingly intractable problems such as the Algerian war, which dominated and poi-
soned the politics of the early Fifth Republic. In many policy areas, such as housing,
health, education and energy, the advent of the Fifth Republic was not a watershed, but
a largely irrelevant political event.
The configuration of constraints never presents itself in identical form to different
Conclusion 493
governments. To take an obvious example, growth and tax receipts may be dramatically
raised or lowered by international events over which governments have no control. The
power of groups within and outside the state apparatus may be by turns stable, struc-
tured, apparently invulnerable and durable, or else fluid and variable. Such power is
sometimes personal, sometimes institutional. It may be manifested sporadically or
exercised persistently. Certainly the power configuration in any modern state, and
France is no exception, is multifaceted, complex and evanescent.
Successful government could be characterised as the successful management of con-
straint. Constraint can be managed in three ways: by acceptance of the unmovable,
accompanied by an effort of pedagogy towards voters; by using the available assets of
governments – electoral legitimacy, the referendum, or simply money – to overcome or
at least to modify those constraints that are not set in stone; or by transforming con-
straint in one domain into a tool to act on those in other areas. An example of the first
could be observed in de Gaulle’s acceptance of the need to devalue the franc in 1959 –
and his accompaniment of this by the monetary reform launching the new franc. The
second is well represented by de Gaulle’s decision to face down the army and the
French settlers in Algeria who had brought him to power; the third by the tendency of
successive governments to use the European ‘constraint’ as a lever for the modernisa-
tion of France’s economy. From this perspective, too, an unsuccessful government
may be seen as characterised by its failure to follow any of these courses; and by its
tendency to submit to constraints without either mobilising against them or explicitly
acknowledging their presence.
A weak régime?
The preceding chapters have highlighted the extent to which the strengths which set the
early Fifth Republic apart from its predecessor have either diminished with half a
century’s use or have been bought at the price of weakness in other areas. This is true,
first and foremost, of the presidency, which suffers from being unaccountable and
overpersonalised while at the same time curiously hampered in other respects.
Outside periods of cohabitation, the president may dictate policy to the government,
in the assurance that parliament will do little to oppose him, and without any consti-
tutional obligation to defend his actions to any official body. Such actions may involve
anything from the reinforcement or downgrading of France’s nuclear deterrent to the
choice of architect for the new national library. Constitutionally unable even to set foot
in parliament while in office, the president defends his actions only to the media, before
journalists and at times of his own choosing, and with no equivalent right of reply for
the opposition. The Chirac years, moreover, have established that the president is
immune from prosecution for anything less than high treason. Such privileges are
unusual among chiefs of democratic executives. An American president may see his
legislative programme wrecked by Congress; a European prime minister appears regu-
larly before parliament. Neither applies to the president of France – who is also the
only head of a democratic executive able to dissolve the legislature without placing his
own job at stake. If accountability in a democracy is a virtue, France suffers from a
shortage of it at the very top.
A second dysfunction of the Fifth Republic presidency has been the personalisation
of political power. This has not led to the tyranny feared by the régime’s early critics.
Nor is it unique to France; the rise of television has encouraged personalisation even in
494 Conclusion
parliamentary democracies. What makes France an extreme case, however, is the com-
bination of a powerful, directly elected presidency with traditionally weak political
parties. De Gaulle’s vision of a president above parties quickly proved a chimera, but
one that cast a long symbolic shadow. The result has been an ambiguous, and therefore
unhealthy, relationship between the president and his own party: all Fifth Republic
presidents have followed de Gaulle’s example and eschewed overt partisanship, while
constantly intervening, forcefully if indirectly and above all covertly, in their own par-
ty’s affairs. Parties, on the other hand, suffer from an almost permanent state of com-
petition between présidentiables, in which policies serve more as ammunition than as
means of promoting the public good.
Unaccountable and overpersonalised, the presidency is nevertheless far from
omnipotent. Though considerable, his powers are limited both by constitutional and
political restrictions (the two are closely intertwined) and by the difficulty encountered
by any single individual in managing a complex political system. Every president has
limited time at his disposal. The time-consuming business of political management
is common to the head of any political executive; but on top of that, in the French
case, come the ceremony and travel required of an official head of state. The time
left for policy-making is therefore limited, and a president who assumes an over-
interventionist role may find it physically crushing. Moreover, whereas in other demo-
cratic systems, heads of state or of government – the obvious case being the president
of the United States – are assisted by large staffs, the Élysée team, though expanded
and strengthened since 1958, is still small compared to the gros village which works
for the prime minister. In some ways this is an advantage; large staffs present their
own problems of administration and co-ordination. But the size of the Élysée staff
obliges the French president to be selective. For this reason, he has to delegate many of
his powers, and practically all control over policy implementation, to his prime minister
and other ministers, who, in turn, are obliged to devolve authority onto cabinets and an
army of civil servants.
There are also limitations to the president’s powers in which the personal is closely
linked to the political. A president who becomes too absorbed in the minutiae of
legislation may disqualify himself from his wider role as the impartial arbiter and judge
of the wider political implications of government action. And too intimate an involve-
ment in making policy, some of which is bound to be politically controversial, may
damage his image as the statesman above the political battle, the embodiment of the
unity of the nation, the guide to its future action and the guardian of its basic interests.
Opinion polls clearly reveal that the more active the president becomes in policy ques-
tions, the more his popularity declines; hence the frequent popularity of presidents
during periods of cohabitation, whose policy-making role is much reduced. In addition,
the over-concentration of political power in the hands of the president may lead to
public identification of the president with the régime itself – an identification assidu-
ously fostered by de Gaulle in his dire warnings to the voters of moi ou le chaos, but
which was not without its dangers. Under these circumstances, episodes of presidential
weakness may be magnified into periods of wider national dislocation. That was true
when de Gaulle was absent or indecisive during the May 1968 crisis, when certain
members of the government and the top civil service displayed the sense of purpose and
direction of freshly decapitated chickens; in the later months of Pompidou’s debilitat-
ing, and finally fatal, illness; in the summer of 1976, when inflation was high and rising,
the franc low and falling, and the president abroad and hunting big game; or March
Conclusion 495
1983, when Mitterrand’s vacillations over macroeconomic policy encouraged squabbles
within the government and created that uncertainty which business so much dislikes.
The same may prove to be the case of the weakened Chirac presidency following the
2005 referendum defeat.
If the Fifth Republic presidency of ‘normal’ times has not fulfilled the worst fears
of the régime’s opponents, therefore, it is very far from achieving the hopes of its
founders. De Gaulle sought to be a leader above parties; the presidency has become the
chief focus of inter-party and intra-party political competition. De Gaulle wanted the
president to rise above day-to-day government and give his full attention to France’s
long-term interests; real presidents, both by inclination and by force of circumstance,
have stepped into the front line of governing – and faced the practical limitations
noted above.
This, of course, excludes the case of cohabitation. The election of a politically hostile
National Assembly majority in 1986, 1993 and 1997 meant that many of the consti-
tutional provisions which limited presidential power and which fell into abeyance after
1959 were revived: no longer, for example, could the president feel free to hire and fire
ministers, including the first among them, at will. More important, perhaps, is that
while cohabitation has not precipitated a major constitutional crisis, and can therefore
be said to have ‘worked’, it has done so at considerable cost: France’s Tweedledum and
Tweedledee representation on the international stage, the sheer waste of time resulting
from the state of permanent cold war within the executive, and the perception – all too
clear in April 2002 – of complicity between the mainstream Left and Right are all
illustrations of this. Cohabitation may have proved the régime’s flexibility, but the
political contorsions it entailed may also be viewed as a sign of its intrinsic perversity:
as an alternative to constitutionally unchecked and unaccountable presidential power,
it offers checks and balances, not so much between different branches of government
as within the executive itself. Though cohabitation was rendered less likely by the
shortening of the presidential term from 2002, it remains a possibility. Voters could
split their tickets as their American counterparts have done and elect a president
and a parliamentary majority of opposed political camps within a few weeks of each
other, while presidential deaths, resignations and dissolutions all hold the potential to
de-synchronise the elections.
The presidency is the Fifth Republic’s defining feature; hence the prolonged attention
we have given it. But it is not the régime’s only flawed institution. The French parlia-
ment has, it is true, recovered partly from the largely supine state to which de Gaulle
reduced it – a recovery that may be reinforced as the budgetary reform of 2001 is
implemented. Yet it continues to suffer from the characteristic weaknesses of most
contemporary democratic legislatures: with the civil service writing laws and drawing
up budgets, the media holding the executive to account, and party discipline placing
(most) legislators in straitjackets, parliaments and parliamentarians have lost much of
their former centrality to the political process. In France this is compounded by the
constitution’s specific restrictions, set out in Chapter 6; by the separation of the presi-
dency from the legislature, and the fact that (cohabitation aside) the government
proceeds from the president’s more or less free choice, reducing the role of parliament
as a legitimiser of governments; and by the cumul des mandats and the absenteeism it
encourages. As a forum for the expression and confrontation of competing forces
within civil society it remains profoundly inadequate.
France’s administration and public services have been credited with giving France, at
496 Conclusion
first largely unaided by the politicians, the growth and prosperity of the trente glorieuses
– and also vilified as idle and unproductive: it was Clemenceau who observed that a
characteristic of any French administrative building was that you could see late-
arriving employees passing those leaving early on the stairs. There is some justification
in both views. France’s administrative elites include exceptionally able men and women
who retain a high-minded commitment to le service public – as well as others, less
scrupulous, who use the civil service and the security of tenure it affords as a spring-
board for careers in business or politics for which they are not necessarily best fitted.
Lower in the hierarchy, hard-pressed teachers and healthcare workers coexist with the
understretched and the bloody-minded. But assigning praise or blame to individuals or
groups is beside the point. France’s administration contrives to achieve many of the
drawbacks of centralisation – insensitivity and slowness of response to specific or local
needs – while failing to benefit from the supposed advantages of a chain of command:
responsiveness to central direction too readily falls victim to deep fragmentation
between ministries, directorates, services and corps, with even the core of the executive
frequently resembling a huge Byzantine court riddled with feuding factions. The aspir-
ation of policy-makers after 1958, that greater governmental powers, stability and
authority would make decision-making and resource allocation more ‘efficient’ and
more ‘rational’ than during the Fourth Republic has all too frequently given way to a
fitful and supine incrementalism. And the difficulty of moving resources to match the
changing needs of society inevitably detracts from the Jacobin ideal of equal access for
all to public services of uniform quality. That reforming France’s public services to
allow greater flexibility should face resistance from public service workers is unsurpris-
ing. So is their discourse of ‘defending public services’. What is more remarkable is the
regular support such resistance receives from the public, requiring any attempt at
reform to be undertaken with infinite precaution if at all.
This explains, in part, the dilemma of recent French governments in relation to
decentralisation. The chief beneficiaries of the Mitterrand decentralisation reforms, in
the first instance, were those who had already been accumulating local power over the
previous decades: city mayors above all, and presidents of the conseils généraux (figures
who, in the view of observers such as Yves Mény, reproduce at local level the personal-
isation of power assured nationally by the presidency). Perhaps inevitably, the reforms
avoided some of the more difficult choices, and left much unfinished business. A gener-
ation later, governments are still left with two intermediate territorial units, the region
and the département, where one would probably do; with the ancient mosaic of muni-
cipalities, partly compensated for by a system of intercommunal co-operation which
increasingly places responsibility in the hands of indirectly elected councils; with an
outdated, regressive and unjust system of local taxation; and with a range of public
services – most obviously in education – that remain highly centralised. The Raffarin
government’s ‘second wave’ of decentralisation, though sanctioned by a constitutional
amendment, encountered resistance as soon as it began to tinker with these issues: first
from the Socialists who had pushed through the reforms of 1982, and then from a much
wider range of local elected officials who feared, at a time of budgetary constraint, the
transfer of responsibilities to local and regional government without the resources to
discharge them adequately.
A particularly under-resourced arm of the state is France’s judicial system. This, as
we saw in Chapter 13, is the branch of the public services for which the French have the
least respect – with a level of confidence unusually low even by European standards. It
Conclusion 497
is seen not only as slow (an issue of resource), but also as ineffective (in its supposed
leniency towards petty criminals) and above all as unfair. This is more than a matter of
mere inconsistency, of an inability to strike the right balance between the rights of the
accused, the aspiration to rehabilitate criminals and the popular demand for punish-
ment. The view that the well-connected, and especially corrupt politicians and business
executives, benefit from special treatment from the justice system while ordinary cit-
izens face the full rigours of the law is deeply anchored among the French. And as we
have seen, the opinion that politicians are ‘generally corrupt’ (entertained by 62 per cent
of poll respondents in November 2003) has had an especially corrosive effect on French
politics. For politicians of the mainstream parties there is no obvious escape from this.
To attack their opponents as corrupt (even when they are) is to risk a bout of mutual
mud-slinging which will merely reinforce the public’s dim view of politicians ‘in gen-
eral’; to keep off the subject is to court accusations of complicity between parties of
government. In the wider world, meanwhile, France figured in twenty-second place in
Transparency International’s index of perceptions of corruption in 2004, behind all of
the EU15 states except for Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece as well as a range of non-
European countries including Hong Kong, Chile, Barbados and the United States.
Corruption is one feature of the French public’s disenchantment with political par-
ties, and especially with the mainstream parties of government. So is the sense of
distance from the world of politics: 81 per cent of poll respondents in 1997 believed that
‘politicians don’t care what people like me think’; 70 per cent of poll respondents
considered that they were ‘not well represented’ by a political party (and 74 per cent by
a political leader) in 2000. So is the economic underperformance outlined above, and
the resulting sense of failure in government, above all for households affected directly
or remotely by unemployment. So is the perception of complicity between the main-
stream parties, particularly lively during periods of cohabitation. Two months before
the 1995 presidential election, 64 per cent of poll respondents agreed that ‘whether the
Right or the Left is in power, it adds up to the same thing’; two weeks before that of
2002 only 37 per cent discerned a significant difference between Chirac’s and Jospin’s
programmes, compared with 57 per cent who did not. A decreasing proportion of the
French are party members; a generally falling proportion, too, turn out to vote (unless,
as in May 2005, they are given the opportunity to say a resounding no). The campaign
of April 2002 was marked by each of these traits. They were aggravated by poll fore-
casts that at the run-off, the voters would have to choose between Chirac and Jospin;
and by the availability of thirteen other candidates of Left and Right, each determined
to measure his or her party’s electoral strength by the first-round result even at the
expense of their putative political allies. The widespread mobilisation against Le Pen
underlined the continuing commitment of the great majority of the French to demo-
cratic values, but not to mainstream politicians. Chirac’s re-election at the second ballot
by 82 per cent of voters (and 62 per cent of registered electors) resulted above all from a
wish to avoid the worst. He had, after all, been the first choice of under 20 per cent of
voters (and only 13.75 per cent of the registered electorate), and as subsequent events
showed, it gave him no unusual moral authority among the French to govern.
Disenchantment, even disgust, with parties and politicians has not meant either
detachment from democratic values (at least in opinion polls, the public’s commit-
ment to these has strengthened rather than the reverse) or depoliticisation. For over a
decade, observers have noted political mobilisation in France taking other forms,
most obviously that of single-issue groups. The French were traditionally viewed as a
498 Conclusion
nation of non-joiners; associations now attract as many members as in other Western
democracies – some of them, such as Emmaüs, Médecins sans Frontières, or Attac
acquiring an international dimension. In the aftermath of May 1968, France was
partly left out of the wave of new social movements that crossed Europe; now a
whole panoply of such movements mobilises French activists, from the various anti-
racist groups to the unemployed movement, from the resurgent feminists of the late
1990s to one of Europe’s most successful gay rights movements. Many of these per-
form important functions, aside from the pursuit of short-term goals, of political
agenda-setting, wielding what might be termed an innovatory or pedagogical power.
Equally, however, it is the case that a wholesale shift of citizen mobilisation away
from parties, which at least in principle aim to aggregate and reconcile diverse social
demands into something resembling a programme of government, and towards single-
issue groups, is unlikely to make governments more legitimate or their task any
easier – especially in a country where the tradition of protest or insurrection is as
lively as in France. At times, indeed, group mobilisation has appeared as a sort of
extravagant alternative to normal political processes; the anti-Le Pen mobilisation
between ballots in 2002 almost certainly helped keep the far Right-wing vote down at
the run-off, but Le Pen could more economically have been eliminated altogether by a
handful more votes for Jospin. Other groups, moreover, have exercised a more intimi-
datory power; if they become sufficiently well known for turbulent or even violent
activities, and if these are tolerated by apprehensive governments anxious to ‘defuse
the situation’, then the most oblique and implicit of threats may achieve a result.
Such groups join others, equally numerous, able to exert a more discreet form of
inhibitory power. Public-sector unions may have achieved notable successes – for
example, against the planned Juppé reforms in 1995 – by street mobilisation and well-
supported strikes; the judges of France’s commercial tribunals were just as effective,
through more discreet channels, in preventing the Jospin government’s attempts to
reform entrenched practices that had been denounced by a parliamentary inquiry as a
national scandal.
Taken individually, few if any of the political problems outlined above are unique to
France. Most democratic countries complain of an overbearing executive and a weak-
ened parliament, of a machinery of government which is overloaded, defective and
inefficient. It is of the nature of local government to be an untidy patchwork, and of
local taxes to be unfair. Most justice systems are overloaded, and pulled alternately
between the development of a rights culture and popular (or populist) demands for
tough sentencing. Virtually every established democracy has seen growing public dis-
enchantment with government and political parties, often (though not always) fuelled
by corruption. All have veto groups of one sort or another, and most have seen single-
issue groups develop at the expense of parties. But two things distinguish France from
most other democracies. The first is that France has experienced practically all of these
difficulties, together, in a more or less acute form: a particularly unaccountable execu-
tive, an unusually weakened parliament, an especially unwieldy bureaucracy governing
(if that is the word) peculiarly centralised public services, an exceptionally fragmented
local government system, courts held in rare contempt, a near-continuous rumble of
corruption cases over fifteen years, and an uncommon range of veto groups. The sec-
ond is a curious combination of hostility and high expectations: disgust with what is
seen as the bias and favouritism of the public authorities coexists with a continuing
regard for the public services and above all for the state – to the point where France’s
Conclusion 499
state-centred model is still seen as something that less enlightened systems would do
well to emulate.
What readily results is a vicious circle. Poor economic performance, and above all
rising unemployment, limit the freedom of manoeuvre of governments, financially but
also politically – the more so as they may already have been destabilised by corruption
scandals. Attempts to reform in order to improve economic performance, or to restore
the public finances, rapidly encounter resistance, centred on interest groups that stand
to lose out but often supported by much of the public and by opposition parties,
whether moderate or extreme; the proposals are duly modified or withdrawn. Economic
performance stays poor, losing popularity for the government and encouraging protest
parties, but also leading growing numbers of voters to look to the state for protection
(and to value the existence of the protected employment it offers). This reinforces
resistance to reform, limiting the government’s freedom of manoeuvre and perpetuating
unstable finances and poor economic performance.
If this somewhat pessimistic account is accurate, it matters well beyond the confines
of France. In the most general terms, first, the prosperity and political stability of the
world’s fifth largest economy are of interest to its partners and neighbours. More
specifically, France’s problems, though perhaps concentrated, extend to other countries
at the heart of the euro-zone, Germany and Italy in particular. Finally, France’s polit-
ical difficulties have spilt over in dramatic form into the European arena. The defeat
of the European constitutional treaty at the referendum of May 2005 will affect the
future of the continent more profoundly than France’s failure to ratify the Paris Treaty
creating the European Defence Community half a century earlier.
At one level, the no vote reflected the dynamic of political alienation outlined above.
It was a vote of protest both against an unpopular government (reflecting the poor poll
ratings of both president and prime minister) and, more generally, against established
mainstream parties and elites. At another level, the vote reflected the central ambigu-
ities at the heart of France’s relations with Europe: the preference for a strong Europe
with weak institutions; the reluctance of an old nation state to surrender sovereignty to
a supranational body of which it was nevertheless a founding member; and the aspir-
ation to resolve both of these contradictions by making Europe in France’s image. The
debate on the constitution, even more than that on the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, laid
bare these ambiguities. France’s voters were invited to agree to a palpable strengthening
of European institutions at the expense of national governments; an economic and
social settlement within which, even if the free market was not engraved in stone as the
treaty’s left-wing opponents claimed, the notions of public services and social protec-
tion had no very privileged place. As in 1992, the no vote attracted right-wing national-
ists, left-wing Jacobins and anti-capitalists. What was new was the wider circle of voters,
especially those working in the public services, whose diffuse pro-European sentiments
were counteracted, for the first time, by a sense of personal risk in the face of a Europe
increasingly seen as a vector of globalisation and neo-liberal economics.
The irony of a no result is likely to be that it achieves the opposite result to
that intended by its supporters. Some distinctive features of this old, complex, self-
conscious and (still) highly political society may thereby be better safeguarded, within
the confines of France, at least in the short term. But France will be in a weaker
position to promote a French vision of the continent within the institutions of the EU.
And the EU, without a constitution, will have less authority to further a distinctively
European project in the wider world. Whatever his preoccupations with French
500 Conclusion
sovereignty, it is unlikely that the founder of the Fifth Republic would have welcomed
such an outcome.
Further reading
Baverez, N., La France qui tombe, Paris, Perrin, 2003.

Camdessus, M. (ed.), Le sursaut: vers une nouvelle croissance pour la France, Paris, La Documen-
tation Française, 2004 (also on website http://www.lesrapports.ladocumentationfrancaise/
BRP/044000498/0000.pdf).
Forbes data (leading companies) on http://www.forbes.com/lists/
Marseille, J., La guerre des deux France, Paris, Plon, 2004.
OECD, social statistics on France on http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/35/22/34555346.xls
Smith, T., France in Crisis: Welfare, Inequality and Globalization since 1980, Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Transparency International, 2004 report on perceptions of corruption, on http://
www.transparency.prg/cpi/2004/cpi2004.en.html
Appendix 1: Chronological table
Main events from the Revolution to the
collapse of the Fourth Republic
1789 July Fall of the Bastille.

August Abolition of all feudal rights.
1792 August Fall of the monarchy.
September Establishment of the First Republic.
1793 January Execution of Louis XVI.
1799 November Bonaparte becomes First Consul.
1804 May Establishment of First Empire.
1814 April First abdication of Napoleon I and restoration of Louis
XVIII.
1815 June Battle of Waterloo, second abdication of Napoleon and
second monarchical restoration.
1824 September Charles X succeeds Louis XVIII.
1830 July Revolution in Paris, abdication of Charles X, accession of
Louis-Philippe.
1848 February July monarchy overthrown, Second Republic proclaimed.
December Election of Louis Napoleon to the presidency of the
Republic.
1851 December Coup d’État by Louis Napoleon.
1852 December Proclamation of the Second Empire, Napoleon III
proclaimed emperor.
1870 July Outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War.
September Battle of Sedan, collapse of the Second Empire and
proclamation of the Third Republic.
1871 January Armistice.
March–May Revolutionary Commune in Paris.
1875 January–December Constitutional laws voted in parliament.
1877 May–June Dissolution of the republican-dominated Chamber of
Deputies by President MacMahon.
October–December Victory of the republicans in the elections.
1879 January Resignation of the president of the Republic, republican
victory in the senatorial elections, foundation of the
‘Republican Republic’.
1887 November–December Wilson scandal, leading to resignation of President
Grévy.
1887–89 Republic threatened by General Boulanger and his
supporters.
1892–93 Panama scandal.
1894 June President Carnot assassinated.
1897 Beginning of the Dreyfus Affair, which drags on for seven
years.
1903–5 Anti-clerical legislation culminating in the separation of
Church and state.
502 Appendix 1: chronological table, 1789–1958
1914 July Assassination of Jaurès, socialist leader.
August Outbreak of World War I.
1918 November Armistice.
1919 June Versailles Treaty signed.
1920 December Tours Congress, foundation of the French Communist
Party.
1923 January French occupation of the Ruhr (until 1930).
1934 February Violent right-wing demonstrations in Paris.
1936 March German re-militarisation of the Rhineland.
April–May Victory of the left-wing Popular Front in the elections.
June Popular Front government under Léon Blum.
October Spanish Civil War begins.
1937 June Collapse of the Popular Front government.
1938 September Munich Agreement.
1939 March Germany occupies Czechoslovakia.
September Outbreak of World War II.
1940 May–June France invaded, Pétain becomes head of government, de
Gaulle to London, armistice. Half of France occupied.
1941 June Germany invades Russia.
1942 November Allied invasion of North Africa, the whole of France
occupied.
1944 June Allies land in Normandy.
August Paris liberated.
September General de Gaulle sets up government.
1945 May End of World War II in Europe.
October French vote by referendum to end the Third Republic.
1946 January General de Gaulle withdraws from the government.
May France votes against first proposed constitution.
November Constitution of the Fourth Republic accepted by
referendum, and outbreak of the war in Indo-China.
1947 January Election of Auriol as president of the Republic.
April Foundation of the first mass Gaullist movement – the RPF.
May Communists leave the government.
June Marshall speech on financial aid to Europe.
November–December Wave of political strikes.
1949 April North Atlantic Treaty signed.
1951 April Coal and steel agreement between France, Germany, Italy
and the Benelux countries.
June General election.
1952 March–December Pinay prime minister.
1953 January Official end of the RPF.
August Sultan of Morocco deposed.
December Coty elected president of the Republic.
1954 May–July Dien-Bien-Phu, end of war in Indo-China negotiated by
Premier Mendès-France.
November Outbreak of the Algerian war.
1956 January General elections in France, Poujadists fare well.
February Demonstrations in Algiers against Premier Mollet.
March Independence of Tunisia and Morocco.
October Anglo-French intervention in Suez.
1957 March Treaty of Rome establishing European Economic
Community.
1958 May Revolt by French settlers in Algiers.
June General de Gaulle becomes head of government.
September Referendum on the Constitution of the Fifth Republic
resoundingly passed.
Appendix 2: Chronological table
Main events from the foundation of the Fifth
Republic until 2005
1958 September Referendum on the Constitution of the Fifth Republic;

79.25 per cent vote in favour.
October–November Creation of the Gaullist UNR, general elections. Big
Gaullist gains.
December General de Gaulle elected president by 78.5 per cent of
the votes of the electoral college.
1959 January De Gaulle proclaimed president of the Republic, Michel
Debré appointed prime minister.
1960 January Uprising in Algeria.
April Creation of the PSU.
1961 January Referendum ratifying de Gaulle’s policy of self-
determination in Algeria: 75.26 per cent vote in favour.
April Army coup in Algeria against French government.
1962 March Évian agreements on Algeria.
April Referendum ratifying Évian peace settlement with
Algeria: 90.7 per cent of voters in favour. Pompidou
becomes prime minister.
August Unsuccessful attempt on de Gaulle’s life at Le Petit
Clamart.
October Motion of censure passed against Pompidou
government, parliament dissolved. Referendum for
direct election of president of the Republic: 61.75
per cent in favour.
October–November General elections. Big gains for government.
1963 March–April Miners’ strike, government obliged to climb down.
1965 September Creation of the FGDS (Fédération de la Gauche
Démocrate et Socialiste) of Socialists, Radicals and left-
wing clubs.
December De Gaulle re-elected president of the Republic at the
second ballot against Mitterrand.
1966 February France withdraws from NATO.
1967 March General elections: narrow victory for the government.
November Creation of the Gaullist UDVe.
1968 May The ‘events’ – student revolt and general strike,
National Assembly dissolved.
June Big victory of the government in the general elections.
July Couve de Murville replaces Pompidou as prime
minister.
November–December Collapse of the FGDS, Mitterrand withdraws
temporarily from political life.
1969 April Referendum on the Senate and on regional reforms:
de Gaulle resigns after 52.4 per cent voted against.
1969 June Pompidou elected president of the Republic at the
second ballot against Poher. Chaban-Delmas appointed
prime minister.
July Creation of the CDP and of a new Socialist Party under
the leadership of Alain Savary.
1970 November Death of General de Gaulle.
1971 June Creation of the new Socialist Party: Mitterrand
becomes first secretary.
1972 April Referendum ratifying enlargement of the Common
Market to include Great Britain, Ireland and Denmark:
67.7 per cent in favour, but abstentions, spoilt and blank
votes total 46.75 per cent.
June Joint Programme of Government signed between the
Socialists and the Communists.
July Messmer replaces Chaban-Delmas as prime
minister.
1973 March General elections: victory for the government, but with
much reduced majority.
1974 April Death of President Pompidou.
May Election of Giscard d’Estaing to the presidency at the
second ballot against Mitterrand. Jacques Chirac
becomes prime minister.
October Many leaders of the PSU join the Socialist Party.
1976 February Twenty-second Congress of the PCF.
March Departmental elections: big gains for the Left.
August Chirac replaced as prime minister by Raymond Barre.
December Creation of the RPR headed by Chirac.
1977 March Local elections: sweeping victory for the Left.
May Creation of the Republican Party (ex-Independent
Republicans).
September Breakdown of negotiations between the Communists
and the Socialists.
1978 February Creation of the Union pour la Démocratie Française
(UDF), electoral alliance grouping non-Gaullist parties
of conservative presidential coalition.
March General elections: victory for the government by
comfortable majority.
1979 March Violent demonstrations in north and east to protest
against government’s economic policies.
March Departmental elections: left-wing gains.
June European elections.
1980 September Senatorial elections: Socialist gains.
November Mitterrand announces candidacy for presidency.
December Law and order bill, ‘Sécurité et Liberté’ adopted.
1981 April First ballot of presidential election.
May Election of Mitterrand to the presidency. Resignation
of Prime Minister Barre who is replaced by Mauroy.
National Assembly dissolved.
June Historic victory of Socialists in legislative elections.
Mauroy forms second government which includes four
Communists.
October Devaluation of the franc.
November Unemployment reaches 2 million.
December Nationalisation Law voted.
1982 January Constitutional Council rejects several articles of the
Nationalisation Law.
February New Nationalisation Law voted.
Appendix 2: chronological table, 1958–2005 505
March Defferre Act on decentralisation voted. Elections to
departmental councils: right-wing successes.
June New devaluation of the franc and austerity programme.
November Reform of electoral system for town councils.
1983 January FLNC dissolved.
March Elections for municipal councils: Left loses 31 towns of
more than 30,000 inhabitants. Mauroy forms his third
government. Second austerity programme and new
devaluation of the franc.
April Violent farmers’ demonstration in Brittany.
May Doctors’ strike.
June Demonstrations by police.
August French intervention in Chad.
September By-election at Dreux: extreme Right does well.
Senatoral elections: gains for right-wing opposition.
1984 January Several Communist attacks on government policies.
February Lorry-drivers block motorways.
March Demonstration by Catholics against Savary Bill on
Church schools. PCF denounces restructuring of the
steel industry.
April Demonstration by Lorraine steel workers in Paris:
leaders of Communist Party participate.
June Elections to European Parliament: defeat of Left;
extreme Right wins 11 per cent of poll. More than
1 million demonstrate in Paris against Savary Bill.
July Mitterrand withdraws Savary Bill. Mauroy resigns as
prime minister; replaced by Laurent Fabius.
Communists refuse to enter government.
September Press law voted.
October Unemployment reaches 2.5 million.
November Mitterrand meets Col. Kadhafi in Crete.
1985 February Twenty-fifth Congress of PCF.
March Elections to departmental councils: new gains for Right.
April Michel Rocard resigns from the government.
May Central Committee of PCF critical of government.
June Rocard announces candidacy for 1988 presidential
elections. Electoral system for legislative elections
changed.
August Rainbow Warrior affair.
September Charles Hernu, defence minister, resigns as result of
Rainbow Warrior affair.
October PS Congress at Toulouse: Rocard faction wins 28.5
per cent of votes.
1986 February Three terrorist explosions in Paris. New French
intervention in Chad.
March Legislative elections: Left defeated; small majority for
moderate Right: Front National wins 31 seats; further
decline of PCF. Regional elections: Right wins 20 of 22
councils. Chirac appointed prime minister. Series of
bomb explosions in Paris.
April Right-wing programme presented to National
Assembly: included wide-ranging privatisation and
changes in nationality laws. CERES abandons Marxism
and changes title to Socialisme et République.
June Mitterrand criticises government’s proposals on reform
of nationality laws.
July Mitterrand refuses to sign ordonnance on privatisation.
1986 September Senate elections. Left loses ground.
October Mitterrand refuses to sign ordonnance on electoral
constituencies. Electoral law for legislative elections:
pre-1986 system re-introduced.
November Mitterrand again expresses disagreement with
government over reform of nationality laws. Mitterrand
publicly disapproves of bill destined to privatise part of
prison service.
December Student demonstrations in Paris: Higher Education Bill
withdrawn. Public-sector strikes.
1987 January Mitterrand receives delegation of railway workers.
Mitterrand expresses his disapproval of government
policies in New Caledonia.
March Demonstration by 30,000 against proposed changes in
nationality laws. Demonstration by 200,000 in Paris to
defend social security system.
April Lille Congress of PS. Extreme Right organises
demonstrations in Marseille against immigrants.
May André Lajoinie selected by PCF as candidate for 1988
presidential election.
October Pierre Juquin, dissident Communist, announces
presidential candidacy.
1988 January Jacques Chirac announces candidacy for presidential
election.
February Raymond Barre officially announces candidacy for
presidential election.
March Mitterrand officially announces candidacy for
presidential elections.
April First ballot of presidential elections: Mitterrand and
Chirac go through to the next round; Le Pen wins
14 per cent of votes. Lajoinie does badly.
May Re-election of Mitterrand as president. Michel Rocard
appointed prime minister. National Assembly dissolved.
June Election to National Assembly: PS biggest party but no
overall majority. Rocard reappointed prime minister.
October–November Wave of public-sector strikes.
November Referendum on the future of New Caledonia: the yes
vote wins 80 per cent of votes cast, but abstentions, at
63 per cent, reach a record level. The Rocard
government establishes the revenu minimum d’insertion
(RMI), and the impôt de solidarité sur la fortune (ISF),
to help pay for it.
1989 February Roger-Patrice Pelat, a close friend of President
Mitterrand, is charged with insider dealing during the
purchase of American Can by the nationalised French
firm Péchiney. Pelat dies of a heart attack the following
month.
March Municipal elections. Socialists make up some of the
ground lost in 1983, but Chirac wins every
arrondissement in Paris. Green and Front National
councillors elected in many towns.
April–May Abortive ‘renovators’ movement in RPR and UDF.
June Arrest of Paul Touvier, former leading member of the
Vichy milice. European elections. Joint RPR–UDF list
led by Giscard d’Estaing leads the poll, 5 points ahead
of Fabius’s Socialist list. Greens win 10.6 per cent of the
vote and their first seats in the Strasbourg parliament.
July Celebration of bicentenary of the French Revolution.
November ‘Islamic scarf’ affair. Education Minister Jospin seeks
opinion of Conseil d’État to resolve the issue of whether
Muslim girls should be allowed to wear a headscarf at
school.
December Front National candidates win a parliamentary
by-election at Dreux and a cantonal by-election at
Salon-de-Provence.
Complete end to exchange controls.
1990 January Law on party finance increases state aid to parties,
allows business funding and includes an amnesty for
past offences.
February RPR congress. An unprecedented internal opposition
motion tabled by Charles Pasqua and Philippe Séguin is
defeated by a 2–1 vote.
March Chirac confirms refusal of any electoral agreement with
the Front National. Socialist Congress. Confrontation
over leadership posts between supporters of Laurent
Fabius and Michel Rocard.
April Magistrates criticise the law on political finance after
the amnesty of former minister Christian Nucci, tried
for his involvement in the Carrefour du développement
affair.
May Profanation of a Jewish cemetery at Carpentras
provokes unanimous condemnation from all political
parties except the Front National, and massive silent
demonstrations.
June Fiftieth anniversary of de Gaulle’s first London
broadcast marks climax of the ‘de Gaulle year’,
confirming the near-unanimous national veneration
for de Gaulle. Creation of Union pour la France, an
RPR–UDF confederation intended to co-ordinate
policy and choose a common candidate for the
presidential election in 1995.
November Demonstrations by lycée students force financial
concessions on education budget from government.
Government creates a new tax, the contribution sociale
généralisée, to cover the widening social security
deficit.
December Twenty-seventh Congress of PCF marked by relatively
open debates.
1991 January Beginning of Gulf war, with French participation
alongside British, American and Arab forces. Jean-
Pierre Chevènement resigns as defence minister in
opposition to French policy.
March End of Gulf war.
May Mitterrand sacks Rocard as prime minister and replaces
him with Édith Cresson.
June National Assembly ratifies Schengen agreements on
abolition of European border controls. Chirac’s speech
on ‘noise and smells’ of immigrant families.
September 200,000 farmers demonstrate in Paris.
October Beginning of contaminated blood scandal, as three
Health Ministry officials are charged with failing to
prevent the use of HIV-contaminated blood for
transfusion to haemophiliacs. Poll shows 32 per cent of
French ‘agree with Le Pen’s ideas’.
1991 November Mitterrand announces plans for referendum on
large-scale institutional reforms, including an element
of proportional representation, for the second half of
1992.
December Mitterrand’s popularity reaches record low as a result
of scandals, rising unemployment and Cresson’s poor
performance as prime minister.
1992 January Pierre Mauroy resigns as first secretary of PS, and is
replaced by Laurent Fabius. Examining magistrate
Renaud Van Ruymbeke searches PS headquarters
in the course of investigations on the Urba
affair.
February Signature of Maastricht Treaty on European Union.
March Regional and cantonal elections. Rout of Socialists,
who keep one regional presidency out of 22. Strong
showing of ecology groupings: a Green president of
Nord–Pas-de-Calais.
April Mitterrand replaces Édith Cresson as prime minister
with former finance minister Pierre Bérégovoy.
June Parliament adopts constitutional reform necessary to
ratification of the Maastricht Treaty.
September France ratifies the Maastricht Treaty by a 51 per cent
vote at referendum. Mitterrand is diagnosed as suffering
from prostate cancer.
December Three Socialist former ministers, including Laurent
Fabius, charged with offences relating to the
contaminated blood scandal.
1993 February Michel Rocard suggests left-wing alliance between
Socialists, Greens, centrists and dissident Communists.
March Legislative elections. Right-wing landslide: RPR wins
257 seats, and UDF 215, against 57 for Socialists.
Édouard Balladur appointed prime minister.
April Michel Rocard takes over Socialist Party after collective
resignation of leadership.
May Suicide of former prime minister Pierre Bérégovoy.
July New privatisation law promulgated. Constitutional
Council strikes down several parts of new immigration
and nationality law.
August Wave of speculation against the franc leads to widening
of fluctuation bands within the European Monetary
System.
October Rocard becomes Socialist first secretary.
1994 January Major demonstrations in support of secular schooling
after failure of government attempts to increase state
aid to Catholic schools. Twenty-eighth Congress of
PCF. Official end to ‘democratic centralism’. Georges
Marchais, PCF secretary-general since 1972, hands over
the leadership to Robert Hue.
February Unemployment reaches record level of 3,300,100, over
10 per cent up in a single year.
April Paul Touvier sentenced to prison for life for crimes
against humanity.
June European elections. Michel Rocard resigns party
leadership after Socialists’ worst result since 1971
(14.5 per cent). Philippe de Villiers’s Eurosceptical
right-wing list wins 12.4 per cent. Adoption of Toubon
Law on defence of French language.
July Pierre Suard, head of Alcatel Alsthom, is arrested and
charged with corruption. Resignation of
Communication Minister Alain Carignon, also later
charged with corruption-related offences.
September Unemployment at 3,322,800, or 12.6 per cent of labour
force. Revelations on Mitterrand’s wartime past cause
shock among Socialists.
October Alain Carignon, former minister and mayor of
Grenoble, placed in custody awaiting trial for
corruption-related offences.
November Paris-Match publishes photos of Mazarine,
Mitterrand’s natural daughter, whose existence had
previously been concealed from the public. Jacques
Médecin, former mayor of Nice, charged with
corruption offences and imprisoned after extradition
from Uruguay. Jacques Chirac announces his
presidential candidacy.
December Liévin congress commits Socialists to a strongly
left-wing line. Jacques Delors, outgoing European
Commission president and a favoured figure in opinion
polls, announces that he will not be a presidential
candidate.
1995 January Socialist Party members choose Lionel Jospin as
presidential candidate after a one-member, one-vote
selection process.
February Mitterrand appoints Roland Dumas to presidency
of Constitutional Council. Balladur announces
presidential candidacy, and promptly loses what had
been a commanding poll lead.
April First ballot of presidential election. Jospin leads with
23.3 per cent to Chirac’s 20.8 and Balladur’s 18.6, but a
total right-wing vote of over 59 per cent makes Chirac’s
future victory almost certain. Le Pen wins 15 per cent.
May Second ballot of presidential election. Chirac elected
president with 52.6 per cent of votes. He resigns as
mayor of Paris, leaving the succession to Jean Tiberi.
Alain Juppé becomes prime minister. Bernard Tapie,
businessman and former minister in Socialist
governments, sentenced to a year in prison for
corruption offences. Henri Emmanuelli, Socialist first
secretary, given a suspended prison sentence of one year
for offences related to corrupt party funding. Jacques
Médecin, former mayor of Nice, sentenced to two years.
June Le Canard Enchaîné reveals that apartments belonging
to the city of Paris have been rented out to senior elected
officials of the city and their families at below-market
rents. Municipal elections. Left-wing parties show
strong resistance, and win several arrondissements in
Paris. Front National wins Toulon, Marignane and
Orange. After a four-year moratorium, Chirac
announces resumption of French nuclear tests in
Mururoa atoll.
July Seven die after Algerian Islamic militants plant a bomb
in Saint-Michel metro station. Constitutional revision
extends area of application of referendum.
August Resignation of free-market Finance Minister Alain
Madelin.
1995 August–September Chirac’s and Juppé’s popularity falls after tax rises and
revelations on Juppé’s son’s use of an apartment
belonging to the city of Paris.
October Chirac goes on television to reaffirm France’s
commitment to Maastricht convergence criteria, at
expense of his presidential programme.
November Reshuffle removes most of the women appointed to the
government in May. Juppé announces reforms to social
security system and to public-sector pensions.
December A wave of demonstrations and strikes forces Juppé to
withdraw parts of his reform plans, and leaves him, the
government and Chirac deeply unpopular.
1996 January Death of François Mitterrand.
February France’s last nuclear test at Mururoa before switch to
simulated testing.
June Juppé announces plans for an austerity budget to meet
Maastricht convergence criteria.
August After some signs of recovery since 1994, unemployment
rises again, to 12.5 per cent.
1997 February Front National candidate Catherine Mégret wins
municipal by-election at Vitrolles. Left-wing parties
mobilise against reform of nationality laws.
March Jean Tiberi, mayor of Paris, charged with corruption
offences. Front National’s Strasbourg congress
provokes large anti-Fascist demonstrations, and sets the
scene for confrontation within FN between Le Pen and
Bruno Mégret.
April Chirac announces dissolution of National
Assembly, ten months before the end of its term in
March 1998.
May First round of legislative elections. Left–Green alliance
wins 42.5 per cent of votes cast, against 36 per cent for
mainstream right-wing coalition and 15.1 per cent for
the far Right.
June Left–Green alliance wins a majority of seats at second
round of legislative elections. Juppé resigns and is
replaced as prime minister by Lionel Jospin, who forms
a government with Socialist, Communist and Green
ministers. Juppé also leaves leadership of RPR, where
he is replaced by Philippe Séguin.
June Signature of Amsterdam Treaty, effecting limited
reforms to EU, notably in common immigration policy.
1998 January Wave of occupations of benefit offices by unemployed
workers is ended by police interventions and limited
government concessions.
February Claude Érignac, prefect of Corsica, murdered.
March Regional and cantonal elections. Right loses six regional
presidencies to Left. Four right-wing presidents stay in
office thanks to alliances with the Front National,
provoking damaging controversy within mainstream
Right.
April Maurice Papon, secretary-general of the Gironde
prefecture during the Occupation, convicted of crimes
against humanity for his role in deportation of Jews.
Roland Dumas, president of the Constitutional
Council, charged with corruption offences related to the
sale of French-built frigates to Taiwan.
May Launch of ‘The Alliance’ grouping RPR and UDF.
Alain Madelin withdraws Démocratie Libérale from
UDF.
July France’s World Cup victory confirms climate of
renewed national optimism, with renewed growth and
falling unemployment.
December Split of Front National as Bruno Mégret leaves with a
significant number of the party’s cadres. Government
adopts bill on the 35-hour week.
1999 January The euro becomes Europe’s currency in commerce and
on money markets, though not yet in the pockets of
individuals.
March Start of Kosovo war between Western allies, including
France, and Serbia.
April Séguin resigns as president of RPR, and is temporarily
replaced by Nicolas Sarkozy.
June End of Kosovo war. European elections. Defeat and
division of both mainstream Right (divided between
three lists) and of far Right. Pasqua and de Villiers
create a new Eurosceptic right-wing party, the
Rassemblement pour la France. Strong showing of
Green list led by Daniel Cohn-Bendit (9.7 per cent), and
of CPNT list, which wins over 6 per cent and seats in
Strasbourg parliament. Start of parliamentary debates
on reform of the justice system. Constitutional
amendment encourages parity of political
representation between men and women.
November Resignation of Finance Minister Dominique Strauss-
Kahn, suspected of having received payment for non-
existent consultancy work with France’s main student
insurance firm.
December Michèle Alliot-Marie elected president of the RPR, the
first woman to become leader of a major French party.
2000 January Chirac abandons plans for constitutional reform to the
justice system in the face of opposition from right-
wingers in National Assembly and Senate.
February Parity law voted, implementing the 1999 constitutional
amendment.
March Laurent Fabius and Jack Lang enter government in
reshuffle. Roland Dumas resigns as president of
Constitutional Council. He is replaced by a Gaullist,
Yves Guéna.
May Unemployment falls below 10 per cent. Former
president Giscard d’Estaing announces intention to put
down a private member’s bill reducing the presidential
term to five years.
June Chirac approves the shortening of the presidential term,
which is voted by parliament.
September Referendum on five-year presidential term. Abstentions
exceed 70 per cent, and blank and spoilt ballots over
4.5 per cent of votes cast. But the reform is passed by
73 per cent of valid votes. A testimony by Jean-Claude
Méry, formerly an RPR fundraiser, recorded on video
and released posthumously, gives details of the illegal
finance of the RPR and accuses Chirac of direct
involvement.
December French presidency of EU ends with Nice Treaty.
2001 March Municipal elections. Left wins in Paris, Lyon and Dijon,
but right-wing victories in provinces and several large
towns.
March Unemployment below 9 per cent.
May Publication of memoirs of General Aussaresses
relaunches debate on torture in Algerian war.
June Revelations on Chirac’s purchase, in 1992–93, of air
tickets for over 2 million francs paid in cash again raises
the question of the relationship between politics and
justice.
11 September Attacks on New York. France quickly moves to help
defeat Taliban in Afghanistan.
2002 1 January Euro banknotes and coins replace francs in France.
21 April First round of presidential election. Elimination of
the Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin by
Le Pen. Almost all parties call for Chirac vote.
5 May Jacques Chirac re-elected with 82 per cent of vote.
6 May Jospin resigns and is replaced by Jean-Pierre Raffarin.
9 and 16 June Legislative elections. Big majority for new right-wing
party, the UMP.
20 November UMP formally launched at congress.
2003 12 February Government uses Article 49–3 of the Constitution to
pass reforms to electoral law for regional and European
elections. The reform is censured by the Constitutional
Council.
17 March Constitutional amendment specifies ‘decentralised’
nature of Republic.
19 March Beginning of second Iraq war, opposed by Chirac.
20 March Start of Elf trial.
May–June Strikes to protest against government pensions reform.
13 June Convention for the Future of Europe releases draft
August Heatwave kills estimated 15,000 elderly people,
damaging popularity of Raffarin government.
3 September Raffarin announces continuation of tax cuts despite
risk of France exceeding Europe’s 3 per cent deficit
target.
December Intergovernmental conference in Rome fails to agree on
2004 30 January Alain Juppé, former prime minister and the president
of Chirac’s party, the UMP, receives a suspended
18 months’ prison sentence plus a ten-year ban on
holding elective office for his role in city hall
corruption.
March Law banning visible religious signs (such as the Muslim
scarf or veil) from schools is passed, after December
2003 report from Stasi Commission.
21 and 28 March Regional elections. Big gains for the Left, which wins
over 50 per cent of votes for first time since 1988. FN
stagnates with 13 per cent, moderate Right drops to
37 per cent. Chirac seeks a more ‘social’ dimension to
his government. The defeat for the Right is followed by
a government reshuffle, in which Sarkozy is moved from
the Interior to Finance.
1 May Ten new member states (Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia,
Cyprus, Malta, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia,
Slovenia, Hungary) enter the EU.
1 June Noël Mamère, mayor (Vert) of Bègles (outside
Bordeaux) celebrates France’s first gay marriage, but is
censured for it in the courts.
6 June Sixtieth anniversary of D-Day landings. For the first
time a German chancellor and the Russian president
take part in the celebrations.
13 June European elections. Record abstention (over 57 per cent
of electorate). Victory for former gauche plurielle with
43 per cent of vote (29 per cent for PS, 7.4 per cent for
Greens, 5.25 per cent for PCF). Extreme Left and Right
stagnate with 2.6 per cent and 9.8 per cent respectively.
The UMP wins only 16.6 per cent of vote, and the UDF
11.9 per cent.
18 June European Council signs the European constitutional
treaty.
14 July Chirac announces referendum on the European
September Within PS, Laurent Fabius declares opposition to
November Juppé resigns from UMP leadership, and is succeeded
by Nicolas Sarkozy. Sarkozy resigns position as finance
minister.
December PS members vote in favour of the European
constitutional treaty at an internal party referendum.
2005 February Finance Minister Gaymard resigns after minor property
scandal.
February Reforms incorporate a Charter of the Environment to
the French Constitution and adapt the text to the
March Big demonstrations over the 35-hour week and wages
are followed by the first no majority in the polls on the
referendum on the European constitutional treaty.
29 May European constitutional treaty defeated at referendum
by nearly 55 per cent of voters.
31 May Raffarin resigns, to be replaced as prime minister by
Dominique de Villepin. Sarkozy re-enters government
as interior minister, but keeps his post as party leader.
1 June Dutch referendum rejects the European Constitution.
16–17 June European summit. Deadlock on the issues of the British
budget contribution and the future of the Common
Agricultural Policy.
Appendix 3: Voting behaviour, presidential election, first ballot,
21 April 2002: penetration of each social group by candidate
(Source: SOFRES, L’état de l’opinion 2003 (Paris, Seuil, 2003), pp. 91–2)
Far Left (3 Hue Jospin Other Mamère Chirac Other St-Josse Le Pen Mégret
candidates) (PCF) (PS) moderate (Verts) (RPR) moderate (CPNT) (FN) (MNR)
Left (2 Right (4
candidates) candidates)
Total 10.4 3.4 16.2 7.7 5.2 19.9 13.8 4.3 16.9 2.3
Men 8 4 13 8 6 17 11 7 23 3
Women 12 3 18 7 5 22 15 2 12 2
Age range
18–24 19 2 10 8 13 12 15 2 16 1
25–34 12 0 17 13 7 15 14 6 17 1
35–49 12 3 14 7 6 14 15 6 20 3
50–64 9 6 16 8 3 18 12 5 21 2
65 and over 5 5 20 4 2 36 13 2 10 3
Employment group
Self-employed 8 0 8 5 4 18 31 9 17 0
Public-sector employee 14 3 17 16 8 11 12 4 14 1
Private-sector employee 13 2 16 6 5 14 12 6 23 3
Unemployed 17 3 14 7 11 17 5 2 20 4
Not economically active 8 5 17 6 4 26 15 3 14 2
Occupation of head of
household
Shopkeeper, artisan, small 4 2 7 5 2 23 29 5 20 3
business
Professions, managers 8 2 17 11 10 15 27 1 8 1
Intermediate groups 13 2 18 14 7 12 11 4 18 1
White-collar worker 20 3 13 10 6 16 10 3 18 1
Blue-collar worker 15 3 15 4 5 12 7 7 27 5
Retired 8 5 18 6 3 28 12 3 15 2
Educational qualifications
None 10 3 21 0 2 28 9 5 16 6
Primary 9 6 17 4 2 29 13 3 16 1
Secondary (baccalauréat) 10 4 14 5 4 17 12 7 23 4
Secondary (technical) 14 3 16 10 5 15 14 4 18 1
University or equivalent 11 2 16 12 10 17 18 2 11 1
Religion
Regularly practising 4 0 12 5 2 37 27 1 10 2
Catholic
Occasionally practising 7 1 14 7 2 24 23 5 17 2
Catholic
Non practising Catholic 12 3 15 7 6 18 10 6 21 2
Other religion 4 1 29 6 7 22 16 4 6 5
No religion 18 8 18 9 8 8 9 3 16 3
Appendix 4: Voting behaviour,
legislative elections, second ballot,
9 June 2002, in constituencies where
one left-wing and one right-wing
candidate present: penetration of each
social group by Left and Right
(Source: IPSOS poll on http://www.ipsos.fr/CanalIpsos/poll/7573.asp)
Left Right
Total 47 53
Men 49 51
Women 45 55
Age range
18–24 53 47
25–34 54 46
35–44 54 46
45–59 48 52
60–69 23 77
70 and over 39 61
Employment group
Self-employed 21 79
Public-sector employee 56 44
Private-sector employee 50 50
Retired, not economically active 35 65
Occupation of interviewee
Shopkeeper, artisan, small business 26 74
Professions, managers 54 46
Intermediate groups 58 42
White-collar worker 49 51
Blue-collar worker 56 44
Primary or technical 40 60
Secondary (baccalauréat) 56 44
University or equivalent 49 51
Income level
Low 49 51
Average 46 54
High 48 52
Appendix 5: Voting behaviour in two
referendums on Europe, 20 September
1992 and 29 May 2005
(Source for 1992: SOFRES, L’état de l’opinion 1993 (Paris, Seuil, 1993), p. 86; source for
2005: exit poll on tns-sofres.com/études/pol/290505_referendum_r.htm)
Maastricht referendum, Referendum on

20 September 1992 European constitutional
treaty, 29 May 2005
Yes No Yes No
Total 51 49 45.5 54.5

Men 49 51 44 56
Women 53 47 46 54
Age range
18–24 52 48 41 59
25–34 51 49 41 59
35–49 49 51 35 65
50–64 47 53 45 55
65 and over 57 43 63 37
Occupation of head of household
Farmer 29 71 — —
Shopkeeper, artisan, small business 44 56 45 55
Professions, managers 70 30 62 38
Intermediate groups 57 43 46 54
White-collar worker 44 56 40 60
Blue-collar worker 42 58 19 81
None 43 57 40 60
Primary 46 54
Secondary (technical) 40 60 冧 32 68
Secondary (baccalauréat) 61 39 41 59
University or equivalent 71 29 57 43
Party preference
PCF 16 84 5 95
PS 76 24 41 59
Les Verts 57 43 36 64
UDF 59 41 76 24
RPR (1992), UMP (2005) 31 69 76 24
FN 7 93 4 96
None 36 64 37 63
Appendix 6: Abbreviations for
French parties
1 The Right
1.1 Alliances
UNM Union pour la Nouvelle Majorité (1981)
URC Union du Rassemblement et du Centre (1988)
UPF Union pour la France (1990)
1.2 Gaullists and neo-Gaullists

RPF Rassemblement du Peuple Français (1947–53)
UNR Union pour la Nouvelle République (1958–67)
UDVe Union des Démocrates pour la Ve République (1967–68)
UDR Union des Démocrates pour la République (1968–76)
RPR Rassemblement pour la République (1976)
RPF, again Rassemblement pour la France (Gaullist Eurosceptics: 1999)
UMP Union pour une Majorité Présidentielle (April–November 2002); Union pour
un Mouvement Populaire (since November 2002); party formed of former
RPR and most of former UDF (below)
1.3 ‘Giscardians’, or non-Gaullist moderate Right (NGMR)

RI Républicains Indépendants (1962–77)
PR Parti Républicain (1977: successor to RI)
DL Démocratie Libérale (1997: successor to PR)
UDF Union pour la Démocratie Française (1978 : Giscardian confederation,
including (1) PR, (2) right-wing Radicals, and (3) CDS – see below – plus
smaller groupings); PR (now DL) withdrew in 1998; a single party since 2002
when most members and cadres joined the UMP (above)
PPDF Parti Populaire pour la Démocratie Française
1.4 Other Right

CNIP Centre National des Indépendants et des Paysans
CPNT Chasse, Pêche, Nature, Traditions
2 The extreme Right

FN Front National (1972)
MNR Mouvement National Républicain (1999)
Appendix 6: abbreviations for French parties 519
3 The Centre
MRP Mouvement Républicain Populaire (IV Republic)
PDM Progrès et Démocratie Moderne (late 1960s–early 1970s)
CD Centre Démocrate (late 1960s–early 1970s)
CDS Centre des Démocrates Sociaux (1976–96)
UDC Union du Centre (1988–93)
FD Force Démocrate (1995–98: successor to CDS; fully merged into UDF from 1998)
CDP Centre Démocratie et Progrès
PSD Parti Social-Démocrate
4 The Socialists and close allies

SFIO Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière (1905–71)
FGDS Fédération de la Gauche Démocrate et Socialiste
CIR Convention des Institutions Républicaines
PSU Parti Socialiste Unifié (1960–90)
PS Parti Socialiste
MRG Mouvement des Radicaux de Gauche (allies of PS, 1972–96)
PRS Parti Radical Socialiste (MRG’s name since 1996–98)
PRG Parti Radical de Gauche (from 1998)
RCV Radicaux-Citoyens-Verts
MRC Mouvement Républicain et Citoyen
MDC Mouvement des Citoyens
CERES Centre d’Études, de Recherches et d’Éducation Socialistes
5 The Communists
PCF Parti Communiste Français (since 1920)
6 The extreme Left

LCR Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire
LO Lutte Ouvrière
OCI Organisation Communiste Internationaliste
PCI Parti Communiste Internationaliste
MPPT Mouvement pour un Parti des Travailleurs
Appendix 7: Other abbreviations
AFEP Association Française des Entreprises Privées

AFSSA Agence Française de Sécurité Sanitaire des Aliments
ANVAR Agence Nationale de la Valorisation de la Recherche
BNP Banque Nationale de Paris
CAP Common Agricultural Policy
CFDT Confédération Française Démocratique du Travail
CFSP Common Foreign and Security Policy
CFT Confédération Française du Travail
CFTC Confédération Française des Travailleurs Chrétiens
CGC Confédération Générale des Cadres
CGPME Confédération Générale des Petites et Moyennes Entreprises
CGT Confédération Générale du Travail
CIASI Comité Interministériel pour l’Aménagement des Structures Industrielles
CID-UNATI Comité Interprofessionnelle de Défense–Union Nationale des Artisans et des
Travailleurs Indépendants
CNIL Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés
CNJA Centre National des Jeunes Agriculteurs
CNPF Conseil National du Patronat Français
CNT Confédération Nationale de Travail
COB Commission des Opérations en Bourse
COREPER Committee of Permanent Representatives (Europe)
DATAR Délégation à l’Aménagement du Territoire et à l’Action Régionale
DOM-TOM Départements et Territoires d’Outre-Mer
ECB European Central Bank
ECJ European Court of Justice
ECSC European Coal and Steel Community
EDC European Defence Community
EDF-GDF Électricité de France–Gaz de France
EEC European Economic Community
EMS European Monetary System
EMU Economic and Monetary Union
ÉNA École Nationale d’Administration
EP European Parliament
EPC European Political Co-operation
ESDI European Security and Defence Identity
EU European Union
Euratom European Atomic Energy Community
FEN Fédération de l’Éducation Nationale
FFA Fédération Française de l’Agriculture
FLN Front de Libération Nationale (Algeria)
FLNC Front de Libération Nationale Corse
FNEF Fédération Nationale des Étudiants de France
Appendix 7: other abbreviations 521
FNSEA Fédération Nationale des Syndicats des Exploitants Agricoles
FO Force Ouvrière
FSU Fédération Syndicale Unitaire
GATT General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs
GDP gross domestic product
HLM Habitation à Loyer Modéré
IAA Independent Administrative Agency
ISF Impôt de solidarité sur la fortune
JHA Justice and Home Affairs
MEDEF Mouvement des Entreprises de France
MEP Member of the European Parliament
MNEF Mutuelle Nationale des Étudiants Français
MODEF Mouvement de Défense de l’Exploitation Familiale
MP Member of Parliament (UK)
MRAP Mouvement contre le Racisme et pour l’Amitié entre les Peuples
NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organisation
NPM New Public Management
NSM new social movements
OAS Organisation Armée Secrète
OECD Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
PACS Pacte Civil de Solidarité
PEEP Parents d’élèves de l’enseignement public
QMV Qualified Majority Voting
RMI Revenu Minimum d’Insertion
SEA Single European Act
SEM Société d’Économie Mixte
SG Société Générale
SGAE Secrétariat Général des Affaires Européennes (new name for SGCI from
October 2005)
SGCI Secrétariat Général du Comité Interministériel pour les questions de
coopération économique européenne
SIVOM Syndicat Intercommunal à Vocation Multiple
SNCF Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer Français
SNES Syndicat National de l’Enseignement Secondaire
SNESup Syndicat National de l’Enseignement Supérieur
SNI Syndicat National des Instituteurs
SNPMI Syndicat National des Petites et Moyennes Industries
SUD Solidaires, Unitaires et Démocratiques
TEU Treaty on European Union
TGV Train à Grande Vitesse
TPG Trésorier-Payeur Général
UNAPEL Union Nationale des Associations des Parents d’Élèves de l’Enseignement
Libre
UNEF Union Nationale des Étudiants de France
VAT value added tax
WEU Western European Union
WTO World Trade Organisation
Index
abstentionism, electoral 271–2 d’Argenlieu, Thierry 50

Act Up 325 Aron, Raymond 83–4
Action Directe 325–6, 328–9 Arreckx, Maurice 406
Action Française 11 Arthuis, Jean 133
administration 281–2; elite 301–4; Fifth Association Française des Entreprises Privées
Republic 284–95; foundation 282–4; 314, 318
politics 287–8, 290–1; public sector 495–6; associations 15, 312–13, 315, 320–1, 497–8
Third Republic 283; transformed 295–308 asylum seekers 125, 404
Afghanistan 180 Attac 37–8, 39, 335
African colonies 12, 16, 50, 94, 113, 128, 152 Attali, Jacques 95
Aftalion, Florin 37 Aubry, Martine 130, 132, 133, 139, 195, 211
Agence Française de Sécurité Sanitaire des Auriol, Vincent 87
Aliments (AFSSA) 300 Ayrault, Jean-Marc 161
Agence Nationale de la Valorisation de la
Recherche (ANVAR) 20 Bachelot, Roselyne 161
Agir à Gauche 192 Badinter, Robert 88, 132, 290, 411, 413–14,
agriculture 25, 118, 134; Chirac 125; 415–16
demonstration 324; trade unions 317, Baguenard, Jacques 366
332–3, 342, 345; see also CNJA; Common Balladur, Édouard: African colonies 128;
Agricultural Policy; FNSEA Chirac 77, 78, 82, 105, 122; cohabitation
Agriculture Ministry 306 57, 59, 96, 121, 256; dirigisme 33; domaine
Airbus 466 réservé 62, 94; Gaullism 223–4; Juppé
Algeria 12, 13, 23, 31, 50–1, 87, 88, 136, 137, 138; Mitterrand 122–3; parliament
487 meetings 161–2; popularity 100;
Algerian war 59–60, 97, 101, 113, 165, 324 privatisation 37; reform 305; Rwanda 158;
Algérie Française 11, 218, 239, 241, 254 Séguin 137
Allègre, Claude 124, 132, 133, 305, 307, 320, banking sector 19–20, 42, 293, 306
333, 343 Bariani, Didier 229
Alliot-Marie, Michèle 130, 226 Barre, Raymond 143; and Chirac 77, 223;
Alphandéry, Edmond 133 economic affairs 115–16; EU 439; and
Alstom 43, 340, 376, 444 Giscard 71, 81, 89, 230, 274; inflation 285,
Alternance 2002 234 462; parliament 61, 150; price
alternance 32, 40, 171, 277, 302, 411 deregulation 296
Amsterdam Treaty (1997) 64, 114, 227, 296, Barrot, Jacques 481–2
428–9, 440, 444, 464 Barzach, Michèle 137–8
anarchists 202 Bas, Philippe 94
anarcho-syndicalism 7, 317 Bauer, Michel 302–3, 340
ancien régime 1, 5, 15, 44 Baylet, Jean-Michel 206
anti-clericalism 5, 7, 9, 23, 229 Bayrou, François 229, 231, 232, 235
anti-racism 163, 324, 335 Bazire, Nicolas 123
Appleton, Andrew 335 Beffa, Jean-Louis 43
Aragon, Louis 8 Bell, David 59
Ardant, Philippe 86 Benmakhlouf, Alexandre 416
Index 523
Benoist, Jean-Marie 37 Carpentras affair 329
Bentley, A. F. 334 Carter, Jimmy 71
Bérard, Marie-Hélène 137 Cassen, Bernard 38
Bérégovoy, Pierre 33, 82, 94, 95, 116, 133, Catholic Church 5, 9, 15, 18–19, 23, 26, 32,
148, 344, 464 40, 200
Berlusconi, Silvio 430 Catholic Right 238–9
Besancenot, Olivier 203, 204, 259 censure motions 146–7, 147–8, 160, 255
Besse, Georges 325 centralisation 22, 350, 358–9, 359–60,
Beyme, Klaus von 168, 217 360
Bianco, Jean-Louis 94, 95 Centre Démocratie et Progrès (CDP) 220,
Bilger, Pierre 303 228–9
bipolarisation 45, 255–6, 275, 277 Centre des Démocrates Sociaux (CDS) 228–9
Blair, Tony 82–3, 201, 459, 470 Centre d’Études et de Recherches Socialistes
Blanc, Jacques 228, 231 (CERES) 191, 193, 196, 205
Bloch-Lainé, François 21, 289 Centre National des Indépendants et des
Blum, Léon 173, 193, 491 Paysans (CNIP) 227, 232–3, 236
Bocquet, Alain 161, 184 Centre National des Jeunes Agriculteurs
Bokassa, Jean-Bedel 113 (CNJA) 317, 321, 332–3, 458–9
Bolkestein directive 479–80 Chaban-Delmas, Jacques 10, 93, 106;
Bon, Michel 303 defeated 71; Delors 211; domaine réservé
Borloo, Jean-Louis 211 60, 61, 112; Gaullists 221; networks 357;
Bosnia 115, 468–9 New Society programme 161; notable 22,
Botha, P.W. 114 361; parliament 149–50; politique
Bouchardeau, Huguette 202 contractuelle 342–3; Pompidou 81, 95,
Boucheron, Jean-Michel 406 136; progress contracts 304–5; Resistance
Boulin, Robert 393 98
Bourdieu, Pierre 38, 204 Chalandon, Albin 137, 289
Bousquet, Jean 406 Chambers of Agriculture 317
Bousquet, René 75 Le Chapelier law 15
Boussel, Pierre 202 Charasse, Michel 111
Boutin, Christine 239 Charette, Hervé de 228, 231, 305
Bouygues, Martin 407 Charlot, Jean 169, 220, 255, 261
Bové, José 38, 325 Charter of Fundamental Rights of the
Boy, Daniel 213 Union 429–30
Braibant, Guy 411 Chartier, Émile 316
Brandt, Willy 427 Chasse, Pêche, Nature, Traditions (CPNT)
Brezhnev, Leonid 113 168, 178, 237–8, 257, 258, 262, 266, 313,
Briant, Yvon 236 341, 452
Britain: budget rebate 455, 480–1, 484; Chaty, Lionel 305
strikes 323; see also Blair, Tony; Thatcher, Chevènement, Jean-Pierre 93, 132, 133, 137,
Margaret 139, 190, 193, 205, 266
Brittany 326 Chirac, Claude 95
Brogan, Denis 177 Chirac, Jacques 32, 43, 76–7, 76–80, 224;
Broglie, Prince Jean de 393 administration 281; agriculture 125;
budgets 116, 147, 150–1, 163–4 Balladur 105, 122; cohabitation 57, 59, 78,
Buffet, Marie-Georges 185, 186, 478 82, 96, 122, 256, 483–4; constitution 61;
Bundesbank 464 defeats 223; ecology movements 209;
Bush, George W. 471 electoral support 222, 269–70, 277; EU 13,
31, 440; Fabius 242; Giscard 106, 221; Iraq
Cabana, Camille 305 war 133; Jospin 89; Juppé 59, 77, 78, 80,
cabinets 92–3, 94, 137, 143, 293–4, 301–2, 120, 136, 225, 256, 407; Kosovo war 96; Le
355–6 Pen 203, 245, 261; Maastricht Treaty 78,
Calvet, Jacques 288 440, 476; Madelin 224, 231; on Mitterrand
Cambadélis, Jean-Christophe 204 61; Nice Treaty 472; nuclear energy 41;
Camdessus, Michel 43, 490 Paris 227, 364; parliament 150; policy-
Canard Enchaîné 393, 410–11 making 120–1; Pompidou 69–70, 76;
Carignon, Alain 137, 376, 406 presidency 225; provincial visits 96; RPR
524 Index
107; Sarkozy 249; support 98, 100, 101; Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) 342,
Tobin tax 38 423, 426, 436, 453–9, 459–60, 481, 484
Christian Democrats 5–6, 10, 12–13, 216, 217 Common Fisheries Policy 449
Christnacht, Alain 93 Common Foreign and Security Policy
CID-UNATI 318, 327, 343, 461 (CFSP) 423, 427, 428, 441, 445, 453,
Citizen’s Charter 305 467–72, 469, 471–2, 481
citizenship 10–11, 16–17, 25, 156, 403–4 communes 351–2, 354, 384–5
city councils 367 Communist International 171, 173
Civil Code (1804) 391 Communists 9, 10, 12; see also Parti
civil servants 281–2, 293; business 302–3; Communiste Français
educational background 292–3; Fifth Concordat of Bologna 15
Republic 284–95; gay 293; local Confédération des Syndicats Médicaux
government 288; ministers 291–2; Français 318
networks 293; politics 288, 290–1; Confédération Française Démocratique du
provinces 360–1, 367; scandal 403 Travail (CFDT) 314, 317, 318, 321
civil society 492 Confédération Française des Travailleurs
Civil Solidarity Pact 124, 197, 341 Chrétiens (CFTC ) 317
class politics 6–8, 9, 25, 26–7, 213; Marxism Confédération Française du Travail (CFT)
185; PS 201–2; voting 270–1, 272 317
Clemenceau, Georges 14, 23, 87 Confédération Générale des Cadres (CGC)
Closets, François de 23 317
Clubs Perspectives et Réalités 227–8 Confédération Générale des Petites et
coalitions 8, 10, 32, 100–1, 258 Moyennes Entreprises (CGPME) 317–18
Cochet, Yves 210 Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) 7,
Codaccioni, Colette 133 18–19, 177, 314, 317, 332, 337, 342, 346
Cogan, Charles 483 Confédération National du Travail (CNT)
cohabitation 40, 96, 98, 161, 256, 261, 277; 317
alternance 32–3; de Gaulle 223–4; Fifth Confédération Paysanne 458–9
Republic 62–3; Jospin 82; Conseil d’État 53, 293, 296, 301, 391–3,
Mitterrand/Chirac 57, 59, 74, 78, 82, 397–8, 413
127–8; Mitterrand/Balladur 128; Conseil National du Patronat Français
Chirac/Jospin 128; models of 127–9; party (CNPF) 21–2, 314, 317, 342, 344 see also
politics 121–2; patronage 123–7; president Mouvement des Entreprises de France
107; prime minister 121–9 Conseil Supérieur de la Magistrature 393,
Cohen, Élie 299, 308, 340, 461 396–7, 411
Cohen-Tanugi, Laurent 36–7, 41 conseils généraux 232, 356, 361, 368, 380, 496
Colbert, Jean-Baptiste 18, 21, 319 Constitution 49, 53, 55–6, 499; amendments
Cold War 8, 41, 115, 468 56, 63, 65, 401; de Gaulle 54; Debré 53–4,
Colombani, Jean-Marie 135 59; disrespect for 390; executive/legislative
colonies: see African colonies powers 143; Fifth Republic 55, 57, 64, 85;
Combined Joint Task Forces 470 magistrats du siège 405; parliament 61–2,
comités interministériels 91 142–9; PCF 182–3; prime minister 86
Commissariat au Plan 34, 298, 310 Constitutional Council 395–6; appointees
Commission d’Accès aux Documents 393; citizenship rights 156; jurisdiction 63,
Administratifs 300 413; Left/Right 414–15; parliament 64,
Commission de Contrôle des Assurances 300 149, 157; president 64, 88; public policy
Commission de la Privatisation 300 400–2
Commission de la Sécurité des Contribution Sociale Généralisée 146
Consommateurs 300 Convention des Institutions Républicaines
Commission des Infractions Fiscales 300 (CIR) 188, 191
Commission des Sondages 300 convergence 466–7, 483–4
Commission National de Contrôle des corporatism 330–4
Campagnes Électorales 300 corruption 194, 304, 406, 411–12, 497
Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et Corsica 41, 93, 137, 326, 343, 369
des Libertés (CNIL) 300 Coty, René 51, 87
Committee of Permanent Representatives Council of Ministers 89, 91, 94, 112
(COREPER) 447–8 Cour de Cassation 396–7, 414–15, 451
Index 525
Cour de Justice de la République 396, 403 Delanoë, Bertrand 195
Cour des Comptes 300, 301, 356, 398–9, 413, Delors, Jacques 211, 289, 433, 439–40, 449,
490 481, 483
Couve de Murville, Maurice 80, 132, 143 Delouvrier, Paul 286
Crédit Lyonnais 293, 299, 303, 304, 314, 340, Démocratie Libérale (DL) 228, 232, 262; see
464 also Parti Républicain; Union pour la
Crépeau, Michel 206 Démocratie Française
Cresson, Édith 130; agriculture 134, 327, demonstrations 43, 324–5
333; CEC 450; Citizens’ Charter 305; départements 15, 36, 351–4, 353, 363, 366,
ÉNA 381; lack of networks 98, 100; and 371, 373–4; see also local government
Mitterrand 80, 89 Deputies 153, 157, 163, 165
crime 45, 134, 137, 419 Déroulède, Paul 11
criminalisation 403, 412–13 devaluation 115, 432, 455, 493
Croix de Feu 11 Devaquet, Alain 138, 324
Crozier, Michel 315, 316 direct action 325, 329
cumul des mandats: Jospin 369–70; limits on directeur de cabinet 92
157, 164, 166, 210, 367, 384, 474; mayors dirigisme 285, 437; business 338; CAP 460;
364; notables 361, 380–1; parliamentarians de Gaulle 217, 223; dismantled 33–5, 44;
154–5, 165, 265–6, 495 EU 299, 452; traditions 18–22, 483; trente
glorieuses 41–2, 43, 461
Dahl, Robert 334 divers droite 236–7
DATAR 20, 34, 285–6, 286, 292, 360 Doha Round 458
de Gaulle, Charles 1, 13, 56, 67–8, 96–7; domaine partagé 62, 126, 128, 132
Algerian crisis 113; arbitration 87; on domaine réservé 60, 61, 62, 112, 120, 126, 132,
cohabitation 223–4; constitution 31–2, 54; 135, 151–2
Coty 51; death 218; EEC 30; Foccart 95; Dosière, Armand 93–4
Fourth Republic 52; Gaullism 218–19; Drancourt, Michel 37
integration 438; Jacobin tradition 11–12; Dray, Julien 191, 204
notables 55; parliament 149–50; political Dreyfus Affair 5, 239, 319
parties 168–9; political resources 95–6; La Droite Indépendante 238
Pompidou 12, 89, 101, 105, 143, 220; droits acquis 315–16, 319–20, 321
power 59–60, 105; presidency 170, 426–7, Dugoin, Xavier 407
494, 495; referendum 60 Duhamel, Jacques 220, 228–9, 233
Debatisse, Michel 321 Duhamel, Olivier 53, 67, 120, 295, 418–19,
Debray, Régis 14 479
Debré, Jean-Louis 98, 153, 161, 162, 164 Dumas, Roland 88, 95, 110, 314, 408, 416
Debré, Michel 81, 254–5; administration Dupuy, François 292
291–2; Algeria 113, 136; cabinet 92; Durand, Yves 92, 138
committees 145; conflict 290; constitution Dutreil, Renaud 234
53–4, 59, 61, 142; electoral support 222; Duverger, Maurice 54, 169, 216–17
ÉNA 286; on Fourth Republic 51; Dyson, Kenneth 17, 438
interpellation 148; May 1968 329;
parliament 142, 150; Pompidou 69, 255; École Nationale d’Administration (ÉNA) 42,
private members’ bills 159; provinces 350; 70, 286, 450; see also énarques
resignation 60, 106, 255 École Polytechnique 118, 283
Debré Law 5, 11–12, 32 ecology movements 207–10, 212, 267, 273,
decentralisation 22, 35–6, 75, 117, 132, 380– 335
5; Defferre 291–2, 366–7, 384–5; Mauroy Economic and Monetary Union 423, 427,
370–1, 385; Mitterrand 301, 350–1, 496; 453; see also euro
PS 368, 374–7; Raffarin 36, 41, 301, 351, economy 115–16, 193, 285–6, 345, 383,
371–2, 385, 496 489–90
Declaration of the Rights of Man and the education 5, 118, 119–20, 297; Allègre 305;
Citizen 3, 10, 14, 36, 63 Church schools 13, 324, 487; employment
defence policy 114–15, 126 35; expansion 26; Ferry laws 17; funding
Defferre, Gaston 133, 188, 290, 291–2, 366–7, 116, 419; Haby Act (1975) 118; illiteracy
377, 384–5 309; technicians/generalists 283, 293; trade
Defferre Law 50, 350, 356, 366–7, 369, 374, 383 unions 333, 345; see also May 1968
526 Index
‘events’; Muslim headscarf affair (2004) 187, 190, 198, 205, 235, 237, 240,
Education Minister 134, 138 245, 247
Ehrmann, Henry 345 Électricité de France (EDF) 332, 452
elections, cantonal 58, 237, 354 electoral systems 75, 90, 161, 169–70, 245,
elections, European 58, 266, 427, 475; (1979) 262–5, 275, 366–7, 379, 402
207, 222, 229, 427, 475; (1984) 179, 206, Elf oil 113, 314, 408
207, 240, 242, 475; (1989) 208, 237, 257, Elgey, Georgette 135
475; (1994) 189, 194, 206, 201, 238, 266, Elgie, Robert 135, 163, 292
475; (1999) 204, 225, 238, 246, 248, 252, elites 20–1, 24, 38, 42, 195–6, 301–4, 309,
272, 475; (2004) 187, 198, 201, 235, 237, 358
238, 240, 252, 475 Elleinstein, Jean 182
elections, municipal 58, 181, 354, 367; (1965) Élysée 93–5, 123–4; see also president
264; (1977) 181, 199, 222, 264; (1983) 240, Élysée Treaty 426, 442–3
264, 368; (1989) 380; (1995) 189, 245, 407; Emmanuelli, Henri 39, 191–2, 194, 406
(2001) 210, 237, 247 employment 35, 138, 281, 336, 465
elections, parliamentary (legislative) 58, 174; énarques 287, 292–3, 301–2, 308, 340, 381,
(1946) 186; (1956) 177, 241; (1958) 177, 397–8; see also École Nationale
182, 186, 212, 254, 264, 271; (1962) 56, 63, d’Administration
69, 89, 182 186, 212, 219, 220, 232, 255, encadrement du crédit 298
259, 264, 271; (1967) 69, 188, 212, 219; État de droit 389–90, 393, 412–20
(1968) 69, 89, 188, 212, 219, 220, 264, 271; Euratom 50
(1973) 106, 199, 218, 221, 271; (1978) 73, euro 465–6, 489
106, 178, 188, 199, 211, 222, 229, 23, 271; European Agricultural Guarantee Fund
(1981) 63, 89, 173, 182, 187, 189, 196, 200, 454
207, 211, 212, 213, 222, 229, 239, 242, 256, European Central Bank 34
264, 271, 291, 296, 342; (1986) 58, 74, 193, European Coal and Steel Community 50,
208, 212, 223, 242, 247, 256, 271, 276, 342; 423, 426, 476
(1988) 63, 89, 201, 212, 213, 223, 231, 245, European Commission 244, 296
256, 261, 271; (1993) 58, 74, 77, 194, 200, European Common Market 50
201, 208, 209, 212, 217, 224, 236, 245, 247, European Council 135, 481
256, 261, 264, 271, 340, 376; (1997) 58, 61, European Court of Human Rights 395, 403
80, 89, 95, 105, 178, 189, 201, 209, 213, 225, European Court of Justice 296, 302, 394, 411,
236, 243, 245, 256, 257, 261, 266, 271, 342; 432, 482
(2002) 58, 62–3, 178, 185, 190, 195, 201, European Defence Community 13, 426,
203, 205, 206, 209, 212, 234, 237, 239, 245, 476–7, 499
248, 256, 258, 261, 266, 267, 270–1 European Economic Community 7, 29,
elections, presidential 58, 175–6; (1965) 73, 426–7
170, 182, 188, 193, 211, 219, 239, 255, 261, European Monetary System 72, 114, 137,
270, 274; (1969) 69, 71, 188, 202, 211, 232, 427, 462, 464, 466
239, 255, 261, 262, 274, 438; (1974) 73, 182, European Parliament 428
188, 193, 202, 207, 221, 239, 255, 261, 265, European Political Co-operation 427
268, 271, 274; (1981) 71–5, 77, 173, 178, European Regional Development Fund
182, 187, 189, 196, 199, 202, 207, 212, 213, 372–3
222, 239, 242, 256, 261, 265, 267, 268, 269, European Security and Defence Identity 470
271, 273, 274, 275, 276, 291, 296, 342, 350; European Single Market 463, 465
(1988) 74, 77, 189, 201, 212, 213, 223, 256, European Union (EU) 114, 451; chronology
261, 267, 269, 271, 274, 275; (1995) 77, 194, 424–5; Commissioners 481–2;
201, 203, 209, 211, 217, 218, 224, 240, 243, Constitution 64, 478–9; enlargement 478;
245, 249, 256, 257, 258, 261, 265, 267, 268, French law 409; grands corps 302;
269–70, 271; (2002) 78–9, 83, 111–12, 122, institutions 437, 499; integration 39, 135,
128, 171, 178, 185, 186, 190, 201, 203, 205, 295, 299, 422–3, 434–46, 487; laws 402–3,
206, 207, 209, 211, 212, 234, 237, 239, 240, 460; monetary crisis 127; public policy
242, 243, 244, 245, 248, 249, 256, 258, 261, 446–50
262, 265, 267, 270, 272, 274, 276, 277, 278 Eurosceptics 238
elections, regional 58, 353, 366, 379; (1986) Évin, Claude 110
207, 208, 247, 266, 366; (1992) 201, 207, executive 54–5, 147, 149–50, 151, 152–3,
208; (1998) 231–2, 237, 240, 245, 246, 257; 392–3
Index 527
Fabius, Laurent 81, 89, 301–2; blood Fouchet plans 114, 435–6, 438, 439, 442, 460,
contamination scandal 194; CFSP 441; 467–8
Chirac 242; cumul des mandats 154–5; Fourth Republic: Algeria 23; coalitions 10,
Industry 133; institutional reform 157; 32; de Gaulle 52; decolonisation 268;
National Assembly 159; parliament 155, failings of 49–51, 487; inflation 20;
158; popularity 195; présidentiable 191, ministers 129; political parties 13, 253–4;
192; Rome Treaty 39; Tobin tax 38 Vichy régime 350
Fabre, Robert 206 France-Alternance 234
le fait majoritaire 56, 60, 152–3, 165, 259–60, France-Telécom 303, 404, 452
488 Francis I 15
farmers: see agriculture Franco-German relations 441–6
Faure, Edgar 118, 132, 153, 291–2, 343 Franco-Prussian war 7
Featherstone, Kevin 438 François-Poncet, Jean 94
Fédération de la Gauche Democrate et Freemasons 313–14
Socialiste (FGDS) 188 French Revolution 1, 3, 6, 14
Fédération de l’Éducation Nationale (FEN) Frey, Roger 415
318, 333 Front de Libération Nationale Corse
Fédération Française de l’Agriculture (FFA) (FLNC) 326, 329
317 Front National (FN) 11, 216, 239–47;
Fédération Nationale des Étudiants de elections 38, 45, 242–4; funding 266;
France (FNEF) 319 ideology 39, 245–7; immigration 244–5;
Fédération Nationale des Syndicats des Mitterrand 75; public opinion 277; split
Exploitants Agricoles (FNSEA) 247, 317, 258; two-ballot system 212–13, 262, 264;
318, 319, 327, 328, 332–3, 334, 341, 342, UDF 231–2; see also Le Pen; Mégret
344, 357, 456, 458–9
Fédération Syndicale Unitaire (FSU) 318 Galbraith, J. K. 489
Ferry, Jules 12 Galland, Yves 229
Ferry, Luc 118, 120, 133, 134 Gambetta, Léon 5, 14
Ferry Laws 17, 26 Garaud, Marie-France 77, 80, 95, 222
Fifth Republic 31–2, 49–50, 134–5, 145–7, Gattaz, Yvon 37
487; administration 284–95; bipolarisation gauche plurielle 82–3, 173, 186, 189–90, 207–
45, 275; chronology 58, 503–13; civil 10, 258, 277
servants 284–95; cohabitation 62–3, gauche socialiste 191, 197, 204
127–9; constitution 55, 57, 64, 85; Gaudin, Jean-Claude 230–1
Gaulllists 350; inflation 20; institutions Gaullism 217–27; Christian Democrats 6,
45, 216–17, 259, 262–7; integration 257–8; 12–13; coalition 223; electoral strength
Left/Right division 32; ministers 129–31; 219–20, 225, 255; Fifth Republic 350; loss
National Assembly 64, 85–6, 174; of power 33, 221; organisation 220, 222–3;
parliament 141–2; PCF 177–9; political president 218–19; Radical Party 220–1;
parties 254; presidents 67, 87–90, 102–4, splits 216–17, 265; state 18–19, 219; UMP
488; Socialists 152–3; strategic 33, 46; see also Rassemblement du Peuple
environment 182–3; violence 325–6 Français, Rassemblement pour la
Fillon, François 118, 134, 334 République, Union pour la Nouvelle
Finance Ministry 134, 295, 306 République
financial sector 19–20, 293 gay rights 325, 335, 341
First Republic 3, 5, 10, 349–50 Gaymard, Hervé 133, 234
Fischer, Joschka 429, 440 Gayssot, Jean-Claude 163, 185
Fiszbin, Henri 182 gender parity 125
Fitoussi, Jean-Paul 464 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade
Foccart, Jacques 94, 95, 105, 126, 152 (GATT) 28, 30, 296, 456, 457, 482
Foll, Olivier 417 General Secretariat of Government 91–2
food safety 300–1, 457–8 General Secretariat of presidency 94
Force Ouvrière 204, 317 Génération Écologie 208–9
foreign exchange 298 Générations association 247
foreign policy 113–15, 126, 127, 164 Germany 435, 466; see also Franco-German
Forrester, Viviane 35 relations
Forum des Républicains Sociaux 239 Gicquel, Jean 94
528 Index
Gillibert, Michel 406 Hubert, Élisabeth 133
Giraud, André 289 Hue, Robert 178, 183, 185, 186, 189, 190, 203,
Giraud, Michel 406 407
Giscard d’Estaing, Valéry 60–1, 70–2, 157, L’Humanité 180–1, 184, 186
321–2; Barre 71, 81, 89, 230, 274; Bokassa
113; Chirac 106, 221; defeat 229; Ignazi, Piero 38
Démocratie française 228; election 31, illiteracy 309
255–6, 269, 275–6; EU 114, 427, 438–9; immigrants in government 165
foreign policy 113–14; Mitterrand 71, 188, immigration 17, 25, 273, 417; Front National
222–3; national champions 19; prison 39, 244–5; labour market 24–5; law and
conditions 117; RI 101, 220, 221, 227; see order 45; Sarkozy 131; unemployment
also Union pour la Démocratie Française 240–1; work permits 328–9
globalisation 27–9, 35, 135, 295, 296 independent administrative agencies 399, 404
Gluckstein, Daniel 202 Indo-China 12, 16, 50–1
Goguel, François 9, 129, 149 industry 6, 19, 306; see also state-owned
Gollnisch, Bruno 247 industry
Goustat, André-Henri 237 inflation 20, 34, 285, 461, 462, 466, 489, 494
government 85–7, 110–11, 150–1, 153, 157–8, Inglehart, Ronald 38, 273
252–3; see also parliament inspecteurs des finances 303–4
Grant, Wyn 456 institutionalism 432–3
Gravier, Jean-François 359 institutions: bipolarisation 277; economic
Greenpeace Rainbow Warrior 134 affairs 285–6; Fifth Republic 45, 216–17,
Greens: see Les Verts 259, 262–7; judiciary 393–4; local
Gremetz, Maxime 184 government 351–7; parliament 142,
Grémion, P. 384 157–61; reform 164; state 20
Griotteray, Alain 230 interest groups see state–group relations
Grossouvre, François de 95 intergovernmentalists, liberal 431–4
Guéna, Yves 88, 164, 416 International Criminal Court 64
Guesde, Jules 7 interpellation procedure 148, 149
Guichard, Olivier 286, 287 Ion, Jacques 346
Guichard Report 358 Iraq war 114, 120, 133
Guigou, Élisabeth 130, 133, 139, 195, 299,
414, 416, 449 Jacobinism 10–12, 312; ancien régime 44; de
Gulf war 118, 165 Gaulle 11–12; First Republic 349–50;
judiciary 36–7, 41, 63, 390–3; limits of
Haberer, Jean-Yves 293, 303 357–66; local autonomy 15; state 22–3
Habert, Philippe 273 Jacomet, André 393
Haby, René 138 Jarry, Robert 181
Hallstein, Walter 460 Jaruzelski, Wozzeck 114
Halphen, Éric 414, 416, 417, 419 Jean-Pierre, Thierry 416
Hamon, Léo 211 Jèze, Gaston 141
Hassan II of Morocco 114 Jobert, Michel 94, 211, 221
Hautecloque, Jean de 50–1 Joly, Eva 417, 419
Hayward, Jack 138, 139, 296, 316, 319, 330 Jospin, Lionel 105, 201, 277; agriculture 458;
health ministry 137–8, 197 appointments 123–4; cabinet 92–3;
Heath, Edward 70 cohabitation 59, 82, 89, 96, 122, 138–9,
Heisbourg, François 471 256; cumul des mandats 369–70; defeat 78,
Hernu, Charles 314 190, 213; gauche plurielle 173; Hollande
Herriot, Édouard 10, 361 192; ideology 42, 43, 198; Islamic
Hersant, Robert 247, 401 headscarves 155; Kosovo war 128;
Herzog, Philippe 184 National Assembly 97; présidentiable 189,
Hirsch, Étienne 21 265; public servants 306; social issues 173,
HLMs 26, 38, 369, 407 177; success 194; Tobin tax 38; working
Hoffmann, Stanley 315, 431 hours 79, 83, 122, 124, 197
Hollande, François 192, 194, 198, 479, 480 Journal Officiel 160
housing 25–6, 306, 308–9, 491; see also Joxe, Pierre 111, 112, 155, 326
HLMs Joxe Law 367
Index 529
judges 403–4, 405–8, 410, 412, 414, 416, 6–8; coalitions 277; conflicts 44–6;
418 race/immigration 272–3
judicialisation 389–90, 400–12 left wing 1–2, 202–5; Common Programme
judiciary 63, 137, 165–6, 496–7; institutions 275; divided 171–7, 190–3, 258–9;
393–4; Jacobinism 36–7, 41, 63, 390–3; and elections 169–70, 211–12; French
state 15–16, 23–4 Revolution 14; gauche plurielle 82–3;
Juillet, Pierre 77, 95, 105 leadership 193–5; nationalisation 296–7;
Juppé, Alain 107, 131; anti-interventionism nationalism 10–11
297; Balladur 138; cabinet 92; Chirac 59, Legatte, Paul 404
77, 78, 80, 120, 136, 225, 256, 407; military legislation 146, 150, 163, 286
service 150; popularity 100; Sarkozy 235; Lellouche, Pierre 475
social security 42–3, 45, 119; UMP 234; Lemaire, Gilles 210
women appointees 130, 133 Leninists 8, 171, 173, 181
Juquin, Pierre 182, 208 Léotard, François 123, 138, 158, 228, 230,
jus solis 10–11, 17 231
Justice and Home Affairs (Europe) 428 Lepage, Corinne 133
Justice Ministry 391, 392 Levy, Jonah 289, 375, 383
Lévy, Raymond 287
Kadhafi, Colonel Mu’ammar 114 Liberation 3, 7, 19
Katz, R.S. 169 Libya 114
Keynes, John Maynard 27–8 Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire (LCR)
Kirchheimer, Otto 169, 201–2, 220 202–3, 204
Kohl, Helmut 114, 439, 440, 444, 463, 469 Ligue des Droits de l’Homme 319
Kosovo war 96, 128, 470, 471 Ligue des Patriotes 11
Kouchner, Bernard 100 litigation 400
Kriegel, Annie 180 local authorities 351–4; business 374–7; co-
Krivine, Alain 202, 204 operation 364–6; decentralisation 381–5;
funding 363–4, 382; rationalisation
Labarrère, André 16 379–80
Labour Inspectorate 306 local and regional government 288, 349–88
labour market 24–5 passim
Laguiller, Arlette 203, 204, 274 Long, Marceau 403–4
laïcité 5, 9, 32, 40 Longuet, Gérard 137, 230, 231, 297
Lalonde, Brice 189, 194, 207–8, 209, 274 Lorrain, Dominique 375
Lamassoure, Alain 370 Louis XIV 16, 18
Lamy, Pascal 481–2 Lutte Ouvrière 203, 204, 266
Lancelot, Alain 266–7
Lang, Jack 112, 117, 132, 133, 195, 343 Maastricht Treaty (1992) 64, 227, 296, 428,
Larzac military camp 117 445–6; Chirac 78, 440, 476; convergence
law and order 45, 197–8, 390–1, 401 466–7; FN 244; Mitterrand 74;
lawyers 318, 391, 416 referendum 31, 39, 88, 224, 273; single
Le Chapelier Law 312 currency 30, 402, 464
Le Floch-Prigent, Loîc 408 Mabileau, Albert 377
Le Galès, Patrick 377 McLean, Maire 452
Le Lay, Patrick 407 MacMahon, Marshal 5
Le Pen, Jean-Marie 165, 171, 239, 478; MacSharry, Ray 457
Besancenot 259; Chirac 203, 245, 261; Madelin, Alain 133; administrative reforms
electoral support 78, 79, 171, 267, 276; and 282; Chirac 224, 231; Démocratie Libérale
EU 478; FN 234, 239, 241; media 165, 232; ecology 209; elections 37, 249;
242; Mégret 240, 245–7, 258; vote- industry minister 297; Léotard 228, 230;
switching 212–13 sacked 136, 137, 225
Le Pen, Marine 247, 277 magistrats see judges
Lebanon hostages 127 Mair, P. 169, 171
Lecanuet, Jean 123, 228–9, 231 Maisons de la Culture 116
Leclerc, General 50 Malraux, André 116, 132, 133, 143, 219–20,
Left/Right divisions 1–2, 8–10, 40, 171, 267– 329
8; anti-clericalism 9, 253–4; class politics Malvy, Martin 370
530 Index
Mamère, Noël 190, 209 decentralisation 301, 350–1, 385, 496;
Mansholt, Sicco 456 devaluation 462–3; education 119–20;
Maoists 202 elections 10, 101, 189, 199–200, 268, 274,
Marcellin, Raymond 133 275; EU 438–9, 439; Fabius 89; financial
Marcellin Act 358, 362 crisis 97; FN 75; foreign policy 114;
Marchais, Georges 179, 180, 183, 185, 189, Giscard 71, 188, 222–3; grands chantiers
200, 276, 407 117, 132; inflation control 34; leadership
Marignano, Battle of 15 31–2, 193; networks 98, 213; popularity
Martin, Pierre 271 127–8; protectionism 29; PS 32, 105–6,
Marxism 7, 8, 185, 196, 205, 314–15 187; Rocard 59, 75–6, 81, 100, 106, 119,
Massé, Pierre 289 189, 206; scandal 75, 201, 417; Tapie 106,
Matignon 90, 91–3, 123–4, 129; see also 206; taxation 297
prime minister Mitterrand, Jean-Christophe 95, 113
Matra 340, 376 Mollet, Guy 8, 30, 50, 187, 191, 453
Mauroy, Pierre 95; Catholics 23; monarchy 3; absolute 1, 10, 14; republican
Communists 81, 189; decentralisation 61, 63, 108
370–1, 385; dismissal 107; mayor 22, 191, Monde Diplomatique 37–8
377; Mitterrand 106; nationalisation Monnerville, Gaston 156
146–7; popularity 119; vote of confidence Monnet, Jean 21, 285, 426
148 Monod, Jérôme 234, 288–9
Maurras, Charles 11 Monory, René 138
May 1968 ‘events’ 68, 69, 97, 101, 118, 182, Montebourg, Arnaud 191
324, 329, 494 Moravcsik, Andrew 431–2
Mayer, Daniel 415 Morocco 50–1, 393
Mayer, Nonna 273 Mossuz-Lavau, Janine 277
mayors 383, 384 Mourousi, Yves 97
Mazeaud, Pierre 88, 416 Mouvement contre le Racisme et pour
Mazey, Sonia 372 l’Amitié entre les Peuples (MRAP) 319
Méchet, Philippe 475 Mouvement de Défense de l’Exploitation
Médecin, Jacques 406 Familiale (MODEF) 317
media 204, 242, 247, 313, 410–11, 493–4 Mouvement des Citoyens (MDC) 190, 205,
Médiateur 300, 399, 404 262, 266
Mégret, Bruno 240, 241, 245–7, 258, 262, 277 Mouvement des Démocrates 221
Méhaignérie, Pierre 231 Mouvement des Entreprises de France
Mélenchon, Jean-Luc 191, 192, 204 (MEDEF) 42, 247, 317, 318, 321, 326, 332,
Méline tariff 7 342, 344
Menon, Anand 438, 448, 450 Mouvement des Radicaux de Gauche
Mény, Yves 289, 377, 453, 496 (MRG) 205–6, 229
MEPs 170, 453 Mouvement National Républicain (MNR)
Mer, Francis 133, 307 246–7, 262
Mermaz, Louis 110–11, 153 Mouvement pour la France (MPF) 238, 262
Messier, Jean-Marie 303–4 Mouvement pour un Parti des Travailleurs
Messmer, Pierre 80, 110, 143, 148, 150 (MPPT) 202
Michel, Hervé 370 Mouvement Républicain Populaire (MRP) 6,
Micouraud, Fernand 181 10, 186–7, 188, 227
military conscription 37, 150 multinationals 34, 314
Military Programme Law 112, 115 multipartism 259–60, 261–2
Millon, Charles 115, 231, 239 municipalities 264–5, 351–2, 354; see also
Minc, Alain 37 local government
ministers 129–38, 143, 291–5 Muslim headscarf affair 32, 39–40, 155, 404,
ministries 294–5 409
Mission de la Mer 287
mission d’Évaluation et de Contrôle 159, 164 Nallet, Henri 416
Mitterrand, François 73–6, 124–5, 196–7; Napoleon I 15, 282–3, 397
Balladur 122–3; CERES 193; CIR 191; Napoleon III 7
coalition 173; cohabitation 57, 59, 122, National Assembly 1, 144; amendments 162;
256; Le Coup d’État permanent 61, 75; cohabitation 495; Fabius 159; Fifth
Index 531
Republic 64, 85–6, 174; Jospin 97; parliament 143–4; absenteeism 154–5;
presidency 56, 153, 162; prime minister agenda 145; amendments 160;
56–7; Senate 147, 157; staff pay 153–4; committees 145, 153, 300–1; committees of
two-ballot system 264; see also parliament enquiry 148–9; constitution 142–9;
national champions 19, 20, 296 Constitutional Council 64, 149, 157; in
National Defence Committee 114–15 decline 149–55; and executive 145–7,
nationalisation 28–9, 146–7, 162, 285, 296–7, 149–50, 153; extended 160–1; le fait
340, 489 majoritaire 152–3; Fifth Republic 141–2;
NATO 41, 50, 68, 467–8, 470 institutions 142, 157–61; legislation 144,
Nazism 10, 12 162–4; questions 148; in resurgence
neo-functionalism 432–3 155–64; scandal 165–6; sessions 160; vote
neo-liberalism 28, 37, 459–60, 466 bloqué 155
networks 94–5, 97–8, 293, 357, 384–5 Parodi, Jean-Luc 90, 266–7
New Caledonia 81, 88 Parti Communiste Français (PCF) 173,
New Public Management 304 177–86, 210; CGT 346; in decline 179–82,
new social movements 45, 335–6, 498 213; elections 33; Giscard 276; members
Nice Treaty 114, 429, 430, 440, 444, 470, 472 171–2, 177–86; Mitterrand 73–4; PS 212,
Nicoud, Gérard 327, 461 275
Nixon, Richard 79 Parti Communiste Internationaliste (PCI)
Noël, Léon 415 202
Noir, Michel 138, 406 Parti des Travailleurs 202
Noir-Botton affair 403, 407–8 Parti Ouvrier Français 7
notables 22, 55, 156, 292, 361–2, 363, 380–1 Parti Populaire pour la Démocratie Française
Nouveau Monde 191–2 (PPDF) 228
Nouveau Parti Socialiste 191, 192 Parti Radical de Gauche (PRG) 206
Nouveaux Écologistes du Rassemblement Parti Radical Socialiste (PRS) 205–6
Nature et Animaux 266 Parti Radical 227, 229, 232
nuclear deterrence 115, 127, 146, 493 Parti Républicain (PR) 105, 106, 228, 230; see
nuclear energy 20, 41, 117–18, 159, 314 also Démocratie Libérale; Union pour la
nuclear testing 137, 193, 469 Démocratie Française
Parti Socialiste Autonome 187
Office d’Évaluation de la Législation 159 Parti Socialiste (PS) 186–202; alliances
Office d’Évaluation des Politiques Publiques 188–90, 213; attacked 198; class politics
159 201–2; Communists 212, 275;
Office Parlementaire d’Évaluation des Choix decentralisation 368, 374–7; defeated 105;
Scientifiques et Technologiques 158–9 dominance 256; elites 195–6; factions
oil prices 71 191–3; Fifth Republic 152–3; funding 199;
Organisation Armée Secrète (OAS) 325–6, membership 172, 195–6; Mitterrand
328–9 105–6; National Council 192–3; offices
Organisation Communiste Internationaliste held 210; PCF 185; scandal 406–7; Les
(OCI) 82, 202 Verts 189–90, 276; see also Section
d’Ornano, Michel 163 Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière
Orwell, George 16 Parti Socialiste Unifié (PSU) 187, 202
Ottenheimer, Ghislaine 306 party system 252–80 passim
ozone depletion 159 Pasqua, Charles 16, 133; Chirac 224; gay
magazine 293; Halphen 414; immigration
PACS 124, 159, 161, 197, 239, 335 401–2; Maastricht Treaty 476; Mitterrand
Palestinians 128 124; RPF 227, 238, 262
Palewski, Gaston 415 patronage 98–9, 111, 123–7, 290–1
Panafieu, Françoise de 133 peasants 3–4, 6, 17
pantouflage 247, 284, 287 Peillon, Vincent 191
Papon, Maurice 405–6 Pelat, Roger-Patrice 95
Parents des Élèves de l’Enseignement Privé pension funding 310
(PEEP) 247 Perben, Dominique 418
Paris Commune 3, 7 personalisation of politics 277, 493–4
Paris Treaty 499 Pétain, Marshal 217
Parisot, Laurence 318 Peyrefitte, Alain 132, 162, 327–8, 435
532 Index
Peyrelevade, Jean-Philippe 293 prime ministers 54, 80–3; cabinet 92–3; civil
Pflimlin, Pierre 51 service background 131; cohabitation
Picasso, Pablo 8 121–9; constitution 86; government 85–7;
Picq report 305 ministers 136–7; National Assembly 56–7;
Pisani, Edgard 133, 211 president 86–7, 88–9, 100, 110, 379–80;
Pitts, Jesse 316 special funds 98
Pius IX, Pope 5 prison conditions 117, 419
Plan, National 19 see also Commissariat au private members’ bills 145, 159, 163
Plan privatisation 298–9, 489
Plogoff nuclear power station 117 progress contracts 304–5
Poher, Alain 156, 261, 274 proportional representation 266–7
Poincaré, Raymond 113 proportionnelle départementale 169–70
Poland 180 protectionism 7, 299, 437, 483
policy-making 109, 111–12, 118–21, 158, 383 provinces 294–5, 349, 350, 352, 360–1, 367
political parties 168–280 passim; 518–19; Public Accounts Directorate 307
bipolarisation 255–6; de Gaulle 51–2, public funds 20, 23, 266, 308, 332, 407
168–9; EU 477–9; Fourth Republic 51–2, public policy: Constitutional Council 400–2;
253–4; fragmentation 46, 266, 277; EU 446–50; judges 403–4; judicialisation
funding 163, 166, 266; government 252–3; 400–12
membership 171–2, 257; presidency 494; public/private finance 23, 357, 375
presidents 225–6; public opinion 170–1, public responsibility 403, 412–13
272; see also multipartism; specific parties public sector 19–20; administration 495–6;
politique contractuelle 342–3 borrowing 464; deficits 452; economic
pollution 287 affairs 285; employment 281; EU 296;
polytechniciens 340 expenditure 116, 491; modernisation 305;
Pompidou, Georges 14, 68–70, 101; Chaban- Raffarin 45, 306; reform 310; state 282,
Delmas 81, 95, 136; Chirac 69–70, 76; de 297–8; strikes 45, 248–9, 307–8; traditions
Gaulle 12, 89, 101, 105, 143, 220; death of 309–10; utilities 299; see also public funds
31, 56; Debré 69, 255; delegating power public servants 23, 306, 403; see also civil
105; Europe 427, 438; globalisation 296; servants
Juillet 95; networks 98; notables 292; Le
nœud gordien 60, 69; political strategy 274; Qualified Majority Voting 428, 429, 449, 460,
referendum 221 463, 482
Poniatowski, Michel 105, 110, 228, 315 Queuille, Henri 50
Poperen, Claude 182
Poperen, Jean 191 race 11, 206, 273
poperénistes 191, 197 Radical Party 5–6, 6–7, 7, 9, 188, 220–1, 229
Popular Front 7, 19, 173, 491 Radicaux-Citoyens-Verts (RCV) 205–6
Poujadism 239, 241, 253 Raffarin, Jean-Pierre: decentralisation 36, 41,
poverty 197, 491 301, 351, 371–2, 385, 496; dismissal 107;
prefectoral corps 354–6, 366, 384–5 DL 234; employment legislation 336;
presidency 87–90, 93–106, 109–29, 136, 170, La France d’en bas 277; ministers 133;
175–6, 407, 488, 494 policy-making 111–12; as prime minister
presidentialism 120, 488 79, 80, 96, 100, 106, 119, 120, 334; public
presidents 96; activism 119; campaigning sector 45, 306; reforms 324; working
106; coalitions 100–1; cohabitation 107, hours 119, 159
121–9; Constitutional Council 64, 88; railway building 18, 289
electoral strategies 274–6; Fifth Republic Rainbow Warrior affair 417
67, 87–90, 102–4; National Assembly 56, Ramonet, Ignacio 38
153, 162; networking 97–8; parliamentary Rapid Reaction Forces 441, 470
support 109–10; patronage 98–9, 111; rapporteur role 163
policy-making 118–21; popular support Ras l’Front 319
99–100; powers 88–90; prime ministers Rassemblement du Peuple Français (RPF)
86–7, 88–9, 100, 110, 379–80; as 218
spokesperson 112 Rassemblement pour la France (RPF) 227,
pressure groups 112, 247, 313–15, 343–5 238, 262
price controls 285 Rassemblement pour la République (RPR)
Index 533
77, 78, 79, 107, 218, 222, 225–6, 234, 262, Rumsfeld, Donald 471
298; membership 172, 222, 226 Rwanda 158
referendums 57–60, 62, 64, 87–8; (1946) 50;
(1958) 52, 57, 88; (1961) 88; (1962) 55, 60, St-Josse, Jean 178
70, 88, 156, 232; (1969) 61, 68, 155–6, 217, Salat-Baroux, Frédéric 94
313; (1972) 88, 170, 221, 273, 475–6; sans-papiers 328–9
(1988) 88; (1992) 74, 88, 170, 224, 238, Santer, Jacques 440
258, 273, 475–6, 499, 517; (2000) 88; Sapin, Michel 133, 291–2
(2005) 45, 64, 79, 80, 105, 169, 170, 186, Sarkozy, Nicolas 133; Chirac 111, 249;
187, 190, 192, 195, 202, 205, 211, 213, 238, Corsica 326, 369; as finance minister 43,
258–9, 271, 273, 277, 307, 430, 441, 475–6, 444–5; immigratiion 131; Juppé 235;
478–80, 495, 499, 517 présidentiable 120, 136–7, 194; Séguin
regional councils 366 225–6; UMP 105, 235–6
regionalism 350 Sartori, Giovanni 253–4
regions 286–7, 351–2, 353, 354–6, 383 Sartre, Jean-Paul 8
Religion, Wars of 14 Saunier-Seïté, Alice 138
religion, and voting behaviour 6, 269–70, 272 Sautter, Christian 307
Rémond, Bruno 377 Savary, Alain 118, 191, 195
Rémond, René 9, 216–17 Savary bill 193, 402, 488
Renault 162, 182, 287, 299, 313, 325, 340, 489 scandal: blood contamination 194; civil
Renseignements Généraux 417–18 service 293, 403; committee of enquiry
Républicains Indépendants (RI) 101, 105, 148–9, 159; elites 345; Gaullists 227;
220, 221, 227; see also Parti Républicain; Mitterrand 75, 201; parliament 165–6
Union pour la Démocratie Française Schengen accords 302
republicanism 3–4, 9, 10 Schlesinger, Arthur M. 49
Resistance 3, 7, 8, 10 Schmidt, Helmut 71, 72, 114, 439
Restos du Cœur 320–1 Schmidt, Vivien 319, 321, 338
réunions interministérielles 91, 92 Schmitter, Philippe 330–1
Revel, Jean-François 37 Schrameck, Olivier 92–3, 123, 125, 128–9,
revenu minimum d’insertion 336, 378, 490 138
Rey, Henri 198 Schröder, Gerhard 201, 440, 442, 444–5, 459
Richard, Alain 471 Schuman, Robert 435
right wing 1–2, 216–17, 230–1; authoritarian Second Republic 3
38; Catholic Church 9, 32; Centrists Sécrétariat Général du Comité
232–3; coalitions 233; economic policies Interministériel (SGCI) 93, 299, 448–50,
230; extreme 212–13, 216–17, 239–47; 451
media 247; nationalism 11; non-Gaullist Secrétariat Général des Affaires Européennes
moderate 227–32, 233; OAS 325–6 (SGAE) 93, 126, 127, 299, 302, 448
Rimbault, Jacques 181 Section Française de l’Internationale
Ripert, Jean 330 Ouvrière (SFIO) 6, 8, 171, 173, 186–7, 191,
Rocard, Michel 202, 333; budget 112, 116; 196–7, 199–202; see also Parti Socialiste
cabinet 92; Defferre 188; dismissal 107, Sécurité et liberté law 162
194; Fabius 192; Gulf war 118; laws 150; Sedan, Battle of 10
Mitterrand 59, 75–6, 81, 100, 106, 119, Séguin, Philippe 37, 137, 155, 157–9, 163,
206; modernisation 305; PS 191; state 224–5, 476
interventionism 297; vote of confidence Seillière, Ernest-Antoine de 42
148 Senate 64, 147, 155–7, 225
Rome Treaties 29, 30, 39, 50, 152, 394, 426, Servan-Schreiber, Jean-Jacques 137, 229
428, 436, 453 Servent, Pierre 129
Rondin, Jacques 381 Shonfield, Andrew 21
Rosa, Jean-Jacques 37 Siemens 444
Rouban, Luc 302, 304, 305, 382 Simonian, Haig 442
Roussin, Michel 137 Single European Act (SEA) 427–8, 432–3,
Roux, Ambroise 314, 318 436, 445–6, 463–4; associations 374;
Royal, Ségolène 194, 195 dirigisme 452; legislation 372, 453;
Rueff, Jacques 115 liberalisation 296; neo-liberalism 466–7
rule of law, aversion to 416–17, 419–20 Smith, Timothy 491
534 Index
Social Charter 467 Syndicat National des Petites et Moyennes
social issues 50, 173, 177, 241, 491 Industries (SNPMI) 318
social protection 480
social reform 308–9, 321–2 Tapie, Bernard 106, 137, 194, 206, 406, 474,
social security 7, 12, 21, 42–3, 45, 50, 119 475
socialism 7, 8, 9, 32; see also Section tariffs 7, 18
Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière; Taubira, Christiane 190, 206
Parti Socialiste Tax Directorate 307
société bloquée 319–20 taxation 297, 307, 379–80
Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer teachers’ unions 318, 320
Français (SNCF) 297, 299 technology parks 375
Soisson, Jean-Pierre 228, 231 telephone tapping 134
Solana, Xavier 470 Tenaillon, Pierre-Yves 407
solar energy 286–7 terrorist bombings 97
Solidaires, Unitaires et Démocratiques TGV 289, 404
(SUD) 318–19 Thatcher, Margaret 282, 455
Sorman, Guy 37 Théry, Gérard 289
SOS-Racisme 196, 204, 319 Thiers, Adolphe 14
Soucy, Robert 239 Third Republic 3, 10, 11, 14, 16–17, 32, 283,
Souviron, Jean-Pierre 289 350
sovereignty 226–7, 273, 392, 422–3 Thoenig, Jean-Claude 292, 360, 365, 384
Soviet Union 179–80, 184 Thorez, Maurice 179–80
Spaak, Paul-Henri 454 Tiberi, Jean 227, 407, 411, 417
Stability and Growth Pact 437, 445, 452, 460, Tiberi, Xavière 407
464, 465, 484, 490 Tixier-Vignancour, Jean-Louis 239
Stalin, Joseph 182 Tobin tax 37–8
state 18–19, 22–4; authoritarianism 319; Tocqueville, Alexis de 15, 22, 283, 315,
Catholic Church 23, 40; Gaullism 219; 346–7
institutions 20; Jacobinism 22–3; Toubon, Jacques 416
judiciary 15–16, 23–4; pressure groups Touffait, Adolphe 411
313–15; public services 282, 297–8; Tours, Congress of 8
shrinking 298–304; traditions 14–24, 40–4 Touvier, Paul 405–6
state–group relations 339–45; corporatist and trade unions 7, 21, 134; agriculture 332–3,
concerted politics models 330–4; 342, 345; banned 15, 312; doctors 318;
domination-crisis model 315–22; endemic education 333, 345; lawyers 416;
and open conflict model 322–9; pluralist membership 316; students 319;
model 334–45 unemployed 341–2
state interventionism 296–7 Transparency International 497
state-owned industry 24, 28–9, 33–4, 83, Trautmann, Catherine 162
298–9, 461 Treasurer and Paymaster General post 356
steel industry 21, 325, 327, 340 trente glorieuses 24–7, 496; Algeria 31;
Sternhell, Zeev 239 dirigisme 21–2, 41–2, 43, 461; Left/Right
Stirn, Olivier 208 40; social reform 308–9; transformations
Strauss-Kahn, Dominique 132, 137, 139, 34, 282; urbanisation 359
194–5 Trichet, Jean-Claude 440
strikes 7, 26, 45, 150, 248–9, 290, 307–8, 320, Trotskyists 106, 190, 191, 202, 204
323–4; see also May 1968 ‘events’ truck drivers 150, 325, 328–9
student demonstrations 26, 68, 328; see also Truman, David 334
May 1968 ‘events’ Tunisia 12, 50–1
student movements 228, 319 Turkey 478
student numbers 26, 383 two-ballot system 262, 263–5
subsidiarity 377–9
Suleiman, Ezra 289, 293–4, 338, 344, 347 unemployed movement 45, 320, 335
summit attendance 126–7 unemployment 257, 497; immigration 240–1;
sumptuary legislation 18 Jospin 42, 197–8; revenu minimum
Syndicat Intercommunal à Vocation Multiple d’insertion 336; statistics 34–5, 74, 272,
(SIVOM) 365 464, 490; trade union 341–2; youth 309
Index 535
Union Démocratique et Sociale de la Villepin, Dominique de: appointment 82, 94,
Résistance (UDSR) 73, 188 143, 302; Chirac 77; civil unrest 328;
Union Nationale des Associations des Parents cohabitation 123; Commissariat au Plan
d’Élèves de l’Enseignement Libre 298; Danone 43; Debré 98; as Élysée
(UNAPEL) 247, 343 secretary-general 95
Union Nationale des Associations Familiales Villiers, Philippe de 230, 238, 262, 475, 478
332 violence 325–8
Union Nationale des Étudiants de France vote bloqué 86, 146, 147, 150, 151, 155, 157
(UNEF) 199, 204, 319 voting 514–15, 516, 517; abstentions 212,
Union pour la Démocratie Française (UDF) 271–2, 277; class 270–1, 272; protest vote
106, 225, 227; Bayrou 232, 235; de Villiers 257, 274, 277; religious factors 272;
262; in disarray 231; Front National 231– switching 212; see also elections
2; membership 172; non-Gaullist moderate Voynet, Dominique 130, 162, 189, 209–10,
Right 233; RPR 223, 234; small groups 258, 261, 267, 327
229; see also Parti Républicain; Démocratie
Libérale Waechter, Antoine 208, 209, 267, 475
Union pour la Nouvelle République (UNR) Waters, Sarah 324, 335, 336
217–18; membership 172; see also Weber, Eugen 17, 349–50
Gaullism Weber, Henri 204
Union pour un Mouvement Populaire Western European Union (WEU) 468, 470
(UMP) 79, 107, 217, 218; EU referendum Wilson, Frank 337
13; Gaullism 33, 46; Giscard 101; Juppé Wilson, Harold 79
234–6; membership 172, 235, 262; reform Wilson, Woodrow 49
117; Sarkozy 105, 235–6; support 234–5, women: in government 130, 133, 164–5, 195,
258 206, 380; labour market 24–5; voting
universalism 38 tendencies 270
universities 309, 383, 490–1 women’s movement 335
Urba group 199, 201, 406, 416 working hours 321, 490; Jospin 79, 83, 122,
urbanisation 25, 181, 308–9, 359, 364, 368–9 124, 197; Raffarin 119, 159
Uruguay Round 333, 334, 342, 456, 457 World Cup football team 78, 97, 341
World Social Forum 38
Valmy, Battle of 10 World Trade Organisation (WTO) 30, 296,
Van Biezen, M. 171 459, 482–3
Védrine, Hubert 94, 95, 123 Worms, Jean-Pierre 365, 384
Veil, Simone 100, 132, 231, 242 Wright, Gordon 40, 296
Vendée rebellion 3, 5 Wright, V. 138, 139
Les Verts 38, 177, 190, 207–10, 262, 276
Vichy régime 3, 11, 75, 217, 350, 390 Zemmour, Éric 411

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The Government and Politics of France

Andrew Knapp and Vincent Wright

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

ISBN10: 0–415–35733–0 (hbk)

ISBN13: 978–0–415–35733–3 (hbk)

List of ﬁgures and maps xv

1 French political traditions in a changing context 1

3 Presidents and prime ministers: the personal factor 67

4 The sources of executive power 85

5 Executive policy-making: the variable diarchy 109

6 The French parliament: decline – and resurgence? 141

7 The Left and the Greens: the dilemma of government 168

8 The Right: domination and division 216

9 Transformations of the party system: continuity and change 252

10 The administration: foundations, myth and changing reality 281

11 The state and the pressure groups 312

13 French justice and the elusive État de droit 389

14 France and European integration 422

(see also appendices)

1.1 Left, Right, and the tradition of political division in France 2

Area of division Left Right

Régime (early Submit exercise of royal power to Maintain pre-1789 absolute

Table 1.2 France: régimes since 1789

1789–92 Constitutional monarchy: king’s powers limited by National Assembly

The politics of class

Le parti du mouvement et le parti de l’ordre

The common core

Liberty, equality, fraternity

• An ambition, an expression of national will by a traditionally active and ambitious

The state: image and reality

The changing context of French political traditions

Post-war boom: the trente glorieuses

Together, these three large-scale developments – two successive economic transform-

Political conﬂict and the state: transformations

The dismantling of dirigisme

The state tradition: challenges from within

• Decentralisation, or failing that the ‘defence of local liberties’, is an aspiration as

Redeﬁning political conﬂict

The survival of traditions

The state tradition

• As a dense institutional architecture. The complex network of interministerial

Patterns of political conﬂict

General historical and political works

On French political cultures

On the trente glorieuses

On economic change since the 1980s

On the changing boundaries between Right and Left

Ultimately, a failure: the Fourth Republic (1946–58) 49

Ultimately, a failure: the Fourth Republic (1946–58)

The Gaullist agenda

Figure 2.1 The heart of the Fifth Republic Constitution.

suﬃciently large to be able to fend oﬀ an opposition censure motion). A president

Readings of the Fifth Republic

The republican monarchy

The Constitutional Council and the État de droit

Table 2.1 Constitutional amendments since 1958

Type* Date Nature of amendment

a 4 June 1960 Reforms to French Community, allowing newly independent