France

I

The Fourth Republic

France emerged from World War II profoundly weakened economically, but it had once again learned to appreciate its republican traditions. Indeed, one effect of Vichy’s collapse was to discredit the traditional right, which had never really accepted the values of 1789 as its own. The nearly universal acceptance of republican values after 1945 facilitated the building of a more stable political system.

The year 1945 was also a turning point demographically and economically, after which France acquired an energy not seen for half a century. Striking new population growth and a rising standard of living increased demand for consumer goods and for more education and other services from the state. Women, enfranchised in 1944 by a wartime decree, exercised their newly acquired right to vote and gradually improved their economic status.

Having dealt with some of the collaborators, the new government sought to build on the patriotic spirit of the Resistance, hoping to synthesize unity out of the myth that nearly everyone had been a resistor. The government enacted fresh reforms, extending the vote to women. But political differences soon resurfaced, and parties quickly formed. The political right, which had been discredited by its association with Vichy, was in disarray. A new centrist party, the Christian Democratic Mouvement Republicain Populaire, or MRP, emerged and won about 25 percent of the votes in the fall 1945 legislative election, as did the older socialist and communist parties.

The National Assembly drew up a new constitution amid protracted controversy. It soon became clear that the constitution would mandate another parliamentary regime, not the presidential system that de Gaulle favored. De Gaulle resigned in January 1946 and spent the next 12 years in virtual political exile. The assembly approved a proposed constitution calling for a state dominated by a single-chambered legislature, but the voters rejected it, fearing it would facilitate a communist takeover of the whole government. In October 1946 the voters approved a second draft, which proposed a two-chambered legislature, but included mechanisms to make it easier to pass legislation than under the Third Republic. The Fourth Republic was born.

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During the 12 years of its existence, the Fourth Republic witnessed a string of relatively short-lived governments that over time tracked more and more to the right. None was particularly distinguished, except for that of the Radical Pierre Mendès-France, who sought to breathe life into the republic through a series of reforms inspired by British economist John Maynard Keynes. Two major items dominated the political agenda: the economy and decolonization.

I

1

Economic Issues

At the end of World War II, the French economy suffered from low production and an excess of money, which led to rapid inflation. The Vichy experiments at planning and the postwar nationalization of key industries—coal, gas, electricity, and some banks and insurance companies—prepared the way for bold efforts to energize the economy. Beginning in 1946, Jean Monnet, head of the state planning commission, administered a program to break through traditional economic bottlenecks by stimulating investment and thereby production. Part of the investment capital was provided by the United States under the Marshall Plan.

In addition, France and other European nations recognized how economic isolationism had undermined all their economies during the 1930s. They began to form international associations to promote more broadly based economic growth and to lay the basis for possible long-term political integration. An additional incentive to form such associations was the fear that an economically weak and politically divided western Europe would invite further expansion by the Soviet Union, which after World War II had established a broad band of satellite countries in eastern and central Europe.

In 1951 France joined with West Germany and other European nations in the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), the brainchild of the French statesman Robert Schuman. The ECSC led to the formation in 1957 of the European Economic Community, known as the Common Market, a trade association that included Germany, Italy, and the Benelux countries (Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg). Although generally successful, reduction of tariff barriers tended to benefit large producers at the expense of smaller ones. In the 1950s many small producers backed a short-lived, right-wing protest movement for tax relief, led by the shopkeeper Pierre Poujade. The movement failed, but it expressed resentment against modernization that would show itself more forcefully later.

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2

Decolonization

Overall the Fourth Republic dealt successfully with economic issues, but it was less successful in resolving colonial ones. Decolonization eventually brought down the regime, much as the Franco-Prussian War had terminated the Second Empire and World War II the Third Republic. The sprawling French Empire, like those of other European nations, faced widespread revolts after World War II.

In Indochina, resistance movements had been organized to oppose the Japanese, who had occupied the area during World War II. After the war, these movements were redirected against French imperialism. From 1946 to 1954 the French army attempted to suppress the resistance movements in Indochina, but it was dealt a humiliating defeat at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954 (see First Indochina War). Prime Minister Mendès-France arranged for as graceful a diplomatic and military withdrawal from Indochina as was possible under the circumstances, and he preempted trouble in Morocco and Tunisia by conceding independence.

The prime minister faced a much more difficult situation in Algeria, where the vast majority of Arab Algerians wanted independence but the 1 million European settlers there demanded the continued protection of French rule. A violent independence movement began in 1954, and increasingly large numbers of French troops were sent to Algeria to put it down. The movement escalated into a virtual civil war involving the use of terror and torture. Extremists in the French army and their sympathizers who feared a French pullout from Algeria plotted to bring down the French government. By 1958 it was clear that the Fourth Republic could not resolve the crisis (see Algerian War of Independence).

Supporters of Charles de Gaulle, who had bided his time in retirement, plotted to use the turmoil to put him in power under a new constitution, and eventually a smooth transition was arranged. De Gaulle became the last prime minister of the Fourth Republic. In May 1958 the National Assembly vested him with full power for six months and the authority to draft a new constitution, to be approved by the voters. Then in June the Assembly dissolved itself. The Fourth Republic was dead.

J

The Fifth Republic

A new constitution for France’s Fifth Republic was drafted by a committee headed by Gaullist Michel Debré. The new constitution was a hybrid of the presidential and parliamentary systems. It pruned back the powers of the two-chambered legislature and granted the president considerably more power than the presidents of previous regimes. But it also maintained a prime minister, who was chosen by the president yet needed the support of the legislature.

Perhaps because the first president was likely to be the charismatic de Gaulle, the constitution did not spell out the distribution of power between the president and prime minister. This ambiguity would create uncertainties later, but it also allowed for flexibility in situations in which the presidency and the legislature were controlled by different parties.

The constitution was approved by 80 percent of the voters in September 1958. The elections that followed gave a new Gaullist party a near majority in the legislature, while the left, which had opposed the new constitution, lost badly. Following procedures stipulated by the new constitution, which gave the right to choose the president to a college of local officials, de Gaulle, not surprisingly, was made president. De Gaulle chose Debré as his first prime minister.

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1

The De Gaulle Years

De Gaulle attempted to keep the French colonial empire together by granting more autonomy to the remaining colonies within a new French Community. But in the end he had to agree to their overwhelming demands for independence. The Algerian crisis, which had brought him back to power, was the toughest problem on his agenda. De Gaulle had led the differing parties to believe he was sympathetic to their opposite positions. He had misleadingly assured the French Algerians that “I have understood you.” But he gradually recognized the hopelessness of continued repression in Algeria, and in 1962 he reached agreement with the insurgents in meetings at Evian, France.

The Evian Accords, which 90 percent of French voters also approved, provided for an Algerian referendum on independence. A majority of Algerians voted for independence. Even before the accords were reached, however, a group of military officers and colonials organized the Secret Army Organization (OAS), which conspired to overthrow the government. De Gaulle put down this rebellion in 1962, ending the Algerian crisis. French Algerians remained bitter over what they saw as de Gaulle’s sellout. Most of them also had to endure the insult of living in a France governed by their nemesis, de Gaulle, after having suffered the injury of leaving Algeria forever.

De Gaulle envisioned a greater role for France in world affairs than it had played under the Fourth Republic. With the Algerian crisis settled and Soviet expansionism into Europe more or less contained, de Gaulle set out to create and lead a group of nations distinct from the American and Soviet superpowers. To give this group teeth and to gain independence from the United States, he initiated a successful, if expensive, program to develop nuclear weapons. Then in 1967 he pulled France out of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a defense alliance led by the United States that France had joined earlier to provide a common front against the USSR.

De Gaulle maintained cordial relations with former French colonies and even intervened in Canadian internal affairs by declaring solidarity with Canadian Francophones who were demanding independence for the province of Québec. He also prevented Britain from joining the Common Market on the grounds that it was too closely tied to the United States. At the same time, he forged stronger ties with West Germany. In the end, de Gaulle did make the French feel that they continued to be an important presence in international affairs, even after their once extensive empire had crumbled.

At home de Gaulle worked to strengthen the franc, which in the late 1950s was again in trouble, instituting devaluations and government austerity measures. Whatever the effect of these measures, the economy experienced another growth spurt in the 1960s, which added credibility to the Fifth Republic. To enhance his authority, de Gaulle had the constitution altered in 1962 to provide for the direct election of the president, beginning with the next election, in 1965. De Gaulle was elected to a second term as president in 1965, but he had a harder time winning than expected. He failed to get a majority of votes in the first round of the election. Even in the second round, his margin of victory was only 10 percent over that of his challenger, François Mitterrand.

However, de Gaulle still seemed unremovable and irreplaceable in 1968, when he faced his worst crisis. That May, a student protest movement escalated into a massive national strike, paralyzing the country. These developments drew on multiple resentments that had been building against the Fifth Republic for years, particularly among the young and the working class. De Gaulle wisely retired from the scene, waiting for the country to grow tired of the chaos. He then boldly reentered, presenting himself as the only alternative to anarchy and promising university reforms for the students and wage increases for the workers.

In the legislative elections of June 1968, de Gaulle’s party won a crushing victory. But de Gaulle’s prestige had declined greatly, and he ruled with less mastery than before. Aging, tired, and apparently looking for an exit, in 1969 he pledged to leave office if the voters rejected his proposal to restructure the Senate. It was rejected and de Gaulle resigned. The most prominent French leader of the 20th century made perhaps the strangest departure from politics in all French history.

With de Gaulle gone, Gaullism became an affair of more ordinary politicians. The Fifth Republic, which de Gaulle had previously seemed to embody, became more depersonalized and institutionalized. De Gaulle was succeeded as president by the much less commanding Georges Pompidou, who was closely tied to big business. Pompidou was less committed to French intervention in world politics than de Gaulle had been, and he permitted Britain to enter the Common Market. In economic matters, he leaned more toward a laissez-faire position than had de Gaulle, and his administration undertook relatively few new initiatives.

When Pompidou died in 1974, he was succeeded by Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, who was not a Gaullist but the leader of the center-right Independent Republicans. A technocrat by training, Giscard had a progressive agenda. He proposed to protect the environment, legalize contraception and abortion, lower the voting age, and redistribute taxes. He was successful in most of these initiatives. However, his popularity was undercut by the first major economic downturn since World War II, which caused unemployment and inflation to grow. He was defeated in 1981 by François Mitterrand, whose Socialist Party also won a majority in legislative elections.

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