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03799
Crisis and Compromise
By Philip Williams
Politics in Post-War France
By Philip Williams and M. Harrison
De Gaulle's Republic
CRISIS AND
COM PROMISE
Politics in the Fourth Republic
by
PHILIP M. WILLIAMS
LONGM ANS
LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO LTD
48 Grosvenor Street, London W.I
Associated companies, branches and representatives
throughout the world
© Philip M. Williams 1958 and 1964
First published 1954 under the title
Politics in Post- War France
Second edition 1958
Third edition 1964 under the title
Crisis and Compromise
Printed in Great Britain by
Western Printing Services Ltd, Bristol
PREFACE
This book has a large but limited theme : the political machinery of the Fourth
Republic and the combinations of men who operated or obstructed it. It
describes each of the principal parties and political institutions of the regime,
and analyses its working as a system. But it does not attempt to recount the
history of the period, or to discuss problems of policy except where this is
necessary to explain their impact on institutions or parties. As it stops in
1958, the old title, Politics in Post-War France, is no longer appropriate.
To deal with the sweeping changes of the Fourth Republic's last five years,
the book has been entirely recast. Of the thirty-one chapters eleven are quite
new, and all but three of the rest have been completely rewritten. For when
the first edition was completed ten years ago, France was at war in Indo-
China and at peace in Algeria. Tunisia, Morocco, Madagascar and much of
Western and Equatorial Africa were still ruled from Paris. The future of
western European union seemed to depend on the fate of the European
Defence Community, and most Frenchmen bitterly regretted Britain's
absence from that project. At home, industrial production lagged at the 1929
level : the French economic miracle lay ahead. With Gaullism in ruins and
Poujadism not yet born, the political system seemed secure. Neither Pierre
Mendes-France nor Guy Mollet had attained the premiership. The Algerian
war had not begun its stealthy encroachment on the freedom of minorities :
opposition newspapers were not yet confiscated by the government, meetings
were not broken up, internment camps for suspected terrorists had not been
established, and though the officer corps might grumble at its political masters
it did not dream of challenging their authority.
Some old material has been omitted to make room for the new develop-
ments, and in some respects I have changed my mind. In 1953 1 seriously over-
estimated the stability of a regime which had yet to face a political and
emotional challenge as grave as the Irish question in Britain, or the problem
of the South in the United States. It may be that different governmental
actions and policies could have saved the Fourth Republic, and an attentive
reader of both editions would find my views on some leaders, groups and
practices more severe than they used to be. But I am inclined to doubt
whether France could have accomplished her disengagement from North
Africa without the sacrifice of at least one Republic at home (in the end it
very nearly cost her two). General de Gaulle, who had the immense advantage
of coming to power as the nation's last resort, used it skilfully to settle a
problem before which his predecessors had been impotent - yet, with far
greater prestige and a far freer hand than they, he often had to employ
similar expedients. The frequency with which undesirable practices of the
old regime were taken over by the new shows that they often arose from the
difficulties of the situation as well as weaknesses of the leaders' characters or
faults in the constitution. In pointing this out from time to time I do not
necessarily condemn the Fifth Republic, which has had even more difficult
situations to confront.
PREFACE
To keep this work within manageable dimensions, many important and
interesting subjects have had to be omitted. Administration, justice and
'France overseas' fall within its scope only where they impinged on domestic
politics. The social and philosophical background is not treated; revealing
episodes such as the worker-priest movement, or the protest against the
Rosenberg executions, find no place; and even the influence of press and
army, trade unions and universities is touched on only briefly. In my approach,
though I have tried to appreciate all points of view about French affairs, I
have found it neither possible nor desirable to avoid acquiring preferences
and prejudices. While the British academic tradition in writing about politics
is one of complete detachment, the French (even in their state-controlled
universities) are less concerned to avoid the appearance of taking sides. There
is much to be said for both approaches; there is nothing to be said for pro-
fessing one and practising the other. Bias is dangerous only when it is con-
cealed - or unconscious. The reader is therefore entitled to know my political
standpoint, which is that of the moderate wing of the Labour party.
The title, part of Chapter 8 and much of Chapter 29 are adapted from an
article of mine which appeared in the Political Science Quarterly in 1957. 1 am
grateful to the publishers for permission to use this material.
My principal debt of gratitude is to the Warden and Fellows of Nuflield
College, Oxford, for making it possible for this book to be written and later
rewritten, and for much stimulus and encouragement in the process. I am
grateful for valuable advice and comment to Saul Rose and Francis de Tarr,
who read Chapter 7 and Chapter 9; to those who read all or large parts
of the manuscript: Malcolm Anderson, Ian Campbell, Bernard Donoughue,
Francois Goguel, Martin Harrison, Serge Hurtig, David Shapiro and Nicholas
Wahl; and especially to David Goldey and Anthony King, who read the
proofs as well. Jean Brotherhood was not merely a paragon among secretaries
(not least in patience) but helped invaluably with the index. It is impossible
to name all, and would be invidious to mention only a few of the academic,
political, official and journalistic friends in France without whom this book
would never have been written ; but I must particularly thank Jean Touchard
and his colleagues of the Fondation nationale des sciences politiques for their
help and friendship over many years. None of these, of course, has any
responsibility for the views I have expressed or the errors I have committed.
CONTENTS
PREFACE V
ABBREVIATIONS ix
PRINCIPAL DATES xii
, PART I THE BACKGROUND
1. The Basis of French Politics 2
2. The War and its Aftermath, 1936-1947 1 7
3. The Search for a Majority, 1947-1953 31
4. Revolts against the* System', 1954-1958 44
PART II THE PARTIES
5. Political Communication and Party Structure 60
6. The Communist Party 71
7. The Socialist Party 88
8. The Christian Democrats (MRP) 103
9. The Radical Party 115
10. TheGaullists 132
11. The Conservative Groups 148
12. The Extreme Right 160
13. The Minor Parties 170
PART III THE INSTITUTIONS
14. The Constitutional Problem 184
15. The President and the Cabinet 195
16. The National Assembly: (1) Machinery and Methods 208
17. The National Assembly: (2) Government and Parliament 222
18. The National Assembly: (3) The Committee Structure 242
19. The National Assembly: (4) Legislation and Finance 257
20. The Council of the Republic 276
21 . Subordinate Institutions and Constitutional Amendment 292
22. The Electoral System 307
PART IV THE SYSTEM
23. Voters and Members 322
24. Politics and the State Machine 336
25. Interests and Causes 352
26. Pressure Politics 369
27. Parties and Coalitions : (1) The Battle of the Monoliths 386
28. Parties and Coalitions : (2) The War of Manoeuvre 396
29. Parties and Coalitions : (3) Crisis as an Institution 413
30. The Men and the System 428
31. Society and the State 444
CONTENTS
MAPS
1. Income per head, 1951 456
2. The Left in the Third Republic 456
3. Agriculture and poverty, 1954 456
4. Population increase, 1946-54 456
5. Catholic areas 45~
6. The Right in the Third Republic 457
7. Electoral turnout, 1946-1951-1956 457
8. Electoral evolution, 1946-56 457
9. Communists, 1946-1951-1956 458
10. Socialists, 1946-1951-1956 458
11. Radicals, 1946-1951-1956 458
12. RPF 1951 and Poujadists 1956 458
13. MRP, 1946-1951-1956 459
14. Conservatives, 1946-1951-1956 459
15. Electoral alliances, 1951 459
16. Absolute majorities, 1951 and 1956 459
17. Referendum 21-10-1945: Oui a de Gaulle 460
18. Referendum 13-10-1946: Constitution of the Fourth Republic 460
19. Referendum 28-9-1958: Oui a de Gaulle 460
20. The traditional Right 1936-1956 460
21. Distribution of industry, 1954 (with names of departments) 461
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bibliographical Note 463
List of Books 465
List of Articles 470
APPENDICES
I. CONSTITUTION OF THE FOURTH REPUBLIC 478
(including amendments 1954)
II. THE MINISTRIES 494
III. THE MINISTERS 496
iv. a. THE OPPOSITION: Votes in the Assembly, 1945-1954 498
b. OPPOSITION AND GOVERNMENT: Votes in the Assembly, 1955-1958 500
v. THE VERDICT OF THE ELECTORATE: Referendums and elections
1945-1958 502
VI. THE WORKING OF THE ELECTORAL SYSTEM 504
VII. COMPOSITION AND OUTLOOK OF THE PARTIES 509
DIAGRAMS
1. Party alignments, 1945-1946 21
2. Duration and composition of Governments, 1944-1958 33
3. Party alignments, 1947-1954 43
4. Party ah'gnments, 1955-1958 52
INDEX 511
ABBREVIATIONS
I. French Parties
(*with a separate group in the National Assembly; III - Third Republic only;
V - Fifth Republic only.)
Action republicaine et sociale
Centre national des independants (et paysans)
Independants d'outre-mer
Jeune Republique
Mouvement pour la liberation du peuple
Mouvement republicam populaire
Mouvement du triomphe des libertes democratiques (Algerian)
Parti democrate populaire (III)
Parti populaire francais (III)
Parti du regroupement africain
Parti republicain de la Liberte
Parti socialiste autonome (V)
Parti social francais (III)
Parti socialiste unifie (V)
Rassemblement democratique africain
Rassemblement des Gauches republicaines
Rassemblement des groupes republicains et independants francais
(1951 and 1956 elections)
Rassemblement national (1956 election)
Rassemblement du peuple francais (Gaullists)
Republicains spciaux (Gaullists)
Section frangaise de 1'Internationale ouvriere (official title of the
Socialist party)
Union democratique des independants
Union democratique du Manifesto algefien
Union democratique et socialiste de la Resistance
Union democratique du travail (V)
Union des forces democratiques (V)
Union et fraternite franchise (Poujadist deputies)
Union de la Gauche socialiste
Union des nationaux et des independants republicains (1951
election)
Union pour la nouvelle Republique (V)
*ARS
*CNI, CNIP
*IOM
JR
MLP
*MRP
*MTLD
PDP
PPF
*PRA
*PRL
PSA
PSF
PSU
*RDA
*RGR
RGRIF
RN
*RPF
*RS
*SFIO
*UDI
*UDMA
*UDSR
UDT
UFD
*UFF
UGS
UNIR
*UNR
II. Other Organizations
ACJF Association catholique de la jeunesse francaise
APEL Association des parents des eleves de Tenseignement libre
APLE Association parlementaire pour la liberte de Tenseignement
CFTC Confederation francaise des trayailleurs Chretiens
CGA Confederation generale de 1'agriculture
CGC Confederation generale des cadres
CGSI Confederation generale des syndicats independants
CGT Confederation generale du travail
CGT-FO Confederation generale du travail - Force ouvriere
CGPME Confederation generale des petites et moyennes entreprises
CGV Confederation generale des viticulteurs
CNPF Conseil national du patronat frangais
DST Direction de la surveillance du territoire
EDC European Defence Community
EN A ficole nationale d'administration
X ABBREVIATIONS
II. Other Organizations (continued)
FLN Front de Liberation nationale (Algerian)
FNSEA Federation nationale des syndicats d'exploitants agricoles
FO Force ouvriere
I G A M E Inspecteurs-generaux de 1'administration en mission extraordinaire
('super-prefects')
INSEE (see Publications)
JAC Jeunesse agricole chretienne
JOC Jeunesse ouvriere chretienne
NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization
OAS Organisation de Parmee secrete (V)
PME Petites et moyennes entreprises
SDECE Section de documentation exterieure et de contre-espionnage
SEATO South-East Asia Treaty Organization
UDCA Union de defense des commercants et des artisans (Poujadists)
III. Publications
AN, Doc. no Documents published by the National Assembly
AP UAnnee politique, published annually from 1944-45 by Editions
du grand siecle, from 1957 by Presses universitaires francaises
APSR American Political Science Review
BC Bulletin des Commissions (published by the National Assembly)
BCE Bulletin du Conseil economique
INSEE Institut national de statistiques et d'etudes economiques
JO Journal Officiel de la Republiquefrancaise. Unless otherwise stated
the series referred to is that of Debats parlementaires either of
the Constituent or of the National Assembly according to the
date. The date shown is that of the debate, not that of publica-
tion.
JO(ACE) Journal Officiel ... Avis et rapports du Conseil economique.
JO(A UF) Journal Officiel . . . Debats de VAssemblee de /' Union francaise
JO(CR) Journal Officiel . . . Ddbats parlementaires, Conseil de la R&publique
JP Journal of Politics
P. Adm. Public Administration
P. Aff. Parliamentary Affairs
PS Political Studies
RDP Revue du droit public et de la science politique
RFSP Revue francaise de science politique
RPP Revue politique et parlementaire
SCC i Seances de la commission de la constitution, comptes rendus
analytiques (First Constituent Assembly)
SCC n Seances . . ., etc. (Second Constituent Assembly)
TM Temps modernes
WPQ Western Political Quarterly
PRINCIPAL DATES
GOVERNMENT DOMESTIC
'44 June De Gaulle: Bidault, Foreign Aug. Paris liberated ~~~
^ Oct. Resistance militia dissolved
'45
Apr. Mendes-F. resigns
Oct. referendum ; election ; 3 big parties
'46 Jan. Gouin, Soc. : Tripartisme Mar.-May nationalizations, social security
May referendum, 53 % non
June election, Socs. lose
June Bidault, MRP : Socs. lose Finance June De Gaulle's Bayeux speech
Sep. Mollet leader of Soc. Party
Oct. referendum, 53 % out
Nov. election, Socs. lose
Dec. Blum: all-Soc. government Nov. Monnet Plan agreed to
'47 Jan. Ramadier, Soc. Jan. Auriol (Soc.) elected President
May Communists out Apr. De Gaulle founds RPF
Oct. RPF win municipal elections
Nov. Schuman, MRP: Moch, Interior Nov. Communist-led strikes;
Nov. CGT split
'48
May Poinso-Chapuis decree
July Marie, Rad. : Schuman, Foreign July Duchet founds CNIP
Oct.-Nov. Communist coal strike
Nov. New upper house: no RPF maj.
__9
Oct. Bidault, MRP
'50 Feb. Socs. out, lose Interior Jan. 'Scandal of the Generals'
July Pleven, UDSR; Socs. back
*51 Mar. Queuille, Rad. June election, 120 RPF
Aug. Pleven ; Socs. out Sep. Lot Barang£ (church schools)
'52 Jan. Faure, Rad. Mar. RPF splits in NA on Pinay
Mar. Pinay, Cons. May last big Comm. demonstrations
'53 Jan. Mayer, Rad. Bidault, Foreign
May 5-week crisis May De Gaulle ends RPF (as party)
July Laniel, Cons.: Gaullists in July 1st Pouj. agitation; Aug., big strikes
Dec. Coty (Cons.) elected President
'54
June Mendes-F. : MRP out, lose Foreign
Sep. 'Scandal of the leakages*
Nov. Constitution amended
'55 Feb. Faure, Rad. : MRP back Mar. Poujadist pressure on NA
May Mendfes-F. leads Rad. Party
Dec. NA dissolved, election Jan. 2
'56 Jan. Mollet, Soc. : MRP out Jan. Left gains, but 50 Poujadists
Feb. Lacoste M. for Algeria Spring 1 1 Poujadists unseated
May Mendes-F. resigns Spring Heakages trial*
Oct. Rad. Party split
— ,
May Govt. falls May Mendes-F. loses Rad. Party
June Bourges-M, Rad. July NA accepts internment camps
Oct. 5-week crisis
Nov. Gaillard, Rad. : MRP, Cons, back Nov. Gaullist propaganda campaign
*58 Mar. Constitutional reform fails
Apr. 3rd crisis in a year
May nth Pflimlin, MRP; Socs. join
' _ „ „, May 24th Gaullists seize Corsica
June De Gaulle ; all but Comms. in June NA allows govt. to draft const.
Sep. referendum, 85 % out; Nov. election
PRINCIPAL DATES
IMPERIAL
Dec. Franco-Soviet treaty
May Algerian outbreak repressed
Feb. Yalta conference ends
May European war ends
'45
Nov.
Dec.
Haiphong bombarded
Indo-China war begins
Mar. Madagascar revolt
Aug. Algerian government bill
Apr. Moscow conference fails
June Marshall Aid offered
*47
Apr* Algerian 'elections'
Feb. Communist coup in Prague
Mar. Berlin blockade begins
*48
July NA ratines Atlantic Pact
Dec. Communists win in China
June
Oct.
Tunis negotiations open
Indo-China frontier posts lost
May Schuman Plan (Coal and Steel)
June Korean war begins
'51
Dec. Tunis talks broken off
Dec. NA ratifies Schuman Plan
Mar. Tunis repression, ministers arrested May EPC treaty signed
Aug. Sultan of Morocco deposed
'52
'53
May Dien-Bien-Phu falls
July Indo-China peace
July 31st Tunis negotiations
Nov. Algerian war begins
'54
Aug. NA defeats EDC
Dec. NA accepts German rearmament
'55
Jan. Soustelle Gov-Gen. Algeria
July NA ratines Tunisian treaty
Aug. Outbreaks in Morocco, Algeria
Nov. Sultan returns to Morocco
ALGERIA, ETC. *56
Feb. 6th Europeans riot
June Bombs in Algiers. Loi-cadre for Black Africa
Oct. Ben Bella *kidnapped' Nov. Suez war ; Budapest repression
'57
Jan. Massu i/c police ; bazooka fired at Salan
Sep.
Nov.
NA defeats Algerian loi-cadre
OB, us sell arms to Tunisia
July NA ratifies Common Market
Feb. Sakiet (Tunisia) bombed
Apr. NA rejects 'good offices'
May 13th European riot, C. of Pub. Safety
May Parachutist threat to Paris
July De Gaulle appeases Tunisia
Feb. GB, us offer *good offices'
'58
PART I
THE BACKGROUND
Chapter 1
THE BASIS OF FRENCH POLITICS
1. FRANCE AND BRITAIN: THE BACKGROUND
The British have never had much respect for the political capacity of their
nearest neighbour. Official and ministerial circles too often share the general
impression that the French are incapable of governing themselves properly, or
even of managing a democratic system at all. There is little understanding of
the deep differences between the British and the French outlook on politics, or
of the fundamental reasons for these differences. The faults in the political
structure of France are the result of her historical and geographical back-
ground. No country can rid itself of its past.
In the first place the Reformation failed on the other side of the Channel.
The Catholic Church is active and powerful, retains the allegiance of a sub-
stantial proportion of the population, and is therefore, as in all Catholic
countries, a focus of political controversy. Education remained an explosive
problem for half a century longer than in Britain; and the conflict was always
more bitter because the issues were more clear-cut. As Bodley once put it, the
group structure characteristic of French politics was reproduced in Britain in
the religious sphere - and the clear and straightforward British party system
was paralleled in France by the struggle between clericals and anticlericals.1
Secondly, the form of the state is still open to attack. Frenchmen are used to
changes not merely of government but of the whole political regime. In 170
years they have had fifteen new constitutions. The British practice of revolu-
tionizing the reality while retaining the name and the facade was reversed in
France: there the fundamentals of life continued with comparatively little
change over large regions of the country, while the political surface was always
turbulent. The stability and resilience of French life below that surface were
unfortunately less striking than the apparent chaos at the top. The well-known
story of the Paris bookseller regretting that he could not supply a copy of the
constitution 'because we do not deal in periodical literature' dates from 1848 ;
its modern counterpart could be seen in the huge posters in the Metro just a
century later - 'Republics pass: Soud6e paint lasts'. The Fourth Republic
was then two years old and had ten more to live.
Thirdly, though the political form of the state may be open to question and
change, its administrative structure has stood without fundamental alteration
since the reforms of Napoleon. It is a tightly centralized system, based on a
uniform pattern and closely controlled from Paris. The police, who enjoy
much more power than in Britain, are directly subject to the ministry of the
interior. A centralized administrative and police system is reinforced by a
centralized judicial organization under the ministry of justice, and protected
L Bodley, France, i. 138 ; ii. 457. Information on the date and place of publication of books
is given at the first reference when the author is cited in one chapter only, in the bibliography on
p. 465 when he is cited in more than one. Articles are cited in the footnotes by number only, as
listed on pp. 470-7.
THE BASIS OF FRENCH POLITICS 3
by an army much stronger than the British - for France has three land fron-
tiers. The seizure of power is greatly simplified where in the words of Deschanel,
* We have the Republic on top and the Empire underneath. '2
The Frenchman's approach to the problem of authority is consequently
shaped by three crucial experiences: a political struggle waged with sectarian
bitterness and sparing few sectors of the country's organized life; a recent
memory of governments abusing their authority to maintain their position ;
and an immensely powerful administrative machine providing a standing
temptation to abuse. There is a latent totalitarianism in the French attitude to
politics which makes French democrats fear the power of government, and
expect from it more danger than advantage.
These historical factors were reinforced by geographic, demographic and
economic ones. Uncertainty about the future was engendered by a stationary
population and an invasion in every generation ; it provided fertile soil for
defeatism and disillusionment. Above all, France remained until 1940 a
country of small enterprise. Agriculture was far more important than in
Britain: in 1946 France still had one industrial worker for every agricultural
worker, while Britain had nine. Small towns and small industry predominated:
there were sixty-one towns with a population of 100,000 in Britain, only
twenty-two in France. Almost half the population still lived in agricultural
communities. Where in Britain the small farm was destroyed by enclosures
and the small business subjected to the full force of competition, in France
they not only survived but were protected economically, courted politically
and glorified ideologically.3
France was not naturally a wealthy country. Her early efforts at industrial-
ization failed, prejudicing Frenchmen for generations against capitalist pro-
gress and its consequence, the ruin of the unsuccessful. Business families often
valued security and stability far more than risky expansion on borrowed
money which might endanger their control of their firms. Until the Fourth
Republic the ruling economic outlook. was 'Malthusian': a conviction that
the market was fixed and one trader's gain meant another's loss, a preference
for high profit on a low turnover, and a willingness to mitigate competition
sufficiently to keep the weaker firms afloat. Almost everyone worshipped the
cult of the 'little man'; no adjective was more favoured in election speeches
and newspaper titles than petit* Social stability was prized above economic
progress, and the politician who sought votes in good times or feared revolu-
tion in bad ones used laws, taxes and tariffs to protect the weak - and so ham-
per the strong. In Britain free trade was a Liberal policy and almost a Liberal
1. See Index for brief biographical notes on persons named. The Vichy regime has indeed been
called 'nothing but this sovereign state apparatus . . .deprived of its democratic and republican
facade' : Luthy, The State of France, p. 38.
3. Of a working population of 20,500,000, there were 9,100,000 who lived in rural communes
where over 20% worked in agriculture: Bulletin mensuel de statistique, October 1952, p. 44.
Britain, the United States, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands had all become urbanized far
sooner and more thoroughly: see the striking diagram in Moraze, Les Francois et la Rgpublique,
p. 217 ; and for later figures, below, n. 32. Cf. Goguel in Aspects de la societe francaise (henceforth
cited as Aspects)* pp. 248-50.
4. Luthy, pp. 287, 332; Siegfried, Tableau des partis en France, p. 90 - translated as France:
A Study in Nationality, pp. 42-3 ; Siegfried, De la IIP a la IVe Republique, p. 25 ; Thibaudet, La
Republique des professeurs, pp. 259-60.
4 THE BACKGROUND
religion, but in France it was the work of an autocrat, Napoleon III, and it did
not long survive the advent of the Third Republic.5
The principle that the state should not interfere with the economy was thus
accepted in theory by both countries but applied very differently in practice.
One result was that in France business success was suspect, since it was assumed
(not always wrongly) to be due to political favours.6 From the state, it was
thought, came improper privileges for the powerful and very proper protec-
tion for the weak. 'A subject rather than a citizen, the rural Frenchman
continues to expect his sustenance from his suzerain.'7 Progress was resisted
because it meant sacrifices for some ; and the resistance was effective enough to
bring about long periods of decline - until these in turn provoked discontent
and revolution. France had achieved her economic and social (and therefore
political) equilibrium not by integrating the conflicting forces into a society
which all accepted but by bringing them into a condition of mutual stalemate.8
2. FRANCE AND BRITAIN: POLITICAL ATTITUDES
Differences so deep-rooted explain why few of the political terms and axioms
of British politics applied across the Channel. Words like 'Right' and 'Left'
had quite different connotations in the two countries. For in France three
issues were fought out simultaneously: the eighteenth-century conflict between
rationalism and Catholicism, the nineteenth-century struggle of democracy
against authoritarian government, and the twentieth-century dispute between
employer and employed. On the Continent, Right and Left defined positions
in relation to the philosophical and political struggles, which turned in normal
times on educational policy and in crises on the structure of the regime ; the
social contest over the distribution of the national income provided a new topic
of division, already foreshadowed in the Revolution, which after 1848 cut the
political Left in two.
Thus, where Britain had two major political attitudes, France never had
fewer than three. The clerical and conservative Right was opposed by a
socialist Left (itself, since the rise of the Communist party, internally divided
by the deepest fissure of all). But between these rivals was a great amorphous
mass of peasants and small businessmen, who were social and economic
conservatives yet ardent Republicans and anticlericals. As they owed their
position to the Revolution it was indeed the heritage of revolution that they
5. On these two paragraphs and the next see Moraz£, pp. 46-7, 56-61, 69-72, 116-18, 199-206 >"
Siegfried, France, pp. 15-17, 21-3, 113-14, and Tableau, pp. 32-7, 44-8, 232-4; Liithy, pp. 179-
180,286-334 (especially 311-13, 320-3); Maillaud, France, Chapter 6; Tannenbaum, The New
France, Chapter 3 ; Fauvet, La France de'chire'e, pp. 29-30, translated as The Cockpit of France,
pp. 33-5; Earle, ed., Modern France, particularly Chapters 4 (by J. B. Christopher), 17 (by J. E.
Sawyer) and 19 (by D. S. Landes); Landes, article no. 135 (see Bibliography on pp. 470-7),
pp. 329-50. For an instance of opposition to modernization, Chevallier, Les Paysans, pp. 141-56,
169-79 ; for the political preponderance of the small independent business and professional man,
Priouret, La Rtpublique des date's, pp. 180-7, 215-18 ; for qualifications to the thesis of French
economic stagnation, Raymond Aron, France Steadfast and Changing, pp. 45-8, 53-64, 141-3.
6. Liithy, pp. 25-6; Priouret, D6put6s, pp. 138-42; Moraz6, p. 73; E. Beau de Lom6nie, Les
responsabilite's des dynasties bourgeoises (4 v., 1943, 1947, 1954, 1963), passim.
7. Moraz6, p. 202 (cf. p. 61 on other classes).
8. The Third Republic has been called 'the stalemate society* ; Hoffmann in France: Change
and Tradition (henceforth cited as Change), p. 3, and in no. 126, p. 29. Cf. Aron, Steadfast,
p. 135.
THE BASIS OF FRENCH POLITICS 5
were determined to conserve. This was the basic source of the curious con-
tradiction between their words and their deeds : revolutionary language in the
political field, conservative actions in the social. Best represented by the
Radical party, they dominated French politics between 1900 and 1940.9
Since Left and Right divided on issues other than those predominant in
Britain, it is not surprising that they had a different electoral basis. The equa-
tion between industry and the Left, agriculture and the Right was largely
invalid in France. The agrarian Midi was the stronghold of the Left, industrial
Lorraine voted Right. When the Socialists first became an important party in
the election of 1893, their highest percentage of votes in the provinces was in
the agricultural Cher department.10 In June 1951 the Communist vote
exceeded 40% in three constituencies - one in the Paris suburbs and two in the
rural centre, Creuse and Corr£ze. The reputation of the Right as more
nationalist and more concerned with defence than the Left, even if un-
deserved, helped it to win the allegiance of the industrial departments on the
eastern frontier.
This persistence of old issues reflected the failure of the industrial workers
to impose their own demands on politicians and the public. They failed partly
through sheer lack of numbers, partly because the small scale of French in-
dustry and the individualism of its employees hampered their organization,
and partly because governments were more responsive to the rural vote. The
dominant groups of the Third Republic, the Radicals and their allies, drew
their strength from the countryside and small towns where individualism
flourished; they had little following in the urbanized regions where the
economy was changing, the division between proletariat and bourgeoisie was
sharpening, and a new and more highly organized type of politics was develop-
ing.
British and French attitudes towards government differed as profoundly as
political behaviour or political terminology. Habits which remained powerful
in France had been formed in an age when politics were a luxury remote from
the realities of day-to-day life. There was no nineteenth-century tradition of
independent local government to breed an attitude of responsibility. The
country's governing personnel was recruited far more than in Britain from the
professions and the intellectuals, and far less from businessmen, farmers, or
workers ; the more theoretical and unreal character of the issues was both
cause and consequence of this situation.11 For there was (and is) a curious
blend of idealism and cynicism in the characteristic French attitude to
political programmes - an idealism which attaches more importance to the
symbolic value of a proposal than to its practical effect, a cynicism which
9. The Radicals have been called 'les conservateurs du muse"e re"volutionnaire': Hoffmann,
Le Mouvement Poujade, p. 384. The 'three-party' interpretation is also proposed by Dupeux,
no. 80, pp. 332-4.
10. Bodley, ii. 465. Names of departments are shown in Map 21 on p. 461.
11. In France * politics are the hobby of individuals, not the condition of their lives' : R. de
Jouvenel, La Rdpublique des camarades, p. 4. At the turn of the century more than half the deputies
were drawn from the professional classes, while only a fifth were dependent upon agriculture,
industry or commerce - the occupations of five-sixths of the electorate: Bodley, ii. 157-63.
Cf. Priouret, Dtputts, pp. 123-5, 145-6, 180-7 ; Luthy, p. 24. For the Fourth Republic see below,
p. 332.
6 THE BACKGROUND
remains unshakably confident that nothing will ever really be done. According
to the influential Radical philosopher Alain, 'The true power of the voters
should be defined, I believe, rather by resistance to the authorities than by
reformist action. . . . The important thing is to construct every day a little
barricade or, if you like, to bring each day some king before the court of the
people.'12
This outlook could flourish in a country whose atomized, small-scale
economy helped for decades to breed individualism, strong local loyalties,
sharp regional differences, and a political psychology better adapted to resis-
tance than to construction: and whose history was a source not of shared
experiences but of bitter conflicts, in which each side had its own memories,
its own anniversaries, its own symbols and its own martyrs. Marianne, who
personified the regime, was to one vigorous group of enemies merely the hire-
ling of the capitalists, to another the kept woman of the freemasons.13 It was
precisely because the centrifugal forces were so strong that the heirs of
Rousseau uncompromisingly defended the Republic one and indivisible; they
feared any geographical decentralization, any recognition of corps inter-
medicares between state and individual which might allow their enemies on the
Right or the Left to build up a La Rochelle, a Vend6e or a Paris Commune as
a bastion of separatism.
In a naturally fragmented and individualist society their doctrinaire
antagonism to organized social groups helped powerfully to reinforce the
peculiar French style of authority, which was characterized by a 'horror of
face-to-face discussion'. Instead, problems were referred for settlement to a
superior authority, the state, supposedly above the battle but inevitably
remote, impersonal, arbitrary and suspect: Them. And many Frenchmen in
turn reacted like 'draftees in a modern army, where the goals are to preserve
one's individuality, evade the regulations wherever possible, and obtain
special privileges, preferably on a permanent basis'. Here were the roots of
the incivisme or lack of civic responsibility which made them regard the state
as an enemy personified in the tax-collector and recruiting sergeant.14
Yet those two agents of the hostile state were regarded very differently.
When conscription was politically unthinkable in Washington or Westminster,
Frenchmen bore a crushing burden of military service. Thus incivisme was not
exactly bad citizenship, but rather civic indiscipline (or individualism) in
domestic affairs : where the British response to government was instinctively
co-operative, the French was traditionally negative. This outlook was least
attractive in economic matters, where reluctance to pay taxes was reinforced
by suspicious peasant tight-fistedness. But the same contrariness protected the
individual against oppression, inspired resistance to an occupying enemy, and
produced movements of indignation and protest whenever authority was
12. Alain (fimile Chartier), Elements d'une doctrine radicale (4th ed., 1933, first pub. 1925),
pp. 123-4. * It is a good idea to talk of reforms, but imprudent to carry them out' : quoted Sieg-
fried, Tableau, p. 76 (France, p. 36).
13. The first act of the rioters who stormed Government House at Algiers on 13 May 1958
was to carry off her bust.
14. Crozier, no. 64, pp. 779-97 (' face-to-face'); Wylie, Village in the Vaucluse, pp. 206-10.
330-3 ('Them'); Tannenbaum, pp. 6-7 ('draftees*). Cf. Siegfried, De la ///», p. 254.
THE BASIS OF FRENCH POLITICS 7
gravely abused. If gave rise to the conception of democracy summed up by
Alain as Le Citoyen contreles Pouvoirs: 'the title of one of his books and the
substance of all of them '.15
France, then, was a country without consensus. Internal divisions went
deeper and the feeling of community was less widespread than in Britain. It
was assumed that governments could never be trusted and must always be
checked, since their aims were as questionable as their methods. Against a
state regarded as 'not a referee but a player - and probably a dirty player',
the Frenchman used his 'ancient secret weapon of anarchy' or the improved
modern model, democratic institutions. It was not surprising that democracy,
worked in this spirit, seemed to many Frenchmen incompatible with effective
government. But the spirit itself was 'a reflex to political disorder' as well as a
cause of its persistence.16
The constitution of the Fourth Republic was thus a characteristic symptom
rather than a basic cause of the weakness of the French democratic state. Its
imperfections of detail mattered not in themselves but because of the absence
of a will to govern and accept government. Nor is it sufficient to complain that
the French are too intellectual or too narrow-minded, too selfish or too
Utopian, too intransigent or too fond of combinazioni, to be capable of
managing democratic institutions. The French, like the rest of us, are the
prisoners of their past; and the outside observer must endeavour to follow
Spinoza : ' Do not laugh, do not weep - try to understand.'
3. THE THIRD REPUBLIC
The Third Republic was established in 1875 by a majority of one vote in an
Assembly dominated by monarchists who could not agree on a king. It never
won the genuine allegiance of its opponents. In the Ralliement of the 1890's,
the Catholic Church made its peace with the regime. But the Dreyfus case
soon vividly showed that most Frenchmen of the Right still instinctively
sympathized with the violent attacks on democracy launched by men like
Charles Maurras. Maurras himself lived to become an outspoken apologist
for the Vichy regime and to describe his sentence of life imprisonment at the
Liberation as ' the revenge of Dreyfus '.
For though Great Britain has many conservatives (in all parties) who prefer
to make progress slowly, it is happily free of real reactionaries. France is not.
Men who condemned all that was done in the years following 1789 could not
simply be dismissed as harmless cranks. Sixty years ago an English commen-
tator observed that 'France is the land of political surprises, where lost causes
come to life again/ Thirty years later the most acute of French political
writers pointed out that every regime of the past retained its partisans, await-
ing the opportunity to reassert their claims to power.17 In 1940 the chance
15. Fauvet, Cockpit, p. 26. Cf. ibid., p. 29, and Dtchirte, pp. 22, 24-5; Siegfried, De la IIIe,
p. 118 ; D. Thomson, Democracy in France (1st ed., 1946), pp. 14, 17; N. Wahl's analysis of the
clash between the representative and the administrative traditions of government in The Fifth
Republic (1959), pp. 24-30, and in Beer and Ulam, Patterns of Government, Part in.
16. I take the 'reflex' phrase from Professor H. W. Ehrmann's stimulating essay (no. 86), p. 11 ;
the * dirty player' from a broadcast by Professor D. W. Brogan ; the ' secret weapon' from Liithy,
p. 128.
17. Bodley, ii. 352. Siegfried, France, pp. 96-7 ; Tableau, pp. 199-200 ; cf, De la IUe, pp. 81, 85.
8 THE BACKGROUND
came, and a vast body of opinion rallied joyfully to the men of Vichy - not
indeed to the Lavals and D6ats, but to the men who felt, as Petain allegedly
once said, that 'France will never be great again until the wolves are howling
round the doors of her villages. '
What was at stake in the French political struggle was thus more than
specific issues of economic or educational or foreign policy. It was the frame-
work within which these specific issues should be tackled. To Republicans the
heritage of the Revolution meant political freedom, the responsibility of the
rulers to the ruled; freedom of opportunity, the chance to rise to the top - and
in practice a preference for rulers drawn from the under-privileged; freedom
from clerical domination; freedom to own one's own land. The Right stood
for authoritarian government, for the rule of the wealthy and respectable, for
clericalism and landlordism. It is understandable that for electoral purposes it
was essential to look and sound Left; indeed it became almost a recognized
rule of French politics that a party added the word Gauche to its title at the
moment when it contracted an alliance with the Right. In some areas can-
didates of the Right called themselves Independent Socialists. Just before the
war the most conservative group in the Senate was named Gauche republicaine.
Usually when a new parliamentary assembly was elected there was a noisy
quarrel over the seating arrangements, the party allocated the benches on the
right denouncing this monstrous misrepresentation of its position - as the
Gaullists did in 1951 and the Poujadists in 1956.
In electoral campaigning the danger from the Right played the principal
part, but in parliamentary conflict the Socialist pressure, which split the
Republican majority, became more and more important during the present
century. French politics came to focus on these two threats, from the Right
against the Republic and from the Left against property. Their tone was there-
fore overwhelmingly defensive.18 Moreover, as we have seen, the dominant
section of opinion remained intensely suspicious of the power of the govern-
ment even after capturing it. Two Napoleons had overthrown the Republic,
two other generals (MacMahon and Boulanger) had threatened it; so Alain's
ideal politician was Camille Pelletan, minister of marine from 1902 to 1905,
who systematically disregarded his professional advisers. The results were
unfortunate for the navy but (in Alain's view) advantageous for the regime:
the leading Republican intellectual might have echoed the slogan of his great
enemy Maurras - Politique d'abord! In 1906 this strange philosopher of a
governmental party wrote:
In France there are a great many radical electors, a certain number of radical
deputies and a very small number of radical ministers : as for the heads of the civil
service, they are all reactionaries. He who properly understands this has the key to
our politics.19
Familiarity with office did not change the Radicals' outlook fundamentally.
They continued to use their position to weaken the institutions of government
and to thwart the progress of powerful personalities. In 1900 it had been
observed that the Republicans 'use all the force of governmental machinery to
18. D. Thomson, The Democratic Ideal in France and England (1940), p. 59.
19. Op. cit.t p. 25. But cf. below, pp. 337, 343.
THE BASIS OF FRENCH POLITICS 9
crush men of parts who seem apt to win popular favour'. In 1940 this attitude
had not altered. The Left, alarmed at having produced Clemenceau in 1917,
had made certain that he should have no successor. Promotion went to safe
men of the type who had formed the Tiger's cabinet, and whom he had
described as 'the geese who saved the Capitol'.20
The weakness of government was only partly due to this hostility to strong
personalities. It was also the result of many institutional barriers which had
been set up in the cabinet's path. The electoral system promoted political
individualism. The constitution allowed the President with the consent of the
Senate to dissolve the Chamber; but President MacMahon's dissolution for
partisan purposes in 1877 so discredited this weapon that ixo successor ever
dared make the attempt. Consequently the deputies knew they could count on
four years before they would have to face the electors again, and felt free to
overthrow ministries with impunity. Parliament's work was organized by
committees of specialists which developed a point of view and a prestige of
their own, and whose views the Chamber tended to follow. Since the leaders of
the committees were almost ex officio potential ministers with an interest in
replacing the incumbents, they tended to behave as critics rather than as allies.
The President of the Chamber had far less authority than the Speaker of the
House of Commons, and procedural rules left the ministry much weaker than
in Britain: it had no control of parliamentary time, and devices like the inter-
pellation seemed to have (and had) been invented for the express purpose of
keeping the government subject to the domination of the deputies. Above all
the Senate, a powerful and sober second chamber carefully insulated from the
dangerous control of universal suffrage, stood guard to check any 'hasty'
legislation or any over-presumptuous cabinet with which the Chamber failed
to deal. The governmental system of the Third Republic was 'a machine so
well provided with brakes and safety-valves that it comes slowly to a state of
immobility'.21
Yet even these institutional devices were not the main difficulty. For the
weakness of French government was due less to the number and potency of
the brakes than to a deficiency of motive power. It was because there was no
majority for action in the country that there was no pressure strong enough to
overcome a resistance which found so many points of advantage in the con-
stitutional framework. This became apparent at the turn of the century when
the Radicals and their allies, including most of the Socialists, had an anti-
clerical programme to enact. They organized a steering committee, the Z>^-
gation des Gauches, which dominated the Chamber. Since a majority was ready
to support its instructions, it could overcome the hostility of committees or
interpellators without difficulty. For three years their leaders wielded an
authority as great as that of a British government because there was for once a
real political objective, capable of rallying a real majority.
20. Bodley, i. 328 ('men of parts*); Brogan's introduction to Werth, The Twilight of France,
p. xvi (Clemenceau) ; J. Hampden Jackson, Clemenceau and the Third Republic (1946), p. 170
(* geese'). ' Only mediocrity was reassuring ... of all possible perils genius was the one from which
the nation soon found itself most thoroughly preserved' : H. de Jouvenel, Pourquoije suis syndi-
calists (1928), p. 20; cf. R. Binion, Defeated Leaders (New York, 1960), p. 137
21. Brogan, loc. cit., p. vi.
10 THE BACKGROUND
But such a programme had to be political in the narrow sense. The indus-
trial workers were neither numerous nor organized enough to attract similar
support for their own demands. The small farmers and small businessmen
feared and suspected the working class: they resisted reforms for its
benefit at their own expense, they cherished an individualist type of society
which powerful trade unions might threaten, and they valued economic
efficiency less than social stability which enabled the least fortunate of
them to maintain his independent existence and escape the ultimate disaster
of proletarianization. The political pattern of the Third Republic was there-
fore clearly marked: at election times the two wings of the political Left united
to defend the Republic, but once in power they divided over social and
economic policy.22 So Chambers as well as individual politicians regularly
began their careers strongly inclined to the Left and ended them strongly
inclined to the Right. It was even made a complaint against the Fourth Repub-
lic that this traditional evolution occurred less smoothly than in the past.
The basic reason for the weakness of French government was thus the con-
tentedness of the dominant section of opinion. This middle block, Centre or
even Right in British terminology but Left in the Continental sense, was
wholly negative in outlook, equally opposed to clerical reaction and to social-
ist experiment, neither wanting nor expecting advantage from positive
governmental policies. Its aim was to prevent action, of which it was almost
sure to disapprove; its method was to keep the government too weak to em-
bark on dangerous courses ; and its principal instrument was the Senate, con-
trolled by moderate Radicals - older men and less subject to electoral pressure
than their colleagues in the Chamber - who ejected any ministry which leant
too far towards either clericalism or socialism. This situation explained why
governments changed so frequently and policies so little; as early as 1875,
indeed, Laboulaye had described France as ' a tranquil country with agitated
legislators'.23
For it was only in major crises that Right and Left confronted one another
in battle array. Normally political decisions were taken not after a clear and
intelligible clash between opposing sides, but as a result of quite minor shifts
of view or emphasis within the centre groups which permanently predomi-
nated in power. The cautious, uncommitted, unstable floating vote, which in
Britain was usually polarized by the two-party system, in France provided the
leadership for almost every government. Since small changes at the fulcrum
might upset the balance of power and bring great policy decisions, they were
sometimes bitterly fought over and provoked big displacements of votes else-
where.24 But the legislators were equally agitated over shifts which had no
such significance for policy, yet still raised some men up on the seesaw and
cast others down. For superimposed on the battles over policy was another
22. See Siegfried, France, pp. 60-1 (Tableau, pp. 125-6), for one of many descriptions of this
process. Cf. Priouret, Ddputts, pp. 177-8, 208-11, 219-20 (he points out that the first Republican
social measure was the abolition of the Sunday rest day as a clerical survival).
23. Bodley, i. 57.
24. So of three Radical premiers elected in 1953, 1954 and 1955, one obtained 200 more left-
wing votes in the Assembly than the other two, Moraz<§, p. 149; cf. pp. 23, 123, 132, 152, 218,
252-4,
THE BASIS OF FRENCH POLITICS 11
contest for careers, office and power, which, as in eighteenth-century Britain,
often seemed to approximate to the pure game-theory of politics.25 Conducted
according to elaborate unwritten rules in the 'house without windows' where
the Chamber of Deputies sat, the game fascinated the closed circle of players
but repelled their uncomprehending constituents. The people felt little more
sense of participation in the government when it was representative than when
it was authoritarian.
The gap between citizens and politicians had no grave immediate con-
sequences beforethe 1930's. A comfortable majority of the electorate remained
loyal to the regime and the centre politicians who defended it. In a fairly self-
sufficient small-scale economy, politics had no day-to-day effect on the life of
the ordinary voter, who could judge his deputy's behaviour by theoretical and
doctrinaire standards. The type of question which excited politicians was
whether the navy ought to celebrate Good Friday, or whether the army
should supply guards of honour for civil as well as religious funerals.26
Below the parliamentary surface the country's need for government was
met, as under the monarchy and empire, by the permanent bureaucracy (for
the Radical distrust of the administration had the strange result that by con-
stantly upsetting cabinets it allowed few ministers the time or authority to
acquire real control of their departments, and so ensured that a long-term
policy in any sector of government could normally originate only with the
feared and suspected officials).27 In times of great crisis the politicians sus-
pended their game and the ideologists their crusade, and the country conferred
on some respected leader - a Clemenceau or a Poincar6 - an authority which
was almost unlimited for a time. The needs of efficient government reasserted
themselves briefly against those of representative control - to be thrust back
into their subordinate place as soon as the emergency was over.
The Third Republic maintained this equilibrium for three generations, far
longer than any previous regime since 1789. Politically the powers of govern-
ment were concentrated in Paris, but its functions were narrowly limited and
its abuses checked by a close parliamentary control in which, however,
between elections the ordinary voter had no part to play. Socially, like that
other stalemate society the Habsburg Empire, the regime contrived to keep the
contending groups in a 'balanced state of mild dissatisfaction' which most of
them found preferable to any serious alternative, even if in the Burkean
partnership of the dead, the living and the yet unborn the French state seemed
over-committed to those who were dead.28
But the structure was ill-adapted to shocks from outside, and it broke down
when confronted with the economic and international crises of the thirties.
When the financial and economic difficulties of the inter-war years called for
treasures that were electorally unpopular, no majority for them could be
25. Hoffmann in Change, p. 16, and no. 126, p. 31 ; Aron, Steadfast, p. 5.
26. Even in May 1951 urgent parliamentary business was delayed by the Socialists* insistence
that since the Assembly was not to sit on Ascension Day it must not sit on Labour Day either.
27. Maillaud, p. 39; J. Barthelemy, Le Gouvernement de la France (1939 ed.), pp. 142-3; M.
Aug6-Laribe, La politique agricole de la France (1950), pp. 386-91 - referring respectively to
foreign, educational and agricultural policy. Cf. Liithy, p. 39.
28. Ehrmann, no. 86, p. 7.
12 THE BACKGROUND
found; the only solution that the deputies could devise was to hand over to
the government special powers to legislate by decree. If democracy meant
paralysis the capacity for action had to be restored by suspending democracy.
The return to normal only underlined the lesson. From February 1930 to
February 1934 the country had fourteen ministries. When the Germans
entered the Rhineland France had a caretaker government awaiting a general
election, and therefore too timid to call up reservists. When they marched into
Austria, France was in a ministerial crisis. During the Munich episode there
was a government but no parliament; Daladier, having been granted special
powers, had sent the Chamber off on holiday. The defeat of 1940 did not
kill the Third Republic, it merely drew attention to the fact that it was dead.
'The constitutional crisis that opened in the thirties is still awaiting its
solution.'29
4. SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION
The changes which matured in the next generation have been described as the
most far-reaching since 1789.30 For the first time for over a century the birth-
rate began to rise ; the coming decade will see the impact of an abnormally
large generation of impatient young adults upon the psychological, social
and political outlook of their countrymen. The economy expanded far faster
than the British or American. Both the changing age-structure and the
economic advance brought problems as well as benefits, for large sectors and
regions were still excluded from or even harmed by the process of moderniza-
tion. But for the first time the predominant economic outlook was forward-
looking and expansionist; 'the market is at last seen as growing instead of
frozen5.31 Progress, prosperity and rejuvenation cracked the crust of the old
society at many points ; horizons broadened and some barriers to communica-
tion and comprehension between Frenchmen were lowered if not eliminated.
The new influence of youth weakened the hold of the old tightly-closed
authoritarian family. Unprecedented numbers of students started to force
a breach in that fortress of political radicalism and academic conservatism,
the teaching profession - /' University.
Though small businesses flourished for a time after the war, their numbers
soon began to fall off. The proportion of the population engaged in agriculture
dropped sharply.32 Everywhere the family farm was in decline ; everywhere the
isolation of the village was diminishing, and indeed in some regions it was
ceasing to be the main economic or even social centre as a result of the steady
drift to the towns and the demand for better conditions and facilities in the
countryside. Progress and expansion after a generation of inflation trans-
formed the attitude to savings: there was less determination to hoard and
more willingness to invest and risk. Even the tenacious class divisions were
somewhat less bitter. The traditional owner gave way to the professional
manager; much of the business community at last accepted the welfare state;
29. Ibid., p. 10. 30. Hoffmann in Change, p. 60.
31. Hoffmann, no. 126, p. 62; cf. Change, pp. 63-4.
32. From 44% in 1906 to 36% in 1936, 27% in 1954 and under 25% in 1960: Tannenbaum,
p. 12. Cf. Wahl, p. 25 ; Aron, Steadfast, pp. 52-3 ; Siegfried, De la ///«, pp. 259-60. (Figures from
INSEB.)
THE BASIS OF FRENCH POLITICS 13
workers, though still feeling alienated from society in many ways, grew less
savagely rebellious as they drew away from the poverty line ; and between the
sides in the class war the new technical and administrative cadres formed a
buffer growing in size and importance.33 The defeatism and depression of the
pre-war years were replaced by a new vitality and self-confidence. At the same
time, however, the country's relative power in the world had declined sharply:
the more sharply because it had been artificially prolonged between the wars.
Simultaneous progress at home and retreat abroad set up acute psychological
strains.34 In some areas adjustment was remarkably rapid, in others remark-
ably slow, but the price in both cases was a tension with explosive potentialities.
This new France which began to show itself in the middle 1950's was the
result of changes which had begun twenty years before as dissatisfaction with
the old 'stalemate society' became widespread. Greatly accelerated by the
second world war, these changes were often encouraged and promoted - in
fact if not always in intention - by Vichy and the Resistance alike.35 Many
representatives of groups which had been excluded from positions of influence
in the Third Republic rose to power in the economy, society and government
of post-war France. The newcomers were younger and more progressive than
their predecessors, and the society they meant to modernize was less frag-
mented, less individualist, more willing for and responsive to organization
than pre-war France had been. Yet the impulse for change came from above
rather than from below, as it had done ever since the first Napoleon.
The new climate was visible first of all in the willingness to allow authority
to men in their prime. Resistance organizations, writes Hoffmann, were
'dominated by young men who acceded to responsibilities which French
youth had been deprived of since the days of the Revolution'.36 No longer
could the gibe be repeated that France was ruled by men of seventy-five
because the octogenarians were dead: in 1952 she had her youngest prime
minister for seventy years, and in the next six the new record was again broken,
twice. Five of the last ten governments of the Fourth Republic were led by
men in their forties. Yet it was precisely in politics that the new generation
made least impression. As one critic cruelly asked, 'What's the good of being
young if you carry out the old men's policies?'37
The technocratic elements in business management and public administra-
tion (which in France are closely linked) composed another group which
vastly improved its position, firstly through Vichy's industrial 'organization
committees' which gave great power to the managers of the big firms, and
later through the post-war planning machinery, nationalized industries, and
33. Priouret, Deputes, pp. 240-52; Aron, Steadfast, pp. 57-60, 64-5 ; Tannenbaum, pp. 10-23 ;
Fauvet, Cockpit, pp. 150-5, D6chir6e, pp. 147-52. From 1953 to 1957 industrial production
increased by 10% a year, and (1949 = 100) real wages rose from 118 to 145, production of house-
hold appliances from 202 to 562, of radios, television sets and gramophones from 166 to 513 ;
INSEE figures quoted Wahl, p, 21, cf. Aron, p. 65. Farm tractors were 56,000 in 1946, 211,000
in 1953 and 628,000 in 1959: INSEE figures, more fully in Change, p. 418.
34. Wahl, pp. 20-3 ; Aron, Steadfast, pp. 146-50.
35. This is one theme of Professor Hoffmann's chapter in Change, to which this section owes a
great deal. Cf. also Priouret, Deputes, pp. 229-31.
36. Change, p. 36; no. 126, p. 46.
37. Pierre Cot, JO 5 November 1957, p. 1350.
14 THE BACKGROUND
expanding private businesses.38 Thibaudet had listed the Saint-Simonian
devotion to industrial progress as one of the half-dozen important political
attitudes in France; now 'the Saint-Simonian tradition was no longer under-
ground'.39 The ascendancy of Jean Monnet and his planning staff, says
Professor Ehrmann, "provides an excellent example of a highly intense
minority which overrode, at the price of ceaseless efforts, the traditional
values and preferences of a relatively indifferent majority'.40
The Liberation gave them an exceptional opportunity of which they took
full advantage: business was unpopular, scared, and anxious to redeem by
co-operation its rather murky wartime record, while under Communist
leadership the working class, sharing briefly in power almost for the first time,
was also willing to co-operate in laying economic foundations for the overdue
social reforms it demanded. After that first favourable moment, however, the
planners could not have maintained the momentum without exploiting other
assets: Marshall Aid; effective planning instruments for influencing the supply
of credit and the direction of investment ; a large nationalized sector ; above all,
despite the 'relatively indifferent majority', the goodwill of their contem-
poraries in business and the administration and of most of the holders of
political power.41 Their success was to widen still further the gap between those
economic sectors and geographic regions which were willing and able to
adapt and those which refused and revolted: between 'modern France' and
the 'static France' which uttered in Poujadism its strident protest against the
incomprehensible injustices of the new world.42
The devout Catholics, who had normally been excluded from power in the
Third Republic, formed another group which was promoted by both Vichy
and the Resistance. Their party, the Mouvement rtpublicain populaire (MRP),
belonged to the majority for all but seven and to the government for all but
thirty months of the fourteen-year period from the Liberation to the fall of the
Fourth Republic. They were convinced if cautious advocates of social reform,
economic modernization and accommodation to France's new position in
Europe (though over colonial matters they were less enlightened). In post-war
journalism, in administration, in party politics and in the public life of rural
France, active Catholics played a far more prominent part in the Fourth
Republic than under its predecessor. No longer, therefore, was it unquestioned
republican orthodoxy to condemn social pluralism and group organization
38. Hoffmann in Change, pp. 39-42, 53-4; in n. 30 he points out that de Gaulle's first finance
minister had been chairman of Vichy's organization committee for coal-mines ; cf. no. 126, pp. 40-
43, 48-9 ; no. 127, pp. 47, 56-7, 63-4, 68-9 ; Priouret, Dtputds, pp. 229-30. On the organization
committees see also Ehrmann, Organized Business in France, Chapter 2 ; Pickles, France Between
the Republics, pp. 37-8, 210.
39. Hoffmann in Change, p. 40; Thibaudet, Les idies politiques de la France, Chapter 3, Even
Vichy contributed to the Saint-Simonian revival, for Plain's own pastoral ideology was by no
means shared by ministers like Pucheu and Bichelonne : Hoffmann in Change, p. 42, nos. 126-7,
loc. cit. ; Ehrmann, Business, pp. 63, 68-76.
40. Ehrmann, no. 86, p. 16; cf. Liithy, pp. 288-97.
41. See below, pp. 337, 343; on the machinery, Wilson, French Banking Structure and Credit
Policy.
42. Goguel, France under the Fourth Republic, pp, 141-6; Liithy, pp. 287-91, 301-15, 430-1,
453-4; Priouret, Deputes, pp. 249-58 ; Fauvet, Cockpit, pp. 97-100, bichiree, pp. 90-3 ; Hamon,
no. 120, pp. 841-5 ; and below, Chapter 12.
THE BASIS OF FRENCH POLITICS 15
and to oppose any corps intermddiaires screening the state from the individual
citizen.
The proliferation of new organizations in a once atomized and individualist
society was indeed among the most significant of the new developments.
Again the war played an important part. Vichy with its corporative state doc-
trine threw up new bodies from which grew the main post-war organizations
of business (the Conseil national dupatronatfran$ais, CNPF), of the peasantry
(the Federation nationale des syndicats d'exploitants agricoles, FNSEA), and
of several leading professions - and in some cases also discovered their post-
war leadership.43 The fragmentation of the country into several sealed-off
zones concentrated attention on the interdependence of different parts of
France, and stimulated willingness to plan on a national rather than a local or
regional scale;44 before long the planners and the progressive businessmen
were to find France itself too small a unit for the developments they wanted to
encourage. The reforms of the Liberation marked an irreversible expansion of
the state's economic and social activities, by nationalization, planning and
social welfare measures45 (though generous family allowances and retirement
pensions - and subsidies for church schools - all date back to 1939 and 1940).
Politically, the large constituencies adopted at the Liberation as a framework
for proportional representation did, despite the many drawbacks of that
system, help to widen the limited horizon of the local politician. And the per-
sonnel of Parliament was a little less cut off from the country's economic life
than before. The Gaullists recruited many managers, engineers and industrial-
ists, and the Socialists (and even MRP) allowed more influence to trade
unionists than the governing parties of the Third Republic had ever given
them.
These changes, however, did little or nothing to solve the problem of a
political authority which still appeared as remote, as impersonal and as
arbitrary as ever. There were a number of useful and important administrative
measures taken to strengthen the machinery of the state, but the changes
designed to harness popular political energies proved a total disappointment.
The Fourth Republic did no more than the Third (or the Fifth) to encourage
genuine political participation. Assiduously though the deputy might culti-
vate his constituents, they continued to regard him not as an agent for the
enactment of policies they had had a hand in deciding but as a local am-
bassador, or rather consul, performing services and seeking benefits from a
foreign body over whose inexplicable whims they had no control. How could
it be otherwise when the result of general elections bore no visible relationship
to the composition of governments, which still seemed to be arbitrarily made
43. Hoffmann in Change, pp. 38-9, no. 126, pp. 40-1 ; Ehrmann, Business, pp. 67, 79, 8 In., 115,
etc. ; Liithy, p. 288 ; Fauvet and Mendras, eds., Les paysans et la politique (henceforth cited as
Paysans), pp. 235, 289-90. The trend had begun earlier: cf. Tannenbaum, p. 9; Sharp, The
Government of the French Republic, pp. 88-9. These bodies were of course always centres of
pressure-group activity and sometimes of resistance to modernization ; but even the arch-conser-
vative Petites et moyennes entreprises (PME) proved such a two-way transmitter between the
government and the membership that the latter revolted to follow Poujade.
44. Hoffmann in Change, p. 40; no. 126, p. 43.
45. Priouret, Diputis, pp. 230-1, 238-9 ; Aron, Steadfast, pp. 61-2 : social security and welfare
payments made up over 40% of the total of wages and salaries in 1947. Cf. Liithy, pp. 326-8.
16 THE BACKGROUND
and unmade by the politicians in the course of their endless private game? But
this game, 'the System' as General de Gaulle called it, and the immobilisme
which it protected received shorter shrift from the citizens of the Fourth
Republic than from those of the Third. Until 1934 the System and the stale-
mate society held the allegiance of a safe majority of the electorate and an
overwhelming majority in Parliament. But in the post-war years society was no
longer in stalemate and the enemies of the System could sometimes command
a third of the seats and nearly half the votes. In their insistence that represen-
tative government must mean their own dominance over the cabinet, the
deputies did not merely degrade government: they themselves ceased to
represent.46
In these conditions a weak regime was dangerously vulnerable to shocks
from abroad. The resurgence of Germany had fatally weakened the Third
Republic before the Wehrmacht crushed it in the battle of France. The sense
of national humiliation which resulted was to influence the outlook of French
political leaders from Georges Bidault, first foreign minister of the Fourth
Republic, to Michel Debre, first prime minister of the Fifth, and to determine
that of one important social group, the officer corps. And where the Third
Republic had enjoyed the credit for winning an empire, the Fourth suffered
the odium of losing it. The new regime was inherently no stronger than the old,
and it succumbed when confronted with the French equivalent of the Irish
question or America's problem of the South: the war in Algeria.
46. Hoffmann in Change, p. 51 ; no. 126, p. 56. In 1957 an inquiry among 3,500 conscripts found
that 97 % knew the winner of the Tour de France (the annual bicycle race) and 15 % the prime
minister: Georgel, Critiques et reforme des constitutions de la Rtpublique, i. 177. An inquiry late
in 1958 asked how many parties were desirable: 97% said there were too many; the average
member of a splinter group wanted only 3-5 parties, members of a major party 3, and others 2-8 :
Converse and Dupeux, no. 59, p. 10.
Chapter 2
THE WAR AND ITS AFTERMATH, 1936-1947
World war shook France from the economic stagnation and political paralysis
which had marked the last years of the Third Republic. Defeat provided the
opportunity for a counter-revolution directed against both the working-class
movement and the democratic regime itself. The Resistance was a revolution-
ary response to this challenge, and its triumph revolutionized the political
situation. But the apparent national unity was quickly dissipated. The Com-
munist drive for power forced all groups to take sides. During 1945 and 1946
there proceeded simultaneously a national effort at indispensable economic
reconstruction, a struggle over the framing of the new constitution, and a
bitter political 'cold war' between jthe ruling parties. When the Communists
went out of office in May 1947 the regime gradually returned to normal and
the political practices of the past slowly revived.
1. POLITICAL FORCES, 1936-45
Before the second world war the Radicals were politically dominant, appealing
to all those who 'wore their hearts on the left and their wallets on the right'.
The party was so loose in its organization and discipline that members with
very different opinions could join ; the Radicals in the Senate (such as Cail-
laux) were far more conservative than those in the Chamber (like the rising
young leader Daladier). At elections the latter could usually impose an
alliance with the Socialists, but during the course of each parliament's life
the moderate wing gradually encouraged their colleagues into coalition with
the Right. Its pivotal position gave the party a permanent hold on power ; the
premiership and ministry of the interior were generally in its hands, and it
was able to train many skilful and experienced politicians both in Paris and
through its extensive hold on local government.
But the Radicals had the defects of their qualities. The body of opinion
represented by them was broad but shallow. This negative, unconstructive
and timid following handicapped the party in a period of crisis. Loose dis-
cipline allowed it to attract such wide support that it became less a party in the
British sense than a social club attached to an electioneering machine. Its hold
on power meant that it attracted the careerist politician and the unscrupulous
henchman: few were the political and financial scandals in which Radicals
were not involved. And in training its young men it sought not to promote
strong personalities but to suppress them. Many Radicals positively preferred
mediocrity to ability.
Until 1936 the Socialist party sat on the far Left in Parliament. Once
revolutionary and anti-militarist, the Socialists had settled down as orthodox
defenders of the regime - although they long refused to take office. When they
changed their minds in 1936, on becoming the strongest party in the Popular
Front majority, they were already feeling the breath of competition on their
Left. For at that election the Communist party was accepted as an ally by the
Ig THE BACKGROUND
Socialists and Radicals. Hitherto badly under-represented by the electoral
system it suddenly leapt from a dozen parliamentary seats to seventy, but in
its turn refused office and gave Blum's government only the cold comfort of
* support without participation'. - . .
The Right like the Socialists, was too weak to win an electoral majority.
Much of its strength lay in the support of influential figures like P6tain in the
army Chiappe in the police, Coty in business, Maurras among intellectuals.
During the thirties such men became more and more sympathetic towards
fascism. At home strong fascist leagues grew up of which Croix defeu was the
largest (and least extreme). Abroad the entire Right demanded a policy
favourable to Mussolini's Italy and to Franco's cause in Spain, and many of
its supporters came to see the predominance of Nazi Germany as a lesser evil
than the rule of a Jewish Socialist prime minister in Paris.
Fascism did not attract the Right alone. Among its most extreme exponents
were the former Communist leader Doriot and the 'Neo-Socialist' D6at. It
gained indirectly, too, as Hitler's successive victories sapped the determination
and paralysed the will of French leaders - including most Radicals and half the
Socialists as well as the Right. Since at first the Communists stood for resis-
tance to Germany, by the time of Munich anti-Communism had become
the main bond between the forces of appeasement and the main motive of
governmental policy. Then when the Nazi-Soviet pact was signed the
Communists turned defeatist, playing into the hands of those of their enemies
for whom the class war at home was more important than the fight against
Hitler.
So where the first world war had brought national unity, the second des-
troyed it. The regime had long been opposed by an extreme Right which felt
excluded from government and an extreme Left which felt alienated from
society. For some years it had also been losing former supporters who believed
it could no longer fulfil its task. The defeat seemed to prove them right. An
overwhelming majority conferred full powers upon Marshal P6tain as chief
of the French State : the very name of Republic was abandoned. His regime
was based primarily on right-wing opinion, which found at Vichy (not of
course among the German puppets in Paris) the political leadership it really
sought. But the Marshal's first cabinet also included two prominent Socialists,
a Radical ex-premier, and an assistant secretary of CGT, the trade union
federation. Conversely when General de Gaulle issued his appeal on 18 June
1940 he found followers in all political camps from Socialists to Croix defeu,
but his support from the Right came from individuals only.1 In the Resistance
inside France the pioneers were usually Socialists, Catholic democrats or
army officers. Only after Germany's invasion of Russia did the Communist
party play its active part.
Though directed against a foreign occupier, the Resistance was potentially
a revolutionary movement; and the Liberation was potentially a revolu-
tionary change. For a few months indeed the new Gaullist authorities
shared precarious power with the largely Communist-controlled militia and
1. The Communists denounced him as a hireling of the City of London : cf. Rossi, La physiologic
4 u Parti comrnvniste fran$ais, pp. 86-7, 90-3, 220, and his other bpoks cited in the bibliography.
THE WAR AND ITS AFTERMATH, 1936-47 19
insurrectionary committees which dominated most of southern France.2 But
at the end of 1944 Thorez allowed his supporters to be disarmed and the Liber-
ation Committees disbanded without resistance. The war was still raging and
the party had decided to bid for power by legal means. It knew that the old
political leaders as a group (and often as individuals) had suffered a disastrous
loss of prestige. The Right was discredited by Vichy; the Radicals were blamed
for the events leading up to the war, for their weakness and lack of responsi-
bility in power, and for their rather unheroic part under the occupation. Thus
two of the three main forces on the pre-war scene were under a heavy cloud.
New men rose to the top who, as in any revolution, included both inexperienced
idealists and more or less scrupulous and patriotic adventurers. Welded into a
strong Resistance party they might form a buffer against the Communists;
dispersed and divided, they would easily be outmanoeuvred by the largest and
best-disciplined party.
The Resistance party was never formed. The Communists were bent on
hampering any organization they did not control. Some Resisters from the old
parties, especially Socialists, were unwilling to lose their former political
identity. Christian Democrats who could hope at last to found a major party
would not renounce this opportunity for an uncertain fusion with rather
reluctant anticlerical partners. Above all General de Gaulle, who in 1943 had
revived the discredited old parties by bringing them into the National Resis-
tance Council to strengthen his hand in Washington and London, was in
1944-45 still unwilling to forfeit his position as a national hero by stooping to
lead a political party.3 The attempt to transform the non-Communist Resis-
tance into a political movement was thus stillborn, and instead three parties
succeeded in canalizing the new enthusiasm.
The Communists reaped in votes the reward of their Resistance record after
1941, becoming the largest single party; and they contrived through their
dynamism, their organizing capacity and their ruthless use of slander and
violence to capture control of CGT.4 Equally spectacular was the sudden
emergence of a new party, the Mouvement republican populaire (MRP),
based on an old tradition of Catholic democracy which had never before
found effective political expression and on a new generation of progressive
Christians who had come to maturity in the Resistance. Between these two the
old Socialist leaders hoped to rejuvenate their party and make it the link and
leader of all the new forces.
In these forgotten years of 1944-45 General de Gaulle was earning distinc-
tion at home as the first French premier to bring Communists into his
administration, and abroad as the chief advocate of the middle way between
2. Robert Aron, Histoire de la Liberation de la France (1959), pp. 573-637; Lfithy, pp. 100-4;
Rieber, Stalin and the French Communist Party, pp. 150-8, 168-74.
3 Wright, Reshaping of French Democracy, pp. 32-6, 64-78; Matthews, Death of the Fourth
Republic, pp. 107-11 ; Fauvet, La IVe Republique, pp. 24-7; H. Michel, Histoire de la Resistance
(1950), pp. 47-8, 51 ; M. Granet and H. Michel, Combat (1957), pp. 297-306; R. Hostache, Le
Conseil National de la Resistance (1958), Chapters 2 and 3 ; Bourdet, no. 27, pp. 1837-62; Frenay,
4. Lorwin, French Labor Movement, pp. 107-11 (and in Earle, pp. 202-4); Rioux, Le Syndi-
calisme, pp. 75-6; Lefranc, Les experiences syndicates en France, pp. 140-1 ? 151-68; Rossi,
pp. 444-5 ; Rieber, pp. 179-82, 220-4,
20 THE BACKGROUND
Washington and Moscow. Vincent Auriol, later President of the Republic and
champion of 'the System* against Gaullism, was the General's chief constitu-
tional adviser and his agent in dealing with the politicians. The Communists
were seeking fusion of their party with the Socialists; the voters of the Right
could find an electoral home only with MRP; the General was on intimate
terms with both Socialists and MRP but sharply divided from the Radicals
and Conservatives.5 And the style of government, in which a national hero of
authoritarian temper carried out the revolutionary policies of an insurrec-
tionary committee subject to the criticism of a parliamentary assembly, was
one which combined features cherished by the extreme Right, the extreme
Left and the moderate Centre.6
2. POLITICS AND CONSTITUTIONAL REFORM, 1945-47
The Third Republic formally committed suicide on 10 July 1940 when the
Chamber and Senate, sitting together as a National Assembly empowered to
revise the constitution, voted full powers to Marshal Pftain. The rival
government of General de Gaulle established itself at Algiers in 1943. It
gradually obtained Allied recognition, and took control in France in 1944.
But until 21 October 1945 its authority was based on no formal or legal
title.
On that day the French electorate had three decisions to take. They had to
choose their parliamentary representatives. They had to decide by referendum
whether the new assembly should draft a new constitution: if not, it would
simply become a Chamber of Deputies, a senatorial election would take place
according to the pre-war procedure, and the new parliament might or might
not proceed to revise the constitution in the manner prescribed in 1875. But if
the voters gave the new assembly constituent powers (as they did), they would
also have to accept or reject a governmental proposal limiting its authority to
seven months and requiring its draft constitution to be approved by another
referendum. For General de Gaulle was unwilling to confer unlimited power
on a single assembly checked by no rival institution.
The referendum produced an overwhelming vote of no confidence in the
Third Republic. Only the Radicals advocated returning to the system of
which they had been the principal beneficiaries (and only one in three of their
two million surviving voters followed them). The Assembly was given consti-
tuent status by 18,600,000 votes to 700,000.7 But this enormous majority
divided over the Assembly's powers. Socialists and MRP supported General
de Gaulle and called on their followers to vote 0 UI- 0 UL The Communists,
against whom the restrictions on the Assembly's powers were directed, cam-
paigned vigorously for OUI- NON. On the second question they were joined
by the Radicals, who disliked plebiscites in principle and General de Gaulle in
™vT*e ten? '^onservrati,ve' is used to denote the small and shifting right-wing groups like
PRL , (Parti rtpubhcain de la Liberty, the Peasant party, the Independent Republicans, and the
dissident GauUists: see below, Chapter 11. Without a capital letter, 'conservative' refers to a
social and economic outlook which some anticlericals share
6. Moraze, p. 141.
7. See Appendix v. Voting figures from Husson, Les Elections et R£f6rendums (1945-6, two
volumes, cited henceforth as Husson i and ii).
I Anti- I 1
i Clerical J Clerical \
For a new constitutional regime
Socially progressive; constitutionally, for the Fourth Republic
Socially conservative; constitutionally, for the Third Republic
I. Referendum. 2! -1 0-45
For a new constitution
(Carried)
3. Referendum, S-S'46
For the first draft constitution
(Lost)
Com. I
DeG.
-or-
RPF
Soc.
Rad.
MRP
ConsJ
2. Referendum, 21 • 10-45
For limiting the Assembly's powers
(Carried)
For
Against
4. Referendum, 13-10*46
For the second draft constitution
(Carried)
5. For the government, 1946
(Tripartisme)
Rad.
DeG.
MRP
Cons.
6. For a P. R. electoral system, 1947
Single-member
seats, majority
voting
Mu I ti -member
seats, majority
voting
Split
Fig. 1. Party Alignments 1945-7
22 THE BACKGROUND
practice. The General won this vote by nearly 13 million to 6£ million. For
the first time France had a Constituent Assembly with limited powers.
The election produced an Assembly unlike any of its predecessors. The three
large organized parties, Communists, MRP and Socialists, polled 5, 4f and 4^
million votes respectively. These three disciplined groups shared between
them in roughly equal numbers nearly four-fifths of the 586 seats in the
Assembly. The Radicals were routed; they and their allies polled 2 million
votes, but the party held only 24 seats in metropolitan France and many of its
leaders were beaten. The different varieties of Conservative did a little better
with about 2-J- million votes and 64 seats.
For nearly three years after the Liberation the Communists held office and
their pressure on the government dominated the political struggle. They
pinned their hopes on completing the revolution legally, by electoral victory
and infiltration of the state machine. The basis of their strategy was a close
alliance with the other great Marxist party; and the reluctance of the Socialist
leaders was to be overcome by arousing their followers who still recognized
'no enemies on the Left'. The Radicals were also potential allies, for distrust
of political generals had led them to co-operate with the Communists in the
1945 referendum. MRP was to be discredited as the standard-bearer of re-
action; in particular the clerical dispute, which many hoped had been buried
in the Resistance struggle, was resuscitated in order to prevent any close com-
bination between MRP and the 'Socialists.8 But proportional representation,
in many ways a help to the Communists, hindered them here : for it allowed
each party to fight the electoral battle alone, and so enabled the Socialists to
escape being forced into a Marxist coalition which might have alienated them
irrevocably from MRP.9
Immediately after the election General de Gaulle reconstituted his govern-
ment and based it on the support of all the main parties. But a few weeks later,
on 20 January 1946, he suddenly resigned in exasperation with the quarrels
and demands of the parties. Like some other war leaders, he was more
interested and knowledgeable in military than in economic affairs ; reconstruc-
tion of the army was his most cherished objective, and the interference of
party politics in this sphere precipitated his departure.10 He rejected any idea
of carrying out a coup d'etat, and Blum and Auriol advised him against
appealing by radio to the public.11
His departure inaugurated a year of tripartisme, a coalition government of
the three main parties, headed at first by the Socialist President of the Con-
stituent Assembly, F61ix Gouin. The three parties associated in the govern-
ment (allied would be too strong a word) could reach no agreement on the
constitutional problem. The Socialists, having failed to arrange a compromise,
joined the Communists against all the other principal parties in voting the
8. See Hamon, no. 119, pp. 103-5. 9. Goguel, Fourth Republic, pp. 61-2.
10. The last straw was a large cut in the military budget, moved by the Socialists in order to
embarrass the Communist minister responsible but promptly taken up and carried by the Commu-
nists themselves. But see below, p. 386 ; and Fauvet, IVe, pp. 64-5.
11. Wright, Reshaping, p. 131 ; Chapters 4 and 5 give the fullest account of the General's
relations with the cabinet and parties. For his rejection of a coup, see La France sera la France
(a collection of his pronouncements published by RPF), pp. 31-3; Monde, 13 March 1951;
Rassemblement, \ \ July 1952 - but cf. his memoirs : Le Salut, pp. 286-7.
THE WAR AND ITS AFTERMATH, 1936-47 23
draft constitution on 19 April 1946 and campaigning for it in the referendum.
Its opponents attacked the draft itself (which conferred virtually unchecked
power on a single chamber); the electoral law associated with it; and the con-
troversial preamble - especially the omission of the right to 'freedom of
education', the guarantee of the Catholic schools. But they were even more
hostile to the sponsors than to the provisions of the draft. They feared that
acceptance would constitute a triumph for the Communists, consolidating
both their alliance with the Socialists and their domination of that alliance.
The referendum of 5 May 1946 checked the steady Communist advance. For
the first time in French history the electorate answered NON in a plebiscite.
The draft constitution was rejected by a majority of just over one million votes
in a poll of twenty million. Some Socialists had evidently voted against their
leaders - who tried to recover the lost ground by a sharp reversal of policy and
violent denunciation of the Communists. Nevertheless, in the general election
on 2 June the Socialists were the principal losers. The Communists gained a
little, M RP gained more. As it emerged as the largest party, its leader Georges
Bidault succeeded Gouin at the head of the tripartite government. An equally
important shift of power was the replacement of Andr6 Philip, the Socialist
minister of finance who favoured a controlled economy, by Robert Schuman,
on economic matters one of the most conservative members of MRP.
During the referendum campaign General de Gaulle maintained complete
silence and did not even vote.12 But after the election he emerged from his
reserve. At Bayeux on 16 June he denounced the working of the regime,
attacked the power of the parties, and expounded his own remedy of strong
presidential rule - the so-called Bayeux constitution.13 His open opposition
presented a challenge to MRP, which claimed to be the parti de lafiddite. But
the MRP leaders believed that an unsatisfactory compromise was better than
another controversial draft constitution, another rejection by referendum, and
another seven months of provisional government. Until a constitution had
been adopted there could be neither relief from the paralysing pressure of
imminent elections nor hope of upsetting the coalition with the Communists.
MRP therefore accepted the last-minute concessions offered by the
chastened Communists and worried Socialists. But to their vast embarrass-
ment General de Gaulle, in another speech at Spinal, denounced the new
proposals.14 The October referendum proved MRP's fears well-founded. The
constitution was adopted by a majority of only 9 million against 8 million; a
third of the electorate, 8£ million people, did not trouble to vote. Plainly it
was accepted not on its merits but as an escape from provisional government.
The Socialist and Communist parties alone had polled on 2 June half a
million more votes than were cast in favour of the constitution on 13 October.
Yet since June MRP with its 5£ million voters had joined the OUI camp.
There was therefore a gap of 6 million between the earlier vote for the three
parties and the subsequent vote for the constitution they had framed. General
de Gaulle had shown his power. But he was not yet ready to re-enter the
12. V Annie politique (henceforth cited as AP), 1946, p. 161.
13. Text of the speech in ibid., pp. 534-9; cf. La France sera la France, pp. 36, 51, 167.
14. Extracts in ibid., pp. 16, 44, 169 ; text in AP 1946, p. 245.
24 THE BACKGROUND
political arena, and the general election of 10 November again gave nearly
three-quarters of the seats to the three main parties. MRP lost the half-
million votes which they had gained in June, and the Socialist decline con-
tinued. The Communists slightly increased their vote, again becoming the
strongest party; but their real power diminished, for the Socialist defeat
deprived the Marxist parties of their (theoretical) majority. The groups
opposed to tripartisme adapted their tactics to the electoral system and divided
the constituencies between them; this particularly helped RG R (Radicals and
allies) who won 70 seats. The Assembly contained 183 Communists, 166
MRP, 103 Socialists, and 74 Conservatives. It lasted until 1951.
Tripartisme was dying. MRP wanted to demonstrate its anti-Communism
to the voters who had deserted it in the referendum ; the Communists feared to
lose their hold on the working class by staying in office. Since neither party
would vote for the other's candidate, Thorez and Bidault in turn failed to
secure the absolute majority of the Assembly which they needed to be elected
prime minister. The immediate problem was solved by the formation on 16
December of a one-party Socialist government under the veteran L6on Blum.
The general public was delighted to find a ministry which knew its own mind ;
the rival parties were less pleased. In January the constitution was officially
inaugurated by the election as President of the Republic of Vincent Auriol,
who had succeeded Gouin as President of the Assembly a year before. Blum
resigned (as was customary on the election of a new President) and the big
parties renewed the coalition under another Socialist, Paul Ramadier.
The Radical party, after a year in opposition, now returned to office and began
its climb back to power; but its influence was as yet small and the Ramadier
ministry rested on the alliance of Socialists and MRP.
The Communists were increasingly uneasy partners. They were opposed to
the other parties both on domestic issues, especially wages policy, and on
colonial questions (Madagascar and Indo-China were both in revolt). In
March their deputies - other than ministers - abstained in a vote of confidence
on Indo-China, though the party stayed in office in the hope of influencing
French policy during the foreign ministers' conference in Moscow. By May
France had aligned herself with the West, and a strike at the Renault works
warned the Communists that their trade union influence was threatened: the
whole party (including ministers) voted against the government on wages
policy. The ministers refused to resign, and were dismissed on 5 May 1947,
the most important date in the history of the Fourth Republic.
The Republic had won its 'battle of Prague'. It had taken the risk of
admitting Communists into the government, but had escaped the fate of most
countries which tried that gamble. The Socialists had not been enticed into an
alliance controlled by their rivals. The Communists had neither gained control
of the key ministries nor penetrated the governmental machine sufficiently to
paralyse it. They were not strong enough either to win a free election or to
create a revolutionary situation. Their one great asset was their grip on the
trade unions; and France had now to be ruled against the opposition of the
largest party and the industrial working class,
A month earlier General de Gaulle had re-entered politics. At Strasbourg on
THE WAR AND ITS AFTERMATH, 1936-47 25
7 April 1947 he appealed to all Frenchmen to rally to his Rassemblement du
peuplefran$ais (RPF), a new non-party movement to reform the constitution,
combat the Communist 'separatists' and regenerate national life. His appeal
met with a large response in the country. In the autumn RPF extended its
activity to Parliament, setting up an 'inter-group' which all deputies (except
Communists) were invited to join while still remaining members of their for-
mer parties. But Socialists and MRP forbade their members to adhere, so
that the new body consisted of old opponents of tripartisme reinforced by a
few MRP dissidents who preferred the leadership of the General to that of the
party. Gaullists and Communists, whose alliance in 1944 had laid the founda-
tions of the Fourth Republic, were now both bent on its destruction.15
3. SOCIAL CONFLICTS
The events of 1947 transformed French politics. Domestically, imperially and
internationally there were adjustments and reversals of policy (not all for the
better). The working of the regime changed completely. Party cohesion
declined as soon as it ceased to be indispensable in defence against Com-
munist pressure. Old individualist habits revived and profoundly affected both
political behaviour and constitutional practice.
In the autumn of 1947 the creation of the RPF inter-group and the begin-
ning of active Communist opposition opened a new phase of parliamentary
life. The problem of the political regime emerged again into the forefront of
controversy. There was massive support in the country for both the drastic
solutions, 'people's democracy' leading to Communism, and presidential
democracy leading perhaps to authoritarian rule from the Right. Their
advocates in the Assembly combined in a negative coalition to make all
government impossible, hoping afterwards to fight out their own battle over
the ruins of the parliamentary republic. Only by the alliance of all the middle
parties, loyal to the classic forms of parliamentary rule, could a system of the
familiar type be preserved.
Union of the centre groups was indispensable to the regime's survival and
perhaps to their own. But even on the constitution itself they disagreed:
Socialists and MRP had created the Fourth Republic, Radicals and many
Conservatives still preferred the Third. A graver weakness arose from the
clash of party ambitions. The middle parties had a common interest in stand-
ing together against the oppositions. But this could neither suppress their
rivalries nor prevent the weaker Radical and Conservative groups from
pressing continually for a larger share in power as their parliamentary bar-
gaining position improved. Nor was this merely a matter of jobs, for the
majority was deeply divided on all questions of policy.
The main cause of division was the economic problem: the distribution of
the national income and of the burdens and benefits of government expendi-
ture among different social groups. In the post-Liberation inflation, fixed-
income groups suffered but small businesses flourished, paying their debts
and taxes in depreciated francs. The wage- and salary-earner could not escape
direct taxation; but the self-employed defrauded the treasury on a massive
15. Luthy, p. 137.
26 THE BACKGROUND
scale. Peasants, because of their electoral influence, had always paid far less
than their share of taxation.16 Radical and Conservative politicians passion-
ately advocated a free economy - but insisted on guaranteed agricultural
prices and government-supported markets.17 Moreover, wartime and post-
war food shortages meant a golden age for the peasantry. In August 1947 - the
peak year for farm prices - the average town worker was spending almost
three-quarters of his wages on food.18 Since the supply nearly all came from
small farmers, rationing was far less effective than in Britain (where half of it
entered through the ports). And the German occupation had reinforced and
strengthened old habits of obstruction by making resistance and sabotage a
national duty.
For a generation before the war, opposition to taxation had prevented
France from balancing her budget. Deputies would not risk electoral disaster
by voting adequate taxes; governments would not court parliamentary defeat
by proposing them. They paid their way by inflation. Between the wars the
monetary problem dominated French politics as unemployment dominated
British - largely because of the determination of the better-off to evade their
share of the national burdens. Frenchmen were always more reluctant to give
their money than their blood.
The remark that ' France is a land of excessive taxation, fortunately tem-
pered by fraud' was as true of the Fourth Republic as of the Third. In 1948
the ministry of finance raised £10,000,000 from Parisians owning American
cars, three-quarters of whom had been paying no income tax at all. Officials
estimated evasion of one tax at 20%, of another at 30 to 50%.19 Governments
had to rely on indirect taxation which fell most heavily on the poor. This
increasing burden on those least able to bear it was the main cause of the
recurring political crises; and it could never be tackled effectively because of
the conflicting electoral interests of the governing parties.
In 1945 Mend&s-France, as de Gaulle's minister of economic affairs, had
urged an austere policy of controlling the economy, reforming the currency
and limiting governmental commitments in order to avoid inflation. He was
opposed by bankers and businessmen, peasants and profiteers, conservatives
16. Wright, Reshaping, p. 254: 19% of national income, 1 3% of taxes. For other estimates
see Pickles, French Politics, pp. 247-8; Goguel, Fourth Republic, p. 191 ; Duverger, Institutions
financier es> pp. 130, 154-6, 168-75; Raymond Aron, Le Grand Schisme, pp. 220-1 ; Meynaud,
Groupes de pression en France, p. 203 and n. ; Statistiques et ttudes financiers, Supplement
finances francaises, no. 18, 1953, p. 202, summarized in Monde, 6 to 9 June 1953, and by B. de
Jouvenel in Manchester Guardian, 6 and 7 July 1953 ; Shoup, no. 199, pp. 341-2.
17. See for instance Aron, Schisme, pp. 215-16; Siegfried in A? 1952, p. xi.
18. Agricultural prices in relation to the general price level reached 121 in 1947 (1913 parity
100). In the thirties and forties they were nearly always over 100, but they dropped below 90
during the fifties : Paysans, p. xxv.
19. Cars: Ren6 Pleven, rapporteur of the finance committee, to a committee on fiscal reform
(Figaro, 9 December 1948) ; Jules Moch, minister of the interior, to a Socialist conference (Bulletin
interieur SFIO, no. 39, February 1949, p. 69). Percentages: Figaro, 12-13 August 1950; Edgar
Faure, minister of state for the budget, JO 23 May 1950, p. 3814, who quoted an estimate of
3-400 milliards (£3-400 million) for loss through fraud. Ehrmann, Business, p. 314, puts it 50%
higher. Among small businesses investigated in 1950, the fraud rate was 80 % : Duverger, op. cit.,
p. 168. In 1949 even tax-exempt government bonds proved unsaleable as long as purchasers*
names were recorded : M. Wolfe, The French Franc between the Wars (New York, 1951), p. 21n.
(I owe this reference to Dr. D. Goldey.) For some important qualifications see Aron, Steadfast,
pp. 49-51 ; and on the whole subject Shoup, no. 199, pp. 325-44.
THE WAR AND ITS AFTERMATH, 1936-47 27
and Communists. The General preferred the more comfortable advice of his
finance minister, Ren<§ Pleven; Mendes-France resigned and the inflation
promptly followed. As prime minister in 1946, Georges Bidault called a con-
ference of business, peasant and trade union representatives at the Palais
Royal; but they merely agreed to support one another's demands for price and
wage increases and so gave the inflation a further impetus.20 In December
L6on Blum formed an all-Socialist government which could at last formulate
an agreed economic policy; the other parties allowed it to survive for a month.
Significantly, a public opinion poll found that 62% thought it the most
successful cabinet since the Liberation.21
At the root of the long-term economic problem was the technical inadequacy
of France's agriculture and small-scale industry. The Monnet Plan was a bold
attempt to lay foundations for modernization. But since the necessary invest-
ments were financed mainly through the budget (and Marshall Aid) this policy
entailed real sacrifices, which provoked stubborn political resistance and
persistent efforts to shift the burden. In one form or another the economic
problem destroyed most governments in the first seven years of the Fourth
Republic.22 In November 1947 Ramadier was swept out of office by the reper-
cussions of the month's great strikes. Schuman's first ministry was beaten in
July 1948 over the military budget, Marie's broke up in August over price
policy, Schuman's second fell in September because the Conservatives objected
to the appointment of a Socialist minister of finance. Wages policy split
Queuille's cabinet in October 1949 and Bidault's in February 1950; the latter
was finally defeated in June over civil service pay. Throughout 1951 economic
policy was in constant dispute within the successive governments ; in January
1952 the second Pleven ministry was beaten when it tried to economize on the
railways, in February the Faure cabinet fell when it proposed increased taxes,
in December Antoine Pinay was ousted over his proposals to meet the social
security deficit, and in May 1953 Ren6 Mayer was overthrown on demanding
special powers to economize by decree.
Until 1948 prices rose steadily; either wages rose correspondingly, giving a
further twist to the inflationary spiral, or wage stabilization led to strikes and
a reinforcement of the Communist party. But in 1949 and 1950 the heavy
investments of the post-war years at length began to produce results. The
national income rose while prices remained stable - until the Korean war
destroyed the equilibrium once again. At the same time some post-war
governments made a real if insufficient effort to finance their expenditure by
taxes instead of inflation: the proportion of the national income taken by the
government rose substantially after the war.23 The ministries of the Fourth
Republic lasted no longer than those of the Third, but they did try to tackle
problems that their predecessors had shelved.
Gratitude is not a political sentiment. The modernization programme im-
posed burdens which were fiercely resented by men on the margin, terrified of
20. See below, p. 394 and n. 21. Sondages 1947, p. 38 ; also Aron, Schisme, p. 189.
22. *The movement of the American wholesale price index seems to mark the rhythm of
French polities': MorazS, p. 146 (cf. p. 139; his italics).
23. See below, p. 267n.
28 THE BACKGROUND
proletarianization and unable easily to carry extra liabilities. After 1952 the
small businessman lost the advantages of inflation; his customers migrated to
the booming industrial areas; and stricter checks on fraud made the high
nominal rates of taxation seem intolerable. The peasantry were embittered by
the fall in agricultural prices which ended their 'golden age'. For these small
men in town and country were often poor ; they were a burden on the economy
because of their excessive numbers, not their undue individual wealth.24 Many
indeed were barely kept alive by ' that barbed-wire entanglement of protective
devices which enables the marginal producer to survive without really enjoy-
ing it'.25 Modernization, however indispensable, threatened their cherished (if
unreal) economic independence - and an 'inhuman technocracy' added insult
to injury by maintaining that their disappearance would benefit themselves
and their country. The exasperation and resentment of 'static France' was the
political price paid for Monnet's economic miracle.26
4. THE LINES OF POLITICAL DIVISION
The economic problem tended to unite the parties which competed for working-
class votes, the Socialists and Communists, against those with no working-
class following, Radicals and Conservatives. MRP at first stood with the
parties of the Right in the hope of retaining the vast mass of conservative
support which it had acquired at the Liberation. But the foundation of
RPF won away right-wing supporters of MRP, which was thus thrown back
on the Catholic trade unions and from 1 948 normally aligned itself in economic
controversies with the Socialists. A few years later RPF in turn lost these
right-wing supporters to the old-fashioned Conservatives, and from 1950 a
tendency developed for some Gaullists to seek working-class votes and join
with the Left in support of working-class claims.
The economic problem was not the only cause of division between those
centre parties whose union alone kept governments in being. Colonial and
military questions often produced a similar alignment of forces, with first
Socialists and then members of MRP advocating conciliation of Indo-Chinese
or North African nationalism, while most Radicals and Conservatives
demanded firm government and the maintenance of French rule. On such
issues the Gaullists for years sided with the Right, and within the majority a
' Fourth Force ' of Conservatives and Radicals found themselves more often in
agreement on policy with the Gaullist opposition than with their 'Third
Force ' Socialist and M RP partners.
But this simple division into four groups, authoritarian and democratic
conservatives, totalitarian and democratic socialists, omits a major historical
factor, the clerical question. To most foreign observers the problem of the
church schools seemed trivial, but to many Frenchmen education was as vital
an issue as it is to American Catholics, or was to Englishmen half a century
ago. It symbolized the attempt to mould the nation's life in either a Catholic or
24. Statistiques, pp. 208-9, 215-16, and summaries (see n. 1 6).
25. Wright, no. 227, p, 7.
26. See below, pp. 167-9,
THE WAR AND ITS AFTERMATH, 1936-47 29
a secular spirit. And even the least ideologically-minded politician knew that
in some regions toczte' was still the real electoral dividing line.27
This cleavage cut right across the social and political divisions, splitting the
'Fourth Force' as well as (though less deeply than) the Third, and uniting
most Radicals and all Socialists with the Communists in a common hostility
to the claims pressed alike by Conservatives, MRP and RPF. This was the
weapon used by the Communists in 1945 to keep Socialists and MRP apart.
It split the first Schuman government in 1948, led the Socialists to ally with
Radicals instead of MRP in the subsequent local and senatorial elections,
and so provoked bitterness which gravely weakened the majority up to the
1951 election. It was by exploiting the church schools question in the new
Parliament that RPF alienated the Socialists from their former partners and
finally broke the old majority.
Since politics turned on several different conflicts instead of one, there was a
coherent majority neither in the country for a single party nor in Parliament
for a lasting coalition. Associates on one issue were bitter opponents on
others.28 MRP for example worked with Socialists, Radicals and most Con-
servatives in defending the regime against Communists and Gaullists. On
matters involving working-class interests and sometimes on colonial questions
it sympathized with the Socialists and Communists; Radicals, Conservatives
and (until 1951) RPF were hostile to its views. But over church schools
MRP found its friends (or competitors) among Gaullists and Conservatives,
while all Socialists and most Radicals joined the Communists against it. And
on Europe it agreed with most Conservatives and Socialists and opposed
Communists and RPF, with the Radicals split. So complicated a situation put
a high premium on the arts of manoeuvre and facilitated other, temporary
combinations. Electoral tactics united MRP with the Communists against all
the other parties in defence of proportional representation; Socialists and
RPF often held very similar views on the problem of Germany.
Most of the peculiarities of French government were thus caused by the
country's history. The battle against the Church and the struggle for political
freedom were still political issues in the middle of the twentieth century, and
they split public opinion on lines different from those imposed by the con-
temporary social and economic conflict. This persistence of several major
political dividing lines was the basic cause of the instability of government, as
the bitterness of the conflicts and the recent memories of power abused were
the fundamental reasons for its weakness. Strong organizations like the
Labour or Conservative parties, each seeking to form a (fairly) homogeneous
government to put into practice a (fairly) coherent policy, were impossible in
France. The young and dynamic on each side, impatient with the compromise
and weakness of coalition government, were consequently tempted into
extremist organizations which alarmed more prudent sympathizers and en-
raged opponents. The democratic parties could not compete effectively
because they were at loggerheads over the clerical question, which lay
27. It was the only political problem on which voters* views corresponded closely with their
party sympathies : Converse and Dupeux, no. 59, p. 19.
28. See Figures 1, 3 and 4 (above, p. 21, and below, pp. 43, 52).
30 THE BACKGROUND
between Socialists and M RP, preventing the development of a Labour party,
and between Radicals and Conservatives, weakening still further the rudi-
mentary links between the political representatives of the bourgeoisie. No
French party could hope to attract a majority of voters or deputies. No French
government could be based on a single party which put its policy into practice
and then submitted it to the judgment of the electorate. Every ministry was a
coalition. Responsibilities were never clearly apportioned; the government
parties devoted as much energy to mutual recrimination as to fighting the
opposition. The clash of political principles became obscured in the com-
plexity of parliamentary manoeuvring. The public grew apathetic and cynical;
divided ministries, lacking effective support in the country, were too weak to
impose necessary sacrifices on any powerful private interest or organized
social group. But these undoubted evils had causes deeper than the structure
of political institutions, and changing that framework has not done much to
cure them.
Chapter 3
THE SEARCH FOR A MAJORITY, 1947-1953
Between 1947 and 1953 the orientation of French policy changed slowly but
drastically. While they remained in alliance the three 'social' parties. Com-
munists, Socialists and MRP, had dominated the Assembly and the govern-
ment. But with the Communist withdrawal into impotent isolation the French
proletariat found itself virtually disfranchised, at least for constructive pur-
poses. Socialists and MRP were not strong enough to govern without
Radical and Conservative support, and within the new coalition the struggle
to dominate policy was, though less desperate, as active as in the period of
tripartisme. In the 1946 Assembly a precarious equilibrium was maintained.
But at the 1951 election the isolation of the Communists enabled the con-
servative groups to improve their parliamentary position and secure tem-
porary control of power and policy.
1. SOCIALIST DISCONTENT
The tripartite coalition had great difficulty in holding together. But while it
did so governments had no need to worry about their parliamentary strength.
The breach with the Communists at once restored the 'problem of the
majority' to its former predominance. During the Third Republic the main
source of parliamentary instability had been the contradiction between the
Radical attitudes on political (especially clerical) and on economic questions;
most Chambers began with a period of uncertainty in which the initial left-
wing majority, elected on traditional political grounds, fell apart when
governments had to deal with financial matters. In the Fourth Republic the
difficulty was aggravated since the extreme groups were much stronger. The
1946 election returned 180 Communists, and RPF at first rallied 80 Gaullists.
Together they slightly exceeded the combined strength of MRP and the
Socialists. A centre combination therefore needed to attract the votes of most
members of the loosely-organized Radical and Conservative groups, without
alienating the two big disciplined parties.
Coalitions with no bond but fear of the extremists could have no common
policy and the division and impotence of governments gave an immense
electoral advantage to their opponents. So the self-interested but useful
motives which attach men and parties to power were counteracted by power-
ful pressures in the opposite direction. Deputies were tempted to vote against
the government to ensure their own re-election, and parties felt that they could
recover lost ground by a spell out of office. The Socialists could not constantly
compromise on trade union claims without forfeiting support to the Com-
munists, while MRP, unless they could produce benefits for the Catholic
schools risked the defection of the Church to General de Gaulle.
These pressures were not remote but immediate. The French people cast
their votes twelve times in four years: in three referendums and three general
elections between October 1945 and November 1946, second chamber
32 THE BACKGROUND
elections at the end of 1946 and 1948, municipal elections in spring 1945 and
autumn 1947, departmental council elections in autumn 1945 and spring 1949.
No politician, party or government could plan ahead, for all were preoccupied
with averting imminent disaster at the polls. The compulsion to take short
views was irresistible. Feeling the tide was with them, the Radicals and Con-
servatives made demands to which the Socialists had to sacrifice more and
more of their policy.
Some Socialist leaders, more influential in the country than in Parliament,
urged the party to resign and repudiate responsibility for a policy which it dis-
liked. They feared that continual concessions for the sake of governmental
unity were losing votes and weakening the non-Communists in the trade
unions. Others were more afraid that by going into opposition the Socialists
would precipitate the breakdown of parliamentary government and the
triumph of General de Gaulle. But even these rarely advocated unconditional
participation in government - in August 1948, when the Socialists broke up
the Marie cabinet, only five deputies (mainly ex-ministers) at first favoured
joining its successor. The great majority of the party were for conditional par-
ticipation, and the battle raged around the stringency of the conditions. When
rank and file pressure became too great or their partners in office too exacting,
the Socialists would revolt: during the 1946-51 Parliament they brought down
six governments in a vain attempt to check the drift to the Right. When they
finally escaped into opposition exactly the same dilemma faced MRP, which
was now on the exposed flank of the majority.
2. RADICAL REVIVAL
The first reaction to the collapse of tripartisme was an attempt to constitute a
new coherent majority around the Third Force formula. This depended on a
close alliance of Socialists and MRP, reinforced by any Radicals or Conser-
vatives who accepted its fundamental premises : social reform to win back the
allegiance of the proletariat, and defence of the regime against both RPF and
Communists.
By the autumn of 1947 the Ramadier ministry was breaking up. The
Socialists disliked its unprogressive proposals for the government of Algeria,
MRP resented its municipal election law tampering with proportional repre-
sentation, and Radicals and Conservatives criticized its economic policy. The
majority fell from 1 82 in May to only 49 in September ; the prime minister was
persuaded not to resign by the President of the Republic. At the October
municipal elections RPF won control of the thirteen biggest cities in France,
and had 40% of the votes against only 25% for Socialists and MRP together.
With far more support in the country than the government, General de Gaulle
demanded the immediate dissolution of Parliament, and his followers in the
Assembly tried to impose it by voting systematically with the Communists.
In November 1947 Ramadier fell. The new Communist policy of intransi-
gent opposition was launched by great strikes which reached revolutionary
temper in Marseilles and other southern towns. Before the complicated
negotiations for a ministerial reshuffle had been completed, the cabinet
resigned and L6on Blum was put forward as a Third Force premier. But he
1948
1949
Y///////^w
BIDAULT
Q
PLEVEN
PLEVEN
1951
P. FAURE
1952
1953
QUEUILLE
General
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jille
PLEVEI
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on PI NAY
MAYER
LANIEL
LAN1EL
1954
I .
MENDES
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ENDE:
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i i
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1951
!952
1953
1954
are-
.taker
heral
;ction
MOLLET
1956 i5£ <%%%%^
1958
Pflimlin
y/////////^^
1958
J FMAMJ JASOND
5^3 Coalition including Socialists [7777] Coalition without MRP
SSSS and Communists l ' '
Cofl//t/on Including Socialists \ 1 Coalition of MRP, Radicals,
butnotCommunilts ' ' ond Conservatives
| X | Coalition including Gaullists
Fig. 2. Duration and Composition of Governments 1945-58
34 THE BACKGROUND
alienated many Conservatives and Radicals by attacking Gaullists and Com-
munists equally, and failed to obtain the necessary absolute majority of the
Assembly. Plainly the Third Force was too weak to govern without support
from parties which repudiated its basic ideas. All future cabinets were there-
fore based on temporary and uneasy compromises, and all parliamentary
combinations had a shifting and incoherent character.
The ministerial crisis had been precipitated by the Socialist party secretary
Guy Mollet in order to shift the government to the Left. But the demonstrable
need for Radical and Conservative votes brought about instead a move to the
Right. Robert Schuman became prime minister and was replaced as minister
of finance by Rene Mayer, a Radical with big-business and administrative
connections. As in December 1946 the leadership of the government passed to
a party just repudiated by the electorate.1 More important than the change of
government was the split in CGT. The anti-Communist minority broke away
to form a separate federation, CGT-Force ouvriere (FO), which was politically
independent but friendly towards the Socialist party. FO and the Catholic
trade union federation, CFTC, now provided a counterpoise to Communist
control of the working-class movement. Moreover, internal division and the
failure of the strikes so weakened the unions that after the end of 1947 they
could neither challenge the government nor even effectively defend the interests
of their members against the employers.2
Schuman once described his government's life as an obstacle race. In March
1948 General de Gaulle's former minister Ren6 Pleven tried to remove one
obstacle by reconciling his old leader with the parties of the Third Force, but
his advances were rejected by both sides. The nominal majority split over
Mayer's stiff fiscal levy at the end of 1947, over devaluation at the beginning
of 1948, over dismissals of civil servants in June, and above all over two
questions which revived the clerical controversy: the fate of twenty-eight
Catholic schools belonging to the nationalized colliery companies, and the
Poinso-Chapuis decree (named for the minister of health who issued it) which
indirectly allowed local authorities to subsidize church schools. The Socialists
decided on 19 July to bring the government down, proposing as a pretext a
trivial cut in the military budget.
Once again a crisis opened by the Left ended in a move to the Right. The
most active conciliator in the late cabinet had been the Radical minister of
justice, Andr6 Marie. He now became prime minister at the head of a broad
coalition in which Paul Reynaud, the Conservative leader, was minister of
finance. The Socialists, who had vetoed Reynaud's appointment nine months
1. Parties in decline are less dangerous and so more acceptable to a people who prefer weak
government: Aron, Schisme, pp. 188-9. See below, p. 452.
2. On the crisis of 1947 and its sequel, the coal strike of 1948, see Ltithy, pp. 139-57; Fauvet,
IVe, pp. 135-8; Matthews, Chapter 12; Lorwin, Chapter 8; Earle, Chapter 12; Pickles, French
Politics, pp. 82-5, 97-9, 102-6 ; Werth, France 1940-1955, pp. 368-86, 402-5 ; Lefranc, pp. 184-93,
210-22; and below, p. 74n. The FO split was imposed on reluctant leaders by a rank and file
exasperated at Communist violence: Lorwin, p. 126; Earle, pp. 206-7; Lefranc, pp. 191-3;
Rioux, pp. 69, 79; Liithy, p. 150; Ehrmann, no. 82, pp. 155-6; Godfrey, The Fate of the French
Non-Communist Left, pp. 48, 51-3 ; but Werth (pp. 385-6) thinks that since American trade unions
helped with money, it must have been a political plot. (In his view French workers are tainted by
taking dollars from American workers but Tunisian workers are not: cf. pp. 570fT.) On FO see
below, p. 359.
THE SEARCH FOR A MAJORITY, 1947-53 35
before, now accepted him reluctantly. As a condition of taking office he in-
sisted on emergency powers to reorganize by decree the civil service, the
taxation system, the nationalized industries and the social security organiza-
tion. On securing these powers from Parliament he used them to raise food
prices; the trade unions protested violently and the Socialists broke up the
government.
Significantly, MRP supported the Socialists. In 1947 they had shown their
determination to remain politically on the Left by resisting the appeal of
General de Gaulle. This decision cost them most of their conservative follow-
ing and gave greater weight to their working-class rank and file. In 1948 they
emerged as a party of the social and economic Left too. Robert Schuman,
narrowly elected to a second premiership, chose the only Socialist minister of
finance between 1946 and 1956, Christian Pineau. His tenure lasted just two
days; on 7 September 1948 the cabinet met the Assembly and the Conserva-
tives overthrew it by six votes. Three days later Henri Queuille, a Radical
leader from pre-war days, was elected prime minister.
The significance of this long ministerial crisis was great though negative. In
terms of measures it proved the impracticability of any clear-cut orientation of
policy, whether Right or Left; and in terms both of men and of constitutional
methods it seemed for a time to mark the triumph of the defunct Third
Republic over the upstart Fourth. At the Liberation new leaders had replaced
the discredited seniors ; but soon the old politicians were recalled. None of the
first three premiers had held office before the war; four of the next five had
done so.3 The Marie administration, with the first Radical prime minister and
the first Conservative minister of finance, marked a stage in this revival of the
old regime.4 The reversion was equally apparent in constitutional practice;
the Marie cabinet was mostly and the Queuille cabinet wholly selected before
the respective prime ministers had been chosen by the Assembly. Marie
developed his predecessor's method of evading the constitution by making
matters unofficially questions of confidence, and defied the spirit of the new
regime both by demanding special powers and by staking the existence of his
government on the second chamber's consent to them.5
The events of August and September 1948 defined an equilibrium of forces
which was to last for three years. The older leaders and groups regained a
share in power but not a monopoly or even a preponderance; the constitu-
tional pendulum swung half-way back to the Third Republic. The failures of
Reynaud and Pineau showed that no wholehearted policy, Conservative or
Socialist, could command the support of the Assembly. The centre parties
3. Of the first three, Gouin had been a deputy, de Gaulle and Bidault not. The next five (Blum,
Ramadier, Schuman, Marie and Queuille) had all spent twelve years or more in the Chamber,
though Schuman's first office was under Petain. Governments from 1949 to 1954 were formed by
three pre-war office-holders (Queuille, Laniel, Mendes-France), one pre-war parliamentarian
(Pinay) and four 'new men' (Bidault, Pleven, Faure, Mayer). After 1954 Pinay was the only
pre-war deputy nominated for the premiership.
4. Reynaud was assisted at the ministry of finance by Joseph Laniel and Maurice Petsche, so
that the three Conservative groups (Republican Independents, PRL and Peasants) were all
represented. Queuille was at first his own minister of finance, but soon transferred the post to his
under-secretary Petsche, who retained it until 1951.
5. See Prelot, no. 184, pp. 720-30; and below, pp. 226, 232-3, 270-1, 281.
36 THE BACKGROUND
were 'condemned to live together' in compromise and frustration. Therefore
the government was too weak to challenge any of the great organized interests,
employers, workers or peasants.6
3. DOCTOR QUEUILLE
Henri Queuille proved surprisingly well suited to this difficult situation. He
was a characteristic figure of Third Republican politics. A country doctor by
origin, he had served in twenty pre-war cabinets, in a dozen of them as minis-
ter of agriculture. His skill in the despised arts of parliamentary manoeuvre
was to stand him in good stead. Competent observers gave his ministry three
weeks; it lasted thirteen months and reversed the steady drift of opinion away
from the parties of the Centre.
Queuille believed, like Stanley Baldwin, that 'the art of statesmanship is to
postpone issues until they are no longer relevant'. His first expedient was to
lower the political temperature by deferring for six months the imminent
departmental council elections. General de Gaulle protested in angry speeches
hinting at insurrection. But after an ugly clash between Gaullists and Com-
munists at Grenoble in September, and a bitter and violent miners' strike in
October, public opinion rallied to the government in alarm at the spectre of
civil war.
In Parliament, however, the ministry faced a new obstacle. It had been
agreed in 1946 that after two years the upper house, the Council of the
Republic, should be wholly re-elected and its method of election reconsidered.
To weaken the Communists the new law greatly restricted proportional
representation, which had made the first Council almost a replica of the
Assembly, and reverted to a system very like that used to elect the old Senate.
MRP also suffered from this change; both parties fell to a score of members
out of a total of 320. Almost half the new senators (a title they forthwith
bestowed upon themselves) had sought RPF support at the election. In the
end only 58 of them accepted the Gaullist whip, so that RPF could not, as it
had hoped, use the new Council to block all legislation and force the govern-
ment to hold new elections. But the Radical and Conservative senators found
the upper house a useful weapon, and the new 'second thoughts chamber'
celebrated its appearance by rejecting the budget.7
At the beginning of 1949 the government's prestige stood high. Queuille
had started with a modest aim: to ensure that ministerial crises could occur
without endangering the regime. His very success made it safe to overthrow
him. Previous ministerial crises had been affairs of desperation, provoked by
parlies which felt their support slipping away and their very existence at stake.
The impending ones were crises of hope, the work of groups or leaders gaining
ground in the country who felt entitled to exert more influence on policy. In
May Reynaud began a vigorous drive to remove the Socialists from office;
6. Pr61ot points out that the Radical recovery meant a victory for the peasants and that Rey-
naud's policy involved an agreement with CGA (Confederation generate de V agriculture) and a
breach with the trade unions. He adds, *as the trade unions ejected M. Paul Reynaud, the
employers' unions executed M. Christian Pineau* (ibid., pp. 729-30). 'Condemned*: Queuille,
J0> 24 May 1949, p. 2871.
7. See below, pp. 279-80 (electoral), 286-7 (political).
THE SEARCH FOR A MAJORITY, 1947-53 37
some MRP leaders (notably Bidault) contemplated abandoning them for an
alliance with RPF, but the rank and file firmly refused. At the end of July the
Conservatives attacked Daniel Mayer, the Socialist minister of labour, for
a minor infringement of the wage freeze and the majority fell to three. Only
the parliamentary recess saved the government, and before the reassembly in
October it had broken up. British devaluation forced France to follow suit,
and Mayer seized the opportunity to demand a return to free collective bar-
gaining (suspended since before the war). This proposal split the government;
attempts at compromise failed and Queuille resigned on 5 October 1949.
The rules of the parliamentary game required that the Socialists, who had
brought down the last government, be invited to form the next. President
Auriol called on Jules Moch, who as minister of the interior had broken the
great strikes, helped devise the new electoral law for the Council of the
Republic, and produced several compromise proposals before the Queuille
government fell. But he was too strong a personality to be popular. The bitter
hatred of the Communists was indeed an asset to him, but many MRP deputies
and some even of his own party were also unfriendly. He was elected prime
minister with only one (disputed) vote to spare, failed to form a government
and had to resign. The same fate befell the next nominee, Ren6 Mayer, who
had a comfortable majority of 158 but was unable to reconcile the demand of
his own Radical party that Daniel Mayer should leave the ministry of labour
with the Socialists' insistence that he should remain there.
It was now MRP's turn. The bickerings of the politicians had exasperated
the public, and Bidault took advantage of this impatience, refusing to con-
front the Assembly until the parties had accepted his cabinet. This enabled
him to form a government but did nothing to resolve the conflict. Radical
attacks on the budget nearly destroyed his ministry in December, in February
the Socialists resigned over wages policy, and four months later they turned
him out over the salaries of civil servants - many of whom were Socialist
voters.
The crisis of June- July 1950 showed that the political balance had changed
little in the previous two years. The Socialists would not give up their new
freedom without compensation. They helped elect Queuille to the premier-
ship, but refused to join his government and overthrew him (with the aid of
the left wing of MRP) when he formed a conservative cabinet. The Socialist
leader Guy Mollet then drew up a programme including constitutional and
electoral reform, to please the Radicals and Conservatives, and a halt to
deflation, to satisfy his own party and MRP. On this basis the Socialists
returned to office; but they were not strong enough to claim the premiership,
which fell to the leader of the smallest of the majority parties, Ren6 Pleven of
UDSR.
The approaching general election made the coalition even harder to main-
tain. Mistrust between the Socialists and MRP had persisted since the former
left the Bidault government, and worsened in November when several MRP
deputies voted to impeach Moch (Pleven's minister of defence and principal
colleague).8 Moreover the conflict over economic policy broke out again,
8. See below, p. 299.
38 THE BACKGROUND
Socialists and MRP advocating industrial subsidies, Radicals and Conser-
vatives attacking them. Most serious of all was the disagreement on electoral
reform. The Radicals demanded a return to the pre-war double ballot which
MRP bitterly opposed. The Conservatives were divided. The 100 Socialists
were comparatively indifferent and voted in turn for each solution proposed;
the 180 Communists voted equally regularly against each and so the Assembly
rejected them all. For a time the government maintained a precarious neutrality,
but at the end of February it at last broke up.
As the Socialists were now the party of conciliation on the crucial issue,
Guy Mollet was nominated for the premiership. When he failed to obtain an
absolute majority, Queuille contrived to solve the crisis by simply reconstitut-
ing his predecessor's cabinet. To minimize the ravages of electoral fever he
resolved to hold the elections in June, four months early. As no electoral
reform could pass without the consent of MRP, he persuaded his Radical
friends to give way, and the new law and the budget were passed just in time
for elections on 17 June.
4. THE NEW ASSEMBLY
The results showed a severe defeat for the two parties most responsible for
creating and governing the Fourth Republic. MRP lost half their 5 million
voters of 1945, and of the 4^ million Socialist votes only 3 million were left.
Communist strength at 5 million was almost unimpaired ; Conservatives and
RGR - Radicals and allies - retained nearly all their supporters, 2% million
and 2 million respectively.9 RPF (which had not existed in 1945) won 4 mil-
lion votes. Some came from conservative-minded electors who had switched
from MRP to General de Gaulle when the former made too many com-
promises with the Communists. Others were voters for the older parties
whose candidates had thought it advantageous to climb on the Gaullist band-
wagon; these 'political hitch-hikers' were mainly Conservatives who soon
jumped off, as many Radicals had already done.
For RPF had passed its peak. It still had over 20% of the vote, second only
to the Communists with their 25%; but in the municipal elections of 1947
some 67% had voted for these two parties. Together the Socialists with
nearly 15%, Conservatives (13%), MRP (12*%), and RGR (11%) held a
narrow popular majority. But these four parties of the regime were divided
over the social reforms of the Liberation, which were still approved by a
majority of voters (Communists, Socialists, MRP and some RPF), and
over church schools (where the balance in the electorate was now very
close).10
Changes in the Assembly were greater owing to the new electoral law (see
Chapter 22). This modified proportional representation by allowing parties to
form alliances, and discarded it entirely where an alliance (or single party)
9. These 1\ million exclude 300,000 who voted Gaullist in 1946: Goguel, Fourth Republic,
pp. 90, 102. Both RGR and Conservatives claimed great gains; they did win seats but they lost
votes.
10. On these results see Goguel, op. cit.t Part in; Pickles, French Politics, Chapter 9; Williams,
no. 219. Some RGR voters favoured the Catholic cause in education.
THE SEARCH FOR A MAJORITY, 1947-53 39
won a majority of votes. Radicals, Conservatives and MRP gained most
from the new system; the Socialists gained less as they were often excluded
from the centre combinations. RPF could have made alliances, but its leader
nearly everywhere preferred independence even though it cost him a few
seats. The Communists were isolated throughout the country and lost heavily
by the new law. The two opposition parties had just under half the votes ; the
old system would have given them over half the seats, the new one gave them a
third.
The six major parties were approximately equal in the Assembly but the
three strongest were those least able to combine: 121 Gaullists, 107 Socialists
and 101 Communists out of 627. With the Communists in unrelenting opposi-
tion there was no majority for a government unless either RPF or Socialists
could be won over or split. As the Socialists were eager to escape taking
responsibility for the policies of others, RPF could achieve a commanding
position by widening the breach between them and their former partners. It
did so by using the clerical question to divide the centre parties as the Com-
munists had done six years before.11
In accordance with custom Queuille resigned after the election. A Radical,
Ren6 Mayer, was nominated for premier; MRP thought him too anticlerical.
A Conservative, Maurice Petsche, failed for lack of Socialist support. Ren6
Pleven's last government had pleased the Socialists ; he won their votes and
was elected premier but they would not join his cabinet. RPF pressed its
advantage. A powerful pressure-group, the Association for Educational Free-
dom, had enrolled a majority of the Assembly, and in mid-September its bill
(called the lot Barange after its sponsor) was voted by the combined clerical
groups, the government remaining neutral since most Radicals opposed the
bill. The Socialists could now claim that the old partnership had been broken
by others.
In December the Pleven ministry won its solitary triumph when the Assembly
ratified by a large and unexpected majority the Schuman plan for a European
coal and steel community. But its own supporters were no longer reliable.
MRP joined the three oppositions in passing the sliding-scale bill (a Socialist
measure tying wage rates to the cost of living, which the upper house delayed
and drastically amended). Radicals and Conservatives attacked Robert
Schuman for attempting to conciliate the Tunisian nationalists. Ren6 Mayer,
minister of finance, was a target for the Peasant group of right-wing Conser-
vatives. Finally the budget, which called for special powers to reorganize the
social services and nationalized railways, drove the Socialists into opposition
and they defeated the cabinet in January 1952. The new premier was Edgar
Faure, a young Radical leader, who tried hard to win them back by concessions
over Europe and Tunisia, the budget and the sliding-scale bill; the Con-
servatives and many of his own party revolted, and on proposing higher taxes
he was beaten at the end of February. A Conservative, Antoine Pinay, was
nominated ; his failure was meant to show these rebels that there was no right-
wing alternative to the old majority and they must therefore make the necessary
concessions. But to the general astonishment he achieved the impossible:
11. See above, p. 22.
40 THE BACKGROUND
twenty-seven Gaullist deputies defied their whip to vote him into the premier-
ship at the head of the most conservative majority France had known for
twenty years.
Aided by a world-wide fall in prices Pinay succeeded in checking inflation
(and expansion), restoring confidence and winning a great popular reputation.
Inevitably this provoked parliamentary jealousy. But not until the end of 1952
did Radicals and MRP feel it safe to overthrow him, the former with their
usual skill manoeuvring the latter into taking the blame. By then external
questions had come to overshadow domestic ones. For it was under Pinay
that the new resident in Tunis took it upon himself to arrest the local ministers ;
and it was his foreign minister, Robert Schuman, who signed the treaty
establishing a European defence community. MRP's main aim thenceforth
was to get the ED C treaty ratified; to stop it, the Gaullists were ready to
work with the Communists as well as the 'anti-Europeans' in the traditional
parties. In January 1953 Ren6 Mayer purchased precarious RPF support for
his new cabinet by sacrificing Schuman and equivocating on the European
army. But in May the Gaullists turned him out when he demanded special
powers to effect economies; the next premier, Joseph Laniel, gave them office
and obtained the special powers. His election, however, was preceded by the
longest ministerial crisis on record, which for the first time brought into par-
liamentary discussion the basic choices facing the country.
For this President Auriol was largely responsible. In sending first for Paul
Reynaud and then for Pierre Mend&s-France, he gave a platform to two
leaders who had consistently refused office without power. Reynaud announced
that he would form no ministry until the constitution had been revised to allow
governments to dissolve the Assembly at will; Mend&s-France proposed to
choose his ministers without regard to party claims, and to make them
promise not to join the next cabinet. His appeal for clear choices and general
sacrifices brought a remarkable public response, and won him support from
many - but not enough - younger deputies in revolt against their leaders.
Georges Bidault, the next nominee, also declined to consult the parties and
affirmed that he would use his full constitutional powers; he was beaten by a
single vote. Andr6 Marie adopted the more traditional tactics of equivocating
on policy and appealing to men of tried experience ; he received the lowest vote
of the four. But the long crisis was now discrediting the parties, especially
MRP (who, after blocking Marie, deterred Pinay from standing). When
Laniel was nominated they thought it prudent to support him, and he was
comfortably elected.
The new cabinet was paralysed by its internal divisions. It omitted the Con-
servatives closest to Pinay, and included friends of Mend&s-France such as
Edgar Faure and Francois Mitterrand, as well as Gaullist members (soon
renamed Social Republicans) who were no longer recognized by the General.
The ministry's economy decrees, drafted in August under the new special
powers, attacked many vested interests; but the first to become known
affected workers and state employees, who seemed once again to bear the
burdens which others would evade. Their wrath provoked a strike movement
on a scale unknown since 1936, and - unlike the Communist-led strikes of
THE SEARCH FOR A MAJORITY, 1947-53 41
1947-48 - remarkable for its spontaneity and orderliness.12 MRP pressure
obtained a few concessions for the strikers, whose movement was followed in
October by widespread demonstrations of peasant discontent.
Still more important developments were occurring in the French Union.
Public opinion, as Mendes-France's candidature had shown, was weary of the
Indo-Chana war and uneasy about events in North Africa. This mood grew
stronger in June, when the King of Cambodia fled to Siam, and in October,
when the Vietnam national congress resolved against remaining in the French
Union in its existing form - although, too late, a new doctrine of the Union's
constitutional status was slowly being evolved in Paris. Even men of the Right
began to ask why France should divert her forces from Europe to a Far
Eastern war where victory could bring no benefit.
Thus over Indo-China the failure of 'association' to satisfy nationalist
aspirations tended to bring part of the Right into agreement with the Left.
But in North Africa it merely stiffened the diehards. In August 1953 the resi-
dent in Morocco deposed the Sultan, who was the nationalist leader as well as
the monarch and the religious chief. Faure protested and Mitterrand resigned ;
but the responsible minister, Bidault, justified an action he had previously
forbidden. For the first time serious observers began to hint that the enemies
of liberal policies abroad might one day endanger democracy at home.13
Even these problems were far overshadowed by that of the European army.
Gaullists and Communists were willing to accept any alliance in order to
defeat the treaty, and its principal sponsors played into their hands. For it was
primarily to save EDC that MRP had accepted unpopular conservative
policies at home and in the empire. Instead the consequence was a hardening
of opposition to the treaty on the Left. When the two houses met at Versailles
in December 1953 to elect a President of the Republic, the Communists,
Socialists and Radicals sometimes acted and cheered together as in the days of
the Popular Front.14 When Herriot retired a month later the Socialist Andr6
Le Troquer was elected President of the Assembly, with Gaullist as well as
left-wing support, against the strongly * European' Pierre Pflimlin of MRP.
Several new committee chairmen owed their elevation to Communist votes,
and it no longer seemed unthinkable that a premier might be installed in the
same way.
The presidential election harmed the regime. Hitherto one day and two
ballots had always sufficed to find the clear majority required. But this time
the old conflict of Left and Right, already complicated by the EDC quarrel,
was still further embroiled by a prolonged contest of wills between Laniel, who
maintained that as premier he had a quasi-constitutional right to the presidency,
and the Radicals, who hoped Queuille would ultimately emerge victorious
from the general exhaustion. On the seventh day and thirteenth ballot the
12 Rioux, pp. 119-21 ; Godfrey, pp. 66-7. Because of a leakage, it began before the decrees
were'published: see Delouvrier in Crise dupouvoir et crise du civisme (henceforth cited as Crise),
p. 83.
13. Fauvet, no. 90, p. 107 ; cf. his IVe, pp. 293-4.
14. On EDC see Aron and Lerner, eds., France Defeats ED C and Grosser, La IV* Republique
et sa politique exterieure, pp. 234-46, 312-20. The presidential election is minutely dissected m
Melnik and Leites, The House without Windows.
42 THE BACKGROUND
electors chose Ren6 Coty, a highly respected Conservative senator of seasoned,
Third Republican presidential timber (he was vice-president of the upper
house). He had voted for P6tain in 1940 but had never compromised with the
Germans; illness had kept him from taking sides over EDC; Gaullists and
MRP both voted solidly for him; and with his election the ideals of the Resis-
tance and Liberation seemed to have been peacefully laid to rest.
I. Atlantic Pact, 1949
For
Against
3. Queuille & Pleven
1948-51; 1 95 1 election
5. Plnay. Mayer & Laniel
1952-4
Against P.
ForM.&L.
7. European Defence
Community, Aug. 1954
*L. Loi Barange, Sept. 1951
(subsidies to Catholic schools)
4. Constitutional
amendment, 1954
6. Mendes-France
1954-5
For, then
Against
8. German Rearmament
Dec. 1954
Fig. 3. Party Alignments 1947-54
Chapter 4
REVOLTS AGAINST THE 'SYSTEM', 1954-1958
In the early years after the war foreign policy played little part in the parlia-
mentary struggle. Communists, MRP and de Gaulle agreed on a 'hard*
policy of dismembering Germany to which only the Socialists demurred,
France had to retreat from this untenable position, and the London declara-
tion of June 1948, by which the Allies decided to restore a central German
government, marked the collapse of her policy; the political price was paid by
Georges Bidault, foreign minister (except for one month) ever since the
Liberation. His successor Robert Schuman, after the Atlantic pact had been
ratified overwhelmingly in July 1949, set French policy on an entirely new
course. His plan for a European coal and steel authority was launched in May
1950 and voted by Parliament in December 1951. It helped to hold the
majority together, for the centre parties welcomed the popular policy of
European economic union; their cohesion was endangered only when the
highly unpopular cause of German rearmament was linked to it. The first
proposal for a European army came in late 1950, and coincided both with the
first serious criticism of the Indo-China war and with the early rumblings of
the coming storm in the North African protectorates. The final rejection of the
EDC treaty in the summer of 1954 followed soon after the turn towards
conciliation in the protectorates and the peace - sequel to military disaster - in
Indo-China. Only a hundred days after that war ended, another began in
Algeria. It was to destroy the Fourth Republic.
The same year, 1954, saw the one real attempt at change within the regime.
Mend&s-France enjoyed a success that was spectacular but short-lived. In so
right-wing an Assembly a liberal leader had little chance, and that little was
denied him by the Allies' insistent demand for German rearmament. He hoped
for a stronger position in the next Parliament, but his apparent electoral
victory of January 1956 was soon followed by total defeat. Thus in 1956 the
System triumphed over its various enemies: first the Gaullists were routed at
the polls and then the new challengers (Poujade as well as Mend&s-France)
each found his following melt away as swiftly as it had appeared.
The tragedy of these last years of the Fourth Republic was that catastrophe
abroad overshadowed its real success at home. Post-war sacrifices were at last
bearing fruit in rising production and rapidly improving living standards.
Relieved of immediate economic pressures many voters lapsed into apathy;
but an active minority neither understood nor accepted the contrast between
growing domestic strength and self-confidence and the steady erosion of
France's world position. The result was an assertive nationalism, influencing
the Left as well as the Right, which focused the political conflicts of these years
on external rather than internal affairs. The revolt against EDC was the first
symptom of the new mood, and its outcome - the admission of Germany to
NATO - did nothing to assuage the widespread bitterness at Allied indiffer-
ence to French views and interests. Such resentments strengthened the
REVOLTS AGAINST THE 'SYSTEM', 1954-58 45
repeated right-wing protests against any withdrawal overseas : Tunisia was the
occasion for Mendes-France's defeat early in 1955 and Morocco mined
Edgar Faure's credit later in the year. When the Algiers settler riots of Feb-
ruary 1956 led Mollet to reverse his conciliatory policy, he was followed by
most of his Socialist and Radical supporters as well as by his conservative
opponents, but was soon condemned by both extremes: the few advocates of
timely concessions to Algerian nationalism, and the settlers, soldiers and right-
wing 'ultras' who were resolved to prevent such concessions and eager to
silence those who favoured them.
Once again France was fighting to hold an untenable position. In office,
most politicians soon found this out, and almost every government after 1953
was overthrown for truckling to Arabs or foreigners. When the crisis came
in the spring of 1958 it showed the weakness of the ultras in the National
Assembly, where they could destroy cabinets (with Communist help) but not
replace them. But it also showed the precariousness of the regime, for on
failing in Parliament the ultras turned to direct action. And against the threat
of civil war the Fourth Republic found itself helpless : its citizens apathetic,
and its professional defenders disloyal. For too long weak governments had
allowed generals and proconsuls to defy them with impunity, and by May 1958
disobedience was universal.
When faced with a major crisis French politicians, even those of the Left,
turn by instinct to a national saviour. The Chamber of the Cartel des Gauches
elected Poincar6 in 1926, the left-wing victors of 1932 chose Doumergue in
1934, the Parliament of the Popular Front voted for P6tain in 1940. In 1958
the National Assembly of the Republican Front averted an open military
revolt by installing General de Gaulle.
1. 'SUPERMAN'
The first signs of revolt appeared in the spring of 1954. LaniePs government
was intensely unpopular; the Left's dislike of him was feeble compared with
the army's hatred. EDC was condemned by a chorus of generals headed by
Marshal Juin, who quarrelled publicly with Pleven, the minister of defence.
During the battle for Dien-Bien-Phu Pleven and Laniel were assaulted by ex-
soldiers and serving officers in mufti at a war memorial ceremony, the police
showing little enthusiasm in their defence. Soon, however, the military zealots
of the Right were to acquire a new target for their hatred.
In May Dien-Bien-Phu fell. Five weeks and three votes of confidence later
the Laniel government was beaten by thirteen. President Coty summoned
Mendfes-France, the unofficial leader of the opposition, who promised to
resign either if he owed his election to Communist support or if he failed to
make peace in Indo-China within a month.1 He needed 314 non-Communist
votes. To everyone's surprise he received 320.
The seven months of his premiership saw a series of spectacular policy
decisions, bewildering cabinet reshuffles, and complex shifts of party allegiance.
He began by choosing his own colleagues, defying the usual rules (only four
1. But before resigning he promised he would bring in a bill to authorize sending conscripts
to Indo-China - a measure none of his predecessors had ventured to propose.
46 THE BACKGROUND
had served in the last government and only one was an ex-premier) and
ignoring the parties (though he carefully balanced supporters and opponents
of EDC). The cabinet was based on Radicals and Gaullists ; the Socialists and
Communists were in the majority but not in the ministry, a few MRP and
Conservative dissidents took office although their parties were reserved or
hostile. The deputies were sufficiently impressed by the premier's sudden
popularity in the country to give him massive majorities for his settlement in
Indo-China, his conciliatory policy in Tunisia, and his demand for sweeping
special powers over the economy.
This brief honeymoon was ended by EDC. No decision on that subject
could have left the cabinet or the majority intact. When Mend&s-France tried
(in vain) to induce France's partners to modify the terms of the treaty, three
'anti-European' ministers resigned; when the government decided to bring
the unchanged text before Parliament while itself staying neutral, three 'pro-
Europeans' left it. On a procedural vote, with half the Socialist deputies
defying their whip, ratification was defeated by 319 to 264. This outcome was
neither a victory of parliamentarians over the public (who were indifferent),
nor of extremists over democrats (who were divided), nor of immobilistes over
reformers (both camps included supporters as well as opponents of change). It
was no accident which could have been altered by a different stand on the
premier's part: the deputies' minds were made up. Yet it surprised the 'Euro-
peans' in Paris and Washington who had so rashly helped to wreck any com-
promise, and it earned the prime minister the unrelenting enmity of M RP. To
save the Atlantic alliance Mend&s-France then sponsored the London and
Paris agreements rearming Germany. Dulles called him 'Superman' when he
forced these through the Assembly in the face of bitter Communist hostility,
reluctant opposition from many of his own staunch supporters, and a most
discreditable attempt by the leading 'Europeans' (other than Schuman and
Pflimlin) to stir up the nationalist and anti-German passions they had been
deploring for years.2
Meanwhile on 1 November the Algerian war had begun. Francois Mitter-
rand, minister of the interior, dissolved the main nationalist party; Mend&s-
France appointed Jacques Soustelle as a reforming governor-general; both
reaffirmed that Algeria was for ever part of France. The rising strengthened
conservative hostility to the premier, which was further aggravated when he
attacked the alcohol interest. In February 1955 he was overthrown by the
votes of Communists and Conservatives reinforced by twenty right-wing
dissidents from his own Radical party - and by M R P, despite their approval of
his North African policy on which the vote was taken.
Late in 1954 the constitution had been amended: would-be premiers now
formed their governments before the vote, in which a clear majority of the
Assembly was no longer required. Antoine Pinay (Conservative) declined
nomination; Pierre Pflimlin (MRP) failed to form a ministry; Christian
2. Some of them even spread rumours that ministers were betraying defence secrets to the
Communist party: see Williams, no. 222; Wright, no. 229; Thdolleyre, Le procts des fuites;
Fauvet, IVe, pp. 280-3. The prefect of police, Jean Baylot, and Superintendent Dides were
dismissed ; on them see pp. 52, 98n, 130n., 146n., 165n., 347-8.
REVOLTS AGAINST THE 'SYSTEM*, 1954-5S 47
Pineau (Socialist) tried to revive the European programme and the MRP
alliance but was beaten in the Assembly. Success went at last to a Radical,
Edgar Faure, finance minister in the last two cabinets and foreign minister for
the last two weeks. A talented conciliator, he carried by a huge majority the
Tunisian agreements which had destroyed his predecessor. But the storm-
centre had now moved to Morocco, where French right-wing extremists (in
the police force) murdered a leading liberal newspaper-owner.3 The premier
sent out a new resident, Gilbert Grandval, a progressive Gaullist whose long
period of authority in the Saar had won him a reputation as a forceful pro-
consul.4 But the Right would not allow concessions to nationalism in a
second North African territory. GrandvaFs mission was wrecked by blatant
military and administrative sabotage, openly encouraged by some Gaullist
ministers and Conservative parliamentarians. On 20 August 1955, the
anniversary of the Sultan's deposition, there were outbreaks and massacres
both in Morocco - as the resident had warned - and in Algeria. Grandval
resigned and with him vanished the last chance of compromise. The obstruc-
tionists (among them the new resident, General Boyer de la Tour) soon
brought about the very result they feared. Within three months the Moroccan
nationalists were able to impose the triumphant return of the exiled Sultan.5
The National Assembly faced an election in June 1956 and would approve
no drastic step, forcible or conciliatory, to halt the spreading Algerian war.
Faure therefore resolved to go to the country, escaping months of electioneer-
ing, permitting an earlier decision on Algerian policy - and also retaining an
advantageous electoral law and denying his opponents time to develop their
campaigns. His coalition was under heavy fire both from Poujade whose
demagogic tax-resistance movement was sweeping the south, and from
Mend&s-France who had captured the Radical machine. The latter demanded
a return to the pre-war electoral system of single-member constituencies and
two ballots; as it was favoured by the countryside, the proposal of the leader
of the Left was voted by the conservative (but rural-minded) upper house.
With Communist help Faure resisted this demand, but on 29 November 1955
he was beaten by an absolute majority in a vote of confidence. This defeat
enabled him to take the bold (but unexpectedly popular) decision to dissolve
the Assembly for the first time for nearly eighty years.
The election offered the voter his clearest choice since the war - although
over the predominant North African issue every leader except Bidault and
Poujade professed liberal intentions. In 1951 a broad centre majority had
straddled every question. Now the centre was broken. On the moderate Right
Faure's parliamentary coalition formed the basis of constituency alliances
embracing MRP, the Conservatives, and the premier's Radical associates
(who were expelled by their party). On the Left a rival Republican Front was
called for by Guy Mollet (Socialist), Mendes-France (Radical), Mitterrand
3. See below, p. 350n. The victim, Lemaigre-Dubreuil, had himself been a right-wing extremist
in the thirties, and later helped to plan the Allied landing at Algiers in 1942.
4. Later in the year the Saar voted heavily to rejoin Germany.
5. He formed a cabinet identical with that proposed to Paris eight years earlier by the liberal
resident Labonne - except that then foreign affairs and defence were to be in French hands.
Labonne had of course promptly been recalled : Bloch-Morhange, Les Politiciens, pp. 57-8.
48 THE BACKGROUND
(UDSR) and Chaban-Delmas (Social Republican).6 These opposing demo-
cratic combinations were harassed on their flanks by Communists and Pou-
jadists - who left one another severely alone. The slogan of the former was
Front populaire /, that of the latter, Sortez les Sortants ! (roughly, 'Throw the
rascals out !'). Vulgar and violent, these political newcomers used rowdyism
and occasionally physical force on a scale unheard of in French electioneering.
Though these tactics did them more harm than good, they appealed success-
fully to nationalist and racialist feelings about North Africa, to the discon-
tents of peasants and small shopkeepers, and above all to the widespread
distrust of all politicians as a class.7
2. FROM SOCIALISM TO 'iMMOBILISME*
On 2 January 1956 France recorded her highest vote since the war. The
strength of the traditional parties was little altered: Communists, Socialists
and right-wing Radicals maintained their percentage share of the poll, MRP
fell back slightly, the Conservatives gained 24%. But among the various
groups of critics there were sweeping changes. The Gaullists, divided and
absorbed into the System they had been elected to oppose, lost nearly four-
fifths of their four million votes. Mend&s-France's Radical supporters doubled
their vote, from one to two million, and raised their share of the poll from
5 to nearly 10% ; they gained most around Paris and in the booming industrial
north-east. But in the rural south, which was losing population to the expand-
ing areas, it was the Poujadists who crystallized the demand for change. To
everyone's surprise (even their own) they polled 2^ million votes or nearly
13%. In a few areas these came largely from the Gaullists, but in the south
they gained from every party including the Communists.
The conservative coalition thus suffered a double disappointment. First,
despite the Gaullist collapse they added only 800,000 to their vote and 1% to
their share of the electorate, while the Left - Communists, Socialists and
Mend&s-France Radicals together - gained two million (5%). Secondly, the
electoral system failed to help them. They had hoped in conservative depart-
ments to win a clear majority of votes (and therefore all the seats), while in
left-wing areas neither Communists nor democratic Left would command a
clear majority and so proportional representation (PR) would continue to
apply.8 Poujade frustrated these calculations by making heavy inroads both
on their own former votes and on those they had expected to acquire from the
Gaullists. Consequently it was hard for anyone to win a clear majority. In
1951 it had been done in forty constituencies, usually by an alliance of the
centre parties, but in 1956 in only eleven (one Left, ten Right). Everywhere
else PR applied. The Poujadist surge thus benefited not only their own can-
didates but also the Communists, who regained fifty seats of which the
6. The Social Republican (Gaullist) ministers were dismissed by Faure in October 1955; the
party's candidates were divided, most choosing conservative rather than left-wing allies (see below,
p. 136n.)-.
7. Cf. below, p. 325n. For this election see Nicholas et aL, nos. 167-70; Pierce, no. 180; Les
flections du 2 Janvier 1956 (1957, henceforth cited as Elections 1966). For the Poujadists see below,
Chapter 12; and for the dissolution, below, p. 239.
8. See pp. 315-6 below.
REVOLTS AGAINST THE 'SYSTEM*, 1954-58 49
electoral law - rather than the electorate - had deprived them in the last Par-
liament. To hamper Mendes-France, Faure's cabinet had risked strengthening
Thorez; and their tactical ingenuity had produced an Assembly with only 200
of their own supporters, 150 of the Republican Front, 40 Radical and Gaullist
doubtfuls, 150 Communists and 50 Poujadists.9 It seemed, and was, even
more ungovernable than its predecessor. Yet Guy Mollet' s new cabinet was
to prove the longest-lived of the Fourth Republic.
The country's swing Left had changed the parliamentary balance. Mollet
was the master of the legislature, for without the hundred Socialist votes no
government could survive, and Communists and Conservatives alike feared
to drive him into the arms of their rivals. Mendes-France's leadership in the
election campaign therefore availed him little.10 He refused the ministry of
finance, fearing the inflationary consequences of Socialist domestic policies;
was vetoed for the foreign ministry by MRP; and was finally relegated to an
uneasy office without portfolio. Worse was to follow. On 6 February 1956
(anniversary of the Paris riots of 1934) the new prime minister visited Algiers
to inaugurate his policy and install his liberal minister for Algeria, General
Catroux. A mob of the poorer Europeans greeted him with rotten tomatoes
and he sacrificed his minister as Faure had thrown over Grandval.
In Catroux's place Mollet appointed Robert Lacoste, who of all the Socialist
leaders had been the most favourable to General de Gaulle ten years before and
to Mendes-France in 1 954. Refusing to fight simultaneously against both settlers
and Moslems, the newminister firmly postponed political concessions until the
day of military victory. The national pride which Mendes-France had tried so
hard to rekindle was now mobilized against him by his former allies, Soustelle
and Lacoste. The ex-premier resigned in May after delaying his departure so
as not to seem to disavow the sending of conscripts to Algeria; his fellow-
Radicals stayed in office as he (quite superfluously) advised them. Few of his
colleagues came to his defence against the outrageous treason charges of 1954
which the crypto-fascist Right now revived, ably exploiting a long and sordid
official secrets trial to reveal many police intrigues and rivalries and further
discredit the regime.11
The liberal mood of the election campaign and the protests of the first con-
scripts sent to Algeria were soon forgotten as public opinion reacted against
long years of humiliation and defeat. The Suez expedition was acclaimed by
most Frenchmen and supported by a united cabinet, including the most
liberal ministers, Francois Mitterrand and Gaston Defferre ; many conservative
politicians privately thought it unwise, but Mendes-France found little
9 The majority unseated eleven of the Poujadists and declared their rivals elected. Though
probably legally correct, this was politically inept and injured Parliament in general and the
Republican Front in particular. See Appendix vi. WWM:At.
10. In polls during the campaign, 27% had said they would like Mendte-France as premier
and 2% that they would like Mollet: cited Duverger, La VI* Rfyublique et le rtgime pr&identiel,
p 133, cf. his Demain la Rtpublique, pp. 51, 82. But looser institutional ties with Algeria were
P. 195 (c, p 200) claims that
supported by Fauvet, IV*9 pp. 316-17, or by AP 1956, p. 24.
50 THE BACKGROUND
backingfor his cautious public disapproval12 The repression of the Hungarian
revolt disillusioned the allies of the Communist party, incensed its enemies
and completed its isolation. In January 1957 a by-election in south Paris
showed how opinion had moved: the Conservative won, the Socialist did
well, the Communist receded, the Mendesist lost three-quarters of his pre-
decessor's vote, and Pierre Poujade in person kept only half that of his can-
didate a year before.
This much-maligned ministry introduced some overdue reforms at home
(higher old-age pensions and longer paid holidays) and in Black Africa and
Madagascar, where Defferre's loi-cadre for once enabled France to keep pace
with the demands of local nationalism and retain the goodwill of its leaders.13
For, if the Right was happy to see a Socialist-led government take responsi-
bility for waging the war in Algeria, Mollet was skilful at extracting advantage
from his opponents' reluctance to turn him out. It was under his ministry,
however, that the ravages of the Algerian conflict began to afflict France itself.
First, a war superimposed upon a boom rapidly dissipated the record reserves
of foreign exchange built up by Edgar Faure, and once again subjected
France's economy to inflation and her policy to the need for foreign aid.
Secondly, this government began the legal harrying of minorities, mani-
pulation of opinion and petty interference with the freedom of the press; its
successors went so much further that before long a colonel in the defence
ministry could have all copies of a newspaper illegally seized without even
seeking the formality of ministerial approval. And, thirdly, the Mollet cabinet
presided over a further decline of the civil power across the Mediterranean.
Though the 6 February riots had installed a new minister and a new policy
in Algiers, the government continued secret talks with the rebel FLN and in
October serious negotiations seemed possible for the first time. But as Ben
Bella and four other FLN leaders were flying to a preliminary conference at
Tunis (in a Moroccan plane with a French crew) they were diverted and
arrested at Algiers by French military intelligence. One junior minister knew
in advance and another resigned in protest, but Guy Mollet, like Georges
Bidault before him, covered and justified zfait accompli he had disapproved
or forbidden.14 Then as murderous and indiscriminate FLN terrorism
sowed chaos in Algiers, Lacoste handed over complete power in the city to
General Massu's parachutists. They broke the terrorists, but their methods
alienated Moslem opinion and in France itself aroused vociferous criticism.
Without the army Algeria could no longer be administered; and within it
officers were increasingly angered by the government's hesitations and the
attacks of a part of French opinion. In December 1956 General Jacques
Faure was found plotting to seize power in Algiers; the government gave him
12. Among the doubters were Faure, Reynaud, Pinay, Pflimlin, and every speaker at the
Conservative party meeting: Fauvet, IVe, pp. 321-2; Isorni, Le silence est tTor, pp. 173-6.
But only eleven Radicals abstained with Mendes-France ; seventeen Socialists later condemned
the expedition. The only avowed opponents were the Communists - and M, Poujade, who
opposed 'fighting for the Queen of England'. On the Communists see below, p. 172.
13. See Robinson, no. 192.
14. See above, p. 41. Max Lejeune, minister of state (secretaire d*£tat) for the army, knew
beforehand ; Alain Savary, minister of state for Tunisian and Moroccan affairs, resigned and so
did the ambassador at Tunis,
REVOLTS AGAINST THE 'SYSTEM', 1954-58 51
sixty days' fortress arrest and posted him to Germany.15 Next month French
extremists killed an ADC with a bazooka shell fired into the office of the
commander-in-chief, General Salan, who was then considered a loyal repub-
lican; the perpetrators were arrested and their leader Kovacs implicated lead-
ing Gaullist politicians in the plot. His charges, even if false, served their
purpose and investigation of the bazooka plot was hushed up.
In May 1957 the Mollet government was at last overthrown by the Right.
They approved of the war but not of higher taxes, accused the cabinet of
extravagant spending, and suspected its intentions in Algeria. But though the
Socialists had lost the premiership they still controlled the Assembly. Because
of their lukewarmness and Radical hostility, Pierre Pflimlin (the new chairman
of MRP, who held mildly liberal views about Algeria) withdrew his candida-
ture without a vote; the Socialists then gave their willing support to Maurice
Bourges-Maunoury, the Radical minister of defence who had been mainly
responsible for the infringements of civil liberties under the Mollet govern-
ment. He formed a Socialist and Radical cabinet without those ministers who
had been critical of Lacoste's Algerian policy, and obtained from the Assem-
bly the narrowest vote of confidence (240 to 194) ever given an incoming
premier.
The deputies promptly granted to the new ministry the tax increases they
had refused to the old one. In July they voted by a large majority to ratify the
treaties setting up the Common Market and 'Euratom'; Mendes-France
joined the Gaullists, Poujadists and Communists in opposition. Algerian
terrorism was met by setting up internment camps in France, but Lacoste's
loi-cadre, a mild measure of Algerian political reform, divided the cabinet. A
'round table' of parliamentary leaders patched up a compromise. But the
Right revolted and brought the government down.
Ten years earlier the Assembly of 1946 had been chosen by a system of pro-
portional representation which guaranteed a third of the seats to the various
enemies of the regime. Now the 1956 election had produced a similar result,
and a similar dilemma. Unless all the other parties stood together no govern-
ment could be formed or survive ; yet these parties could agree only on a
standstill policy (immobilisme) which in turn provoked discontent within their
own ranks. When Pinay was nominated the Socialists showed that he could
not command a majority; when Mollet stood the Conservatives returned the
compliment (both of course were assisted in their demonstration by the votes
of their common enemies). After five weeks a young Radical, F61ix Gaillard,
emerged to form a combination as broad and shallow as Queuille's nearly a
decade before. For the first time since the 1956 election MRP and Conser-
vative leaders sat in cabinet alongside not only the Radicals, but also the
Socialists to whom they had been opposed for six years. But the Socialists
could not concede too much without losing control of their party, nor the
Conservatives without seeing their rural followers go over to Poujade.
15. The same penalty was inflicted on General Paris de la Bollardiere for resigning and publicly
denouncing military brutality in the countryside. Paul Teitgen, the senior police official who
exposed General Faure's plot, also soon resigned in protest against the tortures and 'disap-
pearances' of Moslems in Algiers. On the army's mood see Planchais, Le malaise de
Chapter 5; and Girardet in Military Politics, Chapter 5, and no, 99b,
52 THE BACKGROUND
Though the Gaillard government introduced some necessary economies, its
energies were mainly occupied in avoiding its own disintegration.
These domestic strains were accompanied by an endless colonial war. Over
Algeria as over Indo-China, there was a majority neither for victory at any
price nor for peace by negotiation, but only for ineffective compromise
solutions; when Gaillard reintroduced and passed the Lacoste loi-cadre it had
to be so whittled down in order to attract the votes of the Right that few
remembered it had once been meant to win over the Moslems. North Africa,
however, was nearer home than Indo-China, and the tensions it generated
were much more serious. They were to destroy not merely a government but a
regime.
3. THE DELIQUESCENT STATE
Across the Mediterranean the authority of the Republic had been flouted for
years. Generals and residents, prefects and riot leaders had imposed their own
disastrous policies at Tunis in 1952, Rabat in 1953, Algiers in 1956. More
recently the disease had spread to France. Left-wing officials gave military
secrets to the press; right-wing police officers falsely accused their political
superiors of treason and found respectable politicians to purvey their slanders.
Military judges showed gross political bias. General Faure was not punished
for sedition; Kovacs was not tried for murder;16 Bourg&s-Maunoury, minister
of the interior, did not even resign when in March 1958 the Paris police
(organized by ex-superintendent Dides) staged an ugly anti-parliamentary and
anti-semitic demonstration outside the Assembly. Socialist and Radical
ministers were too busy denouncing left-wing critics of the Algerian war,
seizing their papers and banning their meetings, to recognize the real threat to
French democracy.
The Fourth Republic was crumbling both at the top and at the base. The
long ministerial crises of 1957 exacerbated public opinion and sapped the self-
confidence of the political leaders themselves. Dr. Queuille's medicine was too
insipid when the political temperature, raised by Indo-China and Tunisia,
Morocco and Suez, was kept at fever pitch by the Algerian war. This was the
year of two bitter emotional agitations, one by the Right over Captain
Moureau, an officer who was seized and doubtless murdered by Moroccan
guerrillas, the other by the Left over Djamila Bouhired, a Moslem girl accused
of terrorism who was tortured and sentenced to death in Algiers after a
scandalous trial.
The democratic politicians could not agree on the measures to be taken
either at home or overseas. The conflicts between the parties were complicated
by bitter divisions within each of them, especially among the Radicals who
had traditionally specialized in managing political transitions. A solution
through the normal political process seemed unattainable, and the familiar
remedy of constitutional reform again came into fashion. In press and intel-
lectual circles a campaign in favour of a presidential system obtained support
in unexpected quarters. While the parliamentary leaders preferred less drastic
16. After de Gaulle came to power Kovacs was brought to trial but given bail on medical
grounds and escaped from the country. On the leakages and slanders see above, pp. 46n., 49,
I. Financing pension*
1956
3. Decolonization
1955-57
5. Europe 1957
Common Market
7. Party politics 1957
PInay & Mollet
For?,
only
For
Against
2. Repeal of
Loi BarangS, 1956
4. Algeria 1957: Special
powers (internment)
6. Algerian reform
1 957 (lot -cadre)
8. 27 May & I June 1958,
Pflimlin & De Gaulle
Fig. 4, Party Alignments 1955-8
54 THE BACKGROUND
and more ingenious schemes, more and more of them felt that changes must
come soon, either by their own initiative or else imposed on them from with-
out.
Yet they knew also that the chance of agreed reform from within was small
indeed. Therefore, from President Coty downwards, some were turning as a
last resort to a towering figure outside the regime. In the final months of the
Fourth Republic General de Gaulle was receiving more visitors than for many
years past, and they ranged from the far Right to the very fringes of the Com-
munist party. The left-wing weeklies UExpress and France-Observateur, the
bitterest critics of Guy Mollet and his younger prot<5g£s and successors, gave
space and encouragement to the Gaullist alternative. Meanwhile the Gaullist
leaders were multiplying their activities. They appealed to public opinion with
new journals like Michel Debr£'s Courrier de la Colere and Jacques Soustelle's
Void Pourquoi (both started in November 1957). Behind the scenes they
organized for illegal action, reviving the old wartime and Resistance networks
and penetrating into the heart of the state machine. They had a foothold in
the Cornell d'£tat and a stronghold in the ministry of defence under a Gaullist
minister, Jacques Chaban-Delmas ; they enjoyed the sympathy of the chief of
the general staff and of a number of senior officers in Algeria; and L6on
Delbecque, a Gaullist on the minister's personal staff, provided a link between
the discontented military chiefs and the revolutionary Europeans of Algiers.
The Gaullists were not the only plotters; the crypto-fascist Right were also
active in Algiers and vigilant in Paris. They had no public support in France.
Up to the very moment of crisis, by-elections and local elections showed little
change in opinion; Communism was standing still, Poujadism was in decline
and the other extreme Right groups were utterly negligible.17 But if an explo-
sion occurred they could count on public indifference, for no one (not even the
Communists, as the Gaullists rightly foresaw) was willing to fight for the
regime. The detonator for the explosion - every explosion - was ready in
Algiers. But it could not be touched off without the assent of the army.
The soldiers had little love for the Algiers Europeans, whose demonstration
against Lacoste's loi-cadre had been stopped in September 1957 by General
Massu. But they deeply distrusted the politicians in Paris and were determined
never to permit a 'government of scuttle' to hand Algeria over to the FLN.
They were furious when at the end of 1957 Britain and the United States
delivered arms, after France had refused, to Tunisia - which had become the
FLN's base. Then in February 1958 the air force caused an international out-
cry by bombarding the Tunisian village of Sakiet; as usual the government
had not been informed beforehand. The Left (including some ministers)
wanted to defy the army and punish those responsible, the Right to defy
world opinion and reoccupy Tunisia. The Centre feared the consequences of
either challenge, and Gaillard accepted Anglo-American mediation. But the
Right resented his minor concessions to Tunisia and suspected that the
1 7. At Marseilles in February 1 958 an extreme-Right candidate won 2 % of the vote ; in north-
west Paris in March another won 3 % on the first ballot and under 1 % on the second, 2,500 votes
out of 580,000 electors. (In both cases the official Conservative was very right-wing.) The Gaullists
were recovering slightly from their low point of 1956.
REVOLTS AGAINST THE 'SYSTEM', 1954-58 55
Algerian problem also would be internationalized. In April they overthrew
the cabinet - the third they had defeated in twelve months. So opened the last
and longest interregnum of the Fourth Republic.
It soon became clear that those who had caused the crisis were unlikely to
gain by it. Soustelle had no more chance of forming a cabinet than Mendes-
France. Bidault was sent for; he was frustrated by his own party and in par-
ticular by its chairman Pflimlin. Pleven, a specialist in reconciling opposites,
was prevented from forming a cabinet by the refusal of orthodox Radicals to
sit with a right-wing ex-Radical, Andr6 Morice. The Socialists decided to .stay
out of office altogether so as to remove Lacoste from Algiers without directly
disavowing him. The crisis provoked by the Europeans of Algeria was leading
to the progressive elimination of all their political friends. And to crown the
process the premiership was offered to Pflimlin, leader of the liberal wing of
MRP.
In the hothouse atmosphere of Algiers his nomination seemed a prelude to
capitulation to the FLN. The army leaders officially warned President Coty
that the election of a 'government of scuttle' would have incalculable con-
sequences ; the mob, stimulated by the rival plotters and remembering their
success of 6 February 1956, rioted against Pflimlin's candidature. On 13 May
1958, with the connivance of a section of the army, they occupied Govern-
ment House in Algiers a few hours before the Assembly was due to vote, and
set up a Committee of Public Safety under General Massu. But the news
rallied support to Pflimlin and induced the Communists to abstain; instead of
failing as expected, he was comfortably elected. Hoping to win the army back
to its allegiance he delegated civil power in Algiers to General Salan. But the
commander-in-chief, after a day's hesitation, publicly appealed to a third
general: de Gaulle.18
4. 'RESURRECTION'
General de Gaulle's name had been canvassed on the Left as well as the Right;
but a candidate for the premiership had to appear before the National Assem-
bly, and when sounded privately by President Coty ten days earlier, de Gaulle
had refused to do so. Now he seized the chance presented by Salan: that
evening (15 May) he publicly announced his readiness 'to assume the powers
of the Republic '. The brief trial of strength had begun.
Although the cabinet was reinforced by the entry of the Socialists and by
repeated and massive majorities in the Assembly, the isolation and discredit of
Parliament and the politicians now became painfully clear. Against the threat
(or bluff) of insurrection in France and invasion from Algeria the government
found itself defenceless. The army and air force were openly mutinous ; the
police had shown their feelings in their demonstration in March; the civil
administration disregarded orders. Nor was the defection of the state machine
offset by any mobilization of popular forces. Hardly any Frenchmen believed
that the former leader of the Resistance now intended to destroy democratic
18. For a fuller account of the 13 May crisis and its background see Williams and Harrison,
De Gaulle* s Republic, Chapters 3 and 4 ; Werth, The De Gaulle Revolution, Parts I and n ; Macridis
and Brown, The De Gaulle Republic, Part i; Williams, no. 220.
56 THE BACKGROUND
liberties, and few would run risks or make sacrifices for the Fourth Republic -
or even for the proletarian revolution.
On Saturday 24 May Corsica was taken over by supporters of de Gaulle.
Convinced at last of their own impotence, ministers secretly opened negotia-
tions with the General. But he feared the army would launch the planned
invasion from Algeria, Operation Resurrection, and tried to rush matters. He
only stiffened resistance in the Assembly, where a majority still preferred even
a Popular Front to the Algiers Committees of Public Safety; for once the
deputies were desperately trying to keep in office a premier who wanted only
to escape from it. The resignation of the Conservative ministers gave Pflimlin
the pretext he needed, and despite his enormous majority of 408 to 165 he
resigned in the early morning of 28 May. Later that day in eastern Paris some
200,000 people demonstrated for the parliamentary Republic.
In a special message next afternoon President Coty threatened to resign his
own office unless the deputies elected de Gaulle premier.19 It took the Socialist
leaders three more days to bring round enough of their followers. The General's
moderate language won over some members, the composition of his ministry
(which included Mollet and Pflimlin but not as yet Soustelle) reassured many
more. On Sunday 1 June he appeared in the Assembly he had once said he
would never enter again, and delivered the shortest investiture speech of the
Fourth Republic. With nearly half the Socialists voting for him, he was elected
with a majority of more than a hundred.
The deputies had not yet said their final word. General de Gaulle asked
Parliament to vote bills continuing the government's special powers in
Algeria, giving it full authority in France for six months, and allowing it to
draft a new constitution to be ratified by referendum. The deputies wanted
Parliament to vote the draft, but gave way when de Gaulle threatened to
resign; after exacting a promise that he would not alter the electoral law they
departed, reassured, into an exile which they still could not believe would be
permanent.20 But they were not to meet again, and fewer than a quarter of
them would reappear in the first National Assembly of the Fifth Republic.
During the summer the government hastily drafted its constitutional pro-
posals, submitted them to a mainly parliamentary consultative committee
whose objections were mostly ignored, and presented them with an immense
publicity campaign for ratification by the electorate. Most of the Fourth
Republican parties approved, the Socialists by a large and the Radicals by a
fairly narrow majority. The non-Communist Left opposition refused to
defend the Fourth Republic and insisted that their NON vote implied the
election of a Constituent Assembly to draft a new constitution in the proper
democratic way. The Communist party, after denouncing them for hair-
splitting when the Republic was in danger, discovered the unpopularity of the
old regime in its own ranks and itself came out for a Constituent Assembly.
On 28 September, in a record 85% poll, four-fifths of those voting approved
19. Coty's resignation would have opened the way to a Popular Front government; cf. below,
pp. 202-3.
20. The government sought and obtained the right to change this law from a higher authority,
the people themselves, in the referendum of 28 September 1958.
REVOLTS AGAINST THE 'SYSTEM5, 1934-58 57
the new constitution. As all the O Uh and nearly all the NONs were voting
against the defunct republic, the electorate's condemnation of it was quite as
overwhelming as their repudiation of its predecessor thirteen years earlier.21
21. For a fuller account of the interregnum period and the referendum campaign see Williams
and Harrison, De Gaulle's Republic, Chapter 5, and 'France 1958 ' in Butler, ed., Elections Abroad',
Macridis and Brown, Part n ; Werth, op. cit., Chapters 20-25.
PART II
THE PARTIES
Chapter 5
POLITICAL COMMUNICATION AND
PARTY STRUCTURE
The Third Republic had found its democratic base in the provinces rather
than Paris. Its six hundred small constituencies were remarkably self-
contained, and the deputy who entrenched himself in his fief by conscientious
local services had little to fear from pressure-groups or prefects, party whips
or national swings. Party and professional organization was very weak; few
prefects cared to offend a powerful politician; and the floating vote was small.
The opinions of the electorate remained stable over long periods, changing
their labels but rarely their proportions. The focus of political organization on
the Right was often the chateau or the Church; on the Left, an ad hoc com-
mittee of lawyers, doctors or schoolteachers, influential in local government
and sometimes linked by freemasonry; and everywhere the small local
newspapers, which were born for, lived on, and sometimes died of electioneer-
ing. Occasionally a daily in a provincial metropolis became a great power in
its region, like Le Progres at Lyons, but there was no national press and broad-
casting was used politically only in the last few years. The capital was a remote
and suspect world: its ministers, writers, bureaucrats, salons, journalists and
proletarians might influence the policy-makers at times, but they had little if
any impact on the voters.
After 1945 the rapid changes in French society outpaced the slow evolution
of political methods. Parties were better organized than in the Third Republic,
though (except in 1945-47) worse than in most democratic countries.
Pressure-groups grew in number, scale and power.1 The press, temporarily
reorganized at the Liberation, never quite resumed its old role. Radio and
television developed in the Fourth Republic, but their full impact on politics
was reserved for the Fifth.
1. THE MEDIA OF COMMUNICATION
Before 1939 the smaller local newspapers were already declining as transport
improved, and in the Fourth Republic many of them disappeared. The great
regional journals were more widely read: Toulouse kept its militant D<2p£che,
a mighty force within the Radical party, and Marseilles had an old-style news-
paper war between the Socialist Provencal and the reactionary Meridional.
But these were exceptional, for most of the regionals were reluctant to offend
potential readers by violent polemics. The largest, Quest-France, was Catholic
and moderate but gave little space to politics. Some provincial papers took no
clear line at all.
Another sign of the reader's distaste for polemical politics (or for politics)
was the rapid decline of the official party publications after a momentary post-
war expansion. The Liberation brought a revolution in the journalistic balance
1. Parties are discussed in the following chapters, and in Chapter 23; pressure-groups in
Chapters 25 and 26.
POLITICAL COMMUNICATION AND PARTY STRUCTURE 61
of power, for the presses of papers which had appeared under German censor-
ship were provisionally allotted to new party or Resistance organs. In 1939
journals supporting the Radicals and Conservatives had had 5,000,000 readers
and Socialist and Communist ones 1,300,000; in 1944 these figures were
reversed. MRP had a new press with 1,300,000 readers, and many 'non-
party' conservative papers passed to Resisters of the Left. These sweeping
changes helped to cripple the old parties and strengthen the new in the early
post-war elections, and a law of 1946 sought to perpetuate them. But it was
thwarted first by political opponents and then by the readers themselves. In
ten years the Communist papers lost two-thirds of their circulation and many
had to close. MRP's national daily, UAube, ceased publication in 1951. The
Socialist Populaire survived precariously, thanks to the British Labour party
and other sympathizers, as a bulletin for party members rather than a news-
paper.2
Resistance journals like Combat soon suffered a similar fate. At the Libera-
tion there had been great hopes that a new, purified and independent press
would replace the notoriously venal Parisian papers (which were often on sale
both to foreign governments and to French bankers and industrialists). But
financial weakness and inexperience soon forced many of the newcomers
into merger or liquidation. Business recovered much of its power, though its
new organs were more discreet and less corrupt than the old ones. But one
exception stood out: Le Monde preserved that 'financial and intellectual
independence [which] in some quarters seems astonishing if not almost
scandalous'.3 Financiers tried to buy it or wreck it; a Socialist government
abused price-control powers to force it into bankruptcy; but its circulation
rose steadily and by 1958 was nearly 200,000, over three times that of the old
Temps. Arousing strong admiration and intense hatred, it became the indis-
pensable paper of a serious generation of students and of the entire political
class. At times it was more effective as a critical forum than Parliament itself.
The other Paris dailies also had more readers than before, and their stan-
dards were not quite as abysmal as those of their predecessors (or some of their
popular counterparts in other countries). Usually they were more anxious to
increase circulation than to influence opinion: Le Figaro was a weathercock of
respectable bourgeois opinion, France-Soir ran no risks but had a mild
preference for progress, and Le Parisien Libert attracted many Communist
readers by giving little emphasis to its extreme reactionary politics. The place
of the old journaux d? opinion was taken by the weeklies. On the Left, the
satirical but well-informed Canard Enchaine was joined by several newcomers.
When Claude Bourdet was evicted from Combat he founded UObservateur,
later France-Observateur, to appeal to the neutralist intellectuals. L'Express
rallied the progressive bourgeoisie to Mend&s-France; Ttmoignage Chretien
wrote for the Catholic Left, a new group who also influenced the tone of other
Catholic papers like the daily La Croix. The right-wing weeklies were not much
2. On the Communist press see below, p. 77; on the 1946 law, below, p. 392. By 1950, 109
dailies had closed; by 1957, 27 more: list in AP 1957, pp. 552-3. In 1958 the ten main regionals
had 45 % of the total provincial circulation: Grosser, p. 162 (the best short account of the press).
3. Delouvrier in Crise, p. 82. See also A. Chatelain, Le Monde et ses lecteurs (1962), Chapter 2,
p. 183, n. 53,
62 THE PARTIES
read: Aspects de la France was a pale shadow of the pre-war daily V Action
fran$aise> and Rivarol poisoned far fewer minds than Gringoire. Also in sharp
contrast to the 1930's, the leading monthlies were the Left Catholic Esprit and
the neutralist Temps Modernes, with the Vichyite Merits de Paris far behind.
But all these journals gave focus to currents of opinion whose influence was
out of proportion to their numbers. Among the individualist extremists on
both political wings there were parties around a newspaper rather than news-
papers belonging to a party.
Sound radio played less part in France than in other great democracies. As
elsewhere, political broadcasting mattered less than 'non-political' daily
programmes (though Mendes-France's fireside chats helped consolidate his
brief popularity). Every government abused its control of the radio, but only
the Socialists approached the degree of partisanship which became common-
place in the Fifth Republic. To escape manipulated information, listeners
turned increasingly to the independent stations, Radio Luxembourg and
Europe No. 1. In television the state network had no competitor, but it still
covered only a limited area when the Fourth Republic fell; it was not used in
an election until 1956, and then with conspicuous ineptitude by everyone
except Pierre Poujade.
Thus means of communication were slow to adapt to the growing ' nationali-
zation' of political issues and moods, With television in its infancy, radio not
much used, the Paris press influential only close to the capital, and few political
leaders making electioneering tours, there was hardly more national political
campaigning in the Fourth Republic than in the Third.4 Nor did the forms of
party organization change much more rapidly, although all the many parties
of the Fourth Republic were twentieth-century foundations.
2. THE PARTIES: MEMBERS AND OUTLOOK
The Radical party has enjoyed a continuous existence since 1901, the Socialist
party in its present form since 1905 and the Communists since 1920. For in
France political parties are a left-wing innovation: the Radicals established a
very loose formal framework, the Socialists introduced disciplined voting, and
the Communists extended that discipline to all spheres of party activity. Con-
servative forces, relying on the influence of powerful individuals, were long
reluctant to organize politically except in very loose formations which avoided
both the name and the habits of party (Democratic Alliance, Republican
Federation), or in anti-parliamentary leagues dedicated to the violent over-
throw of the democratic system (Action fr an faise).
The second world war gave a great impetus to party organization. MRP,
born of the Resistance and founded in 1944, was intended to be a 'movement'
with a purpose broader than mere electioneering. Two small Conservative
parties, the Peasants and the Parti republican de la Liberte (PRL) were also
formed at the Liberation; but only after the foundation in 1948 of the Centre
national des inddpendants et paysans (CNIP) did the moderate Right for the
first time in its history gradually build a headquarters recognized by most of
t £ ?£ Pira?agaiidxT ?nutl!e 1956 ,camPai8n see factions 1956, pp. 67-195, especially pp. 88, 1 10,
161, 182, 195; and Nicholas et aL, nos. 168-70, pp. 147, 160-1, 257-60, 280-1.
POLITICAL COMMUNICATION AND PARTY STRUCTURE 63
its troops. Two very different leaders, General de Gaulle and Pierre Poujade,
were successively to evoke the latent anti-parliamentary sentiments of many of
their compatriots. Although their followings also differed greatly, both men
attracted support predominantly from the Right and marginally from the
Left. The Gaullist RPF, founded in 1947, was already withering when the
General withdrew his patronage in 1953; the Poujadist Union et fraternitt
francaise (UFF), formed to fight the 1956 election, had perished within a few
months - except in the Assembly against which it so vigorously vituperated.
One of the smaller groups, Union democratique et socialists de la Resistance
(UDSR) emerged from the Resistance movement. The rest arose from splits
within other parties: Action republicaine et sociale (ARS) were conservative
Gaullists on their way into CNIP, the Dissident Radicals were opponents of
the progressive policies and strong leadership of Mendes-France, and one
wing of the Peasant party refused to submerge its identity in a wider Conser-
vative coalition.
French parties bore little resemblance to one another and still less to
political parties as they are conceived of in Britain. First, they were much
smaller. At their peak just after the war the Communists and RPF each
claimed about a million members, the Socialists a third and MRP a fifth of
that number; but within five years most of these had deserted. The Con-
servative groups never attempted, and the Radicals tried only under Mendes-
France, to organize their rank and file supporters ; instead these parties con-
tented themselves with a network of notables scattered through the small
towns and the countryside, who sprang into sudden activity at election times.
Pierre Poujade claimed 350,000 for his Shopkeepers' and Artisans' Defence
Union (UDCA), which started with a professional purpose but later
developed into the political UFF; Mendes-France brought the Radicals above
the 100,000 mark; both successes were short-lived. By the end of the Republic
the Communists were probably the only party with over 100,000 members and
the Socialists their only rival with over 50,000. Thus if most of the main groups
could rely on influential supporters in the localities, only the Communists
could boast of anything like the constituency structure of a big British party.
Discipline differed immensely from one group to another. For a short
period at the Liberation it seemed that the pressure of the more rigid parties
would react on the looser ones. Until 1935 the Radicals and Conservatives
together with the smaller intermediate groups had controlled four-fifths of the
seats in the lower house, but ten years later they held little more than a quarter.
The rest were divided between two old well-organized parties, Communists
and Socialists, and a new one, MRP, which also despised and condemned the
personal and parochial politics of pre-war days and aspired to become a
powerful and disciplined unit. Like the Communists it owed much of its force
and cohesion to a base of support deeper than simple electoral loyalty.
While these three strong parties were agreed they dominated Parliament.
But once the Communists were relegated to the opposition, the fate of govern-
ments again came to depend on a handful of marginal votes - and life and
uncertainty returned to the parliamentary scene. In day-to-day business every
party could still count on the votes of the enormous majority of its members;
64 THE PARTIES
but on the major questions where discipline was worst, party authority was
soon little stronger than in pre-war days. It was most effective on the Left,
which had always hoped by mass organization to offset the personal prestige
of its conservative adversaries. It was weakest in the Centre : for there
politicians were often torn between their conflicting views on social and
economic questions and on political and religious problems; and were par-
ticularly likely, because of their pivotal position, to be tempted by the sweets
of office into personal decisions of which their colleagues disapproved.5
At bottom the differences in behaviour reflected differences in purpose. The
ordinary Communist deputy obeyed his party because he believed it was a
force dedicated to constructing a new society. The Poujadists at first seemed a
solid group when they arrived in Parliament in 1956 to make their inarticulate
but vehement protest against the existing political order; in 1951 the Gaullists
had created the same impression, though it soon became plain that many of
them were making the protest only in order to arrive in Parliament. And if
those parties of revolt could not keep their ranks unbroken once they were
subjected to the temptations of power, their governmental rivals were naturally
even more vulnerable.
All the democratic politicians of the Fourth Republic were under inter-
mittent pressure from a new political generation, impatient with the System
and insistent on more positive and progressive government. Though the
reforming zeal of the Liberation did not last, there remained a pent-up
demand for change which sought expression at different times through MRP
and the Socialist party, Mend^s-France and de Gaulle. But when Mend£s-
France sought to impose discipline as well as reforming policies on the Radical
party, he soon found that the members of that electoral co-operative would
not renounce the right to vote as conscience, career or constituency dictated.
MRP soon lost most of its initial missionary fervour and its leaders accommo-
dated themselves all too readily to what de Gaulle called 'the games, the
poisons and the delights of the System'. Among the parties of piecemeal
reform only the Socialists retained the strict parliamentary voting discipline of
which they were traditionally proud; in compensation (or in consequence) a
decision committing the party's vote caused them more acute internal dis-
sension than any of their rivals suffered. Ultimately, exasperation with the
Republican politicians was to give another chance to the General whom they
had ousted in 1946 and thwarted in 1951.
3. MONEY AND POWER
In organization, too, the same terms covered different realities. But since all
parties existed largely and some exclusively for electoral purposes, an apparent
similarity was imposed by the local government system. France has ninety
departments very roughly corresponding to English counties, and 38,000
communes varying from tiny hamlets to great cities like Lyons or Marseilles.
The Socialists, a relatively well-organized party, had a 'federation' in each
department, and should have had a 'section' in each commune (or each ward
of a big town), though in practice this ideal was only partly realized. The
5. See below, pp. 397-400,
POLITICAL COMMUNICATION AND PARTY STRUCTURE 65
sections met monthly or fortnightly, and collected members' subscriptions,
keeping most of them. At the national level there were an executive committee
for current business, an annual conference which was the party's supreme
authority, and between the two a national council or * little conference' con-
sisting of a representative from each federation and meeting quarterly (more
often in emergencies). There were also special committees to regulate disputes
over discipline and check the party's accounts.6
All the parties were poor. Subscriptions were low, members were few, and
loyalties tended to be local: for instance in the Socialist party the sections
decided the rate of subscription and the central organization received only a
fixed sum per member. The better-organized parties tried to raise funds and
strengthen cohesion by levies on the salaries of their members of parliament.
All charged something for the services of the group's office, and members
sometimes voluntarily offered more. The Communists went much further,
collecting most of these salaries and repaying only the equivalent of a skilled
worker's wage. Poujade in his heyday tried to imitate their system by housing
his troop of * non-political' provincials in a single hotel, drawing their
deputies' salaries in common, and retaining much of them for the party (but
his attempt to increase its share late in 1956 seems to have helped to under-
mine his authority over his followers). It was believed that the lucrative if
illegal profits of trading in over-valued Indo-Chinese piastres were used for
years to replenish the funds of several parties, though only one - RPF,
scourge of the corrupt System - was exposed in public. But the main source of
party finance seems to have been business. Senator Boutemy, a former Vichy
prefect who was made minister of health in 1953 but had to resign after violent
Communist attacks, was alleged without contradiction to be the political
paymaster for CNPF and in 1951 to have financed members of all parties
except the Communists; any Radical deputy could have £500 from his funds
and ex-ministers (including the then premier) £1,000.7
6. Socialists and RPF called their national council the conseil national', M RP, comitl national',
Radicals, comite executif\ Communists, comite central. Those of Communists and MRP were
supposed to meet every two months; the Radicals' and (till 1956) the Socialists*, every three
months; RPF's met less often and was used more for long-term policy-making. The executives
were called bureau politique (Communist), comite directeur (Socialist), commission executive
(MRP and, till 1955, Radical), conseil de direction (RPF) ; members of parliament were generally
kept in a minority on them (except by the Communists) but usually managed to dominate them.
MRP and RPF gave representation to 'corporative' organizations of youth, women, workers,
etc. For these large parties, conferences mustered from a thousand to four thousand delegates
(Communists rather fewer). They were generally held in summer, though the Radicals preferred
autumn ; in most parties they were annual, but the Communists held theirs every two years in
principle and less frequently in practice (between 1947 and 1959 only three instead of the statutory
five). Special conferences were called as occasion arose. CNIP, the least structured of the big
parties, held no full conference until 1954. See Campbell, no. 47, pp. 412-23.
7. JO 17 February 1953, p. 1067, M. Pronteau- a Communist who was informed by some of
the beneficiaries: Bloch-Morhange, p. 43. See also ibid., pp. 118-23; Isorni, Ainsi passent les
Republiques, pp. 9-10 (who says no promises were required in return for the money); JO 24
November 1948, p. 7196, letter of M. Macouin (PRL) read by M. Duclos; Ehrmann, Business,
pp. 223-7; below, p. 371 and n. Allegedly the amounts were doubled in 1956: Fauvet, Cockpit,
p. 142, Dechiree, p. 135. On RPF and the piastres scandal, Monde, 1, 22, 23, 30 and 31 October
1953 ; all parties except CNIP and the Communists were implicated, according to a biased
source, Faucher, Uagonie d*un regime, p. 26. On Communist and Poujadist levies see also below,
pp. 80, 165 ; Socialist members contributed about one-sixteenth of their salaries to the party and
provided from 20 to 25% of its budget. On electioneering costs and on particular party funds,
below, pp. 371-2.
66 THE PARTIES
These central contributions were spent mainly in the constituencies. This
both reflected and reinforced the individual deputy's remarkable independence
of his party headquarters. Nowhere was the contrast with Britain more
striking than in the capital. Paris could neither offer the facilities nor perform
the functions that a British party expects from head office at Westminster.
Apart from the Communists only the Socialists had an organization com-
parable even with the British Liberals. Most French parties had no more than
six or ten headquarters officials, with even fewer typists and doormen.8 Some
like CNIP, with hardly any full-time staff, had to recruit outside sympathizers
for an election campaign; others like MRP, normally better organized, found
half their regular officials disappearing to contest seats in the provinces. How-
ever, parties could manage with these tiny staffs because campaigns were so
localized - some headquarters did not even know the names of the candidates
they were nominally sponsoring.
Thus the politician could not expect much help (or hindrance) from his
party. He had to rely on his own reputation, activity, financial resources and
friends for his campaign; the party label helped, especially in the towns and
especially on the Left, but except in 1945-46 the deputy was more often an
asset to the party than the party was to him. Moreover, when so many
organizations were competing, expulsion from his original party need not
terminate a parliamentarian's career.9 Therefore members were independent
enough to defy the machine when its instructions ran counter to their own
views or ambitions or the needs of their constituents. In every party (except
possibly the Communist) there were conflicts between the members of par-
liament and those who sought to give them orders - whether these were the
delegates of the active rank and file or an authoritarian party leader. As in the
Third Republic, the militants or the external leadership suspected the deputies
of an excessive willingness to compromise at the expense of principle, while
the parliamentarians upbraided their critics for narrow sectarianism and
flagrant irresponsibility.
Power was centralized in two parties other than the Communist. RPF's
national organs were not elected but nominated by the Founder-President,
and at first all key posts were filled and major policies decided by him. But the
strict discipline, which proletarian Communists had accepted only with
reluctance after fifteen years of pressure, could not suddenly be clamped down
upon a bourgeois movement whose members were far less prepared by their
personal lives for organized collective activity. Central office interference in
elections produced a constant stream of resignations in the constituencies; and
8. In Britain in 1951 Conservative headquarters numbered 220, Labour 100, Liberals 50; a
fifth of the Liberals and a third of the other two were policy staff: D. E. Butler, The British
General Election of 1951 (1952), pp. 25-7. The French Socialists had to cut staff from 102 to 37
in 1948-49; Ligou, Histoire du Socialisms en France 1871-1961, p. 589. They had 60 permanent
employees in 1958: Laponce, Government of the Fifth Republic, p. 62 (a useful source for party
organization). Robert Buron claims that only half a dozen party officials in all counted politically :
Le plus beau des metiers, p. 20.
9. See below, pp. 324-8. In a poll in November 1944, 72% favoured voting for a pro-
gramme and 16 % for a man; by January 1958, 52 % wished to vote for a man and only 27 %
for a party: cited Le referendum de septembre et les Elections de novernbre 1958 thenceforth
cited as Elections 1958), p. 278.
POLITICAL COMMUNICATION AND PARTY STRUCTURE 67
when in 1951 RPF acquired a strong parliamentary group, the deputies
proved so recalcitrant over policy and tactics that within two years General de
Gaulle had repudiated all connection with them. Nor had Poujade any better
fortune, though the inadequacy of his followers' educational background and
their total lack of political experience should have made them easier to mani-
pulate - even if they did not take too seriously his warning that whoever
betrayed the movement would be hanged. Within ten months of entering the
Assembly a third of his deputies had disobeyed his order to vote against the
Suez expedition, and in 1958 the whole group defied its leader and supported
General de Gaulle for the premiership.
Another pair of formations was at the opposite extreme of decentralization.
The Radicals and Conservatives were hardly more than federations of parlia-
mentary personalities who enjoyed strong influence in their own constituen-
cies. They made little attempt to impose common tactics or policies. So far
from the parliamentary parties being affiliates of organizations in the country,
the latter existed (if at all) merely as constituency appendages to individual
deputies. In 1951 about a third of the seats were contested by more than one
Conservative list, and about a sixth by rival lists each claiming allegiance to
the Radicals or one of their allies in RGR (Rassemblement des Gauches
Republicaines, a combination including Radicals, UDSR and some smaller
groups) ; in 1956 the former were rather better co-ordinated but the latter much
worse. Deputies elected against one another might join the same parliamentary
group, or members returned on the same list profess different loyalties in the
Assembly. Thus when dissensions appeared in these organizations they nor-
mally reflected not revolt at the grass roots but struggles between rival par-
liamentary chieftains: Daladier and Herriot among the Radicals, Pleven and
Mitterrand in UDSR, Antier and Laurens in the Peasant party. And when
Mendes-France tried to bring order out of the Radical anarchy by imposing a
common policy and disciplined voting, he soon found that the new recruits
he won for the party in the country did not compensate for the alienation of its
parliamentary stalwarts. Within less than a year the Radicals had split, and
six months later even the extra-parliamentary organization turned against its
turbulent leader.
If three of the seven parties were more or less disciplined despotisms and
two more or less quarrelsome oligarchies, the other two could make fairly
plausible claims to be 'democratically' organized bodies. Socialist candidates
were chosen locally; the executive committee was annually elected by the
conference and most of its members had to be outside Parliament; between
conferences it was the executive which settled policy, imposed discipline, and
even in a ministerial crisis had greater authority over tactics than the parlia-
mentary group. But Guy Mollet gradually established a tight grip on the
machine which, with the firm support of the two largest federations (Nord and
Pas-de-Calais) sufficed to ensure him effective control of the party. MRP's
constitution was deliberately designed to reduce the weight of the large federa-
tions;10 it gave the parliamentarians virtual control of the executive and
substantial representation on the national council - though dissensions did
10. See below, pp. 106-7.
68 THE PARTIES
appear both there and at annual conference. In neither party, however, was
there normally a clear-cut division between those in and those out of Parlia-
ment. Usually at both levels there were representatives, if in different propor-
tions, of both wings : M RP conservatives and progressives, Socialist supporters
and opponents of the leadership.
No party was really ruled by its rank and file. In those that were despotically
organized the conference itself was controlled from above. In the oligarchies it
was usually easily manipulated, and could always be defied with impunity.
And even in the more democratic parties the leadership had sufficient influence
to get its way, though occasionally at the price of tactical concessions. Only in
1946 among the Socialists and (irregularly, as usual) in 1955 among the
Radicals did a conference succeed in replacing an incumbent leadership.
4. PRINCIPLE AND PRACTICE
Parties in the Fourth Republic - even more than elsewhere - were characterized
in theory by lofty aspirations to universality and in practice by a humbler con-
centration on representing particular groups and interests. In Parliament the
democratic parties all chose their representatives mainly from the professional
classes; there were very few workers, except on the Communist benches, and
peasants were rare except on those of the Conservatives (and in later years of
MRP).11 Some parties had a special attraction (or repulsion) for particular
occupational groups. Priests tended to favour MRP; the many engineers and
army officers in RPF both gave it and responded to its technocratic and
military tone; lawyers were most numerous in the loose traditional parties,
Radicals and Conservatives; commercial travellers and shopkeepers in the
food trades predominated among the Poujadists; minor civil servants like
postmen and railwaymen were often Socialists (though police officers might
equally be Radical and rural schoolteachers Communist).
Each party found it profitable to work on specific sections of the electorate
and futile to try to cultivate others. In 1956 68% of practising Catholics voted
MRP or CNIP, 68% of Protestants were Radical or Socialist, and 79% of the
irreligious cast Socialist or Communist ballots.12 Communists and Socialists
naturally found little welcome among businessmen, or Radicals and Con-
servatives among industrial workers. The state tended to take its employees
from its own schools, while private industry often recruited them from the
Catholic educational system: so in 1951 among white-collar workers in
private business 52% voted MRP or RPF and only 13% Socialist or Radical,
while among those employed by the state the proportions were nearly reversed
(17%and48%).13
11. For details see tables by M. Dogan in Partis politiques et Classes sociales en France (hence-
forth cited as Partis et Classes), p. 298, and Elections 1956, p. 456. See also below PD 80n., 95n.,
109 n. 14, 110 n. 21, 123, 140, 156.
12. Upset, Political Man, p. 245. On Protestant voting in 1946 and 1951 see Schram, Protes-
tantism and Politics in France, Chapter 15 ; for 1956, Paysans, pp. 377-85.
13. M. Crozier in Partis et Classes, pp. 89, 95-8. A poll in the 1956 election (taken from a very
small sample in southern Paris) found that shopkeepers and artisans provided only 10% of the
CNIP voters but 54% of the Poujadists, while retired people, rentiers and women without
occupation were respectively 48 % and 19 % - although by income-groups the composition of the
two parties was very similar : Stoetzel and Hassner in Elections 1956 (from Table m bis on p. 249).
POLITICAL COMMUNICATION AND PARTY STRUCTURE 69
There was geographical as well as social differentiation. Parties were con-
centrated in particular areas, and because of the diversity of the country and
the multiplicity of political issues they might represent different interests and
groups in different regions. Even the tightly disciplined Communists needed to
make very dissimilar appeals in the coalfields and factories of the north and in
the prosperous Protestant vineyards near the Mediterranean coast. Around
Toulouse the Right was so weak that the political struggle was fought out
between the traditionally dominant Radicals and the Socialists who were
threatening to replace them. In the west MRP and RPF competed for the
favour of the Catholic Church; in Alsace the former was the Catholic and the
latter the Protestant party ; in the third main Catholic area, the Massif Central,
the Peasants replaced both. The Socialists in Limoges both kept a strong
working-class following and rallied all opponents of the Communists, who
dominated the region through their hold on the peasantry. Around Nantes
and St. Nazaire Catholic trade unionists supported MRP while anticlerical
businessmen voted Radical. Thus the outlook and interests of members of the
same party might differ according to their region of origin.
Nor were these the only factors of division within political groups. Numer-
ous as they were, the parties only imperfectly represented the real tendencies of
opinion even on domestic questions, and in the later years of the regime, when
external affairs became crucial, the gap between organizational facade and
political reality grew wider still. Every question that raised passions - Indo-
China, the European army, the Algerian war, the advent of de Gaulle - caused
dissension within all the parties of the majority and often those of the opposi-
tion as well. For example, in 1958 the extreme Algfrie frangaise champions
were in Parliament a Gaullist, a Conservative, an MRP and a Radical
leader, and in the cabinet a Socialist; yet each of their parties contained both a
minority which favoured sweeping concessions to Moslem nationalism and
many supporters of a middle course. So policy disputes added to and cut
across geographical divisions and personal quarrels, destroying the cohesion
and paralysing the effectiveness of every party and group.
French parties, excepting the special case of the Communists, thus differed
from British ones in being very much smaller, much less well organized, far
poorer and far more decentralized. Their frequent and notorious internal
divisions took place within organizations supported by only a small fraction of
the voters and numbering their members at best in tens of thousands. No
party had the slightest hope of ever attaining power and applying a programme ;
their only object was to win a marginal increase in the bargaining power they
could wield in the inevitable deals with other minority groups. To achieve this
limited aim they had to appeal to sectional interests - social, geographical or
religious - and to express a sectional outlook more forcibly and intransigently
than their rivals who were tilling the same electoral field. But on arriving in the
legislature they discovered that to put any of their principles into practice,
achieve any short-term gains for their clients, or use any such successes to
assure their own re-election, they had to compromise. A continued refusal to
join in the parliamentary game spelt only political impotence and the sacrifice
of the interests of the sections they represented. (French industrial workers
70 THE PARTIES
would have obtained many more immediate concessions from governments
had they not 'sterilized* their votes by bestowing them on a party in root and
branch opposition to the regime.)
Some groups - the Communists, the Poujadists at first, a section of tfye
Gaullists - preferred to remain as protest parties reflecting and profiting
politically from the latent revolt of many Frenchmen against a regime from
which these politicians usually tried to dissociate themselves completely.
Others enjoyed or endured a central position which made them indispensable
to almost any conceivable governing coalition. In the Third Republic this had
been the role of the Radicals, who shared it in the Fourth with a sometimes
reluctant MRP; there were always minor collections of 'king's friends' such
as the pre-war Republican Socialists and the post-war UDSR; and at one
time a fourth group, the ex-Gaullist Social Republicans, discovered an un-
expected vocation as a pivot-party.14 Intermediate between protesters and
compromisers were the parties of policy, Socialists and various brands of
Conservative, who were willing to join governments whose general attitude
satisfied their (not always exacting) requirements; their bargaining position
varied with their own strength, with the stability of the regime, and with the
pliability or stubbornness of their leaders. But all parties which tried to work
the system had to adopt between elections a posture of bargaining in defence
of particular interests, which contrasted sharply with the high-principled
intransigence they expressed at the polls. Repeated over several elections, this
contrast reinforced the unjust conviction of the ordinary citizen that politicians
(even those of his own party) were beings from a different world, untrust-
worthy in their promises, greedy and corrupt in their motives, erratic and
absurd in their behaviour, disastrous for the nation because of their factional-
ism and ineptitude. Perhaps even more than specific discontents this attitude
provided an inexhaustible source of recruits for the parties of revolt, of which
the largest, longest-lived and most feared was the Communist party.
14. MorazS, pp. 148f.
Chapter 6
THE COMMUNIST PARTY
1. HISTORY
The French Communist party, like its opposite numbers elsewhere, has used
varying tactics to attain unchanging objectives. Moscow often embarrassed its
faithful followers by sharp and sudden turns of policy which required them to
contradict themselves overnight. But the embarrassment was only a matter of
public relations ; the hardened Communist knew that the party line of the
moment was merely a device to acquire governmental power in his own country
and to promote (as he supposed) the world revolution by serving the interests
of the USSR.
The French party was founded in December 1920 when the Tours con-
ference of the Socialist party split over affiliation to the Third International. A
large majority of the party's members (though only a small minority of its
deputies) accepted the twenty-one conditions imposed by Moscow, which in-
cluded the expulsion of the dissentients and the adoption of the name of Com-
munist party. But the initial success was not followed up. The repercussions of
the struggle for power in Russia, the internal feuds within the party, and the
resentment of revolutionary Frenchmen at receiving instruction from novices
in backward Moscow all contributed to a sharp Communist decline and a
recovery of the old Socialist party and its associates in the trade unions.
Between 1924 and 1928 Communist membership fell from 88,000 to 52,000;
and though the party gained votes, these came largely from the traditional Left.
The decision in 1928 to treat the Socialists as the main enemy to be destroyed,
and to maintain Communist candidates against them on the second ballot,
cost the party 40% of its votes between the two ballots and reduced its mem-
bership in the Chamber to a dozen.1
Nor did its situation improve for some years. The party was divided by
bitter personal and political rivalries. Maurice Thorez, arrested in 1929,
believed that he had been betrayed by colleagues who had seized the oppor-
tunity to be rid of him. When he came out of prison a year later, he described
the party as weak and declining in numbers, full of mutual suspicion, lacking
any sense of reality, and ruled by an arbitrary leadership which demanded
from its followers uncritical obedience.2 The separate Communist trade
unions had proved a complete failure. In the 1932 election the party lost
300,000 of its former million votes, and on the second ballot little more than
half its remaining supporters continued to vote for it against better-placed
candidates of the Left. If the Socialists had retaliated where a Communist was
in the lead, the latter would have lost eight of the ten seats which they re-
tained.3 In the Chamber and in the provinces (though not in the capital) their
1. The fullest account of its development (to 1940) is Walter, Histoire du Parti communiste
franpais; he is a sympathizer. Crapouillot, no. 55 (January 1962), is hostile but useful. On 1936-45
see Rossi; Ehrmann, French Labor from Popular Front to Liberation (1947); and Esprit, no. 80
(May 1939), pp. 157-70. The 1928 figures come from Walter, p. 191, and Rossi, p. 331.
2. M. Thorez, Fits du Peuple (1st ed., 1937), pp. 63, 72-3. 3. Walter, pp. 240-1.
72 THE PARTIES
political influence was negligible. But the party itself was not primarily con-
cerned with immediate electoral success. Expulsions, Reorganizations, and
changes of line were gradually building it into a disciplined movement avail-
able to promote whatever policy seemed likeliest to bring it to power.
The Popular Front gave the Communists their chance. As late as the begin-
ning of 1934 the party line still insisted that social democracy, not fascism, was
the real enemy of the working class. On 6 February 1934 Communist ex-
servicemen marched beside the fascists against the Chamber of Deputies. But
on the 12th, after an abrupt change of line, Communist and Socialist trade
unionists joined in huge anti-fascist demonstrations in defence of the despised
bourgeois Republic. Next year Laval signed the Franco-Soviet pact, and
Stalin's commendation of the French rearmament programme put an
immediate end to Communist anti-militarism. At the 1936 election the Radical,
Socialist and Communist parties made an official alliance for the second ballot,
and the electoral system no longer harmed the Communists so severely. They
won 1£ million votes and returned seventy members to the new Chamber.
The new line was decided from above without prior discussion by the rank
and file.4 But it was certainly more popular than the old one among party
members and voters alike. An even greater advantage was that Blum and
Daladier, by accepting Communist co-operation, seemed to testify to non-
Communists that the outstretched hand had really replaced the knife between
the teeth. But the Communists had changed their 'image', not their nature.
They refused office in the Blum government, keeping their hands free to
exploit domestic discontent and attack its foreign policy. Their real sentiments
towards their partners of the Popular Front were shown when the Vichy
regime put the leaders of the pre-war governments on trial, and prominent
Communists wrote to Marshal P&ain offering to give evidence for the prosecu-
tion. L'Jtfwwamte' protested when Vichy released Socialist leaders from jail and
even when they were treated as political prisoners instead of as ordinary
criminals.5
The Popular Front had come to power at the worst possible moment. As
the German menace came more and more to determine the course of politics,
the government drifted further to the Right. By 1938 the Radicals again
dominated the ministry; and Daladier, three years earlier the chief Radical
advocate of the Popular Front, became the man of Munich. The Socialists,
hopelessly split between pacifists and resisters, went out of office and saw their
political influence disappear. Only the Communist party stood solidly for
opposition to Germany, and this alone discredited the resistance policy with
much of the French bourgeoisie. After the general strike of November 1938
the Daladier ministry was primarily an anti-Communist administration, and
many conservatives allowed their support for appeasement to turn into
sympathy for fascism.
4. See Esprit, he. cit.y p. 167.
5. Rossi, pp. 83, 431-2; he quotes Billoux's letter, the first published. During the 1951 election
campaign the former president of the high court of justice published several others in Le Populaire.
(Ironically, one ex-minister against whom the Communists offered * evidence* was Pierre Cot,
later a leading fellow-traveller.) Cf. Crapouillot, pp. 46-7; Histoire du Parti communiste franfais
(by an opposition group of party members, henceforth cited as Histoire), ii 42-7.
THE COMMUNIST PARTY 73
The signature of the Nazi-Soviet pact led to another complete change of
party line. After violently denouncing the appeasers of Germany, the Com-
munists turned overnight into demagogic pacifists and anti-patriotic defeatists.
Their enemies seized the opportunity to suppress the party and its satellite
organizations and expel its deputies from the Chamber. But resentment at
the 'phoney war' and the government's anti-working-class policy enabled the
Communists to survive their somersault without disastrous damage. After the
German victory they continued their defeatist policy, claiming that the war
was an imperialist one, that the main enemy was at home, and that the down-
fall of the French bourgeoisie gave the party its opportunity. The leaders
hoped to carry out their revolution with German connivance and the backing
of Germany's partner, Russia, just as the men of Vichy hoped to carry out
theirs with Italian support and German acquiescence. The first Communist
reaction to the German entry into Paris was to apply to the occupation
authorities for permission to publish UHumanite legally.
In May 1941 tension between Germany and Russia produced the first signs
of change, and in June the Nazi attack on the USSR led to another violent
reversal.6 Now that the Soviet Union was in danger the 'mercenaries of the
City of London* became overnight 'our gallant British allies', the Gaullists
suddenly changed from traitors to comrades, and the Communists took the
lead in Resistance activity, showing a zeal and a heroism which their own rank
and file and many non-Communists equated with patriotic enthusiasm for the
French cause. But the temporary coincidence of French and Russian interests
led to no relaxation in the struggle for power.
The Resistance movement helped Communist penetration into circles pre-
viously impervious to it. In agricultural areas their influence in the maquis
offered a useful basis for the extension of their hold on the peasantry. A body
like the Front national, safely controlled by the party behind a respectable
facade of Marins and Mauriacs, enabled them to appeal to groups which they
could not normally reach; the Right was unused to working with the Com-
munists and willing to accept them as patriotic Frenchmen - though the
experienced Socialists were much more suspicious.7 Above all the war per-
mitted the Communist capture of the trade unions. Under the Popular Front
their penetration was already well advanced. In 1940 many anti-Communist
union leaders went over to Vichy, and the rest had neither the numbers nor
the organization to resist effectively.8
No doubt the sharp changes of party line destroyed the Communists'
reputation for consistency and cost them some peripheral support. But they
strengthened the cohesion and discipline of the solid core of militants. Those
who survived these repeated switches were reliable followers, available for any
purpose for which the leadership wished to use them. The Resistance move-
ment gave the party new advantages to exploit when, in 1944, victory over
6. Some individual party members were, however, already engaged in Resistance activities.
See Domenach in Einaudi et al, Communism in Western Europe, p. 74; Michel, p. 38; Histoire*
ii. 30, 33-5, 50-4, 70-5 ; Rieber, p. 84; A. Lecoeur, Le Partisan (1963), pp. 141-66, 172-7.
7. Debu-Bridel, Les Partis centre de Gaulle, pp. 36, 52; cf. Bourdet, no. 27, pp. 1844-5, 1849>
1857. (Marin was a Conservative leader, Mauriac a. famous Catholic writer.)
8. See above, p. 19 and n,
74 THE PARTIES
Germany appeared imminent and power seemed within its grasp. At the
Liberation the Communists tried to discredit experienced political adversaries,
use the purge of collaborators to rid themselves of potential opponents, and
pay off old scores by murdering ex-Communists who had left the party in pro-
test against the Nazi-Soviet pact - whether they had subsequently collaborated
or resisted.9 But even more important than this revolutionary violence was
another consequence of the Liberation: thanks to General de Gaulle they
became for the first time a government party, with greater prestige, power, and
opportunity to infiltrate part of the machinery of the bourgeois state.
Though the Communists escaped being outflanked on the Left by leaving
office in May 1947, they continued for months afterwards to proclaim them-
selves a party of government. Indeed, Andr6 Marty and the extreme wing of
the party thought with some cause that the leadership had wasted a revolu-
tionary opportunity and become corrupted by this period of respectability.10
Later in the year, however, the Cominform was set up, Zhdanov 'exposed
their errors', and a new revolutionary phase opened. The strike weapon was
ruthlessly used for political purposes until it broke in the party's hands.11
They found less and less response to their violent agitations : the general strike
against Jules Moch's candidature for the premiership in 1949 failed, and so
did the attempts in 1950 to stop arms arriving from America or troops leaving
for Indo-China, the campaigns against Generals Eisenhower and Ridgway in
1951-52, and the protest strikes against the arrest of Jacques Duclos in 1952.
For a moment it even seemed that these successive defeats might give an
opposition within the party the upper hand.12
In the end the old leaders were able to survive and to insist on continued
doctrinal rigidity and verbal intransigence. But they had to modify their
political tactics. During the honeymoon period of 'peaceful co-existence'
after Stalin's death, the Communists tried hard to re-enter the normal political
arena and had some success with nationalists like Daladier, Gaullists like
Soustelle, and especially neutralists like Bourdet. In 1954 they offered their
9. Richer, pp. 178-80, and Rossi, pp. 442-5 give details. Ex-members killed at the front or in
concentration camps were omitted by Communist papers and spokesmen from lists of fallen
deputies. Almost half the leaders who had resigned were assassinated or had narrow escapes:
Micaud, no. 162, p. 347. Cf. Histoire, ii. 89-90.
10. A. Marty, U Affaire Marty (1955), pp. 240-51, 257-8; he denies that he ever favoured
armed insurrection. At the meeting which set up the Cominform in 1947 Duclos admitted that
some Communists had opposed leaving office in May; other delegates then denounced Thorez's
*nostalgia for government', and Duclos promptly confessed to 'opportunism, legalitarianism,
parliamentary illusions': E. Reale, Avec Jacques Duclos au bane des accuses (1958), pp. 84, 136,
163. Cf. Dumaine, Quai d'Orsay, p. 180; Histoire, ii. 253, 256-9 ; and sources below, p. 401 n. 17.
11. In the 1 948 coal strike no decision was taken without prior reference to Thorez : A. Lecceur,
L'autocritique attendue (1955), p. 37; on 1947 strikes see references above, p. 34n.; in both there
were serious economic grievances for the party to exploit. At the 1947 Cominform meeting
Duclos at first called the Communists 'the party of order' who would not play into de Gaulle's
hands by violence ; but in his self-criticism after being denounced, he promised to mobilize the
people for extra-parliamentary action against American imperialism: Reale, pp. 87, 160, 163.
Cf. Lecoeur, Partisan, pp. 225-30 (Cominform), 230-41 (strikes).
12. For the internal disputes (especially the repudiation and reaffirmation of Billoux's * ultra-
Left' article in 1952), see P. Herv<§, Lettre a Sartre (1956), pp. 22-35. In Crapouillot, Herv6 (who
wrote the post-war section, pp. 54ff.) suggests that the ultra-Left wing, with Chinese support,
wanted to concentrate on opposing the Indo-China war rather than German rearmament:
no. 124, pp. 67-70. See also Lecoeur, Partisan, pp. 256-8. On Duclos' arrest see below, p. 21 In.
Histoire, ii, 259-61 accuses Thorez of systematically purging Resisters.
THE COMMUNIST PARTY 75
support to the opponents of EDC, and voted for Mendes-France as premier;
in 1955 they temporarily saved Edgar Faure's government and averted a
change of electoral law; in 1956 they gave prolonged backing to Guy Mollet,
and voted the special powers which were to make General Massu the master of
Algiers.
Fluctuations of policy were accompanied by changes in leadership. At the
1950 congress L6on Mauvais (said to belong to the extremist wing) was
dropped from the secretariat and Arthur Ramette, leader of the Nord
federation, lost his seat on the bureau politique. Two years later Andr6 Marty,
the party's vieillard terrible, and Charles Tillon, its chief Resistance leader,
were removed from all their offices; the former was subsequently expelled. In
1954 Auguste Lecoemy who had replaced Mauvais and led the attack on
Marty, was in turn disgraced and then ejected. Many local leaders were also
purged. And in 1956 the most prominent of the younger intellectuals, Pierre
Herv6, was hastily and irregularly expelled for prematurely demanding the
'destalinization' which the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist
party was about to approve. For the French bonzen had been proud of their
exceptionally fulsome adulation of Stalin, and may well have feared that
repudiation of the 'genial leader' would affect their own power.13 Certainly
they were conspicuously reluctant to destalinize: Raymond Guyot publicly
upbraided the Italian, Polish and Hungarian Communists and praised only
the Albanians.14 The Budapest repression disturbed many of the party's
intellectual adherents (including Picasso) and all its fellow-travellers (notably
Sartre) and completed its political isolation. Its working-class followers, too -
as the party discovered in May 1958 - were silently losing confidence.16 And
the advent of the Fifth Republic was to aggravate rather than to diminish
dissensions within the ranks.16
2. ORGANIZATION AND FOLLOWING
The party's formal structure was unique in two ways. First, below the section
level was a basic unit, the cell, which was supposed to comprise all party mem-
bers working in the same establishment. Secondly, all party executive bodies
were responsible upwards to their superiors as well as downwards to their con-
stituents (thus the central leadership often appointed and removed officials of
departmental federations). All links were vertical through the hierarchy, and it
13. For their ultra-Stalinism see Duclos' speech on Thorez quoted by Jean Baby, Critique de
base (1960), pp. 140-1 ; ibid., p. 215; Herv6, no. 124, p. 65. For the leaders* motives, cf. Baby,
pp. 15-16; Herve, Lettre, pp. 44-5, 152-3, 155. Baby (who defends the Hungarian intervention,
pp. 28-32) was expelled for writing his book.
14. France-Observateur, 22 November 1956. Cf. HervS, Lettre, pp. 44-61, and no. 124, p. 75;
and the quotations by Macridis, no. 152, pp. 620-1. Early in 1956 some local units apparently
enjoyed greater freedom, and in June the deputies and central committee genuinely debated (for
five hours) the decision to abstain on an Algerian vote in the Assembly ; but this case was unique
in the Fourth Republic. See R. Barrillon's articles in Le Monde between 15 and 24 July 1956,
especially those of the 17th and 18th.
15. Baby, p. 179, cf. also pp. 35, 37, 211, 218; D. Mothe, Journal d'un ouvrier 1956-58 (1959),
pp. 82-95 and pass im ; Herv6, no. 124, pp. 73, 74.
16. MM. Servin and Casanova, disgraced in 1961 for crypto-Gaullist heresies which had lasted
for three years, seem to have attracted more support (especially from younger members) than any
previous dissidents. Characteristically, they had formerly been the most rigorous defenders of
orthodoxy.
D*
76 THE PARTIES
was a grave violation of discipline to try to create horizontal links which might
interfere with the chain of command.17 The cells were not allowed to criticize
the party's political line. But discussion was encouraged, for it informed the
leaders of the reception given to their policies and enabled heresy to be exposed
and smothered at birth. The isolation of each unit prevented any dissentient
from contaminating its neighbours. If a cell showed signs of deviation a senior
party member was assigned to bring it back into line ; if his ability and prestige
failed to retrieve the situation, it was dissolved. Thus dissension could rarely
reach the section, still less the federation or central committee.
The workplace cell was a good instrument, in normal times for agitation and
direct action (far more important for a revolutionary party than electioneer-
ing), and in an emergency for clandestine work. But the leadership had
continually to combat the members' preference for organization based on resi-
dence ; in 1946 there were 28,000 rural and local cells and only 8,000 workplace
ones, and in 1954 only 5,000 out of 19,000 were workplace cells (perhaps no
more than 2,000 in industrial plants).18 Moreover, in later years reports of cell
meetings no longer emphasized the vigour and freedom of discussion. *. . . The
life of a great many cells . . . has been profoundly transformed. They are more
or less cut in two : on one side those who approve blindly . , ., who tolerate no
criticism; on the other those, workers or intellectuals, who want to say why
they are disturbed or discontented.'19
For the party's formally democratic constitution was a sham. Often the
rules were flatly violated. Expulsions were carried out unconstitutionally.20
Party conferences, national councils (due in years with no conference) and
central committee meetings were held much less frequently than the constitu-
tion required. Conferences and councils were so carefully prepared in advance
that no post-war expulsion or purge aroused the least whisper of dissent.21 The
central committee never really debated policy, and far from it electing the
national executive bodies, its own composition was settled by a few leaders
who used their power to reward the orthodox, punish the hesitant, and so
reinforce their own authority.22 But in the end control from the top stifled
enthusiasm at the base. * In periods of crisis, the dissenters, who know it is use-
less to vote "against" something with their hands, prefer to " vote with their
feet": they leave the party.' And, when the crisis period ended, 'everything
17. For fuller details of the formal organization see Politics in Post-war France, pp. 48ff.
(henceforth cited as Williams).
18. On the initial resistance to workplace cells see Walter, pp. 121ff. On post-war developments,
Domenach, p. 84, and Naville, no. 164, p. 1914. On the whole subject, Duverger, Political Parties,
pp. 27-36; Partis et Classes, pp. 181-3 (anonymous article written by Pierre Fougeyrollas).
19. Baby, p. 27; also pp. 35, 74, 101, 134, 149, 152, 154, 205, 217; cf. Histoire, ii. 266-7.
Contrast earlier accounts in Domenach, pp. 84-5 ; Micaud, no. 162, p. 338 ; Brayance, Anatomic
du Parti communiste francais, p. 38.
20. See for instance Herv6, Lettre, pp. 240-50,
21. Baby, pp. 35, 152-4; Domenach, pp. 89-90.
22. Baby, pp. 150-1 ; Lecoeur, Partisan, pp. 249-50 ; Brayance, pp. 98-9. Baby, p. 137 : '. . . in
practice, an authoritarian centralism [which] paralyses any genuine democracy . . ,' ; cf. pp. 134,
135, 154, 202, 217. Herve, Lettre, p. 44: 'What has poisoned the internal life . . . of international
communism is the extension of the police regime, of the police spirit, of the police type of man-
oeuvre ... '; cf. pp. 47, 115, and also his Dieu et Cesar sont-ils communistes?, pp. 66-8. One
report claimed that four-fifths of the central committee members never opened their mouths :
see Godfrey, no. 100, p. 329. Also see Lecoeur, Autocritique, pp. 21, 31-2, 71.
THE COMMUNIST PARTY 77
returned to normal - that is to the routine of declarations nobody reads,
protests nobody hears, meetings nobody attends'. The party might retain a
substantial membership and a vast electoral following, for there was no
acceptable alternative. But behind the impressive facade its strength was slowly
crumbling away.23
The great increases in Communist membership came in the two periods of
ostentatious patriotism, the Popular Front and the Liberation. Between 1934
and 1937 the number of adherents rose from 45,000 to 340,000; below 400,000
in 1944, it was soon alleged to have reached the million. Subsequently it
dropped steadily until 1956, when a membership of 430,000 was claimed; it
then levelled off, and the figure given in 1959 was only 5,000 fewer. These
claims were certainly inflated, perhaps by 50%.24 Nevertheless, in 1958 Com-
munist membership probably equalled that of all other parties combined -
and it demanded more of the individual than did the others. The demands,
however, were not always met. Even in the early fifties only a minority of
members (between a third and a fifth) seem to have attended cell meetings, and
half of these were otherwise inactive.25 And in later years their zeal continued
to decline.
One sympton of disaffection was the collapse of the party press. In 1954
UHumanite's circulation in the Paris area was only half the pre-war figure
(77,000 against 144,000 in 1937) while in the provinces it had dropped still
further.26 In 1949 the party admitted that only a third of its voters in the Paris
region read UHumanit^, and five years later that only a quarter did; the pro-
portion fell to 2% in some rural areas. The circulation of the Communist press
dropped by two-thirds in the ten years after 1947, and few of the 900,000
remaining readers still believed what they read.27
Another failure was in a sphere to which the party attached great impor-
tance : the recruitment of youth. Here centralization of party authority made it
23. 'Crisis', Domenach, p. 90 (cf. Baby, pp. 27, 35, 154); 'normal', Baby, p. 115, cf. Herv6,
no. 124, p. 70. And see below, pp. 85-7.
24. The official 1954 figure was 506,000; Lecceur, ex-organizing secretary, says (Autocritique,
p. 24) that the real figure was below the 340,000 of 1937 (and that the decline was worst in the
working-class areas). Since he also claims (p. 62) that the apparent half-million drop since 1946
was * false*, the real peak figure must have been 800,000 or (probably) less. In 1945 there were
545,000 paid-up members and 825,000 claimed : Histoire, ii. 285. Figures in text from Fauvet,
Les forces politiques en France, p. 36; Domenach, pp. 71-2; Duverger, Parties, pp. 87-8, 317;
Brayance, pp. 205-7; Herv6, no. 124, p. 70n. (he suggests there were about 700,000 card-holders
in 1945 and 300,000 in 1961). In Partisan, p. 280, Lecceur says that the peak figure of cards
distributed was 800,000, but that the real membership was far lower.
25. Brayance, p. 207; cf. Lecceur, Autocritique, pp. 23, 24, 64; Naville, no. 164, p. 1915;
Domenach, p. 101. Micaud (no. 162, p. 334) was told the real militants were usually under 5%.
Meynaud and Lancelot, La participation des francais a la politique, p. 31, suggest that the party
in 1961 may have had about 150,000 active members (plainly their definition of 'active' differs
from Micaud's).
26. Partly because of the party's new provincial papers, though these too were in decline and
many were soon to close ; at the beginning of the fifties they had only 40 % of their 1945 daily
circulation : Bauchard, no. 9b, p. 600.
27. Mothd, pp. 83-4, 123 ; Wylie, p. 214. The last two figures are from Fauvet, Dtchiree,
p. 133n., Cockpit, p. 140n.; those for 1949 from Domenach, p. 118; the rest from Humanite,
13 November 1954. Cf. Godfrey, no. 100, p. 328. Humanite printed 600,000 copies in 1945 and
192,000 in 1960: Herv6, no. 124, p. 70n, All party papers have lost readers and every party has
lost members.
78 THE PARTIES
easy for the leaders to insist on early promotion. In 1946 the Communist
parliamentary group had the lowest average age (forty) of any important party.
At the 1950 conference the delegates averaged only 31 and hardly any were
over 45. Half the bureau politique of 1952 were in their forties, and party
spokesmen proudly pointed out that Maurice Thorez had entered it at twenty-
five and Benoit Frachon (general secretary of CGT) at thirty. A generation
later, however, they were still in place. The Communists were indeed the only
Fourth Republican party to retain their pre-war leadership; and, in spite of
the changes lower down in the hierarchy, they found it increasingly hard to
attract young recruits. At the 1954 conference their failure was blamed on
Marty, who had recently been expelled - yet in the next five years the number
of members under 25 was halved.28
The leadership also tried to encourage the industrial working-class element
in the party; petty-bourgeois origins were considered as dangerous as middle
age for a revolutionary movement. The great extension of its appeal at the
Liberation had diluted its working-class character.29 In 1950 there were
official complaints that only 44% of federal secretaries and 37% of federal
committees were workers, and insistent demands that the proportions be
greatly increased.30 But at the congresses of 1954 and 1959 the proportion of
working-class delegates was still only 40%, and dissident Communists indeed
claimed that the party's crisis was worst in the great factories round Paris
which had once been the strongholds of militancy.31
Ironically, the party did best in the sphere to which it should have attached
least importance. Throughout the Fourth Republic its electoral influence
remained intact. From just under 1-J million votes in 1936, or 15% of the
votes cast, the Communists jumped to 5 million in October 1945, over 26% (of
a total doubled by the admission of women). By November 1946 they had
gained another 500,000; at the general election of June 1951 their vote fell
back almost to 5 million. Nearly half the loss of 450,000 votes occurred in the
areas where the Church is strong and the main issue was often that of the
Catholic schools - twenty-nine north-western, eastern frontier and Cevennes
departments which contained altogether only 27% of the electorate. But the
industrial departments,the scene of the main Communist progress in November
28. For the pressure in favour of youth, Brayance, pp. 70, 214-15 and Humanite, 6 April 1950;
for the 1954 criticisms, ibid., 5 and 7 June 1954 ; for the under-25s, Marcel Servin's report in Monde,
27 June 1959 and Baby, pp. 88-9 (10-2% in 1954 and 5-6% of almost the same total in 1959). The
youth organization in 1956 had only 30,000 members, a tenth of its post-war and a third of its
pre-war strength: Baby, p. 87 (Domenach, p. 90, gives the 1936 figure of 100,000). Among
conference delegates the average age rose to 32 in 1954, 35 in 1956 and 38 in 1959, and pre-wa
party members were 35, 41 and 37 % of the respective totals : Humanitt, 8 June 1954 and 21 July
1956, Monde same dates and 27 June 1959. Membership among £cole normale students dropped
from 25 to 5%: ibid., 17 November 1956. But inconclusive figures suggest some Communist
success among young voters in 1956: Elections 1956, p. 408 and Williams, no. 168, p. 174n.
29. Between 1937 and 1945 party membership rose 50 % in industrial, doubled in semi-industria\
and more than trebled in agricultural regions : Duverger, Parties, p. 34. The latter had the highest
membership in proportion to population in 1945 (ibid.) but also the largest drop subsequently
by 1954 the number of rural cells was halved: see C. Ezratty in Paysans, p. 78 (but cf. ibid.,
P- 439).
30. Monde, 13 February 1950; cf. Duverger, Parties, pp. 158-9.
31. Lecceur, Autocritique, p. 23; Baby, pp. 9, 156, 179; cf. MotU, passim; contrast Micaud,
no. 162, writing of an earlier date.
THE COMMUNIST PARTY 79
1946, also contributed more than their share of the losses five years later.32
In 1956, however, the party recovered there: over the whole country its vote
increased to 5,600,000 (though as the total poll also rose, its percentage share
remained the same). Gains in the industrial north were offset by losses in
the rural south, where part of the perennial protest vote was attracted by the
novelty and violence of another enemy of the System, Pierre Poujade.33 No
major nation-wide decline in Communist electoral support occurred until the
advent of General de Gaulle.34
The party was strongest in the industrial zone between Paris and Belgium,
on the northern and western edge of the Massif Central, and along the
Mediterranean coast (with parts of the hinterland). In the rural areas its
influence derived less from its championship of the proletariat than from its
annexation of the traditions of 1789. In the south and centre almost all the
departments where Communism was strongest had been on the Left since the
beginning of the Third Republic; only in the towns and in the industrial north
did the party make a specifically working-class appeal.35 Its influence on the
peasantry was not confined to the poor sharecroppers of the centre, but
extended to prosperous southern farmers and winegrowers who voted to
express a political rather than a social choice; in Gard most Protestant
peasants (who own their land) probably voted Communist.36 In some rural
areas Communist leadership in the maquis gave the party a foothold which
improved its political position both directly, and also indirectly through giving
its members the opportunity to take over official positions.37 But the crucial
32. From the 15 most industrial departments (see Map 21), which include some 35% of the
electorate, came 45% of the Communist gains in November 1946, 51 % of their losses in 1951,
and nearly 70% of their net gains in 1956. (Four eastern departments are both industrial and
Catholic.)
33. The Communist share of the poll fell most where the Poujadists did best, and rose most
where no Poujadist stood :
In constituencies where Communist share of poll was
Poujadist vote was : down2j% stable up 2j%
over 15% 16 18
10-15% 5 22 2
under 10% 3 24 4
(no candidate) - 5 4
See also Pierce, no. 180, p. 412 and n.; Werth, The Strange History of Mendes-France ...,
pp. xvii, 271 (who claims that even party members voted for Poujade and a more ruthless policy
in Algeria) ; Pay sans, pp. 60, 203, 249 ; below, pp. 87n., 167n.
34. Even then fewer than half the defectors voted for any other party, at least in the Marseilles
area: Olivesi and Roncayolo, Geographic electorate des Bouches-du- Rhone (cited as Olivesi),
pp. 124, 130, 224-5, 238.
35. Goguel, Geographic des elections francaises, pp. 105, 117; also Fauvet, Forces, p. 39,
Cockpit, pp. 95-9, Dechirte, pp. 88-91 ; and Maps 2 and 9. In the 1947 municipal elections their
percentage varied directly with the size of communes : Cotteret et al, Lois Electorates et megaliths
de representation (henceforth cited as Ine%alites\ p. 121.
36. Schram, p. 201. On peasant Communism see Wright, nos. 224, 228, Chapter 13 in Earle;
Ehrmann, no. 83; Klatzmann, no. 132; Paysans, pp. 51-2, 65-6, 69-83, 307, 380, 439; Fauvet,
Cockpit, pp. 93-6, Dechiree, pp. 86-9, and in Partis et Classes, pp. 172-7; Siegfried, De la IIIe,
pp. 209, 261-4; Moraz6, pp. 194, 218-19; Ltithy, pp. 435-6; Wylie, pp. 212, 218-21. Rural party
membership was often small (only 1,000 of its 54,000 voters in Correze in 1951 : Brayance, p. 69).
37. Duclos in Reale, p. 86; Duverger, Parties, p. 317 ; Goguel in Aspects, pp. 259-60, and no.
102b, p. 951 ; Derruau-Boniol, no. 69, pp. 61-2; Partis et Classes, p. 191. For example in Haute-
Vienne a Communist prefect and a mayor of Limoges enabled the party to appeal to the peasantry
as a * serious* instead of a 'wild* movement. (But the mayor's defection in 1952 did not corre-
spondingly reduce the party's popular support.)
80 THE PARTIES
facts remain that (outside Alsace-Lorraine) most industrial workers voted
Communist and that the party depended overwhelmingly on their support.38
To the Communists, however, elections were a test of efficiency rather than
a road to power. They considered Parliament a minor field of operations. In
1924 the International insisted that the French party must apply strictly the
rules drawn up at the Second World Congress. The Communist deputy was
'responsible not to the anonymous mass of electors, but to the Communist
Party'. He was to make use of his parliamentary immunity to facilitate the
illegal as well as the legal work of the party, subordinate his parliamentary to
his party work, and introduce 'purely propagandist proposals, drafted not
with a view to their adoption but for publicity and agitation', as the party
leaders might require. The parliamentary group was dominated by the party
executive, which had to approve its choice of officers, had a representative
with a right of veto at all its meetings, and gave instructions in advance on all
matters of importance (including the right to choose who should speak for the
party and to approve the text of their speeches). Every Communist candidate
had to give a written undertaking in advance to resign if called upon to do so
by the party.39
Party leaders and officials were usually found seats in Parliament; in 1950
the fourteen members of the bureau politique were all deputies except L6on
Mauvais, who had been a senator (though of the seventeen members nominated
at the 1956 conference, six were not in Parliament). The party thus arranged
for its corps of professional revolutionaries to be maintained by the state they
were subverting, for it drew the salaries of Communist parliamentarians and
paid them only the equivalent of a skilled worker's wage.40 This practice
brought into the central party funds nearly twice as much as the ordinary
members' subscriptions even when membership was at its peak.41 It kept the
ordinary deputy's outlook close to that of the class from which he had usually
sprung.42 It enabled the party to exploit the ordinary Frenchman's prejudice
against politicians; and it helped to avoid the internal disputes between rank
and file and parliamentarians which plagued all left-wing movements,
38. It was estimated in 1956 that 70 % of manual workers voted Communist in Paris and almost
as many in Marseilles, and that from 75 to 80 % of Communist voters in these cities were working
class: Pans, J. Klatzmann in Elections 1956, p. 273; Marseilles, Olivesi, pp. 246, 253, 268, 271.
For the five elections of 1945-56 over all France M. Dogan estimated the first proportion at 50
and the second at 70%: in Hamon, ed., Les nouveaux comportements politiques de la classe
ouvriere (1962), pp. 113-14; cf. Partis et Classes, p. 33, and Fauvet, Cockpit, p. 93n., Dechiree,
p. 86n. (but see below, p. 95n.). For estimates in two Paris suburbs in 1946, P. George in Moraz6
et al., Etudes de sociologie Electorate, pp. 82-5, and L. A. Lavandeyra in P. George et al, fitudes
sur la banlieue de Paris, pp. 131-2.
39. Theses of the Second World Congress, quoted Walter, pp. 143-4.
40. In 1958 each deputy kept £15 a week and the party took £70 : G. Gosnat at the 15th party
conference, Monde, 28-29 June 1959 and Humanity 29 June 1959.
41 In 1946: Priouret, La Republique des partis, p. 177. The elus* contribution rose each year
from 1 952 (262 million francs) to 1 958 (492 million) : Marrane's report to 14th conference (Cahiers
du Communisme, special number 1956, p. 409) and Gosnat's to 15th, loc. cit. But so few Communist
deputies were returned in the 1958 elections (under de Gaulle) that the party's finances were hard
hit and it had to reduce staff and suspend several local dailies: ibid,, and AP 1958, p. 155.
42. In 1951 38% of the Communist deputies had been manual workers and another 20%
white-collar workers (including minor civil servants); in 1956, 42% and 17%. These social cate-
gories were next strongest in MRP, where they had fewer than 20% of the deputies between
them. See Dogan's tables (above, p. 68n.).
THE COMMUNIST PARTY 81
especially the Socialists. To the militant, the deputy was less suspect when his
origins and standard of living plainly cut him off from the parliamentary
fraternity, the Rfyublique des camarades. To the deputy, the militant was no
threat when both formed part of a tightly-disciplined army whose commanders
were themselves members of parliament.43 Nor could he easily forget his own
subordinate role, for the party staff prepared his bills, resolutions and even
speeches.44
The low rating given to parliamentary activity resulted in a low level of
ability. Often the educational background of the Communist deputies made
them less articulate than others, and at times their truculent approach in-
hibited mutual understanding - which indeed was rarely their object.45 Apart
from a few skilful procedural specialists the rank and file made little impression
in debate, although their leader Duclos and their brilliant fellow-traveller
Pierre Cot showed that the handicaps could be overcome. As assiduous
workers they were sometimes effective in committee.46 But, as the International
had instructed in 1924, the Communist deputy had always to * remember that
he is not a "legislator" trying to find a common language with other legis-
lators, but a Party agitator sent into enemy territory to carry out the decisions
of the Party'.39
3. CHARACTERISTICS
The characteristics of the party were essentially military. The high command
was in theory elected but in reality self-perpetuating; it appointed and dis-
missed subordinates, settled the party line and conveyed detailed directives
down to the lower levels. Although all the troops had volunteered, many of
them - like some regular soldiers - in time found it hard to imagine existence
outside the ranks in which their friendships had been made and their life
organized.47 For the party expected much of its members: it sought to domi-
nate their whole mental outlook, claimed most of their leisure time, assigned
and withdrew duties from them as it saw fit.48 It aimed indeed to be far more
than an ordinary legal political party, ntore than a massive conspiracy for the
seizure of power, more even than a state within the state. 'It is a discipline
opposing a discipline, a university opposing a university, a police opposing a
43. It was not always realized that the commanders - the members of the bureau politique and
secretariat - in effect kept their full parliamentary salary: Lecceur, Autocritique, pp. 57-8. This
may have contributed to their isolation from the rank and file, on which see Baby, pp. 214-16;
Micaud, no. 162, pp. 348-9 ; cf. Histoire, ii. 290.
44. Buron, p. 155.
45. But cf. Fauvet, Cockpit, p. 87, Dechiree, p. 80; Noel, Notre Derniere Chance, p. 110; and
Christian Pineau's novel Mon cher depute, pp. 56-8. Lecoeur says that some deputies, and parti-
cularly the leaders, were on familiar terms with * reactionary* colleagues though hostile to the
Socialists : Nation Socialiste, no. 9 (March 1957), p. S6. Marty claimed (op. cit., p. 85) that Jacques
Duclos called in two RPF doctors (one a former deputy) to get him out of prison on health
grounds in 1952. Resistance friendships were sometimes tenacious, and some of the fellow-
travelling Progressives maintained wide contacts.
46. Isorni, Ainsi, p. 55, and Silence, pp. 132-3 (cf. p. 57). But some, especially the leaders, were
conspicuous absentees : Noel, pp. 63, 109; and see below, p. 244 n. 9, 246?n. 21.
47. Cf. Micaud, no. 162, pp. 338-41; E. Morin, Autocritique (1959), pp. 159-60, 174.
48. In 1952 the paper edited by Pierre Herv6 was suppressed without his being consulted, and
he was formally ordered to undertake other propagandist work which he did not want: Herv6,
Lettre, pp. 20-2, 27, 245, cf. Dieu et Cesar, pp. 25-32, 41-2, 54-6,
82 THE PARTIES
police, an organization of workers, women, children, old men, cripples,
tenants, tradesmen, housewives, sportsmen, motion picture stars. It is a com-
plete society which, in embryonic form, already exists inside the society it aims
to replace.'49
The Communist appeal was wide.60 The largest and least regionalized
French party, it had support throughout the country. Satellite organizations -
from the Tenants' League to the Federation of Cin£-Clubs - spread its in-
fluence in a dozen subsidiary fields.51 Just after the war the Communists won
many supporters, from Picasso to Joliot-Curie, among the intellectuals who
enjoy such exceptional prestige in France. Generosity, social conscience, revolt
against the existing order and (for persons compromised in the war) personal
prudence brought some bourgeois Frenchmen to join or support the party.
But it forfeited much of this sympathy by its rigid Stalinism and its defence of
the repression in eastern Europe; in 1956 Budapest finally alienated most of
the remaining intellectuals and nearly all the fellow-travellers.52
This heterogeneous army was recruited and maintained by uninhibited
tactical opportunism. In office the Communists allowed no considerations of
cabinet solidarity to blunt their attacks on ministers of other parties, and aban-
doned their own policy of wage restraint as soon as it seemed likely to weaken
their position in the trade unions. Out of office they promoted every demagogic
cause with a robust contempt for cost, consistency or practicability.53 In 1945
they displayed - and exploited - the crudest chauvinism against Germany and
over the disputed Italian frontier, and in Algeria they denounced rebellious
Moslem nationalists as instruments of Nazism.54 They 'have long since taken
over practically all the slogans and subject matter of the former Fascist
movements, including the systematic exploitation of national hatred, economic
nationalism and protection of the middle class, and chauvinism and con-
servatism in the arts'.55 Hunting peasant and small-shopkeeping votes, in
49. Domenach, p. 67.
50. Rossi, Chapters 27-29, discusses the Communist appeal to different sections of the popula-
tion; cf. Micaud, no. 162.
51. Puverger, Parties, pp. 107-8; Brayance, pp. 129-50; Coston, Partis, journaux et hommes
politiques, p. 487. Control of the Tenants' League was incomplete: Brayance, pp. 143-4.
52. Even some Progressive deputies (see below, pp. 171-2) publicly differed from the party
line. (But though the Hungarian crisis was the party's worst since 1939 - when a third of its
deputies had resigned - in 1956 only one out of 150 did so.) On the intellectuals see Macridis,
no. 152, pp. 629-32; Herv6, Lettre, pp. 108-24, Dieu et Cdsar, p. 220; Morin, passim; Baby,
pp. 9, 177-81. Ibid., pp. 157, on front organizations, 117-18, 193-201, on hostility to the non-
Communist extreme Left ('for the Party leadership ... the principal enemy', p. 199). Morin was
expelled for writing in France-Ob servateur ; the party spokesman told his cell that it was *the
journal of the Intelligence Service' : Morin, pp. 167-71.
53. Just before the 1951 election the prime minister (Queuille) estimated the cost of the party's
bills and amendments at £2,000 million: see below, p. 26 In.
54. * Finally I was unaware that the party allowed the Algerian nationalist movement to be
persecuted or even took part in the persecution. Besides, I had completely forgotten the colonial
problem. The salvoes of victory had deafened our ears to the massacres of S6tif ... it was a crazy
outburst of patriotic flag-waving' : Morin, pp. 68-9, cf. pp. 72-3, 79, 87. On Algeria, 'It is neces-
sary to mete out the punishment they deserve to the Hitlerite killers who took part in the events
of the 8th of May, and to the pseudo-nationalist leaders . . . ' : Humanity 19 May 1945, quoted
(with many other damaging citations) in Vote communiste, March-April 1962; and in G. Mollet,
13 mai 1958-13 mai 1962 (1962), pp. 140-1 ; cf. C. H. Favrod, La revolution algfrienne (1959),
p. 76. Generally, Grosser, pp. 104-5, 144, 206, 215; Rieber, pp. 313-28.
55. Luthy, pp. 437-8 (cf. pp. 134, 433-6). In 1947 they exploited anti-Semitic hostility against
Le"on Blum: Ehrmann, no. 82, p. 150,
THE COMMUNIST PARTY 83
1946-47 they joined the Right in condemning food rationing and economic
controls, and a few years later they were active in fostering the Poujadist
movement - until it became a dangerous competitor in demagogy.56 Their
political activity had but one objective: the acquisition of power. About
methods they had few scruples and about policies little concern - save as
means to this one end. (Yet when their strategy dictated a policy of co-operation,
their single-minded devotion could produce results which none of their rivals
could match; witness the admirable restraint of the trade unions during the
Liberation period.57)
The experiences of 1936-38 and 1945-47 showed the difficulty of working
with the Communists in government. In opposition, their bitter hostility to
the regime drove their opponents together and the unmeasured fury of their
attacks saved more than one cabinet. By defying the ordinary parliamentary
rules they sterilized their votes for constructive (though not for obstructive)
purposes, and so falsified the political balance by removing most of the weight
from the left-hand scale. Yet these self-inflicted wounds were the price of
homogeneity and discipline. And every parliamentary display of common
hostility to the Communists reinforced the workers' sense of isolation from
the community which gave the party its hold on their imagination.
Here was the secret of the Communists' power. The best young working-
class leaders were naturally attracted to a force which claimed to express the
aspirations and defend the interests of their own people - especially when so
few other organizations in French society offered scope for a poor youth's
abilities. But the party could not turn to Moscow's ends the strength it could
command as the champion of the proletariat. Hardened party members might
favour alliances with the nationalist Right for reasons of foreign policy, and
regard the Socialists as their real enemies. But to the working-class Communist
voter his Socialist neighbour was also a man of the Left and a potential ally in
a new Popular Front.58 Thus workers who adhered to Communist-controlled
unions often remained suspicious of the party itself, as the elections of social
security administrators in April 1947 showed: CGT candidates polled only
half their claimed membership while CFTC (Catholic trade union) candidates
nearly doubled theirs, and many workers deliberately voted against individual
Communist leaders.59 Six months later CGT split; it no longer commanded a
majority of trade union votes, and after 1948 it proved useless to the party as
an instrument of direct action.60 In 1956 CGT refused to approve the Soviet
intervention in Hungary.61
56. Ibid., p. 154; AP 1946, p. 191, 1947, pp. 97, 139, 245, 1948, p. 42 ; cf. Domenach, p 128.
Later, Lavau in Partis et Classes, pp. 63, 72-3; Macridis, no. 152, p. 626n.; Pay sans, p. 307;
C5°W''The communists have recreated in their ranks the sense of responsibility which Frenchmen
of recent Republics have totally lost' : Brayance, p. 13. This severe but pseudonymous author is
really Alain Griotteray, later a right-wing conspirator against the Fourth Republic.
59! Jpri947,'p. 77 ; Beaulieu,no.*10,pp. 557ff. ; Lorwin, p. 116 ; Lefranc, p. 147 ; Galant, Histmre
politique de la Securite sociale, pp. 126-7. Even so CGT had 60 % of the vote and CFTC only 26 : %.
60. See above, pp. 34, 74. In the social security elections of 1950 Force OuvntretocklS % of the
vote from CGT; CFTC lost 5% to minor groups which often sympathized with PCX _In 1955
CGT with 43% held its narrow lead over the combined forces of CFTC (21) ana *u Ut>j.
ll. It was condemned publicly by some COT unions and locals, and by Pierre Le Brun's
84 THE PARTIES
The party's organizational basis was a weakness here. The cell unit was sup-
posed to help identify party work with the member's daily life. But this
identification itself concealed a danger: the member might neglect aspects of
party work which did not concern him intimately. Trade union demands might
arouse the rank and file much more than the political campaigns imposed by
the leadership. Nor was this heresy of 'economism' confined to the lower
levels. Leaders in the unions, who knew their followers' wishes, resented the
dissipation of their own strength and credit in futile demonstrations which
often bore no relation to the interests of the French working class. This
deviation caused the downfall of Marcel Paul, ex-minister and leader of the
electricity workers, and even Benoit Frachon himself was suspected of sym-
pathy for it.
The unsuccessful political strikes of 1947-48 shattered the power of the
unions. In the 1950 social security elections CGT polled fewer than half the
votes - and a third of those eligible did not vote at all. For years even strictly
economic strikes were doomed to failure; in 1950 the combined pressure of
the unions backed by open governmental and newspaper sympathy could not
overcome Michelin's resistance at Clermont-Ferrand. And so successfully did
the Communists combat 'economism' that the great strikes of 1953 and 1955,
provoked by purely economic grievances, owed nothing whatever to CGT
leadership. A weak and divided trade union movement, determined not to
allow its remaining strength to be dissipated in political adventures, was of
very little use to a revolutionary party.
Nor did the Communists' other assets compensate for this major dis-
appointment. Even in votes they soon seemed to reach saturation point; in the
Paris 'red belt', their pre-war stronghold, they made no progress at the
Liberation and polled less well in 1951 than in 1936. Their infiltration of key
positions was limited even when they held office and soon reversed when they
left it. And 1947 showed that a Communist threat would provoke a stronger
counter-revolutionary riposte. That October in the municipal elections de
Gaulle's RPF led the field in the thirteen largest cities in France.62
This rallying to the strongest anti-Communist movement at a moment of
crisis was no accident. The party deliberately set out to draw a sharp line
between itself and all its political rivals. 'We are not a party like the others.'
All opponents were confounded together. Thereby the Communists provided
their divided enemies with a bond of union. But they also went far to establish
among the masses the impression they most wished to create: that their own
determined, energetic and youthful movement, able to offer solutions for the
day-to-day problems which beset the ordinary Frenchman, confronted
quarrelling cliques of tired old men interested only in cynical bargaining to
prolong, probably for corrupt purposes, their stay in office.
small but active non-Communist opposition in CGT: see ibid.; France-Observateur, 15, 22 and
29 November 1956; Rioux, p. 66; Grosser, pp. 145-6. Contrast CGTs approval in 1949 of
Thorez's statement that French workers would support the Red Army if it crossed France's
border 'in pursuit of an aggressor* : AP 1949, p. 25 ; Lorwin, p. 283. On CGT and Communism
generally, Lorwin, pp. 279-91 ; Godfrey, no. 100, pp. 323-7.
62. Red belt : cf. Goguel, no. 102b, p. 956, and in Fourth Republic, p. 98, Infiltration : see below,
pp. 391-2. On Communist strength in 1947, Van Dyke, no. 212,
THE COMMUNIST PARTY 85
Political disillusionment provided fertile soil for this Communist campaign.
After the elections of June 1946 the French Gallup poll found 58% of Com-
munist voters completely satisfied with their party: their nearest rivals were
MRP with 31%, Only 9% of Communists were not reasonably satisfied: the
corresponding percentages were double for Socialists and MRP, and higher
still for Radicals and Conservatives.63 The psychology of the French Com-
munist militant was very different from that of other politically-minded
Frenchmen. Party members displayed none of the individualism which so
often frustrated rival parties. In a crisis like the war the Communists could
count on exceptional discipline and devotion for the advancement of their
creed; in humdrum matters like running a municipality they were sometimes
able to develop among their constituents a quite unusual sense of civic
responsibility. Their dynamism, certainty and conviction offered an attractive
contrast to the disputes and hesitations of their old-fashioned, self-doubting
and internally-divided competitors.
Yet the Communist achievement of changing the mental outlook of their
militants (for it was nothing less) was bought at a high price. Rigid discipline
required complete suspension of individual judgment.64 Men convinced of the
triumph of their cause proved willing to accept any crime to ' shorten history's
birth-pangs'. The party was a state within the state, warring against its legal
rival; the genuine qualities of citizenship which it sometimes evoked were
deformed for destructive and disastrous ends. In the last resort its most
important psychological achievement was to kill the intellectual honesty and
pervert the moral integrity which inspired its best recruits.
As the fifties progressed, however, the Communists* revolutionary fervour
diminished. The destalinization and Hungarian crises provoked growing
criticism of the party's bureaucratic structure among both members and
sympathizers. The leadership was attacked for conservatism, dogmatism, in-
correct analyses and false priorities ; for losing touch with the workers, check-
ing them when they wanted to fight, using the most backward and lethargic to
break the militancy of their more active fellows;65 above all for prolonged
equivocation over the Algerian war (no doubt partly due to the growing
racial feeling of the French working class).66
The party's failing dynamism seems hard to reconcile with its stable voting
base. Yet they may have a common cause. The narrower but more revolu-
tionary organization of the inter-war years was dominated by the industrial
63. Sondages 1948, p. 225. In 1952, 62% of Communist voters professed full confidence in
their party; again MRP with 51 % came second: ibid,, 1952, no, 2, p. 6. See Appendix vn.
64. When Laurent Casanova wrote to Maurice Thorez in 1960, *I attach more importance to
my self-respect and human dignity as a communist than to my membership of the bureau politique\
the leader commented : 'This is unheard of. I must say I have never heard such a remark.' Monde,
2 March 1961.
65. J. Simon in Socialisme ou Barbaric 3.18 (January 1956) on the 1955 provincial strikes,
especially pp. 4-6, 13-16, 26-8, 31; Lecoeur, Autocritique, p. 74; Moth6, pp. 108-9, 127-30,
146-7 ; Baby, pp. 35, 37, 70, 122, 211. Cf. n. 72.
66. Mothe", pp. 107-9, shows that workers no less than intellectuals condemned the party
for discouraging the spontaneous opposition to the war which arose in 1956; cf. Baby, p. 115;
Morin, p. 192; Vote communiste, he. cit. On the later growth of working-class racialism, ibid.-,
Mothe", p. 172; Rioux, pp. 87-8; Tillion, no. 208, p. 10; cf. above, n. 33 ; Morin, p. 223. The
party lost its hold on many of the young Communists conscripted for the Algerian war.
86 THE PARTIES
workers. After the war, expanding into new fields, the party presented itself as
all things to all men: 'a Radical party' operating as a pressure-group on
specific bills and governments.67 It was the class party of the workers yet it
lobbied for the shopkeepers and the bouilleurs de cru. The champion of laicitg,
it extended the outstretched hand to the Catholics. Internationalist, it went
through a 'crisis of chauvinism'.68 In revolt against existing society, it con-
trolled much patronage - important more for status than for cash - in Parlia-
ment, local government, the social security system and the nationalized indus-
tries. 'It is in favor of modernization but also supports all the marginal groups
that impede it; it is for socialization and for private property ... it is slowly
becoming a captive of the many and diverse forces whose support it has culti-
vated. It has reached a dead center of compromise and synthesis beyond which
there can be no movement in one direction or another without serious
electoral, and perhaps organizational and ideological, dislocations.' Only a
centralized and ruthless bureaucratic machine could hold together so hetero-
geneous a party.69
The consequences were not surprising. As in Russia, those who rose to power
in the party were the natural bureaucrats rather than the natural revolutionaries.
Inevitably their policy tended to preserve the balance of forces in which they
flourished, and their disciplinary authority was used to crush critics who
threatened their position. ' Fossilized' in their refusal to confront new ideas or
recognize new circumstances - which contrasted so sharply with the flexibility
of their Italian comrades - the French Communist leaders displayed over the
years a narrow and obstinate conservatism reminiscent of their own bour-
geoisie at its worst.70 Yet from their standpoint the alternative was no more
satisfactory. If the workers participated actively in the industrial transforma-
tion of the country, their revolutionary dlan would be weakened: better to
keep them in their ideological ghetto, even through absurd propaganda cam-
paigns like that of 1955 asserting that the masses were becoming poorer. By
allowing revisionist discussion and criticism, Togliatti was risking the erosion
of his party's unity and discipline in the hope of broadening its appeal;
Thorez preferred to maintain the monolithic authority of the organization
over a smaller membership and a narrower sphere of influence.71
By this strategy he preserved a disciplined striking force for use in a
revolutionary situation which he became less and less capable of exploiting.
Politically, the French party behaved so cautiously and equivocally over
Algeria that it avoided immediate unpopularity and repression, but also for-
feited the long-term credit it might have earned by an early and courageous
67. Herv<§, no. 124, p. 73. 68. Grosser, p. 104 (and see above, n. 54).
69. Macridis, no. 1 52, pp. 626-8, 633-4 (he points out that in 1 956 there were 1 ,300 Communist
mayors and 25,000 municipal councillors). Cf. also France-Ob servateur, 15 February 1957;
Naville, no. 164, pp. 1909-20 (especially 191 1-12) ; Godfrey, no. 100, pp. 321-38 ; Moth6, p. 166.
In the 1952 poll, 41 % of Communist voters thought the party most useful in office (31 % even in
a coalition) while only 47 % preferred it to remain in opposition ; 32 % considered it 'the strongest
bulwark of parliamentary institutions', and only 40% favoured forcible seizure of power in any
circumstances: Bondages, 1952, no. 3, pp. 56-8. See Appendix vn.
70. Crozier, no. 64, p. 791. * Fossilized' : Herv6, no. 124, p. 79. 'They have become part of the
familiar furniture of the do-nothing Fourth Republic, like old clocks that have gone slow, and
which no one notices as they strike midday at two in the afternoon' : Hervd, Dieu et Cesar, p. 242.
71. Fougeyrollas, no. 94, pp. 121-31.
THE COMMUNIST PARTY 87
campaign for Algerian independence. Socially, in championing all the back-
ward groups which were suffering from the country's modernization, it
gradually lost touch with those who were benefiting. 72 Thus towards the end of
the Fourth Republic it disqualified itself for leadership either in the hypo-
thetical social revolution which was plainly receding, or in the real political
crisis which was fast approaching. Its hope could lie only in a transformation
of the international balance of power to the advantage of the USSR; and
only in Moscow's accounting could Thorez's policy conceivably yield any
returns.
The French working class, and the many devoted and self-sacrificing party
militants, deserved better leadership than the Communist party gave them.
But where else were they to turn?
72. Herv6 thought the party was in danger of coming to represent the most backward sections
of the working class, like Bonapartism in an earlier generation, and was mobilizing the revolt of
the parasitic elements in society like 'a "Poujadism" of the extreme Left' : Dieu et Cesar, pp. 235,
239.
Chapter 7
THE SOCIALIST PARTY
1. HISTORY
The Socialist party - officially the Section frangaise de V Internationale ouvriere9
S F I O - was formed in 1 905 by the junction of two smaller groups . The French
working-class movement was weak in numbers and organization, and torn
between the demands of its revolutionary ideology and those of parliamentary
strategy. The Dreyfus case posed its dilemma starkly: when reactionary forces
tried to reverse the verdict of 1789, should Socialists continue to agitate for a
new revolution and so endanger the conquests of the old one? Jean Jaures and
most Socialist deputies advocated an electoral and parliamentary alliance
with the Radicals to save the Republic, while another wing under Jules
Guesde adhered to the orthodox Marxist doctrine of opposition to all bour-
geois governments.1 The struggle came to centre on Alexandre Millerand, the
Third Republic's first Socialist minister. In 1904 the Amsterdam congress of
the Socialist International, under German leadership, demanded the expulsion
of Millerand and the unification of the French movement. Jaures accepted its
decision and a year later the united party was established. The affair demon-
strated both the profound internationalism and the abiding mistrust of leaders
which were for years to characterize SFIO.
Nevertheless, Jaures soon established his ascendancy as the great tribune of
Socialism and indeed of the whole Left. The genuine revolutionaries deserted
politics for anti-political syndicalist agitation in the trade unions, and the
Socialist politicians finally became * herbivorous rather than carnivorous
Marxists', still uttering revolutionary rhetoric at banquets but no longer
organizing disorder in the streets. Despite Jaures' assassination on the eve of
war, revolutionaries and reformists alike rallied to the defence of the nation in
1914; and the parliamentary leaders - including the orthodox Marxist Guesde
- entered the government of national unity. But the endless carnage aroused
growing dismay among the militants, and when the Russian Revolution pro-
vided a new focus for extremist loyalties the latent conflict between reformist
leadership and revolutionary rank and file burst forth irrepressibly. At the
Tours conference in 1920 the Bolsheviks used it to split the party with their
twenty-one conditions. 'They are at once', said Guesde, 'everything I have
recommended all my life and what all my life I have condemned.'2
In 1924 SFIO revived its old electoral pact with the Radicals and formed
the left wing of Herriot's parliamentary majority. The associates in this Cartel
des Gauches shared a common republican and anticlerical outlook, but they
differed too deeply over economic policy for the alliance to be lasting;
Radicals preferred to govern (though not to face the voters) in combination
1. As late as May 1956 SFIO delegates visiting Moscow heard a Soviet leader condemn
Jaures for his support of Dreyfus. '"No," said Kaganovitch, "this was not a matter for the
working class, and there was no need to mingle in this affair"': D. J. Dallin, Soviet Foreign
Policy after Stalin (Philadelphia, 1961), p. 240. (I owe this reference to Dr. Anthony King.)
2. Quoted by Natanson, no. 163, p. 94.
THE SOCIALIST PARTY 89
with Conservatives rather than Socialists. In any case this choice was imposed
on them by the intransigence of the SFIO rank and file, who in 1929 over-
ruled the ^ deputies when they wished to join a Radical government, and in
1933^ again shattered the alliance, which had been restored for the 1932
election. The most moderate deputies resigned to form a new group led by
Pierre Renaudel; one wing of these 'neo-Socialists', headed by Marcel D6at
and Adrien Marquet, fell increasingly under Nazi influence. In 1936 the
alliance of the Left parties was reconstituted and extended to include the Com-
munists, and won another electoral victory. As the largest group in the new
majority, SFIO took over the premiership. This first experience of office in
peacetime lasted for only two years.
The short-lived success did not end Socialist dissensions. As Nazi power
increased L6on Blum and most of the leaders officially (though somewhat half-
heartedly) advocated resistance to Germany; but nearly half the party, led by
the general secretary Paul Faure, clung to its traditional pacifism and accepted
first appeasement and then Vichy. In 1940, 36 out of 80 votes against full
powers for Marshal P&ain were cast by Socialists; but three-quarters of the
SFIO members of parliament were on the other side. Paul Faure's chief trade
union ally, Ren6 Belin, became the Marshal's minister of labour.
During the occupation many Socialists played an active and creditable part;
some Resistance movements, like Liberation-Nord, were predominantly con-
trolled by them. Their contribution was perhaps less spectacular than that of
the Communists or the Catholics, who had more solid organizations behind
them; but as individuals the Socialists had nothing to be ashamed of. Their
position at the Liberation seemed very favourable : parliamentary democracy
and political freedom had regained prestige; drastic social reforms were con-
sidered inevitable and indeed overdue ; many pre-war parties were discredited;
and SFIO seemed to have an obvious role in reconciling the new claimants to
power, Communists and Catholics, with the Republic from which they had
hitherto been virtually excluded. Revisionist leaders like Blum hoped to
rejuvenate their movement as a French Labour party, emancipated from a
Marxist creed which they had long ceased to take seriously, and to open it to
new blood from the Resistance organizations for which it could provide the
most natural political channel.
This opportunity was lost. The rank and file remained attached to the old
doctrines, the old prejudices, and the old faces: they would not grant rapid
promotion to newcomers with no record of party service. Potential new mem-
bers, and above all potential new leaders, occasionally joined other groups but
more frequently abandoned politics.3 On the other hand, an exceptionally
drastic purge of the members who had supported Petain sacrificed practical
experience to presumed ideological purity.
The election of October 1945 found the Socialists only the third largest
party. Like the British Liberals between the wars, they were ground between
stronger rivals on either flank. Whether they worked with the Communists
against MRP in defending the first draft constitution, or with MRP against
the Communists as in subsequent months, they still alienated support. A
3. See below, pp. 97, 174.
90 THE PARTIES
second electoral defeat in June 1946 brought their internal differences to a
head. At the Lyons conference of that year the old leadership was repudiated
and the left wing won a narrow majority on the executive committee. Daniel
Mayer, a revisionist proteg6 of L6on Blum, was replaced as general secretary
by the doctrinaire Marxist Guy Mollet, who extended the authority of the
executive over the deputies and sought to take the party into opposition. Upon
the expulsion of the Communist ministers in May 1947 he nearly persuaded
SFIO to withdraw too, and six months later he brought down the Ramadier
government.
But the Socialists were virtual prisoners of their conservative partners. They
dared not repudiate responsibility for policy by going into opposition, for
without their votes no majority could be found: in 1947 or 1948 their resigna-
tion would have brought General de Gaulle to power. But they were too
isolated to impose their own views, and could only, with MRP's help, try to
prevent the dismantling of their post-war reforms. They had to retain office in
governments they disliked, alienating most of their followers by continual
compromises. The resentment of the militants was expressed by three ex-
ministers - Andr6 Philip, Daniel Mayer and fidouard Depreux - who had
taken the revisionist side in 1945-46; but Guy Mollet, as party leader, became
an advocate of participation in government.
As these reversals of position suggest, the division was more tactical than
fundamental. It reflected differences about the best means of competing with
the Communists and not about the desirability of an alliance with them -
which both sides rejected. One wing preferred opposition in order to advocate
the policies of the party and repudiate responsibility for the actions of its
rivals; the other relied on office to win practical reforms to benefit their
followers or to prevent injury to them. In France as elsewhere it was usually
the middle-class Socialists, those who were in a small minority in their own
areas, who showed most devotion to doctrinaire principle and least interest in
the responsibilities of power; and in 1951 the smaller federations carried a
motion empowering the executive committee, rather than the parliamentary
group, to take decisions in a governmental crisis.4 The large working-class
federations like Nord and Haute-Vienne regularly supported the leadership.
But there were many cross-currents, for each SFIO federation enjoyed a good
deal of autonomy and played its own different electoral role: the focus of
anticlericalism at Rennes and of anti-Communism at Limoges; the chief rival
of Radicalism in the south-west, but a proletarian party in the northern indus-
trial area. Their tactics depended on particular circumstances more than on
general principle. Before the 1956 election the chief advocate of local alliances
with the Communists was Robert Lacoste.
The quarrel over participation was settled when SFIO returned to opposi-
tion, first for a few months in 1950 and then for five years in 1951. But instead
the problem of EDC and German rearmament soon came to dominate
Socialist politics. Here the factional lines differed from previous and sub-
sequent struggles: many governmental-minded or nationalistic leaders were
opposed to EDC (e.g. MM. Auriol, Moch, Naegelen, Lacoste, Lejeune)
4. For details see Williams, p. 73, n. 27. Also cf. below, pp. 403-4.
THE SOCIALIST PARTY 91
while Guy Mollet defended it in association with his bitterest critic, AndnS
Philip. The militants favoured the treaty and so did the executive which they
chose. But a majority among the deputies turned against it and finally defied
party discipline to ensure its defeat.
The bitterness of the EDC fight was carried over into the dispute on
Algerian policy which racked SFIO after its return to office in 1956. Robert
Lacoste and Max Lejeune, who were mainly responsible for the policy, were
attacked not only by the old opponents of participation but also by those
'governmental' Socialists who had been their allies against EDC.5 But their
critics found little support in the party, least of all in the big federations (of
which only Bouches-du-Rhone, led by Gaston Defferre the mayor of Mar-
seilles, inclined to their side). By now not much trace remained of the com-
radely feelings which had held the party together through earlier internal
battles, and by 1958 many of the Algerian opposition were on the brink of
secession. In the May crisis they won the support of some of Mollet's closest
associates (such as Albert Gazier and Christian Pineau) and carried a majority
of both deputies and executive against de Gaulle's candidature, which the
general secretary favoured. But though this reinforcement of the opposition
threatened Mollet's position, at the September 1958 conference he was saved
by Defferre - who credited de Gaulle with liberal intentions in Algeria. The
conference therefore approved the proposed constitution of the Fifth Republic,
and the old critics, still led by Depreux, Mayer and Philip, withdrew to form a
new party.6
2. ORGANIZATION AND FOLLOWING
SFIO was democratically organized. The basic unit, the section, corresponded
to the lowest local government area, the commune (or in large towns to the
arrondissement or ward, Lyons for instance having eight sections) ; but while
there are 38,000 communes in France there were in 1959 only 8,000 SFIO
sections. A departmental federation had to have at least five sections and a
hundred members. These units elected their own officers and conference
delegates and controlled their own finances, settling the amount of the sub-
scription and paying over a fixed sum to the centre; prosperous members paid
more than the minimum, but local branches were prone to keep the balance.
5. None of the 17 deputies who protested against the Algerian and Suez policies in December
1956 had supported EDC, although outside Parliament Andr6 Philip had.
6. On it see below, pp. 173-4; and on SFIO divisions, MacRae, no. 149, pp. 203-9. Leaders*
positions for Mollet (F) and against him (A) can be tabulated:
Traditionalism Participation EDC Algeria de Gaulle
Majority 1945-47 1949 1954 1956-57 Sept. 1958
(Mollet) F F F F F
Gazier A, then F F F ?F A
Pineau A F F ?F A
Lacoste A F A F F
Lejeune A F A F F
Defferre A F F A F
Auriol A F A A F
Moch A F A A F
Philip A A F A A
Mayer A A : A A A
Depreux A A A A A
92 THE PARTIES
The Socialists were the poorest of the big parties, and in the 1951 election
probably spent no more than £100,000. 7 Only about ten wealthy federations
could afford a full-time secretary. But after the party took office in 1956
SFIO headquarters employed 'federal assistants' resident in the provinces
and travelling 'national delegates'.8
At conference the smaller federations had more than their share of delegates
(who voted as individuals in electing the executive) but hardly more than their
share of 'mandates' for other votes. In 1951, for instance, there were fifty-five
federations with fewer than 500 members and six with more than 3,000; the
former with 16% of the total membership had 112 delegates out of 374 and
649 mandates out of 3,937; the latter with 40% of the membership had no
more delegates (113) but many more mandates (1,606).9 Delegates were
usually mandated to vote for one or another of the long policy motions pro-
posed - as a rule - by deputies and party leaders. Many federations split their
votes proportionately between the different motions. But the large working-
class federations (like a British trade union at a Labour party conference)
carried habits of industrial solidarity into politics and usually voted as a
block; since the smaller federations were always divided, the big federations
were unbeatable if they stood together.
Before the war the executive was elected by proportional representation
from the different factions (tendances) which each had its own local following,
its own journal and sometimes even its own subscription.10 In 1944, in an
attempt to make SFIO more than a mere federation of parties, the executive's
powers were extended, and its cohesion reinforced by abolishing PR. This
change made possible the internal revolution of 1946. In future, members of
any minority wing sat on the executive by grace of a majority which might
always withdraw its favours.11 In 1951 Jules Moch was ejected for suggesting
with his usual unforgivable clarity that, as the traditional proletariat was
declining in numbers and the party's main appeal was now to other social
groups, it ought to adapt its programme and vocabulary accordingly. In 1956
7. Fusilier, no. 96, p. 261 (the Communists spent ten times as much on posters alone). Cf. above,
p. 66n. For the local branches see Report to the 45th Conference, pp. 15-16. (The party authorities
sometimes io practice appointed a section secretary when no member appeared suitable.)
8. Critics charged that these organizers influenced the federations to which they were sent by
their services, money and pressure : A. Philip, Le Socialisme trahi (1957), p. 200. It seems that they
did, for at the 1957 conference the share of the total opposition vote cast by the 14 federations
to which a federal assistant had been assigned dropped from 18% to under 10% (including
Seine - see below, p. 99 - it fell from 34% to 18%). The opposition increased elsewhere in the
provinces but carried only 5 of these 14 federations (9 previously), and only 39% of their
votes (58 % previously). But the numbers involved were too small to affect the result. (From
Report to the 50th Conference ; cf. pp. 32, 146-7, 159-60.) In 1960 federal assistants were abolished
and more national delegates appointed. It may be no coincidence that SFIO increased staff on
entering the government and reduced staff soon after leaving it.
9. Report to the 44th Conference, pp. 219-20. Each federation had one mandate plus another
for every 25 members, and two delegates plus another for every 15 mandates (or fraction over 7).
The mandate system of voting was also used at the national council (conseil national) ; this body
was largely attended by party officials who were responsive to the leadership : Grosser, pp. 1 14-15.
Rich federations like Pas-de-Calais or Se"ne"gal inflated their voting strength within the party by
buying more cards than they could dispose of: Duverger, Parties, p. 81.
10. Ibid., p. 120.
11. The minimum vote needed for election in a given year has often been as high as 60 % of the
total: Laponce, p. 59, Cf. Ligou, pp. 588, 620-1, 632,
THE SOCIALIST PARTY 93
two opponents of Guy Mollet's Algerian policy lost their seats on an enlarged
executive. In 1960 all the minority members resigned when one, Georges
Dardel, was thrown off by the majority for accepting Communist votes in his
election as chairman of the Seine departmental council.
As the organ of the rank and file, the executive frequently clashed with the
parliamentarians. Suspicion of their integrity had marked the very foundation
of the party, and was kept alive by the tendency of French politicians to start a
career on the Left and conclude it on the Right. At first no parliamentarian
could belong to the executive (or represent his federation at a national council) ;
but in 1913 ten members of parliament were allowed on the executive of 31,
and in 1956 the number was raised to 20 out of 45. Moreover, through succes-
sive conflicts and compromises the deputies gradually increased their influence
in ministerial crises.12
Control over discipline, however, remained with the representatives of the
rank and file. The executive could dissolve and reconstitute a rebellious
federation such as Seine in 1939, or Pyr6n6es-Orientales in 1950.13 Recalcitrant
party leaders were often subjected to mild penalties by the executive or severe
ones by the national council/In 1954 half the parliamentary party successfully
defied the executive in their revolt over ED C; next year seventeen deputies
(including Mayer, Moch and Lejeune) were expelled for repeating the offence
over German rearmament, though they were soon readmitted because of the
imminent general election. Isolated rebels were less fortunate: Philip was
expelled in 1957 for his denunciation of the leadership, and Mayer driven to
resign his seat soon afterwards for opposing internment camps for Algerians
in France.14 By this time the party machinery had become subordinated to
the government; in 1956-57, with the general secretary as prime minister, the
executive met less frequently and rarely discussed politics.15 The anathemas
once hurled by a militant rank and file at leaders who compromised themselves
with the ruling class were now reserved by ministers for their inconveniently
intransigent critics.
The split at Tours in 1920 had divided the parliamentarians from the rank
and file. Membership fell from 180,000 to 52,000 in 1921. 16 By 1936 it had
regained the former level, and a year later the record figure of 285,000 was
attained (though nearly a third of these had fallen away by the outbreak of
war). At the Liberation came another influx, and in 1946 a new record of
12. See below, pp. 403-4. On their financial contribution see above, p. 65n,
13. On it see below, p. 328. Seine was led before the war by a perennial rebel, Marceau Pivert.
14. In June 1957 Mayer and 25 other deputies refused to vote the special powers allowing the
government to set up camps, and in November he alone voted against them ; for this he was
* suspended* by the party for the whole Parliament (i.e. he lost his committee seat — he was chair-
man of the foreign affairs committee - and was supposed not to speak without party leave). In
March 1958 he became president of the League for the Rights of Man, and chose to resign his
seat rather than face expulsion for his next offence against discipline. (Philip was expelled, techni-
cally, for publishing his criticisms in non-Socialist papers - Socialist ones being closed to him.)
15. In 1951-56 it had averaged 39 meetings between July and March. But from July 1956 to
March 1957 it met only 18 times: Report to the 49th Conference, p. 150. It had no opportunity
to discuss Suez: Philip, p. 200. Of its 45 members, 9 were ministers.
16. Rimbert, no. 190, p. 125. The Communists attracted 130-140,000 members but only
13 deputies; SFIO kept 53 deputies but only 30,000 members: Walter, pp. 45, 50, 53.
94 THE PARTIES
354,000 was reached. For the next eight years membership - as in other
parties - steadily declined; for the Socialists this was the first drop lasting
more than two years and also the first to include a general election year, 1951.
At the end of 1954 they claimed only 113,000 - almost the lowest figure since
1928.17 But in the pre-election year of 1955 there was a slight increase, and at
the end of 1957 they claimed 1 18,000.
The party's voting strength fell sharply, from 4J million in October 1945 to
2| million in June 1951. From 20% of those voting in 1932, and 19% in 1936
(before woman suffrage) the Socialist share increased to 23% in 1945, only to
fall back in three successive general elections to 14% six years later. But the
decline slowed after 1946 and was reversed in 1956, when SFIO recovered a
little to 3J million votes (14fc% of the poll). It retained this total in the Fifth
Republic's first election in 1958.
Before this revival many observers claimed that the Socialists were taking
over the Radical party's old electoral following. The 1952 poll found that they
had fewer supporters than any other major party in the big cities with over
100,000 inhabitants, and drew 42% of their votes from the rural communes
with under 2,000. (This strength in the provinces was both cause and effect of a
provincial press far more flourishing than that of the Communists.18) It was
rarely based on the industrial proletariat, for in most areas working-class
Socialist support came from small plants, secondary industries, and state or
public employees - the fields where Force ouvri&re also found recruitment
easiest.19
In 1956 the limited Socialist electoral revival occurred in the industrial
departments, which were little affected by the ravages of Poujadism, and it was
offset by losses in the rural south.20 In Nord and Pas-de-Calais the Socialist
vote exceeded the Communist for the first time for a decade. S FI O's * Radical-
ization' had plainly been exaggerated, for though the party attracted only
15-20% of the manual workers, even this limited proletarian following made
up more than 40% of the total Socialist vote. Moreover the remainder came
from white-collar workers rather than from the small businessmen, artisans
17. In 1934 it was only 110,000. See Rimbert, no. 190, p. 125 for figures up to 1950; Fauvet,
Forces, p. 87, for those of 1945-50; Reports to next year's conference for those of later years;
Duverger, Parties, pp. 8 Iff., for a discussion of their significance. The membership claimed is the
number of party cards sold; it is inflated, e.g. in 1954 (113,000 claimed) monthly subscriptions
paid were only twelve times 88,000. Moreover some subscriptions were bogus : see above, n. 9.
Coston, p. 392, estimates the real figure for 1958 at only 60,000, barely half the number claimed.
18. Its circulation was half as great again in 1952 : Bauchard, no. 9b, p. 601. It was well over
twice as great in 1958 : J. Kayser in Elections 195 8, p. 82. But in Paris Le Populaire clung to life
with the utmost difficulty. (For the 1952 poll see Appendix vn.)
19. Rimbert in Partis et Classes, pp. 204-7. At Lyons in 1958 75 % of salaried or wage-earning
members of SFIO were in FO unions, 10% in CGT unions (mainly those like the printers who
had no alternative) and 15% in no union: Grawitz, no. 115, p. 463 - she confirms Rimbert
throughout. On FO and SFIO see Lorwin, especially pp. 186-7, 291-4; Rioux, pp. 81-2, 130-1 ;
Godfrey, pp. 54-6 ; Williams, p. 71 ; Ehrmann, no. 82, pp. 158-9.
20. The 15 most industrial departments (see Map 21) with 35% of the electorate contributed
30% of SFIO's losses in 1951 but 80% of its net gains in 1956. These gains were greatest in the
most industrial areas ; at Nantes, after the 1955 strikes, the Socialist vote more than doubled (a
much bigger gain than that of the Communists) while elsewhere in Loire-Inf6rieure it rose only
by 50 % ; in the Lille and Arras constituencies it rose by nearly half, but in the rest of Nord and
Pas-de-Calais only by a quarter; at Marseilles SFIO's share was 3 % up, in the rest of Bouches-
du-Rh6ne 1 % down. And see Pierce, no. 180, p. 414; and Map 10.
THE SOCIALIST PARTY 95
and professional men on whom the Radicals had relied. Civil servants were
particularly attracted to SFIO, and in 1951 it was estimated that with their
wives and retired colleagues they made up 30% of its vote.21
Though the civil servants played the leading part in the life of the party,
more workers belonged to it than was often supposed. In 1951 an inquiry
covering 14,000 members found that a third were workers (25% in private and
9% in nationalized industry). Another 15% were civil servants (including
postmen and teachers); almost a quarter of the membership thus enjoyed the
status and security of state employees. In the leadership, both local and
national, the workers were under- and the civil servants over-represented. In
1951 the latter provided 37% of the federal committees, and among the hun-
dred-odd Socialist deputies who sat in the Assemblies of the Fourth Republic
there were never more than four industrial workers or fewer than thirty
teachers.22
Young men were almost as rare as industrial workers in the Socialist leader-
ship. The party youth organization was suspect; in 1947 it was deprived of its
autonomy for Trotskyist heresies. Ten years later it existed in only forty-eight
of France's ninety departments.23 In 1951 only 30% of party members were
under 40; they were in a majority only on one federal committee in eight. In
1946 SFIO had fewer deputies aged 35 or less than any rival party; in 1956,
none at all. This situation in part reflected the influence of the civil servants,
whose long professional struggles against favouritism had given them an
ingrained preference for 'advancement in order of stupidity'. But their
pressure only reinforced the traditional insistence of the militants on long
service as a condition of promotion. Five years' membership was a minimum
for almost any important function in the party. Even in all the turbulence of
Liberation - with a new generation emerging from the Resistance and the
old one thinned by wartime losses and a drastic purge - SFIO still chose far
more pre-war politicians as candidates than any other party.24
Moreover in practice, though not in theory, the Socialists seemed to share
the Radicals' traditional antipathy to females in politics. Anticlerical parties
were handicapped in appealing to women, among whom religious observance
was much commoner than among men. But, the Communists apart, they were
21. Proletarians 40 % : Dogan in Hamon, pp. 1 13-14. In Paris the proportions were about 10 %
and 33% (Klatzmann, Elections 1956, p. 273) and at Marseilles 17% and 30% (Olivesi, pp. 251,
261, 268, 271). Fauvet's estimates of 15% and 21% in all France (Cockpit, p. 93n., Dechirte,
p. 86n.) omit wives and agricultural workers. Civil servants 30%: R. Catherine in Partis et
Classes, pp. 140-1 (roughly confirmed by the 1952 poll). In 1956 Klatzmann thought that one
white-collar worker in six voted Socialist in Paris (loc. cit.) ; and at Marseilles SFIO got a third
of the white-collar vote and drew 43 % of its own vote from this group (Olivesi, pp. 259-61, 271).
Long before the war Herriot had quoted an inn-sign which he applied to SFIO : 'Restaurant
ouvrier. Cuisine bourgeoise. '
22. Rimbert in Partis et Classes, p. 197, for the 1951 inquiry, and no. 191, p. 297 for federal
committees. For candidates and deputies before 1956, Williams, p. 70 (civil servants regularly
outnumbered workers by ten to one); for the 1956 Assembly, Dogan in Elections 1956, p. 456.
In 1951 14% and in 1956 17% of SFIO deputies were manual or white-collar workers (see
above, p. 68n.). N
23. Report to the 50th Conference, pp. 54-7 (but in 1950 it had existed hi only 30 departments).
The Socialist students had to be reorganized again at this time (1957).
24. Under-forties : Rimbert in Partis et Classes, p. 196, and no. 191 , p. 292. Deputies : Duverger,
Parties, p. 168, and no. 81, p. 1880. 'L'avancementau tour de bete', ibid., p. 1882. On candidates
in 1945 see p. llln. ; on SFIO and young voters in 1956 see final references above, p. 78, n.28.
96 THE PARTIES
not particularly hospitable to those they did recruit. In 1951 only 12% of
SFIO members were women; there were only a hundred among the 1,800
members of federal committees and never more than one out of thirty-one on
the executive (at one time even the women's committee had a male chairman).
The family associations and similar organizations were almost all in clerical or
Communist hands.25
Not surprisingly, recruitment dried up. Young people were discouraged by
the party's stress on seniority, and women by its indifference to the newly
enfranchized half of the electorate. Some potential supporters were antagonized
by its faded Marxist vocabulary, others alienated by its narrow anticlericalism,
and yet others offended by its repeated - if sometimes reluctant - compromis-
ing of the principles it still professed. Whereas before 1939 the proportion of
new members to old ones in any given year had never fallen below 15%, for
years after 1945 it was under 4%.26
The Socialists were thus a predominantly lower-middle-class and white-
collar party which kept some local support from industrial workers. They
acted as democratic reformists while still talking the language of Marxist
revolutionaries. Their practice bore no relation to their professions; but in
1945-46 they refused to adapt their professions to their practice. This re-
affirmation of a radical creed was a profoundly conservative gesture.27 But the
gesture inhibited an effective reformist appeal.
3. CHARACTERISTICS
The option of 1945-46 affected the party's internal character as well as its
capacity for expansion. It strengthened the influence of conservative forces
within SFIO by giving them a cloak of militancy, and it sharpened the con-
trast between brave revolutionary words and cautious reformist actions. But
while impeding Socialist recruitment among white-collar workers and
Catholics, it did not win back workers in industry.
SFIO had always suffered from the anti-political tradition of French trade
unionism. This semi-anarchist heritage had deprived it of any organic con-
nection with the industrial labour movement. French unionism was always
based on the civil servants and other employees of the state;28 strong co-
operatives or mass unions in private industry, so familiar in Britain or
Scandinavia, were unknown in France. Indeed when industrial workers
25. Fauvet, Forces, p. 8. The 1952 poll found that 41 % of Socialist voters were women. For
members, Rimbert in Partis et Classes, p. 195, and for committees, no. 191, p. 292. When the
executive was enlarged to 45 in 1956, a second woman won a seat.
26. Duverger, Parties, p. 89.
27. Blum told the conference after Mayer's defeat: *You are nostalgic for everything that
might recall this Party as you knew it in other days . . . you are afraid of what is new.' Mollet's
successful motion proclaimed '.. . . that all attempts at revisionism must be condemned, parti-
cularly those inspired by a false humanism whose real purpose is to mask that fundamental reality,,
the class struggle. ... It is these deviations and errors which tomorrow would lead [us] down the
same path as the Radical party. . . . To enrich Marxism . . . and in no way dilute it ... to
combat all forms of imperialist exploitation, to help the overseas peoples in their struggle for
emancipation . . .': Ligou, pp. 544-7 (cf. Grosser, p. 114). After the 1962 election SFIO re-
affirmed its 1945 programme professing its revolutionary aims.
28. Martinet, no. 156, especially p. 776 ; Ehrmann, Labor, p. 25 ; Lorwin, pp. 60-1 ; Rioux, pp.
37-8 ; Godfrey, pp. 24-5. State employees were naturally predisposed to emphasize electoral and
parliamentary rather than industrial or revolutionary action.
THE SOCIALIST PARTY 97
without organizational experience did come flooding into the unions in 1919,
1936 and 1944-45, they were organized mainly by the Communists or their
revolutionary forerunners.29 In the Fourth Republic, therefore, there were
only a few departments where the Socialist party retained its hold on impor-
tant sections of the industrial working class. But these few, where the real
political struggle was between the two proletarian parties, had both the largest
and the most anti-Communist federations in SFIO.
If the Socialists could not satisfy the revolutionary workers, their appeal to
the reformists was hampered by the religious quarrel.30 They could never
attract the Christian proletariat because of the fervour with which they clung
to the anticlerical tradition. Lalciti was the hidden reef that wrecked the
proposal for a French Labour party which Blum and his friends vainly
launched at the Liberation. Many Resisters then held that only by combining
Socialists and progressive Catholics in one solid organization could the
democratic Left carry weight in coalition politics and impose reforms which
might loosen the Communist hold on the French workers. When the Resis-
tance had challenged the assumption that no Catholic could be a good repub-
lican, there appeared a chance— probably slender and certainly fleeting — to
build a party which could reconcile devout Catholic citizens with the Republic
and Catholic workers with socialism.
The first reconciliation was achieved by others and the second was not
achieved at all. The foresight of a few Resisters and SFIO leaders could not
overcome the determination of the militants to stand by their old creed and
flag. The Socialist rank and file would not welcome the Resistance generation,
which broke away with UD S R or retired into disillusionment.31 And though
they gradually learned to work with the new party of progressive Catholics
they never trusted, understood or sympathized with it: they preferred to vote
Radical or even sometimes Gaullist rather than MRP.
In the Fourth Republic anticlericalism came to centre in SFIO; in 1955
Guy Mollet was still describing MRP as a party which had no right to exist
because it was not based on a class.32 In many rural areas laicite was the real
electoral watershed - and the few places where SFIO maintained its vote in
the disastrous election of 1951 were almost all among those where it fought
unencumbered by clerical allies.33 Parliamentary co-operation between
29. Lorwin, pp. 52-7, 74-5, 108-9; Ehrmann, Labor, pp. 20-3, 51-2; Godfrey, pp. 33, 46;
Rioux, pp. 22-6, 49-50, 54, 75-6.
30. See Derczansky, no. 68, p. 677.
31. The price the party paid could be clearly seen in Bouches-du-Rhone. In the first consti-
tuency (Marseilles) its new young leaders - Gaston Defferre, a pre-war Socialist who rose through
the Resistance, and Francis Leenhardt, one of the few who came over from UDSR - defeated a
traditionalist revolt in 1945 (below, p. 388n.). From November 1946 SFIO made steady progress,
even at the 1951 and 1958 elections when it lost ground nationally, gaining especially among
white-collar but also among industrial workers. But in the second constituency it had an elderly,
discredited and traditionalist standard-bearer, Felix Gpuin, and it lost steadily until his retire-
ment in 1958 - when under new and younger leadership it made striking advances. See Olivesi,
especially pp. 274-6. ^
32. AP 1955, p. 59. In the Fifth Republic Mollet suggested that a cur& might well become
secretary of a Socialist section. For SFIO's strong appeal to Protestants see Schram, pp. 133, 149,
186, 201 ; Paysans, pp. 378-9.
33. There were SFIO-MRP alliances in 55 of the 103 French constituencies, but in only two
of the eight where SFIO held or increased its share of the vote; for details see Williams, p. 74n.
{over
98 THE PARTIES
Socialists and MRP was buried in 1951 by the Barang<§ bill subsidizing
church schools; five years later it could be resuscitated, ironically enough,
only because the Socialist proposal to repeal that law was blocked by the
very Mendesist Radicals against whom the revived Socialist-MRP under-
standing was largely directed. To the teachers who were so numerous in
SFIO this was the crucial question; and its electoral importance made it an
important link between the rank and file in the country and the compromisers
in Parliament.
Indeed many Socialist deputies and would-be deputies were really Radicals
in spirit. The most distinguished of these was Paul Ramadier, sometime
chairman of the parliamentary freemasons' group, prime minister in 1947, and
consistent champion of Socialist participation in government. Freemasonry,
once the backbone of Radicalism, had begun to invade SFIO between the
wars ; and in the Fourth Republic one wing of it evolved rapidly towards the
far Right and carried a section of the party along with it.34 But for years
the traditionalists of the Left found a common bond in anticlericalism, and as
late as 1957 the Socialist bosses preferred the premiership to go to Radicals as
illiberal as Bourg&s-Maunoury or as prudently ineffective as Gaillard, rather
than to an enlightened MRP leader like Pflimlin.
Comfortably installed in national and local administration, and strategically
placed at the political centre of gravity, SFIO grew increasingly reluctant to
disturb the workings of the System. No party defended the regime more
resolutely against the RPF assault. The Socialists voted for Mend^s-France
but stayed out of his government, and lest he steal their own (muted) thunder
they gave only grudging and short-lived sympathy to his campaign to revitalize
French political life. On institutional questions they were staunchly con-
servative, opposing the stronger executive which their social and economic
policies seemed to require, rejecting any suggestion of a presidential system,
and even resisting attempts to give fairer representation to the big cities -
where there were so few Socialist voters.35 Over both Indo-China and Algeria
they were radicals in opposition but standpatters in office. Only in their con-
sistent support of European economic union did they seriously favour a major
change - but one supported by most centre politicians, even the most con-
servative.
To many voters, therefore, SFIO seemed a timid, old-fashioned, bourgeois
party, sadly lacking in dynamic energy and ceaselessly buffeted by stronger
rivals. This impression was not always justified. At the Liberation Socialists
showed courage and foresight in resisting the anti-German chauvinism of
Gaullists, Communists and MRP. The short-lived all-Socialist government of
(One Socialist allied to MRP was the anticlerical zealot Maurice Deixonne, who a few weeks
later led a furious attack on the Barang6 bill.)
34. Pre-war : Thibaudet, Icttes, pp. 186-7 ; Fauvet, Cockpit, p. 138, Dichirte, p. 132 ; Bardonnet,
U Evolution de la structure du Parti radical, pp. 238-42; below, pp. 115, 434-5. Post-war: the
'McCarthyite' prefect of police Jean Baylot (pp. 46n., 347-8) was an active freemason and
a member of SFIO until the 1958 election (when he was returned as a Conservative deputy
endorsed by Georges Bidault's Christian Democrats). On right-wing freemasonry see Coston,
pp. 350-3 ; on Baylot also ibid., p. 504.
35. On cities see Goguel, no. 112, p. 85, who refers to SFIO without naming it; JO (Stnat)
11 July 1961, pp. 765, 768-9; above, p. 94.
THE SOCIALIST PARTY 99
December 1946 acted with vigour and energy; Moch took over the ministry
of the interior when it was the least coveted post in the government and left it
the most sought-after; Mollet andLacoste did not evade responsibility in 1956-
1957, however grave the responsibilities they incurred. But all too often the
party was obliged by its own indispensability to take office in a coalition which
it did not control, and responsibility for policies which it did not approve. In
four of the five Assemblies elected between 1945 and 1958 (and in many
municipal councils throughout France) it held the pivotal position once
occupied by the Radicals : that of the party without whose consent no majority
could be found and no administration formed.
Before 1956 it was widely believed that as the Socialists slipped into the
Radical party's social and geographical skin they were also acquiring its
political habits and temperament. But SFIO's electoral success in 1956
reversed the 'Radicalization' of its voting base while apparently accelerating
the 'Radicalization' of its political behaviour. The party's reputation had
already suffered from the charge that associates of Socialist ministers were
involved in every major scandal from the Algerian wine deals in 1946 to the
'affair of the generals' in 1950. Now, on taking office, SFIO distributed more
patronage to its supporters than any party had ventured to disburse for years.36
Thereby it encouraged what a bitter critic called 'the invasion of certain sec-
tions by men devoid of any principle'. The influx was particularly marked in
Paris, and perhaps explains the Seine federation's unusual, sudden and short-
lived support for the party leadership.37 But it occurred in the provinces also ;
in Lyons in 1958 one member in twenty was a police official, and of these two-
thirds had joined SFIO only since the party had re-entered the government.38
Locally, too, the Socialists were often a party of administration rather than
of opposition. In big towns they kept a large membership, wrote an ex-
deputy, only as a 'mutual aid society of municipal employees' in places where
the mayor 'belonged'. In 1957 they claimed 60,000 municipal councillors,
more than half the nominal figure of party members. Like most French
parties they had become an organization of local politicians, but one enjoying
a pivotal position in many councils ; thus they controlled Marseilles in 1945 in
alliance with the Communists, and again after 1953 in opposition to them.
This strategic situation made them an especially attractive choice for would-
be mayors and administrators, and in national elections SFIO's influence
depended heavily on the prestige of these local leaders.39
36. King, no. 131, pp. 437, 441. See also Coston, pp. 397-8, on colonial appointments ; Plan-
chais, pp. 33-4, on military ones ; Philip, p. 199, on the radio ; Isorni, Silence, pp. 45-6 ; Siegfried
in AP 1956, p. viii, 1957, p. viii. On scandals see below, pp. 299, 339n.
37. 'Invasion' : Philip, p. 203. For similar influences in another party see Bardonnet, pp. 116,
118.
38. Grawitz, no. 115, p. 462. In 1957 this local party had a resident federal assistant and was
visited by a national delegate, and nearly doubled its membership (newcomers 45% of the 1958
total, see table on p. 458). Among these recruits far fewer were trade unionists than among the
longer-standing members (26% as against 64%, calculated from figures on pp. 458, 463) and the
former were not even much younger than the latter (average age 43 as against 49). The newcomers*
attitude to policy is not recorded, but the federation switched from opposing to supporting the
leadership at the 1957 party conference (cf. n. 8 above).
39. See (e.g.) C. Leleu on Isere in Elections 1956, pp. 381-4. On Bouches-du-Rhone in 1956,
Olivesi, pp. 30, 92, 161-2, 182; in 1958, ibid., pp. 104-6, 112, 138, 201, 263, 274-6, and Williams
[over
100 THE PARTIES
The contrast between the party's formal creed and its day-to-day practice
became increasingly evident during the life of the Fourth Republic (notably
when Mollet cited Marx in his defence of the Suez expedition).40 Yet the
leadership maintained a control over the party which its predecessors would
have envied. Hitherto SFIO militants had never been charged with excessive
concern for power or indifference to principle, but rather with a doctrinaire
intransigence which constantly impeded the compromises without which a
system based on party coalitions would become unworkable. In the past the
rank and file, having the last word on policy, had repeatedly defied the parlia-
mentary leaders - though almost always with disastrous results: they had
chosen Communism in 1920, helped paralyse Parliament and endanger the
Republic in the early thirties, favoured appeasement later in the decade, and in
1945-46 prevented any revision of the party's doctrine, any broadening of its
base or any introduction of new blood into its leadership.
Yet 1946 was the militants' last revolt. When German rearmament strained
SFIO's cohesion and discipline in 1954, it was the parliamentarians who were
the rebels. And those of them who had flouted the party's code of conduct
over EDC were all the more reluctant to repeat the offence over Algeria -
especially when a Socialist premier was pursuing enlightened policies of which
they approved both at home and in Black Africa. Despite their internal dis-
putes the Socialists could still regard their party as a community and be proud
of the freely accepted discipline which symbolized its solidarity.41
But the breakdown of this discipline over EDC affected the leadership also.
A major policy endorsed by the majority of the party had been defeated
owing to the deliberate and repeated defiance of its representatives in Parlia-
ment; were this to happen again, SFIO would be in danger of disintegration.
In these conditions discipline was reinforced, and extended to penalize not
merely votes cast against party policy but also criticisms levelled against it.42
This rigidity might have been appropriate to revolutionaries in a revolutionary
situation : it was unacceptable to democrats in revolt against policies which,
they thought, betrayed the party's principles. The camps and prisons of
Algeria finally destroyed the solidarity and comradeship which had survived
all previous quarrels, and the minority found family life in the vieille maison
and Harrison in Elections Abroad, pp. 37n., 83-4. On Somme in 1958, J. Blondel in ibid., pp. 100-2.
'Mutual aid' : Conte, La Succession, p. 54. In 1951 SFIO was called: 'a party of patronage . . .
of ministers and deputies, mayors and county councillors, prefects and police officials, a true
coalition of the ambitious and the interested, within which a few old-style militants curiously
survive as political small rentiers, sadly living on the capital of their memories' ; Martinet, no.
155, p. .55.
40. At the 1957 conference: Monde, 2 July 1957.
41. Grosser, p. 113. Yet suppressed resentments might prevail in a secret ballot: see Melnik
and Leites, pp. 80-2.
42. No one preached the need for rigour more forcibly than Andr6 Philip, who was so soon to
suffer from it. But critics who had respected discipline did not escape. Madame Brossolette in
1958 declined (on party instructions) an offer to stand as the only left-wing candidate in an impor-
tant Paris by-election to the Assembly ; a few weeks later the majority denied her re-election to her
seat in the upper house. Ainong those who resigned from the party in 1958 were fidouard Depreux
(below, p. 400n.), and Mireille Osmin, another critic who as candidate in a Paris by-election in
i957 had obediently advocated the Algerian policy of the majority.
THE SOCIALIST PARTY 101
increasingly intolerable. After their resignations Guy Mollet pronounced
their epitaph: 'They have never been real socialists.'43
Early in the century Peguy said that 'tout commence en mystique et tout
finit en politique'. The remark still applies to the Socialists (as to every Fourth
Republican party which ever ventured to claim a mystique at all). An extreme
right-wing critic lamented SFIO's 'intellectual downfall'. A left-wing
observer noted that: 'Its doctrine is an embarrassment. It dare not reject it, or
apply it, or renovate it: another aspect of the party's sclerosis. SFIO still calls
itself revolutionary, but neither its leaders nor its cadres nor its members nor
its voters have any desire to make a revolution.' Yet with all its failings the
party obstinately maintained and even slightly improved its position during
the Fourth Republic. As Jacques Fauvet put it, 'If today it no longer has the
method of Marx nor the faith of Jaures nor the austerity of Guesde, what has
it left? Power, no doubt: which is much - and nothing.'44
There were many to accuse SFIO of thinking power was everything. Yet
the only serious attempts to reconcile the industrial workers to the Republic
were made under Socialist inspiration in 1936 and in 1945-46; their failure
should not deprive the party of the credit for tackling a task which most of its
rivals preferred to ignore or obstruct. In 1956, with no majority either in Par-
liament or in the country, the Socialists succeeded in passing some useful
reforms at home and in preventing the errors committed in North Africa
from being repeated south of the Sahara. And if they failed disastrously to
solve the desperately difficult problem of Algeria, progress was not so very
much faster under a successor with far greater prestige and freedom of action.
The party's opportunism in these years was violently attacked by Socialists
and others at home and abroad. But they were mistaken in thinking that its.
course was wholly determined by the character of its leader and his skill at
manipulating the machine. Over EDC in 1954 and de Gaulle's election as
premier in 1958, Guy Mollet failed to convince his party. While his success
was normally assured by the support of Nord and Pas-de-Calais, he usually
had a majority of the other votes as well; in any case the numerical weight of
the two big federations only reflected their unusual achievement in retaining
a mass working-class base. And when as prime minister Mollet was denounced
for failing to apply party instructions (often by the very same critics who had
attacked him ten years before for trying to impose party orders on the
Ramadier ministry) he could call in return on the strong loyalties evoked by
the first Socialist-led government for nearly a decade.
Still more important than party loyalty was the support of a public opinion
to whose moods he was uncannily sensitive. In France as elsewhere, a politi-
cian charged by his fellow-partisans with 'putting country before party'
tends to find his standing with other citizens enhanced. If Mollet unjustly
43. Combat, 19 April 1960. To others the vieille maison was still home ; even when the Socialists
decided to support Lacoste's removal from Algiers, he refused to leave SFIO and lead the settlers.
* You don't throw off a party like an old coat' : J. Ferniot, Les Ides de Mai (1958), p. 7.
44. Fauvet, Forces, p. 67 (from Monde, 4 October 1947); Coston, p. 390 (' downfall') ; Duver-
ger, no. 81, p. 1871 (' doctrine'). But some observers still found SFIO quite distinctive in
professing concern for doctrine and looking beyond Parliament to the country : Melnik and Leites,
pp. 53-5.
102 THE PARTIES
despised the intellectuals and their criticisms, so did many other Frenchmen.
If he was nationalist in 1956, so were his compatriots ; if he turned to de Gaulle
in 1958, so did they. Again like the Radicals of twenty years before, the Social-
ists were among the gravediggers of a Republic less because they misrepre-
sented the French people than because they represented them all too well.
Chapter 8
THE CHRISTIAN DEMOCRATS (MRP)
1. HISTORY
The Mouvement rdpublicain populaire represented an old tradition in French
thought, which before 1940 found no effective political expression. Ever since
Lamennais there had been Catholics who were aware of the problems created
by the industrial revolution and Catholics (not always the same ones) who
were anxious for reintegration in the French political community from which,
during much of the Third Republic, they were virtually excluded. In the early
years of this century Marc Sangnier's Sillon formed .a focus for liberal
Catholicism as important as that provided for reactionaries by Maurras and
Action francaise}- A more important electoral influence was Action liberate
populaire. This party was already in decline by 1914, but it had claimed
nearly eighty deputies a decade before.
Between the wars the progressive Catholic tradition was represented by two
small groups, the Parti democrate populaire and Jeune Republique. PDF was
based on Brittany, Alsace, Lorraine, and one or two mountainous southern
departments; commentators found it hard to classify as either Right or Left.
Jeune Republique, founded by Sangnier after the ban on Sillon, was not a party
but an extra-parliamentary 'league'. Less clearly confessional, less electorally
oriented and more progressive than PDP, it adhered to the Popular Front of
1936.
MRP had deeper roots than these predecessors, since it could tap the
social organizations sponsored by the Church or inspired by its principles:
notably the Catholic trade union movement, Confederation frangaise des
travailleurs Chretiens (CFTC) and the youth organizations like Jeunesse
ouvriere chretienne, Jeunesse agricole chretienne and Association catholique de
la jeunesse francaise. Some of these were created and others greatly extended
between the wars, and in 1932 Thibaudet, describing Christian socialism as
one of the six great French political traditions, declared that only leader-
ship was needed to create a powerful new movement.2 Francisque Gay's
paper UAube, with its contributors from PDP, CFTC, Catholic Action
and Jeune Republique, foreshadowed the combination from which MRP
emerged.
1. Both movements were condemned by the Vatican. Sangnier ended his life as honorary
president of MRP and on his death was officially honoured by the Socialist party. Maurras was
sentenced to life imprisonment for collaboration, and just before his death in 1952 he celebrated
his compassionate release by demanding the execution of the minister of justice responsible for
the post-war purge.
2. 'II y a une jeunesse, elle attend un guide; des cadres, ils sont pret pour un tableau; des
hommes, il leur faudrait un homme': Idees, p. 118. Cf. Priouret, Partis, pp. 59-61; L. Biton,
La Democratic chretienne dans la politique francaise (1954), pp. 49-61 ; Dansette, Destm du
Catholicisme francais IS 26-1956, Chapter 2 ; Bosworth, Catholicism and Crisis in Modern France,
Chapters 4 and 5, and especially pp. 24, 37, 241-2, 249, 323. Of MRP's 52 bureau and executive
members in 1959, 40 had been active in Catholic Action and similar groups: f6w?pp 254-5
(full list) cf. Williams, p. 78n. For a full account of M RP see Goguel (with M. Emaudi), Christian
Democracy in Italy and France (1952); for its relations with the Church, Bosworth, pp. 239-61.
104 THE PARTIES
These developments were accelerated by the war and the Resistance. The
progressive Catholic groups refused to compromise with fascism either at
home or abroad. They opposed Mussolini's attack on Abyssinia, Franco's
rising in Spain and the capitulation to Hitler at Munich; and after the defeat
their members and leaders could claim a splendid Resistance record. MRP
was formed in 1944 at Lyons, a centre of Catholic Resistance. Starting with
new men and a clean sheet, it set out to reclaim for the Republic two danger-
ously alienated groups, the devout Catholics and the industrial workers. It
chose to call itself a movement, not a party, in order to emphasize that its
purposes went beyond electoral success to the promotion of Catholic prin-
ciples and doctrines in society. In the purified atmosphere of the new regime it
hoped to regenerate French political life.
In pursuing these ambitious objectives it enjoyed important advantages. A
solid basis in the Catholic youth and social organizations was reinforced by
the clergy's powerful support (which was ardent among the parish priests,
more prudent among some of their formerly Vichyite superiors who were now
seeking merit by association with authentic Resisters). This strong backing
gave it the organization and discipline to compete with the Communist party.
The MRP leaders had no responsibility for either the despised inter-war
regime, the war itself, or the Vichy counter-revolution. Besides the prestige of
novelty and an admirable Resistance record, they enjoyed the tacit blessing of
the greatest of Catholic Resisters, General de Gaulle; and millions of French
Conservatives, bewildered by the disgrace of their former leaders, rallied to
the movement. So MRP achieved an initial success which astounded its own
leaders : in August 1945 it had 100,000 members, in October nearly five million
votes.3
This triumph was artificial. Only a minority of M RP voters shared the pro-
gressive views of the party militants ; the majority were Conservatives for
whom MRP was a temporary barrier against Communism and not a per-
manent political home. To preserve this swollen electoral following MRP
leaders and deputies often adopted a more conservative attitude than the
membership would have wished, but they did not move far enough Right to
satisfy their voters. During 1946 MRP first acquired new support by leading
the opposition to the first draft constitution, then forfeited it again by
reluctantly accepting the second. To millions of its voters this was com-
promising with Communism. They had as yet no alternative party; but they
expressed their resentment in the referendum of October 1946 when some two-
thirds of the MRP voters, especially in the conservative west and north-east,
responded to General de Gaulle's condemnation of the constitution. Given a
lead, they would desert a party whose aims they had never shared to follow a
more acceptable standard.
In April 1947 de Gaulle gave that lead, and the lost Conservatives went over
in droves to RPF. In the October municipal elections MRP kept only 10% of
the votes as against 25% the year before (and Gaullists cruelly suggested that
UAube, now the party paper, should change its name to Le Crfyuscule). But
when the decline was halted a smaller but more homogeneous movement
3. Wright, Reshaping, p. 76 (membership).
THE CHRISTIAN DEMOCRATS (MR?) 105
emerged.4 Although MRP deputies still felt the pressure of right-wing
competition, at the Strasbourg conference of 1949 the militants checked
Georges Bidault's attempt to flirt with RPF. And at Nantes in the following
year a left-wing candidate for general secretary obtained 40% of the vote (224
against 341 for the official nominee, Andr6 Colin).
Yet the movement was being driven inexorably towards the Right. A breach
with the Socialists over wages policy early in 1950 was healed - temporarily - a
few months later. But in the 1951 election a quarter of the MRP deputies held
their seats in alliance with the Right or even RPF and in opposition to the
Socialists; only RPF intransigence kept even Robert Schuman from allying
with these opponents of the government in which he served. Moreover, by
halving the party's numbers in the Assembly this election increased the
relative weight of its Catholic strongholds; nearly half its deputies now came
from the conservative departments of the north-west and north-east. To
avoid being outbid by RPF for the favour of the Church, MRP had to vote
for the Barang6 bill subsidizing Catholic schools and so to reopen the breach
with the Socialists.
In the new Assembly the movement supported the conservative Pinay and
Laniel cabinets. Its ministers now bore the main responsibility for repression
in Tunisia, for crisis in Morocco and for the long war in Indo-China. Its
deputies gave no support to the strikes of 1953, although these were largely
led by CFTC, and voted steadily for Conservative candidates in the presi-
dential election at the end of that year. Its leaders were the main target of
Mendes-France's criticisms, and when he came to power it formed the core
of the opposition to him - finally defeating him over North Africa despite
its approval of his policy there. In the 1956 election its candidates allied
with Conservatives and right-wing Radicals against the Left's Republican
Front.
This rightward movement was punctuated by a number of mutinies. In
1950 a third of the MRP deputies frustrated Queuille's attempt to form a con-
servative ministry. Two years later the same proportion withheld their support
from Pinay, whose administration (detested by the militants) was brought
down in December 1952 by an MRP revolt. In the long ministerial crisis of
the following summer half the deputies opposed Reynaud, three-fifths sup-
ported Mendes-France, almost all repudiated Marie, and only with extreme
reluctance did they resign themselves to Laniel. At the beginning of Mend£s-
France's government in 1954 most of them voted him special economic
powers, and on his fall they did their best to recover a left-wing reputation by
supporting a Socialist, Christian Pineau, for the premiership.
MRP's situation was as uncomfortable as that of the Socialists a few years
earlier, and its struggles to escape were as unavailing; at the 1953 congress its
president, P. H. Teitgen, argued like Socialist leaders before him that by
going into opposition the party would merely paralyse government, discredit
the regime, and play into the hands of the Right. MRP also feared that to
leave a majority which the Gaullists had just entered would enable the
4. C FTC's strength in the social security elections suggests that working-class voters were
more faithful to MRP than hourgeois ones ; see Goguel, no. 109, pp. 249-50, But see n. 14.
106 THE PARTIES
nationalist forces to halt progress towards European integration, and in par-
ticular to prevent the ratification of the European army treaty. It was largely
because they blamed Mend£s-France for the eventual defeat of E D C that they
ended by pursuing him with unrelenting hostility. At odds with the Gaullists
about foreign affairs, with the Socialists about educational and colonial policy,
and with the Radicals about almost everything, MRP were forced into the
embrace of the Conservatives whose political influence they had once hoped to
destroy.
Yet the movement did not disintegrate. The extreme left wing, which had
always been far to the Left of the Socialists, became finally disillusioned ; three
deputies broke with the party in 1950, a few parliamentarians were expelled
in 1954 - temporarily for supporting Mend£s-France or permanently for
opposing EDC - and in the 1956 election some Catholic intellectuals cam-
paigned for the Mendesist Radicals and some trade unionists for the Socialists.
On the other flank, Bidault, now a diehard colonialist, enjoyed a little support
in Parliament but none among the militants; by 1955 he was already isolated
within the party (though he stayed in it three more years). In the centre, the
great majority of members followed Pierre Pflimlin in cautiously urging pro-
gress in Morocco in 1955 and in Algeria in 1956 and 1957 ;5 out of power,
MRP leaders proved more liberal than most ministers from the Republican
Front parties. In the 1956 Assembly MRP's concentration on the European
programme, instead of reinforcing conservative coalitions, now supplied a link
with the dominant Socialist and Radical leaders. And in the Fourth Republic's
final crisis MRP, like most Radicals and half the Socialists, shifted from a
stern republican condemnation of the mutinous army of Algiers to support for
General de Gaulle as the alternative to civil war and the safeguard against
repression and reaction.
2. ORGANIZATION AND FOLLOWING
MRP's organization followed the Socialist model but was modified to
strengthen the leadership. At the base were the familiar sections and federa-
tions ; as in S FI O the subscription rate was fixed by the federations, and there
were the customary difficulties over the collection of affiliation fees by the
centre. Members of parliament did not have to subscribe part of their salaries
to party funds, but generally did so. Federations could choose candidates
freely for municipal elections, but those standing for Parliament or a depart-
mental council had to be approved by the national executive. The supreme
authority nationally was the annual conference, which was supplemented by
the usual national council (comit^ national) of about 200 members, and execu-
tive committee (commission executive) of about fifty.
These bodies differed sharply from their Socialist counterparts. Delegates
to the national council, members of parliament and of the Assembly of the
French Union had a vote at conference. There the federations were represented
not in proportion to membership as in SFIO, but under a sliding scale
favouring the smaller units. The object was to prevent the strong Breton and
5. Pflimlin won the party presidency in 1956 by 429 votes to 167 for a rival more progressive
on social questions, Francois de Menthon : AP 1956, p. 55.
THE CHRISTIAN DEMOCRATS (MRP) 107
Alsatian branches gaining an ascendancy which might have hampered the
movement's appeal elsewhere; but an indirect consequence was to weaken
potential opposition, since in a new and inexperienced party the large
federations - which lost votes by the sliding scale - were those likeliest to
challenge the leadership.6
The annual conference elected the party's president, who was almost always
a prominent ex-minister and served for three years, and the general secretary
whose tenure was unlimited; Andre Colin held the latter office from 1945
until 1955 when he was succeeded by Ren6 Simonnet. They were assisted by a
bureau dominated by the leadership.7 The officers, chairmen of parliamentary
groups and ministers (or five ex-ministers when in opposition) sat ex officio on
both the national council and executive committee and naturally carried great
weight. Deputies and senators chose a third of the national council, which
elected twelve of them to the executive. The national council further co-opted
twenty-four militants and elected five of these to the executive; these were
unlikely to be opponents of the leadership and could be members of parlia-
ment or party officials. Thus rank and file representation was severely re-
stricted. The federations elected only about half the national council, which in
turn chose their eighteen representatives on the executive of fifty-odd (in con-
trast, Socialist parliamentarians were unrepresented on the former body and
limited to a third of the latter).8 Although ex-officio members could not
number more than a fourth of the executive or parliamentarians more than
half, the rest were likely to include few rebels.
The militants were kept in check by the party's structure, but they also
showed more docility (or team spirit) than had been usual among their
Socialist counterparts. MRP conferences were dominated by ministers and
faithfully supported their policies even when these conflicted with party
orthodoxy - or with one another.9 Given the strains on an inexperienced party
which very quickly lost half its following, more internal dissension might have
been expected. But there were naturally many defections among the deputies
in the 1946 Assembly; and voting discipline in Parliament soon had to be
relaxed since any attempt to coerce the Left minority would have split the
party. During the Pinay government parliamentary discipline collapsed
altogether; although there was some improvement subsequently, the whip was
rarely enforced on recalcitrant politicians (except for spectacular offences such
as joining Mendes-France's cabinet, and even then the members expelled for
6. Duverger, Parties, p. 144 ; but the big working-class federation of Nord supported the Pinay
government. Federations had a delegate for every 50 members up to 200, every further 100 up to
5,000, and every 200 beyond. Thus whereas a Socialist federation with 200 members had 9
delegates and one with 2,000 had 81, MRP allotted them 4 and 22 respectively : Campbell, no. 47,
p. 416.
7. Six members sat ex officio ; in 1951, of the seven elected by the executive all but one were
deputies and most were ex-ministers. (The rank and file were given slightly more representation
in 1959.) On officers see Grosser, p. 121.
8. Until 1956 (above, p. 93, on SFIO). Federations had a national council delegate for every
thousand members or fraction thereof. These could not be M.P.s (but could be party officials) ;
however their alternates might be M.P.s, and in ministerial crises distant federations were often
represented by their deputy - or not at all, for attendance was often as low as half the membership:
Laponce, p. 375 n. 6.
9. Grosser, pp. 121-4.
E*
108 THE PARTIES
this were soon readmitted). For years Bidault was permitted to flout the policy
of the party, though it did refuse to support him for the premiership during the
Fourth Republic's final crisis in May 1958.10
One original feature needs special mention. In accordance with Catholic
corporatist ideas MRP required every federation to set up groups (tfquipes)
from whose nominees the national council co-opted twelve representatives.
These groups were to organize women, youth, workers, professions and
management (cadres), local councillors, and peasants ; the last was much the
most effective.11 The workers' equipe was a potential nucleus of opposition; at
the 1953 Paris conference it defeated the platform on workers' control in
industry, and in 1954 it protested against the expulsion of a left-wing deputy,
Andr<§ Denis. But disillusioned militants in MRP were more likely to leave
the party than to remain rebelliously within it. The rank and file's solidarity
and devotion to a common cause enabled ministers easily to defeat their
critics, but also preserved the movement from the violent internal clashes so
common among its rivals.
Like those rivals MRP suffered from the general decline of parties. From
over 200,000 members in 1946 it fell to under 100,000 in 1950 and under
40,000 in 1957. UAube ceased publication in 1951 ; the total circulation of the
party's press was then 600,000, only half the figure at the Liberation. MRP's
vote reached a peak of 5,600,000 in June 1946. But this too was an artificially
swollen figure, which fell by more than half when General de Gaulle launched
his RPF a year later. The remainder proved unexpectedly loyal, and in 1951,
1956 and 1958 alike the movement obtained nearly 2,400,000 votes and about
11% of the poll.12
At the Liberation MRP was a youthful party. Its early congresses were
dominated by men in their thirties; in 1946 it had the second highest propor-
tion of young deputies (after the Communists) and in 1951 the highest of all.
But the gradual disillusionment of many left-wing militants took its toll, and
little new blood was brought in. By 1960 a left-wing Catholic journalist could
describe MRP as the party of a generation which had come to maturity in the
1930's; its leaders were men of 45 to 55, and their juniors were in groups fur-
ther to the Left.13 By the end of the Fourth Republic the movement also
seemed to have tempered its early (and relative) enthusiasm for women can-
didates.
Like other Christian Democratic parties MRP included employers,
workers and peasants. Its parliamentary membership was representative of
the country's political personnel as a whole, though it included more former
10. On MRP discipline see below, pp. 402-3 ; MacRae, no. 149, pp. 194-203.
11. Bosworth, pp. 246-7; cf. R. Plantade in Paysans, p. 125.
12. For membership, Fauvet, Forces, p. 182, Dtchiree, p. 117n., and Les partis politiques dans
la France actuette, p. 99 (where he gives MRP 450,000 members in 1947); Laponce, pp. 105-6.
For the press, Bauchard, no. 9b, p. 602; Biton, p. 135; but cf. J. Kayser in Elections 1956, p. 85.
For votes, 12-3% in 1951, 11 % in 1956, 11-8% at the first ballot in 1958 (including 500,000 for
Bidaulfs dissidents): Monde, 25 November 1958.
13. Suffert, Les Catholigues et la Gauche, pp. 37, 41, 97. This is borne out by the 1956 Assembly
in which 55 % of MRP deputies (but no more than 45 % of any other party) were men in their
forties - MRP having fewer old members, as well as fewer young ones, than most of its rivals.
THE CHRISTIAN DEMOCRATS (MRP) 109
wage-earners (and fewer lawyers) than any party but the Communists.
Opinion polls suggest that among industrial workers MRP had less support
than Communists, Socialists or RPF, but that among white-collar workers
(employes) it usually led the field.14 Of the 100,000 members of MRP in 1950,
these groups accounted for 20% and a further 10% were state employees
(including railwaymen). Five years later the working-class element was down
from20%to!5%.15
The Church backed MRP strongly in the early post-war elections, but
became much more reserved after 1951, partly because the hierarchy preferred
more conservative parties.16 Moreover the movement itself (like the German
CDU) wished to attract non-Catholics and gladly promoted the few who
joined it. In the upper house a Jewish senator was chairman of an important
committee, a Protestant presided over the MRP group, and in 1959 two of
the four MRP senators from Bas-Rhin (which has many Protestant voters)
were practising adherents of that faith. But the electorate continued to regard
the party as essentially Catholic. In its north-eastern stronghold MRP did
badly wherever the hold of the Catholic Church was weak, and where it had
less support its following was concentrated in districts noted for their piety.17
As religious observance is much more widespread among women than men,
MRP was the only party which invariably had more female than male
support at the polls.18
Once M RP shed its conservative fellow-travellers of the Liberation period,
this dependence on Church support confronted it with the risk of becoming a
regional party like PDF between the wars. Of the eighteen departments where
15 % of the electorate voted for it in 1951, seven were in the west and four more
14. Among its deputies, wage-earners were 19*% in 1951 and 18% in 1956: from Dogan's
tables (p. 68n.), cf. Williams, p. 84n. Polls: for 1952 ibid., p. 452, citing Sondagesl9529 no. 3
(cf. Appendix vn) ; for 1956 and 1958 Lipset, pp. 225 and 163. They suggest that M RP took at
least 8 % (more in 1958) of the industrial and about 25 % Cess in 1958) of the white-collar workers
vote; had 20% of the peasant vote in 1951 and 30% in 1956-8 ; and drew about 15 % of its total
support from industrial workers, a little more from peasants and a little less from white-collar
workers (wives, who were probably more pro- MRP than their husbands, are not included in
these figures • and cf. p. 68 above on the distinction between state and private employees). These
polls must be treated cautiously, for when recalculated on a comparable basis they indicate some
wildly improbable changes over the years; I cite only figures that ^ "^^""^J;
They suggest that some 360,000 industrial workers voted MRP; Bosworth, pp. 273-4, gives an
estimate of 150,000 (but points out that this was only a fifth of C FTC ) membership). ^
15. For 1950, J. Fonteneau (assistant secretary) at the Lyons conference: MRP a I Action
no 115 (May 1951), p. 4; 22% were engaged in commerce or industry, 15% in agriculture, 8 /o
Tn the professions or as students; the rest were retired or ^hout occupation Lehousemves
For 1955 D P6py in Partis et Classes, pp. 212-14 ; his inquiry covered a sample of 5,000 members.
Of them 12 % were peasants, who formed only 3 % of the local and 6 % of the national leadership ;
T6k1L\^ 130-2; Goguel, Four* Republic,?. 89 ; J. Chariot
^D^^
Toucha^^
pp 47, 60 on Bouches-du-Rhone; Elections 1956, pp. 317-18 on Lyons ; ibid., pp. 386-7 on Isere,
cf Wvlie DP 217-18, and maps in Bosworth, pp. 345-58.
pp. 251-2, and below, p. 125n.
110 THE PARTIES
on the Franco- German border. Thus, despite its original preference for the
Left, MRP found its support coming from the traditionally conservative
strongholds of the Church.19 In 1951, nearly half the MRP deputies (37 out of
83, omitting overseas members) came from the west and north-east; in 1956
the proportion reached three-fifths (44 out of 70) since the movement lost
seats in the south but gained in Brittany and Alsace. But this was not the
whole story; by increasing its vote outside its traditional strongholds it fore-
shadowed the resilience it was to show, to its own surprise, in 1958.20
The growing influence of young Catholic peasant leaders was reflected in
the departmental councils, where MRP made gains at every post-war election.
By the end of the Fourth Republic MRP was firmly implanted in those parts
of the French countryside where Catholicism was still a living force; it had
built up a network of local councillors and rural militants who were both
younger and more authentically agricultural than the small-town doctors and
lawyers who had manned the pre-war Radical committees. With the help of
its new notables MRP survived even the introduction of the single-member
constituency which it had always feared.21 But in the towns it was another
story. In 1958 no MRP deputy was returned from any of the seven largest
cities in France.22
3. CHARACTERISTICS
MRP's founders held high ambitions : to reconcile the workers to the Catholic
Church and the Church to the Republic, to end the ancient quarrel over
clericalism which was preventing national unity, and to transform the quality
of French public life. Believing in a plural society of many independent social
groups, they found themselves in head-on opposition to the Jacobin tradition
which still inspired most French democrats (from Gaullists to Socialists).
They rejected equally the Marxist collectivism professed by the Left and the
conservative individualism proclaimed by the Right; and while their ideo-
logical originality set them apart from the other parties, they were proud of it
precisely because they believed it could transcend the old divisions.23
M RP's greatest asset was that its members felt they had a philosophy and a
19. In 1932 the Right won the votes of 45 % of the electorate in eight of the 18 departments
and fell below 30 % in only three ; the Radicals reached 30 % in only four and the Socialists and
Communists (even added together) in only two. Goguel, Geographic, pp. 49, 77 and 113 ; Pickles,
no. 177, p, 178 (for Radicals in 1932). In 1945 a conservative Pyrenean peasant claimed he had
always voted MRP 'like my father and grandfather' : d'Aragon in Pay sans, pp. 502-3.
20. In 1956 it gained votes in 30 constituencies of which 14 were in the south (Goguel in Elections
1956, pp. 486-7) but lost seats there because of the electoral law (see Chapter 22). See also
Pierce, no. 180, pp. 416-17; and Maps 5, 6 and 13.
21. For single-member seats, see Chapter 22. In 1951 6% of MRP deputies were peasants,
in 1956 12%, in 1958 17%: Dogan's tables (p. 68n. and Elections 1958, p. 267). For MRP's
success in rural elections, Goguel et al in ibid., pp. 353-9 ; R. Plantade in Paysans, pp. 123-7,
For Catholic rural organizations, M. Faure in ibid., pp. 345-60; Fauvet in Partis et Classes,
p. 175; Suffert, pp. 128-32; Dansette, Destin, pp. 384-90; Bosworth, pp. 122-3, 247; Wright,
nos. 226, 228; below, p. 365.
22. In 1958 Paris had 31 deputies and the six next largest cities 29. (In 1956 the capital had had
a distinctive electoral law which gave MRP seven members where under the ordinary system it
would have had none: see below, pp. 313n., 504.)
23. Einaudi and Goguel, pp. 130-2; Biton, especially pp. 83-4; cf. Bosworth, pp. 310-13;
Fogarty, Chapters 4-7. But see below, p. 113.
THE CHRISTIAN DEMOCRATS (MRP) 111
purpose wider than electioneering. Rather like the Communists, they dis-
tinguished between formal and real democracy; they believed that political
parties should bridge the gap between 'us' and 'them' and restore the broken
circuit of confidence between citizen and government, lepeuple and lepouvoir.
They had a strong sense of the unity and mission of their movement (like the
younger and less hidebound members of SFIO, who in the early years con-
sequently felt far closer to MRP than to their traditional Radical partners).
But as a new and overwhelmingly Catholic party MRP had a conception of
discipline different from that of the more pragmatic and freethinking Social-
ists: 'no longer a technique ... but a kind of sacrament'. In the social
organizations by which the Church appealed to various categories - youth,
women, peasants, workers, students - they had effective channels to approach
the masses with a wider and deeper appeal than individualist groups could
make. And as individuals they were political newcomers, not long exposed to
the contagion of the world's slow stain.24 Was it wholly accidental that when
the Paris parliamentary correspondents voted to choose the most likeable
deputy in the 1946 Assembly the first three places went to MRP members?25
A public penchant for righteousness in politics has its distasteful features,
and MRP morality recalled the failings as well as the virtues of the British
Nonconformist conscience a few decades earlier. Its adherents often displayed
a real concern for the standards of public life, a political vision not limited to
personal careerism, a willingness to allow idealism and imagination to intrude
even into foreign affairs, an appreciation of problems, like the scourge of
alcoholism, that fell outside the well-worn party grooves. On the other hand
their policies were often both restrictive and unrealistic. Some of them
betrayed an illiberal desire to impose minority moral standards on their
fellow-citizens, and a short-sighted weakness for unenforceable legislation
(against, for example, prostitutes and pastis) which either drove these social
evils underground or was so openly flouted as to bring the law into contempt.
On wider issues, too, they were prone to exaggerate the importance of formal
structures and to view institutions as ends in themselves irrespective of the
forces controlling them. This tendency was particularly marked over the
problem of Europe.
MRP's championship of European integration was passionate, if somewhat
belated. In 1945 the movement was proud of its * national' - not to say
nationalist - foreign policy and contemptuous of the Socialists' more liberal
(and more realistic) attempts to modify French attitudes towards Germany.
But in 1950, after years of steady retreat under Allied pressure, the Schuman
plan restored initiative to Paris. MRP now gave a warm welcome to European
24. In 1945 62% of MRP candidates had held no previous elective post nationally or locally,
compared with 56% of Communists, 48% of Radicals, 43% of Socialists (the Conservatives had
to put forward new men since most of the old ones were ineligible, having supported Vichy) :
calculated from Husson, i. xxii. See also Melnik and Leites, p. 82 (discipline); Fauvet, no. 89,
pp. 13-14 (purpose, SFIO), cf. P. Cot in ibid., p. 62n.; Duverger, Demain, pp. 24-6, 50-4, 66
(circuit of confidence).
25. Monde, 3 May 1951. Or that MRP was the only party to choose its typists for competence
rather than beauty?: Isorni, Silence, p. 182. Or that it alone tried to meet Poujadist pressure
honestly and not demagogically? : Hoffmann, p. 371n., Guy, Le Cas Poujade, pp. 128-43 (quoting
each party's reply). In Wylie's village only MRP voters trusted their leaders : pp. 217-18, 221.
112 THE PARTIES
economic association, and quickly became the chief defender of the European
army proposal which soon followed. When EDC was defeated Mend&s-
France, to satisfy the Allies, accepted the restoration of a German army;
MRP leaders denounced * Mendes-Wehrmacht ' with a venom which suggested
either an excessive confidence in the formal safeguards provided by ED C or a
violent underlying anti-Germanism - or else a tactical unscrupulousness un-
edifying in a movement so accustomed to parade its superior moral standards.
But for many MRP leaders Europe had by this time become a psychological
necessity. They could promise themselves that they would now accomplish
within a new framework the social and political advances they had once in-
tended to achieve at home and in the empire.26
A substitute for lost hopes was the more needed because the failures had so
largely been MRP's own fault. In 1946 Georges Bidault, by frustrating the
attempt to create a federal French Union, had exasperated nationalists from
Casablanca to Hanoi. Then for seven years Paul Coste-Floret and Jean
Letourneau presided over Indo-Chinese affairs while incompetence, corrup-
tion and political blindness rotted the French position away - and the party
supported them throughout from a strong sense of personal loyalty, combined
perhaps with concern for the Catholics of Tonkin. In North Africa it was
Radicals and right-wingers who obstructed reforms and demanded repression
most vociferously. But Maurice Schumann succumbed to their pressure over
Tunisia in 1951 and Georges Bidault over Morocco in 1953, and by 1956 the
chief critics of these policies within the movement had all been eliminated (for
other reasons). Yet, conscious of the purity of their own intentions and con-
fident of those of their leaders, MRP members bitterly resented such criti-
cisms - for, again like Nonconformists, they were naively surprised to find
that in politics even the most well-meaning men and movements are judged by
results.
MRP's success had been too rapid for its own good, and its early illusions
were soon shattered. The enormous tail of voters who shared none of the
movement's constructive aims had made it the largest party in France and
confronted its inexperienced leaders with crushing responsibilities. During the
ten years after the Liberation MRP was in office for all but a month. No
wonder it was described as having * the soul of an opponent but the body of a
joiner'. With SFIO it occupied the Radicals' old pivotal position in French
politics; the Catholic democrats were almost as indispensable to every
majority as the conservative anticlericals had once been. But a movement
which was constantly exposing its conscience in public, whatever its merits
and services, was unlikely to facilitate the smooth working of the political
machinery.27 For politicians concerned with power rather than principles
could change allies more easily than men acutely conscious of their mission;
an organization manipulated by a few leaders had a freer hand than one in-
fluenced, however intermittently, by a militant rank and file; an old party
with a tradition of co-operating alternately with Right and Left found willing
26. Cf. Grosser, pp. 124-7, 193 ; also 206, 214-15, 325-6.
27. "... no possible majority with them or without them' : Siegfried, De la HI0, p. 192 (cf. ibid.,
pp. 163-4). They felt 'persecuted and hoodwinked', 'troubled and anxious', and were prone to
'feverish examinations of conscience' : Melnik and Leites, pp. 45-6, 54-5, cf. 172-3.
THE CHRISTIAN DEMOCRATS (MRP) 113
partners more readily than a new movement which prided itself on its original-
ity of doctrine and outlook.
The traditional parties were slow and reluctant to accept MRP as a
political ally or even admit its right to exist at all.28 The MRP militants who
despised and rebelled against the traditional Conservatives were forced into
unwilling association with them by the reticence of more desirable partners.
For at the Liberation the Resistance dream of co-operation with the Com-
munists was shattered by their denunciation of the Machine a Ramasser les
Petainistes and their revival of the old clerical quarrel in order to drive MRP
to the Right. The alliance with the Socialists lasted until 1951, when it was
destroyed by the Right's exploitation of the same dispute; but the Socialists
had never been happy with it, were delighted at the opportunity to break it off,
and were adamant in rejecting MRP's attempts to renew it four years later.
The old-style Radicals were MRP's antithesis, and though their spokesmen
sat with MRP's leaders in many cabinets they could never work together
comfortably. The Gaullists blamed MRP for deserting the General in 1946
and frustrating the RPF campaign in later years; MRP members in turn
feared Gaullist obstruction of the European integration programme to which
they had sacrificed so much. The defeat of ED C was also the decisive count in
their indictment against Mendes-France, whose new radicalism MRP
denounced as fraudulent and reactionary in social, constitutional, electoral
and foreign affairs alike.29 Yet perhaps they found it hardest of all to forgive
him for trying to play the progressive, regenerating role in which they had
once cast themselves ; for reproducing their former attacks against a ' System'
to which they now belonged; for appealing to the very groups - youth,
women, progressive Catholics - which they had once hoped to make their own;
and for attracting a popular enthusiasm and confidence which their own
leaders had failed to arouse.30
MRP deputies (and especially potential ministers) were always more
impressed than the militants with the advantages of participation in govern-
ment. Their hold on the party was secured not only by its organizational struc-
ture but also by the increasing weight of its conservative-minded electorate in
the west and north-east. The left wing suffered repeated frustrations, and in
1956 a million Catholic votes were thought to have gone to the Republican
Front. MRP was then widely written off as a party of 'Christian Radicals'
who had abandoned their principles for the sake of power. Frangois Mauriac
attacked its 'spiritual bankruptcy' and accused it of developing ea holy
patience. It knows how to wait, and while waiting it installs itself . . .'31
28. Einaudi and Goguel, pp. 214-18 (and see above, pp. 97-8).
29. For a content analysis of electoral themes and vocabulary showing that MRP and Radicals
had few common concerns and no common language, A. Touraine in Elections 1956, pp. 298-9,
302. On their instinctive mutual antagonism cf. Melnik and Leites, pp. 96, 162, 250; Einaudi and
Goguel, pp. 216-17; and below, p. 437.
30. For a similar view see Grosser, p. 307, and in Elections 1956, pp. 1 16-17.
31. L'Express, 14 May 1959 ; quoted Bosworth, p. 259. 'Bankruptcy' : Terre humaine, Septem-
ber 1953, pp. 6-10. Cf. Duverger, Parties, p. 188; Hoffmann, no. 125, p. 816: '. . . in practice
everything that gave MRP its ideological originality has been hidden under a bushel for the last
ten years'. Suffert, p. 44, describes the typical MRP outlook more kindly as that of * a conserva-
tive in a changing world*. On 1956 see below, p. 173.
114 THE PARTIES
Yet behind the parliamentary fagade the movement was slowly acquiring
the local roots it had formerly lacked. The new generation of young Catholics
was no less civic-minded but much less conservative than its predecessors.
Within CFTC, leadership passed in 1957 to the young progressives of the
former opposition, the Reconstruction group.32 Young Catholics rose to local
leadership in the peasant organizations. The authorities of the Church in (or,
more commonly, outside) France could sometimes hamper and even destroy
their organizations - such as A C J F - but they could only check the movement,
not reverse it.33 After the collapse of Mendesism, many of this generation
were driven back to MRP because they found the alternatives on the Left
even more unsatisfactory. Their conditional support enabled the movement
to weather the storm in 1958 more successfully than either its friends or its
enemies had ever expected. But the combination of progressive militants and
conservative voters remained precarious in the new Republic as in the old.
32. Suffert, pp. 89-91, 95-7; Rioux, pp. 88-96; cf. Barnes, no. 9a; Lorwin, pp. 170, 294-8;
Bosworth, pp. 266-78, 323-8. _ ^ ^ .
33 Ibid* passim, especially pp. 57-65, 90-3, 106-8, 162-3, 198-9, 323; Dansette, Destm,
Chapters 6 and 8; Suffert, pp. 38-41, 111-13, 116-20; Grosser, pp. 160, 179-82; Remond, nos.
187-88 (summarized pp. 819-20) ; Jussieu, no. 130, pp. 1 16-25 ; on peasants, n. 21 above.
Chapter 9
THE RADICAL PARTY
1. HISTORY
The oldest political party in France is a conservative-minded organization
'which still calls itself "Radical-Socialist", in pious memory of its impetuous
youth'.1 Radical politicians had acted as a group from the early days of the
Third Republic. Based on Paris and adhering to the Jacobin traditions of the
capital, they advocated sweeping constitutional reforms including abolition
of the Presidency and Senate and election of judges. In their struggle to
democratize French institutions and weaken the power of the Church and the
landowners, they saw the few industrial workers and their socialist spokesmen
as potential allies.
In the last years of the century, at the time of the Boulanger and Dreyfus
crises, the character of Radicalism underwent a rapid change. Industry spread
quickly, especially around Paris ; the suburban proletariat grew in numbers,
power and aggressiveness; and for the first time the capital itself began voting
for the Right. In retreat from the cities, the Radicals still found a welcome
among the middle class of the small towns and villages: the schoolteachers
and shopkeepers, country doctors and lawyers who acted as the spokesmen of
the inarticulate peasantry. These rural and small-town notables claimed to
defend the little man against the big, the constituencies against the bureau-
cracy, the provinces against Paris. They distrusted all organized power, whether
wielded by governments or landlords, bishops or generals. Their outlook,
vocabulary and enmities were derived from the Revolution of 1789, and despite
the growing strength of Socialism these traditions bound them to the Left.
In 1 90 1 , during the battle over the Dreyfus case, the Parti republicain radical
et radical-socialiste was officially constituted. In itself this step had no great
consequences, for the organization remained highly localized in the country
and poorly disciplined in Parliament; there was no one official Radical group
until 1910 in the Chamber, or ever in the Senate. Nevertheless Radicalism
attained its peak of power and cohesion at this period, for the adherence of
freemasonry - hitherto predominantly favourable to the moderate republicans
- gave new and solid backing to the isolated election committees of the small
towns. Against the priests and soldiers the Radicals joined forces with the
Socialists whom Jaures had rallied to defend the Republic, and moved on to
their greatest triumph, the separation of Church and State. Yet this victory
was to undermine the foundations of their strength, for by taking much of the
bitterness out of the clerical quarrel it weakened the party's main source of
ideological vitality. Henceforward the intellectual sterility of Radicalism was
to be a commonplace of political commentators.2
1. Luthy, p. 166.
2. On the early period, Kayser, Les grandes bataittes du radicalisms ; on organization, Bardon-
net, pp. 141n., 144-8; on freemasonry, ibid., pp. 228-42, and Duverger, Parties, p. 149; on the
effects of the separation, Thibaudet, Professeurs, pp. 182-3, 193-4, and Idles, pp. 47, 82-3, 120,
153-5,
116 THE PARTIES
Tliis defeat of the Right also loosened the ties between Radicals and
Socialists. Comfortably installed within the institutions of the state, the
Radicals became less eager for their reform ; there was no point crusading for
the abolition of a Senate which Radicals dominated/Moreover the revival of
working-class militancy confronted them for the first time with an organized
power - and therefore an enemy - that threatened them from the Left. In 1906,
a year after the foundation of S FI O and the separation of Church and State,
the trade unions adopted the revolutionary syndicalist Charter of Amiens. By
1907 Jaures was bitterly condemning Clemenceau when as prime minister the
former enfant terrible of the Left used the power of government to deny the
right to strike.3
The growth of Socialism provoked among the Radicals a conflict between
their traditions and their interests which divided the party. The provincial
committeemen had no love for Clemenceau. His 'proconsular' brand of
Radicalism, energetic, nationalist and authoritarian, derived from an authen-
tic Jacobin strain. But the comitardsweiQ cautious traditionalists who suspected
organized power; their vision was bounded by the horizon of their constitu-
encies, and for many of them politics was an eternal round of petty local
jobbery and intrigue which ensured electoral triumph - and so gave new
opportunities for jobbery and intrigue. They overthrew Clemenceau in 1909;
eight years later he had his revenge. At the crisis of the war he swept the party
aside and brought two of its leaders, Caillaux and Malvy, to trial for defeatist
activities. But when he stood for the presidency in 1920 the Radicals defeated
him through the safe secrecy of the parliamentary ballot, and in the 1924 election
Herriot reverted to the old Socialist alliance. The Cartel des Gauches was re-
turned to power - and Clemenceau commented scornfully, *0 plus 0 plus 0
equals 0. '4
Radical parliamentary strength was swollen by the double ballot electoral
system, for the party profited by championing progress against reaction in
some regions, moderation against revolution in others. Some Radicals there-
fore owed their election to Socialist votes at the second ballot and others to
Conservative support. By balancing in the middle of the electoral seesaw the
party gained seats but lost cohesion ; there was permanent tension between the
two wings. The Left relied on the militants in the country and predominated
at election times. The Right were reinforced by the Radical senators, who
were older than their Chamber colleagues and not answerable to a popular
electorate; their point of view prevailed on budgetary and financial matters.
The Socialist-Radical alliances of 1924, 1932 and 1936 all collapsed within
two years, usually over finance (though the last was further strained by the
exigencies of a third partner, the Communists).
Acting as a buffer between more positive and dynamic forces, the Radicals
facilitated transitions whenever the balance of power shifted. These old
enemies of central authority now sought to enter every government; in par-
ticular they always coveted and usually controlled the ministry of the interior.
3. Priouret, Ddputts, pp. 204-20; M. Agulhon in George et al, Baritieue, pp. 51-5, for the
striking suddenness of the change among Radicals in one locality, Bobigny.
4. Thibaudet, Idtes, pp. 143, 147-51,
THE RADICAL PARTY 117
Daladier in 1934 led one cabinet which the Socialists supported and the Con-
servatives opposed, in 1938 another which was favoured by the Right and
attacked by the Left; in between, his party had belonged to Conservative
governments until the 1936 election approached, then switched to the Popular
Front. By joining each combination and moderating each swing of the
pendulum the Radicals made government workable in a deeply divided land.
But they did not offer strong leadership for a dangerous period.
Although at the top they had become a governmental party, in the country
they were still dedicated to protecting the humble citizen against overweening
authority and the simple provincial against the wily Parisian. These pre-
dilections limited the leaders' breadth of view and reduced their freedom of
manoeuvre. Radical militants and deputies were devoted to the single-member
constituency which restricted the politician's horizon; Radical ministers were
often inhibited from vigorous action by the traditions and habits of mind of a
party which preferred weak and conformist leaders to strong personalities.
In 1930 Siegfried called the Radicals the true conservatives of France,
representative of all the backward elements in her life: the small towns, the
regions unaffected by industrialization, the political traditionalists.6 This party
for quiet times was utterly unsuited to the crises of the thirties and the trials of
the German occupation. The great majority of Radical parliamentarians sup-
ported Munich and voted for P6tain (though 26 of his 80 opponents were
Radicals). Herriot and Daladier were deported to Germany and some well-
known Radicals were killed by the Germans or the French fascists; but the
party's contribution to the Resistance was not very impressive.
In the unfamiliar world of 1945 the Radicals were at a grave disadvantage.
Their failure of leadership both before and during the war had cost them the
support or confidence of many of their followers (in the 1945 referendum two-
thirds of their remaining voters repudiated the constitutional regime under
which the party had flourished).6 To the new groups which had come to
political activity through the war and the Resistance - youth, workers, pro-
gressive Catholics - their outlook seemed decadent and outmoded. They
avowed their preference for the old press, constitution and electoral law at a
time when these were condemned by the public as dangerous or demoralizing
political influences.
New legal conditions also hampered them. A party based on distrust of
organized power was severely handicapped in the new regime of disciplined
political units backed by strong social organizations such as the trade unions
or the Catholic Church. More than any of their rivals the Radicals had relied
on the personal influence of local notables and individual politicians; they
could no longer exploit this asset since most parliamentarians who had voted
for P&ain - though still in good standing with the party - were (until 1953)
barred by law from any public position. Under legislation which the Radicals
bitterly criticized, many of their newspapers changed hands. A new electoral
5. France, pp. 78-9 ; Tableau, pp. 159-61. On the last few paragraphs also France, pp. 36-8,
59-60; D. Hal6vy, La Ripublique des comitts (1934), pp. 46, 96-7, 165; and on provincialism,
Bardonnet, pp. 26-7, and De Tarr, The French Radical Party, pp. 18-19.
6 See above, p. 20, and Appendix v. Opinion polls showed Radical voters as the least satis-
fied with their leaders : see Sondages, 1948, pp. 225 and 240; 1952, no. 2, p. 6; cf. Appendix vn.
118 THE PARTIES
law, offering no scope for alliances, prevented them from reaping their usual
profit from contradictory combinations in different areas. They could no
longer prevent women getting the vote (a change which they had always
feared would strengthen the influence of the priests). At local elections early
in 1945 the party did so badly that in the autumn its supporters, fearing to
waste their votes, turned elsewhere to stop the Communists.7
Yet simultaneously the Radical leaders were conducting a strange flirtation
with the Communists themselves, which was based on a common dislike of
plebiscites and distrust of General de Gaulle. In the referendum campaign of
October 1945 the two parties advocated opposite answers to the first question
(a new constitution) but the same negative reply to the second (limited powers
for the Constituent Assembly). Since the campaign centred on the second
question, the Radicals and Communists made an unofficial non-aggression
pact for the general election held on the same day.8
At that election most of the party leaders were beaten and only two dozen
seats were saved. The Radicals belatedly accommodated their tactics to the
hated new electoral system which favoured strong parties, especially where
smaller competitors multiplied opposing candidatures. In April 1946 a
Radical-UDSR alliance was announced, and in November the Radicals
negotiated a pact with the new Conservative party (PRL) by which each
refrained from contesting a number of departments. Within a year they had
switched from friendship with the extreme Left to friendship with the extreme
Right.9 The new combination added very little to their vote but much to their
parliamen tary strength.
Since electoral success was always their object, the sudden rise of RPF
swept most Radicals along with it. In the elections for town councils in 1947
and the second chamber in 1948 most Radical candidates sought Gaullist
support by accepting the RPF label - a device, as the sequel showed, for
emergency use only. Older leaders like Herriot always remained suspicious of
generals in politics, and in 1951 they at last persuaded the party to forbid the
* bigamy ' by which its members could simultaneously belong to RPF. But the
attractions of Gaullism had already diminished before sentence was pro-
nounced, and most of the 'bigamists ' had long since returned to their original
hearth; Paul Giacobbi, the first chairman of the RPF inter-group in the
Assembly, entered the government in 1950 to draft the electoral reform which
was to blight Gaullist hopes. In the 1951 election three-quarters of the Radical
deputies won their seats in alliance with Socialists and MRP.10
In the new Parliament the party again formed an intermittent part of every
majority and a permanent component of every ministry. In 1952-54 three
conservative-minded premiers were elected with solid Radical support; the
7. Goguel in Uinfluence des syst&mes tlectoraux sur la vie politique (henceforth cited as
Systbrnes Mectoraux), pp. 80-1. On the press law see below, p. 392.
8. De Tarr, pp. 43-6.
9. 'They sleep with everybody but no longer reproduce' ; quoted Wright, no. 227, p. 6. For the
electoral system see below, pp. 309-10; for UDSR, below, pp. 174-6; for the PRL pact,
Priouret, Partis, p, 106.
10. Of the 78 Radical and allied members for French constituencies 58 were elected in alliance
with these Third Force parties, 3 in alliance with RPF, and 17 in opposition to both. On Radicals
and RPF see De Tarr, Chapter 6. See also below, p. 121.
THE RADICAL PARTY 119
last of them, Laniel, was overthrown by the defection of one wing of the party.
Earlier and later left-centre cabinets (both led by Radicals) were upset by the
revolt of another faction. Of the four Radical premiers in this Parliament,
Edgar Faure was elected in 1952 with Socialist votes, Ren6 Mayer in 1953 by a
conservative majority, Pierre Mendes-France in 1954 with temporary Com-
munist and consistent Socialist support, and Edgar Faure again in 1955 in
opposition to the entire Left - even though he had been a leading colleague of
Mendes-France. 'In a single month, one Radical leader was thrown out of
office by another and replaced by a third. The founder of the party was surely
Judas, not Gambetta.'11 But the Radicals themselves were disconcerted by
these speedy acrobatic turns - which always seemed to end on the Right.
During 1955 Mendes-France led a growing demand for a more progressive
policy, democratic party organization, and rigid discipline. This pressure
brought about a revolution and then a reaction within the party which went
far to destroy it as an eifective political force. These events are discussed in
Section 4.
2. ORGANIZATION AND FOLLOWING
The paper structure of the Radical party had some superficial resemblance to
that of its rivals but bore even less relation to reality. The lowest territorial
unit was the committee (comitf) based on the commune or canton, and above
it were departmental and sometimes regional federations, the strongest being
that of south-western France. The committees differed from the sections of
other parties in being entirely self-sufficient; indeed the party itself had been
formed by bringing existing comites together.12 The federations enjoyed full
independence in choosing candidates and election tactics, and could not be
used as an instrument of pressure by the centre against the deputy; neverthe-
less they were suspected and feared by Radical members of parliament lest
they interfere with the politician's cherished freedom of action.13
Membership was open to individuals, organizations and newspapers sup-
porting the party's nebulous doctrines. (However, in later years few news-
papers retained their membership.14) Since the rules governing conference
membership were very vague, the admission of individual members made it
easy for conferences to be packed. Important Radical elus (members of parlia-
ment and of major local councils) attended ex officio. Local parties sent an
indeterminate number of delegates (in practice only the well-off). Any paid-up
11. Fauvet, Cockpit, p, 27, D6chir6e> p. 23. Mendes-France was overthrown by Mayer and
succeeded by Faure (cf. below, p. 127).
12. Effective committees might have 80 members and 30 or 40 attending monthly meetings;
Mendes-France's committee at Louviers numbered 117 and that at nearby Evreux, 300. But many
committees were phantom. Allen, no. 2, pp. 449-50; cf. Bardonnet, p. 38.
13. Ibid., pp. 33-42, 53-62, 63 n.141, 67-8. Thibaudet says the committees acted as 'brakes
rather than motors' and 'miniature senates' (stnaticuks] : Id6es, p. 141. On the federations*
financial autonomy see Allen, loc. cit. Because of it, national headquarters could be small, and
in 1929 its budget (not published in the Fourth Republic) was only a tenth of the Socialist figure :
Hatevy, pp. 191-2.
14. On their former importance, Duverger, Parties, p. 150; Bardonnet, pp. 32-3 ; F. Goguel in
Encyclopddie politique, i. 323-4. (The late M. Kayser told me that the journals of Patendtre and
Laval did not belong to the party and these politicians owed their influence upon it to other
sources.)
120 THE PARTIES
member could buy a special card ; factions tried to have conferences held in a
favourable region so that their supporters could attend, and leaders bought
cards for distribution to sympathizers - not always party members - who
could shout and demonstrate, though not (in theory) vote. There was wide
scope for fraud: 'card-votes, proxies and obscure voting rules . . . allow very
small groups to neutralize, if necessary, the wishes of the conference'.15
The national council (comite extcutif) was supposed to organize con-
ferences and decide electoral and disciplinary matters. On it ttus outnumbered
rank and file representatives by at least three to one. Members of parliament
dominated both by personal prestige and because meetings were held in Paris;
only if the quorum was not reached (and it was only 150 out of a total varying
from 1,200 to 2,000) were decisions referred to another session to which 'the
provincial members shall be summoned' (sic). Nevertheless from 1946 to 1955
the party leaders preferred to work through the executive committee of seventy
(then called the commission executive, before and since known as the bureau),
whose weekly meetings were attended on the average by only twenty members
- among whom party officials and members of parliament or of ministerial
cabinets were naturally much more numerous than representatives of the
provincial rank and file. Tactics in ministerial crises were decided by a joint
sitting of the executive and the deputies called, from the town whose delegate
proposed its establishment in 1917, the 'Cadillac committee'; it too was
dominated by parliamentarians and very loosely managed (there were some-
times more votes cast than members).16
Control from the top was no guarantee of harmony. Dissensions could arise
not only between parliamentarians and militants but among the parliamen-
tarians themselves, owing to differences of age, policy, local interest or tactical
appreciation. Usually the rank and file had been to the Left of the elus>
and between the wars fidouard Daladier led them in attacking the cautious
policies of his former schoolteacher, fidouard Herriot. But in the lean years
after the war the militants were on the Right; older leaders like Herriot might
support Third Force governments for fear of de Gaulle, but 'young Turks'
and Radicals in the country were convinced that opposition was electorally
more fruitful. At the Toulouse conference of 1949 Daladier stood against
Herriot in a bitter contest for the party presidency; the leaders arranged a
curious deal with the pro-Gaullist faction, and beat off his attack by 759 to
382. Six months later the loser became president of RGR and the quarrel was
15. A. Gourdon in Partis et Classes, p. 233, cf. p. 235 ; Bardonnet, pp. 38, 74-6, 83-7 ; Duverger,
Parties, pp. 41-2, 143-4, 145-6; Goguel, he. cit.; De Tarr, p. 23n.; Frederix, Etat des forces en
France'(l915), pp. 131-3, 212-3; below, pp. 127, 129. For an estimate (by Goguel in 1951) that 500
men decided party policy, Bardonnet, pp. 71-2. But before the war the rank and file were credited
with more influence by Siegfried, France, p. 72, Tableau, pp. 147-8 ; Soulier, IS instability minis-
tlrielle, p. 371 ; Thibaudet, Idles, pp. 146-7, 188, and Professeurs, pp. 152-6, 244-5 Cany honest
Radical deputy will tell you that a year before a general election the pressure of his committees
drives him dotty', p. 245).
16. Bardonnet, p. 127; U>id.t pp, 125-8 on Cadillac, 114-18 on the executive. On the comite
executif, ibid., pp. 93-110, 138 ; Gourdon, he. cit. ; Goguel, he. cit. ; Duverger, Parties, pp. 41-2,
143-4; DeTarr, p. 247. The 1951 decision to ban * bigamy' with RPF was voted by 543 to 128 at
a meeting attended by two-thirds of the 1,200 members; at the same meeting 271 out of the 382
present confirmed the expulsion of Chambaretaud (below, pp. 178-9): V Information radicale,
6th year, no. 61: Monde, 15 March 1951.
THE RADICAL PARTY 121
peacefully resolved - for the 6war of the two fidouards' was not fought to
make le grand Charles king. Herriot was made unassailable as life president, and
the machine was entrusted to an administrative president, L6on Martinaud-
D6plat, whose policies provoked another revolt of the militants at Marseilles
in 1954. Daladier was again their standard-bearer (though this time on the
Left of the battlefield) and was very narrowly defeated by 746 to 689.17
When the chieftains were agreed the clansmen rarely raised their voices. But
the officers would not accept a rigid chain of command, and any attempt to
impose centralized control would have foundered on the mutual jealousies of
the parliamentarians long before it began to meet resistance in the federations.
These cherished their autonomy, though they often prized tactical flexibility
more than particular policy preferences, and sometimes even chose their can-
didate to suit their alliance partners.18 Protected by the divisions at the top,
they retained unrestricted freedom except that from 1947 they were forbidden
to ally with the Communists.
Where the party itself was weak this impotence of the centre benefited the
local notables. Elsewhere it profited the members of parliament, who in-
dividually often dominated their departmental federations and collectively
controlled the party's central institutions - if they were united. But since some
of them owed their seats to support from the Right and others to the sympathy
of the Left, they agreed only in defence of their personal independence of
judgment and decision. Thus deputies did not need to fear discipline de vote
(the equivalent of a three-line whip); and no one ever pretended to expect
party loyalty from senators.19 On the Left Mendes-France flouted every
canon of Radical orthodoxy on economic, military and colonial policy. From
the Right Daladier and the 'young Turks' actively opposed governments sup-
ported or even headed by Radical leaders.20 Many other Radicals allied with
or even joined RPF; there was a clause in the party statutes forbidding mem-
bers to belong to another political organization, but for four years it was con-
veniently ignored. The 'bigamists' were not forced to choose between their
loyalties until 1951, when Chaban-Delmas - the Radical and Gaullist mayor
of Bordeaux - invaded Herriot's own territory at Lyons to speak for his RPF
opponent, Soustelle. Bowing to the wrath of the patriarch (and impressed by
the ebbing of the Gaullist tide) the comite exe'cutifzt last invoked the forgotten
clause and banned 'bigamy'.21 But discipline did not improve. In the second
National Assembly three of the four Radical premiers were overthrown
mainly by members of their own party.
17. AP 1949, pp. 198-9, 1954, pp. 81-3 ; De Tarr, pp. 130-1 ; Bardonnet, pp. 76n., 77n., 83n.,
121-2 and n. At both the Toulouse and Marseilles conferences irregularities in the voting were
alleged. On Daladier and RGR see below, pp. 177-8.
18. On the importance of alliances see below, p. 323. At Bordeaux in 1951 they picked one
candidate to stand if RPF agreed to an alliance, and another in case the Conservatives did (but
in the end ran no list) ; in Aube they were refused by RPF, so they allied with the Socialists and
changed their candidate in consequence: Monde, 22 and 31 May 1951 ; Bardonnet, p. 155n.
19. Ibid., Chapter 3, for parliamentary control generally; below, p. 398n. for an exceptional
case of discipline de vote.
20. Like some Pacific tribes, Radical young Turks organized to shake the old men out ot tne
coconut-tree and finish them off': Duverger, quoted Bardonnet, p. 177n. Their leaders (Bourges-
Maunoury and Gaillard) were given office, and Daladier was offered it, hi 1950-51.
21. Ibid., pp. 154-60; De Tarr, pp. 145-52; AP 1951, pp. 34, 71; above, p. 118. For other
bigamies see below, pp. 129, 178.
122 THE PARTIES
Control by oligarchy thus ensured the independence of the elus both at
elections and in Parliament. But parliamentary dominance did nothing at all
to assist the Radicals to decide on and promote a policy. When Mend&s-
France became leader and tried to turn the old electoral co-operative into a
modern party with a purpose, he shattered both his own career and the
organization - and perhaps even the Fourth Republic.
The party had from 80,000 to 100,000 members between the wars, but only
30,000 in 1946; it revived to 62,000 in 1948, but fell back to 51,000 the next
year. Votes cast for the Radicals and their allies were two million in 1951,
150,000 fewer than in 1946, and their share of the electorate was down from
8£ to 8% ; probably losses to RPF were masked by gains from other parties.22
But at the same time the party was steadily regaining political influence,
returning sixty-eight deputies from metropolitan France in 1951 compared
with only twenty-four in 1945.23 For departmental councils and most senatorial
elections majority voting was used, so that the Radicals could once again
profit from alliances with Socialists in some departments and Conservatives or
Gaullists in others. In Parliament they long presided over both houses, and
earned the title le parti des prtsidences. From 1947 they held office in every
government, and from 1950 they or their UDSR allies filled at least three of
the six chief ministries.24
In their following as in their outlook, behaviour and policies the Radicals
seemed to be a party of a bygone age.25 Their votes came from the elderly, and
their constitution and conduct showed their profound reverence for seniority.
Yet they were no mere collection of greybeards. War and Liberation had
removed many older leaders, and rank and file influence did not (as among the
Socialists) check the ascent of their juniors or interfere with their indepen-
dence of judgment. Some able and progressive young political newcomers
joined the Radicals, whose parliamentary group in 1946, with an average age
higher than any other, still contained proportionately more members under 35
than the Conservatives and twice as many as the Socialists.26 In 1956, after
22. On members, Bardonnet, pp. 50-1 ; Fauvet, Forces, p. 110 ; for the 1946 figure I am indebted
to Dr. F. De Tarr; see also below, n. 49. On votes, Goguel, Fourth Republic, p. 90 (the 1946
figures in Husson i and ii differ slightly, as alliances and joint lists allow different classification).
On losses and gains see a 1951 poll quoted by Stoetzel, no. 204, pp. 113-14, Table iv.
23. Radicals and UDSR together in 1945 (when they were not yet allied) had 45 members
from France and 59 counting overseas deputies; in November 1946, as allies in RGR, they had
55 and 70, and in 1951, 78 and 95. On UDSR see below, pp. 174-6.
24. fidouard Herriot presided over the Assembly until 1953, Gaston Monnerville over the
Council of the Republic throughout its existence, Albert Sarraut over the Assembly of the French
Union from 1951 and fimile Roche over the Economic Council from 1954. In the first Assembly
the average cabinet had four Radical full ministers and in the second, six.
25. Fauvet, Forces, p. 103 ; De Tarr, p. 14 (who quotes a Christmas cartoon of a small boy
pointing at Santa Claus: 'Look, a Radical!'). In 1952 and 1955 two polls (by one organization)
found that RGR had fewer voters under 35 and more over 50 than any other party: Sondages,
1952, no. 3, p. 81; Stoetzel, no. 204, p. 116, Table xii, for 1955. Under-35s were 11 and 23%
respectively of the Radical total, minimum for other parties 30 and 25% ; over-50s were 65 and
47 %, maximum for other parties 45 and 42 %. (Between 1952 and 1955 mortality among Radicals
over 50 seems to have been alarmingly high.) On 1952 see Appendix vn.
26. Duverger, Parties, pp. 165-8; Bardonnet, p. 179; Lavau, no. 138b, pp. 1903-4, on the
attractions of Radicalism for a young politician. Thibaudet once maintained that there were no
young Radical idealists : Idees, p. 258.
THE RADICAL PARTY 123
the Mendesist revolution, their percentage of members under 40 was double
that of any other democratic party and exceeded only by the Poujadists.
In social composition the Radicals were overwhelmingly middle-class. Well
over two-thirds of the RGR deputies were always professional men and over a
quarter were lawyers; businessmen far outnumbered peasants; there were
three ex-wage-earners in 1951 and one in 1956. Radical mayors, usually
peasants, administered 5,000 of France's 38,000 communes.27 The party was
strongest in the small country towns; in the industrial regions its share of the
electorate in 1951 was only half that attained elsewhere.28 In 1952 and 1958
polls estimated that 5% or fewer of industrial workers voted Radical (but 1 1 %
in 1956 under Mendes-France).
In agricultural areas its influence, once strong, was diminishing: from 18%
of the agricultural vote in 1951 it dropped to under 12% in 1956 although its
share of the total vote rose - for Poujade was taking away old Radical votes in
the countryside while Mendes-France was gaining new ones in the towns.
More permanently, the foundations of the party's rural strength had been
undermined when it was deprived of much of its provincial press by the purge
laws of the Liberation, and subsequently lost its former secure hold on the
ministry of agriculture and the powerful professional and co-operative
organizations.29 Without these sources of influence the Radicals were in
danger of becoming a rootless group dependent on the personal popularity of
individual leaders (which alone had saved their few seats in 1945).30
In the Fourth Republic several attempts were made to secure a base for the
party. There was some progress in recovering the traditional southern strong-
holds: of thirty-six departments where 10% of the electorate supported the
party in 1951, only a quarter were north of the Loire, and of twenty-one
where 15% did so, eleven were in the south-west - still influenced by a great
Radical newspaper, the Depeche du Midi of Toulouse. But the newer groups
which were trying in different ways to reshape the party sought to penetrate quite
new social groups and geographical regions. Mend&s-France's modernizing
Radicalism won widespread (if short-lived) support in the Paris area and the
industrial north-east in 1956. In some provincial towns and in Parisian bour-
geois quarters there took root an aggressive right-wing 'neo-Radicalism'
closely linked to the wealthy settlers of North Africa. 'Alongside Toulouse
and Lyons, Paris and Algiers have become the capitals of a new Radicalism.'31
27. Deputies: Dogan's tables, p. 68n. above; only SFIO had as many professional men and
only CNIP as many lawyers. Gourdon in Partis et Classes, pp. 224-30 (for mayors, candidates
and deputies).
28. In the 17 most industrial departments it had 4-9 % in the other 73, 9-8 % : Goguel, Fourth
Republic, p. 113 (cf. Williams, p. lOln.). In the 1947 municipal elections it was strongest in
communes with 2,500 to 4,000 inhabitants, weaker in those with fewer (the countryside) and
weakest in those with more: Inegalitts, p. 121. Above, p. I09n. 14, for polls cited next sentence.
29. Below, p. 392, and De Tarr, pp. 55-6 (press); Paysans, pp. 18-19, 48, 53, 461 (votes,
including RGR), 106-8, 113 and 276-8 (organizations), 112 and 257-64 (ministry). The
Radicals had never put forward many peasant candidates but this had not hitherto prevented them
garnering rural votes : ibid., pp. 108 (pre-war), 212 (post-war).
30. L. Latty and J. M. Royer in ibid., p. 111. Cf. ibid., pp. 42, 53.
31 . Gourdon, loc. cit., pp. 235-8 ; cf. n. 39 below. For regional varieties, also De Tarr, pp. 82-5 ;
Goguel, no. 108, pp. 329-31 for bourgeois Paris; in Fourth Republic, pp. 103-6, and Gtographie,
pp. 110-11, for 1951 ; in Elections 1956, pp. 488-92, for 1956; and cf. Map 11. There were 51
[over
124 THE PARTIES
3. CHARACTERISTICS
* NCOS' and Mendesists were utterly different in their policies, their standards
of political behaviour and their impact on French public life. The former
publicly proclaimed their solidarity with right-wing Conservatives;32 the
latter ultimately found an uneasy home among the left-wing Socialists. Yet
they had something in common. Each group included a few old party mem-
bers and many newcomers. Each prospected new fields in its search for sup-
port. And each tried to make the party face issues instead of fudging them -
though they faced in opposite directions.
This meant attempting a complete change in the party's character. For
among French political groups the Radicals had the best lines of communica-
tion with all the others: lines which the Neos would have broken on the Left
and the Mendesists on the Right. The Radicals had great experience and skill
at playing party politics and attracting a wide variety of opinions. North of
the Loire they could appear as a party of the Left hostile to clericalism and
reaction; around Paris they were (till 1956) the spokesmen of extreme con-
servatism; in the south they won right-wing votes as the last bulwark against
the Marxists.
Expert tacticians though they were, this diversity was not merely tactical.
Many different traditions, from Bonapartism to the Paris Commune, stemmed
from the great Revolution which all good Radicals venerated. Yet though
wide, the tolerance on which the party prided itself was not unlimited: in 1946
the Left Radicals were expelled because they claimed (like Clemenceau) that
the Revolution was indivisible and therefore refused to break with the Com-
munists; and in 1951 the Radical Gaullists, proconsular nationalists in the
Jacobin tradition (also like Clemenceau), were forced to choose between the
party and RPF.33 The leaders could reasonably maintain that continuing an
alliance on grounds of mere principle when it was no longer politically
advantageous was an un-Radical activity; and even after the departure of these
small groups the party still embraced a great variety of views. But by the
beginning of the Fifth Republic it had shed both Neos and Mendesists and
retained only the two most traditional species of the genus : the inveterate
opponents and the immovable supporters of every cabinet whatever its com-
plexion.34
With a core of members who subordinated policy to popularity or power,
and fringe groups which advocated every conceivable policy choice, the
Radical deputies from agricultural and 18 from industrial areas in 1951 ; 32 and 24 in 1956 ; 21 and
21 after the split (below, p. 128). Western and southern Radicals dropped from 50 to 31 and then
18 : Laponce, no. 137, p. 355.
32. DeTarr, p. 129.
33. De Tarr gives the fullest account of how each different group followed and diverged from
the central party tradition. Of the Left Radicals, most ended as Communist * fellow-travellers'
(below, pp. 171-2), but Jacques Kayser was readmitted in the Mendesist period, and the strongly
anticlerical Albert Bayet became an intransigent defender of Algtrie franfaise.
34. The party was split both in 1949-50 when the Socialists supported Bidault against attacks
by the Right, and in 1953 when the Left opposed the Conservative Laniel ; seven Radical deputies
took a right-wing and five a left-wing line on each occasion, but twelve supported and eight
opposed both governments. Sometimes when a Radical obtained office transmutation between
the species occurred (above, n. 20). Cf. below, pp, 407-8, 418-19 ; MacRae, no. 149, pp. 187-94.
THE RADICAL PARTY 12
Radicals were serious claimants to office in any situation, and therefore a pole
of attraction for able young politicians who reinforced their team of elder
statesmen. Sometimes, like Queuille in the crisis of 1948-49, they could teach
more earnest and less easy-going rivals an object-lesson in experience, patience
and guile. Often they were more eager to control the levers of power than to
use them for any constructive purpose. Always they were 'compromisers, bar-
gainers, conciliators, administrators and caretakers . . . willing to adapt their
policies to the needs and desires of the day' and to echo Queuille in 1951 : 'I
will do my best, the least harm possible; you can pass judgment afterwards;
France must have a government.'35
It was a limited conception of leadership for a country whose social struc-
ture and world position were rapidly being transformed. The Radicals'
prestige suffered from their ineffectiveness in the thirties and their heavy share
of responsibility for 1940, and although by tactical skill the leaders brought
the party back to power, they could not restore the intellectual identity and
sense of purpose which had been waning for years. As the party of the French
Revolution Radicals stood for values and fears deeply ingrained in French
political psychology: the defence of the weak against the powerful, the cult of
the little man, the mistrust of aristocracies of birth and wealth, the demand for
equality. But the Socialists were formidable competitors in the same field, and
the rise of Communism gave more weight to the conflicts which placed
Radicals on the Right than to those which had located them on the Left. To
Thibaudet laicite had been at the very centre of the Radical outlook; but it
began to seem out-of-date when even rural Radicals feared the Communists
more than the Church.36 To preserve the traditional electoral alliance with the
Socialists most provincial deputies opposed the Barang6 bill to subsidize the
church schools ; but they did so half-heartedly, avoiding the subject when they
could, voting as constituency interests dictated when they had to, and leaving
fervent anticlericalism to their allies.37 The innovators of both Left and Right,
Mendesists as well as Neos, gave vital economic and colonial problems
priority over that faded shibboleth.
On these problems Radicals could no longer remain all things to all men:
the interests of their voters drew them too strongly to the conservative side.
The 'young Turks' of 1930 had been on the Left; those of 1950 were on the
Right. In the Fourth Republic 'the supporters of conservative political and
economic interests not only had links with the party: they joined it, led it, and
35. Quotations from De Tarr, pp. xvii, 165-6.
36. Thibaudet, Idees, pp. 159-61, 165; Paysans, pp. 276-7. A 1952 poll found that 40% of
Radical voters were practising Catholics: Bosworth, p. 252, Stoetzel, no. 204, p. 117, Table xvi,
and Sondages> 1952, no. 4, p. 40. This poll omitted all persons not baptized Catholics (20 % of the
population by its own estimate, 4 % by another : ibid., p. 54). For other polls see Fogarty, p. 361 ;
Bosworth, pp. 251-2; Lipset, p. 245.
37. Lavau, no. 138b, pp. 1894-5, 1901 and n. ; De Tarr, pp. 125-6; Goguel, Fourth Republic,
p. 126 ; Fauvet, Cockpit, p. 72, Dechiree, p. 66 ; cf. Siegfried, De la HIe, p. 188. In the key divisions
on the Marie bill (4 September 1951), the Barange bill (10 September 1951) and article 6 of the
education budget (9 November 1952), pro-clerical votes were cast by Parisian and Algerian
Radicals and those elected in alliance with RPF or Conservatives, and anticlerical votes by mem-
bers elected against strong Conservative opposition ; most members who temporized represented
departments where the Conservatives were weak and their votes might be won in future. (My
analysis.)
126 THE PARTIES
tried to transform it into their own image'.38 The rich spokesmen of the North
African settlers - * a veritable French "Tamany Hall" ' (sic) - were 'found at
every turn of the party's political life and through their agents controlled its
machine'.39 The new leadership not only subordinated social progress to
economic expansion (Mendes-France himself did that) but also threatened the
trade unions; defended the interests of farm lessors against the lessees for
whom the party had once stood ; gave much more support to Conservative
than to Socialist candidates for the premiership ; opened an anti-Communist
campaign which shared many features with McCarthyism ; and championed
the narrowest interests of colonialism, above all in North Africa.40 The party
which had once expressed provincial mistrust of Paris now represented the
most reactionary elements in the capital. In 1930 Siegfried had claimed that
its allegiance to the Left was 'its real raison d'etre9; a quarter of a century
later it was said to have no link with the Left at all.41 On becoming
leader, wrote Mend&s-France privately, he had found the headquarters
'with no funds and no files' and the party 'with no soul and no modern
ideas'.42
4. REVOLUTION AND REACTION
The Mendesist revolution was supported by two groups who for quite differ-
ent reasons were determined to reverse the rightward trend which the Neos
had imposed on the party. A few modernizers wanted to substitute an equally
clear and permanent leftward orientation which they claimed to be the true
vocation of Radicalism. But a far larger number were discontented traditional-
ists who followed Jean Baylet, controller of the D6p£che du Midi and proto-
type of Alain's provincial Radical.43 They took a different view of the party's
vocation, and wanted no lasting choice of direction. Their eyes always fixed
on the next election, they feared that the Neos' liking for discredited con-
servative governments would lose votes and prevent an alliance with the
Socialists, and they hoped that the broad coat-tails of a premier enjoying un-
rivalled popular prestige would carry them to victory. But their support of
Mendes-France wavered when he left office, fell off when his popularity
waned, and disappeared altogether when his policies split the party and
threatened to reduce each faction to a powerless rump. Their defection broke
38. De Tarr, p. 80; cf. Lavau, no. 138b, p. 1899 ; Bardonnet, p. 267.
39. Gourdon, loc. cit., pp. 237, 239; cf. De Tarr, pp. 82-4; Lavau, no. 138b, pp. 1899-1900;
Bardonnet, pp. 267-8; Hamon, no. 120, p. 840; Grosser, pp. 131~2;.Nicolet, Pierre Mendes-
France ou le me1 tier de Cassandre, pp. 104-5 ; below, p. 354.
40. Gourdon, loc. cit., p. 223; Fauvet, forces, pp. 111-12; Lavau, no. 138b, pp. 1896-1900;
De Tarr, Chapter 5.
41. Siegfried, Tableau, p. 160 (and France, p. 79) -cf. De la IIle, pp. 192-3. Lavau, no. 138b,
p. 1901.
42. Quoted Nicolet, Cassandre, p. 149. Yet even under his leadership the party could appeal
to the 'little employer or future little employer, little property-owner or future little property-
owner . . .' (De Tarr, p. 20) as almost fifty years before it had claimed: * Small bourgeois, small
employers, small shopkeepers, small peasant owners, small white-collar workers, small civil
servants have discovered that they are closer to the working class than to the great banks, the big
capitalists and those specially favoured by wealth ...' (F. Buisson in 1910, quoted Bardonnet,
p. 265n.).
43. On the Dtp&che see Economist, 27 January 1962 (friendly) and Lectures franyaises no. 31,
October 1959 (hostile).
THE RADICAL PARTY 127
the left wing in 1957 as it had broken the right in 1955.44 By then not much
remained of the party which once had dominated French politics.
Pierre Mendes-France was never really a Mendesist.45 Unlike his young
followers of the Jacobin Club or the new recruits he won for the party, he was
a lifelong Radical. He went less far than they in anti-colonialism, shared
neither the neutralism nor the nostalgia for the Popular Front that many of
them professed, was more favourable to traditional Radical causes like laicite
and the single-member constituency, more amenable to tactical compromises,
and more averse to open quarrels. As prime minister he organized no coherent
parliamentary following, but carried each successive policy by a different but
always disparate majority like a virtuoso of the System. So far from seeking to
impose discipline on his own party, he would not help his friends to oust
Martinaud-D6plat from the administrative presidency in 1954.46 But his
neutrality did not appease the Neos: the successful attack on his government
four months later was led by Ren6 Mayer. Worse still, the new premier who
revived the Conservative alliance was Mendes-France's own minister of
finance, Edgar Faure.
These developments determined the fallen premier's course. The existing
Radical party had proved too unstable a base; the misadventures of General
de Gaulle were a warning against attempting to form a new party; the only
alternative was to renovate the old one. Already the provincial militants were
seething. At the special conference of May 1955 the right-wing leaders used all
the dubious practices which had preserved their power for so long, but were
defeated by a no less irregular Mendesist coup d'etat^1 Martinaud-D&plat's
post was abolished and Mendes-France became first vice-president, Herriot
remaining titular president. A committee of seven was set up to reorganize the
party and give more influence to the rank and file; its half-heartedness con-
tributed to the ultimate failure of the Mendesists.48
There had been other internal revolutions in the Radical party. But never
before had its membership nearly doubled in a couple of years.49 Many of the
new recruits came from groups hitherto closed to Radicalism: youth, women,
technical and managerial staffs, even Catholics.50 At the annual conference in
44. Nicolet, Cassandre, pp. 105-8, cf. pp. 158-62.
45. De Tarr, pp. 191-201, 219-21; Bardonnet, p. 20n. For useful summaries of the whole
episode see Allen, no. 2, and Laponce, no. 137; also Brigitte Gros's novel, Vfronique dans
Vappareil (1960).
46. See above, p. 121.
47. AP 1955, pp. 46-8; De Tarr, pp. 131-3; Bardonnet, pp. 76n., 151n., 212n.; Nicolet,
Cassandre, pp. 111-12. One reactionary journalist (never eloquent on abuses of the past) wrote
that : * Nowadays seizing control of a party is like raiding a bank van' : Faucher, p. 152.
48. Nicolet, Le Radicalisme, pp. 117-18 ; Allen, no. 2 ; Bardonnet, pp. 98-9, 100, 118-19, 127-8,
130-1, 273-4. The Mendesists did try to organize in greater depth a party in which membership
was 'exclusively political, without effect on professional or family life' (ibid., p. 271) by bringing
together Radical civil servants, lawyers, businessmen etc, ; the attempt was a total failure and the
one successful society (the doctors) distinguished itself only by opposing the social reforms of the
Mollet government (ibid., pp. 219-23).
49. From 57,000 in May 1954, just before Mendes-France became premier, to 73,000 soon after
(November), 90,000 a year later, and 105,000 at the peak : Bardonnet, p. 51. For previous revolu-
tions (especially after 1927 under Daladier) see ibid., pp. 17-19, 22, 165-6. On membership see
also Nicolet, Radicalisme, p. 1 16. In Cassandre, p. 1 14, he suggests that the real increase was from
50. -Ibid., pp. 114-18.
128 THE PARTIES
November 1955 they consolidated Mendes-France's victory. Partly to check
his rival's progress, Faure seized the chance which his opponents rashly gave
him to dissolve the Assembly. The traditionalist Radicals were still fervently
Mendesist, especially as the dissolution meant an election fought under an
electoral law they detested; most Radical minsiters resigned, and the party
expelled Faure and several leading Neos - including Mayer, Martinaud-
Deplat and Lafay - who were organizing RGR as a stronghold of their fac-
tion.51
Mendes-France's progressive policies appealed to the Left; his personal
vigour and style attracted the Gaullists and evoked echoes of Clemenceau. In
the election the vote of his Radical supporters doubled while that of his
opponents hardly changed. But the Mendesists had no time to choose reliable
candidates, and in most constituencies they endorsed sitting Radical members
who included many traditionalists and a few open enemies. Those whose votes
had contributed to Mendes-France's fall did conspicuously badly. But the
outgoing deputies who had only recently found salvation shared in the boom
as well - though not as much - as the truly Mendesist new candidates, and
among the fifty-eight Radical members returned wearing their leader's label
only a small minority, mostly young newcomers from Paris, went as far or
further than he in their zeal for reform.62
The old Radical instinct to join every majority and then slow down its pro-
gress was soon at work. The first disputes over the ministry's composition
showed the weakness of the Radical leader's position and the anxiety of his
Socialist allies to conciliate their opponents - both in the Assembly and in
Algeria.53 At first, when the young Mendesists wanted the party to refuse
office, their leader sided with his senior colleagues against them. Then after he
resigned in May (finding himself impotent to influence policy in Algeria) he
continued to discourage his followers from attacking the twelve remaining
Radical ministers or their Socialist partners.54 It made no difference ; public
opinion in its new nationalist mood was with the government, and even muted
criticism cost Mend&s-France the popularity which alone had enabled him to
impose his outlook and policies upon the parliamentarians of the System.
The old parliamentary hands had defected, but the new recruits remained
faithful. At the Lyons conference of October 1956 Faure's expulsion was con-
firmed and Mend6s-France's policy endorsed overwhelmingly. Twenty
senators and fourteen deputies, among them Queuille, Morice and Marie,
thereupon resigned from the party. A year earlier it had included five ex-
premiers of the Fourth Republic; now Mend&s-France alone remained. And
when, riding the crest of the nationalist wave, the government invaded Egypt,
only eleven Radicals abstained with their nominal leader in the Suez vote.55
51. See below, p. 178,
52. On these results see Goguel, Elections 1956, pp. 488-92; Williams, 2nd. ed., p. xx n., and
no. 168, pp. 168-70; Pierce, no. 180, pp. 415-16; above, p. 48 and below, p. 178n.
53. They were given the chance to do so by Mendesists who put principle before tactics and
voted to postpone a bill repealing the church schools subsidy - a measure which was anathema to
MRP, but which no Socialist could oppose. See above, p. 98.
54. De Tarr, pp. 219-21.
55. See above, pp. 49-50 ; and Williams, p. xxi n. ; another of the few open Suez critics was
Edgar Faure. Of the fourteen deputies who resigned at Lyons, nine had voted against Mendes-
[over
THE RADICAL PARTY 129
The electorate was also turning against Mend6s-France. At a by-election in
south Paris in January 1957 the Radical vote was only 20,000 (against 80,000 a
year earlier and 27,000 even in 1951). He had both split his party and flouted
public opinion, and the south-western traditionalists who had joined him in
hopes of electoral success and governmental patronage now deserted him just
as the Gaullist ' hitch-hikers ' had left the General five years before - for fear of
immediate exclusion from the corridors of power and subsequent disaster at
the polls.56 Again as with RPF, an attempt to enforce disciplined voting
brought the quarrel to a head. In March 1957 Mend&s-France, by moderating
his stand on Algeria, induced the parliamentary group to agree to vote as the
majority decided in important divisions. The new rules were at once broken by
the twelve ministers and nine of their supporters, reaffirmed at a special con-
ference in May (at the price of more policy concessions which offended the
young Mendesists) and .again promptly defied by the ministers and their
friends ; the bureau - the party executive, supposedly a Mendesist stronghold -
refused to expel two of the recalcitrants and Mendes-France resigned the
leadership.
At the November conference at Strasbourg Jean Baylet, the south-western
traditionalist, reappeared as kingmaker. The Mendesists carried their policy
motion but lost all their offices - since only comitg executif members could
vote to elect the bureau?'* Soon they were subjected to the discipline they had
tried to enforce. When the Fourth Republic collapsed a few ex-Gaullists
among them returned to their old allegiance, but most of them joined with the
opposition Socialists in a new anti-Gaullist group, UFD. In the 1958 election
* bigamy' was forbidden, and by choosing to continue the new liaison they
excluded themselves from the original hearth exactly as they had ejected their
adversaries during the previous campaign.58
If disarray was complete among Radicals of the Left, it was scarcely less
among their right-wing opponents, who were split into three groups. The
oldest, RGR, had been turned by the leaders expelled in 1955 from an
alliance of parties into an independent formation.59 But the 1956 election gave
it only a dozen deputies, and its limited influence was dissipated by personal
disputes. Its secretary Jean-Paul David was one of the two bosses of right-
wing Radicalism in the Paris area; the other - Bernard Lafay - set up a group
France when his government was overthrown and only three for him (two were new to the Assem-
bly). The split showed how unwisely Mendes-France had allowed his prestige to benefit his oppo-
nents in the election.
56. Nicolet, Cassandre, p. 161 : traditional Radicalism insisted on the need 'for friendly wire-
pulling as a check on arbitrary power ... It means the defence of local groups of citizens against
dishonest appeals to the general interest. But it is also, and more frequently, a complete ignorance,
a total contempt - whatever the verbiage - for this general interest. Mendes-France wore himself
out against this instinctive insistence on office.' (His italics,) No Radical cry was more venerable
than 'Justice for all, and jobs for friends! ' : De Tarr, p. 156. On Gaullists, below, p. 140.
57. On the comiti extcutifsee above, p. 120 ; on the south-western influence, Nicolet, Cassandre,
58. On the defeat of Mendesism see Allen, no. 2 ; Laponce, no. 1 37 ; De Tarr, pp. 226-33, 236-8 ;
Bardonnet, pp. 98-9n., 119-20, 169-73, 274n. On the 'bigamies' see ibid., pp. 159-60 and nn., and
De Tarr, pp. 134 and n., 238. On UFD see below, p. 174.
59. See above, p. 128, and below, pp. 176-8.
130 THE PARTIES
of his own, the Republican Centre, which showed some strength in the by-
elections of 1957. While these parties contended for the urban Neos, the
Dissident Radicals who split off at Lyons appealed more to conservatives in
the countryside.60 Henri Queuille was their president and Andr6 Morice their
secretary, and they spread further confusion by calling themselves 'the
Radical Socialist party' until restrained by the courts. At their first conference
at Asnieres in April 1957 the Dissidents piously adopted the constitution of
the old party with all the old abuses, and claimed to have attracted a third of
its membership (33,000 in over fifty federations). The prosperous commercial
atmosphere of their headquarters and the tone of their conference - with few
women or young men, no disagreements, and the rank and file firmly relegated
to the role of 'innocent and passive shareholders' - stamped them as a party
of the Right. Morice joined an Algerie fran$aise 'quartet' with Bidault,
Duchet and Soustelle, and fervently demanded the silencing of journals which
criticized the war and its abuses.61
During 1957 attempts to unite the splinter groups were frustrated by per-
sonal differences, political disputes and internal divisions: Martinaud-D6plat
joined the Dissidents; J.P. David controlled RGR and Lafay was not invited
to discuss reunion; Queuille wanted to rejoin the Radical party (and did so in
1 958) but Morice would not ; Mitterrand and most of U D S R still sympathized
with the Mendesists; Pleven (also of UDSR) offered Morice a post in May
1958, and so the 'orthodox' Radicals prevented him forming a government.62
The advent of General de Gaulle split both the 'orthodox' Radicals and
UDSR- while the right-wing groups all supported him in hopes of riding the
Gaullist wave to a safe electoral haven. But the division had shattered both
factions, and though Morice pooled his provincial influence with Lafay's
financial and Parisian strength in the Republican Centre, at the November
election both men lost their seats.63
Even after the departure of the Dissidents, the attenuated Radical party was
divided in every important vote. General de Gaulle was an old adversary, and
when he stood for the premiership he was opposed by eighteen of the forty-
two Radical deputies: most of the Mendesists, their staunch ally Daladier,
their faithless friend Baylet, and their illiberal antagonist Bourg&s-Maunoury.
At the party conference in September 1958 these incongruous associates
mustered 40% of the votes against the new constitution; at the November
60. See Pay sans, pp. 115-16 ; and note 31 above. Of the fourteen seceding deputies only three
were from industrial departments, and only one was from northern or eastern France (though
none came from Baylet's south-western stronghold). Reactionary Radicalism in alt its forms owed
much to one wing of French freemasonry (cf. Coston, pp. 346-53, and also above, p. 98 and n.)
which moved Right as the Catholic Church moved Left.
61. The journals retaliated: cf. below, p. 351n. On Asnieres see AP 1957, pp. 36-7; De Tarr,
p. 225; Bardonnet, pp. 28, 73, 107 (organization), 51n. (numbers), 91 and n., 133n., cf. 267-8
(tone).
62. 'Some are departing, others want to return; it's no longer a party but a railroad station' :
De Tarr, p. 243, quoting a delegate in 1957. Cf. ibid., pp. 134, 225 ; Bardonnet, pp. 50-2 and nn. ;
AP 1957, p. 119, and 1958, pp. 50-1.
63. The right-wing Radicals polled 1,400,000 and returned twenty members. The Republican
Centre (see Coston, pp. 349-50) ran several crypto-fascist candidates who had formerly followed
Colonel de la Rocque, Pierre Poujade and Me Tixier-Vignancour (see Chapter 12); also Jean
Baylot, ex-prefect of police and Mendes-France's enemy in 1954 (see p. 46n.).
THE RADICAL PARTY 131
elections the Gaullist tidal wave swept them all away. At a far lower ebb even
than in 1945, the Radical party was reduced to 20,000 members, a million
votes and thirteen seats. Perhaps the old men had been right to 'prefer
effectiveness in a sordid cohabitation to disaster in a healthy split'.64
The weaknesses of that traditional Radical doctrine were all too evident.
France in the middle of the twentieth century could not afford timid political
leadership. Her industrial re-equipment demanded painful sacrifices, her
imperial retreat called for uncomfortable reappraisals, her foreign policy
required clear-cut choices. The Radical party existed to protect its following
from painful sacrifices, uncomfortable reappraisals and clear-cut choices. Its
voters were a drag on any constructive and vigorous economic policy. Its
financiers used the party to obstruct timely reforms overseas. Its deputies
joined every majority and its ministers sat in every cabinet, bewildering and
disgusting the voter by ensuring that he was never presented with clear alter-
natives.
Having neither policy nor discipline nor consistency in its choice of allies it
contributed greatly to political confusion - even in its own ranks, where con-
ferences regularly applauded speakers who employed a common vocabulary
to advocate opposite policies, and then voted a negre-blanc motion endorsing
both points of view. Prudence and guile, not decision and discipline led
Radical politicians to success: and when Mendes-France tried to impose a
real choice they frustrated him within a month and broke him within a year.
But in the end 'wearing their ears out by dragging them along the ground'
harmed the politicians themselves, for in 1958 as in 1945 the Radical record
was overwhelmingly repudiated by the electorate.
Yet despite its failings the party performed an essential function in French
public life. Its chiefs were used to power, and had a sens de V&at often lacking
in less experienced groups. Its wide embrace enabled it to recruit able men, its
lax discipline allowed them freedom to preach their individual views, and it
therefore afforded a platform from which unpopular minority views could be
put by men of recognized standing. The conviction that 'the main task of a
great party is the same as that of a good stomach: not to reject but to assimi-
late' provided an indispensable element of continuity in a deeply divided
country. Inevitable political transitions could occur with the minimum of
disturbance when a highly flexible party was available to switch without
embarrassment from one coalition to another. Radicalism formed a buffer
between more active and constructive but also more ruthless rivals: when the
Mendesist demand for decision and clarity broke it into impotent fragments,
the buffer was eliminated. Majorities could no longer be assembled nor minis-
tries formed because an indispensable component of both had disappeared.
At the end of the Third Republic a hostile critic conceded, 'Perhaps it was a
Radical party that Spain lacked in 1936'. By the end of the Fourth, France
lacked one too.65
64. G. Martinet, France-Observateur 14 October 1954. Cf. De Tarr, pp. 233, 235-8 ; on member-
ship, Laponce, pp. 76, 83.
65. B.S. (Goguel), no. 87, p. 187 ('Spain') ; cf. pp. 174, 183, 221 ; also DeTarr, pp. 9 ('stomach ),
238-45. Verdicts on the Radical party are commonly, and appropriately, n&gre-blanc.
Chapter 10
THE GAULLISTS
1. HISTORY
In the Fourth Republic the Gaullist movement took three political forms: the
short-lived Union Gaulliste of 1946, the Rassemblement du Peuple fran$ais
(RPF) founded in 1947, and the party of Rdpublicains sociaux (RS) which
succeeded it in 1953.1 But Gaullism was born much earlier, on 18 June 1940 -
the 125th anniversary of Waterloo - when the unknown undersecretary for
war in the outgoing French government proclaimed over the BBC that the
battle of France had not decided the war. Without the slightest organized
backing he was setting out upon a revolutionary path. Already he had revealed
in his writings his extraordinary self-confidence and self-sufficiency; the
resounding vindication of his solitary stand inevitably confirmed his certainty
of his own mission. Long before Winston Churchill addressed him as 'the
man of destiny', the General had cast himself in that role.2
The decision of 1940 and its consequences profoundly influenced the de-
velopment of Gaullism. They gave the movement the centralized structure
which was intended to make it the exclusive instrument of its founder's will.
They gave it its leadership, for General de Gaulle never fully extended his con-
fidence to any but his earliest collaborators. They gave it much of its consti-
tutional doctrine, for the General's political prescriptions were deeply affected
by the fear of another 1940 and the need to devise remedies in advance against
such a catastrophe.3 They even bequeathed to RPF many of its internal
problems. For that revolutionary decision placed the General in opposition to
the great majority of the army, to nearly all the Right and to most of the
influential men and classes in the country. Ten years later these men and
classes formed the bulk of a new Gaullist movement: but neither they nor
their leader forgot that at a crucial moment they had taken opposite sides.
Gaullism, more even than MRP, was the movement of a generation.
Twenty years later the core of the party was still formed by men who had
answered the call as Resisters or Free Frenchmen. Very many original
followers became devotees for life who willingly subordinated their own views
(and careers) to the General's successive policies and appeals. These true
Gaullists were contemptuous of the timid bourgeoisie who applauded P6tain
in 1940 and stayed prudently attentiste until 1944. For them Conservatism
was a slothful or cowardly acquiescence in existing trends and Gaullism a bold
1. For useful accounts of RPF see Pierce, no. 178 ; Neumann, no, 166; Casalegno, no. 49. On
Gaullism in the Fifth Republic see Elections 1958, pp. 15-19, 361-71, and sources above, p. 57n.
2. Since he was twelve : Wright, Reshaping, p. 42.
3. As he told the press on 17 August 1950 :
*The nation remembers how a regime of the same type, though with less glaring vices, literally
evaporated when the disaster against which it had been unable to protect us had broken down the
country's defences ... It is therefore necessary that in good time another power appear, morally
capable of taking in charge the independence and interests of France. This has been accomplished
once! The country may rest assured that it would be accomplished again.* AP 1950, p. 296 ; see
also AP 1946, p. 538, 1948, p. 329; and below, p. 191 and n.
THE GAULLISTS 133
assertion that the course of history could be changed by human will;4 with the
traditional Right there might be occasional co-operation but no trust, esteem
or lasting understanding. Dedicated to their charismatic leader and their lofty
cause, Gaullists too often attributed attacks on either of them to mere
pettiness, corruption or even treason.
Suspicion of Gaullist intentions was fostered by the General's prickly
intransigence and arrogance, the character of some of his associates, and the
determination with which they waged the political struggle in London and
Algiers. But these doubts proved unjustified. De Gaulle established neither a
dictatorship nor the quasi-presidential regime he himself desired. His govern-
ment held free and genuine parliamentary elections only five months after the
end of the European war, and allowed the country to make its own constitu-
tional choice. No doubt he influenced the results by allowing women to vote
(against Radical protests), by the form of his constitutional proposals, and by
his new electoral law. But these were honest attempts to find a democratic
solution in a revolutionary situation.
In January 1946, three months after the election, the brief honeymoon
between the parties and the General came to an abrupt end. Conciliation and
compromise had never been marked features of his character, and no doubt
he made too little allowance for the difficulties of partners who had to meet a
totalitarian and demagogic rival on the electoral battlefield. But to be a prime
minister unable to act without first conciliating three strong and mutually
suspicious parties, and leader of a ministry whose solidarity was little more
than a mockery, would have frustrated a humbler and more patient man.
Making no attempt to seize power, General de Gaulle quietly withdrew into
private life.5
MRP did not follow him; and a breach was opened between the party of
Resistance Catholics and the Catholic leader of Resistance. For a great
political movement could not go into silent retirement like a single individual,
and MRP dared not withdraw from office and so leave the Socialist lamb in a
t&te-a-tete with the Communist tiger. But the General felt himself betrayed in
January, and in May he returned the compliment: he left MRP to bear alone
the brunt of opposing the constitution which the Marxist parties had drafted,
and did not even cast his own vote against it. Not until the battle was over did
he fire his first shot, the Bayeux speech of 16 June 1946 calling for a quasi-
presidential constitution. And in the referendum of October 1946 theparrf de
lafidelite clashed with the leader to whom it had proclaimed its faithfulness,
and found that two-thirds of its voters preferred to follow his leadership.
Millions of MRP electors were disillusioned with their party and hostile to
tripartisme. But they would not throw their votes away on a new, weak party
lacking the endorsement of the General himself; the Gaullist Union, founded
by Ren6 Capitant to advocate the 'Bayeux constitution', secured only 300,000
votes in the November election and returned only half a dozen members (who
mostly joined UD S R). To mobilize the electoral influence he had demonstrated
4. See for instance Noel, pp. 72-6, 80-1 ; R. Capitant, preface to Vallon, UHistoire s'avance
masqu^e, pp. 6-11 ; cf. E. Michelet, Le Gaullisme passionnante aventure (1962),
5. See above, p. 22 and n., and below, pp. 386-7.
134 THE PARTIES
at the October referendum, de Gaulle personally had to take the lead of all the
forces opposed to tripartisme, including the Right which had never loved or
trusted him, and the Radicals who had so recently allied with the Communists
against him. The man who had once hoped to rebuild France with the aid of
Socialists and MRP now became the chief of a movement challenging these
parties for power.
At Strasbourg on 7 April 1947 General de Gaulle launched his Rally of the
French People, RPF. In May the Communists went into opposition, and the
government had to try to govern against the hostility of most of the organized
workers. The atmosphere of alarm and tension was aggravated by the onset of
the cold war; de Gaulle himself feared an imminent Russian attack and
another 1940. Amid continuing colonial troubles, grave economic difficulties
and violent revolutionary strikes, RPF seemed the one force capable of check-
ing the Communist advance. Before the end of 1947 it was claiming more
members than the Communists themselves. And in the municipal elections of
October 1947 the Gaullists (with their allies on coalition lists) secured nearly
six million votes, almost 40% of the total and far more than MRP and
Socialists combined. They united the Conservative and Radical followings,
took over the disillusioned from MRP, and in the big cities also ate into the
electoral support of the proletarian parties. De Gaulle's triumphant return
to power seemed only a matter of time.
At first the General and his supporters earnestly denied that the Rally was a
new party. It was meant to attract Frenchmen of all views who were loyal to
the state (but not collaborators or Communists). It would form no new par-
liamentary group, only an 'inter-group' of deputies who would remain mem-
bers of their original parties. In the event these came mainly from RGR and
Conservative groups; yet this was not the wish of the Gaullists but the choice
of S FI 0 and MRP, who both forbade their members to join the inter-group.
The great expectations of November 1947 were never realized. The Marshall
Plan averted the expected economic collapse. The inter-group attracted less
than eighty deputies; the inevitability of the General's triumph was evidently
not appreciated at the Palais Bourbon. The Assembly majority ignored his
invitation to them to commit political suicide by voting their own dissolution.6
Trying to impose discipline on its supporters just as if it were a new party,
RPF came up against the refractory individualism of the French deputy of
the Right ; only two dozen members accepted the strict Gaullist whip. 7 After a
great effort to capture control of the upper house, RPFclaimed 150 of the 320
senators elected in November 1948. But many candidates, especially Radicals,
had welcomed Gaullist support with no intention of accepting Gaullist dis-
cipline. When RPF formed within this new inter-group a separate group
pledged to obey orders, it recruited only fifty-eight senators.
Queuille's long ministry, from September 1948 to October 1949, ended
6. De Gaulle demonstrated his determination to come to power legally when he demanded that
the Assembly dissolve itself by the two-thirds majority required for a constitutional amendment,
since the regular conditions for dissolution (see below, pp. 236-7) were not fulfilled in 1947.
7. Pierre Montel (a vice-president) and twelve Conservative deputies resigned from the inter-
group in protest against instructions to oppose Paul Reynaud's financial programme in the brief
Marie government.
THE GAULLISTS 135
Gaullist hopes of early success. Those who had hoped that RPF would shield
France from revolutionary violence were shocked by a clash at Grenoble in
which two men were killed. Prices stopped rising, and at the beginning of 1949
a successful loan was floated. Increasingly RPF suffered from clashes between
parliamentarians and militants, clericals and anticlericals, just like the parties
it despised. When the ministry finally broke up the crisis lasted a month; yet
even this unfortunate spectacle did not help RPF.
By 1951 it was evident that the Gaullists would not obtain power by them-
selves. But if together with the Communists they commanded a clear majority
in the new Assembly, they might threaten to paralyse government and thus
dictate terms. To avoid this result, an electoral law was voted which encouraged
party alliances by discriminating against parties which were too suspect (like
the Communists) or too intransigent (like RPF) to contract them. For the
General still hoped for a nation-wide response to his appeal, which he would
not allow to be tarnished by compromises with the System; besides, he had
learned a lesson from the senatorial elections, and refused to swell the ranks
of his parliamentary supporters with men whose electoral commitments
divided their loyalties. So local RPF branches were allowed to enter into
electoral combinations in a handful of departments only.8 Partly as a result,
and partly because the movement obtained rather fewer votes than had been
expected (perhaps in consequence of the electoral law), the Gaullists won only
120 seats instead of the 200 for which their optimists had hoped.
Even so, at the beginning of the new legislature they scored an important
success. By forcing to the front the question of the church schools they
obliged M RP either to oppose them and forfeit the support of the Church, or
to follow them and break with the Socialists. When the Barange bill to sub-
sidize the Catholic schools went through in September 1951, the old majority
was broken. If the indignant Socialists began voting with RPF and the Com-
munists on other matters, the opposition would command a majority of the
Assembly. Two governments fell, one through Socialist and the other through
Radical defections, and RPF's moment seemed to have come.
But the Gaullist manoeuvring had unexpected results. Since the centre of
gravity of the majority had been shifted far to the Right, a Conservative,
Antoine Pinay, was put up for the premiership - and the former Conservatives
in RPF insisted upon voting for him. In March 1952 he became prime
minister at the head of the most Conservative parliamentary majority for
twenty years. Inside the Gaullist movement months of friction followed. The
rebellion was soon consolidated when the by-elections showed that in middle-
class areas RPF had lost two-thirds of its votes within a year. But left-wing
Gaullists in the cities proved equally uncompromising, and in divisions the
once monolithic group split three ways like mere Radicals, or saved its unity
by undignified but unanimous abstention.9
8. Eleven RPF deputies owed their election to alliance with Conservatives; eight of them
revolted before or in July 1952; less than a quarter of the other members of the group did so
(see below, p. 153n.), On the electoral law see below, pp. 313-14.
9. On a minimum wage bill in April, 26 RPF deputies voted for Pinay, 29 abstained and 28 -
mainly from Paris and the industrial areas - voted against him: Williams, p. 136n. On the split
see also below, pp. 140, 153, 372.
136 THE PARTIES
In July the General and his advisers decided to impose new disciplinary
rules, and a quarter of the Gaullist deputies resigned to form a new group,
ARS (see Chapter 11). But indiscipline was contagious, and in January 1953
even the 'orthodox' parliamentary group defied the leadership by voting for
a new prime minister, Ren6 Mayer. In May a heavy Gaullist defeat in the
municipal elections convinced the General that he had failed, and he required
RPF to abandon all parliamentary and electoral activity. The deputies, re-
christened first URAS (Union des republicans (Faction sociale) and then
Social Republicans (RS) were at last free to play the parliamentary game.
Two months later their leaders were in office.
In supporting Mayer for the premiership the Gaullist deputies had changed
their tactics. By entering the majority they hoped generally to strengthen their
influence and specifically to defeat the European army treaty. To achieve this
crucial objective intransigent Gaullist leaders were ready to appear on plat-
forms with Communists, while the more opportunist were willing to sit in
cabinet with MRP and other pro-European colleagues. Claiming to be a
centre party and apparently reconciled to the System, they were learning with
the zeal of neophytes how to turn its own weapons against it. All four
premiers elected from 1953 to 1955 won a majority of their votes, but only
Mend£s-France - himself a distinguished rebel against and victim of the
System - kept their support to the end. The other three were defeated by
defections in which the Social Republicans played a decisive part. Andre
Diethelm, RS chairman in the Assembly, could claim: ' We are still alive, for
we can destroy - if not create.'10
This conduct did not endear the party to the electorate. From 120 deputies
in 1951 the Gaullist numbers dropped to 71 at the dissolution in 1955; in the
new house only 21 were returned. The collapse was due to their rather lofty
attitude towards their constituency duties, to the conservatism of their original
voters (for only four of the ARS dissidents were beaten), and above all to de
Gaulle's withdrawal; but also to their attempt to manipulate the System they
were pledged to destroy. By entering, leaving and then rejoining the conser-
vative coalition they had given an impression of unreliability which was
reinforced by their quarrels with Edgar Faure (and with each other) over
Morocco, and then by their conduct in the election campaign. Their leader
Chaban-Delmas (a former Radical) joined Mollet and Mend&s-France in the
Republican Front, but most outgoing RS deputies were allied with the Right.
They had won their spurs as a centre party.11
In the election Social Republicans of the Left and Right each lost three-
quarters of their votes. The few who survived were those who enjoyed strong
constituency loyalties.12 Two of their leaders entered the Mollet cabinet,
10. JO 21 May 1953, p. 2816; AP 1953, p. 43.
11. Moraz6, pp. 147-8, 150-1. Ten candidates made apparent ements with the Left (of which 8
included and 2 excluded Socialists) ; but of 49 sitting members who stood again, only one did so
(after the Conservatives had rebuffed him) and 26 preferred to ally with the Right - among them
even so thorough a Mendesist as Diomede Catroux, nephew of General Catroux.
12. Even these often depended on personal reputation rather than genuine local roots. Thus
in Lyons (Soustelle's seat) RS had no real local base and met in the big public halls, while an old
party like the Radicals preferred ward meetings in clubs and caf6s : Elections 1956, p. 320.
THE GAULLISTS 137
which most of the group supported until its fall; thereafter they again began
voting for premiers at their first appearance but quickly turning against them.
Nor was their opposition now confined to the parliamentary stage ; leaders like
Soustelle, Chaban-Delmas and Debr6 were actively working for the over-
throw of the regime. The result was seen in May 1958.
2. ORGANIZATION AND FOLLOWING
RPF was built around its leader, constructed according to his ideas, led by
his loyal disciples and devoted to his service. This personal allegiance was
almost the only common bond between supporters of diverse social and
political origins. Too heterogeneous to enjoy a natural unity of purpose, the
movement tried with indifferent success to enforce strict discipline as a
substitute.
Power was concentrated in the President of the Rally, General de Gaulle
himself, who chose a secretariat and an executive to assist him. The general
secretary (at first Jacques Soustelle, later Louis Terrenoire) was named by and
took instructions from the President. The secretariat comprised de Gaulle's
personal collaborators, working either in Paris or as regional delegates in the
field but all meeting weekly in the capital. The executive originally had twelve
members, who could not have seats in Parliament (Diethelm, a Gaullist leader
from the earliest days, had to resign in 1948 on being elected a senator). In the
constituencies power was in the hands of a departmental delegate, selected by
and responsible to the centre, which also chose his chief subordinates on his
recommendation. The elected departmental council was purely consultative
and could communicate with headquarters only through the delegate. The
twenty-two regional delegates were members of the secretariat, and checked
any tendency by departmental delegates to support their local councils against
the centre.13
General de Gaulle originally conceived RPF as a broad non-partisan
movement appealing to all classes and especially the workers. In the early days
the Gaullists gave much attention to organizing workshop cells, and they
always retained some influence on the margin of the trade union movement.14
There was a corporative structure of youth, family and ex-service organiza-
tions, and large fractions of the departmental councils, national council
(conseil national) and annual conference (assises) were chosen on a non-
territorial basis. The conference selected the national council, on which the
departmental councils and national headquarters were represented as well as
the social groups (though parliamentarians were at first excluded). It was the
national council which in the early days worked out two of the most original
13. Late in 1951 the delegate for Meurthe-et-Moselle resigned in sympathy with the depart-
mental council ; it promptly made him its chairman, and was as promptly disaffiliated : Monde,
8 and 9 January, 18-19 May 1952 ; Figaro, 17-18 May 1952 ; cf. n. 16. RPF's formal organization
is described more fully in Williams, pp. 123-9.
14. Particularly through the small Confederation g^ndrale des syndicats independants, whose
secretary (a former Communist deputy) enjoyed Gaullist support against a rival faction led by
the former Vichy minister of labour, Ren6 Belin. See references in ibid., p. 124n. ; Lorwin, pp. 131,
298-9 ; Rioux, pp. 104-5 ; Lefranc, pp. 207-8 ; Gu6ry, Les maitres de fUNX, pp. 130-50 - hostile
but informative. In 1948 RPF claimed 145,000 members organized in workplace cells (groupes
d'entreprise) : R. Barrillon in Partis et Classes, p. 279.
138 THE PARTIES
items of the party programme, educational allowances and the 'association'
of labour and capital.15
This structure ensured close control from Paris. Local tactics were nationally
determined, and parliamentary candidates were personally chosen by the
General himself. But control from the centre led to friction at the periphery;
at every election RPF suffered a crop of resignations of local leaders affronted
by the peremptory instructions from above.16 The subordination of members
of parliament was no less deeply resented. For the deputies who rallied to de
Gaulle in 1947 had all been elected without his sponsorship, and after reject-
ing the discipline of a party few of them were now ready to submit to that of a
military leader. The decision to organize * inter-groups' instead of a separate
parliamentary party suited the politicians better than the General: they
acquired an electorally profitable label without undertaking any clear com-
mitment, he mobilized an impressive paper following on which he could not
rely. Attempts to impose discipline simply provoked resignations.17 So at the
end of 1948 distinct groups of faithful Gaullists were set up in both houses;
each was joined by about a third of the inter-group.18 After the 1951 election
the inter-group and its equivocations disappeared from the Assembly.
The parliamentarians gradually obtained a voice in policy-making. In 1949
they were permitted to attend their local departmental council and the national
council, and a liaison committee was set up; the General also nominated four
deputies and three senators to an enlarged executive of twenty (renamed con-
sell de direction instead of comite executif). In 1 95 1 the national council was in
turn enlarged to give them a quarter of the seats.19 But at that year's general
election most members of the executive won seats in the Assembly, and they
soon came to resent the control of tactics by a leader and advisers outside
Parliament.20
In July 1952 an attempt was made to reimpose the discipline which Pinay
had broken. The parliamentarians were given a somewhat greater voice, but
15. See below, p. 143. Fractions: half of each departmental council; nearly a third of the
national council ; at first a majority, later a large minority of the conference.
16. Thus in 1951 the departmental delegate for Morbihan, the three RPF senators and two
RPF candidates came out for the rival Conservative-MRP list with which headquarters had
forbidden them to ally. For other examples see Williams, p. 129n., and below, p. 143. For
bitter criticism of headquarters for its over-confidence and ignorance of the provinces by an
ARS deputy (a former Free French officer) see J. Halleguen, Aux quatre vents du Gaullisme (1953),
pp. 218-26 ; for the author's own dictatorial methods as a departmental delegate, Monde, 17 May
1950.
17. See above, n. 7, and below, p. 143 and n.
18. The group in the Council of the Republic was called Action dtmocratique et rfyublicaine,
and had 58 members. Until 1951 there were two groups in the Assembly, Action dtmocratique et
sociale (with 18 members at the end) and Rtpublicains populaires independants (half a dozen
ex-members of MRP, affiliated to the larger group).
19. It was increased from 140 to 233 of whom 40 were deputies and 20 senators; AP 1951,
p. 294. Fauvet, Forces, pp. 242-3 nn., names the executive (omitting Diethelm) and some pro-
minent members of the council.
20. Though most members of the executive were now in Parliament (16 out of 29 by 1952),
the General still controlled it; after the 1952 pro-Pinay revolt he omitted to convoke it for weeks
and then did not invite the chief rebel. At an earlier executive meeting two future rebel leaders
had bitterly opposed supporting any cabinet not led by the General (for that policy would not
have brought them office, while a revolt might) : Noel, p. 46. The deputies themselves had never
been allowed to discuss such a policy: Halleguen, pp. 231, 237; on pp. 234-6 he quotes the Gen-
eral's haughty letter to the rebellious deputies.
THE GAULLISTS 139
in return were required to observe discipline on all votes affecting the life of a
government and all other major questions where the parliamentary party so
decided. These rules were voted by 478 to 56 at a national council meeting at
St. Maur;21 thirty deputies resigned and even the loyalists attacked the new
rules. In November General de Gaulle consented to reduce his personal
authority and allow more representation to both parliamentary and rank and
file opinion. But the damage had been done and six months later, after a heavy
electoral defeat, the disillusioned leader withdrew from politics. When most of
his parliamentary followers regrouped as the Social Republicans they adopted
a title and form of organization borrowed from the Conservatives, founded on
departmental autonomy and control by members of parliament.22
This choice of organizational form showed that by 1953 Gaullism was no
longer a mass movement. Yet at one time it had attracted the largest member-
ship ever attained by a French party. From a million early in 1948 it dropped
to 350,000 two years later, recovering by the end of 1950 to 500,000.23 Its mass
support was essentially urban. In the countryside RPF was always a party of
notables, familiar figures with a following only in old Conservative or
Bonapartist strongholds. But in the cities it appealed successfully to suppor-
ters of the Left. At the 1947 municipal elections RPF's own lists (as distinct
from coalition ones) obtained under 10% of the vote in the small rural com-
munes but nearly 30% in the towns; in Paris RPF gained 137,000 Socialist
and Communist votes, which stayed Gaullist in 1951 but then reverted
(usually) to SFIO.24 Both in 1951 and afterwards the proletarian quarters
remained more faithful to the Gaullists than the respectable bourgeois dis-
tricts.25
With their coalition allies the Gaullists had won 38% of the poll in 1947. In
1951 they had 21% (17% of the electorate) and 4J million votes. This left
RPF well behind the Communists but far ahead of the other parties (none of
which reached 3 million). And since the electoral law harmed Thorez's
followers far more than de Gaulle's, RPF jumped from two dozen seats in the
Assembly to first place with 120.26
21. On it, Halleguen, pp. 239-42; Noel, pp. 49-51.
22. Goguel, Le regime politique francais, p. 92.
23. Fauvet, Forces, p. 227 and n. Soustelle claimed 800,000 in May 1947 and 1,500,000 requests
to join in April 1948 ; in 1949 only 450,000 asked to renew membership ; in 1955 RPF was under
100,000 and the Social Republicans (in 65 departmental federations) only 25-30,000: Barrillon
in Partis et Classes, pp. 280-4. Coston, p. 291, and Malterre and Benoist, Les partis politiques
francais (n.d., 71956), pp. 130-1, give only 500,000 in October 1947.
24. Communes over 9,000 inhabitants, 28 % ; all communes over 2,500, 21 % ; all under 2,500,
9% : AP 1947, pp. 363-4, Fauvet, Forces, p. 224. Paris: see Williams, p. 13 In. Cf. Intgalitte,
p. 121 ; Elections 1956, pp. 315 (Lyons), 410 (Aisne) ; and Olivesi, pp. 176-7 (Marseilles). In 1951
RPF's support was much less clerical and more urban than that of the right-wing parties:
MacRae, no. 148, p. 295. A 1952 poll (above, p. 125n.) found that 24% of RPF voters were not
practising Catholics. ^,-,« i. ^
25. Goguel, no. 108, pp. 330, 333; cf. Barrillon, loc. cit., p. 283. In 1951 RPF lost over half
its 1947 votes in Paris (and even more in the rich west end) but under a quarter in the working-
class banlieue. However, Professor N. Wahl kindly informs me that RPF's strongest supporters
were non-proletarians obliged by the housing shortage to live in working-class districts (cf. Wylie,
p. 218, on village Gaullists).
26. Apparent 6s, here as elsewhere, are counted with the group.
F*
140 THE PARTIES
Gaullists of the Left complained of under-representation in the parliament-
ary party, but did not deny that they were a minority.27 Almost all the twenty-
three departments where RPF polled 20% of the electorate had been
right-wing strongholds twenty years before.28 But outside the Conservative
west Gaullist strength lay in the dynamic industrial regions, and south of the
Loire it reached 20% only in three west-coast departments - so that it was
weak in the old unoccupied zone which Vichy controlled from 1940 to 1942.29
This strong conservative element reflected the lack of self-confidence which
had led so many notables to creep under the General's banner when it was un-
furled in 1947. By 1951 many of them - especially Radicals - felt strong
enough to confront the electorate without sheltering beneath that long shadow.
A year later the right-wing fellow-travellers also defected; the ARS seceders
of 1952 were men from a Conservative background or Conservative consti-
tuencies, particularly those low on their lists whose seats were unsafe.30 Their
departure left RPF with 74 metropolitan deputies, 53 of them from north
of the Loire.
However, as a dynamic modernizing movement Gaullism attracted a follow-
ing unlike that of the older conservative parties. RPF had a higher proportion
of young voters than any rival but the Communists, and even the decaying
Social Republicans in 1955 drew 31% of their membership from the under-
thirties.31 Only one metropolitan Gaullist member of the 1946 Assembly was
over fifty when elected, though in its heyday RP F attracted senior and success-
ful men; the average age of its group in 1951 was fifty. Only one of its 107
metropolitan deputies had been a wage-earner. The technocratic element was
strong ; industrialists and engineers were the largest group on the 1950 national
council and numerous in the 1951 Parliament. There were few lawyers, and
half of these seceded with ARS, leaving the traditional political profession
weaker than in any party except the Communist.32
The leadership was not very typical of the rank and file. Polls suggested
that both in 1951 and 1958 the Gaullists won about 17% of the manual
workers' vote and drew about 23% of their support from this class. In 1949
RPF sources claimed a membership of 450,000, of whom 40% were manual
or white-collar workers, 20% shopkeepers or classes moyennes, 15% peasants
and 10% professional men. At RPF's annual conferences the two or three
thousand delegates were not drawn from the intellectual or political governing
27. Vallon, pp. 33-4, claims that at least a quarter of RP F's votes but only a tenth of its deputies
came from the Left.
28. In 1932 the Right had polled 30% of the electorate in 21 of them, the Radicals in seven
and the Socialists and Communists together in only one, Gironde : Goguel, Geographic, maps on
pp. 49, 77, 107; for Radicals, Pickles, no. 177, p. 178.
29. MorazS, p. 130. Cf. Map 12.
30. See pp. 135n., 153n., and for the electoral system, p. 388. In 16 constituencies the RPF
deputies were divided between rebels and loyalists ; only in 4 did the man with the best chance of
re-election go over to ARS.
31. Votes: 38% according to the 1952 poll (corrected figure in Appendix vii) as against
Communists 42%, Radicals 11 %, others 30-31 %. Members (18,000 analysed) : Barrillon, he. cit.,
p. 284.
32. Council : Fauvet, Forces, p. 239n. Deputies : Dogan in Partis et Classes, p. 298 (there were
49 professional men, 40 businessmen and engineers and 16 agriculturalists); and Barrillon in
ibid., p, 282.
THE GAULLISTS 141
classes. Andr6 Malraux once referred to the Gaullist clientele as 'the rush-
hour crowd '.33
3. CHARACTERISTICS
General de Gaulle was no Napoleon. But in the French political tradition
RPF was a branch of the Bonapartist stream, which in some regions flows
underground for generations, then bursts forth with explosive suddenness.34
The demand for a government with authority, the passionate nationalism and
the determined attempt to woo the Left were hallmarks of its character. But
these characteristics, which enabled RPF to penetrate circles which con-
ventional Conservatives could not reach, also made the latter shun such
agitations as dangerous adventures into which only the direst necessity could
lure prudent men.
Some of the old Conservatives found RPF's nationalist outlook on foreign
and imperial questions congenial, though they might feel it was expressed
with excessive bluntness. They were willing to accept de Gaulle's emergency
leadership even though they distrusted his views on economic and constitu-
tional matters. But they had no real confidence in him, and were profoundly
suspicious of some of his associates. They detested the policies of his govern-
ment at the Liberation - the purge, the nationalization of industry, the admis-
sion of Communists to office. Almost all of them had followed P6tain in 1940,
and the leading Vichy apologists remained bitterly hostile to RPF. However,
in their fear of Communism the Conservative voters turned en masse to the
new Gaullist movement, and many parliamentary Conservatives thought it
wise to follow the trend.
The pressure of these Vichyite votes affected RPF in its turn. The General
and the movement gradually shifted their ground on treatment of the im-
prisoned Marshal, amnesty for the purge victims, and the return of former
pro-P6tain politicians to political life. In April 1950 Colonel R6my, a promi-
nent Resistance and RPF leader, advocated rehabilitation for the Marshal;
he declared not only that the Vichy shield had been as necessary to the country
in 1940 as the Gaullist sword, but that General de Gaulle had himself spoken
of the need for two strings to France's bow. The article was disavowed and
33. Malraux: ibid., p. 277. Members: ibid., pp. 281 and 284; in 1955 RS claimed21 % manual
and 20% white-collar workers, 18% professional, 17% farmers, 14% shopkeepers, 9% civil
servants. Polls : cf. above, p. 109 n. 14.
34. 'Bonapartism . .. aims at establishing an autocratic government within the framework
of the democracy. According to this vigorous conception, we should have a national leader
chosen by a popular plebiscite, who would curb anarchy and silence the chatterboxes in Parliament
Equality would still exist, but order would prove more excellent than liberty, while the material
conquests of 1789 would be guaranteed against not only a return of the ancien rlgime but also
against any threat of social revolution . . . Bonapartism continues as a latent tendency even outside
of any political system. From time to time, it comes to the surface, and its expressions even
remind one of the eruptions of a volcano/ Siegfried, France, pp. 98-100; Tableau, pp. 203-6.
* Springing from all classes, Boulangism cut clean across the parties. They came together, no
longer to defend social interests, but for or against the new movement according to their tem-
peraments In our democracy there is always an underlying Boulangism* : Dansette, Le Boulan-
gisme, pp. 369, 371. In 1947 the Gaullists won a clear majority in the same Paris districts that
Boulanger had carried sixty years before: Barrillon, he. cit., p. 281. And de Gaulle's first appeal
to workers was directed to the areas where they had most favoured Napoleon m : Ehrmann, no. 82,
p. 166, cf, p. 164.
142 THE PARTIES
R6my had to resign from the Gaullist executive, but the phrase itself was
never denied; plainly the General's views had changed since his denunciation
of Per e la Dtfaite. But de Gaulle had no intention of disavowing the past.35
The wartime record which divided de Gaulle from the Right should have
brought him closer to MRP. But though millions of its voters transferred
their support, these were mainly disillusioned Conservatives who soon found
themselves as unhappy with the new movement as with the old. The MRP
leaders who went over were very few (though some who did not were friendly to
RPF). The rank and file of the party was anxious to establish its republican
bona fides in Socialist and Radical eyes, and would not tolerate even short-
term and tactical alliances with the Gaullists.36
The Radicals, considering themselves the incarnation of the Republic, had
no such inhibitions. They flocked to de Gaulle's banner in 1947, only to desert
it in 1949. A few went over permanently, notably two old Gaullists and
spokesmen of 'proconsular' Radicalism:37 Jacques Chaban-Delmas, who
took his local party with him, and Michel Debr6, who lost the support of his
only at the moment of rupture. But RPF attracted far more short-service
recruits from the 'committee Radicals' - typical adherents of France's most
temperamentally conservative party, with its anxiety for a quiet life, its dis-
trust of new solutions, its philosophy (so far as it had one) of defending the
citizen and weakening the government, and its suspicion of strong leaders,
especially generals. The reasons for this remarkable alliance were temporary:
men of property looked for immediate protection against Communism,
politicians hoped to repair the disaster which had struck their party, Gaullists
and Radicals alike detested tripartisme. But the alliance also was temporary,
and it collapsed as soon as the political situation made dangerous roads to
salvation less attractive - especially since the Radicals soon came back to
power, [and RPF was beginning to display clerical sympathies over that
traditional republican touchstone, the church schools problem. The episode
again illustrated Radical willingness to associate with any partner in the hope
of electoral profit and Radical skill at getting the better of the bargain.
It also illustrated the problem which faced RPF once its initial impetus had
declined. The raison d'etre of the movement was constitutional reform: the
Rally was to mobilize members of all parties for this essential but limited
objective.38 Instead, frustrated of early success, it soon developed into a new
party in everything but name - a disciplined and autonomous movement
seeking power and obliged to take a line of its own on all major issues. Con-
sequently the educational and social questions, over which the other parties
fought, faced RP F with an acute internal problem.
At first the movement seemed likely to split from top to bottom over the
treatment of the church schools. Like other Resisters, many active Gaullists
felt that this was an out-of-date and regrettable dispute. Most of them sent
35. See Williams, p. 134. For his mature view of P6tain, Le Salut, pp. 248-50. For the R6my
affair, AP 1950, pp. 78-9 ; R6my*s article in Carrefour, 1 1 April 1950, was reprinted together with
some of the replies it evoked in R&ny (G. Renault), La justice et Vopprobre (Ed. du Rocher,
Monaco, 1950).
36. See above, p. 105, and below, p. 402. 37. See above, p. 116.
38. Its constitutional solution is discussed below, pp. 191-2.
THE GAULLISTS 143
their own children to the state schools, and the RPF leadership (like that of
the left-wing parties) included many Protestants and Jews.39 The general
secretary (Soustelle) and propaganda organizer (Malraux) were opposed to
the General's own pro-clerical tendencies. But the Catholics pressed their
claims hard. At RPF's first conference the education committee failed to
reach agreement.
Friction spread to the constituencies, and came to a head at the Melun local
by-election of June 1949. Henri Lespes, an MRP deputy turned Gaullist, was
nominated by national headquarters to stand for the departmental council.
The local RPF members of parliament disliked intervention from Paris,
especially on behalf of a clerical candidate; they put up a nominee of their own
and he was elected. Three senators were censured by headquarters, and a
deputy expelled. The Radical chairman of the Assembly inter-group then
resigned in protest, and was supported by his colleagues.40 The incident
accelerated Radical defections from RPF, which was soon left with a follow-
ing sympathetic to the Church. In 1949 the Gaullists adopted an ingenious
solution, the allocation-education (a subsidy to the parents of school children
instead of to the schools themselves), which gave partial satisfaction to
Catholics and minimum provocation to anticlericals. And in September 1951
all but five of the 120 RPF deputies voted for the Barange bill.
In the end it was on social questions that unity proved unattainable. Early
in 1950 RPF was still voting with the Radicals and Conservatives to amend,
in ways disliked by the trade unions, a bill restoring collective bargaining. But
they were also supporting a wage bonus which Conservatives opposed, and
violently denouncing the government as a puppet of American trusts. By the
1951 election RPF had lost its politically Radical but socially conservative
fellow-travellers. Business money (which had once flowed freely) was diverted
to CNIP, a less adventurous party immune from such dangerous if imprecise
ideas as the 'association' of labour and capital. General de Gaulle retaliated
by bitterly attacking the electoral activities of the patronat*1 In September
1951 RPF joined the Socialists, the Communists and most of MRP in
carrying through the Assembly (against the government, Radicals and Con-
servatives) a bill tying minimum wage rates to the cost of living. In March
39. Barrillon in Partis et Classes, p. 279 ; cf. Coston, pp. 501n., 504, 513. Soustelle, Valkm,
Baumel and Schmittlein (president of the parliamentary group first of RS, later of UNR) were
among the Protestants ; Henry Torres, Raymond Aron and the Palewski brothers were among the
Jews; Michel DebrS was half- Jewish. In 1951 and even 1956 the many Protestants of Alsace
voted heavily Gaullist: Paysans, pp. 380-3, cf. Schram, pp. 136, 148, 167-71, 192; Dreyfus in
Elections 1956, pp. 414-17.
40. The four members of parliament protested to General de Gaulle: 'We have fought too
hard against the feudal power of party executive committees to tolerate it in RPF, whose
methods and ukases are transforming it from a national rally into a political party . . .' : AP 1949,
p. 123. At Melun MRP, angry at Lespes' defection, had supported the dissident Gaullists against
him despite their anticlerical attitude. But six months later another local by-election in the depart-
ment was won by a Conservative supported by both RP F and MRP, against a Radical backed by
PRL and the Gaullist dissidents. And in the 1951 general election Begouin, the deputy whom
RPF had expelled, was elected as a Radical with a prominent local Catholic as his second - and
was opposed by the candidate he had sponsored at Melun.
41. Trusts: Fauvet in Monde, 15-16 January 1950. Funds: Barrillon, loc. cit., pp. 277-8; cf.
Nicolet, Cassandre, p. 102; Ehrmann, Business, pp. 230-1. Association: ibid., pp. 359-61. De
Gaulle: Monde, 24-25 June 1951.
144 THE PARTIES
1952 its leaders announced that they would enter no cabinet which excluded
either MRP or SFIO.42 This was the context in which the conservative
Gaullists rebelled against the leadership to put and keep Pinay in office. There-
by they further displaced the movement's centre of gravity.
The evolution to the Left was not confined to domestic affairs. Purged of its
most opportunist elements RPF lost in weight but gained in elan, recovering
some of the mystique of the past and reverting to a kind of Jacobin revolution-
ary nationalism.43 Soon the fight against EDC brought the Gaullists into
alliance with neutralists of the Left and made them increasingly tolerant of
Russian policies and critical of American. In 1954 Soustelle violently con-
demned the conduct of the United States in Guatemala. Whereas in 1952 Le
Rassemblement had treated American suspicions of Gaullist anti-American-
ism as a 'fable', two years later it claimed that these suspicions proved that de
Gaulle really spoke for France. ' From nationalism to opposition to EDC ...
to opposition to American policy ... to the assertion that the US and the
USSR were equal dangers to peace . . . [and] that France must act as a bridge
between the two blocs, such was the long road travelled by the General and
his companions.'44
Gaullist imperial policies evolved equally rapidly. The Indo-China war
came to seem a humiliating counterpart of American aid, and a burdensome
diversion of French forces from Europe; Christian Fouchet, chairman of the
Gaullist deputies, called it the Fourth Republic's Mexican expedition.45 Over
North Africa a similar shift occurred. In 1947 de Gaulle had championed the
Algerian settlers and opposed political concessions.46 But by 1951 the North
African election funds were already flowing to apparently safer parties.
Liberal Gaullists became increasingly vocal. The Sultan of Morocco, deposed
in 1953, was befriended by de Gaulle and chose as his spokesman in Paris the
Gaullist deputy and air ace Pierre Clostermann. In the Assembly most
Gaullists supported Mendfes-France, the General commended him publicly,
and when in 1955 he and his successor needed strong proconsuls for North
African danger-spots, each sent a Gaullist of liberal reputation: Jacques
Soustelle to Algiers, and Gilbert Grandval to Rabat.
In the 1956 election several Gaullists were active on the Left. Clostermann
was returned as a Radical and Jean de Lipkowski (Grandval's assistant) as an
independent Mendesist; Capitant and Vallon were prominent in various 'new
42. Ibid., 2-3 March 1952.
43. Marcus, Neutralism and Nationalism in France, Chapter 3. At the 1952 conference Capitant
claimed that RPF would restore to the people the rights of which capitalism and parliamen-
tarianism had robbed them: Monde, 12 November 1952, Rassemblement, 13 November. Cf.
MacRae, no. 149, p. 184.
44. Marcus, pp. 97-105; cf. Moraze", p. 166.
45. JO 20 October 1953, p. 4396 ; AP 1953, p. 293. Cf. Marcus, p. 101.
46. To the press, 18 August 1947 : '. . . we must not allow the fact that Algeria is part of our
land (est de notre domaine) to be called into question in any form, either at home or abroad.'
At Algiers, 12 October 1947 : 'Any policy which would lead either to a reduction of the rights and
duties of France here, or to the discouragement of the inhabitants of metropolitan origin ... or,
finally, to a belief among Moslem Frenchmen that they might be allowed to separate their lot
from that of France, would in truth only open the gates to decadence' (my italics) : La France
sera la France, pp. 178, 181 ; Grosser, p. 138. On RPF in Algeria see S. Wisner, UAlgerie dans
rimpasse (1948), pp. 96-8.
THE GAULLISTS 145
Left' groups.47 But the coming nationalist upsurge soon showed itself in the
Gaullist movement. Already most (not all) of the Social Republicans had
opposed Edgar Faure's liberal policy in Morocco. After the election Algeria
alienated them from Mendes-France, then turned them against the feeble
cabinets of 1957-58, and finally enabled them to destroy the Fourth Republic
itself.
The Gaullists had always predicted and sometimes promoted the decay of
a regime which had never found means of appealing to anyone's imagination,
and in its decline provoked increasing impatience and frustration. Adminis-
trative scandal, parliamentary intrigue and governmental impotence offered
easy scope to its enemies, and the young and enthusiastic found the Fourth
Republic as drab or even as sordid as the Third. To his critics, de Gaulle's
programme was best summed up by the Canard Enchaine : ' La France manque
de pain? Moi, je serai le Boulanger.' The Gaullists of 1947, dynamic, deter-
mined and justly proud of their record in the war and Resistance, were con-
vinced that they could rally the people and that the feeble regime would
crumble the moment it was challenged.
They had underestimated their opponents, for the Republic, as Anatole
France once said, was bad at governing but good at self-defence. On finding
themselves condemned to years of unexpected opposition the Gaullists - like .
so many parties of the Right which pride themselves on their superior
patriotism - lapsed into strident and shameless irresponsibility. They charged
the parties in power with playing politics at the expense of the national in-
terest - yet they voted with the Communists to destroy the regime in the hope
of winning a battle among the ruins. With shrill indignation they exploited
the 'affair, of the generals' to accuse the governing parties of betraying the
soldiers fighting in Indo-China - yet they raised their own party funds from
the lucrative traffic in Indo-Chinese piastres. They condemned the System
because of its divided cabinets without authority - yet once in office Gaullist
ministers busily sabotaged the policies of the premiers who appointed them.
They insisted demagogically that the country's disputes and difficulties arose
not from her weakened situation or her divided people but from the deliberate
choice of the selfish politicians, and that these evils could be simply cured by
a new structure of government ensuring determination and authority among
the rulers and evoking discipline and sacrifice among the citizens.
Naturally this appeal was stigmatized as fascist. RPF shared some features
of fascist movements: the simultaneous demand for national revival and
social change, the call for strong government superseding futile party bicker-
ing, the evocation of the dignity and power of the state against the rampant
demands of pressure-groups and sectional interests. Gaullist psychology was
marked by the cult of authority and of the infallible leader. RPF was led by
prosperous men but supported by a section of the poor, especially by economic
proletarians who resented and repudiated that social classification.
Yet de Gaulle's own record - whether in 1940, in 1944-46 or after 1958 -
was poles removed from fascism. The French social structure has little in
common with that of the countries which succumbed to fascism between the
47. See below, p. 173.
146 THE PARTIES
wars. RPF was based on the dynamic and not the declining regions of
France. It was nationalist - but no more so than the German Socialists at the
same date. It had neither the extensive capitalist support nor the purely
demagogic programme of other fascist movements, and it was never tainted
by any breath of anti-semitism. De Gaulle was never prepared to seize power
illegally. The movement's propaganda never glorified violence, and its
* shock troops ' were kept firmly subordinate. And in demanding * the balancing,
the reconciliation of great pressure-groups by a strong executive * it was putting
forward a potentially dangerous remedy - for a potentially fatal disease.48
Many RPF supporters who detested fascism would have been content to
turn the movement into a respectable parliamentary Conservative party.
Rather than permit such a frustration of his purpose General de Gaulle
preferred division in the Assembly, disaster in the constituencies, and with-
drawal from the political arena. By 1956 his disciples, having lost both their
leader and their following, had degenerated into a turbulent and aggressive
parliamentary splinter group. But because of the many military and adminis-
trative contacts of their leaders, because of their past experience of clandestine
political activity, and above all because of the General's own character and
reputation, they were well placed to take advantage of the crisis which - as de
Gaulle had always expected - eventually shattered the fragile structure of the
Fourth Republic.
In 1958 subversion, riot and overt military pressure at last brought Gaullism
to power in circumstances which gave maximum scope to whatever fascist
tendencies were latent in the movement. Moreover UNR, the dominant party
of the Fifth Republic, seemed more prone to right-wing authoritarian
temptations than RPF as long as the Left Gaullists were outside the fold.
Yet despite the defections of Soustelle and Delbecque an overwhelming
majority loyally supported the President's progressive Algerian policies. In
power they appeared not as fascists but as middle-class reformers: not
sentimental, not particularly humanitarian and not at all liberal-minded,
but concerned to create a prosperous and thus strong and united nation.49
Like Theodore Roosevelt's American Progressives early in the century, the
Gaullists recruited among a younger generation and a different social milieu
from the established parties.50 Again like the Progressives the Gaullist leaders
were disagreeably self-righteous; this made them sometimes unscrupulous,
frequently heavy-handed, perpetually impatient, and too often grossly un-
generous to opponents (also, at times, ludicrously bombastic). But like the
Progressives, too, at their best they remained devoted to an ideal of the public
48. Shock troops : Fauvet, Forces, p. 237 ; Guery, pp. 24-5. (One of their organizers was Jean
Dides, on whom pp. 46n., 52, 348.) 'Balancing'; H. S. Hughes in Earle, p. 259 (he argues that
RPF was, on the whole, fascist); for the other view see Aron, Schisme, pp. 225-6, and no. 5,
p. 81 ('neither the strength nor the vices of fascist parties').
49. Far more often than others Gaullist voters said they supported their party 'to shape
France's future', and far less often 'to defend my legitimate interests' (1 1 % of RPF voters, 22 %
or more for every other party; they rated leadership much higher and doctrine much lower than
anyone else: Sondages, 1952, no. 3, quoted Appendix vn). But some Gaullist politicians were to
display a keen appetite for spoils.
50. This comparison was suggested to me by Professor N. Wahl.
THE GAULLISTS 147
good, contemptuous of private intrigues and social pressures, eager for con-
structive reform and willing to take personal risks for their conception of
public duty - as in 1940, when they threw up their careers and prospects to
follow an obscure brigadier-general who knew that he could save his country
and that no one else could.
Chapter 11
THE CONSERVATIVE GROUPS
1. HISTORY
Until 1939 an amorphous set of shifting, ill-organized groups stood to the
Right of the Radical party in the political spectrum. Although all were broadly
Conservative, there were many differences between them which often cut
across the nominal lines of political division.
The Right had opposed the Third Republic until, towards the end of the
nineteenth century, it became plain that the traditional royalist cause was lost.
Among the laique section of the bourgeoisie there then emerged a Centre
which took up the defence of social and economic conservatism within the
framework of the Republic; it was mainly embodied in a loose organization,
Alliance dgmocratique, which often co-operated with the moderate Radicals.
But ardent Catholics or nationalists found it hard to accept the regime that
had humiliated the army in the Dreyfus affair and imposed the separation of
Church and State. Republicans therefore remained suspicious of these openly
right-wing elements, and before 1914 governments rarely risked the cohesion
of the majority by accepting support from them.
As militant anticlericalism declined and a revolutionary working-class
movement arose, the political centre of gravity gradually shifted. Increasingly
frequently the dominant Radicals had to rely on support from the Right as
well as the Centre at the polls or in Parliament. Such combinations remained
unpopular with the militants. But the embarrassment they caused the party
was much less acute after the first world war, when hardly any open enemies
of the Republic sat in the Chamber of Deputies. For fourteen of the twenty
inter-war years the Conservative groups held or shared power.
Yet these groups were never effective in parliamentary action. The Third
Republic itself had been established by a monarchist Assembly which could
not agree whom to place on the throne. New organizations were set up early
in the new century, but they eschewed the name of party, did not impose
discipline on their members of parliament, and corresponded only very
approximately to the different tendencies of Conservative opinion: Alliance
d<*mocratique stood for social conservatism but was indifferent to the Church;
Fddfration rfyublicaine had most appeal to nationalists; Action lib&ale
populaire attracted devout Catholics, and its successor, the Parti d^mocrate
populaire, was so progressive socially that many observers refused to regard
it as conservative at all.1
Nor were such distinctions of outlook and ideology the only obstacle to
strong organization on the Right. With the exception of the extreme national-
ists most Conservatives were suspicious of mass movements, which they
1 . I use conservative with a small V to denote supporters of a social and economic outlook,
and with a capital 'C' to distinguish those who also (whatever their private religious views)
supported the claims of the Church in politics. The Conservatives who accepted the Republic
usually referred to themselves as Modirts.
THE CONSERVATIVE GROUPS 149
thought distasteful, demagogic and dangerous. They preferred to base their
electoral support upon the local influence of individual notables in areas where
the old ruling class retained its traditional ascendancy. But these independent
political feudatories, wary of the masses and jealous of their own power and
status, found discipline and organization repugnant. No Conservative party
ever attained genuine cohesion, exercised real authority over its parliamentary
representatives, or attracted a large popular following. Mass movements of
the Right always took the form of frankly anti-parliamentary leagues such as
Action fran$aise .
This loose structure gave full scope for the personal rivalries which be-
devilled the Right throughout the Third Republic as much as the broader
conflicts between groups, policies and ideologies. In the last years of the
regime there were several leaders each with a distinct outlook and separate
following: among the anti-Germans Louis Marin, the ultra-nationalist presi-
dent of Federation republicaine, and Paul Reynaud, an unruly individualist
from Alliance democratique; on the side of appeasement its president P. E.
Flandin, and Pierre Laval, a refugee from the Left who had committed him-
self to no organization. Outside Parliament Colonel de la Rocque built up
Croix defeu, an ex-servicemen's association, into a powerful anti-parliamen-
tary league; when it was dissolved in 1936 by the Popular Front government,
he transformed it into the Parti social fran$ais with active constituency com-
mittees and a large bourgeois following. Although its supporters in the Cham-
ber were a mere handful, competent observers expected them to number a
hundred after the general election of 1940.2
In 1940, however, not a new Chamber but a new regime was installed. At
first the Vichy government corresponded to the real desires of the great
majority of the Right. Admiration for fascism - though for Mussolini rather
than Hitler - had been steadily growing among French Conservatives terrified
by the Popular Front. Although some prominent individuals like Matin were
opposed to Vichy, the majority accepted this authoritarian and traditionalist
regime as their own.
At the Liberation, therefore, most right-wing politicians were discredited.
Those who remained set about organizing what they hoped would become the
great Conservative party of the Fourth Republic, the Parti republicain de la
Liberte1. But the Right still did not take kindly to discipline, and several
prominent leaders stayed out, dropped out or were driven out. PRL neither
built up an effective local organization nor acquired a popular following.
During the 1946-51 Parliament it had nearly thirty deputies (many of whom
also followed de Gaulle). But it disappeared as a separate group in the 1951
Assembly.
Two other groups existed in the first Assembly of the Fourth Republic. The
Independent Republicans attracted nearly all the Conservatives who stayed
out of PRL in 1945-46. They were rather more willing than their rivals to
support and join Third Force governments. The Peasant party was the post-
war successor of a small and demagogic Parti agraire, founded in 1928 by
Fleurant-Agricola (M. Fleurant as he then was) and based on the poor
2. Duverger, Parties, p. 320; Fauvet, Forces, p. 134.
150 THE PARTIES
Catholic departments of the Massif Central. Just after the war this area was
the seat of four of the six Peasant party federations and returned the half-
dozen Peasant deputies, who originally were affiliated to MRP. The party
expanded rapidly and by 1950 claimed federations active in forty-five depart-
ments, provisional committees in another seventeen, and a total membership
of 20,000. At the dissolution in 1951 it had attracted nearly twenty deputies
from other Conservative groups. They were more governmental than PRL
but less so than the Independents.3
These separate groups came together in the Centre national des independants
et pay sans (CNIP), which grew out of CNI - a committee set up in July 1948
to co-ordinate the activities of those PRL and Independent members of par-
liament who rejected the leadership of de Gaulle. Early in 1951 CNI extended
its scope and title to embrace the Peasants. In the general election of that year
Conservatives sponsored by it ran on common lists, each deputy deciding
after his election whether to join the Peasant group or the Independents (who
absorbed the remains of PRL). As men elected on the same list usually
adhered to the same group, the division was broadly by departments; but
colleagues occasionally chose differently, as in Meuse and Aveyron, while
conversely Conservatives elected on different lists might find themselves
associated for parliamentary purposes, as in Haute-Saone or Basses-Pyr6n6es.
The fifty-three Independents tended to represent northern and industrial
Conservatism, while the forty-three Peasants were mainly drawn from the
more backward regions.4
From opposition to tripartisme the various Conservative groups gradually
drifted into association with the majority as the political centre of gravity
shifted towards the Right. In 1951, out of eighty-seven metropolitan Con-
servative deputies only twenty-one were elected in alliance with Gaullists;
thirty-three formed part of combinations in which Socialists also participated
and the rest won their seats in opposition to both. The intransigence of General
de Gaulle was mainly responsible for this result, for many Conservatives
would have allied with the Gaullists in preference to the government parties
if only the former had been willing. But in the new Assembly it was the
Conservatives and not RPF who seduced the other's following. Pinay was
elected premier in May 1952 with the support of twenty-seven dissident
Gaullists, who broke with their party in July and formed a new group, Action
rfyublicaine et sociale. ARS co-operated closely with CNIP and finally joined
it in 1954, And after the 1956 election the Independents, ARS and most of
the Peasants formed a single Conservative group in the Assembly (entitled
3. On its membership see Fauvet, Forces, p. 114; on its post-war history and outlook, R.
Barrillon in Pay sans, pp. 131-47; on the Parti agraire, J. M. Royer in ibid., pp. 154-5. A fourth
small Conservative group was the Union democratique des independants (UDI) who mostly
came from MRP by way of RPF and adhered to CNI (see below) in 1951. On Conservatism in
the early years see Marabuto, Partis politiques et mouvements sociaux, pp. 47-61.
4. The Independents attracted three-quarters of the Conservative deputies from north of the
Loire, the Peasants two-thirds of those from departments along or south of the river. They had
respectively 18 and 3 deputies from the advanced departments (index of production per head 110,
national average 100); 2 and 15 from the backward departments (index under 70); 27 and 22
from the rest. Later ARS brought in ten more members from the advanced, one from the back-
ward and twenty from the intermediate category (see Goguel, Geographic, p. 140, for the depart-
ments in each).
THE CONSERVATIVE GROUPS 151
Independants et pay sans d9 action sociale). Led by Pinay, this new combination
represented the greatest unity the parliamentary Right had ever achieved.
2. ORGANIZATION AND FOLLOWING
This success was primarily due to Roger Duchet, Independent senator for
Cote d'Or, the founder of CNIP and its general secretary throughout the
Fourth Republic. Understanding the limits of the possible among politicians
notorious for their ferocious individualism, he began the Centre as a modest
clearing-house for co-ordinating Conservative electoral activity. In its early
years it concentrated on helping re-elect sitting members rather than stimula-
ting contests throughout the country or proselytizing the electorate. CNIP's
executive at first contained only members of parliament, though in time they
agreed to co-opt a few outsiders, who often represented sympathetic pressure-
groups.5 The departmental centres (of which seventy-five were represented at
the conference of November 1956) were simply committees of notables - local
councillors and leaders of the district's business and peasant associations.
Active supporters numbered some 20,000 (mostly councillors) during elections
and under a thousand between them; the party did not even pretend to seek a
rank and file membership.6 To do so might have its dangers, as was shown
when the CNIP conference of December 1954 was swamped by a mass of
Poujadist and ultra-royalist activists about whom there was nothing Conser-
vative at all. But not to do so had disadvantages too: lacking voluntary
workers and propagandists CNIP members were particularly likely to be-
come mere spokesmen for the local pressure-groups on whose political and
financial support they sometimes became wholly dependent.7
At first CNIP repudiated any intention of putting pressure on parliamen-
tarians who joined; its first communiqu6 described them as 'those who mean
to preserve their freedom of voting and do not wish to submit to party dis-
cipline '. But it was not long before the Independents adopted a party outlook
and vocabulary. In the Paris senatorial elections of 1952 they announced that
'All other lists of "Independents" or "French Independents" are regarded
by the Centre as splitters (listes de division)'. At the 1954 conference it was
decided to expel members of parliament who joined a cabinet in which the
party had by a two-thirds majority resolved not to participate.8
The extent to which a party organization can impose discipline on its mem-
bers of parliament depends largely on the loyalty it can command from its
5. In I960 the executive included 21 deputies and 17 senators among its 48 members : Laponce,
p. 116.
6. Figures from ibid. An official circular stated that the national Centre *ne reunit pas de mili-
tants politiques'; the model constitution for departmental centres specified that the * centre est
compost d'elus locaux et de personnaliteV ; ARS announced that its parliamentary founders
*se refusent par avance £ instituer une organisation demagogique tendant a tromper les masses
en leur laissant croire notamment qu'on sollicite leur avis . . .' : quoted by M. Merle in Partis et
Classes, pp. 257-9.
7. Ibid., p. 257 n. 32; M. Dogan in Paysans, p. 214.
8. CNIP members of the existing Mendes-France cabinet were not, however, required to
resign. In May 1958 Pflimlin's opponents were at first one vote short of a two-thirds majority;
later they succeeded in voting the withdrawal of the CNIP ministers, and the premier resigned.
First communique : Monde, 25-26 July 1948. 'Splitters' : quoted Forces nouvelles (MRP), no. 14,
17 May 1952. Cf. Williams, p. llln.; Merle, he. cit., pp. 243-6.
152 THE PARTIES
electorate. The allegiance of Conservative voters, which had always been
loose, improved markedly during the Fourth Republic.9 After the 1954 con-
ference CNIP began to undertake propaganda in the country. Its endorsement
proved valuable when rival Conservative candidates were in the field, especially
in by-elections;10 and at the 1956 general election, although there were more
dissident lists than in 1951, they won less support11 But CNIP was not strong
enough to make or break a deputy, and while its leaders might try (often in
vain) to influence the behaviour of Conservative politicians in a given depart-
ment they made no attempt to impose a uniform policy throughout the
country. Duchet found it easier to increase the number of Conservative
deputies than to strengthen their cohesion, and flexibility rather than dis-
cipline had to remain his watchword.12
The particularism of local magnates was not the only problem, for inter-
necine rivalry among Conservatives was as frequent at the top as in the con-
stituencies. Any attempt at coherent organization had to allow for a tradition
of personal independence cherished by men who differed in political outlook,
economic interest and constituency background; whose individual ambitions
were better served by the continuation of several small parliamentary groups
(and leaders) ; and who reserved the right to give political, personal or group
jealousies priority over the rather nebulous 'general interest' of an inchoate
Conservative party.13 Thus the story of Duchet's achievement is largely that
of the changing but ceaseless disputes among his colleagues.
For years the most conspicuous of these was the bitter feud between Pinay
and Laniel - prot6g6s respectively of two old enemies from the Third Repub-
lic, Flandin the appeaser and Reynaud the opponent of Nazi Germany.
Duchet himself was a Pinay man, and in 1950 Reynaud attempted to oust him
from the secretaryship of his own organization. Pinay's cabinet in 1952 and
Laniel's in 1954 included between them eight members of CNIP's executive -
but only one man sat in both. Duchet and Pinay blocked Laniel's stubborn
bid for the Presidency of the Republic. But this prolonged quarrel was
eventually overshadowed by the struggle over North African policy, and in
1955 the rival Independent leaders stood together in defence of Edgar Faure's
Moroccan policy against a right-wing offensive by their ex-Gaullist colleagues
ofARS.1*
9. Merle, nn. 38 and 85 ; in 1955 a poll found 82 % of former Conservative voters meant to vote
the same again, the highest percentage of any non-Communist party. Formerly they had been the
least stable of all: cf. Sondages, 1952, no. 3, p. 43, and Appendix vn.
10. The right-wing vote was split in 18 of the 29 metropolitan by-elections between 1952 and
1958. All the CNIP candidates ran ahead of their rivals, except for two who fought former local
deputies. Thirteen won, seven of them despite split votes, which deprived five others of possible
victory. Of course CNIP often endorsed a candidate who could have won without its aid.
11. Lists neither endorsed by CNIP nor apparenttes with its lists had 20% of the Right vote
in 1951 and 15 % in 1956 ; 17 % and 9 % outside Seine and Seine-et-Oise, the scene of the extreme
Right's main effort. In Eure the CNIP nominee defeated a challenger backed by Pinay himself;
at Bordeaux a deputy endorsed by CNIP ran far ahead of another with strong local support,
though the split cost them both their seats.
12. In 1958 the CNIP group admitted Jean Fraissinet of Marseilles, who at a by-election early
that year had defied Duchet by refusing to withdraw, and so had given the seat to a Communist.
See also below, p. 154.
13. On these parliamentary disputes cf. MacRae, no. 149, pp. 171-87; and below, pp. 432-3.
14. Duchet later separated from Pinay and became an Algdrte franc aise extremist ; his sympathy
[over
THE CONSERVATIVE GROUPS 153
The ARS group brought into the fold about thirty Conservatives who had
been Gaullist fellow-travellers. Most were deputies who had sat as Conserva-
tives before 1951, whose seats depended on Conservative votes or who
represented the Conservative west; ARS attracted few city members despite
its large vote in Paris.15 Several of its deputies had belonged to PRL, and like
PRL members they tended to be further to the Right than the Independents,
more sympathetic to urban business than the Peasants, and - as befitted ex-
Gaullists - more nationalist than most of their new allies. In 1954 the ED C
treaty was opposed by half the ARS members, but only by a fifth of the
Independents and a third of the Peasants. The governments of 1956-58 faced
more consistent hostility (mainly over Algeria) from ex-ARS members than
from former Independents.16
The third component of the united Conservative group of 1956 came from
one wing of the Peasants. Paul Antier, the ambitious leader of that party, had
been the first deputy to join de Gaulle in 1940, and after the 1951 election he
favoured a government under Gaullist leadership. While holding office as
Pleven's minister of agriculture he worked hard to organize a new majority
and install a new cabinet. He was therefore dismissed and replaced by his own
under-secretary (a former official of Vichy's Peasant Corporation, Camille
Laurens) and the party split. Laurens and most of the 'lawyer-peasant'
members of parliament continued to support governments, while Antier, the
' peasant-peasant ' deputies and the party executive preferred to oppose them.17
The spfit was healed in June 1952 but reopened within eighteen months. In
1954 Antier's friends left CNIP, though it still endorsed his candidates in the
1956 election. The united Conservative party in the new Assembly absorbed
the Laurens faction; Antier's depleted followers formed a separate group
which affiliated to it. But in May 1957 that restless leader launched a new
alliance with Poujade and Dorgeres (a pre-war peasant agitator who had just
been elected as an extreme-Right deputy). Again the party executive approved
Antier's course, but most of his surviving parliamentary supporters defected
and he was left with a tiny splinter group.18
Antier's chequered career showed that among peasant politicians the line
for the generals' revolt of April 1961 lost him the secretaryship of CNIP and gave Reynaud a
belated revenge.
15. Of 28 RPF members from the previous Assembly 13 joined the rebels (including 8 of the
11 who had been PRL candidates in 1946). So did 8 of the 11 deputies who owed their election
to Conservative support; 8 of the 16 members from the west (nine departments from Calvados
to Vendee omitting the Breton peninsula) ; 8 of the 15 Gaullist lawyers ; but only 3 out of 22 from
the three Parisian departments and only 2 out of 14 from the constituencies including Lyons,
Marseilles, Lille, Bordeaux, Strasbourg and St. Etienne.
16. Of 20 ex-ARS deputies 16 voted against all or all but one of these four governments at
their fall. Of 29 ex-Independents only 11 did so. Cf. MacRae, no. 149, pp. 180-3; and below,
pp. 158-9.
17. When Mendes-France came to power these roles were reversed for a time. On the split
see Barrillon in Paysans, pp. 135-9. Laurens eventually replaced Duchet as secretary of CNIP
in 1961.
18. On Dorgeres see below, p. 161n., and on Rassemblement paysan, below, p. 166 n. 25. In
1956, out of 32 Peasant deputies standing only 19 were re-elected, compared with 22 out of 26
ARS and 33 out of 40 Independents; Poujadist gains in the countryside had thus changed the
composition of the Conservative party as well as reducing its members: Pierce, no. 180, p. 418
and n.
154 THE PARTIES
between parliamentary Conservatism and anti-democratic reaction might be
imprecise. When P6tain's lawyer Isorni was elected for Paris in 1951 the
Independent group would not admit him to membership, and he became a
parliamentary Peasant. But the Independents' scruples were short-lived,
especially in the capital where the extreme Right was strongest. As the 1953
municipal elections approached the lure of Vichyite votes proved irresistible
to Conservatives, neo-Radicals and ex-Gaullists alike. Prominent among the
ARS recruits to Conservatism was Fr<§d6ric-Dupont, former leader of the
riot of 6 February 1934, already boss of the left bank, and henceforth a per-
petual thorn in CN IP's side. In the 1958 election he endorsed several dis-
sident candidates of whom one was elected: J. M. Le Pen, a young ex-
Poujadist deputy of fascist tendencies. Both men were nevertheless admitted
to the Conservative group (which also included all but one of the fourteen
unrepentant Vichyite officials who sat in that Assembly, and a far smaller pro-
portion of Resisters than any other party). For CNIP valued numbers more
than unity and welcomed any recruit who could carry a constituency - even if
he had defied party discipline or bore dubious democratic credentials. As
Siegfried had said, 'It is difficult to classify them [right-wingers] all as hostile
to the Republic, but she cannot count on them.'19
In numbers the Conservative groups increased gradually during the Fourth
Republic. At each of the three elections of 1945-46 they polled 2£ million
votes ; but as they contested fewer departments in the last election, the apparent
stability conceals a small advance.20 In 1951 they faced RPF competition but
still held just under 2,300,000 votes, or 9% of the total electorate.21 In 1956
they won more from the Gaullists than they lost to the Poujadists, and in-
creased their total vote to nearly 3,200,000.
In parliamentary strength they grew steadily: from 62 (metropolitan)
deputies in each of the two Constituent Assemblies to 70 in November 1946,
87 in 1951, and 95 in 1956. Including overseas members they had 74 deputies
at the beginning of the first legislature of the Fourth Republic and over 80 at
the end, in spite of defections to de Gaulle; the 1951 election brought them
up to 96, and the RPF split to 135. But at the 1956 election, though their vote
increased by nearly a million, the electoral law did not help the Conservatives
as it had in 195 1.22 They had expected to gain seats but lost them instead,
falling back to 97.
Both the voters and the representatives of the Right were older than their
rivals. In the three National Assemblies of the Fourth Republic their deputies
had the highest average age of any group (except the Radicals in 1946) and the
lowest proportion of young members (except the Socialists in 1946 and 1956);
19. De la IIP, p. 198; cf. pp. 206, 259. See also below, p. 160 (Isorni); Harrison, no. 123,
pp. 147-56 (Dupont) ; above, nn. 12 (discipline) and 14 (Duchet). Of Conservative deputies in
1958, 25 % were Resisters, of M RP members 47 %, and in all other groups over 50 % : M. Dogan
in Elections 1958, p. 257. This was partly because Conservatives were old, and young Resisters
of the Right had joined other parties : Grosser, p. 133.
20. Husson, i. xxxiii~iv and ii. xxxii gives them 2,546,000 in October 1945, 2,540,000 in June
1946 and 2,466,000 in November 1946 (when by including Gaullist votes Goguel brings them up
to three million : Fourth Republic, p. 90).
21. Goguel, loc. eft. 22. See above, pp. 39-40, 48-9 and below, pp. 313-16.
THE CONSERVATIVE GROUPS 155
and 45% of their voters were over fifty (a percentage exceeded only by the
Radicals).23
Before 1939 the strongholds of Conservatism had been the Catholic west,
the eastern frontier departments as far as Champagne, the Massif Central, and
a few scattered mountainous areas in the south. In 1951 RPF, MRP and
CNIP together dominated the same regions.24 By 1956 RPF was in decline;
MRP was still a vigorous competitor among the devout; and CNIP's
support tended to be drawn from provinces where religion was either dead, as
in Champagne, weak, as in parts of Normandy, or traditional and respectable
rather than a passionately held belief.25 One poll in 1952 found that 85% of
Conservative voters were practising Catholics, but that the devout were much
fewer than in MRP. Four years later another poll showed a third of all prac-
tising Catholics voting for each of these parties and less than a third for all
others combined - but negligent Catholics were four times as likely to choose
CNIP as MRP.26
Conservative voters included more property-owners than any others and
were more prone to justify their party preference as * defending my legitimate
interests '.27 Polls showed CNIP obtaining at most 7% of the manual and 1 1 %
of the white-collar workers' vote, winning a steady 21% of the businessmen
and attracting more peasant support than any rival.28 Electoral analysis
confirmed these conclusions. In 1956 20% of agricultural voters supported the
Conservatives, but only 14% of others ; and in the cities they were strong only
in bourgeois districts.29 Like the Radicals, though less strikingly, they were
weak in the industrial areas. The 17 most industrial departments included only
two of the fifteen where CNIP's vote reached 20% of the electorate in 1951
and only three of the fifteen where it did so in 1956. In the rest of France their
percentage vote in 1951 was well above that in the 17 departments, and even
within a region their strength often lay in the backward rural areas.30
The same rural bias was reflected in their leadership. Local departmental
centres were often dominated by peasant spokesmen.31 In the National
23. Sondages, 1952, no. 3; Duverger, Parties, p. 167, for 1946; my calculations for 1951 and
1956. Cf. Appendix vn.
24. In 1932 there were fifteen departments - of which nine were western and four eastern - in
which 45 % of the electorate voted for the Right. In 195 1 RP F, M RP and Conservatives together
reached 45 % in twelve of these departments and missed it by less than a hundred votes in two
more. Cf. Maps 6, 15, 16.
25. Suffert, pp. 36-7; Fauvet in Partis et Classes, pp. 171-2; Merle in ibid., p. 251 ; Paysans,
pp. 332-3 (but contrast pp. 502-3). See Maps 5, 14, 20.
26. For 1952 sources see p. 125n.: 73% of MRP and 56% of CNIP voters were devout,
25 and 38 % were Catholics (23 and 29 % practising) but not devout. For 1956 see Lipset, p. 245.
Cf. below, p. 158.
27. Bondages, 1952, no. 3, pp. 40-1 (quoted Merle, he. cit., p. 252) ; and Appendix vn.
28. Among businessmen it ran well behind the Gaullists in 1951 and 1958, barely ahead of the
Poujadists in 1956. Among peasants the detailed figures show highly unlikely variations : 25 % in
1951, 45 % in 1956, 35 % in 1958. For sources see p. 109 n. 14.
29. J. Klatzmann in Paysans, p. 50 (agricultural); for cities, Goguel, no. 108, pp. 326-33 for
Paris 1951 (for 1946 cf. George in Moraz6 et al.y, Merle, he. cit., p. 251n. for Bordeaux 1951;
Elections 1956, pp. 320-1 for Lyons; Olivesi, p. 177 for Marseilles 1956 (cf. p. 271).
30. Goguel, Fourth Republic, pp. 104, 113 (1951 totals 10-2% in the 17 departments, 7-8% in
the rest); Elections 1956, p. 485; cf. ibid., p. 390, on Isere. See Maps 14, 20, and 21.
31. Over half the members in Somme, three-fifths in Hautes-Pyr6nees - the rest being business
or professional men, and few of the peasants being 'large proprietors' (over 250 acres) : Merle,
loc. cit., p. 255n. On CNIP candidates, ibid. pp. 253-4.
156 THE PARTIES
Assembly they always had a higher proportion of peasants than any other
group.32 This reflected the influence of the Peasant party, for only five In-
dependents gave agriculture as their profession while half the Peasants did
so.33 But half the Conservatives as against only a fifth of the Gaullists had
strong rural links ; Dogan calls them the ' country Right ' and the * city Right '.34
CNIP aspired to be the party of all the well-off, but it was still heavily
dependent upon the traditional bulwarks of Conservatism, the rural notables.
3. CHARACTERISTICS
In 1930, at a moment when the entire Right seemed to accept the parliamen-
tary regime, Andr6 Siegfried located its base in those classes which mistrusted
universal suffrage and claimed (or at least felt) that their birth or fortunes
entitled them to rule the country. The battle between Right and Left, he
argued, was a contest between the political claims of social hierarchy and those
of democratic equality. Around the bishops, landowners and capitalists
gravitated larger groups which were socially dependent upon them. French
politics c would be incomprehensible if we lost sight of the fact that the counter-
revolutionary party keeps constantly rebuilding itself as its spirit crystallizes
into new forms'.35
The taint of counter-revolution sometimes made Conservative support an
embarrassment rather than an asset to governments. This handicap was
reinforced when the most anti-parliamentary Conservatives turned to Vichy
and even to fascism, and found themselves discredited by the outcome of the
war. Yet the Liberation saw a weakening even of that section of the Right
which had defended the Republic and participated in the Resistance. For the
rise of MRP deprived many old-style Conservatives of the support of the
Church, on which they had hitherto been able to count; and the Gaullist
movement won away from them many of their most alert, modern-minded
and patriotic (or nationalist) adherents. Like the Radicals, the remnants of
the old-fashioned Right suffered from seeming, and being, survivals from the
past rather than parties adapted to the post-war world. But the Conser-
vatives had less influence (and the Radicals more) than their numbers would
suggest.88 Much of their energy was dissipated by individualism and diverted
into factionalism. A narrow devotion to the interests and prejudices of the
32. A quarter in 1951 and a fifth in 1956; only RPF (till ARS seceded) and the Communists
(in 1956) exceeded 10 %. CNIP also had most lawyers (over a quarter) and in 1946 most business
men, but not later (a fifth in 1951 and a quarter in 1956, the same proportions as for RGR
and MRP). See Dogan's tables, p. 68n. above.
33. Among the other half were P6tain*s defence counsel, the mayor of Biarritz, and the presi-
dents of the road hauliers* and house-property owners* associations. A * Peasant' senator, M.
Boutemy, distributed the political funds of the employers' federation. Even among the self-styled
professional agriculturalists many had rather tenuous connections with the soil.
34. Partis et Classes, p. 325. Contrast Barrillon in Pay sans, pp. 145-6.
35. France, pp. 28, 32-4; Tableau, pp. 59-60, 68-72. Their outlook had changed little by 1954:
see comments and quotations in Merle, loc. cit,, pp. 262-3. But see below, n. 49.
36. 'Theoretically a vote of the Right is as good as a vote of the Left, but in practice this is not
so. The member of the Left enjoys special privileges owing to the prestige of his party, for ... the
Republic instinctively refuses to allow the nation to be governed by men who are not at bottom
inspired by its spirit.' Siegfried, France, p. 93, Tableau, p. 191. In the Fourth Republic RPF
suffered more from these suspicions than the orthodox Conservatives.
THE CONSERVATIVE GROUPS 157
better-off hampered their quest for votes. In 1951 Siegfried was still preaching
the need for a modern and intelligent Conservatism.37
In the Fourth Republic the Conservatives made remarkable progress in
overcoming these weaknesses. They consolidated their influence with the
peasantry and small businessmen (big business at first usually preferred
RPF, and later favoured the right-wing Radicals as well as CNIP). They
substantially increased their popular vote and became for a time the largest
party in the Assembly. They set up an effective headquarters which brought
five-sixths of the Conservative voters and nine-tenths of their deputies under
its rather loose control. Tainted at first by their Vichy associations, they
were by the end of the regime accepted as good republicans (though many of
them proved unwilling to run any political risk in the defence of democracy).
They directed the government only between 1952 and 1954, but their power
was greater than the composition of ministries indicated. From 1954 the Pre-
sident of the Republic was a Conservative, Coty. They enjoyed the sympathies
of many senior officials, and the newly strengthened employers' organization
wielded considerable influence on the administration.38 The details of
economic policy were often repugnant to business or the peasantry, but its
general lines were much more satisfactory to these groups than to the indus-
trial workers. More surprisingly, CNIP produced in Antoine Pinay the
Fourth Republican leader who won most general and lasting esteem from his
countrymen; for Guy Mollet's popularity was less general, Mendes-France's
less permanent, and Pinay aroused far less bitter hostility than either - while
no one else drew any public following at all. So rapid was the Conservative
recovery from the demoralization and discredit of the Liberation that while
the Third Republic had begun with MacMahon and ended with Blum, the
Fourth - it was said - began with Blum and reverted to MacMahon.39
The revival of right-wing strength was accompanied by no great renewal of
right-wing ideas.40 Not all Conservatives were unprogressive. The classes
moyennes from whom they drew much of their strength were a conglomeration
of disparate groups. Dynamic employers, managers in large businesses, and
many professional men had as much to gain from economic expansion and
modernization as rentiers, retired people, small farmers and shopkeepers had
to lose.41 The attempt to appeal to both at once was one reason for CNIP's
disunity; while most Conservatives opposed Mendes-France bitterly, eight of
them served in his ministry and twenty-two voted for him to the very end.
Even among more orthodox party members there were men like Paul Rey-
naud whom no one could accuse of being out of touch with reality. Never-
theless it was precisely the Conservatives of this type, the least hidebound, the
37. De la IVe & la Ve Rfyublique, p. 176.
38. Ehrmann, Business, pp. 257-71 and references there.
39. Duverger, quoted Wright, no. 226, p. 3.
40. One Gaullist wrote bitterly : * One of the peculiar characteristics of our Conservatives is
their refusal to see and accept facts . . . [and] realities When in the end they give way to them,
it is almost always too late In so far as they recognize change in the world, they prefer to con-
vince themselves that it can continue without Frenchmen having to accept the innovations and
sacrifices necessary for coming to terms with it. They mistake stagnation for prudence, passivity
for wisdom, apathy for social stability* : Noel, pp. 73-4.
41. Merle, he. cit., p. 273 ; Wright, no. 227, pp. 10-11.
158 THE PARTIES
most capable of adjusting their ideas, the representatives of modern and
industrial constituencies rather than backward rural ones, who were most
likely to go over to MRP or Gaullism.42 And with one of these rival move-
ments more attractive to ardent Catholics and the other to passionate
nationalists, the orthodox Right found its following severely reduced and its
recovery confined within narrow limits.
Attempts were made to regain the lost audience. In 1951 the Conservatives
tried both in the election and in Parliament to outbid MRP as defenders of
the church schools. But all sections of CNIP suffered serious handicaps in a
competition for the allegiance of devout Catholics. Among the Independents
one faction was led by Reynaud, who came from the rather laique Alliance
dgmocratique, the other by Duchet, who had once stood for Parliament as an
anticlerical Radical. PRL, though more right-wing in its economic policy
than M RP, was so little influenced by the Church that in 1946 it had made an
electoral pact with the Radical party. And the Peasants were far too regional-
ized, too reactionary and too exclusively a pressure-group for a single
economic interest to attract support away from MRP. Even when in 1954 the
orthodox Conservatives began for the first time officially to call themselves
an essentially Christian party they (like earlier right-wing leaders such as
Maurras) gave mainly secular reasons for their faith: 'mobilizing the divine'
as Barr£s had once put it.43
Nor could the Gaullists easily be overmatched in nationalist fervour by a
party among whose leaders 'ex-Vichyites outnumber the ex-Resisters, but
both categories are far outstripped by the ex-straddlers'.44 The task proved
still harder after the principal CNIP leaders became ardent defenders of
European integration (including EDC) and in Morocco belatedly accepted an
imperial retreat more far-reaching than that for which they had destroyed
Mend&s-France over Tunisia.45 Nevertheless they did their best. Once the
1956 election was over most of the party, under Duchet's leadership, attempted
(in common with many Radicals and some Socialists) to wash away these sins
by swimming with the nationalist tide,46 And in 1958 the majority of CNIP
members turned to de Gaulle, despite their deep distrust of him, as the one
man who could save the army's unity and Alggriej ran false.
42. This remained true in the Fifth Republic, where the conflict over financial policy between
Pinay and Albin Chalandon of UNR was largely a battle between stabilizers and expansionists.
(Reynaud, like many Gaullists but few Conservatives, was a carpet-bagger with no deep roots in
his constituency.)
43. Merle, he. cit., pp. 265-7; Suffert, pp. 42-3 ; Serant, OA va la Droite, pp. 33-4. Merle cites
from official publications such phrases as * Religion has provided society with the framework of
lasting institutions, and this framework has given to successive generations an impression of
security without which no enterprise would have been possible' and *... legislative measures
extending the economic functions of the State are opposed to the very spirit of the Encyclicals.'
On Catholic attitudes to the parties see above, pp. 109, 155 and notes.
44. Wright, no. 227, p. 5. Cf. n, 19 above.
45. Two-thirds of their deputies voted for EDC; MRP was the only other party to show a
majority for the treaty. Pinay and Pierre July of ARS were the ministers directly responsible for
the return of the Sultan of Morocco, and they were supported by Laniel, Reynaud and Duchet. On
Conservative external policies see Grosser, pp. 132-6.
46. See Bodin and Touchard, no. 21, pp. 277-82; Weber, no. 215, pp. 560-78. As Noel wrote
earlier, in North Africa * When. . . calm prevailed they opposed reforms, calling them useless or
premature since the population remained peaceful. When blood has flowed, they have found in
that another motive for deciding nothing' (p. 75).
THE CONSERVATIVE GROUPS 159
Yet nationalist agitation was not a role in which they were particularly
effective. For although their ranks included bitter demagogues like Jean
Legendre, accomplished time-servers like Frederic-Dupont and ambitious
factional leaders like Barrachin and Antier, there were also among them
many realistic and responsible men.47 In private though not in public all
sections of Conservative opinion doubted the wisdom of the Suez expedition.48
Pinay himself (not to speak of the Mendesist minority) recognized the
inevitability of decolonization in Algeria. Increasingly the party gave its
support to European integration. Consequently, while the excesses of CNIP's
reactionary wing kept alive all the suspicions of the centre groups, the pru-
dence of its moderate section restrained it from exploiting effectively the
nationalist and anti-parliamentary moods of French public opinion.
In the Fourth Republic as in the Third there were always Conservatives
who, in the traditional phrase, were republican moderates but not moderately
republican, and represented the liberal and parliamentary (though not
democratic) strand in the old monarchist tradition.49 As the Vichy regime
evolved towards fascism many more men of the Right came to conclude like
Thiers before them that the Republic served Conservative interests best. At
the Liberation, therefore, there was a 'new Ralliement'.50 Many Conservatives
suspected the ' Bonapartist ' movements of the Fourth Republic, and remained
faithful to the centre governments which Gaullists and Poujadists assailed so
furiously. Such men were torn between their specific preferences in foreign or
social policy and their overriding desire to defend the existing political
regime. Like all centre groups they were under constant strain, their loyalty to
their party leaders in office constantly eroded by their resentment at the con-
cessions which had to be made to keep cabinets together. Coalition politics
accentuated all the differences that separated factions and all the uncertainties
that harassed individuals. Ambivalent and divided, the Conservatives were
therefore vulnerable to the unscrupulous demagogy of an increasingly vocal
and violent extreme Right.51
47. 'The moderation of the "Moderates" [Conservatives] does not exclude a marked pro-
pensity for the use of vindictive and slanderous behaviour. Under the Mendes-France government
we were able to observe ... the snarling virulence of the traditional Right . . .' : ibid., p. 79. Legendre,
the ARS 'member for beet-growing' (Priouret, Deputes, p. 234), was the leader of this attack.
Barrachin, once prominent in Croix defeu, led the ARS revolt; when de Gaulle reproached him,
'But for me you wouldn't be in Parliament' he is said to have replied *But for you I would be m
the cabinet'. For Antier and Dupont sree above, pp. 153-4. For an example of both demagogy
and time-serving see CNIP's response to Poujade: Hoffmann, pp. 356-63, Guy, pp. 128-43.
48. Seep. 50 n. 12.
49. See Remond, La Droite en France, pp. 25, 31, 84-6, etc. _ ^.,AXt_
50 Hoffmann in Change, p. 45; no. 126, p. 51. But Siegfried warned that On the Right the
Republic does not and doubtless never will create unanimity: for even when it seems to have
overcome the ancient enmities, they never die' : De la IHe, p. 206.
51 For CNIP's eagerness to repudiate the charge of being right-wing, reactionary or even
conservative see Merle, loc. cit.. pp. 261-2; he also quotes the retort of Abel Bonnard, later a
collaborationist minister, in Les Moderns (1936) : '. . . they are simply property-owners without a
doctrine, men who share the same social habits but have no bond of faith to unite them, uneasy
egotists, not quite believing in the legitimacy of their own advantages, who merely hope to make
sure of enjoying their own life-interest in them . . .'
Chapter 12
THE EXTREME RIGHT
1. VICHYITES AND CRYPTO-FASCISTS
During most of the twentieth century the right-wing enemies of democracy
were weak in numbers, though Maurras's Action frangaise always enjoyed a
good deal of influence among intellectuals, particularly students. The rise of
fascism abroad and the fear of the Popular Front at home brought them
wider sympathies in conservative and bourgeois quarters, and the defeat of
1940 thrust power into their hands. But there were bitter divisions within
their ranks. Marshal Plain's government and entourage included many
followers of Maurras; these reactionary men of Vichy were bitterly attacked
by the national-socialist collaborators in Paris (led by the ex-Socialist D6at
and the ex-Communist Doriot). The collapse of Germany discredited all the
different factions and it was some years before the extreme Right attempted to
resume political activity.
Their weakness was not only in numbers. Their 'mania for division' re-
vealed a 'reactionary sectarianism' which closely resembled revolutionary
sectarianism in its demand for orthodox purity.1 This tendency was aggravated
by the cult of personality so common on the Right; where the left-winger
favours teamwork, 'the man of the Right' (as one of them put it) 'demands
the leader and rejects the team'.2 In the Fourth Republic Gaullists and Pou-
jadists built major parties around the personality of a leader, while the small
groups of the far Right, whether formed for electoral battles or for street
fighting, were rarely more than the organized clientele of a particular minor
chieftain.
The first electoral effort came in 1951. One of the few prominent Pe*tainists
eligible for Parliament, Maitre Jacques Isorni, was persuaded by P. E. Flandin
to stand in the election. Though his ad hoc group U N I R ( Union des nationaux
et des independents republicans) ran too few lists to qualify as a 'national
party' under the electoral law, it elected three champions of the Marshal: his
former defence counsel - Isorni - in north-west Paris, his ex-secretary at Oran
(Algeria) and one of his ministers of agriculture for Calvados (Normandy).
After some hesitation they were allowed to join the Peasant parliamentary
group and became absorbed as active and useful if rather right-wing Con-
servative members.3
This was not the only sign of a change of climate. In 1951 the bitterest
enemies of the regime founded Rivarol, a weekly organ which except in
circulation, proved a worthy successor to the pre-war Gringoire. Next year
the Gaullists of the capital split over whether to collaborate with Vichyites in
1. Serant, p. 157.
2. Coston, p. 24. This is both the fullest and the most friendly source for most of these groups.
See also R, Barrillon in Monde, 14, 15 and 16 February 1958; Weber, no. 216.
3. For National parties* and the electoral law see below, pp. 506-7; for 1951, Isorni, Ainsi,
pp. 8-19 ; UNI R also won 5% of the vote in a fourth district, Tarn. Some other Conservative
deputies had Petainist sympathies: below, pp. 177, 179n.
THE EXTREME RIGHT 161
the coming municipal elections. In 1953 Parliament, which was soon to elect
as President of the Republic a respected politician who had voted for P£tain
in 1940, passed an amnesty law allowing others who had done so to resume
their parliamentary careers.4 Several tried; very few succeeded.
Although on the French Right there was little enthusiasm for democracy,
its violent enemies were always very few.5 Most of them were concentrated in
the big towns and especially in Paris. In 1954 they formed a short-lived
Rassemblement national, which began fighting by-elections the following year
and in the 1956 general election, allied to other right-wingers under the title
Rtforme de f£tat, ran enough lists to qualify as a 'national party'. Its leader
Me Tixier- Vignancour was returned as its only deputy in his pre-war con-
stituency of Basses-Pyr6n6es.6 In Parliament he became the temporary
manager of the inexperienced Poujadists ; outside it he was the ardent defender
of every fascist conspirator against a regime which he skilfully and unscrupu-
lously undermined, especially in the notorious leakages case of 1956.7
A robust and ruthless revolutionary, Tixier hated the Fifth Republic no less
than previous numerical variants of the regime. His attitude to them all was
one of destructive opposition, more nihilist than conservative. There had
always been such right-wing extremists who were delighted to practise the
politique du pire by encouraging rival extremists of the Left - with whom
indeed they shared a common contempt for the feeble creatures who occupied
the middle ground. But this attitude did not extend to another sector of
extreme-Right opinion, less noisy but perhaps more influential, which drew
its inspiration from a crusading wing of the Catholic Church that had more
importance at Rome than in France itself. The Catholic extreme Right con-
cerned itself with mobilizing anti-democratic opinion through 'education*
and psychological warfare, not with electioneering or revolutionary activity.
Its influence on army officers, particularly in the Fifth Republic, shows that
the distinction can be exaggerated.8
Other movements of the far Right had direct action as their sole aim: the
4. See below, p. 21 On. 9.
5. 'The political dinosaur (la reaction) is a species (or specimen) peculiar to France . . . hostile,
at first actively but later passively, to a political regime which originated much less in the general
will than in the bankruptcy, absence and misfortunes of the regimes which preceded it. The Third
Republic did not appear in France as a dejure but as a de facto form of government, in a country
which was not and never had been republican but gradually became so ... out of fear of militant
clericalism' : Thibaudet, Idfes, pp. 33-4.
6. RN fought every Paris seat in 1956; and though Tixier was elected in the provinces, his
votes were urban : Pay sans, pp. 123-4, However, one peasant extremist - Henri Dorgeres, pre-
war * Green Shirt' leader and later active in Vichy's Peasant Corporation - was elected in Ille-et-
Vilaine as a champion of the bouilleurs de cru (home distillers) against Mendes-France's anti-
alcoholism measures: J. M. Royer in ibid., pp. 149-81, cf. Guy, pp. 180-92, Coston, pp. 161-5.
His vote was negligible in the towns but reached 30 % and even 42% in the poorer rural cantons :
Pay sans, p. 178.
7. On Tixier and the Poujadists cf. below, p. 168 ; for the leakages trial see above, pp. 46n., 49.
Grandson of a Republican deputy of the 1870's, he won a seat in 1936, was unseated for electoral
fraud but re-elected. In 1940, as head of Vichy's radio, he was said by Maurras to favour the
pro-German D6at: L. de G6rin-Ricard and L. True, Histoire de r Action francaise (1949), p. 240.
He was later disgraced by Vichy (not on political grounds). In 1961 he declared in court: *I will
never use the word legitimacy, for I know it has not existed in France since 21 January 1793' :
Monde, 21 July 1961.
8. On it see Bosworth, pp. 183-5, 199-200, 224-8, 334-6; Coston, pp. 509-12; Remond, nos.
187-8. On the sympathies between extreme Right and extreme Left see Weber, no. 216.
162 THE PARTIES
Indo-China ex-servicemen's association which rioted at the time of Dien-
Bien-Phu; Jeune Nation, later the Parti nationalists, a small but noisy fascist
movement started in 1954 by four sons of a leading Vichy milicien executed at
the Liberation, which joined the Anciens d'Indochine in attacking Communist
headquarters after Budapest in 1956; the Parti patriote revolutionnaire, set up
in 1957 by the Gaullist lawyer-adventurer Me Biaggi, which specialized in
wrecking opponents' meetings. Many of their adherents found in Algfrie
franfaise the opportunity that some German-Americans saw in McCarthyism:
a chance to retaliate against those who had questioned their patriotism. The
presse de la trahison, once a Resistance name for collaborationist journals,
became a term of abuse flung by some of its former victims against left-wing
papers sympathetic to Algerian nationalism. These extreme-Right groups kept
closely in touch with their fellows in Algeria (Biaggi was the main organizer of
the riot of 6 February 1956). And there their allies, constantly plotting against
both Fourth and Fifth Republics, acquired at times a substantial following.9
The advent of de Gaulle embarrassed both Vichyites and crypto-Fascists.
Dorg&res supported his election to the premiership; Isorni was the only
orthodox Conservative to oppose it (since 'the defender of Louis XVI cannot
vote for Robespierre'); Tixier voted for the General's candidature but against
giving him full powers (explaining that for casting a similar vote eighteen
years before he had been declared unworthy to sit in Parliament by the very
man who was now asking him to repeat the performance). All three men
were opposed by Gaullists in the 1958 election and all lost their seats. Biaggi
in contrast was elected on a U N R (Gaullist) ticket in Paris, but left U N R over
Algeria a year later. By this time the government had dissolved most of the
direct-action groups and all of them had gone into bitter opposition to the
regime. Here they rejoined an old ally of the far Right, to whom Tixier had
once paid the richly - if temporarily - merited tribute: 'Thanks to Pierre
Poujade we have found our way back to the masses. *
2. POUJADISM: HISTORY AND FOLLOWING
Pierre Poujade, the son of an Action frangaise architect at St. C6r6 in Lot, had
belonged to the youth movement of Doriot's PPF before the war and to that
of Vichy during it. Escaping to North Africa, he married a colon's daughter
and served in the Royal Air Force. After the war he became a commercial
traveller, used his savings to buy a small stationer's shop in his home town,
and in 1952 was elected to the municipal council as a Gaullist candidate on a
Radical list. His movement appealed to the fears of the petty-bourgeois who
was determined not to sink into the ranks of the proletariat, and to the
antagonism towards the politicians of the System felt by many men of the
traditional Left in the poorer parts of the south.
France had a million small shops, far more than other European countries
(one for every 54 inhabitants in 1956, compared with a European average of
one for every 71), and their number increased by 40,000 between 1950 and
1953. At St. C6r6 itself the population had been halved during the last century
9. See Williams and Harrison, pp. 45-6, 51-63, 226-7. For their extreme weakness in France
see above, p. 54n. For the riots over Indo-China see above, p. 45, and below, p. 167.
THE EXTREME RIGHT 163
while the number of shopkeepers and artisans remained unchanged. With the
end of inflation and the rapid growth of competition from co-operatives and
multiple stores, the small man could no longer pay his debts and taxes in
depreciated francs. The inefficient and bureaucratic fiscal system came to seem
oppressive as well when his ex-hero Pinay introduced severe penalties for
future tax evasion in return for an amnesty for past frauds. These tighter con-
trols were bitterly resented by those innumerable small shopkeepers - four-
fifths of the total - who declared an income lower than the working-class
average while remaining grimly determined to differentiate themselves from
the despised proletariat.10 When Poujade organized forcible opposition to a
tax inspector's scrutiny of a neighbour's accounts, he began a revolt which
spread like wildfire through the south.
The first Poujadist organization, UDCA (Union de defense des commer-
gants et des artisans), was formed in 1953. At the outset the movement was not
obviously right-wing. Laniel's Conservative government was then facing the
first major strikes for five years and the first widespread blocking of roads by
peasant carts. Poujadist propaganda was directed against the rich and power-
ful, the technocrats and officials, and the recognized spokesmen of the small
businessmen like L6on Gingembre; Poujadist influence was concentrated in
the traditionally left-wing south and centre; and the Communists, seeing an
opportunity to extend their influence and perhaps sympathizing with another
revolutionary sprung from the people, gave UDCA full support and in many
areas came close to controlling it.11
UDCA's change of direction began at its first conference, at Algiers in
November 1954. The annual subscription was trebled (to 1,000 francs) and a
new weekly, Fraternitd franfaise, was founded under the editorship of an
Algiers extremist, Paul Chevallet. Mendes-France was now in office, and
Poujadist attacks were increasingly directed against the Left in general and
Jews in particular; they enthusiastically denounced economic progress and the
campaign against alcoholism.12 In January 1955 a monster rally in Paris
opened a campaign of pressure on the parties: the Communists reacted with
shameless demagogy, the Socialists with equally shameless cowardice and the
Conservatives with both - MRP alone retaining some sense of dignity and
responsibility. In March the Assembly debated tax controls with a shirt-
sleeved Poujade in the public galleries directing the tactics of those sym-
pathetic members (mostly Conservatives) whom he was later to describe as
10. Lipsedge, no. 146, points out that French fiscal administration employed as many civil
servants (80,000) as that of the United States and that cafes were subjected to 24 different taxes,
garages to 25. Siegfried calls the movement *a product of deflation' ; De la IIIe, p. 203.
11. For the economic background see Hoffmann, pp. 14-22; for Communist influence, pp.
38-40 ; for the changes in Communist policy, pp. 348-56 ; for Communist support in the early
days, VHumanite 6 July 1954, quoted pp. 378-9 : 'Union is strength; the Eight of St C<§r<§ have
excellent article, no. 210, pp. 30-43; on early Communist influence also p. 83., and Guy,
pp. 40-3; on Gingembre, below, pp. 361, 379-80.
12. Hoffmann, pp. 57 (alcohol), 252-3 : 'We will defend the traditional structure of the French
economy ... we are against reconversion.' Peasant demonstrators' banners at Chartres in February
1955 proclaimed, 'Milk = Misery, Productivity - Ruin': De Tarr, p. 206.
164 THE PARTIES
* grovelling at my feet'.13 The Poujadists set up 'parallel unions' of peasants,
students and workers, and made ostentatious contributions to a number of
strike funds.14 When the local councils were renewed in April they tried - in
vain - to unseat their most prominent enemies. Evidently by the middle of
1955 the decision to fight the parliamentary election had been taken, though
it was not yet avowed.
They began their electioneering, therefore, long before the other parties.
Their candidate in Is£re held 51 meetings after the dissolution - but 183 earlier
in the year, which had earned him seven appearances in court. Everywhere the
Poujadist campaign was slanderous, violent and utterly negative, except over
North Africa where the movement expressed the most extreme colonialist
views. A favourite technique was bar-to-bar canvassing, and 'non-political'
shopkeepers, barmen and commercial travellers made ideal propagandists.15
Opponents' meetings were broken up, usually by rowdyism and obstruction;
juvenile student 'ragging' rather than fascist thuggery was the general tone;
and all parties except the Communists suffered from these tactics. Electoral
violence is unusual and unpopular in France, and almost everywhere the
Poujadists soon abandoned it.16 But their catchy slogan Sortez les Sortants !
and their verbal extravagance appealed to the ordinary Frenchman's bound-
less contempt for all politicians - except, sometimes, for his own deputy.17
Even the Poujadists underestimated their own success, while the predictions
of journalists, prefects and politicians were made derisory by the event.18 The
newcomers won 2,600,000 votes and elected 53 members to form the UFF
group: Union et fraternitd f ran false. The new Assembly, with much legal
warrant and no political sense, unseated eleven of them.19
Hoping to put his new parliamentary strength to use, Poujade now turned
on his extreme fascist associates as he had previously ousted the Com-
munists. Enforcing his demands by a threat of resignation, he moved party
headquarters back from Paris to St. C6r6, sent Chevallet home to Algiers
(where he became an intermediary between the local fascists and the ex-
Cagoulard conspirators in Paris), and expelled the extremist leaders of the
peasants' and workers' 'parallel unions'.20 But though he dominated the
13. See Hoffmann, pp. 76-81, 356-63, 368-71 ; Guy, pp. 99-101, 113-8, 128-43 (party replies) ;
Lavau in Partis et Classes, p. 83.
14. Hoffmann, pp. 111-16, and (for the peasants) Royer in Pay sans, pp. 182-206.
15. Hoffmann, pp. 190-1; Elections 1956, pp. 29 (Fauvet), 480 (Goguel); OUvesi, p. 77; Le
Poujadisme (by Maurice Bardeche et al.), p. 6.
16. Their chief victim (Mitterrand) unexpectedly gained votes; the Poujadists did worse in his
department than in any of its neighbours. Cf. Hoffmann, pp. 164-5; Elections 1956, p. 421;
Touchard, no. 210, p. 38 (' success in inverse ratio to violence used*).
17. For samples see Hoffmann, Chapter 6; also Williams, no. 168, pp. 156n., 161; Thomas, no,
170, pp. 278-80; flections 1966, pp. 61-4.
18. These authorities relied on traditional opinion-makers such as local councillors, whom
the Poujadists by-passed. The Communists were sometimes better prophets: Thomas, no. 170,
p. 265. The French Institute of Public Opinion twice concealed the Poujadists under * others', and
in a third poll credited them with 1 % of the votes of youth.
19. See Appendix vi. The Poujadist success wrecked all the calculations which had led Faure
to dissolve: see above, p. 48. The 53 include Jean Dides, who affiliated to the group.
20. For the organization (democratic locally but highly authoritarian at and above the depart-
mental level) see Hoffmann, pp. 262-303. For the peasant union, Royer in Paysans, pp. 192-8;
Coston, pp. 267-71. The constitutions of both unions, and of U DC A, are published in Le
Poujadisme, pp. 129-33.
THE EXTREME RIGHT 165
organization, he could not solve the problems that had baffled de Gaulle:
retaining the momentum of an anti-parliamentary army with a foothold in the
enemy fortress - the National Assembly - and preserving the disciplinary
subordination of the invading deputies to a commander who himself still
stood outside the abhorred System.
The stationer from St. C6r6 should have found his troops more manageable
than those of his illustrious predecessor. For the RPF deputies in 1951 had
been three times as numerous - and so had more to gain by standing together.
Without help from them there was no stable majority - and so the System
could not survive without splitting or assimilating them. Men of personal
distinction were as common in their ranks as they were rare among the
Poujadists - few of whom had any political experience and fewer still any
political talent.21 Collectively less indispensable and individually less capable,
they - unlike the Gaullists - were rarely courted by and never made any im-
pression upon their colleagues.22 'Moved by the one virtue of indignation',
wrote a sympathetic Conservative, 'they were, however, incapable of drafting
a bill or delivering a speech. They produced no reform, even on fiscal ques-
tions. They could never express their wishes and the cries which they con-
scientiously uttered at regular intervals provoked countercries without ever
awakening an echo.'23
They might have seemed a sufficiently malleable group (especially as all
their members had sworn to maintain discipline under penalty of being
hanged). Moreover, taking a leaf from the Communist book, Poujade insisted
that the party draw their parliamentary salaries and withhold a levy before
paying the balance to the member. But over the 'Euratom' treaty in June the
group kept its unity only by abstaining - and allowing three dissidents to vote
for the government. In October some Poujadists seem (in a secret ballot) to
have disobeyed the order to keep a Socialist out of the chair by voting instead
for an MRP leader whom they had bitterly denounced in the election cam-
paign. In November, Poujade amazed his followers by instructing them to
vote against 'fighting for the Queen of England' at Suez; a third of them
defied him and the articulate few, who were all ultra-nationalists, broke with
him for good.24 Even their loyalist colleagues almost elected a rebel to chair
the depleted group.
Disarray in Parliament reflected decline in the country. At a by-election in
21. For thirty of the fifty UFF members this was their first political venture; of the rest only
two had stood for Parliament. Ex-Socialists, ex-Radicals and ex-Gonservatives each numbered
two or three; one had been MRP, four PSF (before the war) and eight RPF like their leader:
Hoffmann, p. 162; Le Poujadisme, pp. 126-7; Coston, pp. 235-6; cf. Dogan in Elections 1956,
p 449.
22. *Dr. M. Harrison tells me that committees rarely asked them to report on bills other than
their own (and for some time not even these). De Gaulle was the only prospective premier ever
to promise (though he did not give) office to any of them: Isorni, Ainsi, p. 77.
23. Ibid., p. 75 ; in Silence, p. 57, he adds that their speeches were often written by others. For
the extraordinary bills they sponsored see Le Poujadisme, pp. 68-70. ^
24 Among the defectors were two who were in the army, Le Pen (above, p. 154) and Demar-
quet (below p. 167); and the three Euratom rebels led by Dides. The last three and two others
voted for the government ; the party conference expelled Dides from the movement and the other
four from the parliamentary group. Seven members who abstained were censured and lost half
their salary for three months. Three of the dissidents had already protested in September when
the levy on salaries was raised from £20 to £50 a month.
166 THE PARTIES
south Paris early in 1957 Poujade himself won less than half the vote obtained
by Le Pen a year before. Turning from the fickle townsmen to the perennially
discontented peasants, he negotiated an uneasy alliance with two rival rural
demagogues, Dorgeres and Antier (even lending Antier enough Poujadist
deputies to enable him still to lead a parliamentary group when his former
followers revolted).25 This new combination perhaps dissuaded the orthodox
Conservatives from making concessions at the peasants' expense. But it failed
to restore the waning fortunes of Poujadism in the country, and in Parliament
even a vote for Pinay's abortive government in October 1957 brought the
party no greater influence. At the end of the Fourth Republic Poujade suffered
the humiliation of seeing first his thirty remaining deputies and then his voters
repudiate his leadership for that of a more formidable enemy of the System.
The deputies defied their leader both in electing General de Gaulle premier and
in approving his constitution; but having now themselves become sonants, in
November they too went down to a defeat as crushing as Poujade's own.26
The political Poujadism of UFF was based on the shopkeepers, caf6 and
bar proprietors and artisans who adhered to the commercial Poujadism of
UDCA; 95% of the UFF candidates and all but five of the deputies were
drawn from these occupations. The 1956 election showed that the areas of
strength of the two organizations generally coincided closely, and local sur-
veys suggest that the party drew from half to two-thirds of its votes from its
professional clients.27 Those who were on the economic margin were naturally
the most tempted by Poujadism; the Poujadist social security administrators
elected in 1955 were often declared ineligible for failure to pay their own social
security contributions.28
Not all the Poujadists were small shopkeepers. Wealthier traders hoped to
profit from concessions to their weaker brethren; of 33 Poujadist leaders in
Paris, 17 had large cars and 7 had two houses.29 Many more recruits came
from another discontented class, the peasants - particularly the bouilleurs de
cru and the producers of wine.30 But large towns and industrial areas gave a
25. On the Paris election see Bodin and Touchard, no. 21 ; on Dorgeres, above, n. 6 ; on Antier,
above, p. 153 ; on Rassemblement pay son, Royer in Pay sans, pp. 179-81, AP 1957, p. 87 - it split
in 1959 over Poujade's hostility to de Gaulle.
26. On post-1956 Poujadism see Coston, pp, 237-40; in June 1958 a conference condemned the
deputies by 83 votes to 2. Only two of them were re-elected, Luciani as a Gaullist and Le Pen as
CNIP. Poujade himself did well at Saumur-Sud (Maine-et-Loire), with 7,000 votes out of 40,000.
fiut the combined national vote of the extreme Right, * orthodox* Fdujadists and ex-Pbujadist
deputies was Under 700,00t), less than a quarter of the 1956 figure.
27. For candidates and deputies see Dogan in Elections 1956, pp. 433, 456 ; for local estimates,
ibid.> pp. 206-7 (south Paris, nearly 60%), 348 (Aveyron, 65%), 401-4 (Aisne, almost 50%),
cf. 315-16 (Lyons), 420 (Bordeaux); also Olivesi, pp. 178-80 (Marseilles); and above, p. 68n.
In one small Somme village UFF drew 90% of its votes and in another 60% from shopkeepers,
artisans or their families : J. Bugnicourt in Pay sans, p. 484. A national poll found that about
half the Poujadist voters were self-employed: Lipset, p. 154 (cf. pp. 163, 225). For a general
discussion see Hoffmann, pp, 190-2, For UFF and UDCA, below, p. 167 and n. 37.
28. Hoffmann, pp. 13-14, 150, Poujade's own shop is said to have sold about ten postcards a
day.
29. Ministry of finance figures quoted Lipsedge, no. 146; cf. Touchard, no. 210, p. 21; also
n. 30 below.
30. Agriculturalist votes for the Poujadists averaged 15%, rarely fell below 1 0 % and sometimes
reached 25% ; J. Klatzmann in Pay sans, pp. 48, 50» 59; cf. Rbyet in ibid*, pp. 200-3; Olivesi,
THE EXTREME RIGHT 167
poor welcome to Poujadism, except for the declining textile centres.31 In
regions of expansion the movement failed - though in a fast-growing depart-
ment like Is&re a vigorous protest vote for Poujade might come from districts
which were losing population to the booming towns.32 And in the countryside
it tended to be strongest in areas where owner-occupied farms were too small
to be viable, or where the poverty of the small shopkeeper reflected that of his
customers; for, curiously enough, the movement was born and flourished
precisely where least taxes were paid.33 Over great tracts of the impoverished
south Poujade ravaged the followings of every party, including the Com-
munists.34
But in the west and around Paris he attracted predominantly those right-
wing voters who felt betrayed both by RPF, which had become absorbed in
the System, and by CNIP leaders who had supported ED C, restored the
Sultan of Morocco and voted for higher taxes. Rich and aristocratic 'parlour
Poujadists' welcomed a 'poor man's de Gaulle' who could attract mass sup-
port to the anti-parliamentary, ultra-nationalist cause. Among the Poujadist
deputies from Paris were Dides and Le Pen, and from the west J. M. Demar-
quet - an organizer of riots against Pleven in 1954 and Mollet in 1956. At a
by-election in 1957 the party's candidate was General Faure, the first soldier
to plot against the regime in Algiers. Poujadists were active conspirators
against the Republic, both before and during the reign of de Gaulle.
Individual extremists came from all over France and above all from
Algeria. Most Poujadist voters probably came from the Right, and ex-
Gaullists were often the largest single group.35 But in the nationalist but pro-
parliamentary north-east they did very badly, and only one old RPF bastion
gave a really warm welcome to U F F : the old Chouan stronghold in the west.36
Here Poujadist campaign violence was most vicious; and here was the only
zone of UFF strength where UDCA afforded no solid professional base.37
pp. 93, 196. Again they were not always the poorest peasants : ibid., pp. 76-8, 82 ; Wylie, p. 329 ;
Elections 1956, p. 393. Sometimes even agricultural workers voted Poujadist: Olivesi, p. 85.
31. Hoffmann, pp. 36, 196 (general); Dreyfus, no. 79, p. 540 on north-eastern France, and
Elections 1956, pp. 392, 394 on Isere (general and textiles) ; ibid., pp. 401, 416 (textiles).
32. For Isere, Elections 1956, pp. 391-4; Paysans, p. 203; Williams, no. 168, p. 169 n. 2.
Generally, ibid., p. 174 n. 2; Hoffmann, p. 197; Pierce, no. 180, pp. 412-13.
33. Hoffmann, pp. 11-13, 194-5; Poujade's own department of Lot with 4% of the nation's
population paid barely 1 % of all local taxes. Also Elections 1956, p. 343 ; Prost, no. 185, pp. 74-6
and (with C. Brindillac), no. 31, pp. 446-8. However, there was a negative correlation between
the most Poujadist and the poorest rural departments: MacRae, no. 148, p. 297. This is perhaps
explained by Poujadist weakness in the Left's rural strongholds (cf. nn. 37 and 38). See Maps 3
and 12.
34. In Bugnicourt's two Somme villages a quarter of the UFF votes came from former Com-
munists : Paysans, p. 484. Cf. Olivesi, pp. 37-8, 55-6, 80-2, 221 (Bouches-du-Rhone) ; Wylie,
p. 328 (Vaucluse); Paysans, p. 439 (Savoie); Elections 1956, pp. 381, 393 (Isere), 421 (Vendee),
480-1, 496; Prost, no. 31, p. 452; Williams, no. 168, pp. 169 n. 2 (Isere) and 173 (for national
figures cited above, p. 79n).
35. Elections 1956, pp. 404-5 (Aisne), 420 (Gard); Paysans, p. 484 (Somme).
36. So did * little Vendee' in Bouches-du-Rh6ne, which always voted for extreme-Right
movements: Olivesi, pp. 78-82, 116, cf. pp. 40, 178, and Wylie, pp. 329-30. On the north-east
see Moraz6, p. 211 ; on RPF and UFF, Map 12. Only 21 of the 52 Poujadists were elected north
of the Loire, but 53 of 74 RPF (ARS and overseas members omitted).
37. Conversely, in west-central France - an area of Communist and Socialist rather than
Radical strength -UDCA was strong and UFF not. Elsewhere, M RP lost less than the Conser-
vatives to Poujade ; perhaps organized parties resisted his inroads better than loose ones. It was
[over
168 THE PARTIES
3. POUJADISM: CHARACTERISTICS
There were thus two Poujadisms. The extreme Right exploited the move-
ment in the north and west and in Algeria. But economic Poujadism appealed
to Left as well as Right: to Protestant as well as Catholic in Gard, to the poor
of Boulogne as much as to the rich of Neuilly. Concentrated in c static France',
economic Poujadism was the obverse of Mendesism in the expanding north.38
Backward businessmen and peasants rebelled against the economic progress
that threatened them with proletarianization. Poujade's 'eulogy of sclerosis'
appealed to all those who feared reform - whether reorganization of the dis-
tributive system, modernizing of industry, rearrangement of scattered agricul-
tural holdings or an attack on alcoholism.39
The movement was well equipped to exploit every kind of contradictory
discontent at the polls, despite its grave organizational weaknesses which pro-
voked more than one split.40 Yet the elections came almost at the crest of the
wave. Negation and cynicism, xenophobia and violence were effective weapons
for a lightning campaign but poor foundations for a lasting party.41 Positive
proposals might have alienated support; Poujade said they were 'the special-
ists' job '. His propaganda had * as much intellectual content as a scream '.42
Vigorous and vulgar irresponsibility gave Poujadism more appeal than
RPF in some groups and areas. Despite his endorsement of Dides and Le
Pen, the stationer was more successful than the General in resisting conser-
vative take-over bids, and so long as there were left-wing votes to be lost he
would allow no compromising electoral alliances with notorious reactionaries
like Tixier or Dorg&res.43 The tone of Poujadist propaganda was quite unlike
that of the extreme Right. Where Maurras had vilified the Revolution, Pou-
jade invoked 1789, Valmy, Clemenceau, the Resistance and the Republic,
condemned the parliamentarians but not Parliament, and professed profound
claimed (but contested) that many former non-voters turned out for him : no . 3 1 , pp. 445-8 ; no. 1 85,
pp. 73-4; Pay sans, p. 484; Wylie, pp. 328-9; Olivesi, pp. 37, 77, cf. 119 and 202-3; contrast
ibid*, p. 178, Hoffmann, pp. 201-2, Goguel in Elections 1956, pp. 480-1. Fullest analysis in
Hoffmann, pp. 189-208.
38. Discontent took one or the other form according to regional conditions. For the total
Radical poll doubled in departments where the Poujadist won less than 10% of the vote; rose by
half in those where they won 10 to 1 5 % ; and fell by 5 % where the Poujadists exceeded 15%. (For
a similar comparison between Communists and Poujadists see above, p. 79n.) On Radicals cf.
Wylie, pp. 328ff.
39. Hoffmann, pp. 252-3 ; Siegfried, De la Ille, pp. 203-4. The regions which had done best
under the local autarky of the wartime economy were very susceptible to Poujadism : see maps in
Moraz6, p. 131.
40. Hoffmann, pp. 49-52, 125-31, 283-93. At the great Paris meeting in January 1955 the
organizers forgot to have membership forms at the doors : Guy, p. 1 61 .
41. The party did badly in its homeland, the centre, and especially in Poujade's home depart-
ment, Lot. An early foothold in Paris gave it no advantage: Touchard, no. 210, p. 41 n. Fami-
liarity perhaps bred contempt; as one journalist was told, * Poujade's fine, naturally, but after all
an election is a pretty serious matter'.
42. Quoted Wright, France in Modern Times, p. 542; for samples see references above, n. 17.
His boundless cynicism was shown on the day after the elections when he spoke twice about
Mendes-France - amiably to V Express and nastily to Le Figaro.
43. Hoffmann, p. 340; Paysans, p. 177. Wisely: for in some southern villages he took more
votes from the Radicals (Wylie, p. 328) or even Socialists (Olivesi, p. 119) than from all the
Right. Indeed polls suggested that in religion and connected beliefs Poujadist voters resembled
Radicals most, Socialists next: Lipset, pp. 161-2, 245. Cf. Siegfried, De la Hie, pp. 204, 260-2.
THE EXTREME RIGHT 169
respect for President Coty.44 The keynote of Pierrot's appeal was his defence of
les braves gens, lespetits, and the political ancestor he caricatured was Maurras's
great enemy Alain, the champion of the people against all the elites: the
politicians and the technicians, the officials and the academicians and the
rich.45 If there were far fewer Poujadist ministrables than Gaullists in 1951,
this was a parliamentary handicap but an electoral advantage, for their in-
experienced and inarticulate candidates had an authentic common touch.
Unlike the many RPF carpet-baggers who despised constituency chores,
most Poujadist candidates had genuine local roots - except, significantly, for
the unknowns who contested Parisian seats and apparently appealed largely
to newcomers like themselves. Provincial suspicion and dislike of the capital
were as important Poujadist themes as the popular suspicion and dislike of the
well-off, the well-educated and the well-placed.46 Indeed they were the same
theme: Poujadism - like American Populism - was a protest against metro-
politan sophistication, wealth and success in which a deep but confused sense
of grievance found expression (often with highly reactionary overtones) in the
popular accents of the underprivileged provincial cut off from the seats of
power and unable to understand, let alone influence, the forces which were
undermining his way of life.47
The movement did not survive its sudden electoral triumph. Yet it was a
symptom no less important for being transient. It showed that the political
consequences of economic modernization were not as exclusively beneficial as
many commentators had supposed, since those who suffered from the process
reacted 'with the wild gestures of drowning men'. Like other popular
authoritarian right-wing movements it was violent, eruptive and short-lived;
but the latent discontent with the political system which they so briefly
crystallized remained dangerous after they had disappeared. And, if this
popular provincial outburst against modernity, centralization and the state
differed from fascism in many ways, it was none the less disquieting that 'the
revolt was bom, not in circles where faith in the regime was always lukewarm,
but at the very base of the Jacobin Republic'.48
44. Ibid., p. 203; Touchard, no. 210, p. 28; Hoffmann, pp. 136, 214, 229-31, 242. (Later he
visited the Pope and saluted Joan of Arc : ibid., p. 410.)
45. Hoffmann, pp. 171, 211-13, 219-20, 228, 246; Touchard, no. 210, p. 27.
46. Hoffmann, pp. 251-2, 411 ; Touchard, no. 210, p. 42.
47. Hoffmann, p. 254n., citing R. Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (New York, 1955), Chapter 2.
There is a still closer parallel with Uomo Qualunque in post-war Italy.
48. Hoffmann, p. 387; cf. pp. 388-90, 400, and Siegfried, De lallle, pp. 204 ('drowning*), 262.
Chapter 13
THE MINOR PARTIES
The Fourth Republic produced a rich crop of minor parties, some of them
entirely ephemeral. This chapter examines, first the neutralist or 'fellow-
travelling' left-wing groups; secondly the friends of Mendes-France and the
opponents of the Algerian war; then a single middle-sized party, UDSR, the
uneasy ally of the Radicals; next a number of right-wing splinter groups,
mostly linked with both Radicals and UDSR in the Rassemblement des
Gauches republicaines (RGR) - a nebulous body which in 1955 suddenly
became the chief focus for right-wing Radical activity; and finally several
groups of overseas deputies.
These little groups were electorally negligible but not without interest or
importance. The neutralists and Mendesists influenced the outlook of the Left
(and others) much more than their derisory showing at the polls suggested -
just as after 1900 Action f ran false, which could hardly return a single deputy,
had exerted a tremendous attraction on the entire Right. For the small
extreme groups enjoyed influential support and sympathy in the press; and
they appealed to intellectuals who always helped to create the climate of
opinion, and sometimes could influence their neighbours' attitudes to specific
problems (though never decide their votes).
Other minor parties, lacking the following to constitute a popular movement
or the clarity of outlook that gives intellectual influence, were able through
their strategic position to play a vital parliamentary role. There was always an
important place in French assemblies for a little group of able men without
bitter enmities, whose marginal situation entitled them to a large share of
ministerial posts but whose entry into a government aroused little jealousy
among the big parties. In the Third Republic this part was played by the
Republican Socialists, the party of Briand and Painlev6. In the Fourth it fell
especially to U D S R.
Yet other organizations had their origins in history. The list of minor
groups was littered with relics of the past. Some like the royalists represented
an ancient tradition. A few such as Alliance ddmocratique were remnants of
once powerful movements, now dead but for the name and a frustrated
politician or two clinging to it - like a National Liberal in Great Britain - in
the hope of marginal political advantage. Many were mere cliques formed
around a particular leader or group ~ such as Paul Faure's collection of
Socialists who had followed Marshal P6tain. But not all the lesser groups
looked backward for their inspiration. Many of the colonial parties were soon
to be ruling their own countries. And one major French party, MRP, was
built from just such petty splinter groups that had flourished in a previous
Republic.
THE MINOR PARTIES 171
1. THE EXTREME LEFT
The groups discussed in this section and the next were divided among them-
selves between socialists and liberals, neutralists and westerners, revolution-
aries and reformists, supporters and opponents of a new Popular Front. These
conflicts kept them for years in ceaseless, amoeba-like effervescence, and were
submerged only by the Algerian war and its consequence, the collapse of the
Fourth Republic. In the end their common opposition to de Gaulle's regime
brought most of them into uneasy association in a single Parti socialists
unifig; but even PS U excluded the crypto-Communists, most Trotskyists, and
all Left Gaullists.1
The three main trends on the Left were represented by the e fellow-travellers ',
the neutralists, and the Mendesists. Recruits came from all the Third Force
formations. There were fellow-travelling Radicals like Pierre Cot, expelled by
their party in April 1946 for preferring a Communist to a UDSR alliance;
there were the neutralist Socialists of the Parti sodaliste unitaire, who had
been expelled by theirs for opposing the drastic laws passed during the great
strikes of late 1947; there were extreme-Left Catholics. In April 1948 the three
groups formed a joint committee along with Jeune Republique? Late in 1950 a
broadened version of this committee, renamed Union progressiste, was set up
as an alliance of neutralists and fellow-travellers.
The Progressives maintained their separate identity in the Assembly, but in
order to obtain committee representation they normally affiliated to the Com-
munist group.3 Most of their French members were Left Radicals who (after
expulsion from their old party) had been re-elected with Communist support;
from overseas came West African nationalists belonging to RDA.4 The
defection of RDA in 1950 was offset by the adherence of three MRP mem-
bers who in the same year broke with their party over foreign and social
policy: the Abb6 Pierre, a marquis, and a professor of medicine who sat for a
wine-growing area and had led the battle against Coca-Cola.5 In the 1951
election the fellow-travelling Progressives accepted places on Communist
lists, and four out of six held their seats. But the neutralists stood indepen-
dently and were all beaten, new neutralist candidates also faring very badly.
Two Socialist deputies who had gone over to the Progressives in 1948 were
defeated, one as a neutralist in Paris, the other on a Communist list in Allier.6
1. On the Left Gaullists see the next section. On Trotskyists and other dissident Communists
see Williams, pp. 142-3; in 1951 their half-dozen lists won from 1 to 2% of the vote. On the
neutralist Left see Marcus, Chapter 2, and Werth, France 1940-55, Parts 4 and 5. Coston, pp. 398-
426, discusses most of these groups. Their appeal depended largely on friendly journals like
VObservateur (later France-Observateur), U Express, Esprit, Temps Modernes and even Le Monde.
See C. Estier, La Gauche hebdomadaire 1914-62 (1962).
2. On JR see p. 103 ; it had lost most of its leaders either to MRP or to UDSR.
3. Only from 1949 to 1951 had they the minimum membership (fourteen) needed for represen-
tation in their own right. They were first called Union des r&publicains et rgsistants, later Union
des r&publicains progressistes.
4. On RDA see below, pp. 176, 180-1.
5. They formed their own group, Gauche independante, and affiliated to the Progressives (whom
they soon joined): cf. Einaudi and Goguel, pp. 171-2. For two other ex-MRP members who
briefly associated with them see below, p. 398 n. 8. On Catholic fellow-travellers generally see
Dansette, Destin, Chapter 5; Bosworth, pp. 110, 183, 265.
6. The four fellow-travellers were the ex-Radicals Cot and Meunier and the aristocrats d'Astier
de la Vigerie, editor of Liberation, and Gilbert de Chambrun (the only Left Catholic to survive).
[over
G*
172 THE PARTIES
In 1954 co-operation was resumed with the formation of a Paris liaison
committee, nucleus of the future Union de la Gauche socialiste (UGS). On it
were represented the fellow-travelling Progressives, Jeune Republique, the
neutralist Nouvelle Gauche (including the remnants of Gauche independante,
and with Claude Bourdet of France-Observateur as secretary) and the Mouve-
ment pour la liberation dupeuple (MLP), an extreme-Left Catholic working-
class group born from a split in the old family-association movement.7 In the
1956 election one Socialist federation, Vosges, defied party headquarters and
with the Communists and MLP ran a joint list which elected a Communist
and a Socialist (who was expelled by the party, sat as an independent, but
generally voted with his former friends). As the only case for ten years of a
Popular Front in a parliamentary election, Vosges attracted much attention:
superficial observers noted that the joint list won 8% more votes than the
two parties' combined poll in 1951, but not that this limited gain - in a con-
stituency with heavy unemployment - was below the increase in their national
vote and far below their regional increase.8 Plainly the Popular Front
alignment still deterred some potential Socialist voters as it had done over the
whole country ten years before.
The Progressives benefited from the Communist advance and regained two
of the four seats they had lost in 195 1.9 From time to time one or other of
their deputies now voted differently from the Communists ;10 three of them
condemned the Soviet action in Hungary, and the whole group ostentatiously
stayed away when the Assembly debated it; over Suez, while the Communist
spokesman denounced the canal company and the American imperialists,
Pierre Cot solemnly appealed to the government to stand by President
Eisenhower and Mr. Gaitskell; and in May 1958 the Progressives voted for
Pflimlin as premier while the Communists abstained. In the general election of
November 1958 two Progressive deputies even fought (unsuccessfully) with-
out Communist support.11 Despite these unprecedented signs of independence
the Union progressiste refused to merge into the new Union de la Gauche
socialiste which was formed in December 1957. UGS therefore embraced
only individual Progressives along with MLP, Claude Bourdet's Nouvelle
The secretary of the Parti socialiste unitaire, which had broken with the Communists over Tito,
won 3 % of the vote in Aisne where he had been Socialist deputy in 1945. One other new neutralist
(in Seine-Inferieure) reached 2 %.
7. On MLP see Suffert, pp, 99-105; Dansette, Destin, pp. 372-8 ; Bosworth, p. 110 and n. For
UGS's * clerical* reputation see Ligou, pp. 634-5.
8. In the neighbouring departments the total of votes cast for the Communist and Socialist
parties together was 35% higher than in 1951, and their combined share of the poll was up by
4£% (whereas in Vosges it was down by li%).
9. Chambrun was beaten, but a joint Communist-Radical list won two seats in Creuse, appa-
rently on protest votes (no Poujadist fought this constituency, allegedly because the prefect had
persuaded them to withdraw in order to defeat the Communists!) The Radical member (Ferrand)
affiliated to the Progressives and eventually joined PSU (see below, p. 174.)
10. They had occasionally done so previously in committee: see AP 1953, p. 11 for a
case.
11. At Belfort Dreyfus-Schmidt ran ahead of the Communist, who stood down in his favour
at the second ballot; in Creuse Ferrand ran behind at both ballots. Communist losses of votes in
1958 were exceptionally heavy wherever a party man was standing in a seat formerly represented
by a Progressive. (For the 1958 electoral system see below, p. 316, cf. p. 307.)
THE MINOR PARTIES 173
Gauche, a majority of Jeune Rdpublique and a few provincial socialist groups,
notably in Normandy.
2. THE MENDESISTS
The extreme Left groups, whether neutralist or fellow-travelling, had sup-
ported Mendes-France for the premiership but turned against him when, after
the defeat of EDC, he took up the cause of German rearmament. Other
admirers, however, remained devoted to him despite (or more rarely becauseof)
his foreign policy. Often these were former Catholics or Gaullists (or both) who
felt out of place with the traditional Left. Malraux and Mauriac inspired a
Nouvelle Gauche of more intellectual than political significance, and quite
different from Bourdet's movement of the same name. Two deputies and a
senator took refuge in Jeune Republique after M RP expelled them for opposing
EDC and German rearmament; all three stood unsuccessfully in 1956. JR
returned one candidate, Constant Lecoeur in Seine-Maritime east. He
affiliated to the Radical group, like the only other Left Independent to win a
seat, Jean de Lipkowski - Grandval's aide during his Moroccan mission and a
future Left Gaullist. Lipkowski' s mother was a founder of the Union Gaulliste
in 1946 and an outgoing RPF deputy; mother and son were both candidates
of an ephemeral group of ' Gaullists for Mendes ', the Parti republicain pour le
redressement economique et social (she lost). The Mendesist and neutralist
groups of Left Independents polled some 300,000 votes, most of which were
probably ex-Gaullist and Catholic; the total Catholic vote for the Left in
1956 was estimated at a million.12 As the Algerian war became more bitter
and nationalist feeling grew in France, the anti-colonialist cause and the
defence of civil liberties found among the left-wing Catholics some of their
most consistent and courageous champions.
Within the Radical party itself Mend6s-France's faithful followers num-
bered only a dozen deputies in 1956, mostly from the Paris area and parlia-
mentary newcomers; several had belonged to the left-wing Jacobin Club
within the Radical party, though one, the air ace Pierre Clostermann, had sat
in the previous Assembly as a Gaullist. With their failure to impose party
discipline on their senior colleagues these young Mendesists grew increasingly
dissatisfied with a party to which they felt no spiritual allegiance. Their
closest allies were the Left Catholic critics of the war and its abuses, and those
dissident Socialists who shared their views about Algeria and their impatience
with the traditional political leaders. Just as an unofficial Algerie franfaise
party grew up which cut across party lines, so the opponents of the war were
driven into closer intimacy. The crisis of May 1958 and the collapse of repub-
lican opposition to de Gaulle strengthened these bonds - though severing
those with the former Gaullists, who returned to their old allegiance.
The decisive step in the new alignment on the Left was delayed until Sep-
tember 1958. When the Socialist party voted to support the constitution of the
12. Elections 1956, p. 141 ; Suffert, p. 39. JR and the 'Gaullists for Mendes' were the only
Left Independent groups to run 30 lists and so qualify to make electoral alliances (see_below,
p 313) - though MLP and Bourdet's Nouvelle Gauche jointly ran 21. Some Catholic or Gaullist
Mendesists belonged to a short-lived Union democratism du travail, revived in the Fifth Republic
by the same men as a Left Gaullist party; on it see Goston, pp. 302-7.
174 THE PARTIES
Fifth Republic, Mollet's opponents at last lost hope of ousting the general
secretary and broke with SFIO to set up their own organization, the Parti
socialiste autonome. Comprising those who had opposed both the war and the
new regime, PSA brought together old-fashioned socialists like fidouard
Depreux, revisionists like Daniel Mayer and Andr6 Philip, and Mendesists
like Alain Savary. In the 1958 election its candidates co-operated with Men-
desist Radicals and the left-wing UGS in an ad hoc alliance, the Union des
forces democratiques, UFD.
Between these grouplets there were still political, ideological and personal
differences; but their common interests and enmities finally prevailed. After
byzantine negotiations Mendes-France and his leading Radical followers in
1959 made their journey to a Socialist Canossa and were admitted to PSA.
Next year the reinforced party fused with the much smaller and more Catholic
UGS (whose extreme left wing broke away) and with a tiny dissident Com-
munist group to form the Parti socialiste unifte, P S U. The UGS minority soon
won virtual control of the new organization, which reproduced within its
meagre ranks all the contradictions of outlook, policy and temperament which
bedevilled the French Left.
3. UDSR
The most important of all the minor parties was the Union dgmocratique et
socialiste de la Resistance, whose working life coincided with that of the
Fourth Republic. It was the only political group in France which had its roots
exclusively in the Resistance, for it was born in June 1945 as a federation of
five Resistance movements which rejected the Communist embrace. Most of
its members preferred an alliance with SFIO and, but for the suspicious
jealousy of the Socialist rank and file, might have fused with and rejuvenated
that ageing party. But few of the newcomers were given good electoral
opportunities, and their disillusionment changed to exasperation when SFIO
joined the Communists in supporting the first draft constitution in April
1946. Shedding a few members, UDSR turned instead to an alliance with the
Radicals in a new combination, RGR.13 In November 1946 it abandoned its
federal structure and formally became a new political party.
The liaison between the movement born in the Resistance and the most
typical product of the Third Republic was no love-match.14 UDSR had far
closer affinities with other parties. Its first general secretary - Francis Leen-
hardt, later chairman of the Socialist parliamentary party -, its assistant
secretary and several deputies went over to SFIO. It was also a refuge for
Gaullists: in 1946 Capitant, Malraux, Soustelle and most of the few Union
Gaulliste deputies were associated with it and Jacques Baumel was assistant
secretary. Claudius Petit led another wing of progressive Catholics from
Jeune Republique, who sympathized with MRP. But the leader, Ren6 Pleven,
had been a conservative finance minister under de Gaulle, and by 1948-49
the party was behaving almost as a Conservative group.15
13. For RGR see next section; for UDSR's early days, Williams, pp. 143-4.
14. Fauvet, Forces, p. 123 ; De Tarr, pp. 93-4 - one Radical summoned all republicans to quit
'this monster' which assembled fascists, clericals and socialists.
15. See for example AP 1949, pp. 58-9, 127, 131. Pleven was consistently supported by the
[ovef
THE MINOR PARTIES 175
This central position and these multiple links made UDSR a useful in-
dicator. Its birth marked the failure of one Communist bid for power - an
attempt to exploit their influence within the Resistance. Its breach with the
Socialists helped to frustrate a second bid - the organization of a Marxist
coalition which the Communists hoped to dominate; for by repudiating the
Socialist alliance UDSR helped to deprive the Marxist combination of an
electoral and parliamentary majority. In turning against tripartisme (which a
Resistance organization might have been expected to support) UDSR pointed
the way the electorate was soon to follow. Although a nucleus of Gaullism
and the group from which many of RPF's principal leaders came, it was the
first of the parties which had permitted double membership to put an end to
'bigamy'. In spring 1948 Pleven tried to reconcile RPF and the government
parties;16 in June 1949 he could no longer retain both Gaullists and non-
Gaullists in his own group; and by July 1950 he was leading a government
designed, not to strengthen the majority on its Right by an understanding
with RPF, but to restore it on the Left by bringing back the Socialists.
UDSR's relations with its Radical allies had been under severe strain
during 1949 while UDSR opposed the Radical prime minister, Queuille. The
friction was diminished by Pleven's option for the Third Force, but re-
appeared within RGR. There the anti-governmental forces remained strong
enough to elect Daladier, the opposition Radical leader, as RGR president
in May 1950.17 UDSR was now firmly in the majority and considered aban-
doning RGR altogether; the combination held together for the 1951 election,
but over the church schools problem in the following September most Radicals
took the anticlerical side while most UDSR members voted for the Barang6
bill. This provoked a clash outside Parliament, and at UDSR's Marseilles
conference a month later the pro-Socialist wing, led by Frangois Mitterrand,
won control of the (rudimentary) organization. But the deputies remained
faithful supporters of each ministry in turn, and voted as steadily for Pinay
whom the Socialists opposed, as for Faure whom they had favoured.
UDSR's reconciliation with the governmental parties affected its own
character as well as its external relations. At the centre of gravity of an
Assembly whose majority was always precarious, it was the chief of those
marginal formations whose support every ministry needed.18 Like the pivot-
parties of the Third Republic it was too small to be feared and too essential
to be ignored. Thus on emerging as a governmental party it became a favoured
recipient of ministerial spoils, and so increasingly attractive to deputies
dependent on the sympathy of the administration - above all those represent-
ing colonial constituencies. In 1945 these, who were mostly settler members of
Gaullist sympathies, made a third of UDSR's deputies. When the Gaullists
Conservatives in his department; Petit's candidature in 1946 was opposed by the local Radicals
(De Tarr, p. 93) and in 1951 he stood on a joint list with MRP and CNIP.
16. UDSR had played this role before. When General de Gaulle quarrelled with the Commu-
nists in November 1945 and the Socialists early in January 1946, temporary compromises were
f ou nd by U D S R members .
17. See below, pp. 177-8.
18. In February 1948 it had saved Schuman's first cabinet by abstention, and in September it
destroyed his second: AP 1948, pp. 19, 154.
176 THE PARTIES
left UDSR in 1949 its parliamentary group fell from 27 to 14, only 5 from
overseas. But a new overseas element was soon to enter and eventually to domi-
nate the party. In 1950 Mitterrand, as minister of colonies, by his sympathetic
handling of a crisis in Ivory Coast won the confidence of the Rassemblement
ddmocratique africain (RDA), the main West African nationalist party. At
the cost of a party split RDA broke its Communist links, began voting with
the government, and entered into close relations with UDSR. After the 1951
election the 9 UDSR members returned from metropolitan France were
reinforced by 14 overseas colleagues, and in 1956 the party, with a mere 6
French deputies, survived only by its pact with RDA.
UDSR therefore evolved from a predominantly conservative into a dis-
tinctly liberal group. Mendes-France chose Mitterrand as his minister of the
interior and was supported by most UDSR members - though the conser-
vative, 'European9 and pro-clerical minority remained hostile to him, and
Pleven was a bitter opponent. Such drastic shifts in policy could occur because
the party was a group of leaders - members of parliament, local councillors
and journalists - without strength among the electorate except where an
individual deputy had built up a personal following. Having no membership,
the organization was available for manipulation by rival leaders;19 having no
ideology, it held together - in spite of its divisions - until the end of the
Fourth Republic. But Mitterrand's emergence in May 1958 as potential
leader of a Popular Front, and his success in September in carrying the party
against de Gaulle's proposed constitution, at last provoked Pleven, Claudius
Petit and the old minority to secede. In the election two months later these
two were the only survivors from UDSR.20
4. RGR, DISSIDENT RADICALS AND CONSERVATIVE GROUPS
Like UDSR, the Rassemblement des Gauches republicaines (RGR) was a
federation of groups which developed into a separate political party - though
the former did so very early in its life, the latter very late. RGR was an
alliance between a major party (the Radicals), a middle-sized group (UDSR),
and four small ghost parties of Third Republican politicians, mostly ineligible
for Parliament under the purge legislation passed at the Liberation. It was
formed in 1946 to unite all opponents of Marxism, of the Socialist-Communist
draft constitution, and of clericalism. In the elections of June and November
1946 and June 1951 RGR served - as intended - as an electoral clearing-
house. But it was also frequently used as a weapon in the struggle to control
the Radical party, and in the election of January 1956 the defeated Radical
faction took it over and turned it into a new party.21
The small components of the federal RGR were cliques centred around
political leaders of a previous generation - for few French political move-
ments ever completely disappear. Alliance democratique had been one of the
chief conservative organizations in the country, and even in 1939 it retained
19. Cf. Williams, p. 144 and n.
20. Mitterrand lost his seat (despite Communist support) but was returned to the Senate in
1959 - and to the Assembly in 1962.
21. On RGR-Radical relations see De Tarr, pp. 86-95, 133-4, and Bardonnet, pp. 156-60;
for 1946, ibid., p. 89.
THE MINOR PARTIES 177
thirty deputies. But at the Liberation its Resistance element went into PRL,
leaving only the personal following of Pierre-fitienne Flandin, a former
premier - and foreign minister under Vichy - who was ineligible for Parlia-
ment. Several of its members sat in the Assembly (as Conservatives, not as
RGR representatives), and some held office - notably Pinay. Its general
secretary headed the CNIP list in Dordogne in 1951, and in 1954 it left RGR
altogether.22
A second small party in RGR was Reconciliation fran?aise, the remnant of
Colonel de la Rocque's Parti social fran$ais. It was represented in the 1946
Assembly by Guy Petit, a parliamentary Peasant and the mayor of Biarritz,
and in 1951 also by Pierre de Leotard, who affiliated to the Radical group; it
had several sympathizers in the Conservative ranks. The Parti socialiste
democratique consisted of the friends of Paul Faure, who had been general
secretary of SFIO for twenty years, leader of the pacifist opposition to Blum,
and later a supporter of Petain; one or two PSD members were to attempt a
political comeback in the Fifth Republic. Lastly, the Parti republicain socialiste
included a few politicians, mostly ex-Socialists, whose central position and
pro-government voting records had earned them a large share of jobs in
nearly every Third Republican ministry.23
The primary interest of these little groups was the return of their leaders to
politics through the abolition of the ineligibility law (though most beneficiaries
of its repeal in 1953 discovered that even their former constituents had
entirely forgotten them). Early in 1951 these groups jointly affirmed their
solidarity in opposition to the governments supported by their larger partners,
Radicals and UDSR.24 In the general election of 1951 most of their candi-
dates were given places low on the list with no chance of success. But in Paris,
where Radicals headed three lists out of six, UDSR, Reconciliation franfaise
and the Paul Faure Socialists led one each; though the last two lists gained no
seat, one Radical (Lafay) pulled in Pierre de Leotard as his second. Over the
whole country 17 constituencies out of 103 were fought by two different lists
sponsored by RGR parties; however, only six of these involved outgoing
RGR deputies - and in eight of the 17 the rival lists belonged to the same
apparentement (alliance).25
The minor parties had some importance within RGR, since they were over-
represented in its governing bureau and therefore strengthened the hand of
those Radicals - like Daladier - who shared their hostility to the Third Force.
In November 1949 Daladier was defeated by Herriot for the presidency of his
own party; six months later minor-party votes elected him president of RGR.
22. Its political position had always been confusing: see below, p. 215. On Flandin see above,
pp. 149, 152, and below, p. 210 n. 9 ; the ineligibility law was specially drafted to apply to Mm.
23. At the time of the constitutional referendum in September 1958 this defunct grouplet was
suddenly resurrected and given radio and poster facilities to campaign for O UI.
24. AP 1951, p. 33. Two years later a Radical complained, 'The other little parties have scoffed
at us brazenly, carrying their impudence to the point of insisting on our running candidates who
represented nothing whatever and then using the clerical press (lapresse bien pensante) to disown
RGR': Bardonnet, p. 159n.
25. For the electoral law see below, Chapter 22 ; it multiplied hopeless contests, since only
'national parties' fighting in at least 30 departments could participate in alliances. Twelve of the
17 conflicts opposed a Radical list to a UDSR one; but seven of these twelve UDSR lists were
apparently put forward only to bring UDSR's total up to 30.
178 THE PARTIES
Herriot resigned as R G R's honorary president and both U D S R and the pro-
government Radicals complained that the election had been rushed and
irregular.26
Daladier tried to strengthen RGR's power and prestige (and his own
influence) by proposing the formation of a single RGR group in the new
Assembly elected in 1951. A single group already existed in both the Council of
the Republic and the Assembly of the French Union. But the Herriot Radicals
promptly pointed to Article 61 of the party constitution which - if anyone
remembered to invoke it - forbade Radicals to belong to more than one group.
Separate Radical and UDS R groups were therefore retained in the Assembly,
and Daladier had to content himself with the presidency of an inter-group
embracing both. Shortly afterwards he moved to the Left, and the smaller
parties in RGR transferred their support to the new leaders of right-wing
Radicalism, Rene Mayer and Martinaud-D6plat.
These were the defectors who overthrew Mend£s-France's government in
February 1955. Edgar Faure (hitherto considered a man of the Left Centre)
accepted the succession and so alienated his former friends and became the
standard-bearer of the Right. After the Radical party came under Mendesist
control, RGR ostentatiously elected Faure as its president. In December the
Radicals expelled first the prime minister for dissolving Parliament, and then
several right-wing leaders who refused to resign their posts as party delegates
on the RGR bureau?1 RGR was thus transformed into the organ of those
Radicals who, under Faure's leadership, chose to fight the 1956 election in
alliance with MRP and CNIP rather than with the Socialists. The new party
contested 32 constituencies and won 12 seats.28 It was soon to be over-
shadowed by a bigger Radical split, but personal rivalries impeded close co-
operation between the various dissidents.29
Even before Herriot faced his troubles with RGR nationally he had had to
meet a local challenge in his own Lyons fief. There the RGR secretary was a
rich businessman, L£on Chambaretaud, who recruited individual members
into RGR in opposition to the old leader. Not until May 1951 could Herriot
persuade the Radical party to expel Chambaretaud and his friends. They
retaliated by setting up the Rassemblement des groupes rfyublicains et inddpen-
dantsfran$ais (R GRIP) a sham 'national party' to which isolated candidates
could attach themselves so as to form electoral alliances.30 In some areas
dissident Radicals and Socialists joined it, in others extreme right-wingers;
some of its lists fought alone, but most were allied either with the Third Force
26. Monde, 7-8 and 9 May 1950. And see above, pp. 120-1.
27. De Tarr, pp. 133-4; Bardonnet, pp. 158-9.
28. In two seats sitting Radical and RGR deputies fought one another : in Seine-et-Oise north
the former doubled his share of the poll (from 6^ to 13*%) while the latter raised his from 9£
to 10 % ; in Vienne the former gained 2,000 votes while the latter lost 6,000 (two-fifths of his 1951
poll) and his seat. In Sarthe the 1951 Radical candidate stood as RGR and dropped from 13,000
to under 5,000 votes, while a Mendesist newcomer polled nearly 19,000. Four RGR leaders
won a smaller share of the vote than in 1951, while Mendesist rivals almost overtook them. Faure
increased his own share from about 25 % to 35 % ; so did Mendes-France. See also Pierce, no. 180,
p. 415.
29. See above, pp. 129-30.
30. For the subterfuges it used to claim the required total of 30 lists see below, p. 506-7. On
Lyons see De Tarr, p. 94.
THE MINOR PARTIES 179
or with Conservatives (and one - in Yonne - with the Socialists). RGRIF
won 5% of the vote in ten scattered departments and elected one Socialist
member and five Conservatives;31 Chambaretaud in Lyons polled enough
votes to prevent the government parties securing an absolute majority and all
the seats. RGRIF made a fleeting reappearance in 1956 as a satellite of
RGR, and Chambaretaud himself stood as an RGR candidate, saying 'I
chose the serious one'.
The 'national party' rule was responsible for the creation of yet another ad
hoc conservative group in 1951 : a Taxpayers' Defence movement (Defense des
contribuables) based on the small business pressure-group Petites et moyennes
entreprises (PME).32 It opposed the government coalition and its lists mostly
fought in isolation, but one accepted an alliance with other Conservative
groups, two with RPF and four with the government parties; these seven
included all the five departments in which its vote was over 5 % . Its one deputy
(Abel Bessac, of Lot) was an MRP member at odds with his party - but he
still fought in alliance with the government coalition. The group disappeared
in 1956 as its grievances were expressed by the Poujadists, who seem to have
taken over most of its votes.33
Of all the oddities of French public life perhaps the most engaging is the
royalist movement. During most of the twentieth century the driving force
behind what was left of French monarchism came from the passionately
nationalist and reactionary Action fran$aise. But a new pretender, the Comte
de Paris, broke with family tradition. In the 1930's he disavowed Action
frangaise, and though he declared his support for Marshal P6tain in 1940 (and
for General de Gaulle in 1958) he always insisted that a restored monarchy
must repudiate authoritarianism and social and economic privilege. His
political bulletin gave steady support to Third Force governments, called for
better treatment of the working class, condemned EDC and favoured de-
colonization. His moderation and responsibility earned him widespread
respect; indeed the pretendership was said to be the most ably filled political
post in the Fourth Republic.34 In 1950 Parliament, against opposition from
the Communists and the Socialist senators, repealed the law of 1886 which
had forbidden pretenders or their eldest sons to reside in France. Members of
former reigning families could now stand for Parliament, but were still
ineligible (under Article 44 of the constitution) for the Presidency of the
Republic. The hereditary pretender's negligible chances of being called to
power legally were improved when in 1958 the French people in fear of civil
war turned to their self-made pretender, General de Gaulle. For the ban on
Pretender-Presidents, retained in the first draft of the Fifth Republic's consti-
tution, was dropped in the final version - allegedly at de Gaulle's wish.
31 On the Socialist (Arthur Conte of Pyre"ne"es-Orientales), see below, p. 328. Some of the
Conservatives (who sat for Aisne, Loire, Basses-Pyrenees, Haute-Saone and Gironde^ west) were
open Petainists. Another RGRIF candidate was Houdet, the rebel Gaulhst in the 1949 Melun
Mondel5 June 1951;onPME see below, pp. 361 f.
o ,
33. Elections 1956, p. 404 (on Aisne). Bessac joined CNIP, and did not stand in 1956.
34. S, M. Osgood, French Royalism under the Third and Fourth Republics (Tne Hague,
p. 204. On rival royalists see also Girardet, no. 99a.
180 THE PARTIES
5. COLONIAL GROUPS
Although developments in the French Union are not discussed in this work,
colonial representation in Parliament had an impact on party politics which
requires brief mention. The majority of overseas members joined major
French parties; those representing native electorates preferred the Com-
munists, Socialists or MRP, while settler members and pro-administration
native deputies usually chose MRP in 1946, RPF in 1951, or the Radical
party at any time. Their allegiance to their group was generally less close than
that of their metropolitan colleagues. Extreme nationalists from Algeria,
Madagascar and West Africa formed parties of their own which usually
maintained loose links with the French Communists. During the life of the
Fourth Republic moderate nationalists also set up several independent par-
liamentary groups.
The second Constituent Assembly included a dozen representatives of the
Union democratique du Manifests algerien (UDMA); a decade later their
leader Ferhat Abbas became the first prime minister of the provisional
government of rebel Algeria. Although still a moderate in 1946, he protested
against the colonial provisions of the new constitution and refused to contest
the November elections. Most of the Algerian native seats then went to
administration puppets or to moderate nationalists - who formed a short-
lived separate group but soon drifted away into larger parties. But the ex-
treme Mouvement pour le triomphe des libertds dgmocratiques (MTLD) of
Messali Hadj elected half a dozen deputies, who usually voted with the Com-
munists (though in November 1947 they supported L6on Blum for the
premiership). They were all eliminated in the notoriously dishonest elections
of 1951. The three nationalists from Madagascar also lost their seats at this
time; they had been jailed since 1947, after a dubious trial, for instigating the
great rebellion of that year.35
The chief moderate nationalist groups were the Overseas Independents
(Independants d'outre-mer, IOM) whose leaders had often been trained in
Catholic missions, and R D A which had a predominantly Moslem leadership.36
IOM was formed in 1948, mainly by dissatisfied MRP, Socialist and Pro-
gressive deputies; for committee representation it affiliated to MRP. RDA
broke its links with the fellow-travelling Progressives in 1950, and its members
then affiliated to UD S R which they eventually came to dominate.37
In the 1956 elections the colonial administrators no longer tried to obstruct
RDA (as they had still done in 1951 in spite of its parliamentary alliance
with the colonial minister, Mitterrand).38 IOM, Socialists and conservatives
all lost ground to it, and RDA further strengthened its position in the
35. Tunisia, Morocco and Indo-China were protected states, so their native inhabitants had
no parliamentary representation (though Cochin- China was till 1954 a colony and could - but
never did - elect a deputy) ; but see below, pp. 209n., 294. For the French Union in the two 1946
constitutions see below, p. 293.
36. On African representation see Guillemin, no. 114. At RDA's 1957 conference 70%
of the delegates were Moslem : A Blanchet, L'itinfraire des partis africains depuis Bamako
(1958), p. 26.
37. See above, p. 176. Gabriel d'Arboussier, in 1950 secretary of RDA and leader of its pro-
Communist minority, changed his mind and rejoined his old comrades seven years later.
38. Blanchet, pp. 18-19.
THE MINOR PARTIES 181
territorial assemblies elected in 1957 under the new liberal loi-cadre. This law,
by granting home rule, was to accelerate subsequent political evolution.
RDA's success drew all its opponents together. Early in 1958 a new * Parti
du regroupement africain (PR A) was formed by the fusion of eight parties:
IOM, recently renamed Convention africaine; the Mouvement socialiste
africain, which had just formally separated from SFIO; and half-a-dozen
parties confined to particular territories, which each faced RD A competition
at home. RDA was in office and had to compromise; PR A was not.39 It
could outbid its rival by radical demands - for early independence, and for a
Franco-African federation based on big regional units rather than separate
territories - which found much favour within RDA itself. In 1958 the differ-
ences between the cautious RDA leader Houphouet-Boigny and his im-
patient rivals in and outside his own party dominated the debates on the
Community provisions of the Gaullist constitution.
The overseas deputies naturally took a detached view of much French par-
liamentary business. They behaved, with growing effect, like territorial
spokesmen in a federal senate.40 Their efforts to influence developments north
of the Sahara were unsuccessful; there they could never offset the parlia-
mentary, still less the extra-parliamentary power of the settlers. But in Black
Africa the electoral law was modified by their pressure as early as 1951, and
from 1956 their views were decisive in policy-making for the tropical terri-
tories. Here, therefore, overseas representation in Parliament played an
important part in the success of French decolonization. Through it the
leaders who took over after independence acquired an invaluable political
training, an intimate acquaintance with the political system of the metro-
politan power, and an opportunity to work with her leaders and spokesmen
as equal colleagues.
Looked at from within that political system, the role of the overseas parties
illustrated the activities of minor groups in general. Those that were unwilling
to compromise were driven - like the Progressives at home, and MTLD or
the early RDA abroad - into accepting the patronage of the great party of
all-out opposition, and so became identified in the public mind with Com-
munism. If, however, they were prepared to use their votes for bargaining,
they could exploit the advantages that the system conferred on all marginal
groups. Because of the antagonism between natives and settlers, the net
advantage to be gained from their support was nearer fifteen votes than
eighty.41 But the Constituent Assemblies had shown that fifteen overseas
votes could well be decisive when the metropolitan members were evenly
39. Guillemin, no. 114, p. 877; cf. Grosser, p. 352, Blanchet, pp. 75-7, 84, 95-6, 102.
40. Guillemin, loc. cit.
41. There were 75 overseas deputies in 1946, 77 in 1949, 83 in 1951 ; but only 52 in 1956 as
Algeria did not vote (see below, p. 209n.). Native voters usually chose native members, but in
1951 the colonial undersecretary Dr. Aujoulat transferred from the white constituency in his
colony to the native one, proclaimed * His face may be white but his heart is as black as a black
man's', and was triumphantly elected. In 1956 Roger Duveau successfully followed the same
course in Madagascar - though Aujoulat was defeated. Gabriel d'Arboussier (son of a French
colonial governor and a Soudanese mother) won seats for RDA in Moyen-Congo, Niger and
Ivory Coast and later became a Senegalese minister ; Blanchet, p. 5 ; T. Hodgkin, African Political
Parties (1961), p. 103.
182 THE PARTIES
divided.42 In the Fourth Republic the moderate nationalists tended steadily to
support successive cabinets in return for policy concessions, material advan-
tages for their constituencies, and office for their leaders: IOM held a
colonial under-secretaryship in seven cabinets and a full ministry in one,
Houphouet-Boigny was a senior minister in the last four administrations of
the Fourth Republic. Without the excitement and panache of violent agitation,
the uninspiring process of bargaining quietly helped both sides. To their
clients in Africa the native deputies brought steady if sometimes slow material
and political progress. To French governments in trouble they brought a slight
but useful reinforcement of ministerial stability. In these Negro leaders the
traditional pivot parties of the Third and Fourth Republics had found apt
pupils.
42. See below, p. 191.
III
THE INSTITUTIONS
Chapter 14
THE CONSTITUTIONAL PROBLEM
1. THE THIRD REPUBLIC
Political and institutional factors acted on one another to produce the
governmental instability which characterized the Third Republic. But among
its complex causes the most fundamental was the structure of political
opinion in the country. For the politics of most Frenchmen were negative.
They feared the revival of the reactionaries, the return to power of the groups
which stood for a hierarchical society: the landlord, the Church, the great
capitalist. They feared that a strong centralized administration would corrupt
those who wielded power; ministers of the Left were as distrusted as those of
the Right. They supported the Left politically, yet many of them feared social
and economic experiment and opposed positive government.
Shaped to serve the purposes of this negative majority, the political institu-
tions of the country had in turn increased its influence. Together the suspicion
of governmental power and the fear of social change worked against strong
parties and in favour of an electoral system which encouraged negative and
individualist politics.1 The single-member constituency allowed the deputy to
entrench himself through local services in a stronghold from which he was
hard to dislodge. The double ballot permitted every individualist politi-
cian and splinter group to gain publicity by contesting the first round without
much risk of presenting the seat to the other side, and at the second it helped
the negative voter to block the most dangerous candidate, whether he were a
political reactionary or a social revolutionary. The Chamber therefore
usually contained a chaotic welter of small groups. While most members came
from the political centre, after 1918 they generally needed either clerical or
socialist votes at the second ballot against a candidate of the other extreme.
Consequently every centre group was internally divided according to the
electoral situation of its individual members.
The immediate cause of governmental weakness in France was the artificial-
ity and instability of parliamentary majorities composed from this unpromis-
ing material. The moderate supporters of every government feared that their
more extreme associates would go too far in policy and so compromise their
own electoral prospects; every majority therefore contained a minority
awaiting the moment to change partners and enter a new majority. These
divisions were counteracted by none of the factors of cohesion which reinforce
British party discipline. In Britain a general election imposes a substantial fine
on members of parliament, even when they run little risk of losing their seats ;
and the prime minister's right to dissolve if he is beaten gives him both a
weapon against rebels in the house, who are rarely ready to risk a party defeat
at an election, and a chance to appeal to the country on a clear-cut issue which
divides his own party from its rival. But in France the deputy's re-election
depended much more on his personal reputation; expulsion from the party
1. See below, pp. 307-8.
THE CONSTITUTIONAL PROBLEM 185
and competition from an official candidate held few terrors for a member
whose following was so largely personal that lie could distance the intruder on
the first ballot and regain the lost votes on the second. The clash of opposing
groups was never clear-cut. The head of the government was prevented from
dissolving Parliament, not by constitutional law but by political convention.
The convention grew up early in the Third Republic, whose royalist
founders had set up a regime designed to be transformed later into a monarchy.
They gave the President of the Republic the right to dissolve the Chamber
before its legal term was up, provided he obtained the consent of the Senate.
Presidency and Senate would, it was hoped, be strongholds of conservatism
against the assaults of a Chamber based on universal suffrage, and the disso-
lution would be their joint weapon for keeping the deputies in check. How-
ever, the first President, the monarchist Marshal MacMahon, dissolved the
Chamber in 1877 for partisan purposes, tried unsuccessfully to use the
administrative machine to secure a conservative majority in the new house,
and so discredited the power of dissolution for eighty years. By 1879 the vic-
torious Republicans controlled both houses and the presidency. Before the
constitution was five years old the assumptions of its makers had broken
down.
After 1879 Parliament would normally elect as President only a safe and
mediocre man who would not challenge the authority of the elected house.
The Senate passed gradually into the hands of the parties which already
dominated the Chamber, and became less and less likely to consent to a dis-
solution directed against them. It was never asked to, partly because it was
sure to refuse but even more because of the popular reaction to the crisis of
1877 : thereafter dissolution was associated with an attempted coup (Fdtat. Nor
were a timid President, a hostile Senate and a suspicious public the only
obstacles. French governments were too weak to pass the budget on time, and
lived on appropriations voted monthly, so that a ministry wishing to dissolve
the Chamber would probably have needed parliamentary consent to an
unusually large credit. In 1934, when Doumergue's government seriously
contemplated dissolution, its demand for a grant alarmed the Radical party
into bringing it down.2
Members were therefore secure for four years. The overthrow of a cabinet
did not threaten their seats and might indeed open the way to promotion,
especially among the pivotal centre groups whose marginal position enabled
them to raise * a record crop of ministerial portfolios to the acre '. So the slight
shifts of public or parliamentary opinion, which in Britain cause a trimming of
policy or a government reshuffle, in France led always to a change of cabinet.
But the practical effect was much the same, for as a rule most members of the
old ministry passed straight into the new one.3
Besides the electoral system and the deputies' security of tenure, there were
less important institutional causes for the weakness of French governments.
The standing orders of the Chamber handicapped the administration: control
of parliamentary time was jealously preserved by the house itself, and the
2. Soulier, pp. 559-60.
3. See below, p. 206. 'Record crop* : Siegfried, Tableau, p. 169 (cf. France, p. 83).
186 THE INSTITUTIONS
right of interpellation allowed members to raise a short debate and enforce a
vote on any subject. These procedures reflected a conception of politics which
preferred a ministry safely subordinate to the representatives of the peoople to
one strong and independent enough to govern effectively. So did the com-
mittees, which gave Parliament an alternative leadership to that of the
cabinet. Each specialized in a sphere corresponding roughly to that of a
government cepartment, and they developed a certain corporate sense. Their
rapporteurs had opportunities for informed criticism of administration; their
chairmen were ex officio potential ministers; both enjoyed personal influence
and procedural advantages in the discussion of bills. In theory the govern-
ment should not have suffered, since (from 1910) each committee was based
on proportional representation and should have reflected the majority in the
house. But that majority was shaky and heterogeneous, and accident might
easily concentrate unreliable members in particular committees or positions
of influence.
Yet a further obstacle to the power of the cabinet lay in the influential uppe
house.4 To the maker of the Third Republic the Senate was the essential bul-
wark of conserative principles and interests against the danger of universal
suffrage. As it was chosen by the local notables under an electoral system
under-representing the cities, its composition was weighted heavily against the
Left; and though the Radicals overcame these handicaps by ceasing to be
radical, the proletarian parties never secured a real foothold in a second cham-
ber far more powerful than the British House of Lords. Unlike a British peer,
a senator was not removed from the main political battle, and if he became a
minister he was entitled to speak in either house. The two houses had equal
rights in legislation and finance (except that the Senate had no power of
financial initiative). Senators formed about one-third and deputies two-
thirds of the National Assembly of the Third Republic, which elected the
President and could amend the constitution. And, since a senatorial seat was
influential, sheltered, and tenable for nine years, it often attracted the ablest
of the lifelong politicians from whose ranks the senators - again unlike the
peers - were entirely drawn. Skilfully and patiently they built up their strength
over half a century, never challenging the Chamber unless they were sure of
victory. They hampered unpopular governments by blocking legislation, and
in the last decade of the Third Republic began to encroach on the executive
sphere: the Senate forced three ministries out of office between 1875 and 1929,
four between 1930 and 1940.
Yet it was the political situation which made these institutional barriers
serious obstacles to governmental authority. Early in the twentieth century
the separation of Church and State had provided a real programme attracting
a genuine majority. Under the Combes ministry the Chamber was managed
by the Delegation des Gauches, a steering committee of the majority parties
which dealt without difficulty with the interpellation nuisance and the com-
mittee danger. I terpellations which might threaten the government were-
adjourned sine die; the majority had a motive for unity and therefore held
together to vote for the delay proposed by its leaders. Effective discipline was
4. See below, pp. 276-7.
THE CONSTITUTIONAL PROBLEM 187
applied in committees. The ministry, responsive to the wishes of its followers,
fell only when its programme had been put into force and their loyalty had
weakened.
The powers of the finance committee and Senate were also largely a func-
tion of a particular political situation. Since electoral necessity attracted the
men of the Centre towards the Left, almost every Chamber opened with an
apparent left-wing majority. But this disintegrated once economic and social
questions came to the fore, and the search for a new combination began. The
Senate and the finance committee owed much of their influence to their key
roles in this recurrent struggle. Moderate Radicals, republican and anti-
clerical but terrified of social experiment, occupied a predominant position in
the Senate and a pivotal one in the Chamber. Since the upper house was too
cautious to risk its prestige by unsuccessful aggression, it moved against a
government only when this crucial group of deputies was wavering. Apparently
a rival institution, it behaved in fact as a reinforcement to its political friends
in the Chamber. But the finance committee often acted in the opposite direc-
tion, focusing the opposition of those Centre deputies who still preferred the
left-wing connection and disliked association with the Conservatives. In the
recurrent manoeuvre by which the Radicals and their friends reversed their
alliances, the finance committee acted as a brake and the Senate as a
goad.
This did not mean that the Senate was always on the Right. It expressed
those negative views, hostile both to clerical reaction and to social change,
which predominated in the country. In the 1880's it led the resistance to
Boulangism; and of the four governments it destroyed in the 1930's two were
of the Right, led by Tardieu and Laval, and two of the Left, under Blum. As
the balance-wheel (or millstone) of the system, the Senate prevented policies
or governments moving too far from the political centre of gravity. It could
fulfil this traditional - but rarely achieved - function of a second chamber
because it was so composed that its majority was in accord with the dominant
section of the electorate. The roots of its power were more political than
institutional. Governments were weak and programmes hard to carry, not
because of the provisions of the constitution but because public opinion - or
its principal elements - preferred weak government and inaction. That pres-
sure determined the working of the institutions and dictated the character of
the system.
The Third Republic was criticized by the Left because the popular house was
too weak, by the Right because it was too strong. Socialists wished to abolish
the Senate, conservatives to multiply restraints on the power of the Chamber.
The Left looked back to the 'Convention government' (regime d'assemblee)
of the revolutionary period with its omnipotent single chamber. The Right
demanded a 'parliamentary government' of checks and balances based on the
British constitution. Yet through stressing legal principles and ignoring
political realities they had wholly misunderstood the institutions they so
ardently admired. 'Parliamentary government' at Westminster in 1850
curiously resembled the Third Republic; and as over the next century
188 THE INSTITUTIONS
its bulwarks were shorn away, the executive emerged far stronger than
before.5
In Britain between the reform acts of 1832 and 1867 there were always
more than two parties, weak, loose and inchoate. At general elections many
contests turned on personal and local differences rather than political prin-
ciples, and the majorities that emerged were highly unstable; only one of the
nine Parliaments sustained a single premier throughout. Leaders had to rely
on personal followings and skill in manoeuvre in default of authority over an
organized party. Every ministry, in name or in fact, was a coalition of diverse
groups. Important political issues remained open questions on which ministers
publicly disagreed. Cabinets survived or succumbed by tiny majorities, and a
marginal group like the Peelites enjoyed preferential treatment in the distri-
bution of offices. Occasionally, as in the Crimean war, a surge of revolt would
sweep the benches and unite all elements against the administration. Despite
the Lords, the Crown and the dissolution prerogative, the House of Com-
mons was at the height of its power.
That power declined as the nominal authority of the House grew. The
advance of democracy concentrated in the House more power than it could
use effectively, and obliged it to impose tight discipline, organize into rigid
blocks, and transfer its newly-extended authority to the government in order
to get its business done. Approximating in theory to the omnipotence of an
assembly without a rival, it fell in practice to the dependent status of a body
which ratifies the decisions of the executive, and from which the parties appeal
to the people and test their reactions. Today it only rarely behaves as an
independent institution, almost always as a necessary link between cabinet
and electorate. The distinction between 'Convention government' and 'par-
liamentary government' was therefore largely a legal fiction. Based on consti-
tutional forms divorced from political realities, the concepts ignored the
crucial factor : the rise of organized parties.6
2. THE DEBATE AT THE LIBERATION
The makers of the Fourth Republic gave themselves the impossible task of
solving by constitutional arrangements a problem set, not by the forms of the
law, but by the divisions of the people. French Republics had always lived
dangerously. Since 1871 the regime had been threatened first by a counter-
revolutionary Right, then by a revolutionary Left and finally by both. Because
of the country's turbulent history and the power of the administration, re-
publican tradition subordinated the executive to the legislature and accepted
the high price of this settlement in governmental weakness and instability.
Other democratic great powers have tried to avoid these disabilities. The
5. See the lament in Economist, 23 April 1853 (quoted Economist, 25 April 1953) and Disraeli's
speech of 30 August 1848 (Hansard ci, col. 705-6). In French discussion 'Convention government*
concentrates all power, judicial as well as executive, in a single chamber; * parliamentary govern-
ment' has an irresponsible chief of state, ministers responsible to a legislature which can be
dissolved by the executive, and (normally) a second chamber and an independent judiciary.
6. Realistic French critics themselves found the concepts inapplicable: see quotations in
Williams, p. 167n. For useful discussions see Th6ry, Le Gouvernement de la IVe Rtpublique
(1949), Chapter 5; Duverger, Demain, pp. 27-31, 59-61, 102-3, and VIet pp. 42-4.
THE CONSTITUTIONAL PROBLEM 189
British solution uses strict party discipline to transform the nominal
authority of the House of Commons over the government into the practical
control of the government over the Commons; the American solution
separates executive and legislature constitutionally, leaving each as master
within a sphere which the other cannot conquer. But in France neither the
strong, disciplined party nor the strong, independent executive was acceptable,
for each aroused disquieting historical memories, and each was sponsored
by a group whose democratic good faith was contested by its opponents.
General de Gaulle was alone in advocating a solution restricting parlia-
mentary control over the executive.7 The Left demanded the omnipotent
assembly of revolutionary tradition; the Right and Centre feared that it
would be abused by the parties which sponsored it - at worst by the Com-
munists to impose their own dictatorship, at best by the Socialists to keep the
executive in intolerable subjection. With the moderate parties insisting on
checks and balances and the Left fearing that any prolonged dispute would
play into de Gaulle's hands, the Fourth Republic finally came into being as a
patchwork compromise, based on Socialist conceptions but tempered by
concessions to the supporters of 'parliamentary government'. By 1947 its
Socialist and MRP creators had to rely on the friends of the Third Republic
for support against the Communist and Gaullist assaults, and the men of the
old order, as they gradually regained influence and courage, attempted to
adjust the system to their own purposes.
The Communist constitutional solution derived from the Convention of
1793 and the Paris Commune of 1871. It concentrated power in a single
Assembly unchecked by any rival authority, electing the President, controlling
the government, dominating executive, legislature and judiciary alike. This
arrangement gave legal authority to the Assembly but effective power to the
government. For a legislature bearing such responsibility would have to
discipline itself, and amid several loose and conflicting parties a single co-
herent group, following a deliberate strategy and recognized leaders, would
soon establish its preponderance.
If the Communist party accepted the rules of democracy, this solution
would have many advantages. To compete with its power and numbers its
opponents would have to coalesce into an equally powerful block, endowing
France at last with a two-party system. For the Communist constitutional
answer (taken at face value) was very much the same as the British: a legally
omnipotent elected house which made its theoretical powers effective by
handing them over to a committee of the majority. As in Britain, party dis-
cipline was the essential element in this arrangement, without which its
advantages and drawbacks cannot be understood.
Such a system is tolerable only when there is confidence that the party m
power will not subvert the democratic system; and Frenchmen feared that a
two-party system with the Communists as one contestant would soon lead to
civil war Yet many good democrats were attracted to a similar constitutional
solution - with safeguards against Communist predominance. In particular
the Socialist party, which also accepted the revolutionary tradition and the
7. On it see below, pp. 191-2. He did not campaign for it until 1946.
190 THE INSTITUTIONS
single Assembly, joined the Communists in supporting the first draft constitu-
tion in April 1946. When that draft was rejected at the May referendum the
parties of the Left had to compromise with MRP; but the October constitu-
tion was nevertheless based on Socialist ideas. Many of its principles and
details could be found in L6on Blum's early work on governmental reform
and Vincent Auriol's proposals for post-war reconstruction.8
The Socialists condemned the Third Republic for buttressing the power of
conservative interests and encouraging a politics centred on personal and
parochial squabbles rather than on a fundamental clash of policies. To meet
the first fault they wanted to abolish the checks to the lower house by destroy-
ing the Senate's power and eliminating the Presidency of the Republic. To
meet the second they advocated proportional representation in order to
extend the politician's horizon, weaken local ties, end the demoralizing
alliances of the second ballot, and elevate the tone of public life. They hoped
to replace the old shifting, incoherent groups by powerful parties, each with its
distinctive outlook and its disciplined following in and out of Parliament.9
Elections would be fought on clear issues, so a definite majority would emerge
and solve the problem of governmental stability. The Assembly would elect a
prime minister whose government would represent the majority that had
chosen him. This community of outlook would guarantee the security of the
government, and it would no longer need means of pressure on the Assembly
such as the vote of confidence so prodigally employed in the Third Republic.
The executive being a projection of the legislature, the two would normally
be in harmony and the stability of the former would be happily combined
with the final authority of the latter.
In case of a clash the Assembly was to be able to turn the government out
by a vote of no confidence; but to restrain the irresponsibility which had
sometimes marred the Third Republic, a government defeat would lead
automatically to the dissolution of the Assembly. In minor matters the deputies
could instruct the government to change its policy, and the cabinet, unable to
call for a vote of confidence, would be obliged to give way. This system would
have secured the executive's stability at the price of its authority, for a govern-
ment would have been subject to the pressure of its followers without effective
counter-pressures against them. The plan, reflecting the traditional French
democratic distrust of power and its holders, formed a natural basis for com-
promise in 1946 when government through a strong party seemed to imply
Communist domination and a strong presidency meant power for de Gaulle.
Among the other democratic parties, the Radicals simply wished to retain
as much as possible of the Third Republic. All Conservatives wanted to
strengthen the executive and to impose barriers against the principal Assembly.
MRP favoured constitutional provisions reflecting its Catholic and corpora-
tive outlook: one characteristic suggestion was to give extra votes to parents
8. Blum, La Rgforme gouvernementale, especially pp. 39, 62-3, 150-3, 163, 167-9, 175-9, 218,
222-7 ; Auriol, Hier . . . Demain, ii. 21, 23, 31, 33, 38, 51, 142, 197-8, 208, 223, 239-40, 249, 261,
2fjt 28j.
9. See below, pp. 387-8. Like the founders of the United Nations they built a constitutional
structure on political sand, wrongly postulating that the * great powers' of the moment would
continue in alliance. (I owe this point to Professor Wahl.)
THE CONSTITUTIONAL PROBLEM 191
according to the number of their (legitimate) children. Like the Conservatives
and Radicals it waged its main constitutional fight to preserve checks and
balances and allow the executive some independence.
The debate took place under a provisional regime planned by de Gaulle
before the Liberation. Both he and the politicians had known that its structure
might well influence the shape of the final constitution, and as the parties were
unanimous in demanding that the provisional government must be responsible
to the Constituent Assembly (if in nothing else), the General gave way to their
insistence.10 In the first Assembly the Left parties had a majority, and after de
Gaulle's resignation they carried their draft constitution; it was rejected at
the referendum of May 1946. In the second, the struggle turned on the selec-
tion and powers of the President and second chamber, the electoral law, the
machinery for constitutional amendment, and the independence of the
judiciary. As MRP generally sided with the Right, the balance was very even
and several major issues were decided by tiny majorities; the votes of a few
colonial members were crucial, and disgruntled conservatives bitterly attacked
the 'Madagascar constitution'.
Paul Coste-Floret, the MRP rapporteur of the second constitutional draft,
warned that in France presidential government would mean dictatorship
(pouvoir personnel) and Convention government like that of 1793 would lead
to revolution; democracy would work only in a compromise system where
Parliament and executive were balanced.11 The constitution-makers were thus
neither able nor willing to erect a new structure, and tried only to repair the
faults that the old one had revealed in its years of decline. Article 13 was sup-
posed to prevent the Assembly delegating its legislative power, since timid
Chambers in the 1930's had often abdicated and left the government free from
parliamentary control. Article 94 forbade constitutional amendment when
part of France was under enemy occupation ; it belatedly denied validity to
the vote of 10 July 1940 conferring full powers on Marshal P6tain, but did not
prevent another Republic committing suicide quite constitutionally, in 1958,
under threat of 'military usurpation'.12
3. THE FOURTH REPUBLIC AND AFTER
The campaign to amend the new constitution began before it was adopted. At
Bayeux in June 1946 de Gaulle warned his countrymen that the new institu-
tions were wholly misconceived. In French conditions an executive dependent
on Parliament could not be stable; therefore the executive must be indepen-
dent of Parliament. In normal times this was the only way to remove power
from the feeble and factious parties, and in a crisis like that of 1940 it would
permit a President to go into exile as a National Assembly of nine hundred
men could not.13 The President would be chosen by an electoral college
10. Thery, pp, 15-16; Wright, Reshaping, pp. 82-4; and cf. below, p. 200 and n.
11. JO 20 August 1946, p. 3185. He summed up : '. . . if we condemn presidential government
and rule out Convention government, we are obliged to revert to ... parliamentary government*.
12. * Usurpation' : de Gaulle's broadcast of 8 June 1962. On Arts. 13 and 94 see below, pp. 270-
275,302.
13. AP 1946, p. 163. Under Article 45 of the 1946 constitution ministers could be appointed
only after the election of the premier, 'except when a ca& of force majeure prevents the meeting
[aver
192 THE INSTITUTIONS
comprising the two houses of Parliament supplemented - or swamped - by
representatives of various aspects of the national life. Rooted in French his-
tory, this was a presidential conception resembling George Washington's
and not Franklin Roosevelt's. The Founding Fathers of the United States,
who had wished to shelter the President from popular pressures and ' factions ',
were frustrated by the rise of parties. Now de Gaulle was determined to weaken
the parties by instituting an electoral college which they could not control.14
While the proposed President would choose and dismiss his ministers, they
would also be responsible to Parliament - a contradiction resolved neither in
the General's sketchy statements nor later in the Fifth Republic (where peace
in Algeria was promptly followed by a trial of strength). He could submit to a
referendum a bill on which the government suffered parliamentary defeat, and
in case of political deadlock he could, with his ministers' consent, dissolve
the Assembly.15 But the deputies would be unable to rid themselves of a
chief executive enjoying both the American President's security of tenure and
the British premier's power to coerce Parliament. Where the first is weak in
dealing with Congress and the second must watch for shifts in the floating
vote, he would enjoy the advantages of both offices without suffering the
checks imposed upon either.
Such a regime had many precedents in French history. In its theoretical
structure it had affinities with both the Second and Third Republics. In its
popular support it reflected that Bonapartist demand for a republic with real
authority which, as Siegfried remarked seventeen years before the sudden
ascent of RPF, was a latent force always liable to explode with eruptive
violence.16 But the General failed to impose his constitution as the Commu-
nists failed to introduce theirs, since until 1958 most Frenchmen feared an
overweening President no less than a preponderant party.
Although the Gaullist campaign for major reconstruction failed, the consti-
tution of the Fourth Republic was nevertheless amended, like that of the
Third, before it was ten years old. The underlying reason in both cases was a
shift of power away from the groups which had held it in the aftermath of
war: royalist advocates of immediate peace in 1871, disciplined parties of the
Left in 1946. Each of these had enjoyed an artificial parliamentary majority
and shaped a constitution to fit its own purposes; when the excluded groups
returned in force they set about changing the new institutions to suit
themselves. The National Assembly of the Fourth Republic resolved on
of the National Assembly'; the proviso was introduced in answer to de Gaulle's criticisms:
Thery, p. 117n. (see La France sera la France, p. 41, for de Gaulle's statement of 27 August 1946,
and cf. above, p. 132n.).
14. In the constitution of the Fifth Republic the electors were parliamentarians, members or
delegates of local authorities, and overseas representatives. In 1962 de Gaulle, by referendum,
introduced direct election of the President.
15. Asked what would happen if President and ministers disagreed, he replied that in his system
this could not happen: La France sera la France, p. 49, quoted Williams, p. 162n. In the Fifth
Republic the President could dissolve without ministers' consent, and the referendum provisions
were also slightly different.
16. See above, p. 141n. For the Gaullist constitution in practice see Williams and Harrison,
Part III; D. Pickles, The Fifth French Republic (2nd. ed., 1962).
THE CONSTITUTIONAL PROBLEM 193
30 November 1950 to amend eleven articles of the constitution; four years
later to the day, after elaborate negotiations to assemble an adequate major-
ity, it finally passed the specific amendments.17 Following the post-war trend,
these changes marked a partial return to the constitutional practice of the
Third Republic, particularly over the choice of a premier and the powers of
the second chamber.18
They did not satisfy the revisionists, and within eight months both houses
called for further amendments to 28 articles: 23 affecting the French Union
and 5 others, notably those regulating the election or ejection of a prime minis-
ter by the Assembly. Nothing effective was done for two years, although in the
last weeks of the Fourth Republic frantic but ineffective efforts were made to
amend these five articles. But members of parliament were prepared to con-
sider only marginal adjustments to the details of the existing system, while
opinion in the country was growing increasingly critical of the structure itself.
Domestic reformers feared that without a major institutional change, in-
genious schemes to prevent the deputies overthrowing a cabinet every six
months would merely lead them to install as prime minister a man who would
offend nobody - and therefore achieve nothing - even if he survived for five
years.19 Nationalists were convinced that the overseas empire was doomed
unless the central power in Paris could be greatly strengthened. Critics on all
sides denounced 'the System' by which a Parliament of multiple parties and
shifting coalitions excluded strong personalities from power, and deprived
the ordinary citizen of any sense of participation in the government of his
country.
Although presidential government had long been anathema to good
republicans, it attracted some support during the second world war, notably
from L£on Blum. In 1956 the cause was revived by Professors Vedel and
Duverger, who pointed to significant similarities between the structure of
French and American opinion and argued that the people could regain a
sense of political participation only if they directly elected the chief executive.
Gaullist critics contended more bitterly that the self-seeking parliamentarians
had filched sovereignty from the people in whose name they claimed to
exercise it. Ren6 Capitant pointed to their aversion, not only to the referen-
dum, but to any electoral law which might allow the voters to designate a
government or express a clear political demand. Michel Debr6, de Gaulle's
chief constitutional adviser, accused the politicians of the System of deliberately
dividing the nation, raising false controversies and obstructing reforms: he
threatened them with imminent revolution unless they promptly mended
their ways.20
Within months the regime had collapsed under the strain of the Algerian
17. See below, pp. 302-3.
18. On the trend see above, p. 35. On the reform, Campbell, no. 46, Goguel, no. 110,
Macridis, no. 151, Pickles, no. 175, Pierce, no. 179, Williams, no. 221 ; Poutier, La Reforme de
la Constitution ; Drevet, La procedure de revision de la Constitution du 27-10-1946; and below,
pp. 210, 212, 216-17, 226-9, 237, 239-40, 283-5.
19. See below, p. 241.
20. See Goguel, no. Ill ; Capitant, preface to Hamon, De Gaulle dans la Republique, pp. iii-vi ;
Debre\ Ces princes qui nous gouvernent; Lavau, no. 140; Duverger, Demain, passim. Most of
these critics were more 'presidential' than de Gaulle himself.
194 THE INSTITUTIONS
war. The Gaullists came to power and Debr6 became the main architect of
the new hybrid system, the only variant of presidential government to enjoy
organized political backing. The parties which had hesitated to make con-
stitutional amendment too easy were now coerced into letting the ministry
draft its own proposed constitution ; and after refusing to consider a normal
presidential system with an independent legislature, they had now to accept a
deviant form overwhelmingly dominated by the executive. In September 1958
four-fifths of the voters, disillusioned with the parliamentary republic which
had twice failed within twenty years, yet still opposed to the Communists,
turned to de Gaulle and accepted the constitutional solution which he had
vainly proposed in 1946.
As general staffs are sometimes said to prepare for the last war, the politi-
cians who made the Fourth Republic in 1946 had prepared for the last con-
stitutional crisis. Later parliamentarians who tried to reform the system did so
within the same narrow limits, and as early as 1948 the results of their efforts
were summed up in the phrase, 'The Fourth Republic is dead, it has been
succeeded by the Third'. In terms of constitutional practice Part III of this
book is a commentary on that contemptuous verdict. Nevertheless historical
experience - and indeed the sequel - give little ground for believing that a
stronger regime would have survived without disruption and disaster the
tremendous shock of decolonization and the diminution of French power in
the world.
Chapter 15
THE PRESIDENT AND THE CABINET
The makers of the Fourth Republic were anxious to diminish the importance
of the President of the Republic who was not responsible to Parliament, and
increase that of the prime minister who was. In this aim they failed com-
pletely. Although the President s powers were strictly limited by the constitu-
tion, Vincent Auriol became more influential than any of his predecessors and
Ren6 Coty, though less active;, intervened spectacularly in the crisis of 1958.
But while the presidency proved stronger than had ever been intended, the
premiership never became the driving force for which the constitution-makers
had hoped. The political foundations on which they relied proved shifting
and unstable, and instead of the leader of a united team, almost every premier
had to be a broker between rivals over whom he had little control.
1. THE PRESIDENCY
The royalists who created tie Third Republic had designed it to be trans-
formed into a monarchy as scon as they could agree on a king. Prominent
among the bulwarks which tkey established against the menace of democracy
was the Presidency of the Republic. But because of its imposing nominal
powers, it was feared and restrained in a number of ways. There was legal
restriction: every official act of the President except his resignation required
the countersignature of a minister. There was political convention: after 1877
no President ventured to ask tie Senate to approve a dissolution of the Cham-
ber. There was also the sileikt "but effective method of keeping dangerous men
out of the office. Profess-or Bn ogan observed of the first four incumbents that
Thiers had been chosen as the: greatest living French statesman, MacMahon as the
most honourable French soldier: Gr6vy had been elected in 1879 because of what
he had said in 1848, Carnot was. elected in 1887 because of what his grandfather had
done in 1793. x
In the Second Republic direct election by the people had made Louis Bona-
parte President and then Emperor. In the Third such dangers were avoided;
the President was elected for seven years by the two houses of Parliament
sitting together as a National Assembly. Its members sometimes made a mis-
take and chose an assertive man who had to be removed, like Casimir-Pe"rier
in 1895 and Millerand in 1924; even Poincare" might not have survived without
the first world war. More commonly *a deep instinct' led Parliament to cast
its secret ballot against any st rong leader, and Gambetta was beaten by Gre" vy,
Ferry by Carnot, Waldeck-Rousseau by F61ix Faure, Clemenceau by
Deschanel and Briand by Oo-umer. As J. J. Weiss remarked in 1885, 'The
fundamental principle of tike constitution is or ought to be that the President
hunts rabbits and does tot govern'.2
1. The Development of ffiodern Frmce, p. 198.
2. Quoted Thery, p. 29, and Datsette, Histoire des Presidents, p. 353. * Deep instinct' : Siegfried,
De la IIP, p. 36.
H
196 THE INSTITUTIONS
In this tradition the Left in 1945-46 regarded his office as either useless or
dangerous. The first draft constitution reflected its desire for a puppet Presi-
dent, who was to be elected by an open ballot of the National Assembly. When
this draft was rejected at the referendum of May 1946 the Left made conces-
sions, agreeing to election by a clear majority in a secret ballot of members of
both houses, as in the Third Republic.3 This seemed unimportant politically,
for although the senators had enabled the Right to dominate the presidential
electorate in the past, the new Council of the Republic was to be so chosen
that its political composition would reflect that of the Assembly. But in 1948,
when the conservative parties had grown stronger, they adopted a method of
electing the upper house more advantageous to themselves. Their victory over
the presidential electoral college thus acquired new importance.4
There was another struggle over the President's powers. The Third Repub-
lic had made him both formal chief of the state and nominal head of the
executive, but had robbed him of prestige by subjecting him to nomination by
Parliament, and of power by requiring a ministerial countersignature for
everything he did. An adroit President could aifect domestic affairs by skill in
picking prime ministers, and foreign policy by advice to which his status,
experience and long tenure gave weight. But his paper authority far exceeded
his real influence. The makers of the Fourth Republic set out to correct this
discrepancy.
The President was still to sign treaties, receive ambassadors, remain nominal
commander-in-chief and preside over the National Defence Council. He took
the chair in the cabinet, and was to keep its minutes (a politically crucial
innovation in France as in Britain).6 High officers and officials were appointed
by him in a cabinet meeting. He kept some prerogatives which had lain dor-
mant in the Third Republic: the right to address messages to Parliament,
which was to prove unexpectedly important in 1958, and to refer bills back
for a second deliberation, which was soon found very useful. No bill was ever
referred back in the Third Republic, but a dozen were under the provisional
government (where there was no revising chamber, and no risk of friction
when the premier was himself acting head of the state), and a dozen more in
the Fourth Republic.6
The President granted pardons in the High Council of the Judiciary, a new
body over which he presided and of which he chose two members out of
3. The Left had feared that a secret ballot would help de Gaulle to win by allowing their mem-
bers to break party discipline, as they had done in the past. They wanted to require a two-thirds
majority (or three-fifths from the fourth ballot). The Right would have liked half, and the Gaullists
a large majority, of the electoral college to be non-parliamentary.
4. See below, p. 277 (and cf. n. 29). Even without the change the two houses would have differed
politically once they were elected at different times ; but it was the first election which might have
installed de Gaulle.
5. He presided at the conseil des ministres but not the conseil de cabinet, at which the premier
took the chair and junior ministers attended; it met rarely in the Fourth Republic, except under
Mendes-France. See F. de Baecque (who was on Coty's staff) in Les Institutions politiques de la
France (henceforth cited as Institutions}, i. 201, 234-8, 264-5; Arn6, Le President du conseil,
pp. 77-9, 90-1 ; Drago, no. 76; on minutes also Dansette, Presidents, p. 324, Siegfried, De la IIP,
6. See below, pp. 198 (appointments), 203 (messages), 200 (bills referred back); on the pro-
visional government, Thery, p. 66.
THE PRESIDENT AND THE CABINET 197
fourteen. Together with, the President of the Council of the Republic he could
initiate the procedure for deciding whether a new law was in conformity with
the constitution.7 Above all he could nominate candidates for the premiership,
and not merely (as in the first draft constitution) transmit possible names to
the President of the Assembly. But since almost all his other acts needed a
ministerial countersignature, he seemed to have gained more in formal status
than in real power.8
2. VINCENT AURIOL
The constitution-makers failed to weaken the Presidency; instead its influence
increased, thanks to the vigour and determination of the first incumbent - who
had once advocated abolishing the office he was to fill so successfully.9 Vincent
Auriol, the first Socialist President, had entered the Chamber in 1910, served
under Blum as minister of finance in 1936, and voted against Marshal P6tain
in 1940. While interned by Vichy he sketched proposals for constitutional
reform which 'the constitution of the Fourth Republic followed more closely
than any French constitution had ever followed a theoretical work'.10 At
Algiers in 1943 he became the chief mediator between General de Gaulle and
the politicians, and after the return to France he was President of both Con-
stituent Assemblies and acted as unofficial President of the Republic in minis-
terial crises. In the interminable conflicts of constitution-making he was a
tireless producer of compromise solutions.11 It was appropriate that the man
most responsible for the conception and delivery of the new Republic's con-
stitution should become its first official head.
More unexpected was the position he built up, unlike any previous Presi-
dent, as the most influential personality in France. An astute and gregarious
southerner, Auriol was at his best in managing the parliamentarians, whom
he understood and esteemed. The multiplicity and weakness of the parties and
the inexperience of the new leaders gave Mm advantages which he neither
abused nor neglected. Disliking some of the policies and personalities of his
old party, he developed into a 'governmental Radical'; and without flouting
the proprieties he emerged as a vigorous public defender of French interests
abroad and the Fourth Republic at home:
Above the ministers, urging one on and blocking another, having his favourites and
often choosing them badly, advancing easily through the parliamentary jungle,
striving as if he revelled in the task to find a compromise between men, parties, bills
or programmes ; involving himself in public affairs beyond his constitutional powers,
creating a presidency to his own measure, on occasion relieving a minister of a
7. See below, pp. 299, 305. Le droit de grdce covers reprieves and commutations as well
as pardons stricto sensu. •
8. No countersignature was needed for these nominations, which were not effective until
approved by the Assembly: ThSry, p. Ill, Fabre, no. 88, p. 197n., Arne", p. 44; nor for some of
his acts as chairman of the High Council of the Judiciary and Constitutional Committee and as
President of the French Union : see p. 199 below and nn. 15, 17, 19.
9. Auriol, ii. 234ff. Similarly Jules Gr6vy, twice President of the Third Republic, had in 1848
proposed a republic without a president. For Auriol's term see Dansette, Presidents, Chapter 16 ;
Arne, pp. 67-8, 76-7, 81-2 ; Pickles, no. 176 ; Merle, no. 158.
10. Priouret, Partis, p. 45 ; and see above, p. 109n.
11. Wright, Reshaping, pp. 151-216 passim.
198 THE INSTITUTIONS
difficult file or bombarding him with a technical note, bullying officials, presiding,
travelling, proclaiming, talking a great deal, listening less often, the chief of state :
M. Auriol.12
As a chairman who was more informed and experienced than the ministers,
he could play a major part in cabinet debate. One observer records a foreign
policy discussion which President Auriol concluded by turning to the silent
prime minister to ask his views; another says it was occasionally hard to tell
where presidential advice ended and ministerial decision began. A minister
notes, 'his natural dynamism sometimes overcame his perfect courtesy'. In
January 1950 it was the President who insisted that the government must act
against Communist sabotage of national defence and the Indo-China war. On
all major appointments his advice had to be heard, and in practice he generally
enjoyed a veto. Outside the cabinet room he had ample opportunity to
influence individuals, delegations and audiences.13
His views carried most weight in the traditionally presidential fields of
foreign affairs and defence. In the Fourth Republic, unlike the Third at times,
the President had full access to all diplomatic documents. He was chairman
of the National Defence Council, a consultative body which met rarely, and
of the defence committee of ministers and soldiers; and he gained unexpected
influence simply by continuing in office through the frequent changes in the
premiership and defence ministry and the many reorganizations of the defence
departments. Auriol used foreign visits, like that to the United States in April
1951, for a vigorous public and private presentation of the French case. He
did not conceal his opposition to German rearmament and his irritation with
America for supporting it. And he was violently attacked by Communists for
denouncing the Cominform's subversive activities, defending the Atlantic
pact, condemning the 'iron curtain' and advocating effectively controlled dis-
armament. In a vigorous defence of his conception of the office, Auriol
refused to become a silent figurehead and argued for a 'moral magistracy'
entitled to advise, warn and conciliate; impartiality was not indifference,
'Never', a perspicacious observer of his conduct had written early in his
term, 'would the Third Republic have tolerated a First Magistrate departing
so far from his position of arbiter.'14
Auriol was particularly active in two fields where he enjoyed specific
constitutional authority: the imperial and the judicial. 'Beyond the vicissi-
tudes of ministries/ wrote Dansette, there was 'an filysde policy of the French
Union'. Though Auriol was a Socialist, and was later to oppose Guy Mollet
over Algeria, this policy was not always particularly liberal. Nor was it
12. Fauvet, 11", p. 130. See also Dumaine, pp. 190, 515; Merle, no. 158, p. 295; Dansette,
Presidents, pp. 267-8 ('most influential'), 325 ('Radical').
13. Ibid., pp. 267-8 (silent premier); Bertrand, Les techniques du travail gouvernemental, p. 37
(advice and decision) ; AP 1950, p. 9 (Indo-China) ; Siegfried, De la Hle, p. 230, Goguel, Rtgime,
p. 52, and Georgel, i. 91-2 (appointments); Dumaine, p. 157 (delegations); Arne, pp. 71, 74-7,
81-3, 137. Auriol failed in an epic struggle with Robert Schuman over one appointment (of a
cultural director at the Quai d'Orsay): Grosser, pp. 44-5. 'Dynamism': Buron, p. 223.
14. Dumaine, p. 190. See also Suel, no, 206 ; Grosser, pp. 44-6 ; Arne, pp. 68, 84-2 ; Baecque in
Institutions, i. 196-8; Goguel, Regime, p. 51; Merle, no. 158, pp. 300-1; AP 1951, pp. 291-2,
669. 'Moral magistracy' : Dansette, Presidents, p. 270; Georgel, i. 88-9; Pickles, no. 176, p. Ill ;
Ara6, p. 68 ; Drago, no. 76, p. 167.
THE PRESIDENT AND THE CABINET 199
invariably decisive, but it was actively pursued, especially in his later years.
Auriol's talks with the ex-emperor Bao Dai over Vietnamese independence in
1949 were described as the most personal presidential conduct of a negotiation
for decades, and three years later he received the same sovereign alone in the
absence of the responsible minister, Jean Letourneau. He dispensed with
ministerial countersignature for his later letters to other heads of state, in-
cluding the monarchs of the protectorates ; and in the Tunisian crisis of March
1952 he both proposed and drafted an important letter to the Bey.15
His second special interest was the administration of justice. The committee
on the first draft constitution had reached unwonted unanimity in assigning
to the head of the state the presidency of the new High Council of the Judiciary.
Within it, he had a casting vote on disciplinary matters and a virtual veto on
judicial appointments and promotions. President Auriol watched carefully
over the High Council's development, which was difficult both because the
ministry of justice resented being partly superseded by the Council, and be-
cause some governments brought pressure on it over specific cases. His sup-
port was indispensable to its independence. In April 1950, for example, when
the cabinet wished to discuss the acquittals of accused Communists, the Presi-
dent insisted that these were matters for the High Council alone. Occasionally
he took bolder action, as in October 1948 when he intervened both with the
High Council and the senior judges to urge rigour in applying the laws against
speculation in foodstuffs.16
In 1946 the Communists had tried unsuccessfully to deprive the President
of the right of pardon, which at that time (as later in the Fifth Republic) had
great political importance. The first draft constitution transferred this right to
the High Council; the second provided that the President should exercise it in
that body. In practice he was bound neither by the ministerial countersigna-
ture, which was automatic, nor by the High Council's views. While he always
followed these in lesser cases, reprieve from a death sentence was recognized
as his personal prerogative; he commuted two-thirds of those passed between
1948 and 1953. Auriol was to use the right of pardon very liberally in amnesty-
ing minor offenders from the occupation period and correcting the sharp dis-
crepancies in sentences awarded by different courts and at different dates. He
used it also in one major political case to reprieve the Malagasy deputies
implicated in the rising of 1947. Like de Gaulle he took these duties very
seriously; they were estimated to occupy a third of his time, and he called
them * my most onerous responsibility ',17
15. 'filysSe policy' : Dansette, Presidents, pp. 325-6 ; qualifications in Grosser, p. 47. Bao Dai :
ibid p. 46, for 1952 and Berlia, no. 13b, pp. 910-1, for 1949. Countersignature : ibid. ; Institutions,
i. 205, 210; Merle, no. 158, p. 301 ; but cf. Arne, pp. 72, 73n. It was clearly not required for ap-
pointments to his own cabinet or to the new French Union secretariat, headed by a Moslem
Algerian prefect, which he set up in March 1952. On Auriol's Indo-China policy see Fauvet,
IVe, pp. 253, 255. ,-..,-
16. On the High Council see below, pp. 293-4; also Institutions, i. 206 (discipline and appoint-
ments), 210 (countersignature); Arne, pp. 76-7; AP 1950, p. 76, and Monde, 24 April 1950
(Communists); ibid., 16 October 1948 (speculation).
17. ]
i. 196,
fast Constituent Assembly^ cited as SCCT), p. 124. Malagasies : see below, p. 211 (but even
v [over
200 THE INSTITUTIONS
These functions were conferred on the President because he was supposed
to stand above party quarrels and watch over the permanent interests of the
state. Similarly he was the natural spokesman in a national emergency, and in
1947 he presided over a committee, representing every party and religious
denomination, which appealed to the peasants to send wheat quickly to the
hungry towns.18 His services could be called upon in a constitutional dead-
lock, and he was chairman of the new Constitutional Committee which
decided whether a newly-voted law infringed the constitution.19 Paul Coste-
Floret, rapporteur of the second Constituent Assembly, described him as
'guardian of the constitution'.20
In this unwritten role Auriol always acted circumspectly. He never used his
right to send special messages to Parliament.21 He refused to intervene during
the 1947 strikes, when CGT asked him to refer back to Parliament the drastic
public order bill which had just been voted against furious Communist
obstruction; in January 1948, when the Communists objected to the allocation
of vice-presidencies in the Assembly; and in July 1949, when Herriot as its
President protested against alleged unconstitutional behaviour by the second
chamber.22 Although Coste-Floret had spoken of his right to refer bills back
for a second deliberation as 'fundamental', Auriol knew that its abuse might
merely provoke the Assembly to reassert its own view and so damage the
prestige of the presidency. He found it a useful way out of political difficulties,
notably to resolve two conflicts between the houses (once at the request of the
Constitutional Committee and once as an alternative to it). But both he and
his successor were wary of using it on matters of political controversy.23
While Auriol did not try to extend his powers for the benefit of his office or
his party, he did employ all his personal and constitutional influence on behalf
of the parliamentary Republic which he believed he had been elected to
defend. In 1947 he encouraged (if he did not suggest) Ramadier's dismissal of
his Communist ministers. At the height of the Gaullist challenge he emerged
both publicly and privately as the leader of the Third Force, denouncing
RPF's agitation for new elections as fatal to political stability, insisting that in
a republican constitution ministers must be responsible to Parliament, and
encouraging conservative politicians to split the attacking forces.24 Whenever
Auriol could not overcome proconsular arrogance, and the leading witness was deliberately
executed before the reprieve could arrive: Grosser, p. 47). Two-thirds: Pickles, no. 176, p. 112
(624 out of 988). 'Most onerous' : Auriol to Figaro, 9 December 1953, quoted ibid.
18. AP 1947, p. 104; Arne", p. 81.
19. See below, pp. 305-6. He needed no countersignature to summon it or sign its minutes, but
did to inform the Assembly of its decision : Soulier, no. 203, p. 213.
20. JO 20 August 1946, pp. 3187-8 (quoted Arne", pp. 57, 66).
21. Below, p. 203. All Presidents sent an inaugural message.
22. Pickles, no. 176, p. 109 ; also AP 1947, p. 243 and Arne, p. 80 (CGT; the non-Communists
supported the appeal); below, pp. 237 (Communists), 281 (Herriot).
23. It was proposed by the government (Baecque in Institutions, i. 207) and ministers had to
countersign: Soulier, no. 203, p. 213, and Drago, no. 75, p. 405. Coste-Floret: JO 13 September
1946, p. 3701. For the conflicts between the houses below, pp. 305-6. Eight bills were referred
back in the first Parliament, three in the second and one in the third : Baecque, loc. cit. Only one
was important; it was not discussed again for four years (Arn6, p. 71, and below, p. 21 In.) and
some never were: see Williams, p. 177 and n.
24. Communists : Dumaine, p. 170; Siegfried, De la IIIe, p. 155, De la IVe, p. 208. Gaullists:
at Quimper on 31 May and at Bordeaux on 14 June: AP 1948, pp. 332-3 ; Arn6, pp. 67, 81-2;
below, p. 433.
THE PRESIDENT AND THE CABINET 201
a government fell it was his duty to find a new premier who could command a
majority; and Auriol probably had more success in getting the man he
wanted than any other President. In November 1947 he chose a leader of
MRP, which had just suffered a catastrophic electoral defeat; in July 1948 he
announced the designation of Andr6 Marie in a statement which committed
the nominee to a specific political programme, and he persuaded SFIO to
reverse its decision not to join the government. Repeatedly he protected 'his'
majority by refusing the resignation of a cabinet or putting pressure on the
parties, especially his own. In 1952 he put forward Pinay, who split RPF ; and
in his last long crisis, in 1953, he incurred severe criticism both by his choice of
candidates and by his unprecedented communiques urging Socialists and
Gaullists to refrain from wrecking tactics: 'veritable appeals to public
opinion ' over the heads of the angry and resentful parties.25
Communists and - ironically - Gaullists accused him of breaking the tradi-
tion of a non-controversial presidency, condemned him for behaving as the
leader of the System and not of the nation, and vented their resentment by a
disreputable slander campaign against his family and associates. The other
parties, including his own, attacked him for interventions which they found
inconvenient. But admirers could claim that 'Auriol was a great President of
the Republic; no President of the Third Republic participated so directly and
so effectively in the life of the state'.26
3. RENE COTY
Vincent Auriol's tenure of the Presidency won him great popularity in the
country, raised the status of the office, led to an unprecedented struggle for an
unexpectedly desirable succession - and damaged his own hopes of winning a
second term from politicians suspicious of men with extra-parliamentary
reputations. Moreover, his handling of his last ministerial crisis had offended
MRP, Gaullists, Mendesists and SFIO; the Socialists did propose his re-
election to break a deadlock, but they found no support at all.27
The 'parliamentary congress' which elected Auriol in 1946 had been
governed by conventional rules: personal voting without proxies, secret
ballot, an absolute majority required for victory. Two weeks before the new
election these arrangements were passed into law, notwithstanding warnings
that an absolute majority might prove hard to find. It did. Thirteen of the
seventeen previous contests had been settled on the first round and four on
the second; that of December 1953 took 13 ballots. The successful candidate
was in the Third Republican tradition, unknown to the public but esteemed in
Parliament; many of his predecessors had presided over the upper house, of
which he was senior vice-president. He was personally so modest that he
brought no tail-coat to Versailles on the day of his election, and politically
25. Fabre, no. 88, p. 211 ('more success*); Dansette, Presidents pp. 269 CapP«*O, 324;.
Merle, no 158, pp. 296-9 ; Georgel, i. 94-6; Arne, pp. 45-6, 98-9; Fauvet, pp. 23 6f., Williams,
2 P. 42 ; of. Roche, no. 193a, p. 4 ; Pickles, no. 176, p. 108 :
•o^ofto^^
by his attack on the Fifth Republic ('where there are no ministerial crises there is no liberty ) .
^ 27 .9See below! p. 416, and Williams, p. 413 (crisis) ; Melnik and Leites, pp. 177-9 (re-election).
202 THE INSTITUTIONS
inoffensive, since he had never been a controversial figure and had been ill
during the bitter EDC debates.28 Once again the senators seemed to have
swayed the decision in favour of a moderate conservative from their own
ranks.29
As an unobtrusive conservative in the old tradition, Ren6 Coty's conception
of his office differed from his predecessor's. He considered he had a duty to
express the feelings of the great majority of Frenchmen, but had no right to
speak publicly on questions within the province of Parliament. Enunciating
only governmental policies, he put forward no personal views except to
demand constitutional reform which was (in theory) common ground among
supporters of the regime. In cabinet he appears to have participated actively,
speaking less briefly and forcefully than Auriol. In ministerial crises he did not
fight for his own preferences. The pro-European Conservative President re-
sumed consultations with the Communist leaders whom his Socialist pre-
decessor had recently refused to see ; and instead of indulging his personal
preference for cautious and comfortable senior politicians, he had instead to
bring to the front a new political generation.30
He was also less active in the imperial and judicial fields that had attracted
Auriol. In 1949 negotiations with Bao Dai were conducted by the President,
in 1954 by the government. In accord with successive ministries Coty spoke
out repeatedly against 'sacrificing a new Alsace-Lorraine across the Mediter-
ranean'; and throughout the Algerian war notorious judicial abuses met
from an filys6e preoccupied with the immediate problem of the army's loyalty
only a 'heavy and oppressive silence [which] has contributed to the dissolu-
tion of the state'. Yet it was under this conscientious, conventional, self-
effacing President that the first dissolution for nearly eighty years took place,
and in his final crisis he was to display a more audacious and controversial
initiative than any of his predecessors.31
In his inaugural message President Coty had paid a warm tribute to Charles
de Gaulle. As early as 1954 he made contact privately with the General, and as
the Fourth Republic's crisis developed he came increasingly to believe that
the way out lay through Colombey-les-Deux-£glises. Early in May 1958 he
secretly approached de Gaulle, who refused to appear before the Assembly as a
candidate for the premiership. But the circumstances soon changed dramatic-
ally. On 14 May the President vainly ordered the army in Algeria to obey the
legal government; on the 29th, believing that an airborne invasion from
Algiers was imminent and that only one man could avert civil war, he informed
Parliament by message that he was sending for de Gaulle, and that if the
28. For Coty's personality, R. Triboulet, Monde, 28 November 1962; and Melnik and Leites,
pp. 251, 262, 272-3, 277, 280 (no tail-coat). Though his name was never canvassed publicly, he
was so classic a candidate that M. Goguel had privately predicted his success: ibid., p. 283.
29. Radical deputies preferred a Socialist, Radical senators a right-wing colleague: ibid.,
p. 175; cf. Institutions, i. 214. Auriol, the only left-wing President, had been chosen at the one
moment when the upper house was not biased against the Left by its electoral system : Duverger,
VP, p. 101 (cf. above, p. 196; below, pp. 277, 289). On the politics of Coty's election see above,
pp. 41-2.
30 Dansette, Presidents, pp. 335-40, AP 1955, pp. 598, 600 (presidential statements); Arn6,
pp. 45-6, 55-6, 76n. ('forcefully'), 236 and n. ; above, p. 13 and below, p. 416.
31 Bao Dai: see n. 15. 'Silence': Duverger, Remain, p. 117. Algeria: AP 1957, pp. 544-5,
cf. 1955, pp. 598-9, 1956, p. 480, and Arn6, p. 83. Dissolution: below, pp. 238-9.
THE PRESIDENT AND THE CABINET 203
deputies rejected his nomination he would resign. Andre Le Troquer, Presi-
dent of the Assembly, would then become acting President of the Republic and
presumably send for an anti-Gaullist leader to form a Popular Front govern-
ment.32
The presidential right of message, authorized by Article 36 of the consti-
tution, had seemed such a dead letter that only two years earlier Andre" Sieg-
fried had thought it unlikely to be invoked even in the gravest of crises.33 Only
Millerand in 1924 had ever used it for a political purpose, and he was to
resign within forty-eight hours. But now a President, though not responsible
to Parliament, was threatening resignation as a political weapon. He could
justly claim that by doing so he was offering the Assembly a choice of alter-
native policies. But constitutionally his action (like the circumstances) was
unprecedented ; rightly or wrongly it was resented as illegitimate, especially by
the Socialists without whose votes de Gaulle could not be elected; and there-
fore politically it was a blunder which harmed the General's chances. It was
only after reading an exchange of letters between Auriol and de Gaulle that
many Socialist deputies came round.34
After the General's election as premier Coty remained President for seven
months, but at the end of 1958 he retired two years before the normal end of
his term. Describing himself soon after his election as ' still a counsellor of the
Republic', he had exercised less influence than Auriol though more than many
of his predecessors before 1940. He preferred instead 'a moral magistracy in
which Frenchmen of all views could see themselves', and he was rewarded by
unexampled popularity.35
4. THE PREMIER AND THE CABINET
The presidency, at least under Auriol, had developed potentialities which the
constitution-makers had not expected. The premiership failed to fulfil their
hopes of real executive leadership. Following Blum in 1919, they looked for-
ward to stronger parties which would enable a united government to com-
mand the support of a coherent parliamentary majority ; then the prime minis-
ter could lead both executive and legislature in pursuit of common purposes.
But they hoped that the prestige and power he would need could be conferred
on his office without waiting for the slow growth of an effective party system.
Blum wished to bring the French system nearer to the British ; and by strength-
ening the lower house against the upper and the premier against the President,
the framers of the constitution were consciously pursuing the same objective.36
32. The April 1946 draft constitution would have given Le Troquer a veto, for under it messages
needed the prior consent of both the premier and the President of the Assembly : Institutions,
i. 207, Thery, p. 62. Coty's message was countersigned by Pflimlin and Lecourt, MRP minister of
justice, to authenticate the signature: J. R. Tournoux, Secrets d'Etat (1960), p. 388n. For Coty's
earlier dealings with de Gaulle see ibid., pp. 85, 242-5 ; Fauvet, IVe, p. 345 ; Dansette, Presidents,
pp. 340-1. His inaugural message is in AP 1954, pp. 51-8.
33. De la IIP, pp. 230-1.
34. Text of the letters and of Coty's message in AP 1958, pp. 538-40, cf. Arne, pp. 68-9 ; for
the parliamentary reactions see Williams, no. 220, p. 38 and Dansette, Presidents, pp. 342-5.
35. Ibid., pp. 330, 357; Grosser, p. 48 ('moral magistracy'); Arn6, p. 68, and Berlia, no. 13b,
p. 910 (* counsellor '); cf. above, pp. 55-6. _ .
36. * Our aim has been to create a real head of the government, a prime minister in the English
sense of the term' : P. Coste-Floret, JO 5 September 1946, p. 3552. Cf. Blum, pp. 151-3.
H*
204 THE INSTITUTIONS
The title of president du conseil had never been mentioned in previous con-
stitutions; it appeared fourteen times in that of the Fourth Republic.37 He
alone was chosen by the representatives of the people, and other ministers
were appointed by him under Article 46. A series of articles asserted his
political, legislative and executive supremacy as Blum had demanded in 1919.38
In the Third Republic a government could be destroyed by the rashness of a
subordinate, since any minister could make a matter a question of confidence;
now Article 49 reserved this right to the prime minister alone. Under Article
14 every government bill had to bear his signature. Article 38, enacting past
practice, required two ministers to countersign the acts of the President of the
Republic; the prime minister had now to be one of them, though this intended
source of strength carried an additional responsibility which might prove
inconvenient.39
Article 47 specified that the prime minister was responsible for ensuring the
execution of the laws, which in the Third Republic had been the duty of the
President (though he needed a minister's countersignature).40 Most official
appointments, but not the most important ones, were made by the prime
minister instead of the President.41 A third paragraph of Article 47 gave the
prime minister specific responsibility for defence, though after 1948 his powers
were delegated to the defence minister.42 But while the premier had far more
legal authority than in the Third Republic, his great powers were never
exercised alone.43 For his acts under Articles 38 and 47 he needed the
countersignature of another minister, and major decisions under Articles 30,
49 and 51 (senior appointments, seeking the Assembly's confidence, and dis-
solution) had to be settled in cabinet under the President of the Republic.
Perhaps of more practical importance than the legal changes was the
creation of a prime minister's office. Blum had regarded this as crucial, since
without it the premier must either overburden himself by holding an extra
ministry, or weaken himself by having no departmental staff. After repeated
changes, in 1934 Flandin set up an office du president du conseil at the Hotel
Matignon, and Blum strengthened it in 1936.44 In the Fourth Republic a far
stronger department was given permanent control of the civil service and
37. The council of ministers was mentioned twice in the 1875 constitution and five times in that
of 1946, which also spoke at four points of the cabinet : Thery, p. 120.
38. Blum, pp. 62-3.
39. In May 1948 Schuman's cabinet was divided over a decree issued by Mme Poinso-Chapuis,
MRP minister of health, which indirectly allowed church schools to be subsidized; as his signa-
ture had had to appear on the decree, he was badly placed to mediate. Gf. Th6ry, p. 59, on past
practice.
40. The highway code, instituted in 1899 by the President, was revised in 1954 by the premier :
Arn6, p. 148 (cf. pp. 143-51).
41. The President in cabinet appointed members of the Conseil d'&at, ambassadors, university
rectors, prefects, generals, colonial governors, and other senior officials (Art. 30); judges were
named in the High Council of the Judiciary (Art. 84) ; the prime minister chose his ministers under
Art. 46, and made all other appointments under Art. 47.
42. Ramadier kept close control over his Communist defence minister, but some later ministers
(notably Moch) had a very free hand. Cf. Suel, no. 206 ; Institutions, i. 255-8 ; Arn6, pp. 1 14-15,
136-40. In 1948 large powers for the defence of West Africa were delegated to the High Com-
missioner, but this was attacked as unconstitutional : AP 1948, p. 224.
43. Except (in theory) in introducing government bills under Art. 14 ; Thery, pp. 87-8, 132. But
cf. Arne, pp . 170-2.
44. Thdry, pp. 123-4; Arne, pp. 28-30, 130-43. Soulier, p. 567, contests its importance.
THE PRESIDENT AND THE CABINET 205
temporary responsibility for several vital problems.45 But many premiers still
held a major department also : four took the foreign office, three Finance, two
Defence and one (twice) the Interior.46
These four departments, together with Justice (traditionally the second post
in the government) were recognized informally as the senior ministries. Their
holders were potential prime ministers and they could be held by an ex-
premier without loss of dignity.47 But above them in the elaborate ministerial
hierarchy stood the two dignified ranks of vice-premier (vice-president du con-
seil) and senior minister without portfolio (ministre d£taf). A vice-premier
was almost always a leading figure in his party and sometimes, especially
under tripartisme, he acted as an * overlord' co-ordinating all its ministries; he
might serve either without portfolio or in a major office. But a ministre d'£tat
had no department, except under Mollet ; generally he took responsibility for a
special problem such as constitutional reform, Council of Europe affairs, Indo-
China, or Tunisia and Morocco. Next to these senior ministers stood the
heads of ordinary departmental offices, of which some were ancient and
powerful, others new but well-established, and a few transient creations,
invented for parliamentary rather than administrative advantage.
From 1920 to 1945 the creation or merger of ministries had nominally
required legal sanction, but under the Fourth Republic premiers could alter
the ministerial structure at will and often did. Usually they merely restored a
dormant ministry like Economic Affairs, or created one for a new problem,
like the Sahara. Occasionally a once-only office was invented and abolished,
like Population in 1946 or Youth, Arts and Letters in 1947. But a few re-
organizations were sweeping; in 1956 Guy Mollet suppressed nine depart-
ments and grouped six of them under a single minister. Flexibility was in-
creased by the use of ministers of state (secretaires d'Jitat) to assist the premier,
replace a full minister whose department had lost political status but not
administrative identity, or take responsibility for a group of services within an
old ministry; they reduced the need for under-secretaries (sous-secretaires
d'fitaf) of whom there were few in the Fourth Republic. These two junior
offices provided both opportunities for training and selecting politicians on
their way up to full cabinet rank, and patronage to attract marginal votes to
buttress a faltering majority.48
Despite constant complaints the ministerial inflation was no greater in
45. Including food, broadcasting, information and atomic energy : Arne1, pp. 129-32 ; Bertrand,
Techniques, and no. 16, pp. 435ff. ; Marcel, no. 154, pp. 452-99 (reprinted in Institutions, i. 221-59) ;
Macridis, no. 150. The premier also controlled SDECE (see below, p. 348).
46. Foreign office: Bidault (1946), Blum, Schuman (September 1948), Mendes-France. Bidault
and Schuman had held it in the preceding government ; similarly, Queuille kept the Interior on
becoming premier in 1950 and 1951. Defence: de Gaulle (1944, 1945 and 1958) and Gouin.
Finance : Queuille (in 1948 only), Faure (1952) and Pinay. Cf. Georgel, i. 260-4; Arne, pp. 89-90.
47. See below, p. 415. One premier came from Transport (Pinay) and one went to Education
(Marie).
48. Mollet: see below, p, 378. For the hierarchy and number of ministers of different
ranks see G. Galichon in Institutions, i. 261-8 ; Dogan and Campbell, nos. 72 and 73, pp. 313-45
and 793-824; Arn<§, pp. 90-3, 101, 104-5. Secretaires d'Etat attended the conseil du cabinet (see
n. 5) but not the conseil des ministres unless specially summoned (except for those attached to the
premier). Sous-secretaires d*£tat normally attended neither. A few premiers appointed a full
minister (ministre deUgue a la presidence du conseil) to assist them.
206 THE INSTITUTIONS
France than in Britain. In each country only about a quarter of the 600 mem-
bers seriously aspired to office, Though the velocity of circulation was far
greater in France, the 'fiduciary issue' (the number of ministers surplus to
those whose intrinsic worth creates public confidence in the government) was
so much larger in London that the ministerial masse monetaire was about the
same on each side of the Channel. British ministries usually have over seventy
members, almost all French ones had from twenty to forty varying inversely
with the premier's prestige ; a full minister of commerce or the merchant
marine was a harbinger of political storms.49 While commentators were often
dismayed to find that a third or a quarter of the deputies (excluding the
Communist or Poujadist enemies of the regime) had held ministerial office,
this proportion was always lower than in Britain. But while most British
ministrables from the majority held office simultaneously, French ones rotated
frequently. The large size of a British ministry helped to keep the majority
together, while the smallness of the French one was a liability; for at West-
minster a quarter of the majority MP's were in office at any time, at the Palais
Bourbon rarely a tenth. Even in the House of Commons the ex-minister is a
potential danger, but there he is a rarity, while in the National Assembly ex-
ministers always far outnumbered the holders of office. Politically, if not
administratively, French governments had far too few members for their own
good.50
The rotation of ministers did not prevent a surprising degree of continuity.
In every French Parliament about twenty senior ministrables each served in
several governments. They provided the core of every cabinet. Around them
clustered the newcomers and the transients who were more numerous (usually
about fifty) but often less weighty. The six highest governmental posts were
held between 1944 and May 1958 by 48 men in Paris, 27 in London and 30 in
Washington. Over a period of years the new men introduced to office by
French cabinet crises were no more numerous than those brought in by
British government reshuffles, so that from 1945 to 1957 there were over half
as many full cabinet ministers in Britain as in France (72 against 122) and far
more including juniors (295 against 208). As in a major reshuffle at West-
minster, in an average cabinet change in Paris about half the ministers kept
their old posts, half the rest moved to new ones, and a quarter were replaced -
mostly by promoted ministers of state. When Clemenceau was criticized for
overthrowing so many governments he had answered that they were all the
same. His successors could echo the complaint51
The difference between the two countries was that the British premier
could weather any but the most extraordinary political tempest (if necessary
by throwing his colleagues overboard) while in France the captain was more
vulnerable than the crew to shifts in the parliamentary wind. Once the brief
49. Ramadier had most full ministers (26) when he formed his cabinet in January 1947, and
fewest (12) after reconstructing it in October ; in 1952 Edgar Faure had 26 in his government of 40,
and in 1957 Bourges-Maunoury had 46 altogether: 14 full ministers, 25 ministers of state and
7 under-secretaries. Cf. Georgel, i, 265-6; Arn6, pp. 101 (full figures), 105 ; below, pp. 418-9.
50. Below, pp. 426, 432; and Dogan and Campbell, no. 72, especially pp. 325-7.
51. Ibid., especially pp. 318, 340; Campbell, nos. 39-41; cf. Williams, pp. 375-6. Six posts
(named p. 205) : my calculation.
THE PRESIDENT AND THE CABINET 207
episode of tripartisme was over, the political conditions familiar in the Third
Republic reappeared. The premier escaped from bondage to three rigid par-
ties, but could not command loyalty from a majority made up of several loose
ones ; both his cabinet and his parliamentary support were constantly threat-
ened by disruption through conflicts of personal ambitions, party politics or
electoral interests. Almost every premier was worn down in six months by the
physical strain of shouldering heavy executive responsibilities while fighting
daily for parliamentary survival.52
Every possible legal text had been provided to make the prime minister a
real leader. But by strengthening his nominal powers the constitution-makers
had transferred to him the suspicions which had once been concentrated on
the presidency. In the Fourth Republic as in the Third, Parliament chose
bargainers and conciliators for the office in which a strong man might have
proved dangerous ; and a prime minister who wanted to act decisively could
be thwarted by the refusal of his divided majority, and deterred by fear of the
deputies' hostility to him next time he sought their votes. Weak premiers
meant a weak premiership, and strong ones were rare because positive
leadership was at a discount.53 The legal reforms did not lead to the con-
stitutional revolution that Blum had hoped for, since the expected revolution
in the party system occurred neither in the country nor in the National
Assembly.
52. Siegfried, De la III6, pp. 239-40; George!, i. 261 and n. ; Arn£, pp. 112n., 246. Significantly
Mollet, with a strong party behind him, was not.
53. Soulier, pp. 565-74, for the Third Republic ; below, Chapters 17, 28 and 30, for the Fourth.
Chapter 16
THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY
(1): MACHINERY AND METHODS
Under Article 3 of the constitution the sovereign people delegated power
(except in constitutional matters) to the popularly elected house of Parliament,
which was renamed National Assembly to denote its superiority over the
three advisory bodies, the Council of the Republic, Assembly of the French
Union and Economic Council. The Assembly had the final word in passing
laws, voting the budget and supervising the government. Under Article 45 it
elected the prime minister, and Article 48 made ministers responsible to it
individually and collectively; while the formal procedure for expressing con-
fidence or censure was laid down in Articles 49 and 50, the Assembly exercised
its day-to-day supervision by questions and interpellations and through its
committees, which were also its main instruments in legislation and finance.
These primary functions are discussed in the three following chapters.1
The Assembly was also an electoral college. Under Article 6 it could choose
by proportional representation up to one-sixth of the members of the Council
of the Republic; this right was fully exercised under the Council's original
electoral law in 1946, but waived when the system was changed in 1948.2 The
six hundred deputies and three hundred councillors of the Republic sat
together at Versailles to elect the President of the Republic. The deputies for
France proper also chose two-thirds (68) of the metropolitan councillors of
the French Union. Under Article 83 the Assembly chose nearly half the High
Council of the Judiciary, which advised the President on pardons ; under
Article 19 an amnesty to a class of convicted persons could be granted only by
law. The Assembly could impeach the President or a minister before a High
Court of Justice chosen, under Article 38, from its own ranks. Under Article
91 it elected a majority of the Constitutional Committee. Constitutional
amendments had to be passed by a special procedure; unless it voted them
by a two-thirds majority they required approval by the Council of the Repub-
lic (and perhaps by a referendum). It had to ratify many kinds of treaty under
Article 27, and under Article 28 to consent to their denunciation.3 Under
Article 7 the Assembly had to vote a declaration of war and the Council of the
Republic had to be consulted on it.
These varied tasks were performed by a body which had no coherent
political majority. The deputies would accept leadership neither from the
government like the House of Commons, nor even from their own officers and
committees like the House of Representatives. Jealously preserving their
control over the arrangement of business, they used their powers so fitfully
and inconsequentially that they often frustrated themselves as well as their
1. On Parliament, especially procedure, see Lidderdale, The Parliament of France, and Camp-
bell, no. 45. On prestige and titles see below, pp. 280-1, 286n.
2. See below, p. 279.
3. See below, pp. 225 (treaties), 298-300 (impeachment, Judiciary), 302-6 (constitutional).
NATIONAL ASSEMBLY (1): MACHINERY AND METHODS 209
natural enemy, the executive. The standing orders of the National Assembly
were among the institutional causes for the failings of the regime. But the
rules survived because the politicians had no common purpose to induce them
to sacrifice their personal freedom and prominence. Fearing that strong
authority might reduce their own power or damage causes they believed in,
they allowed parliamentary procedure to be used for obstructive rather than
constructive purposes. The ordinary Frenchman was disillusioned by the
impotence of government, and in the end the parliamentarians who had feared
an authority subject to their own control found themselves subordinated to
one which they could not influence.
In the Third Republic a Chamber of Deputies had sat for four years ; in the
Fourth, a National Assembly sat for five. Under Article 6 of the constitution
the term was fixed by an ordinary law. It was not clear whether a sitting
Assembly could properly extend or shorten its own life, but it could unques-
tionably dissolve itself by a two-thirds majority, and General de Gaulle
urged this course on the deputies in October 1947 when he claimed that they
no longer represented the country.4 They rejected his advice, but on 12 May
1951 the first National Assembly did vote a premature end to its own life. The
second was elected five months early, on 17 June 1951, and was dissolved by a
defeated premier, Edgar Faure, on 2 December 1955. The third relinquished
its power to de Gaulle's government on 1 June 1958.5
1. MEMBERSHIP
The National Assembly had 627 members in 1951, of whom 544 represented
metropolitan France (including Corsica), 30 sat for Algerian constituencies
and 53 for overseas departments and territories.6 Deputies had to be 23 years
old and to have completed military service; they might not be serving officers
or have held within the last six months certain appointive positions of
authority within their constituency.7 Bankrupts and felons were ineligible for
election;8 so were members of former reigning families, until 1950, and
4. Constitutional amendment required either a two-thirds majority in the Assembly, three-
fifths in both houses, or popular approval in a referendum; see below, p. 302. The April draft
constitution had expressly provided for dissolution by a two-thirds majority.
5. See below, pp. 275, 313-14, 315-16. The 1951 bill passed the Assembly by 362 to 219 and
the upper house by 278 to 35, sufficient to carry a constitutional amendment without referendum;
but that procedure required delay (see below, p. 302) which would have made the bill pointless.
It therefore went through as an ordinary law, which terminated the powers of that Assembly on
.4 July 1951 and of future ones on 31 May in their fifth year,
6. The two Constituent Assemblies had 586 members: 522 for metropolitan, 26 for Algerian
and 33 for overseas constituencies (and 5 others representing Frenchmen in Tunisia and Morocco).
In June 1946 these became 544, 30 and 45, a total of 619. Three African members were added in
1947 and six in 1951 ; one seat was lost in 1949 and another in 1954, by the cession of Cochin-
China to Vietnam and French India to India. But the 1956 Assembly had only 596 members, as the
war prevented elections in Algeria. Three overseas departments (Guadeloupe, Martinique and
Reunion) had three members each and French Guiana had one. Fifteen Algerian and five other
African deputies represented French citizens (almost all white settlers).
7. M. Rastel, elected UDSR member for Eure-et-Loir in 1951, was unseated because he had
resigned too late as prefect of the department: Campbell, no. 43, p. 70; L, Philip, Les Contentieux
des flections aux Assemblies politiques frang, aises (1961), pp. 39-40.
8. The Assembly could expel deputies sentenced after election; but three Malagasy members
convicted of sedition, and M. de R6cy, convicted of fraud, continued until 1951 to count as mem-
bers for the purpose of reckoning the absolute majority even though they could not vote.
210 THE INSTITUTIONS
persons sentenced to * national disgrace ' for their wartime activities, until 1 953. 9
If a member of one of the four assemblies was elected to another, he had to
choose within a month. Similarly, a parliamentarian in most posts paid by the
state (ministers were the chief exception) had to resign one or other position.10
Each Assembly judged the eligibility and verified the credentials of its own
members; the rules were tightened in 1952 when a deputy killed in a car crash
was found to have two identity cards and, under his real name, to be due for
trial as a collaborationist.
Like most parliaments which settle their own election disputes, the Assembly
was accused of misusing its power. In 1951 several seats in two constituencies
depended on a difficult point of electoral law, which the majority parties
decided in their own favour in Seine-Inf6rieure but against themselves in Bas-
Rhin (where they were reluctant to unseat the Gaullist war hero General
Koenig). In another legal dispute in 1956 eleven Poujadists were unseated by
the left-wing majority, which gained eight seats, against the votes of the Right
which could hope for only two; MRP voted first for invalidation and then
against, changing after it had gained its one seat. Public opinion was too
shocked by this behaviour to recognize the strong legal case against the Pou-
jadists.11
Under Article 21 of the constitution a member enjoyed immunity from
prosecution or arrest for his speeches or votes in Parliament. Under Article 22
he could not be arrested at all except with permission of the house or when
caught in a criminal act (en flagrant delit); before the war, and after the con-
stitutional amendment of 1954, this privilege covered only periods when Par-
liament was sitting. In 1949 a permanent committee on immunities was set up
to deal with the growing number of applications to prosecute deputies, par-
ticularly Communists ;12 a bill was introduced obliging newspapers edited by a
deputy to name another person to take responsibility in libel cases;13 and
9. Even those whose indignit£ nationals had been remitted for later services ; this clause was
directed against P. E. Flandin (but in Yonne in 1952, 307 of the 932 senatorial electors nevertheless
voted for him). Before the 1951 general election prefects were told to count votes for ineligibles as
spoiled ; this discouraged several from standing, though some persuaded relatives to do so instead
(cf. n. 37). Despite the 1953 amnesty, in 1956 only fifteen ex-ineligibles stood and only four won:
Dogan in Elections 1956, p. 445. Among them were Georges Bonnet (the foreign minister at
Munich) and Tixier-Vignancour. On reigning families see above, p. 179.
10. On leaving Parliament an official regained his post and pension rights. A deputy might not
take directorships in certain types of business. For details see Williams, p. 192n. ; Lidderdale,
pp. 82-5; Meynaud, pp. 143, 317.
11. See Institutions, i. 116-18; Philip, pp. 37-57; Campbell, no. 43; below, Appendix vi.
In December 1945 the Assembly refused to seat Camille Laurens because of his Vichyite past.
But in June 1946 it accepted him, and rejected Communist attempts to unseat Daladier and
Reynaud as political undesirables; and in 1951 it seated Jacques Isorni (Petain's counsel), against
the Communists' opposition, and Maurice Thorez against RPF's.
12. Between 1902 and 1940 there were 102, between 1945 and 1951 about 350: see J. Duclos,
JO 22 June 1949, p. 3639 ; J. Minjoz, JO 8 November 1951, p. 7725 ; and n. 13. The eleven bureaux,
between which deputies were divided by lot, had nominated all committees until 1910 and an ad
hoc committee for each immunity case until 1949; thereafter their only functions were verifying
credentials. The Fifth Republic restored ad hoc committees for each immunity case.
13. It passed in 1952 after prolonged Communist obstruction and evidence that 90 % of immu-
nity cases concerned communist editor-deputies : Minjoz, he. cit. A Communist paper in Dakar
had once announced, * As frequent prosecutions for libel have been causing us serious expense,
we have entrusted the management of our newspaper to a member of Parliament. It will no
longer be possible to sue us for libel without first obtaining the leave of the house' : quoted London
[over
NATIONAL ASSEMBLY (1): MACHINERY AND METHODS 211
another bill tried to guard against any repetition of the Madagascar affair of
1947, when the Assembly had waived the immunity of three nationalist
deputies charged with non-capital offences and the government then prosecuted
them for treason.14
In interpreting flagrant delit the courts favoured the accused. At Brest in
1950 the judges refused to try two Communist deputies arrested for rioting,
and in 1952 a Paris court severely criticized the police, who had arrested
Jacques Duclos during a riot and charged him with conspiring against the
safety of the state; the case collapsed in ridicule when the 'carrier-pigeons*
found in his car turned out to be his dinner. Parliament, too, was reluctant to
authorize prosecution except for grave crimes ; the first Assembly allowed only
15 applications out of 328, and in 1953 the second refused by 11 votes to
permit five leading Communists to be prosecuted for the sedition imputed to
their party. In May 1958, as the Corsican coup sent the Fourth Republic
tottering, the Assembly consented to the prosecution of the insurgent deputy
Pascal Arrighi - though not to his immediate expulsion as the government
wished. Its corporate feeling safeguarded rioters and rebels, but also un-
popular minority members.15
Article 23 allocated to deputies an 'indemnity' for loss of other earnings,
related since 1938 and equal since 1950 to the salary of a conseiller d'£tat. In
1955 it amounted to about £2,500, double the figure four years earlier; rather
less than half was taxable. A contributory pension varied with length of service
up to three-quarters of the current indemnity. A member could frank letters
from the house; make free telephone calls within Paris; and travel by rail and
in Paris and bring his wife to the capital free or at very low fares.16 To deal
with his fifteen letters a day (but up to three times as many if he was in the
public eye) he probably shared a secretary with two or three colleagues ; and in
preparing his bills, amendments and reports he might get help from the
secretary of his official committee or his party group.17
Times > 11 July 1949. After one editor escaped prosecution on grounds of insanity, concern was
expressed that Communist papers might evade the new law by appointing mad co-editors : see
JO 13 March 1952, pp. 1274-5 (and cf. Institutions, i. 121).
14. The upper house opposed it, the President referred it back, and it was revised, reintroduced
and passed only in 1953: see Drago, no. 75; Berlia, no. 12b; M. Lesage, Les interventions du
legislateur dans le fonctionnement de la justice (1960), pp. 152-67; and below, pp. 247 n. 24, 306.
15. Pickles, French Politics, pp. 269-70, 293-4; Institutions, i. 122; Goguel, Regime, p. 40;
Drago, nos. 74 and 75. The Brest court claimed that by Third Republican custom flagrant delit
justified arrest but not prosecution without leave of the house; the Assembly disavowed this : AP
1950, pp. 74-7, 285-6. Duclos's birds were solemnly pronounced to be eating-pigeons by a jury
consisting of a professor of natural history, a military communications expert and the President
of the National Federation of Pigeon-Fanciers; his release showed that at the height of French
'McCarthyism' the courts were not intimidated; cf. AP 1952, pp. 50-1, 75-6, 1953, pp. 80-1;
but see below, p. 351. The proposed bill to expel Arrighi could have been used against any
member advocating the independence of Algeria. He escaped prosecution because the regime fell.
16. After essential expenses were met the deputy had about £1,000 to maintain himself, his
family and his home in the constituency: Muselier, Regards neufs sur le Parlement, pp. 54-60.
See also above, p. 80; and Hamon, no. 121, pp. 553-5.
17. On party groups, below, pp. 214-6. Each day from 8,000 to 15,000 letters were received
and rather more sent out from the Palais Bourbon: Muselier, p. 142. Figaro, 27 and 28 March
1950, estimated that the average member spent half his working time on his mail of thirty letters
a day. Some came of course from epistolary lunatics; in 1953 one Parisian deputy heard weekly
from an enthusiastic constituent that national salvation lay in paying half of all wages in national
lottery tickets. See also below, pp. 329, 340, 374, 429 n. 5 ; and Lancelot, no. 136.
212 THE INSTITUTIONS
Each Friday night he would take the train for his constituency to hold his
'surgeries', visit the prefecture and the local mayors and notables, attend
party meetings, agricultural shows, festive or sporting events, and deal with
the affairs of the town of which he was often mayor or the canton which he
represented on the departmental council. On Monday night he returned to
Paris. Probably he would attend parliamentary party meetings on Tuesdays,
committees on mornings later in the week, and the chamber itself relatively
infrequently, for two-thirds of the sittings were detailed and dull and attracted
only specialists. At some point in the week he had to find time for his visits
to the ministries on his constituents' behalf; his job, if he had one; his con-
tacts, not least with the press; his reading; and his family.18
2. THE SITTINGS
Normally the Assembly sat at 3 p.m. on Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays,
but it often met in the morning and evening and sometimes at the weekend.
Up to 1951 it averaged 297 sittings a year, afterwards 219, compared to only
about 140 for the pre-war Chamber of Deputies. But then the Chamber had
had to sit for no more than five months in the year (though extraordinary
sessions were usually needed to vote the budget) ; and its sessions were closed,
in theory by the President of the Republic, and in fact by the government of
the day. The deputies* standard outcries when they were 'sent on holiday'
were neither meant nor taken very seriously.
In 1946 this cloture power was abolished. Under Article 9 of the new con-
stitution Parliament sat permanently in theory and for at least eight months
of the year in fact. The session began on the second Tuesday in January and
should have finished by 31 December, though the time-honoured practice of
prolonging the final sitting into early January still had to be employed when
the budget was late.19 Brief extraordinary sessions were usually held in
January, not always for budgetary purposes. The right to adjourn was trans-
ferred from the government to the Assembly itself, which found it politically
difficult to exercise and rarely began the summer recess on time. The consti-
tutional amendment of 1954 therefore made the session begin in October
instead of January (so that the annual re-election of bureau and committees
should not delay the final voting of the budget) and restored the government's
right to close it after seven months.20
During the Munich crisis Parliament had been in recess and the government
did not recall it. Article 12 of the new constitution entitled the bureau to con-
vene the house if it considered this necessary, and obliged it to do so on the
denjand of either the prime minister or a third of the deputies. In September
1949, when France followed Britain in devaluing the currency, the Com-
munists tried unsuccessfully to have the Assembly recalled; in August 1953 a
Socialist and Communist attempt narrowly failed, and Parliament discussed
18. On this paragraph see Hamon, no. 121, pp. 554-63 C a professional exercising a badly
organized piofession*); Pineau, passim ; Muselier, pp. 133-65 ; Buron, pp. 27-34, 71-90, 114-15,
, 134, 142.
, , .
19. But M. Goguel informs me that the clocks in the Chamber were not, as often stated, stopped
at five murates to midnight on 31 December (though the calendar was).
20. AcHorarmsents up to ten days before 1954, and eight afterwards, counted in the session.
NATIONAL ASSEMBLY (1): MACHINERY AND METHODS 213
neither the great strikes nor the deposition of the Sultan of Morocco. The
1954 constitutional amendment required over half instead of a third of the
deputies to make recall obligatory. In 1957 the agricultural pressure-groups,
reinforced by the Communist party, seemed likely to rally a majority for
recall ; the government therefore itself summoned the Assembly to meet early.21
When the deputies gathered in their semicircular chamber, the Com-
munist benches were on the President's left while Gaullists and Poujadists
were seated (violently protesting) on his right. Committee and government
spokesmen had special benches in front. Ministers, whether or not they were
members of parliament, could speak when they chose in either house.
'Government commissioners' could advise and even speak for them; in!956
two high officials put the case for Euratom and one of them enjoyed a parlia-
mentary triumph.22 The deputies often spoke from their places, but long set
speeches were made at the tribune under the President's desk. Voting might be
by show of hands, by Ayes and Noes respectively rising in their places, or by
recorded ballot; each member had white (Aye) or blue (No) cards with his
name on them to place in the urns brought round by the attendants. Proxy
voting was usually allowed, and all the cards of each party were kept by its
whip (boitier), so that a handful of deputies often recorded several hundred
votes.23 A personal vote (scrutin public a la tribune) took an hour and a half
and became a dangerous weapon of Communist obstruction. From 1947
successive amendments to standing orders restricted its use until in 1952 it
was abolished, except on verification of credentials. But in 1955 there was a
reaction against proxies, which were forbidden on votes of confidence and
censure, the election of a premier, and (if the house so chose) on a vote to
ratify a treaty.24
By this revolt against proxies the deputies were breaking with an old-
established tradition which had a profound effect on their work and outlook.
Without proxies members could not have indulged in the absenteeism of
which their constituents so often complained; one critic estimated the average
attendance at fifteen in the morning, forty in the afternoon, fifty or sixty for a
major foreign policy debate, and a full house only for a question of party or
electoral importance. Proxies permitted many deputies and more senators^ to
combine their functions with those of local councillor or mayor, to which
they often attached more importance and which inevitably coloured their
21 This enabled the government to decide the agenda for the special session, but failed to
prevent its defeat two weeks later: AP 1957, pp. 86-9, See also AP 1949, p. 159; 1953, pp. 61-3
67 • Arne, p. 245. In 1953 the Left was frustrated by the postal strike and the delaying tactics of
the majority of the bureau, which gained six weeks by obstruction and finally recalled the house
only a week before the normal date.
22. Isorni, Silence, pp. 66-7; cf. Arne, p. 185 ; AP 1956, p. 70. Advisers hardly ever spoke, but
often. attended; one ministry had 23 'administrative prompters' authorized: Boissane, no. 22,
P*23.' For example, on 27 March 1952 two dozen deputies carried one amendment to the new
standing orders by 343 to 247, another by 352 to 236, and the proposals as a whole by 378 to 100
with 1 10 abstentions. To vote against his party a member put in two cards of the wrong colour ;
I have heard an experienced parliamentarian admit that he did not know which colour meant
Aye and which No, only whether he was voting with or against his bottler.
24. For methods and rules of voting see Lidderdale, p. 141 ; Blamont, Les techniques parle-
mentaires, pp. 69-75. In the Fifth Republic proxies were restricted severely, though m-altogether
effectively and electronic voting was installed ; for the results see Monde, 27 November, 1963.
214 THE INSTITUTIONS
outlook and behaviour. Through proxy voting members were encouraged in
their illusion that they could carry out their external duties effectively and
still keep Parliament permanently in session to guard against executive
abuses.25 Nor was its effect confined to those who normally stayed away.
Lobbying was easier when attendances were small. When specialists cast the
votes of their absent colleagues, life was easier for the crank or the pressure-
group, the assiduous committeeman or the disinterested expert. It was easier
for the party leader to withstand revolts, since the boitier voted on behalf of
absentees. Thus the system might distort the result of an individual division,
and over a period it inevitably diminished the member's sense of individual
responsibility.26
3. THE PARTY GROUPS
The parliamentary parties, or groups, were far more important in the National
Assembly than in the pre-war Chamber. In well-organized parties like SFIO
and MRP, one senior deputy was made responsible for the work of each
committee; study groups met with non-parliamentarians to formulate policy;
and deputies were not supposed to ask questions, make speeches or bring in
bills or resolutions without the group's consent. On the Right and Centre (and
in the Council of the Republic) the groups were looser, though in the later years
Conservatives voluntarily informed their group of their bills and questions.
All groups gave their members moral support and material help, such as
secretarial assistance, in return for a monthly levy which varied by party
from £3 to £9; at the end of the Fourth Republic each group also received £4
per member per month from the Assembly's own funds.27 Even an ill-
organized party like the Radicals met far more often than before the war. At
these private meetings argument could be serious and not demagogic, and
party interests could be discussed with a frankness impossible in public
debate. Here the deputy had a real opportunity to change votes and perhaps
alter the decision of Parliament.28
Among the looser political formations, parliamentary groups had never had
any necessary link with parties in the country. In the Third Republic there
were parties with no group and groups with no party, and except on the Left
ttie groups in the Chamber and Senate were quite different. Radicals had not
always formed a single group in the Chamber, and never did so in the Senate.
NATIONAL ASSEMBLY (1): MACHINERY AND METHODS 215
On the Right a politician's electoral connections often bore little relation to
his parliamentary allegiance. In 1928 the 110 deputies supporting Alliance
democratique belonged to six groups ranging from the far Right to the
moderate Left.29 Even after 1945, when the political structure of the groups
was more straightforward, and Communist, Socialist or MRP groups were
merely the parliamentary expression of their parties, a group like U D S R was
still the general staff of an army without troops.
At the beginning of the Third Republic groups were regarded with sus-
picion, for each deputy was supposed to represent the country as a whole and
not a geographical, political or social segment of it. At first they could not
announce meetings through the Chamber's services or hold them on its
premises, and their members could not speak in their name in the house. But
Presidents of the Republic had to consult their chairmen over cabinet-making,
and in 1910 they at last acquired formal status when the Chamber decided to
choose its committees proportionately from them, and obliged deputies to
join one group only. Still they existed only for the committee elections. In
1930 a member whose group did not re-elect him to the finance committee
formed a new group solely to regain his place (he did) ; and a group of deputies
who would not join a group ranged from dissident Communists to intransigent
royalists.30 A resolution of the Chamber in 1932 required all members of a
group to sign a political declaration, but this failed to enforce unity upon them.31
Their powers grew if their cohesion did not. They selected the committees,
they arranged seating in the Chamber, and their chairmen sat on the presidents'
conference which settled the order of business. After 1945 the rights of groups
and chairmen were expanded to the detriment of the individual deputy,
especially the independent. The groups were mentioned in eighteen of the
Assembly's standing orders and (until 1954) in three articles of the constitu-
tion.32 Many parliamentary initiatives were formally considered as party acts;
thus an absent proposer of an interpellation was replaced by a colleague from
his group. The presidents' conference was given more authority, debates in the
house were more and more often 'organized', and sometimes the only mem-
bers called to the tribune were those who spoke in the name of the group which
once they had been forbidden to mention.33
29. Middleton, French Political System, p. 128.
30. For years it returned to the foreign affairs committee the distinguished Conservative
Georges Mandel, once Clemenceau's associate and later the chief opponent of appeasement:
Barthdlemy, Essai sur le travail parlementaire et le systeme des commissions, pp. 92, 94, 101.
3 1 . Ibid., p. 93, for an apocryphal (or perhaps typical) declaration : 'Ni Reaction ni Revolution.
Ni Rome ni Moscou. Le Progres dans 1'Ordre, la Paix dans la dignit6. La Main Tendue, mais la
Porte gardee. La deflation budgetaire dans le progres social. La repression de la fraude fiscale sans
inquisition ni vexation. La reduction du nombre des fonctionnaires dans le respect des droits
acquis.*
32 The Assembly had to elect its bureau (until 1954) and its representatives on the Constitu-
tional Committee by group PR ; until 1954 a caretaker cabinet in case of dissolution had to contain
representatives of all groups (Articles 11, 91 and 52). See also Waline, no. 213, pp. 1189-91;
Lidderdale, pp. 115-16, 141, 144, and 238; and Arrighi, Le Statut des partis politiques, pp. 14-19.
33 See below, pp. 219-20 (presidents' conference, organized debate), 223-4 (interpellation).
The MRP patriarch Francisque Gay once described a committee rapporteur as 'That colleague
who has been given the task, in the name of the MRP parliamentary group, to make a report to
the committee, and to defend it, who has expressed the MRP position and who on most points
has won the day for the views of our party . . / : JO 11 August 1947, p. 4233.
216 THE INSTITUTIONS
The party groups brought some much-needed discipline into the individual-
ist disorder of the old Chamber. But members' allegiance to them was never
exclusive and rarely complete. In the Third Republic groups for the defence of
private local and professional interests had flourished; in the Fourth they were
forbidden (by Standing Order 13) but the ban was easily evaded.34 Many
deputies - especially from the Gaullist, RGR and Conservative benches -
joined 'inter-groups' which promoted various causes, afforded presidencies
and vice-presidencies to impress constituents, and sometimes cut across party
lines by reproducing in Parliament the electoral alliances which members
formed in the country. In these loose parties of the Right and Centre, with
their divided interests and loyalties, the leaders found it very difficult to im-
pose their views; and in the last months of the regime the engagements they
made in the 'round table' meetings of party chairmen were repeatedly broken
by their followers.35
It was hard to use the whip when a rebellious faction could freely set up its
own group, with representation on all committees and in settling the agenda.
Late in 1957 the Assembly decided to check this proliferation in the next
session by recognizing only groups with 28 members, instead of 14; but in the
Fifth Republic the Radicals soon found a way round by adhering to a vague
combination for committee elections which split into two wholly autonomous
(and undisciplined) sections for all other purposes.36 Thus, though the groups
were far more important in parliamentary life after the war than before, they
could not cure the congenital individualism of the French politician. Where
the party leaders had failed, the officers of the Assembly had little hope of
success.
4. THE CONTROL OF BUSINESS
Unlike the House of Commons or the House of Representatives, the Assembly
elected its officers in each annual session. At the first sitting the oldest deputy
presided and the six youngest acted as secretaries to supervise the counting of
votes and drafting of the official record,37 The Assembly proceeded at once to
choose an executive committee (bureau) consisting of a President, six vice-
presidents who relieved him in the chair, fourteen secretaries, and three
stewards (questeurs) who organized the administrative and financial services.
Until the 1954 constitutional amendment these 24 members had to represent
the parties proportionately, and even afterwards the majority continued to
elect CoHmunists to junior posts in the bureau. Since 1920 the President and
viee-presl(leiit&, the party and committee leaders had also sat as a business
committee of the house, the presidents* conference.38
34. See below, pp* 374-5.
35. Andrews, BO. 3; Maurice Deixonne, SFIO chairman, JO 18 February 1958, p. 890.
36. Waliae, no. 213, p. 1218; and see below, p. 433.
37. When the Communist veteran Marcel Cachin was doyen d'dge, standing orders had to be
aiaeaded to limit his rights. In 1951 he was junior to a new Conservative member, Eugene Pebellier,
an octogenarian haberdasher from Le Puy who first left his native town to come to Paris in place
of Ills ineigible son and namesake (a former deputy who had voted for Petain). The son wrote
aa$ tlse ikt&er delivered an inaugural speech, praising the Marshal and condemning ineligibility,
wfejefe contrasted oddry with Cachin's revolutionary discourses.
38. On it see below, pp. 219-20; on committees, Chapter 18 ; on the change about the bureau,
p, 237, and Berfia, no. 12b, pp. 685-6.
NATIONAL ASSEMBLY (1): MACHINERY AND METHODS 217
The Fourth Republic made the President of the Assembly a vice-president
of the Republic in all but name. If the filysee fell vacant he became acting
President and took the chair at the parliamentary congress which met within
ten days (but up to six months if Parliament had been dissolved) to elect a
successor.39 He promulgated laws if the President neglected to, sat on the Con-
stitutional Committee, and was consulted before a prospective premier
was nominated or Parliament dissolved. A dissolution made him premier
automatically before 1954, but afterwards only if the government that dis-
solved had previously been censured by the Assembly.40
The new duties did not prevent a resumption of old traditions. French
deputies have always preferred a prominent political leader to preside over
their debates, rather than a non-partisan Speaker of the British type. Three
Presidents of the Chamber (and five of the Senate) had been elected direct
to the filys6e, and several had become prime minister. In 1946 the first Presi-
dent of the Constituent Assembly, F61ix Gouin, resigned to replace de Gaulle
as head of the provisional government; the second, Vincent Auriol, became
President of the Republic; and the National Assembly then chose a party
leader, ex-premier and ex-President of the Chamber, fidouard Herriot. When
he retired in January 1954 the Communists, seeking allies for the fight against
EDC, helped to elect the Socialist Andre Le Troquer against the strongly
'European' Pierre Pflimlin. Next year German rearmament dislocated this
fragile Left majority and Le Troquer was defeated by a new MRP candidate,
Pierre Schneiter. After the 1956 election the Republican Front restored him to
the post he coveted.41
Its potential importance was shown in May 1958, when President Coty's
resignation would have brought Le Troquer to the filysSe, a Popular Front
premier to the Hotel Matignon - and probably the parachutists to Paris. Even
in less dramatic circumstances the President of the Assembly could wield
great influence. In a recess he could help or hamper a party which wanted the
house recalled. Being in close touch with the deputies he could, if he chose,
suggest to the President of the Republic a strong candidate for the premier-
ship (or one of whom he himself approved) and indicate where the marginal
votes were and how best to woo them. It has been said that in December 1953
Le Troquer influenced the presidential election by adjourning at a psycho-
logical moment; and that two years later Schneiter by his formal advice
decided the government to dissolve, and then by delaying tactics prevented
the opposition recalling the house, before the dissolution could be pro-
nounced, to vote a new electoral law or motion of censure. The constitution-
makers of 1946 had meant to weaken the executive by strengthening the
President of the Assembly; but if parliamentary rights are opposition rights,
39. In the Third Republic the President of the Senate had presided. 'Vice-president* : see
Sauvageot, no. 196, and Soubeyrol, no. 202.
40. Arts. 41, 11, 40, 36, 91, 45 (implied), 51 and 52 respectively. No law ever fell to him to
promulgate. The 1954 constitutional revision made him less likely to become a dissolution premier
but more powerful if he did, since he would control the police (as minister of the interior) as well
as the army (as premier) : Soubeyrol, no. 202, p. 555, cf. p. 561. It also gave him in practice more
influence on the recall of the Assembly in recesses : ibid., p. 561 .
41. Cf. below, p. 433. In the eleven years of the Fourth Republic there was an opposition Presi-
dent of the Assembly for only six months in early 1954 and one month in early 1955.
218 THE INSTITUTIONS
the way the new powers were used confounded their authors by making him
in a crisis almost a President against the Assembly.42
In normal times the President was much less partisan than the American
Speaker, though more so than the British. By custom he neither spoke nor
voted, nor did a vice-president at sittings over which he presided (but Herriot
broke tradition twice in the Third Republic and once in the Fourth, on
30 December 1949 when he saved Bidault's budget from defeat by Radical
defections). His authority was far weaker than that of his Anglo-Saxon
counterparts. The deputies treated him with decent respect but no special
deference, often contesting his decisions, continuing to speak when ruled out
of order, or ignoring the five-minute time-limit imposed by standing orders on
certain speeches.43 The chair could do little to check the irrelevance which
was always the cardinal sin of French parliamentary debate. Like the old
Chamber, the Assembly disliked binding precedents; it preferred to take
important procedural decisions itself and repudiate them later because,
emanating from a transient political majority, they lacked moral authority.44
The Assembly would not strengthen its President (especially if he were a
prominent party leader) because suspicion of power was inbred in the politi-
cians of a deeply divided country. Yet those divisions confronted him with a
problem no British or American Speaker faced. Unlike Congress or the
House of Commons, the National Assembly always had many members who
would cheerfully destroy the parliamentary system to achieve their political
aims. Communists might not filibuster as systematically as Irish nationalists
or as freely as southern senators, but they exploited procedural loopholes with
persistence and ingenuity. In 1950 they used the quorum rules to delay for a
month and finally force the withdrawal of a bill that had been expected to
pass in a few hours. In the six months after the 1951 election they spoke on
the average half as long again as other deputies, and among the six most
loquacious members, four were Communists. At critical moments they went
beyond verbal obstruction. During the general strike of November 1947 they
fought the government's drastic public order bill for 1 14 hours, one member -
protected by his party colleagues - occupying the tribune all one night. When
their campaign against the Indo-China war reached its peak in March 1950, a
deputy spoke for five and a half hours on one sub-amendment to a bill against
sabotage, quoting Soviet price statistics in minute detail; later fighting broke
out and the house was cleared by the guards. (Yet both the disputed bills were
speedily passed^ though with substantial concessions to those non-Commu-
nists who thought them harsh.) The Poujadists also provoked some angry
iinideiits, especially when their colleagues were unseated by the votes of their
opponents.45
42. Sonbeyrol, no. 202, pp. 554-63 passim. On recesses see n. 21 ; and on May 1958, above,
pp. 202-3.
43. Once when Jean Dtdes wanted to speak at length, Le Troquer agreed privately to stretch
but not to 'forget' the limit of 5 minutes; reminded him after 15 ; failed repeatedly to stop him;
and suspended the sitting in disorder after 35, with Dides still demanding just 5 more : JO 25 Feb-
ruary 195&, pp. 997-8.
44. Generally, Blum, pp. 171-2 (see n. 56) ; Lidderdale, pp. 77, 151, 155-6 ; Noel, p. 169.
45. Blamont,pp.63-6;Soubeyrol,no.202,pp. 533-4 ; Lidderdale, p. 156n, (1947); R. Lamps,
JO 3 March 1950, pp. 1859-81 ; AP 1950, pp. 51-3, 1957, pp. 24-6, 38-9, 47-8 ; G. Loustanau-
[over
NATIONAL ASSEMBLY (1): MACHINERY AND METHODS 219
Obstruction and violence obliged a reluctant Assembly to tighten its rules.
Personal voting was first restricted and then (for a time) eliminated. The
quorum rule was changed, after some delay owing to the absence of a quorum.
Standing orders were amended in 1952 against vigorous Communist opposi-
tion. Dilatory motions like the previous question were limited, and only four
speakers allowed on them. The President was authorized to subject members
who defied his rulings to stiflfer penalties, including financial sanctions, with-
out seeking the leave of the house; and if these were rarely imposed in the
latter years of the Fourth Republic this was partly because warnings were
more effective.46 Interpellations and urgent discussions were permitted only
when proposed by the presidents' conference. More and more major debates
were 'organized', as in the United States Congress, with the conference dis-
tributing the time available; for instance in a debate on family allowances in
May 1951 it allotted one hour for voting and 5£ for discussion: three com-
mittees had 20 minutes each, the government 30, the Communists 50, MRP
44, S FI O 29 and eight other groups 15 each.47 This was an invaluable device
for saving time, and indeed for improving discussion.
The deputies accepted procedural changes with reluctance, for they feared
discipline more than disorder. Their tradition equated presidential firmness
with discourtesy; so no vice-president liked to incur needless odium by his
severity, while a weak President was apt to remember that he faced re-
election within the year and a strong (or tactless) one easily alienated sup-
porters.48 In theory a majority could end debate by closure, but this had
become a dead letter.49 Even organized debate was no panacea, for members
were not always checked when their party's time was up ;50 and if the total
time was inadequate the purpose of the debate might be frustrated, or the
whole arrangement might collapse.51 Above all, no rules of debate could check
the most dangerous form of obstruction, which was to attack the order of
parliamentary business.
The agenda of the house had at one time been proposed by the bureau, but
since 1920 by the presidents' conference. This was a business committee
Lacau, JO 27 March 1952, p. 1528 (RPF members had spoken 42,000 lines to about 48,000 for
each of the other major groups and 75,000 for the Communists). Another noisy debate early in
1950 had turned violent when a member shouted 'le mutin' at Andre" Marty, and the Communists
thought he had called Jeannette Venneersch 'la putain': JO 27 January 1950, p. 623. Their
violence converted many reluctant members to changing the electoral law.
46. Soubeyrol, no. 202, pp. 536-8, 561. But cf. n. 43.
47. JO 9 May 1951, p. 4903. Time was not always distributed in this rough proportion to
numbers; the Communist opponents of standing orders reform in March 1952 had much more
than their strict share (see Williams, p. 201n.).
48. Travail, pp. 699-701 (Goguel), 860, 863. Personal as well as political opposition defeated
Le Troquer after his first year: AP 1955, p. 5. M. Goguel's proposal to strengthen the President
by electing him for a whole Parliament was adopted in the Fifth Republic.
49. Lidderdale, pp. 137-8.
50. As Le Troquer admitted: JO 3 December 1954, p. 5747, cf. p. 5757, 'It really is curious
that one arouses protests every time the Assembly's decisions have to be applied'. On 11 April
1951 a debate on civil expenditure, planned for 2$ hours, took 12. But members did speak (or
read) faster in organized debates: Isorni, Silence, pp. 127-8.
51. In the debates on the Schuman Plan, tax reform, and the second economic Plan the indus-
trial production committee had only 15 minutes to put its view : Harrison, Commissions de I* Assem-
ble (unpublished), p. 218.
220 THE INSTITUTIONS
consisting of the President and vice-presidents, the chairmen of the party groups
and of the nineteen standing committees, the rapporteur-general of the finance
committee, and a government representative. It met weekly to arrange
business for two weeks ahead. But its programme was often upset by a vote of
confidence (which meant delay), the absence of a committee report, or some
other unexpected development. Much time was lost discussing the agenda,
which from 1948 was made progressively harder to change. Worse still, the
conference - in which each member had one vote - under-represented the
opposition, which usually held relatively few committee chairmanships and
included few of the smaller party groups; consequently its recommendations
were often defeated in the house. In 1955, therefore, conference votes were
adjusted to party strengths, ministers forming a little 'party' of their own.
After this change its proposals were less likely to be upset in the Assembly
(though in 1956 the house twice refused to debate repeal of the Barang6 law
subsidizing church schools) but more likely to go against a government whose
majority was melting away. In November 1955 Edgar Faure was beaten first
in the conference and then, when he made rejection of its proposed agenda a
matter of confidence, in the Assembly.52
A disgruntled party would rebel on a matter of parliamentary priority even
more readily than on a question of substance, since an indifferent public was
less apt to notice and blame it; and all deputies were tempted to postpone
uncomfortable subjects like taxes and debate popular topics like higher
pensions. The government could resist only by demanding votes of confidence
on priority for its own business, like Queuille in May 1951, Pinay in Decem-
ber 1952, Faure in November 1955 and Gaillard in January 1958. Even a
premier who survived this test (and only two of these did) found that the more
he used his heavy weapons the faster they wore out. Thus the determination of
the Assembly to control its agenda was a godsend to demagogues and obstruc-
tionists, and a threat to governmental authority.
Accepting no leadership, the Assembly easily fell into chaos, beginning far
too many tasks and then leaving them unfinished. In April 195 1 the agenda of
the dying Assembly still included a constitutional amendment proposed five
months before; two major bills of which half had been voted, and four which
had been abandoned - one of them back in December 1949; and 140 bills
adopted in committee but not yet discussed by the Assembly, three-quarters of
them opposed measures. The budget was three months late, and the credits
for twelve government departments still had to be voted. The contentious
electoral law for metropolitan France was due to return from the Council of
the Republic, and that for the overseas territories had not been begun. But
the Assembly was most unwilling to give priority to the budget and electoral
859> Gcorgd, i. 234, 241-2; Arn£, pp. 180-2; Cotteret,
tK / AP I955' pp' 88~9> 1956> PP- 27> 89« Til1 1948 a*y 50 members could
to change the conference's proposals. Afterwards, to hamper the Communists, only the
I?™3?? ? a committee or 30 members from three different parties could move a change and
oe^aa aosotate majority of the house could carry it; and from 1950 it was out of order to propose
to change «& agnda accepted by the Assembly, or to add an interpellation, an urgent discussion,
ora; m on which there was no committee report. Before 1955 PR in the conference had been
* ** P°*^ •<*«»* L 241n., Williams, p. 207. The conference 'was an
s': Buron, p. 113.
NATIONAL ASSEMBLY (l): MACHINERY AND METHODS 221
law, which had to be passed if a general election were to take place before the
summer holidays.53
Yet in refusing a minimum of discipline the deputies stultified themselves,
for their attention was distracted to minor matters and major policy frequently
escaped their control. When the Assembly recessed in July 1953 it had not
debated European, North African, or Indo-Chinese affairs for over a year (not
that debates would necessarily have given much guidance to the government).64
In domestic policy parliamentary and administrative responsibilities were con-
fused, and while the legislature had to decide the number of donkeys in the
national stud, the currency could be devalued or the national economic Plan
adopted without reference to Parliament. But these absurdities were unlikely
to be remedied while the deputies insisted on managing their affairs so badly.
* What a fatal contradiction for the regime : all power in the hands of a power-
less Assembly, powerless by its nature, powerless by its rules, powerless by its
composition.'55
Back in 1919 Blum had denounced the Chamber's habits in an attack which
had lost none of its force in the next Republic.56 All parties agreed that drastic
changes were required, and many felt that standing orders stood more in need
of reform than the constitution itself. Measures were indeed taken to meet
Communist obstruction (inevitably restricting the rights of the individual
deputy) but they could not deal with the root of the trouble while the mem-
bers cared less for the rational conduct of public business than for their private
right to change their minds and repudiate their leaders at will. Government
supporters were less concerned to get business through than to protect their
personal freedom to dissent whenever they chose, and to prevent stricter
regulations which might be used against them when they were next in opposi-
tion. Fearing leadership, they tolerated anarchy; impeding governmental
action, they also crippled effective parliamentary criticism.57 The real de-
ficiency was one of will, not of technical devices, and it was the division of
purpose within the majority that gave the obstructionists the opportunities
they exploited so skilfully.
53. Monde, I April 1951. For the subjects the deputies preferred see below, p. 249.
54. The deputies had considered the main lines of policy in five recent investiture debates, in
which the prospective premier appeared without colleagues or staff to answer a confused succes-
sion of questions great and trivial ; these were a poor substitute for orderly parliamentary discus-
sion. On Tunisia in June 1952, they had found no majority and rejected six successive ordres du
jour: AP 1952, pp. 228-9. (M. Mitterrand pointed out that in 1881 the Chamber had rejected
23 ordres du jour on the same subject: JO 4 June 1953, p. 1952.)
55. Isorni, Ainsi, p. 53. For criticisms by senior parliamentary officials see Goguel, Fourth
Republic, pp. 167-9, and no. 107, pp. 853-61 ; Blamont, no. 18, pp. 393-7.
56. '. . . permanent vices of organization and method. Two or three questions, discussed together,
alternate from one sitting to the next. On each, numberless amendments, endless speakers drag-
ging out their interminable remarks amidst universal apathy . . . [at] the slightest incident the
Assembly moves abruptly from indifference to rowdy excitement . . . [The President] has nothing
to say when four different discussions are begun at once, when the day's business is upset at the
last minute, when the same speech is begun again for the tenth time, when a question that had been
settled is reopened on a new pretext, when a debate wanders into the most futile digression All
that is needed is a break with tradition. That is essential, but it would be enough.' Blum, pp. 158-9,
171-2 (fuller in Williams, pp. 207n., 209n.). Cf. R. Lecourt, JO 25 March 1952, pp. 1461-2.
57. But the government was not blameless and the deputies had some grounds for mistrusting
it. Gaillard tried in 1957 to use procedural devices to stifle debate on his Algerian reforms; but
the Communists, with support from the rest of the opposition, warned that 'if you play that game
all 150 of us will make speeches "explaining our votes'": JO 28 November 1957, pp. 5026-7.
Chapter 17
THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY
(2): GOVERNMENT AND PARLIAMENT
The Fourth Republic proved no more successful than the Third in solving the
essential problem in working a democratic constitution: the relationship
between legislature and executive. Before 1940 French cabinets had little
control over the shifting moods of a Chamber which by constitutional con-
vention they could not dissolve. But the Socialist leaders who largely inspired
the new constitution wanted to break with the traditions of the Third Repub-
lic. They hoped and believed that the political system would be transformed by
the rise of a few strong and disciplined parties. Chamber and government
would cease to be rival powers and become complementary instruments of a
common purpose: the executive would not need to coerce a majority which
shared its objectives, nor the majority wish to upset its own leaders pn trivial
points of difference. Both would normally survive, as in Britain, throughout
the life of a Parliament. A prime minister would be elected individually, to
enhance his authority, and by an absolute majority, to ensure that he had
solid support.1 He could be removed only by an absolute majority of the
deputies in a formal and deliberate decision sanctioned, if it was repeated, by
the automatic dissolution of the Assembly. Irresponsible voting would thus be
checked, and the stability of government which France needed would be
reconciled with the tradition of parliamentary supremacy which she cherished.2
These rules failed to achieve their objects, largely because the constitutional
doctrine was applied before its political foundation had been laid. Weak and
loose parties soon regained influence in Parliament. Men and measures were
found to be inseparable ; the leader could not be distinguished so sharply from
his team. An absolute majority was assembled more easily for mutual obstruc-
tion than for any common constructive aim. Dissolution was made subject to
strict conditions, and the deputies tried hard to see that these were never ful-
filled. Governments, though as precarious as ever, rarely fell in the manner
prescribed in the constitution. A return to the pre-war methods was begun in
practice in 1948 and extended by constitutional amendment in 1954, but it
solved nothing.
1. PARLIAMENTARY SCRUTINY
Hie National Assembly spent much more time and energy than most Parlia-
ments on mating and unmaking governments, but it also needed milder
1. In reckoning the absolute majority seats legally vacant like the unfilled Cochin-China seat
<fed not count; but three Malagasy deputies did, who were in prison after the 1947 rising and could
H0t vote. Sec JO 21 November 1947, pp. 5113-4, and Drevet, pp. 44-5. The absolute majority
was about 294 m the two Constituent Assemblies, 31 1 in the first National Assembly, 314 in the
second and 299 in the third.
2, Bta*, especially pp. 150-3, 219-23; Auriol, ii. 50, 244, 249; Thery, pp. 188-92; Wright,
Res&apw^ pp. 85-9. Article 45 of the constitution had a premier chosen for each Parliament in
paragraph I, ignoring other occasions (resignations, etc.) until paragraph 4 : Sauvageot, no. 195,
p. 242.
NATIONAL ASSEMBLY (2): GOVERNMENT AND PARLIAMENT 223
procedures for influencing their day-to-day activities. It could express views
through its committees, by questions and motions, and in foreign affairs it had
to ratify many treaties.
The committees were the most effective instrument of scrutiny. Ministers
were often asked to appear, especially before those like Foreign Affairs and
Defence which were more concerned with checking administration than with
legislating. Others, like Finance, were active in both. The government
gradually gained new powers to issue decrees applying budgetary bills, but
Parliament required consultation with the finance committees of both houses
and sometimes the consent of the Assembly's committee; after 1956 a new
budgetary procedure and the use of the lot-cadre extended and formalized
this practice.3 Some aspects of administration were supervised by statutory
sub-committees representing several standing committees. One on defence
expenditure had existed since the early Third Republic; another on public
enterprises proved an effective and acceptable instrument of general oversight
without vexatious interference.4 Special committees of inquiry might be use-
ful on administrative questions, but not for probing political scandals.5
In the chamber itself members could ask questions or introduce motions,
called interpellations, seeking an explanation of ministerial acts or policies.
Written questions were very numerous but unimportant, 'free legal advice for
the citizen rather than close control of the civil service'. Oral questions were
really short debates limited to five-minute speeches by the minister and then
the questioner. They never enjoyed the esteem and importance they have in
Britain, for there were no supplementaries to give opportunities to the deputy;
yet ministers disliked them because the attacker had the last word.6
The traditional weapon of the house against the executive was the inter-
pellation, which could make the reputation of a politician who used it skil-
fully: Clemenceau in the Third Republic, Debr6 in the Fourth. Unlike a
debate on the adjournment in the House of Commons, it ended with a vote -
either of a simple resolution, * The House, having heard the minister's explana-
tion, passes to the order of the day' or of a motion qualified (motivf) by
3. See below, pp. 242-3, 268-9, 272-3.
4. On it see Ridley, no. 189; Lewis, no. 145; Lescuyer, no. 143 (cf. below, p. 374n.);andhis
Le contrdle de V&at sur les entreprises nationalises, Chapters 6, 7 and 1 1. In 1953 two ex-chairmen
of the sub-committee, Ren6 Mayer as premier and J. M. Louvel as minister of industry, issued
decrees ending the autonomy of the nationalized industries, but in 1955 Parliament reversed these
by law. In the third Assembly another sub-committee was set up on parafiscalitl (compulsory
levies, such as social security contributions, which are not part of the state revenue).
5. The Council of the Republic's sub-committee on nationalized industries had one set up,
successfully, when Jules Ramarony, minister of state for merchant shipping, tried to obstruct its
inquiry into the faulty construction of two liners : Georgel, L 84-5. But political inquiries usually
led nowhere after much acrimony. For instance, on the committee investigating the * scandal of
the generals*, the Communist member released confidential documents to UHumanite> the
Gaullist chairman and two friendly colleagues interviewed an important witness privately,
several members resigned, and the MRP and SFIO survivors disputed bitterly: see Williams,
no. 218. A later committee on exchange dealings with Indo-China had little more success. A law
in 1953 made their proceedings secret. Generally, see Biays, no. 17; Pactet, no. 171, pp. 165-71.
6. Blamont, Techniques, p. 109, and no. 18, p. 391 : supplementaries would inevitably have led
to impromptu debates and upset business. In the first Assembly about 140 oral questions a year
were asked and in the second 200, but only about half were answered. Nearly^ all the 4,000
written questions asked annually were answered: Campbell, no. 45, p. 361; Noel, p. 9. 'Free
advice' : M. Prelot in Travail, pp. 863-^t. Also see Buron, p. 205.
224 THE INSTITUTIONS
expressions of confidence in or disapproval of the government's attitude. Nearly
half the governments overthrown by the Chamber of Deputies were beaten
on interpellations, and some members and even ministers subordinated their
loyalty to the old cabinet to their hopes of promotion in the new. Often
governments were upset by an accidental aggregation of opposites, incapable
of sustaining a successor. Yet the procedure was not a cause but an expression
(at most an aggravation) of ministerial instability. A disciplined majority
could always refuse to debate dangerous motions, as the anticlericals early
in the century obediently did at the behest of their steering committee, the
Delegation des Gauches.1
Increasingly, after 1918, the growing number and triviality of interpellations
impaired their effectiveness. Members used them to force a debate on a
cherished subject, rather than to attack the government. After 1946 legislation
took more and more time, and the presidents* conference accepted fewer
interpellation debates, usually grouping several motions together.8 The
second National Assembly held full debates on 316 out of 1,549, mostly
grouped, and brief ones on 220 more in which a speaker from each party had,
in theory, five minutes to discuss the date for the main debate.9 In February
1953 Ren6 Mayer was interpellated on his choice as minister of health of
Senator Andr6 Boutemy, a former Vichy prefect and the current distributor
of the employers' political funds: when the Assembly voted for a debate at an
early date, the minister resigned. LanieFs defeat was clearly imminent when
five of the six interpellations on the fall of Dien-Bien-Phu came from deputies
belonging to the majority. But if crises occurred during a recess, Parliament
might well be confronted with a fait accompli, as it was when the Sultan of
Morocco was deposed in the summer of 1953 and when his successor abdicated
in 1955. When the house reconvened in October 1955 Faure faced eighteen
interpellations on Morocco.10
Foreign policy was a special case. It aroused little attention among voters or
members of parliament unless the question was exceptionally controversial. In
the first and second Assemblies only a fifth of the votes of confidence related
to any external question (even including military expenditure). The few inter-
pellations on foreign affairs usually came from a handful of Communists,
^fellow-travellers', or extremists of the Right.11 But Parliament's potential
great, since it had to ratify many treaties - for instance, all those
7, Speger, pp. 332, 342, 345 (no solidarity); 227-8, 244 (discipline) ; 237 (opposition); 119 and
Prelot'spreCaee (fall of cabinets). In the Fourth Republic 5 governments were defeated on inter-
pellates^ omtfpaacaal and 2 on other bills. On Debr6 cf. below, p. 281 and n.
& BlasjQKt, T$cipwjae$» pp. 103-6 ; 'in practice the Assembly no longer discusses interpellations
mess il was*s to safely pai>lic opinion by holding a debate on a subject of general interest and
eo*&sra*; d ma, 1&, pp. $90, 393 ; Georgel, i. 232 ; Goguel in Travail, pp. 705, 863.
9. Of coarse, little was heard of the date: cf. Le Troquer, JO 10 March 1955, p. 1274. On
nwtesseeftloa* pp. 18-19; cf. Campbell, loc. cit. At first about 200 a year were put down, but
bf 1952 tfefcre were almost twice as many.
!& Bontay: Musdier, pp. 95-6. Laniel: AP 1954, p. 28. Recesses: cf. Georgel, i. 232, and
Giosser, pp. 87-8; before Dim-Bien-Phu fell the chairman of the foreign affairs committee,
£to^ Mayer* lew to Geoeva to warn the foreign minister (Bidault) against asking for American
«eleaFin*emetio% and in 1955 the chairman of the defence committee, Pierre Montel, went to
Morocco to tirge Ben Arafa not to abdicate. Faure: Arne, p. 252n.
IK OrassejF pp. 79-83. Cf. Blamont, no. 18, p. 390; Georgel, i. 232. On votes of confidence,
, pp. 234—5.
NATIONAL ASSEMBLY (2): GOVERNMENT AND PARLIAMENT 225
dealing with European union needed ratification, though not those granting
independence to Morocco or Tunisia, or treaties of alliance.12
On the most controversial treaties the government consulted Parliament
before signature. In 1948 the deputies imposed impossible conditions for the
setting up of a central German government; they did not have to ratify the
treaty, and Schuman's cabinet ignored them, so next year Parliament insisted
that it and not the government must give the French consent required by the
Atlantic pact before a new partner (i.e. Germany) could join. Before the ED C
negotiations began in 1952, Edgar Faure consulted the Assembly; his succes-
sors vainly pressed its terms on France's partners, who were misled into over-
confidence by the French 'Europeans' and were amazed when the deputies
rejected the treaty in 1954. Mendes-France, under allied pressure to admit
Germany into NATO instead, also consulted the Assembly first; ninety
* European' MRP and CNIP deputies first consented to the policy, then
voted against the treaty; it passed on a second vote, but to get it through the
upper house Edgar Faure had to promise to work for the aims sought in the
senators' proposed amendments. In 1957 the Assembly easily accepted the
Common Market, both before the treaty was signed and when it needed to be
ratified. In general foreign policy was imposed on an occasionally indignant
Parliament, rather than made by it or even with it.13 The real influence of the
deputies was felt less on the conduct of policy than in the frequent ministerial
crises when they could select the men who made it, altering the balance of
power in a cabinet, blackballing a foreign minister, and above all choosing a
premier.
2. THE INVESTITURE OF THE PREMIER
When a government fell in the Third Republic, the President named a new
prime minister who appointed his colleagues and then came before the Cham-
ber of Deputies for its approval. The President could do something to help
candidates he favoured and much to hinder those he disliked, for timing was
vital and he need not propose his enemies unless they were sure to fail. Critics
argued that if his choice coincided with the Chamber's it was superfluous; if
not it was undemocratic. The provisional regime of 1945-46 therefore pro-
vided that while the new constitution was being drafted, prospective prime
ministers were to be designated by the Assembly itself (as in 1848 and 187 1).14
There were two votes, one on the man and another on his team. The Left's
first draft constitution kept this system, in the hope that future Presidents of
the Assembly would take the initiative in crises, as Vincent Auriol had in the
provisional regime; that ministries so chosen would be in harmony with Par-
liament; and that premiers would thus be better able to resist the mistrusted
President, whose name might be Charles de Gaulle. But this constitutional
12. See Arts. 27 and 28 of the constitution. Treaties adding, abandoning or exchanging territory
also required the consent of the peoples concerned ; but French India was ceded in 1954 with no
plebiscite (only a vote by local councillors) and the treaty, signed in 1956, was not ratified until
1962 : cf. Georgel, i. 248 and n. Parliament ratified the NATO but not the SEATO pact.
13. Grosser, pp. 88-101 ; Corail, no. 60, especially pp. 780-816, 837-53.
14. Thery, pp. 90-111 ; cf. Soulier, pp. 496-7. Ibid., pp. 275-302, on pre-war Presidents; for
their critics, P. Cot, JO 17 April 1946, p. 1968.
226 THE INSTITUTIONS
draft was defeated at the referendum of May 1946, and M RP then urged that
the Assembly should, like the old Chamber, vote only after the government
had been formed.15
The final compromise form of Article 45 satisfied the Left by keeping the
'investiture5 vote on the leader alone, and MRP by allowing the President to
propose candidates. With Auriol and not de Gaulle at the £lys£e the premier,
working in harmony instead of conflict with the head of the state, could wield
his new authority against recalcitrant ministerial colleagues. The Commu-
nist ministers who joined their followers against the government on a vote of
confidence, in May 1947, would have brought down a Third Republican
premier. But Ramadier, supported or instigated by the President, maintained
that the Assembly had chosen him and not the cabinet, and that its vote con-
firmed its confidence in him ; when the Communist ministers would not resign,
Auriol signed a decree stating that their 'duties . . . had terminated as a con-
sequence of their vote '.16 In October Ramadier called for the resignation of all
his ministers (and halved their number) without himself vacating office.17 In
February 1950 the Socialists left Bidaulf s government and were replaced. In
1954 Mendes-France twice lost three colleagues, and in 1955 Edgar Faure dis-
missed his RS (Gaullist) ministers; both premiers filled the vacant posts and
stayed in office.18
Although the prime minister's right to reconstruct his cabinet became
accepted, the Assembly was uneasy when it had to choose a captain without
knowing his team. The early premiers accepted interpellations on the com-
position and policy of their cabinets ending with informal votes of confidence ;
and in September 1948 Robert Schuman was defeated by six votes because he
had appointed a Socialist minister of finance.19 The Radical premiers of 1948
informally revived the old procedure; Andr6 Marie made known the main
lines of his cabinet in advance, and Henri Queuille formed his before the
-investiture debate. In October 1949 first Jules Moch and then Ren6 Mayer was
elected premier but failed to form a ministry, while Georges Bidault went to
the investiture debate with a cabinet in his pocket and was safely elected.20 On
his fall, Queuille was invested as premier by 363 votes to 208, but chose a
cabinet too conservative for the Socialists or MRP's left wing; the Assembly
15. They threatened to oppose the second draft constitution unless satisfied on this point and
on the secret balot for presidential elections (above, p. 196 and n.)
16. See above* p. 200. Georges Marrane, the Communist minister of health, had not voted
(being a member of the upper house) and was not dismissed, but he resigned at once.
17. Since tfee new status belonged to the premiership and not to its holder, the minister of
state (secretaire <T&af) attached to the prime minister's office did not resign either : Sauvageot,
no, 195, pu 245,
18. Contrast Third Republican doctrine : Soulier, p. 79n., But in 1950 Blum said it was Bidault' s
as weS as his constitutional right to stay in office : Populaire, 4-5 February 1950.
in May 195S when his Conservative ministers left him, but this was a pretext.)
This was cited as a weakness of the new procedure, but the same had often happened under
the old: see Soldier, pp. 119-2L
20. Both Marie and Queuille refused a debate on composition and policy (but allowed a short
discussion and vote on their refusal). Bidault refused any debate or vote and the house upheld
Him by a show of hands; but when the Socialists resigned in February 1950 he accepted a debate
and narrowly survived it (they abstained). The rapporteur of the constitution, Paul Coste-Floret,
had anticipated both the formation of cabinets before investiture and the later debate : JO 28 Sep-
tember 1946, p. 4200, quoted Thery, p. Ill, and Williams, p. 181n.
NATIONAL ASSEMBLY (2): GOVERNMENT AND PARLIAMENT 227
insisted on a debate and overthrew him by 334 to 221. The Radicals now
announced that they would vote for no premier without knowing his cabinet;
Pleven was elected after conforming to their demand; and a constitutional
amendment initiated in November 1950 proposed to revert to the Third
Republic's rules. To reinforce the lesson, Guy Mollet in March 1951, Ren6
Mayer in July and Maurice Petsche in August all stood without first forming
governments - and all lost.21
Yet in the new Parliament the constitutional procedure returned to favour;
the first six cabinets after the 1951 general election were all formed after the
investiture of the premier. Ren6 Pleven in 1951 might have lost the Socialist
vote by naming his government, which had to follow the election returns in
shifting to the Right. In 1952 Edgar Faure was hardly thought a serious can-
didate until his investiture speech, or Antoine Pinay until the vote was
announced. In January 1953 Georges Bidault tried - as in 1949 - to form a
cabinet before the vote but this time had to abandon the attempt, while Rene
Mayer again refused to look beyond the investiture debate and at last was
successful. In the next crisis, shock treatment from the early candidates failed
but the parties took it from Laniel because of the long interregnum; and
in 1954, after the fall of Dien-Bien-Phu, Mendes-France disdained to negotiate
with them at all.22 But by the constitutional amendment passed at last in 1954,
the Assembly was not to vote on a premier until he had formed his government,
and he would no longer need an absolute majority of the Assembly.
Of the first five prime ministers elected after the Liberation, four had had
200 votes more than the absolute majority, and even Bidault, with no Com-
munist support, polled 90 more than he needed. But in December 1946
neither 'Bidault without Thorez* nor 'Thorez without Bidault' won an
absolute majority, and after Communists and Gaullists went into opposition
the rule became an obstacle. Two more candidates failed to clear it in the first
Assembly and six in the second. Of sixteen premiers elected before the con-
stitutional reform, seven had fewer than 50 votes to spare and only Schuman
(in 1947) and Mendes-France had over 100.23
The proposers of the 1954 constitutional amendment believed that the
Third Republic's procedure would shorten crises and make them easier to
solve. But Gaullists and MRP warned that more governments would fall if
successors were easier to find; they favoured the absolute majority rule
because, if a smaller majority sufficed, a government might be formed without
them and decide against them on the all-important question of EDC. The
rule made them both indispensable (and so, as their views were fundamentally
opposed, ensured that nothing whatever could be decided).24 But the Socialists
21. See Arne, pp. 189-208 ; also Fabre, no. 88 (only up to 1950). Queuille was elected in March
1951 after telling the Assembly he would keep the old cabinet, but offered Bidault a vice-premier-
ship ; the Socialists then insisted that Ramadier must have one too, and only Ramadier himself
made them give way.
22. Only he and Faure accepted debates on the composition and policy of their cabinets ; see
Arn6, pp. 197-200. 'Shock treatment' : above, p. 40.
23. Details in Appendix n, and in Arne, pp. 45, 198, 207.
24. MRP senators favoured the change of rule; their spokesman on the constitution (who
opposed his party over EDQ argued that narrower majorities would be more coherent and less
subject to mutual obstruction than broader ones: L. Hamon, JO (CK) 10 March 1954, p. 365,
[over
228 THE INSTITUTIONS
were now adamant that it must go. The Assembly suppressed it only by 309 to
300, MRP and Gaullist ministers voting against their parties; but when
SFIO threatened to oppose the whole amendment bill if this vote were
reversed, the suppression was confirmed by 321 to 237. In the upper house the
Gaullists restored the absolute majority and the Socialist senators duly voted
against the bill; the Assembly removed it again (by 412 to 207) and seventy
MRP deputies failed to vote for the bill's final reading.25
Neither the hopes nor the fears were fulfilled. The prospective premier was
handicapped by having to form a cabinet before the vote, for expectant
deputies produced about forty more favourable votes than disappointed
ones.26 In the first crisis under the new system Pflimlin failed to form a cabinet,
Pineau's attempt to do so contributed to his defeat, and Edgar Faure succeeded
only by evading the new rules: he duly chose his senior ministers who could
bring him votes, but made no appointments to the junior posts to which
wavering * back-benchers* might aspire until he was safely installed.
The absolute majority rule had been a scapegoat and not a cause. While
abstentions blocked a candidate's election, hostile votes were cast only by
parties keeping their distance from the majority (as the Communists voted
against every prospective premier from 1947 to 1953 and the Socialists against
six in 1952-53) or from some particular bugbear (as right-wingers voted
against Socialists and Mendes-France, and Gaullists against Queuille).
Ordinary opponents abstained, as the Socialists did on one investiture vote
in the second Assembly, the Conservatives on two, MRP on three, and the
Gaullists on six. * Investiture courtesy9 might even lead members who had
an eye to future reciprocity to vote for a candidate they hoped and believed
would fail; and Pinay owed his unexpected success as much to his 'courtesy
majority' of MRP and Radical enemies as to the 27 defecting Gaullists - who
confounded the prophets by turning it into a real one.
The new rules brought new habits, and courtesy disappeared as soon as it
might cost something. The first nominee who could have been elected by a
relative majority was also the first not to be given one. When Christian
Pineau stood in February 1955, after the reform, there were fewer abstentions
than on any previous unsuccessful aspirant (except Blum in 1947); fewer
favourable votes than for any candidate since 1946 (except Mayer in 1951);
and a record hostile vote of 312. In all, nine nominees stood from 1955 to
1958; tlie new rule did not save the three who were in a minority, or help the
four wlio had an absolute majority. It elected two men who (given identical
voting) would have failed under the old rule: Bourges-Maunoury, one of the
weakest premiers of the Fourth Republic, and Pierre Pflimlin who presided
over Its collapse. It still permitted divided cabinets like Faure's in 1955 and
aad Probt&mes constitutionneb et r&alitts politiques, pp. 19, 28-30. Others feared that only
colkmrfess premiers would win absolute majorities: Goguel, Rtgime, p. 55 (cf. Arne, p. 194).
25. H» senators also wanted ministers to appear with the premier when the Assembly voted :
tf« deputies overruled them.
m 26. Bedia, no, 12a> p. 440n. In the first Assembly the average premier lost 41 supporters, and
IJJJr6 ^?£ ll* betweeo the two dekates. Only Queuille (in 1951) and Mendes-France gained,
and oiityEKlaiat avoided a second vote. Schuman was beaten on it in 1948 and Queuille in 1950.
Most cafcinets also had more opponents than the premier alone. See Appendix n ; Arne, pp. 197-8 .
NATIONAL ASSEMBLY (2): GOVERNMENT AND PARLIAMENT 229
Gaillard's in 1957, whose members were mainly concerned to prevent their
colleagues taking action. It did not even shorten ministerial crises: before the
reform three crises out of twelve lasted longer than three weeks, after it three
out of five did so.27
The investiture experiment had at least strengthened determined prime
ministers, enabling several to dismiss dissentient colleagues and one, Mendds-
France, to pick a united team independent of party control. But the professors
of law who invented it had unhappily combined proportional representation
in the election of deputies with an absolute majority rule for the choice of
premiers.28 This curious conjunction might not have mattered if a few dis-
ciplined parties had continued to dominate the Assembly as in 1945-47; but
once the looser groups regained their influence it provoked difficulties, and
before long the old arrangements were restored. This reversion to the Third
Republic did not remedy the weaknesses, which had been political and not
procedural. Crises were not solved faster, stronger men were not elected
premier, and majorities were no more coherent. The frequency with which
governments called on their doubting followers to reaffirm their confidence
showed once again that they knew it to be precarious.
3. VOTES OF CONFIDENCE
Third Republican governments could usually get their way in the Chamber
only by seeking numerous votes of confidence even on trivial matters. A pru-
dent leader might even resign as soon as his majority dropped and before it
disappeared - for he would need the deputies' goodwill in his future career,
and must not seem to cling to office against their wishes.29 These traditions of
a Parliament of individualists were always deplored by the Socialists, who
condemned both the governments for coercing the Chamber by votes of con-
fidence on minor questions and the deputies for upsetting cabinets on them. In
the new regime, with real parties and a real majority, they hoped that new
constitutional rules could change the old habits. Their remedy, however,
rested both on an insecure and temporary political foundation and on a basic
misunderstanding of the British example that inspired it: for Blum imagined
that a British government could not seek a vote of confidence from the House
of Commons.30 A French cabinet without this weapon - and lacking any
coherent majority, any common purpose shared with its following, or any
tradition of parliamentary acceptance of cabinet leadership - would be help-
less against the pressure of the deputies and obliged to trim before every
breeze of parliamentary feeling. Few premiers would hold office at the price
of sacrificing all authority and all consistency of policy.
While the new constitution was being drafted the provisional regime was
established by an ordinance of 2 November 1945, which reflected the Socialist
27. Arne", pp. 201-8, 303-5; Georgel, i. 105. Five crises before but only one after 1954 were
settled in less than a fortnight. For the votes, see Appendix u, and Arn6, p. 207.
28. Hamon, Probl&mes, p. 23.
29. Soulier, pp. 239, 248. Ibid,, pp. 114, 233, etc. for complaints of too many confidence votes
in the Third Republic ; cf. Lidderdale, p. 37 ; J. Meyer, La question de confiance (1948), pp. 17-19 ;
Williams, p. 21 2. Tardieu asked for 60 in eight sitting months in 1929-30, but this was exceptional :
A. Tardieu, Le Souverain captif (193 6), p. 49.
30. Blum, p. 222 (cf. Williams, p. 214n.).
230 THE INSTITUTIONS
conception. The government had to resign on defeat on a motion of censure,
but not on losing a bill or an estimate, and it was not expected to stake its own
existence on a vote of confidence. Within two months these rules led to a
direct clash, for when the Socialists proposed to reduce military credits,
General de Gaulle unconstitutionally (in their view) treated the vote as one of
confidence. The quarrel, briefly patched up, led to his resignation three weeks
later.31 In the new constitution the Socialists had to compromise, and both the
April and the October drafts allowed governments to seek a vote of confidence.
But for use in ministerial self-defence the weapon was blunted by the con-
ditions S FI O imposed.
Installed by an absolute majority of the Assembly, a prime minister was to
be removed only in the same way. This caused no problem if he won a vote of
confidence, or if he lost by an absolute majority. But he might be defeated by
less. Then, by the Assembly's standing orders, the government was beaten on
the point at issue but had not lost the confidence of the house. But whatever
the rules no leader, after declining responsibility for governing unless the
deputies accepted his policy, was likely to stay in office when they refused him
satisfaction.32
Articles 49 and 50 endeavoured to make procedure reinforce the position of
the ministry. The occasions on which its life was at stake were to be limited,
defined, and proclaimed to Parliament and the country. The government need
resign only if defeated on a vote of confidence sought by the prime minister
(Article 49) or of censure tabled by the opposition (Article 50). The govern-
ment's decision must be deliberate: the prime minister must consult the
cabinet before demanding a vote of confidence. The deputies' vote must be
deliberate also: one clear day must elapse between the demand for confidence
or censure and the vote upon it.33 The ballot must be public, and a govern-
mentneed resign only if an absolute majority of the Assembly voted against
it. It was therefore expected that ministers would wield votes of confidence
less prodigally, and deputies treat them less lightly, than in the Third
Republic.
These hopes rested on an unreal political foundation. The Socialists
expected politics to be dominated by three great parties and majorities to be
formed by their own choice of an ally. But tripartisme collapsed in France
when co-operation broke down between the international great powers. With
a majority as heterogeneous, divided and undisciplined as in the Third
Republic, there was no clear clash between loyal supporters and firm oppo-
Bents of the government. As before, the marginal members of the majority
31, The?y, pp. 1&8-92; Arne, pp. 268-9 ; Solal-Celigny, no. 200, pp. 732-3.
32. The second Constituent Assembly, unlike the first, recognized that a defeated government
might resign instead : Thery, p. 193, Georgel, i. 55-7. But if it did, it nullified other constitutional
provisions (below, pp. 237-8). That governments should not use votes of confidence to coerce the
Assembly was held by all parties when they were in opposition: JO 16 May 1947, pp. 1656-7
(GucoM*, Gaullist) ; 24 June 1950, p. 5263 (Lussy, SFIO) ; 18 February 1958, p. 844 (Triboulet,
^fJ^ ?P;51 and 1I3 (Bo&te. CNI, Viatte, MRP, and Begouin, Radical); Arn6,
!£« (^«P; J £*?van and Mendte-Rrancc). Cf. Meyer, pp. 119, 127; and JO 12 March
1958, pp. 1551-2, for Tnboulef s attempt to ban votes of confidence on bills.
33: On the origins of the delay period (which was two days in the provisional regime) see
Soulier, pp. 245-6 ; Georgel, i. 61-2 and n. ; cf. Meyer, p. 1 14.
NATIONAL ASSEMBLY (2): GOVERNMENT AND PARLIAMENT 231
prized their freedom to switch their votes and allegiance when they chose.
Commanding the political decision, they transformed the procedural prob-
lem. For they neither needed nor desired the opposition to determine by a
vote of censure the moment for their defection from the majority: that pro-
cedure therefore became superfluous and inoperative. They did not have to be
coerced into supporting the government on great clashes of principle with the
opposition; on these their allegiance was safe. But the vote of confidence was
often needed to keep individual waverers and hesitant parties loyal to un-
popular decisions or unpalatable compromises without which the majority
would crack and the government fall. It thus became a common event instead
of a rare and solemn one. When the formalities were a nuisance they were
evaded or disregarded entirely; when they were convenient the vote of con-
fidence was used as a procedural device. As the politics came to resemble those
of the Third Republic, the procedure did so too.
The hopes of the constitution-makers broke down as soon as the majority
proved unstable. The first vote of confidence was asked in March 1947 to
compel the Communists to observe ministerial solidarity or else resign. The
second, in May, put pressure on the Socialists who had said they would not
stay in office without the Communists ; after voting with the government it was
harder for them to leave it. MRP then urged Ramadier to ask for votes of
confidence against Socialist demands on civil service wages in July, and on an
Algerian government bill in August; meanwhile the other parties persuaded
him to seek one against MRP over the municipal election law. In September
MRP, having got satisfaction over Algeria, voted confidence in the govern-
ment over a coal subsidy which they opposed, while the Communists (who
approved of it) voted against it to show no confidence in the cabinet.34
If friction was too serious, a vote of confidence might so strain relations
between parties as to shatter the majority instead of consolidating it. In
February 1951 Pleven's compromise electoral reform instituted a double
ballot which MRP detested. The prime minister sought a vote of confidence
on the bill, but appeased M RP by agreeing to accept the house's decision on a
private member's amendment for a single ballot. On 28 February the Assem-
bly voted confidence with most MRP members abstaining; next day it
rejected the single ballot, ministers not voting. Now the Radicals demanded
that Pleven ask a vote of confidence on the double ballot clause in the bill; he
would lose their ministers if he refused and MRP's if he agreed, and to avoid
bitterness which would make the next government harder to form, he himself
resigned.35
When major parties clashed the vote of confidence might fix (or shift)
responsibilities, or even postpone the fall of a cabinet. Its everyday use was
less dramatic. Free of pressure from the government, the Assembly would
often overwhelmingly reject its measures or carry popular proposals which it
34. Meyer, pp. 152, 158, 161, 165, 175 ; cf. Colliard, no. 58, pp. 222, 225-6 ; and Arn6, pp. 275-6,
for similar cases later.
35. He had already done so on 28 February when he won the vote of confidence by only 27;
the President refused his resignation then, but accepted Pleven's arguments for it on 1 March.
232 THE INSTITUTIONS
considered impracticable.36 A vote of confidence protected not only the
ministers but also the deputy, who could tell his critical constituents that he
had opposed their favourite demand, or accepted the government's utterly
inadequate compromise, only to avoid a cabinet crisis. The less certain the
majority, the more votes of confidence were needed: 46 in the first Parliament,
73 in the second and 45 in the short life of the third.
When the formal safeguards were inconvenient they were evaded or laxly
interpreted. A premier wanting to use this procedural weapon against obstruc-
tion might not have cabinet authorization; he was likely to protect himself for
the future by securing it in advance, which eliminated both its inconvenience
and its advantages.37 He might find the day's delay helpful - or a nuisance.38
In January 1948 Schuman faced forty amendments to unpopular tax pro-
posals; he grouped them by article and subject and held five votes of con-
fidence after one day's delay. This practice permitted unlimited inflation, and
on 27 February 1952 Edgar Faure asked for twenty votes of confidence. Yet
even a laxly interpreted delay clause slowed the passage of bills - notably the
old age pension fund bill of 1956.39
The constitutional safeguards were wholly abandoned when a premier in-
formed the Assembly that he would not formally seek a vote of confidence but
meant to resign unless he got his way. This practice put less strain on relations
between government parties when the demand for confidence was really
directed against one of them. Ramadier used it to bring pressure on the
Socialists over civil service pay in July 1947, and over the Algerian govern-
ment bill in August (the SFIO conference had insisted that the formal con-
fidence vote should not be used). Schuman employed it frequently, for instance>
in March 1948 to evade the delay rule when he feared that after a weekend in
their constituencies deputies would be likelier to vote against him.40 In June
1948 his cabinet decided to use it on the ratification of the London agreements
36. The government lost in December 1949 on ex-service pensions by a unanimous vote; in
May 1950 on a bonus for railwaymen by 541 to 27, and on teachers' salaries by 540 to 27; in
Apnl 1 951 on a 30% increase in family allowances by 551 to 34. (The minorities were the ministers.)
37. As Quemlle did in December 1948 and in May 1951, and Pleven in December 1951 :
Colaard, no. 58, pp. 222-3 ; JO 24 April 1951 ; Monde, 2 May and 9-10 December 1951 ;AP 1952,
p. 19; GeorgeJ, i. 108-9; Arae\ pp. 262-6, 270-1, 276; Solal-Celigny, no. 200, pp. 722-3, 735-6.
So QueoiIIe could caH for a vote of confidence (with proxies) later in May 1951 when the Commu-
Bisi beaefafis began filling up at 5 a.m. in an empty house. Pleven had no authorization in Decem-
A ^S?® *** Conservatives calkd a snap vote on the Schuman Plan late at night, President
Aunoi bad to be roused and driven forty miles into Paris to preside at the cabinet which gave it.
soap voles of ojfrfldence, censure or investiture were impossible as they all required notice, so
me » Assembly could safely ban proxies on these in 1955: see Solal-Celigny, no. 201, pp. 305-9
and above, p. 213. '
3& It helped to save governments in December 1949 and December 1950, and to gain a majo-
rity ftatfee Eroopeaa army in February 1952 : Figaro, 24-25 December 1949 ; AP 1950, pp. 232-3 ;
PJ * ; P' 73?* *** n°' m* pp' 314> 320' But sometimes it strengthened the hostile
: BaauKjat, p. 118.
' ' Pp* 724~7 (cf< no* 201» pp' 30I~4)- On 1948> Colliard,
*2^2*f afe° Geoi»ci- *> 109» *ri Arne, pp. 264-6. Many of Faure's 20 votes were on
!5~1- °*£ been discmsed - for midnight was approaching and he wanted the 'clear
rather ^a the day after (but he was beaten on an early vote).
**" ml
^Mo^foo^wtes of confidence (60%) were held before the weekend, except by Pinay and
Meades-France, wfoo were popular m the country and had 10 of their 1 3 on a Monday or Tuesday.
NATIONAL ASSEMBLY (2): GOVERNMENT AND PARLIAMENT 233
on Germany; in August Andr6 Marie did so on Paul Reynaud's bill for
financial special powers ; in December Queuille used it three times in a day,
and by the end of his long ministry the constitutional procedure seemed to
have fallen into disuse.41
Queuille preferred the informal procedure because it interfered less obviously
with members' independence of judgment.42 But this was a sign of strength,
for the unofficial demand for confidence was normally less effective as well as
less obnoxious, as it attracted little publicity and did little to screen the deputy
from his critical constituents. Bidault, who succeeded Queuille, could afford
no concessions ; he needed every weapon to save his budget. Besides, all his
predecessors were old parliamentary hands and two were traditionalist
Radicals; Bidault was a parliamentary newcomer and founder of MRP.
Determined to force the Assembly to take the responsibility of ejecting him, he
remained undeterred when his majority fell to 6, 4 and 0 on formal confidence
votes.43 For if two governments were defeated in this way the second might be
able to dissolve the Assembly : a prospect far more distasteful to Radicals
who wanted a new electoral law than to MRP who preferred the existing one.
The formal vote of confidence, with its contingent threat of dissolution, was
thus a handier weapon for an MRP premier harassed by rebellious Radicals
or Conservatives than for a Radical premier facing MRP recalcitrance.44
In March 1951 Queuille came back to power leading a very weak cabinet.
But an election was imminent and the budget months overdue, so that the
party responsible for his fall would provoke resentment which could quickly
be expressed at the polls. Queuille now needed the formal vote of confidence,
and while in 1948-49 he had used it only once in ten sitting months, in 1951 he
employed it nine times in only ten weeks. His successor, Pleven, sought no
vote of confidence for months. But this denoted weakness: in the new Parlia-
ment the cabinet could not take sides on Barang6's bill subsidizing church
schools without a split, or stake its existence on the bill tying wages to the cost
of living (which it openly opposed) without courting defeat and playing into
RPF's hands.
The vote of confidence was thus both a procedural and a political weapon.
Procedurally, the formal vote put more pressure on the deputies, gave time for
negotiation, and raised the spectre of dissolution. It enabled the government
to regain the parliamentary initiative from the committees, the opposition or
rebellious back-benchers, and to choose the time and ground for battle.45
41. On this paragraph see Georgel, L 108; Meyer, p. 152 (civil service); Colliard, no. 58,
pp. 222, 225-7 (coal, Algeria, Schuman); AP 1948, pp. 95 (Germany), 133 (Reynaud), 226
(Queuille), 326 (Schuman), and 1949, pp. 129, 325 (Queuille on a holiday bonus in My and on
petrol rationing in May).
42. His cabinet had authorized formal votes on new taxes in September 1948, on the aircraft
industry in June 1949, etc.: AP 1948, p. 157, 1949, p. 98. (Queuille, Faureand Mollet were formally
authorized to ask for informal votes of confidence, and Gaillard demanded one against a proposal
to restrict the use of the formal procedure : Arne, p. 270.)
43. On 3 1 January 1950 Bidault won four such votes on the budget but lost a fifth by 293 to 293
(a tie is negative in French procedure) : AP 1949, p. 223, and 1950, pp. 2-5.
44. For dissolution see below, pp. 236-8. Bidault asked for eleven votes of confidence to protect
his budget from Radical and Conservative attacks, but none (despite cabinet authorization) to
prevent Socialists and MRP rewriting his collective bargaining bill: AP 1949, p. 203.
45. Cf. Arne, pp. 270-2; and see Solal-Celigny, no. 201, pp. 312-5, 320 (cf. no. 200, p. 737).
234 THE INSTITUTIONS
Politically, it subordinated the specific question to the fate of the cabinet and
so altered votes, rallying waverers to the government but alienating oppo-
nents who agreed with the particular policy; consequently Edgar Faure in
November 1955 did not use it on his Moroccan policy, with which the Left
opposition sympathized, and Guy Mollet similarly refrained after Suez when
he wanted an impressive majority for his foreign policy, which the Right
approved.46
Political behaviour depended on political circumstances. The first four
premiers of the regime asked only 15 confidence votes in almost three years.
But their successors had difficulty carrying increased taxation against Radical
and Conservative opposition; the next three premiers sought 31 votes of con-
fidence (18 of them budgetary) in twenty months, and in the first sixteen
months of the new Parliament three prime ministers asked for 53, all but ten
on their budgets.47 In November 1950 Ren6 Pleven's first cabinet was severely
shaken by a vote on Indo-China in which its majority was 150, because the
omission of the word 'confidence' was the price of the victory.48 A year later
Pleven changed an unofficial vote of confidence (on economies) into an official
one because President Auriol wanted him to stay until constitutionally
ejected. His successor Edgar Faure formally staked the life of his government
on a motion on the European army, which he then withdrew to win Socialist
support. When Antoine Pinay tried to avoid votes of confidence, he suffered
massive defeats; as opposition grew stronger he had to resort to them.49
After his fall the decisive issues were those of external policy, which pro-
voked major clashes between parties rather than contests over details with
groups of recalcitrant individualists. The vote of confidence was both less
essential and less available: no cabinet could agree to stake its life on EDC.
In January 1953 Rene Mayer won the Gaullist vote and the premiership by a
pledge not to do so (for which he was scathingly criticized even by Edgar
Faure). In June when Paul Reynaud refused to repeat this pledge, Pierre Cot
protested amid applause that so grave a decision ought not to be taken under
a threat of dissolution. Mendes-France then promised not to dissolve if
beaten, but affirmed that no government could retain authority unless it en-
gaged its existence on so vital a question; yet when he became premier a year
46. Simaariy, Pleven was reluctant to alienate RPF by using it on the Schuman Plan in Decem-
ber 1951, tmt be Bad to do so to avoid a snap vote. Conversely, Pinay was beaten on his amnesty
for tax frauds, but reversed the decision by making it one of confidence : ibid., pp. 723, 727, 735.
For Fauns, ibid., 1956, p. 315; for Mollet, AP 1956, p. 118 ; for Pleven also AP 1951, pp. 321-2;
cf. Ame, pp. 273, 275-6. In June 1950 Bidault was defeated in the Assembly on a financial point,
and made it a matter of confidence : 30 R G R and I O M rebels now voted for him, whije 30 P R L
aad Peasans who had supported him now obstained. (He lost; below, p. 254.)
47. Only 5 of tie first 15 confidence votes were budgetary, but 11 of Bidault's 13, 7 of Pleven's
9 m his first cabinet and 9 of 13 in his second, 20 of Faure's 23 and 14 of Pinay's 17. Queuille's
9 were al on priority for government business or electoral reform before the 1951 election. Of
toe next 53, less than half were voted on, as Pleven, Faure and Pinay all fell with several pending.
For details see Appendix n, and tables in Ame, p. 274, and in Solal-Celigny, nos. 200-1 ; both omit
the vote of 1 December 1950.
4^AP 1950, pp. 229, 233; cf. AP 1957, pp. 22-4 for Molfet's similar Pyrrhic victory on agri-
cultural policy shortly before his fall. An interpellation debate often ended with the Assembly
expressing its confidence in the government ' ; if it did not, ' suppressing its mistrust of the govern-
ment might be the impression conveyed.
/A49* iPP?l*2' ™7 Q^ve*), ^52> PP- H SO, 83 (massive defeats); below, pp. 238 and n.
(Auool); SoM-Ceiigny, no. 200, pp. 729 (Faure), 727, 736-7 (Pinay).
NATIONAL ASSEMBLY (2): GOVERNMENT AND PARLIAMENT 235
later he stayed neutral on the treaty for fear of breaking up his cabinet. Ger-
many, Indo-China and North Africa had pushed the budget into the back-
ground of politics, and from 1953 to 1955 there were only twenty votes of
confidence : twelve on external affairs and only four budgetary.50
At the end of that Parliament it was pointed out that the duration of govern-
ments seemed to be inversely related to their predilection for votes of con-
fidence.51 Yet the next premier, whose party doctrine forbade governments to
use this weapon, wielded it more vigorously than any predecessor - and lasted
longer. For though Guy Mollet had only minority support in Parliament, few
of his nominal opponents wanted to bring him down. At first, MRP and the
Conservatives feared to leave SFIO dependent on Communist support and
perhaps encourage a Popular Front; when the Communists had turned
against him, the Right preferred him to take responsibility for waging (and
paying for) the Algerian war. This allowed him to use constitutional votes of
confidence to force his hesitant critics to turn him out or accept his domestic
policy. Algeria was not yet the most controversial parliamentary problem,
and of Mollet's 34 formal votes of confidence 15 were on social policy and 1 1
(plus several unofficial ones) were on finance.
Under his successors liberals and diehards clashed bitterly over North
African affairs, while the domestic disputes between Socialists and Conser-
vatives became more envenomed.52 Struggling for survival, Bourges-Maunoury
and particularly Gaillard expanded the scope of their votes of confidence to
paralyse parliamentary debate by asking for a single vote to open and close
discussion on the whole text of a bill with all its clauses. Hitherto Presidents of
the Assembly had resisted governments which tried to limit their difficulties in
this way, but now Le Troquer allowed the dying Fourth Republic to set a
dangerous precedent - thoroughly exploited by its successor.53
The formal vote of confidence was most freely used by leaders of pro-
gressive majorities facing attack from the Right : Bidault in the first Parliament,
Mendes-France in the second and Mollet in the third drew the lines of con-
flict sharply and repeatedly challenged their critics. More conservative leaders
preferred to minimize differences and lower the political temperature: a
Queuille, Pinay or Laniel used the informal confidence vote whenever he could
and the constitutional form only when he had to.54 Their formal votes were
50. AP 1953, p. 4 (Mayer); Monde, 27 March 1953 (Faure); JO 27 May 1953, pp. 2867 (Cot),
2870 (Reynaud), 3 June 1953, pp. 2910-1 (Mendes-France) ; Arn6, pp. 272-3; Solal-Celigny,
no. 201, pp. 310-1.
51. Ibid., p. 311, cf. p. 321.
52. Of the eleven votes of confidence after Mollet's fall, four were on Algeria and six were
budgetary.
53. Arn6, p. 276 ; Blamont, pp. 115-17. Without impeding debate, a 'legitimate* vote of confi-
dence might be quite complex. Edgar Faure' s on electoral reform on 12 November 1955 was by
no means the most elaborate: 'against the discussion of M. Meunier's or any other counter-
proposal, for the adoption of the one clause of the bill as reported, and against any motion,
amendment or new clause which would reduce its scope or delay its application'. If in the first
two Assemblies a premier asked for one vote of confidence on several items, the President would
announce it as several distinct votes ; only three times did he allow one vote on two or three con-
nected clauses: Solal-Celigny, no. 201, p. 313.
54. Ibid, (see n. 45), on their respective advantages; Blamont, p. 119, on the deputies' growing
dislike of the unofficial form. But on 3 June 1958 it was used for the last vote of the National
Assembly of the Fourth Republic by Charles de Gaulle.
236 THE INSTITUTIONS
usually concentrated in the last few weeks when the premier was trying to
stave off impending disaster. Ren6 Pleven and Edgar Faure each led one
government which was attacked by the Left and another which was criticized
by the Right; each preferred the light artillery in the former and the heavier
weapons in the latter. F£lix Gaillard's sweeping votes of confidence offended
the conservative elements in his divided majority. The marginal members on
whom the government most needed to put pressure were also those who most
resented it, for they came from the parties of weak discipline and individual-
ist tradition, and with no solid organization behind them they had most to
fear from a dissolution.
4. DISSOLUTION, DEFEAT AND CENSURE
To the makers of the constitution dissolution was the ultimate sanction against
parliamentary irresponsibility. They hoped by Articles 49 and 50 to dis-
courage unnecessary votes of confidence and restrict cabinet crises to the rare
occasions when a majority, drawn from a few disciplined parties, turned
decisively against its own leaders. But parliaments with no coherent majority
had been common in the past, and Articles 51 and 52 allowed for their re-
appearance by organizing the dissolution, under strict conditions, as an
emergency exit from deadlock. Although the deputies tried hard to prevent
the conditions ever being fulfilled, in 1955 a French Parliament was dissolved
by the executive for the first time for nearly eighty years.
In the Third Republic the Chamber could be dissolved by the President
with the consent of the Senate. But by convention the power was never used
after 1877, so that deputies who felt secure for four years had upset govern-
ments without fear of electoral penalties. The Right wanted the cabinet to
have power to dissolve; the Left would not hear of dissolution as an executive
weapon, but only as an escape from parliamentary irresponsibility or in-
coherence. The Socialist solution was automatic dissolution. It presupposed a
coherent majority normally working in harmony with the executive; two
clashes would mean the end of both ministry and Assembly. But the constitu-
tion-makers were or professed to be more afraid of futile general elections
than of frequent changes of government.55 The first draft constitution com-
promised on *a kind of annual ration of crises'.56 If the Assembly threw out
two governments in a session the prime minister could dissolve, after con-
sulting both the President of the Assembly (the best judge of whether another
government could find a majority) and his own cabinet (which would hand
over to the caretaker ministry described below). But these cautious provisions
applied only in the second half of the Assembly's five-year term.
After their referendum defeat the Left made a few concessions : the care-
taker rules were modified, the 'close season' was reduced from a Parliament's
first thirty months to eighteen, and the two government defeats could occur
within eighteen months instead of twelve.57 Article 51, then, allowed the
55. JO 10 April 1946, p. 1679, and 17th, p. 1952 (Cot) ; 22 August 1946, p. 3246 (Ramadier) ; 27
May 1953, pp. 2S59 (Lecourt), 2S68 (Cot) ; Auriol, ii. 249 ; Triery, Chapter 4 ; Georgel, i. 66, 74-7 ;
Ara6, pp. 289-91 ; Williams, p. 227cu In 1 93 1 Blum had urged dissolution of a conservative Chamber.
56. Ree6 Coty, JO 12 April 1946, p, 1770.
57. Another compromise: MRP wanted two years, the Left six months. ,
NATIONAL ASSEMBLY (2): GOVERNMENT AND PARLIAMENT 237
cabinet to dissolve (after consulting the President of the Assembly) when two
crises had occurred within eighteen months, provided: first that both govern-
ments were constitutionally defeated under Article 49 or 50 by an absolute
majority on a vote of confidence or censure; secondly, under Article 45, that
they were more than two weeks old; and thirdly that the Assembly that de-
feated them was over eighteen months old. It was not to be penalized for
upsetting ministries early in its own life, before a majority had crystallized, or
early in theirs, since it had chosen not a cabinet but a premier alone.
The power of dissolution was thus made hard to use - or misuse. Article 52
ruled out manipulations like MacMahon's in 1877 by laying down a minimum
and maximum period (twenty to thirty days) between the dissolution and the
election, and a date (the third Tuesday after the poll) for the new house to
meet. It also installed a caretaker cabinet to supervise the administration and
especially the prefects, who could influence a local contest by urging a politi-
cian to stand or withdraw, to make or refuse an alliance, or to support one
candidate rather than another.58 In the first draft constitution the Assembly's
President and committee chairmen took over from the ministers who had
dissolved. In the final draft the President of the Assembly became caretaker
premier, chose a new minister of the interior in consultation with the bureau
(elected by PR under Article 1 1), and appointed new ministers without port-
folio from all groups unrepresented in the government. By a curious paradox
France was to acquire a cabinet of national union at a moment of bitter con-
troversy.
Some consternation was caused by the fear that these arrangements might
bring Communists back to power. They provoked an incident in January
1948, when Herriot was due for re-election as President of the Assembly. His
health would not stand the strain of an emergency premiership, and if de
Gaulle succeeded in forcing a dissolution he might resign. The obvious sub-
stitute premier was the senior vice-president of the Assembly, who in a bureau
elected by PR represented the largest party, the Communists: thus a dissolu-
tion might allow Jacques Duclos to become caretaker premier and appoint a
minister of the interior controlling the prefects and the police. He was there-
fore demoted to third vice-president, behind members of SFIO and MRP;
the Communists refused to serve on the bureau and appealed to President
Auriol as guardian of the constitution, but he declined to intervene. Even so,
many parliamentarians thought the caretaker arrangements made a dissolu-
tion impossible, and the constitutional amendment of 1954 abandoned them.
If a dissolution was not the result of a vote of censure the old administration
was now to stay in power; if it was, the President of the Assembly would
become both premier and minister of the interior.59
During the life of the first Assembly ten ministries went out of office, but
58. In 1956 prefects were said to have intervened in half a dozen of the 103 constituencies, not
always to help pro-government candidates ; in three of these seats an ex-minister of the interior
was standing: Williams, no. 168, p. 153 ; and cf. Pineau, pp. 18-21. On 1877 see Soulier, p. 49.
59. Institutions, i. 186-7, Georgel, i. 115-18; on the 1948 incident, Lidderdale, p. 104n. By
1954 the Radicals, back in power, favoured keeping the old government which in 1946 (in oppo-
sition) they had wanted to remove. Many people thought the old Art. 52 required a cabinet
formed by PR (cf. Georgel, i. 115 and n.) ; in fact one Communist minister without a department
would have been enough. Some criticisms of the constitution could have been met by reading it
238 THE INSTITUTIONS
only one crisis qualified under the strict conditions of Article 51. Instead of
staying until ousted constitutionally, most cabinets fell apart internally or
resigned on defeat by a simple majority. Two cabinets left office on the election
of a new President of the Republic (Blum's) and National Assembly (Queuille's
third) as tradition and Article 45 respectively required. Two were defeated on
first meeting the house, Schuman's second by a simple and Queuille's second
by an absolute majority. Ramadier's, Marie's and Queuille's first govern-
ments 'rotted from within' with no vote in the Assembly, and Pleven's first
after a vote in which it was neutral. Schuman's first ministry fell because
SFIO defected; the premier insisted on a vote, but it was not a constitutional
vote of confidence and he lost only by a relative majority.60 President Auriol
tried in vain to encourage premiers to stay in office until constitutionally
defeated; he dissuaded several from premature resignation, but could not
prevail when the prime minister warned that a formal vote would exacerbate
the divisions of a majority on which any government must necessarily be
based,61 So of the ten premiers only Bidault was constitutionally overthrown,
by an absolute majority on a vote of confidence when the Socialists moved
from abstention to opposition.
The seven premiers of the second Parliament proved much more determined
to use their constitutional rights, perhaps because they came from a new
political generation.62 Only Pinay resigned without a vote, when MRP's
decision to abstain made defeat inevitable. Faure (in 1952) and Laniel were
beaten by relative majorities, but Pleven, Mayer, Mendes-France and Faure
(in 1955) all had absolute majorities against them on votes of confidence.
After Mayer's fall in May 1953 the deputies had to beware of possible disso-
lution. When they overthrew Laniel by a relative majority, he wanted to
await a constitutional defeat and then dissolve, but he was foiled by the
defection of the Radicals, led by Edgar Faure and Martinaud-D6plat, who
were against dissolution in 1954 though for it in 1955.63 Until eighteen months
after Mayer's fall Mendes-France could have dissolved on defeat; his difficul-
ties with the Assembly therefore began only in November 1954. A few weeks
later he was ousted by an absolute majority, so that when Edgar Faure was
ejected in the same way ten months afterwards he was entitled to dissolve.
The deputies had miscalculated, for the new standing order banning proxies
60. He asked for a formal vote of confidence against a Radical amendment to reduce the army
estimates, which was withdrawn ; he was beaten on a similar Socialist amendment after an infor-
mal threat to resign if defeated (cf. below, p. 254n.). The Socialist ministers moved to their party's
beaches during the debate ; this traditionally indicated resignation.
61. As QpeuiHe did in October 1949 and Pleven in March 1951. Auriol accepted Marie's
resignation in 1948, but said later he had been wrong. He dissuaded Ramadier in September 1947
(his majority had fallen below fifty), Pleven in November 1950 (the Assembly had humiliated a
leading minister, see p. 299 below), and Queuille in April 1951 (the deputies had failed to carry
electoral reform, p. 288n. below) ; and he kept Pleven's second cabinet in office until its constitu-
tional defeat (cf. above, p. 234). See AP 1949, pp. 169-70, 338 ; 1950, pp. 231-2 ; 1951, pp. 39-40,
287; Mo**d«, 29-30 April 1951 and 18-19 November 1951 ; Flory, no. 93, pp. 851-9 ; Drago, no. 76,
p. 166; Georgd, 1 93-4 ; Arne, pp. 57-63. Auriol's views were shared by many of his predecessors
{SouEer, pp. 75-6, 98, 131, 171) and by his successor (cf. Georgel, i. 92-4).
62. See above, p. 13. On resignations with or without votes in Parliament see Arne, pp. 279,
63. For periods when dissolution threatened, and for Laniel, see ibid., pp. 280-1 • for the dura-
tion of governments, see Appendix H.
NATIONAL ASSEMBLY (2): GOVERNMENT AND PARLIAMENT 239
on votes of confidence had made it harder for the tacticians to do their
sums.64
The decision to dissolve was taken, exceptionally, by a vote of the cabinet.65
Neither the prime minister nor the President of the Republic originally
favoured it, but it was strongly urged by the President of the Assembly, Pierre
Schneiter of MRP, whose advice was constitutionally required. Five Radical
ministers had their resignations refused as unconstitutional because the old
cabinet now had to retain office during a dissolution. Schneiter stopped the
opposition parties recalling the Assembly before the decree dissolving it was
published - on the anniversary, as they proclaimed, of Napoleon Ill's coup
d'etat. But their attack on the dissolution failed. The Communists did not join
in, and the critics, finding that public opinion welcomed Faure's action,
quickly abandoned their campaign.66
Unhappily the dissolution proved no more effective as an escape from dead-
lock than as a means of governmental pressure. It gave neither Faure nor his
opponents a secure majority, and the new Assembly, like the old, offered no
basis for stable government. Ministries still resigned in disregard of the con-
stitutional forms. Mollet and Bourges-Maunoury were defeated by relative
majorities, and Gaillard by an absolute majority but on an informal vote of
confidence. Pflimlin took the defection of three Conservative ministers as a
pretext to resign, despite his comfortable majority, because he feared insurrec-
tion by the army.
The attempt to regulate the fall of governments therefore failed entirely,
although President Auriol and some premiers tried to make it work. At best,
the formal rules might have kept a cabinet in office without power: a leader
who did not resign on defeat by a simple majority could not get his measures
passed, might have humiliating motions carried against him, and risked
offending Parliament and harming his future career; 'the problem was not
only to attain and retain the premiership, but to become premier again'.
Bidault took the absolute majority rule seriously, and Laniel wished to do so ;
but six premiers resigned after defeat by a simple majority, and none ever kept
office after being in a minority on a vote of confidence.67
The constitutional amendment proposals of 1950 would have required
64. Solal-Celigny, no. 201, pp. 307-9; surprisingly, the new rule had thus made dissolution
more likely. * Inside dopesters', who often exaggerated the cunning of the wire-pullers, alleged
that Faure had told some loyal supporters to vote against him and ensure a constitutional defeat :
cf. Georgel, i. 120; New Statesman,! December 1955. But of the 21 defectors, 12 were staunch
Mendesists, 8 were Moroccan diehards, and 1 was a local rival of Faure (who, resenting his
vote, refused a profitable electoral alliance with him).
65. P. H. Teitgen, preface to Georgel, i. rv (4the only vote in my experience'); cf. Blamont,
no. 19, pp. 113-14. For the political reasons for it see above, p. 47, and below, pp. 315-16.
66. Blamont, no. 19, states that the President could not refuse a dissolution (p. 113), that
Schneiter's opinion was personal, written and secret (p. 112), that ministers could not resign
(p. 124), and that a censure motion would have been out of order (p. 1 18). Cf. Institutions, i. 184-7;
and Arn6, pp. 282-9. On Coty's and Faure's hesitation, AP 1955, p. 92 (cf. Teitgen, he. czY., for
Faure) ; on Schneiter, above, p. 217; on the public reaction, Elections 1956, pp. 4-5 (Duverger),
122 (Grosser); generally, Pierce, no. 180, pp. 398-401; J. R. Tournoux, Cornets secrets de la
politique (1958), pp. 41-61; J. Georgel, La dissolution du 2.12.1955 (1958). Bourges-Maunoury
as unwilling minister of the interior would take no part in organizing the election.
67. Six: Schuman (twice in 1948), Faure (in 1952), Laniel, Mollet and Bourges-Maunoury.
Quotation: from Duverger, Demain, p. 46.
240 THE INSTITUTIONS
governments so defeated to resign. This would have made it easier to remove
them but also costlier, for dissolution would have come much nearer. In 1950
this proposal seemed to command general support, but by 1953 MRP and
RFP both strongly dissented; both parties were stronger in that house than
they were likely to be in the next. They argued that the absolute majority
clause checked 'orange-peel crises' (contrived by the parliamentary tacticians
rather than willed by most members of the house) and MRP threatened to
oppose the whole amendment bill if it were dropped. It was therefore restored
(by show of hands) as the bill was going through the Assembly; the Council of
the Republic cut it out by 31 1 to 3, but the deputies finally overruled them by
500 to 1 17 and easier dissolution again receded. An alternative adumbrated by
MRP members in these discussions was proposed in 1957 by the Assembly's
franchise committee, taken up in 1958 by Gaillard's government, and adopted
in the Fifth Republic: that any proposal which the government made a matter
of confidence should pass unless the opposition carried a censure motion by an
absolute majority.68
The censure motion had been taken seriously only by the constitution-
makers, who envisaged it as the opposition's principal weapon. But the 1947
standing orders did not mention it. In 1949 Ren6 Capitant, the Gaullist leader
and a professor of law, used it to force a debate on his interpellations on
Indo-CMna; as on a vote of confidence, only five-minute 'explanations' were
allowed, and he was easily defeated. The Communists seized on the new
device, but the house voted to debate a censure motion by Duclos in eight
months' time (which meant never) and three later ones were similarly balked.
Early in the next Parliament the Gaullists put down three censure motions
and the Communists two. One was never discussed, two were defeated, and
two were lost with no vote cast against them; they were intended to force a
vote on an unpopular increase in the petrol tax, but as only an absolute
majority could pass them, the government's supporters abstained.
As a procedural weapon the censure motion therefore failed, though the
Communists still tried occasionally to use it. In 1952 the Socialist leaders
introduced a motion against Pinay's economic and social policies, which was
more in accord with the intentions of the constitution-makers ; and in 1957 one
was proposed on Tunisia, by Tixier-Vignancour, and three on Bourges-
Maunoury*s agricultural policy, by the Communists, the Conservatives and
Zl1*^?1 lobb?' Both g°vernments fell before any of the censures could be
debated." Thus in eleven years of the Fourth Republic fewer than twenty
ensure motions were proposed, only five were discussed, and none passed.
Bci^governments always find time for a censure debate ; but the Assembly
allowed inmstnes to treat them as a tiresome but unimportant kind of inter-
pellation. The marginal deputies wanted to choose their own moment for
defection, and had no need to bring dissolution nearer by censuring the
NATIONAL ASSEMBLY (2): GOVERNMENT AND PARLIAMENT 241
government by an absolute majority when they could so easily deny it their
confidence by a simple majority.
Experience thus gave no reason for hoping that procedural gadgets could
solve political problems. Yet the tireless search for new ones continued. Some
of their sponsors wished to prohibit abstention - which was the recourse of
cowardly opponents, but also of members unable (from conviction or electoral
necessity) to support the government yet unwilling to bring it down. The
Socialists Jules Moch and Francis Leenhardt favoured a Swiss-type system by
which the house would choose for two years a premier whom it could not
remove. At the end Pflimlin's cabinet tried to disallow negative majorities by
permitting a premier to remain, as in West Germany, until ousted by a censure
motion naming his successor. There were renewed suggestions to make dis-
solution automatic on a government defeat, as Paul Reynaud had proposed in
1953.
These 'gadgets' attacked the wrong problem. For the need was not just
stability but authority; and if premiers were safe for two years or five, only a
man guaranteed to offend no one (and therefore do nothing) would ever be
elected. By 1958, therefore, the alternative to ministerial instability seemed to
be 'Queuilles in perpetuity', and a growing body of press and academic
opinion was turning to the presidential system.70 Authority and democracy
seemed incompatible under parliamentary government, where the sovereign
and suspicious deputies contested the executive's right to determine policy,
and an alternative and sometimes hostile leadership was institutionalized in
the committee system.
70. ' Queuilles' : Duverger, VIe> p. 121. On all these ingenious devices see ibid., pp. 114-24, and
his Demain, pp. 44-51 ; Pickles, no. 175; Georgel, i. 147-53, 320-1; Berlia, no. 15; AP 1955,
pp 41 44-6, 62; 1957, p. 27; 1958, pp. 15-16, 20-1, 28-9, 33, 64, 72-4, 543-4.
Chapter 18
THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY
(3): THE COMMITTEE STRUCTURE
The standing committees were the central feature of French parliamentary
procedure. All bills, before the house debated them, went to committees which
killed the majority and redrafted the remainder. For some committees like
Foreign Affairs, legislation was less important than parliamentary control
over the executive. One, the finance committee, reviewed every ministry's
budget and scrutinized the whole administrative field.
It was through its committees above all that Parliament asserted legislative
and encroached on executive power. But committees and cabinets were not
autonomous political forces, they were battlefields where the groups which
clashed openly in the Assembly fought out their differences away from public
view. In the ministerial arena, however, only the moderate parties were present ;
in Parliament and its committees the extremists could manoeuvre to upset the
carefully balanced compromises by which coalitions live. Thereby respon-
sibilities, always hard to establish in a multi-party system, were still further
obscured; and governments had to wage an endless uphill battle which
drained their energies and diminished their authority.
1. ORIGINS AND ORGANIZATION
In 1875 there were only three 'permanent' committees, Finance, Army and
Foreign Affairs; the rest were elected by the bureaux (themselves chosen by
lot) to deal with each bill presented.1 The Left fought for permanence and
proportional representation, while the Right, remembering the revolutionary
Committee of Public Safety, feared that 'little parliaments' would undermine
executive authority. But the growing mass of bills made ad hoc committees
impracticable. By 1898 there were eleven permanent committees, which
handled most legislation. The Chamber made all committees permanent in
1902 and accepted PR in 1910; the Senate took a decade longer in each case.
Although criticisms persisted from conservatives and others, the Fourth
Republic's founders and leaders favoured strong committees, to which Article
15 gave constitutional status.2
Article 53 formalized the Third Republic's custom that ministers could
appear at their request before any committee. More commonly the com-
mittees invited them. They came much more frequently in the Fourth Repub-
hc than in the Third: often to the finance committee, about once a month to
Foreign Affairs and Defence, and perhaps quarterly to most of the others.
Officials could represent their minister, and private persons came occasionally
S6e Lidderda^ Chapter 7, and BartMtamy.
1935X 3. d M D ar^^y Committee System (New York,
w. oetow, pp. 268, 273n. In the Fifth Republic committees were severely restricted.
NATIONAL ASSEMBLY (3): COMMITTEE STRUCTURE 243
(for instance, spokesmen of accident victims on a workmen's compensation
bill); but the functions of an American committee hearing in preparing
legislation were fulfilled (if at all) by the private consultations of the bill's
rapporteur. A committee could extend its ordinary scrutiny of governmental
activities by seeking special investigatory powers; each year there were about
ten such inquiries from committees of one or the other house. It was also the
committees which usually chose Parliament's representatives on about fifty
consultative bodies.3
Wednesdays and Thursday mornings were reserved for committee meetings.
Each committee had its room and its secretary from the Assembly's staff.4
The finance committee met twice a week or more, and divided its work among
rapporteurs ; the others usually met weekly or less often, and chose a rappor-
teur for each bill. In the chamber the committee chairman and rapporteur had
a privileged position in debate. The chairmen formed about half of the
presidents' conference which proposed the Assembly's agenda.
In the Fourth Republic there were normally nineteen standing committees
(and also two smaller permanent committees on Accounts and Parliamentary
Immunities).5 No deputy sat on more than two, finance committee members
usually on only one, and some party leaders (such as Thorez, Mollet and
Queuille) on none. Each had 44 members, one-fourteenth of the whole
Assembly; so each party group had a committee place for every fourteen
members. Groups of less than fourteen and deputies belonging to no party
had to affiliate (s'appar enter) to a larger group.6 After 1952 a member who
changed his party automatically lost his committee places. Parties chose their
own representatives and could trade seats in different committees, but the
main parties were hardly ever more than one seat up or down. Nominations
went to the house as a single agreed list, though fifty deputies could challenge
it.7
3. Bromhead, no, 32, pp. 152-4; Campbell, no. 45, p. 361 ; Grosser, pp. 85-6; Pactet, no. 171,
pp. 160-6, 170-1. In 1947 the labour committee offered to hear strikers* representatives and nego-
tiate with the government: ibid., p. 166. In 1956 the finance committee held American-style
* hearings' on fiscal reform: Meynaud, p. 105. Committees might meet jointly; in 1954 Pierre
Mendes-France addressed the defence, foreign affairs and overseas territories committees together
on his vain attempt to amend the EDC treaty. On the attention paid to hearings by ministers
see Buron, pp. 203-4.
4. But few committees had even a typist of their own ; M. Prelot in Travail, p. 854 (though see
below, p. 251). Cf. Buron, p. 155.
5. Economic Affairs ; Foreign Affairs ; Agriculture ; Alcoholic Beverages ; Defence ; Education ;
Family, Population and Health; Finance; Interior; Justice and Legislation; Merchant Marine
and Fisheries; Communications and Tourist Industry; Pensions; Press; Industrial Production;
Reconstruction and War Damage ; Franchise, Standing Orders and Petitions ; Overseas Territories ;
Labour and Social Security (1952 titles). Beverages replaced Food in 1949. The Assembly would
never agree to fewer committees or places: cf. Williams, p. 23 6n. Special co-ordinating commit-
tees sometimes dealt with a treaty interesting several standing committees (see Grosser, pp. 88-9,
Arne, p. 252) but had not for decades been used for a bill (Goguel in Travail, p. 687).
6. In 1951 Pleven's finance minister Maurice Petsche, an independent Conservative, affiliated
for a week to UDSR (which had only thirteen members) and then withdrew again. This timely
gesture enabled his prime minister's group to keep its representation on every committee.
7. Assignments were usually made by party leaders (but in S FI O by annual election). Members
occasionally joined a party to obtain a committee assignment. In 1954 an ex-chairman of the
foreign affairs committee, Jacques Bardoux, was dropped from it by the Republican Independents
(CNI) but regained his place by becoming a Peasant. Inter-party trading allowed I O M and RD A
members to concentrate in the overseas territories committee; this caused a contest over its
[over
244 THE INSTITUTIONS
Committees of 44 were too big for efficiency, but the penalties for absentee-
ism were not applied and the quorum of 22 was rarely enforced. On most
committees a nucleus of a dozen or fifteen members attended regularly,
drafted most reports, and spoke often in the house on the committee's sub-
ject.8 In the Fourth Republic absent deputies were allowed to send substitutes,
but these could be casually chosen for a single meeting and weakened the
expertise and common purpose which the committee system was supposed to
foster. On important bills more deputies attended, from interest or at a sum-
mons from their party; on others they often stayed away because much
activity, especially on minor committees, was futile. Paradoxically, attendance
was best at the committees which met most frequently and made most de-
mands on their members.9
Each committee elected a chairman and a small bureau, limited (except for
Finance and Overseas Territories) to two vice-chairmen and two secretaries so
as to check the traditional inflation of these sinecure titles.10 While there was
no seniority rule, chairmen of important committees were always men of
standing in the house and party. Those who were not already ex-ministers
became ministrdbles by virtue of their election; indeed, Poincar6 once
attacked them as * would-be ministers setting ambushes for the present
ministers'. There was little evidence of this tendency in the Fourth Republic,
although twenty-four committee chairmen resigned to take office.11 Many
others preferred to remain as chairmen, several became chairmen because
they were ex-ministers, and few used their positions to oppose or embarrass
governments,12 Most chairmen were drawn from the parties of the majority,
some from the 'loyal opposition ', few if any from the enemies of the regime.13
membership in 1950. Some colonial deputies affiliated to a major party solely to get a seat there,
while conversely an Algerian member could ensure a place on the interior committee by joining
IOM.
8. Pr&ot in Travail, pp. 852-3. In four busy committees in six months of 1952 one-eighth of
the members (23) took five or more bills to report and five-eighths (109) took one or none : from
Broinhead, no. 32, p. 148. See also 1954 figures in Harrison, Commissions, pp. 72-5, 196-7 ; I am
most grateful to Dr. Harrison for allowing me to use this abundant unpublished material.
9. ./Mi, pp. 77-82, 93-4, 97-9. During 1956 average attendance varied from 19 (Pensions)
to 35 (Agriculture) : ibid., p. 72. Foreign Affairs also had good attendances but the substitutes
deprived it of cohesion: Grosser, p. 84 (but cf. Noel, pp. 108-9). Unless specially whipped,
Commimfets were no more assiduous than others: ibid., and Harrison, pp. 97-8 ; but cf. Isorni,
Amsf* p. 55.
10. The pre-war beverages committee had a bureau of 21 : Barthelemy, Essai, p. 121.
1L Hve in the first Parliament, eighteen in the second and one in the third. Only five stepped
straigtit from a committee chair to the corresponding ministerial post : Louvel (industry) in 1950,
Pan! Cosle-Floret (constitutional reform) in 1953, General Koenig (defence) in 1954, Juglas
Ccojooies} and Badie (pensions) in 1955 ; only two of them held the new office for three months.
A lew otfeers made the move after an interval. Poincard: in 1933, quoted Soulier, p. 194n.
!2. Pierre Moatd (Defence) was expelled from Morocco in 1955 for intriguing against the
jra^iBiniste^s policy - but he had been sent there for the purpose by the defence minister:
Ar 1955, p. 7O.
*^B; J1*5 ^pwBfHUust elected was Midol (Communications) who resigned in protest against
the defeat of his colleagues: AP 1949, p. 3. Not until 1951 did the finance committee remove
s from its sub-committees and posts as rapporteurs of departmental budgets. The
committee set up a sub-committee without Communists or Progressives to deal
EDC treaty (Grosser, p. 88) and in March 1953 non-Communist members of the
roimttee formed themselves into a very large sub-committee. (This had also been done
NATIONAL ASSEMBLY (3): COMMITTEE STRUCTURE 245
There were no Communists after 1949, no Gaullists in 1951 and no Poujadists
ever; but two RPF chairmen were elected by important committees in 1952,
when still in opposition, and a year later the majority conceded six chairs
(including Foreign Affairs, Justice and Interior) to their Socialist opponents.
When SFIO returned to power in 1956 they concentrated parliamentary as
well as governmental responsibilities in their own hands.14 But normally few
chairmen were opposed and very few defeated when they came up for their
annual re-election.15
Parties accepted this continuity because the chairman's power was far less
than in the United States Congress. He was expected to guide his colleagues
(who did not admire ineffectiveness) but not to dominate or thwart them.
He had to fight in the presidents' conference for priority for their proposals.
During recesses he might urge their views on officials or ministers. Survival
increased his influence, for he might outlast many ministers and gain an
expert knowledge of his subject. But unless his committee supported him he
had little personal opportunity to help or obstruct legislation.16
The committee itself, however, had great power. If hostile it could bury a
private member's bill altogether; if favourable it could redraft even a govern-
ment measure and pilot it through the house. Consequently, when a bill over-
lapped committee boundaries its title might be chosen so as to steer it in the
right direction, and indeed the ability tojouer les commissions was one of the
skills of experienced parliamentarians (not least of ministers). In 1950 the
Communists persuaded the press committee, with its large contingent of
editors, unanimously to claim jurisdiction over the bill against libel in journals
edited by members of parliament, and charged the committee on justice and
legislation with 'imperialism' when it resisted the claim; but the Assembly
ruled against them. The Left had more success in extending the jurisdiction
of the traditionally anticlerical education committee, to which in 1950 they
managed to send a school medical service bill which the health committee
had unanimously claimed. In the second Parliament, however, they were
weaker: Barang6's bill subsidizing church schools was assigned to Finance in
1951, and a contentious bill on agricultural instruction to Agriculture in
1954.17
14. Besides half the cabinet they provided the rapporteur-general and thirteen committee
chairmen, leaving only five chairs for the whole opposition- in accordance with their old doctrine,
'Toutes les places et tout de suite!' But they were indignant when the Gaullists did the same in
1962.
15. Of the 21 chairmen in 1951, six soon became ministers and two soon died. Of the other 13
and the 8 successors, nine were re-elected (generally unopposed) till the end of the Parliament,
and five till they became ministers ; five were beaten, but two won again later; one retired; one
lost his seat on changing his party. Only one committee (Justice) had a contest every year.
16. Bromhead, no. 32, p. 149n.; chairmen rarely reported on bills. But in 1948, when RPF
strongly opposed postponing local elections, a bill to do so was sent to the interior committee
because Franchise had a Gaullist acting chairman: AP 1948, p. 134. On guidance see Prelot in
Travail, pp. 853-4, and Isorni, Silence, p. 135; on influence in recesses, Grosser, pp. 87-8; on
powerful pre-war chairmen, Barthelemy, Essai, pp. 124-30, 245-5 ; on the presidents' conference,
Buron, p. 113. ^
17. JO I March 1950, p. 2126 (press), 22 June 1950, pp. 5130-4, 5143-4 (medical); 5Cno. 81,
23 March 1954, pp. 2091, 2094 (agriculture; on this bill see Paysans, pp. 275-80). In 1951 Educa-
tion proved to have a pro-clerical majority after all, and refused to claim the Barange bill. On
procedure see Galichon in Travail, pp. 810-1 ; and below, pp. 256-9. On ministerial techniques
for dealing with committees, Buron, pp. 203-7.
246 THE INSTITUTIONS
An interested committee which was not given charge of a bill could ask to
present an advisory report offering amendments or criticisms.18 On a major
proposal many committees would usually have views, and sponsors - or
governments - could sometimes neutralize one by favourable reports from
others. Six committees reported on the Coal and Steel Community, nine on
the Common Market and Euratom treaties; in each case only the defence
committee was opposed. But the defeat of EDC was presaged by six com-
mittee reports, all hostile.19
A solidly-based government could call party discipline to its aid, though not
with equal effect at all times, in all parties or in all committees. After 1902 the
whip of the Delegation des Gauches was as potent in committee as in the
chamber, and even the undisciplined Radical party of the inter-war years
occasionally reacted against flagrant individualism in committee. In the
Fourth Republic the government had more chance to use pressure because the
well-organized parties were more important. Communists never broke dis-
cipline in committee, though their Progressive allies occasionally did. Socialist
discipline was also good. On the Centre and Right there was less party cross-
voting in committee than in the house, for since each party had very few
representatives individual defections were less probable (though more
damaging).20
The effectiveness of discipline varied between committees as well as between
parties. It was greatest in those which dealt with matters of major political
importance, least in the specialist committees which concentrated on a
limited subject. These were more likely to oppose the government, since they
tended to attract members with a special interest - personal, professional or
constituency. But their opposition was less dangerous, since they enjoyed less
parliamentary prestige.
2. 'SPECIALIST* COMMITTEES AND 'POLITICAL' COMMITTEES
In theory the more technical committees offered many advantages as a legisla-
tive device. They afforded to all deputies a training which the House of Com-
mons denies to the majority who never obtain office.21 Members could be re-
elected to the same committee and so gain knowledge and experience in their
subject Bills could be carefully examined in a small expert group, rather than
rushed through a large assembly incapable of dealing usefully with detail. A
non-partisan approach was possible since committee work attracted little
publicity (very brief official reports, hardly any newspaper space and, by
18, Tfeere were advisory reports on 9 of the 86 government bills and 7 of the 53 private members'
bats which became law in 1956.
19. AP 1951, p. 319 ; 1954, pp. 428-9 ; 1957, pp. 71-2. In the upper house in 1951 the right-wing
opfwsiiiQii was stronger and every specialist committee opposed the coal and steel plan, only the
foreign aiMrs committee favouring it.
20v See figures in Bromhead, no. 32, pp. 154-7, for 1952 (Pinay's year, in which MRP were
mudi more and the Radicals much kss divided than usual). Harrison, p. 36, analyses 124 divisions
in 1954 and shows the Socialists cross-voting in 11, MRP in 15, Gaullists in 16, Peasants in 18,
Riepobicaji Independents in 28, and Radicals in 30, almost every party having abstentions but
no cross-voting in about as many divisions again. On inter-war Radicals see Barth61emy, EssaL
pp. 107, 145. ** >
,21. See Bfogan in Parliament: a Survey, pp. 80-3. The Communists did most to maintain
coBtmmty and tram specialists : Harrison, pp. 63-5, cf, Isorni, Silence, pp. 1 32-3.
NATIONAL ASSEMBLY (3): COMMITTEE STRUCTURE 247
custom, no discussion on the floor of the house).22 In practice there were so
many bills that they were not always thoroughly scrutinized, and a high turn-
over of members reduced specialization.23 Even where the committees worked
best technically, there was a high political price to be paid. For the stronger
their corporate sense, the more vigorously they challenged the government's
leadership.
Proportional representation did not necessarily ensure a government
majority in each committee. Even in Britain the whips feel safer on the floor
than 'upstairs', where an individual absence is more serious and the strong
views of deeply interested members may prevent the committee being a micro-
cosm of the house. In France the majority was probably smaller and certainly
less cohesive, party discipline was less effective, and committees were per-
manent (in Britain most members have long been appointed by the whips for a
particular bill). The opposition might hold influential committee posts.
Parties often re-elected dissident deputies who had a reputation in their sub-
ject. And all 'technical' committees inevitably approached problems differ-
ently from the lay majority, as- the parliamentary immunities committee
showed in 1949 over the Madagascar prosecutions.24 Some expressed or
intensified a general discontent with the government: the perennial demands of
Pensions, and Reconstruction's defence of the housing programme, spelt
votes for every deputy.25 Above all, these committees provided an institutional
fagade for the operation of pressure-groups.
Every committee attracted members with a personal, professional or
electoral interest in its subject. In 1952 MRP's trade unionists went to the
labour or industry committee, but its extreme Lido-China diehards preferred
to sit on Defence together with three Gaullist generals and one admiral, the
most nationalist of Socialists (Max Lejeune) and later the crypto-fascist
J. M. Le Pen.26 The education committee, with its majority of teachers, in-
cluded the most laic Gaullists, the anticlerical zealots of SFIO (Maurice
Deixonne and Rachel Lempereur), and both the priests in the Assembly. The
medical professions provided half the health committee. Agriculture drew all
but six of its 44 members from the land, and no urban deputy ever stayed on
it. In 1949 half the members of the overseas territories committee sat for
colonial seats, half those on the reconstruction and war damage committee
22. Lidderdale, p. 169; but cf. Travail, pp. 855-6, and Grosser, p. 85. _
23 Harrison, pp. 55-63, 112-13. In 1956 139 laws were passed. One committee (Labour) dealt
with 25; five (Justice, Agriculture, Defence, Overseas Territories, Finance) with 10 or more;
three with 8, four with 3 and six with fewer (my calculations). ^ ^
24 Above p. 21 1. P. H. Teitgen of MRP, a former minister of justice, argued that by pro-
nouncing on these deplorable proceedings before the final appeal the Assembly would infringe
judicial independence. The immunities committee unanimously disagreed; its chairman and
spokesman was Teitgen's father, also of MRP : AP 1949, p. 120.
25 In July 1950 Pensions came within one vote of beating the newly-formed Pleven Govern-
ment, and in January 1953 it defeated the new premier Rene Mayer by 424 to 142; in November
1956 it led the house to reject its ministry's budget, which was passed next month on a confidence
vote by only five; in January 1958 Gaillard carried a vote of Confidence agams j * ^^^
1950, p. 154; 1956, pp. 108, 114; 1958, pp. 6-7; cf. Georgel, i. 233, 240, 242. In 1952 the recon-
struction committee considered resigning en bloc in protest against a housing cut : Monde, 29 Feb-
ruary 1952. Cf. AP 1952, pp. 90, 137 for both pensions and housing.
26. The defence committee demanded very early on that the press be muzzled over Algeria.
AP 1956, p. 32.
248 THE INSTITUTIONS
for Normandy and Brittany. In 1956 two-thirds of the labour committee
came from industrial areas; Merchant Marine attracted only seaboard mem-
bers; of 18 representatives of the Midi wine-growers, 13 were on Beverages.27
This was not all. Not only did the interior committee have as many mem-
bers from Algeria as from France itself: the former attended when Algeria
was on the agenda and the latter when it was not. Similarly, the working
nucleus of a committee tended to be dominated even more completely than
the full body by the strongest interest on it. Since the MRP trade unionists
gave the labour and industry committees a left-wing majority, conservatives
could achieve little there; so they attended rarely, reported on few bills and
moved elsewhere as soon as they could. Again, in assigning bills for report
each committee's preferences tended to accentuate its peculiar character.
Peasant members reported many bills on agriculture, none on labour ques-
tions; MRP deputies were favoured in Finance but ignored in Education;
Socialists reported three times as many domestic bills as Gaullists, but on
defence the proportions were reversed.28
This sectional outlook of the committees might sometimes be an advantage.
Why were black Africans satisfied by legislation in 1956 and Algerian Mos-
lems disappointed in 1957? The overseas territories had deputies of their own
and a committee which they dominated; they could confront their metro-
politan colleagues with realities, and substantially modify the application of
Defferre's loi-cadre. With a similar institutional base the Moslems might not
have changed the Assembly's decision, but at least they could have made it
face the problem. But as it .was, with no Algerian representation at all in the
Assembly, ministers and deputies were so busy whittling down Lacoste's loi-
cadre to beat off right-wing assaults that they almost forgot, and wholly
frustrated^the bill's original aim of conciliating Moslem opinion.29 In less
dramatic circumstances, too, the committees sometimes ensured that Parlia-
ment saw a controversial problem from different sides. In 1951 rapporteurs
from the same party, MRP, spoke for Agriculture which wanted to legalize
pastis (an aperitif popular in the south) and tax it for the benefit of the
peasantry; for Health which wanted it to stay banned; and for Finance which
wouki authorize it only if the proceeds of the tax went to the ordinary
budget30 J
<> Harrison> no- 122, pp. 172-9; Dogan in Pay***,
188_9)
fjr7^^' W- 74^J 198' 230' and no' 122» PP- 177-8/Bromhead, no. 32,
iSSS^^S" I952reportedabo*t half the government's as weU as the p?ivat;
the Lt on the labour committee (Commimists SFIO
, SFIO, MRP) attended
£-SS
29, Bs&are: A? 1957, pp. 222-3. Lacoste: Fauvet, JT«, p. 334. Lois-cadres' PD 273-4
NATIONAL ASSEMBLY (3): COMMITTEE STRUCTURE 249
The system might sometimes help conflicting interests to be heard. But it
also allowed one committee, packed by a few assiduous defenders of a pressure-
group, to obstruct a policy desired by the majority; or several, representing
different interests, to join in mounting converging assaults on the public till.
Since they had most incentive at election time and most opportunity at
budget time, the strongest committee pressures occurred when the two co-
incided in spring 1951. In one week of April the government found the justice
and legislation committee attacking requisitioning of buildings, Reconstruc-
tion trying to double housing appropriations, Communications unanimously
condemning economies on the railways, and half a dozen others protesting
against insufficient credits. In one week of May Labour demanded £250,000,000
to raise family allowances and provincial wage-scales, Education advocated
an allowance for students, Finance wanted more money for civil servants'
salaries, Interior called for more vigorous action against slums, Justice saved
63 under-worked local courts from abolition, Press opposed economies on the
national film centre, and Pensions sought to treble certain war pensions.31
Budget debates in an election year are dangerous times for parliamentarians,
even in a system without committees, to demonstrate their courage or public
spirit. The specialist committees were no danger to the government unless its
authority had already been undermined. But they played their part in the
undermining, they added to the strain which exhausted the physical stamina
and political authority of premiers in a few months of office, and they were
often, when policies were being determined, a force for demagogy and against
responsibility. As a result their reputation suffered. Specialist committees
normally gained victories only when they were used by a party which was in-
dispensable to the majority - as the labour committee, expressing the dis-
content of MRP 'back-benchers', succeeded over the collective bargaining
law in January 1950, family allowances early in 1951, and the sliding scale for
wages later in the year.32 A committee like Press or Beverages, which remained
the preserve of a group of specialists or the instrument of a narrow interest,
found that its high internal unity did not compensate for its low prestige and
that the government could easily beat it in the house.33 It was from the
'political' and not the 'specialist' committees that the greatest danger came.
The defence, foreign affairs, franchise and interior committees were clearly
'political'; so at times were Justice and Education. Having most prestige
(apart from Finance) they enjoyed most continuity of membership; for mem-
bers of lesser committees had no seniority rule to encourage them to stay there,
and preferred to graduate into bodies with more reputation and importance.
A few specialist committees were coveted, especially Agriculture/but Mer-
chant Marine interested few deputies. Every party sent its best men to Defence,
31. References in Williams, pp. 241-2nn. See below, pp. 353-8, 373-7 for the direct influence
of pressure-groups ; pp. 26 1-3 for some important reservations. The 1956 budgetary reform ham-
pered this pressure: Blamont, p. 98, and below, p. 269.
32. A compromise on family allowances in February 1951 failed in the committee where six
MRP members rebelled, and almost failed in the Assembly where 32 did so. In September all
MRP committeemen and four-fifths of * back-bench' MRP deputies voted for a sliding-scale bill
opposed by a government including MRP ministers.
33. See below, p. 262. Cf. Buron, pp. 206-7.
250 THE INSTITUTIONS
Foreign Affairs and Finance, to which the ordinary 'back-bencher' could
rarely aspire.34 On the major committees the party leaders sat, party divisions
were mirrored and party discipline was best. They were therefore potentially
the most dangerous to the government.
These * political' committees had more status than the specialist ones - but
less solidarity. When Interior fought Ramadier's government in August 1947
over the municipal election and Algerian government bills, and Schuman's in
1948 over dismissals from the civil service, there was no agreed committee
view on any of these matters: the hostile majorities were made up of Com-
munists reinforced first by MRP, then by Socialists and Algerian Moslems
over Algeria, and lastly by everyone but MRP. Franchise, in December 1950,
rejected every proposed electoral reform by differing majorities, so that the
rapporteur was obliged to invert normal practice and appeal to the Assembly
to give the committee a lead, and the crucial compromises had to be made
outside the committee in informal negotiations between ministers and
majority party leaders. Again in 1957 the government called a 'round table'
(excluding Gommunists and Poujadists) to work out acceptable terms for its
Algerian framework-law (lot-cadre); the interior committee promptly
destroyed the compromise in a series of contradictory votes.35
The foreign affairs committee voted rarely, except to express outraged dig-
nity. But when it did it was often less representative of the Assembly than the
other major committees. In the first Parliament it was well to the Left, as a
Socialist, an MRP, an IOM and even a Conservative member (Marin) often
voted with the Communists; later, its Conservative members were unusually
liberal. The European army dispute as usual upset all the ordinary conven-
tions: ten SFIO and four MRP members of the foreign and defence com-
mittees opposed the treaty to which their parties were pledged. At the 1954
committee elections two M RP rebels were turned off (a third had already been
expelled from M RP) but all but one of the Socialists remained to speak and
vote against party policy.36 Yet this division in committee only reflected the
situation in the house, for EDC had corroded party discipline.
On these bitterly controversial issues the government itself might be as
divided as Parliament. In 1948 the Assembly had an anticlerical majority
(reflected in the education committee) which was small enough to be upset
if the Radical aad Socialist ministers voted against their parties. When the
committee won on two problems involving church schools, it did so first
•
3d. See WMams, pp. 239n., 412n. ; Grosser, p. 86.
NATIONAL ASSEMBLY (3): COMMITTEE STRUCTURE 251
because the Socialist ministers would not let the premier cast their votes, and
again next month through Socialist and Radical support and the weakness of
a ministry which had just been defeated in six committees in a single week.37
The 'specialist' committees might sometimes lead strong forces on to the
parliamentary battleground; the 'political' committees were battlegrounds
themselves.
3. THE FINANCE COMMITTEE
The finance committee was at once highly political, since it expressed the out-
look of Parliament against the executive, and technically specialized, though
its scope was all-embracing. For while the competence of its rivals was
restricted to one sphere of policy, its own jurisdiction extended over all the
activities of the state. As the Assembly's watchdog against both the miserly
ministry and the extravagant spending committees, it always played a dual
role: the scourge of every finance minister when it opposed higher taxes, but
his valued ally against the increased expenditure demanded by private mem-
bers and sometimes by his own colleagues. Permanent and specialized for over
a century, it was approved even by critics of the committee system.38
In investigating departmental budgets the finance committee never pedanti-
cally limited its sphere. In three successive Republics it was assigned bills to
re-establish a Vatican embassy (1920), subsidize church schools (1951) and set
up a nuclear striking force (1960). Enjoying the same broad view as a govern-
ment, it attracted rising men of ministerial calibre: more than half its original
non-Communist members obtained office by the end of the first Parliament,
one (Pleven) as premier, five as finance minister, and four in junior economic
posts.39 Elder statesmen might prefer the foreign affairs committee with its
lighter agenda, but ambitious majority 'back-benchers' and able young
opposition critics generally made their way to Finance.
On it there were few passengers. In 1952 the 39 estimates on which it re-
ported were assigned to 27 rapporteurs. In half the year it dealt with 285 bills
(while four other busy committees together took only 414). It met three times
as often as its most assiduous rivals (Defence, Justice and Foreign Affairs) and
a very heavy burden fell on its rapporteur-general, who alone reported on 1 15
of the 285 texts, and on its chairman. To cope with the work the finance com-
mittee, like Defence and Pensions, had civil servants permanently seconded
to it and allowed (against regulations) to attend its meetings. This 'sometimes
transformed the dialogue of Government with Parliament into a discussion
between two coteries of the administration ' .40
As the focal point of most parliamentary pressures, the committee's
37. AP 1948, pp. 76-83, 92-5, 224. Cf. above, p. 34.
38. Blum, p. 187; Auriol, ii. 214.
39. Every finance minister of that Parliament came from it, except Schuman (an ex-chairman
of it) and Queuille.
40. Goguel, no. 107, p. 856. On officials cf. his Fourth Republic, pp. 166-7; Pactet, no. 171,
p. 170 and n. ; Travail, pp. 693, 814, 854-5. On meetings, Harrison, Commissions, Table 8 ; on bills
and budgets, Bromhead, no. 32, pp. 148, 150. Mendes-France claimed that as chairman he worked
a fifteen-hour day and a seven-day week ; every day he received 2-300 letters, only half from
constituents and three-quarters asking favours ; and as up to fifty visitors or deputations tried to
see him daily, he was bound to offend most of them : in Schoenbrun, As France Goes, p. 148.
252 THE INSTITUTIONS
cohesion was constantly under strain. Consequently the new rule allowing sub-
stitutes to replace absent members at committee meetings harmed it far more
than other committees; while their unity was somewhat impaired, its character
was wholly transformed. In the past when it had discussed the agriculture or
education estimates, the relevant standing committee sent its rapporteur to
advise; now, half the specialist committee might sit as substitute members of
the finance committee itself. A reform of standing orders in 1952 checked this
abuse by requiring each party to present a list of names, not exceeding half its
quota of places, from which Finance substitutes had to be drawn. This change
enabled the committee to regain some of its old coherence.41
Because it dealt with the whole field of politics, the finance committee
caniedmuch more weight than the others and acquired many more responsibi-
lities. It enforced the checks set up by standing orders against the deputies'
pressure for spending (and they sometimes drafted proposals as resolutions
rather than bills so as to escape its scrutiny). At the end of the Fourth Repub-
lic, Parliament even agreed to leave detailed examination of government
expenditure to the finance committees of the two houses.42
Made prudent by its budgetary bias, the finance committee tended to oppose
overdue but expensive social reforms; and, like the house as a whole, it was
kinder to farms than to factories. In the first Parliament it tried to divert
investment credits from coal-mining to agriculture, but the minister of indus-
try resisted successfully with the help of the industry and economic affairs
committees, both urban strongholds. In the second Assembly it whittled
down and delayed the industry committee's proposals to raise the inadequate
miners' pensions, and in the third it reduced the scope of the government's
old-age pensions bill, which the labour committee wanted to widen, and
rejected the taxes by which it was to be financed. But its caution also made the
committee an indispensable barrier against the flood of demagogic proposals.
Only when the majority was determined (in a good or bad cause) did the
finance committee side with the spenders - as in 1951, when the finance
ministry demanded educational economies, the ministry of education publicly
appealed for support to the finance committee, it unanimously condemned
the cuts^ and they were dropped.43
The finance committee was therefore a rival centre of leadership to the
cabinet: the most 'governmental' committee of all in outlook, but also the
most dangerous if it decided to oppose. In the Third Republic it was accused
of being a * committee of successors' with a bias towards criticism. In the
Fourth it harassed and hampered most governments, and some of its early
qiieiriiioiisfcess was due to rising young politicians using it as a springboard for
41. Btemont, pp. 49-50, 90.
KJi^"af?lS^>PP*2l8rr ; and °n resolutions» Harrison, p. 41 (they were easier to pass than
Ms aed ataost as ussfal for propaganda, though they had little or no effect).
43. ^vestments: JO 26 April 1950, pp, 2904-8, 2912-15, 2921-2; the minister and all the
3^^^?^ MRP* ***"** Pensi°ns: Harrison, pp.' 221-31; MRP members
J/Zfe 1 H£ r^Si°T C^S^ again&t * the other' Old a*e : Blamont, P- 51. Education :
c^S^f ±±^? ^Pnl \?51' *C> n°* 149' 29 April 1951> P- 465°- When the education
cwraatee f^^mst earlier cuts, the minister thanked the Assembly for its valuable
26 ^ 195°> PP* 4016-17' *" -o ^ V 246n!;
NATIONAL ASSEMBLY (3): COMMITTEE STRUCTURE 253
promotion. Edgar Faure and Maurice Petsche were the leading critics of Ren6
Mayer, Schuman's finance minister, who suffered four major defeats in the
committee in three months (though he usually got his way later in the Assem-
bly). Soon Petsche was finance minister in Bidault's cabinet, Faure was his
minister of state for the budget, and their Radical critics were led by Felix
Gaillard and Maurice Bourges-Maunoury; in December 1949 the committee
threw out the budget, substituted an unbalanced one of its own, rejected three
compromise plans, supported most of the wrecking senatorial amendments
and was defeated only by lavish use of votes of confidence in the house. Before
long the new rebels were ministers, and under fire in their turn.44
Governments generally beat off these * young Turk' assaults. Sometimes
party discipline persuaded the committee to reverse its own decision, as it did
over Ramadier's budget in June 1947 and Pleven's rearmament budget in
December 1950.45 If the committee members would not make public con-
fession of error, ministers could usually defeat them in the house where the
marginal deputies had no previous vote to live down. In December 1949
Bidault used six votes of confidence to insist that the Assembly consider his
original budget instead of the committee's version and to save its essential
points - but was beaten four times when he did not bring this weapon into
play. When Bourges-Maunoury and Gaillard became premiers themselves, they
to found that only by wielding the whip could they rally a reluctant majority.46
Appearances were often misleading. Governments fell when their support
was disappearing through the defection of either a major party, or individuals
from the loosely-organized groups. Because the finance committee had so
wide a sphere of activity it was often the arena in which these weaknesses first
became apparent ; its members therefore seemed to overthrow governments
to which in fact they had no special hostility. This was particularly true of the
committee's five leaders: its two rapporteurs-gdnfral, Charles Barang6 of
MRP until his retirement and Francis Leenhardt from 1956, and its three
chairmen, first J. R. Guyon till 1951, then Paul Reynaud, and Pierre Mendes-
France while Reynaud was in Laniel's cabinet. Guyon and Leenhardt belonged
to a disciplined party, SFIO, which was in the majority throughout their
terms. Reynaud and Mend&s-France were conspicuous among French
politicians in their contempt for office for its own sake. Barange repeatedly
refused it, and he and Reynaud were the government's best (and sometimes
only) friends on the committee.47 Mendes-France, once a scourge of cabinets,
gave Laniel every help on becoming chairman in 1953; and overthrew him
next year because of Indo-China, not finance.
Sometimes the committee's assaults helped wear down a government but
44. Details in Williams, pp. 243-4; the committee's resentment had technical reasons as well,
for it was belatedly and often inadequately informed by an administration which had acquired
bad habits under Vichy. "The day when detailed estimates of expenditure are laid before Parliament
in good time, governments will regain the confidence of the committee which they have obviously
lost': Fauvet in Monde, 16 December 1949. (Finance committee Radicals had been equally
rebellious in the 1930's, when they were on the Left of the party.)
45. AP 1947, p. 117; 1950, pp. 258-62. (In 1950 the sub-committee members who had first
successfully proposed economies abstained on the second vote, which cancelled them.)
46. AP 1949, pp. 214-19, 221-3; 1950, pp. 1-5, 10; 1957, pp. 65-7, 117-18, 140, 161-2
47. On Pleven's tax increases in December 1951 they were 2 against 37: AP 1951, p. 330.
254 THE INSTITUTIONS
did not directly overthrow it, as in January 1952 when it rejected Pleven's
budget and substituted an unbalanced one. The government won this battle
in the Assembly, which agreed to discuss its original budget instead of the
committee's, but was destroyed in another - over railway reorganization - in
which the leaders of the committee were on its side.48 Again, when party
alignments were moving against the government the shift was more often
under-represented than exaggerated in the committee. Thus in July 1948
Schuman was defeated on the military budget. The finance committee had
rejected it by 13 Communist votes to 0, government supporters abstaining;
but next day Conservatives and MRP had changed their minds and passed
the budget by 23 to 13. When it was defeated in the house the criticism came
from the defence and not the finance committee, and the vote was on strict
party lines, the Gaullist and Communist oppositions being joined by SFIO
but by no other member of either committee.49 Bidault was overthrown on a
confidence vote in June 1950, when he challenged under Parliament's financial
rules a Socialist bill affecting civil service salaries, which both committee and
Assembly had passed. But this was a party division in which the chairman
(Guyon) spoke for S FI O and not for the committee, and those of its members
who defied their groups did so to support the government, not to oppose it.50
When Rene Mayer fell in May 1953 its members were again somewhat more
favourable to him than their colleagues.
Only twice did the finance committee participate directly in a government's
defeat In rejecting Faure's tax increases in March 1952 the Assembly was
following its lead, and its members were disproportionately hostile to the
government; yet even on this occasion Barang6 voted for the government
(Reynaud was abroad). After 1953, when external affairs came to dominate
politics, the only premier overthrown on a financial question was Mollet. The
finance committee severely mauled the budget in December 1956, but he
carried it by six votes of confidence. In March 1957 Reynaud condemned his
economic and financial policy, in May the finance committee rejected 98% of
Ramadier's proposed new taxes, and a few days later Mollet was beaten on a
vote of confidence. The Centre representatives on the finance committee were
much less favourable to him (but the Conservatives slightly less hostile) than
other members of their parties.51
Politically, therefore, although Finance was a more dangerous opponent
for the cabinet than any other committee its opposition usually only registered
and Barans6 V0ted for ^ £°vemmeilt and no cxjmmitteeman from a government
P- 1I5-17: four amendments to reduce military credits had been proposed by
iT6 COI?mittJf> token ones by te Radical chairman and a Conservative
StSd^SSH^tS68 y a Communi?t W* a Socialist; the first two were withdrawn and
tae tnntf defeated, but the government was beaten on the fourth
*- 263~5' Tho ^ PRL and P^ant members and one Repub-
80Verament ***>* their S^PS- See AP 1950, pp. 123-6, and
Republican Independents, and moderate Peasants, half the
y ° °f their ten ^ance-committee men ; one of the four
tf Vermnent was on ^ committee. A majority of Conservatives
/ ^ com^ltteemen abstained, including Reynaud; two-thirds of
uties voted for him, but only one of their five conmiitteemen.
NATIONAL ASSEMBLY (3): COMMITTEE STRUCTURE 255
the disintegration of the majority; it was no longer the 'hotbed of intrigues
against the government' it had been in the Third Republic.52 Technically, it
was often a help to the ministry, beating off many specialist committee assaults
which might otherwise have strained either the budget or the majority. Its
worst offence was to consume far too much of the scarce commodity it
existed to save: parliamentary time. Repudiating budget after budget, but in
the end repudiated by the house it was supposed to represent, the finance
committee rarely overthrew cabinets but often helped to exhaust them in the
endless war of attrition between executive and legislature.
It was not committee intransigence but party incoherence that ensured par-
liamentary preponderance. Committees were strong because majorities were
weak, and meddlesome because governments were timid and divided. Their
'mother-in-law' behaviour was an irritant rather than a threat, and a deter-
mined cabinet could almost always persuade the house to disavow a recal-
citrant committee.53 This did not justify the system; the cumbrous machinery
for examining bills took much of members' time and energy, but often wasted
them on measures with no chance of success, or allowed a bill to be dis-
creetly smothered in committee by a pressure-group which might not have
dared to oppose it in the house.54 But, since the deputies would not put up
with the crude methods of selection and rigid government control which pre-
vail in the House of Commons, some variant of it was inevitable. The ad hoc
committees of the early Third Republic could never have dealt with the
modern volume of legislation (and those created early in the Fifth were some-
times even more influenced by pressure-groups than the regular standing com-
mittees). Moreover, without committees Parliament would have exercised its
powers of scrutiny blindly and haphazardly. Short-lived ministers all too
easily became spokesmen of the bureaucracy in Parliament, not of the citizen
in the administration. Committee supervision allowed the representatives of
the ordinary man to criticize and perhaps influence the operations of govern-
ment. The results of admitting his influence were sometimes bad, but the
results of excluding it might well have been worse.55
The system also had effects on the deputies themselves. Committee work
was less publicized and less partisan than debate in the Assembly, and built up
that spirit of camaraderie which is a virtue and not a vice of parliamentary
government. The club atmosphere moderated passions and allowed opposition
members to work usefully with their colleagues. It was in committee that
Gaullists and even Poujadists grew accustomed to bargains and compromises
with the System, and the Communists themselves frequently made genuine
concessions to achieve unanimity.56 Any supporter of the majority or 'loyal
52. Duverger, Institutions financieres, p. 348.
53. Pactet, no. 171, pp. 171-2. Also in the Third Republic: Barth61emy, Essai, pp. 53, 233, 334;
Soulier, p. 222; Blum, p. 192. 'Mother-in-law': Wright hi Cole, European Political Systems,
p. 625.
54. See below, pp. 262-3, 373.
55. Blamont, no. 18, pp. 388-9. For a more critical view see Goguel, he. cit. (above, n. 40).
56. Isorni, Silence, pp. 134-8; Grosser, p. 86; Dogan in Paysans, p. 222; Harrison, pp. 182-3,
234-5. (They discuss five different committees.) Cf. Hamon in Travail, p. 851, and no. 117,
pp. 387, 390/406.
256 THE INSTITUTIONS
opposition' could, unlike the frustrated British back-bencher, make a con-
structive contribution to policy if he chose (not all did). The committee sys-
tem therefore encouraged able men to enter Parliament and work hard within
it, and gave them a better appreciation of the executive's problems. 'To
educate our parliamentary masters, as well as the voters, is one of the functions
of Parliament which is better done (at high cost) in the American and French
systems. Assiduity, application to a special field, mastery of procedure and of
subject-matter, all these virtues are more automatically rewarded in Congress
or the National Assembly than they are at Westminster.'57 Yet though the
deputies could do so much more than MPs to scrutinize the budget and
amend the laws, they were often even more discontented with the working of
Parliament and their own part in it than legislators across the Channel.
57. Brogan in Parliament; a Survey (1952), p. 82.
Chapter 19
THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY
(4): LEGISLATION AND FINANCE
The French Parliament was never an efficient legislative machine. A flood of
private members' bills competed vainly for time and attention with the govern-
ment's measures. The Assembly spent far too much time on the bills that
failed, too little on those that passed. Since deputies could propose to spend
public money, cabinets exhausted much of their political credit in resisting
assaults on the budget, which absorbed half the house's time and left it unable
to fulfil its other tasks. Cumbrous procedure, shortage of time and dispersed
leadership meant that controversial measures had little hope of success unless
there was exceptional pressure behind them.
Major reforms could pass only in a major crisis. When there was no secure
majority, Parliament could palliate the consequences of its own omnipotence
only by abandoning its power to the government. Yet the politicians made
more effort than in the past both to tackle substantive problems and to
improve the machinery for dealing with them. They streamlined budgetary
procedure, restricted the deputy's right to propose expenditure and, when
obliged to delegate legislative power to the government, exacted far more
effective safeguards.1
1. LEGISLATIVE METHODS
By common consent Parliament sat too long and legislated too much. The 450
sitting hours of 1902 had doubled by 1954. Fewer than a thousand bills,
resolutions and reports were presented annually to the last Chamber before
1914; 1,800 to the one ending in 1936; 2,700 a year to the first National
Assembly of the Fourth Republic, 3,000 to the second and 3,600 to the third.
Parliament dealt annually with over 1,300 bills ; the first Assembly passed 276
a year into law, its successors 199.2 This was four times as many as in Britain
at the same periods, but a single British bill might correspond to many French
ones; at one time there were forty bills in a French budget. Private members
introduced far more bills in France, and many matters needed legislation
which in Britain the executive could settle. All bills were presented to the
bureau of the Assembly or, after 1954, of the upper house; printed and cir-
culated with an explanatory note (expose des motifs) ; and at once referred to a
committee which had three months to report.3 This time-limit was a dead
1. Radical reformers proposed to remedy executive weakness by ^P0^8/^.^0^
British devices as more delegated legislation, government control of business, and limitation of
amendments : Travail, pp. 679, 697, 701, 847. raninhdl
2. Fullest statistics in Cotteret, Le Pouvoir legislatif en France -pp. 46-9 See also Campbell,
no. 45, pp. 352-3 ; Travail, pp. 681-2, 809 ; Georgel, i. 236, 247; Arn6 p. 169.
3. After the 1954 constitutional amendment a member sent bills to his own hou^e and the
government to either house (but all money bills went to the Assembly) : see below p. ^™
Assembly's bureau once refused a bill declaring its author s descent from Joan of Arc ^M^her,
p. 68), and its President rejected a few for unconstitutionahty ; Hernot r^^o^ej^aj^^.
dum on the electoral law, and Le Troquer rejected Poujadist bills to call the States-General.
Blamont, pp. 30-1 (cf. Institutions, i. 137).
258 THE INSTITUTIONS
letter, but the government could extract bills from a dilatory committee if it
really wanted to - though it might not like the shape in which they emerged.4
The author of a private member's bill often sat on the relevant committee
and was frequently chosen to report on it; if he did not, he could attend for
the discussion, though not for the vote. But on a government bill the minister
had to withdraw before the committee deliberated, and it could and usually
did rewrite the bill completely - and often badly. The government could not
move amendments, and had to find a friendly deputy to act for it; in the
Fourth Republic it had the new and rarely exercised right to ask the Assembly
to reject the report and discuss its own original draft - though the committee
could then re-examine the text and move amendments. The bill was taken
clause by clause, and committee members, being specialists in the subject,
usually dominated the debate. The President, unlike the British Speaker, had
no right to select amendments (except to stop duplication). On each, in prin-
ciple, only a proposer, an opponent, a minister and a committee spokesman
could speak and the proposer reply; other deputies (unlike senators) could
not 'explain their votes'. TTiere was no equivalent of the British 'guillotine',
for time-limits were not always respected, even in an 'organized debate', and
did not require a vote on a named clause at a fixed time. Deliberate obstruc-
tion by a flood of amendments could be met only by rejecting them en bloc,
which was occasionally done.5
The decision on the whole bill was preceded by members' short 'explana-
tions of their vote'. The measure, if passed, was sent to the Council of the
Republic; once the two houses had agreed or the lower had overruled the
upper, it went to the President of the Republic to be promulgated within ten
days (or, very rarely, referred back for a second deliberation). This procedure
could be delayed or accelerated. A motion for the previous question (ques tion
prdalable) meant rejection of the proposal before any debate ; this was how the
Assembly defeated the European army treaty on 30 August 1954, and the
repeal of Barange's law subsidizing church schools (after debating the pre-
vious question itself) on 8 November 1956. The motion prejudicielle, which
delayed discussion until some prior condition had been fulfilled, was used by
the Communists to obstruct bills they disliked by demanding priority for
popular proposals of their own.6 A bill could be referred back (r envoy e) to the
4. Btemont, p. 50 ; Galichon in Travail, p. 822 ; Harrison, pp. 107-8 : after the three months the
government or 50 members could demand an urgent debate on an unreported bill, though this
was veryjare (but CNIP tried it in June 1957 on their bill to ban the Communist party). Goguel
in Trawilt pp. 695-6, 858-9 thinks the committees had more power to obstruct, and cites three
biBs of 1948 against alcoholism in the colonies which were never reported. Cf. Malignac and Colin,
UcOcoo&sme* p. 88 ; Arne, pp. 179-80 ; and below, pp. 262, 3 73 .
5 For instance at the peak of Poujadist pressure in 1955: H. George, Le droit ^initiative
parle?neK$cure m matifrefinanctere depuis . . . 1946 (1956), pp. 1 53^. Later, amendments to money
biHs were normally required four days hi advance : ibid., and Blamont, p. 69. On bad amendments
m committee, Travail, pp. 857-8, and in the house, n. 12 below; on time limits and organized
debate, above, pp. 218,219. See also Blamont, pp. 31-2, 53, 66-9 ; Campbell, no. 45, pp. 829-30;
Arae, pp. 184-5. ***
6. IJdderdale, p. 186; Blamont, pp. 62-3. The bill against libels by editor-deputies (above,
p. 21QQ.) was obstructed to the limit of the rules by the Communists, who delayed it for 18 months
m committee, tried to stop debate with a motion prljudicielle (on the unpopular increase in the
price of petrol), and extorted much extra speaking time by threatening a flood of amendments :
JO 8 November 1951, pp. 7702-36.
NATIONAL ASSEMBLY (4): LEGISLATION AND FINANCE 259
committee, which itself could insist on a reference-back at any time. Parts of
the bill could be separated (disjoint) to form a new measure. On dilatory and
procedural motions, as on amendments, only four speakers were allowed.
The procedure for urgent discussion was intended to speed up the process,
but was so abused by the deputies that it had to be restricted out of existence.
In the National Assembly's first session a majority of the bills passed went
through under it, and in its second session nearly a third did. In 1948 urgency
procedure provoked a protest by the Council of the Republic, whose meagre
rights were seriously infringed by it. After this, it had to be asked for by either
the government or the relevant committee ; but the Assembly wasted so much
time deciding between them that in 1950 the rules were tightened until * urgent*
bills were often dealt with more slowly than others.7
Minor and uncontentious measures could be dealt with by an unopposed
bills procedure, vote sans debat, by which after the committee report the
Assembly passed each clause and then the whole bill without any discussion.
It was used extensively: in 1947 two-fifths of the bills passed, and in 1956 over
half, went through in this way.8 It was proposed by either the government or
the committee to the presidents' conference; the government could stop it
there, and any deputy before it came to a vote in the house; three-quarters of
the objections came from the government.9 If the committee again asked for a
vote sans debat, only the government or fifty members could object; if either
did, the committee could by an absolute majority apply for a 'restricted
debate' (dibat restreinf). But the debates on which that procedure could be
used would never have been long ones, and it was not allowed on major bills.
On these debate was normally ' organized ' .10
The first Assembly passed about three-fifths, the second over half of the
government bills introduced (compared to 98% in Britain). More than 70%
of the bills they passed were of governmental origin, though in the third
Parliament the percentage fell to 62.11 The failure rate was largely due to the
7. In 1947 (January-August) 88 'urgent' and 73 normal bills passed; in the rest of 1947, 42
and 64 ; in 1948 (January-August), 59 and 178 ; in the rest of that Parliament, 19 and 495. After
1950 urgency had to be voted by an absolute majority of the committee, which was hard to get,
and approved by the presidents' conference; urgent bills were debated on Fridays (a bad day)
and one even came up on successive Fridays for six months. So the procedure virtually lapsed except
for government bills. In 1956 (my calculations) one private member's bill out of 53, 2 treaty
ratification bills out of 14 and 6 other government bills out of 72 went through under it, including
longer paid holidays, old age pensions, and special powers in Algeria. See also F.G., no. 105,
pp. 345-6; Bruyas, no. 36, p. 549; Galichon in Travail, pp. 823-4; Lidderdale, pp. 192-200,
272-3 ; Harrison, p. 83 ; Williams, pp. 208-9.
8. Government bills: in 1947, 81 of 207; in 1956, 10 of 14 treaties and 40 of 72 bills. Private
members' bills: in 1947, 33 of 66 ; in 1956, 27 of 53. Ten of the 53, and 4 government bills, needed
more than one reading in the Assembly. For 1947 figures see Lidderdale, pp. 201-2.
9. Andre Mercier, JO 25 March 1952, p. 1464 (cf. Raymond Triboulet, JO 12 March 1958,
p. 1551).
10. On organized debate see above, p. 21 9. Restricted debate allowed no general discussion, no
amendments except ones already rejected in committee, no speech longer than five minutes, and
only one speaker per party on the final vote. It could not be used on constitutional, electoral,
financial or some judicial matters, amnesties, treaties, bills referred back by the President or
Constitutional Committee, or amendments to standing orders. On it see Blamont, p. 40; Noel,
p. 191 ; Travail, pp. 702 (Goguel), 824 (Galichon). Eight bills passed in 1956 had had only res-
tricted debate; only one was a government bill.
11. Cotteret, pp. 47-9; Campbell, no. 46, pp. 352-3. Fewer government bills were defeated
than the figures suggest, as a later government often abandoned them, or reintroduced them in a
new form.
K
260 THE INSTITUTIONS
parliamentary log-jam, for which ministers themselves had some responsibility.
Since 1930 the administration had grown contemptuous of Parliament; it laid
its bills at the last moment, and under urgency procedure which impeded
their examination. The government also encouraged Parliament to act, and
later acted itself under special powers, on matters which did not need legisla-
tive authority. Although it had advice from consultative committees and the
Conseil cT&at, its bills were sometimes so badly drafted by harassed and
transient ministers that Pinay in 1952 reproached the departments with relying
on Parliament to make them workable. In fact the amendments often made
them worse, though they usually improved private members' bills.12
Above all Parliament dealt with too many bills in too little time, since it
spent half its sittings on the budget and perhaps a quarter on general political
debates. Even an uncontentious measure, passed sans debat but amended in
the upper house, might take a year from introduction to promulgation.13
Bills referred back by the President of the Republic for correction of technical
deficiencies sometimes disappeared for years or for ever. It took seven years to
pass a minor measure against socially dangerous alcoholics, four for the over-
seas labour code, two for penal law reform. A really controversial proposal
could be imposed only by a determined government with a loyal majority (and
these were rare), an exceptionally powerful interest-group (a weak minority
could obstruct but only a majority could legislate), or an external crisis that
made Parliament and public conscious of the need for action. The constitution
foreshadowed organic laws on the presentation of the budget (Article 16) and
on local government (Article 89); Parliament remitted the first to the govern-
ment in 1955, and never attempted the second. Successive governments vainly
strove to carry legislation reforming education, co-ordinating transport, re-
modelling the fiscal system. Procedure, wrote an expert in 1953, gave no
encouragement to efficiency or to making bills coherent, either internally or
with other legislation; everything in it tended to slowness of action, narrow-
ness of view, dilution of responsibility and frittering away of authority.14
Major reforms required a real majority. The Constituent Assemblies, with
their rigid parties, could nationalize industries and institute social security;
the second National Assembly voted subsidies to church schools; the third
passed major social and colonial measures, but relapsed into impotence or
arbitrariness when it turned to finance or Algerian reform. When there was no
majority the deficiencies of procedure accentuated parliamentary chaos and
irresponsibility. During the Fourth Republic some of these faults were remedied
P' 849-5° ' °n the Conseil d^tat, also Bertrand,
secretariat, ,W.,pp. 62-9; Institutions, i. 242-3
Marcel Prelot » Travail, p. 859; F.G., no. 105
qu^ p- 201; Btanont, no/18, pp. 395-7, who cites
n. 1« ; !t WaS ^ °n 29 April 1947 « '"*«*% theA amended
"**"'' "»«>"»«» ploWBapMas or tarad.
s^a«iiEisftis±E
ns a better reforming record on transport, etc?)
NATIONAL ASSEMBLY (4): LEGISLATION AND FINANCE 261
by stricter rules, especially financial. Rules were no substitute for political
driving force and could make little difference on major matters. But in the
absence of a majority they did limit the cost and consequences of political
disorder.
2. PRIVATE MEMBERS' PROPOSALS
For 250 years the British MP has been unable to make any proposal costing
money. Although in the last century his bills were often important (the first
factory acts were among them), there are today few major topics open to
private members. MPs who do well in the ballot for places often take an
innocuous measure from a colleague, party or government department, or fall
back on an animal welfare bill. But the French member in the Third and
Fourth Republics (though not the Fifth) could propose expenditure of public
funds : a remarkable stimulus to his own imagination, to his constituents, and
to the pressure-groups which wrote so many of his bills. In the first Parliament
4,800 private members' bills were introduced (900 by senators) and in the
second, 4,000. They accounted for a quarter of the acts passed by those two
Parliaments, and for over a third of those voted in 1956-58. Much government
legislation was stimulated by their pressure.15
Their number was misleading. A topical grievance might evoke a separate
bill from each party if it were national, or from each local member if it were
not. Communist bills on war damage compensation or hydro-electric develop-
ment differed only in the name of the department to which they were to apply.
Most such bills were short (only a third had more than one clause) and they
were often assigned in batches to a single rapporteur.16 But they were a grow-
ing threat to the budget, for when the elector voted for a list in a large con-
stituency instead of a man in a small one, the deputy's fate depended far more
on his party and far less on his local services. 'Rivers and harbours' expendi-
ture was therefore outstripped by the competitive pressure of the parties, and
the sums demanded by deputies in a pre-war session might now be proposed in
a week or two.17
The flood was barely retained by a number of dykes - procedural checks
applying to all bills, and financial rules protecting the budget against members'
15. Buron, p. 104. Statistical sources: n. 11. Pressure-groups: below, pp. 373-5. In the first
session of the second Assembly the most popular subjects of private members' proposals were,
in order : budgetary matters ; prosecutions of deputies ; protection of local products from wicker-
work to seaweed and from cauliflowers to sandals; the wine industry; compensation for storm or
flood ; tax exemptions ; keeping open local railway lines ; housing. There were bills for a campaign
against porpoises, a higher clothing allowance for customs officials, regulating the profession of
ju-jitsu instructor, and reorganizing the band of the Garde republicaine\ Monde, 4 October 1952,
quoted London Times, same date. On the third Parliament see Cotteret, pp. 50-3, and De Tarr,
p. 28. In 1958 one of the few proposals not involving expenditure authorized juges de paix to try
persons prosecuted for not destroying thistles: Yves Peron, JO 20 February 1958, p. 919.
16. Harrison, pp. 100-1, 199 (21 identical hydro-electric bills were presented together; none
was ever reported). Cf. Buron, p. 155.
17. Private members demanded 15 milliard francs (£1,800 million) of expenditure hi 1930 :
A. Tardieu, La Profession parlementaire (1937), pp. 194, 199. In May 1951 the Communist bills
alone would have cost £2,000 million: Queuille, JO 11 May 1951, p. 5079; and Pickles, French
Politics, p. 96n. On the budget for 1953, £1,200 million was demanded within a week: Duchet,
minister of posts, quoted Monde, 5-6 April 1953. On the new electoral law see below, pp. 307-9.
On the comparatively responsible handling of 'rivers and harbours' pressures, Huron, pp. 77-8.
262 THE INSTITUTIONS
bills or amendments. Of the 2,000 or so private members' bills introduced each
year, the committees reported only about 700; of the 700 reports only about
250 were submitted for discussion in the Assembly by the presidents' con-
ference ; these 250 had still to face the finance committee and the government.18
This preliminary slaughter, which killed seven bills out of eight without debate,
was carried out with the knowledge or even complicity of sponsors who had
often meant them for the local newspaper or election address rather than the
statute book: NL Henri ThSbault, Peasant deputy and mayor of Angoul&ne,
probably expected no action on his resolution to ban tourist cars from by-
passes during shopping hours. Rural members and Communists were par-
ticularly prone to demagogy. Of seven hundred agriculturalists' bills and
resolutions on marketing, wine legislation and compensation for natural
disasters in the second Assembly, only a hundred were adopted (and those
usually the least important). But the authors of the others spread them over
columns and pages at election time to lend credibility to their familiar but still
serviceable promises. For this purpose a bill had only to be published, not
pressed, and even Communist rapporteurs often killed off their colleagues'
measures once they had been safely recorded in UHumanitf™
A first and sometimes feeble barrier was the specialist committee. The
alcoholic beverages committee might water down an outrageous proposal but
hardly ever rejected one, since all its members sat for the wine and cider dis-
tricts and none could openly oppose a popular proposal. The house therefore
treated this institutionalized raiding party with a contempt which safeguarded
the members* time and taxpayers' money. Government bills were drafted
to avoid it, and its private members' bills were kept off the agenda by the
presidents* conference.20 If ever the committee wanted to legislate rather than
make propaganda, it needed a vote sans debat; this meant prior appeasement
of any opponents and above all of the government, for an opposed bill might
get no second chance from the presidents' conference even if the committee
later satisfied the objectors.21
The real dykes against the flood were thus the rapporteurs and the presi-
dents' conference, who each stopped far more bills than the committees and
the Assembly put together. The presidents' conference was at once a 'baro-
meter' for political pressure, a 'market* for deals between parties or com-
mittees and the government, and a 'lightning conductor' against the wrath of
3'°°° reports were never debated* E- Moisan, quoted
** process is ^P^Hshed : Harrison, pp. 100-13.
.comnuttee assigned 49 proposals to Communists
nac?tod Only One' Most of ** Deported 27 were
*""• pp' 233~7» *** edif>rin» quotation*
, n°- 5,197 of 20 June 1957.
J? ^nference), 172-6 (the Coca-Cola struggle, cf. below,
rx Sn « , - -oa srugge, c. eow,
o^o^fa^to^tS^f *£F» fa "* house: one went to restricted <*«* and
NATIONAL ASSEMBLY <4): LEGISLATION AND FINANCE 263
pressure-groups. It checked undue generosity by members and committees
without making electoral disaster the reward for political responsibility. It
distinguished serious bills, intended either to pass or to provoke the govern-
ment to act, from crankish, irresponsible or purely propagandist proposals.
But the system obliged conscientious rapporteurs to spend time, goodwill and
hard work on measures that were doomed to disappear instead of those that
had a chance of passing.22
The financial barriers were the strongest of all, and each rampart depended
on the ones behind it. The presidents' conference would turn down bills that
flouted the financial rules (unless the pressure was very strong and it wanted to
give the government a sharp warning: for the same reasons it occasionally put
forward a Communist proposal for debate). It was thus really these rules which
gave the government the last word: Articles 16 and 17 of the constitution, the
Assembly's standing orders 48 and 68, and the so-called hi des maxima (first
voted in the budget for 1949 and thereafter repeated each year as clause 1 of
the finance act). Article 16 confined the budget to financial matters, but it was
constantly broken because the government as well as the deputies found that a
budgetary clause or amendment always passed more quickly and often more
easily than a separate bill; however, the finance committee maintained some
check, and after 1955 standing orders were changed to make this 'tacking'
more difficult. SO 68, reinforcing Article 16, banned any proposed new clause
in budget bills unless it created or released new resources or enforced parlia-
mentary control.23
Paul Reynaud complained that Article 17, which forbade any proposal to
spend money during debates on the budget or supplementary estimates, still
allowed members to play the fool eleven months out of twelve.24 It did help to
check log-rolling - deputies voting constituency favours to one another -
which was much harder when proposals came as separate bills, reported at
intervals, instead of all together as amendments to the budget. But its main
object was to save time rather than money, and it did not rule out moves to
reduce taxes.25 These were barred by SO 48, which was strictly enforced by
the finance committee; any amendment increasing expenditure or reducing
revenue was disjoint to become a separate bill (and no such bill was ever re-
ported on). This rule was wider than Article 17 in including tax reductions
and applying at all times, but narrower in checking only 'back-bench'
amendments in the house, not those moved in committee or reported by a
committee. More general still, the lot des maxima disallowed proposals from
any quarter which raised expenditure or lowered revenue without creating
additional resources to cover the gap.26
22. Harrison, pp. 111-13. Cf. Buron, pp. 104-5, 109-10, 112-13.
23. H. George, pp. 42-5 (on Art. 16), 175-80 (on SO 68), 226-7 and passim on the origins,
scope, advantages and drawbacks of each rule. See also Louis-Lucas, no. 147.
24. JO 11 September 1946, p. 3652.
25. George, pp. 49-50 on its purpose, 51-71 on its application. It may even have lost tune, for
an amendment was less profitable electorally than a bill, and one bill less than two : cf. L. deTinguy,
no. 209, pp. 491-2. As long as any fifty members could have a bill discussed as *urgent', the
Communists had evaded Article 17 by interrupting budget debates with popular proposals; this
was stopped by restricting urgency procedure.
26. George, pp. 157-75 (SO 48) ; 180-217 (hi des maxima} ; 159, 166, 172, 174, 212 (no proposal
[over
264 THE INSTITUTIONS
These ramparts sometimes reinforced one another but often protected
different sectors of the front. All were in constant use. In two days m Decem-
ber 1949 seven popular proposals from different parties and committees were
checked under Article 1 7 and six more under S O 48 ; and on that year's budget
the newly-invented loi des maxima stopped proposals (mostly Communist) to
spend £775 million and reduce taxes by £200 million. In May 1951, a month
before the general election, half the 200 amendments to the loi de finances and
34 of 36 new clauses were disallowed. In December 1952 the Communists
tried successively but vainly to exclude from the scope of the loi des maxima
social security, war-damage credits, low-cost housing, education, war pen-
sions, and unemployment pay.27 m
The rules did not have to be invoked by a minister. Exceptionally, in 1951,
the Assembly's presiding officer used Article 17 against a proposal accepted by
both committee and government (the spending minister was present, the
finance minister not); in 1955, the MRP chairman of the health committee
appealed (in vain) to the loi des maxima against a finance committee proposal
to prolong the full tax exemption of the bouilleurs de cru*8 But almost in-
variably it was the ministry which called them into play. Their enforcement
then depended on the finance committee, and they were effective only because
it showed 'much wisdom and courage [and] a rigour which the Third Repub-
lic never knew'.29 Usually it was an invaluable buffer for the government, but
when the pressure was so strong that its members shared the feelings of the
house, a wise minister knew it was time to compromise. Thus in April 1949
the cabinet proposed a 14% increase in war pensions ; the pensions and finance
committees both voted unanimously for 16J% ; the government first invoked
Article 17, then accepted 15%. In April 1951 the pent-up pressure for higher
family allowances became irresistible as the general election drew close. The
government offered a 15% increase; the labour committee demanded 40, but
dropped to 30 to win the finance committee's support; a Communist pro-
posal for 50 was disjoint; the government raised its bid to 20%, was beaten by
551 to 34, invoked the loi des maxima against the two committees, but finally
agreed to the finance committee's offer of 25%.30
In such cases the premier had either to accept the finance committee's terms
for compromise or spend some of his political credit by demanding a vote of
confidence. A strong leader might prefer the riskier course, but Georges
Bidault was overthrown in June 1950 when he appealed to the loi des maxima
(which the finance committee had refused to apply) against a Socialist
disallowed under either was ever revived, except with the government's consent). Cf. Lidderdale,
pp. 221-4; Emerges; Institutions financitres, p. 352; Galichon in Travail, p. 825 on its progres-
sively tighter drafting.
27. JO 26, 27 and 28 December 1949, pp. 7241, 7261, 7298, 7493 ; Monde, 20-21 May 1951 ;
JO 9 December 1952, pp. 6086-90, and George, pp. 189-90.
28. JO 25 October 1955, pp. 5261-2; he sat for Paris and had no bouilleur constituents. Art.
17: George, pp. 72-3.
29. Jfefit, p. 221 ; on earlier failures to enforce, pp. 72, 157-8, 184-7, and Thery, pp. 150-3.
3d References in Williams, p. 260nn. ; also for the government using Article 17 and the loi des
maxima against tlie committee ; and for the finance minister giving way over compensation for
German requisitionrag, despite the loi des maxima^ after bitter protest from M R P, S F I O, R P F,
Cororminists, and a unanimous reconstruction committee.
NATIONAL ASSEMBLY (4): LEGISLATION AND FINANCE 265
proposal concerning civil service salaries. On 20 December 1952, with several
votes of confidence pending, Pinay warned the Assembly that its 356 amend-
ments would add £190 million to expenses while taking £200 million off taxes;
next day SO 48 was invoked sixty-eight times and SO 68 twenty-three times;
the following night he was out of office. For all their procedural defences, as
long as home affairs were the main political battleground it was on the budget
that ministers faced the hardest fight, had most need to call upon their fol-
lowers to show confidence, and were likeliest to be disappointed. Up to 1953
financial questions were fatal to all the six governments turned out by the
Assembly (though after 1954 they caused the defeat of only one out of six).31
There was nothing sacrosanct about the financial rules. Their force de-
pended on political circumstances. In 1946 Pierre Cot insisted both that mem-
bers of the Assembly must have the right to propose expenditure and, for fear
of demagogy, that members of the upper house must not. In 1950 the deputies
overrode the senators and decided that Article 17 applied to the 'special
treasury accounts'; in 1951 they reversed their own ruling when the Left
invoked it against Barang6's bill to subsidize church schools. In 1953 RPF
voted for the lot des maxima after opposing it in the past, while SFIO, having
supported it when in the majority, was now in opposition and voted against
it.32
The rules could not be divorced from their political context, for expenditure
was not always a vice or parsimony a virtue. Some conservative economy
campaigns were quite as demagogic as the pressure for spending which they
helped governments to resist. Many deputies who favoured reducing state
expenditure were against any specific economies, so that ministers found it
even harder to cut expenses than to raise taxes.33 Some demands for spending,
such as the Mendesist insistence on developing research and scientific facili-
ties, were of no electoral profit to their sponsors. The Communists attacked
the loi des maxima for allowing government supporters to make demagogic
promises that they knew were out of order, and warned that an administration
freed of parliamentary pressure would never undertake social legislation.34
Even politicians trying to protect their electoral rear against the demagogues
often acted more responsibly than they spoke, and a manoeuvre staged for the
voter's benefit did not always develop into a real assault on the treasury. After
all, the loi des maxima could at any time have been superseded by a new law if
Parliament had not tacitly accepted its superior authority.35
After 1953 ministries were less vulnerable on financial questions because,
when financial prudence clashed with electoral necessity, the deputies often
31. AP 1950, p. 125, 1952, p. 92; JO 22 June 1950, p. 5161, 20-21 December 1952, pp. 6690,
6692, 6851; George, pp. 175, 179n. (SOs), 81 (votes of confidence; cf. above, pp. 234-5,
252-5).
32. George, pp. 46 and 89 (Cot), 57 (BarangS), 189 (maxima). On 'special treasury accounts'
see below, p. 343 and n.
33. Fauvet in Monde, 28 December 1949; Edgar Faure in ibid., 25 April 1950, and in Figaro,
15 December 1950; Duverger, op. cit., pp. 27, 346, 371-2. Cf. George, pp. 78, 106.
34. JO 14 February 1958, p. 785 (Ballanger), 19th, p. 909 (Duclos), 20th, pp. 918-19 (Peron),
cf. 913-14 (Pleven and Cot), 924 (Edgar Faure); also 28 December 1949, p, 7493 (Pronteau). And
see Goguel, Regime, p. 59 ; Buron, p. 104.
35. To emphasize its importance, Vincent Auripl referred back a bill in 1949 ; George, pp. 195-6,
266 THE INSTITUTIONS
gave the government special powers to take action they could not face, or to
undo harm they had already done. In March 1958 they accepted the logic of
their own restraint and agreed, with little opposition, to renounce by constitu-
tional amendment their right to propose higher expenditure or lower taxation.
Few deputies of the Fourth Republic were political heroes, but most cared for
the public interest as well, and some even as much, as for their own electoral
survival.
3. BUDGETARY PROCEDURE
It was in the budget debates that members had been most prone to generosity
at the taxpayer's expense, and that the restrictions therefore bore most
heavily. The Assembly's ingenuity in evading the rules was a perverse tribute to
the new determination with which they were enforced, and good evidence
that they were effectively impeding traditional demagogy. Their gradual re-
inforcement throughout the Fourth Republic culminated in 1956 in the belated
adoption of a new budgetary procedure which left Parliament free to criticize
and reject the budget, but sharply reduced its capacity for irresponsible mis-
chief.
French Parliaments always considered the budget both as the most con-
troversial kind of legislation and as their own best weapon for controlling
governmental policy. In theory all expenditure and all taxation had to be
passed in a single bill by 31 December; expenditure was voted in detailed
'chapters* between which transfers of credits (virements) were forbidden;
revenues were not earmarked for particular expenses. Under the new consti-
tution the budget was to include only financial matter, and its presentation
was to be regulated by an organic law. These aims were rarely achieved. The
regulation took ten years and was the work of the government, not Parlia-
ment Budgets were presented in many bills, discussed in a disorderly way and
(at first) voted very late,
To allow the upper house to deal with the budget in better time, it was split
up into an appropriation bill for each major service ; a lot de finances imposing
taxes (and sometimes amending the expenditure already voted); monthly
credits, known as * provisional twelfths', for departments whose expenditure
was voted late; supplementaries; and special treasury accounts.36 After in-
ordinate delays on the budgets for 1947 and 1948, expenditure for 1949 was
authorized en bloc for each ministry; with fifteen items to vote instead of
5,000, the main credits were voted on 3 January.37 But Parliament resented
seeing BO detailed appropriations until the money had been spent. Eleven
votes of confidence were needed to force through the next budget in February
1950, and the later detailed bills took longer than before the war. The Cour des
Canptes warned that administrative efficiency and parliamentary control
3& In 1951 the Assembly voted 76 budget bills - 4J for the current year and 35 for the next:
Campoel, no, 45, p, 357. There were 33 bills in the budget for 1953 and 31 for 1955: Muselier,
V* 89, Biamont, p. $8; cf. his no. 1&, p. 401, quoted Williams, p. 255n.
37. For precedents in the Third Republic see Lidderdale, p. 212n. ; cf. Duverger, op. cit., pp. 333-
334; a simlar procedure was followed in 1946. Later budgets facilitated parliamentary control
by smpier presentation. The civil budget for 1953 had only 1,200 chapters and 8,000 pages
f^fe^t i^QOO two years earlier); in 1955 the whole budget had 4,000 pages: see George, p. 31.
NATIONAL ASSEMBLY (4): LEGISLATION AND FINANCE 267
both suffered when budgetary bills were spread over the whole year and well
over half the expenditure was authorized by provisional credits. 'France*,
complained Edgar Faure, 'is the only democratic country where the budget is
discussed at such time-consuming length that it prevents Parliament voting
substantial and indispensable bills.'38
Simplified procedure soon became a liability. In the Korean crisis of late
1950 Ren6 Pleven passed his new taxes in a separate rearmament budget in
January, while the rest of the budget was voted only just before the June
general election. Next year he carried all the civil credits before the end of
1951, an unprecedented achievement; but the deputies then baulked at both
the economies demanded by his cabinet and the taxes proposed by his
successor. For two months the deficit mounted until Pinay became prime
minister, pronounced it over-estimated, raised a loan (on outrageously
generous terms) instead of new taxes, and obtained powers to cancel by
decree expenditure already authorized by the Assembly.39 His successors
were given even greater discretionary powers, as described in the next
section.
These powers were in part the executive's answer to a spendthrift Parlia-
ment. For the deputies found ingenious ways round the rules against pro-
posing expenditure during the budget debates. The oldest, commonest but
weakest was to move token reductions. Poor party discipline made these easier
to carry than in the House of Commons, but they had little effect on the
government. To evade the hi des maxima, which forbade new spending in
the current year, in 1951 a proposal was made to take effect a year later ; it was
accepted by the finance committee and the government, and was at once
imitated for other popular causes. This technique was revived in the next
Parliament and led Paul Reynaud to complain that every budget had a hidden
time-bomb with a twelve-month fuse. Pinay and Mayer then sought and Laniel
obtained powers to limit next year's expenditure to the current year's level.40
The deputies promptly found a new manoeuvre: they refused to discuss chap-
ters they thought inadequate until the government made a better offer, or they
adjourned consideration of an entire departmental estimate until it was
' rectified Mn December 1951 the government vainly tried to invoke Article 17
against this procedure, which soon became very popular. Four estimates for
1953 were adjourned, and seven for 1954. Mend&s-France met a proposal to
38. AP 1950, pp. 133-4 (Cour); JO 18 May 1951, p. 5499 (Faure). The Assembly spent 112
sittings and 383 hours on the budget in 1950, against a pre-war record of 28 sittings and 93 hours ;
later the total number of sittings dropped (above, p. 212), so the proportion taken by the budget
rose from a third to nearly half; cf. also Williams, pp. 254-5, and n. 47 below. On the Cour des
Comptes see below, p. 338.
39. Cf. Goguel, no. 107, p. 858n. The Third Force governments had faced severe political
unpopularity to maintain high investment for reconstruction. Between 1938 and 1951 state
expenditure rose by less than half but taxes by 80 % ; in 1938 40 % of expenditure had been met
by borrowing or inflation, in 1951 22 % was covered by loans, American aid and 'other resources* :
Edgar Faure, quoted Monde, 17 May 1951, cf. JO 18 May, p. 5498 ; Wilson, p. 353n. It was the
Conservative champions of sound finance who reduced investments, increased borrowings - and
gained votes.
40. See references in Williams, p. 259n. ; cf. George, pp. 71, 204. For Reynaud, JO 27 May
1953, p. 2847, cf. 2871 (contrast Mitterrand, p. 2866); also P. Courant, JO 14 February 1958,
p. 782. For Pinay, etc., cf. Chapus, no. 52, pp. 978-9; George, pp. 192-4; Galichon in Travail,
pp. 826-7.
K*
268 THE INSTITUTIONS
adjourn the first estimate presented for 1955 (the post office) by a successful
confidence vote against this breach of 'the letter as well as the spirit of the
constitution*. Three months later it became clear that he had lost his majority
when two estimates were adjourned (one, pensions, by a unanimous vote).41
The new rules protected governments against direct pressure for expendi-
ture. The presidents' conference effectively discouraged dilatoriness: after
1952, in any week when the house fell behind on the budget it had to meet at
midnight on Friday to catch up. The premier could usually rely on the
deputies' esprit de corps to overcome senatorial obstruction, and on party
discipline to defeat opposition from the finance committee (though this used
up some of his political authority). But in adjourning estimates the Assembly
had found a dangerous loophole. To close it was one aim of the new budgetary
procedure instituted in 1956.42
Parliament had delegated to Edgar Faure's government its constitutional
task of regulating the presentation of the budget; and Faure's ideas, formu-
lated in 1951 and based on earlier procedural experiments, inspired the
'organic decree* of 19 June 1956 which Guy Mollet's cabinet enacted with the
approval of the finance committees of both houses.43 A single budget bill was
to be laid by 1 November, accompanied by economic and financial reports,
and arranged in economic rather titan administrative categories. No amend-
ment was allowed unless it reduced expenditure, increased revenue or enforced
parliamentary control. Unless the whole bill passed the Assembly by 10 Decem-
ber, Part 1 (which authorized taxes and loans and classified total expenditure
into civil and military, capital and current) was to go by the 15th to the upper
house under urgency procedure. Part 2, which could not be begun till Part 1
was voted, divided expenditure first into broad types (Litres, such as ordinary
expenses, investments, subsidies, or war-damage reconstruction) and then by
ministry. The Assembly, like the House of Commons, had about 150 items to
vote. If these were not passed by the new year the government could make
appropriations for continuing services (services vot&, rather like the British
consolidated fund), takingaccount of changes already approved by Parliament.
This meant no more provisional twelfths, and far fewer supplementary esti-
mates. As the new credits were voted the government allocated them to chap-
ters by decree. Unless either of the two finance committees declared its
opposition, the money could be spent after two weeks and the decrees were
approved after two months.44 Only if the Assembly's finance committee re-
jected the decrees (the Council's committee gave only an advisory opinion)
41. B&L, pp. 827-3 (on 1951), and p. 706 (Goguel); Blamont, pp. 93-4; George, pp. 62-7;
Dowager, op. cit., pp. 353-4; Arae, pp. 175-6 ; Georgel, i. 293-5 ; AP 1954, pp. 89-90. 'Rectifica-
tSOi!f 5*-?** Itod k*^1^ had corrected printing and drafting errors, but in the Fourth they
made ctoages of substance ; Laniel needed five to cany the education estimates.
42. Biamont, p. 94, on 1956; George, pp. 152-3 (Fridays), 222-3 on the breaches of classical
Jmdgetary rales which were the price of the procedural improvements. See above, pp. 252-3 on
tfee finance committee, and below, pp. 286-7, on the upper house.
^C^BS?^™ 9^*>Insiituti°r% i- 393-441 ; Duverger, op. cit., pp. 301, 303, 332-40,
195U>P 5498^9 ^ PP' Cart°U' n°* 48< °n FaUre*S ideas' J0 1S May
44. For precedents over military virements and war damage reconstruction see Blamont, p. 60,
a^lowr budgetary adjustments see below, nn. 62 and 65. The ministry of finance was allowed
under strict conditions, to authorize virement between chapters.
NATIONAL ASSEMBLY (4): LEGISLATION AND FINANCE 269
was Parliament called upon to allocate the new credits by a bill discussed, if
the government wished, under urgency procedure.45
The organic decree did not guarantee an easy passage for the budget. Mollet
needed six votes of confidence for his, and both he and Gaillard were nearly
beaten on pensions.46 But the deputies now had to take responsibility for
accepting or rejecting estimates without procedural manoeuvres. The specialist
committees lost influence, since each ministry's estimate was dispersed over
several litres and the debate was therefore directed to problems of finance
rather than general policy; their rapporteurs might still influence the finance
committee, but their weight in the whole house was so reduced that the chair-
man of the defence committee (Pierre Montel) protested that the finance
minister was already the government of France and now the finance committee
was to become its Parliament. For while the Assembly could no longer
examine expenditure in detail, the finance committee could still do so. It had
no less opportunity to oppose the budget, but much less to obstruct it.
The decree saved much time at its first trial, when the hi de finances for 1957
passed its first reading on 10 December and its last on the 29th; there were 104
amendments instead of 994, and 29 sittings of the Assembly instead of 122.
The administration benefited, for the new rule about 'continuing services'
protected it against political disturbance: although the long ministerial crisis
of autumn 1957 prevented the budget for 1958 being laid on time, Part 1 was
duly voted before the end of the year. In the past, very detailed parliamentary
examination had often hampered governmental responsibility and coherence
of policy. The new procedure, without depriving Parliament of its authority,
gave the administration more chance to function and the government more
chance to govern.47
4. DECREE-LAWS AND FRAMEWORK-LAWS
The new budgetary procedure was only an exceptionally important instance of
Parliament's growing tendency to abandon legislative authority to the govern-
ment. It could do this either by distinguishing major spheres of policy, with
which only Parliament could deal, from minor ones which might be left to
governmental regulation; or else by authorizing the executive to act on
matters which Parliament specified. The first alternative had support among
some Resistance jurists, whose constitutional plans were to be realized in the
Fifth Republic. The second had been used extensively between the wars, when
Parliament repeatedly abdicated its powers to the executive.48
Between 1919 and 1939 eleven governments had obtained special powers to
45. The Council was dissatisfied, for its committee had only ten days on the first reading and
five on the second ; the Assembly's committee had a month, then ten days, then five days to decide
finally on third reading. If either acted faster it had more time on the next round, if slower it had
less (and if the Assembly took over a month on the first reading its consent was presumed).
46. See above, p. 247n.
47. On its working see Blamont, pp. 98-101, AP 1956, pp. 89, 107-8, 120; for Montel, JO
20 November 1956, p. 4941. In the Fifth Republic the time spent soon increased again, to 43
sittings and 162 hours on the first reading of the budget for 1962 (cf. n. 38).
48. On the whole problem see Soubeyrol, passim; Cotteret, pp. 36-45, 65-83; Galichon in
Travail, pp. 793-809; Goguel, no. 107, pp. 853-5; Georgel, i. 297-305; Arne, pp. 152-60;
Freedeman, Conseil d'Etat, pp. 84-91 ; Huron, pp. 117-19.
270 THE INSTITUTIONS
override existing legislation by 'decree-laws'. These theoretically needed
eventual parliamentary approval, but they could operate without it and, as
their purpose was often to transfer the blame for unpopular decisions from
Parliament to the government, members were not always eager to approve
them. While decree-laws enabled the executive to act where the legislature
would not, they encouraged evasion of responsibility by the deputies and of
parliamentary control by the administration. After the early years the
authority given was very widely drawn and still more widely interpreted:
Laval prohibited foreigners keeping carrier-pigeons under powers given him
to defend the franc. Daladier's special powers enabled him to go through
the Munich crisis without summoning Parliament and, a year later, to ban
the Communist party by decree-law. After the defeat Parliament abdicated
all its powers, including that of drafting a new constitution, to Marshal
P&ain.49
The Resistance movement reacted against these abuses, and in the two
Constituent Assemblies only Paul Reynaud defended decree-laws. Article 13
of the constitution enshrined this hostility : 'The National Assembly shall vote
the law. It cannot delegate this right.5 But jurists held that these words did not
prevent ministers being authorized to alter existing legislation by decree, and
the constitutional drafting committees seem to have known this.50 Indeed,
Ren6 Capitant warned them that unless the new Parliament was capable of
acting rapidly, decree-laws would soon revive. But the new Assembly dealt no
better than the old Chamber with matters requiring speed or technical
expertise or secrecy (such as tax changes). Deputies still feared the electoral
consequences of many measures they knew to be necessary, and procedure
still hampered leadership and facilitated obstruction. Supporters of Third
Republican institutions, including decree-laws, regained influence after 1948.
So, *torn by its double complex of powerlessness and sovereignty', Parliament
alternated between delegating its powers to the government and throwing out
cabinets which tried to use them. Three distinct techniques were used : first the
separation of spheres, as in Reynaud's law of 17 August 1948; secondly, in
1953-55, special powers like those of the inter-war years, but with stricter
limits of time, authority and subject-matter; thirdly the framework-laws (lois-
cadres) by which Parliament after 1956, instead of transferring a specified
subject to governmental regulation, passed legislation laying down principles
and invited the executive to fill in the details.51
The Reynaud law conferred both temporary and permanent powers.52 'To
make [the administration] more efficient and less costly' (Art. 1) and to
49^%& The Destiny of France, p. 152 (pigeons) ; M. Sieghart, Government by Decree (1950),
pp. 273-304; Scute, pp. 162-5, 184-9; Galichon in Travail, pp. 800-2; Soubeyrol, pp, 21-7.
50, mi* pp. 60-1, 64, 70, cf. 56-71, 74, 183-4; Arae, pp. 154-5; Pinto, no. 181; but cf.
Georgel, L 298. Article 13 was meant to exclude from legislative power the Council of the
Republic and the Assembly's own committees as well as the government.
51"t£SF y* I(?2"3 ^P113111) J J- Donnedieu de Vabres, quoted Institutions, i. 140 (* double
mqtaO; *>«"*£ «* (Oklichon), cf. p. 847 (Hamon); Cottar*, pp. 40-2, 66-8, 78-9;
oonDeyroa, pp. 4-o, 15, 37.
™S^!J?ct °f ^ kwin ****• PP- 215~18' and m AP 1948, p. 363 (of the original bill, ibid , p 339)
01 2*f\f«* **** * *ran. R is My discussed by Pinto, no. iS/anST by Soubeyrol'
^.77-90, Mane sent his ministers a circular (printed in Cotteret, pp. 70-1), asking them not to
introduce bills where regulations would now suffice.
NATIONAL ASSEMBLY (4): LEGISLATION AND FINANCE 271
ensure profitability and encourage individual responsibility in the nationalized
industries (Art. 2), the government was instructed to reorganize them; for
equally vague objectives it was to reform the social security system and fiscal
structure. These powers were subject to time-limits; many decrees under them
needed parliamentary approval; and they could not be used to denationalize
an industry, give up the state's controlling interest in a mixed company, or
reform the army or judiciary. Reynaud's proposed use of them broke up one
government (Marie's), and the next (Schuman's second) was slaughtered at
birth by the Right because they would have been wielded by a Socialist finance
minister. QueuUle then took office and used them little, though he did invoke
them to introduce an unpopular fiscal reform.53
Other powers under this law were unlimited in time, but restricted in scope
to matters, enumerated in detail, 'of a nature to be dealt with by regulations'.
On these, which covered much the same fields but excluded taxation, broad-
casting and the press, governments could override existing (but not future)
legislation by decrees which needed no parliamentary approval, though Par-
liament could always regain its authority by passing a new law. By the end of
1954, 350 decrees had been issued. These permanent powers were used by
Pleven in October 1950 to remove the social services of the gas and electricity
industries from Communist control, and by Ren6 Mayer in 1953 to abolish -
temporarily - the autonomy of the nationalized industries.54
Reynaud's bill was attacked as unconstitutional by the opposition, Ren6
Capitant arguing strongly for the loi-cadre against the d£cret-loi.™ Over the
next five years governments frequently obtained powers to carry out economies,
or reduce or even increase taxes by decree. But Parliament would not repeat
the 1948 precedent on a large scale. Queuille in April 1951 and Pleven in
January 1952 sought powers to reorganize the nationalized railways: the for-
mer was unanimously opposed by the Assembly's communications committee
and the latter (who had also wanted to reform the social services) was over-
thrown on a vote of confidence. Pinay was driven to resign when in the budget
for 1953 he too sought powers to reform the fiscal and social security systems.
But six weeks later Ren<§ Mayer was authorized to do so unless Parliament
dealt with them by bill within three months.56
Asked by Mayer's government for an advisory opinion on the scope of
Article 13, the Conseil d'fitat on 7 February 1953 enunciated *a solution of
compromise and expediency'. It approved the conception (which it had itself
invented) of matters 'of a nature to be dealt with by regulations*. But it
condemned as unconstitutional any delegation of power, either on the
'essential rules' governing matters reserved to the law by the constitution
itself or by the republican tradition expressed in its preamble, or so general
53. This went into force unless modified by Parliament within twenty days ; of 962 clauses one
was abrogated and one amended: Soubeyrol, pp. 88, 141, cf. 126.
54. The spheres of law and regulations are conveniently summarized in Travail, pp. 797-9.
See also Cotteret, pp. 41-4; Soubeyrol, pp. 89 and n., 131, 171 ; Lescuyer, pp. 115-16, 142-70.
55. In 1946 Capitant had argued as a jurist that Article 13 would not prevent decree-laws
(cf. n. 51). But in 1948, as RPF leader, he maintained impressively that it did : JO 9 August 1948,
pp. 5566-70.
56. Soubeyrol, pp. 91-105, 141-3 ; Travail, p. 804; Cotteret, p, 41 ; BC no. 148, 23 April 1951,
p. 4634; AP 1952, pp, 7-9; below, nn. 62, 65, and pp. 343-4.
57
272 THE INSTITUTIONS
or imprecise as to amount to an abdication of parliamentary sovereignty-
Later governments tried not to flout these limits too blatantly, and after one
more revolt Parliament accepted the inevitable. In May 1953 Mayer was
refused powers to impose by decree economies and higher taxes* which
offended in particular the powerful alcohol interest. But Laniel, coming to
office after a seven-week ministerial crisis, won a striking revenge for the
executive. His law of 11 July 1953 temporarily included military and judicial
administration and civil service promotions and retirements within Reynaud's
matters for regulation. It allowed his own government powers to promote
productivity, exports and full employment, and also to defer the operation of
any bill costing money (refused to Mayer) and to co-ordinate the transport
system(refusedto Pleven).58 After 1953 decrees submitted to the Conseil d'Etat
under special powers quadrupled in number.59
Under the next premier, Mendes-France, the Left abandoned its opposition
to decree-laws. The Socialists voted for his law of 14 August 1954, the Com-
munists abstained, and (despite some criticism from MRP members who had
voted for the earlier bills) Article 13 of the constitution was 'formally laid to
rest in an atmosphere of good humour and opportunism'. Though his powers
were confined to his own government, Parliament renewed them to his succes-
sor Edgar Faure - for longer than Faure had asked, and without even a vote
of confidence - and indeed extended them widely. There was no more
opposition on constitutional grounds. Laniel, Mendfcs-France and Faure
issued over 450 decrees in less than two years.60
Up to 1955, 31 bills delegated power to the government, in terms less vague
than in the Third Republic but really precise in only ten cases. However, there
were more genuine safeguards against abuse (though they differed confusingly
from law to law). Under three acts, decrees could be issued only by a specific
government; under most, they had to be approved by the cabinet; under all
the important ones, they went to the Conseil d'fitat, a new and welcome
assurance that they were intra vires.*1 Usually (unless 'of a nature to be dealt
with by regulations') they required eventual parliamentary approval, which
was a more real check than before the war - though the decrees Parliament
rejected were too often the better ones, especially on the subject of alcohol.
Serious parliamentary criticism was frequently appeased by requiring decrees
57. Tbe opinion is translated in Freedeman, pp. 1 69-70, and the original is in RDP 69. 1 (1953),
pp. 170-1; for comments see Monde, 20 February 1953; Travail, pp. 804-5 (*... expediency').
Guy Petit, as minister of state assisting Pinay, had recently drafted a bill defining the * domain of
tlie law*, but the Conseil refused to give an opinion on it then, and in 1956 disapproved Petit's
private member's bfll embodying it: Cotteret, pp. 71-7 (reprints the later bill and opinion). The
CoasdTs responsibility for the idea of matters *by nature* not legislative is asserted by Pinto,
no. 181, pp. 518, 531, and by Freedeman, p. 87, and hinted by Soubeyrol, p. 166.
58. Sonbeyrol, pp. 107-16, 218-20; Chapus, no. 52 (both giving incomplete texts); Travail,
ppj, 805-6. Where the law of 1948 had prudishly authorized the government to modify *les dispo-
sitions en vigiieuT*, that of 1953 frankly specified 'les dispositions legislatives '.
59. The annual average was nil up to 1 948, 59 in the next five years (with a peak of 1 00 in 1 948-9)
and 241 after 1953 (with a peak of 460 in 1954-5) ; but from 1956 many were applicable in Algeria
and the colonies but not in France. See table in Freedeman, p. 90 and n.
6a Soobeyroi, pp. 1 17-31. The 1954 law dropped all reference to the two spheres (p. 120), and
the extension authorized the government to establish taxes, penalties and courts (p. 127).
61. md.3 pp. 159-61, 166, 181-2 (10 of 33); Blamont, pp. 80-2; Travail, p. 804; Cotteret,
pp. 43-5.
NATIONAL ASSEMBLY (4): LEGISLATION AND FINANCE 273
to be submitted for the advice of the finance committee of each house and
sometimes for the consent of the Assembly's; occasionally other committees
were added.62 After 1953 all the major bills followed the Conseil d>£tat by
expressly excluding, first matters reserved to Parliament by the constitution or
its preamble, and secondly the goods and liberties of the citizen. But this
distinction ominously implied that the constitution did not protect civil
liberties. It foreshadowed the encroachments which the Algerian war was
soon to bring, across the Mediterranean in Mollet's special powers law of
March 1956, and in France itself with Bourges-Maunoury's law of June
1957.63
Jurists disliked the special powers bills of 1953-55, despite the new safe-
guards, and preferred the lois-cadres invented by Blum in 1936 and revived -
again by Socialists - in 1956.64 Gaston Defferre's great colonial reform of
23 June 1956 had nine clauses enunciating principles, to be applied by decrees
laid before Parliament. Economic and administrative decrees went into force
at once, political decrees (unless amended or abrogated) after four months.
The two houses agreed on amendments to all the 17 political decrees and to
23 of the 28 others, accepted four unchanged, and let only one go into force by
default. This method satisfied the upper house, and it took only four months
to pass the bill into law and thirteen to bring all the decrees into force. Thus
a determined government and majority could still work the parliamentary
machine efficiently.65
Unlike ordinary legislative procedure, this method concentrated parlia-
mentary discussion on the principles and not on the details which usually
attracted the local pressures. Even when the decrees needed approval the
government was protected, for unless both houses agreed in good time it
could enforce its own text. Unlike the decree-law, which gave a blank cheque
62. For instance, the consent of the finance committee of the Assembly was required for tax
reductions under a law of 8 August 1950, and for budgetary virements between ministries under
Laniel's law (there were precedents as early as December 1945). That of the reconstruction and
defence committees was also needed for changes in their credits (laws of 31 December 1953 and
of 2 April 1954): Soubeyrol, pp. 45ffl, 96, 113, 115. Cf. Blamont, pp. 59-60; Williams, p. 237n.
63. Cf. Soubeyrol, pp. 112, 127. The Conseil d'Etat (like Anglo-Saxon courts) interpreted the
government's powers more widely during war or grave disorder (pp. 149-53) and the constitution
itself extended them overseas, including Algeria (pp. 154-8). The state of urgency, invented by a
1955 law, was invoked only by Pflimlin in 1958 : see Arne, p. 158, and Drago, no. 77. The laws of
1956 and 1957 had no legal or political safeguards at all, except that they had to be renewed when
a new government took office; on them see Petot, no. 174, and Charpentier, no. 54, p. 259.
64. Ibid. (pp. 220-70) ; Cotteret, pp. 66-8 ; cf. M. Prelot in Travail, p. 846; L. Hamon, JO (CR),
25 January 1951, p. 236; R. Capitant, JO 9 August 1948, p. 5566; G. Liet-Veaux in Institutions,
i. 140; and the opinion of the Conseil d^tat (n. 57). On 1953-5, also Blamont, pp. 80-1 ; Duverger,
System, p. 58; cf. Goguel, no. 107, p. 854n. On both, Soubeyrol, pp. 180-6.
65. Charpentier, no. 54, pp. 230-5, 251, 253, 255, 260-3 ; cf. Blamont, pp. 82-3. The bill had
seven other clauses on the electoral system: a matter for the law. Decrees accepted unchanged by
the overseas territories committees were not debated in the house. The solitary decree put into
force by default had been approved by the Assembly, but the Council thought it unfair to property.
On Mollet's political strength see above, p. 235. Defferre's *tacit consent* procedure had prece-
dents (with less generous time-limits) in Queuille's fiscal reform of 9 December 1948 and Mayer's
law of 7 February 1953 (above, n. 53 and p. 271) ; also in the rearmament budget of 8 January
1951, by which Parliament authorized the cabinet to increase existing taxes by £25 million unless
within a month it had voted corresponding economies: Soubeyrol, pp. 98-9, 142-3; cf. Louis-
Lucas, no. 147, p. 746. Under it the cabinet raised the petrol tax; the finance committee voted
against it by 40 to 1 : BC no. 9, 13 November 1951, p. 142,
274 THE INSTITUTIONS
to a man, title loi-cadre allowed and indeed required the collaboration of
government and Parliament on a precise programme. But this closer contact
meant greater political risks, which could be run only by a strong cabinet,
and once political conditions ceased to favour this co-operation the new pro-
cedure worked less well or was abandoned altogether.66 The housing act of
August 1957, for all its 62 clauses, still left the government undue discretion
over aims as well as methods; and the Algerian institutions law of February
1958 disappointed the Moslems without conciliating the Right, whose par-
liamentary assault was only postponed until the decrees were laid before the
house. Two more enabling bills on agriculture and the Common Market were
never passed.67 And Mollef s successors preferred Laniel-type decree-laws for
their financial legislation, since those deputies who wanted to avoid respon-
sibility for voting on the details of a law had no desire to pronounce on the
decrees which followed.68
Delegation had great political advantages. First, it limited Parliament's
opportunities to wear down governmental authority. If the premiers of 1953-
1955 demanded far fewer votes of confidence than their predecessors, this
was partly because special powers freed them from the need to whip thek
supporters into line on every contentious point. But while a ministry with a
stable majority could make constructive use of Parliament, a weak and vul-
nerable one needed special powers to restore the balance of the system.69
Secondly, on some contentious questions a parliamentary minority had such
opportunities to obstruct, or a majority so feared the electoral repercussions of
its votes, that special powers gave the only hope of action. But the deter-
mination of the executive could not be inferred from the impotence of the
legislature. Parliament showed conspicuous cowardice over all aspects of the
alcohol problem - beets, bars and bouilleurs; yet the reversal of Mayer's
proposals under Laniel and of Mend&s-France's decrees under Faure showed
that ministers, too, might lack political courage. If governments sought
special powers to avoid a legislative battle, they often failed to get them like
Pleven and Mayer, broke up over them like Marie, or met a violent reaction
when they tried to use them, like Laniel.70
The parliamentary bottleneck often made delegation necessary even on
uncontroversial matters. When the overloaded Conseil d'fitat was breaking
down in 1953, Mayer's government introduced a bill to transfer the lesser
cases to lower administrative courts ; it was so delayed by other measures and a
government crisis that only Laniel's special powers brought it into force that
year. In the same Assembly the industrial production committee, which was on
excellent terms with its ministers, buried 7 of their 19 bills for sheer lack of
time. Unfortunately special powers might make the worst of both worlds, for
too often the civil service, unprepared with major reforms, used its delegated
66. Oiaipeotier, no. 54, pp, 252-7, 260-70; cf. Capitant, JO 9 August 1948, pp. 5566, 5570.
* ' diflfered on «** m' See Charpentier, no. 54,
n n *"**• Cottere^ PP- 67-8; no. 161, p. 846
, no. 54, pp. 259-60 ; Cotter*, p. 44 ; Georgel, i. 300.
<>• *». P* 3H. On
70, Sonbeyrol, p. 7 (revolts) ; below, pp. 356-7 (alcohol).
NATIONAL ASSEMBLY (4): LEGISLATION AND FINANCE 275
authority for hasty and piecemeal enactment of minor projects which had
been on its shelves for years. Ten weeks before the regime collapsed a Socialist
complained that 'more and more we tend to administer from the Palais Bour-
bon, while more and more the departmental bureaucracy spends its time
legislating in our place'.71
The grievance was genuine but the trend was not, for in the third Parlia-
ment real progress was made in tackling the problem. While the flood of bills
somewhat abated, a higher proportion of private members* measures was
passed. Within metropolitan France even the governments which abdicated
to the military in Algeria made less use than their predecessors of their
delegated powers to alter the law. The genuine loi-cadre was better than either
the uncontrolled decree-laws of the thirties or even the improved model of the
fifties, and in different political conditions might have increased Parliament's
output without diminishing its authority. But no technical reforms could
solve the inextricable political deadlock over the Algerian war; and the Fourth
Republic ended, like the Third, with the most sweeping delegation of all when
Parliament abandoned its authority to change the laws and the constitution
into the hands of a national hero.72 These capitulations were ratified both by
the deputies and by their colleagues who manned that last bastion of republi-
can traditionalism, the upper house.
71. Ren6 Dejean, JO 18 March 1958, p. 1636. On the courts bill, Soubeyrol, p. 114; on the
committee, Harrison, pp. 213-14; onfonds de tiroirs reforms, Brindillac, no. 29, p. 58.
72. Of the three laws passed on 3 June 1958, one gave de Gaulle the same Algerian special
powers as previous governments. Another gave him full powers for six months, except over: matters
reserved for the law by the constitutional preamble; civil and trade union liberties; the definition
of and penalties for criminal offences; *the fundamental guarantees accorded to citizens'; and
the electoral law. The third (on which see above, p. 56, and below, p. 303) allowed the govern-
ment to draft a new constitution to be approved by referendum. This, in its last Article (92),
empowered the government during the next four months to dp anything necessary for the life
of the nation, protection of the citizens, or safeguarding of liberties; and also to settle the electoral
law. See AP 1958, pp. 71-4, 542-4, 561.
Chapter 20
THE COUNCIL OF THE REPUBLIC
The Senate had been a political bastion of the Third Republic, but its social
and economic conservatism made it unpopular in 1946. The constitution-
makers reduced its powers and changed its method of election; but when the
conservative forces revived they restored the old type of electoral system, in
1948, and some of the lost powers, in the constitutional amendment of 1954.
That compromise settlement ended the guerrilla warfare between the houses,
for while the new second chamber was no more progressive than the old it was
weaker and less obstructive.
1- THE BACKGROUND
The Senate of the Third Republic was the chief obstacle placed by the founders
in the way of a majority of the Left. They took every precaution to make it
safely conservative. It was elected by delegates of the local authorities whose
numbers were weighted, against the great cities, to favour the countryside and
later the small provincial towns.1 These local authorities were often less pro-
gressive than their constituents, for many villages which voted Left in national
elections chose as mayor a Conservative with the time and experience to run
local affairs: Aisne, for example, returned seven deputies of the Left and four
senators of the Right, Senators were chosen for nine years, a third retiring at a
time; as the local councils had themselves been elected earlier, the Senate
represented the out-of-date opinions of an excessively conservative consti-
tuency. The minimum age was 40 and the average much higher.2 A quarter of
the members were to be chosen for life by the monarchist lower house elected in
1871.
Although the Senate seemed an impregnable bastion of conservatism, the
Rightsoon lost control of it by internecine quarrelling. In 18 84 the Republicans
forced through a constitutional amendment which abolished life senatorships
as the incumbents died off, and altered the electoral colleges to strengthen the
small country towns (though not the great cities) at the expense of the rural
areas. By 1900 the Senate and Chamber were both passing from the hands of
the moderate Republicans into those of the Radicals. Thus the twentieth-
century Senate did not stand openly on one side of the party battle like a
French House of Lords ; it kept squarely in the centre. It consistently opposed
proportional representation, which was favoured by both Socialists and Con-
servatives but disliked by the groups between them. The typical senator was
characterized as a professional man from the provinces, 'a moderate and
ardently patriotic Radical; against the Left which threatens his savings; yet
24 dele*ates ' ^ rest °f *« department with
*» dozen
Cf HSriS'^T ^Km W0te> 'By definition & «™tors «« old' : Le Po'litique (1923), p. 35.
1 - 267n
THE COUNCIL OF THE REPUBLIC 277
afraid of being governed by "Reaction"; liberal but conservative, anti-
socialist but timid; a subscriber to Le Temps, an anticlerical . . . whose wife
attends 7 a.m. mass'.3 He and his colleagues were decisive in maintaining the
negative policy (ni reaction ni revolution) to which the majority of the elec-
torate was wedded : and this was the secret of their power.
The Senate differed from the House of Lords in authority as well as in out-
look. Because its members sat for a long term and were generally re-elected, it
tended to attract the ablest parliamentarians - who in turn reinforced its
power and increased its attractiveness. The senators, unlike British peers, had
all undergone a regular political apprenticeship and were elected by active
local politicians. More skilful than the Lords, they rarely rejected bills out-
right: those they disliked were buried in committees and never emerged.4
They never challenged governments fresh from a general election; they did
not need to. For majorities of the Left were always unstable, since their
marginal members tended to seek a change of allies when the elections were
past and the budget had to be dealt with. When the moderate Radicals in the
Chamber began to contemplate switching from working with Socialists to
working with Conservatives, their friends in the upper house would intervene
to hasten their decision.
Instead of defying public opinion, the senators tried to circumvent it or
waited for it to change. Before a surge of popular feeling like that of 1936 they
would bow gracefully, accepting legislation which they detested in the justi-
fiable confidence that their revenge would not be long delayed. In the later
years of the Third Republic they extended their power to government-making,
although constitutionally their right to do so was not clear. After ejecting only
three ministries in the first 55 years, they overthrew four in the last decade - of
which they found two unduly clerical and two dangerously socialist.
The senators exercised a cautious influence on policy by hampering pro-
gressive legislation, wearing down and occasionally destroying governments,
and keeping the £lys£e, through the presidential electoral college, in safe and
conservative hands. With so clear a political bias the Senate's status was
naturally controversial. The Radicals wanted to abolish it, until it came under
their control ; Antonin Dubost wrote a book against it, ended life as its presi-
dent, and was succeeded in the chair by the first premier overthrown by the
upper house, L£on Bourgeois. But the demand for its abolition was taken up
by the under-represented Socialists, and at the Liberation the end seemed to
have come.5
With tripartisme in the ascendant and Radicals discredited, the old-
fashioned anticlerical conservatism of the Senate was thoroughly unpopular
in October 1945; and the 25-to-l referendum vote against a return to the
Third Republic was partly a vote of censure on it. Accordingly there was no
3. W. d'Ormesson, Qifest-ce qifunFrancais? . . . Clemenceau, Briand, Poincare (1934), pp. 52-3.
I owe this and the Barthou reference to Dr. D. B. Goldey.
4. Woman suffrage and real proportional representation were blocked until the end ; effective
secrecy of the ballot for nine years, income tax for eight, a weekly rest-day in industry for four,
pensions for railwaymen for twelve: Sharp, p. 127; Barthelemy, Goitvernement, p. 82. Cf.
above, p. 1 1 8 (woman suffrage) ; below, p. 308 (PR).
5. Forms of influence: Duverger, VIe, pp. 98-100; cf. above, p. 196. Dubost and Bourgeois:
E. M. Sait, The Government and Politics of France (New York, 1920), p. 125.
278 THE INSTITUTIONS
second chamber, but only two advisory bodies not forming part of Parlia-
ment, in the draft constitution which was defeated at the second referendum of
May 1946. In the new Constituent Assembly three tendencies clashed. The
Radicals and their allies favoured a return to the old Senate. M RP (like
General de Gaulle) wanted a broadly corporative chamber representing pro-
fessional interests, colonial territories, and local authorities. The Communists
and Socialists recognized that there had to be a second chamber if the new
constitution was to be accepted at the polls, but hoped to keep it feeble and
submissive; they prevailed at the time, but had to concede that while the
powers of the new body were laid down in the constitution, its composition
should be left to an organic law and reconsidered two years later,6 A new
electoral law in 1948 and a constitutional amendment in 1954 partially
restored the old Senate.
The Council of the Republic passed through three phases. The first Council
was similar to the Assembly in party complexion, and stilled some suspicions
by its cautious determination not to overstep the bounds. For a time it was
disregarded, but within a couple of years it had defended itself successfully
against encroachment by the deputies, helped the government resist their
demagogic pressure, and acquired a reputation as a genuine 'house of second
thoughts'. The second Council, based on a rural and conservative consti-
tuency very like that of the old Senate, was elected when Radicals and Con-
servatives were fellow-travelling with RPF; and by trying to regain the
Senate's powers, revive its conservative role and destroy the Third Force
majority, it reawakened old suspicions and damaged its cause. But the
absorption of the Gaullists into 'the System' reduced party friction, and when
procedural concessions were no longer likely to lead to political deadlock
it became possible to remedy the technical faults of the 1946 constitution.
2. COMPOSITION AND POWERS
The Council's composition was laid down by Article 6. It was elected by
'universal mdirect suffrage' on a territorial basis by local and departmental
communities - a vague formula open to many interpretations; it was to have
from 250 to 320 members, renewable by halves; and up to a sixth might be
elected by the National Assembly by proportional representation. A com-
pEcated law of 27 October 1946 feed its membership at 315, one more than in
the old Senate. Most (200) were chosen by electoral colleges in each depart-
ment of metropolitan France. These included the local deputies and depart-
mental council (very roughly like a county council) and an overwhelming
majority of elected delegates.7 First the citizen cast his vote for a list of * grand
electors* which he could not alter; between lists the seats were distributed by
PR. The electoral colleges then chose the Councillors of the Republic: 68 by
ample majority vote in departments which had only one councillor apiece • 59
by PR in the 22 larger departments. Another 73 seats were allocated between
£r matter °f S°VOTm^tal organization (e.g. presentation
30°
THE COUNCIL OF THE REPUBLIC 279
parties to achieve PR (based on the first-stage voting) over the whole country,
and to the unelected candidates of each party who had the highest proportion
of votes polled in their constituencies. The local government bodies of Algeria
chose 14 members, and those of French territories overseas, 51. The last 50
councillors were elected by the National Assembly: 3 to represent Frenchmen
living abroad and 5 those in Tunisia and Morocco; 7 assigned to ensure still
more accurate nation-wide PR; 35 allocated proportionately between parties
in the Assembly. These elaborate provisions ensured that party strengths in
the first Council almost reproduced those in the first National Assembly.
Article 102 required the whole Council to be renewed within two years, after
the election of new local authorities. By that time the Communists were in
active opposition to the regime, and Gaullism had attracted a great following.
PR had now lost favour with the parliamentary majority, to whom it would
give only a minority of seats. Article 6 was therefore reinterpreted, and a
different electoral system was introduced. Under the new law of 24 September
1948, the term of membership was six years; half still had to be renewed at a
time. As in 1946 there was a minimum age of 35. A candidate might not stand
in more than one constituency at a time (as he could for the old Senate). There
were 246 metropolitan councillors (four extra) and 74 from overseas (one
extra): in all 320, the constitutional maximum.8 Each department had a seat
for its first 154,000 inhabitants and another for each subsequent 250,000 or
fraction thereof.9 Nation-wide PR and partial election by the National
Assembly were abandoned.
In the electoral colleges P R was now to operate only in the 1 1 departments
with a population above 654,000 and four or more seats, which elected 72
councillors. The remaining 79 departments, with 174 seats, elected by majority
vote and two ballots.10 The electoral colleges were revolutionized. With the
deputies and departmental councillors there now sat, instead of the 85,000
grand electors, 100,000 representatives of the municipal councils according to
their size (which rises, not proportionately, with population). The 1,312
councils of communes with over 3,500 inhabitants elected their delegates by
PR; the other 37,000 used a majority vote with three ballots. Thus the 1946
system of thinly disguised direct election was replaced by an indirect method
which, as in the Third Republic, favoured small communities against large.
As Communists and RP F were strongest in the cities, this electoral law helped
the parties supporting the regime.11
The weighting was slightly less extreme than before. The rural half of the
8. After French India was ceded there were 319. The members were divided alphabetically by
constituencies into two equal groups; one, chosen by lot, was renewed in May 1952 and the other
in May 1955.
9. The curious limit of 154,000 gave a second member to Lot, the new constituency of the
Council's President Gaston Monnerville : Intgalitts, pp. 216-1 8, 259-61 . The allotment gave Lozere
one councillor for 90,000 inhabitants and Seine one for every 240,000 : Goguel, Rtgime, p. 35n.
10. As usual with a double ballot system, for election on the first ballot the majority required
was more than half the votes cast and more than a quarter of those on the register ; on the second
ballot it was a simple plurality. The Assembly was still to elect councillors representing Frenchmen
abroad (three), in Morocco (three), and (provisionally) in Vietnam (one, a newcomer) ; the two
from Tunisia were now chosen locally.
11. Intgalitts, pp. 1 12-34, 334-6, on the motives of the 1946 and 1948 laws and the way they
were framed.
THE INSTITUTIONS
population elected two-thirds of the municipal delegates and the urban half
(in communes of more than 3,500 inhabitants) chose one-third. Even in a
department with no big city like Oise, nearly two-thirds of the delegates were
elected by tiny communes with less than 1,000 inhabitants and under half the
total population. In Nord, Lille had 180,000 voters and 64 delegates, Lamber-
sart 18,000 and 27, and Arleux 1,800 and 5. Yet the large cities were under-
represented rather less than in pre-war senatorial elections ; with three-quarters
of the population Marseilles elected 7% of the departmental delegates in the
Third Republic, 25% in the Fourth. Paris, with a reduced share of the popula-
tion of Seine, chose more delegates. The eleven next largest towns, with one-
sixteenth of the national population, had 264 delegates before and 900 now
out of 100,000.12
The new law weakened those parties which were strongest in the great
cities and also those with few allies, hampered by the double ballot; the Com-
munists were doubly handicapped, and elected only sixteen metropolitan
councillors in the eleven PR departments. MRP lost votes to RPF and seats
to Socialists and Radicals, who allied against it. The two defeated parties had
had a majority in the old Council (as in the Assembly), but returned only 40 of
the 320 new members. The Socialists with 60 held their own, and the rest went
to overlapping groups of Radicals, Conservatives and RPF. In later years the
Gaullists lost and the Radicals gained slightly, but the party balance changed
remarkably little.13 &
The constitution-makers insisted on the subordinate status of the upper
house. Its composition was left to be settled by law (and so, in the last resort,
by the National Assembly). In 1946 it was organized in the political image of
the Assembly so that it would not, and its powers were restricted so that it
could not, challenge the sovereign house. The first safeguard was removed
after two years, the second after eight. But the 1954 constitutional amendment
satisfied both houses and settled their conflict.
Under Article 5 the Council of the Republic was part of Parliament. It had
the same immunity, salary and ineligibility rules as the Assembly, judged the
validity of its members' election, and chose its bureau by PR Against the
wishes of the Left, it was housed (like the old Senate) in the Luxembourg
Palace. But precautions were taken to discourage a revival of the senatorial
tradition. The National Assembly was given that title, denoting sovereignty
wtoch had formerly belonged to the two houses meeting jointly to elect a
Prudent or amend the constitution. Its President became the second person
m the state, and under Article 11 its bureau acted in a joint session (in the
Third Repubhc the Senate's bureau had acted and its President, as in the
in Infealites nn 214-91 vr> <i «V A T „ * *ysiem> pp. /i-2, ana
r
gates, tea tosmoret&an Toulouse where most people lived?/6«?.p 345 pT^verlresentation
THE COUNCIL OF THE REPUBLIC 281
Fifth, had precedence). Article 37 allowed the President of the Republic to
communicate directly with the Assembly but not the Council. Article 9 re-
quired the Council's sessions to coincide with those of the Assembly. But
despite all precautions the tradition proved too strong, and in December 1948
the new majority of the Council voted themselves the title of * Senators, mem-
bers of the Council of the Republic'.
Under Article 29 the new senators, like their predecessors, joined the
deputies in electing a President of the Republic; they had about a third of the
votes. They also chose a third of the metropolitan members of the Assembly of
the French Union, by Article 67, and four out of thirteen members of the
Constitutional Committee, by Article 91. But they had no representative on
the High Council of the Judiciary or the High Court which tried political
cases (a task performed in the Third Republic by the Senate). They could
initiate no constitutional amendment; but they could block one unless either
a referendum or two-thirds of the Assembly approved it, and if the President
of the Republic agreed they could alert the Constitutional Committee to sur-
reptitious amendment.14 They had to be consulted (but not necessarily to
consent) before war was declared, under Article 7, a treaty ratified, under
Article 27, or a law passed, under Article 20.
In June 1949 the new majority of the Council argued that their duty to
advise on declarations of war or ratifications of treaties implied a right to dis-
cuss ministerial policy. They therefore introduced interpellations, in all but
name, by modifying their standing orders on 'oral questions with debate'.15
The Assembly objected that by Article 48 the government was not responsible
to the Council, and so should not be interpellated there; Herriot officially
protested to the President of the Republic, but Auriol refused to intervene,
saying that the Constitutional Committee existed only to protect the upper
house against the lower.16 A few Radical premiers even disregarded Article
48 altogether. In August 1948 Andr6 Marie threatened to resign if the Council
amended Paul Reynaud's special powers bill; in March 1955 Edgar Faure
sought its approval for his foreign policy, including German rearmament; and
in June 1957 Maurice Bourges-Maunoury in effect asked for its confidence
over special financial powers. But such cases were very rare.17
In legislation the Council's powers were closely restricted until the con-
stitutional amendment of 1954. Although its members might introduce bills of
their own, under Article 14 these had to go to the National Assembly before
being debated in the Council. But in June 1949 the upper house decided in its
14. On these institutions and functions see Chapter 21.
15. Previously only a committee, a party leader or 30 members could initiate these * questions*,
and no vote was taken.
16. Lidderdale, pp. 267-9 ; Bruyas, no. 36, pp. 568-70 ; Georgel, i. 85-7 ; Blamont, p. 107 ; below,
p. 305 ; cf. n. 23 ; and for the Herriot and Auriol letters, AP 1949, p. 219. From 10 to 25 oral
questions with debate were raised in a year: Campbell, no. 45, p. 361. In fact, if not in law,
interpellations did threaten the life of the government; and as constitution-drafter and premier
of the Fifth Republic Michel DebrS carefully ruled out the procedure which he had himself
invented and skilfully exploited. On the Council's scrutiny of governmental actions see also
Georgel, i. 84-5 (on a committee of inquiry) ; Grosser, pp. 89-90; Marcel Plaisant, chairman of
its foreign affairs committee, no. 182.
17. Bruyas, no. 36, p. 571, JO(CJR} 13 August 1948, p. 2402, and AP 1948, p. 132 (Marie);
AP 1955, pp. 29, 359, 691 (Faure); cf. Vedel in Institutions, i. 180, Arne, pp. 232-4, 256-7, 270-K
282 THE INSTITUTIONS
new standing orders that its committees should examine these bills, unless the
author objected, before sending them to the Assembly. The Communist,
Socialist and MRP deputies promptly revived the old majority of tripartisme
and voted by 429 to 150 (Radicals, Conservatives and RPF) to receive no bill
after its consideration by senators.18
Once a bill passed the Assembly it became law, under Article 20, if the
Council did not deal with it within two months. But for budget bills the Coun-
cil could take no more time than the Assembly had taken, and for bills
classed as 'urgent*, only as much as the Assembly allowed itself by its own
standing orders. The deputies were naturally wary of the senators' traditional
delaying tactics, but they committed an opposite abuse by applying urgency
procedure to half the bills passed in 1947, and so preventing proper examina-
tion in the Council's committees.19 At last, in June 1948, the Assembly left
the Council only 33 hours (including two nights) to consider an urgent but
difficult bill; the Council decided unanimously, except for the Communists,
to overrun its time-limit ; the Assembly, with the agreement of all parties in it,
demanded that the bill be promulgated under Article 20. The Council pro-
tested to the Constitutional Committee and won its point. The rules of urgency
procedure were then relaxed to allow the Council at least three days' grace;
and the procedure itself gradually fell into disuse.20
A bill which passed the Council unchanged was promulgated forthwith as
law. If the Council voted amendments, the Assembly might reject them, or
accept them in whole or in part.21 There could be no further amendments
aiming at an agreed compromise, as in the Third Republic's 'shuttle' system
of several readings (navette). But under the last paragraph of Article 20, if the
Council rejected a bill or voted an amended version in public ballot by an
absolute majority, the Assembly could overrule it only in the same conditions.
This 'veto' seemed unimportant until the law of September 1948 created a
Council politically very different from the Assembly. In finance there were
further restrictions. By Article 17 only the deputies could initiate expenditure.
By Article 14 the Assembly could not receive senators' bills increasing expen-
diture or reducing revenue, so that no one could discuss these. By their own
standing orders senators might not move amendments to increase an amount
proposed in the Assembly by the government or the finance committee.22 In
1950 they were prevented from introducing new material into financial bills by
way of amendments.23
18. Lidderdate, pp. 259-60; JO 28 June 1949, pp. 3801-9, 3836-7
* J9' 2* l^47 'Cbnuaiy-Angust) the Council amended only 27 of the 88 'urgent ' bills but 39 of
™^7-lF;G*>110* 105' pp* 345~6- See a*80 Ger**r, no. 97, pp. 407-9; above, p. 259 and n.
fe^f^^Tt^5 ^19^Pi\98' 336; SouHer' n° *>3> pp- 19Sff. The Assembles
to«*tat j^cjKied, the Council's included time spent in committee. Only half a dozen bills
am^S^S^ «T ^SS*1 WitMn ** A^Uy'5 strict interpretation of the rules: S.
GTKmbach, JO{CR) 15 June 1948, p. 1504 (cf. below, n. 29).
21. Interpreted to include a compromise figure between different amounts: see Blamont, no.
2Q» pp. 305-6. *
to^cr^r^^ 26S ; GaHdl011 m TravaU> p* 833' Umike Pre-war senators they could move
b^^^t^f!9^"^^7 * ^ Practice and oral ^tion with debate were both banned
^fee^gmal draft of the 1954 constitutional amendment: cf. Williams, p. 279n., and the speech
and report of Mme Peyrotes, rapporteur (JO 29 November 1950, p. 8267; AN doc. no. 11 431)
THE COUNCIL OF THE REPUBLIC 283
Experience revealed serious technical faults in these legislative arrange-
ments. One flaw followed from the constitutional rules: the Council could not
deal with bills till they had passed the Assembly, but both houses had to
begin, end and interrupt their sessions together. The Council's agenda was
therefore empty when it assembled and crowded just before it recessed, and
the senators suffered alternately from frustrating idleness and gross over-
work.24 Another flaw was the rigidity of Article 20, under which any com-
promise between the houses required unsatisfactory subterfuges.25 Again,
after 1948 the new Council often used its 'veto'. Nearly one in ten of the bills
voted in the first Parliament was amended or defeated by an absolute majority
of the Council. If the Assembly then reaffirmed its own view by a simple
majority only, the bill was neither accepted nor rejected. This deadlock
occurred on six bills, including major measures like the electoral law and the
budget for 1951; they had to be sent back to the Assembly's committee, or
withdrawn and a new version substituted, while a compromise was worked
out in private negotiations.26 The old navette had been much more convenient.
The constitutional amendment introduced by the centre parties in Novem-
ber 1950 was intended (inter alia) to remedy both these weaknesses. But the
Council's political attitude delayed its passage. Socialist and MRP deputies
were willing to improve the machinery for co-operation between the houses,
but not to help the upper house regain its lost political power; they demanded
the abolition of the 'veto' as the price of reform. Conversely the conservative
senators feared that without that safeguard the deputies would ignore them
entirely. It took four years to appease these suspicions, for the technical prob-
lem could not be solved while a left-wing Assembly jealous of its prerogatives
confronted a conservative Council with which the Gaullists were trying to
shatter the Third Force majority. In 1951 the Right won control of the
Assembly also, and when RPF disintegrated the Radicals and Conservatives
could hope to amend the constitution - provided they conciliated MRP and
the Socialists, ensured a three-fifths majority in the Assembly, and so avoided
the referendum which all the centre parties regarded as unthinkable. By the
final compromise Articles 14 and 20 were completely changed.27
The new Article 14 allowed any bill to be introduced in the upper house, by
the government or a senator, except for treaty ratification bills under Article
27 and bills entailing lower revenue or higher expenditure (the Council failed
24. Ibid. Cf. Edmond Barrachin, minister for constitutional reform, JO 21 July 1953, p. 3595.
25. *. . . you can watch the deputies falling furiously upon the amendment with big sdsorrs
and a pot of glue, trying to suppress a few words . . . without adding a comma or a syllables (of
that would be a breach of Article 20) and to reconstruct a draft which still does not violate syntax
too outrageously' : Waline, Les Partis contre la Rfyublique, p. 156. For the subterfuges see Mme
Peyroles' report, pp. 7-8 ; Bruyas, no. 36, p. 560; Berlia, no. 11, p. 682 h.l.
26. Blamont, no. 20, p. 309; and cf. below, n. 47. The first Assembly passed 1,360 bills; the
Council accepted 774, amended or rejected 540 (121 by an absolute majority), and had 46 out-
standing in 1951 : ibid., pp. 298, 302. By March 1953 the 121 had risen to 168, with no more
deadlocks : Berlia, no. 12a, p. 437. The Council altered two-fifths of all bills, and saw all its
amendments accepted on about a third of these, some accepted on half, and none on the rest:
Campbell, no. 45, p. 356. But cf. n. 41 below.
27. See above, p. 193 ; and on referendum-phobia, below, p. 302 and n. MRP was more in-
transigent than S FI O (it was weaker in the upper house). In November 1954, 21 of its deputies
voted against the reform and 50 abstained; cf. above, p. 228,
284 THE INSTITUTIONS
to limit the last restriction to bills 'directly' causing expense). On Article 20 a
complicated bargain restored the navette, subject to safeguards against
obstruction., in return for the abandonment of the 'veto '. An absolute majority
of the Assembly was therefore no longer needed to override an absolute
majority in the upper house, but bills could now be read repeatedly. An
ingenious system of time-limits encouraged both houses to act promptly, and
the Assembly kept its right to the last word.28
For its first reading the Council had no more time than before for ordinary
bills (two months) or finance bills (the time taken in the Assembly), but twice
as much for bills under urgency procedure (double the time the Assembly
gave itself by its own standing orders) - though these limits were not strictly
enforced.29 The major change came with a bill's second passage through the
Assembly, which opened a navette period : a hundred sitting days for ordinary
bills, a month for budget bills, and two weeks for urgent measures. After this
the Assembly could either pass its own version of the bill or add some or all of
the Council's amendments. At each reading within these periods, each house
had as much time as the other had taken on its last reading (but at least one
day for financial or urgent bills, and seven for others). The Council could have
extra time if the deputies consented, and automatically did if they overstepped
their own time-limits.30 These complicated arrangements proved far more
satisfactory than those of 1875 or 1946. The navette restored flexibility with-
out encouraging delay, since the Council wanted several readings and the
Assembly feared to extend the time-limit. Impatient deputies could no longer
get their way by ignoring the upper house, and stubborn senators could be
overruled in the end; for both there was a premium on co-operation. The
Council lost its 'veto* on a bill but gained opportunity and time (two months
plus 100 days) to publicize its case.31
The compromise was an immediate success. Most of the budget for 1955
was passed in 1954 under the newly-voted rules. The Council did not obstruct
and the Assembly often allowed it extra time. Old jealousies did not prevent
an amicable agreement between the Presidents of the two houses on the inter-
pretation of the new rules, or unofficial contacts on most controversial bills.32
No flood of bills swamped the Council when it won the right of first reading.
In 1955, when Edgar Faure led a conservative majority, 41 government bills
were introduced there but only one passed; in 1956-58 with the Socialists in
28. An ©artier version limited not the time but the number of readings to three in the Council
and four in the Assembly: the senators disliked this. The Gaullists tried to save the 'veto*, but
were beaten in the Council itself by 197 to 98.
29. Wtee the old draft had said a time-expired bill 'est promulguee', the new one said it *est
en etm d'etre prooralgoee*. See also above, n. 20, and below, pp. 305-6.
30. This last provision nearly wrecked the compromise; the deputies accepted it only by 307
to 305 after an appeal by the premier, Mendes-France. They also wanted a right to add new
material without allowing the Council a new reading. Conversely the Council failed to secure an
ED C clause' that no treaty ratification bill could be classed as urgent without its consent.
J~:J5*^ £*??*"*!? J*f Poutier' pp* 77~1Q2* The nght-wing Radical senator Laffargue
atotted that the Council had never expected the deputies to concede so much : /O(CJ?) 16 March
1954, p. 422. On the premiums' cf. Gilbert Jules, rapporteur: ibid., p. 425.
32. Poutier, pp. 37-8 on the first month; Blamont, Techniques, p. 77 on tteprotocole d> accord
(fliere was another on the working of the lois-cadres, ibid., p. 78, cf. p. 84) ; and see AP 1957
THE COUNCIL OF THE REPUBLIC 285
office, only 37 were laid before the upper house but 25 became law. Once the
senators could debate their own measures they brought in fewer, but passed
more.33 Discussion was not dilatory, and the time-limits worked well; only
once did the Assembly vote a bill which the Council had failed to consider in
time. Out of 500 bills passed only six, none of them politically controversial,
were decided by a 'Waterloo' after the hundred days - the Assembly re-
affirmed its own text on five of them and accepted the Council's amendments
on the sixth.34 But its right to the last word, though so rarely exercised, was
decisive in preventing obstruction. Mollet's old age pension fund set up in
1956, was financed in ways disliked by the Right and many Radicals: the
Council twice voted wrecking amendments, but gave way when the Assembly
reasserted its view for the third time, and the bill (which was classed as
urgent) finally passed on fourth reading 97 days after its introduction.35 Here
was proof that a determined government and majority could overcome
senatorial opposition without undue difficulty or delay. The Council's tech-
nical grievances had been remedied without the Assembly's political supremacy
being impaired.
3. POLICY AND INFLUENCE
'The Right has social preoccupations but pretends to think only of technical
considerations, while the Left proclaims its social repugnances and refuses to
pay attention to technical considerations.'36 This double problem bedevilled
discussion of the weaknesses of the 1946 arrangements. But the second cham-
ber's case, already endangered by the black social record of the old Senate and
the rural and conservative bias of the reconstructed Council, was for years
further imperilled by the irresponsible ways in which some opposition senators
sought advantage for their party or their house. They provoked the deputies
into jealousy of the Council's prestige, suspicion of its intentions and con-
tempt for its proposals, and they frustrated their own colleagues who tried
conscientiously to perform a more modest role.
The first Council of the Republic had made no attempt to challenge a
National Assembly controlled by the same parties. At first, 'complacently
listening to the echo of its own voice', the Assembly often ignored the sugges-
tions of the Council, which was said to have little more political importance
than the Academic franfaise.37 But from June 1947 onwards the deputies
became more accommodating; the Communists were in opposition, and the
Council explained its proposals by personal contacts between committee
rapporteurs or through the good offices of the government. Amendments
33. Figures from Cotteret, p. 48. Until 1954, senators introduced 74 bills in an average year
and passed 4 ; afterwards, 46 and 8.
34. Blamont, pp. 77-8, for the Assembly's decisions, with list of bills. Edmond Barrachm said
there were eleven ' Waterloos' and not six: JO 12 February 1958, p. 743. In 1956 all but 6 of the
86 government bills which passed, and all but 8 of the 53 private members' bills, took two readings
or fewer in each house ; only 3 and 1 took more than three readings (my calculations).
35. AP 1956, pp. 57-8, 63-4, 125.
36. Hamon, ProbUmes, p. 25 (from Combat, 13 March 1954).
37. Duverger, Manuel de droit constitutionnel, p. 355 ('echo'); Priouret, Partis, p. 263
('Academic'). In March 1947 the Council unanimously rejected a series of changes in tenancy
laws; they were reaffirmed by the Assembly unanimously and without debate: Gerber, no. 97,
p. 407.
286 THE INSTITUTIONS
clarifying the Algerian government bill and modifying the municipal election
bill were accepted by the Assembly.38
The Council first acted on the political stage in November 1947, when the
Communists - though bitter opponents of a strong upper house - used it to
obstruct the government's public order bills during the general strike. In
December 1947 and August 1948 the Council helped the government by
restoring its original drafts of Ren6 Mayer's special levy bill and Paul Rey-
naud's special powers bill (which the deputies, having shifted the responsibility,
then accepted). In September the Council was allowed to amend the new law
on its own composition. But when the Communist councillors nearly upset
the government by carrying a vote for early departmental council elections,
they showed the Gaullists how easily the second chamber could be used as a
weapon against the first.39 The entire upper house faced re-election in Novem-
ber 1948; if RPF won an absolute majority it could block all legislation for
which an absolute majority of the Assembly could not be found, and might
well be able to force an election.
This strategy narrowly failed. Though RPF's inter-group claimed 150 of
the 320 senators, only 58 joined the separate RPF group and many ' bigamists *
proved unreliable. In the first test, on budgetary procedure, Pierre de Gaulle
mustered only 132 votes (including 21 Communists) against 154. The govern-
ment thus kept a precarious margin against the opponents of the regime in the
supposedly sober 'house of second thoughts'. But the success of Gaullists and
Radicals, and the defeat of Communists and M RP, meant that on opposition
and government benches alike the social and economic conservatives were far
stronger in the second chamber than in the first.40
The new majority promptly set out to increase the Council's powers, failing
over legislation but succeeding over oral question with debate; to exert a con-
servative pressure on policy; and to embarrass government supporters by
taking up questions which divided them. The Third Force and left-wing
deputies retreated - predictably - into a watchful and jealous suspicion, and
when the Council amended a bill they often reaffirmed their original view with
little discussion and by a larger majority. The senators tried to alter the con-
stitution de facto and were then aggrieved that the deputies became wary of de
Jure amendment; they mounted a party political assault and then complained
that their friendly advice received insufficient attention.41
The opposition senators celebrated their election victory by first amending
the hi des maxima for 1949 and then rejecting it by 105 to 0; the Gaullists
voted against the bill they had themselves reshaped, while 207 government
3S. Brayas, no. 36, p. 547.
PP'
mes, p. 26.
THE COUNCIL OF THE REPUBLIC 287
supporters abstained rather than support the mutilated measure; and the
Assembly restored the original provisions. On the lot de finances RPF
changed tactics ; the right-wing opposition amended the bill and then carried
it by 150 (less than an absolute majority) to 23 (mainly Communists) with the
governmental senators again abstaining. The Assembly once more easily
restored its own version, and the manoeuvres damaged the prestige of both the
Council and RPF, which had so self-righteously denounced the parties for
their complex and crafty parliamentary intrigues.42 "The power of the
senators is not so much themselves to reconsider, as to get the deputies to
reconsider. The reproach against them is precisely that they act, or at least
talk, in a spirit which is likely to lead to exactly the opposite result. Brandish-
ing its standing orders as a weapon against the Assembly, the government and
the regime, the Council of the Republic awakens a reflex of self-defence in
those it seeks to combat and destroy.'43
Many senators learned the lesson. Next year they were indignant that
Georges Bidault had included no senator in his ministry, and reluctant to vote
his proposed tax increases.44 Yet 29 Radicals, after unbalancing the lot de
finances, abstained to let it pass without an absolute majority (its 158 sup-
porters were three too few). Deadlock was avoided, the Assembly's finance
committee made compromise proposals, the Council's amendments were duly
defeated, and the leader of the Radical senators (Charles Brune) soon entered
Bidault's cabinet. The Council again had to be overruled by the Assembly in
January 1951, when it unbalanced Pleven's budget, but thereafter it made less
difficulty for the government.45
After 1948 the Council gave a small majority to the cabinet when its life
was threatened, and a much larger one to conservative policies at other times.
In January 1950 the senators amended the bill restoring collective bargaining,
to the detriment of the trade unions, and in June they tried to switch 30 mil-
liard francs (£30 million) of investment funds from the nationalized to the
private sector; in both cases the old majority of Communists, Socialists and
MRP revived in the Assembly to restore the original proposals. Even after
the 1951 election they were more conservative than the deputies; they helped
the government to block the sliding scale for wages, obstructed Pinay's anti-
trust bill, and led the way in demagogic attacks on the nationalized industries.
In 1956 they tried unsuccessfully to upset the financing of major bills on
housing and old age pensions. Socially and economically the upper house was
still a bourgeois and peasant weapon against the town workers.46
42. Ibid., p. 557; JO(CR) 31 December 1948, pp. 3826, 3897-8 ;AP 1948, pp. 227-8; cf.
p. 233.
43. Fauvet in Monde, 4 June 1949 (over petrol rationing) ; cf. ibid., 6 January 1951 ; AP 1949
p. 81 (petrol).
44. Radical deputies feared to vote for higher taxes lest a Radical senator from their department
rejected them and so became a more popular and dangerous. rival at the next election (whereas
in the Third Republic senators had feared competition from deputies) : Fauvet, Monde, 22 Decem-
ber 1949, 1 February 1950. See also above, pp. 253 and n.
45. Arne", pp. 233-4; AP 1950, pp. 3-4, 1951, p. 2. In 1957 it won some concessions from Gail-
ard, whose majority in the Assembly was unreliable.
46. AP 1950, pp. 11, 133; 1951, pp. 121-2, 136, 335; 1956, pp. 57-8, 63-4; 1957, p. 17;
Meynaud, p. 266, Arne; p. 234n. (anti-trust) ; Lescuyer, no. 143, pp. 1181-2 (nationalized indus-
tries), though cf. his book, pp. 250-1 ; Ehrmann, Business, pp. 251-2* 352-3, 383, 387-8 (both).
288 THE INSTITUTIONS
In constitutional matters the senators, elected by the local politicians of the
countryside, preferred the institutions of the Third Republic and especially
the single-member constituency system favoured by rural France. In April
1951 they nearly killed any electoral reform by voting overwhelmingly (206 to
37) for scrutin d'arrondissement*1 This had no chance in an Assembly
dominated by Communists and MRP. In the new house, however, it won
Socialist and left-wing Radical support, and in 1955 a strange alliance de-
veloped between progressive Mendesists and conservative senators (countered
by an even odder combination of Edgar Faure's right-wing followers with the
Communist party). The premier, who wanted early elections with no change of
electoral system, was nearly frustrated by the Council's new powers - for the
senators could now both stop legislation over a limited period, and repeatedly
oblige the deputies to go on record against the system which the country was
believed to favour. But he was saved by a miscalculation of his adversaries
which unexpectedly allowed him to dissolve the Assembly.48
On external affairs the Council's reputation was nationalist. The opponents
of EDC were confident that the treaty would never pass the upper house
(though Edgar Faure unexpectedly induced it to accept the agreement on Ger-
man rearmament which eventually took EDC's place). The senators, on
whose benches sat some of France's richest colonial capitalists, had no liking
for emancipation overseas. In May 1951 they were able, because of the immi-
nence of the general election, to prevent a wide extension of the colonial
franchise which the Assembly had accepted. They made difficulties over the
Tunisian negotiations of 1956 and the mild Algerian reform bill of 1958.
But they displayed unwonted liberalism over the loi-cadre for the African
territories ; the colonialist spokesman (Luc Durand-R6ville) found him-
self isolated, the Council's amendments were limited, and the Assembly
accepted them in order that the bill should become law before the summer
recess.49
Being nationalist and conservative the Council was strongly defence-
minded.50 These preoccupations did not foster liberal values. In July 1953 the
deputies agreed but the senators refused to extend to conscientious objectors
the amnesty they did not hesitate to grant to former collaborators. The Coun-
cil was more alert to the perils of untimely progress than to the risks of arbi-
trary repression. In January 1958 it further mutilated the Algerian reform bill
which had already been disastrously emasculated to appease the Right in the
Assembly. When internment camps for suspected FLN terrorists were set up
in France in 1957, the special powers bill authorizing them was fought line by
47. AP 1951, pp. 97, 100; the deputies, owing to Socialist defections, mustered only 308 votes
to override it — three short of an absolute majority. The government was about to resign when
Herriot proposed to refer the bill back to committee; eventually a 'new' but hardly altered bill
was brought in, pressure put on the rebels by SFIO (below, p. 400) and an absolute majority
found.
48, AP 1955, pp. 85-90 ; above, pp. 238-9, and below, pp. 3 1 5-16.
_ 49. AP 1951, pp. 121-2, 136, 335 ; 1956, pp. 64-5, 214; 1957, pp. 16-17 ; 1958, pp. 7-8. Despite
its anti-European reputation the Council accepted the Common Market and Euratom treaties
by a three-to-one majority.
50* In March 1949 the senators, though in opposition, voted the defence minister a third pro-
visional twelfth when the deputies bad allowed him only two : AP 1949, p. 39.
THE COUNCIL OF THE REPUBLIC 289
line in the 'hasty and irresponsible' lower house, where the left-wing opposi-
tion secured some important concessions; the 'sober and reflective' senators
voted it with little discussion and no important amendment by a majority of
ten to one.51 Not until the Fifth Republic used the same powers and the same
camps for right-wing Frenchmen suspected of the same crimes did the
enthusiasts for severity begin to view with alarm the menace to freedom.
The conservatism of the upper house reflected that of its electorate. Occu-
pationally the Council was drawn from much the same groups as the Assembly,
except that as it had few Communists, only five manual workers were elected
in 1948. The 56 lawyers equalled the agricultural, industrial and trading
interests together, and 60% of the senators were professional men. Like their
predecessors they were active in local government; 20 were chairmen and 124
members of departmental councils, and 107 were mayors. They were rather
younger, for the Fourth Republic lowered the minimum age from 40 to 35 and
the average dropped from 61 in 1939 to 50 in 1948.52 As in the past they prided
themselves on maintaining a higher standard of dignity and courtesy than the
deputies. Speeches tended to be shorter and obstruction rarer in the Council.
Angry scenes were frowned upon. To a traditionalist of moderate temper like
Ren6 Coty, the second chamber had less need of powers than of the pomp and
precedence which would attract elder statesmen. He told a young colleague in
1 948, 6 Your house is too noisy for me ... the other day I caught myself shout-
ing "Go to Moscow !" at the Communists.' It was his apology for his own
decision to become a senator.53
To anyone but the most ambitious ministrable the Council offered many
advantages as a political base. A senator's seat in the provinces could not be
won without strong roots in local government, but once won it was far safer
than the deputy's. Some of the sixty overseas seats (a fifth of the total) were
almost rotten boroughs ; twelve votes were cast to elect Luc Durand-R6ville
senator for Gabon in 1948, and fourteen to re-elect him without opposition in
1952. Pierre Bertaux won a seat in Soudan by 13 to 10 in 1953, then lost it by
15 to 5 in 1955. Interest-groups took full advantage of these anomalies. Henri
Borgeaud, the leader of the Algerian colons, was for years chairman of the
Radical senators. His RPF colleague Antoine Colonna represented the
French of Tunisia. At home, peasant organizations naturally had many
spokesmen in the * chamber of agriculture' ; their leader was Rene Blondelle.
Andr6 Boutemy, the employers' political paymaster, was one of several par-
liamentary friends of business who preferred the upper house. It was also a
convenient refuge for senior party officials like Roger Duchet, secretary of
CNIP, Pierre Commin, assistant secretary of SFIO, and Vincent Delpuech,
the Radical treasurer until 1955. But Andre Diethelm, who handled RPF's
finances, migrated to the Assembly in 1951.
51. XP 1949, p. 39; 1953, p. 59; 1957,pp. 78, 131; 1958, pp. 7-8. Isorni, who worked devotedly
for a reform disliked by the Church (legitimizing children by the subsequent marriage of their
parents) says it could never have passed if the upper house had kept its old powers: Ainsi, p. 46.
52. Occupations : Le Figaro, 16 November 1948. Local : Monnerville, JO(CK) 17 January 1950,
p. 20. Age: Hamon, no. 121, p. 553. On the deputies see below, p. 332.
53. Raymond Tribouletin Monde, 28 November 1962.
290 THE INSTITUTIONS
The passage of time made this step less necessary for the career-minded
politician. The senator had always enjoyed influence in his constituency and
local party, and gradually he acquired it on the national level. Unrestricted
access to the Palais Bourbon enabled him to meet and persuade his colleagues
there. At first the senators were * outsiders', and some of them like Michel
Debr6 in RPF and L6o Hamon in MRP always remained intransigent or
isolated in their own parties. But not all did. The Socialist senators obeyed the
whip over EDC when the deputies would not (and in 1953 SFIO amended
its constitution to give them equal status). When Mendes-France tried to turn
the Radicals into a party of principle rather than of compromise, the resis-
tance to him centred at the Luxembourg. In CNIP, Roger Duchet was a
strong force for moderation as long as he was in office.
Ministerial promotion was indeed a cause as well as a consequence of the
armistice between the houses. The senators gave the budget for 1950 a hard
passage partly because none of them had office under Georges Bidault; later
premiers learned from his mistake. By 1951 a senator was minister of the
interior, and Guy Mollet made even socialism palatable by inviting eight to
serve under him. Seven years after Bidault the upper house, its appetite
whetted, taught F61ix Gaillard a similar lesson for appointing only four (in
junior posts). In 1958 the premiership itself was offered to a senator, Jean
Berthoin. Nor was it only in appointments that their influence was felt. In
1953 the choice of a Conservative rather than a Socialist President seems to
have been due to the Radicals of the Luxembourg, and Coty's personal
success to the general confidence of his colleagues there. In 1958 it was the
senators who carried SFIO in support of de Gaulle when both deputies and
executive^were still mostly against him, and in that decisive crisis Gaston
Monnerville played a crucial part.64
The legal and constitutional concessions to the upper house were thus only
a recognition of its growing political weight. Early in the Fourth Republic the
second-chamber controversy had provided '. . . a good example of our bad
methods ... a brilliant theoretical debate on the advantages of two solutions
and a compromise settlement combining the weaknesses of both'.65 But in
time even men of the Left came to see advantages in bicameralism. An upper
house which was not distracted by the fascinating game of making and un-
making governments could give more time to legislation. More time should
mean not only closer scrutiny, but also less dependence for information on the
administration, a party, or private pressure-groups. A constituency of ex-
perienced local politicians might predispose its representatives to reasonable
compromise rather than ideological intransigence, and encourage them to
offer a psychological as well as a technical corrective to the feverish agitation
of the deputies.56 &
lA£ Sde^V^m^ Tr* n°* m-PP* 3WO ^nnerville, SFIO); above,
^p^fcik (Bldmdt)* For seQat°rs in office see Georgel, i. 83, and below,
55, Ramon, PrM&mes, p. 27 (from Combat, 15 March 1954).
25 Janlmry 1951>
THE COUNCIL OF THE REPUBLIC 291
The constitution-makers, then, had set out to establish a second chamber
which should have neither the first word nor the last, but whose word must
always be spoken. It could not initiate and its advice could always be rejected
but the sovereign Assembly must always hear from the 'house of second
thoughts' before making up its own mind. But as long as the Council was
being used as a weapon against the regime, these aims could not be achieved
When it accepted its role as a chambre de reflexion, the technical faults were
remedied and a working relationship between the two chambers at last
established. The constitution-makers failed to correct the conservative bias of
the upper house, but they did undermine its obstructive power and so achieved
a major part of their objective. In some of their other experiments even this
qualified success was denied them.
Chapter 21
SUBORDINATE INSTITUTIONS AND
CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT
The makers of the new constitution tried to improve on the old one by intro-
ducing several subsidiary institutions. A new High Court was to dispense
political justice, and a new High Council to supervise ordinary justice. The
referendum made a timid and ineffectual appearance in the normal process of
constitutional amendment, while surreptitious changes were checked by a new
Constitutional Committee. There were new subordinate assemblies to advise
on colonial problems and on economic and social affairs. The preoccupation
of the constitution-makers with these questions was also reflected in a Pre-
amble which set forth the political principles professed, if not always practised,
by the regime.
The declaration of rights took up nearly a quarter of the time spent by the
first constitutional drafting committee. But in the referendum of May 1946
the product of their labours was denounced by the opposition as a menace to
property, the freedom of the press, and the Church's rights in education.1 The
second drafting committee therefore substituted a short declaration, which was
also vigorously criticized. It reaffirmed the 1789 declaration of rights which
its authors were simultaneously violating.2 It appealed to 'fundamental prin-
ciples recognized by the laws of the Republic' - but open to interpretation
in precisely opposite ways.3 It added supplementary principles : equality of
women, the right of asylum, the nationalization of public services and de
facto monopolies, and a workers' share in management (which no attempt
was made to realize). It enunciated respectable but vague aspirations
such as the nation's solidarity in meeting natural calamities, and hopefully
announced controversial legislation for a misty future: 'the right to
strike is exercised within the framework of the laws which regulate it'.4 And it
failed - apparently through inadvertence - to promise the freedom of associa-
tion which had been deliberately omitted in 1789 by men who detested inter-
mediary bodies between the citizen and the state.
The declaration renounced wars of conquest and announced France's
willingness, given reciprocity, to limit her sovereignty in the cause of peace.5
It proclaimed equality of opportunity throughout the French Union and an
intention to lead subject peoples towards democratic self-government. These
principles commanded no universal assent, and if a new political majority
I. Wright, Reshaping, pp. 135, 156-61.
Z The purge kgislation violated non-retroactivity, and some nationalization acts conflicted
with the principles of compensation : Duverger, Manuel, p. 371 ; Waline, pp. 125-7.
3. Ibid. Waline thought this phrase protected lay education, Duverger the church schools;
they agreed that it was the most obscure phrase in the constitution.
4. Cf. Pickles, French Politics, pp. 233-5 ; Noel, p. 132n. As the Fourth Republic got no further
than banning police strikes, the Conseil d'Etat acted in default of Parliament; Arne, pp. 158-9.
The Fifth also showed reluctance to attempt major legislation.
5. In October 1952 Heniot attacked ED C as unconstitutional because there was no reciprocity,
Germany not being a sovereign state: AP 1952, pp. 66-7, 70.
SUBORDINATE INSTITUTIONS 293
chose to ignore them, no method of enforcement was provided. The individual
citizen could not rely on them in court. Yet there was perhaps a case, in a
country where there was bitter dispute over the fundamentals of politics and
conspicuous bargaining and manoeuvre over detail, for a solemn and formal
statement of the ends which democratic political activity is ultimately sup-
posed to serve.
1. THE INSTITUTIONS OF THE FRENCH UNION
Even before the constitution was adopted it became clear that the liberal pro-
fessions of the Preamble rested on an insecure political foundation. For, in the
first draft proposed, native inhabitants were to enjoy full equality with French-
men and the French Union was to be founded on free consent. At the referen-
dum of May 1946 this draft was approved in the few 'old colonies* where
native voters were in the majority. But wherever citizenship was restricted to
white men it was rejected, and settler deputies were sent back to Paris to
impose a different arrangement. General de Gaulle in his Bayeux speech
helped them by warning against the disintegration of the empire, and MRP,
urged on by Radicals and Conservatives, set out to whittle away what the
Left had granted. Colonial nationalists and their French sympathizers wanted
self-governing local assemblies to precede federal institutions ; instead Bidault
as prime minister insisted on creating a strong centralized structure, cautiously
parcelling out local autonomy from Paris, and giving white settlers separate
representation almost everywhere. In the new version of the French Union
little was left of the original liberal approach, except for the mildly pro-
gressive phrases of the Preamble. Free consent disappeared, and *the pious
gesture [was] replaced by the fait accompli' *
The Union was to consist of the French Republic (comprising Algeria and
the overseas departments and territories as well as France itself) and those
* associated states' which chose to join; Tunisia, Morocco, Vietnam, Cam-
bodia and Laos, although governed by France, were legally foreign countries.
It was to have an assembly of its own (which was approved both by federalists
and by conservatives like Herriot, who feared that the traditional assimilation
policy would bring more and more overseas deputies until France became ' the
colony of her colonies'). The President of the Republic was ex officio Presi-
dent of the Union, though the Associated States had no say in his election ; and
the Union's High Council was to 'assist the government', which was respon-
sible to the French Parliament alone.7
These institutions had little life in them. The rulers of Tunisia and Morocco
would not join for fear of prejudicing their nominal independence. There was
resentment against the centralized constitution, especially at Article 62 by
which the Union's resources were pooled for a defence policy controlled
exclusively from Paris. When the High Council met after five years' delay,
three Indo-Chinese delegations led by their premiers sat for two days with
6. Wright, Reshaping, w. 179-80, 201-5, 213-15. Cf. Grosser, pp. 247-51,
7. For a useful short summary of the large literature see K. Robinson, The Public Law of
Overseas France since the War. For the overseas departments see ibid., pp. 21-2, and above,
p. 209n. Algeria had a separate (settler-dominated) Assembly from 1948 till its dissolution in 1956.
294 THE INSTITUTIONS
seven French cabinet ministers under Vincent AurioFs presidency to settle
procedure and discuss common military, diplomatic and economic problems.8
But in June 1953 the Kong of Cambodia fled to Siam and demanded indepen-
dence, and in October a Vietnam national congress - opposed to the pro-
Communist Vietminh - rejected participation in the French Union (adding
later 'in its present form'). Although Georges Bidault, now foreign minister,
and President Auriol opposed constitutional concessions, France offered on
3 July to negotiate new Indo-Chinese treaties, and promised in January 1954
that the French Union would be based on the liberal Preamble rather than the
centralizing text of the constitution. It was too late to undo the harm done
in 1946. Soon only Laos remained within the Union; South Vietnam in 1954,
Cambodia in 1955, and Morocco and Tunisia in 1956 became fully indepen-
dent The old constitutional structure lay in ruins, but it was still hoped that a
new one could accommodate the African territories. The Algerian war
destroyed the Fourth Republic before this could be built.9
Less shadowy than the High Council, the Assembly of the French Union
was mainly concerned with tropical Africa, where French colonial policy was
most successful. At its first meeting, at Versailles on 10 November 1947,
75 members from metropolitan France sat with 75 from 'overseas France* of
whom 40 came from western and equatorial Africa. Cambodia and Laos
joined in 1948 and Vietnam in 1950; with their 27 delegates and the 27
balancing Frenchmen there were 204 members (there would have been 250 if
Tunisia and Morocco had attended).10 The Frenchmen were elected by pro-
portional representation of parties, 68 by the metropolitan deputies and 34 by
the senators.11 Among them were a few experts like the colonial historian
C. A. Julien, and many former or intending members of parliament, not all of
them interested in or qualified for their task.12 Although the Assembly was not
part of Parliament its members enjoyed parliamentary status, under Article 70.
The Assembly of the Union had to be consulted on laws settling the consti-
tution or changing the status of an overseas territory, under Articles 74 and
& AP 1951, pp. 303-5, 391 ; 1952, pp. 282-3 ; 1953, pp. 302-3, 307 ; Robinson, p. 19 ; Lachar-
riere, nos. 133-4; G. Peureux, Le Haut-ConsetideV Union Francaise (1960), pp. 7-9, 36-52, 168-72.
The first annual session set up and the second formalized a presidential secretariat drawn from
both Associated States and French ministries. On Auriol and Coty as Presidents of the Union
above, pp. 1 98-9, 202 ; and on the Union up to 1951 , Pickles, French Politics, Chapters 10 and 1 1.
9. AP 1953, pp. 247-50, 253-8, 272-4, 282-91, 570-93; 1954, pp. 176-7, 189-90, 202-4, 258,
601 ; 1955, p. 282; 1956, pp. 178-80. Cf. Grosser, pp. 284-90, 300-3.
10. The Indo-Chinese were chosen by then* governments, the other 75 from overseas by the
local elected assemblies set up throughout the Union under Article 77. Among the 40 tropical
Africans were six from the two UN trust territories, Togo and Cameroons. Of the other 35, 18
represented Algeria, 7 Madagascar, 4 the Indian Ocean territories (Reunion, Comores, Somali-
tend, French India), 4 the American (Guadeloupe, Martinique, Guiana, St Pierre-and-Miquelon)
and 2 the Pacific,
11. Overseas parliamentarians voted in some party meetings to choose candidates for formal
election later: Institutions, i. 152. In several parties counsellors of the Union, like parliamentarians,
were represented on their governing bodies.
12. In July 1952 Raymond Dronne (RPF) denounced the * flotillas of candidates' intriguing
in the lobbies and proposed to suppress altogether this * asylum for defeated parliamentarians,
party officials and personal cronies'. A week later the senators elected among their 34 representa-
tives eight colleagues (four of them Gaullists) who had just lost their seats : Monde, 6-7 and 12
July 1952; JO 4 July 1952, p. 3543; cf . Arne, pp. 231-2 and n.; J. Raphael-Leygues, no. 186a,
p. 120. Yet some of the Assembly's best members were recruited in this way, for example Georges
Gocse, a Socialist defeated in the 1951 election, who specialized on Moslem questions.
SUBORDINATE INSTITUTIONS 295
75, and on decrees applying a French law generally overseas or to a specific
territory, under Article 72. Before voting a law to apply overseas, the National
Assembly was expected - but not obliged - to consult it. It could send resolu-
tions of its own to the French government, the High Council or the National
Assembly. Associated States could seek its views, though none ever did; and
so could the government in Paris, which sometimes modified decrees in the
light of its advice.13
Three-quarters of the Assembly's activity was self-generated.14 Repeatedly
it complained of neglect and humiliation: in 1948 because it was kept in-
sufficiently informed, in 1949 because the government stopped its mission of
inquiry into social services in the overseas departments, in 1951 because the
deputies voted, without debate, that Algeria was outside its competence.15 In
1951 the disillusioned President of the Versailles Assembly migrated to the
Palais Bourbon and his successor Albert Sarraut mourned its 'sumptuous and
glacial exile . . . definitely too far from the other assemblies, the government,
the press, and the man in the street'.16 In the Tunisian crisis of 1951-52 its
voice was not heard. It discussed the decrees applying the 1956 loi-cadre for
the overseas territories - but not the Togo statute which became a yardstick
for the others. The resolution by which Parliament decided to amend the
French Union clauses of the constitution was submitted to it, but no amend-
ment bill followed.17 It worked or stagnated amid 'the general indifference of
public opinion, Parliament and the government', while the Negro leaders pre-
ferred the National Assembly where power lay.18
2. THE ECONOMIC COUNCIL
As the Assembly of the Union had been intended to give the colonial peoples a
louder voice in Paris, the Economic Council was similarly envisaged as a
forum for groups - notably the workers* and peasants' organizations - whose
views had often had an inadequate hearing. But though it undertook more
useful work than the Assembly of the Union, it suffered almost equally from
the inattention of Parliament and public.
Under Article 25 of the constitution, the Economic Council was the lowest
in status of the four assemblies ; its members had ho parliamentary advantages
except a salary. The government had to consult it on the national economic
Plan, and it gave advisory opinions before the Assembly debated bills within
its sphere. By an organic law, this included all economic and social bills
except the budget, and any bill ratifying an economic or financial treaty. It
could examine these bills on its own initiative, and could be sent others by the
Assembly or its committees, or by the government. The Council had twenty
13. See Pickles, French Politics* pp. 229-31 on its activity and legal competence.
14. Wright, in Cole, p. 651. Even on its best days its atmosphere was that of a powerless
debating body like the Paris municipal council: P. Fr6d6rix, Monde, 29 August 1951.
15. Institutions, i. 157-8; AP 1948, p. 100; JO(AUF) 7 April 1949, pp. 427-32, and 15
February 1951, pp. 126-39. (But it did discuss a major bill on Saharan administration: AP 1956,
p. 235.) Cf. Arae", pp. 232, 250-1.
16. AP 1951, p. 185; JO(AVF) 12 July 1951, p. 665.
17. Togo: Institutions^ i. 157, and Robinson, no. 192. Loi-cadre: ibid.', above* pp. 50, 273.
Amendment: AP 1956, p. 180; Drevet, p. 97; Coret, nos. 61-2.
18. On African deputies see above, pp. 180-2* 'Indifference' : Goguel, Regime, p. 77.
296 THE INSTITUTIONS
days (but only two on urgent bills) for its report, which was circulated to all
deputies; its rapporteur could speak in committee and, if the minister or
committee so requested, in the house. It had to be consulted on decrees and
orders applying bills it had dealt with (and could be, on others). From 1951 it
had to present a twice-yearly report on the national income and on means of
increasing production, consumption and exports. Disputants could seek its
arbitration in an economic or social conflict. In general it dealt with special
subjects specifically referred to it, major current problems like the Coal and
Steel Community or fiscal reform, and broad general inquiries - into the
national accounts, or the housing problem.19
All sections of Resistance opinion had wanted an Economic Council,
though their conceptions of it differed. The new body fell between the con-
sultative committee of trade unionists demanded by the Left, and the cor-
porative sub-parliament, representing professions and regions, which MRP
favoured. Its members were chosen by national organizations of workers or
employers to represent their side, rather than as technical or industrial
specialists, and its committees were proportionate (for example, only a third
of the agriculture committee was rural).20 Although the backward sectors of
the economy were denied the inflated representation they enjoyed in Parlia-
ment, the weighting of interests was arbitrary, and was not improved by the
changes made for political reasons in 195 1 .21
The CounciTs methods of work were also unsatisfactory. It met fortnightly
at the Palais Royal for discussions that were often hurried, especially at first
when it had only two days for the many 'urgent' bills. In 1947 no private dis-
putant consulted it; the deputies ignored three-quarters of its reports; the
government sent it no decrees, and modified the Monnet Plan without refer-
ence to it; and when it was asked to report on wages and prices it succumbed
to wrangling between rival experts. 'When the Assembly refers a bill to the
Council the explanation is ... lack of interest in it at the Palais Bourbon ; or ...
a desire to delay a vote, or to be covered by an independent opinion.'22 Yet
even the deputies were less jealous of it than of the Assembly of the Union,
since it reported on bills they had not examined and so did not threaten their
prestige. And in time the government if not the Assembly began to find the
Council mildly useful. In 1952 it submitted 3 statutory reports, 29 on its own
initiative, and 5 requested by the government.23
19. Cadart, no. 38, for its status; B. Chenot in Institutions, i. 164-5; Aubry, no. 8a, for a
MI formal account, and no. 8b for its procedure.
20. Cnavagnes, no. 55 ; Archambeaud, no. 4; By6, no. 37. An Economic Council dominated by
cm! servants had existed from 1925 to 1940.
21. Dwerger, System, p. 76; Meynaud, p. 218 and n., and no. 161, p. 851. Of its 164 original
members 45 represented trade unions (26 workers, 9 black-coated, 10 staff) ; 40 industry and
commerce (6 nationalized industry, 8 large and 6 small private industry, 10 commerce similarly
divided, 10 artisans); 35 agriculture, including 5 workers; 10 were government-appointed econo-
mists and scientists (Pensee Jranfaise), 9 co-operators of various sorts, 8 spokesmen of the family
associations, 2 of war-damage victims, and 15 of overseas territories. The law of 1951 added five
members and instituted regional corresponding members ; reduced CGTs seats by half, to equal
the other unions; gave 27 of CG A's 30 seats to its constituent units, which were more influential
and less left-wing; and substituted classes moyennes spokesmen for two intellectuals. Half the
members changed.
22. By4 no. 37; quotation from p. 597.
23. Etepnties: Goguel, no. 105, p. 349, and Rtgirne, p, 50; but cf . Lavau, no. 138a, p. 826. In
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SUBORDINATE INSTITUTIONS 297
The Council was a useful sounding-board for an interest without much
parliamentary influence. Big business used it to obtain a hearing at a time
when its views enjoyed little political sympathy. But when the climate changed
after the end of tripartisme, employers soon came to regard the Council as an
undesirably public forum in which the Left was too well represented.24
Organizations rarely sent their most influential leaders there, not wishing their
votes to commit them too completely; they often preferred abstention to the
bad publicity of opposing a popular proposal; on issues of little direct interest
they sometimes traded their votes for future favours; and they tried to avoid
discussing problems on which a major interest was split. Consequently a pro-
posal strongly disliked by a big group often met almost universal hostility.
Thus in 1949 the trade unions wanted a return to free collective bargaining;
they got the Council to debate it in April, and in November to reject by 137
to 0 the government proposal for compulsory arbitration (which was later
defeated in the National Assembly). In June 1950 another government pro-
posal - for a special court to deal with cartels - was thrown out by 105 to 4.
During 1952 unanimity was complete on 5 reports out of 37, almost com-
plete on 3 more, and complete except for the pro-Communist members on
another 7.25
In Council voting there were three broad coalitions: labour; business and
agriculture, which tended to agree; and the smaller intermediary groups -
such as family associations, industrial staffs, artisans, nationalized industries
and Penseefran$aise (government-appointed intellectuals, who wrote many of
the major reports). Generally agriculture found it easiest and CGT hardest to
make friends and win votes. Thus in 1952 agricultural and nationalized-
industry members almost always voted in the majority, while CGT did so
only half the time, and in between these extremes business was on the losing
side more often than non-Communist labour. The bigger organizations dis-
liked displaying their internal divisions (except at times within agriculture) or
their differences with their allies (except between CGT and non-Communist
unions). But they needed support from the middle groups, which often split
their votes; and some cross-voting did occur at times. In 1950 CGT allied
with the employers to defeat a profit-sharing proposal favoured by the middle
groups and other unions, and with CGA and some small employers against
the Franco-Italian customs treaty (which passed easily). In 1951 CGT and
CFTC supported higher family allowances against opposition from agricul-
ture and FO (which feared they would prejudice wage claims). In 1952 labour
1948 the government refused to send Reynaud's special powers bill to either the Council or the
Assembly of the Union (Soubeyrol, p. 80) ; and its creation of a special commission on the national
accounts suggested some mistrust of the Council. On the Council's early working see Pickles,
French Politics, pp. 230-3, and later Meynaud, pp. 217-21, 255-6, 316-17; Arne", p. 232 and n. ;
Seligson, no. 197 ; Lewis, no. 144 (p. 167 for reports in 1952).
24. Ehrmann, Business, pp. 253-6, and no. 84, pp. 468-9; Duverger, loc cit. L6on Jouhaux was
the Council's first President, and £mile Roche its second. For the unions* attitude to and use of
it see H. Lesire-Ogrel, *Les syndicats et le Conseil economique', in A. Tiano et alt Experiences
francaises fraction syndicate ouvriere (1956), pp. 356-428.
25. AP 1949, pp. 64, 203 ; JO(ACE) 1949, p. 408, 1950, pp. 236-9; Lewis, no, 144, pp. 167-9.
For other massive abstentions see Williams, pp. 299-300 and nn.s and cf, Ehrmann, loc. cit.
298 THE INSTITUTIONS
joined either business or agriculture in the minority on 12 of the 37 re-
ports.26
Although the Council's reports were often thorough and informative, the
public and parliamentary nature of its proceedings diminished its utility either
as a technical advisory chamber or as a focus for the pressure-groups them-
selves.27 They had to show solidarity because they were open to the public
gaze, and were naturally tempted to combine against the consumer for whom,
at a generous estimate, not more than a sixth of the councillors spoke. But on
major issues the Council behaved responsibly. It passed by 111 to 15 Andr6
Philip's report on the Coal and Steel Community, which for once had a great
influence in the National Assembly - partly because he was a prominent ex-
deputy.28 It may have played a useful part in improving the economic educa-
tion of the pressure-groups, whose claims and attitudes in the later years of the
Fourth Republic were often less outrageous than in the past.29 And there was
perhaps some advantage in a direct confrontation, without the refracting
medium of Parliament, between the spokesmen of workers, peasants and
businessmen. But these spokesmen were rarely the most powerful or represen-
tative. The Palais Royal quite failed to attract the lobbyists away from the
Palais Bourbon. The Council's detractors therefore maintained that its
debates were too political, its reports came too late, its views commanded no
attention, and it cost more for less benefit than a proper legislative reference
service. Yet it had some staunch defenders, even in the National Assembly.30
3. POLITICS AND JUSTICE
Impeachments in France are tried before a High Court of Justice. In the Third
Republic the Senate sat in this capacity to judge persons impeached by the
Chamber of Deputies (and also those indicted for threatening the security of
the state). At the Liberation an exceptional High Court was created to try
former Vichy ministers and high officials. Consisting of members of the
Assembly (chosen originally by lot, later by PR), it sat from 1945 to 1949,
heard 108 cases, and pronounced 18 death sentences and 38 of imprisonment
or 'national disgrace'. Its prestige was never high.31
In the Fourth Republic Article 57 of the constitution regulated impeach-
ments, and Article 58 set up a new High Court including many deputies. Im-
peachments were preferred by the National Assembly, voting in secret by an
absolute majority of its members excluding those who would have to try the
case. The new Court was elected by each National Assembly when it first met;
iw -?3 \%fr E*£f^1£'ff **' PP- 357~9' 404j and J°(ACE^ 1^50, pp. 197, 221 ; and on
J^L* ^ ' Pm?; °n l?52> LeWlS' n°' 144' pp' 167~71 ; on a similar voting Pattem m 1953-6,
Oo^z-Gny, no. 101 ; on tbe importance of the ' middle groups' cf. Lesire-Ogrel, p. 367.
27. ^Cf. L^au, 80.1388, p* 826-7; Bye, no. 37, pp. 603-4 ('each group brings ... its own
files, its own figures, its own desires for light and for shadow') ; Meynaud, p. 220; but cf. no. 161,
28. 'AP 1951, p. 298 ; JO(ACE) 1951, p. 269.
n^fiSS11>-^ditkSI PressufeS * Fmnce' m Ehrmann» «U to**™* Croups on Four Continents
™^^Y al£:5*£?)' PiP^!P"lj and m nJ?' 141» pp' 36"7' <* Lesire-Ogrel, pp. 424-71.
30 • ajwwj, pp. 848-9 (Marcel Prelot against, fidouard Bonnefous for). A prominent deputy
once told me how much he regretted having never had time, in his year on the economic affairs
committee, to read a single report of the Council.
' Mamtel> PP' 333-5» Guerin, no. 116. (Only Brinon, Darnand and Laval were
SUBORDINATE INSTITUTIONS 299
a detailed law, under Article 59, was passed in October 1946 at the same time
as the constitution itself. The deputies chose by a two-thirds majority in a
secret ballot: a President, two vice-presidents and 20 judges from their own
ranks by proportional representation of parties; 10 more judges who could
not be sitting (but were often former) members;32 30 alternates in the same
conditions; 3 prosecutors who might be members of the Assembly (in 1953
only one was) ; and 6 deputies who, with a chairman and two members named
by the High Council of the Judiciary, formed the committee of preliminary
inquiry (commission d'instruction). The Court judged impeachments of minis-
ters for offences in office, or of the President of the Republic for high treason.58
Its deliberations were normally public, its final decision taken in secret and by
an absolute majority.
Two motions came before the National Assembly. On 29 March 1950 the
Communists failed to impeach three Socialist leaders (Gouin, Moch and
Pineau) over the wine import scandals of 1946. On 30 November 1950 they
again attacked Moch over the 1949 * scandal of the generals', and obtained
235 votes against 203, many members apparently wishing to strike a safely
secret political blow at the minister, his party, or the government. The premier
got a vote of confidence from the Assembly in a public ballot; and as the Com-
munist motion was fifty short of an absolute majority the incident had no
sequel.34
The constitution-makers were agreed on the principle that the judges should
no longer be supervised by the ministry of justice, but by a new body in-
dependent of the executive. Like so many of the new institutions this was a
compromise. Conservatives and Radicals had wanted a Council chosen by and
from judges, to avoid political influence; Pierre Cot and the Communists
opposed a close, self-administering judicial corporation and favoured a
Council elected by (and perhaps from) the deputies; Socialists and MRP
shared both fears. The final composition of the High Council of the Judiciary
(Conseil suplrieur de la magistrature) was prescribed in Article 83, and its
functions in Articles 35 and 84. The President of the Republic and the minister
of justice became ex officio chairman and vice-chairman, and of the twelve
members, who sat for six years, half were professional and half political
representatives. Four grades of judges (juges depaix and courts of first instance,
appeal and Cassation) chose one each, and two were appointed by the Presi-
dent of the Republic from the other judicial professions ; these six were not re-
eligible. The other six were chosen by the National Assembly by a two-thirds
majority from outside its own ranks. For every full member an alternate was
chosen in the same way.35
The political representatives had been advocated as an element free from
professional cliques and jealousies - and also, as their term was longer than
the deputies' own, from their own * constituents'.36 At the first election in
32. Five of the ten elected on 28 August 1951 had just lost their seats.
33. Not defined in the penal code, by which the High Court was normally bound.
34. AP 1950, pp. 50, 229-31 ; cf. Williams, no. 218, and above, pp. 37, 238 n. 61.
35. SCC i, pp. 127-32, 615 ; n, pp. 87-92 (principles), Waline, no. 214 (rales).
36. P. Cot, SCC I, p. 129 and n, pp. 89 and 91 ; P. Ramadier, SCC n, p. 88.
300 THE INSTITUTIONS
March 1948 the Assembly's justice committee drew up an agreed list, and all
parties picked jurists rather than politicians;37 in 1950, when the Communist
nominee broke with the party and offered to resign, President Auriol refused.38
A two-thirds majority was preferred to PR as a way to ensure balanced
representation;39 this invited deadlock, and in 1952 a struggle for a vacant
seat lasted without a decision over twelve months and thirteen ballots.
Under Article 35 of the constitution the President exercised his right of
pardon in the High Council, which met weekly at the filys^e. He had to ask
but not to take its advice ; in practice he diverged from it only by clemency.
In its first three years the Council considered 75,000 cases (often in groups),
and by April 1949, 27,000 out of the 38,000 imprisoned under the Liberation
purge, and 1 5,000 of the 40,000 sentenced to * national disgrace ', had benefited
from a pardon.40 In 1952 the butchers' association advised 15,000 of its mem-
bers sentenced for price-fixing offences to appeal for clemency to the Council;
by threatening to paralyse it, they extorted concessions from the government.41
The Council also supervised the judges (the magistrature assise) though not
public prosecutors and State attorneys (the magistrature debout or parquet). It
was responsible both for then* discipline, replacing the Court of Cassation (the
highest civil court in France, which had performed this function under pre-
vious regimes), and for their promotion, taking over from the ministry of
justice; so that the semi-political High Council of the Judiciary was substi-
tuted for a branch of the judiciary in one sphere and of the executive in
another. Disciplinary action was rare, promotion frequent: in 1949 the Coun-
cil made a thousand appointments.42 Article 84, which made the judges
constitutionally irremovable, required the High Council of the Judiciary to
ensure (assurer) their discipline and independence.
A bitter struggle developed around this verb between the Council and a
ministry of justice unreconciled to losing its powers. The ministry held that it
was against French tradition for an irresponsible organization - and President
- to control the judiciary; that the minister's countersignature (though never
likely to be refused) was therefore necessary before the Council's decisions
could be enforced; and that the Council should perform its supervisory
activities from a remote and ineffective height. A tiny staff, inadequate
acconjmodation, and dossiers prepared by the ministry circumscribed the
independence of the Council.43 Yet it was determined to administer its allotted
37. Except that SFIO asked Blum, who refused, and then nominated Andr6 Hauriou, a
professor of law and a senator. In 1952 SFIO proposed a former deputy (a barrister) for the
vacant seat (see n. 38).
38. Bat be lost his seat after all when the party published a confidential Council document he
was suspected of having given them earlier: Monde, 20 October 1951.
39. P. Coste-Floret, SCC i, p. 617.
40. For the meaning of * pardon' and the President's role see above, pp. 197n., 199 ; for the
75,000, C. Anbert in Monde, 16 June 1950; for the other figures, ibid., 14 April 1949. Numbers
tried and punished were relatively much higher in Belgium, Holland and Norway : see Williams,
p. 302n.
41. Meynaud, p. 224.
42. Anbert, he. cit. In six years Auriol's candidates were defeated only three times: Monde,
9 May 1953 (but cf. p. 199 above). Coty seems to have had less influence : ibid., 24 November 1962.
43. 'Busily the High Council manufactures bills. Methodically the Ministry buries them. Or
rather it does not bury them ; bureaucratic routine takes care of that. It simply fails to dig them
out* : Anbert, fac. cit. The High Councirs committees met in the ministry's library - in overcoats,
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SUBORDINATE INSTITUTIONS 301
sphere and indeed extend it to the parquet. In April 1948 the cabinet approved
a bill giving the upstart body even less scope than the minister had conceded,
but this stayed buried in the Assembly's justice committee. A year later
President Auriol announced a bill to remove the examining magistrates
(Juges d9 instruction) from the parquet's supervision; three days later the minis-
ter of justice, Robert Lecourt, retorted that the ministry would deal with the
problem itself; the cabinet supported him, the rest of the Council unanimously
protested.44 But the shortage of parliamentary time prevented any far-reaching
reform.
The struggle to take judicial administration out of politics was not con-
cluded when the High Council was set up, but an important beginning had
been made. The ministry still influenced promotions but could not finally
decide them, and the most powerful deputy had little say on them. Overt
political interference was publicized and checked as in April 1950 when the
Council (supported for once by the minister, Rene Mayer) protested at the
cabinet's threats against judges who had acquitted accused Communists.
These advances of the early Fourth Republic were largely due to President
Auriol, under whom 'the centre of gravity of the judiciary perhaps moved
from the Place Vendome to the £ly$6e'.45
French judges, though secure in their posts, had hitherto been subject to
political influence because their low pay made them too dependent on pro-
motion.46 The High Council checked the consequence without removing the
cause; the standard of judges could not be improved while their salaries
remained inadequate. Bias, conformity, mediocrity and pusillanimity caused
some shocking abuses during the Algerian war, especially in the military
courts (where civilian judges preside).47 Experience in the Fifth Republic
abundantly showed that the courts were not tools of the government, but their
other failings denied them that public confidence which has made their
American counterparts the accepted protectors of minorities against the mis-
deeds of men in power.
4. CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT AND THE CONSTITUTIONAL
COMMITTEE
France has had many constitutions, and their status is naturally lower than in
the United States. Since the Revolution constitutional theory has insisted on
as the radiators did not work : Figaro, 28 October 1949. When President Auriol offered a building
attached to the filysee this was stopped- on grounds of 'economy* - for if the Council left the
ministry's premises the dossiers might go with it : Anbert, loc. cit. The Council eventually obtained
its own building.
44. Monde, 14 April 1949. While judges could be removed only for cause shown after a hearing
before the disciplinary authority, the minister could dismiss members of the parquet from their
posts (though not from the profession). The parquet claimed to supervise and promote juges
d* instruction because of their investigating functions; but their dependence on it encouraged
abuses such as keeping untried suspects too long in prison.
45. Siegfried, De la IHe, p. 230; cf. Goguel, Regime, pp. 70-1. But the constitution of the
Fifth Republic was drafted by a minister of justice, Debr6, and restored some of the ministry's
powers at the High" Council's expense: see Williams and Harrison, p. 256, but cf. pp. 167-8. On
1950, Monde,.2* April 1950; Arne, pp. 76-7; and above, p. 211.
46. Cf. R. C. K. Ensor, Courts and Judges in France, Germany and England (1933), pp. 40-2,
11S-21; and Sharp, pp. 196-7. But cf. above, p. 211n. 15.
47. See below, pp. 348, 351 and n.
302 THE INSTITUTIONS
the sovereignty of Parliament; courts have never inquired whether a law con-
formed to the constitution, and there has been no effective restraint on rulers
and majorities who sought to infringe or alter inconvenient constitutional
provisions. Assuming that partisan behaviour would recur, all the political
groups wished to safeguard their own position. In 1946, when the Left was
predominant, conservatives tried to erect barriers against the will of the
majority. Later the Right demanded an easier amendment procedure and the
Left resisted it.
In the Third Republic a constitutional amendment had only two stages:
first a resolution passed by an absolute majority in both houses, then a bill
voted by an absolute majority of the two houses sitting together at Versailles.
In the Fourth, Article 90 laid down three : a resolution stating the object of the
amendment and passed twice (with three months' interval) by an absolute
majority of the Assembly; a bill voted in the ordinary way ; and a referendum.
But the resolution need not pass the Assembly twice if the Council of the
Republic also voted it by an absolute majority, nor need the bill go to
referendum if it had a special majority (three-fifths in both houses, or two-
thirds on its final reading in the Assembly).48 Referendum or special majority
were thus alternative safeguards against abuse. As in the lifetime of the Third
Republic, the republican, form of government could not be changed (Article
95); and because of its death in 1940, no amendment might be initiated or
passed while all or part of France was occupied by foreign troops (Article
94).49
The procedure proved unexpectedly hard to operate. In 1945 most deputies,
apart from Communists and Radicals, had favoured the referendum. But
after a few years in Parliament they became as hostile to it as their predecessors,
and by 1953 even keen revisionists preferred no amendment at all to one
ratified by the electorate. The special majorities therefore became essential.
With the Communists opposed, these were hard to attain: a two-thirds
majority required 80 or even 90% of the non-Communist deputies, and for
three-fifths to suffice, 75 or 80% of them had to agree with a Council where
party strengths were different. As there was more dissent from the constitution
than assent to any alternative, it proved impossible to make substantial
changes through this procedure.50
Resolutions for amendment could be introduced only by a deputy, not by a
senator or the government. (This restriction, broken by Pflimlin in the last
days of the regime, was very easily evaded : the first senatorial motions asking
48. Except that even two-thirds of the deputies could not abolish the upper house without a
refereEtdiim, an illusory protection which guaranteed neither its powers nor its composition :
A, Hriip, JO 28 September 1946, p. 4219, quoted Brevet, p. 120, cf. p. 111. The fractions were
of votes cast, not of total membership; ibid.t pp. 115-16; Goguel, no. 110, p. 487; cf. Poutier,
p. 30, The initial resolution went to the upper house only if the lower so chose: Drevet, pp. 50-2.
49. But the constitution was amended in June 1958 while Corsica (and Algeria) were occupied
by insurgent French troops.
50. As M. Goguel had predicted : Rtgime, p. 47. Communist strength in the Assembly varied
from 16 to 30%. On the referendum debate in 1946 see Drevet, pp. 99-114, and on referendum-
phobia later also Ibid., pp. 133, 136; Poutier, pp. 42-3 ; Goguel, no. 110, pp. 487-8. In 1946 the
Communists wanted to ban the referendum, in 1953 to make it compulsory : Drevet, pp. 107, 109,
112-13, cf. Poutier, pp. 22,
SUBORDINATE INSTITUTIONS 303
the Assembly to introduce a resolution dated from 1949.51) The deputies
voted three resolutions : one in November 1950, under which the 1954 amend-
ment passed; one in May 1955, which led to an abortive bill in March 1958,
and was the enabling authority for transferring the amending power to de
Gaulle's government in June; and Pflimlin's, on 27 May 1958.52 The Council
of the Republic, which could not amend the resolutions, voted the first in
January 1951 and the second in July 1955 with accompanying motions of its
own: for it feared that a resolution which it had passed in order to increase its
own powers might be used by the Assembly to reduce them.53 This was possible
because the Assembly decided in 1950 that the * object' could be specified
merely by enumerating the articles to be amended (so that the purpose of the
changes had to be inferred from the committee's report).54 The rapporteur in
1955 disagreed with this interpretation; but his own resolution, which specified
one article only, was amended in the house to add 27 others on which the
committee had not reported.55
The amending bill under the 1950 resolution was passed by the deputies only
on 22 July 1953, by the senators (to whom they allowed extra time) on 17
March 1954, and in final form by the Assembly on 30 November by a two-
thirds majority, 412 to 141. 56 Its passage was complicated both by differences
between the houses and by a problem of procedure. The amending bill could
alter no article not specified in the resolution: but must it change all those
specified? By 1953 few people still wanted to amend Article 7 (on the state of
siege) and the Assembly voted by 500 to 0 not to do so. But the senators feared
that they might accept a resolution in order to increase their own powers, then
see the Assembly drop the changes they wanted and proceed only with the
rest. They decided by 207 to 0 that every article in lie resolution must be
amended, and so proposed a purely formal change in Article 7. Proclaiming
its right to stand firm, the Assembly gave way. But in 1955 it opened the way
to similar manoeuvres by a resolution authorizing a separate discussion and
vote on the different articles. Intended to prevent disputes on the domestic
clauses holding up amendment of the overseas ones, that decision allowed
General de Gaulle in 1958 to carry the Fourth Republic's second constitu-
tional amendment. This altered one Article (90) so as to permit his govern-
ment to draft the whole new text.57
51. Drevet, pp. 37-42, Poutier, pp. 9-11, Georgel, i. 18. For the articles most deputies wanted
to amend see ibid., i. 13-14, 323-5.
52. The last covered Articles 9, 12, 13 and 45 (as the government proposed) and 48, 52 and 92
(added later), which were to be joined to the bill then before the upper house; it passed on a
vote of confidence by 408 to 165, but Pflimlin resigned: Drevet, pp. 173-5, Georgel, i. 320-1
(and above, p. 56). The first two are discussed below.
53. Drevet, pp. 55-8. In 1951 the Council demanded a broader reform and no reduction of
its own rights (see also AP 1951, p. 8; Berlia, no. 13a, pp. 475-6; and Poutier, p. 18); the
Assembly's rapporteur said this motion was unconstitutional. But in 1955 the Council passed
another urging priority for amendment of Article 90 itself.
54. Drevet, pp. 60-5. Specifying the 'object* was supposed to avoid the kind of sweeping
formula used by Laval in 1940; 1958 showed it did not (pp. 60, 178-9).
55. Ibid., pp. 65-8. To Article 90 were added three articles on the rise and fall of ministries
(49-51) which the committee had discussed informally, one on money bills (17) and twenty-three
on the French Union (60-82) which it had not,
56. On it see Berlia, nos. 12a and 13a.
57. Drevet, pp, 68-77, 118, 175-81 suggests that Parliament could not legally be excluded from
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304 THE INSTITUTIONS
Experience with the first amendment had shown that only ministers could
organize agreement between the parties. But their legal right to do so was
doubtful. Until 1958 everyone agreed that they could not propose a resolution
(and the Communists contended that they should not even speak). When
Ren£ Mayer's cabinet brought in an amendment bill in 1953, the Conseil
cFttat advised that this was legal but the Assembly's franchise committee
voted that it was not. In 1954, however, Mendes-France's government helped
to reconcile the views of the two houses on the navette, and saved the critical
clause by a majority of only two. In the third National Assembly Guy Mollet
called strongly for an amending bill, but would not intervene in detail. Felix
Gaillard, when his credit was already wearing thin, introduced an amendment
bill of his own which he emasculated in hopes of an easier passage: the
franchise committee decided that his action was legal (reversing its view of
1953) but threw out his bill. A new measure was reported out, twice referred
back to committee (once after a vote of confidence in the government), and
after thirteen sittings passed the Assembly on 21 March 1958 by 308 to 206.58
But it was not to come into force till a new electoral law was voted. There was
some reason to claim that de Gaulle's was the only way the constitution could
be amended, and some excuse for the attacks to which Article 90 was sub-
jected.59
Yet procedure was not mainly to blame. If the first amendment took four
years to pass and the second made little progress in three, the delays were due
partly to extraneous factors (elections, government crises, ED C, Algeria) and
partly to disagreements of substance. When the object was accepted a for-
mula could be found; the French Union clauses, added to the 1955 resolution
at the last minute with no prior discussion in the franchise committee, were
the only ones on which that querulous body could agree in 1956.60 Certainly
the special majorities meant that the agreement had to extend to every party
which supported the regime. But it was illogical of conservatives to suppose
that they could remedy this situation by changing Article 90 so as to remove
the veto that every 'republican* party enjoyed: for either all these parties
agreed on the object of the revision and Article 90 was no obstacle, or some
disagreed and clung to their veto. Controlling the upper house, conservatives
naturally favoured an easy amendment procedure, which would allow them to
carry proposals when they had a majority in the Assembly and block them
when the Left had.61 But a written constitution is pointless if it can be changed
the process unless Article 3 had been amended (but no resolution had authorized its amendment).
De Gaulle's bill was voted by 350 to 163 in the Assembly, where some opponents abstained to
ensure a s|«dal majority and no referendum, and by 256 to 30 in the upper house.
58. Some politicians amended arithmetic and argued that 308 was three-fifths of 514.
59. Brevet, pp. 78-91, 139-40, 154-5, 170-3; cf. Georgel, i. 18-21, Arne", pp. 173-5.
60. Drevet, pp. 135-8 (delays), 139, 154-5; its own rapporteur, Paul Coste-Floret, admitted
that except on the Union clauses its conclusions were useless. (In June 1958 the committee's last
fling was to insist that Parliament must vote on de' Gaulle's draft, and that it should not go to
referendum if accepted there. But the General got his way by threatening to resign.)
61 . Cf. Pomtier, p. 45. For conservative complaints against the need for compromise see Drevet,
p. 133, es$>ecially Jean Legarefs: *a special majority cannot be assembled around great ideas
and great texts*. But do great ideas and great texts make acceptable constitutions in divided
countries?
SUBORDINATE INSTITUTIONS 305
like any other law, and in Socialist eyes conservatives had no divine right to a
privileged position.
Since the demand for constitutional change came from conservatives, the
Constitutional Committee had no function. Created in 1946 to check surrepti-
tious violation of the constitution by the Assembly, it was a compromise
between the Right who favoured judicial review of the constitutionality of
laws, the Radicals who wanted a strong second chamber, MRP and SFIO
who preferred control by referendum, and the Communists who opposed any
check at all. The Socialists, fearing obstruction of their social security and
nationalization policies, had its competence limited to the first 89 articles of
the constitution so as to exclude both the amendment procedure and the
Preamble, which thus remained an abstract pronouncement with no visible
means of support.62
Under Article 91 the Committee included the President of the Republic as
chairman, the Presidents of both houses of Parliament, seven members elected
annually by the Assembly and three by the Council of the Republic by pro-
portional representation of parties. The seven and three, who could not be
members of the chamber which elected them, were often professors of law; in
1946 MRP elected Marcel Prelot, once a university rector and later a Gaullist
politician, and the RGR deputies chose Andr£ Siegfried. Under Article 92 the
Committee could consider only a law referred to it by an absolute majority of
the senators through the joint agency of their own President and the President
of the Republic within the ten days (five where urgency was claimed) allowed
for promulgating the law.63 The Committee either reconciled the two houses
(but the constitution made it hard to arrange a compromise) or decided
in five days - two in urgent cases - whether the law 'presupposed amendment
of the constitution'. If not, it was promulgated; if so, under Article 93 it was
sent back for the Assembly to decide whether to begin the amendment pro-
cedure.
As the inventor of the compromise later affirmed, the Committee's function
was to protect the Council of the Republic.64 This was both futile, since the
constitution guaranteed the Council's existence but not its powers or method
of election, and irrelevant, since the upper house soon proved to be more
aggressor than victim. The Committee was therefore called on for only one
ruling, in June 1948 when the second chamber was still cautious and co-
operative. The issue was not the bill but the urgency procedure under -which
it had been passed; the Communists therefore plausibly claimed that the
' 62. SCC n, pp. 101-5. The first draft constitution included no checking authority, which was
why MRP opposed it : Wright, Reshaping, pp. 1 55-6. After its defeat in May 1946 S F I O accepted
the Committee to avoid de Gaulle's alternative, a check by the President. Some authorities
thought that decree-laws, though not laws, could be challenged in court for infringing constitu-
tional principles : Pinto, no. 181, pp. 526-7 ; cf. Pickles, pp. 234, 235n.
63, No countersignature was needed : Goguel, Regime, pp. 68-9, cf. Soubeyrol, no. 202, p. 560,
and above, p. 200 n. 19
64. On 27 July 1949 Auriol wrote to Herriot, *. . . the Committee has been instituted to protect
the Council of the Republic against the encroachments of the Assembly, and not the other way
round* : AP 1949, p. 335 ; above, pp. 200, 281 ; Brevet, pp. 19-21. On his role in 1946, SCCn, pp.
405-6,
306 THE INSTITUTIONS
Committee had no jurisdiction. But all the non-Communists in the Council sup-
ported the appeal to the Committee, which ruled in their favour ; the Assembly
accepted the verdict; and the President found a procedural solution by refer-
ring the bill back to the Assembly under Article 36.65 A year later relations
between the houses had grown much worse. In July 1949 the Assembly over-
ruled the Council's amendments to a bill on parliamentary immunity, and
then adjourned. Under Article 9 the Council had to adjourn also, and was
unable to appeal to the Committee. Since an appeal had to come after a bill
had passed the Assembly but before it was promulgated, the Assembly could
clearly evade Article 92 by adjourning for ten days after voting a bill challenged
by the upper house. But the President of the Republic came to the Council's
help and again referred the bill back to the Assembly.66
Other appeals were occasionally proposed. In August 1948 the opposition
challenged Paul Reynaud's special powers bill under Article 13, which for-
bade the Assembly to delegate legislative power, but the majority senators
voted them down. In September 1951 the anticlericals failed to carry an appeal
against the Barange bill subsidizing church schools, as a- breach of Article 1
(La France est une Rgpublique . . . lalque)*1 On such controversial legislation a
senator's view on the bill would often decide his vote on the need for amend-
ing the constitution. Indeed Article 93 itself, with its hint that the voting of an
unconstitutional law would very likely be followed by a constitutional amend-
ment, reflected the low status of French constitutions and the presumption
that a temporary but determined political majority would not hesitate to over-
ride them.
As it was assumed that majorities would misuse their power, minorities
wanted to be able to stop them. The special majority rules gave every party
but the Communists an effective veto, and therefore prevented the Fourth
Republic undertaking any important change by way of constitutional amend-
ment* To enthusiastic revisionists this was another proof of the decadence of
the regime; but many of them (most Conservatives and some Gaullists)
wanted a stronger state only to entrench immobilisme at home and abroad.
Had there been a real majority there would have been little demand (or need)
for constitutional reform. Without one, reform agitation was 'the constitu-
tional talisman which diverts attention from political impotence '.68
65» Soulier, no. 203, and see above, p. 284 and n. The Committee's decision was unanimous
apart from one abstention: Prelot, no. 184, p. 727. Cf. Williams, pp. 290-1.
66. An appeal under Article 92 would also have needed his co-operation. See p. 211 n. 14;
Drago* no* 75, p, 404 ; on Art 9, above, p. 28 1 ; on relations between the houses, above, pp. 286-7.
67. On the appeal, the anticlerical senators were 40 fewer than on the bill itself. Cf. AP 1951,
p. 224 ; E. Weill-Raynal in Popidaire, 25, 26 and 27 September 1951 ; Lemasurier, no. 142 ; Pernot,
no. 173; and on Reynaud's biH, Pinto, no. 181, pp. 519-20, and above, pp. 270-1*
68. Leo Hamon, quoted Georgel, i. 23.
Chapter 22
THE ELECTORAL SYSTEM
Though electoral systems are often defended on high principles, they are
usually chosen for party or individual advantage. In France they were classical
terrain for partisan manoeuvres. Every great political change brought the
adoption of a wider franchise, larger or smaller constituencies, or a new method
of allocating seats. Manhood suffrage was instituted in 1848. Women were
given the vote by General de Gaulle in 1945. Large multi-member constituen-
cies based on the department prevailed from 1848 to 1852, 1871 to 1875, 1885
to 1889, 1919 to 1927, and 1945 to 1958; electors had sometimes to vote for a
list, not a person, and seats were attributed in various ways.1 In between there
were small single-member constituencies based on the arrondissement; a can-
didate was elected at once if he had over half the votes cast and a quarter of
those on the register; if no one did, there was a second ballot after a week
(before 1914 two weeks) at which the man with most votes won. But the simple
Anglo-American system with only one ballot was unacceptable to Frenchmen.
For with many parties members would often be elected by a small minority of
voters ; and if the system forced the citizens of a deeply divided nation into two
hostile camps, the consequence (especially if one camp were dominated by the
Communist party) might be civil war rather than stable democracy.
1. 'SCRUTIN D' ARRONDISSEMENT* AND PROPORTIONAL
REPRESENTATION
Thirteen of the Third Republic's sixteen elections were held under scrutin
cT arrondissement with two ballots. After 1914, few seats were won by an
absolute majority at the first ballot;2 at the second round most constituencies
had a straight fight between Right and Left, some had three-cornered con-
tests, and a handful might have four candidates.3 The system encouraged
small, moderate and ill-disciplined parties. They were small because at the
first ballot every individualist and splinter group could spread propaganda and
solicit votes without risking the triumph of their worst enemy. They were
moderate because at the second round, the serious candidate nearest the centre
was likely to win the doubtful voters.4 'At the first ballot you choose, at the
second you eliminate'. Radicals in the left-wing Midi could attract Conser-
vative support against the more dangerous Socialists, while in the Catholic
1* See Campbell, French Electoral Systems and Elections (1957). On 1958, see n, 21.
2. To 1881, 80%; to 1914, 60%; in 1932, 40%; in 1928 and 1936, 30%. Ibid., pp. 34-7.
3. Even in 1928 and 1936 only 130 and 59 seats had three second-ballot candidates with over
1,000 votes, and only 9 and 14 had more: Middleton, pp. 95-6; Williams, p. 310n. (1928);
Inegalit&s, p. 272 (1936). On the two blocs see Goguel, Lapolitique des partis sous la Troisieme
RtpubUque, passim; Siegfried, France, pp. 51-2, 68-72 (and Tableau, pp. 24, 31-4); SouHer, pp.
401-2, 406-8, 448-9; Duverger, Parties, p. 216.
4. Under full PR the Communists would have had 54 more seats in 1928, 38 in 1932, and 21
in 1936 ; Socialists 8 more, 7 fewer and 28 fewer; Radicals and allies 36, 46 and 30 fewer; groups
to their Right 34 fewer, 21 more and 37 more: Soulier, p. 516n.; Systemes electoraux* p. 64;
Lachapelle, Les regimes Mectoraux, p. 164,
308 THE INSTITUTIONS
west they gained Socialist votes against the friends of the Church; in 1928
fewer than fifty deputies won without clerical or socialist help.5 Members of
the centre groups therefore rejected party discipline, since ^ their electoral
interests differed regionally. While nominally extreme British parties are
brought closer by a common magnet, the floating voter, the theoretically
moderate French parties were pulled asunder by their members' dependence
on extremist second-ballot support.6
As the Radicals benefited from the second ballot, the Socialists and Con-
servatives both demanded proportional representation (PR); occasionally
they made 'unnatural' electoral alliances based on this common interest.7
Even when the PR supporters captured the Chamber they were frustrated by
the Radical Senate, which before the 1919 election imposed a hybrid com-
promise allowing PR only if no list won a clear majority of votes within a
department. This law, which rewarded electoral discipline, helped the Right
in 1919 and the Left in 1924. Scrutin farrondissement was restored in 1927,
but by 1945 it seemed to everyone but its Radical beneficiaries as discredited as
the Third Republic itself. Yet it was not the cause of heterogeneous majorities
in Parliament; it was precisely because there was no homogeneous majority
among the voters that most Frenchmen preferred an electoral system of this
type. It was a consequence of the division of opinion which it helped to per-
petuate.
Scrutin d'arrondissement enabled the citizen to choose a deputy to act as his
personal spokesman with the authorities, and as an ambassador from his
district to Paris. Critics complained that the clash of political ideas was lost
amid the confusion of local interests, and that loose parties, shifting majorities
and short-lived cabinets never allowed the voter to pronounce on the record
of a responsible government. The supporters of PR believed that it would free
the deputy from the parish pump, broadening his own horizon and that of his
followers. Real parties, bound together by loyalty to a common political ideal,
would permit a real majority at last to emerge. And in 1945 a more immediate
reason made every party but the Radicals welcome PR: it ensured them all
against a Parliament dominated by one rival, particularly the Communists.8
PR was a device to make the citizen choose between ideas rather than men
by voting for a party list.9 If the lists were unalterable the deputy would be
subjected to the organization which drew them up ; and if they had to contain
a name for every seat at stake, it might be hard for small parties and impossible
for independent candidates to stand at all. The device was less effective if the
lists could be left incomplete or altered by the voter. The 'preferential vote*
5, AP 1929, p. 419, quoted Siegfried, France, p. 179. Thus the Radicals, unlike the British
Liberals, did not lose from the growth of socialism : Duverger, Parties, pp. 323-4.
6, GeaetaHy, tbid^ pp. 240, 318, 324, 331; Middleton, Chapter 4; Campbell, Chapter 4;
Goguel in Syst&mes tlectoraux. On the Centre, Soulier, p. 528.
7, Cf. Campbell, p. 89. By this politique dupire the Right sometimes forced centre politicians
to terms: see Long, Les Elections legislatives en Cdte d*Or, pp. 105-6, 204.
8, Gopjel, Fourth Republic, pp. 61-2, and Regime, p. 26.
9, Yet Ireland's single transferable vote combines PR with a vote for men not lists, and
allows broad justice between parties without impeding coalitions among them. But when M.
Duverger proposed it in 1956, an ex-premier told him it was politically impossible because no
<kputy .could tell how it would affect his own re-election: Demaint p. 99, also pp. 91-101. Cf.
Campbell, p. 45, Intgalites, p. Ill,
THE ELECTORAL SYSTEM 309
slightly weakened its force by allowing him to cross names off his chosen list
or move them up or down;panachage undermined it altogether by letting him
distribute fractions of his vote over candidates on more than one list.10 But
PR was also a means to ensure that the conflicting ideas were fairly repre-
sented. The larger the constituency within which it operated, the better this
function was fulfilled. If the whole country was treated as a unit, as in Weimar
Germany, each party was represented proportionately to its share of the total
vote and even a tiny minority could win a seat.11 But with smaller constituen-
cies only substantial minorities won representation. It would take over a sixth
of the votes to be sure of a seat in a district with five members, over a quarter
in one with three.
General de Gaulle acceded to the parties' demand for PR with rigid lists,
but he chose small constituencies without national pooling of votes (and with
heavy rural over-representation, later corrected).12 In October 1945 the first
Constituent Assembly was elected under this scheme. In its constitutional
drafting committee the principle of PR was adopted by 38 votes to 3, and
against Radical and Conservative opposition the 'big three' parties agreed to
reject panachage and the preferential vote, and to allow national pooling by
large parties only. But their bill lapsed when the draft constitution was rejected
by referendum, and in the second Constituent Assembly the 'big three' dis-
agreed. Both Communists and Socialists favoured national pooling, but not
M RP ; and some Socialists wanted panachage, which the Communists loathed.
By threatening to abstain and let panachage pass, MRP forced the Commu-
nists to drop national pooling and join an unholy alliance against both
amendments. This combination imposed the law of 5 October 1946.13 Most
departments formed a single constituency, though seven were split up; most
constituencies had three to five members; PR operated only within the con-
stituency; lists had to have as many names as there were seats; there was no
panachage, and only a bogus form of preferential vote.14
Thus de Gaulle's electoral law, almost unchanged, governed three post-war
elections. It decisively marked the politics of the period. Its effects on party
discipline are discussed in the next chapter. Between parties, it distributed seats
more fairly than scrutin (Tarrondissement but still with a bias; the Centre
had gained from the old system, the new one now helped the Left - for it
favoured size, and at each of these elections Communists, Socialists and
MRP were the three strongest parties with three-quarters of the seats. Large
parties gained because the 'highest average* system of allotting seats was pre-
ferred to the 'highest remainder' system (see Appendix VI) and because most
10. Either by voting for a list, but striking out some of its candidates and writing in the names
of rivals, or else by writing out a list of his own.
1 1 . But special provisions often debarred it, for many PR advocates worried about justice for
large minorities only.
12. In6galitls> pp. 48-52; and for the maldistribution of seats, pp. 177-213, 231-61. In 1946
the industrial areas had 38 more seats than de Gaulle had intended, but they were still short and
by 1956, after shifts of population, were again badly under-represented. Cf. Maps 4 and 21.
13. Jtaf., pp. 53-84; Campbell, pp. 103-12; AP 1946, pp. 72-5, 226-8. The alliance revived
for PR in municipal elections in 1947, and against a double-ballot system in 1951 and 1955.
14. On it see Appendix vi. Seine formed six constituencies* Nord three, and 5 departments
two each. Of 102 constituencies 4 had two members, 13 had three, 32 had four, 16 had five,
11 had six, 9 had seven, and 17 had more: 3 eight, 7 nine, 5 ten, 2 eleven.
310 THE INSTITUTIONS
constituencies were small, so that at least one-sixth of the vote was usually
needed to ensure election. In October 1945 and June 1946 each of the cbig
three* parties could win a seat for 37,000 votes at most, while the Radicals,
half their size, needed 60,000. At least 94% of ' big three ' supporters cast their
votes for a deputy, but half the Radicals 'wasted' theirs on defeated can-
didates.15
Consequently, PR reduced the number of parties represented in Parliament.
This is not strange. The second ballot had strongly encouraged multiplicity,
and since PR operated only over a small constituency and favoured big
parties, electors preferred to 'vote usefully'. More important still, fear of the
Communists drove them to seek an electoral rampart. Independently of the
law, it reinforced the stronger parties and impelled them to organize. But the
stricter discipline operated not on a majority and an opposition party but on
several minority groups, each with a sectional base (assured by PR) which it
had little incentive to expand ; and the law brought about conflict in the country
between the parties which were obliged to co-operate in Parliament.16
3. BASTARD PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION, 1951 AND 1956
The electoral system of 1945^6 lost favour early in the Fourth Republic. But
PR with national pooling remained nearly everybody's second preference,
since it offered a universal guarantee against electoral catastrophe; and some
form of PR was still the first choice of individuals in all parties, and of both
Communists and MRP. Both prized unity and discipline; in both active
militants were (at least in the early years) more important than prominent
local personalities; both feared that alliances would be made more easily
against them than with them. The Communists wanted PR to reinforce their
internal discipline: to preserve their deputies from dependence on support
from outside the party, and to keep their followers from being tempted either
to 'vote usefully* for a strong Left candidate, or to discriminate between the
leadership's nominees (this was why they so bitterly opposed panachage). It
also protected them against a majority system, where alliances would harm
them, and against small constituencies, whose boundaries would be drawn
against them. The moralists of MRP desired electoral justice (though not to
excess : it was they who had stopped national pooling). They were afraid of
anticlerical alliances against them on the second ballot between the Radicals
whom they despised and the Socialists whom they vainly courted; the depart-
mental and senatorial elections of 1948 confirmed and strengthened these
fears. The militants disliked almost equally the willing embrace of RPF,
15. In November 1946 Radicals and Conservatives often withdrew in the other's favour,
and so narrowed the gap; RGR put up 21 fewer lists than in June: AP 1946, p. 580, Priouret,
Partis, p. 106n, For the figures cited see Campbell, pp. 107-13 ; Husson, i. xxxiii-v and ii. xxxii-iii,
253; In4gafit£s, pp. 291-2. In November 1946 less than 2% of Communist votes were * wasted',
3% of MRP, about 10% of Conservatives and Socialists, 27% of RGR and 47% of Gaullists;
MRP paid 32,000 votes per seat, Communists 33,000, Conservatives 35,000, SFIO 38,000 and
Radicals 43,000.
16. See below, pp. 317-18, 389. Between the September 1945 majority elections to depart-
mental councils and the October general election under PR, Radical and Conservative votes
dropped sharply: Goguel, Fourth Republic, p. 63. Supporters of the majority system therefore
claimed that it let people vote as they chose without fear of wasting their vote (in Britain it is
PR supporters who use this argument).
THE ELECTORAL SYSTEM 311
which would prejudice their hopes of proving themselves republicans of the
Left, and the bigamous temptations of local combinations which, differing
regionally* would wreck the movement's precious unity and blast their hopes
of regenerating French public life. For these active Catholics transferred to
politics the habits of discipline learned in their religious organizations as
naturally as free-thinking Radicals tended to political individualism.17
Indifferent to internal unity and with no aim beyond electoral success, the
Radicals were the champions of scrutin d'arrondissement. Over the years
their many well-known personalities had built up strong local positions, and
under the old system they could hope to revive the great days of the Third
Republic, when they sat in the middle of the political seesaw and gained both
ways at the second ballot; when the deputy's personal standing meant more
than his policy, and well-repaired local by-roads could become his highways to
political success; when Parliament was the rampart of the provincial petty-
bourgeoisie and peasantry against all forms of organized power, whether
wielded by bishops or trade unionists, generals or dictators. This was among
the few subjects on which Radicals of all wings agreed, and they were con-
vinced that the electorate agreed too.18
The other parties were more divided. The well-entrenched Conservatives
and Socialists, with their strong local roots, were both traditional supporters
of PR among whom scrutin d'arrondissement was fast gaining ground. The
constituency interests of CNIP parliamentarians and SFIO federations
differed too widely for either to have a strong common view; but whereas the
individualist Conservative deputy voted for Ms personal preference, the dis-
ciplined Socialists - having little to gain or lose over the country as a whole -
cast a united vote for every proposed change.19 For PR had not fulfilled the
hopes that it would improve the quality of candidates or the tone of public
life. It hampered alliances at the polls between parties which would have to
co-operate in Parliament. It grew increasingly unpopular with the electorate,
who preferred to vote for a man, not a list. Above all it guaranteed 180 seats to
SFIO's Communist arch-enemies; and in 1951 the ministry of the interior
estimated that RPF would win 150, since against the divided centre groups
the two oppositions would be the largest single parties and gain the advantage
of size which in 1945-46 had accrued to the big three.20 PR would therefore
mean either an ungovernable Assembly or one in which General de Gaulle
could dictate terms for his co-operation.
17. Goguel in Encyclopedic, i. 354, and Rtgtme, pp. 85-6.
18 Perhaps wrongly: a poll in October 1950 snowed 22% for a two-ballot system, 16% for a
one-ballot majority system, 25% for PR and 37% don't knows: Pouillon, no. 183, p. 99 (cf.
Intgalitts, p. 91). By 1955 scrutin d'arrondissement does seem to have regained support as list
systems lost it: cf. ibid., p. 106. Mendes-France was always one of its strongest supporters,
notably at the Radicals' DeauviUe conference in 1950 (cf. below, pp. 3 1 5, 33 1 ).
19. On one vital vote 15 deputies defected, which was rare in SFIO: above, p. 288n., and
below p. 400. But even this showed an ideological rather than a constituency preference : MacRae,
no. 149, pp. 209, 210. PR was still favoured in regions where the party was weak; its senators
came from its strongholds and were for scrutin d'arrondissement.
20. The ministry (which predicted the actual results with striking accuracy) expected from
metropolitan France under PR: 159 Communists, 146 RPF, 82 SFIO, 68 Conservatives, 64
RGR, 25 MRP: Carrefour, 6 February 1951 ; for details see Williams, p. 317n, And cf. above,
p. 66n,» on voting for a man not a list
312 THE INSTITUTIONS
TMs prospect made PR increasingly acceptable to Gaullists. Originally
RPF was a centralized movement of new men who demanded strong govern-
ment and hoped to build a real majority party. Despising parish-pump
politics and believing in parliamentary discipline, they advocated large con-
stituencies and a majority list system with two ballots, hoping to lead on the
first and attract all anti-Communist votes on the second. But as their impetus
declined their preferences changed. If rivals led on the first ballot, they risked
defections among their own supporters at the polls and perhaps in Parliament.
As an important but isolated minority instead of a potential majority they,
like Communists and MRP, found in PR their best hope of internal dis-
cipline and fair representation; and by maintaining Communist strength PR
would ensure their own bargaining position. In September 1948 RPF for the
first time demanded immediate dissolution of the Assembly without prior
electoral reform, and in 1950 de Gaulle approved two * honest' electoral
systems: the majority list system and PR.21 Opponents concluded that RPF
wanted to keep PR but blame M RP for it.22
If so, it failed. Electoral reform had a difficult passage among the reefs of
conflicting party interests, second preferences, and minority opinions.23 But
MRP was isolated among the centre parties in its defence of PR, and was
eventually driven to compromise in order to escape unpopularity and an un-
governable (or Gaullist-dominated) Assembly. Yet it feared even these pros-
pects less than the second ballot, and its determination finally obliged the
reluctant Radicals and the indifferent or divided Socialists and Conservatives
to settle for a single-ballot system of '* bastard PR'. The most fervently
moralizing of parties had imposed 'the least honest electoral law in French
history',24
The centre parties agreed only on the need to weaken the Communists
without strengthening RPF. The Assembly's franchise committee was too
divided to report, and when it asked the house for instructions no majority
could be found to give them. MRP and many Peasants insisted on a single
ballot; the Radicals and most Conservatives demanded two ; the Socialists
voted for each in turn, and the Communists opposed any change. On 21 Feb-
ruary 1951 the 180 Communists, with different allies on each vote, rejected
eight successive proposals. The battle lasted six months, provoked a conflict
between the houses, and destroyed a cabinet. Many African deputies were
concerned only to impose a wide overseas franchise on the reluctant Council
21. AP 1948, p. 176; 1950, p. 54. But in power, in 1958, he restored scrutin tfarrondissement.
His advisers* who often lacked local roots but could ensure their places on a party list, were
keener on PR than the Gaullist deputies, who had all been elected on another ticket and hoped
to renew tbeir old alliances,
22. P. H. Teitgen, JO 21 December 1950, p. 9443. But Michel Debr6 always wanted a single-
ballot ma|ority system.
23. Some UDSR and Conservative members feared that with two ballots the extremists would
kad on the first and polarize the centre vote on the second. Some MRP 'back-benchers', too
low on their lists to be re-elected in a big constituency, had cultivated a small corner of it in hopes
that scrutin (Tarr&ndissement would be introduced. Failing it, many Radicals preferred PR with
national (not departmental) pooling of votes, Anti-GaulHst urban Radicals needed PR to survive.
MRP, allied to the Coinmunists in defence of PR, had as its second choice a single ballot with
provision for party alliances* which the Communists loathed.
24. As Remy Roure called it in Monde, 26 April 195L
THE ELECTORAL SYSTEM 313
of the Republic; many French ones were obstructive in order to avoid a sum-
mer election. But on 7 May the prime minister's patience was rewarded and
the bill passed by a majority sufficient to override the upper house.25
The new law was similar in principle though not in method to that of 1919.
It amended and did not repeal the PR law of 1946, keeping the same consti-
tuences (except that Gironde was divided), the same system of party lists with
a candidate for every seat, and the same illusory preferential vote. But pana-
chage was now allowed; by-elections, abolished in 1945, were restored; and
though in theory seats were still distributed by PR, two new provisions trans-
formed the working of the system: apparentements and the absolute majority
rule. Everywhere outside the Paris area lists could form an alliance or
apparentement^ and their votes were then counted together as if cast for a
single list.26 Any list or alliance which won an absolute majority of votes took
every seat. P R was still used to distribute seats both within an alliance, and
generally when no one won an absolute majority of votes. This system enabled
the government parties to combine and so gain the advantage of size which in
1945-46 went to the 'big three', and in 1951 would otherwise have gone to the
two oppositions. Moreover, the combined Centre might win an absolute
majority, and could therefore attract citizens wanting to 'vote usefully'.
Government supporters argued that a vote for RPF was a vote for the Com-
munists.
The system was not condemned by its victims alone; Herriot called it inept
and monstrous. Those who disliked PR because they had to vote for a list
instead of a man found the new law even worse. If PR had made the elector a
puppet of the party bosses, apparentement encouraged their most dubious
manipulations. In H6rault Jules Moch was in alliance with Paul Coste-Floret,
whose brother wanted Moch impeached. In Tarn a Catholic might find his
vote for MRP returning the anticlerical zealot Maurice Deixonne. Such com-
binations, it was argued, were ineffective as well as dishonest, since they
would deter potential supporters : so government supporters would either form
a large apparentement which might well lose votes, or fail to unite so that P R
would still operate over four-fifths of the country. Even if the system worked,
the electorate would certainly regard it as rigged by the syndicat des sortants.
Many of these criticisms were borne out. The voters' choice was still fet-
tered to a list, andpanachage did not really free it.27 The anomalies appeared
early. MRP leaders in industrial areas like Nord counted on SFIO drawing
its full vote by intransigent anticlericalism, while the Socialists needed similar
extremism from their Catholic partners. Paul Ramadier in Aveyron was left
out of the conservative alliance, and could only hope that RPF would poll
25. Above, p. 288n. See Neumann, no. 165; A.S., no. 194; IntgaUth, pp. 92-101.
26. But only if they were authorized by a 'national party* running lists in 30 departments.
Eleven parties qualified in 1951 and eighteen in 1956, but some of them (and many of their lists)
were bogus. The Paris area had a form of PR which helped the weaker parties, depriving RPF
and Communists of 9 seats in 1951 and Communists alone of 10 in 1956 (7 going to MRP).
On both these points, and on by-elections, see Appendix vi. On technical aspects of the election
law see Nicholas, no. 167. Gironde's 10 seats were split into 6 and 4 ; cf. below, p. 327n,
27. Jules Moch had panachage votes from 7,000 admirers in other parties, which he did not
need but which raised the average of his list enough to elect a third Socialist ; wanting to help the
man but not the party, these 7,000 voters had achieved the reverse. See Appendix vi.
314 THfc INSTITUTIONS
well and rob the apparentement of an absolute majority. Everywhere Com-
munists and RPF had a stake in the other's success. At the count, some
remarkable results showed that it was substantial. In IKrault fewer than
39,000 Socialists elected three members while 69,000 Communists had none.27
At Lille 107,000 Socialists had five deputies and 106,000 Communists none;
84,000 MRP voters had four and 94,000 Gaullists none. Gains and losses
depended more on a party's alliances than on its own performance. In two of
the three departments where they did best the Communists lost seats. The two
most successful Socialists in the country were both beaten. A Radical minister
(Andr6 Maroselli) gained 4,000 votes but lost his seat to an independent Con-
servative, allied to RPF, who polled less than half his total.
The * thieves' ballot', as the Communists called it, achieved the intended
results. Although critics - including de Gaulle - had warned that disgusted
voters would stay at home, there was no evidence that they did.28 In the 103
constituencies there were 53 alliances of SFIO, MRP and Radicals, 36 of
which included Conservatives also. In 31 constituencies the governmental
parties won an absolute majority of votes and all the seats.29 Throughout
France the Communists won 71 fewer seats and RPF 26 fewer than the 1946
law would have given them. SFIO profited least, being kept out of the centre
alliance in many departments, especially in the west: there were only 16 extra
Socialist seats to 30 for MRP, 27 for RGR and 24 for the Conservatives, But
arithmetical computations underestimate the Centre's real gains, for 'vote
usefully' was a potent slogan and the new law helped its inventors in the
polling-booths as well as at the count. Nor was it so exceptionally unjust. In
June 1946 PR had given the Communists a member for every 26,000 votes, the
Radicals one for every 59,000; the new law gave the Radicals a seat for every
28,000 votes and the Communists one for every 52,000. Yet PR had been
vaunted as the height of mathematical fairness by those who vilified the
apparentements law as a monster of political iniquity.ao
lake the Anglo-American electoral system, the new law sacrificed abstract
justice to make a working majority possible. The old system would have
returned at least 172 Communists and 143 Gaullists - together 315 members
out of 627. With less than half the votes these parties would have held more
than half the seats, and the 1946 law would have endangered a regime which
for all its faults was preferred by every Frenchman to the dominance of his
extreme opponents, and by most to either of the major alternatives.
The new law found only few and shamefaced defenders, yet it was to remain
in use for a second election in very different circumstances. The political con-
flict was less intense than in 1951 but more straightforward (at least in outline
28. There were 2% fewer non-voters than in 1946 ; and in the dozen constituencies where the
old system was in force because no apparentement was made, there were as many as elsewhere.
Spotted papers were up from 360,000 to 540,000, probably because panachage is complicated.
^. In 40 constituencies a list (1) or alliance (39) won an absolute majority; it included the
Socialists in 31, the Gaullists in 7 and neither in 2, In 2, S FIO and MRP were joined by Conserva-
tives but not by Radicals. Of the 31, 25 were in the old republican zone along and south of the
Loire. See Maps 15 and 16*
38v Cf. Campbell, pp* 121-2, and in no. 42;InegalMs, pp. 304-10. * Wasted' votes were 24%,
double the proportion under PR but half that under pre-war scrutin farrondissement.
THE ELECTORAL SYSTEM 315
- the details were as confused as ever) when towards the end of its life the
Assembly, following an unbroken tradition, began debating the method of
electing its successor. The beneficiaries of apparentement had quarrelled before
they could begin to enjoy the unfamiliar luxury of a secure majority. As the
Gaullists were absorbed by the System, Pierre Mend&s-France gradually
emerged as leader of the opposition to conservative immobilisme, and when
his government was overthrown by defections among his fellow-Radicals he
set about reorganizing his party with a view to a close alliance with SFIO.
Always a staunch defender of scrutin d'arrondissement, he now urged it more
insistently than ever.31 Under it he could share out seats with the Socialists
and other allies, distinguish between friends and enemies in his own party,
capitalize on his popularity by endorsing a single candidate in each consti-
tuency, and hope that at the second ballot some Communist voters would (as
between the wars) rally to the Left candidate with the best hope of victory.
The conservatives frustrated him. Edgar Faure, his successor and rival,
proposed that the election which was due in June 1956 be held in 1955. This
would minimize 'election fever', enable a fresh Parliament to take major
decisions over Algeria - and give the Mendesist and Poujadist forces less time
to organize. It also endangered electoral reform. For although the 1951
system had now no public advocates, many politicians privately hoped to put
it to use once more; right-wing alliances would win an absolute majority and
all the seats in conservative constituencies, while in Left strongholds PR
would operate because the clash between Communists and democratic Left
would give a clear majority to neither.32 In 1954 the Right had used fleeting
Communist support for Mendes-France to hint that his policy was treason-
able, yet in 1955 they deliberately chose to weaken him by strengthening the
Communists. Once again they had succumbed to their fatal penchant for the
politique dupire?*
Just as in 1951, the Assembly's franchise committee could reach no agree-
ment; the deputies rejected sixteen proposals by contradictory majorities; and
the senators were overwhelmingly for scrutin d'arrondissement. But there
were several differences. First, in 1951 the existing system (PR) was favoured
by only one governmental party, MRP, which held out for compromise but
could not stop change. Secondly, the government was then bent on reform,
whereas in 1955 its main interest was in the date rather than the rules of the
election. Thirdly, conservatives as well as MRP were now in tacit accord
with the Communists, who knew that any majority system meant alliances
against them and that under the 1951 law they could count on PR operating
over most of France. Fourthly, the Socialists and others had joined the
Radicals, so that there was now more backing anjong the deputies for scrutin
d'arrondissement. Lastly its senatorial supporters, who then had only a single-
shot weapon, the absolute majority on their one and only reading of the bill,
31. Cf. n. 18, and below, p. 331.
32. On these hopes see Pierce, no. 180, pp. 395-8, 420-1 ; Georgel, L 118, 120; AP 1955, p. 82;
Intgalit6sy p. 102; Fauvet, IVe, pp. 304-7 ; Berlia, no. 14, p. 131 ; Elections 1956, pp. 7, 20. Some
Conservatives also feared that scrutin d'arrondissement would weaken their new-found discipline.
33. Ibid., p. 22. By 1956 the same men were clamouring in patriotic indignation to ban thft
Communist party.
316 THE INSTITUTIONS
could now by the navette force it to repeated votes in the Assembly - where it
found a majority on its third reading, though only a tactical one. The struggle
was prolonged, but it was broken off when the Communists switched their
tactics and their votes, and the opposition, miscalculating, defeated the
government by five votes too many and so allowed it to dissolve the Assembly.3*
Edgar Faure thus got his early election, and the 1951 law remained in force.
But its results disappointed the Right as well as the moderate Left.35 For the
conservatives, whose strategy depended on the Right vote being united while
the Left vote was split, had underestimated Poujade. Their alliances went
according to plan but the voters did not. There were apparentements of the
moderate Right (Conservatives, right-wing Radicals, MRP, and most ex-
Gaullist deputies) over two-thirds of the country and of the Republican Front
(SFIO, most Radicals, and a few Gaullist and small-party candidates) over
half of it. But only ten of the Right and one of the Left won absolute majorities ;
89% of the seats were distributed by PR, and in these the advantage of size
was less than usual since alliances were narrower and competing groups more
equally matched.36 Paradoxically, therefore, on its second trial the bastard
PR of the 1951 law gave a more proportional result than the strict PR of
1945-46.37
4. MYTHS AND MANIPULATIONS
Politically divided on many questions and by many parties, France has
electoral systems which are adapted to this situation and help to perpetuate it
A simple majority system is perhaps unworkable and has certainly been un-
acceptable, since unchecked majority power is tolerable only to those who are
confident that their opponents would not abuse it. In France a national
majority has normally seemed unattainable, and in abnormal times it has
sometimes loomed as a threat rather than a boon. Devices have therefore been
found to protect minorities, like PR, to divide majorities, like the second
ballot, or to bolster the safe parties against the dangerous ones, like apparente-
ment.
Scrutin cTarrondissement had always been opposed by Republicans until they
took it up in 1889 to check Boulanger, who seemed on the way to a national
majority (as, ironically, de Gaulle restored it in 1958 to check Soustelle). It
34. ^ On the dissolution, above, pp. 238-9. The pre-war distribution of seats had always been
inequitable and was now hopelessly out of date, but a new distribution was too controversial to
aBow scrutin eTarrondissement to pass quickly (the same problem had caused similar difficulties
in 1927 and 1951) : In&galitis, pp. 15-16, 32, 98, 105-6, 261.
35. However, the Right would have fared worse under any other system : see Williams, no. 168,
p. 170 and n. Cf. Pierce, no. 180, pp. 405-6.
36. SFIO fougfct alone in 48 constituencies; it was allied to Radicals in 48, Communists in
one (Vosges; p. 172 and n.) and Left groups in six. RS joined the Left in 11. MRP joined
Conservatives in 51 seats, 22 of them with RS also, and fought alone in 41. The Poujadists
illegally used apparentements to split their forces into three allied 'national parties', a real one
for shopkeepers and bogus ones for peasants and consumers ; this was why 1 1 of their deputies
were unseated (see Appendix vi). See Map 16.
37. The worst-off party (omitting those polling less than 10% of the vote) paid 27,000 votes
per seat more ton the best-off party in 1945. It paid 24,000 more in June 1946, 13,000 in November,
26^)00 m 1951, and 17,000 in 1956. For the worst-off party, the difference between its percentage of
seats and of votes was 44, 4-0, 3-0, 8-1 and 2-7 respectively; and the average difference for all
parties was 2-4, 2-0, 1-8, 3*6 and 1-6 (my calculations from sources given in n. 15),
THE ELECTORAL SYSTEM 317
was less just than PR, but more effective in encouraging alliances between
neighbouring parties ; and if the alliances were temporary this was part of its
attraction for politicians who preferred not to commit themselves to legal
rules or political combinations too far in advance. For circumstances might
change and tactics and allies with them ; because of the multiplicity of divisions
no one could be sure where he would find his friends and enemies in the
future.
PR was much faker, but it separated at the polls parties which had to co-
operate in Parliament and so made the task of government more difficult. For
a politician tended to depend for support on a restricted social and ideological
clientele, and if he tried to extend it he found that the floating vote was not a
single group in the centre but a series of grouplets in the interstices between
the main parties. A Socialist never appealed to the same voters as a Con-
servative : in the Midi he might woo away Radicals by stressing anticlericalism
and playing down collectivism (but then he must beware of seeming luke-
warm to his own supporters); in the north he might acquire merit with the
militants by outbidding the Communists (but then he would risk losing votes
on his right flank). The Conservative in the west had to prove himself a better
defender of property than RPF, and of church schools than MRP. Where
social issues predominated over religion MRP might compete with Socialists
rather than Conservatives, as in Nord, and Radicals clash with the Right
rather than S FI O, as in Paris. But nowhere was there a central pool of doubt-
ful votes open to every party: only separate ponds, each fished by one or two
rivals. Every party claimed to be the best defender of some group interest or
sectional ideology. The political function of the floating voter in Britain - to
attract both parties towards a common mean - was not performed in France.
An occasional protest movement at the crest of the wave might, like Gaul-
lism in 1947 and Poujadism in 1956, attract some votes from all sides. No one
else could hope for gains at the expense of their distant opponents, and PR
made everyone concentrate his fire on political neighbours who were com-
peting for the same clientele. Under tripartisme hostilities were most bitter
between Communists and Socialists, and between MRP and the Right.
RPF at first directed its main attack on MRP. Instead of exchanging mutual
support as in a second ballot system, each party fought in isolation from all
others and in special hostility to its potential allies. The bitterest blows of a
PR campaign were exchanged by parties which would have to co-operate in
Parliament if any government was to be formed. And in guaranteeing every
party against disaster PR ensured the enemies of the regime the maximum
opportunity for obstruction.
The apparentement system tried to palliate these consequences by putting
co-operativeness at a premium and intransigence at a discount. Consequently
many voters complained of being hoodwinked by the party bosses who fixed
the alliances ; and any arrangement which weakens the sense of civic responsi-
bility should certainly be scrutinized with suspicion in a country where
indvisme is so widespread. Yet the managers were not as indifferent to their
clientele as was sometimes maintained. In fact apparentements allowed the
elector two separate choices corresponding to his political priorities. Over
318 THE INSTITUTIONS
most of the country the alliances registered the preference of most voters for
the parliamentary regime against either * presidential ' or * people's ' democracy,
within this framework the moderate voter could then opt for his economic,
social or religious tendency. But where politics revolved around a single issue,
that question became the basis of alliances; so in the west, preoccupied with
its church schools, the Catholic voter could opt first for the clerical apparente-
ment of MRP and RPF and secondly, within it, for the parliamentary or the
'Bonapartist* solution to the country's problems.
Nor was the pressure on the voter so clearly destructive of his sense of
responsibility. His desire for a party free of trammels was wishful thinking, a
Utopian demand and not a political preference. To make the parliamentary
system work parties had to compromise in the Assembly : was an electoral
law that compelled the voter to face the fact really less honest than one
encouraging his illusion that his party lived in a political vacuum? The
passionate socialist hated having to choose between intransigent Communists
who outraged his principles, and a temporizing SFIO which was for ever
compromising them. Yet this was his only real choice. If, in his dream world,
no consequences followed the fall of a government and no difficulties re-
strained his party from enacting its programme overnight, there was some-
thing to be said for a mechanism to make him look the nasty world in the
face.
Indeed the most cogent criticism was that the compulsion was still far too
weak. Apparentements differed from one constituency to another and so might
pull deputies of the same party in opposite directions. They allowed splinter
groups to try their luck without risking any penalty - for unless their enemies
had an absolute majority, the splinter group's votes would revert to its allies at
the count like those of an unsuccessful candidate on the second ballot.38 They
involved no commitment at all to united action by the allies, and in 1951 they
actually encouraged each partner to differentiate itself by a sectarian cam-
paign against associates who might otherwise compromise it with its own
followers. They thus did nothing to help and perhaps a little to hinder co-
operation between the moderate groups whose individual strength they in-
flated. They were simply a negative mechanism against the advocates of
drastic change.39
Under the Fourth Republic the voter participated less than ever in choosing
his government Scrutin cTarrondissement had returned majorities which were
clear, though often loose, unreliable and short-lived. But after a PR election
there were no electoral alliances to impose a choice between the many possible
combinations. Apparentement encouraged partnerships in the distribution of
seats, but not in the campaign, so they were too negative and fragile to stand
the slightest strain. Policies were therefore still decided and reversed in Par-
liament and not at the polls. Majorities were even less coherent and fell apart
^ 38. M. Goguel advocated a majority list system with two ballots to force the centre parties
mto jomt lists and a joint campaign, thus laying the foundation in the country for parliamentary
cooperation. But alliances that differed regionally would destroy party discipline, and it would
fce hard to find a legal formula to prohibit this practice or a political majority to enact it if found -
as nc remarked: no. 113, p. 294.
39. On the splintering effect of apparentement, below, pp. 527-8. Generally, Buron, pp. 44-5.
THE ELECTORAL SYSTEM
319
even more rapidl^ than in the Third Republic, and the voters merely adjusted
the bargaining strength of each party by fractional alterations which mar-
ginally influencea the balance of parliamentary power - until new alignments
among the deputies transformed it. The first National Assembly opened with
in office and the Conservatives in opposition; within two
were out and the latter in. In 1951 SFIO joined in centre
RPF; by 1953 Gaullists were part of the majority and
the Communists
years the former
alliances against
Socialists in opposition. At the 1956 election Socialists and Radicals won a
common victory, yet the Republican Front of Mollet and Mendes lasted
barely a month and the alliance of their parties was in ruins within two
years - its normal life-span in a pre-war Chamber.
Both scrutin cTarrondissement and apparentement were devices to give more
freedom of manoeuvre to the men of the Centre from whom governments had
to be formed, strengthening their numbers against the enemies of the regime
ajnd allowing them to choose and change their associates according to the
npeds of the mon.ent. Both were often abused: for men who begin by accepting
compromise as a regrettable necessity easily come to regard it as a virtue, and
no group struggling for power keeps its original ideals wholly untarnished.
But the new device had two particular drawbacks. First, where scrutin
cfcarrondissement looked fairer than it really was, apparentement seemed to
produce blatantly unjust results and so helped to discredit its authors and the
regime itself. Secondly it gave less flexibility: parties were more rigid, shifts of
alignment more abrupt and crises more prolonged. Instead of a brief inter-
regnum while the balance of petty groups was slightly adjusted, there was now
a long one in which the big parties sparred for advantage - often ending much
as they began, siijice they had no real alternative. In Queuille's phrase they were
'bondemned to live together' by their fear of the untouchables, the opponents
qf the parliamentary system.
I The electoral ! system, though subject to perpetual tinkering, underwent
ikajor reconstruction only when the political regime itself changed. Because
tjhe stakes of thd game were high the rules were disputed (and the temptation
tjo cheat on the deal was strong). But the devices used were all self-attenuating.
PR protected minorities, but only fair-sized ones; scrutin d'arrondissement
Assembled majorities, but only disunited ones;40 apparentements bolstered the
safe parties agaiist the menacing ones, but worked only in times of clear and
^resent danger. Politicians were therefore almost always frustrated when they
^cted on their Belief (or assertion) that electoral reform could revolutionize
]bolitical behaviour. PR did not ensure stable disciplined parties, large con-
stituencies did not abolish the parish pump, apparentements did not provide a
secure basis for government, the return to scrutin d'arrondissement in 1958 did
not check (but helped) the sweeping advance of a new party of largely un-
known candidates. More humdrum calculations went equally wrong. PR did
not stop the decline of MRP from its peak or the recovery of the Radicals
ferom their hollow; scrutin d'arrondissement did not ruin the one or rescue
&e other; apparentements in 1956 did little good to the Right or harm to
the (^mmunis^ (or to the Poujadists either). The one certainty was that the
40, Until 1962?
320 THE INSTITUTIONS
repeated attempts to fabricate in every Parliament a new law tailored to suit
the existing majority inevitably contributed to the ordinary citizen's dis-
illusionment with politics.41
41. Many deputies * thought it was premature to discuss ... an electoral law [which] should be
devised in accordance with the political situation on the eve of the election': Fauvet in Monde,
15 January 1958. Cf. Campbell, pp. 43-5.
PART IV
THE SYSTEM
Chapter 23
VOTERS AND MEMBERS
In the early years after the war the people were screened from then* rulers by
the overweening organizations of three rigid parties. To the opponents of
tripartisme, these had 'confiscated the sovereignty of the people' and it had to
be restored by reducing their power. But the decline of strong parties only
brought back the Third Republican regime of shifting majorities, minority
manoeuvres and pressure-group obstruction; and though the shifts and
intrigues were often designed to exploit or respond to the voter's own changes
of mood, this system was as alien to him as tripartisme itself. He neither under-
stood nor approved of the politicians' game, and denounced its consequences
without ever realizing his own share of responsibility for them. 'The protest
movement is both the safety valve of a society divided by deep conflicts and the
traditional French form of democracy.'1
1, THE MAN AND THE PARTY
At the Liberation all the traditional rules and assumptions were upset by the
electoral law and the electorate, which both favoured the large parties of the
Left and the Resistance. But when the political trend was reversed the laws
were changed too. The first Council of the Republic was elected in 1946 by
PR, which strengthened the machines, but the second was chosen in 1948
under a predominantly majority system with individual candidatures. Party
lists were kept for the National Assembly in 1951, but apparentement removed
the incentive to vote for the large groups. The new laws were as much a
consequence as a cause of the new outlook.2
To a new candidate the endorsement of a party was always important, and
in 1945-46 essential. His choice of party was not necessarily ideological:
Bourges-Maunoury became a Radical because Socialist candidates had to be
party members for a qualifying period, and Edgar Faure because he thought
(wrongly) that as MRP's standard-bearer in Vaucluse he would lose to
Daladier.3 Reputation among the active party members remained the chief
qualification for endorsement in SFIO, and useful in MRP. For Commu-
nists (and Gaullists in 1951) acceptability to the national leadership was as or
more important. But on the Right and Centre, parties were federations of
local politicians with few militants and little discipline ; and their nomination
did not confer electoral potency on a candidate but recognized that he had it
already, usually through past services in local government or peasant organ-
izations. Even in 1945-46 the Radicals survived, not in their traditional strong-
holds, but where a local leader had kept his reputation and his right to stand.
UD S R was never more than a coterie of politicians each with his local follow-
ing. In 1956 its leader Rene Pleven deterred any potential constituency rival by
1. Hoffmann in Revolution in World Politics, p. 79 ; and cf. below, pp. 334-5, 383, 451 .
2. See above, pp., 278-9, 313-14, and below, pp. 388-9.
3. Faure lost in Paris and MRP beat Daladier: Dumaine, pp. 27-8. On Bourges-Maunoury
see BIoch-Morhange, p. 22.
VOTERS AND MEMBERS 323
making a corner in endorsements and becoming candidate also of the Radi-
cals, RGR and CNIP.
As most successful candidates were teles de lisle, the lower places were
usually bestowed to balance the ticket.4 Even in 1945-46 local feeling had
to be respected. The rival towns of Colmar and Mulhouse shared the top
two places on the MRP, Socialist and Radical (but not RPF) lists in Haut-
Rhin in 1951. In 1956 there were men from Moulins, Montlu$on and Vichy on
four of the six main lists in Allier, and in Seine-Maritime west no party
neglected Le Havre or Dieppe. Protestants expected representation in Alsace
and Basques in Beam. Veterinarians were at a premium in the countryside,
and doctors everywhere - even in Paris. Peasant leaders were in universal
demand. Women were thought useful, but rarely placed high; conservative
parties sometimes demonstrated their egalitarianism by putting in a railway
worker (last). A leading local personality might lend his prestige without seek-
ing election; in 1956 seven senators stood in last place on RS lists, and Charles
Barange and another retiring deputy also agreed to help their successors in
this way. Candidates were often chosen to appeal to circles not accessible to
the lele de lisle? The Radical member for Seine-et-Marne in 1951 had a
prominent local Catholic as his second, a peasant official third, and ex-
Gaullist mayors fourth and fifth. Conversely, even SFIO considered it tacti-
cally impossible to head a list with two Jews.
Political balance was a delicate matter. A party strongly influenced by its
militants or anxious to make a clear impression on the voter usually chose a
fairly homogeneous team; MRP candidates were generally progressive in
Seine but conservative in Basses-Pyrenees. But a coalition could represent its
various components, a divided party could satisfy both its wings, and a
politician whose voters were of different views or traditions could offer appro-
priate homage to both sides.6 It was harder to face both ways in making
alliances, for these might decide not only whether a party won or lost but
whether it was Right or Left. In 1951 conservatives in many parties entered
centre coalitions only because RPF refused their approaches. In 1956, the one
RS deputy who made an apparent ement with the Republican Front had pre-
viously been refused by their opponents; MRP deputies with shaky western
seats insisted on an alliance with the Right which the party's urban militants
detested; and Socialists everywhere were attacked by the Communists be-
cause their party had agreed to a few local coalitions with pro-clerical
Gaullists.7
In the campaign itself the party organization played a far less important
4. In 1956 390 deputies had been top of their lists, 109 second, 31 third and 14 lower; only 57 %
of Communists but 77 % of others were teies de liste : Campbell, p. 1 1 8, and Elections 1956, pp. 429-
430 (Dogan), 505 (Goguel).
5. Ibid., pp. 430-2, 435-6nn. ; Partis et Classes, pp. 228-30 (Gourdon on Radicals), 254 and n
(Merle on CNIP), 292-3, 299-300, 314-15 (Dogan on the 1951 Assembly); Williams, no. 168,
p. 152; Rose, no. 169, pp. 254-5; Pierce, no. 180, p. 403n.; Pineau, pp. 15-17; Paysans, pp.
510-1 l;Buron, pp. 35-42.
6. RGR's list in Indre in 1951 had three Radicals, a member of UDSR and a Paul Faure
Socialist. Pinay's secretary stood for Tarn in 1956 with both the Gaullist and the Vichyite candi-
dates of 1951 on his list.
7. See above, pp. 97n., 121n. also Nicholas et at, no. 168, p. 153, no. 169, p. 253.
M
324 THE SYSTEM
part than in Britain, as there were fewer problems of getting out the vote: no
register to keep, no canvassing, official dispatch of election addresses, and on
polling-day (a Sunday) no cars or party workers required. Public meetings
were generally held, since the voters expected them (Marseilles had nearly 600
in the 1956 election), although many candidates doubted their utility. Outside
the towns it was essential for the member or his colistiers to visit the mayors
and local notables of as many communes as possible; in Mendes-France's
largely rural constituency of Eure, the lists in 1956 averaged 72 'meetings'
which were mostly of this kind. The experienced candidate adapted his speech
slightly to his audience, arguing in a conservative stronghold for strengthening
the moderating influence of the Senate, and in a mining town for 'associating
the second chamber with the work of the sovereign National Assembly'.
This conventional type of electioneering was common to all the democratic
parties. But for the Communists an election was a recruiting campaign,
and they occasionally used house-to-house canvassing. The Poujadists
profited greatly from the active support of shopkeepers and commercial
travellers.8
Less dependent on the organization for money and propaganda activity
than a British MP, the deputy became increasingly important to it, especially
in the countryside and on the political Centre and Right. Campaigns were
fought at the constituency level, for there was no nation-wide press and
broadcasting facilities were minimal. In the organized parties headquarters
might supply literature and perhaps a little money, but candidates from the
looser groups often preferred to rely on their personal reputations and to
raise their financial backing locally.9 Though the national prestige of his party
affected the member's chances of re-election, among the centre groups it was
rarely decisive.
To the party a strong candidate was vital, for in spite of the list system the
voter still chose between men. Even in 1951 over two hundred deputies had
no colleague elected from their list.10 Occasionally a newcomer exploited the
confusion caused by the vague interchangeable labels of the unorganized
groups; but increasingly lists concentrated their publicity on the man and not
the party.11 Even in the well-organized parties a single leader in each consti-
tuency came to personify Ms movement over a wide area. When panachage
was introduced in 1951 the elector, while still supporting his party, could
repudiate one or more of its nominees and transfer a fraction of his vote to
candidates on a rival list; some leaders like Jules Moch and Rene Pleven
attracted thousands of admirers, while others were crossed off their own lists
(particularly if they were in coalition with another party).12 Five years later,
when resentment against the sonants expressed itself in the Mendesist and
8. Ibid., pp. 152-61, 250-63, 265-80; Elections 1956, pp. 322-52 (C. Prieur on Aveyron, p. 325
on the Senate), 353-68 (F. Essig on Eure, p. 354 on meetings), 422 (Goguel) ; Buron, pp. 48-61.
9. See Williams, no. 168, pp. 153-4; Buron, pp. 68-9; above, pp. 65-6, below, DD. 371-2.
10. In 1951, 209 ; in 1956, 281 : Elections 1956, pp. 429-30, 505.
11. Ibid., pp. 422, 504-5; also p. 418 (on confusion among independents in Haut-Rhin) and
Y. Levy, Le prabltme des modes de scrutin (1956), p. 32 (for Communists voting Trotskyist by
mistake in 1951, and Mendesists misled in 1956). And see above, p. 66 n. 9.
12. See Appendix vi. Among leaders who ran behind their lists in 1951 were Georges Bidault,
Pierre de Gaulle (both allied to Conservatives) and Maurice Thorez.
VOTERS AND MEMBERS 325
Poujadist revolts, some voters loyal to their old party nevertheless deleted the
sitting member's name.13
The familiar candidate was an asset far more often than a liability, and even
organized parties were reluctant to lose him. In 1946 it had cost nothing to
discipline a deputy who had held his seat for only a year, but by 1951 he had
sat for five and the risks of displacing him were far greater. In some areas and
sectors of politics voters and even militants preferred the man to the organiza-
tion, which indeed he sometimes dominated. Jacques Chaban-Delmas took
the Bordeaux Radical party over to de Gaulle; the MRP federation of
Charente also followed its member into RPF; its neighbour in Dordogne
approved the local deputy (Andre Denis) in his repeated revolts and final
defection to the Left. In 1946 Charles d'Aragon, another MRP left-winger
(and a marquis) had headed the poll in Hautes-Pyrenees; five years later he
went off to Paris to stand as a neutralist, and the party lost seven-eighths of its
votes to the profit of a strong new Conservative, Jacques Fourcade, the Presi-
dent of the Assembly of the French Union. In Somme, where the MRP
deputy turned Conservative and the Radical joined RPF, each was re-elected
by his own former voters.14
When a party was doing well in the country it had little need to worry about
discipline; once it began to do badly it could ill afford to apply it. For a
recalcitrant deputy could often ensure his own political future by going over
to a rising party, which could clinch its prospective victory by adopting the
defector as its own candidate. Eight members stood for their old consti-
tuencies under RP F's banner in 195 1, and six were successful ; thirteen fought
with the endorsement of another party, and seven won; and in 1956, of 32
Gaullists who had gone over to the Conservatives or RGR, 26 saved their
seats. The deputy who stood as an independent had less prospect of success. In
1951 one Conservative dissident, the aged but formidable Canon Kir in C6te
d'Or, acquired so much Radical, MRP and even Socialist support that he was
triumphantly re-elected; in 1956 his chastened party restored him to the head
of its list at the expense of a sitting member, who was beaten.15 But this was
exceptional. Often other deputies who stood as independents in 1951 only one
was re -elected.16 In 1956 all five lost.
However, the organization could not lay down the law to a wayward par-
liamentarian, for a quarrel usually hurt them both. A rebel who could not
hold his seat might still deprive the party of it.17 After 1946 only the Com-
13. Examples in Williams, no. 168, p. I72n. In 1956 Radical sitting members put their vote up
30%, new Radical candidates 80%. CNIP and MRP sortants also did much worse than new-
comers, but Socialists and Communists did much better and GaulUsts a trifle less badly; the
electorate discriminated against outgoing deputies from the old majority (notwithstanding Dogan
in Elections 1956, pp. 442-3). On conditions favouring new men or old see Buron, p. 36.
14. For the villages of Somme see J. Bugnicourt in Paysans, pp. 476-7, 480, cf. 471 ; also
Professor J. Blondel kindly showed me his unpublished study of Amiens. On rebellious local
parties, AP 1947, p. 215, 1950, p. 153 ; Monde, 26 June 1953.
15. Long, pp. 155-64 (for other examples of CNIP flexibility, above, pp. 152,1 54). Two other
Conservatives quarrelled with their local parties and lost ; so did three Socialists. In all 3 1 members
stood for a new cause in their old seat; 17 had been MRP, and so had 5 who stood else-
where ; of these 22 only eight won (four RPF and four Conservatives).
16. M. Bessac; see above, p. 179. . .
17. In 1956 three ex-MRP independents lost, only one to MRP. Three Conservatives without
CNIP endorsement lost; one, supported by the Bordeaux party, cost CNIP the seat.
326 THE SYSTEM
munists dared wield the whip freely. Very few members had to retire from
Parliament because of political disputes: perhaps half a dozen MRP deputies
in 1951 and three in 1956, and two or three Socialists on each occasion. It
became rare in the towns and almost unknown in the countryside for a deputy
to be re-adopted in a lower place on the list. Against 35 non-Communists
downgraded in 1946, in 1951 there were only ten (of whom three were beaten)
and in 1956 eleven (five lost).18 Laxer discipline gave the member little incen-
tive to break with his party, unless it was on the wane (of 36 deputies who
fought under a new banner in 1951, 22 were ex-MRP, and of 43 in 1956, 37
were ex-Gaullists). The public reaction against monolithic parties and the
stronger position of the sitting member had swung the balance of power in his
favour and given him greater freedom of action. The local organization was
unlikely to cause him difficulty unless he neglected the constituency, and
national headquarters would do so only against isolated individuals who
flagrantly violated a cherished party principle: an MRP rebel could afford to
abstain on the Japanese peace treaty, but not to campaign against the Euro-
pean army.
More serious problems arose when the national party clashed with a local
branch. Regional differences of outlook and interest often obliged a candidate
to adapt his party's appeal and policy to local needs. This bothered neither the
undisciplined Right and Centre nor the opportunists of the far Left: the Com-
munists cheerfully attacked the high cost of living in the towns and the low
level of food prices in the country, and Radicals had flourished for years by
suiting their views and alliances to regional circumstances. But MRP can-
didates were sometimes embarrassed by the conduct of colleagues from
another wing of the party. SFIO was especially vulnerable; its local alliances
with pro-clerical candidates in 1951 and 1956 were exploited against it else-
where, while party headquarters had always to resist the desire of a few
branches for a pact with the Communists.19
The Communists themselves were concerned to weaken their rivals' dis-
cipline and reinforce their own. At the Liberation they had sought immediate
electoral influence and parliamentary strength, and therefore preferred well-
known candidates. But in later years the leadership valued reliability more
than numbers and eliminated doubtful members, notably critics of Stalin's
pact with Hitler. Even in 1945 the Lot-et-Garonne branch was forbidden to
renominate its hero Renaud Jean, the pre-war peasant leader and chairman
of the parliamentary group, who had openly condemned the pact; and the
veto was repeated in 1951. Perhaps twenty members at that election and fifteen
at the next were removed or downgraded for political reasons.20 But even the
18. Dogan in Elections 1956, pp. 435-8; Pierce, no. 180, pp. 403-4; Williams, no. 168, p. 171.
On 1946 see below, p. 388. In urban areas about one member in five and elsewhere about one in
eleven was downgraded either in 1946 or 1951. But in 1956 all victims but one were in urban
areas (or semi-urban ones where the party was sure of several seats, like MRP in Alsace). The
five who lost were 2 SFIO, 2 CNIP and 1 MRP.
19. By law a party's apparentements had to be authorized nationally, but only party discipline
could stop a federation agreeing to a joint list with another party, as Vosges did in 1956. See above,
pp. 97n., 172,323.
20. In 1951 thirteen Communists were downgraded and in 1956, eight; nine and two were
beaten. Politics seems to have caused most of the Communist retirements in both years. See
[over
VOTERS AND MEMBERS 327
Communists were more ruthless in the towns than in the country, and even
their well-disciplined electorate took some account of personality.21
One ordinary deputy even defied the party and put it to rout. Louis Prot
was a popular veteran, deputy for Somme since 1936; in 1949 a younger col-
league tried to force him out. Prot resigned from the party, sent his parlia-
mentary proxy to Thorez to prove his political orthodoxy, and publicly
accused the local leaders of organizing an armed robbery at the Liberation
and burning down their own headquarters to destroy the evidence. Paris
ordered an inquiry. Profs interesting speeches stopped, and after everyone
had been mildly censured he settled down to nine more years of total obscurity
as senior Communist deputy for Somme. Other Communist politicians also
suffered from bourgeois failings, and Pierre Herve in Finist£re was the victim
of a similar campaign by the local leader who had had to make room for him
at the top of the list.22
Such disputes were more frequent - or more public - in other parties. The
Gironde Radicals followed Chaban-Debnas into RPF against opposition
from both his predecessor (an ex-senator whom he had displaced from the
Assembly in November 1946) and his colleague Marc Dupuy, his senior in age
but his junior on the list.23 Louis Marin, the grand old man of French
nationalism, was replaced in 1951 after 46 years as member for Nancy by his
second, the steelmasters' spokesman Pierre Andre, who was barely half his
age. Madame Brossolette, a highly respected senator for Seine, was a dis-
ciplined Socialist but supported the minority in the party; on this pretext she
was downgraded in 1958; Georges Dardel, the local boss who took her seat,
turned against Mollet a month later.24
It was easier under the 1951 electoral law than under simple PR for can-
didates to stand as individuals. As between two men of similar views in 1945-
1946, either one conceded top place and the seat to the other, or else they ran
separately, split their vote, and both failed. In 1951 and 1956 they could
present allied lists, combine their forces, and let the voters choose between
them. (This partly explains the great proliferation of lists, which averaged five
Williams, p. 353, and sources in n. 18. For Renaud Jean, Rossi, p. 446 ; Wright in Earle, pp. 224-5,
and in no. 228, p. 41.
21. In November 1958 they often polled best, relative to the NON vote at the September
referendum, where an outgoing deputy was standing. The fellow-travelling Progressive members
proved to have strong personal support not transferable to the Communist party.
22. Herve: Dieu et Cesar, pp. 26-7. Prot: Monde, 28 and 29 April, 14 and 21 May, 14 June
1949; Humanite, 9 September, Figaro, 7 and 11 September. He may have had a still stronger
weapon. According to Histoire, ii. 27 the decision to approach the Nazi authorities in 1940 was
not made, as the official line claims, by local militants who were later disgraced for it, but on
direct orders from Thorez and Duclos to a central committee member (later killed by the Germans)
who was deputy for Somme; he obeyed but disapproved, and gave the records to 'a comrade
from the Somme . . . who has already made use of them by way of a shield'. In 1958 Prot fought
a hopeless seat 'but this apparently was against the wishes of the Paris headquarters* ; his younger
rival (Ren6 Lamps) was narrowly beaten in the best seat, Amiens : see J. Blondel in Elections
Abroad, pp. 95, 101-2.
23. Dupuy's strength lay outside Bordeaux, where Chaban-Delmas was mayor. In 1951 he
persuaded the Assembly to make Gironde into two constituencies; but a party conference
(held in the absence of his supporters) did not renominate him : Monde, 22 May and 2 June
195L
24. See above, pp. 93, lOOn.
328 THE SYSTEM
per seat in 1945-46, seven in 1951, and ten in 1956.25) Thus in 1950 the
Socialists in Pyrenees-Orientales were split by a quarrel over control of the
local newspaper between the veteran deputy and president of the departmental
council, Louis Nogueres, and the young party secretary, Arthur Conte. The
organization supported its secretary and was disaffiliated by Paris. But
apparentement solved the difficulty; at the 1951 election Conte headed a list of
bis own in unfriendly alliance with SFIO, Radicals and MRP. He ran well
ahead of the official Socialist, affiliated to the SFIO group in the Assembly,
and was soon readmitted to the fold.26
Relations between competitors did not always permit this happy solution.
Some disappointed candidates preferred to fight on their own and so damage
(or coerce) those who had repudiated them. In Paris, where the law allowed no
alliances, a UDSR candidate in 1956 was accused of splitting the Mendesist
vote; he replied that he had accepted second place on the Radical list but then
found it had been offered to seventeen others. In Calvados Joseph Laniel
belatedly picked as his second a young local councillor who had begun a
vigorous campaign against the sitting members in general and his future leader
in particular.
If list voting had not eliminated personality from general elections, the
individualist had still more scope when by-elections were restored in 1951. In
Paris he might reach half a million voters, which was cheap publicity for a
politically-minded novelist, a commercially-minded restaurant owner or an
earnest-minded crank. In 1952 the founder-president of the International
League of Illegitimate Children contested a Paris seat, demanding 23 reforms
in the interests of his fellows and the restoration of French as the sole language
of diplomacy. Even at a general election independents were not always deterred
by the need to form a complete list Two Paris constituencies had nineteen
lists each in 1956. In 1951 6,000 citizens of Allier voted for five members of
one family, who appropriately called their list ' Republican Concentration '. A
motorists' candidate in Bordeaux urged everyone to strike two names off their
own party's list and panacher in his favour, which would harm nobody and
give him two seats; 1,500 electors (or their equivalent in fractions) responded.
In north-eastern Paris there were 4,500 votes for the list of Mecontents, anti-
partis et independants nationaux. Five years later a similar appeal won two and
a half million votes and fifty seats.
2. THE CONSTITUENCY REPRESENTATIVE
The function of a party within the regime was to defend the values and
interests of a group of prudent and not too discontented voters ; its spokesman
was normally a local man they knew and trusted. But the protest candidate
exploited his fresh appeal and his freedom from sordid parliamentary habits.
25. Campbell, p. 117; Dogan in Elections 1956, pp. 426-9 (the proliferation was all on the
Right); Goguel in ibid., p. 504; Intgalites, p. 319. Pierce, no. 180, p. 402 reckons seven 'genuine'
lists per seat in 1951 and eight in 1956. For the Poujadists exploiting this provision, see Appen-
26. He won many non-Socialist votes (and kept them in 1956). But he was far behind the Com-
munist, a champion of private property, dear wine and tomatoes, and no imports from Spain:
see Williams, p. 354.
VOTERS AND MEMBERS 329
True Gaullists believed with their leader that the 'higher interests of France'
were 'quite different from the immediate advantage of Frenchmen*; regard-
ing themselves as representatives of the nation as a whole, they often made it
all too plain that the particular territorial base into which the party leaders
had 'parachuted' them was fortunate to have the honour of returning them to
Paris - an attitude that cost them dear in 1956.27 The Poujadists, in contrast,
were an ostentatiously provincial movement in revolt against the wicked
capital. Their candidates combined the appeals of local origins and political
novelty- except in Paris itself where they deliberately presented outsiders. The
Communists, with their priceless asset of a disciplined following, placed their
men and their allies where they could do most good: when Pierre Cot's seat in
Savoie was unsafe they moved him to Lyons, Pierre Herv6 was sent to head the
list in Finistere, and Roger Garaudy and Waldeck-Rochet, as they rose in the
party hierarchy, were promoted from provincial constituencies to stand in the
capital. But they too presented familiar local figures in the rural departments.
In every party discipline was stricter in the towns, where the member's per-
sonality counted for less than in the individualist-minded countryside.
The new electoral law did not lighten the member's burden of constituency
duties. Indeed it increased the pressure on the government supporter, who
heard from his own followers throughout the department, from people with a
claim on a ministry held by his party, and from opposition voters who doubted
whether their favourite member had influence enough to help them. In return
he could write at election time to mayors of his party that their village was at
last to have its new school or that the recently abandoned bus service was to be
resumed (and sly mayors with more partisan fervour than social conscience
were even said to slow up house building till their party came to power in
Paris). Moreover, the ministerialist's constituency work not only made friends
'but above all it neutralizes enemies. A Communist mayor devoted to his
rural commune has become used to writing to a Conservative when he has
need of a deputy; they have come to work together on a non-political basis. It
will be hard for the mayor to denounce the member and try to defeat him. '28
Even Mendes-France did not disdain to supplement his exposure of con-
servative follies in Indo-China or North Africa by pointing with pride to the
housing achievements of his team of local mayors, A few national figures like
Antoine Pinay and Paul Ramadier might say little about constituency prob-
lems - but only a long and famous record of local services allowed them to do
so. For the deputy who neglected his department was not lightly forgiven,
however worthy his reasons. M. E. Naegelen, Governor-General of Algeria
for three years before the 1951 election, prudently migrated from his Alsatian
seat to the distant Basses-Alpes. Andre Philip, a devotee of the Council of
Europe, was badly beaten at Lyons; his Strasbourg colleague Frangois de
27. Below, p. 429 . Quotation: C. de Gaulle, Le Salut, p. 28. Types of candidate: Huron,
p. 36.
28. Elections 1956, pp. 331-2 (C. Prieur on Aveyron). Also Waline, p. 84, quoting Madame
Vienot's letter resigning her seat in 1947 because the new system imposed such a physical strain;
Wylie, pp. 215-16, 223-7, quoting letters about a village school at the 1951 election; Lavau,
no. 141, p. 33, on sly mayors; Dogan in JPaysans, pp. 225-7; '"subsidyism" is the basis of the
electoral life of our countryside', C. d'Aragon in ibid., pp. 512-13 ; Buron, pp. 24-6.
330 THE SYSTEM
Menthon profited from the popularity of his second, a local man who answered
letters. Ministers were usually safe at the head of their lists - even where
panachage and preferential voting showed that numbers of their political fol-
lowers regarded office and fame as no substitute for presence in the district.
Lesser figures were in much more danger. An Alsatian MRP member who
had repeatedly attacked his party's North African policies was not re-nomin-
ated in 1956 : Parisians assumed that he was suffering for his liberal views, but
he himself explained that his sin was his unwillingness to attend all local
ceremonies.29
Particularist feeling was strongest among the peripheral groups - Bretons,
Basques, Catalans, Alsatians - where a candidate was handicapped if he
could not speak dialect. In 1951, when RPF 'parachuted' General Koenig
into Strasbourg (the party's birthplace), he had to 'attend his own meetings
rather than take part in them' and rarely opened his mouth. Five years later,
still a * foreigner', he was thought to have cost his declining party thousands
of votes.30 A Gaullist in 1951 put out literature in Yiddish in a Jewish quarter
of Paris, and in 1956 Socialists had handbills in Arabic for North Africans and
in Polish for immigrant miners. Other SFIO leaflets were designed for rail-
waymen, young people, and Communists; and the Communists organized
many of their urban meetings for particular groups - women, youth, teachers,
the badly-housed, or transport workers.
Some constituencies or regions depended on a single trade or industry. No
special pressure-group was needed to persuade members from the Midi to
defend the winegrowers. A doctor-deputy from Herault, in his concern for
hygiene, naturally defended a ban on aperitifs based on spirits, likepastis, and
demanded one on Coca-Cola. In the 1951 election the local Radical mem-
ber wrote to the Radical premier about the sad state of the wine trade; the
Conservative followed suit next day; their MRP rival wrote to the MRP
minister of agriculture the day after, and then the Socialist, Jules Moch,
trumped them all by taking the matter to the cabinet. In fruit, beet and wine
departments in 1956 the prudent candidate tempered his condemnation of
alcoholism (women had votes) with a repudiation of any specific measure pro-
posed against it.31 Coastal members naturally joined to support port improve-
ments and shipbuilding subsidies, but quarrelled over their precise destination.
In the regions on which the church schools conflict centred, the activity of
A PEL and the Comtiede defense la'ique was perhaps as superfluous as it was
intense, for even without organized pressure no candidate could win support
without committing himself to one side or the other.
29. Elections 1956, pp. 335-7 (Ramadier), 362-3 (Mendes-France), 413 (Alsace); Williams,
no. 168, pp. 165-6; Monde, 16 June 1951 (Menthon); Buron, pp. 81-90.
30. Monde, 4 June 1951 : the general's predecessor (who changed his constituency at both
this election and the next) 'doubtless did not appear sufficiently often in a province . . . where
people insist on "a flesh-and-blood deputy", "a deputy who is one of us" '. Cf. F. G. Dreyfus
in Elections 1956, p. 415. In Alpes-Maritimes in 1951 the general who headed the RPF list came
from an old local family and it was his second, an aircraft manufacturer who allegedly contributed
largely to party funds, who was 'rather out of his element' and had to be kept quiet
31. Figaro, 11 June 1951 (Herault), cf. Monde, 21 May. 'Enfin nous nous attacherons a la
formule qui permettra aux petits bouilleurs de cru de concilier leurs revendications bien compre-
hensibles avec le programme de lutte contre 1'alcoolisme': Radical election address in Vienne,
1956, quoted by Thomas, no. 170, p. 270. And see below, p. 357
VOTERS AND MEMBERS 331
Large constituencies made the member's task of reconciling local interests
harder, perhaps to the public advantage. Even in mainly agricultural depart-
ments candidates were wise to pay attention to minorities of industrial
workers, who formerly had often been confined to a single small district. Con-
versely, outside Paris almost every deputy had some rural voters in his area.32
To cover his wider parish the member had to spend more time in his depart-
ment than before the war - yet after all his efforts he knew his constituents far
less well than under scrutin cfarrondissement. Mend&s-France, who had
experience of both systems, favoured the small area because the deputy could
explain his unpopular votes personally to all the influential men of his district,
and so build support which enabled him to resist the pressure-groups.33
Even in the cities local services paid impressive parliamentary dividends.
Like an American senator with seniority, a French political leader was valued
by his constituents for his national reputation which reflected glory on the dis-
trict, but also because - as he was not slow to remind them - their town or
department gained from having its claims pressed by an * ambassador to
Paris' on whom the fate of the minister's bills or the length of his tenure might
one day depend. Lyons was a Radical bastion while Herriot lived, though less
secure as he grew less efficient as mayor. Rapid Socialist progress in Marseilles
owed much to Gaston Defferre's local administration, and at Bordeaux
Jacques Chaban-Delmas kept a powerful machine when disaster struck the
Gaullist cause elsewhere. Even in the capital the mayor of Vincennes saved
his seat in 1956 through the support of his own suburb, which made up only
one-twelfth of his electorate but gave him half his votes; and no rising party
of the Right could afford (though it might have preferred) to reject the eagerly
proffered alliance of the master of the Paris left bank, fidouard Fr6d£ric-
Dupont.
The successful politician of the Third or Fourth Republic established his
local base among fellow-citizens who judged him on his constructive achieve-
ments as well as his ideology; if he had no base he was taken much less
seriously by his fellow-practitioners. The Communists were successful muni-
cipally because they were efficient and capable administrators; the Poujadists
never penetrated local government at all ; many Gaullists who swept to the
Assembly on a wave of protest in 1958 were surprised to see the 'man of the
System' they had expelled from Parliament comfortably returned to his
mayoral chair six months later.34 At a municipal election the voter was elect-
ing councillors to support or oppose a mayor whose work he could evaluate
32. *In my capacity as a rural deputy ... I was often in conflict with my colleagues from the
towns. On the other hand, when I was elected on a list system I could reconcile the interests of
countryside and town instead of setting one against the other, and thus I could defend the true
general interest': V. Auriol, JO 2 August 1945, p. 1762 (quoted Inegalites, p. 41). But not all
members tried. In Eure in 1956 the CNI candidate was a peasant leader who talked of nothing
but agriculture ; his ARS opponent (the prince de Broglie) concentrated exclusively on the towns :
F. Essig in Elections 1956, p. 359 ; cf. Williams, no. 168, p, 170.
33. P. Mendes-France, La politique et la veritl (1958), pp. 266-7. But cf. Paysans, p. 214.
34. Bloch-Morhange, pp. 175-6; Hoffmann, pp. 405-6 (the Poujadist vote dropped by two-
thirds in the municipal elections of early 1956, while it was still rising in parliamentary by-elections) ;
Blondel's study of Amiens (see n. 14); Wylie, p. 238; Paysans, pp. 42, 510-13; Williams and
Harrison, pp. 112-13 ; Chapman, Introduction to French Local Government, pp. 222-3 ; Buron,
pp. 34, 90-7, 139.
332 THE SYSTEM
from his own experience. But at a parliamentary election Ms attitude was
quite different. This was an opportunity to send to Paris an envoy either to
defend his interests and outlook, or to express his resentments. Both to the
prudent majority and to the angry minority the deputy's function was
negative: protective obstruction for the one, denunciatory obstruction for the
other. In each camp only a few voters imagined that the politician might play a
more positive role in supporting a real ministry with a real programme. But
this was not because the ordinary Frenchman was incapable of thinking
constructively about politics. In local government, for all its limited powers,
there was a circuit of confidence between rulers and people. In the National
Assembly, for all its omnipotence, there was none.
3. THE MEMBER OF PARLIAMENT
The protest voter in indignant revolt against the political regime was likely to
turn to a candidate from his own background, who shared his exasperation
and would not be seduced by the wiles of the System. Most Poujadist deputies
were small shopkeepers, like the butcher from Haute-Savoie who thought
politics a *m6tier instable* and kept his shop open at week-ends (wisely: he
was unseated). Many Communist members sprang from the working class.
But to voters who supported the regime, their deputy was a spokesman for
their ideas and an advocate for their interests; it was more important that he
should fulfil these roles effectively than that he should himself be one of them-
selves. Professional men were therefore even more over-represented in the
French than in other legislatures. Bodley remarked long ago that half the
deputies came from the tiny professional class, and included more lawyers
than men engaged - like five-sixths of their countrymen - in industry, com-
merce or agriculture. In 1946 those three occupations provided 204 deputies
out of 544, and the professions 281. Among the 378 non-Communists, lawyers
outnumbered workers and peasants by 69 to 62 and teachers businessmen by
57 to 54. Wage-earners were 177 in 1946, 155 ten years later; under half were
manual workers, who were nearly all Communists. Middle-class preponder-
ance was still greater in the conservative 1951 Assembly, and in the upper
house.85
Nevertheless, politics was one of the few ways to rise rapidly in the stratified
French social system. Few members had been eminent in another profession
before election to Parliament; and indeed, ever since Bodley's day, the old
ruling class had lamented its own alienation from the regime and the people by
complaining that *the best men keep out of politics*. In the Assembly there
was no social equivalent to the old school tie, and a title did not always win
Conservative hearts; one department was Represented by the crypto-Com-
munist son of a marquis and a small-town solicitor of Eurasian origin who
belonged to the Peasant party. The few women, usually Communist or
MRP, dwindled from 32 deputies in 1945 to 19 in 1956, and from 22 senators
in 1946 to 9 in 1958.86 Though there was no locality rule, carpet-baggers were
35. Hamon, no. 121, pp. 548-53 ; Bodley, ii. 155-63 ; Husson, ii. xxx ; Dogan's tables(see p. 68n.) ;
cf. Williams, p. 206n. ; overseas members omitted* On senators see above, p. 289.
36. Hamon, no. 121, p. 549. Women and wage-earners were more numerous among candidates,
to balance the ticket, but they usually had low places with no chance of election.
VOTERS AND MEMBERS 333
unpopular in the provinces, especially among the traditional parties. Contrary
to the popular legend that politicians were excitable men from the Midi, more
northerners represented southern seats than vice versa; but outside the capital
most deputies sat for the department where they had been born.37 The mem-
ber's contact with his electors often extended beyond his postbag, his weekly
visits and his local government work. Like American congressmen, many
deputies had deep roots in their districts and were 'representative' of their
people not only in politics.
In Parliament, as in the barrack-room, men from different classes and
provinces met and mixed freely. Often the most valuable contacts occurred
within the party groups, and as these were sometimes more restricted occu-
pationally than the Assembly as a whole, the geographical melting-pot was
more effective than the social. But in so diverse a country the lobby fulfilled
an important function as a forum for exchanging experiences, for the prejudiced
newcomer soon discovered that 'foreigners' from other regions and 'enemies*
with other faiths had personal problems and temptations not unlike his own.
He learned the need for compromise between rival groups, opposing interests,
even conflicting ideals. Even the famous Gaullist general or Radical lawyer
might benefit from meeting less distinguished compatriots on equal terms.38
The lobby kept down the temperature of domestic conflict. For Parliament
was a club in which success went to the man with many friends and no enemies :
the bargainer rather than the fighter. Before the rise of the Communist party,
Robert de Jouvenel noted that 'there is more difference between two revolu-
tionaries, one of whom is a deputy, than between two deputies, one of whom
is a revolutionary'.39 Those who suffered from the ingratitude of their 'com-
mon enemy, the voter' quite frequently found new public employment from
ministers of other parties. Of the leading Socialists defeated in 1951, Andr€
Philip was promptly appointed to the Economic Council, Paul Ramadier to
the ILO, and J. R. Guyon to the chair of the Alcohol Commission. Even when
SFIO was in resolute opposition, Jules Moch represented France in dis-
armament negotiations for years and M. E. Naegelen was offered the Moroc-
can residency by Laniel. Though such political appointments were usually
criticized, they were often strictly justified by merit; and parliamentary life
would not necessarily have been healthier if the livelihood of all the members -
and their families - had depended exclusively on their electoral survival.
Members recognized that many opponents were also colleagues. Just as the
governmental parties installed political mechanisms that were usually self-
attenuating, so they carried on most of their controversies with moderation
and rarely exploited their victories to excess. When Frenchmen were needlessly
divided the quarrel was often fomented by the enemies of the regime to split
and weaken its defenders.40 Yet even among the protest parties only the Com-
munists resisted (not quite completely) the temptations of the System; the
37. Under half of RPF's deputies but over 60% of CNIP and SFIO were local born. Only
one provincial member in ten was born in Paris. (My calculations.)
38. See Hamon, no. 117, pp. 389-90; no. 121, especially pp. 559-60.
39. La Rtpublique des camarades (1914), pp. 16-17.
40. Above, p. 319 ; below, pp. 315-16, 450-2. Even the insurrectionaries of 1958 chose to show
strength rather than use it.
334 THE SYSTEM
others were absorbed by it within two years of their election. The parliamen-
tary shock-absorber thus cushioned the edifice of French government from
the full impact of waves of popular discontent. But the groundswell remained,
and exasperation with the politician who talked revolt in his constituency and
compromise in Paris contributed to the low repute of his profession in France.
This was undeserved. Most members of the Fourth Republic's Parliaments
had been subjected to an unusually severe test of patriotism and courage, for
the Resistance and the Free French movement were their principal recruiting
grounds. In intellectual capacity the National Assembly certainly stood com-
parison with the House of Commons. Among leaders and c back-benchers '
alike the great majority were conscientious, well-intentioned and honest men.41
If the deputy's standing was lower than in the great days of the Third Repub-
lic, this was more a result of major social changes breaking the traditional
lines of political communication than of any decline in personal quality.
Antoine Pinay thought Ms colleagues in the Fourth Republic better than those
of the Third. Another acute observer (with little love for the regime and none
for the Resistance) thought that a third of his fellow-members were at once
able, disinterested and wholly devoted to their duties; and that as human
material the parliamentarians were much superior to their economic, pro-
fessional or official opposite numbers.42
But theirs was a thankless task, for in France more than elsewhere the 'fret-
ful constituent' clamoured for incompatibles and blamed his representative
when he did not get them. The cowardly or cynical politician therefore talked
one language in his department and another to his colleagues; the conscien-
tious member patiently educated his voters in compromise, explaining the
limits of the budget, the price of economic progress, the choice of evils abroad,
or the legitimate claims of other classes or regions.43 But since no party was
ever clearly responsible for the government of the country, the most public-
spirited member could never be judged on a clear record : only on proposals he
and his friends would never have the power to execute, eked out by explana-
tions of the difficulties frustrating them.
This state of affairs exasperated the voters, yet they were themselves largely
responsible for it. Choosing deputies to oppose authority, they prevented the
emergence of a government effective enough to make contact with the people -
who, having no contact with their rulers, chose deputies to oppose, * using their
franchise not to build the State but to protect themselves against it'.44 That
choice, rather than the human frailties of the members, ensured that obstruc-
tion always had the advantage over construction in the French Parliament.
Yet how could the voter be expected to regard a general election as an oppor-
tunity to choose a government, when the deputies cherished their claim to
incarnate - and interpret - the will of the people? Before 1940 the majority
41. Noel, pp. 102; Hamon, no. 121, p. 558 ; Priouret, Deputes, p. 235 ; Isorni, Silence, pp. 15-16.
Senator Ren6 Laniel was expelled for business irregularities ; the first police action against him
had been taken while his brother was premier. Also Buron, p.- 107.
42. Isorni, Silence, pp. 16-17 and (for Pinay) 36-7. For the social changes see below, pp. 445-7.
43. Cf. accounts of meetings in Elections 1956 (R Essig on Eure and C. Prieur on Aveyron,
especially p. 340) and in Nicholas et al (Thomas, no. 170, on Vienne, and Rose, no. 169, on
Pas-de-Calais).
44. Goguel, no. 113, p. 298.
VOTERS AND MEMBERS 335
which the voters thought they had returned never lasted more than two years
after the general election. After 1946 its duration was shorter still. In the first
National Assembly the 'big three' coalition broke up six months from the
election, in the second the Third Force was dislocated within three months and
RPF disrupted within nine, and in the third the Republican Front never came
to life at all.
The elector therefore felt he had no share in choosing his rulers. So, if he
belonged to the large minority of Frenchmen who were exasperated with their
own condition or that of their country, he cast a protest vote for a party -
Communist or Poujadist, perhaps Gaullist or Mendesist - which could express
his resentment loudly enough to be heard in the 'house without windows'
where the deputies sat; and unless he was on the extreme Left a new man or
movement could always count on a welcome from him. If he belonged to the
majority which distrusted sweeping changes, or bitter words, or violent
methods, then he cast a defensive vote for a deputy, preferably a familiar and
trustworthy figure, from whichever of the safe centre parties would best uphold
his personal ideas or interests and oppose 'adventures'.
* It has become conventional to think of human power as a plague to be
classed with the plagues of nature : the odious government, the levelling mistral,
the flooding Durance.' This was the heritage of intermittent abuse of authority
by established governments or their revolutionary enemies, and of con-
tinuing arbitrary rule by a remote and centralized bureaucracy which the
ancien regime had developed and its successors perfected. 'For several
decades . . . French voters have chosen their members of parliament with the
idea much less of delegating to them the task of government than of acquiring
in them intercessors with the mysterious Us who represent Power, and gaining
protection against the actions of Power.'45
45. Ibid. * Plague*: Wylie, p. 332.
Chapter 24
POLITICS AND THE STATE MACHINE
Long before she had democratic institutions, France possessed an exception-
ally capable, self-confident, powerful and centralized bureaucracy. It recruited
many of her ablest men, and French higher education, which was largely
geared to its needs, produced a series of tightly specialized professional groups
bound together by similar social origins, a common training, and intense
esprit de corps. This massive machine was not easily controlled by amateur and
transient ministers handicapped by unstable parliamentary majorities and
divided coalition cabinets. But the politician had some help in penetrating
the bureaucratic jungle from his small personal staff or cabinet (though in the
Fourth Republic this was itself often drawn from the higher civil service). The
officials, conversely, found that the diffusion of political responsibility some-
times allowed them to make counter-forays into the parliamentary field.
The bureaucracy adapted itself to weak political leadership by devising
procedures and institutions to carry on the nation's government when minis-
tries faltered or fell, and internal controls to investigate and check its own
abuses.1 These tasks of inspection and supervision were performed by the
services with most prestige, the grands corps de F&at, which attracted the
ablest entrants to the civil service and gave them an intimate knowledge of its
working. Often their members were promoted to senior departmental posts or
seconded to other important public duties. They imposed some unity on a
bureaucratic empire made up of many ancient and autonomous baronies.
Some old ministries like Justice, War and Education had for years been the
official Parisian bastions of closed and proud professions, which jealously
guarded their ramparts against interfering outsiders - such as ministers with
minds of their own.2 History sometimes gave a department a pronounced
political character. Education was once a missionary ministry of the anti-
clericals, and the rural schoolteachers were the 'republican clergy'; Interior
was responsible for the defence of the regime and was kept out of Catholic
hands; but the foreign office was a stronghold of the old Catholic families who
would serve the state only in a military or diplomatic capacity. Under tri-
partite these departmental differences were accentuated by the parties, which
each * colonized' the ministries it controlled. And for all its great administra-
tive reforms the Fourth Republic never brought under proper control the
state machine overseas. Reflecting the outlook and interests of each local
European colony, this imperial bureaucracy was protected by political defences
in depth as solid as those of the 'corporative' ministries in Paris. Its resistance
to reforms helped to provoke the colonial wars which sapped the loyalty of
the army and police, and finally undermined the regime itself.
D IV01??3?** n°* 7°^PP' 147~66> and i* w- J- Siffin, ed., Toward the Comparative Study of
Public Administration (Bloomington, Indiana, 1959), pp. 182-218.
2. Cf. Lavau, Pressures, pp. 63, 87n.; and below, p. 378. These 'corporative' ministries
remained resistant to outside control in the Fifth Republic.
POLITICS AND THE STATE MACHINE 337
1. THE 'GRANDS CORPS* AND THE 'CABINETS'
After the war a reform inspired by Michel Debre set up an £cole nationale
d* administration (EN A) through which all entrants to the higher civil service
had to pass. It did not go far to democratize recruitment, since French higher
education remained beyond the reach of sons (though not grandsons) of
manual workers and peasants. A separate entry competition for lower-grade
civil servants went some way to alter the balance, but the grands corps of the
Fourth Republic continued to be staffed by the sons of the comfortably-off-
often, indeed, of higher civil servants. But EN A did break down the co-
option which had flourished in certain grands corps in the past, when each
service controlled its own entry through scores of separate examinations; and
perhaps it helped to diminish the conservatism which had made the higher
civil service so suspect to the traditional Left. Other factors contributed to
the change. The climate of public and especially student opinion had altered
greatly, and the conservative £cole libre des sciences politiques, through which
almost every high official had passed, was incorporated into the university of
Paris and lost its right-wing bias.3 The higher civil service of the Fourth
Republic therefore embraced every shade of political opinion (though Com-
munism was under-represented). The commonest attitudes were a pragmatic
zeal for efficiency and modernization, an exasperation with the political
defenders of the incapable and the backward, and a sense of duty to uphold
the general interest of the community amid the clamour of the pressure-
groups and the competitive demagogy of the parties. The high officials 'feel
they make history more than the politicians, unstable, incompetent and con-
demned to superficiality'.4
In the absence of effective and respected political controls the bureaucracy
had developed powerful institutions to check its own abuses. Legal super-
vision was exercised by a jurisdiction separate from the ordinary courts, the
Conseil d'£tat, which tried cases involving the state. Originally subject to
governmental pressure, it became completely independent early in the Third
Republic. There were purges in 1879, 1940 and 1945, but otherwise no member
was ever removed until 1960. Protected by this independence and fortified by
their personal experience of administration, its members made the Conseil
into a tribunal affording the French citizen better remedies against misuse of
power by public authorities than Englishmen enjoyed under Dicey's rule of
law. Its jurisprudence frequently made law on highly controversial matters. In
the Third Republic a conservative Conseil, in tune with prevailing political
opinion, for years prevented any development of municipal socialism; and in
the Fourth it defined limits on the right to strike of state employees, which
according to the Preamble to the constitution should have been laid down by
3. Brindillac, no. 28, pp. 865-7; R. Catherine in Partis et Classes, pp. 112-21. Also Bottomore,
no. 25; Feyzioglu, nos. 91-2; Diamant (n. 1), pp. 159-62 and 195-7; Bertrand in Robson, ed.,
The Civil Service in Britain and France, pp. 170-84; Chapman, The Profession of Government,
pp. 80-3, 88-94, 115-24; C. Chavanon in Aspects, pp. 161-5; P. Lalumiere, V Inspection des
finances (1959), pp. 15-21, 28-49.
4. Brindillac, no. 28, pp. 869-77 (quotation, p, 870). Ehrmann is more pessimistic in Business*
pp. 257-71, a little less so in no. 85, pp. 534-55. Cf. Catherine, loc. cit.t pp. 133-6; and below,
pp. 343, 345-6.
338 THE SYSTEM
law.5 While the Conseil, like British and American courts, was willing to allow
the government wider freedom of action in war or major civil emergency, it
frequently found against the authorities in normal times. It was the recognized
protector of the rights of civil servants against the state, and in 1 954 it declared
illegal the government's attempt to exclude five students suspected of Com-
munism from the entrance examination to EN A. Besides its judicial functions
it was often called on to advise the government on the legal aspects of adminis-
tration, and occasionally on major points such as the extent to which Parlia-
ment could constitutionally authorize the government to alter a law. In the
Fourth Republic yet another of the Conseil's many tasks, that of advising on
the drafting of new government bills and decrees, took on an importance it
had rarely enjoyed in the Third.8
The bureaucracy also developed checks on its own financial abuses. One
of the most powerful and closely-knit of the grands corps was the Inspection
des finances, on whose ability and cohesion the power of the finance ministry
largely rested. Its members were in constant demand for key posts elsewhere
in the civil service - and in private business, which often tempted them to leave
their ill-paid government employment at about forty.7 Politicians of the Left
suspected them of collusion with the * money power', and in 1946 the Socialist
party proposed to abolish the corps altogether. But as SFIO's influence de-
clined the inspecteurs soon regained their grip on most of the key economic
positions, wrested influence in the nationalized industries from the technicians,
and even annexed leading posts in the most exclusive and jealous rival corps,
the diplomatic service. 'Under the Fourth Republic as under the Third, we
are governed by the Inspection des finances.**
Another powerful inspectorate was the Cour des Comptes, an ancient
administrative tribunal which gained status and influence in the Fourth
Republic through the constitution (Article 18 authorized the Assembly to use
it for inquiries into public finance) and the Assembly's standing orders (which
encouraged direct co-operation between it and the leaders of the finance com-
mittee). Expanding its activities and extending its inquiries more widely out-
side Paris, the Cour also audited the public accounts more promptly than it
had done before the war. In the early post-war years vigorous reports criticiz-
ing extravagance and lax administration gave unprecedented publicity to its
work, provided opposition parties with political ammunition, and led to some
important improvements. Parliament specifically protected its activities from
governmental restriction under the special powers law of August 1948, and
5. The most comprehensive of the many accounts is Freedeman; see also Chapman, op. cit.,
pp. 229-41, and on the judicial side, C. J. Hamson, Executive Discretion and Judicial Control
(1954). For municipal socialism see Freedeman, pp. 105-6, 160-1 ; for the right to strike, ibid.,
pp. 157-8, Soubeyrol, pp. 152-3, Arne, pp. 158-9, and cf. above, p. 294n.
6. Hamson, pp. 22-41 (ENA); for legislation, Institutions, i. 314-24; above, pp. 260, 271-3.
7. Brindillac, no. 128, pp. 863-4, 867-8; Ehrmann, Business, pp. 263-4, 267-70; Lalumiere,
pp. 7, 62-91, 127-75. This pantouflage seems to have diminished in the Fourth Republic: see
Ehrmann, no. 85, p. 552 and n. ; Entreprise, no. 384 (19 January 1963), p. 35 ; Brindillac, no. 28,
p. 870. Cf. below, p. 379.
8. M. Waline, 'Les resistances techniques de radministration au pouvoir politique', in Poll-
tique et Technique, p. 171. SFIO: Lalumiere, pp. 7-8; Catherine, he. cit., p. 146. Diplomatic;
Williams, p. 264, Grosser, pp. 49, 70. And see Huron, pp. 216-7; below, p. 343.
POLITICS AND THE STATE MACHINE 339
through its subsidiaries they were extended over the social security system and
the nationalized industries.9
The influence of the grands corps was widely felt in the many detached
duties to which their members were constantly called, especially in the cabinet
of a minister. This was a small private office, restricted in 191 1 to seven mem-
bers and in 1948 to ten (these limits, often evaded in the Third Republic, were
broadly observed in the Fourth, though not in the post-war interregnum).10
Few French government departments were subordinated like British ones to a
single official head ; so, if contacts between the different divisions (directions)
were not to resemble diplomatic dealings between independent powers, the
cabinet had to co-ordinate them. It also performed liaison duties with other
ministries. But the regular officials often resented its activities. Its members
inevitably thought in terms of their minister's plans and career rather than
longer-term interests ; were properly concerned with parliamentary and tactical
considerations, and harassed and hurried a machine that was rarely rapid and
sometimes lethargic; insisted on taking over politically difficult questions for
which they were not always technically qualified; and frequently proved more
sympathetic to pressure-groups than their regular colleagues.11
These grievances partly reflected the very variable quality of cabinets. A
minister could and did choose them from his family, party or home town,
especially for liaison tasks with the press, Parliament or constituency for
which such political nominees were best qualified.12 Some politicians were
ruined by their bad appointments. Some of Felix Gouin's collaborators, re-
cruited from his Marseilles local base, used his authority to traffic illegally
in Algerian wine; and Roger Peyr6, the contact-man of the 'scandal of the
generals ', plied his trade with cabinets rather than with ministers themselves.13
Yet, rightly used, the cabinet was a valuable if not indispensable instrument
for the politician, who without it would have found it hard to resist the per-
suasive advice of his 'mandarins'. The system allowed able young men to
shake the complacency of their comfortable elders. Some political leaders
formed 'brains trusts' of expert advisers, who worked with them out of office,
came in with them, and followed them from one post to another. The directeur
or chef de cabinet of a senior minister, like Jacques Duhamel under Edgar
Faure or Abel Thomas under Bourges-Maunoury, could wield much more
power at an earlier age than a parliamentarian in junior office.14 But ministers
9. Details in Duverger, Institutions financieres, pp. 411-7, 420-2, 429-31; Institutions, i. 325-
333 ; Williams, pp. 265-6.
10. Institutions, i. 270-4, 277; Seurin, no. 198 (on numbers, pp. 1223-8), and King, no. 131,
pp. 436-7; Buron, p. 181.
11. Massigli, Sur quelques maladies de VEtat, Chapter 3 ; R. Catherine, Le fonctionnaire franfais
(1961), pp. 300-21, 329-31 ; Seurin, no, 198, pp. 1284-6; Meynaud, pp. 201-2; Lavau, Pressures,
p. 85 ; Wahl in Beer and Ulam, pp. 202-3 ; Pay sans, p. 249 and n.
12. The surnames of seventeen ministers (nine of them Socialists) occur among the members
of cabinets between 1945-55 (cf. n. 21) ; and five Corsicans served in the cabinet of one minister
from that island: Seurin, no. 198, p. 1234 nn. Young politicians frequently moved from a cabinet
to Parliament, like Leon Blum, Edgar Faure and Maurice Faure. Cf. Buron, pp. 176-9, 183-4.
13. 'Generals*: see below, p. 348. Cf. Brogan, France, p. 660.
14. In 1954-55 the directeur s de cabinet of Mendes-France and Mitterrand investigated the
leakages affair' (on which see below, p. 348); Pinay's organized the return of the Sultan of
Morocco : and Bourges-Maunoury's planned the redistribution of constituencies for an (abortive)
[over
340 THE SYSTEM
in the Fourth Republic tended much more than in the past to choose for
senior cabinet posts high civil servants who combined a modicum of political
sympathy with administrative expertise.15 In some 'technical' ministries an
official might make his career in the minister's cabinet, passing from one
politician to his successor. These trends minimized the risk of corruption and
the danger of friction with the permanent staff, but they reduced the advan-
tages as well as the drawbacks of the system.16
2. PARTY POLITICS AND DEPARTMENTAL RIVALRIES
Political influence on the administration came through many channels besides
the cabinet. The tradition of parliamentary intervention to obtain minor
favours was long-established. In 1949 a minister of justice received in nine
months 11,700 requests from deputies for pardons or promotions for their
clients, or one per member per fortnight. In 1957 a minister of the interior
found that of 800 candidates for twenty posts as police commissioner, 600 had
the support of a member of parliament.17 Yet this pressure was a nuisance
rather than a menace; deputies often forwarded requests which they hardly
pretended to support, and officials treated these in the spirit in which they
were sent.18
Much more serious was the influence of party politics on senior appoint-
ments, which became systematic under tripartisme when the three govern-
ment parties parcelled out the administration between them. But the worst
of the abuses were caused by the Communists* bid to set up a state within the
state, and ended with their departure.19 Some of their appointees were re-
moved, and many other officials who had been chosen through political in-
fluence later allowed their party connections to lapse. Some ministers tried
conscientiously to undo the damage. Gradually, as the new institutions were
consolidated, the administrative reforms of the Liberation began to improve
recruitment to the higher civil service under guarantees of entrance by merit.
The open spoils system was checked, but politics could not be wholly
excluded from appointments to policy-making posts. Rigid party spheres of
influence disappeared with tripartisme, but the Fourth Republic revived the
loose allotment of ministries characteristic of the Third. Interior and Education
remained Socialist and Radical fiefs, while the foreign office, traditionally a
Catholic stronghold, was monopolized by MRP until 1954. The parties
generally, and MRP in particular, were charged with trying 'not merely to
electoral reform: Seurin, no. 198, p. 1268n. ; cf. Grosser, pp. 57-8. Membership of Chaban-
Dehnas* cabinet gave L£on Delbecque facilities for organizing the 13 May insurrection in Algiers.
15. Between 1945 and 1955 over 85% of cabinet members whose professions were published
came from the civil service: Seurin, no. 198, pp. 1236-7, cf. pp. 1267-70; King, no. 131, pp. 439-
440; Lalumiere, pp. 163-4. The" main reasons were apparently financial at first, technical later:
no. 198, p. 1286; Buron, p. 181, cf. p. 216.
16. No. 198, pp. 1286-93; no. 131, pp. 442-3; Waline (see n. 8), pp. 168-9; cf. Catherine,
op. cit., p. 317. On cabinets generally see Buron, pp. 176-88.
17. R. Lecourt (Justice), quoted Figaro, 27-28 March 1950; G. Jules (Interior), U Express,
1 February 1957. Paul Delouvrier spoke of these personal interventions as *the immense army
of ants*: in Crise, p. 80. For a defence see Buron, pp. 27-34, cf. p. 87.
18. Massigli, 62-4; Catherine, op. cit., pp. 343-7; cf. Siegfried, De la III6, p. 219, on the
deputy's powerlessness to influence nominations.
19. On these see below, pp. 347, 391-2.
POLITICS AND THE STATE MACHINE 341
ensure the "loyalty" of the officials who had to work with the minister, but
also and perhaps especially to build up gradually a network of judiciously-
placed political friends who will remain devoted to the party's policy and to
this or that leader for the moment out of office'.20
In 1956 more systematic 'colonization' revived when the Socialists, return-
ing to office after five years without influence on appointments, set about
making up for lost time. They brought in the largest and most partisan
cabinets since tripartisme; and a long ministry with few coalition partners
gave them exceptional opportunities to influence appointments.21 Yet, as
their tenure showed, colonization might defeat its own ends by provoking
counter-colonization of the party by the administration itself. If political
allegiance affected a civil servant's career he would be tempted to join a party,
as in some ministries in the Third Republic he had become a freemason, to
improve his chances of promotion. Between 1956 and 1958 there were more
signs that SFIO's official and police recruits were influencing the outlook of
the party than that they were reinforcing its grip on the state machine.22
Ministers often found or felt that officials with a different outlook from their
own were a poor instrument for their policies. The ministry of economic
affairs so retained the impress of its first incumbents, Pierre Mendes-France
and Andr<§ Philip, that until 1952 only Socialists and MRP left-wingers held
the office; conservatives preferred to suppress the department's separate
identity rather than fight the views of the civil servants. MRP ministers found
some officials and most army officers bitterly hostile to the ED C treaty; con-
versely Mendes-France and Christian Pineau, taking over a foreign office
occupied for ten years by MRP ministers, found little sympathy for their
policies among their subordinates. In June 1956 Pineau made sweeping
changes which aroused opposition both in the department and among the
politicians who counted most friends there. Even so, a few months later he
and his colleagues (like their British opposite numbers) conceived and planned
the Suez expedition without consulting their civil servants.23
If a minister deeply distrusted his staff, he had the last word. After the break-
up of tripartisme most Communists and some fellow-travellers were removed
from sensitive posts (though Bidault was criticized for dismissing Frederic
Joliot-Curie from the atomic energy authority, and the defence leakages of
1953-55 showed that the purge had been limited in scale and effect). Mendes-
France's government transferred out of Algeria high police officials who had
used the FLN revolt as an excuse to strike at all Moslem nationalists. A
determined and politically secure minister would not be deterred from his
20. Catherine in Partis et Classes, pp. 127-40; quotation, p. 139. Cf. Buron, pp. 239-40.
21. Previous ministries had had 250-275 members in their cabinets, Mollet's had 350 - and
more of them were party appointments: King, no. 131, pp. 437, 441n. Officials were fewer than
at any time since the previous Socialist-led ministry: table in Lalumiere, p. 163. One directeur de
cabinet was allegedly appointed before his minister: Seurin, no. 198, p. 1235. Colonization was
especially active in broadcasting.
22. On SFIO, above, p. 99 and n. ; generally, Massigli, pp. 71-3 ; Noel, p. 135; Meynaud and
Lancelot, pp. 54-5. Cabinet members in the Cadillac committee might decide Radical policy:
Seurin, no. 198, p. 1273.
23. Grosser, pp. 67-8, 72; Massigli, pp. 22-3, 51, 67-71; Planchais, pp. 54-7; for Pineau,
Diamant (n. 1), pp. 150n. and 211 n. 14.
342 THE SYSTEM
policy by official disapproval; the finance ministry could not stop Pinay's
amnesty for tax frauds or his cuts in investment. But it might be a different
story if the minister suffered from weakness of character or political situation,
and a politician whose course was very obnoxious to his advisers sometimes
found unexpected difficulties in his way.24
The senior civil servants were able, well-informed and tactful men. Unless
there were internal conflicts, like that between the road and rail divisions of
the ministry of transport, they could generally persuade their ministers to
adopt most if not all of the department's attitudes and policies. (There was a
striking if trivial instance in February 1950 when a deputy who was demanding
cheap fares for students in Paris became minister of transport and rejected his
own motion.) But an agreed departmental policy was not enough, for there
were always battles with other ministries, even those controlled by the same
party. In 1949 the minister of labour clashed with the minister of transport
over the dismissal of railwaymen in May, and with his colleague who dealt
with the civil service over salaries in September : all three men were Socialists.
In the same year Pflimlin resigned the ministry of agriculture after opposing
his Economic Affairs colleague, also of MRP, over the guaranteed price of
sugar-beet, French administrators, like others, appreciated a docile political
master less than one who could win their departmental and parliamentary
battles for them.25
In the thick of interdepartmental conflict was the ministry of finance,
the most powerful department, the most impervious to external pressures, and
the focus of most resentment.26 Every spending department from Education to
Defence complained of the miserly treasury which so unjustly rejected its own
reasonable demands (and so conveniently refused those of its client pressure-
groups which it thus escaped the odium of opposing). For instance, in the
third Parliament a Socialist finance minister, Paul Ramadier, was opposed by
the Right for overspending and by his own party over his tax policy. His
Radical successor Felix Gaillard clashed violently over the defence budget
with Andr6 Morice, and over social expenditure with Albert Gazier. When
Pierre Pflimlin of MRP took over in 1957, his attempt to cut the education
estimates was successfully resisted by a minister, Ren6 Billeres, who (though
a Radical) was well known to be a practising Catholic.27
To the political parties the finance ministry was a natural target and scape-
goat. Socialists and MRP left-wingers saw it as a stronghold of bourgeois
reaction, threatening social reform and a controlled economy, needing to be
dismantled and subjected to a new ministry of economic affairs ; and while
24. Purges: AP 1950, pp. 73-4, 286; cf. 1954, p. 290, 1955, p. 179; on leakages see below,
p. 348. Brindillac, no. 28, p. 869, suggests that certain high officials brought about Faure's defeat
in 1952. (Cf. Chavanon in Aspects, p. 176, on Bidault's fall in 1950.) See also nn. 25, 38.
25. On relations between ministers and civil servants generally, see Meynaud, pp. 200-6;
Buron, pp. 132, 189-91, 195-9, 205-10; and n. 38.
26. Meynaud, pp. 207-9. * If you want to act effectively in this field, become a civil servant in
the Budget Division and not a deputy' : Chavanon in Aspects, p. 176. On the ministry see Duverger,
op. c/r., pp. 317-20, 344; the budget division in Paris had 11 administrative class officials (the
budget bureau in Washington has 200). On its reputation, Buron, pp. 72, 208-9, 215-7 ; Paysans,
pp. 253-9.
27. AP 1957, pp. 39, 80-1, 124.
POLITICS AND THE STATE MACHINE 343
intransigent Gaullists like Michel Debr6 accused it of treating France as a
business run by the petty-cash clerk, to Peasants and Poujadists it was the
bastion of ruthless modernizing technocracy.28 The fears of the Left seemed to
be borne out by de Gaulle's disastrous decision in 1945 to prefer the advice of
its minister (Pleven) and the Bank of France to that of the economic affairs
minister, Mendes-France. They were reinforced by the policies of most of the
Radical and Conservative ministers who held the office from 1947 to 1955.
But these politicians were often much more restrictionist than their officials,
who unlike their predecessors were 'New Dealers', Keynesian expansionists
with no doctrinaire hostility to state intervention in the economy.29
With acceptance of an active role for the state went a tendency to extend
their own powers. The finance ministry campaigned vigorously against the
administrative irregularities which flourished in the upheavals after the
Liberation. It sharply curtailed the growth of the 'special treasury accounts',
which had proliferated after the war when departments were struggling for
autonomy, and were threatening to make coherent financial policy im-
possible.30 It also pressed for more influence over the new institutions - the
nationalized industries, the Planning Commission and the social security
system - which were set up just after the war to fulfil the new economic and
social functions of the state. But here it faced opposition from the Left which
favoured keeping them autonomous, both on theoretical ' democratic * grounds
and because of its fear of the conservatism of the traditional bureaucracy. The
social security structure, defended by all the trade unions and their political
friends, survived with minor changes ; but the nationalized industries, at
first a preserve of the engineers and technicians, were gradually subjected
to stricter financial control after the political pendulum swung Right in
1947.31
Such changes of organization were often a means for the executive to
introduce changes of policy without reference to Parliament. But members
might revolt. In 1951 Pleven was brought down by the Socialists for seeking
special powers to reorganize the railways and social security system; and
though in 1953 Rene Mayer was given them, and tightened ministerial control
over the nationalized industries, his principal decrees were reversed by
28. SFIO : above, p. 338. Peasants : AP 1952, p. 20. Debr6, La mort de VEtatrlpublicain^ p. 19.
29. Lalumiere, pp. 179-200, 221 ; Brindillac, no. 28, pp. 873-5; Ehrmann, Business, p. 266.
In 1948 Jean Monnet had to mobilize MRP and Socialist support, and to threaten resignation,
to prevent Queuille cutting the investments which Marshall Aid had been given to sustain:
Fauvet, IV6, p. 154. In 1952 the finance ministry vainly opposed Pinay's similar short-sighted
policy. (Yet Socialist ministers had few inspecteurs des finances in their cabinets : Lalumiere,
p. 165, and cf. above, n. 21.)
30. They covered expenditure ranging from the state lottery to the railway deficit and, from
1951, the subsidies to church schools. Parliament had always fought them, as they frustrated its
control ; the ministry had once encouraged them (for the same reason) but opposed them after
the war. By 1950 the 300 special accounts of 1946 had been reduced to 60 and brought under
proper control. See Tinguy, no. 209, p. 495 ; J. Blocquaux, JO 25 April 1950, pp. 2807-8 ; Duverger,
op. cit., pp. 63, 233-4, 330-2; Williams, p. 265; Wilson, p. 340n.
31. On the nationalized industries, see Lalumiere, pp. 105-8, 154-8; Ehrmann, Business,
pp. 264, 349; Lescuyer, Chapters 5-7; B. Chenot, Les Entreprises nationalises (1956), pp. 98,
110-1 1, and in no. 56, p. 733. The Planning Commission was transferred in 1954 from the prime
minister's office to the ministry of finance: Institutions, i. 258. Generally, see Brindillac, no. 28,
p. 875; Donnedieu de Vabres, no. 78.
344 THE SYSTEM
Parliament two years later without much opposition.32 The legislature could
thus frustrate attempts at administrative policy-making even when the
ministers had special powers ; and much more easily when they had not.
So when in 1948 Madame Poinso-Chapuis, MRP minister of health, issued
a decree indirectly allowing local authorities to subsidize church schools, it
caused such a political storm that it was allowed to lapse — though never
formally abrogated.33 In this case the minister first adopted a new policy and
then abandoned it under political pressure, all without legislation.
An initiative from the parliamentary side could be met by bureaucratic
inertia. Laws could be limited in scope by restrictive drafting of the decrees
applying them, as the ministry of education did in 1951 (in opposition to the
Comeil d'Etat) with the lot Barange subsidizing church schools. They might
even be sabotaged entirely. Two months before the regime fell, Ren6 Pleven
complained of 'the casual treatment of laws which stipulate that the decrees
and regulations applying them must be promulgated within a fixed time-limit'.
Sometimes, as with the press law of 1946, the party interests of the minister
responsible determined whether the law was carried out to the full or left as a
dead letter. Or a new government might dislike its predecessor's policies:
Pinay, the hero of small business, passed a mild law against cartels which his
successor Rene Mayer made no attempt to enforce. There might be resistance
from a pressure-group which had influence within the administration, or from
the ministry of finance. Occasionally Parliament reacted, and in 1957 Bourges-
Maunoury, who had not applied the loi Laborbe (a private member's bill on
agricultural prices) would have been beaten on this had he not fallen on
Algeria first. At least the milk producers waiting for the loi Laborbe had more
political influence than the civil servants, whose pay was supposed to be
governed by a law of 1946 that had never been put into effect.34
It was very rare that a united administration found itself ranged in isolation
against a hostile citizenry. Much more often there were fierce interdepart-
mental battles in which both sides enjoyed support outside the governmental
machine, and took advantage of the fragmentation of political responsibility
to mobilize these external reinforcements. Some departments could always
count on widespread parliamentary sympathy: Education on the Left, Defence
on the Right, Agriculture everywhere. Just as leading politicians had their
brains-trusts of civil servants, so some senior civil servants had their helpful
members of parliament whom they could brief to intervene in committee or in
the house. The debate on the Sakiet raid, from which the crisis developed
that destroyed the regime, was described by one observer as a fight between
the army's deputies and those of the foreign office.35
32. Above, p. 271 ; below, p. 361 . The powers were usually exercised by the officials : Chavanon
in Aspects, pp. 173-4.
33. Above, p. 34 ; and Remond in La Lalcit^ pp. 393-4.
34. Barange, Laborbe: Arne, pp. 149-52. Pleven: JO 20 February 1958, p. 913. Cartels:
Ehrmann, Business, p. 387. Civil servants: Meynaud, p. 229, Duverger in Monde, 12 September
1957. See also below, n. 48 (Algeria), pp. 378-9 (pressure-groups), 392 (press law).
35. Faucher, p. 221 ; cf. Lavau, Pressures, p. 88. An important tax reform * was carried through
singlehandedly by a civil servant who mobilized some sectors of the business community against
others and finally used the lobbyists of his allies when the bill seemed to falter in parliament.
Similar tactics permitted beating back the alcohol lobby with the aid of the oil interests * : Ehrmann,
POLITICS AND THE STATE MACHINE 345
Administrators who had developed the habit of political manipulation were
likely, when overruled by their official rivals (or even by their own minister),
to reopen the debate elsewhere. Plans and projects could sometimes be killed
before birth by the 'national industry or even institution' of well-timed leak-
ages, which allowed ministries to carry on 'private wars . . . torpedoing each
other's plans prematurely brought to light'; permitted the civil service unions
to launch the great strikes of 1953 against decrees not yet published; and
encouraged officials who detested governmental policies to supply ammuni-
tion to opposition parties and politicians. The extravagant precautions some-
times taken to avoid publicity were a reaction against a real danger.36 But
conflict within the official world was more memorable than co-operation to
those engaged in it, and more interesting to those outside. Public attention
was directed to the occasional spectacular clash and not to the normal routine
of constructive but unexciting co-operation between officials and departments.
In fact it was this regular bureaucratic activity which kept the machinery of
French government working without disruption in spite of political instability.
Indeed, the Liberation and the Fourth Republic saw the accomplishment of a
silent administrative revolution which, though it attracted little attention,
made the machine far more efficient than before.
The central direction of policy was reinforced by the establishment of a
cabinet secretariat and a stronger prime minister's office. Civil service recruit-
ment was reformed by the creation of EN A. Government bills were much
improved by being submitted to the Conseild'fitat for prior technical examina-
tion before they went to Parliament. Jean Monnet's Planning Commission
and other new agencies gave the French state machinery for effective inter-
vention in the economic field. The Cour des Comptes was given new financial
scope by the constitution, and gained new prestige by its work. In local
government the decentralizing provisions of the constitution proved a dead
letter; on the contrary the new 'super-prefects' (IGAMEs) ensured more
effective central control in emergency and interdepartmental co-ordination in
normal times. The politicians set up in the High Council of the Judiciary an
institution which proved its value in taking justice out of politics.37
These improvements in the machinery of government only threw into
relief the problem of the political authority which was to control them. In the
absence of an effective government they merely conferred more policy-making
power on the bureaucracy. Its influence went far beyond the task of daily
management which any competent civil service will do for a weak or incapable
minister. Some constructive policies of the most far-reaching kind were devised
by officials, who then took them out of ordinary party warfare by persuading
the rival political groups. Monnet's planning objectives and machinery were
accepted by all parties including the Communists, though political struggles
no. 85, p. 548 ; on alcohol cf. below, p. 356. Generally, Meynaiid,pp. 205, 309-10; and cf. above,
p. 252, and below, pp. 378-9. Also Buron, pp. 74-5, 105, 206-7.
36. Quotation from Delouvrier in Crise, p. 83. Cf. Massigli, Chapter 1; Grosser, pp. 60-2,
and below, p. 348. Precautions: cf. Planchais, pp. 67-8; above, p. 341 (Suez); below, p. 346
(Schuman plan).
37. Cassin, no. 50, and above, pp. 204-5, 260, 272, 299-301, 338; below, p. 347.
346 THE SYSTEM
sometimes occurred when his policies were put into practice. In 1952 he went
to the Coal and Steel Community to develop another of his major policies
which had become common ground among the parties of the regime; for it
was he who had devised the 'Schuman Plan' with the help of his own sub-
ordinates and without consulting the foreign office, winning over Robert
Schuman only a few days and most of the cabinet only a few hours before the
decision was announced to the world.38 Yet the pursuit of European economic
union was taken up by all the parties of government, and though they divided
and were defeated when they tried to extend it to the military sphere, they
soon reunited on their original line of advance.
Long-range policies had been the work of officials rather than politicians in
the Third Republic as well as the Fourth. This situation was a by-product of
ministerial instability; however undesirable in theory, it was preferable to
having no long-range policies at all. Both economic expansionism and Euro-
pean co-operation corresponded to strong and deep desires of most (not all)
thinking Frenchmen, and were perhaps made more acceptable to politicians
of different views because they were given detailed form by civil servants
rather than by one of themselves. But while the economic bureaucracy
accepted change, their colonial colleagues clung to routine ; and when France
faced the challenge of decolonization, the danger of political abdication
became evident. 'The French state reveals its true face when it takes off the
parliamentary mask: Vichy, the occupation in Germany, colonialism have
shown its authoritarian nature.'39 Overseas, first the administration and
then the army successfully imposed policies on governments too weak,
divided or precarious to develop or enforce their own. These policies were in
the long run neither workable on the spot, nor tolerable internationally, nor
acceptable at home. Tension therefore grew steadily between an overseas
bureaucracy and army intent on their own purposes, and a Parliament which
gradually became alarmed at the wider consequences. By 1958 the contagion
of insubordination had spread to the forces of the state at home.
3. THE DEFENCE AND SECURITY SERVICES
In the government's first line of defence against domestic enemies stood the
prefects. They were direct agents of the minister of the interior, and then-
tenure of their posts was at his discretion. Their main functions were to
represent the government in each department, co-ordinate the activities of the
different ministries, supervise the local authorities, maintain order, and defend
the regime. In the nineteenth century they had also acted as the government's
election agents, and as late as 1924 there was a 'massacre' of prefects when
the opposition won an election. But as the prefectoral corps gradually de-
veloped the habits and attitudes of a career service, its members increasingly
kept their posts under successive governments - though purges still occurred
in great crises like 1940 and 1944.
3S. Gerbet, no. 98, pp. 542-53. On planning struggles see n. 29 ; and on bureaucratic policy-
making, Wahl in Beer and Ulam, pp. 326-30. Cf. Huron, p. 132.
39. Bnndillac, no. 30, p. 799. Cf. p. 3 n.2 ; and Hoffmann in Change, p. 91. On the army's policy
in Algeria see Girardet in Military Politics, pp. 134-41.
POLITICS AND THE STATE MACHINE 347
The Socialists and Communists had always mistrusted the prefectoral
system and the men who manned it. In the 1946 constitution five articles, 85 to
89, expressed an intention to weaken the prefects and strengthen the elected
municipal and departmental councils. But when the Communists went into
opposition and launched the great strikes of 1947 and 1948, their former
partners quickly discovered, like so many advocates of decentralization on
acceding to power, that Paris had too little rather than too much control.
Following Vichy and Liberation precedents, Jules Moch therefore appointed
eight 'super-prefects' or I GAM Es (inspecteurs-genfraux de r administration
en mission extraordinaire) whose task was normally to organize co-operation
between neighbouring departments, and in an emergency to co-ordinate under
civil control all forces in their areas (which corresponded to the military
regions). In 1953 LaniePs government used its special powers to enact
administrative reforms restoring to the prefect some of the authority he had
gradually been losing to the local agents of other ministries. The constitutional
provisions for strengthening the local councils were wholly forgotten.40
Yet the local authorities were not as weak as they looked, for many mayors
and departmental councillors were also members of parliament. A prudent
prefect had to be attentive, not merely to the reigning minister of the interior,
but also to the entrenched local ministrable whose parliamentary influence
might one day dethrone him. Towns therefore preferred as mayors a deputy
or senator whose political influence could temper the theoretical rigours of
administrative centralization; and a powerful politician friendly to the regime
rarely found an unacceptable prefect sent to his department.41 These factors
mitigated the effect of party politics on the appointment and transfer of pre-
fects. Most of the corps leaned towards the Radical party, which until 1936
had almost monopolized the ministry of the interior; pro-clerical politicians
never held it, and MRP in 1951 had no prefect and few sub-prefects in its
ranks. While open enemies of the regime were not appointed, there was no
purge of the Gaullists who came in at the Liberation, and there were even two
Communist prefects and one regional commissioner while the party was in
office. Because of their activities Jules Moch, when he became minister of the
interior, had to dissolve 11 of the 65 companies of riot police (Compagnies
republicaines de securite, CRS) which were over 80% Communist.42
In later years the struggle against Communist influence led some high
security officials to patronize other enemies of democracy. Two reactionary
freemasons co-operated closely in 'McCarthyite' activities between 1952 and
1954: the Radical minister of the interior L£on Martinaud-Deplat and the
Socialist Jean Baylot, who occupied the politically vital post of prefect of
police in Paris. When Mend&s-France came to power Baylot was removed;
40. Chapman in Local Government, pp. 95-106, 119-23; Prefects and Provincial France,
pp. 61-2, 168-9, 174-7; and no. 51. Panter-Brick, no. 172; Abbott and Sicard, no. 1.
41. Chapman, Prefects, pp. 157-61, 200-6. Isorni quotes as a sample of lobby conversation
'Get rid of this idiot of a prefect for me and I'll see if I can change my vote* : Silence, p. 184.
Many prefects and parliamentarians worked closely together on behalf of the constituency :
Buron, pp. 25-6, 83-4.
42. MRP: Neumann, no. 165, p. 744n.; cf. Catherine in Partis et Classes* pp. 134-5. Mendes-
France in 1954 and Mollet in 1957 offered MRP the Interior. Moch: in Bulletin interieur SFIO
no. 39 (February 1949), p. 67. Cf. Buron, pp. 213, 240.
348 THE SYSTEM
within an hour forty members of parliament (including Le Troquer, the
Socialist President of the Assembly) had telephoned the premier to protest.
Baylot and his collaborator Superintendent Dides later became extreme-
Right deputies. The consequences of their control of the Paris police became
fully apparent first in the spring of 1958, and then under the Fifth Republic.48
Political interference was particularly damaging in the intelligence services.
As well as the old rivals, the Surete nationals and the Paris prefecture of
police, there were now several small intelligence organizations attached to
different ministries, and one major one directly under the premier: SDECE
(Service de documentation exterieure et de contre-espionnage), which was once
called in court 'the really secret secret service'. Constantly at cross-purposes,
these agencies arrested and intimidated one another's informers in a struggle
which often seemed more concerned with party politics than with national
security. Repeated reorganizations failed to cure them. In wartime London
SDECE (then called Bureau central de renseignements et d' action) was headed
by Colonel Passy, who departed with de Gaulle in 1946. The Socialist politi-
cian who took it over was utterly isolated in his own agency. When the
scandal of the generals revealed that defence information had leaked to the
Indo-Chinese nationalists, his Gaullist second-in-command, Colonel Four-
caud, allegedly bribed and intimidated witnesses to support charges of treason
against two leading Socialist ministers.44 But the counter-espionage service of
the ministry of the interior (D S T) tried to hush up the scandal, either for fear
of American reactions as ministers claimed, or to save the government's
reputation as the opposition asserted.
The rival services were amalgamated under a new head. In vain : a new
scandal again broke over military leakages in 1953-54. Two senior defence
officials who opposed the Indo-China war passed confidential information to
papers and politicians of the Left. Superintendent Dides and the prefecture
investigators failed to discover that they were both 'fellow-travellers' (though
one had even been a Progressive local candidate). Instead the prefecture led
opposition politicians, the President of the Republic and France's allies to
believe there was a traitor in Mendes-France's cabinet - a task facilitated by
Martinaud-D6plat, who did not tell his successor that the leakages had been
going on for a year. When the case was at last tried by a military court in 1956,
Tixier-Vignancour, who was kept well supplied with confidential documents
by his friends in the police and secret service, was allowed by the civilian
presiding judge to use it for an outrageous campaign against the Left and the
Republic - while the highest security officials in France helped him by de-
nouncing one another as undercover Communists. Credulous, unscrupulous
and enmeshed in party intrigue, these services did much to discredit the regime
they were supposed to serve before they finally betrayed it in May 1958.45
43. Protests: Faucher, p. 115. Also see above, p. 52, and below, p. 351.
44. Cf. Williams, no. 218. A former cagoulard and later plotter of May 1958, Fourcaud was
described at the inquiry as a 'cloak-and-dagger character' who 'conspired morning, noon and
night'. Years later he suggested at a trial of de Gaulle's would-be assassins that the attack had
been staged by the government - but denied a suggestion that he had himself known of it in
advance: Monde, 5 and 7 September 1962. On SDECE also Fauvet, IVe, p. 162.
45. See references above, p. 46n.
POLITICS AND THE STATE MACHINE 349
Those administrators and soldiers who served in French-ruled lands over-
seas had no need of indirect methods. They simply defied the wishes of Paris.
As a senior minister confessed when after four years he relinquished responsi-
bility for the Tunisian and Moroccan protectorates: *The/<zz7 accompli is the
great and constant temptation which it is to their credit that residents-general
resist - in so far as they do not succumb. Moreover they themselves are in a
similar situation in regard to some services (police, information, etc.). . . .
Above the residents-general the minister for foreign affairs is responsible for
their administration which is reputed to be in accordance with his own views.
This is one of the fictions on which the democratic regime depends. . . .' In
1955 a normally conciliatory premier exploded in Parliament against the
mutinous officials in Morocco: 'It is time this stopped. These resignations
cancelled and then repeated - it's finished ! . . . No more resignations by officials,
obedience! . . . We must put an end to proceedings which lead to the disinte-
gration of the state. It's the government that governs and if this government
survives tonight, govern it will! ?46
But it was hard for ministers, however determined, to impose their wishes
when their own representatives abroad quickly became the spokesmen of a
local administration which sprang from and sympathized with the local
French colony. Several ministers and governments conceived liberal policies
in North Africa; very few pressed them hard against the settlers and their
military and parliamentary friends, who could so easily bring a cabinet down;
those that tried found that the administrative machine would not implement
policies which the local Europeans disliked. The Fifth Republic was to show
that the weakness of will in Paris had been only part of the problem. Not even
a determined French government could make the entrenched local community
accept concessions, short of total withdrawal when the price of maintaining
France's position became too high.
The local resistance took several forms: lobbying by politicians in Paris,
rioting by city mobs on the spot, and the continuous sabotage of the govern-
ment's policies by its own services. The Indo-China war finally became
inevitable when a general ordered the bombardment of Haiphong; and the
Saigon administration kept such tight control over what Paris was allowed to
know that the censor delayed for ten vital days Ho Chi-Minh's telegram to the
prime minister (Leon Blum) appealing for negotiation. In Tunisia it was the
resident-general who decided to arrest and deport the Bey's ministers; in
Morocco it was the resident who deposed the Sultan against instructions from
Georges Bidault, who subsequently defended the act he had originally for-
bidden ; and in Algeria army intelligence seized Ben Bella and his companions
from their Moroccan plane with the knowledge of a minister of state, Max
Lejeune, but not of any member of the cabinet.47
Yet these spectacular acts of insubordination were no more damaging in the
long run than the electoral manipulation, administrative obstruction and
political intrigue by which the Algerian authorities and European community
46. Robert Schuman in La Nef, March 1953, p. 68 (quoted Grosser, p. 52; Fauvet, IVe,
p. 215 • AP 1953, p. 225). Edgar Faure, JO 8 October 1955, p. 4956 ; cf. below, p. 354.
47. Cf. Fauvet, IV^ pp. 95, 208, 213-17, 294, 319-21; Grosser, pp. 52-3, 256-7, 267, 275-6,
365-6; above, pp. 41 , 50 and n.
350 THE SYSTEM
prevented the reform bill of 1947 ever going into effect.48 When these methods
seemed likely to fail more extreme ones were used. In Morocco the assassina-
tion of nationalists and their French sympathizers (Mendes-France was one
intended victim) was organized by the police in justified confidence that no
local judge would ever convict a European terrorist.49 Defeat in Indo-China
added to the government's problem a new dimension : the exasperation of the
army officers with the futile sacrifice of their comrades and their determination
never to allow a repetition. By 1956 hotheads like General Faure were already
conspiring against the regime, and in 1958 President Coty was officially
warned by the senior commanders four days before 13 May that the army
would not tolerate a 'government of scuttle'.50
By sabotage, blackmail and insubordination the administrators and soldiers
tried to eliminate and succeeded in restricting the freedom of action of their
political masters. But these too bore a heavy responsibility. Ministers never
told the country the truth about Indo-China; if they had, the army might not
have suffered a humiliating defeat, and civil servants would have had less
excuse for betraying official secrets to help the anti-war campaign. General
Faure's plot was exposed by a high official in the Algiers prefecture, who very
soon resigned because his protests against the mass 'disappearances' of sus-
pects arrested by the parachutists were ignored by the Socialist ministers who
had ordered the operation but preferred not to know about its consequences.51
These were new and sensational developments in French government. Not
that the services of the French state had ever been free from political inter-
ference. But hitherto the police had been criticized by enemies of the regime as
the servile instruments of the men in power; and indeed in the early days of
the Fourth Republic they were still loyally unravelling plots against it. The
judges were always a conservative body, and in 1940 all but one had sworn
allegiance to P&ain. But they had never shown the gross anti-republican bias
of their confreres in Weimar Germany, and they too had usually been attacked
for subservience towards the authorities of the day - notably during and after
the Nazi occupation.52
The army was traditionally officered by old Catholic families with no great
love for the Republic, but despite occasional aberrations it had loyally
accepted for generations that its highest duty was unconditional obedience to
any legal government - although in 1940 it was taught a different lesson. In the
Fourth Republic, as in the Third, there were complaints of political inter-
ference with military promotions. A chief of the general staff used a dubious
48. In 1955 Soustelle as governor recommended that the reform bill be applied ; the government
found justifications for further delay; and the Socialist spokesman asked whether ministers
thought the law was optional: £douard Depreux, JO 29 July 1955, pp. 4539-40.
49. As the police chief sent from Paris to investigate Lemaigre-Dubreuirs murder admitted :
Monde, 13 December 1962, reporting the trial for another offence of one of the assassins, now
repentant. (His unrepentant fellow-murderers were at large * awaiting trial' - after seven and a
half years.)
50. See above, p. 5 On, 55.
51. Monde, 20 and 29 September, 1 October 1960. Would the same paper have received (or
published) a report by the committee for safeguarding human rights in Algeria, in December 1957,
if the government had acted on it instead of hushing it up?
52. Plots: at one conspiratorial gathering five of the eight men present were officers: Moch,
JO 14 June 1949, p. 3361. Courts: cf. above, pp. 211, 301.
POLITICS AND THE STATE MACHINE 351
contact-man to obtain information about cabinet meetings, promotion for
himself, and the appointment as assistant director of military personnel of a
general whom he called 'a good republican whom, therefore, MRP want to
send out of the way'; his candidate got the job after the MRP premier had
been replaced by a Radical and the M RP defence minister by a Socialist - and
MRP deputies charged that the new ministers were favouring freemasons.53
In 1958 similar complaints were raised against a Socialist war minister by a
right-wing deputy (who had himself tried twenty times to have an officer
prot£g6 promoted). Marshal Juin repeatedly encouraged military opposition
to government policy, especially over EDC. But these incidents, however
disagreeable or discreditable for a government, were not dangerous for the
regime.54
The Indo-China disaster and the Algerian war, following on earlier
humiliations, changed the climate and falsified the old certainties. Judges
began to show a conspicuous bias against the anti-war Left which in the Fifth
Republic was found - to the dismay of Gaullist leaders and Socialist ex-
ministers who had once warmly approved of it - to conceal open sympathy for
the O AS.55 In the police force, many in the lower ranks and some in the higher
always remained reliable. But after years of combating the Communists, fol-
lowed by a bitter fight against the FLN in which many policemen lost their
lives, it became clear early in 1958 that some branches were tolerant of or even
allied to the fascists. The loyalty of the army had been shaken by military
defeat, German occupation and bitter internal division. Indo-China taught
the leaders of military opinion that warfare could not be divorced from
political direction either in the field or in the capital, and made them con-
temptuous of politicians who would neither fight the war seriously nor end it
honourably. Algeria taught them to act as a pressure-group, urging and bully-
ing the politicians to muzzle the press, chastise the Arabs, and defy the allies.
At last the soldiers preferred like Georges Bidault *to mourn the Fourth
Republic rather than Algerie fran$aise\ By 1958 the regime commanded little
loyalty from the people, and still less from the state machine.
53. See Williams, no. 218, p. 475n.; JO 3 March 1949, pp. 1204 (Monteil), 1214 (Ramadier),
and Monde, 18 February 1950.
54. JO 4 February 1958, pp. 494-510; also Planchais, pp. 33-4, Faucher, pp. 222-4. Juin:
Fauvet, IVe, pp. 263-4.
55. As in the Morice libel case: an ex-minister was accused in the press of profiting from build-
ing the Germans' Atlantic Wall; the journals were forbidden to give their evidence* as facts over
ten years old are no defence for a libel, but he was permitted to state his case in full : Monde,
2-3, 5, 6 and 13 November 1958. And in the leakages case: Williams, no. 222, pp. 398-400.
Chapter 25
INTERESTS AND CAUSES
It was the weakness of governmental authority which allowed sections of the
state machine to develop their own policies and impose them on their political
masters. Outside government, private pressure-groups found their task
facilitated by the indiscipline of parties as well as the weakness of the executive.
For it is a common illusion that only the party whip prevents the politician
searching his conscience to find and follow that nebulous ideal, the general
interest. In reality party discipline is a protection as well as a constraint,
screening him from the vociferous groups which try to influence his electoral
fate.
A disciplined party can withstand pressure better than an individual
politician, but it is more vulnerable and more easily tempted in a multi-party
system than in a two-party regime where one rival holds power and responsi-
bility and the other hopes to. A majority party (actual or potential) dare not
identify itself exclusively with one interest for fear of losing the floating vote.
But in France perpetual coalitions obscured responsibility. No party, hopeful
of a clear majority, was competing for the rich prize of a central floating vote
which would give or withhold power: for this vote did not exist. Instead
multiple cleavages split the nation into several opposing camps: bourgeois
against worker, peasant against townsman, Catholic against anticlerical.
Between these camps votes shifted rarely, within them frequently, for com-
petition was fiercest between rival parties bidding for the same clientele and
every moderate had to fear a more extreme defender of the same cause. At
elections, parties in a permanent minority dared not offend the group on which
they depended - not for victory, but for survival. In a Parliament with no
majority, manoeuvre and obstruction could often be practised with success.
The groups which exerted pressure on the politician were very various. The
most limited local interests, which had been so potent in the Third Republic,
lost much of their power when large constituencies were adopted in 1945. But a
body like the winegrowers, on whom the prosperity of a whole region de-
pended, could command the support of every politician in the area. Operating
on a national scale were some groups who enjoyed the favours of all parties -
ex-servicemen, tenants of houses, the peasantry. Workers and employers had
their usual range of political friends and enemies. Long ago Thibaudet had
warned, 'No hope for a party which writes on its banner: Interests.'1 But he
also pointed out that some interests, broad and inclusive enough to generate
political ideologies, could offer to their electoral defenders not only a core of
committed support but the satisfaction of championing immortal principles.
Groups large and small could both profit from the consequences of the
multi-party system they did so much to engender. Sometimes they pressed
outrageous demands with such arrogance and stridency that complaints
echoed all along the political spectrum. Yet too many politicians took these
1. Thibaudet, Professeurs, p. 256; cf. Idees, pp. 57-8, 181-2.
INTERESTS AND CAUSES 353
'feudatories' at their own high valuation. Frequently one group could be
played off against another which it existed to fight, or with which its interests
conflicted (no other taxpayer wanted the Poujadists to shift their burden on to
his shoulders). Even when an organization represented a real common interest
its power might be limited: the workers were poorly organized, the middle
classes and sometimes the peasants unwilling to use direct action. And where
the power was available, it had to be used with discretion, for if they were
bullied too humiliatingly the politicians sometimes reacted by defiance instead
of concession.
Resistance to the pressure-groups often succeeded - or failed for causes
quite unconnected with the organization which trumpeted its victory. The
'technocrats' were so freely abused precisely because they often successfully
defended the general interest against particular claims. Money without votes
to back it was weaker than in the past, and groups that did carry excessive
weight rarely had to thank the occult Parisian interests denounced by dema-
gogues of Left and Right. Usually they won because cabinets were weak in
Parliament and members obeyed the injunctions of their constituents, who saw
no connection between the sectional demands they pressed so impatiently and
the governmental anarchy they condemned so harshly.
1. THE PRESSURE-GROUPS
In eighteenth-century France innumerable narrow corporations combined in
fierce defence of their historic privileges. The Revolution swept them away,
and from the Jacobins to Clemenceau and de Gaulle it was orthodox repub-
lican doctrine to deplore and denounce intermediary bodies which came
between the citizen and the state. Freedom of association came later in France
than in any other major democracy. But the centralized Republic was weak at
the top, and loose parties, unmanageable Parliaments and unstable govern-
ments gave pressure-groups every opportunity for influence. The consequences
were deplored by public figures of all views from the President of the Republic
to the royalist pretender; the Pope himself conceded that Catholic approval
for social pluralism might need some qualification.2
Among those whose nefarious activities were most frequently exposed and
lamented were the 'North African lobby' in external affairs and the 'alcohol
lobby* in domestic policy. They shared some common features. In each case a
small group of wealthy men, exercising considerable influence on the loose
parties of the Right and Centre, provided a natural target for left-wing
hostility. Each was screened from this attack by a mass of poorer allies, who
were convinced that their interests were interdependent and were prepared to
defend them by ballot or by riot. Neither faced a direct antagonist of similar
dimensions. Both suffered serious setbacks under the Fourth Republic, pre-
cisely on those sectors of the front where the rich men's 'lobby' was most
exposed; both resisted most successfully where they could call on the aid of
their poorer associates. Each found some support in most parties, and each
2. In his letter to Charles Flory in Crise, p. viii. The Cpmte de Paris attacked the * economic
feudalists* in his monthly bulletin, and President Auriol in his speech at Pau: Monde, 27 July
1951 and 30 June 1953. Cf. below, p. 385.
354 THE SYSTEM
had friends as well as enemies within the administration. But the only protec-
tor of the alcohol interests within the government was the ministry of agricul-
ture, which was no match for the ministry of finance; they had to redress the
balance by calling in the aid of Parliament. The colons, on the contrary, con-
trolled the local administration in North Africa through which Paris had to
try to execute its policies; and though their parliamentary influence was skil-
fully and effectively deployed, it was a secondary (and by itself an inadequate)
weapon in a well-stocked armoury.
The failure of French policy in North Africa, so sharply contrasted with its
successes south of the Sahara, was plainly due in part to the settlers' influence.
Theirs had been the first important 'lobby' in the Third Republic, and half a
century later they could still sometimes make policy and often veto it.3 Paris
was distant and preoccupied, for Algeria was controlled by a busy minister of
the interior and Morocco and Tunisia by an overworked foreign minister.
Residents and governors on the spot had a very free hand unless they offended
the settler leaders; the few who did, like Eirik Labonne at Rabat and Yves
Chataigneau at Algiers, found their authority undermined by political pressure
in Paris and did not long survive the return to office of the Radicals.4 Whether
or not that party was financed by the colons, as was widely believed, its leaders
certainly worked closely with them. Rene Mayer was deputy for Constantine
and a leading minister. L6on Martinaud-D6plat controlled the party machine.
Henri Borgeaud was chairman of the Radical senators, and commanded thirty
votes in the Assembly which were often enough to provoke or avert a minis-
terial crisis; the change from reform to repression in Tunisia at the end of
1951 seems to have been brought about by such parliamentary pressure on the
feeble Pleven cabinet. 'Here', wrote a progressive senator in 1953, 'the
Algerian Radicals are past masters and the colonial immobilisme of the Fourth
Republic owes much to their understanding of "the music".'5
The lobbying of the settlers certainly played an important part in the hesita-
tions and reversals of policy which caused France to miss so many oppor-
tunities in North Africa. Yet a liberal policy faced other and greater difficulties.
The power of the colons had local rather than Parisian roots; and the
obnoxious governors might have defeated their parliamentary critics if their
efforts had not been paralysed by subordinates on the spot - prefects,
prosecutors, policemen - who were bitter opponents of reform. But a deter-
mined government could defeat these forces: Mendes-France reversed the
whole course of policy in Tunisia, and the Moroccan diehards, using every
weapon of administrative sabotage, military disobedience and political
intrigue against Gilbert Grandval in 1955, only accelerated instead of
preventing the switch from repression to concession.6
Although the struggle was so much more long-drawn-out in Algeria, the
colons' lobby was not the main reason for this. For all its entrenched local
3. The first: Priouret, Dfyutts, p. 172. For an early, typical and informed attack see Bourdet,
no. 26 ; and cf. Werth, Strange History.
4 AP 1947, pp. 285-8, 1948, pp. 19-20, 57 ; cf. Bloch-Morhange, Chapter 4 (see above, p. 47n.).
5. Hamon, no. 120, p. 840. On colon influence on the Radical party see above, p. 126n. On
Pleven see references in Williams, p. 190n.
6. Above, p. 349 (sabotage). Fauvet, /K*, pp. 296-300 (Morocco).
INTERESTS AND CAUSES 355
influence and its devoted parliamentary friends, the 'lobby' alone could have
been defeated in Algeria as it was in the protectorates ; indeed many of the
richest capitalists (Walter in Morocco and Blachette in Algeria) were in favour
of conciliating Moslem nationalism. In 1947 an Algerian reform bill was
whittled down by colon pressure in Parliament, but it could still have trans-
formed the problem if it had not been wrecked by the authorities on the spot.7
Ten years later the diehards repeated the operation against another reform
bill; the result was a parliamentary reaction against them and, in the next
ministerial crisis, every political leader who sympathized with them found
himself eliminated in the struggle for power. In Parliament they had lost the
game, and Alain de Serigny's story of his efforts to stop Pflimlin only shows
the weakness of their hand.8
Among the many obstacles to a liberal policy in Algeria, the interests of the
big capitalists loomed large only when the question was a minor and secondary
one in French politics. Once the issue was really joined they would soon have
been swept away, had they not been protected by the fears of nearly a million
poor whites, the mutinous mood of a humiliated and frustrated army, the
weakness or indifference of the major parties, and the exasperated nationalism
of many French voters at home. The proof came in the Fifth Republic, when
the old institutions and most of the old leaders had disappeared. De Gaulle
had nothing to fear from the colons' parliamentary pressure, but the slow and
tortuous way in which his Algerian policy evolved over four years showed the
real difficulties he still faced even more than his own preference for taking
devious paths to his fixed goal.
The powerful and pernicious alcohol interest owed its influence to the mil-
lions of Frenchmen who were concerned with the production or sale of alcohol.
Between them they imposed on the state a loss of over £10 million a year
through its commitment to purchase at guaranteed prices more than twice as
much alcohol as the market could hope to absorb; the enormous quantity
drunk damaged the nation's health and caused further burdens on the treasury.
The various sections of the alcohol lobby were all concerned to maintain this
system and to discredit its critics, though there were minor conflicts of interest
between them. Numerically the most important groups were: the three million
bouilleurs de cru, owners of fruit trees entitled to distil a little alcohol for their
own consumption (who in fact sold three times as much to the towns); the
million and a half winegrowers; and the half-million who owned or worked in
bars. As powerful politically and far stronger financially were the 150,000
beet-producers and the rich distillers who bought their crop.9
The state began buying industrial alcohol for munitions in 1916, and after
7,
Mo:
gp ^
923. Generally, Priouret, Deputes^ p. 234.
9 Among many accounts see Brown, nos. 33, 35 ; Warner, The Winegrowers of France and the
Government since 1875, Chapter 10 ; J. M. Cotteret w-Paysans, pp. 293-301 ; Meynaud, pp. 248-54,
259-60- Malignac and Colin (especially Chapters 9 and 11), and no. 153; Ehrmann, Business,
pp. 244-5; Schoenbrun, pp. 172-3; newspaper and JO references in Williams, pp. 355-6nn.;
also below, pp. 375, 379.
N
356 THE SYSTEM
the war Parliament prolonged the system 'temporarily'. In 1922 the political
alliance of northern beets and southern wines was sealed by the market-
sharing agreement of Be'ziers: wine was protected against competition in the
market for alcoholic drinks, while beets for alcohol were sold to an obliging
state at the same price as sugar-beets. An outlet for some of the surplus was
found by its compulsory use in a motor-fuel mixture. From 1931 the state also
relieved the overstocked wine market by buying up the surplus for distilling.
Beet production doubled soon after the second war because the Monnet
planners wanted a bigger supply of sugar. But since refineries were not as
profitable as distilleries, no more sugar was produced. The extra production
merely added to the budgetary burden and caused conflict between the minis-
ters of finance and agriculture. After Pflimlin resigned over the beet price in
December 1949, the cabinet reduced it in order to force production down; in
the ensuing political storm the government was assailed by peasant deputies of
every party from Conservatives to Communists.
The alcohol surplus and the budgetary deficit continued to mount. After
1950 the lobby again got alcohol compulsorily mixed in motor-fuel. But this
made the fuel both dearer than petrol and worse in quality, and exasperated
the petrol companies, motorists and road hauliers, themselves an aggressive
pressure-group. The subsidy cost the state in 1952 more than half the sum
Pinay saved by slashing the desperately needed housing programme.10 Next
year Ren6 Mayer tried to check the abuse; the peasants' leader, Senator Rene"
Blondelle, rallied seventy rural deputies against him at a meeting chaired by
the minister of agriculture's brother, and the spokesman of the lobby (with
some exaggeration) claimed credit for the government's defeat. Laniel came to
power and obtained the special powers denied to Mayer, but he used them very
differently; Henri Cayre, the beet-growers' secretary, boasted of the major
part he himself played in drafting the new decree-laws on alcohol.11 Mendes-
France's efforts were frustrated by Parliament, and it was not until the third
Assembly that the finance ministry could first halve and then stop the use of
alcohol in motor-fuel.12
On the human side, much more alcohol was drunk in France than any-
where else, and doctors claimed that the toll of alcoholic diseases was far
worse than in other countries. Administrators warned that its direct cost to the
state was at least £150 million a year, perhaps much more. But the producers
either stoutly maintained that the problem was an invention of Anglo-Saxon
soft-drink and whisky manufacturers, or blamed it on the kind of alcohol they
did not themselves sell.13 Under Vichy the advertising, manufacture and sale
10. J. Cayeux, chairman of the health committee, JO 30 October 1952, p. 4587. The Rtgie des
Alcools claimed there was no loss, as it valued its stocks at the price it had paid for them (so the
more unsaleable alcohol it acquired the better off it claimed to be) : Warner, p. 208 ; J. Callen,
'Les secrets du "lobby" betteravier', France-Observateur, 13 May 1954.
11. Ibid.; when M. Cayre sued the paper for libel the court found only one statement not
proven and awarded him 1 franc (a farthing) damages: Monde, 19 and 20 December 1956 Also
Meynaud, pp. 163, 165n., 312; Brown, no. 35, pp. 988-9 (for Mayer) ; Lavau, Pressures, pp. 82-3.
12. Below, p. 379; Meynaud, pp. 253-4 (and in his M?*w?//e.y 6tudes sur les groupes de pression
en France, 1962, p. 308); Brown, no. 35, pp. 985-6.
13. Ibid., pp. 983-4; Le Monitew Vinicole of 10 November 1956 solemnly warned, 'To drink
water may be dangerous, fight against cancer by drinking alcohol. * Cf. Mendras, no. 1 57, p. 759 ;
[over
INTERESTS AND CAUSES 357
of certain alcoholic drinks (particularly pastis) was restricted by law; the
owners of bars - or lemonade-sellers as they preferred to call themselves -
insisted that patriotism required immediate repeal. The ban was defended by
urban MRP members who were concerned for health and the family, and
relied largely on the women's vote. But their rural colleagues deserted when
the Radicals, the main advocates of pastis, proposed in an election year (1951)
that it be legalized and taxed to pay for such popular agrarian causes as higher
family allowances for agricultural workers. The repeal was carried because the
Communists, who had hitherto feared that it might injure the winegrowers,
decided to change sides and vote for it.14
Of all the alcohol groups the bouilleurs de cru had the worst press (they did
no advertising). They were blamed by both the wine and the beet interests for
the problem of alcoholism, so far as it was admitted at all.15 In the towns,
where there were no bouilleurs and many women voters, they faced universal
reprobation. But in eastern France all politicians agreed that the innocent
activities of their constituents had nothing in common with the notorious
frauds of the Normans, while in Normandy no candidate (indeed no prudent
man) would question an abuse so prized by the voters as the bouilleurs' tax
exemption. For two generations the bouilleurs had met inquiring tax-collectors
with physical violence and hostile governments by the ruthless use of their
votes. As they numbered half the adult male population of twenty depart-
ments, and a quarter in another forty, they were a strong and arrogant force
which made deputies tremble (perhaps cravenly, for their leader Andre
Liautey was very lucky to win a seat in the Assembly in 1951 and he was
badly beaten in 1956).16 Mendes-France aroused the fury of all sections of the
alcohol interest by a frontal attack in 1954, when he reduced beet purchases,
imposed restrictions on bars, and limited the bouilleurs'' tax exemption to
farmers only. Within a year his measures - though approved by public
opinion - had all been upset by Parliament or by his successor, Edgar Faure.17
The alcohol interest was strong because it allied money and numbers.
Through the Regie des alcools the precarious survival of poor winegrowers of
the Midi became dependent on the comfortable and parasitic prosperity of
the beet-producers and the distillers. Protected politically by the northern
Royer in Pay sans, pp. 168-9, 186-9. Cost in money and disease: Brown, no. 35, pp. 977-80;
Malignac and Colin; and S. Ledennann, Alcool, alcoolisme, alcoolisation (1956).
14. AP 1948, p. 157; 1949, pp. 78, 86; 1950, p. 155. JO 2 January 1950, pp. 13-14; 24 and 26
July 1950, pp. 5868ff., 6008ff.; 9 May 1951, p. 4906. Meynaud, p. 259.
15. Ibid., p. 251 ; Brown, no. 35, p. 984. For the lobby's pressure on newspapers see Malignac
and Colin, pp. 83-4.
16. Ledermann, pp. 44-8 (numbers, violence) ; Brown, no. 35, p. 991 ; cf. below, p. 375. On the
election see Williams, no. 168, p. 165 ; Claudius Petit, who campaigned hard against alcoholism,
also lost his seat (but regained it in 1958); but Edgar Faure, after voting against the bouilleurs,
was re-elected with a very much larger vote than before. On the bouilleurs' campaign see Muselier,
pp. 165-77, with many edifying quotations; Royer in Paysans, pp. 167-74, on Dorgeres; cf.
ibid.9 pp. 297-8.
17. Brown, no. 35, pp. 900, 922; Meynaud, p. 260; Werth, Strange History, pp. 142-5; Hoff-
mann, pp. 16, 57, 62-3 on Poujadist use of the theme. In the vote on 8 November 1955 the
bouilleurs were supported by fewer than a tenth of the members from Seine and Seine-et-Oise,
but by three-quarters of the provincial deputies. In 21 cases back-benchers from the same list
voted on opposite sides : in 12 the bouilleurs'' supporter was the lower on the list, in 4 he was the
higher, and in 5 he was not up for re-election. (My calculations.) They won by 407 to 188.
358 THE SYSTEM
conservatives, including some stern Gaullist critics of intermediary bodies, the
system could also mobilize left-wing reinforcements from the south, where
every deputy had to defend the trade on which his region depended. The wine-
growers did so badly from the alliance that their discontent frequently found
expression in direct action - from strikes of mayors to highway barricades -
or, in 1956, in a massive vote for Poujade.18 The beet-producers did well only
while they faced no opponents stronger than the medical profession or the
unorganized women's vote ; the motor trade and the finance ministry together
were at last too much for them. The bouilkurs were influential because hun-
dreds of thousands of Frenchmen were determined to use their vote first and
foremost in this not very lofty cause;19 if the spectacle was unedifying it was
hard to see why politicians or institutions (other than those of democracy
itself) should be held responsible for it. Gaullist deputies in the Fifth Republic
defended the bouilleurs as ardently as their predecessors.20
The alcohol interest suffered from a bad public reputation which made it
somewhat easier for the administration and even for a determined political
leader to resist its pretensions ; it had the advantage of enjoying support in all
parties and organized opposition from none. The ideal situation for a pressure-
group was to muster equally widespread support for a cause that public
opinion found respectable. It was for this reason that every government found
the ministry of pensions budget the hardest to pass, for none could offer
enough to satisfy a Parliament in which opposition to the claims of ex-
servicemen was unthinkable.21 Rather similarly, from 1919 onwards, the
tenants' organizations were strong enough to maintain rent controls which in
the long run stopped the repair of old houses and the building of new ones
(though they were unable or unconcerned to press the state or local authorities
to provide enough accommodation for the homeless). In the Fourth Republic,
where housing had become a desperate problem, the property-owners were
still politically weak, but the main tenants' league had come under strong
Communist influence and carried less weight than in the past.22
The sinister interests manipulated the politicians more successfully in
popular demonology than in reality. At worst, like the colons, they might help
to veto reforms when these could still have achieved a useful purpose. If, like
the alcohol interests, they had the backing of several million voters and no
organized opposition, they might even be able to impose bad policies on timid
ministers. But wealth alone was not enough; when business mounted its major
parliamentary operation against ratification of the European Coal and Steel
Community, it suffered such a total defeat that it never tried again.23 And it
was rare for any of the lesser groups to have the numbers, or any of the larger
18. For the winegrowers see Warner; Ledennann; and J. Callen in France-Ob servateur, 27 May
1954. (Being poor and on the Left they were attacked less often than their allies by 'men of good-
will'.) For their contribution to Poujadism see above, p. 166, Hoffmann, pp. 335-6, Royer in
Paysans, pp. 186-9 ; and for their electoral importance, above, p. 330.
19. Perhaps one in ten or twenty of the 3 million bouilleurs: Goguel, no. 113, p. 309.
20. Michel Debre" frustrated them, obtaining special powers by threatening to enforce Mendes-
France*s decree. By 1963 the bouilleurs were fighting a losing rearguard action.
21. Cf. Goguel, Regime, pp. 97-8, Meynaud, pp. 75-6,1 82, 195-6, 229; and above, p. 247n.
22. Meynaud and Lancelot, no. 161 ; on Communism, Brayance, pp. 143-4.
23. See below, p. 362.
INTERESTS AND CAUSES 359
ones the unity, to wield to the full the power they claimed. Big business had
different interests and attitudes from small, industry from commerce, whole-
salers from retailers, modern firms from backward ones. Sharecroppers did
not always agree with owner-occupiers, lessors with lessees, rich regions with
poor, efficient farmers with inefficient, winegrowers with beet-producers. Like
the parties, the pressure-groups were riven by internal conflicts and differences,
and were more effective for negative than for positive purposes.
2. THE SOCIAL CLASSES
No class suffered more from its internal divisions than industrial labour. The
workers were fewer in France than in the other great democracies, and harder
to organize because the average plant was much smaller. The trade unions
were weaker in numbers and resources, for only in brief moments of excite-
ment in 1919, 1936 and 1945 had they ever succeeded in attracting a majority
of the proletariat. Faced with the stubborn and bitter hostility of their em-
ployers, the workers grew impatient with the slow task of building up indus-
trial bargaining power, and instead launched sudden and violent attacks on
entrenched positions which they had not the strength to capture or hold.
Serious effort to improve conditions was therefore directed at the govern-
ment rather than the employer. But labour's influence had always been gravely
impaired by its inability to unite. Historically, political disputes had so harmed
the labour movement in its formative years that in the twentieth century
abstention from political activity became the first principle of trade union
philosophy. This did not prevent the division of the labour movement between
the revolutionary syndicalists, who preached the general strike to overthrow
the bourgeois state, and the reformists who chose to work within it - but with
their effectiveness limited by the traditional inhibitions against political
action.
Between the wars the revolutionary wing of the movement fell under Com-
munist control, while the reformist wing found its main base in the relatively
powerful unions of state employees. Both had the state as target, but both
were hampered by the anti-political tradition. After 1945 the Communists won
control of the unions, but their violence and intimidation in the strikes of 1947
provoked most of the non-Communist minority to secede from CGT and,
with active encouragement from SFIO, to set up CGT-Force ouvriere.24
This curious amalgam of Socialist reformists, ultra-cautious moderates and
old-style anarcho-syndicalists was soon surpassed in militancy by the Catholic
unions of CFTC, traditionally a highly conservative body which by the end
of the Fourth Republic had developed a wholly new aggressiveness and self-
confidence. New minor groups were the staff union, CGC, which was politi-
cally rather conservative, and a small and internally divided union, COS I, in
which Gaullists and Vichy trade unionists competed furiously. But all the
unions together probably organized in the 1950's no more than 2,500,000 out
of about 12,000,000 employed (6,000,000 in industry, mining and transport).
24. On its initial 'subsidy' from Daniel Mayer as minister of labour see Meynaud, p. 70;
Lorwin, p. 174n. (CGT and CFTC had had money also). See above, pp. 19, 34, 96-7 and notes
for the split and for sources.
360 THE SYSTEM
CGT outnumbered all the others together; CFTC was rather stronger than
FO. But the non-Communist unions were more important than their numbers
suggested, for many workers who stayed in CGT were suspicious of its Com-
munist leadership - as they showed in periodical social security elections and
in every political strike.25
The industrial power of the unions was reduced because CGT often be-
haved as, and was always suspected of being a tool of the party: many pre-
miers (including Mollet though not Mendes-France) consequently refused
contact with it. The political influence of the industrial workers was sterilized
because they gave their votes to the Communist ' untouchables', though the
non-Communist unions had much influence in SFIO, some in MRP and at
times a little in RPR Their parliamentary instrument was the labour com-
mittee of the Assembly, through which in 1950 they defeated the government's
plan for compulsory industrial arbitration.26 Yet, weak though they were
politically, the unions could usually achieve more through a sympathetic
government than through direct action.
Just after the war both the government and the political climate were
exceptionally favourable to labour. In France, as in Britain, drastic social
change seemed both inevitable and desirable. French business had been dis-
credited by its conduct under Vichy, which left the patronat politically im-
potent and convinced that its popularity was irremediable : for years it shunned
any publicity, indulging a mania for secrecy which continued to harm its
reputation. But Vichy had also endowed business with a new organizational
structure and leadership which enabled it to make a rapid recovery from the
low point of 1946.27
In the past, loose parties of conservative individualists like Alliance
dgmocratique had been powerfully influenced by business views and interests,
though few businessmen had themselves sought a political career. The new
party structure, less easily permeated from outside than the old, gave a new
reason for tighter pressure-group organization but did not encourage more
employers to take to politics. In the Assemblies of the Fourth Republic only
about forty of the 600 deputies were industrialists, and only twenty of the
country's 500 most important businessmen themselves chose to enter Parlia-
ment.28 Because of the unpopularity of the great economic interests, even con-
servative politicians usually avoided too close association with CNPF, and
few of its spokesmen in the two houses enjoyed much esteem (though Ren6
Mayer and Maurice Petsche, two of the very few deputies with big-business
experience, between them held the key finance ministry for nearly four years
between late 1947 and early 1952). If economic policy was comparatively
satisfactory to industry during most of the period, this was due in part to its
25. Above, pp. 83-4. On numbers in 1953 see Lorwin, p. 177, and later Ross, no. 193b, p. 81.
26. On the collective bargaining bill see JO 4 January 1950, especially pp. 120-2; a year later
an action committee of the unions and family associations used the labour committee to demand
higher family allowances: Monde, 8 February and 27 April 1951 (and cf. above, p. 264).
27. For fears of publicity see Ehrmann, Business, pp. 207-1 8, 279-84, etc. ; American estimates
of French profits in a magazine subsidized by business were carefully blacked out before copies
reached the news-stands, p. 216n. For short accounts of CNPF see Meynaud, pp. 45-51 • GogueL
Xtgime, pp. 105-6; Brown, no. 33, pp. 703-4.
28. Dogan in Partis et Classes, pp. 298, 320, and in Elections 1956, p. 456.
INTERESTS AND CAUSES 361
success in sheltering behind the smaller and less efficient businessmen, who
could count on their countrymen's sympathy for the * little manr, and in part
to the affinity between the managers in the larger private enterprises and their
brethren in the upper reaches of the administration.
The politicians shunned CNPF but courted PME (Petites et moyennes
entreprises). Conversely the high civil servants considered the first a serious
force and the second a noisy nuisance. Leon Gingembre, PME's active leader,
was as loud in his denunciations as CNPF spokesmen were discreet in their
suggestions. In the early years PME favoured direct action or the threat of it -
in 1947 demonstrations (sometimes violent) against rationing and economic
controls, in 1948 closing of shops and threats of tax strikes to protest against
increases in taxation. As the balance of power shifted, its attention turned to
politics. Since the small shopkeeper vote alone was estimated at 2,500,000,
and the small man's survival was considered an important object of policy,
Radicals and groups further to the Right were responsive to his demands and
even Socialists and Communists bid for his support. In November 1949 PME
organized an Economic Front with other middle-class bodies to co-ordinate
opposition to Bidault's budget, and in the 195 1 election this body tried through
Taxpayers' Defence lists to organize an opposition Conservatism untainted by
association with the government parties. Although this attempt failed, in the
right-wing Assembly returned at this election a majority of the deputies joined
a parliamentary inter-group pledged to forward the policies favoured by the
Economic Front. When Pinay came to power PME 'greeted the government
at first as if it had invented it; but as soon as some of M. Pinay's policies in-
curred its displeasure, it took even more liberties . . . than with any of its pre-
decessors'. Gingembre's activities were frequently an embarrassment to the
more sedate employers, and it took the emergence of Pierre Poujade to con-
vert him to statesmanship.29
The structural issues between these economic interests were important only
in the early years. The nationalized industries, violently attacked at first, were
by 1951 accepted by CNPF and its political spokesmen, apart from one or two
ideological zealots in the upper house. Rene Mayer did try in 1953 to bring
them under stricter governmental control, but this move probably owed as
much to the centralizing tendencies of the inspect eurs des finances as to the
business connections of the premier and his minister for industry, J. M. Louvel
- and in any case it was frustrated by Parliament.30 The installation of the
social security system saw a series of battles over its administrative and
financial organization, on which the Left usually got its way. But the Com-
munists had to accept the election of administrators instead of their nomina-
tion by the unions, and the government and the parliamentary majority
together were defeated by the self-employed; a 'Middle Classes Committee',
inspired by Gingembre, led a massive refusal of contributions which made
29. See below, p. 379. On PME see Ehrmann, Business, pp. 172-84 ('Pinay*, p. 180) ; Meynaud,
pp. 51-5 ; Lavau, no. 139, and in Partis et Classes (*Les classes moyennes'), especially pp. 79-80 ;
Brown, no. 33, pp. 74-5. For the influence of the methods and mentality of the small firm on all
French business see D. S. Landes in Earle, Chapter 19 (* French business and the businessman*)
and J. E. Sawyer in ibid., pp. 306-10.
30. See above, pp. 343-4; Lescuyer, pp. 115-16, 142-70.
362 THE SYSTEM
Parliament give way and exclude them from the ordinary social security system
by an amending law in 1948. Social security remained a major PME target,
but Socialists and MRP defeated all the right-wing attempts to 'reorganize'
it. In the third Parliament the Socialists, back in office, succeeded in establish-
ing an old age pension fund; but Albert Gazier's efforts to reduce the cost of
illness to the sick, though strongly supported by the unions and the social
security administrators, came up against the stubborn and high-principled
resistance so characteristic of doctors everywhere.31
In day-to-day politics the clashes between Right and Left turned on the
usual questions: the burden and distribution of taxation, which fell the more
heavily on the wage- and salary-earner because the self-employed and the
professional man could so easily evade it; the size and objects of government
expenditure; economic controls, wage and price policies, industrial relations,
and social legislation. Often there was a straightforward clash of interests,
ideologies or party loyalties ; for instance late in 1 956 the F O unions protested
bitterly when PME demanded that Parliament reject without discussion all
the social reforms then before it.32 During most of the Fourth Republic's life
these matters were the stuff of electoral, parliamentary and cabinet debate.
Yet often the divisions were less clear-cut. In the early social security debates
the Catholic party and union, MRP and CFTC, insisted against Left opposi-
tion on an autonomous family allowances fund; in December 1952 MRP
brought down Pinay's Conservative government for attempting to tamper with
it. Under Pinay and Laniel, PME and the textile industry fought hard against
tax changes proposed by the bureaucracy and supported by most of C NP F.33
In 1951 the steel and metallurgical industries launched a campaign against
the Coal and Steel Community. L6on Gingembre joined in with his customary
violence, and the whole employers* organization followed with more restraint.
But the steel cartels had inherited a bad reputation from the Comite des Forges
of the Third Republic, and their opponents in the Monnet organization
exploited it against them with great effect. Coal and railways, their former
allies, were now nationalized; agriculture, hoping that the Community would
form a precedent for similar arrangements for foodstuffs, was on the other
side. The minister, Robert Schuman, stood firm and was supported by all the
centre parties, and although CNPF had the support of the business Con-
servatives, the Gaullist nationalists, and the eager Communist advocates of a
united front with * the patriotic employers ', thtpatronat went down to a defeat
far heavier than anyone had expected: the treaty was ratified by a majority of
144. Thereafter business became very chary of risking its prestige and its unity
in an open political battle.34
31. Galant, Chapters 4 and 5; Lavau, no. 139, pp. 380, 383; Meynaud, pp. 92-4, 240-3,
264-5, who quotes the boast of the * Middle Classes Committee' : 'Perhaps for the first time in
parliamentary history we have seen a law that was voted, promulgated and in operation recon-
sidered and entirely modified hy the same people who had drawn it up * (p. 264n.).
32. AP 1956, p. 174.
33. Ehrmann, Business, Chapters 6 to 8, for the employers* attitudes on economic issues (on
taxation, pp. 309-20). One poll among them (ibid., p. 299) showed that they thought well over
half the budget went on civil service salaries (in fact 15 % did).
34. Ehrmann, Business, pp. 407-16, and no. 84; summarized in Meynaud, p. 268. Cf. Gerbet,
no, 98 ; and below, p. 379 .
INTERESTS AND CAUSES 363
Lines were particularly blurred in agricultural matters. Few political groups
tried simultaneously to attract both workers and bourgeois, and those that did
risked their cohesion in the attempt, as both RPF and MRP found in 1952.
But everyone courted the peasant vote, and from extreme Right to extreme
Left every bench contained members of agriculture's 'invisible party'.35 In the
later years of the Fourth Republic a lobby of 100 was organized: the Amicale
parlementaire agricole™ Sometimes townsmen of all political views combined
to resist the pressure, for extreme conservatives were as critical of rural back-
wardness and privilege as any trade unionist, and their parliamentary
representatives resented the fiscal advantages which the peasantry won
through their political strength.37 Parisian politicians who were notoriously
subservient to urban pressure-groups spoke and voted with fine Jacobin
determination against the outrageous claims of the bouilleurs de cru. On the
other hand spokesmen for the farmer exalted the unity of the peasantry,
denounced trade unions, middlemen and civil servants alike, and sometimes
seemed to identify economic backwardness with a higher moral order.38
These conflicts did not always take an economic form. The countryside led
the way in pressing for a return to the Third Republic, in which the Senate
had been a fortress of agrarian influence and the electoral system had satisfied
the peasantry by making the deputy essentially a local ambassador to the
Paris bureaucracy rather than a champion of political causes. Rural leaders
demanded a restoration of the Senate and the old electoral law for the explicit
purpose of increasing the political influence of agriculture.39 Usually, how-
ever, agrarian pressure had more immediate objects such as price supports,
subsidies, investments and tax reliefs.
The German occupation and post-war shortages had improved agricul-
ture's bargaining and purchasing power, and the peasants were never recon-
ciled to losing these advantages.40 In 1948 Andr6 Marie's cabinet broke up
when it offended the trade unions and forfeited Socialist and M RP support by
accepting peasant demands for higher food prices. Agrarian members, par-
ticularly but not only in the Peasant party, were always suspicious of the
Socialists, and blocked Mollet's election as premier in 1951. They also waged a
vendetta against Ren6 Mayer, the business Radical who as finance minister in
1948 had struck a blow at peasant hoarding by calling in the 5,000-franc notes.
Their suspicions of him almost destroyed Pleven's second cabinet, in which he
35. Fauvet in Monde, 1-2 January 1950.
36. On the Amicale see Paysans, pp. 222, 247-8. Edgar Faure was chairman. It excluded
Socialists and Communists - but they too courted rural votes: references in Williams, p. 333n.
37. For instance, JO 29 July 1950, pp. 6208-9, and 16 May 1951, pp. 5278-9, for attacks on
proposals to make townsmen pay for rural family allowances by Robert Betolaud, a PRL
member for Paris, and Emile Hugues, a Radical from Alpes-Maritimes (the Riviera). On the
fiscal privileges of agriculture see above, p. 26 and n. ; cf. p. 252.
38. Mendras, no. 157, and in Paysans, p. 251 ; cf. R. Barrillon and J. M. Royer in ibid., pp. 140-
143, 197, 206; and Chevallier, pp. 141-79. On the bouilleurs see above, p. 357 and n.
39. MM. Lecacheux and Chaumie in the Consultative Assembly : Inegalites, pp. 40-1 . Senators
Andre" Dulin (chairman of the agriculture committee) and Ren<§ Blondelle (then president of
FNSEA), reported in Monde, 28 February 1950, 3 March 1951, 13 April 1951 (cf. Williams,
p. 334n.). Cf. Duverger, 'Conseil de la Republique ou Chambre d'agriculture*, Monde, 22 July
1953; Dogan in Paysans, p. 214.
40. Agricultural income fell from 17% of national income in 1949 to 12% in 1958: RFSP
12.3 (1962), p. 577. Cf. above, p. 26n. 18.
N*
364 THE SYSTEM
was finance minister, and helped to bring down his own eighteen months later,
in May 1953. That summer the end of inflation and the decrees of Laniel's
government provoked the peasant organizations into blocking the country
roads as a means of pressure. Their success was not forgotten.
Rural discontent greatly swelled the Poujadist vote in 1956, and in the third
Assembly the peasant leaders pressed for 'indexation ' of agricultural prices (a
sliding scale which, like * parity ' in the United States, meant tying the prices of
goods sold by the farmers to those of goods they bought). Their agitation
weakened Mollet's government without extracting any serious concessions
from it. It forced Bourges-Maunoury to summon a special session of Parlia-
ment and would probably have overthrown him if he had not fallen earlier
over his Algerian reform bill. Gaillard's ministry finally acceded to the demand
for 'indexation', but de Gaulle's reversed the decision a year later; much of
the early domestic history of the Fifth Republic turned on the peasants'
struggle to recapture the ground they had so briefly won.
Like business and labour, the peasants formed too heterogeneous an in-
terest to be easily brought within a single organization. They too were an
object of political pressure as well as a motive force, and they were divided not
only by politics but by clashes of interest and tactics between regions, products
and economic groups. Because of these internal disputes it was said in the
Third Republic that the clamour of one of the postmen's unions sounded
louder to the government than that of the whole agricultural interest.41 But
here as elsewhere the Vichy period saw an organizational advance which was
to have permanent consequences. Though the Vichy Peasant Corporation did
not survive the Liberation, its conception and many of its leaders exerted a
lasting influence in the Fourth Republic.
Until the second world war 'the history of agricultural organization is
nothing but a long competition between the chateau-owner and the Radical
deputy . . . after ten years, the Fourth Republic sees the two protagonists once
more alone on the field '.42 At the Liberation both were ousted for a moment by
the Confederation generate de V agriculture, CGA, through which a Socialist
minister (Tanguy-Prigent) tried to organize the entire peasantry and attach it
to his party. But the experiment was brief, for CGA soon became a shadow
organization presiding ineffectively over its less extensive but more cohesive
components, especially the Farmers' Federation, FNSE A (Federation nation-
ale des syndicats d'exploitants agricoles)*z
Some departmental farmers' federations favoured the Left and even the
Communists, but FNSEA was dominated by the rich capitalist corn- and
beet- growers of northern France, who made large profits when prices were
fixed at a level to keep the poor and marginal producer in business. Politically
it was on the Right: of eighty officials of peasant organizations returned to the
1951 Parliament, half were Conservatives and only a quarter belonged to the
41. Frederix, p. 36. For peasant diversity see Fauvet and Mendras in Pay sans, pp. 1-35, and
Fauvet, *Le monde paysan*, in Partis et Classes, pp. 155-77.
42. Mendras, no. 157, p. 737, and in Pay sans, p. 232.
43. *CGA, where certain vassals were more powerful than the suzerain': P. Delouvrier in
Crise, p. 78. On it see Pay sans, pp. 236-7 and 287-91 ; Brown, no. 33, pp. 706-8; Marabuto,
pp. 349-59 ; G. Wright in Earle, pp. 226-31 (on 'Communists and Peasantry'), and nos. 223, 225.
INTERESTS AND CAUSES 365
*big three' parties of the Liberation.44 In the agrarian crisis of 1953 the left-
wing leaders of CGA finally lost all influence in their own organization, and
their attempts to build a rival base among the poorer peasants of central France
had little success.
The Conservative fanners profited little from their victory. Since their
political friends were usually in power in the second Parliament, their leaders
were reluctant to embarrass governments with excessive demands. This
caution lost them support, and in the three Peasant party splits the extra-
parliamentary organization always followed (or preceded) the intransigent
counsels of Paul Antier. But in stirring up rural discontent no moderate could
compete with Pierre Poujade or Henri Dorg£res. At the 1956 election the
extremists made alarming inroads into the peasant vote, and a year later an
alliance of those three agitators forced the parliamentary leadership into un-
compromising positions which divided majorities and disrupted governments.45
Less spectacular but ultimately more serious was the threat to Conservative
dominance from the young Catholics of JAC (Jeunesse agricole chretienne),
who in many of the regions away from the Paris basin were taking control of
the local farmers' unions. They were reformers in outlook, based on the poorer
areas, and more interested in land law reform, cheap credits and organized
markets than in pressure on government to fix favourable prices. Early in the
Fifth Republic their influence began to be felt in legislation, organization and
politics, and in 1961 they took over the secretaryship of FNSEA.46
3. THE CHURCH AND ITS OPPONENTS
The transformation of the agricultural organizations and Christian trade
unions were aspects of a startling development in French society: the vigour
and progressiveness of the Catholic Church, which contrasted sharply with the
exhaustion and incapacity to adapt displayed among the freethinkers from
freemasons to Communists. But this striking political change was for some
time obscured by the persistence of the old quarrel over the church schools.
Traditionally the line between Catholic and anticlerical had coincided with
the division between Right and Left. The enemies of the Republic had their
political base in the Church, while freemasonry mustered and drilled the
opposing camp. The Catholic contribution to the Resistance went far to
remove these memories, which MRP fervently hoped to erase. But the con-
flict, though less intense than in the past, was revived and played an important
part in the politics of the Fourth Republic. The exclusion of religious teach-
ing from the state schools, and the right of Catholic parents to send their
children to denominational schools were generally admitted; the issue was
whether private schools could be subsidized from public funds. Vichy revived
the dying quarrel by granting subsidies. But at the Liberation the Communists
44. Wright, no. 223; Goguel, Rtgime, p. 104n.: 41 CNIP, 13 RPF, 8 Radicals, 8 MRP,
7 Communists, 6 SFIO. In 1951 CGA's 30 seats on the Economic Council were reduced to 3,
15 going to FNSEA and 12 to other bodies. On FNSEA see Meynaud, pp. 58-62; Goguel,
op. cit., pp. 103-5; and sources for CGA.
45. R. Barrillon in Paysans, pp. 131-43 ('Les moderes'); J. M. Royer, ibid., pp. 149-206 ( De
Dorgeres a Poujade'); and above, pp. 155, 166 and mi., 344.
46. Wright, nos. 226, 228 ; Tavemier, no. 207; and above, p. 110.
366 THE SYSTEM
successfully demanded their abolition in order to separate Socialists from
MRP.47
At the 1951 election RPF used the same issue for the same purpose. No
Catholic party could fall behind its rivals on this subject without risking the
loss of clerical support and the defection of its voters. Throughout the west
(where the Catholic school population was concentrated) the supporters of the
cause were organized by the Association de parents tf&eves de Penseignement
libre (APEL), which successfully sought binding pledges from candidates and,
rather less successfully, tried to prevent electoral alliances between allies and
opponents of the Church. An Association parkmentaire pour la liberte de
1'enseignement (APLE) organized its 296 pledged supporters to vote only for
governments which accepted their programme. In September 1951, helped by
overseas votes, they easily carried Barang6's bill to restore the subsidies, which
was the cause (or pretext) for the Socialists to break with the Third Force
majority which had ruled the country for the past four years.48
The opposition centred on the teachers' unions and parents' associations of
the state school system. The teachers, perhaps the only really successful trade
union in France, had lost their old intolerant atheism but not their fervour for
latcite, which was shared even by the Catholic teachers of the CFTC union.
In the countryside the electoral organization of the Socialists and to some
extent of the Radicals relied heavily on their services. The anticlerical parties
and organizations were grouped in a Comite national de defense laique along
with intellectual societies like the Ligue des drolls de Fhomme^
Foreigners and Parisians might think this struggle outmoded, but Michel
Debr6 was doubly unjust when he wrote in 1957 that it was a false conflict
artificially kept alive for their own ends by the politicians of the System. For,
far from wishing to exacerbate the division, the moderate politicians were
forced by pressure from the Communists in 1945 and Debr6's Gaullist col-
leagues in 1951 into a battle they had hoped to avoid.50 Moreover, the
quarrel aroused deep historical echoes in the villages. DebrS's own attempt
to settle it in 1960 was met by an anticlerical petition with ten million signa-
tures. This had a more solid basis than mere prejudice. For state employment
and promotion in it often went by preference to those educated in state
schools, while many private employers favoured those with a Catholic up-
bringing; thus France had had separate ladders of social advancement. As the
church schools were very unevenly distributed (predominant in the west, rare
in the south) each ladder had its foot firmly embedded in the soil of a par-
ticular region.51
The struggle was thus waged between parties and provinces, classes and
47. The best short account is R6mond in L&citt, pp. 381-400. And see above, pp. 29, 34.
48. Bosworth, Chapter 8, especially pp. 291-301. APLE included all MRP deputies, all
RPF but 6, all Conservatives but 2, and 14 RGR: AP 1951, p. 179. See also Brown, no. 34;
Goguel, Regime, pp. 94-7; below, p. 376n. Even in this election over 200 deputies ignored the
problem in their election addresses : Remond, Lalcitd, p. 398.
49. On it see Chariot, no. 53 ; on the teachers, below, p. 446 ; cf. also p. 98, on freemasonry.
50. Remond, Laicite, pp. 385, 393, 396. Debr<§ : Ces princes quinousgouvernent (1957), pp. 44-6.
Cf. above, pp. 22, 29, 39.
51. M. Crozier in Partis et Classes, pp. 88, 95-8; cf. above, p. 68, and Map 5. Villages:
C. d'Aragon in Pay sans, pp. 490-2, 504-6.
INTERESTS AND CAUSES 367
ideologies, as well as between organizations. But as the prudence of the politi-
cians of the System indicated, it was far less intense in the Fourth Republic
than in the Third. The 1945 and 1951 pattern was not repeated in 1956. By the
Barange law the church schools had been allocated a small subsidy, the state
schools a much larger sum; the hierarchy was content with its modest success,
and behaved with great discretion at the next election, while many anticlerical
mayors demanded only half-heartedly the repeal of a measure which was an
offence to their personal convictions but a boon to their communal finances.
On both sides other issues, especially North Africa, overshadowed the tradi-
tional conflict. Some freemasons abandoned their enmity to the Church and
went over to the extreme Right. Conversely, Francois Mauriac appealed to
Catholics to support Mend£s-France? and some Catholic trade unionists cam-
paigned for the Socialist party. The Left had no wish to offend these new
recruits, and though it won a large majority in the new Assembly repeal of
Barang6's law was always blocked by defections, particularly among the young
Mendesist deputies.52
Even on this question which had so long divided the parties, the two camps
were far from united internally. The fissure between Communists and other
anticlericals was deeper than that between the two traditional antagonists ; the
debates on the agricultural instruction bill of 1955 revived the old conflict, but
in attenuated form because many rural Radicals now feared the cure less than
the Communist schoolteacher.53 In some country areas Socialists still han-
kered after the traditional alignment, often for electoral rather than ideological
reasons (in 1955 the chief advocate of permitting local SFIO-Communist
alliances was Robert Lacoste); but the party headquarters successfully for-
bade any such dealings. Most leaders of anticlerical pressure-groups tried to
avoid allowing their activities to be exploited by the Communists against their
democratic sympathizers.
On the other side the political influence of the Church was now as diverse as
once it had been uniform. The attitude of the hierarchy differed sharply
according to the state of peasant society in a region, the outlook of the local
population and the personal views of individual prelates: even in a conserva-
tive diocese where Catholicism was strong, the bishop of Saint-Die explicitly
warned his flock not to forget the need for social justice and peace in the
colonies and the world in their zeal for the church schools.54 Outside the hier-
archy political opinions were still more diverse. Those Catholics who refused
to break with the Communist party were indeed sharply disciplined (though
even here Rome seems to have been much more severe than the French
church authorities). But with this exception the spectrum of Catholic opinion
remained complete, from the neutralist Left by way of the centre parties
and the Gaullists to a clerical-fascist extreme Right. Some Catholics were
52 Elections 1956, pp. 131-41 (J. Chariot on the Church), 158-61 (J. M. Royer on the anti-
clericals), 328 (C. Prieur on state schools), 422 (F. Goguel); Fauvet/K*, p. 186; Paysans , p. 334.
Among right-wing freemasons, Martinaud-Deplat relied on conservative votes m 1956 (Olivesi,
pp. 46, 52, 60) and Baylot left SFIO to become a Conservative deputy in 1958 : cf. above, pp. 98,
130n., 347-8.
53. R. Leveau in Paysans, pp. 269-80; on Radical fears, p. 277.
54. J. Labbens in ibid., pp. 327-43, especially 331-3, 336; Chariot in Elections 1956, pp. 132-5
(Saint-Die).
368 THE SYSTEM
the most resolute defenders of the rights of man in Algeria ; others were
crusaders for French sovereignty at any price. The battles within the ranks of
the Church, wrote a sympathizer, sometimes seemed 'the only really pitiless
struggle being fought out in France *.55
Here lay the political weakness, not only of the Church but of all the
greatest corporations. Business and labour, agriculture and anticlericalism
suffered from it equally. Different from one another in so many respects, they
were all broad enough in appeal to form the basis for a political ideology
which often had a stronger hold on men's minds than party loyalty. But by the
same token they were so heterogeneous that there were few matters on which
they could muster their full forces for united action. Occasionally a major
common interest would arise: free collective bargaining for the unions, price
'indexation' for agriculture, subsidies for the church schools. But even on
these there were often tactical differences which reflected differences of politi-
cal outlook. On the major disputes of Fourth Republican politics - decoloni-
zation, or European union - each of the great corporations was split between
the rival camps. And on the lesser matters that directly concerned them there
were usually such divisions of interest within their own ranks that common
action was impossible. Most of the day-to-day battles were therefore fought
out between groups which were smaller but more homogeneous and so more
easily mobilized than the great representative organizations. * States within the
State ... the great confederations often suffer from the same weaknesses as the
State.'56
55. Grosser, pp. 179-85;(' pitiless', p. 180). References above, pp. 103n., 114n., 161 n. 8 172n 7
56. Delouvner in Crise, p. 78 ; cf. Meynaud, pp. 48, 58-9, etc.
Chapter 26
PRESSURE POLITICS
French republican tradition mistrusted intermediary bodies between the state
and the citizen. In the Third Republic this disapproval deterred pressure-
groups from acting as openly as in other countries. Their distaste for publicity
contributed to the widely accepted belief that the country was clandestinely
governed by occult forces - trusts or freemasons, oil companies or cardinals,
Jews, bolsheviks or bankers - who dominated the politicians, fleeced the
people, and stood revealed only when the conspiratorial warfare of rival
feudatories broke out in an interminable and incomprehensible political scan-
dal
Vichy, with its corporative outlook, gave a fillip to organization in sectors
of the economy where it had been weak. Post-war governments extended and
strengthened this trend. For in 1945^6 the dominant political forces were
opposed to individualism, and the overwhelming role of government in
economic life obliged every interest to organize. Taxes and subsidies, managed
imports and restrictive controls, fixed prices and allocated investments,
rationing and nationalization made every trade and union strive to become an
arbiter and not merely an object of policy.1 In the Fourth Republic these
activities continued more openly than before, but the traditional suspicion and
mistrust persisted undiminished.
The strength of the pressure-groups reflected the weaknesses of the French
political structure: sectional parties dependent on a narrow electoral base, a
Parliament with no coherent majority offering every facility for obstruction,
precarious and divided coalition governments. The groups themselves were
often feeble in number, wealth and organization, racked by internal disputes,
and unable to mobilize their paper forces. One interest often found another
obstructing its demands; and excessive pressure on the politicians sometimes
drove them to an indignant and negative response. The pressure-groups were
therefore far stronger in defending old positions than in attacking new ones,
and their influence contributed to immobilisme at home and abroad.
1. PLEDGES AND SUBSIDIES
Different pressure-groups employed varying tactics. The beet-growers shunned
publicity as much as the Abb6 Pierre's league to aid the homeless welcomed
it.2 The ex-servicemen or the bouilleurs de cru wielded electoral power that
guaranteed them wide parliamentary support; other groups owed their
influence to money rather than numbers. The unions and employers, anti-
clericals and the Church each found some parties more favourable than others
- but the peasantry despaired of no one. While influence in Parliament had its
1. Hamon, no. 120, p. 844; Priouret, Deputes, pp. 232-4; Goguel in Aspects, pp. 263-5; and
above, p. 25-8,
2. Homeless : Meynaud, pp. 224-5, and in no. 161, p. 827. In 1950 the alcohol interests strongly
opposed a bill limiting the * non-repayable advances' the state could make in a year, lest it meant
publicity for their subsidy and led to a cut : Warner, p. 276, n. 77 ; Malignac, no. 153, pp. 906-7.
370 THE SYSTEM
uses, especially for obstruction, the administration had great power and un-
popular groups like big business concentrated their efforts on it. An interest
excluded from other channels of communication occasionally gained a hear-
ing through direct action.
This was a last resort, for there were many legitimate opportunities to in-
fluence politicians. A general election was one of the main ones. There is no
evidence of pressure-groups trying to influence a party's choice of candidate,
but once he was chosen they were active in seeking pledges at both national
and local level. Some demands conflicted: the friends and enemies of church
school subsidies, or of football pools, strove only to frustrate their rivals.
Some, like the blind or the ex-servicemen, appealed to every group. Party
headquarters made some effort to help their men; in 1956 the Socialists
circulated official replies to 29 groups ranging from the students' union to
PME, the small businessmen.3 But the French candidate could not shelter as
safely'beneath this umbrella as his British counterpart. The Labour or Con-
servative politician in 1950 had little to gain by pledging support to the
Catholic Church over payments to church schools; first the party loyalty of
voters was high, secondly he would find it hard to fulfil his pledge if he were
elected and everyone knew it, and thirdly his only serious competitor was
as likely to resist the demand as himself. The Frenchman calculated very
differently. His voters were more easily alienated, he was freer to defend per-
sonal views, and a united front of his competitors against the pressure-
groups was inconceivable.
Yet, surprisingly often, candidates were not intimidated. In 1956 in Puy-de-
Dome the Conservative and independent Peasant candidates refused any
answers at all until after the poll. In Is&re even the ex-servicemen had favour-
able replies only from the Left, and the other parties were silent or non-
committal. At Nancy seven organizations published voting recommendations
in the local press; only two had had a reply (even an unsatisfactory one) from
more than half the lists, and the Conservatives, who won three seats, gave a
favourable answer only to the supporters of church schools.4 However, many
sitting members (especially men of the Right and especially in rural areas) for
the first time systematically used letters from local professional groups thank-
ing them for their services, which they hoped would provide a useful shield
against the Poujadist assault. Nationally the Conservatives and the Peasant
party, faced with the same threat, gave pledges of full support to small
business and shopkeeper interests and were often rewarded by praise in the
professional press. But 'the discretion of these journals seems to be exactly
proportional to the power of the groups whose views they express'.5
It did not follow that strong silent groups like the beet-growers, the road
3. J. M. Royer in Elections 1956, pp. 154, 155, 162-3 ; Rose, no. 169, p. 262.
4. Williams, no. 168, p. 167 and n. ; the seven were A P EL, the C FTC railwayman, the CGT
technical-school teachers, the European Movement (cf. Meynaud, p. 145n.), the tourist trade,
the Ahb6 Pierre's league for the homeless (this was his old constituency), and the pro-Communist
tenants' league. In Ille-et-Vilaine two Poujadists sent personal replies to A PEL (the party was
officially neutral), and eight candidates wrote individually to the victims of war damage : none
gained any advantage in votes. Lavau holds that the demands for pledges are ineffective, but
distract the candidate from major problems : Pressures, pp. 69-70. Cf. Huron, pp. 49-50.
5. Royer in Elections 1956, pp. 154-6, 161-2 (quotation from p. 161, cf. pp. 147, 153).
PRESSURE POLITICS 371
hauliers or CNPF refrained from playing any role at elections. Expenditure
was not legally limited. An adequate campaign cost about £6,000 in Paris and
£2,500 in an average provincial seat, though in a small or poor department
much less would do; within limits these amounts could usefully be ex-
ceeded, but in 1956 only one of the few really lavish spenders was successful.6
Deputies therefore had good reason to fear a dissolution, for an election meant
dependence either on the party (and the best-organized were rarely the wealthi-
est) or on the pressure-groups. Although some basic costs were paid by the
state, fully for lists which won 5% of the vote and partially for others, 'the
search for campaign funds . . . poisons the life of democracies and of all parties
whatsoever. None has any reason to envy or reproach another \7
In secretive France there was even less reliable information about the
sources of funds than in other countries. Now and then a little became known.
In 1953, when Andre Boutemy was driven to resign from the cabinet to which
Rene Mayer had imprudently appointed him, it was affirmed without contra-
diction that through his office in the rue de Penthievre CNPF had subsidized
every party but the Communists. No promises were exacted in return for these
subsidies, but the amount "varied according to the quality or the utility of the
candidatures'. In the 1956 campaign the national president of the wholesale
clothiers, on behalf of a unanimous committee, circulated his members with a
frank appeal against candidates who opposed 'a free and private economy',
adding 'It is vital that we should be able to help those who support us, who
may however belong to various parties. For this we need money, and money
now.'8 It was alleged that in the Fourth Republic 'all the previous forms of
subsidy were employed together'. Business funds were given not only to party
leaders, and to individual members for their election expenses, but even for
specific votes on bills, amendments or the election of a premier, though the
writer admitted that 'this last method seems at the present moment (1953)
relatively little used'.9 The member's self-respect was safeguarded by another
common but indirect procedure: some groups amiably offered him the office
space and secretarial help which the American congressman is given but the
European legislator lacks.10
6. Estimates given me at the time by several parties: fuller in no 168, pp. 159-60. In 1946 a
right-wing deputy spent a modest 1,800,000 francs (£3,000) and the Communists 3,000,000 in
the nine-member Arras seat : Fusilier, no. 96, with figures on S FI O and Communist spending. The
ARS winner in a crucial Paris by-election in 1952 spent £14,000 : Faucher, p. 27. Robert Hersant
stood in 1956 as a Radical in Oise, which has a tradition of heavy spending, and his lavish
publicity, children's holiday camps, club subscriptions and film-star visits were said to have cost
£100,000; he won, was unseated (nominally for his war record), but was re-elected with a much
bigger vote. See Buron, pp. 65-70; and above, p. 65.
7. Dissolution : Berlia, no. 12a, pp. 43 1-2 ; R. Lecourt, JO 27 May 1953, pp. 2859-60. * Poisons' :
Isorni, Ainsi, p. 9. A list with under 3 % of the vote in 1945-46 (5 % from 1951) lost a deposit of
£20 per candidate and had to pay for petrol and billposting ; with under 2£ % (from 1951) it also
had to pay for paper, printing and (in theory) postage of election addresses, unless it won a seat.
See Nicholas, no. 167, p. 146; Dogan, no. 71, pp. 88-98. Another expense was the hire of profes-
sional boxers, who in 1956 cost £4 to £5 a night in the provinces but £30 in Paris with its greater
demand and risks : P. Bouju at International Political Science Association, Paris, 29 September 1 96 1 .
8. CNPF: Isorni, Ainsi, pp. 9-10; Boutemy was said to have paid out a milliard francs
(£1,000,000 : Schoenbrun, p. 149 ; Brown, no. 33, p. 717) to over a hundred deputies. The clothiers*
letter is given in full by Royer in Elections 1956, p. 164. And see above, p. 65.
9. Fusilier, no. 96, pp. 271-2.
10. Ehrmann, JBusiness, p. 233 ; Muselier, p. 168 ; Priouret, Dtputte, pp. 233-4.
372 THE SYSTEM
Being concealed, these activities aroused suspicion and speculation. Yet a
senior official well placed to judge maintained that the Parliaments of the
Fourth Republic were freer from corruption than those before 1940, or even
perhaps before 1914. A leading parliamentary journalist wrote in 1957 that
'most members and parties have a hard time making ends meet'.11 Often the
power of money was overestimated. In 1951 Queuille, the Radical premier,
personally solicited business funds for Isorni's Vichyites in order to weaken
the Gaullists; the damage to RPF was negligible. Next year CNPF seems to
have encouraged deputies it had subsidized to desert de Gaulle for Pinay ; but
these defectors were Conservatives on an electoral hitch-hike rather than real
companions, the General's tactics were keeping their leaders out of office, and
when the split occurred RPF's momentum was already declining in the coun-
try. Locally as well as centrally business seems to have spread its manna
widely and rarely concentrated on a single candidate, so that electoral chances
were less unequal than they sometimes appeared. The most conservative
parties were usually the wealthiest, but not always. When the Communists
were in office at the Liberation they had no difficulty finding 'angels' to sub-
sidize them (if only to buy immunity for less than angelic wartime conduct).
Mendes-France's movement did not seem unduly hampered by financial
stringency. If money was often spent in the hope of political influence, in-
fluence in fact or in prospect attracted money too.12
The electoral power of the interest-groups was equally exaggerated. In 1956
the deputy with most business support was beaten in Paris, the leader of the
bouilleurs de cru lost his seat, and a Peasant party member was ousted in spite
of the support, thoroughly and systematically exploited, of all the local
agricultural organizations.13 As in any Parliament many Right and Centre
deputies had close ties to business and farmers' groups, but the members of
the disciplined parties were little affected by them. Socialists who rebelled
against their party did so over the electoral law or EDC. MRP members
defected spectacularly during the business-supported Pinay government, and
again to support Mendes-France for premier in 1953 (though not in 1954). In
1955 that leader inspired the greatest of Radical revolts, which was directed
against the interests rather than for them. On the union side, the opposition of
CFTCs left wing did MRP little harm in 1956. The one conspicuous con-
tribution of a pressure-group to a major change of policy was APEL's
campaign for church school subsidies in 1951; yet even with no one drilling
the clerical forces the voters would probably, under that electoral law, have
returned them in numbers sufficient for victory.14
11. Delouvrier in Crise, p. 77; Fauvet, Dechiree, p. 136 (phrase omitted in Cockpit, p. 143>
Cf. Meynaud, p. 161 ; Hamon, De Gaulle, p. 34, and no. 120, p. 840; Priouret, Deputes, p. 233 ;
Buron, p. 107.
12. Queuille: Isomi, Ainsi, p. 10. RPF: Ehrmann, Business, pp. 225, 230-2; Meynaud,
pp. 313-14; above, p. 143. Gaullist * angels' later financed Mendes-France: Guery, pp. 19, 29,
cf. Bardonnet, p. 268n. Local money flowed to a sitting member : Buron, p. 68 ; above, p. 324.
13. On M. Denais (Paris) see Royer in Elections 1956, pp. 162-3 ; on M. RafFarin (the Peasant)
ibid., and Thomas, no. 170, p. 275; on the bouilleurs' leader, above, p. 357.
14. Bosworth, p. 297.
PRESSURE POLITICS 373
2. PARLIAMENTARY LOBBYING
Some pressure-groups found in Parliament the ideal arena for their activities;
others preferred to fight on diiferent terrain ; none could afford to leave this
sector wholly unguarded. A friendly member could render many services.
He could inform the group about party and governmental intentions and the
likely reception of a group proposal or strategy. He could introduce accept-
able bills and amendments, and indeed many private members' proposals
were drafted by the groups. PME inspired 32 in eighteen months of the second
Parliament, making no bones about announcing publicly that 'At the
Federation's request, MM. Boisde and Frederic-Dupont have introduced . . . *
and even more precise statements. Yet though this 'indirect initiative in
legislation' was widely used, the results were disappointing for few private
members* proposals ever passed into law. Several housing groups gave up
sending prefabricated bills, not because they could find no introducer but
because the bills failed; instead they fed members with evidence and argument
and left them to draw up their own proposals, which in turn sometimes
stimulated government action.15
It was far easier to stop obnoxious plans than to carry favourable ones. A
few friendly members of the right committee, as assiduous in their attendance
at the proper time as others were lax, could often obstruct effectively - and in a
Parliament chronically short of time a bill delayed was often a bill deceased. A
government proposal was harder to block, but could often be amended.16 The
cabinet that insisted on a thoroughly objectionable measure could sometimes
be ousted on a different question; its successor might well be more pliable.
Even if the bill went into force Parliament could propose to abrogate the
detailed decrees applying it. By such means the alcohol interests undid all
Mendes-France's measures within a year - and the Left, at the same period,
upset Rene Mayer's attempt to bring the nationalized industries under strict
governmental control.17 Nor were these pressures confined to legislation. In
February 1948 all sections of the Assembly combined against Ren6 Mayer's
recent austerity budget by 'log-rolling' in favour of different categories of
state employees (but with the finance committee's help the cabinet finally beat
off the attack). In June 1950 the finance committee itself, only MRP dissent-
ing, supported a Socialist proposal about civil service salaries and the Bidault
government was overthrown on it.18 In February 1954 PME instructed its
members to put pressure on MRP and other deputies to oppose any move to
raise the general wage level. Nine months earlier, 22 members promised to
interpellate the government on the cuts in investments on behalf of small
business.19
'The circulars and the delegations of unions, federations, confederations,
15. Meynaud, pp. 191-9, and no. 161, pp. 846-7 (housing); Lavau, Pressures, pp. 86-7, and
no. 139, pp. 371-2, 379. On the bills cf. Dogan in Paysans, pp. 223-7; Huron, pp. 104-5, 122,
155.
16. Friends of the building companies amended the loi-cadre on housing: AP 1956, p. 143.
Bills against alcoholism in the colonies were never reported: above, p. 25 8n. Cf. Lavau, no. 141,
pp. 16-18.
17. Cf. above, pp. 272, 357, 361 ; and below, p. 424.
18. AP 1948, p. 18; 1950, p. 123; and above, p. 254.
19. Lavau, no. 139, pp. 378, 383.
374 THE SYSTEM
leagues and associations of all kinds assail the deputies from beginning to end
of their term and more or less daily*, wrote a former deputy. In eighteen
months in 1953-54 PME sent five letters to every senator and twelve to every
deputy or every member of the finance committee, on whom the pressure was
heaviest.20 Some groups needed to go no further. The farmers, the small
businessmen or the supporters of church school subsidies could count on an
attentive hearing from members anxious for re-election. Groups with money
but not numbers made the most of the assets they had, and often supplied
deputies and especially members of the committees which concerned them
with quantities of well-produced and marshalled information. The committees
had neither adequate time nor expert staff; and by a curious quirk of parlia-
mentary psychology, this plausible evidence from men with money at stake
was often taken more seriously than the information supplied by a disinterested
but suspect executive.21
Despite all the opportunities for influencing members by votes or subsidies,
hospitality or information, pressure-group leaders found them inadequate,
and after 1951 they increasingly sought to get into Parliament themselves
(some had doubtless used their organizations merely as political stepping-
stones). They were not very numerous: a critical left-wing observer reckoned
the known interest-group spokesmen at under 60 out of over 900 parliamen-
tarians. But a spokesman could win over his political friends, and sometimes
'influence the ministers belonging to his party even if they hold him in low
esteem'. And through these agents the interests 'instigated, animated and
directed groups of sympathetic members to defend their cause'.22
^ In the pre-war Chamber of Deputies there had been an astonishing pro-
liferation of groups for the defence of minor interests, from the concierges of
Paris to the commercial travellers. They had only 'an insignificant influence
on the life of Parliament'.23 Some observers criticized themharshly, and though
the end ofscrutin d'arrondissement had weakened their electoral importance,
the National Assembly of the Fourth Republic tried to ban them altogether.24
But the deputies evaded the rule by forming groups to 'study' particular
questions: there were fewer than twenty of these early in the second Parlia-
ment but a hundred in the third (half as many as in the old Chamber).25
Among the first were the forestry groupe d* etude which campaigned for com-
pensation after the great forest fires in Landes in 1949, and the alcohol 'study
20. Ibid., pp. 377-8 (and cf. above, p. 25 In.). Quotation by M. Guerin of MRP in 1953:
Georgel, i. 183.
Hn °^& importance and acceptability of documentation, Goguel, Regime, p. 105 ; Meynaud,
p. 159 ; Ehrmann, Business, pp, 235-6 ; Mendras, no. 157, pp. 747-8 ; Hamon, no. 121, pp. 557-8.
On committees: Brindillac, no. 29, p. 61, and above, p. 246f. ; through them the road hauliers'
spokesmen could influence the rate structure of the nationalized railways : G Vedel quoted
Lescuyer, no. 143, pp. 1178-9, cf. Duverger, System, p. 118.
22. Lavau, Pressures, pp. 67, 84. Hospitality : Buron, pp. 107-9.
23 Barthelemy, Essai, p. 83 and ff. ; the film group wanted free entry to cinemas for its 180
members. Before 1914 there was said to be a group of deputies dissatisfied with their prefects :
Jouvenel, p. 72n.
«?4*J£tandin? °rder 13 : 'Est fate&te la constitution, au sein de 1' Assemble, de groupes dits
de defense d mterets particuliers, locaux ou professionals".'
-I5* f hundred: Bardonnet, p. 269. Half: cf. Barthelemy, p. 87. Socialists could not join one
without the parliamentary party's consent: Waline, no. 213, p. 1211. The standing order was
worded more strictly but taken no more seriously in the Fifth Republic : ibid, p 1207
PRESSURE POLITICS 375
group', set up that December with over a hundred deputies from the Right to
the Communists and four committee chairmen (including Finance) as vice-
presidents; one of its professed objects was to examine the incidence of
taxation on the interests concerned with alcohol.26 Some of the groups held
large annual banquets attended by members of Parliament and often presided
over by the minister with whom they dealt. In 1954 PME's groupe delude et
d* action de V economic privee had its general meeting at the Palais Bourbon,
attended by both members and non-members of Parliament and with a non-
member in the chair. When the bouilleurs* leader Andr6 Liautey was elected in
1951 he promptly organized a 'study group' of 24 members which 'consti-
tuted the parliamentary base of operations for the bouilleurs throughout the
life of the Assembly'. The powerful Amicale agricole played an active part in
overthrowing Mayer's government in 1953 and proposed its own vote of cen-
sure against Bourges-Maunoury in 1957.27
The main aim of the groups was to focus parliamentary pressure during the
budget debates. 'Many groups (particularly, but not only, the farmers) have
got into the habit of regarding the State as a universal insurance fund which
operates without collecting premiums.'28 Even before their parliamentary
organization had developed, the small business groups mounted a powerful
attack on Rene Mayer's special austerity levy in early 1948 and obtained sub-
stantial modifications. Some groups with a wide base of parliamentary sup-
port could make trouble for the strongest government, and every year there
was difficulty over the post office, education and above all war pensions
estimates.29 The groups were strong when the government was weak. In 1949-
1950 they helped to bring Bidault's majority down to single figures. The well-
organized alcohol and tobacco-growing 'study groups' obtained some con-
cessions - with the active aid of the chairman of the finance committee, and of a
flood of constituents' letters and telegrams urging members to refuse con-
fidence in the government. But the still more vociferous road hauliers' lobby
overreached itself; the government refused any concession and was upheld -
by four votes. 'People were arrogant enough to bring collective pressure . . .
into this very house. In the galleries of the Assembly there appeared more or
less qualified representatives of special interests who ... in the midst of dis-
cussion sent . . . their injunctions to certain members of the Assembly. . . .
There are dialogues a regime cannot tolerate unless it is ready to sign its own
death warrant.'30
26. Monde, 23 November 1949 (forestry group), 5 December (alcohol group, cf. above, p. 356).
The Assembly spent several sittings on agricultural calamities in the summer of 1950 but never
taW M4 (for road hauliers' banquets), 246-7 (for
which included a third of MRP, and four Socialists); Lavau, no. 139, pp. 375-6, ,379 , Brown,
no. 35, for the bouilteurs (who had had 150 members in their pre-war group : Barthelemy, p. 54) ,
above* pp. 356 , 363 (Amicale agricole).
29" TJiTp^^njDuverger, Institutions financier est pp. 143-4 (Mayer levy) ; Goguel, Regime,
Business o 237' Goguel, .Regime, p. 106. The pressure was so strong that SFIO authorized a
member' to abstain °^nd so outrageous that in the end he did not. On earher pressure by&e
376 THE SYSTEM
In this case a powerful pressure-group was worsted by an exceptionally
shaky government. Six years later a rather stronger ministry was assailed by a
rising popular movement which had already paralysed the administration and
intimidated the parties. Edgar Faure, by so contriving the encounter that the
deputies could not vote all Poujade's demands without obviously humiliating
themselves, managed to deny the agitator the conspicuous political triumph
which he wanted far more than limited practical concessions.31 But most
pressure-groups had no such ulterior political aim, and most parliamentary
battles were settled by a compromise. In 1957 the tenants' organizations
demanded a 2% cut in the interest rate on loans for house building, and got
1 % ; and won a year's postponement of rent decontrol for vacant ten-year-old
houses, after the justice committee had asked for two. Even when one side
won, it was not always the rich, modern and powerful, though the senators -
more responsive to economic weight than the deputies and less to numbers -
enabled the business lobby to prevent effective anti-trust legislation in 1953. In
1957, when a bank strike won salary increases for the clerks, the finance minis-
ter tried to defer payment but interpellations in the Assembly made him give
way.32
Questions of purely local interest often cut across party or ideological lines.
On the Mont Blanc tunnel, or the diversion of Loire water to Paris, consti-
tuency interests took precedence over political views. All Corsicans (and there
were many in Paris) rallied to the defence of their perpetually discontented
fellows at home. Gaston Defferre was a Socialist, but also mayor of Marseilles
and an ardent and successful advocate of state subsidies for private ship-
builders. Other regional divisions had more far-reaching implications. In 1950
a bill to permit the teaching of local languages in schools outraged the cham-
pions of the Republic one and indivisible and provoked a bitter dispute with
the Basque and Breton friends of local autonomy. In 1953 an unhappy clash
occurred over the trial of thirteen Alsatians who, as conscripts in the German
army, had participated in the SS massacre at Oradour nine years earlier: it
caused demonstrations in both Alsace and Limousin and divided even the
Communist party.33 Because of the geographical concentration of wine-
growing, war damage or Catholic schools, some long-standing political dis-
putes had an essentially regional character.34
A wide variety of cause-groups also operated in Parliament. Some, like the
same lobby see the protest of the premier, Queuille: AP 1949, pp. 327-9, JO 24 May 1949,
p. 2871. In 1951 the hauliers' leader was elected a deputy.
31. Hoffmann, pp. 76-84 (cf. pp. 43-6, 65-70).
32. Meynaud, p. 193n. (banks), and no. 161, pp. 847-50 (housing); Ehrmann, business.
pp. 386-8 (cartels); Arae, p. 370 (banks).
33. Local groups : Meynaud, pp. 231-6, and his Nouvelles Etudes (above, p. 356n.), pp. 148-57.
Defferre: Jarrier, no. 128, pp. 890-1 ; Ehrmann, Business, p. 246. Languages: articles by Dauzat
in Monde, 15 and 29 March, 26 April, 17 May 1950, and Duhamel in Figaro, 29-30 April, 5 and
12 May. Oradour :JO 19 February 1953 ; AP 1953, pp. 10-11, 14-16; Chapman, Prefects, pp. 221-
222; Faucher, pp. 27-8 (on the Communists).
34. * Every member from Normandy votes for apples, every member for Herault votes for wine.
For eight years I voted for Armagnac wheat and brandy' : Barth61emy, Essai, p. 86; cf. above,
p. 330. Of the 15 departments in which church schools taught 25% of primary schoolchildren,
13 were in the west or in the Massif Central (see Map 5). So were 14 of the 21 in which they taught
over half the secondary schoolchildren: Monde, 8 August 1951.
PRESSURE POLITICS 377
Abbe Pierre's league to aid the homeless, obtained a ready hearing even though
they had little electoral support behind them: their case was obviously worthy
and faced no direct opposition. Others like the anti-alcoholic campaign
probably had the public (especially women voters) on their side, but their
support was shallow and diffused and their opponents, backed by money and
substantial numbers, were far more determined and single-minded. Others
again, like opposition to the death penalty, were shunned even by sympathetic
members because their cause was considered electorally disastrous.35
Some political causes enjoyed organized support in several parties. APLE
grouped the parliamentary friends of the Catholic schools; the division
between Communists and others prevented any similar organization (though
not co-operation) of their opponents. Less formally, in the second Parliament,
the leaders of pro-European opinion met to concert tactics, and the non-
Communist opponents of EDC formed a 'shadow cabinet' extending from
Mitterrand and Lacoste to Chaban-Delmas and Andr6 Boutemy ; its secretary
claimed that it intervened effectively in ministerial crises both before and after
the defeat of the treaty.36 As the Algerian war and its repercussions came to
dominate the third Parliament, the diehards and the conciliators each
developed habits of co-operation which cut across party lines. A 'quartet' of
right-wing leaders (Bidault, Duchet, Morice and Soustelle) gave full support to
SFIO ministers like Lacoste and Lejeune, while the minority Socialists found
themselves far closer in outlook to the Mendesists than to Guy Mollet and the
majority of their own party.
On both sides of this conflict the 'causes' outweighed the 'interests*. The
men who on progressive or humanitarian grounds condemned repression and
demanded a political solution were a minority in Parliament, but not an
impotent one. They were able to focus critical opinion, to modify some re-
pressive legislation, and in April 1958 to rout the diehards in the Assembly
and drive them into subversion and mutiny. Many parliamentary voices were
raised on behalf of liberal principles or policies, yet none spoke for the ' Car-
tieriste' businessmen who wanted to save money by evacuating Algeria.
Conversely the small North African lobby, whose manoeuvres had sometimes
intimidated governments when their majorities were already melting away, now
became a real parliamentary force because the interests of the wealthy settlers
were buttressed by the sentiments of the army and of nationalist opinion in
France.
3. BUREAUCRATS AND POLITICIANS
In the early years of the Fourth Republic parliamentary influence was valuable
to a pressure-group that wished to obstruct governmental action. But it was
already inadequate for positive measures, since even a group enjoying general
goodwill found it hard to pass a bill through the overloaded legislative
machine. Subsequent grants of special powers to the government still further
35. Meynaud and Lancelot, no. 161, p. 844 (homeless); Brown, no. 35 p. 990 (alcohol);
Isorni, Ainsi, pp. 65-7 (death penalty - which is rarely carrie d out in France) rfMmters
36. Europeans: Faucher, p. 91. 'Shadow cabinet': Bloch-Morhange, p. 101, and Chapters
7—15 passim.
378 THE SYSTEM
reinforced the bureaucracy and reduced the value of Parliament, even as a
defensive instrument. Whether to put their positive case or to avert decisions
harmful to their interests, groups wishing to influence policy found access to
the executive essential. Increasingly they directed their efforts to building up
consultative machinery outside Parliament to ensure that their views had a
hearing at the time and place where they could do most good.
Even if a group was strong enough to get a satisfactory bill through Parlia-
ment, the administration could often restrict its application - or, conversely,
help the group by narrowing the scope of a bill it disliked. When Parliament
was vigilant the executive's power was limited, but when it was inattentive or
indifferent the administration often made the decisions. In 1955 a Conservative
minister of agriculture accepted the demands of the large and efficient butter
producers and banned the preservative which allowed the small farmer's
butter, produced in primitive conditions, to be kept for sale in the towns; in
1956 his Radical successor recommended that the ban be applied 'with the
greatest tolerance' and in fact it ceased to operate - though a bill to legalize
the new decision received only 160 votes in the Assembly. The administration
was particularly well placed when Parliament contented itself with passing a
hi-cadre, and the final vote of the housing law of 1957 was rather the begin-
ning than the end of the struggle of the opposing pressure-groups to get their
respective policies put into effect.37
The interest-groups therefore usually tried to establish regular relations
with the civil servants dealing with their problems (though in a very few cases
open warfare prevailed, and Poujade at the height of his power was appeased
by the transfer of two civil servants guilty of devising too-effective checks
against tax frauds).38 But as a rule the views of a branch of the administration
tended to reflect those of its regular clients, shorn of their least reasonable
demands. For few conflicts of interest simply opposed private greed to a clear
common good. More often there was a division of forces in which government
departments and private interests were ranged on both sides.39 Only one
department, the ministry of finance, was occupationally bound to oppose the
pressure-groups; and to all who wanted money (and few did not) it was the
fortress to be stormed. All, therefore, wanted allies within the official world
fighting for objectives similar to, even if more limited than their own. They
valued the administrative autonomy of these allies, and when Guy Mollet
reduced the ministries of health, agriculture and merchant marine to mere
ministries of state (secretariats d'fctat) subject to senior * overlords ', there were
outcries from the surgeries, farms and ports.40
The interests tried to influence the policies of their bureaucratic mentors
through a proliferating network of consultative committees whose advice the
administration was often required to ask, though rarely to take. By 1957 over
37. Meynaud, p. 240n. (butter), and no. 161, p. 846 (housing law). Gf. Warner, p. 266 n. 88,
for the administration's contradictory rulings ziboutpiquettes (adulterated wines) in 1947; and
see above, pp. 343-4, and below, p. 392.
38. Hoffmann, p. 77; Ehrmann, Business, p. 492n. ; cf. Meynaud, p. 283n.
39. Meynaud, pp, 206-11, 319-20; Ehrmann, no. 85, p. 548; above, p. 344.
40. Doctors : Meynaud, p. 209n. ; no. 1 60, p. 587n. Agriculture : Pay sans, pp. 1 39n., 249, 253-60
C. de Vaugelas); cf. Arne, pp. 346n,, 362, 367. On industry, cf. Ehrmann, pp. 261-3. Generally
Lavau, Pressures, p. 72.
PRESSURE POLITICS 379
four thousand were operating in Paris, and though their importance varied
greatly it was quite sufficient for the interests to try hard to expand the num-
ber. Some observers indeed feared that consultation had become a euphemism
for the dominance of private interests within the administration itself, and a
threat to the official's sense of responsibility. The Cornell superieur des alcools
gave some plausibility to this view. It included politicians and a majority of
group spokesmen as well as officials, and the beet-growers* secretary Henri
Cayre boasted that through it he had personally helped draft the Laniel
ministry's decrees dealing with alcohol in 1953. Yet three years later, when its
ex-chairman was himself in office as minister of state for the budget, its advice
was overridden by the minister of finance (Paul Ramadier) and the lobby was
routed.41 And influence went both ways. A pedestrians' association with its
headquarters at the ministry of transport provided some slight counterweight
to the motorists and the road hauliers. When the steelmasters were campaign-
ing against the Coal and Steel Community, the Monnet organization en-
couraged the creation of a new association of users of steel products to show
that business was not all on one side.42
On the executive battlefield the balance of power between groups differed
sharply from that prevailing in the electoral and parliamentary arenas. The
large modern firms, on whose behalf some politicians might vote but few
would speak in public, enjoyed excellent contacts and sympathies among the
senior officials. Many links attached the inspecteurs des finances, if not to the
capitalist magnates, at least to their salaried staffs who shared their own un-
sentimental concern for efficiency, productivity and modernization and their
distaste for the myth of the 'little man* so dear to voters and politicians. Pub-
lic and private managers had the same educational background and often
similar career prospects, for many rising young officials went into private
firms at forty. This pantouflage gave big business, unlike its political com-
petitors, an able staff which knew exactly how the official machine worked,
where to get information, whom to approach and when. 'The frontier between
the public and the private sector has become uncertain. ... It is becoming
more and more important for every firm of any size to have in its employ a
manager who can be sure of getting without delay a friendly interview . . .
with the right senior civil servant. . . .'43
Small business used other methods, for CNPF and PME had distinct
constituencies, different leadership, and sharply contrasting styles. Big-
business spokesmen preferred quiet negotiation over details with their fellow
inspecteurs des finances to the angry strikes and demonstrations which PME
led in 1947-48. They looked down on M. Gingembre as a demagogue and on
his organization as a noisy and tiresome agitation of shopkeepers, while he
despised the smooth functionaries ofihepatronat and denounced the trusts no
41. Meynaud, pp. 211-16; on Cayre, above, p. 356. Cf. Galichon m Institutions, i. 280-2,
and in Travail, p. 849; Waline in Politique et Technique, p. 169; Lavau, Pressures, pp, 82-4,
93-4 ; Ehrmann, Business, p. 260, and no. 85, pp. 541-3 ; Arn6, pp. 367-8.
42. Ehrmann, no. 84, pp. 473-4; Business, pp. 171-2. Pedestrians: I owe this example to M.
Goguel. cf. above, p. 344n.
43. Siegfried, De la IUe, pp. 246-7. See also Brindillac, no. 28; Ehrmann, Business, pp. 257-7 1
and 488, and no. 85, pp. 550-2; above, p. 338 and n.
380 THE SYSTEM
less than the unions or the technocrats. Yet in a new political and economic
climate even he was to discover the advantages of sobriety. When the Radicals
and Conservatives returned to office P M E had a better hearing from ministers,
and soon Gingembre stopped vituperating the technocrats to complain that
they did not consult him enough. But he was not strong enough to prevent
the modernizing businesses and bureaucrats squeezing the marginal shops and
firms of the declining regions where Poujadism was born. Before long
Gingembre in his turn was denounced as a timid tool of the trusts, and took
up the mantle of the experienced statesman, less noisy but more effective than
the excitable agitator from the south.44
Access to power thus transformed the behaviour of the groups. When their
friends were in office they tried to get their own men into the cabinet of a
sympathetic minister and ensure that he took the important decisions ; when
the department was hostile they transferred their attention to Parliament - as
the alcohol interests mobilized opposition votes when Mayer demanded
special powers but not when the friendlier Laniel administration obtained
them. In 1956 FNSEA held several conversations with the minister of finance
and then the premier. When these clearly failed it broke relations, and in 1957
it helped overthrow two governments and threatened a direct-action campaign.
At length the weak and divided Gaillard government gave way and accepted
'indexation*.45
While ministers from the same party held a connected group of offices,
responsibilities were clearly established and the influence of the groups was
limited. But when several parties divided up a single sector of governmental
activity, the group had a good chance of finding at least one sympathetic
ministry to help it block distasteful proposals.46 For most groups naturally
had more influence on some parties than on others, and often access depended
on the political situation. Force Ouvriere could count on Socialist sympathies
so completely that in December 1949, when the union called a general strike
and the prime minister appealed to workers to disobey the call, his SFIO
ministers attended the party executive meeting which urged Socialists to
strike. MRP ministers were naturally favourable to C FTC and the family
associations. In the third Parliament the owners of house-property kept in
touch with a Radical minister personally, with a Conservative mainly through
his cabinet, with another Radical in both ways, but only with civil servants
when a Socialist minister was in power.47 The 'liberal professions' relied on
the conservative groups, especially in a conflict which mingled ideology and
interest like the doctors' opposition to Gazier's bill on reimbursement of
medical expenses. In many towns small businessmen dominated the loose local
Radical and Conservative parties, whose individual deputies often depended
heavily on the local urban or rural pressure-groups.
44. Meynaud, p. 55; Lavau, no. 139, pp. 372, 378; Hoffmann, pp. 310-13.
45. Meynaud, pp. 163 (Mayer and Laniel), 225-6 (FNSEA). Yet FNSEA quite failed to
defeat the Common Market in July 1957 : Arn6, p. 354. On cabinetssee above, p. 339. Generally,
Lavau, Pressures, pp. 72-4, 89.
46. Ibid., pp. 84-5. But see below, pp. 390-3, on the drawbacks of party sectors.
47. FO: AP 1949, p. 200; Arne, p. 127. Mollet, as premier in May 1957, discussed economy
proposals with all the major interest-groups except CGT: AP 1957, pp. 42-3 ; cf. Arne", p. 369.
Housing: no. 161, pp. 851-2.
PRESSURE POLITICS 381
Relations between interests and parties showed immense variety. Many
political disputes grew from clashes between interest-groups, but some reacted
on the interests themselves. The students' union split in 1957 over attitudes to
the Algerian war. The great dividing lines in the ranks of labour were the
political, between CGT and FO, and the religious, separating CFTC from
both; only the smallest of the four confederations (the staff union, CGC)
found its exclusive base in a professional interest. Some bodies that looked
like pressure-groups were wholly dominated by a party; the Communists had
a whole network of them extending into the ranks of the bourgeoisie. One
peasant organization had always been an instrument enabling the aspiring
Radical politician to provide local services, attract a rural clientele, and ad-
vance his political career through channels different from the usual local
government ones ; it helped many small-town candidates win peasant support
but brought few authentic farmers to Paris. But another, CGA, forbade its
officials to sit in Parliament. A third, FNSEA, abandoned a similar rule
in 1951 and turned to active political pressure;48 the Peasant party neither
wished nor would have dared to oppose its instructions. However, such a
relationship was not always static. When a dynamic group with an ambitious
leader penetrated far into a promising political field, as La Rocque's Croix de
feu (originally a league of ex-servicemen) did in the thirties or Poujade's union
of shopkeepers and artisans in the fifties, it sometimes changed its character
and transformed itself into a party. In a multi-party system it was not always
easy to distinguish between the two.49
4. GROUP REVOLT AND PARTY RESISTANCE
Some groups relied on or dominated a political party; others enjoyed close
relations with civil servants or ministers; yet others could counter the un-
friendly administration by mobilizing irresistible parliamentary support. But
those who had too little backing among the voters or deputies to overcome
the resistance of officialdom were very likely to threaten direct action, and
might even embark on it. For many more Frenchmen than Americans or
Englishmen looked on the state as an enemy to be frustrated and resisted.
The stubborn selfishness of the rich had for generations taught the poor to
expect no reforms except under pressure of major social upheaval, and the
French trade unions had developed a theory of direct action as the prelude to
the revolutionary general strike. Yet this conception hopefully relied on the
fighting spirit of the troops to compensate for their numerical weakness and
poor equipment. Frenchmen paid dues to private organizations as reluctantly
as they paid taxes to the state.50 The unions were weak, poor and divided, and
48. On political divisions, Meynaud, pp. 33-4, 67-74, 80. On Communist satellites, above,
p. 82, and Brayance, Chapters 7 to 9; for their shopkeeper groups, Hoffmann, pp. 315-18. On
peasants, Mendras, no. 157, p. 746, and in Pay sans, pp. 246-51 ; for Radicals, L. Latty and J. M.
Royer in ibid., pp. 103-8, 112-13, cf. Bardonnet, pp. 215-23, on a vain attempt to create Radical
amicales.
49. Meynaud, pp. 38, 185-8 ; his preface to Hoffmann, pp. xix-xxi ; Hamon, no. 120, pp. 848-9 ;
Lavau, Pressures, p. 68n. On the propensity of ex-service groups to turn to right-wing politics see
Remond, no. 186; and on their pressure-group activities, Brown, no. 33, pp. 712-13.
50. The few well-off organizations often tapped semi-public subsidies or automatic levies which
the members paid without knowing it; see for instance Bosworth, pp. 293-4, on APE L; Mendras
[over
382 THE SYSTEM
labour, never being strong enough to bargain from strength with the employers,
preferred to seek better wages and conditions by political pressure on the
authorities it theoretically intended to overthrow. The meagre results of
these tactics occasionally provoked an explosion of dissatisfaction, sudden,
spontaneous and sometimes violent, and the old revolutionary tradition per-
haps contributed to these relapses into direct action. But they were essentially
an alternative means of extracting aid or concessions from a bourgeois govern-
ment, not of organizing its violent downfall.51
France was peculiar because so many social groups resorted so readily to
methods which elsewhere were an exclusive weapon of the industrial workers.
They too did so to force concessions from a reluctant state. In the post-war
scarcity economy, rival groups jostling for position had found that a harassed
government listened only to those it could not ignore, and the lesson that the
strike was the best way to attract attention was learned too well and applied
too widely. Peasants withheld supplies from the market to force the govern-
ment to change its policy over taxes, prices or imports. Shopkeepers demon-
strated violently against controls, refused to pay taxes, and rioted against
proper examination of their books. Customs officials became expert at go-
slow tactics. The habits persisted after the scarcities. In a not particularly
troubled period in 1951 there were serious or token strikes of butchers and
bakers, university students and their examiners, mayors and milk producers
and bank clerks. In 1950 the bishop of Lu?on, on behalf of other western
bishops, publicly urged his flock to * postpone ' tax payments till their grievances
over the schools question were remedied (though MRP intervened at Rome
and he was disavowed). Winegrowers had been encouraged by two victories
over the authorities in 1946-47, won by withholding supplies and threatening
to refuse taxes and paralyse local administration; in August 1953, led by their
mayors and deputies, they barricaded every road in four departments (but
without much success).52 At the same time the public services were stopped by
huge strikes erupting spontaneously throughout the country.
Such mass movements from below were formidable but rare. After 1948 the
frequent direct-action threats of the pressure-groups contained a large element
of bluff. The troops would not usually follow their commanders in serious or
prolonged illegality, and rival pressure-group leaders competing for the same
clientele, like Gingembre and Poujade, often led their forces into actions for
which there was no enthusiasm, and had to beat a retreat. These bureaucrats
of protest lived on discontent, canalizing it when it was spontaneous and
stimulating it when it was not, for they needed successes to win members and
members to win successes. Such tactics were risky,53 since a defeat that was
in Pay sans, pp. 241-2 (and no. 157, p. 742) on agricultural organizations. CGA was strong
during the post-war scarcity when it issued rubber boots, etc., and lost its hold with this function.
51. Lorwin, Chapters 3, 12, 13, 16; J. Bowditch, 'The concept of elan vital', a rationalization
of weakness', in Earle, Chapter 3.
52. Bishop : Remond in Laicite, p. 395 ; Bosworth, p. 296 ; AP 1950, p. 78 ; Monde, 25 April,
3 May and 22 July 1950. Wine: Warner, pp. 167-8, 183. Generally, Arne, pp. 371-4.
53. Meynaiid, p. 116, cf. pp. 119-21 ; Lavau, Pressures, p. 94, on 'officials of protestation';
cf. Paysans, pp. 250-1. On retreats, Hoffmann, pp. 69, 87-90, 135-6; Meynaud, pp. 157-9- and
Gingembre's own comments in Guy, pp. 168-70.
PRESSURE POLITICS 383
too costly in prestige or money might well destroy the less solid organizations.
Direct action, therefore, was positively preferred only by those who, like the
Communist groups, had a vested interest in revolt, or like the Poujadists
feared that they were doomed economically without artificial support which
would be forthcoming only under extreme political pressure. (Their followers
were often interchangeable.) Organizations more confident of their own
viability preferred moderate courses which imposed less strain on their unity,
carried less risk in case of failure, and in the long run won a better hearing.54
They resorted to direct action only in times of acute tension or when all other
roads were closed. It was not accidental that the first peasant barricades and
the first serious strikes for years occurred in August 1953, when Parliament
had recessed after granting Laniel the most sweeping discretionary powers any
administration had enjoyed since the war. More often than not, strikes and
riots were an avowal of political impotence.
Direct action frequently failed. But if it won any concession from a slow-
moving administration, it soon found imitators. The homeless found that only
illegal 'squatting' on unoccupied premises drew public attention to their
plight. In the Maurienne valley in January 1958 a main Alpine railway line
was blocked in protest against long delays over compensation claims - which
were discussed in cabinet within a week and settled by law within two months.
For not all the protesters were putting forward extravagant demands or, like
the bouilleurs, defending an established but indefensible privilege. All too
frequently these civic rebels expressed an angry sense that their grievances
were neither understood nor considered important by the mysterious They
who decided their fate; that richer or cleverer or more unscrupulous rivals
had the ear of the authorities; that Parliament was impotent to protect their
interests, and that only outrageous behaviour would make Them listen. "The
most important heritage of our political history [is] a permanent tension be-
tween governed and governors which has led the former to see in the State
only a foreign power - "/&" - with which the only possible contacts are
relations of force.'55
The intransigence of the citizen made many French pressure-groups more
demanding, arrogant and irresponsible than their counterparts elsewhere.
(Perhaps the intensity and ruthlessness of the pursuit of sectional claims by the
corps intermediates was a function of their reputed illegitimacy.) In the Fourth
Republic the problem was the more acute because many more decisions than
before were made by government. Dissatisfied groups reacted by denouncing
the intrigues of their opponents, the venality of the politicians, or the ill-will of
the foreigners : They were always a ready scapegoat in misfortune and a safe
shield against painful self-examination and adjustment. So cabinets hampered
by internal dissensions and unreliable majorities found their freedom of
action still further restricted by fear of popular disorders which could be
54. The large representative groups often hinted to the civil servants that they did not expect
full satisfaction for the demands pressed on them hy their members: Delouvrier in Crise, p. 87.
On the 'respectable* style of action see Meynaud, pp. 119-21, 128-9, 199. In housing matters,
influence went with moderation: no. 161, pp. 859-60.
55. Hoffmann, no. 125, p. 820. Squatting: no. 161, pp. 841, 854-9. Maurienne: Georgel, i. 217.
Cf. Buron, pp. 27-34.
384 THE SYSTEM
contained only at a high political price. Each vehemently defending every
particle of its own claims, the pressure-groups contributed to the immobilisme
which ensured that none of them could be satisfied.
Yet they were flimsy organizations, nearly always smaller, poorer and worse
organized than their foreign counterparts. Like the parties they suffered from
excessive fragmentation; it was perhaps because there was no really effective
authority on either side of the negotiating table that orderly bargaining so
often gave way to shrill agitation. The politicians were humiliated and the
regime discredited by sound and fury which often far exceeded the results
obtained. For in the public forum the agitators often failed. The projected
Franco-Italian customs union was successfully fought by the cotton industry
led by Marcel Boussac, owner ofL'Aurore; yet in 1953 a major tax change,
opposed by the same industry, was enacted by a premier (Joseph Laniel) who
was himself a textile manufacturer. At the peak of their power the Poujadists
could neither defeat their chosen enemies at the polls, nor win all the tax con-
cessions they demanded from Parliament, nor check the steady growth of co-
operatives and chain stores. The bakers and greengrocers failed completely to
break the Mollet government's ban on price increases.56 Behind the scenes
there was no single interest which could destroy governments through its
financial power, like the (private) Bank of France before the war, or manipu-
late opinion through the press as effectively as the steelmasters of the old
Comite des Forges*1 'If every group agreed to publish an honest balance-
sheet of its interventions with the authorities, the "failures" column would
rarely be empty.'58
This did not mean the groups were harmless. The colons may only have
delayed evolution in North Africa: missed opportunities cannot always be
retrieved. The alcohol lobby burdened a budget which could never find enough
for genuine and urgent needs. Inarticulate or ill-organized groups suffered:
the homeless, the aged, the consumers. The lobbies added yet another obstacle
against change to those already embedded at so many levels in French society
- for though few were strong enough to impose positive demands, many were
able to veto those of others, and protect their own situations acquises.5B
It was the weaknesses of the political system and not their own intrinsic
strength that gave most of the groups their opportunities. When a third of the
electorate opposed the regime, the basis of government was dangerously
56. Ehrmann, pp. 404-7 on Boussac (cf. Grosser, p. 152, Noel, p. 124); pp. 315-17 on tax
reform. Hoffmann, pp. 76-86, Meynaud, pp. 147, 269-70, on Poujadist failures; cf. Lavau,
no. 139, p. 376, on PME's lack of electoral success. AP 1956, pp. 85, 165-7, on Mollet and prices.
And cf. above, pp. 362, 372, 375.
57. Delouvrier, Crise, p. 81. On the press, Ehrmann, Business, pp. 212-13. On the Bank see
E. Moreau, Souvenirs d'un Gouverneur de la Banque de France (1954), pp. 34-8 ; cf. Frederix,
pp. 105-7 ; and Werth, Destiny, p. 343 on its arrogant bullying of Flandin : ' Our reply will depend
on whether we are satisfied with the actions of the government during the first respite we have given
it as a reward for its present determination. '
58. Meynaud, p. 269.
59. Victims: ibid,, pp. 94-8; Lavau, Pressures, p. 94; A. Sauvy, 'Lobbys et groupes de pres-
sion*, in Politique et Technique, pp. 323-4. Conservatism: when an omcial inquiry in 1955
found potential wheat consumption to be a third of existing milling capacity, the millers' lobby
carried a bill giving each mill a tonnage quota based on its activity in 1935 : Schoenbrun, p. 173,
cf. Meynaud, pp. 261-2. Uneconomic firms were subsidized for years to avoid unemployment in
areas with little industry: Delouvrier, Crise, p. 80. Generally Hamon, no. 120, pp. 841-5.
PRESSURE POLITICS 385
narrow; every vote was or seemed marginal.60 Deputies and parties dared not
alienate support, and cabinets which resisted pressure were almost sure to dis-
appear within a few months. Political courage was never rewarded, for the
government which undertook a long-term policy was unlikely to escape
immediate unpopularity but quite certain that any ultimate benefit would
accrue to a successor. Parties survived at the polls by defending some sectional
interest more effectively than their political competitors, then came to terms
with their opponents in Parliament in order to form a cabinet. Electoral
sectarianism, contradicted by governmental compromise, helped to dis-
illusion the ordinary Frenchman with politics.
Yet the contradiction was in himself. By asking his party to maintain
democracy, yet withholding his support if his full demands were not conceded,
the voter forced on the politician the double-faced behaviour from which he
inferred the rottenness of his representatives and of the regime. It was less
surprising that the politicians sometimes gave way to pressure than that they
often resisted it. The man in the street, who compounded for his own failings
by damning those of the rulers he chose and influenced, frequently enjoyed
better political leadership than he deserved.
In the second Assembly complaints of the power and importunity of the
pressure-groups were heard increasingly from all parties. President Auriol
spoke of Parliament being subjected to 'pressures as impudent as they are
scandalous'. Rene Mayer as a candidate for the premiership declared that
* CNP F + CO A + CG V+ PME' was no more desirable a foundation for a
majority than 'FO + CFTC + CGC-CGT. As prime minister he called
the Assembly a 'chamber of corporations', while Paul Reynaud denounced
the 'economic congregations' which 'paralyse the State within these very
walls'.61 Yet a few years later the groups seemed less excessive in their
demands and more prepared to recognize the limits of the possible: contrast
the violent business opposition to the Coal and Steel Community with the
moderate and reasonable attitude of even a Gingembre to the Common
Market.62 And as the politicians lost credit with the public, and the divided
parties came to seem increasingly artificial, some pressure-groups at least (the
students, the young peasant leaders, the Catholic trade unions, the Jeunes
Patrons, and the non-Communists in CGT) began to develop a feeling of
responsibility for the country's affairs which transcended corporate interests
and contrasted sharply with the earlier blinkered attitude of the lobbies. In
the Fifth Republic it became a commonplace - inconceivable a few years
before - that serious political activity and real influence among the people
were more likely to be found in the syndicate than the political parties.
60. Ibid.) p. 838 : *. . . every vote is marginal or seems to be ; consequently the threat of defection
is formidable, and it is the organization of private interests that makes this threat count - by
representations, by effective publicity given to the member's votes, and by the cultivation of
grievances or gratitudes. '
61. Monde, 2 January and 10-11 May 1953 (Mayer), 30 June 1953 (Auriol); JO 27 May 1953,
p. 2850 (Reynaud). Cf. above, p. 353.
62. Lavau, Pressures, pp. 90-1, cf. Meynaud, pp. 268-9,
Chapter 27
PARTIES AND COALITIONS:
(1) THE BATTLE OF THE MONOLITHS
The early post-war years impressed on General de Gaulle and many of his
countrymen a conception of party politics as a struggle between selfish and
irresponsible factions which must divide and damage the state. The electoral,
parliamentary and (in 1946) governmental scene was dominated by three large
and rigid organizations which seemed to have annexed the public domain and
parcelled it out amongst them, and apparently found service in the same
government advantageous mainly because it afforded facilities for thwarting
one another's policies. Their short reign soon gave way to rather looser
parties and more flexible coalitions, which marked a partial return to the
political system of the Third Republic. But public attitudes towards politics
retained the imprint of the brief post-war experiment.
Tripartisme was partly a product of the reaction against the pre-war
economic and political regime. The Resistance had been directed against 'the
trusts' as well as the Germans, and at the Liberation the old elites were swept
into oblivion or disgrace. Power passed to new men, parties and classes who
meant to carry out a sweeping programme of national reconstruction. But
their leaders were a turbulent group of wartime and Resistance heroes,
revolutionary adventurers and fishers in troubled waters, who were often
better endowed with generosity or courage than with political experience ; and
the need for unity against the enemy had concealed the deep divisions within
their ranks.
In their midst one disciplined, aggressive and unscrupulous party was
manoeuvring single-mindedly for power. In 1944 General de Gaulle won the
race to establish the new administration over northern France, and the Com-
munists accepted his authority in the south rather than risk a violent conflict
while the European war was still raging. But with a foothold in central and
local government, with control of the trade unions without whose co-operation
reconstruction must fail, and with the prestige of sacrifice and triumph in a
cause both patriotic and revolutionary, they could still entertain high hopes of
success by peaceful means.
The Communists faced disunited opponents. Tactically, Gaullists and
MRP welcomed their support over foreign policy, and Socialists feared their
competition in domestic affairs. More fundamentally, General de Gaulle
differed from SFIO and MRP over their conception of France's place in the
world and her form of government at home. After eighteen months of office
the General found the constraints imposed by three rigid and quarrelsome
parties intolerable, while the politicians were equally exasperated with his
authoritarian temper. A month after the first Assembly was elected the clash
came, nominally over the size of the armed forces but at least equally over the
shape of the constitution the parties were preparing.
PARTIES AND COALITIONS: (i) BATTLE OF MONOLITHS 387
After de Gaulle's resignation the three monolithic parties monopolized the
government for twelve months of economic penury and political strife.
Tripartisme soon became almost as unpopular with the parties in the govern-
ment as with those outside it. But the circumstances were exceptionally diffi-
cult. By their drive for power the Communists forced their rivals into a
discipline as rigid as their own, compelled them to take short views (since
elections were never more than a few months away) and diverted their energies
from constructive reform into self-defence against the threat of dictatorship.
Even so the party politicians, first under de Gaulle and later without him,
carried an overdue programme of reforms which a Chamber without a solid
majority had never been able to impose on a conservative Senate. And, while
avoiding a violent clash, they saved Paris from the fate of Prague. There was a
price: the revival of the conservative forces they had hoped to displace. The
Fourth Republic was the product of a half -completed revolution, and as the
flood-waters receded many submerged political features began slowly to
reappear on the electoral, parliamentary and governmental landscapes.
1. THE MEMBER AND THE MACHINE
To both Socialists and MRP strong party organizations were indispensable in
an efficient and honest democratic system. Before the war local and personal
rivalries had confused political issues, weakened loyalties, and obscured
responsibilities; parliamentary chaos and indiscipline had prevented the
electorate's wishes from ever being translated into action. But once each
important ideology had its own organization political life would be trans-
formed. The electorate would enjoy a clear choice, Parliament would function
effectively, and politicians would be held accountable for what they did or
failed to do. The Fourth Republic would substitute organized for unorganized,
and therefore effective for ineffective democracy.
To prevent these new and rigid organizations abusing their monopoly of
political activity, their advocates proposed a basic law regulating their
structure and activities, the statut des partis. Under it the parties would
pledge themselves to maintain fundamental liberties and the rights of
man, repudiate the one-party state, adopt a democratic constitution, and
allow their organization and finances to be inspected by a new authority
representing the parties but independent of the executive. Citizens would
have to vote, and candidates on a party's list would have to join its parlia-
mentary group. A party could deprive of his seat a member who left it or
broke its discipline.
Although Radicals and Conservatives naturally opposed a measure re-
inforcing the power and cohesion of the detested machines, it was the Com-
munists who saved the individualist groups. Sure of their own internal
discipline, the Communists did not want their rivals artificially strengthened;
and they would not tolerate inspection of their funds (which in 1945 were large
and sometimes ill-gotten) or of democratic control within their organization.
But they prudently left the brunt of opposition to allies like Pierre Cot, who
could more convincingly denounce the encroaching state, defend freedom
of association, and appeal to western democratic opinion. To appease them
388 THE SYSTEM
the majority dropped the party statute from the committee's constitutional
draft, and the Assembly never voted on it.1
The failure of legal regulation left the power of the party organizations
intact. This power was largely based on the electoral law. Proportional
representation triumphed at last, and was applied throughout the new
institutions, even to the High Council of the Judiciary. At an election the
voter had to choose between lists presented by the parties, with a fixed order of
names. Small parties and particularly independents were handicapped - and
indeed forbidden in the first Constituent Assembly's draft, which lapsed after
the referendum of May 1946. Seats were attributed to a party, not to an in-
dividual. A vacancy in the Assembly went (until 1951) to the next person on
the former member's list, and in the Council of the Republic, once the list was
exhausted, to a party nominee. In May 1947 a defeated MRP candidate for
the Assembly in Bas-Rhin was named by his party to the upper house.2
In many constituencies the head of a major party's list was sure of election,
while his followers had little chance. The ambitious politician had therefore to
placate not the party voters, but the relatively few militants who ran the
organization and drew up the list. Some even considered the local party
secretary as the keeper of the deputy's conscience, and in 1945-46 many
departmental secretaries were themselves elected to the Assembly, especially
in SFIO where the militants were strongest.3 The parties wielded their new
powers vigorously, and in the two elections of 1946 often penalized a member
by not readopting him or by downgrading him on the list and perhaps en-
suring his defeat. This was not always discipline for its own sake; like other
revolutions the Liberation had thrown up many heroes, some adventurers, and
a few scoundrels, and members elected in 1945 were rarely chosen for proven
political capacity. During the following months some of them found them-
selves, and others were found by their parties, to be unsuited to parliamentary
life.4 Again, a member working hard for the party in Paris might find his local
position undermined by a rival who spent more time in constituency activities.
Deputies readopted in a lower place on the list numbered 31 in June 1946
and 10 in November; 16 of the 41 saved their seats for the moment, but
downgrading at one election was often a prelude to disappearance at the
next.5
Opponents as well as supporters of the regime attached crucial importance
1. On it see SCC I, pp. 55-66 ; Debu-Bridel, pp. 105-7 ; Wright, Reshaping, pp. 120-3 ; Arrighi,
pp. 37-48; Goguel, no. 103.
2. Husson, ii. 164.
3. But their strength was organizational, not electoral. In 1945 the left-wing militants of
Marseilles opposed the alliance with UDSR, and SFIO headquarters dissolved the federation.
The rebels ran a dissident list which won only 6 % of the vote, against 25 % for the official list
led by Gaston Defferre and Francis Leenhardt.
4. The Assembly elected in June 1946 had a legal life of seven months, that chosen in November
one of five years ; yet members retiring without a contest were twice as many in June as in November.
Of SFIO and MRP members who withdrew in 1946, a third stood again for Parliament later.
Clearly politics rather than age or health caused many of the retirements.
5. In 1946 there were 16 MRP, 9 Socialists, 6 Communists, and 10 others downgraded. The
figures omit those (fairly numerous) who changed party or whose party entered a coalition, and
those (generally Communists) who moved up when a leader withdrew, then dropped back later
when he returned ; but include deputies who were not moved up to fill a vacancy but saw an out-
sider promoted above their heads. For later figures see above, p. 326 and n.
PARTIES AND COALITIONS: (1) BATTLE OF MONOLITHS 389
to the electoral law. It installed for five years deputies subject to an organiza-
tion which could quickly lose touch with public opinion, as was shown by the
two referendums of 1946 and the Gaullist municipal victories of October
1947.6 But since the new regime ruled out by-elections, referendums or dis-
solution except in most unlikely circumstances, a divorce between the people
and their representatives would rarely become obvious and never influence
those in power. The critics hoped by amending the electoral law to shatter the
new monoliths and restore political fluidity.
Proportional representation certainly provided a convenient mechanism for
the party to exert its power, and contributed to the rise of strong and dis-
ciplined groups. But both its friends and its enemies exaggerated its effects, for
other factors were also at work. Even under scrutin d'arrondissement Commu-
nists had enforced strict discipline; even under PR, Radicals were reluctant
either to impose it or to abide by it. Even without the legal change the deputy
could not have retained his old independence in 1945 and 1946, when the
elections brought in new men without the personal following and local in-
fluence of their discredited or ineligible predecessors. The approach of these
newcomers to politics was set by the voters' fear of the Communists and their
own impatience for reform. Together with the electoral law, these produced an
Assembly dominated by the three disciplined parties, in which the whole tone
of politics was altered.
Parliamentary life was transformed when these great parties together
formed a cabinet approved by three-quarters of the deputies. Government
policy became the highest common factor of three party programmes, and
party discipline carried it through the house as effectively as in Britain. The
one political problem was to reach and maintain compromises between the
parties, which in agreement could impose their wishes and in discord could
paralyse government and Assembly alike. 'The National Assembly of 1947 is
much more like a diplomatic congress than like its predecessor the Chamber of
Deputies. Parliament is still a theatre and so fulfils its function of publicity;
but improvisation on the spot gives way to a script written and rehearsed
elsewhere.*7 Debate atrophied, for members applauded in unison at a signal
from their leaders, and votes, rigidly determined beforehand, echoed the
decisions of the party executives. If an unexpected development occurred the
sitting was suspended to allow the parties to negotiate. The political choices
registered in the Assembly were made in party headquarters. 'No longer do
any political uncertainties reflect specific moves in Parliament. In committee
or in the house each deputy applies the directives of his party Individual
crochets, manoeuvres, intrigues seem to have disappeared ... we ask ourselves,
is this disciplined Assembly really a genuine Parliament? However . . . what
the new parliamentary practice loses on the side of excitement it gains in
productivity.'8
Most observers of the House of Commons would find the question more
surprising than the description. But to French opinion a bigger legislative
6. Waline, pp. 7-8. 7. Thery, pp. 140-1.
8. Goguel, no. 104, pp. 135-8. Also Hamon, nos. 117-18; Goguel, no. 106: A. Siegfried in AP
1946, pp. vii-viii; Waline, pp. 63-7.
390 THE SYSTEM
output was insufficient to justify the new system, partly because national
tradition was different but even more because, while the price paid for political
discipline was as high as in Britain, the benefits obtained were far less. Instead
of a homogeneous party majority, united by common outlook and interest
behind a coherent policy and single leadership, tripartisme brought together
three suspicious partners who used their power for mutual obstruction as
well, or as much, as for construction in common.
2. STATES WITHIN THE STATE
General de Gaulle's premiership imposed limits on the monopoly of the par-
ties and on the extent of their ambitions. With his resignation the year of
exclusive party power opened, and a great prize was added to the stakes. The
contenders found it wise to regulate their relations and the composition and
policy of the next cabinet in an elaborate written treaty.
The delegates of MRP, the Socialist party, and the Communist party met on
23 January 1946. They proceeded to a broad examination of the situation, and
reached agreement in stating that, given the development of the ministerial crisis,
the formation of a government with equally shared responsibilities, under the
leadership of the President of the National Constituent Assembly, appeared to them
as the solution which would best meet their common preoccupations.
The document condemned recriminations between the parties, insisted that
they all support the decisions of the new ministry, outlined its programme and
'mandated their representatives in the government to have these proposals
included in the ministerial declaration'. But the treaty was a scrap of paper.
The signatories disregarded it, not merely as an alliance but even as a non-
aggression pact. Before long a Socialist minister was denouncing the Com-
munist leader as a deserter; the Communists were attacking the price policy of
the MRP minister of economic affairs; and MRP and SFIO were accusing
the Communist minister for industry of incompetence and electoral corrup-
tion. * France . . . had never before seen such flagrant civil war within a govern-
ment/9
The treaty merely distributed by agreement the spheres of influence in
which the parties conducted their distinct policies. Proportional representation
was applied within the cabinet by a 'horizontal separation of powers'. Each
party bargained with the others to control its own sector of government,
staffed it with ministers of its own choice, and co-ordinated their work under
its own leader. The cabinet seemed to have sunk into a diet in which the party
plenipotentiaries found it convenient to conduct their business, and the prime
minister into a mere broker between them. Sometimes he lost even that role:
when Ramadier was chosen in January 1947 he found that the offices had
already been filled in talks between President Auriol and the secretaries and
parliamentary chairmen of the parties.10
Once appointed, the antagonists parcelled out the administration among
themselves and each exploited his own sector. To preserve party control an
9, Wright, Reshaping, p. 222. For the text of the 'treaty* see AP 1946, pp. 530-1 : and for the
disputes, Priouret, Partis, p. 225; Debu-Bridel, p. 117; AP 1946, p. 214.
10. AP 1947, p. 4. P
PARTIES AND COALITIONS: (1) BATTLE OF MONOLITHS 391
absent minister's duties were usually performed by a party colleague, not by a
minister from an allied department. Official appointments were openly made
in party interests. This was not wholly surprising. In the past, senior adminis-
trative positions had been the preserve of a social class whose political ties
were with the very groups most discredited at the Liberation. Few holders of
these posts supported either of the two largest parties, Communists and
MRP, whose conscious colonization was thus a corrective to the effective
monopoly their opponents had enjoyed for years. Then, many officials had to
be removed because of their occupation record, and in an emergency period
when normal rules for recruiting civil servants could not serve, it was natural
to choose active Resisters for these vacancies; but because of their political
connections (like those of Liberation- Nor d with SFIO), their entry into the
public service automatically contributed to party colonization. *In 1945 there
was a gulf between the new political personnel and the old administrative
personnel. . . . The injection of new blood into the administration in 1945 was
certainly desirable and even necessary; unhappily it was done with too much
haste and too little discernment.'11
The pace of colonization was set by the Communist attempt to establish a
state within the state. In the defence and security services their rivals were
wary.12 But through the elected councils which managed the social security
system, the trade unions who were represented on the boards of nationalized
industries, and the Communist ministers for the economic and social depart-
ments, the party came to dominate the whole public sector from coal to
atomic energy.13 As minister of industry Marcel Paul appointed a cabinet of 70
and created 19 divisions in his department where there had been only three.
Under Charles Tillon management posts in the aircraft industry were adver-
tised only in pro-Communist papers, and non-Communist officials were
purged to make room for party members.14
Other parties, particularly the Socialists, competed actively in their own
ministries, and in 1948 a very critical but competent observer could write,
*. . . in any given department, if you know the political outlook of the minister
who has held office longest since 1944, you almost certainly know also the
party loyalty of most senior officials of the ministry - even of the technical
services ?.15 But the damage was limited by the mutual suspicions of the parties.
Although Maurice Thorez was vice-premier responsible for the civil service,
11. Massigli, pp. 44, 60-1. Cf. Grosser, pp. 68-9.
12. Charles Tillon, de Gaulle's air minister, carried out a thorough purge of the air force; but
no other Communist was ever given control over military personnel (Francois Billoux was defence
minister in 1947 but did not decide promotions). On the police cf. above, p. 347. On Communist
infiltration generally see Pickles, French Politics, pp. 83n., 252; Rieber, pp. 178, 289-92.
13. The coal industry had a board of 18, 6 each for workers, consumers and the state, with a
majority of Communists : all six workers, three officials named by Communist ministers, and one
* consumer' - the secretary of the railwaymen's union, improperly chosen by Marcel Paul without
consulting either the railway board which the nominee 'represented' or the minister of transport,
Jules Moch: Moch, Confrontations (1952), p. 240n. Cf. By6 in Einaudi et al, Nationalization in
France and Italy (Ithaca, NY, 1955), pp. 100-4; and on social security, Galant, pp. 70-5, 123^5.
14. Paul : see JIPP 594 (January 1950), p. 92. Tillon: Sturmthal, no. 205, p. 374.
15. Waline, p. 69. For rough confirmation compare Catherine's political estimates in Partis
et Classes, pp. 128 and 131, with his table on p. 138.
392 THE SYSTEM
he had no control over promotions. The party holding the defence ministry
was kept out of the service and supply departments. Ramadier even proposed
in 1947 to give every minister an under-secretary from another party (but did
not do it). And the worst abuses of colonization disappeared when the Com-
munists left office.16
The parties also sought wider opportunities to consolidate their influence.
The press law of May 1946 was an extreme case of legislation conceived,
opposed, carried, applied and ignored mainly for its impact on party interests.
It was drafted by the Socialist minister of information, Gaston Defferre, with
the aim of perpetuating the changes made provisionally at the Liberation.17
The plant and offices of journals which had appeared under the Germans were
transferred permanently to a government-controlled holding company for
lease to new owners; papers not convicted of collaboration were compensated
(inadequately). Radicals and Conservatives fought the law bitterly, but it was
carried by the votes of the Communists, Socialists, most of MRP and a few
UDSR Resistance leaders. Its effect was limited because, when the Com-
munists went into opposition, the Radicals held the balance in Parliament and
demanded the ministries of information and justice, so as to prevent the law
being applied. Two Socialist ministers of information, in barely one month of
office after the law was passed, transferred over twenty papers convicted of
collaboration; under ministers from other parties the rate was under four a
month. Of papers not convicted, the Socialists took over nearly one a day;
MRP ministers one a month; and Radical and UDSR ministers one in four
months.18
The parties also used their political monopoly to protect their client
pressure-groups and extend their influence. The upheaval of the war had
changed the structure of power and brought new organizations to the top. The
trade unions had greatly increased their power,19 Under predominantly
Communist leadership they made an essential contribution to reconstruction,
and exasperated many of their followers by preaching productivity and wage
restraint while the party held office. The unions, in broad agreement with the
*big three' parties and the ministry of labour, shaped the form of the new
social security system. The minority views of C FTC and the family associa-
tions gained a full hearing and some concessions, since MRP was in power;
but those of the artisans and small businessmen were overridden because
their political defenders were in opposition, and since electoral pressure was
16. See above, p. 340. Thorez: Rieber, pp. 291-2, and P.C.D., no. 66, p. 270. Ramadier: AP
1947, p. 9.
17. See above, p. 61 ; and on the press law, J. Mottin, Histoire politique de la presse 1944-1949
(1949).
18. Some local courts also limited the law's scope by restrictive decisions. In all, 136 convicted
papers and 60 others were transferred. The ministry of information always went to the premier's
party (except under Ramadier when UDSR had it). In October 1949 both SFIO and MRP
refused to serve under any premier who gave it and Justice to the same party. Dr. M. Harrison
informs me that in the Fifth Republic the application of the law was still discriminatory; the
pre-war owners could recover their presses if the post-war paper closed - but only if it had been
Communist.
19. But de Gaulle hi 1945 refused to receive a CGT delegation to discuss the electoral law,
saying unions should be non-political (though in 1958 he asked union leaders to join his cabinet) •
Arne, p. 358 and n. ; AP 1944-45, p. 288 ; Inegalites, pp. 45-7.
PARTIES AND COALITIONS: (1) BATTLE OF MONOLITHS 393
unavailing the objectors were driven to voice their protests by violent demon-
strations.20
Business leadership was divided and timid, and the new Conservative party,
P R L, was weak and quarrelsome ; thepatronat had to take its place among the
many interests which were trying to work through MRP. In the farming
community, the old leaders were mostly compromised in Vichy's Peasant
Corporation and the Left had high hopes of filling the vacuum. The Socialists
used official facilities to build up CGA and looked forward to acquiring a
dominating position in the countryside; the Communists also bid for rural
votes by strongly opposing Mendes-France's plan to check inflation by
currency reform, which the peasants detested. Even the Church hierarchy
found MRP's Resistance record a greater asset to the Catholic cause than
any political service it could render in return.
3. OVER-MIGHTY SUBJECTS
This defeat or discredit of the old elites created an opportunity for sweeping
social change, and the new political leaders thought of themselves more as
revolutionaries bent on overturning a narrow and corrupt political class than
as ordinary politicians administering or even reforming an established regime.
But before their revolution was well under way they were faced by the Com-
munist bid for power, and by de Gaulle's withdrawal into the wilderness to
await the call for his return. In the parties' bitter struggle to carry through
their reforms, defend the parliamentary system and preserve their own
political fortunes, the fraternal feelings of the Resistance movement were soon
submerged. The discipline which had been defended as essential for positive
reform was used also in frustrating internecine warfare ending, as in Weimar
Germany, in stalemate.
Powerful and rigid parties were therefore quickly discredited in France.
They outraged the predominant democratic tradition which exalted the
Republic one and indivisible and condemned all intermediary bodies. They
were denounced for distorting the political process: the voter had a represen-
tative foisted on him by the party machines, the deputies voted not as they
believed but as they were told, the Assembly merely registered the pressure of
irresponsible external organizations, ministries became party fiefs, and the
State, like a conquered province, was divided and despoiled. Since the
cabinet was a diet where each faction had its veto, the opposition was
concealed within the government itself and neither could perform its function
properly. Ministerial solidarity and responsibility disappeared together,
for the few decisions that were taken derived from the secret battles and
bargains of party bosses unknown to the electorate and subject to no public
control.21
The critics' complaints were excessive. In retrospect it was a considerable
success, rivalled only in Italy, for the democratic parties to co-operate with the
20. On unions and Communists see above, p. 24 ; on social security, Galant, Chapters 3-5,
Lavau, Pressures, p. 92, and above, pp. 361-2.
21. These criticisms were made not only by de Gaulle and his followers like Debre", Debu-
Bridel and Waline. but also by non-Gaullists like Arrighi; Prioujret, Partis', and Thery, pp. 140-5,
394 THE SYSTEM
Communists to rebuild the economy without allowing the state to fall com-
pletely under their control. But the French politicians did much more, for the
reforms of 1945-46, both under de Gaulle and after his departure, were
greater than any previous government had attempted (except in 1936, when
They did not succeed or did not last). They gave France an improved adminis-
trative structure, an overdue but comprehensive social security system, and a
foundation on which economic recovery could be built. Admittedly the parties,
unable to agree and unwilling to concede, sometimes failed to face a par-
ticularly awkward problem. In July 1946 they left employers, farmers and
workers to negotiate directly on their differences, and at the Palais Royal con-
ference the interests happily agreed to support both higher wages and higher
prices and so displace the economic burden, through inflation, on to the ill-
organized and politically weak fixed-income groups. This was a shameful
abdication of responsibility, but it could hardly be attributed wholly to the
malign influence of organized parties. A year earlier, de Gaulle himself had
allowed inflation to take its course when he acceded to the advice of the
bankers, the pressure of the peasants, the clamour of the Communists, and
the resignation of Pierre Mendes-France.22
The opposition was on stronger ground in attacking the political practices
of the parties, but its charges were often exaggerated. Some men accused of
cynically exploiting their fellow-citizens were in reality courageously accepting
a dangerous and distasteful responsibility. Everyone knew that the ministry of
food in 1946 was a graveyard of political hopes : this did not stop a Gaulhst
critic absurdly describing the Socialists as 'comfortably installed3 there. For
months the Communists courageously risked their popularity in the trade
unions by opposing wage demands. The impression of total disintegration of
government may indeed have been overdrawn. When men assume heavy
responsibilities in common in a situation of extreme difficulty, their mutual
hostility usually diminishes. Did the party leaders never dramatize their
difficulties with their colleagues in order to ward off impracticable or embarras-
sing demands from their own followers ?23
For though discipline was strong and no individual rebel could stand
against the parties, coalition imposed a severe strain on their internal unity.
The Socialists were the most vulnerable and electorally least successful party
of the three, and their leaders, after bravely attempting to educate their rank
and file to compromise and to modernize, were overthrown for it by internal
revolution in August 1946. In December a quarter of SFIO's deputies defied
discipline rather than support Thorez for premier. MRP members were
occasionally divided in the Constituent Assemblies, a few of them left to
follow de Gaulle, and many more were torn between their loyalties to the man
and the party. Even the Communist leaders faced serious criticism from
within, which mounted as long as they were in office. The appearance of total
22. Mendes-France: Matthews, pp. 179-94; Fauvet, IV6, pp. 37-40. Palais Royal conference:
AP 1946, pp. 179-89; Meynaud, pp. 247-8; Ehrmann, Business, pp. 299-300; Delouvner
in Cm*, p. 84, and in Politique economique, pp. 312-15; cf. C. P. Kindleberger in Search, pp. 1 37-9.
23. Cf. Dumaine, p. 51. Food: Debu-Bridel, p. 115. Communists: above, pp. 24, 74; below,
401. For the Socialist leaders' moderation on la\cite% above, p. 97 ; Matthews, pp.
PARTIES AND COALITIONS: (1) BATTLE OF MONOLITHS 395
monolithic unity was as misleading as the accusation of unbridled partisan
rapacity. The disciplined giants of tripartisme were already feeling some of the
conflicting pressures of electoral competition, ideological loyalty and govern-
mental necessity, which were to bedevil the precarious coalitions of loose weak
parties in the Fourth Republic.
o*
Chapter 28
PARTIES AND COALITIONS:
(2) THE WAR OF MANOEUVRE
All politicians are compelled by the nature of their calling to be both fighters
and negotiators. But they stress different aspects of their task according to tem-
perament and circumstance, and the intransigent champion of all or nothing
is constantly at odds with the shrewd bargainer who prefers a partial and
inadequate success to a gallant but unmitigated failure. Usually the two types
are in conflict, occasionally each complements the other's efforts. But even
when they co-operate for immediate advantage they rarely appreciate one
another's outlook.
Most members of parliament, being nearer the seats of power, are readier to
compromise than the militants of their own party in the country. But while in
a two-party system only one side has direct access to the government, in a
multi-party regime every group, apart from self-excluded revolutionaries, can
hope to enter a coalition, share power and influence policy. This tends to turn
almost all politicians into compromisers, and seems to reduce the parlia-
mentary struggle to a sordid contest for place in which the professionals,
within their closed arena, manoeuvre unhindered by public pressure or even
concern - as in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain, and in the
Third Republic.
But though parliamentarians became imbued with the habit of compromise,
many Frenchmen revolted against it - or its results. Parliament often aroused
the idealist's contempt, and the hatred of the permanent but not insignificant
minority for whom politics were a kind of cold civil war. This minority con-
centrated its activities, not on elections or the Chamber, but on revolution-
ary syndicalism, royalist or fascist leagues or conspiracies, and the extremist
journalism of Grmgoire or Action f ran faise. There was never any lack of con-
temporary evidence to remind the proponents of bargaining politics that
fighting politics had recently been the French style. When the brief reign of the
extreme Right ended in 1944, the extreme Left acquired a share in the govern-
ment and could bid to dominate it.
The collapse of tripartisme and General de Gaulle's campaign for power set
the characteristic conditions of Fourth Republican government. Under
tripartisme the three partners had commanded enough votes to carry any
policy on which they agreed; effective action when they were united was some
compensation for the frequent deadlocks when they quarrelled. But now the
majority lacked numbers as well as unity. A precarious coalition, devoted to
the parliamentary regime but divided on everything else, was opposed simul-
taneously by a powerful Communist party and an intransigent nationalist
movement. Each of the oppositions could embarrass or seduce one wing of the
disparate alliance, or they could combine for its destruction (though for
nothing else). Within the majority the parties of policy were rather better dis-
ciplined than in the past, and the core of c king's friends ' who supported every
PARTIES AND COALITIONS: (2) WAR OF MANOEUVRE 397
cabinet whatever its programme was smaller and steadily diminishing.
Negotiation was therefore more open, exchange of concessions more obvious,
and responsibility for making, maintaining and breaking a cabinet easier to
locate. While the wanton breach of an alliance incurred more discredit, sup-
port was given or withheld in larger blocks and so adjustments were less
smooth and more sudden. Just because responsibilities were more visible,
every cabinet crisis gave rise to elaborate manoeuvres to confuse the issue and
shift the blame. These might profit an individual party, but always harmed the
regime.
From 1947 to 1950 the Fourth Republic seemed perilously vulnerable.
SFIO was the most uneasy governmental party, for to compromise with its
allies would disrupt its own unity and lose ground to the Communists, and
not to do so would wreck the coalition and play into the hands of de Gaulle.
When the immediate danger receded the looser parties had gained ground, and
soon Parliament again became an arena for factional intrigues and individual
ambitions. After 1954 external affairs predominated: first Germany, then
Algeria caused splits in most parties. By 1957 every type of disruption threa-
tened the majority at once, and governments found it hard not only to act but
even to survive. Sheltered by the 'house without windows', the deputies had
not observed that the sky outside was darkening again.
1. WHIPS AND REBELS
The end of tripartisme saw a partial and incomplete return to the parliamen-
tary practices of the Third Republic. The centre governments came under fire
from two sides. While the Socialists had to fight off Communist raids on their
working-class and anticlerical following, their coalition partners were vul-
nerable to Gaullist attack; differences soon developed between leaders and
militants in MRP, and discontent in the country helped Radicals and Con-
servatives regain their strength. In Parliament the support of small groups and
individualists again became necessary, and the precarious majorities and sur-
prise votes of the Third Republic reappeared. Rene Pleven and his two dozen
UDSR followers saved the first Schuman government by their abstention in
February 1948 and brought down the second by their hostile vote in Septem-
ber.1 Decisions such as the comfortable ratification of the Coal and Steel
Community, or Pinay's election as premier, confounded the best-informed
observers. Life and reality returned to parliamentary sittings, and often the
cheers and counter-cheers along the party benches revealed fissures in the
ranks which were not recorded in the vote.2
Yet formal party discipline was better than was often supposed. Under
Pinay's government in 1952 only two groups failed to poll their entire strength,
without a single dissenter or even abstainer, in two-thirds of the 672 recorded
votes.3 No group failed to poll 95% of its members in at least seven votes out
of eight. These figures conceal great differences between parties, discussed
1. Arn6, p. 240, lists five votes in the first Assembly, four in the second, and one in the third
where the government survived by a single-figure margin. Cf. above, p. 175n.
2. Hamon, no. 121, p. 563.
3. Radicals in 63 %, and MRP, who were exceptionally divided under Pinay, in only 57% ;
Campbell, no. 44,
398 THE SYSTEM
below. They slightly overestimate the extent of indiscipline among French
politicians, for they include the overseas members who were the most way-
ward. They somewhat underestimate its importance, for it was worst on
major matters when the government's fate was at stake; when no public
interest was aroused the deputy might stay away and let the whips cast his
proxy for him, defying the party machine only when his constituents were
genuinely aroused.4 Nevertheless the groups played a greater role in the mem-
ber's life than before the war, and unless the compulsion was very powerful,
the deputy who valued his influence with his political friends preferred not to
offend their strongly held feelings.
Both the degree of discipline and the attitude to it varied sharply among
parties. Under Pinay it was rigid on the Left, good on the Right, and weakest
among Radicals, UDSR, dissident and orthodox Gaullists, and MRP. The
Communists were always so solid that a vote against the party was unthink-
able, though in the later years a fellow-travelling Progressive might occasion-
ally abstain. At the other extreme, the Radicals were normally found on both
sides of any question and never imposed discipline de vote.5 A Radical can-
didate for premier could expect to get the votes of his colleagues - even if they
urged members of other parties to withhold theirs - but once elected he could
not count on their support. The Conservatives, who had also profited from
the popular reaction against rigid parties during and after the period of tri-
partisme, were by 1951 'abandoning the outworn conception of individual
independence and gradually substituting that of collective independence'.6
But they never insisted on disciplined voting, merely trying to persuade
minorities to abstain rather than vote against the party. In 1954 resentment
against Mendes-France's Conservative ministers led the group to forbid mem-
bers to take office when a two-thirds majority opposed their doing so - though,
characteristically, the rule was not applied to the offenders who had provoked
it. Conservatives continued, as in the past, to act without penalty with
Gaullists, Mendesists or fascists.7
Popular plebiscitary leaders wreaked havoc with discipline, evoking among
ordinary Frenchmen strong loyalties which some members of parliament
shared and others felt it wise to respond to. General de Gaulle shook the par-
ties in 1947, but the politicians rightly estimated that his impact would not be
permanent. He won over a few devoted followers, mostly from MRP, many
time-servers who jumped off his bandwagon as soon as it slowed down, and a
handful of natural rebels or adventurers seeking a leader against the System -
but often no happier with Gaullist discipline than with any other.8 RP F could
4. Discipline was worse in the upper house where routine votes were fewer; there only 5 groups
out of 11 voted solidly in two-thirds, and only 3 polled 95% in seven-eighths of the divisions;
and while the Socialist deputies broke unanimity in only 1 % of the votes, the senators did in
33 %. For votes in the Assembly see Appendix rv; and in the old Chamber, Soulier, pp. 454-76.
5. Once when they did, for postponing Barang6's bill to subsidize church schools, ministers
were exempted and seven others voted, unpunished, against the party line: Monde, 7 September
6. Yves Florenne in ibid., 26 May 1951. Radicals: below, n. 9.
7. PRL and the Peasants expelled members in the Fourth Republic, but CNIP never did until
1961 : see below, pp. 407, 433. Cf. Waline, no. 213, p. 1220. Two-thirds rule: above, p. 151.
8. Charles Serre of Oran and Albert Lecrivain-Servoz of Rhone were two MRP members
recruited by RPF in 1947. The first soon became a Conservative and the second an Overseas
[over
PARTIES AND COALITIONS: (2) WAR OF MANOEUVRE 399
insist on strict obedience (though at the cost of defections) so long as it was a
large party with hopes of reconstructing the regime. But in 1952 Antoine
Pinay captured the sympathies of conservatives both in Parliament and the
country, and when de Gaulle's mass support evaporated the RPF parliamen-
tarians were rapidly absorbed by the System.
Pinay attracted conservatives and alienated progressives in other parties
too, notably M RP. But under the rule of the Right immobilisme soon brought
about a revival of discontent in the country, and the new mood was crystal-
lized by Pierre Mendes-France. Learning from RPF's failure the difficulties of
launching a new party, he set out at first to mobilize support in all the old ones.
In 1953 he aroused a revolt of the rank and file, especially the younger mem-
bers, against the old leaders.9 Next year he came to power, but the overthrow
of his government by members of his own party convinced him he needed a
more secure base, and he sought and won control of the Radical organization.
But in 1956 the momentum of Mendesism was halted by Mollet as that of
Gaullism had been checked by Pinay; and the Mendesists' attempt to dis-
cipline a parliamentary group they did not control merely led to two splits and
an even worse dispersion than usual of Radical votes in the Assembly. Pierre
Poujade was to suffer a similar disillusionment as a sudden wave of popular
discontent apparently bore him forward to power on its crest, then broke and
carried his hopes away when the waters ebbed.
In loose parties like the Radicals and Conservatives, members could follow
the demands of their constituents or the appeal of a strong leader (often
identical) for as long as it was tactically advisable and then return without
reproach to the fold. In the better-disciplined organizations they had less free-
dom of action : the Gaullists in M RP had to change allegiance altogether, and
Mendes-France's friends within S F I O could try to influence party policy only
by internal pressure. In general MRP applied formal rules much less strictly
than the Socialists. After August 1948, when twenty MRP deputies refused to
support Paul Reynaud's conservative economic policy, the party often had
dissenters of both Right and Left. Usually they were a handful and their
lapses were judged more in sorrow than in anger. Occasionally they were more
numerous, as in July 1950 when a third of the party rebelled against supporting
Queuille's conservative second (and stillborn) cabinet; the militants sym-
pathized with the protest, and the party allowed a free vote. Discipline broke
down completely when, to MRP's great embarrassment, the militants and
left-wing deputies strongly opposed Pinay who appealed powerfully to the
conservative section of the party's electorate. But though by this time discipline
de vote was only a memory in MRP, its deputies prided themselves on a
cohesion based on loyalty to the movement rather than fear of sanctions.10
Independent; both then moved through a small pro-Radical group to the Gauche ind&pendante
and the fellow-travelling Progressives; both lost in 1951. On ex-Gaullists in 1955 see above,
pp. 136, 144, 173.
9. The SFIO group overruled Mollet and its chairman (Lussy) to support him; UDSR was
for him but Pleven against; in MRP he had the votes of only 12 of 31 senior men (ex-ministers
or committee chairmen) but of 40 of the other 58 ; on the Radical leaders' intrigues against him
see Fauvet, IV6, pp. 238-9.
10. Melnik and Leites, p. 82.
400 THE SYSTEM
They rarely carried their differences with the party beyond abstention to a
hostile vote. In June 1953 Mend&s-France did provoke a revolt of the 'back-
benchers', who mostly voted for him while most of the leaders did not; to
avoid another split, discipline de vote was restored when Laniel stood for the
premiership.11 But it was not kept up, and no new revolt occurred when
Mendes-France came to power a year later, for his Indo-Chinese and Euro-
pean policies aroused general hostility in MRP. Subsequently the main dis-
senting group was on the Right, and though it centred on Georges Bidault it
was tiny and ineffective.
Placing greater emphasis on external observances, and with a constitution
giving the militants greater influence, the Socialists had a still more difficult
problem. To them a democratic party was one which took decisions by majority
vote after a free debate, unlike the totalitarian Communists, and then voted
unitedly for them, unlike the careerist Radicals. The mystique of discipline
was general throughout the party, not least among the men who were to lead
the PSA split of 1958.12 But it broke down on several major votes in the
Fourth Republic. In April 1951 15 members rebelled over the electoral law,
though all but one came round after a sharp warning. German rearmament
caused revolts by 20 deputies in February 1952, 53 in August 1954 (whose
votes defeated EDC), and 21 in December; 17 were expelled but readmitted
before the next election. In July 1957 26 members (many of whom later joined
PSA) refused to vote for the bill allowing internment camps to be set up in
France. The Socialists were also divided on the Fourth Republic's first and
last candidates for the premiership: in December 1946 25 refused to vote for
Maurice Thorez, and on 1 June 1958 42 supported Charles de Gaulle and 49
opposed Mm.
Indiscipline, then, differed widely between parties both in its extent and in
the reactions it provoked. Its causes differed too. Conservative and Radical
parliamentarians were individualist notables, whose personal views, ambitions
and constituency interests were apparently reflected in a pattern of dissent
linked more often to the fate of a particular cabinet, or to personal electoral
considerations, than to a general policy alignment. Socialist and MRP in-
discipline was associated less with specific ministries and more with problems
of principle, often personal and episodic in MRP but grouping relatively sub-
stantial and continuing factions in SFIO. (Socialists seem to have judged
even the electoral law on general grounds, nearly all the opponents of
apparentements being on the extreme Left of the party.) But while the timing
and motive for dissidence might differ between types of party, neither was
likely to make a stable coalition partner.13
11. In similar circumstances RPF had restored it in January for Mayer's candidature.
12. As general and assistant secretary until 1946 Daniel Mayer and Robert Verdier were strong
disciplinarians, but both rebelled over EDC and Algerian special powers. £douard Depreux
voted for both policies, which he opposed, out of respect for party discipline (as five others did
over EDC). Cf. above, p. 93n., 327; and on Socialist alignments above, p. 9 In.
13. These conclusions emerge from a thorough statistical analysis of the divisions in each
party in Assembly voting throughout the Fourth Republic: MacRae, no. 149. The main splits are
also cited in Georgel, i. 202-7. The traditionalist parties were also the most representative of
'backward France' (p. 450n.) ; and their members had most chance of office (p. 419n., cf. p. 438).
PARTIES AND COALITIONS: (2) WAR OF MANOEUVRE 401
2. MEMBERS AND MILITANTS
Members of parliament in parties where they enjoyed exclusive control
behaved differently from colleagues who had to consider the demands and
aspirations of party militants in the country. Either would lose his seat if he
failed to satisfy his voters, but in a disciplined organization the deputy might
get no chance to fight it if he offended the militants.14 Yet he and they had
very different preoccupations. He had to remember that a ministerial crisis
might weaken the party's position in the Assembly, alienate the floating
voter, or alarm foreign opinion in a critical international situation ;15 it might
even threaten the regime itself. To the militants and the party executives these
were hypothetical dangers which would be dealt with, if at all, by others.
Their concerns were to press the party's demands even at inconvenient
moments, prevent unceremonious treatment of its sacred cows, and so protect
the enthusiasm and loyalty of the faithful which the compromises of the par-
liamentarians threatened to dissipate. Living in the closed world of the party
and behaving as if it were in a political vacuum, they could play the sea-green
incorruptible and win votes and applause at party conferences. The deputies
had the less glamorous task of bargaining with other groups to provide France
with a government.
Tension existed even in the Communist party, where a member who was
assigned to the post of deputy gave it up when he was told to and obeyed
orders while he held it: in 1948 Duclos himself read to the Assembly the party
secretariat's authorization to the deputies to change tactics and vote for im-
mediate local elections.16 Yet even Maurice Thorez was criticized by Andr6
Marty and the opponents of joining the government, especially when he was
defeated for the premiership in December 1946 and the party's hold on the
trade unions came increasingly under challenge.17 Again, when Mollet came
to office in 1956 the Communists' support for his government pleased their
voters, nostalgic for a Popular Front, but soon offended the militants, who
resented appeasement of the ministry that sent conscripts to Algeria; and after
their first and last open argument in the Fourth Republic, the Communists
decided in June not to vote confidence in Mollet's North African policy. In
1958 de Gaulle's attraction for many Communist voters produced a heresy
among younger leaders like Marcel Servin, who wished to minimize the damage
by moderating their attacks on the regime.
Nor did the most individualist party escape conflicts between leaders and
rank and file. At the Toulouse conference in November 1949 Herriot and the
Radical elders were savagely assailed by Daladier, the 'young Turks', and the
14. Party membership and voting strength were almost unrelated: Duverger, Parties, pp. 91-
101. In 1951 MRP in Haut-Rhin had under a hundred members and 74,000 voters: Fauvet,
°\ 5^But did'he? Andre Siegfried reproached the deputies for their indifference to foreign reac-
tions both in 1930 (Tableau, p. 28, France, p. 12), and in 1951 (AP 1951, p. xi). And cf. below,
p. 423.
16. AP 1948, pp. 159 and 347; JO 20 September 1948, p. 6737.
17 Priouret, Partis, pp. 15, 200-5; Marabuto, p. 170; Rieber, pp. 152, 166-7; Aron, Sdusmf,
pp. 191-2; Dumaine, p. 152, writing of January 1947, mentions 'one clear point: the desire of
the Communist party to be in the next combination at the price of any concession and of its
dignity*. Cf. above, p. 74 and n, 10,
402 THE SYSTEM
local bosses who saw in outright opposition to the government the short road
to electoral triumph. The old 'war of the two fidouards' raged again - so
furiously that fear of the party's disintegration shocked the factions into a
patched-up truce.18 But no compromise followed the revolt of 1955, when
Mendes-France and his new recruits evicted the old right-wing leaders with the
aid of Jean Baylet and his local notables, then lost their allies and their majority
by their unpopular stand over the Algerian war. For in 1949 the Radical party
had been a loose confederation in which rival bosses struggled to control the
machine, a prize that would disappear if the party itself broke up. Seven years
later real militants, fighting for policy and not for place, tried to impose dis-
cipline from outside on parliamentarians who had always resisted it; as soon
as their views began to offend the voters they alienated their fair-weather
allies among the traditional Radicals, and so lost the battle.19
In RP F a similar conflict was fought between the deputies and the personal
advisers of the General. Although a movement founded on de Gaulle's
prestige had 'outside dictation' as its very purpose, even RPF parliamen-
tarians resented military discipline in politics. As early as August 1948 the
vice-chairman (Pierre Montel) and twelve members resigned from the Gaullist
inter-group when ordered to vote against Paul Reynaud's financial policy. A
year later the chairman, Paul Giacobbi, resigned over a disciplinary problem:
his colleagues gave him a unanimous vote of confidence. In 1952 Antoine
Pinay, like Reynaud but on a larger scale, won Conservative RPF members
back to the ministerial ranks at the cost of alienating MRP's left wing.20 For,
while the true Gaullist believed that no real reform was possible without con-
stitutional change which compromises and palliatives merely delayed, the
ex-Conservative RPF deputy knew that most of his electors supported RPF
as an expression of Conservatism. Since the creators of the Rally were not
orthodox Conservatives, tension between them and their parliamentary
representatives was inevitable.
MRP and Socialist parliamentarians also gave more weight than the out-
siders to short-term and tactical considerations. In MRP the party constitu-
tion had been designed to strengthen the leadership, though it could not always
avoid conflicts or even always win them. In May 1949 Georges Bidault's ap-
proaches to RPF were at once disavowed by the party conference, and six
months later the national council sided with S FI O against the M RP ministers
in insisting (successfully) on a return to free collective bargaining.21 There was
again tension with the militants over support for conservative premiers -
Queuille in 1950, Pinay and Laniel. But strong bonds held MRP together: its
members shared a common religious faith, a common political experience in the
pre-war and Resistance generation, and the sense of a mission to reconcile the
Church with the Republic. The rank and file therefore felt a strong sentimental
18. AP 1949, p. 198; Fauvet, Forces, pp. 105-6.
19. Having no militants CNIP escaped these troubles, but its 1954 conference, and the stormy
history of the Peasant party, showed that even the Conservatives were not wholly immune from
them : above, pp. 151, 153.
20. Similarly in 1957 he won the Poujadist deputies away from their leader. On Reynaud and
Giacobbi see above, pp. 134 n. 7, 143, 399.
21. AP 1949, pp. 82-3, 159, and above, pp. 105 ; 106-7,
PARTIES AND COALITIONS! (2) WAR OF MANOEUVRE 403
veneration and respect for the leaders, which - as in Bidault's case ~ survived
(not always with happy results) long after political sympathy had died. Internal
division consequently did less harm to MRP than to other parties. Instead,
dissident groups left the movement altogether.
The clash between leaders and followers, parliamentarians and militants
was worst in the Socialist party. Spurred by two electoral disappointments, the
rank and file rejected Leon Blum's efforts to broaden the party's doctrine and
appeal. In August 1946 Daniel Mayer was replaced as general secretary by
Guy Mollet, the aggressive prophet of class struggle, who nine months later
urged SFIO to bring down Ramadier's government rather than let it con-
tinue without the Communist ministers. After winning a large majority in the
Assembly Ramadier barely survived the vote in the Socialist national council
which, Blum wrote tactlessly, would decide 'in full sovereignty' the strategy of
SFIO - and therefore the government of France.
At the next conference Mollet strengthened his hold, and within a year the
Socialists had brought down three governments. But each crisis meant a move
to the Right, and by 1949 Mollefs friends were advocating participation in
government, while ex-ministers like Andre Philip and fidouard Depreux
opposed it. When Daniel Mayer broke up Queuille's cabinet in September,
over the return to collective bargaining, the Radicals demanded his exclusion
from the next government; after a month without a ministry the Socialist
deputies defied the party executive and agreed.22 In December S FIO assigned
tactical decisions in a cabinet crisis to the first policy-making committee it had
ever set up with a majority of members of parliament, but this was abolished
after only two years. In April 1952 a complicated compromise at last settled
the jurisdictional dispute.23
Conservative politicians and jurists condemned the Socialist party organiza-
tion as a menace to parliamentary sovereignty, as in Ramadier's 'vote of con-
fidence' in May 1947, or to governmental stability, as in the long crisis of
October 1949. But differences between the deputies and the executive were not
fundamental. Often they agreed, and when they did not each side usually had a
minority of sympathizers among the others. Over the Poinso-Chapuis decree
in 1948 both began intransigently but both ended by compromising. Early in
1951 the executive showed more concern than the parliamentarians for budget-
ary stability, and a year later it was the deputies who first decided to oppose
Pleven's government.24 The committee twice intervened to save Pleven's
22. Mayer then asked 'to be relieved by SFI 0 of his mandate as minister of labour* : AP 1949,
p. 180. The party executive picked Dr. Segelle instead, but forgot to tell him - and his cabinet
colleagues, when they met at 2 a.m., had to wait for the new minister to be fetched from his bed in
the outer suburbs. . , rt , . , - ,
23. The executive of 31, of whom 10 were parliamentarians, sat with 9 deputes and 6 senators
chosen by their groups to form the 'committee of 46' until December 1951, when a national
council restored full powers to the executive. Angry Socialist deputies called the executive the
politburo' (AP 1951, p. 324) and their chairman and vice-chairman resigned in protest. By the
final compromise the executive's decision was discussed at a joint meeting with the parliamentary
group (at which the deputies had a five-to-one majority) which could either confirm it, reject it
by a three-fifths majority, or reject by less and transfer the decision to a special national council.
For S FIO's internal evolution see Ligou, pp. 544-53, 557-9, 577-88, 615-25, and references m
! ViFebruary 1951 ; AP 1952, p. 8, The executive also later voted to>ppose Pleven
404 THE SYSTEM
successor, Edgar Faure. And although the militants caused no difficulty over
the external problems which dominated politics after 1954, the party's life
became more turbulent than ever. Over EDC a majority, and over Algeria a
large minority of the deputies rebelled against a leadership strongly supported
by the executive. When de Gaulle stood for the premiership in May 1958 the
executive joined the revolt, and Mollet had to fall back on the support of the
Socialist senators and permission for a free vote in the Assembly.
Even when the behaviour of the outside organizations was most unreason-
able, it was often understandable. Political compromise is often a necessity,
especially in France, but the professional politician too easily came to think of
it as a positive virtue. Outside the Communist party few deputies had personal
experience of the industrial worker's life (only three Socialists and eight
MRP members in the first Assembly, where the problem was most acute).
Many French leaders had begun their careers on the extreme Left and gone
over to a respectable or disreputable conservatism as their age and fortune
grew: Millerand, Briand, Laval, Doriot.25 Politicians in the disciplined parties
sometimes needed reminding that they owed their power to the work and
idealism of simple, unsophisticated people, whose hopes might be incon-
venient, untimely or impracticable, but could not simply be ignored and
derided by their representatives.
Parliamentarians from the looser groups, who did not suffer from this
pressure, were freer to pursue personal ambition or factional advantage with-
out risking penalties from their parties. Endangered in the early years by the
need of Socialist ministers to satisfy a vigilant executive, governmental
stability was more imperilled later by the refusal of Radical and Conservative
deputies to honour the commitments made by their leaders. And members
from the strictly and the loosely organized groups alike were obliged to listen
to the grievances of their voters. If the ordinary citizen took short or partisan
views, demanded immediate material concessions or stood firm for a principle,
then his representatives were bound to pay attention even at some risk to the
stability of government. But the voter also (and not always consistently) put a
high value on stability. He set the politician an insoluble problem, and then
reproached him for not finding a satisfactory answer.
3. PARTNERS AND RIVALS
In the disciplined parties the parliamentary leaders were under pressure from
the membership to carry out the party's policies ; in the individualist ones there
were always notables seeking more power for themselves or their faction.
Coalition governments therefore needed perpetual brokerage to keep them
together. The parties composing them were at once partners and rivals, and
by 19 (7 deputies and 12 militants) to 6 for abstention (3 and 3). On five political and two disci-
plinary decisions in that month, a majority of both deputies and militants defeated a minority of
both ; they differed only on Pinay's investiture in March, 1 1 of the 16 militants wanting to oppose
him and 7 of the 10 deputies to abstain : Bulletin inttrieur SFIO, nos. 59 (February 1952), p. 19,
and 62 (May), pp. 41-3 ; fuller in Williams, p. 372n.
25. In Cote d'Or every local leader in the Third and Fourth Republics followed this course:
Long, pp. 200-4, 265-72. The Communists* first general secretary, L. O, Frossard, was one of
P&ain's ministers in 1940,
PARTIES AND COALITIONS: (2) WAR OF MANOEUVRE 405
the more secure the majority was against opposition attack, the more willing
each of its members became to fight for his own hand. Responsibility was hard
to define and therefore easy to evade. A party governing alone has to be
realistic since its faults may be exposed by the test of practice, but a partner in
a coalition had a permanent excuse for every failure to fulfil a promise: that it
would have broken up the government. A disunited cabinet lacked authority
over its supporters. A heterogeneous majority included unwilling partners who
hoped that a change of alliances would bring them more jobs or better
policies. An opposition of miscellaneous malcontents, united only in negation,
was not made responsible by the prospect of power. Instead of an open clash
of political philosophies enabling the electorate to judge, the bargains and
manoeuvres which go on behind the scenes of other political systems were
brought to the centre of the stage.
A party which was asked to join the government often laid down conditions,
not always successfully. The Socialists vetoed Paul Reynaud as finance minis-
ter in November 1947. By July 1948 the balance of power had shifted against
them and they agreed to serve with him, only to resign when he announced his
policy. In the following May he launched the Conservatives' ultimatum to
Queuille's government to change its economic and social policies.26 This was
resisted by the Socialist ministers, especially Daniel Mayer, who in September
broke up the cabinet; SFIO then had to accept a Radical veto on Mayer's
reappointment. MRP's power similarly dwindled between March 1952, when
the party refused to serve under Pinay unless Robert Schuman kept the
foreign office, and January 1953 when it could no longer resist his eviction.
To prevent differences rankling and poisoning the life of cabinets, successive
prime ministers strove in vain to establish a 'contract of the majority' com-
mitting all the government parties to a common programme. Chained for ten
years to the government bench, MRP supported these efforts, but the other
parties would never abandon the equivocations by which they tried to com-
bine the advantages of opposition with those of office. When offered the
economic ministries by Jules Moch in October 1949, MRP insisted that all
government parties accept responsibility for their policies. The Radicals,
committed by their votes for Moch to the proposals in his investiture speech,
flatly refused any further engagement. Reluctantly MRP gave way, despite
protests from the prospective economic ministers who knew what to expect
from their colleagues.27 But when the Radicals demanded the ministry of
information too, MRP refused to tolerate other ministers attacking their
policies with official resources, and the dispute prevented Moch forming a
government. In 1956 Mendes-France, denied the foreign office by the hostility
of the 'Europeans', declined the ministry of finance because he had no
assurance that his Socialist colleagues would accept his policies. Subsequent
quarrels showed he had been prudent.
These manoeuvres were inevitable when the reputation of a man or a party
26. AP 1949, pp. 78-81, 323-32; Arne", pp. 247, 257, 351.
27. The minority also included Mme Poinso-Chapuis, whose ministerial career terminated with
her celebrated decree in 1948 ; it was not only Socialists who saw the disadvantages of office most
clearly when they were personally unlikely to receive it. For the efforts of the premiers and the
'contract of the majority' see Arne", pp. 209-17.
406 THE SYSTEM
was bound up with the policies and fortunes of a government they did not
control. When MRP was driven against the wishes of its militants to join
Pinay's government, it refused the economic ministries in order to dissociate
itself from the premier's conservative policies, and treated its commitment to
its allies as lightly as they had ever done. In the Laniel and Faure cabinets the
Gaullists in their turn were to show that ex-critics of the System could outdo
its oldest practitioners in their contempt for governmental solidarity. For a
group which obtained office because its votes were indispensable to the majority
might be unable to dictate policy if rival groups were equally indispensable.
Parties entered or supported cabinets because the alternative combination
would be worse, or the odium of provoking or prolonging a ministerial crisis
greater than that of accepting an unsatisfactory compromise. But such tran-
sitory arrangements could evoke no loyalty. No party took risks to defend an
unpopular policy which was not its own, or felt any compunction about
joining a cabinet and then attacking it.
Battling with the parties for the loyalty of his ministers, a premier had first to
struggle for the right to choose them - like a medieval king contesting the
investiture of bishops with the Pope. De Gaulle won a tussle with the Com-
munists on this point, and the Socialists refused to serve under Mendes-
France when he would not give way on it (though Bidault in 1949 and Pleven
in 1950 made personal appointments from SFIO). But this close identification
with its chosen representatives made it hard for a party to detach itself from
an unsuccessful man or unpopular policy without humiliation for him or
embarrassment for them. Jean Letourneau of MRP remained in charge of
Indo-Chinese aifairs long after his policies had collapsed, and SFIO could
oust Robert Lacoste from Algiers in April 1958 only by deciding to stay out of
office altogether. On the other hand, since the selection of ministers raised
delicate personal problems within a party, MRP sometimes preferred the
prime minister to take the invidious responsibility. Any prudent premier
naturally tried to choose senior ministers who could bring strength to his
government.28 Some, like Pinay, invited each group to make nominations
for minor office.
The individualist groups had more difficulty in influencing their members,
among whom the prospect of promotion was a potent lure and the loose party
tie a feeble restraint, since the rebel could so easily transfer to another group.
Paradoxically, therefore, it was precisely the parties which prided themselves
on allowing their members freedom of action which needed the whip to stop
individual decisions engaging the group and compromising its reputation. The
Radicals warned Mendes-France against becoming Gouin's finance minister
in January 1946, UDSR objected to Francois Mitterrand taking the Interior
in September 1948, and in October 1949 when a Peasant deputy accepted
junior office from Bidault, his party exacted from him an undated letter of
resignation which was sent in two months later.29 But some groups preferred
28. His 'first concern' from 1875 to 1958 : Huron, p. 172. On Mendes-France and SFIO see
Fauvet, IV6, pp. 283-4.
29. AP 1946, pp. 11, 15-16; 1948, p. 152; 1949, pp. 213, 217; 1950, p. 5; Arne, p. 348. The
Peasant, M. Ribeyre, emphasized that his resignation was involuntary by voting confidence in
the government which his party opposed.
PARTIES AND COALITIONS: (2) WAR OF MANOEUVRE 407
to disavow their ministers without disciplining them ; in 1957 Mollet appointed
Queuille and another dissident Radical to his abortive government, but none
of their fellows voted for him.
Serving ministers often rebelled against discipline. In May 1949 the Peasants
and in July PRL expelled members who refused to resign from Queuille's
government. In October 1955, when Edgar Faure's Social Republican
(Gaullist) ministers called for a new government and were dismissed, one
repudiated his party and took the premier's side. Two months later, when
Faure himself was expelled from the Radical party for dissolving the Assembly,
five of his Radical ministers resigned but three stayed in office. In the new
Assembly two Social Republicans joined Mollet 'in a personal capacity'
against the party's wish, and in May 1958 one of Pflimlin's four Conservative
ministers refused a party summons to resign. Of all premiers, Mendes-France
did most damage to party discipline, despite his failure with the Socialists. He
gave posts to members of M RP, who were expelled (but readmitted later) and
of CNIP, which changed its rules to prevent any repetition of the offence.30
Few premiers could count like Mendes-France on the loyalty of personal
admirers in many different parties. But all, including him, could expect votes
from several quarters, which came from the 'king's friends': the men who
systematically supported every government, either in hopes of advantage for
themselves or their clients or even on grounds of principle. Dissident Gaullists
of 1952 and Radicals of 1955-56 were as reluctant as dissident Socialists
before the war to see their careers ruined by a party or leader whose sights
seemed set far too high. Other ministerialists traded their votes for concessions
to a constituency or a pressure-group. Overseas deputies were divided between
those who fought every cabinet (like Irish MP's in the 1880's) and were nearly
all eliminated from the Assembly in 1951, and those who preferred (like
Scots a century earlier) to support all ministries impartially. The Peasant
party was similarly split, either internally or organizationally, between Paul
Antier's intransigent wing and the participationist bargainers led by Canaille
Laurens.31 But some politicians, who believed that nothing could be done
without stability, thought any government better than none and no specific
policy worth the disruption of a majority: men like Paul Hutin-Desgr<§es of
MRP, the Breton editor of the largest provincial newspaper, who sought no
office, left Parliament disillusioned in 1955, and supported Government as
systematically in the Fifth Republic as in the Fourth.
'King's friends' at one time made up a substantial parliamentary force.
While SFIO was still in the majority 295 deputies voted successively for a
Socialist, a Radical and an MRP leader as premier in October 1949. But with
its defection in the next crisis, in summer 1950, only 139 members supported
the outgoing and incoming premiers on the four decisive votes. In the second
Parliament there was a major change of men and policies when Mendes-
France succeeded Laniel, but 102 deputies still voted for both leaders : nearly
30. Arn6, pp. 348-9, with other cases. AP 1949, pp. 80, 130; 1954, pp. 70, 102; 1955, pp. 7,
72-3, 92; 1956, pp. 18, 27; 1958, p. 63; and above, pp. 151, 398.
31. Above, p. 135. Lawyers, and old parliamentary hands, typically preferred bargaining to
intransigent politics: cf. above, pp. 134, 135n., 153 n. 15, 156 n. 32.
408 THE SYSTEM
all IOM, nearly half the Radicals, and between a fifth and an eighth of every
other group except Communists and Socialists; 12% of metropolitan mem-
bers but 43% of those from overseas.32 By the third Assembly MRP was less
firmly in the majority, the Radical party was in fragments, and the ban on
proxies stopped many overseas members from voting. The dwindling band of
* king's friends' could now muster only 40 deputies to vote for both Pinay and
Mollet in October 1957. The base of the System was dangerously narrowed by
this decline of the * accommodating and agile men ', for whatever their motives
they had been 'indispensable to the permanence of public life and the gentle-
ness of transitions'.33
4. THE ART OF BROKERAGE
Without the substantial core of support available ex officio to his predecessors,
a premier of the later Fourth Republic had an even harder task. His resources
were few, for once he had formed his cabinet the hope of office was an asset
only to his prospective successors. But he could still use the traditional
weapons: decorations for the influential constituents of hesitant members - or
for the members - and pork-barrel benefits for the districts of deputies from
overseas - or from elsewhere. As in the Third Republic, 'a complete day-by-
day diplomacy was founded on knowledge of the civil service lists, the art of
opportune promotions in the Legion of Honour, a respect for political con-
nections and an adroit use of favouritism'.34 Now and then major posts out-
side the government provided more substantial fare: Mendes-France sent
Jacques Soustelle to Algeria and Edgar Faure chose Gilbert Grandval for
Morocco both as strong administrators with a liberal reputation and as
Gaullists whose appointments might rally a wavering party. But often the
prime minister could make little use of such patronage, for it was subject to
hard bargaining between parties seeking to place their friends, achieve their
own policy objectives, or counteract their rivals. On 21 January 1948 the
cabinet sent an MRP deputy to govern Madagascar, a Radical official to
Equatorial Africa, and a Socialist junior minister to West Africa. A month
later the Algerian settlers and their Radical friends, led by Rend Mayer,
demanded the removal of the liberal governor-general Yves Chataigneau;
SFIO's opposition was overcome by making him ambassador in Moscow and
choosing in his place a Socialist cabinet minister, M. E. Naegelen.35
In dividing the spoils it was not easy to satisfy everyone; in deciding con-
troversies over policy it was often impossible. Ministers and party leaders who
32. Almost 200 voted only for Laniel, over 300 only for Mend£s-France, and 13 for neither
among them de Gaulle's brother and brother-in-law. SFIO had its 'king's friends' too (notably
Paul Ramadier, an old Republican Socialist) but discipline de vote made them invisible A year
earlier, the Assembly had overthrown Rene" Mayer and then rejected four premiers-designate
before electing Laniel; 35 deputies voted for all six men (of these 35, 7 got office from Laniel
and 3 kept it under Mendes-France, who was among the 35). Another 128 voted for five of
the six, of whom only 38 did not vote for Mendes-France. (My calculations )
33. Isorai, Ainsi, p. 87 (cf. p. 137). Of the 40, 14 were MRP and 25 from the debris of Radi-
calism. Of the 29 who later voted for Gaillard and had also voted for Bourges-Maunoury when
he feu, not one was from overseas: proxies might well have saved him.
n 3£ ?e^ri d^ouvenel» Pourquoije suis syndicate (1928), p. 21. (I owe this reference to Dr.
D. B. Goldey.) For examples under Mendes-France, Faucher, p 143
35. AP 1948, pp. 8, 19-20; Arne\ p. 351 ; Fauvet, /JX«, pp. 155-7. But cf, above, p. 333.
PARTIES AND COALITIONS: (2) WAR OF MANOEUVRE 409
had fought hard for the best compromise available often had to settle for much
less than their followers demanded. Then, if a well-organized party gave
trouble, its leaders could impose party discipline. When the difficulty was with
the individualist parties, the cabinet could call for a vote of confidence which
helped hesitant deputies to justify an unpopular vote to their constituents.36
But all such appeals used up part of the government's limited political credit
with the discontented groups on the margin of the majority. A prudent
premier was therefore sorely tempted to arrange that a dangerous problem
should not rise to the surface during his brief incumbency. If his hand were
forced he would tend to do a little less of what he was doing before, in com-
pensation making ostentatious gestures elsewhere. When a Socialist-led
government repressed an Algerian rising, it was no surprise to find its leaders
reassuring their critics (and consciences) that their hearts were still on the
Left by speeches criticizing the United States.
A premier could also appeal to the deputies* sense of responsibility by
pointing out the catastrophic consequences of a crisis now. But as there was
always an international conference, a colonial negotiation or a financial
emergency conveniently at hand, this story soon wore thin. Once Rene Mayer
had saved himself by a treasury crisis and a visit to Washington, he could not
repeat the performance six weeks later on the eve of the Bermuda conference
with Eisenhower and Churchill. Because deputies (like congressmen) resented
being defied or constrained, public opinion had to be brought to bear on them
by manoeuvres, which even the strongest premier did not disdain. Pinay anti-
cipated a coming attack from the Right on his foreign minister by osten-
tatiously rejecting an 'insulting' American note, a glorious gesture which no
Conservative could disavow. Mendes-France, when Gaullists and Socialists
were wavering, arranged an interview with a benevolent General de Gaulle
and announced a minimum wage increase on the eve of a crucial Socialist
caucus.37
These devices frequently failed. Then, on a major issue the cabinet fell, on a
minor one it accepted defeat. Pinay's ministers were beaten in 102 divisions,
out of the 562 in which they voted, and in 41 of these a majority of their
nominal supporters voted against them. Sometimes the government avoided
defeat by neutrality when it knew its followers would otherwise have rebelled.
But in general, though party discipline among deputies was worse on the
major questions, the groups of the majority were much more loyal: only once
under Pinay did the largest section of any ministerial group vote against the
government and it was very rare for them to abstain.38
Supporters of the regime recognized the need to sink their differences over
policy in order to find a majority and a government. But the differences were
genuine and important to both the politicians and their voters. Sometimes a
party which would not accept the compromises of office might be ready to
keep an unsatisfactory cabinet in power rather than precipitate an insoluble
37*. Fauvet! 7%!*p. 235 (Mayer) ; AP 1952, pp. 65, 367-9 (Pinay), and 1954, pp. 79-81 (Mendfc-
France).
38. Campbell, no. 44, pp. 251-3.
410 THE SYSTEM
crisis which would endanger the regime. There were recognized gradations of
support from marginal parties, ranging from keeping a minority ministry in
by not voting against it, through voting for it without joining it, to joining it
while criticizing it. Or a government party confronted by an unacceptable
policy, and obliged by conviction or electoral necessity to resist all efforts at
cajolery or coercion, might still be unwilling to bring the cabinet down. In
such cases curious expedients were used to paper over the cracks.39
A party might announce that its vote indicated confidence in the govern-
ment but disapproval of its policy (or vice versd).^ It might authorize minis-
ters to vote with their cabinet colleagues while ordinary deputies abstained, as
the Communists did over Indo-China in March 1947, the Socialists over
devaluation in January 1948 and an amnesty bill in December 1950, and RPF
over the European army in November 1953. Or all ministers might abstain,
leaving the ' back-benchers * to decide - the French equivalent of a free vote in
the House of Commons. Rene Pleven's government abstained over electoral
reform in February 1951, and Mendes-France's over EDC in August 1954.
The perennial disputes over clerical problems were evaded in this way by
Schuman in May 1948 over the colliery schools, Pleven in September 1951
over Barange's bill, and Mollet in February 1956 over its repeal. Pinay's
cabinet took no part in 1 10 divisions, about a sixth of those held in his nine
months of office.41 Much less often ministers voted on both sides, as on a
motion to postpone debate on Barange's bill in September 1951. When
Pleven's first cabinet decided to send an ambassador to Madrid, in January
1951, it authorized the Socialist ministers to abstain if an interpellation were
moved. Gaillard in February 1958, on MRP's demand, allowed his ministers
to vote as they pleased on a motion to restore the pre-war electoral system.
Once, in 1948, two ministers voted without authority - or penalty - with their
party, UDSR, against Queuffle's postponement of local elections.42
'Papering over the cracks', strangely enough, was more useful in preserving
the edifice than in concealing the gaps in it. For ministers were as unconcerned
about attacking their colleagues in speeches as they were reluctant to differ
from them in a vote. In 1948 the Socialist minister of education (fidouard
Depreux) accused his prime minister (Robert Schuman) of violating the
constitution over the Poinso-Chapuis decree, which had not been submitted to
him for counter signature. In 1949 a meeting of Conservative deputies criticized
new taxes proposed by the independent Conservative finance minister Maurice
Petsche; leading the attack were two junior ministers, Antoine Pinay and
Jean Moreau. Moreau later expressed sympathy for the parliamentary critics
of his own department, the air ministry, whose real target was the Socialist
39. For a full record of party attitudes see the table in Arn6, pp. 225-8.
40. Arne", pp. 275-6, and above, p. 231.
41. Arne", pp. 1 86-8 ; for Pinay, Campbell, no. 44, p. 251 . The executive by convention abstained
on strictly parliamentary questions such as waiver of a member's immunity or amendments to
standing orders, and had sometimes done so on electoral and constitutional reform.
42. Spain: Monde, 11 January 1951. Gaillard: In&gedit&s, p. 108. UDSR: Arne", p. 126n.
(with one other case). Also AP 1948, p. 160, 1951, p. 220 (Barange), 1958, p. 22. It was said that
some crises were avoided by horse-trading, one party making concessions on church schools and
another on naval building: AP 1949, pp. 38-9, and Figaro, 6 March 1949 (quoted Williams,
p. 384n.) ; cf. Fauvet, IVet p. 157.
PARTIES AND COALITIONS: (2) WAR OF MANOEUVRE 411
minister of defence. At next year's S F I O conference Jules Moch, for once out
of office, retaliated by contrasting inadequate governmental provision of
schools and houses with wasteful expenditure on an air force with no aircraft
(the air ministry was one of the few never held by a Socialist). In 1953 Rene
Pleven, as a senior minister in a conservative government, publicly urged his
party to work for a new left-centre majority. ?inay and Mollet denounced one
another every week-end under Gaillard's government, in which both their
parties served.43
Party differences were not the only ones. In this atmosphere of conflict
departmental quarrels were magnified too. As Edgar Faure pointed out,
ministers who hoped to survive into the next cabinet felt 'more loyal to their
respective departments than to the government as a collective entity'.44 If
parties or ministries neutralized each other sufficiently thoroughly, the problem
was left to the unregulated clash of group interests, with the usual dangers
of inflation or disorder - or overseas repression, continued until a revolution-
ary crisis became inevitable.45 After 1953 matters became worse, for the main
political conflicts no longer coincided with the lines of party cleavage. First on
EDC, then on Algeria, the parties themselves were too divided internally to
guarantee that their members would give reliable support to governments in
which their leaders served. When Joseph Laniel was accepted as premier by a
weary Assembly which had rejected five previous candidates, he formed a
broadly-based cabinet which was said to embrace two distinct ministries:
Bidault's, which practised a diehard colonial policy, and Reynaud's, which
favoured conciliation and retrenchment.46 The same was true of his successors.
Mendes-France's government was divided about EDC until the keen 'Euro-
peans' resigned from it; Edgar Faure's ministers quarrelled openly over
Morocco; under Mollet both Socialists and Radicals were split between
Lacoste's supporters and opponents. Andre Morice refused to countersign
Bourges-Maunoury's Algerian reform bill. Felix Gaillard, like Laniel, became
premier when, after a long and indecisive crisis, the major government parties
stopped obstructing one another in the Assembly - only to project their con-
flict into the cabinet. As Paul Reynaud put it, ' Bit by bit the cabinet has come
to look like a miniature Parliament with its majority, its minority and its
manoeuvres behind the scenes.'47
In the hope of imposing on the parties of his majority a sense of respon-
sibility for governmental policy, Gaillard brought their parliamentary leaders
into the discussion of the most controversial problems through 'round-table
conferences'. This device had occasionally been used by earlier premiers to
settle a difficult problem, prop up a falling cabinet, or overcome the difficulties
caused by the exclusion of ministers from the deliberations of parliamentary
43. AP 1948, pp. 77-8, 92-3; 1949, pp. 77, 97; 1952, p. 83; 1958, pp. 34-43 passim; Monde,
29 May 1950, 10 and 11 November 1952, 27 October 1953 ; Ame, pp. 121n., 126-7, 348; Debu-
Bridel, p. 252 (Schuman); Fauvet in Monde, 2 May 1958.
44. Monde, 27 March 1953; cf. R. Lecourt, ibid., 8 April 1953.
45. See above, pp. 383-4, 394; below, p. 440.
46. Faucher, pp. 64-5; Fauvet, IVe, pp. 253-5; Tournoux, pp. 29-31.
47. JO 8 October 1955, p. 4960. 'Whoever experienced the old cabinet . . . knows it was itself
a Parliament where discussions lasted for hours ... often without reaching any conclusion*;
Cpnte, p. 10. Morice: Arne, pp. 121n., 368n,
412 THE SYSTEM
committees on a bill. Bourges-Maunoury employed it to bring into the dis-
cussions of Lacoste's Algerian reform bill the Conservative, MRP and Social
Republican groups, which were unrepresented in the cabinet but essential to
the majority; it did not save him or the bill from defeat. Undeterred, Gaillard
called round tables on the budget, constitutional amendment, electoral re-
form, and a medical insurance bill. The first two helped the government sal-
vage some of its proposals. The others failed because of the indiscipline rather
than the rigidity of the parties. Bargains accepted by their leaders were
repeatedly repudiated by the right wing of the Conservatives, whose defection
overturned every premier of this Parliament. For neither cabinets nor round
tables could conjure up a majority from parties which were aligned one way
on the economy and another on the constitution, and from rival camps whose
irreconcilable views on Algeria cut sharply across all party lines. At the round
table the cabinet abdicated responsibility, but the parties would not assume
it.48
Just as voters chose their deputy to protect them against the government
rather than to uphold it, and members entered Parliament to vote for the
claims and interests of their constituents rather than for a policy, so minis-
ters frequently took office to defend their party's supporters against the designs
of a rival group with a different clientele to protect. As a Radical deputy once
argued, 'But, my dear friends, is it not also true that our presence in the
governments has prevented the other parties, too, from applying their pro-
grammes?' Even politicians who came hopefully to power with far-reaching
aims, and took important decisions in the first honeymoon weeks of office,
were soon discouraged or frustrated by the obstacles strewn in their path.
Consequently, wrote an excellent critic in 1957, *. . . the reigning ideal is also
one of protectionism and security above all - as in so many sectors of the
economy, or in the teaching world. French parties do not govern, they occupy
power. They do not conceive the need for or the conditions of a genuine
executive: they want a right of veto against their allies or rivals ... all atten-
tion is concentrated on the parliamentary game, this system of mutual neutral-
ization ... in which the players avail themselves of power only to obstruct any
effective use of it. '49
48. On round tables see Andrews, no, 3. Cf. Arne", pp. 92, 179, 259-60; AP 1949, p. 74, 1957,
pp. 91-2.
49. Hoffmann, no. 125, p. 816; cf. Hamon, no. 120, pp. 841-8. Radical: Roger Gaborit at a
party executive in 1951, cited De Tarr, p. 158. General Koenig in 1955 and Andre" Morice in 1957
conspicuously used their offices to frustrate their colleagues over North Africa and defence
expenditure. Honeymoon : Delouvrier in Crise, p. 86.
Chapter 29
PARTIES AND COALITIONS:
(3) CRISIS AS AN INSTITUTION
The ' system of mutual neutralization ' maintained French politics in precarious
equilibrium as long as no major decisions had to be taken, but it disintegrated
as soon as they could no longer be deferred. The deputies of the majority were
not the ideological fanatics foreigners often thought them, tearing the country
asunder in their doctrinal zeal; on the contrary, they often seemed to erect
compromise into a principle and to prefer office to ideology. But rapid changes
in the economy at home and the French position in the world posed problems
to which immobilisme could not long provide an answer. To the men who had
framed the constitution, the prime minister was to become the leader of a
coherent majority and the motor of the political system. To those who worked
it - mostly the same men - he began as the broker between parties struggling
to impose or prevent decisions, and finished as 'the fuse that blows whenever
tension rises'.1 Twelve times in the eleven years of the Fourth Republic's life
the fuse blew, and provoked a cabinet crisis.2
Most Assemblies contained several alternative majorities, and the more
there were the less stable was any one of them. The * king's friends ' were always
in them and the enemies of the regime always out, but the 'loyal opposition'
could generally count on a 'fifth column* of sympathizers within the majority
and even the ministry it was attacking. When enough of the discontented
joined the fifth column, the cabinet fell. An effort might then be made to tempt
the loyal opposition, or part of it, by offers of jobs or concessions on policy,
and if it succeeded some waverers, attached to the discarded men or policies,
would retire into the wilderness as the new loyal opposition.
Shifting parliamentary alignments and unstable governments generated new
incentives to political fluidity. In Britain almost all governments enjoy a solid
party majority which sustains them from one general election to the next. In
the United States, a congressional majority which is often negative, undisci-
plined and incoherent cannot precipitate a vacancy in the executive branch.
But in France every change of ministry offered new opportunities for political
promotion. A change of government became an end in itself, and after a few
months in office most premiers had usually exhausted their political credit and
physical health in the endless battle to keep the majority together.
Although the careerist ambitions of groups or men caused a few cabinet
crises and contributed to them all, the agents of disruption were generally
those who were in the old majority from necessity rather than choice. Some-
times a party, like the Socialists in 1947-50 or Mendes-France's Radical
1. Paul Reynaud, JO 27 May 1953, p. 2871.
2. In addition, three premiers were elected at the start of a Parliament, two could not form a
cabinet, and five survived less than six weeks (two of whom lasted only two days). Four more
had been chosen before the regime was bora. See Appendix n, and lists in Arne", pp. 305-10,
432.
414 THE SYSTEM
friends in 1956-57, had to support a government which it could not seriously
influence for fear that it would lose votes or credit by provoking a crisis.
When democracy was in danger all government parties were inhibited from
pressing their full demands for jobs or policies. Yet as the regime grew more
secure, the incumbent ministry became weaker. Pressure from the country
diminished, making it less necessary for the competing centre groups to
behave intransigently. But confidence that the cabinet could now be over-
thrown without disaster encouraged them to insist on their neglected claims ;
Mollet met his first parliamentary trouble when by-elections showed a sharp
drop in Communist and Poujadist votes. The parliamentary equilibrium was
never stable and while short ministries might be a sympton of political malaise,
the ' long ' cabinet - Queuille's, Laniel's, Mollet's - often survived only because
no one wished to confront Parliament and public with dangerous and dis-
ruptive problems. 'Those who think only of the general interest, harmed by
immobilisme, and those who think only of their private interests, harmed by a
government that lasts, both want the ministry to fall ... France governs her-
self by changing her governments.'3
1. THE RULES AND THE REFEREE
Cabinet crises were often turning-points in the shaping of policy and always in
the struggle for power. Elaborate rules were therefore devised to ensure a
minimum of fair play. The most conspicuous feature of a crisis was the stately
ritualism of the public procedure - though it could not always prevent subtle
intrigues behind the scenes exerting an influence on the outcome. Some of the
conventions (regies dujeii) were inherited from the Third Republic; some were
modified by the constitution of the Fourth; and others were built up by prac-
tice to deal with particular situations as they arose.
When a premier was overthrown it was the task of the President of the Re-
public, under Article 45 of the constitution, to designate a candidate for the
succession 6 after the customary consultations'.4 After Rene Mayer's defeat on
Thursday, 21 May 1953, the following visitors called on President Auriol:
Friday morning : the first vice-president of the National Assembly (Herriot
was ill) and six of the eleven ex-premiers who sat in it. Friday afternoon : the
Presidents of the Council of the Republic, Assembly of the French Union and
Economic Council; four more ex-premiers; and delegations from SFIO,
RPF and MRP. Saturday morning : five party delegations (Radicals, UDSR
and three Conservative groups); the eleventh ex-premier; and Pierre Cot,
speaking for the fellow-travelling Progressives. Saturday afternoon : the last
party (the Overseas Independents) and the rapporteurs-generaux of the two
finance committees.
The President could now begin the selection of a candidate. But his hands
were still not free, for convention prescribed the order in which each party
was given its opportunity, beginning with those who had provoked the crisis
and continuing with those who prolonged it. The dangerous opposition was
excluded from the list, which opened with the loyal opposition (in 1953 a
Socialist and then a Gaullist were asked first, as a matter of form). No one
3. Delouvrier in Crise, p, 87. 4, See Arne", p 47 and n.
PARTIES AND COALITIONS: (3) CRISIS AS AN INSTITUTION 415
(least of all themselves) expected them to succeed, since the old government
had usually been upset by an alliance of mutually hostile extremes. The
waverers who had defected from the defunct majority then had their turn.
Sometimes their leader refused; sometimes he would undertake a mission
d* information before deciding; occasionally he rdight accept and begin serious
conversations. If he made no real effort, other parties with a share of responsi-
bility for the crisis were approached. Once one of them made a genuine effort
and failed, the party that stopped him became responsible, and had to try
next. But often their victim's group ensured that they should not profit from
their obstructiveness, and the advantage went to a third party which stood (or
had given the impression of standing) above the battle, wreathed in osten-
tatious virtue.
The candidate needed personal as well as party qualifications. An opposi-
tion leader would normally hold an official post as general secretary of his
party or chairman of its deputies. A majority spokesman would have held
one of the five highest offices or a senior post without portfolio; only one of
the Fourth Republic's fifteen premiers lacked these qualifications.5 A politi-
cian asked to stand for the premiership was called the president du conseil
sollicite if the approach was very tentative, pressenti if it was firm; on accep-
tance (often preceded by a trial run of consultations, tour de piste) he became
the president designed Until 1954 he had to win election by an absolute majority
(becoming investi), form his cabinet (making him at last president du conseil),
and even then secure its acceptance by the deputies (which Schuman failed to
do in September 1948 and Queuille in July 1950). After 1954 the president
designe was elected by a simple majority after first forming his cabinet. To
the prudent politician it was dangerous as well as disagreeable to fail at a late
stage, for this often caused ill-feeling between parties which had eventually to
agree if any majority was to be found. So, of the 59 politicians sollicites by
Auriol, only 24 agreed to confront the Assembly as candidates, sitting in
splendid isolation on the empty government bench to present their pre-
pared speeches, answer the queries of their friends, and evade or fall
into the snares laid by their opponents. Only twelve survived the entire
ordeal.6
The absurd side of these 'rites' needs no emphasis. The gentlemen who
paraded before the President of the Republic, each of them entitled to be
addressed till his dying day as Monsieur le President , were not necessarily those
best able to help him in his task. Presidents of the Assembly of the Union and
Economic Council rarely had much political influence, while among the ex-
premiers summoned were fidouard Daladier, the man of Munich, Jules Moch,
who never actually headed a government, Felix Gouin who had held no office
since the wine scandals of 1946 - but not the great critic of the 'rites', General
de Gaulle. Usually the largest parties came first, but once alphabetical order
was thought more impartial.
5. Cf. above, pp. 205, 206 and Arn6, p. 94. In 82 approaches by Presidents Auriol and Coty,
only five men not so qualified were asked : four opposition leaders and Antoine Pinay.
6. Under Coty 23 were sollicites; three failed in the Assembly and seven succeeded. Lists (of
pressentis) in Arne, pp. 49-51, 307-10. Cf. Appendix n.
416 THE SYSTEM
Yet the rules were not futile and archaic, as they were often thought. Con-
ventions allowed the responsibilities of causing or continuing a crisis to be
fastened on particular groups expert in avoiding them. If a party overthrew a
government when it could not impose an alternative, the rules brought home
its weakness to its own leaders, and its responsibility to public opinion. They
were also useful both to facilitate and to limit the role of the President of the
Republic. He needed to be informed of the chances of the candidate he pro-
posed. He could have much influence on the course and terms of party bar-
gaining. Even restrained by the conventions, he could impose serious obstacles
to a candidate he disliked; without them he would have had too great oppor-
tunities for illicit influence. For the offer of the premiership gave a man or
movement a standing and an opportunity others might resent. When Pinay
was nominated in 1952 Gaullists were bitter against Auriol for splitting their
party (but had he not really meant to show the Right that no defection was to
be hoped for?). Only nine months later Radicals attacked him for recognizing
RP F as part of the ' loyal opposition ' by an approach to Soustelle at a moment
when they believed it could have been split again. Conventions both restrained
a strong President from abusing his office and encouraged a weak one not to
be unduly inhibited by fear of criticism.
The rules left the President a wide discretion - in a grave emergency, even
that of settling the crisis quickly without reference to them, as Auriol attempted
in July 1948 and when the Korean war began in June 1950. They allowed him
to decide which opposition parties were 'loyal' and which were 'dangerous':
thus Coty resumed consultations with the Communists, which Auriol had
briefly abandoned, and early in May 1958 made a confidential approach to
General de Gaulle himself. They left the President to assign the responsibility
for overthrowing the late government, which was not always obvious.7 And
they gave him a wide choice of men, for there were usually about twenty
political leaders conventionally qualified for the premiership.
This discretion had to be used with care, for the prestige of the presidency
was damaged by failures like those of Leon Blum in November 1947 and Guy
Mollet in March 1951 (especially as both belonged to Auriol's own party) and
by the massacre of five successive candidates in May and June 1953. 8 To avoid
such incidents the device of missions d* information was developed: the Presi-
dent commissioned a political leader to investigate on his behalf without
either man's reputation being formally engaged. Until AurioFs last year only
one prospective premier, Bidault in October 1949, accepted nomination with-
out any preliminary inquiry at all. About half the candidates undertook
informal missions for the President, and so did three men who were not can-
didates, Robert Lecourt and Andre Marie in September 1948, and Guy
Mollet in July 1950. But this practice met growing criticism from both Right
and extreme Left, and when Mollet was chosen the Radicals refused to discuss
the situation with anyone but a premier-designate. Missions d' information
7. Arae, pp. 53-4.
8. In 1949 Auriol talked of resigning if Bidault, like Mayer and Moch, failed to form a govern-
ment: Fauvet in Monde, 26 October 1949. On 1947 see Sauvageot, no. 195, pp. 247-8; on 1953,
Fauvet, IVe, p. 240.
PARTIES AND COALITIONS: (3) CRISIS AS AN INSTITUTION 417
were less used thereafter, but Rene Pleven and Robert Schuman undertook
them for Coty in 1957.9
The politicians had their own tactical problems which were the obverse of
the President's. An opposition leader might refuse an offer of the premiership
at once, to emphasize his party's detachment from the men in power and to
avoid the humiliation of failure. Alternatively he might welcome it - without
taking it seriously - because it gave him a chance to prepare the way for a
genuine effort later, an opportunity to discredit rival parties for their obstruc-
tiveness, a platform to put forward an attractive election programme, or even
(to the Gaullists in 1953) a certificate of republican respectability. Within the
majority parties, too, different leaders might take different views. Prudent and
senior men often preferred not to stand and fail - or succeed, if the new
ministry was likely to face very unpopular decisions. Between 1949 and 1953
Bidault and Pleven each declined five separate approaches. Quite frequently a
leader would reject an offer early in a crisis, but accept a few days later, when
the situation had evolved. (But these calculations might go awry, for the
* snow-plough ', called in to clear the way for others, sometimes - like Pinay in
1952 - went ahead and made the journey itself.) Similarly an experienced
politician, looking ahead, might decide that the future seemed more propitious
than the present and bide his time till the next crisis. In January 1952 it was
known that the Socialists would not return to office at once but hoped that
they might do so later, so the Radical caciques chose to wait (in vain) for the
chance of a relatively comfortable spell in office. Then the President would
send for a rising young man with his way to make, like Edgar Faure, or for an
older leader who after earlier failures dared not refuse a last chance, like Ren6
Mayer a year later.
If the shift of policy required to reassemble a majority was expected to be a
minor one evoking little friction, a member of the old cabinet was often asked
to form the new one, in which he would reserve a place of high dignity for his
recent chief. But if relations within the old majority were too strained, the
President was more likely to summon a weighty personage who had been out
of office long enough for his past mistakes to be overshadowed by the current
controversies from which he had prudently kept detached. Whenever an
attempt was made to win over a section of the loyal opposition there were
always majority leaders who, against that very day, had carefully cultivated
friendly relations with the party to be approached. Georges Bidault was, of all
leaders of the Centre, the most acceptable to RPF. Antoine Pinay was adept
at winning conservatives away from their party allegiance. Pierre Mendes-
France appealed to progressives and to admirers of strong leadership.
Christian Pineau was MRP's favourite left-winger in 1955. SFIO could be
tempted by a sympathetic Radical: Queuille (or Pleven) in the first Parliament,
Mendes-France in the second, Bourges-Maunoury, in very different circum-
stances, in the third.
Normally, therefore, a politician was made * available' by his standing with
9. AP 1957, pp. 54, 102 ; the same criticisms were heard. For missions see Arn6, p. 48 ; Georgel,
i. 94-5 ; Dansette, Presidents, pp. 269 and 324 ; Williams, p. 186n. On Auriol and Coty see above,
pp. 201, 202. Pleven's mission made him 'available' for the next crisis: Fauvet, IV6, p. 332.
418 THE SYSTEM
other parties rather than with his own: for he could almost always count on
the votes (if not necessarily the goodwill) of members of his own group.10 But
at times a majority party had to be made to swallow distasteful medicine,
which was best prescribed by a doctor in whom the sufferers had confidence.
In March 1951 Queuille was chosen to persuade his Radical friends to give
way over electoral reform, and in January 1953 Bidault, then still a hero to
his party, was the natural first choice to remove Robert Schuman from the
Quai d'Orsay.
Here, too, the most valuable qualities were those of the conciliator. When a
cabinet broke up through internal dissension, as so many did before 1951, the
minister who had tried hardest to hold it together was often invited to lead its
successor. A chance to solve a crisis might thus be a reward for efforts to avert
it, as with Andr<§ Marie in 1948 and Jules Moch in 1949, or to settle a previous
crisis, as with Guy Moflet in 1951. Moderation, caution and acceptability
were the qualities that brought success, and the bold, challenging, uncom-
fortable leader could rarely hope to secure even a precarious and fleeting grip
on power. His opportunity came only when the situation was not merely
desperate, but manifestly seen to be desperate by the President, the rival
caciques and the ordinary deputies alike.11
2. THE PLAYERS AND THE MOVES
Once chosen, the premier-designate assumed the immediate responsibility for
solving the crisis. He too undertook the 'usual consultations', adding to his
list of visitors the specialists on the major problem of the day - treasury and
bank officials if it were financial, generals if it were military, leaders of the par-
liamentary committees in any event. He was subjected to pressures which
grew stronger as the crisis approached solution.12 Men sought office for them-
selves or their friends; parties struggled to preserve or extend their influence.
An interest-group which had fought the last government would naturally
work for a friendlier successor; but a group which had no responsibility for
the crisis was not debarred from exploiting it, whether its objective was
dearer cider or no European army.
Like an American presidential candidate, the nominee had to try not to tie
his own hands if he won by the promises made to secure the victory. Jobs had
to be allotted to the majority parties in rough proportion to their numbers
(Laniel adjusted them to favourable votes), and while the deputies' expectation
of office might help a candidate for the premiership, their disappointment
with his choice was sure to do him harm.13 The individualist parties had
always thought of political rewards in terms of spoils, and their diverse fac-
tions were hard to woo by other means ; so governments formed by Radical
and Conservative premiers averaged 34 members to 28 in MRP or Socialist-
led ministries and 23 in General de Gaulle's. But as majorities grew harder to
10. Exceptionally, in May 1958, MRP openly blocked Georges Bidault. But in 1953 even
Mendes-France's bitterest Radical enemies voted for him (though ardently urging others not to :
Fauvet, IVe, pp. 238-9; cf. above, p. 399 n.).
11. See below, p. 422. On conciliators in the Third Republic see Soulier, pp. 484-5, 488, 494.
12. Arn6, pp. 96-8. See below, p. 432.
13. See above, p. 228 and n.
PARTIES AND COALITIONS: (3) CRISIS AS AN INSTITUTION 419
find ministries became steadily larger, averaging 27 in the Constituent Assem-
blies, 28^ in the first National Assembly, 33 in the second and 35 in the third.14
A prospective premier found that since his party ties and personal reputa-
tion reassured one section of the potential majority, his policy had to calm the
doubts of the others : consequently in October 1949 the social programme of
Rene Mayer, a conservative Radical, was more progressive than that of Jules
Moch of SFIO. But any attempt to appease one group of waverers would
probably provoke an equal and opposite reaction on the far wing of the
majority, as Schuman found in September 1948 and Queuille in July 1950. The
easy way out was to evade the awkward problem. Pleven appointed an
investigating committee on the Catholic schools question;15 this prevented it
arising throughout his first cabinet, though he returned to office in time to be
plagued by it a year later. Rene Mayer in January 1953 tried by ingenious
equivocation to convince MRP that he favoured the European army and the
Gaullists that he did not.
Shifts and evasions might discredit those who used them, but a bold move
was unlikely to meet with success, at least at the start of a crisis. In the summer
of 1953 Reynaud, Mendes-France and Bidault all flatly refused to negotiate
with the parties.16 After they had failed, Andre Marie reverted to cautious
conciliation rather than harsh instransigence, appealed to tried experience
instead of youthful vigour, and evaded commitments as blatantly as his
predecessors had welcomed them: the performance shamed the deputies into
giving him the lowest vote of all, and in the end success went to Joseph
Laniel, whose haughty attitude proved the unexpected prelude to a year of
immobilisme ending at Dien-Bien-Phu. By then the Assembly was so hungry
for leadership that it chose Mendes-France. Yet even he could not avoid
concessions. He made no promises to the parties, chose his own ministers,
ignored the customary dosage - but appointed 'Europeans' and 'anti-
Europeans' in equal numbers to office; and having proclaimed a year before
that no self-respecting government could fail to stake its existence on the
ED C treaty, he proceeded to resort to cabinet neutrality on the question like
any Pleven or Queuille.
By allowing the European army to be defeated, Mendes-France earned the
bitter hostility of MRP; by agreeing to German rearmament through
NATO instead, he made enemies of the Communists. These two groups, sup-
porters of his liberal policy in North Africa, joined hands with its opponents
among the Conservatives and right-wing Radicals to overthrow him on it in
February 1955. His fall led to a typical ministerial crisis.17 Its course was
14. My calculations from Arn6, p. 101 ; before 1951 no ministry had more than 35 members,
later over half did. By party: Campbell, no. 41, p. 33. In 1945-57, 324 appointments were given
to 78 MRP or SFIO members, but 335 were shared between 119 Radicals, Conservatives and
RS : my calculations from Dogan and Campbell, no. 72, p. 327. Spoils cf. pp. 400, 438.
15. A device also used in the Fifth Republic (and in Britain).
16. The Assembly did not maintain the tone of the candidates; questions to Mendes-France,
for instance, came from deputies representing the neglected overseas departments and the pros-
perous but greedy cider lobby. Laniel refused to answer questions (a precedent cited and followed
by de Gaulle in June 1958). JO 3 and 4 June 1953, pp. 2913, 2958.
17. Except that his government had included much of the normal opposition in its majority,
while most of the normal majority opposed it.
420 THE SYSTEM
decided by MRP which, having served in three cabinets of the Right and
opposed one of the Left, was now determined to repudiate the welcoming
conservative embrace and reaffirm its allegiance to the cause of progress.
President Coty's first nominee was Antoine Pinay, since LanieFs fall the
recognized leader of the Conservatives, the strongest section of the loyal
opposition and indeed of the Assembly. He had been out of office for two
years and three ministries. His popularity with the Right in Parliament and
the country made him the best man to persuade his followers to accept inevit-
able concessions in North Africa, and later he did so - with little difficulty
over Tunisia and much over Morocco. While he could count on the Right,
he needed reinforcement on the Left, and therefore presented a very pro-
gressive economic, social and colonial programme. But for MRP to support
a Conservative would have printed even deeper the right-wing brand they
were determined to erase; and, faced with their firm opposition, Pinay
withdrew without seriously trying to form a cabinet.
The crisis thus became the responsibility of MRP, who had both fought
Mendes-France and checked Pinay. Neither the Radicals nor the Conserva-
tives, therefore, had reason to wish them well; nor had either the Socialist
supporters of Mendes-France or the 'anti-European' Gaullists. So the pros-
pect for an MRP candidate was poor, and the choice consequently fell on a
newcomer to the front rank, Pierre Pflimlin. His special qualification was his
responsible attitude over German rearmament; when nearly all the MRP
leaders vented their rancour at the defeat of EDC by voting against the
treaties which replaced it, and even Robert Schuman abstained for the sake of
party unity, Pflimlin had become the leading supporter of the agreements in the
party. This was enough to win him the nomination, but not the premiership.
Radical friends of Mendes-France did not intend MRP to profit from its
opposition to their leader; and the Radical minority opposed to him claimed
a disproportionate share of cabinet posts in order to strengthen their influence.
So Pflimlin, too, abandoned his task.
The third man came from SFIO. Christian Pineau, whose parliamentary
prestige was rising, had strongly advocated the European army. Among those
who had supported Mendes-France, he had the best chance of winning over
MRP - overjoyed to proclaim its left-wing loyalties by voting for a Socialist.
But few others wished to abet what they saw as MRP's manoeuvre to escape
the consequence of its past actions, and even Socialists showed little en-
thusiasm for their champion's candidature. Pineau's ministerial appoint-
ments did him harm, driving even the Overseas Independents into opposition.
His speech to the Assembly sounded like a bid for votes in the country
rather than in Parliament (and before long the Socialist election campaign
was making copious reference to his proposals). So the Assembly defeated
him.
As Conservatives, MRP and SFIO had all tried and failed, it was the
Radicals' turn. Their obvious candidate was Edgar Faure, an arch-conciliator
who had served as minister of finance under both the Conservative Laniel and
the 'New Dealer* Mendes-France. As a man with friends in all parties he was
eminently 'available'; as a colleague who had shared responsibility for
PARTIES AND COALITIONS: (3) CRISIS AS AN INSTITUTION 421
Mendesist policies, he would blunt his late leader's formidable attack; and as
an astute politician he turned into an asset the cabinet-making problem which
had damaged his predecessors, giving the foreign ministry to Pinay and
the finance ministry to Pffimlin - but withholding until after the vote the
junior posts to which wavering deputies might still aspire.18
These proceedings took four nominees and eighteen days to arrive at an
obvious outcome, widely canvassed before the crisis began. But the delay was
necessary, for the solution of a crisis always took time. At first the parties bar-
gained hard over the distribution of offices and the direction of policy. But
their intransigence diminished as the crisis went on : for, if it was usually un-
popular to overthrow a government, it was almost always thought dis-
creditable to prevent one being formed. So the mere passage of time brought
pressure on a party which was being 'difficult' because it feared that con-
cessions might cost it votes. When public exasperation mounted so high that
stubbornness would forfeit more support than conciliation, the crisis was ripe
for solution.
Before Edgar Faure could emerge in February 1955, his rivals had to be
chastened. The Conservatives had to be shown that they could not themselves
prevail, and must accept a premier more liberal than they would have liked.
MRP had to face its extreme unpopularity and moderate its terms. The
operation Pineau, long canvassed in the lobbies, was needed to prove to its
advocates that a pro-European combination of the Left did not have the votes.
Wearing down resistance and 'clearing off the mortgage' were necessary
preliminaries to a solution, and in twelve of the Fourth Republic's eighteen
elections of a premier, three candidates had to be discarded before a winner
emerged.19
These prolonged negotiations oifered every opportunity for manoeuvres by
parties or pressure-groups to obscure and shift the responsibility for their
actions. In July 1950, Georges Bidault decided not to stand for election
because S F I O was plainly against him ; a successor was picked, for whom the
Socialists at once virtuously announced that they would of course vote - as
for any other republican candidate who might be proposed. In June 1957,
when Pierre Pflimlin was a candidate, SFIO put forward impossible con-
ditions for its support; when Bourges-Maunoury was nominated instead, the
conditions were forgotten. The polite gesture was popular only when it cost
nothing (though occasionally by miscalculation it returned a Pinay, who
won such support in the country that his many enemies preferred not to risk
the odium of removing him from office).20
The President's craft therefore lay in his timing. If he put forward his
favourite's name too soon, the candidate would fail and his own prestige
might suffer. But if he misjudged the proper moment and waited too long, a
nominee might succeed who had been expected - or intended - to fail. He
could not hurry, for skimped bargaining meant a precarious settlement, and
18. Gossip said he had promised sixty-two. Cf. below, p. 432.
19. List in Arn6, pp. 307-10. Of 23 premiers elected in 1947-58, 3 were chosen after an election ;
12 settled a crisis; 3 lasted less than six weeks, and so merely interrupted one; 4 were 'stillborn'
counted in the text as unsuccessful candidates) : the last was de Gaulle. Cf. n. 2.
(20. SFIO : AP 1950, p. 128, 1957, pp. 58-60. Pinay: above, p. 228.
422 THE SYSTEM
cabinets put together within two weeks generally fell apart within six.21 He had
to try to avoid that acute temptation in a long crisis, a patched-up truce which
decided none of the problems at stake. For cabinets where advocates of con-
tradictory policies sat side by side either broke up as soon as a choice had to
be made, like Marie's in 1948, or survived by postponing decisions, like
Mayer's and LaniePs in 1953-54. Such impotent combinations did even more
harm to the political system than prolonged crises.
But here the President of the Republic could play a decisive if only a
negative role. Though he could not impose a candidate he could, and in the
Third Republic often did, systematically exclude the strong (or dangerous)
leader from power. Mendes-France had his opportunities in 1953 and 1954
only because Vincent Auriol and Ren6 Coty so chose. He was denied a third
in 1956 because Coty sent for the other leader of the Republican Front, Guy
Mollet (who was the chief of its largest party; more acceptable to the MRP
waverers without whose votes the new ministry would depend on Com-
munist support; and less hated by the Algerian settlers and their friends in
Parliament). Again, in 1957 and 1958 Coty gave no nomination to the rising
leader of the Left opposition, Francois Mitterrand, for fear of the probable
settler and army reaction in North Africa.22 The strong leader was dependent
for an opening on the President's goodwill and judgment (or perhaps mis-
judgment); and it was the President's task to choose when to confront
politicians and parties ~ and voters - with the consequences of their own
decisions and policies. In a particular crisis he had to find the man and the
moment for a solution; in a whole term of office, to pick the crisis at which a
necessary psychological shock could most effectively be administered to Par-
liament and the country - as Auriol did in May and June 1953, and Coty had
planned to do, even before the riots, in May 1958.23
3. LOSSES AND GAINS
These ministerial crises fulfilled an essential function. Given the system, they
were not the futile aberrations they were generally supposed to be (by French-
men even more than foreigners), but met a need : 'to use new combinations of
men, and the restlessness which a vacuum of power creates, to restore a new
inspiration to the government of the Republic . . ,'24 Naturally some politicians
saw - or made - in them opportunities to advance their careers. But in doing
so they had to attach their fortunes to a problem of public policy, and might
even contribute to its solution.
None the less the drawbacks were grave. The game of making and un-
making cabinets so absorbed and fascinated the players that sometimes they
forgot the outside world altogether. In 1949 the King of Cambodia spent three
21. From 1948 the only exceptions were the cabinets of Pinay and Mendes-France, who won
by surprise and then enlisted public opinion to overawe the deputies, and Mollet, the first premier
after an election. On the length of crises see Arn6, pp. 199-200, 208, 303, 305-10 ; Georgel i 105
107; above, p. 229, and Appendix n. ' ' . '
22. But the press suggestions that he might were perhaps intended to produce the army
reactions that deterred him : see Arn6, p. 56n. Mollet : Fauvet, IVe, p. 308.
23. See above, pp. 40, 55. For some presidential misjudgements see Fauvet, IVe pp 164 249
24. Isorni, Silence, p. 99. Cf. Arne, pp. 302-4, 320-4; Georgel, i. 131-8.
PARTIES AND COALITIONS: (3) CRISIS AS AN INSTITUTION 423
weeks in France waiting for a government with which to negotiate a treaty.
In December 1951 the Assembly voted the expenditure for 1952, then over-
threw two cabinets on their proposals for meeting it - and the deficit mounted
daily as the crisis continued. In 1957 a parliamentary delegation was in Peru
when Mollet fell, and another in Japan when his successor was defeated; every
deputy at once flew home, leaving the senators to represent France. Edgar
Faure deplored the 'psychological perversion which makes us live here in a
pre-crisis atmosphere . . . of perpetual tension'.25
For the fact of instability created an expectation of instability. ' In the houses
of Parliament and in the local parties the frequent crises keep hope and
excitement alive.' The prospect of office was not the only stimulus to specula-
tion on the succession. A parliamentarian might hope to sell his ideas and
policies, as well as his services, to an incoming premier. A high civil servant,
discontented with his political master, could play for time until the next
arrived. A pressure-group, offended by the decision of a minister or cabinet,
had only to await - or provoke - the next crisis and then use its influence on
marginal deputies to demand better treatment. 'Parties, groups and members
set conditions for voting investiture or confidence. Many decisions take root
at these times. Instability weakens the administration's power of resistance . . .
the pressure-group leaders are themselves subject to their members' vote.
What one minister has refused the next may grant. So they must ceaselessly
renew the attack . . ,'26 The alcohol interest recouped under Laniel what it had
lost under Mayer, and many of Mendes-France's measures against it were
reversed under Faure. Like the North African settlers, the trade unions and
the peasant organizations, the alcohol lobby had a hand in causing several
crises (although the parties might in any case have provoked some of them of
their own accord).27
Ministers were always tempted to postpone necessary but unpopular
decisions of which they could not hope to reap the fruits - and then 'freely
to discourse on how they would have managed the situation they bequeathed
to their successors'. The fact of instability might enable them to escape from
their rasher promises: and the prospect of it encourage them to make more.28
Parties were unwilling to offend a rival or an interest whose support they
might need in the next crisis, and had no incentive to exchange the major
mutual concessions which alone could have turned a temporary alliance into a
lasting majority. When the loyal opposition found its road to office (if not
power) through the ministerial crisis rather than the general election, it had no
need to mobilize the support or indignation of public opinion outside.29
25 JO 23 February 1958, p. 923. M. Goguel drew my attention to the 1957 incidents.
26! Delouvrier, Crtse, pp. 86-7 (from start of paragraph). Cf. Huron, p. 132 ^
27. Settlers: against Mendes-France, Bourges-Maunoury, Gaillard and Pflimhn. Unions.
Marie Queuille (1949), Pleven (1952). Peasants: Mayer, Mollet (both in 1951, when he was not
elected premier, and in 1957), and Bourges-Maunoury. Alcohol: Pinay, Mayer and Mend<bs-
it to Dr. D. B. Goldey and the next point to Dr. M. Hamson. On promises, cf. Buron, p. 209.
29. Brindillac, no. 29, pp. 55-7.
424 THE SYSTEM
Responsibility was diffused over men and parties which were all partly in
power and partly out, never holding it long enough or clearly enough for any
credit to accrue to them from a success or for any blame to be fastened on
them for a failure. 'When the general election comes the voter finds that for
five years the government has consisted of everybody and nobody.'30
As no one could be judged on their record over a period, a general election
was not an occasion for the voter to reward or punish his rulers. Between
elections, therefore, ministers, majorities and oppositions alike could behave
irresponsibly without risking too serious a penalty. But the parliamentarians
took pains to reduce the risk still further by minimizing the intervention of
public opinion in their affairs, and thereby bought immunity for personal or
party misdeeds at the cost of further weakening the hold of the regime on the
citizens.
Now and then a crisis broke on an indifferent country solely because of a
domestic dispute in the 'house without windows*. Sometimes one party
would manoeuvre another into upsetting a government which both were
determined to destroy: so the Radicals managed to delay their attack on
Pinay until after family allowances appeared on the Assembly's agenda -
when MRP had to take the responsibility of removing him. Rebellious
deputies whose motives were particularly discreditable tried to find a lofty
pretext: Mendes-France complained of opponents who talked North Africa
while voting alcohol.31 But at least as frequently the politicians chose to over-
throw a cabinet on a relatively trivial matter, for fear that an open clash on a
major problem of policy might make it harder than ever to reunite a majority
behind the next government. When tension was high a party might be forced
to take that risk in order to retain its support in the country, as the Socialists
were in 1948 and 1949. But thereafter the crucial disputes were kept in the
background, and no government was overthrown on German rearmament, or
on Indo-China till after Dien-Bien-Phu. Indeed the emergence of North
African problems into the forefront in the later years was a sign that some
players were no longer observing the rules of a game in which the stakes had
become alarmingly high. The decisive leader who tried to cut through the
tangle, impose unwelcome choices, expose clear responsibilities and appeal to
public opinion found his one opportunity in such desperate circumstances.
But he also committed the supreme affront to his sovereign parliamentary
colleagues.32
These habits, devices and conventions had a common consequence: le
peuple absent?* Sometimes because they were behaving irresponsibly and
knew it, but equally when they felt a deep responsibility not to widen the
divisions among Frenchmen, the parliamentarians tried to avoid a clear-cut
choice of men or measures being presented to the voter. He did not under-
stand the politicians' game because they were careful he should not. He resented
his inability to participate in the decisions of the authorities - and by voting
30. Grosser, p. 51. Cf. Edgar Faure, JO 2 November 1955, p. 5490. For the parties' efforts
to shift the blame for North African repression see Williams, no. 168, p. 167. Cf. below, p. 434.
31. JO 3 December 1954, p. 5575. 32. See below, p. 440.
33. Duverger, Demain, pp. 21-6.
PARTIES AND COALITIONS: (3) CRISIS AS AN INSTITUTION 425
Communist or Poujadist ensured that the authorities would do their best to
keep him from participating. He condemned the regime for its failures (or
successes) of policy but most of all for its failure of style. At each crisis the
newsreels showed the procession of politicians on the filysee steps, and the
laughter in the cinemas became increasingly tinged with exasperation. A
ministry of information film, showing them all in quick succession, was
among the most effective devices of Gaullist propaganda for the referendum
on the new constitution in 1958.
Yet the people were present more than they realized. Outside forces, ignored
or underestimated by the parliamentarians, still set limits to their freedom of
action. The deputies, having surprised themselves by electing Pinay and
Mendes-France, did not dare to remove them for several months. The tacti-
cians who upset a precarious equilibrium in the hope of improving their
position often found instead that they had weakened it. From 1947 to 1951
the Socialists normally provoked crises - but the Right profited from them.
In 1952 MRP abandoned Pinay - and Robert Schuman had to leave the
foreign office. In 1955 the North African settlers' leaders overthrew Mendes-
France for his liberal policies in Tunisia - and found that his successor
extended them to Morocco. In 1958 the Algerian diehards brought down
Gaillard - and exposed their own weakness in Parliament, which they could
redress only by instigating military sedition across the Mediterranean. For all
its faults, the System did not enable the inhabitants of the 'house without
windows' to defy any real movement of opinion outside.
Adjustments in the political balance occur - or rather show themselves -
more frequently in multi-party systems than in two-party politics. But there
too alignments and public moods change, and British by-elections or Ameri-
can mid-term elections affect the men in power. Administrations do not resign,
but they do change course to respond to new directions of the wind, as Attlee's
Labour government found prudent in 1947, Eisenhower's Republicans in
1955, Macmillan's Conservatives in 1962. Despite its reputation the French
Assembly was highly sensitive to such movements in the electorate. But in
Paris a new policy was less likely than in London or Washington to be earned
out by exactly the men responsible for the old one.
Many crises facilitated or followed from such changes of public mood,
reflected in shifts in the composition of the majority. Parties moving from
opposition to office progressed by stages; the Gaullists were warned in January
1953 that 'it's a long way from purgatory to paradise'. A couple of minor
offices were bestowed on the dissidents who had left them nine months earlier
to support Pinay, while the main body began to work its passage by voting
for Mayer and supporting his government. After the next crisis both wings
were represented in the cabinet. Conversely a declining party yielded ground
gradually, like SFIO in the first Parliament or MRP in the second.
Other crises were the precise equivalent of a British government reshuffle,
except that the prime minister himself changed. They gave an opportunity to
bring in new blood, remove unsuccessful ministers, and create an impression
34. See above, p. 405,
426 THE SYSTEM
(or illusion) of fresh minds at work.35 When a British or American cabinet
minister becomes vulnerable, critics concentrate their assault against the
individual; in France they tried to use him to bring the whole government
down. But the consequences of their success were not very different, for in
most crises the turnover of personnel was small: about half the old ministers
kept the same places, half the rest moved to new posts and a quarter went out
of office. And of the 23 premiers elected under the Fourth Republic, 16 had
belonged to the cabinet which preceded their own and 12 joined the one which
followed it.36 This practice mitigated some consequences of ministerial
instability but aggravated others. Continuity was greater than it looked but
solidarity less, since a minister might further his own career by well-timed
disloyalty to his chief, and responsibility was hard to fasten on men who were
generally in office but frequently exchanged functions.
Conducting in the open manoeuvres which elsewhere are concealed if not
always prevented, the System gave wide scope for easy irony against the
politician who accepted office (for his greed and impatience) or refused it (for
his 'flight from responsibility') or survived in it (for his resigned conviction
that delay would dispose of most troublesome problems).37 It permitted
Englishmen or Americans whose decision-making process is paralysed for
half a year in every four to view with complacent alarm the interruption of
government from which France suffered during one month in every eight. Yet
the crisis was also a decision-making device, *a method of government by
shock treatment'.38
On a grave problem, leaders or parties who felt strongly - or thought their
voters felt strongly - might resist all attempts at decision or concession. Then
the sacrifice of a cabinet might be the price of a solution. Responsibility, so
hard to fix in a multi-party system, could at last be brought home to the
recalcitrant party. The blame for governmental instability was attached to
the party leaders, and the cost of insisting on their policies made plain to
their voters, so that reasons of electoral prudence were brought into the
scales to weigh against intransigence. Obliged to face the facts they hoped
to dodge, politicians repeatedly conceded to the new premier the very
demands on which they had overthrown his predecessor: electoral reform to
Queuille in 1951, special powers to Laniel in 1953, Tunisian autonomy to
Faure in 1 955, higher taxes to Bourges-Maunoury in 1957, an Algerian reform
bill to Gaillard in 1958 - and appeasement of Bourguiba to de Gaulle later
that summer. All too frequently a year with no crisis meant a year with no
policy, and the continued presence of a group of ministers distracted attention
from the absence of a government.
Every crisis did not produce a political decision. A very difficult problem
might bedevil and finally terminate the life of several cabinets. A financial
35. This was especially necessary in France because of the strain on the health of ministers,
particularly the premier: Isorni, Silence,?. 98; Siegfried, De la IHe, p. 239; Arne", pp. 112n.,
246; P. Courant, JO 11 March 1958, p. 1523; Andrews, no. 3, p. 497; Edgar Faure, quoted
Fauvet, IV*, p. 191.
36. See Arne", p. 94; Georgel, i, 135-7, cf. 273n.; and above, p. 206.
37. As throughout Leites, On the Game of Politics in France.
38. Edgar Faure in Monde, 27 March 1953. Cf. Sinus (Hubert Beuve-M6ry) in ibid., 30 April
1958; Fauvet, Cockpit, pp. 39-40, Dechiree, p. 34; Arne", pp. 302-4 and n. ; above, p. 414,
PARTIES AND COALITIONS: (3) CRISIS AS AN INSTITUTION 427
policy to satisfy both Socialists and Conservatives proved as hard to find in the
first and third Assemblies of the Fourth Republic as it would have been in the
House of Commons if there, too, both parties had been needed to form any
majority. In 1948 the impossibility of a frankly Conservative policy was shown
by Marie's downfall, and of a Socialist one by Schuman's defeat a week later;
the crises of 1949 and 1950 merely indicated that subsequent governments had
to keep to the same narrow and treacherous path. In 1957 a long autumn
crisis ended in an equally precarious equilibrium, soon upset by the more
desperate problems of North Africa. When a major decision was needed,
instead of a premier tackling a question, the question might dictate the choice
of a premier - as defeat in Indo-China brought Mendes-France to power in
1954.39
Governmental instability was not an ideal device for taking major decisions
(though the record of the 1950's does not suggest that Britain or the United
States have found the best mechanism either). The French method detached
political choices too far from public opinion, and encouraged decision-makers
to seek power while avoiding responsibility. When parliamentary govern-
ment was in danger parties made sacrifices to keep cabinets in being, but their
ability to compromise was limited by fear of losing support to the enemies of
the regime. When it was safe, the risks of a crisis were less and parties could
give freer reign to their appetites, electoral interests, and ideological impera-
tives. But even at best the range of political opinions required to support a
ministry was so great that there were always wide and genuine differences of
view. If the governmental parties did not succeed in neutralizing one another's
pressures, cabinets lost office and politicians generally lost reputation; if they
did, choices were deferred until external events imposed a decision. Either the
ministerialists were many and deadlocked by disagreement, or they were
agreed but too few to win. Three months before the regime collapsed a dis-
illusioned minister remarked sadly that for forty years the opposition had had
a majority in Parliament. 'The majority is a de facto provisional association
with no formal basis, constituted out of weariness after a long interregnum by
the temporary aggregation, without the slightest commitment, of the ballot-
papers of deputies on their way into opposition.'40
39. Moraz£, p. 152. Cf. Georgel, i. 131-2.
40. Robert Lecourt (MRP), JO 14 February 1958, p. 788 (and AP 1958, pp. 20-1).
P*
Chapter 30
THE MEN AND THE SYSTEM
An Assembly with the responsibility for choosing and sustaining a govern-
ment, yet with a vocation to check its actions and a deep suspicion of its
motives, was a novelty to observers from the English-speaking world. Like
American senators, French deputies belonged to an Institution.1 The Third
Republic guarded against the dangers of proletarian revolution or backward-
looking autocracy or plebiscites manipulated by a popular dictator by requir-
ing legitimate political action to be mediated through a sovereign Parliament:
an arrangement which naturally gave political and psychological satisfaction
to generations of parliamentarians. Six years after its downfall a Constituent
Assembly of new men from the Resistance, nearly all of whom condemned
and repudiated the pre-war regime, found the fears that had inspired it and the
habits it had created too strong for them. Their new system rapidly came to
resemble the old one.
The habits and the fears were both important. The obscure parliamentary
game, so suspected and disapproved by the voters, could flourish only in an
Assembly with no majority - and there was no majority because the voters
chose deputies to restrain and not to maintain a government. The members
were proud of their vocation to protect the citizen against the authorities - and
gratified by the frequent opportunities they enjoyed to humble the men in
power. Parliamentarians mistrusted mass pressure from without, having good
historical reason to do so - and disliking interference with their own freedom
of action. With authority fragmented, and responsibility diffused, neither the
deputy nor the party nor the political leader found it easy to use the parlia-
mentary system to pursue positive policies. But as the greatest of parliamen-
tary managers once boasted, 'An assembly has at least as many weaknesses as
qualities. It is most important to know how to use the weaknesses. '2
1. TYPES OF ACTIVITY
The outlook, temperament and interests of the members were as diverse in
Parliament as in any collection of a thousand people. Many of them never
tried to make a reputation. Nearly all overseas deputies concerned themselves
exclusively with the problems of their own territories, and most peasant mem-
bers were equally parochial. The mayor of a large city, whose task was absorb-
ing, time-consuming and almost wholly unpaid, might enter Parliament to
earn a living or gain influence with the remote administration in Paris on
whom his success so largely depended; once there, he was unlikely to find his
parliamentary work so satisfying as to supersede his municipal preoccupations.
Some politicians, especially those who had been active before the war, con-
centrated almost exclusively on building up an impregnable position by favours
1. Cf. W. S. White, Citadel: The Story of the U.S. Senate (New York, 1956).
2. Briand, quoted J. Kessel and G. Suarez, Le onze mai (1924), p. 42. 1 owe this quotation to
Dr. D. B. Goldey.
THE MEN AND THE SYSTEM 429
to constituents. This kind of activity was commonest among rural deputies but
it could be profitable in Paris. Many conscientious members toiled away use-
fully in silence - like M. Grimaud, the Alpine MRP member who undertook
the herculean task of redrafting the tangled rent laws.3
More prominent figures also used their energies in very diiferent ways, for
not all were absorbed in the struggle for office. There were zealots like the
devoted European Andre Philip, or the old-style 'priest-eating' anticlerical,
Maurice Deixonne. Some grands tenors among the lawyers regarded Parlia-
ment as a minor field of activity; other lawyers were politicians first, like the
brilliant 'outsiders', Pierre Cot on the far Left and Tixier-Vignancour on the
far Right, who specialized in disrupting the majority's cohesion and peace of
mind. Among the Radicals in particular there were local barons like Jean
Baylet or Andr6 Maroselli, who were potentates in their region and influential
in the party but little known elsewhere. Here and in the adjoining Conservative
thickets of the political jungle was the habitat of the parliamentary chameleons
like Bernard Lafay.4 Here too were concentrated the lobbyists, the parlia-
mentary defenders of a particular pressure-group such as Henri Borgeaud,
leader of the Algerian colons, Marcel Anthonioz of the hotel and bar trade,
Pierre Andr6 who spoke for the steehnasters, and Andr6 Liautey, the general
secretary of the union of bouilleurs de cru.
Among those who rose above their fellows three types stood out: those who
concentrated on specialist work on their favourite questions in committee;
those who sought office whenever their party was in power (and for some that
was almost always) ; and those who preferred attack to defence, demolition to
construction, or principle to place. Charles Barange on finance, Jacques
Isorni on legal matters, Senator Rene Coty on the constitution, Albert Lalle
on agriculture, Albert Gazier on social questions were among the men who
made their names as hard workers in committees on their own lines, either as
individual specialists or, in MRP or SFIO, as party spokesmen. RPF had
many distinguished generals, professors and diplomats who were recognized
authorities on their own subjects - and were often shocked by the humble
constituency services a deputy was expected to perform (one reason why their
reputations were so often higher outside Parliament than in it).5 Some of its
3. Overseas: Guillemin, no. 114, pp. 846-9, 876-7. Peasants: Dogan in Pay sans, pp. 217,
220-7. Mayors : Debr6, no. 67, pp. 25-8 ; Siegfried, De la IIIe, pp. 219, 244-5 ; Huron, pp. 95-7 ;
Isorni, Ainsi, pp. 38-40. Grimaud: ibid. Harrison, no. 123, on Frederic-Dupont, champion of
the Paris concierges (who once put down a parliamentary question because a constituent, owing
to her age, had not been made lavatory attendant at a national theatre: JO 19 February 1958,
p. 898), Bodin and Touchard, no. 21, pp. 282-3 on the electoral uses of this activity; also above,
p. 329fT. On Mendes-France as mayor see Werth, Strange History, pp. 314-6; on the deputy's
local role, Buron, pp. 23-8, 34, 75-7, 91, 139.
4. He had been a Popular Front supporter before the war, worked with a Communist minister
(Francois Billoux) in 1945, became a Radical municipal councillor in Paris, joined RPF and
quickly left it, was both a Radical deputy and vice-president of APLE, voted for Mendes-France,
then became RGR, and finally Republican Centre with Conservative support. In 1958 he pro-
claimed himself France's first Gaullist, for he had been devoted to the General's father who taught
him at school. In 1961 he accused President de Gaulle of reducing France to anarchy: 'There is
no excuse for his failure and no remedy for his obstinacy' : Monde, 10 October 1961. Cf. Elections
Abroad, p. 53. . ..
5. Besides jobs, licences and decorations (above, pp. 340, 408), constituents sought subsidies
for local authority projects, answers to political and pressure-group demands and even shopping
[over
430 THE SYSTEM
front-rank leaders always rejected the temptations of the System; Jacques
Soustelle was a deadly destroyer of ministries, while Michel Debre failed to
match his reputation only because he sat in the wrong house. The Radicals,
on the other hand, attracted both the bright young gladiators like Felix
Gaillard or Maurice Bourges-Maunoury, who made their names by attacking
successive cabinets until the day they were invited to join one, and the
respected elder statesmen without whom no ministry seemed complete.
The fifty or so ministrables who were serious candidates for the highest
offices had normally to come from a party near the centre of gravity of the
majority, and to be personally acceptable to members of other political
groups. Some were elder statesmen surviving from the last regime: Blum,
Ramadier, Queuille. A few owed their power to the loyalty of a strong party
whose support was indispensable to a majority: Georges Bidault in the early
years, Guy Mollet and Antoine Pinay in the later. (The mere party manager
without a national reputation, like Roger Duchet or Leon Martinaud-Deplat,
was unlikely to reach the very top though he might wield great influence
behind the scenes.) Many ministrables were skilful specialists at reconciling
opposites, among them Ren6 Pleven of U D S R, Andre Marie the old Radical,
and Jacques Chaban-Delmas the Radical in Gaullist clothing. Others, like
Jules Moch or Rene Mayer, had a 'no nonsense' reputation.
Individuals sometimes changed roles. The whole aim of the ' gladiator ' was
to graduate quickly into a ministrable. A specialist minister like Robert
Lacoste of SFIO (industry) or Pierre Pflimlin of MRP (agriculture), or a
local magnate like Gaston Defferre of Marseilles, could rise over the years to
the front rank. More rarely a leading ministrable like Robert Schuman or
Jules Moch would withdraw to the background as a foreign-affairs specialist,
or like Claudius Petit retire from the race for office to become a voice of
conscience, respected if rarely heeded. Francois Mitterrand, once a plain
ministrable of the Centre, became a spokesman of colonial reform and ended
as the potential leader of a Popular Front. Pierre Mendes-France was until
1950 the most distinguished financial technician in the Assembly; then by
establishing a new reputation as the intransigent Cassandra critic of successive
governments he made himself for a time the champion of all who demanded a
change of policy, like SFIO, of style, like the stern unbending Gaullists - or
indeed of men, for among both the rebellious pietaille (back-benchers) and the
leaders most hostile to the System he won sympathies denied him by minis-
trables of the same parties.6 But by the vigour of his attacks, and by giving the
dismaying impression that he meant every word of them, he cut himself off
from the parliamentary fraternity.
Those who accepted the rules of the System were bound together by a strong
club sense, in which political opponents recognized their common function of
absorbing and moderating the clash of hostile forces in the country. The
services for their wives : Muselier, p. 143. For a Gaullist's indignant reaction see Noel, pp. 115-18;
cf. above, p. 329, and Sir P. J. Grigg, Prejudice and Judgment (1948), for the similar view of a
brilliant British administrator turned unsuccessful politician; contrast Huron, pp. 27-34.
6. See above, p. 399 and n.
THE MEN AND THE SYSTEM 431
bargaining politician flourished in this atmosphere, and the intransigent fighter
was a little suspect even to his own party colleagues. Members were willing to
strike but reluctant to wound, and really bitter criticism of another member of
the club was widely resented as bad form. Politicians of the System had seen
the consequences of unrestrained political passion too often in their country's
history, and felt the need to practise mutual self-restraint. They had learned
the lesson so well that at times mutual restraint seemed not far short of
reciprocal complicity.
Open enemies of the regime were kept out of the fraternity and prided them-
selves on having no part in its bargains and manoeuvres. Their opposition
could be a positive asset to a premier, actual or prospective, who would reject
their occasional overtures, as Mendes-France in 1954 and Pflimlin in 1958
refused proffered Communist votes, and would treat their normal enmity as
proof of his own virtue, as Guy Mollet in 1956 and 1957 stressed Communist
and Poujadist hostility to his leadership from the Centre. Yet time and good
behaviour might allay this ostracism, and parties did not remain long in the
wilderness unless they chose to; few did. Tainted Socialist and right-wing
votes, which governments incurred criticism for accepting before 1914,
became respectable between the wars. The Gaullists were feared as a threat to
the regime when they entered Parliament in force in 1951 ; within nine months
they had split and after two years they were in office. The Poujadists also defied
their leader's instructions after nine months ; a year later they supported Pinay
for the premiership. Even the Communists at times became tainted with
compromise, for motives not easily distinguished from those of the respectable
party leaders. While in the United States extreme groups cannot ^hope for
electoral success unless they come to terms with moderate opinion, in France
they found it was easy enough to enter Parliament - but that if they hoped for
office it was then necessary to work their passage to respectability.
Office itself could be as educative as the struggle for it. Men who came to
power with limited ideas and a narrow clientele sometimes learned from
experience and began to govern ; before long they were using their authority to
impose on their own following concessions to the general interest.7 Pinay, at
first a hero to small businessmen, was soon warning them against endangering
the policies they favoured by their short-sighted greed. A right-wing diehard
who was given responsibility for Tunisia and Morocco soon discovered the
need for liberal policies. With less happy results Socialist leaders learned in
February 1956 that the Algerian problem was much less simple than it had
seemed in the election campaign six weeks before.
These advantages of the system were more than offset by its growing draw-
backs At first, under tripartisme, disciplined parties discouraged political
individualism, and members with objectives beyond their own career and re-
election were willing to perform useful but inconspicuous service to their
cause There were complaints of the absence of striking personalities, and in
his valedictory article on 'the faceless Assembly' of 1946-51 Francis Maunac
even lamented that the scandals of those years had been so insignificant, and
7. Brindillac, no. 29, p. 56.
432 THE SYSTEM
hoped that future leaders would wage alongside the party struggle ca hidden
contest of private passions'.8 He was to get his wish.
As the individualist parties recovered and majorities became precarious, the
System again proved fertile soil for ambition, jealousy and intrigue. Once more
the Institution displayed both the assertive pride of the United States Con-
gress (uninhibited by any separation of powers) and the feverish excitement of
a party convention in permanent session. The 'hunt for portfolios' was
resumed with new zest as everyone again speculated on the fall of the govern-
ment. Edgar Faure, in a rare spell out of office, remarked on the resentment of
'back-benchers' against a minister of the same party who stayed in too long
and blocked the way for others. The Radicals, who had been eager to remove
Pinay as soon as others could be manoeuvred into taking the responsibility,
hampered his successor (Rene* Mayer, one of their own leaders) by demanding
and getting far more than their share of the spoils. In 1953 Conservatives who
followed Pinay feared that his chances of the premiership would be less with
Coty as President. In 1956 moderate Conservatives were keener to oust Mollet
than reactionary ones, for they were likelier to get office.9
In the individualist groups this hunger was expressed increasingly crudely.10
But while they contained the most active seekers after office, the disciplined
parties afforded better protection to any of their members who obtained it.
This was an important asset, for men and parties tried to deny office to their
enemies as well as to obtain it for themselves or their friends. Sometimes the
enmities were over policy. The Right overthrew Schuman for appointing a
left-wing minister of finance in September 1948, and the Left Queuille for
choosing a conservative cabinet two years later. In 1957 SFIO would not
serve with Soustelle because of his commitment to the Algerian settlers - or
Mitterrand with Lacoste, for the same reason. But political and personal
resentment might be hard to distinguish. In 1948 Ren6 Mayer refused to join a
government which included Jules Moch; in 1953 RPF tried to stop the ARS
leaders benefiting from their recent desertion; the Radicals vetoed Daniel
Mayer in October 1949 for breaking up Queuille's cabinet, and Andre"
Morice in April 1958 for his obstruction under Bourges-Maunoury and for
splitting their party in 1956. Power positions, too, might be at stake. In
February 1955 Mendes-France's Radical enemies (among whom were two
bosses from the Paris region, Bernard Lafay and J. P. David) demanded half
the jobs offered to the party so as to strengthen their influence. Having lost the
party battle they were expelled in December; before long Lafay and David
had ideologically indistinguishable but bitterly antagonistic organizations of
their own.11
8. Figaro, 24 April 1951. Cf. Priouret, Partis, pp. 81-3.
9. Faure: Monde, 27 May 1953. Radicals: AP 1953, p. 7; Georgel, i. 208. Pinay: Noel, p. 98.
Mollet: Monde, 18 and 22 December 1956. 'Permanent party convention' : T. White, The Making
of the President 1960 (1962), p. 189. Generally, see Noel, pp. 94-8; Buron, pp. 133-5 on ex-
ministers (also above, p. 206).
10. Faure in A. Stibio, Antoine Pinay (n.d., 71955), p. 107, and Arne", p. 97. Cf. above, pp.
p. 400, 418-19 ; below, p. 438 ; and for the next point, above, p. 406.
11. For Lafay's invasion of Frederic-Dupont's fief, see Bodin and Touchard, no. 21, p. 277;
AP 1957, p. 4. See also AP 1949, pp. 175, 178-9; 1953, p. 6; 1955, p. 17; 1957, pp. 60-1, 96;
1958, pp. 50-1 ; Georgel, i. 208-9, and Fauvet, IVe, pp. 154 (Mayer), 232n. (ARS).
THE MEN AND THE SYSTEM 433
Some feuds were exclusively personal. Joseph Laniel was defeated for the
Presidency thanks to Roger Duchet whom he had recently evicted from the
cabinet. The Radicals were said to have 'sentenced' the Conservative Jacques
Fourcade to five years without office for his lese-majeste in standing against
Herriot for the Presidency of the Assembly - and running him close. Harriot's
successor, Andre Le Troquer of SFIO, displayed in his 1957 inaugural his
resentment against Pierre Schneiter, who had committed the same offence
against himself; and in 1958 he pronounced unconstitutional the 'Algerian
charter' that Pleven as prospective premier had omitted to submit to him
before consulting the parties. CNIP, which had tolerated both Mendesist and
fascist deputies in its ranks, expelled its first member in 1961 on the insistence
of Fr£deric-Dupont, whom the victim had kept out of the chair of the defence
committee.12
This political climate, in which lofty sentiments often covered sordid
objectives, favoured a lush growth of political hypocrisy. Individual deputies
brought in demagogic bills, not to pass them but to quote them in their
election addresses. Opposition parties - RPF in the second Parliament and
CNIP in the third - imputed treason to any premier who accepted the Com-
munist votes with which his accusers cheerfully overthrew him.13 To weaken
the Gaullist challenge a Socialist President encouraged the creation of a
Conservative central organization, and a Radical premier induced business
to finance Vichyite candidates in the 1951 election. Edmond Barrachin, pro-
posing to amend standing orders to disallow very small groups in the Assembly,
asked why there should be fifteen of them when there were only six major
tendencies in the country : he should have known, having rebelled against de
Gaulle to form the ARS group six years before. Andre Morice, who led the
Radical revolt against Mendes-France's 'totalitarian' conception of a dis-
ciplined party with a policy, was soon deploring the indiscipline of all French
parties. Certain political chameleons voted for Mendes-France's Indo-
China settlement in 1954 and denounced it at the next election ; but U Express
in its Mendesist crusade for political decency was hardly more scrupulous
about the means it used to discredit the unrighteous.14
Irresponsibility flourished along with cynicism. Respectable MRP and
CNIP leaders like Maurice Schumann and Paul Reynaud, who knew that
rejection of the agreements rearming Germany would destroy France's
alliances, nevertheless voted against them because they blamed Mendes-
France for the defeat of ED C - on the open assumption that they would be
relieved of a distasteful responsibility by the premier's supporters, whom they
12 Duchet: ibid., pp. 241-3; Faucher, pp. 63-4. Fourcade: Faucher, p. 39. Le Troquer: JO
3 October 1957, p. 4487; AP 1958, p. 47; Fauvet, IV, p. 343n.; cf. above, p. 217. CNIP: cf.
above, pp. 151, 154. On the Assembly's hierarchical structure see Huron, p. 170.
13 Except when a conservative majority survived, as in 1955, with the help of these votes that
are found unhealthy and void when they are for and perfectly valid and undoubtedly patriotic
when they are against' : Edgar Faure, JO 2 November 1955 p 5490. Cf. Duverger's un wn ten
article of the constitution ' that Communist votes counted to defeat a premier but not to elect him .
Monde. 6-7 October 1957. On demagogic bills see above, p. 262. ;
14 Auriol: Wahl in Beer and Ulam, p. 280. Vichyites: Isorm, Ainsi, p. 9. Monce • JO 30
September 1957, p. 4451. Barrachin : JO 10 February 1958, p. 743. U Express : Grosser in tiectwrn
1956™p. 115, 126 ; De Tarr, p. 183 ; Williams, no. 168, p. 167. On the consequences of £] political
vocabulary unrelated to reality see Uvau, Partis polities et rfrhtts so^ales, pp. 135-62,
434 THE SYSTEM
were simultaneously accusing of collusion with the Communists. P. H. Teitgen
led the attack for the 'Europeans', and Gaston Palewski headed the Gaullist
opponents of any German rearmament; both then joined Edgar Faure's
cabinet which carried the agreements through the upper house, but thought
it unnecessary to explain their conversion in public.15 While domestic affairs
dominated politics, ministers who disapproved of government policy either
sacrificed their views to preserving the majority - or their careers - or else
fought for them from within to the great detriment of cabinet coherence.
Between Mendes-France's resignation over economic policy in 1945 and
Francois Mitterrand's over North Africa in 1953, the only minister to give up
office over a policy dispute when his party did not was Pierre Pflimlin, who
resigned in 1949 on the guaranteed price of sugar-beet. But the great crises
after 1953 brought more resignations. The 'Europeans' who left Mendes-
France's cabinet over EDC were followed under Mollet by Mendes-France
himself, over Algerian policy, and by Alain Savary on the arrest of Ben Bella.16
With few individual resignations and perpetual coalition governments,
responsibility could rarely be clearly assigned and authority was always
diffused. No leader or party could ever wield full power with its attendant
dangers and benefits ; but each had plenty of scope for manoeuvres to claim the
credit for success and avoid the blame for failure or unpopularity. The balance-
sheet submitted to the public's judgment was not that of a government enjoy-
ing power to act and time to await the results, but the blurred record of a
Parliament where everyone had been in power, but also in opposition.
2. CONCEPTIONS OF PURPOSE
Men and groups with no aim but office, or with unrealistic objectives that
practice never clearly showed to be impossible, could survive far longer when
they were not exposed to the glare of responsibility. The Fourth Republic
allowed diehards to fight battles long since out of date; it drove visionaries to
escape the constraints of the ugly present by setting splendidly remote targets
for the far future; it frustrated reformers who tried on the margin of the
System to work for realistic and progressive policies without becoming ab-
sorbed by it; and it bred many compromisers who made the best of it, and not
a few profiteers who made the most out of it.
It was not always easy to tell the unscrupulous politician whose lofty ver-
biage camouflaged a precise financial or careerist interest from the honest die-
hard who, from misplaced but disinterested conviction, ignored the problems,
dangers and opportunities of the moment and spent his energies fighting
battles of an earlier day. By no means all of these were on the Right. For
instance, there were two conflicts centred around the ancient clerical problem.
One was a difference of opinion over the genuine but limited problem of the
church schools and the Barange law which gave them a small grant (and the
state schools a much bigger sum). This was disputed with reasonable modera-
tion on both sides. But there was also a furious symbolic battle in which one
small group of fanatics seemed to fear the imminent return of the hi Falloux
15. Cf. Monde, 25 December 1954; M. Pellenc, JO(CR) 26 March 1955, pp. 1090-1.
16. See above, pp. 46,49, 50n.
THE MEN AND THE SYSTEM 435
and a clerical monopoly in education, while another ardently resisted, if not
the Jacobin cult of Reason, at least the crudely militant atheism of the free-
masons of 1910.
Another potent source of honest but irrelevant emotion was old-fashioned
nationalism, especially concerning Germany (it was not always disinterested
over North Africa). In every party some men were understandably cautious
towards their neighbours across the Rhine; but others, from the fossil Con-
servative General Aumeran to the republican sage fidouard Herriot, appeared
to think they were still at war with the Kaiser (and perhaps even in alliance
with the Tsar). Confronting dead dangers as resolutely as any right-winger,
some Radicals and Socialists sought Communist help in 1946 against the
fascist leagues of 1934; many fought hard and successfully against the strong
executive power which Marshal MacMahon had abused in 1877; and others
like fidouard Daladier (as anticlerical as ever but more anti-German than in
1938) seemed to suspect Schuman and Adenauer of trying to resuscitate
Charlemagne's holy Roman empire.
At the other extreme, the visionaries were concerned with real problems but
their solutions distracted attention from immediate tasks. Most of them were
outside the System in the rank and file (not the leadership) of the Communist
party or even the extreme Right, or among Catholics with a social conscience
like MLP.17 There were few among the Socialists, Radicals or Conservatives,
though M RP at first had many. Europe was among their favourite causes.
Some practical politicians, despairing of structural reforms through the exist-
ing political machinery, hoped in a united Europe to break the liberum veto of
the pressure-groups and open up the protectionist French economy. Some
progressive 'Europeans' in SFIO and MRP saw in Europe an agency for
social reforms blocked at home; to planners like Jean Monnet it was an
essential condition of modernization; men like Robert Schuman hoped at last
to end the ancient quarrel with Germany. Once under way, however, the
idealistic European movement soon attracted most of the least progressive
and least visionary elements in French pubEc life.
There were visionary anti-Europeans too, and patriotic passion, as the
Resistance had shown, was not always backward-looking or irrelevant. Many
Frenchmen could not conceive of any revival of the nation's influence without
driving force at home, and feared that a diversion of effort to Europe might
well postpone reform instead of promoting it. Men as different as Pierre
Mendes-France and Michel Debr6 feared that without a modernized state and
a real political will in Paris, economic progress would be hampered and social
reform blocked. To Gaullists these changes were an indispensable prelude to
any concession to colonial nationalism; for a strong state could safely grant
reforms which, extorted from a weak one, would rapidly lead to a total
collapse of all French authority overseas. One of them, Jacques Soustelle (who
was thought dangerously left-wing when Mendes-France sent him to Algiers
in 1955), reacted to French retreats elsewhere by championing the thoroughly
visionary demand for the total integration of Algeria into France; it won some
genuine support in the army and a great deal of lip-service from settlers and
17. On MLP see above, p. 172.
436 THE SYSTEM
right-wing politicians. But the nationalists came into increasingly bitter con-
flict with another visionary group, drawn mainly from progressive Catholics
and Socialists in L£on Blum's revisionist tradition, who recognized that the
old ideal of assimilating the colonies was impracticable and accepted their
coming independence (not always with a very accurate appreciation of the
real aims and outlook of the overseas nationalists whose cause they defended).
Alike among nationalists and emancipators, 'Europeans' and social pro-
gressives, the visionary fighting passionately for a cause found at his side less
emotional, more hard-headed exponents of similar policies : men like Pierre
Mendes-France, Jules Moch, perhaps Francois Mitterrand and even Paul
Reynaud: the reformers. They were not numerous, since for historical reasons
the formal demand for more effective government machinery came from the
old Right who wanted it the better to resist change, while men of the traditional
Left rejected the political instruments needed to carry the social and colonial
policies they favoured. They were not necessarily distinguished by moral
superiority, for some reformers were as concerned for their careers as any
compromiser. But they shared a willingness to promote or at least accept
adjustments in the political system to meet the sweeping transformation of
France's situation and the world around her.
The Resistance had brought a new crop of ardent young reformers into
politics. But in SFIO (and sometimes in MRP) they were broken by party
discipline, like Alain Savary, or escaped from this fate into constructive local
work, like Gaston Defferre.18 Those Gaullist reformers who resisted the wiles
of the System often became obsessed with the struggle against it, discredited
themselves by plotting with its most disreputably reactionary enemies, and
sometimes - like Jacques Soustelle - forgot their original objectives in the
process. Some reformers from RPF, many from MRP, and most from
UD S R and the Radical party were absorbed by the regime and transformed
into compromisers - who might retain reforming ideas without reforming
zeal, like Edgar Faure, or not, like Bourges-Maunoury. When Mendes-
France won an opportunity for the lonely band of reforming democrats in
1954, it was lost by the quarrel over Europe with MRP, the friction over
domestic methods and priorities with SFIO, and above all the Algerian war.
The reformers' stand over that conflict was soon to alienate some of their own
number, all their potential allies, and the mass of their misled and misinformed
countrymen.
Some progressive-minded politicians were unwilling to risk their careers and
reputations and stultify their activities for years, perhaps for ever, in any un-
popular cause. Such a man might co-operate and even sympathize with the
reformers, but their style of action was quite alien to him and in a major crisis
he always preferred the company of the compromisers who kept the system
going. These were of many different types, and no party was wholly without
them. Neither Gaullists nor Poujadists maintained disciplined opposition for
long after they entered the Palais Bourbon in force. Many Conservatives on
the floor of the house and Socialists in party meetings urged their more
18. But Deffeire was responsible for one of the Fourth Republic's major reforms, the colonial
hi-cadre of 1956,
THE MEN AND THE SYSTEM 437
intransigent colleagues to join the cabinet and press their policies from within,
rather than preach the party's pure (if nebulous) doctrine in the wilderness.
But^above^all the compromisers were concentrated in the two great pivot
parties which were enabled or constrained by parliamentary arithmetic to
participate in almost every majority and cabinet.19
The Radical Socialists had taken over this role from the better-named
Opportunists at the turn of the century, and retained it into the Fourth
Republic. Electorally they had pacts with the Communists in 1945, with the
right-wing opposition in 1946, with the Centre in 1951 and with the Socialists
in 1956. They provided many members (and opponents) of Third Force
cabinets from 1948 to 1951, right-wing governments in 1952 and 1953,
Mendes-France's left-wing ministry in 1954, Edgar Faure's conservative
administration in 1955, and Guy Mollet's Socialist-led cabinet in 1956. When
Mendes-France tried to transform this old electoral co-operative society into a
party with a policy, he alienated four-fifths of its deputies and all the poten-
tial leaders with whom it was so well endowed, and made majority-building
and cabinet-making even harder than before.
But in the Fourth Republic these problems had already been complicated
by the emergence of a second pivot party, MRP, which proved as indis-
pensable to every majority as the Radicals (it opposed no premier except
Mendes-France himself). For MRP members differed from their permanent
partners both on every major problem of policy - from colonialism to educa-
tion and from foreign policy to the electoral system - and in their basic outlook
as Catholics and not free-thinkers; moralists and not men of the world;
Resisters and not attentistes; men aware of the social problem of the working
class which the Radicals had neglected, hostile to the Third Republic for
which they longed, and favourable to the party discipline which they detested.
MRP also was compelled by the situation to participate in every combination
- with Communists against Conservatives in the Constituent Assemblies,
with the Third Force against the Communists in the first Parliament, with the
Right against the Socialists in the second, and with a Socialist-led majority in
the third. It too had to make repeated concessions to its partners and abandon
most of its crusading zeal. Its members who were least willing to compromise
went over to RPF, the Catholic Left, or, like Georges Bidault in 1958, the
extreme Right. As its fervour for improving working-class conditions cooled
and its ministers became committed to repressive colonial policies, MRP
broke first with the Socialist party and then with the Catholic trade unions.
But the progressive hopes the movement renounced elsewhere were all invested
in Europe, a cause for which MRP displayed a willingness to lead public opin-
ion and to renounce governmental office which the Radicals had rarely shown.
Instead of a single pivot party bent on power and relatively unconcerned
with policy, there were now two with conflicting views and attitudes. MRP,
being the more compact, was potentially a strong hinge for a coalition, but it
was too heavily encumbered with principles and sometimes lacked flexi-
bility. The Radical party resisted the new vocation to which MendesrFrance
19. From 1945 to 1957 56% of all governmental appointments went to MRP, Radicals and
allies : my calculation from Dogan and Campbell, no. 72, p. 327.
438 THE SYSTEM
summoned it, but the battle destroyed its capacity to fulfil its traditional role.
When it disintegrated, the dwindling band of individual 'king's friends' was
left without a focus, and in the third Assembly no leader emerged to fill the
place once occupied by Queuille, Pleven and Faure. UDSR, RGR, ARS,
the * lawyer-peasants' and overseas members engendered even more cynicism
than the Radicals themselves about their character and motives by their
search for jobs and favours for client and constituency. By the end of the
second Parliament almost half the Radical and allied deputies had held office,
and of the fourteen who revolted against Mendes-France in 1956, seven were
offered posts within a year.20
The politicians of the System were not the only profiteers from it. Weak
ministers became dependent on or ineffective against their official subordi-
nates and their personal assistants. Interest-groups benefited: wealthy ones
with direct influence in cabinets, like the North African settlers through their
Radical friends, or in the Assembly and the ministries, like the beet-growers ;
poorer ones with political protection, like the railwaymen with their early
retiring age, or the tax-defrauding small businessmen, or the bouilleurs de
cru; powerful social forces to which competing parties looked for support,
like the Catholic Church with its claims for its schools. Generally it was
'Gingembre's France', the interests opposed to modernization, which con-
centrated on political manipulation : the others did not need to. Yet riots
against tax controls and barricades on rural highways and European economic
treaties showed that the backward forces, though they might delay progress,
often failed to get their way.
Protests and delays alike afforded opportunities for another body of profi-
teers: the opposition parties, which could be extravagant in their criticisms
when they ran little risk of responsibility. Many Radicals and Conservatives
behaved like demagogues over economic policy in 1949; so did MRP over
foreign policy in 1954, and Socialists over Algeria in 1955: but even the least
scrupulous men of the System rarely matched the uninhibited licence which its
enemies allowed themselves. If Gaullists (until 1951), Poujadists and Com-
munists were unable to extract other advantages from it, they made up for
that by vigorously profiteering in votes, multiplying their numbers and
exaggerating their power by exploiting the discontent of Frenchmen who were
not extremists but merely protesters. Finally there were secondary profiteers
who fed on these (often inflated) threats to democracy: Conservative deputies
who used the Poujadist danger to demand lower taxes for their clients;
Socialist ministers who warned of riots in Algiers or mutiny in the army so as
to forestall concessions to the Moslems or to muzzle the French press; above
all the anti-Communist demagogues - bad employers, blind settlers,
McCarthyite politicians like L6on Martinaud-Deplat, right-wing Catholics
and nationalist Gaullists who tried to mesmerize their opponents into accept-
ing another 'unwritten constitutional law . . . that Communist votes do not
count to adopt a reform but only to oppose one '.21
20. Half: ibid** p. 323. Some said Pascal Arrighi, the neo-Radical who led the Corsican insur-
rection in May 1958, was discontented at not having been a minister like his fellows (and like
all the other representatives of those well-connected islanders).
21. Duverger (n. 13) ; cf. Arn£, p. 239 and n.
THE MEN AND THE SYSTEM 439
The line between compromisers and profiteers was hard to draw, and the
same man might adopt the two attitudes at different times (or indeed both at
the same time, for men's motives are often mixed). Some supported govern-
ments out of belief in their policies, desire for stability, or a resigned recogni-
tion that there was no alternative: others welcomed a situation which they
believed could be turned to their own advantage. The list system at general
elections may have been advocated on genuine grounds of principle : it proved
highly advantageous to party leaders whose seats remained impregnable even
when their personal popularity had waned.22 The apparentements of 1951
were perhaps necessary to produce a manageable Assembly : they were also a
device enabling outgoing members to save their seats (and incidentally to give
the supporters of the church schools an inflated majority). The absence of any
clear demarcation line between majority and opposition helped to temper the
jejune indignation (or enthusiasm) of the political newcomer or extremist :
and conveniently enabled the careerist without convictions to repudiate
responsibility for a policy that had failed. The repeated ministerial crises were
a device for taking difficult decisions: and also an opportunity for ambitious
men to hasten the day of their admission to the cabinet. The stability of
ministers offset the instability of governments : and ensured office in per-
petuity for any prominent member of the individualist parties who was pre-
pared to temper the rigour of his principles by a statesmanlike indifference to
their actual application. The System gave every facility to the political oppor-
tunist; and he fulfilled a necessary role in it. Whenever the compromisers of
the Centre were polarized between more fervent, principled, and intransigent
forces, the democratic regime was threatened with collapse and France con-
fronted the spectre of civil war.
French parties, therefore, were ill-adapted to their century.23 Ideologies
that had become increasingly irrelevant were still professed, in the organized
parties because the militants insisted on keeping verbal faith with the past, in
the individualist groups because politicians with few principles found it con-
venient to utter sentiments of impeccable respectability which committed
them to no precise course of action. Would-be modernizes were broken like
Daniel Mayer in 1946 or Pierre Mendes-France ten years later. Any party of
the regime that made an attempt to bury the past and face the future could be
sure that Communists or Gaullists or fascists would revive the dead issue - the
clerical quarrel, or the German menace, or the imperial dream - to defeat a
government, shatter a coalition, or undermine a Republic. Every party,
including those in opposition, came more and more to represent a clientele -
naturally conservative - rather than profess a faith or promote a general
political objective. This gave them strong defensive positions against intruders
like de Gaulle or Mendes-France, but inhibited all constructive action. For
the real issues divided each group internally.
22. Such as Christian Pineau in 1946, and P. H. Teitgen in 1956 : cf. Williams, no. 168, p. 172n.,
^Su
pp. 411,412.
440 THE SYSTEM
Within the Assembly as well as the government there was a stalemate which
rarely allowed any forceful course to gain a majority. In the first Parliament
cabinets were paralysed over economic policy, in the second over international
policy, in the third over colonial policy. In 1957 a ministry had to emasculate
both its repressive measures against Algerians in France, to get Socialist
support, and its reforms in Algeria, to win Conservative votes.24 The decline
of the 'king's friends' had made both indispensable.25 But while any majority
based on a deal between parties was hopelessly divided on policy, any majority
based on policy outraged the entrenched organizations and the politicians
who depended on them or simply were loyal to them.
3. STYLES OF LEADERSHIP
In these conditions it was an uphill task to achieve any positive objective. Some
men succumbed to the System as their will to act was exhausted by the effort
to surmount the innumerable obstacles. Others defied it and were broken by
it. If a leader tried to govern by using the whip of public opinion, his premier-
ship was likely to be spectacular, brief - and singular. Another type, whose
ministries were less impressive but plural, accepted the limits on his freedom
of action and worked within them, earning the scorn of ordinary Frenchmen
by conforming to the System even while deploring its effects. Even Mendes-
France, after insisting in 1953 that his ministers would have to promise not to
serve under his successor, omitted this demand in 1954 when it might have
lost him his next opportunity to govern.26
Only a very bold and self-confident leader dared bring direct pressure on
the deputies by going over their heads to public opinion, for members detested
and resented the threat to their freedom of action, their reputations and their
careers. Broadcast talks to the nation by its chief executive, so commonplace
in the United States or Britain, aroused the direst parliamentary suspicions
against Gaston Doumergue in the Third Republic, Pierre Mendes-France in
the Fourth and Charles de Gaulle in the Fifth.27 The offence was more un-
forgivable still if a leader emphasized his scorn and dislike for his colleagues
by stressing the contrast between an upright and far-sighted ministry and petty
and^ self-seeking legislators. Members then bitterly resented his lack of club
spirit and suspected him of exploiting latent anti-parliamentary feelings.
Mendes-France, who first stood aloof from the System and then denounced it,
was shunned until a major crisis arose, then tolerated reluctantly while he
assumed responsibilities that others were delighted to escape, and removed as
soon as possible - and permanently, for the public which had acclaimed his
decisiveness and foresight in 1954 abandoned him in 1956 to the isolation of a
virtual exile in his own country.
^The problem for the politician who wanted either to keep his influence on
his country's future, or to enjoy a successful career, was thus 'not merely to
£' if 1957' pp* 74~7* 84~93 >" Isomi* Ainsi> PP- 113» 129 ; Fauvet, IV*9 p. 334.
25. Cf. above, pp. 407-8.
26. The omission allowed the one ex-premier in his cabinet of newcomers to succeed him.
. I7' l°we this pomt to Dr* N- WabL ^rhe French opposition had no recognized leader, and no
right of reply.) On premiers and public opinion see Arn6, pp. 375-93.
THE MEN AND THE SYSTEM 441
become premier but to do so again'.28 This meant that he had to allow for and
appease the feelings of his parliamentary colleagues. When Ren6 Mayer stood
for the premiership in 1949 he refused any dealings with the parties, won his
vote, but then failed to form a cabinet. In 1951 he tried again and was beaten.
In 1953 he succeeded at last, by masterly equivocation, in leading a cabinet
(it was weak as well as short). After Georges Bidault brandished the vote of
confidence to impose his policies on the reluctant Socialists in 1950, they never
let him form another cabinet. Antoine Pinay kept M RP in his majority by the
pressure of public opinion, and they blocked him whenever he stood for the
premiership again.
Party leaders like Bidault or Pinay, so long as they kept their organizations
behind them, could never suffer a catastrophe like that which befell Mendes-
France. Guy Mollet, at the head of a highly disciplined party whose votes
were essential to the majority, could remain the dominating figure in a Parlia-
ment even when he had lost the premiership. Yet these magnates, though
secure against political storms, were too dependent on their organizations to
shake off a taint of partisanship, and too committed to them to make wholly
acceptable brokers. That essential function of French parliamentary leader-
ship was better performed by a politician from a very loose or tiny group, the
typical premier of the Fourth Republic as of the Third. A Pleven, a Faure or a
Gaillard built up his reputation over the years in debate or in office until he
attained the premiership, where he was almost sure to damage it - either by
decisions which made him enemies or by indecision which gave him a longer
life but a worse name. He would then rebuild his credit by a discreet with-
drawal from active parliamentary life, followed in a year or two by a well-
timed r entree : normal and sometimes very convenient stages in the career of a
successful ministrable.
Some premiers, like Rene Pleven, were skilled at evacuating office in time to
avoid dangerous decisions and returning to it at a calmer moment, thus pre-
serving a high reputation for statesmanship. A few like Bourges-Maunoury
were dominated by more forceful men;29 but this formula was so unsatisfac-
tory that Laniel, who reigned for the year before Dien-Bien-Phu by refusing
to choose between the policies of Reynaud and Bidault, was the only Fourth
Republican premier never to hold any office again. One or two like Edgar
Faure, beneath an appearance of mental agility unembarrassed by any con-
victions, skilfully manipulated the System to achieve positive objectives. In a
conservative Assembly, wedded to economic backwardness at home and
reaction in North Africa, he pursued a successful policy of economic expan-
sion and carried by twelve to one the Tunisian agreements on which Mendes-
France fell; in a nationalist upper house he put through the unpopular
treaties rearming Germany; against determined obstruction from many of his
own ministers he repaired the follies of his predecessors in Morocco; and when
the Assembly finally brought him down he belied his reputation for malleabi-
lity by promptly dissolving it.30
28 See above p 239. 29. Arne, pp. 109, 350; Fauvet, IV*, p. 332,
30! See Arne, 'pp. 395^26 for sketches of each of the premiers; De Tarr, Chapters 7 and 8,
for Queuille, Faure and Mendes-France.
442 THE SYSTEM
All these practices led to the same result: the System devoured its children.
Some men were feared for showing too much forcefulness, others discredited
for too little, yet others stayed 'available' for the future by long spells of un-
availability in the present. The later years of the Fourth Republic therefore
saw several exceptionally young premiers: four were under fifty and one of
them under forty. As Pierre Cot reproached Felix Gaillard, some men of this
new generation still followed the old men's policies. But, as Gaillard replied, a
minister soon found that his margin for manoeuvre was far smaller than the
critics supposed.31 A leader with a great party behind him was unacceptable
to the rival powers; a leader without one was acceptable precisely because of
the weakness of his personal situation. *An ephemeral monarch among the
barons who enthrone or dethrone him, he can preserve his equilibrium in his
high position only by giving way to the most demanding, and otherwise trying
to neutralize them by playing one against the other. Nine-tenths of his time
are taken up by this task, as futile as it is exhausting. In it he ruins his health,
and loses his integrity.'32
The contrast between the leaders who accepted these limits and those who
rebelled against them was one of style more than policy. Gaullists admired,
supported and served under Mendes-France because of his methods as much
or more than his objectives; and Mendes-France was only one of many left-
wing critics of the System who were turning to de Gaulle in the last months of
the regime.33 But there were other leaders who tried to struggle on within the
rules, seeking to achieve their ends by guile, deviousness, skilful timing, and
immense pertinacity and patience. The regime bred in these men a professional
pride in their obscure art; and in some MRP and Gaullist leaders who had
once rebelled against it, a masochistic pleasure in displaying the skills they
had first condemned and then acquired. De Gaulle had grounds for his warning
against 'the games, the poisons and the delights of the System'.34
Yet the limits were set by the situation, quite as much as the character of
the politicians. Throughout the Fourth Republic any drastic change of govern-
ment and policy would have entailed an alliance with opponents of the regime,
whose price its supporters feared to pay - whether because it would have
weakened their power, injured their interests, or imperilled democracy itself.
Under the Fifth the private pressure-groups and the public services did not
abandon their anarchical habits merely because a strong executive had been
installed. In both regimes ministers pursued in office policies they had de-
nounced in opposition ; juggled with the price index to hold off wage increases ;
and arbitrarily confiscated whole issues of opposition journals (though where-
as during 1957 left-wing papers were seized for what they themselves had
31. Above, p. 13. On premiers* ages see Arn6, pp. 51-2.
32. Sirius (Hubert Beuve-Mery) in Monde, 30 April 1958. Cf. Aron, no. 7, pp. 263-4.
33. See above, p. 54.
34. On 6 May 1953 : AP 1953, p. 476. To conclude his first investiture speech Faure quoted
Montesquieu : 'It is not the means that should be splendid but the end. True politics means reach-
ing it by obscure paths*: JO 17 January 1952, p. 276 (and cf. AP 1952, p. 13; De Tarr, p. 176).
Lecourt said of the 1953 presidential election, * Since Bidault withdrew our role consists of count-
ing corpses*: Faucher, p. 82. Cf. Diethelm (above, p. 136) and Chaban-Delmas (JO 20 November
1953, p. 5635). Leites (p. 426n.) dissects scientifically all the acts and attitudes of this kind com-
mitted by parliamentarians or alleged by their enemies ; and discusses nothing else.
THE MEN AND THE SYSTEM 443
written, after 1958 they were often punished for the offences of others, so as
to make the seizure of a right-wing journal more palatable to the army). No
political manoeuvre of the Fourth Republic did more by its conduct to dis-
credit the regime (and its author) than the equivocation, prevarication and
slow elimination of every alternative by which Edgar Faure, at some cost in
human lives, brought a suspicious right-wing majority and an indignant army
to accept the virtual independence of Morocco. Yet the President of the Fifth
Republic with his unexampled prestige and authority found very similar
tactics necessary to arrive at the same result in Algeria.
The System was often criticized for infirmity of purpose, 'a daily nibbling
by which the policy the government has adopted is gradually emptied of its
substance'; inconsequence, 'a policy which drifts with the stream, with no
aim but to pass round obstacles as they arise, hoping for the best without
knowing how or why'; disingenuous conservatism, * easily agreeing to grant
bogus nominal satisfactions in the hope of averting real reforms'; and the
sham solidarity of immobilisme, 'believing union in doing nothing is better
than the united action of a homogeneous power'. The reproaches were justi-
fied. Yet all these comments were directed against the first government of
General de Gaulle, before there was any Parliament to obstruct him.35 The
men and institutions of the Fourth Republic had many faults, but new men
and institutions proved as inadequate in 1958 as in 1945 to install at last the
long-promised Republique pure et dure.
35. Three in Mendes-France's letter of resignation written on 18 January 1945, printed in his
book (see p. 33 In.), pp. 334, 338, 340; the last by Jules Moch in Populaire, 6 January 1945
(I owe this one to Dr. B. D. Graham).
Chapter 31
SOCIETY AND THE STATE
The Fourth Republic lasted less than a dozen years, but during that brief
period French economy and society changed more quickly than it ever had
in the preceding century. Economic modernization and new means of mass
communication reduced the old differences between regions and classes, but
brought new tensions between those who gained and those who lost. In so
conservative a country, this pace of progress imposed severe strains - greatly
accentuated by the external crisis which began before the Fourth Republic
but reached a climax under it. For men humiliated in 1940, who had rapidly
rebuilt and increased the absolute strength of their country, were called on to
adjust to a sharp decline in its power relative to its rivals and former subjects.
Within Europe, France made her adjustment to the new conditions more
readily than Britain; outside Europe, far less readily. The tensions born of
simultaneous progress at home and retreat abroad came to a head over the
Algerian problem, which first paralysed the working of government and then
threatened political liberties.
These problems were dealt with by new men working a new constitution.
The parliamentary personnel of the Fourth Republic was largely recruited
through the Resistance and the Free French movement, and inspired by out-
raged patriotism and impatient exasperation with the manoeuvres, com-
promises and evasions of the pre-war politicians. Yet the new men quickly
resumed the practices they had once roundly condemned. The regime was
remade in 1946 in order to destroy the bad old ways; but before long the
System reappeared. This return (not persistence) of traditional attitudes and
methods suggests that the problem of adapting the political mechanism to
social change lay not in the faults of character of two very different sets of
men, or the institutional weaknesses of two constitutions devised for quite
different ends, but deep in the history and social structure of France.
In twentieth-century French politics the cleavages of the past remained as
wide as those of the present day. France had her incomplete industrial
revolution before the political victory against authoritarianism had been won.
No consensus had been found about the objectives of political action, and no
rules agreed for the tenure and transfer of power, when industrial civilization
raised the stakes of the political game by provoking demands for governmental
protection of the producer against domestic or foreign competition, the
capitalist against the claims of labour, the worker against the pressure of his
employer.
The French industrial revolution was itself localized, incomplete and
stunted. Over most of the country the old order of self-sufficient peasants and
artisans survived, and they used their disproportionate political influence to
protert their own interests and those of their rich allies at the expense of the
industrial workers. An overcrowded tertiary sector, above all in commerce,
SOCIETY AND THE STATE 445
offered the traditional outlet for the many who sought a precarious and unreal
economic independence. A majority of voters wanted the diffusion of wealth
and power, and resisted speed and standardization, mass production and
large-scale organization, plenty and instability - in a word, Americanization.
Through her thwarted economic development, France acquired the social
problems of industrialism without its material benefits. Two distinct types of
politics coexisted there: a revolutionary class struggle, dominant in most
industrial areas, a traditional ideological conflict which prevailed mainly in
backward regions. Politicians had to shape their attitudes to the needs and
demands of both, and the diversity of issues and alignments created many
parties and factions: the reflection, not the cause, of the absence of an
electoral majority.
The old political fabric was torn asunder by the sweeping social changes
of the post-war years and the governmental policies which encouraged them.
For the first time for over a century the birth-rate rose. The traditional
domination of the family by the older generations was upset. New age-groups
pressed impatiently on the heels of their elders, acceding to responsibility -
in business, politics, agriculture, the civil service - far younger than in the
past. They called for expansion to accommodate the growing numbers of
Frenchmen, invented new voluntary associations for common purposes, and
insisted on a wider conception of governmental activity than the mere preser-
vation of situations acquises. A new attitude to risk-taking and modernization
soon spread from industry to agriculture. The industrial structure was
transformed by the growth of large plants and of specialized skills, which
broke up the old uniformity of the working class and created in the newer
industries a common interest in stability between management and worker.
Under the impact of material prosperity, labour shortage, and the reforms of
1936-37 and 1945-46, labour relations and even class divisions gradually
began to lose some of their old bitterness. The rapid growth of towns upset
the country's social and geographical balance, until one Frenchman in four
lived in an urban area of over 100,000 inhabitants. The old self-sufficiency of
the village disappeared; prosperity and paid holidays brought townsmen
to the countryside, while agricultural mechanization and the decline of the
artisan reduced employment in the rural areas.
New social conditions broke the old lines of political communication. The
small-town newspaper declined as a political force, but neither the regional
nor the Paris press took its place - except for Le Monde, which soon acquired
the status of a republican institution. Even broadcasting had far less political
importance than in Britain or the United States, and television arrived too
late to play a significant role in Fourth Republican politics - though within
its narrow geographical range it contributed to a growing uniformity of tastes
and interests.
As urbanization spread and regional differences waned, the ancient quarrel
between Church and Universite lost its former virulence. The cur£ was
withdrawn from some parishes, and where he remained he might well cham-
pion progress, not conservatism. The new and radical grass-roots organiza-
tions were often founded and manned by young Catholic laymen, products
446 THE SYSTEM
of the flourishing Church youth movements. On social and especially colonial
questions many Catholics were active reformers - and some anticlericals
from the traditional Left took up conservative or reactionary stands. When
the Algerian war revived the passions of the Dreyfus case, the alignment was
new and unexpected: in 1900 Church and army had stood together against
the indignant protests of the teachers and intellectuals, but now the angry
officers found many of their former allies in the opposite camp, along with
the Universite. As the clergy withdrew from militant opposition to the regime,
and as political power shifted from the countryside to the towns, fewer
village schoolteachers regarded themselves as the embattled missionaries of
the Republic. Every year diminished the large fund of accumulated mistrust
which still remained for political exploitation, and with its decline the two
great corporations lost their central place in political organization and con-
flict.
Other factors helped to promote the nationalization and modernization of
political life. With the abolition of small single-member districts and the
growth of official and semi-official regional institutions, the prefect became
less of a focus for political activity and the deputy lost some of the social
standing he had formerly enjoyed in his constituency (if not in Paris). Wider
horizons and stronger parties weakened the authority of the individual
politician, though less than was expected in the first post-war years. The
traditional notables, the professional and business class of the small town,
lost their dominating influence over their fellows as education became more
general, modern communications made the country more uniform, and the
tiny autonomous unit, after falling behind its big competitors in industry and
then in agriculture, began to lose ground even in its last strongholds : com-
merce and politics. The state, traditionally feared and restricted, exercised so
powerful and pervasive an influence throughout the economy that the old
contrast between the pays legal and the pays reel came to seem meaningless
even to extreme conservatives.1 The new professional organizations - of
labour, business, the peasantry and various middle-class groups - rapidly
acquired an altogether new solidity and influence during or just after the war.
While after 1948 the trade unions lost most of the ground they had gained, the
other confederations survived to play a growing role in politics. But since they
usually acted by pressure from without, rather than directly in the electoral
or parliamentary struggle, these new corporations did not replace the old
decaying political mechanisms.
Indeed, in the short run better organization merely allowed the conflicting
groups to express more vigorously their unanimous conviction that others
were being favoured at their expense. The hungry occupation years had been
a godsend to the peasantry, and the black market and inflation were the
shopkeeper's golden age; both resented the return to normality which cost
them their privileged positions. The social reforms of the Popular Front and
the governments issuing from the Resistance did not wholly reconcile the
industrial workers to the regime, but they did alarm employers whose power
was challenged. Yet the state on which all these pressures converged was
1. Isorni, Ainsi, p. 53. (I owe many ideas in this chapter to the authors named on p. 465.)
SOCIETY AND THE STATE 447
poorly armed to resist them, for the politicians who were eager to expand its
functions economically were afraid of strengthening the executive politically.
Historic fears of reaction and revolution imposed 'the paradox of a weak
government with a strong state';2 and the administration's Maginot line
against the invading pressure-groups could often be turned by an attack on its
unfortified parliamentary flank.
Some groups fought for their interests in the old ways; and any effort to
impose taxes on peasants or collect them from small businessmen, cut the
alcohol subsidy or make railwaymen work beyond the age of 55, would cause
a political storm and provoke the party whose clients were threatened to
overturn the government. Some sections of the new middle class, concerned
for modernization and efficiency and dissatisfied with the traditional parties,
contributed to a floating vote far larger than before the war and gave emphasis
to the fluctuations of public opinion. Other victims, finding the old lines of
communication inadequate, resorted to disorderly and extravagant forms of
protest. Some felt wholly cut off from their political representatives. Suspicious
of a government whose processes they could not understand and whose
policies they abhorred, and convinced that occult forces had captured the state
for their own nefarious ends, they inspired outbursts as furious and irrational,
though not as dangerous, as those of the Third and Fifth Republics.
At home the growth of the economy aroused resentment among those who
lost by it or who benefited little; identifying the misfortunes of their class
with those of their country, they clamoured for diehard resistance to change
both abroad and at home. Poujadism, the rebellion of static France against
the economic ascendancy and progress of the advanced regions, was also a
protest against any concession in the empire. But the new psychology which
underlay the expansion in 'modern France* was partly a product of revolt
against the collapse of 1940, and for many modernizers the very purpose of
this economic progress was to rebuild the power of the French state even
more than the prosperity of individual Frenchmen. The crucial decisions on
atomic development were taken by Fourth Republican premiers, including
Mendes-France - whose eloquent appeals for national resurgence made him
for a time a hero of the Gaullists. Men from the Resistance and Fighting
France, who against all prudent calculation had entered upon a struggle against
overwhelming odds in 1940, were often unimpressed by appeals to historical
inevitability or demonstrations that France had not the strength to hold her
place in the new world. Thus economic progress gave rise to exasperation
as well as satisfaction when the country, feeling a new internal strength and
vigour, found itself faced with a steady decline in its external power.
It was therefore not surprising that the familiar problem of reconciling
France's ends and her means was not always discussed in purely rational
terms. In 1945 only the Socialists stood out against the policy of crushing
Germany on which nationalists and Christian Democrats, Gaullists and Com-
munists agreed; and many Frenchmen seemed to find Soviet Russia a more
congenial diplomatic partner than democratic America. But within five years
2. Siegfried, De la IHe, p. 251, cf. ibid., p. 51 ; Hoffmann in Change, pp. 73-4 ; Hamon, no. 120 ;
Priouret, Dtputts> Chapters 11-12.
448 THE SYSTEM
France was committed, despite violent opposition, to the Atlantic alliance;
and many Resisters, whose proven patriotism under Nazi occupation gave
them a clear conscience, had taken up the old themes of intelligent defeatists
like Caillaux and Laval and were preaching Franco-German reconciliation.
In 1954 a revolt of neutralists and nationalists defeated the European army
plan after a furious battle which divided Resisters as well as Vichyites, and
Left as well as Right. But the new perspective of European unity had caught
the imagination of many able and idealistic young Frenchmen, and after the
EDC struggle which seemed to purge the old hatred of Germany, the
adjustment to a new constellation of forces in Europe was accepted without
friction - even by its former opponents when they came to power in 1958.
Elsewhere the change was harder to tolerate. Progressive internationalists
in France had always fought for equal rights for the colonial peoples, not
for independence. Nationalist conservatives who had painfully accepted
reality in one sphere found it all the harder to abandon their remaining
illusions. So the business defeatists like Raymond Carrier, who attacked the
Algerian commitment as too expensive, found no hearing in the Fourth
Republic. Instead, on Left and Right alike, old conservatives and new national-
ists combined to silence the liberals and the realists until it was almost too
late in Tunisia and Morocco, much too late in Indo-China and Algeria. Then-
task was the easier because the colonial bureaucracy was as conservative as
the economic bureaucracy was progressive; and above all because France,
alone among colonial powers, had a mass Communist party. Neither poli-
ticians nor voters were prepared to pay the price for its support; and while
without it the decolonizes were outnumbered, with it they were discredited.
Social reformers at home faced the same dilemma, and the housing and educa-
tional opportunities of the poor remained shamefully inadequate. But there
desirable measures could be deferred without immediate disaster. Overseas,
time was fast running out.
Despite the obstacles, parties and people slowly accepted the need for
change, and by 1958 the diehards commanded only a quarter of the National
Assembly and a minority of the public. At this point the struggle moved to a
new plane, for the humiliations and retreats of twenty years had had their
deepest effect on the men who had borne the brunt of them, the army officers.
More democratically recruited and less traditionalist in outlook than ever
in the past, they had been taught in 1940 that there were higher duties than
obedience to the legal government. One defeat in Indo-China reinforced their
determination not to tolerate a second in Algeria. For two years fear of
military insubordination helped to paralyse ministers, who abdicated to the
army while publicly proclaiming confidence in its fidelity. So the Fourth
Republic was destroyed at last, like most previous French regimes, by a
foreign failure; its own servants repudiated it, and an indifferent people no
longer felt sufficient loyalty to come to its defence. Unhappily, the circum-
stances of the collapse made the twin problems of legitimacy and authority
more acute than ever. For if the Fourth Republic had shown the perils of weak
political authority in its lifetime, its death reminded Frenchmen that revolu-
tionary violence still seethed not far below the political surface, and that
SOCIETY AND THE STATE 449
dangerous hands were waiting to grasp the levers of a strong governmental
machine.
'All government ... is founded on compromise and barter. We balance
inconveniences; we give and take; we remit some rights that we may enjoy
others . . . Man acts from adequate motives relative to his interests ; and not
on metaphysical speculations.' In the shadow of Bonapartism and the Com-
mune John Morley suggested that in France these words of Burke * ought to
be printed in capitals on the front of every newspaper, and written up in
letters of burnished gold over each faction of the Assembly, and on the door
of every bureau in the Administration'. At the end of the century, Bodley
remarked: 'There is a nation to the members of which Frenchmen are more
revengeful than to Germans, more irascible than to Italians, more unjust
than to English. It is to the French that Frenchmen display animosity more
savage, more incessant and more inequitable than to people of any other race. *
Half-way through the next century Raymond Aron observed that republicans
and Resisters, royalists and reactionaries had one common characteristic at
least: their relish for proscribing one another.3
The politicians of the regime learned the lesson and accepted the reproach.
The institutions of the Third Republic were soon warped into the system of
'stable instability', by which conflicts were absorbed and compromises
arranged by frequently changing combinations of the same ministers,
closely supervised by a vigilant Parliament. In the Fourth Republic men and
institutions were shaped by this old mould instead of breaking it. Yet the
post-war reforms were by no means a total failure. The silent administrative
revolution undertaken by de Gaulle and his immediate successors, and the
new financial and legislative procedures gradually hammered out over the
next decade, might have helped the Third Republic tackle many of the
domestic problems with which it had failed to deal.4 They were inadequate for
the violent storms of the post-war world; but would a different regime have
averted or weathered the tornado from Algiers?
The new institutions enabled some dangers to be avoided, decisions taken
and policies pursued without parliamentary obstruction. They could not
solve a problem arising out of the party system, not the formal rules. Under
tripartisme, three strong parties provided a majority without coherence or
durability. But when faced with Communist opposition, Socialists and
MRP had to call in the old political world to redress the balance of the new,
so that governments depended simultaneously on the traditional and ill-
organized groups and on the newer and better-disciplined parties. Whereas
in the Third Republic a prominent non-partisan figure had often been able
to exploit parliamentary fragmentation to assemble a majority, the better-
organized groups now resented his influence on their members. Whereas
under tripartisme the party leaders had been able to trade concessions and
enforce their bargains, the chieftains of the looser groups could never commit
their troops, and on major issues every party of government was now
3. Morley, On Compromise (1874), p. 136; Bodley, i. 215; Aron, no. 7, p. 262.
4. Above, pp. 263ff., 268-9, 272-5, 284-5, 343, 345 ; cf. Williams, pp. 403-4.
450 THE SYSTEM
vulnerable to indiscipline. Mendes-France had to work with less malleable
material than Poincare; MRP operated less smoothly as a pivot party than
the Radicals; round-table decisions were repeatedly upset in the Assembly;
over EDC and Algeria the divisions were within parties rather than between
them.
The traditional parliamentary game complicated still further an already
confused situation. Its skilful and single-minded practitioners in the old ill-
organized groups were enabled to resume the game by the deliberate choice
of their newer and more solid rivals. For these feared the extremists who
wanted a strong state under their own control; lest they should either capture
and abuse power, or precipitate civil war in the attempt, the cautious poli-
ticians took measures to reduce the political weight of 'modern France'
whence the dangers mostly came. 'Static France' was favoured by the
electoral laws of 1948 for the upper house and 1951 for the lower, and as in
the Third Republic the second chamber and the electoral system became
devices buttressing the backward areas, the individualist parties, and the
traditional style of politics.5 So the compromisers and careerists still had a
necessary role to play - and the system rewarded them well for it. The
National Assembly continued to breed political opportunists (as the House
of Commons breeds yes-men, and the Senate of the United States exhibi-
tionists). Critics accused the men of the System of raising artificial disputes
in order to divide the people; their real fault was that they concealed genuine
divergences in order not to.
If the weak parties quickly resumed the bad habits of the past, the stronger
ones quite failed to fulfil their hopes of transforming political behaviour.
Having no prospect of winning independent power, each of them adopted
sectional policies expressing the outlook or interests of the limited clientele
on which it depended for its very existence. These policies could rarely be
applied, for the parliamentary situation usually gave several parties a veto on
action; and as they were not implemented, they were regarded with cynicism
by politicians and voters alike. Either to make a career or to influence policy,
the parliamentarian's road to power led not through the patient mobilizing
of electoral support but through the subtle and absorbing parliamentary
game; and the struggle for power, which occurs every four years in other
great democracies, never ceased in France. 'Among Western legislators, only
the French deputy took part in an execution (the overthrowing of a Cabinet),
in a festivity (ministerial crisis), and in a prize-giving ceremony (the formation
of a Cabinet), every three, six or twelve months.'6 True, the instability was
less damaging than it seemed, since the ministers so often kept or exchanged
their places. True, the crises fulfilled a function, since they enabled difficult
decisions to be reached. But the system exasperated the voter, who soon
5. Just half the metropolitan deputies sat for the 30 most industrial departments. In 1946 these
returned half the Radicals and Conservatives, 55% of the Communists and Gaullists, and 47%
of SFIO and MRP; in 1951, 37%, 65% and 45 % respectively; in 1956, 42% of the traditionalist
members, 55% of the Communists, and 54% of the Socialists, MRP and strict Mendesists. The
Radicals and Conservatives made 50 net gains in 1951, 45 of them in the less industrial half of
France. (My calculations.) Cf. above, pp. 400, 418-9 and nn. ; but cf. Aron, no. 6, pp. 12-13.
6. Aron, Steadfast, p. 24.
SOCIETY AND THE STATE 451
became indifferent to or contemptuous of 'the shuffling of a greasy and well-
marked parliamentary pack'. With no circuit of confidence between rulers
and people there could be no majority to take responsibility; and with no
majority, there could be no clear allocation of responsibility, and therefore
no circuit of confidence.
The Fourth Republic, like the Third, proved successful in absorbing
the dangerous movements in the country, only to succumb beneath an ex-
ternal shock because it had failed to convince the ordinary Frenchman that
it was really his government. Yet many of the manoeuvres he so despised were
promoted by hope of gaining votes, and more by fear of losing them. Few
crises originated exclusively with the players of the game. Much more fre-
quently 'the professionals . . . [gave] expression to them; perhaps they aggra-
vated them; all too often they could not resolve them; but they did not create
them'.7 It was natural for the citizen to blame the mirror rather than the
original for the ugly figure his representatives often cut. 'Very often the Palais
Bourbon has been described as a house without windows, blind, shut off from
the realities of life and the world. Nothing is falser. It should rather be re-
proached with being too open to the thousand changing humours of opinion,
too accessible to every demand from outside, too close to a whole people,
the most ungovernable in the world, of whom, whatever they think, it is the
all too faithful image . . .'8
Some of the outsiders who denounced the parliamentarians' obsession with
their private game were equally obsessed by it themselves. For in attributing
all the faults of the System to the legislature or its members, they convinced
themselves that the problem could be simply solved by a constitution which
kept the deputies subordinate. Yet, as French history had amply shown,
ministerial instability characterized authoritarian no less than liberal regimes;
private interests were not less influential or rapacious when they operated
secretly on the executive rather than openly on the legislature ; and if popular
resentment was deprived of its normal channels of expression it would burst
violently through some irregular outlet. Conflicts are not settled by being
hidden from view, and it is a function of the politician to draw attention to
grievances before they fester and become dangerous. In a regime which scorns
him, this function is not always performed. As an American conservative
warned long ago, 'Monarchy is like a splendid ship, with all sails set; it
moves majestically on, then it hits a rock and sinks for ever. Democracy is
like a raft. It never sinks, but, damn it, your feet are always in the water.'9
Right-wing critics of the System could claim that conservatives of the Left
exploited the fear of strong government to preserve the political System, and
so they did : but there were real dangers of abuse if the centralized adminis-
tration were freed from democratic control. Left-wing critics complained that
fear of Communism was exploited by conservatives of the Right to entrench
the existing social order, and so it was : but a Communist party, once installed,
7. Ibid., p. 28, cf. p. 34.
8. Isorni, Silence, pp. 14-15. 'The faults of the Fourth Republic arose from its being too
responsive . . . [its] weaknesses . . . were the weaknesses of the nation it represented too well*:
W. G. Andrews, French Policy and Algeria (New York, 1962), p. 163.
9. Fisher Ames, cited Brogan, The Free State, p. 7.
452 THE SYSTEM
rarely recognizes electoral defeat as a reason for relinquishing power. So moder-
ate politicians, who feared their countrymen's propensity for political ex-
tremism, were accustomed not to exploit their victories to the full; to ensure
through self-attenuating devices that minorities were not reduced to total
powerlessness; and to avoid open clashes on major issues before the public.
They abhorred the referendum, stigmatized the dissolution as a coup d'etat,
shunned any electoral law which might help to assemble a coherent parlia-
mentary majority, ostracized any member of the club who looked for support
outside the walls of Parliament, and even tried to avoid by-elections. Re-
peatedly a party was offered office or power when it was declining in the
country and no longer dangerous or demanding - SFIO in 1946, MRP in
1947, RPF in 1953, Radicals in 1957. The narrowly parliamentary outlook
of the political class conveniently helped to maintain their own exclusive
power; it arose none the less from French historical experience.
In the abstract it may well be absurd to identify a presidential constitution
with authoritarian rule, and 'direct democracy' with Bonapartist plebiscites.
But if enough people behave as if a referendum were a plebiscite, it will
become one. If the advocates of a reinforced and independent executive
depend upon the groups which have always loathed democracy, then the
political system which they favour will be warped unrecognizably by the
forces which sustain it. Indeed, the presumed advantage of the presidential
system is that an electoral majority is believed to be more easily assembled
than a parliamentary one. But to obtain the electoral majority, the voter's
whole political approach must be changed; and the inevitable tendency will
be to seek this result by employing the one active tradition available for the
purpose, the plebiscitary appeal on behalf of a strong national leader.10
Where its predecessors had excluded the 'unformed' opinion of the masses
and confined political activity to the 'informed' and sophisticated elites, the
Fifth Republic took the opposite course; exploiting 'unformed' against
'informed' opinion, it attracted the unpolitical majority while alienating
almost all the politically conscious.11 'Both maintain the traditional distance
between the leader and the led which protects them all from " Vhorreur du
face a face". Both excuse the leaders from having to mobilize the led and pre-
serve the happy irresponsibility of the led Inevitably, these patterns
result in arbitrariness, and then provoke protest and revolt.' Unable to par-
ticipate in their government, Frenchmen united in their private corporations
and agitated for their claims like 'angry creditors of a bureaucratic state';
their clamour confirmed their masters' fear of participation and determina-
tion to treat the citizen as an administrg.12 But men rarely behave responsibly
before they are given responsibility.
The evil had ancient roots. 'The division of classes was the crime of the
old monarchy, and later became its excuse; for when all those who make up
the rich and enlightened part of the nation can no longer understand and
10. Written in 1953 : Williams, p. 403. The objections are somewhat less applicable to proposals
for simultaneous direct election of Parliament and chief executive, such as those of M Duverger
in Demain and VIe.
11. G. Tillion, Les ennemis compUmentaires (1960), pp. 96-7.
12. Hoffmann in Change, pp. 105, 1 1 5 (cf. p. 222).
SOCIETY AND THE STATE 453
help one another in the government, the self-administration of the country
is virtually impossible, and a master has to intervene. ... It is no small task
to bring together again citizens who have thus lived for centuries as strangers
or enemies, and to teach them to conduct their own affairs in common. It
was much easier to divide them than it is now to reunite them Even in our
own day their jealousies and hatreds survive them.'13 In times of crisis the
fear or the experience of revolution and dictatorship kept open the wounds
between Catholic and anticlerical, proletarian and bourgeois, Communist
and non-Communist. Even in periods of normality, the arbitrary arrogance of
a centralized bureaucracy busily manufactured the 'angiy subjects' of whose
conduct it complained; and the educational system which was the pride of the
Republic was geared to the production of c critical and autonomous individuals
rather than responsible and participating citizens',14 A tradition of opposition
and defiance of authority produced Resisters and Poujadists, men who
rebelled to keep Algeria French and others who protested at the odious
methods used to do so - but no model bureaucrat of the gas-chambers like
Eichmann.
'The most fickle and unmanageable people on earth' could not for long
be ruled by force. In normal times it could be managed by a patient and
unglamorous process of endless compromise between the conflicting groups;
but then the intermediaries monopolized power, the people felt no sense of
participation, and when the stalemate so impeded decision that the national
community was threatened in power or status, it was the regime that paid the
penalty. In a great crisis a rare charismatic leader might identify his cause and
his person with the latent general will which the parliamentary system had
failed to crystallize ; but then he might admit no intermediaries between the
people and the remote (even if benevolent) power that determined then-
destinies. In either case democratic government, if it survived, was warped
and stunted. The historic dilemma remains unresolved: to find a regime
under which governments would be strong enough to act, yet not overween-
ing and oppressive; secure enough to think ahead, yet not so secure as to
ignore criticism; receptive to the voter's claims and grievances, but not so
obsessed with them as to be incapable of leadership ; concerned for the needs
of ordinary people, but aware that their deepest discontents may not have
material causes; neither obliviously neglectful of that splendid abstraction,
'the higher interest of France', nor loftily contemptuous of 'the immediate
advantage of Frenchmen'.15
13. A. de Tocqueville, Uancien regime et la revolution (1952 ed.)» pp. 166-7.
14. Crozier, no. 65, p. 210.
15. Quotations from de Gaulle, Le Salut, pp. 28, 43.
MAPS
The Communist, Socialist and RPF vote (and the Radicals in 1956) show the economic
pattern modifying the historical.
9. Communists 1946-51-56 10. Socialists 1946-51-56
1. Safe: 20% '46, '51, '56
2. 20% except '51
3. Gain: 20% '56 but not '46
4. Loss: 20% '46 but not '56
11. Radicals 1946-51-56
1. Safe:
2.
3. Gain:
4. Loss:
*
15% '46, '51, '56
15% except '51
15% '56 but not '46
15% '46 but not '56
15% '51 only
12. RPF 1951: Poujadists 1956
1. Safe: 15% S46, '51, '56
2. 15% except '51
3. Gain: 15% '56 but not '46
4. Loss: 15% '46 but not '56
Includes all factions and allies.
*15% 1951 only.
1. RPF 15% 1951
2. Pouj. 12i% 1956
Note small overlap.
Radicals and Poujadists confined to the backward areas. Cf. Maps 3 and 4
ALL PERCENTAGES OF ELECTORATE
458
Catholicism (Map 5) influences the MRP vote more than the Conservative.
13. MRP 1946-51-56 14. Conservatives 1946-51-56
Safe:
15% '46, '51, '56
15% except '51
15% '56 but not '46
4. Loss: 15% '46 but not '56
* 15% '51 only
Gain:
1. Safe:
2.
3. Gain:
4. Loss:
*
15% '46, '51, '56
15% except '51
15% '56 but not '46
15% '46 but not '56
15% '51 only
PERCENTAGES OF ELECTORATE
15. Electoral alliances 1951
16. Absolute majorities 1951, 1956
1. Alliance including RPF
2. „ Deluding Socs. or RPF
3 . „ deluding Socs. and clericals
4. ', of anticlericals (Soc., Rad.)
1: also P-O
3: also E-et-L, M-et-M
All seats to alliance:
of anti-Socs.: (1)1951, (2) 1956
including Socs. and MRP: 1951 (3)
of anti-clericals (Soc., Rad.): 1956 (4)
Catholicism prevents any alliance between clericals and Socialists.
459
Catholicism (Map 5) influences the MRP vote more than the Conservative.
13. MRP 1946-51-56
14. Conservatives 1946-51-56
1. Safe: 15% '46, '51, '56
2. 15% except '51
3. Gain: 15% '56 but not '46
4. Loss: 15% '46 but not '56
* 15% '51 only
L Safe: 15% '46, '51, '56
2. 15% except '51
3. Gain: 15% '56 but not '46
4. Loss: 15% '46 but not '56
* 15% '51 only
PERCENTAGES OF ELECTORATE
15. Electoral alliances 1951
16. Absolute majorities 1951, 1956
1. Alliance mcludingRPF
2. „ excluding Socs, or RPF
3. ,, Deluding Socs. and clericals
4. ,, of anticlericals (Soc., Rad.)
1: also P-O
3: also E-et-L, M-et-M
All seats to alliance:
of anti-Socs.: (1) 1951, (2) 1956
including Socs. and MRP: 1951 (3)
of anti-clericals (Soc., Rad.): 1956 (4)
Catholicism prevents any alliance between clericals and Socialists.
459
The historical pattern reappears strongly in the three referenda for or against de
Gaulle. The broad division between Left and Right still follows it (Map 20).
17. Referendum 21-10-45
Out a de Gaulle
18. Referendum 13-10-46
Constitution of the 4th Republic
Limiting the Constituent Assembly's
powers; opposed by Corns, and Rads.
GUI: 1. 70% 2. 60% 3. 55% 4. Less
Opposed by de Gaulle, Right, Rads.
1. GUI 60% 2. GUI 50% 3. NGN
19. Referendum 28-9-58
Oui a de Gaulle
20. The Right 1936 - and 1956
1956: Cons., MRP, RSSRGR; not
Poujadists
Constitution of the 5th Republic:
opposed by Corns., many Rads., etc.
OUI: 1.85% 2.80% 3. 70% 4. Less
'Strong': '36 37i%, '56 30%
1. Strong both '36 and '56
2. Strong only '56
3. Strong only '36
17, 18, 19: % of the vote. 20: % of the electorate.
460
DORDOGNEV / CANTAL \ LOIRE
/ndustry and transport over 50%
tronsPort over ^^; not/onal average - 41%
I I Agr/cu/ture over 40%: national average - 27-5%
21. Distribution of Industry 1954 (working population)
461
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
This brief selection, which does not aim at comprehensiveness, indicates sources
(particularly in English) that I have found useful. It includes a few books not cited
in the text, and a very few authors cited in one chapter only. Otherwise such authors
are not listed ; for their works the reader should consult the index and the first foot-
note reference. Where more than one book by an author is listed, an identifying
letter distinguishes them. Collective works appear, where only one contributor has
been cited, under his name; otherwise under the key word of their titles, as in the
footnotes. Books are published in London (if in English) or Paris (if in French)
unless otherwise stated. All articles are cited throughout by number from the alpha-
betical list on p. 470.
Part I
BOD LEY'S substantial, discursive and opinionated volumes give invaluable back-
ground on French society and politics in 1900. SIEGFRIED (a) gives the best short
account of political attitudes and views between the wars, MIDDLETON and SOULIER
of political institutions, and SHARP of administration. MAILLAUD is a brilliant
short explanation of French problems to the wartime English reader. A. COBBAN
gives an excellent brief description of France's wartime history in the Survey of
International Affairs 1939-46; HOFFMANN (nos. 126-7), makes an exceptionally
interesting attempt to set Vichy briefly in perspective. DE GAULLE'S war memoirs (b)
are splendid works of literature with long documentary appendices. The struggles of
the parties against de Gaulle and against one another, from which the Constitution
of the Fourth Republic emerged, are described in perceptive and lively fashion by
WRIGHT (#). WERTH (c) gives a useful summary of wartime developments; after
1945 his account is coloured by his strong neutralist sympathies.
Among general works on the Fourth Republic, PICKLES (c) and GOGUEL (/)
are good brief introductions for the reader without previous knowledge. Books on
social changes are discussed at the end of this note. The comprehensive narrative
by FAUVET (d), with character-sketches of leading personalities, is complex, but
excellent for the informed reader. The first part of the period is well covered by
PICKLES (Z?), who concentrates on problems of policy, and GOGUEL (d) who traces
party and parliamentary developments. The journalistic comments by SIEGFRIED
(b and c) contain less malice and more reflection than those byBLOCH-MORHANGE
and FAUCHER. GROSSER is admirably clear and balanced, if rather condensed, on
the controversial problems of external policy. PLANCHAIS gave in February 1958
a prophetic account of the army's mood, on which GIRARDET is highly intelligent
and informative. T. OP PERM ANN'S solid Leprobleme algerien (1961) is such a rarity
amid the ephemera that its left-wing publisher feels it necessary to apologize for its
impartiality ; E. BEHR'S The Algerian Problem (1961) is a very good book hi English.
For a brief account of the collapse of the regime and the beginnings of its successor,
see WILLIAMS AND HARRISON and other works mentioned on pp. 57, 192n.
Part II
The electoral geography of France has been subjected to minute scrutiny, but the
practical functioning of French parties has had little attention. Most of them must
be studied in general and collective works. PRIOURET (a) is a useful journalistic
description of them in the early days; the contributions in EARLE are spotty, and
the best general accounts of the early years are FAUVET (b) and GOGUEL (b).
Later, their social composition is analysed with varying degrees of thoroughness in
Partis et Classes, their rural influence in Paysans, and their external policies by
GROSSER. WAHL (b) gives a good general account from a point of view different
from mine. COSTON, though strongly marked by extreme right-wing sympathies,
is full of information on papers and personalities. Some facts and many stimulating
ideas can be found in DUVERGER (b).
464 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Strangely, the only full account of a party is HOFFMANN'S monograph on
Poujadism. The Radicals are well covered by B ARDONNET for their organization,
and DE TARR for their ideological divisions. GOGUEL (e) on MRP is also largely
ideological, and now somewhat dated. On the Communist party WALTER'S
informative apologia ends in 1940; ROSSI'S bitter but documented exposures deal
with the early war years; RIEBER analyses the party's tactics while Russia was
allied to the West; DOMENACH'S sympathetic account dates from 1951. For later
years we have only articles (GODFREY, no. 100; MACRIDIS, no. 152) and the
tediously theological works of ex-Communists. On the Socialist party there are
polemics, and an enormous and pedestrian history by LIGOU. REMOND 's admirable
work on the Right has little after 1945, and the gap is filled only by the excellent but
brief and unfriendly chapters in Partis et Classes, by MERLE, and in Paysans, by
BARRILLON and ROYER. On RPF the reader must await the forthcoming study
edited by WAHL.
Part III
Almost all French textbooks on political institutions have a strong juridical bias,
least marked in DUVERGER (a). Among the more politically conscious general
works are THERY, now dated, and ARNE", a mine of well-organized information;
GEORGEL is also full of material, presented in an assured and aggressive preaching
style. WAHL (b) offers a suggestive presentation of the Fourth Republic's institutions
in terms of the clash between the representative and administrative traditions of
politics. Institutions is informative, and more politically sophisticated than most
official productions. By far the best analysis of the factors and forces governing
French policy-making is in GROSSER.
LIDDERDALE, a House of Commons Clerk, described parliamentary procedure
with professional thoroughness, clarity and political virginity; CAMPBELL, no. 45,
brings him up to 1953. The preparation of governmental legislation and work of the
cabinet secretariat are concisely set out and compared with British and American
practice by BERTRAND. Many aspects of the legislative process are well analysed,
also comparatively, in Travail; others emerge more fully from HARRISON (un-
published). Other sources on committees are BARTHELEMY (a: pre-war but still
well worth reading) and BROMHEAD, no. 32. SOLAL-CELIGNY'S articles (nos. 200-
201) and the law theses by H. GEORGE, SOUBEYROL and DREVET deal compe-
tently and thoroughly with their respective subjects. There is no single good and
up-to-date source on the upper house. A succinct little book by the secretary-
general of the Assembly, M. BLAMONT, gives a specialist's description and critique
of parliamentary methods on the eve of the collapse ; the all too brief observations
of his colleague in the Council of the Republic must be collated from the end of
GOGUEL (d), from his articles (nos. 107, 111-13), and from Travail.
Part IV
The electoral system and elections are most competently and concisely analysed by
CAMPBELL. From 1956 every election and referendum has been very fully dissected,
but earlier ones had less thorough treatment. On 1951 see GOGUEL (d), and on 1956,
see Sections 1956 and, more briefly, NICHOLAS et al (nos. 167-70) and PIERCE
(no. 180). Most French works on administration are legalistic: LALUMI£RE^ on
the Inspection des Finances is an exception. FREEDEMAN on the Conseil d'Etat,
CHAPMAN (a, b) on local government, and the articles by BRINDILLAC, no. 28,
DIAMANT, no. 70, and EHRMANN, no. 85 deserve special mention. On their
respective spheres of policy, EHRMANN (b) and GROSSER are also most illuminating.
A general account by BLONDEL AND RIDLEY is to appear shortly.
Our knowledge of French pressure-groups has greatly expanded in recent years.
We owe a most stimulating analytical introduction to LAVAU (b), a thorough
inventory and methodological critique to MEYNAUD, and several major contribu-
tions to American scholars : a very careful and critical study of the patronat to
EHRMANN (b); an admirably perceptive and balanced historical account of the
BIBLIOGRAPHY 465
labour movement to LOR WIN; some excellent essays on rural politics and organi-
zation to WRIGHT, nos. 223-9 (and to the French writers in Pay sans) ; case-studies
of two major measures to GAL A NT, on social security, and tOARON ANDLERNER
on EDC; and a careful examination of Catholic organizations and attitudes to
BOSWORTH. A special number of Esprit in 1953 has many good and relevant
articles (nos. 28, 107, 120, 128, 138a, 153). Other useful studies on individual groups
areLAVAU, no. 139; BROWN, no. 35; EHRMANN, no. 84; MEYNAUD AND LANCE-
LOT, no. 161. HOFFMANN is most informative on Poujade and his small-business
rivals.
Parliamentary life under tripartisme was excellently described by HAMON in
nos. 117-18; and later on by the same author, no. 121, by DEBRE, no. 67, by
ISORNI (fl, b) and, from outside, in a popular, lively and informative little book by
MUSELIER. ARNE and GEORGEL both deal with some aspects of coalition politics
and the party system. LEITES concentrates exclusively on its seamy side, analysing
dubious evidence with subtlety and malice. Some shrewd observations are buried
in his huge joint work with MELNIK, but the urbane JOUVENEL is still a better
guide to the peculiarities of parliamentary psychology. BURON, a minister in two
Republics, published his frank, informative and unpretentious description and
defence of the political profession after this manuscript was completed.
Of general books on French life, MORAZE'S brilliant intuitions dazzle as much
as they illuminate. Continuity and resistance to change are stressed in EARLE
(especially by the economic and sociological writers); by LUTHY in scintillating
overstatements, offset by unmemorable qualifications; bywYLiEinhis attractive
account of southern village life ; and by FAU VET'S intelligent and balanced anatomy
of French divisions (c). More recent works emphasize change; notably TANNEN-
BAUM on the cultural side, and the Harvard volume Change on the political, social
and economic. The relationship between politics and society is discussed by A RON,
nos. 6 and 7, a vigorous challenge to GOGUEL (d); and in a special number of
Esprit in 1957, notably in the articles by BRINDILLAC, CROZIER and HOFFMANN
(nos. 30, 64, 125). The latter extends his analysis in no. 126, and in Change he carries
it into the Fifth Republic. ARON'S lectures (b) give an excellent and balanced
summary of France's failures, successes and problems in 1959; the summing-up
observations of an American economic historian (L ANDES, no. 135) and political
scientist (EHRMANN, no. 86) are penetrating and suggestive. Much of the vast
literature on institutional reform is out of date in the Fifth Republic, but DU VERGER
(<?, /) remains a brief but powerful critique of both the old regime and the new.
LIST OF BOOKS
ARN£, s. Le President du Conseil des Ministres sous la IV* Republique, 1962.
ARON, RAYMOND, (a) Le Grand Schisme, 1948;
(b) France Steadfast and Changing, Cambridge, Mass., 1960;
(c) — and D. LERNER, France Defeats EDC, 1957;
and nos. 5-7.
ARRIGHI, P. Le Statut des partis politiques, 1948.
ASPECTS: Aspects de la societe francaise by A. SIEGFRIED et aL, 1954.
AURIOL, v. Hier . . . demain, 1945. 2 vols.
BARDONNET, D. Uewlution de la structure du Parti radical, 1960.
z±RRii.LON,K.mPARTISET CLASSES ;P AYS ANS. ^ .
B ARTHELEMY, J. (a) Essoi sur le travail parlementoire et le systeme des commissions,
1934*
(b) Le Gouvernement de la France, 1939 ed.; first pub. 1919.
BEER anduLAM, see WAHL. , 'j^a
BERTRAND, A. (a) Les techniques du travail gouvememental dans I Etat moaerne,
Brussels 1954*
(b) in The Civil Service in Britain and France, ed. W. A. Robson, 1956;
and no. 16.
466 BIBLIOGRAPHY
BLAMONT, E. Les techniques parlementaires, 1958; and nos. 18-20.
BLOCH-MORHANGE, J. Les Politiciens, 1961.
BLONDEL, j. m ELECTIONS 1956; ELECTIONS ABROAD.
BLUM, L. La Reforms gouvernementale, 1936; first pub. anonymously, 1918.
BODLEY, J. E. c. France. 1st ed., 1898. 2 vols.
BOS WORTH, w. Catholicism and Crisis in Modern France, Princeton, N. J., 1962;
and no. 24.
BRAYANCE, A. Anatomic du Parti communiste francais, 1952.
BROGAN, D. w. (a) The Development of Modern France 1870-1939, 1940.
(b) The Free State, 1945;
(c) in Parliament: a Survey, ed. Lord Campion, 1952;
and see WERTH.
BURON, R. Le plus beau des metiers, 1963.
BYE, M, in EINAUDI, M. et al. Nationalization in France and Italy, Ithaca, N.Y.,
1955; and no. 37.
CAMPBELL, P., French Electoral Systems and Elections 1789-1957, 1957;
and nos. 39-47.
CAPITANT, R., see HAMON; VALLON. _ ^
CHANGE: France: Change and Tradition, by S. Hoffmann et al., 1963 ; also pub.
as In Search of France, Cambridge, Mass., 1963.
CHAPMAN, B. (a) Introduction to French Local Government, 1953;
(b) The Prefects and Provincial France, 1955;
(c) The Profession of Government, 1959;
and no. 51.
CHEVALLIER, L. Les Paysans, 1947.
COLE: see WRIGHT.
CONTE, A. La Succession, 1963.
cos TON, H. Partis, journaux et hommes politiques d'hier et d'aujourd'hui, 1960.
COTTERET, J. M. Le Pouvoir legislatifen France, 1962;
and in INEGALITES; PAYSANS; and no. 63.
CRISE: Crise du pouvoir et crise du civisme, Lyons, 1954. (Semaines sociales.)
DANSETTE, A. (a) Le Boulangisme, 16th ed., 1946;
(b) Destin du Catholicisme francais 1926-1956, 1957;
(c) Histoire des Presidents de la Republique, 2nd ed., 1960.
DEB RE, M. (a) La mort de PEtat republicain, 1947;
(b) Ces princes qui nous gouvernent, 1957 ;
and no. 67.
DEBU-BRIDEL, J. Les Partis contre de Gaulle, 1948.
DELOUVRIER, p. (a) in CRISE',
(b) — and NATHAN, R., Politique economique de la France (Lectures at Institut
d'Etudes Politiques 1955-56).
DE TARR, F. The French Radical Party from Herriot to Mendes-France, 1961.
DOG AN, M, in Les nouveaux comportements politiques de la classe ouvriere, ed. L.
Hamon, 1962;
in ELECTIONS 1956; ELECTIONS 1958 ; PARTIS ET CLASSES; PA YSANS;
and nos. 71-3.
DOMENACH, j. M. in EINAUDI, M. et al. Communism in Western Europe, Ithaca,
DREVET, p. La procedure de revision de la Constitution du 27.10.1946, 1959.
DUMAINE, J. Quaid'Orsay, 1955.
DU VERGER, M. (a) Manuel de droit constitutionnel et de science politique. 5th ed
1958; first pub. 1948;
(b) Political Parties, 1st Eng. ed., 1954; pub. in French, 1951 ;
(c) Institutions financier es, 2nd ed., 1957;
(d) The French Political System, Chicago, 1958 ;
(e) Demain la Republique, 1958;
(/) La Vle Republique et le Regime Presidentiel, 1961 ;
BIBLIOGRAPHY 467
and in ELECTIONS 1956; PARTIS ET CLASSES: SYSTEMES
ELECTORAUX; and no. 81.
EARLE, E. M. et al Modern France: Problems of the Third and Fourth Republics,
Princeton, N.J., 1951.
EHRMANN, H. w. (a) French Labor from Popular Front to Liberation, New York,
1947;
(#» Organized Business in France, Princeton, N.J., 1957;
see LAVAU; and nos. 82-6.
EINAUDI, M. et al., see BYE; DOMENACH; GOGUEL.
ELECTIONS ABROAD, ed. D. E. Butler, 1959.
ELECTIONS 1956: Les elections du 2 Janvier 1956, 1957, ed. M. Duverger, F.
r Goguel and J. Touchard. (Association Francaise de Science Politique.)
ELECTIONS 1958: Le referendum de septembre et les elections de novembre 1958
by J. TOUCHARD et al., 1960. (Association Frangaise de Science Politique.)
FAUCHER, J. A. Uagonie d'un regime, 1959.
FAUVET, J. (a) Les Partis politiques dans la France actuelle, 1947;
(b) De Thorez a de Gaulle: Les Forces politiques en France, 1951 ;
(c) La France dechiree, 1957, translated as The Cockpit of France, 1960;
(d) La IV* Republique, 1959;
and in PARTIS ET CLASSES; PAYSANS; and nos. 89-90.
FOGARTY, M. p. Christian Democracy in Western Europe 1820-1953, 1957.
FRANCE, see GAULLE, c. DE.
FREDERIX, P. Etat des Forces en France, 1935.
FREE DEM AN, c. E. The Conseil d'Etat in Modern France, New York, 1961.
GALANT, H. Histoire politique de la Securite Sociale, 1955.
GAULLE, c. DE. (a) La France sera la France: Ce que veut Charles de Gaulle, 1951 ;
(b) Le Salut: Memoir es de Guerre, vol. 3, 1959.
GEORGE, H. Le droit d' initiative parlementaire en matiere financier e depuis la
Constitution de J946, Bordeaux, 1956.
GEORGE, P. et al. Etudes sur la Banlieue de Paris, 1950.
GEORGEL, J. Critiques et reforme des Constitutions de la Republique, 2 vols., 1959.
GIRARDET, R. in Changing Patterns of Military Politics, ed. S. P. Huntington,
Glencoe, 111., 1961.
GODFREY, E. D. jr. The Fate of the French Non-communist Left, New York, 1955;
and no. 100.
GOGUEL, F. (a) La politique des partis sous la Troisieme Republique, 1946;
(b) in Encyclopedie politique de la France et du monde, 1950;
(c) Geographie des elections francaises, 1951 ;
(d) France under the Fourth Republic, Ithaca, N.Y., 1952;
(e) in EINAUDI, M. and GOGUEL, F. Christian Democracy in Italy and France,
Notre Dame, Ind., 1952;
(/) Le regime politique francais, 1955;
(#) — et ai Nouvelles etudes de sociologie electorale, 1954; „
and in ASPECTS', ELECTIONS 1956; CHANGE; SYSTEMES ELECTOR-
AUX; TRAVAIL;
and nos. 102-13.
GROSSER, A. La IVe Republique et sa politique exterieure, 1961 ;
and in ELECTIONS 1956.
QUERY, L. et al. Les Maltresde VUNR, 1959.
GUY, c. Le Cas Poujade, Givors, 1955.
HAMON, L. (a) Problemes constitutionals et realites politiques, pamphlet, 1954;
(b) De Gaulle dans la Republique, 1958, preface by R. Capitant;
see also DOG AN; and nos. 117-21. r .
HARRISON, M. 'Regards sur les Commissions de I'Assemblee Nationale, unpub-
lished thesis, Institut d'Etudes politiques, Paris, 1958;
see also WILLIAMS; and nos. 122-3.
HERVE, P. (a) Dieu et Cesar sont-ils commimistes?, 1956;
468 BIBLIOGRAPHY
(b) Lettre a Sartre et a quelques autres par la meme occasion, 1956;
and no. 124.
HISTOIRE: Histoire du Parti communiste francais, n.d., published anonymously
1962 by an opposition group of party members. 2 vols., incomplete.
HOFFMANN, s. (a) Le mouvement Poujade, 1956;
(b) 'Protest in Modern France' in The Revolution in World Politics, ed. M. A.
Kaplan, 1962;
in CHANGED and nos. 125-7.
HUSSON, R. (i) Les elections et le referendum des 21 octobre 1945, 5 mat 1946 et
2juinl946, 1946;
(ii) Les elections et le referendum des 13 octobre, 10 novembre, 24 novembre et
8 decembre 1946, 1947.
1NEGAL1TES: Lois electorales et inegalites de representation en France 1936-60 by
J. M. COTTERET, C. EMERI and P. LALUMIERE, 1960.
INSTITUTIONS: Les Institutions politiques de la France by F. DE BAECQUE et al,
1959.
ISORNI, J. (a) Le silence est d'or, 1957;
(b) Ainsi passent les Republiques, 1959.
JOUVENEL, R. DE, La Republique des camarades, 1914.
KAYSER, J. Les Grandes Batailles du Radicalisme 1820-1901, 1962;
and in ELECTIONS 1956 \ ELECTIONS 1958.
LACHAPELLE, G. Les regimes electoraux, 1934.
LAICITE, see REMOND (&).
LALUMIERE, p. Ulnspection des Finances, 1959; and in INEGALITES.
LANCELOT, A., See MEYNAUD.
LAPONCE, J. A. The Government of the Fifth Republic, Berkeley and Los Angeles,
Calif., 1961; and no. 137.
LAVAU, G. E. (a) Partis politiques et realites so dales, 1953 ;
(b) 'Political pressures in France' in Interest Groups on Four Continents, ed. H. W.
Ehrmann, Pittsburgh, 1958 ; more fully as no. 141 ;
in PARTIS ET CLASSES', and nos. 138-41.
LEFRANC, G. Les experiences syndicates en France de 1939 a 1950, 1950.
LEITES, N. On the Game of Politics in France, Stanford, Calif., 1959;
and see MELNIK.
LERNER, See ARON.
LESCUYER, G. Le controle de V&at sur les entreprises nationalises, 1959.
LIDDERDALE, D. w. s. The Parliament of France, 1951.
LIGOU, D. Histoire du Socialisme en France 1871-1961, 1962.
LIPSET, s. M. Political Man, 1960.
LONG, R. Les elections legislatives en Cote d'Or depuis 1870, 1958.
LOR WIN, v. R. The French Labor Movement, Cambridge, Mass., 1954;
and in EARLE.
LUTHY, H. The State of France, 1955; pub. in French 1955.
MARABUTO, p. Les Partis politiques et les mouvements sociaux sous la IVe Repub-
lique, 1948.
MACRIDIS, R. c. and BROWN, B. E. The De Gaulle Republic: Quest for Unity, Home-
wood, HI., 1960; and nos. 33-5, 150-2.
MAILLAUD, P. France, 1942.
MALIGNAC, G. and COLIN, R. Ualcoolisme, 2nd ed. 1958; first pub. 1954.
MARCUS, J. T. Neutralism and Nationalism in France, New York, 1958.
MASSIGLI, R. Sur quelques maladies de VEtat, 1958.
MATTHEWS, R. The Death of the Fourth Republic, 1954.
MELNIK, c. and LEITES, N. The House without Windows: France selects a President,
Evanston, EL, 1958.
MEYNAUD, J. (a) Les groupes de pression en France, 1958 ;
(b) — and LANCELOT, A. La participation des Francais a la Politique, 1961 ;
and nos. 160-1.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 469
MIDDLETON, w. L. The French Political System, 1932.
MILITAR Y POLITICS: see GIR ARD BT.
MORAZ£, c. (a) Les Francais et la Republique, 1st ed., 1956;
(b) — et al., Etudes de sociologie electorate, 1947.
MUSELIER, F. Regards neufs sur le Parlement, 1956.
NICOLET, c. (a) Pierre Mendes-France ou le metier de Cassandre, 1959:
(b) Le Radicalisme, 1957.
NOEL, L. Notre Derniere Chance, 1956.
OLIVESI, A. and RONCAYOLO, M., Geographie electoral des Bouches-du- Rhone
sous la IVe Republique, 1961.
PARLIAMENT, A SURYEY: see BROGAN.
PARTIS ET CLASSES: Partis politiques et classes sociales, ed. M. Duverger, 1955.
PAYSANS: Les Pay sans et lapolitique dans la France contemporaine, ed. J. Fauvet
and H. Mendras, 1958.
PICKLES, D. (a) France between the Republics, 1946;
(b) French Politics: the first years of the Fourth Republic, 1953 ;
(c) France: the Fourth Republic, 1955;
and nos. 175-6.
PINEAU, c. Mon cher depute, 1959.
PLANCHAIS, J. Le malaise de VArmee, 1958.
POLITIQUE ET TECHNIQUE by G. BERGER et al., 1958.
POUJADISME, LE by M. B. (Maurice Bardeche) et al, 1956.
POUTIER, c. La reforme de la Constitution, 1955.
PRIOURET, R. A. (a) La Republique des Partis, 1947;
(b) La Republique des Deputes, 1959.
REMOND, R. (a) La Droite en France de 1815 a nos jours, 1954;
(b) 'Laicite et question scolaire dans la vie politique francaise sous la IVC Repub-
lique', in La Laicite, by A. AUDIBERT et al., I960.
and nos. 186-8.
REVOLUTION IN WORLD POLITICS: see HOFFMANN.
RIEBER, A. J. Stalin and the French Communist Party 1940-47, New York, 1962.
RIOUX, L. Ou en est le Syndicalisme?, 1960.
ROBINSON, K. The Public Law of Overseas France since the war (pamphlet), revised
ed., Oxford, 1954; and no. 192.
RONCAYOLO, M., See OLIVESI.
ROSSI, A. (a) Physiologie du Parti communiste francais (1948) translated, slightly
abridged, as A Communist Party in Action, New Haven, Conn., 1949;
(b) Les communistes francais pendant la ldrole de guerre9, 1951.
(c) La Guerre des Papillons, 1954. [Neither (b) nor (c) is cited in text.]
ROYER, J. M. in ELECTIONS 1956; PAYSANS.
SCHRAM, s. R. Protestantism and Politics in France, Alenc.on, 1954.
SCHOENBRUN, D. As France Goes, New York, 1957.
SERANT, P. Ou va la Droite?, 1958.
SHARP, w. R. The Government of the French Republic, New York, 1938.
SIEGFRIED, A. (a) Tableau des Partis en France, 1930; translated as France: a Study
in Nationality, New Haven, Conn., 1930;
(b) De la IIP a la IV* Republique, 1956;
(c) De la IV* a la V* Republique, 1958 ;
see also ASPECTS; and no. 194.
SOUBEYROL, J. Les Decrets-lois sous la IVe Republique, Bordeaux, 1955;
and no. 202.
SOULIER A. Ulnstabilite ministerielle sous la IIP Republique, 1939, preface by
M. Prelot; and no. 203.
SUFFERT, G. Les Catholiques et la Gauche, 1960.
SYSTEMES fiLECTORAUX: ^influence des systemes electoraux sur la vie
politique, 1950, by M. DUVERGER et al.
TANNENBAUM, E. R. The New France, Chicago, 1961.
470 BIBLIOGRAPHY
THEOLLEYRE, j. M. Le Proces desfuites, 1956.
THERY, j. Le Gouvernement de la IVe Republique, 1949.
THIBAUDET, A. (a) Les Idees politiques de la France, 1932;
(b) La Republique des professeurs, 1927.
TOURNOUX, J. R. Secrets d'Etat, 1960.
TRAVAIL: Le Travail parlementaire en France et a Vetr anger, by F. GOGUEL et
aL, 1954. (Special number of RFSP.)
VALLON, L. UHistoire s'avance masquee, 1957, preface by R. Capitant.
WAHL, N. (a) The Fifth Republic, New York, 1959;
(b) in Patterns of Government, ed. S. H. Beer and A. B. Ulam, 1st ed., New York,
1958.
WALINE, M. Les Partis centre la Republique, 1948;
in POLITIQUEET TECHNIQUE; and no. 214.
WALTER, G., Histoire du Parti communist e francais, 1948.
WARNER, c. K. The Winegrowers of France and the Government since 1875, New
York, 1960.
WERTH, A. (a) The Destiny of France, 1937;
(b) The Twilight of France, 1942, introduction by D. W. Brogan;
(c) France 1940-1955, 1956;
(d) The Strange History of Pierre Mendes-France and the Great Conflict over
French North Africa, 1957;
(e) The De Gaulle Revolution, 1960.
WILLIAMS, P. M. (a) Politics in Post-war France, 2nd ed., 1958; first pub. 1954;
(b) — and HARRISON, M. De Gaulle's Republic, 1960;
and in ELECTIONS ABROAD ; and nos. 218-22.
WILSON, J. s. G, French Banking Structure and Credit Policy, 1957.
WRIGHT, G. (d) The Reshaping of French Democracy, 1950;
(b) France in Modern Times, 1960;
(c) in European Political Systems, ed. T. Cole, New York, 1953;
in EARLE; and nos. 223-9.
WYLIE, L. Village in the Vaucluse, Cambridge, Mass., 1957; and in CHANGE.
LIST OF ARTICLES
1. ABBOTT, R. s. and SICARD, R. . . . The Super-Prefect, APSR 44.2 (1950),
426-31.
2. ALLEN, L. A. Mendes-France and the Radical Party, WPQ 13.2 (1960),
445-65.
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476 BIBLIOGRAPHY
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JP Journal of Politics
P.Adm. Public Administration
P.Aff. Parliamentary Affairs
PS Political Studies
RDP Revue du droit public et de la science politique
RFSP Revue francaise de science politique
RPP Revue politique et parlementaire
TM Temps modernes
WPQ Western Political Quarterly
APPENDIX I
CONSTITUTION OF THE FOURTH REPUBLIC
Articles 96 to 106, forming Chapter 12 (Transitional Provisions) are omitted. Where
articles were amended in 1954 the new version appears beside the old. Page references
to the text are given after each chapter heading (in Chapter 2, after each article).
PREAMBLE
(pp. 292-3, 294)
On the morrow of the victory gained by the free peoples over the regimes which
attempted to enslave and degrade the human person, the French people proclaim
anew that every human being, without distinction of race, religion or creed, possesses
inalienable and sacred rights. They solemnly reaffirm the rights and liberties of man
and the citizen consecrated by the Declaration of Rights of 1 789 and the fundamental
principles recognized by the laws of the Republic.
They further proclaim as most necessary in our time the following political
economic and social principles : '
The law shall guarantee to women rights equal to those of men in all spheres.
Any man persecuted by reason of his activities in the cause of liberty shall have
the right of asylum in the territories of the Republic.
It shall be the duty of all to work, and the right of all to obtain employment. None
may suffer wrong, in his work or employment, by reason of his origin, opinions or
beliefs. ° r
Every man may protect his rights and interests by trade union or professional
activity [Faction syndicale] and belong to the organization of his choice.
The right to strike shall be exercised within the framework of the laws which
govern it.
Every worker shall participate, through his delegates, in collective bargaining on
the conditions of labour as weU as in the management of the firm.
Any property, or firm, which possesses or acquires the character of a national
public service or of a de facto monopoly must come under common ownership
The Nation shall ensure to the individual and family the conditions necessarv to
their development. J
It shall guarantee to all, especiaUy to the child, the mother and aged workers, the
protection of their health, material security, rest and leisure. Every human being
who is unable to work on account of his age, his physical or mental condition, or the
economic situation, shaU be entitled to obtain from the community decent means of
support.
The Nation proclaims the solidarity and equality of all Frenchmen with respect
to burdens imposed by national disasters.
The Nation shall guarantee the equal access of children and adults to education
professional training and culture. It shall be a duty of the State to organize free and
secular public education at all levels. S
The French Republic, faithful to its traditions, shall abide by the rules of public
international law. It will undertake no war for the object of conquest and will never
employ its forces against the liberty of any people
APPENDICES
479
On condition of reciprocity, France will accept the limitations of sovereignty
necessary to the organization and defence of peace.
France together with the overseas peoples shall form a Union founded upon
equality of rights and duties, without distinction of race or religion.
The French Union shall consist of nations and peoples who pool or co-ordinate
their resources and their efforts to develop their respective civilizations, increase
their well-being and ensure their security.
Faithful to her traditional mission, France proposes to guide the peoples for whom
she has taken responsibility into freedom to administer themselves and conduct their
own affairs democratically ; rejecting any system of colonial rule based upon arbi-
trary power, she shall guarantee to all equal access to public office and the individual
or collective exercise of the rights and liberties proclaimed or confirmed above.
THE INSTITUTIONS OF THE REPUBLIC
CHAPTER 1. SOVEREIGNTY
(pp. 208, 280, 303 n. 57, 306)
1 . France shall be an indivisible, secular, democratic and social Republic.
2. (i) The national emblem shall be the tricolour flag, blue, white, red in three
vertical bands of equal size, (ii) The national anthem shall be the 'Marseillaise',
(iii) The motto of the Republic shall be: 'Liberty, Equality, Fraternity', (iv) Its
principle shall be : Government of the people, for the people and by the people.
3. (i) National sovereignty belongs to the French people, (ii) No section of the
people nor any individual may claim the exercise thereof, (iii) In constitutional
matters, the people shall exercise it by the vote of their representatives and by
referendum, (iv) In all other matters, they shall exercise it through their deputies in
the National Assembly, elected by universal, equal, direct and secret voting.
4. All French nationals and subjects of both sexes, who have attained their majority
and enjoy civil and political rights, shall have the vote under the conditions decided
by law.
CHAPTER 2. PARLIAMENT
5. Parliament shall consist of the National Assembly and the Council of the Repub-
lic.
(p. 280)
6. (i) The length of the term of each Assembly, its mode of election, the conditions
of eligibility, the rules of ineligibility and incompatibility shall be decided by law.
(ii) However, the two Houses shall be elected on a territorial basis, the National
Assembly by direct universal suffrage, the Council of the Republic by the communal
and departmental collectivities, by indirect universal suffrage. The Council of the
Republic shall be renewable by halves, (iii) Nevertheless the National Assembly may
itself elect by proportional representation councillors whose number must not
exceed a sixth of the total number of the members of the Council of the Republic,
(iv) The number of members of the Council of the Republic cannot be less than 250
or greater than 350.
(pp. 208-9, 278-9)
480
APPENDICES
7. [1946] (i) War cannot be declared
without a vote of the National
Assembly and the prior opinion of
the Council of the Republic.
[1954] (i) unchanged.
(ii) A state of siege shall be proclaimed
under the conditions prescribed by
law.
(pp. 208, 281, 303)
8. Each of the two Houses shall judge the eligibility of its members and the regularity
of their election; and alone may accept their resignation, (p. 210)
9. [1946] (i) The National Assembly
shall convene automatically [de plein
droit] for its annual session on the
second Tuesday in January,
(ii) The total length of recesses cannot
exceed four months. Adjournments of
the sitting for more than ten days shall
be considered as a recess.
[1954] (i) The National Assembly
shall convene automatically for its
ordinary session on the first Tuesday
in October.
(ii) When this session shall have
lasted at least seven months, the
prime minister may pronounce it
closed by a decree issued in cabinet.
This seven-month period shall not
include recesses. Adjournments of the
sitting for more than eight full days
shall be considered as a recess,
(iii) unchanged.
(iii) The Council of the Republic shall
sit at the same time as the National
Assembly.
(pp. 212, 281, 303n., 306)
10. (i) The sittings of the two Houses shall be public. Verbatim reports of debates
and also parliamentary documents shall be published in the Journal Officiel. (ii)
Each of the two Houses may go into committee for a secret session.
11. [1946] (i) Each of the two Houses
shall elect its bureau every year, at
the beginning of its session, by pro-
portional representation of party
groups.
(ii) When the two Houses assemble
jointly to elect the President of the
Republic, their bureau shall be that
of the National Assembly.
(pp. 215n, 217n, 237, 280)
12. [1946] When the National Assembly
is not sitting, its bureau, supervising
the activities of the cabinet, may
convene Parliament; it must do so at
the request of a third of the deputies
or of the Prime Minister.
[1954] (i) Each of the two Houses
shall elect its bureau every year at
the beginning of its ordinary session
and under the conditions provided by
its standing orders,
(ii) unchanged.
[1954] (i). When the National As-
sembly is not sitting, its bureau may
convene Parliament for an extra-
ordinary session; the president of the
National Assembly must do so at the
request of the prime minister or of
the majority of the membership of the
National Assembly, (ii) The prime
minister shall pronounce the extra-
ordinary session closed under the
APPENDICES
481
(p. 212-1, 303n.)
procedure prescribed in Article 9.
(iii) When the extraordinary session
is held at the request of the majority
of the National Assembly or of its
bureau, the closure decree cannot be
issued before Parliament has ex-
hausted the specific agenda for which
it was convened.
13. The National Assembly alone shall vote the law. It cannot delegate this right.
(pp. 191, 270-5, 303n., 306)
14. [1946] (i) The Prime Minister and
the members of Parliament may
propose legislation,
(ii) Government bills and bills pro-
posed by members of the National
Assembly shall be registered with the
latter *s bureau.
(iii) Bills proposed by members of
the Council of the Republic shall be
registered with its bureau and trans-
ferred without debate to the bureau of
the National Assembly. They shall
be out of order if they would result
in a reduction of revenue or a creation
of expenditure.
(pp. 204, 257, 281-5)
[1954] (i) unchanged.
(ii) Government bills shall be regis-
tered with the bureau of the National
Assembly or the bureau of the
Council of the Republic. However,
bills to authorize the ratification of
the treaties prescribed in Article 27,
budgetary or financial bills, and bills
involving reduction of revenue or
creation of expenditure must be
registered with the bureau of the
National Assembly,
(iii) Bills introduced by members of
Parliament shall be registered with the
bureau of the House to which they
belong and transferred after adoption
to the other House. Bills introduced
by members of the Council of the
Republic shall be out of order if they
would result in a reduction of re-
venue or a creation of expenditure.
15. The National Assembly shall examine the bills [projets et propositions de loi]
which are submitted to it, in committees of which it shall settle the number, compo-
sition and competence.
(p. 242)
16. (i) The budget bill shall be submitted to the National Assembly, (ii) This bill
may contain strictly financial provisions only, (iii) An organic law will regulate the
mode of presentation of the budget.
(pp. 260, 263 and n., 268-9)
17. (i) The Deputies in the National Assembly may propose expenditure, (ii) How-
ever, no proposal entailing an increase in the expenditure prescribed or creating
new expenditure may be presented during the discussion of the budget, the estimates
or supplementary credits.
(pp. 263-5, 267, 282, 303n.)
482
APPENDICES
18. (i) The National Assembly shall regulate the nation's accounts, (ii) In this task
it shall be assisted by the Cour des Comptes. (iii) The National Assembly may entrust
to the Cour des Comptes any investigation or inquiry relating to the administration
of public revenue and expenditure, or to the management of the treasury.
(p. 338)
\ 9. Amnesty may be granted only by a law.
(p. 208)
20. [1946] (i) The Council of the Repub-
lic shall examine, in an advisory
capacity, the bills voted by the
National Assembly on first reading,
(ii) It shall give its opinion at latest
within two months of being sent the
bill by the National Assembly. Where
the budget bill is concerned, this
period may be shortened if necessary
so as not to exceed the time used by
the National Assembly for its exami-
nation and vote. When the National
Assembly has determined to adopt an
urgency procedure, the Council of
the Republic shall give its opinion in
the same period as that prescribed
for the National Assembly's debates
by the latter's standing orders. The
periods prescribed in this article shall
be suspended during recesses. They
may be extended by decision of the
National Assembly,
(iii) If the opinion of the Council of
the Republic is in agreement or if it
has not been given within the
periods prescribed in the previous
paragraph, the law shall be promul-
gated in the draft voted by the
National Assembly.
(iv) If the opinion is not in agreement,
the National Assembly shall examine
the bill on second reading. It shall
take its final and sovereign decision
solely on the amendments proposed
by the Council of the Republic, by
accepting or rejecting them in whole
or in part. Should these amendments
be wholly or partially rejected, the
vote on second reading of the bill
shall take place by public ballot, by
an absolute majority of the member-
ship of the National Assembly, when-
ever the vote on the whole bill was
[1954] (i) Every bill shall be examined
successively in the two Houses of
Parliament with a view to securing
adoption of an identical text,
(ii) Unless it has examined the bill on
first reading, the Council of the
Republic shall pronounce at latest
within two months of being sent the
draft adopted on first reading by the
National Assembly,
(iii) Where budget bills and the
finance bill are concerned, the period
allowed the Council of the Republic
must not exceed the time previously
used by the National Assembly for
their examination and vote. When
urgency procedure is invoked by the
National Assembly, the period shall
be double that prescribed for the
National Assembly's debates by the
latter's standing orders,
(iv) If the Council of the Republic has
not pronounced within the periods
prescribed in the previous paragraphs,
the law shall be ready to be [en etat
d'etre] promulgated in the draft
voted by the National Assembly,
(v) If no agreement is reached, each
of the two Houses shall continue its
examination. After two readings by
the Council of the Republic, each
House shall be allotted, for this
purpose, the period taken by the other
House over the previous reading,
except that this period cannot be less
than seven days or one day for the
texts covered by the third paragraph,
(vi) Failing agreement within a
period of a hundred days counted
from the sending of the draft to the
Council of the Republic for second
reading, but reduced to a month for
budgetary bills and for the finance
APPENDICES
483
taken by the Council of the Republic
in the same conditions.
(pp. 281, 282-5)
bill and to fifteen days under the pro-
cedure applicable to urgent matters,
the National Assembly may take its
final decision either by reaffirming the
last draft voted by it, or by modifying
it by adopting one or several of the
amendments proposed to this draft
by the Council of the Republic,
(vii) If the National Assembly exceeds
or extends the periods of examination
allotted to it, the period prescribed
for agreement by the two Houses shall
be increased by the same amount,
(viii) The periods prescribed in this
Article shall be suspended during
recesses. They may be extended by
decision of the National Assembly.
21. No member of Parliament may be prosecuted, sought out, arrested, detained or
judged on account of opinions expressed or votes cast by him in the exercise of his
functions.
(p. 210)
22. [1946] During his term of office, no
member of Parliament may be prose-
cuted or arrested for a crime or
misdemeanour without the authori-
zation of the House to which he
belongs, except flagrante delicto. The
detention or prosecution of a member
of Parliament shall be suspended if
the House to which he belongs so
demands.
(pp. 210-11)
[1954] During the session no member
of Parliament may be prosecuted or
arrested for a crime or misdemeanour
without the authorization of the
House to which he belongs, except
flagrante delicto. Any member of
Parliament arrested out of session
may vote by proxy as long as the
House to which he belongs has not
pronounced on the waiver of his
parliamentary immunity. If it has not
pronounced within the thirty days
following the opening of the session,
the arrested member shall be released
automatically. Except in cases of
flagrant delicto, authorized prose-
cution or final conviction, no member
of Parliament may be arrested, out of
session, without the authorization of
the bureau of the House to which he
belongs. The detention or prosecution
of a member of Parliament shall be
suspended if the House to which he
belongs so demands.
23. Members of Parliament shall receive compensation settled in relation to the
remuneration of a category of civil servants.
(/>. 211)
484 APPENDICES
24. (i) No one may belong both to the National Assembly and to the Council of
the Republic, (ii) Members of Parliament may not belong to the Economic Council
or the Assembly of the French Union.
CHAPTER 3. THE ECONOMIC COUNCIL
(pp. 295-6)
25. (i) An economic council, whose constitution shall be regulated by law, shall
examine, in an advisory capacity, the bills [projets et propositions de lot] within its
competence. The National Assembly shall submit these bills [projets] to it before
debating them, (ii) The Economic Council may also be consulted by the Cabinet.
It is necessarily so consulted on the establishment of a national economic plan
having for its object the full employment of men and the rational use of material
resources.
CHAPTER 4. DIPLOMATIC TREATIES
(pp. 208, 224-5, 281, 283)
26. Diplomatic treaties regularly ratified and published shall have force of law,
even when they may be contrary to French domestic legislation, without requiring
to ensure their enforcement any legislative provisions other than those necessary
to ensure their ratification.
27. (i) Treaties relating to international organization, peace and commercial treaties,
treaties which commit the finances of the State, those relating to the personal status
and property rights of French citizens abroad, those which amend French domestic
legislation, as well as those which allow the cession, exchange or acquisition of
territory, shall be final only after having been ratified by force of law. (ii) No
cession, no exchange and no acquisition of territory shall be valid without the
consent of the populations concerned.
28. Since diplomatic treaties regularly ratified and published have authority
superior to that of domestic legislation, their provisions may be neither abrogated,
amended nor suspended except after a formal denunciation, notified through diplo-
matic channels. Whenever one of the treaties covered by Article 27 is concerned, the
denunciation must be authorized by the National Assembly, except for commercial
treaties.
CHAPTER 5. THE PRESIDENT OF THE REPUBLIC
(pp. 196-7, 203, 204 and n.9 208, 217n., 281, 299, 306)
29. (i) The President of the Republic shall be elected by Parliament, (ii) He shall be
elected for seven years. He shall be re-eligible once only.
30. The President of the Republic shall appoint in Cabinet the Conseillersd'Etat,
the Grand Chancellor of the Legion of Honour, ambassadors and envoys extraordi-
nary, members of the Higher Council and the Committee of National Defence,
University rectors, prefects, directors of the civil service departments, general officers,
representatives of the Government in the overseas territories.
31. (i) The President of the Republic shall be kept informed of international nego-
tiations. He shall sign and ratify treaties, (ii) The President of the Republic shall
accredit ambassadors and envoys extraordinary to foreign powers ; foreign ambas-
sadors and envoys extraordinary shall be accredited to him.
APPENDICES 485
32. (i) The President of the Republic shall preside over the Cabinet, (ii) He shall
have minutes of the meetings kept and shall retain them.
33. The President of the Republic shall preside, with the same functions, over the
Higher Council and the Committee of National Defence and shall take the title of
Commander-in-Chief.
34. The President of the Republic shall preside over the High Council of the Judi-
ciary.
35. The President of the Republic shall exercise the right of reprieve [le droit de
grace] in the High Council of the Judiciary.
36. (i) The President of the Republic shall promulgate laws within ten days of the
law as finally adopted being sent to the Government. This period shall be reduced
to five days in cases of urgency declared by the National Assembly, (ii) Within the
period laid down for promulgation, the President of the Republic, in a message
stating his grounds, may ask the two Houses for a new deliberation, which cannot
be refused, (iii) Failing promulgation by the President of the Republic within the
periods laid down by this Constitution, the President of the National Assembly shall
see to it.
37. The President of the Republic shall communicate with Parliament by messages
addressed to the National Assembly.
38. Every act of the President of the Republic must be countersigned by the Prime
Minister and by a Minister.
39. Not more than thirty days and not less than fifteen days before the expiry of
the powers of the President of the Republic, Parliament shall proceed to elect a new
President.
40. (i) If, in application of the preceding article, the election must take place within
a period when the National Assembly is dissolved in conformity with Article 51,
the powers of the incumbent President of the Republic shall be prolonged until the
election of the new President. Parliament shall proceed to elect this new President
within ten days of the election of the new National Assembly, (ii) In this event, the
designation of the Prime Minister shall take place within fifteen days following the
election of the new President of the Republic.
41. (i) In the event of an impediment duly recognized by a vote of Parliament, in
the event of a vacancy due to death, resignation or any other reason, the President
of the National Assembly shall temporarily assume the duties of the President of
the Republic. He shall be replaced in his own duties by a Vice-President. (ii) The
new President of the Republic shall be elected within ten days, except as stated in
the preceding article.
42. (i) The President of the Republic shall be accountable only in cases of high
treason, (ii) He can be impeached by the National Assembly and arraigned before
the High Court of Justice under the conditions prescribed in Article 57 below.
43 . The post of President of the Republic shall be incompatible with any other public
office.
44. Members of families which once reigned over France shall not be eligible for
the Presidency of the Republic.
486
APPENDICES
CHAPTER 6. THE CABINET1
(pp. 191n., 204, 209, 215n., 217n., 230f, 236-8, 242, 281, 303nn.)
45. [1946] (i) At the beginning of each
legislature the President of the
Republic, after the customary consul-
tations, shall designate the Prime
Minister.
(ii) The latter shall submit to the
National Assembly the programme
and policy of the cabinet which he
intends to form.
(iii) The Prime Minister and Ministers
cannot be appointed until the Prime
Minister has been granted the Assem-
bly's confidenc in a public ballot and
by an absolute majority of the Depu-
ties, except when force majeure
prevents the National Assembly from
meeting.
(iv) The same procedure shall be
followed in the course of a legislature
in the event of a vacancy due to death,
resignation or any other cause, except
as stated in Article 52 below,
(v) No cabinet crisis occurring within
a period of fifteen days from the
appointment of the ministers shall
count for the application of Article
51.
[1954] (i) unchanged.
(ii) The latter shall choose the
members of his cabinet and shall
present the list to the National
Assembly, before which he shall
appear to obtain its confidence on
the programme and policy which he
expects to pursue, except when force
majeure prevents the National As-
sembly from meeting,
(iii) The vote shall take place in a
public ballot and by an ordinary
majority.
(iv) The same procedure shall be
followed in the course of a legis-
lature, in case of a vacancy in the
premiership, except as stated in
Article 52.
(v) unchanged.
46. The Prime Minister and the Ministers chosen by him shall be appointed by a
decree of the President of the Republic.
47. (i) The Prime Minister shall ensure the enforcement of the laws, (ii) He shall
make all civil and military appointments, except those prescribed in Articles 30,
46 and 84. (iii) The Prime Minister shall supervise the armed forces and co-ordinate
preparations for national defence, (iv) The acts of the Prime Minister prescribed in
this Article shall be countersigned by the ministers concerned.
48. (i) The Ministers shall be responsible collectively to the National Assembly for
the general policy of the Cabinet and individually for their personal actions,
(ii) They shall not be responsible to the Council of the Republic.
1. Cofiseil des Ministres, as everywhere except: in Me phrase 'cabinet crisis* (crise ministeriette)
in Arts. 45 (v) and 51 (i) ; and in Arts. 12, 45 (ii), 48 (i), 49 (iii, iv), 50 (i) and 52 (i) where the
text has Cabinet. President du Conseil is translated 'Prime Minister'.
APPENDICES
487
[1954] (i) unchanged.
49. [1946] (i) A vote of confidence may
be called for only after discussion by
the Cabinet ; it may be called for only
by the Prime Minister.
(ii) A vote of confidence cannot occur
until one clear day after it has been
called for in the Assembly. It shall
take place by a public ballot.
(iii) Confidence may be refused to
the Cabinet only by an absolute
majority of the Deputies in the
Assembly.
(iv)2 This refusal shall entail the
collective resignation of the Cabinet.
50. [1946] (i) The voting of a censure
motion by the National Assembly
shall entail the collective resignation
of the Cabinet.
(ii) This vote cannot occur until one
clear day after the motion was intro-
duced. It shall take place by public
ballot.
(iii) A censure motion may be adopted
only by an absolute majority of the
Deputies in the Assembly.
51. (i) If, within a single period of eighteen months, two cabinet crises occur in the
conditions prescribed in Articles 49 and 50, the dissolution of the National Assembly
may be determined by the Cabinet, after an opinion from the President of the Assem-
bly. The dissolution will be pronounced in conformity with this decision, by a decree
of the President of the Republic, (ii) The provisions of the previous paragraph shall
apply only at the expiry of the first eighteen months of the legislature.
(ii) A vote of confidence cannot occur
until twenty-four hours after it has
been called for in the Assembly. It
shall take place by a public ballot,
(iii) Confidence shall be refused to the
cabinet by an absolute majority of
the deputies in the Assembly.
(iv)2
[1954] (i) unchanged.
(ii) The vote on a censure motion
shall take place in the same condi-
tions and manner as the vote of
confidence,
(iii) unchanged.
52. [1946] (i) In the event of dissolution,
the Cabinet, with the exception of
the Prime Minister and the Minister
of the Interior, shall remain in office
to attend to current affairs,
(ii) The President of the Republic
shall designate the President of the
National Assembly as Prime Minister.
The latter shall designate the new
Minister of the Interior in agreement
with the Bureau of the National
Assembly. He shall designate as
senior Ministers without portfolio
[Ministres d'Etai] members of the
party groups not represented in the
Government.
[over
[1954] (i) In the event of dissolution,
the cabinet shall remain in office.
(ii) However, if the dissolution was
preceded by the adoption of a censure
motion, the President of the Republic
shall appoint the president of the
National Assembly as prime minister
and minister of the interior.
[over
2. Inadvertently repealed in 1954 owing to an error in the paragraphing of the constitution as
promulgated in 1946, which had to be corrected retrospectively.
488 APPENDICES
(iii) A general election shall take (iii) unchanged.
place not less than twenty, nor more
than thirty days after the dissolution.
(iv) The National Assembly shall (iv) unchanged.
convene automatically on the third
Tuesday following its election.
53. (i) Ministers shall have access to the two Houses and to their Committees. They
must be heard when they so request, (ii) They may be assisted in debates in either
House by commissioners designated by decree.
54. The Prime Minister may delegate his powers to a Minister.
55. In the event of a vacancy due to death or any other cause, the Cabinet shall
instruct one of its members to exercise temporarily the functions of Prime Minister.
CHAPTER 7. THE RESPONSIBILITY OF MINISTERS UNDER
THE PENAL CODE
(pp. 298-9)
56. Ministers shall be legally responsible for crimes and misdemeanours committed
in the exercise of their functions.
57. (i) Ministers may be impeached by the National Assembly and arraigned before
the High Court of Justice, (ii) The National Assembly shall take its decision by
secret ballot and by an absolute majority of its membership, with the exception of
those who may be called upon to take part in the prosecution, investigation or
judgment of the case.
58. The High Court of Justice shall be elected by the National Assembly at the
beginning of each legislature.
59. The organization of the High Court of Justice and the procedure followed before
it shall be decided by a special law.
CHAPTER 8. THE FRENCH UNION: I. PRINCIPLES
(pp. 193, 281, 293-5, 303n., 304)
60. The French Union shall be composed, on the one hand of the French Republic
which comprises metropolitan France, the overseas departments and Territories,
and on the other hand of the Associated Territories and States.
61. The position of the Associated States within the French Union shall depend in
each case on the act which defines their relationship with France.
62. The members of the French Union shall pool all their resources in order to
guarantee the defence of the whole Union. The Government of the Republic shall
undertake the co-ordination of these resources and the direction of the policy
appropriate to prepare and ensure this defence.
II. ORGANIZATION
63. The central organs of the French Union shall be the Presidency, the High
Council and the Assembly.
64. The President of the French Republic shall be president of the French Union,
whose permanent interests he shall represent.
APPENDICES
489
65. (i) The High Council of the French Union shall consist of the President of the
Union as chairman, a delegation of the French Government, and the representatives
that each of the Associated States shall be entitled to accredit to the President of
the Union, (ii) Its function shall be to assist the Government in the general direction
of the Union.
66. (i) The Assembly of the French Union shall consist, half of members represent-
ing metropolitan France, and half of members representing the overseas depart-
ments and Territories and the Associated States, (ii) An organic law will decide the
conditions under which the different sections of the population may be represented.
67. The members of the Assembly of the Union shall be elected, for the overseas
departments and Territories, by the territorial assemblies ; they shall be elected, for
metropolitan France, in the proportion of two-thirds by the members of the National
Assembly representing metropolitan France and one-third by the members of the
Council of the Republic representing metropolitan France.
68. The Associated States may designate delegates to the Assembly of the Union
within limits and conditions settled by a law and a domestic act of each State.
69. (i) The President of the French Union shall convene the Assembly of the French
Union and close its sessions. He must convene it at the request of half its members,
(ii) The Assembly of the French Union cannot sit during Parliamentary recesses.
70. The rules of Articles 8, 10, 21, 22 and 23 shall apply to the Assembly of the
French Union under the same conditions as to the Council of the Republic.
71 . (i) The Assembly of the French Union shall be cognizant of the bills or proposals
which are submitted to it for its opinion by the National Assembly or the Govern-
ment of the French Republic or the Governments of the Associated States, (ii) The
Assembly shall be entitled to pronounce on motions presented by one of its members,
and, if it decides to consider them, to instruct its Bureau to send them to the National
Assembly. It may make proposals to the French Government and to the High Coun-
cil of the French Union, (iii) To be in order, the motions covered by the preceding
paragraph must relate to legislation pertaining to the Overseas Territories.
72. (i) In the Overseas Territories, legislative power shall belong to Parliament in
matters of criminal law, the regulation of civil liberties and political and adminis-
trative organization, (ii) In all other matters, French laws shall apply in the Overseas
Territories only by express provision or if they have been extended by decree to the
Overseas Territories after an opinion from the Assembly of the Union, (iii) Further,
by derogation from Article 13, special provisions for each territory may be enacted
by the President of the Republic in Cabinet after a prior opinion from the Assembly
of the Union.
III. OVERSEAS DEPARTMENTS AND TERRITORIES
73. The legislative system of the overseas departments shall be the same as that of
the metropolitan departments, unless otherwise determined by law.
74. (i) The Overseas Territories shall be granted a special status which takes into
account their particular interests within the framework of the general interests of the
Republic, (ii) This status and the internal organization of each Overseas Territory
or group of territories shall be settled by law, after an opinion from the Assembly of
the French Union and consultation with the Territorial Assemblies.
490 APPENDICES
75. (i) The individual status of a member of the Republic and of the French Union
shall be subject to change, (ii) Alterations of status and transfers from one category
to another, within the framework settled by Article 60, may follow only from a
law voted by Parliament, after consultation with the Territorial Assemblies and the
Assembly of the Union.
76. (i) The powers of the Republic shall be vested in the representative of the Govern-
ment in each territory or group of territories. He shall be the head of the territorial
administration, (ii) He shall be responsible to the Government for his actions.
77. An elected Assembly shall be instituted hi each territory. The electoral system,
composition and competence of this Assembly shall be decided by law.
78. (i) In the groups of territories, the management of common interests shall be
entrusted to an Assembly consisting of members elected by the Territorial Assem-
blies, (ii) Its composition and powers shall be settled by law.
79. The Overseas Territories shall elect representatives to the National Assembly
and to the Council of the Republic under the conditions prescribed by law.
80. All subjects of the Overseas Territories shall have the status [qualite] of citizen,
by the same right as French nationals of metropolitan France or of the Overseas
Territories. Special laws will lay down the conditions under which they exercise their
rights as citizens.
81. All French nationals and subjects of the French Union shall have the status of
citizen of the French Union which shall ensure for them the enjoyment of the rights
and liberties guaranteed by the Preamble to the present Constitution.
82. (i) Citizens who are not subject to French civil law shall retain their personal
status [subject to indigenous law] so long as they do not renounce it. (ii) This status
[statut] may in no circumstance constitute a ground for refusing or restricting the
rights and liberties pertaining to the status [qualite] of French citizen.
CHAPTER 9. THE HIGH COUNCIL OF THE JUDICIARY
(pp. 204n.9 208, 299-301)
83. (i) The High Council of the Judiciary shall consist of fourteen members :
(ii) The President of the Republic, chairman;
(iii) The Keeper of the Seals, Minister of Justice, vice-chairman;
(iv) Six persons elected for six years by the National Assembly, by a two-thirds
majority, outside its membership, six alternates being elected under the same
conditions ;
(v) Six persons designated as follows :
(vi) Four members of the judicial profession elected for six years, representing each
branch of the profession, under the conditions prescribed by law, four alter-
nates being elected in the same conditions ;
(vii) Two members designated for six years by the President of the Republic
outside Parliament and the judiciary, but within the legal professions, two
alternates being designated under the same conditions.
(viii)The decisions of the High Council of the Judiciary shall be taken by a majority
vote. In the event of a tied vote, that of the chairman shall prevail.
84. (i) The President of the Republic shall appoint, on the proposal of the High
Council of the Judiciary, to judicial posts, except for those of public prosecutor.
APPENDICES 491
(ii) The High Council of the Judiciary shall ensure, in conformity with the law, the
discipline of these judges, their independence and the administration of the courts,
(iii) These judges [les magistrates de siege] shall not be removable.
CHAPTER 10. TERRITORIAL COLLECTIVITIES
(pp. 260, 347)
85. (i) The French Republic, one and indivisible, shall recognize the existence of
territorial collectivities, (ii) These collectivities shall be the communes and depart-
ments, and the Overseas Territories.
86. The framework, the extent, the possible regrouping and the organization of the
communes and departments, and the Overseas Territories shall be settled by law.
87. (i) The territorial collectivities shall administer themselves freely by councils
elected by universal suffrage, (ii) Their mayor or president shall be responsible for
carrying out the decisions of these councils.
88. The co-ordination of the activity of civil servants, the representation of the
national interest and the administrative supervision of the territorial collectivities
shall be ensured, within the departmental framework, by Government delegates
designated in Cabinet.
89. (i) Organic laws will extend departmental and communal liberties ; they may
prescribe for certain large cities, rules of operation and structures different from
those of small communes, and may include special provisions for certain depart-
ments; they will decide the conditions of implementation of Articles 85 to 88 above,
(ii) Laws will also decide the conditions under which the local services of the central
administration shall operate, in order to bring the administration closer to those
with whom it deals [les administres].
CHAPTER 11. AMENDMENT OF THE CONSTITUTION
(pp. 191, 193, 208, 209n., 215n., 217n., 281, 301-6)
90. (i) The amendment procedure shall be as follows: (ii) Amendment must
be decided on by a resolution adopted by an absolute majority of the membership
of the National Assembly, (iii) The resolution shall specify the object of the amend-
ment, (iv) It shall be submitted, after a minimum period of three months, to a
second reading at which proceedings must follow the same conditions as at the
first, unless the Council of the Republic, apprised by the National Assembly, shall
have adopted the same resolution by an absolute majority, (v) After this second
reading, the National Assembly shall draft a bill to amend the Constitution. This
bill shall be submitted to Parliament and voted by the same majority and in the
same manner prescribed for an ordinary law. (vi) It shall be submitted to a referen-
dum, unless it has been adopted on second reading by the National Assembly by a
two-thirds majority or has been voted by a three-fifths majority in each of the two
assemblies, (vii) The bill shall be promulgated by the President of the Republic as a
constitutional law within eight days of its adoption, (viii) No constitutional amend-
ment concerning the existence of the Council of the Republic may be adopted with-
out the agreement of this Council or recourse to the referendum procedure.
91. (i) The President of the Republic shall be chairman of the Constitutional
Committee, (ii) It shall comprise the President of the National Assembly, the
President of the Council of the Republic, seven members elected by the National
492 APPENDICES
Assembly at the beginning of each annual session, by proportional representation of
party groups, and chosen outside its membership, and three members elected under
the same conditions by the Council of the Republic, (iii) The Constitutional Commit-
tee shall examine whether the laws voted by the National Assembly presuppose
[supposenf] amendment of the Constitution.
92. (i) Within the period allowed for promulgation of the law, the Committee shall
be apprised by a joint reference from the President of the Republic and the President
of the Council of the Republic, the Council having taken its decision by an absolute
majority of its membership, (ii) The Committee shall examine the law, shall endea-
vour to promote an agreement between the National Assembly and the Council of
the Republic, and if it does not succeed, shall give a ruling within five days of the
reference to it. In cases of urgency, this period shall be reduced to two days, (iii) It
shall be competent to give a ruling only on the possibility of amending the provisions
of Chapters 1 to 10 of the present Constitution.
93. (i) A law which, in the opinion of the Committee, implies amendment of the
Constitution, shall be returned to the National Assembly for a new reading, (ii) If
Parliament confirms its first vote, the law cannot be promulgated before the Consti-
tution has been amended in the manner prescribed in Article 90. (iii) If the law is
held to be in conformity with the provisions of Chapters 1 to 10 of the present
Constitution, it shall be promulgated within the period prescribed by Article 36,
the latter being extended by the periods prescribed for in Article 92 above.
94. In the event of the occupation by foreign troops of the whole or part of metro-
politan French territory, no amendment proceedings may be initiated or continued.
95. The republican form of government cannot be the object of an amendment
proposal.
APPENDIX II
APPENDIX II
THE MINISTRIES
Premier
Ministry
formed resigned
Com
Soc
Full Ministers
Rad
MRP etc. Con
Gaull Other
Totals
Mins. incl.
only U-Secs.
1. DE GAULLE
10. 9.44
13.11.45
2
4
3
3
1
9
22 22
GENERAL ELECTION, 21 OCTOBER 1945
2.
DE GAULLE
21.11.45
20. 1.46
5 5
5
1
1
_ 2
22
22
3.
GOUIN
Soc
26. 1.46
12. 6.46
6 7
6
-
-
1
20
26
GENERAL ELECTION, 2 JUNE
1946
4.
BIDAULT
MRP | 23. 6.46
28.11.46 7 6
8
1
-
1
23
33
GENERAL ELECTION, 10
NOVEMBER
1946
(Thorez
Com
4.12.46)
(Bidault
MRP
5.12.46)
5.
BLUM
Soc
16.12.46
16. 1.47
17
_
—
—
— —
17
30
6.
RAMADIER
Soc
22. 1.47
5 9
5
5
2
_ _
26
26
9. 5.47
11
6
5
2
_ _
24
25
7.
RAMADIER
Soc
22.10.47
19.11.47
6
3
2
1
_ _
12
13
(Blum
Soc
21.11.47)
8.
SCHUMAN
MRP
24.11.47
19. 7.48
5
6
3
1
_ _
15
28
9.
MARIE
Rad
26. 7.48
28. 8.48
6
6
5
2
_ _
19
28
10.
SCHUMAN
MRP
5. 9.48
7. 9.48
4
6
4
1
_. _
15
24
11.
QUEUILLE
Rad
11. 9.48
6.10.49
5
5
4
1
_ _
15
32
MOCH
Soc
(13.10.49)
MAYER, R
Rad
(20.10.49)
12.
BIDAULT
MRP
28.10.49
_ 5
6
5
2
_ _
18
33
7. 2.50
24. 6.50
_ _
8
6
3
_ _
17
28
13.
QUEUILLE
Rad
2. 7.50
4. 7.50
_ _
9
9
3
_ _
21
33
14.
PLEVEN
UDSR
12. 7.50
28.2.51
5
6
8
3
_ _
22
33
(Mollet
Soc
6. 3.51)
15.
QUEUILLE
Rad
10. 3.51
10. 7.51
5
7
7
3
-
22
35
GENERAL ELECTION,
17 JUNE
1951
(Mayer, R.
Rad
24. 7.51)
(Petsche
Cons
2. 8.51)
16.
PLEVEN
UDSR
10. 8.51
7. 1.52
_ _
7
9
8
_ _
24
37
17.
FAURE, E.
Rad
20. 1.52
29. 2.52
_ _
8
11
7
_ _
26
40
18.
PINAY
Cons
8. 3.52
23.12.52
_ _
4
7
6
— _
17
29
19.
MAYER, R.
Rad
8. 1.53
21. 5.53
_ —
6
9
8
_ _
23
37
(Reynaud
Cons
28. 5.53)
(Mendes-F.
Rad
5. 6.53)
(Bidault
MRP
11. 6.53)
(Marie
Rad
19, 6.53)
20,
LANIEL
Cons
27. 6.53
12. 6.54
_ _
5
6
8
3
22
39
21.
MENDES-F.
Rad
19. 6.54
_ _
1*
7
3
4 1
16
29
3. 9.54
_ _
2*
5
4
3 1
15
27
20. 1.55
5. 2.55
-
3*
6
5
5 1
20
37
CONSTITUTIONAL REFORM 30 NOVEMBER 1954: MINISTRIES
FORMED
BEFORE INVESTITURE
22.
(Pineau
FAURE, E.
Soc
Rad
19. 2.55)
23. 2.55
( - 4
5
4
6
6
5
1
4
16
19
I?
21.10.55
24. 1.56
-
4
3,4*
6
1* -
18
28
GENERAL ELECTION, 2
JANUARY 1956
23.
MOLLET
Soc
1. 2.56
21. 5.57
7
_
6-
_
1
14
38
24.
BOURGES-M
Rad
12. 6.57
30. 9.57
5
_
6,3
__
14
46
(Pinay
Cons
18.10.57)
C -
_
-,6
9
_ „
15
18)
(Mollet
Soc
28.10.57)
( - 7
5
6,3
1
22
42)
25.
GAILLARD
Rad
5.11.57
15. 4.58
4
3
4,2
3
17
36
26.
PFLIMLIN
MRP
14. 5.58
28. 5.58
4
5
45
4
_ _
22
22
27.
DE GAULLE
1. 6.58
8. 1.59
3
3
2,1
3
3 9
24
24
Small type denotes an unsuccessful candidate; brackets one whose government never came into existence (with date of
investiture) ; * ministers who broke with their parties. After 1955 Radicals etc. are divided between Left (shown first) and
Right.
No. 7: all ministers resigned except the premier (see p. 227). Nos. 23, 26, 27 shown in their complete, not original form.
494
Last Crisis
Poss. PMs/ Days
approached
Votes for ... against
PM;Govt; At PM; Govt; At
fall fall
Ministers
in/ not in
last govt.
Duration
(months)
all Parl.
Confidence votes
no./monthly
average
PM
no.
14
1.
1 8
555 unan.
0 - -
13 9
2 2
2.
1 6
497 503 —
55 44 —
12 8
44 4
3.
1 11
384 516 —
0 0 —
17f* 6
5 4
4.
( 1
259
2)
2
240
24)
S 18
575 544 —
8 2 -
6 11
1 1
5.
3 6
549 521
0 12
10 * 16
10 8
6 1
6.
360
186
300 -
280 -
7.
( l
300
277)
4 5
412 322 214
184 186 295
8f 7
8 8
8 1
8.
1 7
352 357 —
190 197 —
13f* 6
1 1
— —
9.
2 8
322 289 —
185 295
13f* 2
10.
4 14
351 340 -
196 227 —
10f* 5
13 8
1 0
11.
( 1
311
223)
t
(4
341
183)
V6 22
367 -
183 -
11 * 7
8 7
13 2
12.
230 195
186 352
13 4
5 8
363 221
208 334
16f* 5
13.
6 18
373 329 -
185 224
15t* 7
74 54
9 H
14.
( 4
286
259)
5 10
359 388 —
205 180 —
21f* 1
4 2
9 44
15.
(4
241
105)
f
(7
281
101)
t
9 31
391 390 243
102 222 341
19f* 5
5 4
13 3
16.
6 13
401 396 283
101 220 309
2If 5
U 14
23 16
17.
3 8
324 290 —
206 101 —
15f 2
94 5
17 3
18.
4 16
389 384 244
205 214 328
12 11
44 34
1 0
19.
( 3
276
235)
( 4
301
119)
( 6
313
228)
t
10
272
209)
t
12 37
398 386 293
206 211 306
10 12
114 84
4 4
20.
1 5
419 421 273
47 8 319
4 12
74 5
10 2
21.
FOR WHICH RELATIVE MAJORITIES SUFFICED
( 3
268
312
2 14)
4 18
369
210
5f 14
11 8
5 4
22.
271 218
259 318
1 8
420 213
71 250
2 12
16 12
34 3
23.
6 21
240 253
194 279
10| 4
34 14
4 24
24.
( 3
198
248|
4 11)
( 5
227
290]
2 20)
6 36
337 255
173! 321
10t* 7
54 5
8 14
25.
6 29
274 -
129 -
9f 13
4 4
_ —
26.
1 4
329 —
224 —
4 * 20
7
— ™"
27.
Ministers in last govt.' include promoted junior ministers. Figures relate to the ministry immediately above; between nos. 6
ind 8 (first Ramadier and Schuman) they were 10f and 5; between nos. 21 and 22 (Mendes-France and Faure) 3f and 16;
tnd between nos. 24 and 25 (Bourges-Maunoury and Gaillard) 9t* and 8.
t new PM was in old govt. * old PM joins new govt.
495
APPENDIX III: NOTES
NON-PERMANENT MINISTRIES
a.
Armaments
1.
Tillon, C
2.
Bourgds-M, R
Armed Forces
1.
Michelet, M
3.
„
4.
Guillaumat,
N
b.
Budget
1.
E. Faure, R
2.
Courant, I
3.
Moreau, I
c.
Commerce
1.
Letourneau, M
2.
Pflimlin, M
3.
Bonnefous, "
U
4.
Ribeyre, P, then
G. Petit, P
d.
Marine
1.
Jacquinot, I
2.
Jacquinot, I
War
1.
Diethelm, N
2.
Coste-F, M
Air
1.
Tillon, C
2.
Maroselli, R
e.
Economic Affairs
I.
Mendes~F, R
2.
Billoux, C
3.
Menthon, M
(to 5.4.45)
4.
Philip, S
5.
Buron, M
f.
Food
1.
successively
2.
Longchambon, N
3.
Farge, N
Giacobbi, R
Ramadier, S
Pineau, S
g. Associated States 1. *Reynaud, I 2. *Letourneau, M
3. Fr6deric-D, ARS 4. La Chambre, I
(from 5.6.53)
h. Sahara 1. Lejeune, S
i. Information 1. Teitgen, M
4. *Letourneau, M
7. Coste-F, M
j. External Finance (1. Filippi, R)
k. Population 1. R. Prigent, M
L. Arts and Letters 1. (and Youth):
B our dan, U
m. Merchant Marine 1. Colin, M
4. Morice, R
n. Assistant to PM
2. *Corniglion-M, RGR
2. Soustelle, G 3. Malraux, G
5. Gazier, S
2. Malraux, G
6. Buron, M
o. i/c European
Affairs
2. Tinguy, M 3. Defferre, S
5. Schmittlein, G 6. Antier, P
1. G. Palewski, G, 2. Houphouet-B, U 3. Boulloche, N,
then July, ex-ARS from 7.7.58
1. *MoUet, S 2. *Pflimlin, M 3. Mitterrand, U,
4. (*Bonnefous, U) 5. M. Faure, R, to 2.9.53
from 16.5.58
p, q. i/c constitutional (p), electoral or administrative (q) reform:
1. Giacobbi, R, and see Ministres d*Etat.
Notes ,
t Vice-premiers ; * Ministres d'Etat with portfolio.
All were deputies except those italicized ; who were all senators except: those in ministries 1 to 4 ; Blum (nos. 5
and 9) ; Catroux (no. 23) ; and most of those in no. 27 (but Deere", Houdet, Berthoin and Michelet were
senators). Where two names appear for one post, they served consecutively. Ministers in brackets were chosen
but never officially appointed.
Parties : C - Com, S - Soc, M - MRP, R - Rad ,U - UDSR. G - Gaullist, I - Rep. Ind. (Cons), P - Peasant,
N - non-party, r - neo-Rad.
496
Reconstruction
Ex-Servicemen
Posts
N. Africa ;
Algeria
__
Frenay, N
Laurent, S il
Catroux, N
1
Dautry, N
,,
Thomas, S *2
„
—
Thomas, S i3
2
Billoux, C
Casanova, C
Letourneau, M
3
9)
iy
4
Lejeune, S
Thomas, S
5
Tillon, C
Mitterrand, U
—
6
[dismissed] cl
„
Thomas, S
—
—
1
Coty, I
Mitterrand, U
—
8
Maroselli, R
— „
9
Catoire, M
—
0
C. Petit, U
Betolaud, PRL
—
1
„
Jacquinot, I
Thomas, S u
2
Brune, R
14
3
15
4
15
> ? 1
5
JJ
Temple, I
Laniel, I ie
6
Duchet, I i6J
„
i7
*Mitterrand, U
7
99
,,
8
Courant, I
Bergasse, ARS
j j
9
Lemaire, G
Mutter, P
Ferri, G
20
)9
—
Fouchet, G
21
[temp, resigned]
Temple, I
—
»
9>
Masson, R
—
„
( » )
99
(Dumas, M)
—
Duchet, I
(Legaret, U)
Bonnefous, U
22
Triboulet, G j
Badie, R J
—
Catroux, N 1
23
Tanguy-P, S
Lacoste, S |
hi
—
99
24
Dulin, R
—
(Jacquinot, I)
—
(Chochoy, S)
(Bergasse, I)
—
(Lacoste, S) hl
bl
—
Caret, I
(Colin, M)
—
5J
25
„
Quinson, RGR
—
Mutter, I
26
Badie, r
—
_ «
hi
27
Sudreau, N
Michelet, G
Thomas, S i2
PM bl
APPENDIX IV (a)
to
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cs»
1
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s
ll I
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en
a
-I 1
ss-Pis^^-feGssfcl! ^llsslsl&SsassUrs
Is
1
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oj
Sill^^l^^a
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pposition
Q
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S
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501
APPENDIX V
THE VERDICT OF THE ELECTORATE
(All votes in thousands)
Warning note
French election statistics are unsatisfactory because of the number of parties,
their complex and changing alliances, their imperfect correspondence with the
groups in the Assembly, and the loose allegiance of the deputy to his group. With-
out drastic simplification they are incomprehensible, but the classification can easily
mislead - not always inadvertently. The official figures are rarely the most useful.
1. Four referendums (France only)
21 October 1945:
(i) for a Constituent Assembly -
(ii) for the proposals of the government, re-
stricting its powers and duration
5 May 1946:
for the first draft constitution .
13 October 1946:
for the second draft constitution
28 September 1958 :
for the constitution of the Fifth Republic .
Yes
No
Total
Electorate
15,656
596
24,623
10,847
5,381
24,623
9,110
10,273
24,657
9,039
7,830
25,073
17,669
4,625
26,603
From Husson, Elections et rlftrendums (reproduced in AP 1944-45, p. 492, AP 1946, pp. 577,
579) and AP 1958, p. 59.1.
2. Six general elections (France only)
Date
Com.
Soc.
MRP
Rad.
etc.
Cons.
Gaull.
Others
Total
votes
Absten-
tions
Elec-
torate
21.10.45
5,005
4,561
4,780
2,131
2,546
165
19,190
4,965
24,623
2. 6.46
5,154
4,188
5,589
2,295
2,540
115
19,881
4,482
24,697
10.11.46
5,431
3,434
4,989
2,136
3,073
155
19,218
5,505
25,083
17. 6.51
4,934
2,784
2,454
1,980
2,295
4,266
239
18,952
4,861
24,522
2. 1.56
5,517
3,229
2,362
3,246
3,180
837
2,815
21,478
4,618
26,768
23.11.58
3,908
3,194
2,273
1,766
4,502
4,165
534
20,485
6,242
27,236
From Goguel, Esprit, February 1947, p. 238, and Fourth Republic, p. 90; these figures repro-
duce M. Husson's for the first two elections but differ for the third, when his classification was :
Com. (including Trotskyist) 5,489, Soc. 3,432, MRP 5,058, Rad, etc. 2,381, Cons. 2,466, Gaull.
313, Others 64. The 1956 figures are from Goguel, RFSP 1956, p. 7. The Rad. etc. column groups
three of his categories, Radical, RGR and minor Left, the last of which appeared in previous
years under Others. M. Goguel divided between Left and Right both Rad etc. (2,412 and 834
respectively) and Gaullists (235 and 602); cf. my estimates in no. 168, pp. 168-9. Others include
Poujadists 2,482 and extreme Right 333, but apparently omit miscellaneous independents (the
total votes are too few). Persons of voting age, including those not on the register, numbered
26,984 thousand in 1951 and 27,914 in 1956. For 1958 the figures are those of Goguel et al. in
Elections 1958, p. 298; Rad. etc. include minor Left; Conservatives include about 700 thousand
Republican Centre (ex-Radical) ; Others again include only Poujadists and extreme Right, but
not miscellaneous.
In all six elections there is a discrepancy between the total electorate and the figures of voters
and abstainers combined. It is caused by spoiled papers, and increased in 1951 and 1956 by the
operation ofpanachage (see pp. 309, 505).
502
APPENDICES
3. Six Assemblies (France and overseas)
503
Date
Com.
Soc.
MRP
Rad.
UDSR
Cons.
Gaull.
Others
Total
seats
21.10.45
161
150
150
28
29
64
4
586
2. 6.46
153
129
169
32
21
67
15
586
10.11.46
183
105
167
43
27
71
22
618
17. 6.51
101
107
96
76
19
98
120
10
627
2. 1.56
150
99
84
75
19
97
22
50
596
30.11.58
10
47
64
40
129
206
81
578
From the official lists of parliamentary groups. The first three are taken from Wright, Reshaping^
p. 262, and refer to dates a few months after the elections concerned. Those for 1951 are from the
first official list, modified by two subsequent elections and by the Assembly's decision in the
disputed contest in Seine-Inferieure. Those for 1956 are from the first list, modified by one subse-
quent election and by the invalidation of eleven Poujadist members ; the Radical total includes
RGR, and Others include 42 Poujadists ; no elections were held for the 30 Algerian seats, or for
the territories ceded to India (one seat). The 1958 figures are from AP 1959, p. 13 ; Others include
66 Algerian integrationists ; Conservatives include 11 Republican Centre; 'Radicals' include
UDSR and allies, only 13 being strict Radicals.
4. Five Councils of the Republic (France and overseas) and one Senate
Date
Com.
Soc.
MRP
Rad.
etc.
IOM
Cons.
Gaull.
Others
Total
seats
8.12.46
84
62
70
44
—
44
315
7.11.48
19
62
21
86
—
71
57
3
320
18. 5.52
16
56
27
73
12
83
49
4
320
19. 6.55
14
56
24
74
14
83
44
10
319
8. 6.58
16
56
26
65
23
90
39
1
319
26. 4.59
14
51
34
64
"
94
44
6
307
Group figures from AP 1948, p. 443; the official list published in May 1949; and AP 1952,
p. 607, 1955, p. 53, 1958, p. 76, 1959, pp. 47 and 619-20. Some refer to the opening of the next
session. The whole Council was elected in 1946 and, under a completely different electoral system,
in 1948; half in 1952, 1955 and 1958 ; and the whole Senate, under a slightly altered system and
with fewer overseas members, in 1959.
APPENDIX VI
THE WORKING OF THE ELECTORAL SYSTEM
1. The distribution of seats
Most departments formed a constituency ; the largest were divided (pp. 309n., 313n).
Votes were cast for party lists, not individual candidates. Seats were allotted by
PR. Any list polling the Quotient (the total vote divided by the number of seats at
stake) was entitled to a seat. Seats left over were distributed on the 'highest average'
principle, going one by one to that list which, given the seat, would have a higher
average vote per seat than any rival. In the final arrangement, any transfer of a seat
would have brought the new average of the list which gained it below that of the
list which lost.
Correze had four seats, and in November 1946 its votes went :
Communists 52,864 Radicals 26,082 TOTAL 132,539
MRP 29,978 Socialists 23,615 QUOTIENT (£) 33,135
Only the Communists polled the Quotient; they therefore took the first seat. In
subsequent calculations their vote of 52,864 had to be divided by two (their total of
seats if they were given another) and their average became 26,432. As MRP's vote
was higher than this, it took the next seat ; its divisor also became two, and its average
14,989. As Radicals and Socialists had no member, their averages were still the same
as their original votes. The Communist average of 26,432 was now the highest, and
the next seat went to them. Another seat would bring their total to three, so for the
last round their average became 52,864 divided by 3, i.e. 17,621. MRP's average
stayed at 14,989, the Radicals at 26,082 and the Socialists at 23,615. As this gave
the Radicals the highest average, they won the last seat. Result : Communists 2,
MRP 1, Radicals 1, Socialists 0.
An alternative form of PR is the 'highest remainder' system. Again, seats go first
to lists which poll the Quotient ; but any seats left over are now allotted not according
to a list's average but to its remainder, i.e. its poll minus the Quotient. Had this
applied in Correze, the Communists would again have had the first seat. But their
claim to a second would depend not on their 'average' of 26,432, but on their
'remainder* of only 19,729 - i.e. 52,864 minus 33,135. This remainder was smaller
than the vote polled by each of the other three lists, which would therefore take the
last three seats. Result: Communists 1, MRP 1, Radicals 1, Socialists 1. As this
system slightly benefits weaker parties, the Centre majority in the first National
Assembly adopted it in 1951 for the Paris area (Seine and Seine-et-Oise) where the
Communists and Gaullists were strongest; it helped its authors appreciably (see
p. 313n). It was also used in three overseas departments, Guadeloupe, Martinique and
Reunion ; the fourth, Guyane, had only one member and used the Anglo-American
system of election by plurality at a single ballot.
2. Apparentement
A more important change made in 1951 was the introduction of apparentement.
The 'highest average' system, favouring large parties, seemed likely to help the
strong but friendless Communists and Gaullists. Apparentements were a device to
transfer the advantage of size to the government parties, by allowing an alliance of
parties to count the votes of its component members together in the distribution of
seats.
504
APPENDICES 505
Marne had five seats, and in 1 95 1 its votes were :
Allied lists Isolated lists
MRP 36,702 Communists 47,200
Socialists 18,607 RPF 45,931
Radicals 16,659
Ind. Cons. 3,907 Ind. Cons, 4,051
Total of allies 75,875 (of others 97,182) TOTAL VOTE 173,057
QUOTIENT Q) 34,612
Under the 1946 system the Communists, RPF and MRP would have won seats by
polling the Quotient and the two former, with averages well over 20,000, would
have taken the last two seats. Under the * highest remainder' system these two seats
would have gone instead to the Socialists and Radicals. But the 1951 electoral law
allowed the allies to count their votes together and amass the largest total, more than
double the Quotient. Thus one Quotient seat went to the Communists whose
average became 23,600 ; one to RPF whose average became 22,965 ; and two to the
allies. Their average became 25,292 (75,875 divided by 3) and the last seat therefore
fell to them also. The three seats won by the allies were then distributed among them
on the 'highest average' rule, two going to MRP and one to the Socialists. Results :
Com. Soc. Rad. MRP RPF
Actual (1951 system) .... 1 1 - 2 1
Notional (1946 system) .... 2 - - 1 2
Notional (highest remainder) ... 1 1 1 1 1
The 1951 law also enacted that if a list or alliance won an absolute majority of
votes cast, it took all the seats. Altogether it gave the government parties 97 more
seats than the 1946 system would have done. Of these 97 gains, 51 were due to the
absolute majority rule ; 9 to the change in Paris ; and 37 to the ability of several
weak but allied parties to pool their votes and so gain the advantage of size.
3. Preferential vote andpanachage
Persons win seats, as well as parties. But in 1946 the party chose the persons and
the voter could do nothing effective to modify its choice. The 'preferential vote'
allowed him to delete a candidate he disliked and move up one whom he favoured.
But these changes would not even be counted unless half the ballots cast for the
list concerned had been modified in some way, since it was assumed that unaltered
ballots represented positive votes for the original names. While this assumption
made the preferential vote quite futile, the alternative would have deprived Maurice
Thorez of his seat in 1951 because a mere 800 Communist voters, out of 140,000, had
struck off his name. (In municipal elections all modifications were counted, and two
councillors were returned in Paris in 1953 after urging their voters to delete the names
of their own leaders ; a third advised them to strike out his second. The courts found
this illegal and unseated all three.)
The law of 1951 allowed the voter also to change the original lists by panachage,
deleting names on his party's list and adding instead those of candidates from other
lists (see p. 309). In effect he transferred a fraction of his vote from his own party to
any list from which an added candidate came. This device weakened the grip of the
organization and gave the voter a freer choice. But in 1946 altered ballots were only
1.9% of all valid votes cast, and in no constituency reached 7%. In 1951 and 1956
they were almost 7% over the whole country, varying from 2% on Communist lists
to 12% among Conservatives (see Campbell, p. 122). They reached 47% for one
506 APPENDICES
RGRIF list in 1951 ; no other list attained 25%. In one department, Ille-et-Vilaine,
16% of the ballots were altered in 1951 and 13% in 1956.
Panachage contradicted the principle of PR, that votes should be for opinions
and not persons. The results were sometimes strange. Herault, with six seats, voted
as follows in 1951 :
Allied lists Isolated lists
Socialists 39,028 Communists 69,433
Conservatives 25,827 RPF 21,256
Radicals 23,596 Ind. Left 10,301
MRP 20,766
Total of allies 109,217 (of others 100,990) TOTAL VOTE 210,207
With a clear majority of votes cast, the allies won all the seats. Within the alliance
the Quotient was 109,217 divided by 6, or 18,203, which gave two seats to the
Socialists and one to each of the other allied lists. For the sixth seat, the Socialist
average was 13,009 (39,028 divided by 3) or just above the Conservatives' average
of 12,913 (25,827 divided by 2) ; the Socialists therefore won this last seat. But their
leader, Jules Moch, had had more than 7,000 panachage votes from admirers who
supported other parties. Each of these 7,000 had transferred a sixth of his votes to
SFIO ; they brought its average up by over 1,000 and gave it the third seat. Moch
himself had no need of these reinforcements. So, intending to help the Socialist
leader but not his party, the 7,000 had done exactly the reverse.
Most voters who us&d panachage did so at the top of the list, either to show con-
fidence in a prominent figure for whose party they would not vote (like Modi's
admirers), or to repudiate the local leader of their own party while remaining loyal
to the party itself. In the second case the voter might delete a name without replac-
ing it by another; this simply annulled a fraction of his vote. This action, too, might
have surprising results. Take a five-member constituency in 1951, with 40,000
Communists, 35,000 Gaullists and 80,000 supporters of an alliance of government
parties ; these would have an absolute majority of the 155,000 votes cast, and would
win all five seats. But now suppose 10,000 Socialists resent all deals with black
reaction, and 10,000 Conservatives repudiate any bargain with red marxism; each
deletes their deputy's name in protest, and so annuls a fifth of his vote. Altogether
4,000 votes (a fifth of 20,000) disappear entirely ; the total vote drops to 1 5 1 ,000 and
the coalition's vote to 76,000. This is still an absolute majority of 151,000 (the total
of votes cast) but no longer of 155,000 (the number of persons voting). On which
figure was the majority to be reckoned? This highly obscure point in fact arose in
two constituencies in 1951, when the disposition of eight parliamentary seats
depended on it. The Assembly, in one day, decided the point both ways. The govern-
ment parties used their majority to choose the first interpretation, favourable to
them, in the Rouen district; but they adopted the second for Bas-Rhin in order not
to unseat a war hero, General Koenig, and arouse discontent in the difficult province
of Alsace.
4. 'National parties*
In 1951 and 1956 only 'national parties' were allowed broadcasting time, and only
their lists could take part in apparentements. They were defined as parties with lists
in at least thirty departments (not 30 constituencies). This rule incited minor parties
to multiply bogus lists which made no pretence of campaigning; in 1951 UDSR's
list in Hautes-Pyrenees had four votes, and in Lozere one (its two candidates there
were husband and wife, and the vote was said to be his). Some grouplets were created
APPENDICES 507
and ran a swarm of bogus lists solely to enable an individual politician or two to
take advantage of the law. Jacques Isorni and a few Vichyite friends founded
UNIR for this purpose in 1951, though it failed to qualify (Ainsi, pp. 8-11). The
right-wing Radical Leon Chambaretaud invented RGRIF, of which several
political strays took advantage, notably Arthur Conte and Andre Liautey (see pp.
179, 328, 357). One of the founder's friends and neighbours stood for Reunion and
his wife across the world in Guadeloupe - but neither stirred from Lyons. Liautey
helpfully supplied his secretary to head an RGRIF list in one seat, his mayoral
assistant and his chauffeur to form one in another ; of the party's 36 lists, 10 issued
no literature and conducted no campaign (see JO 23 August 1951, pp. 6468-73).
In 1956 a car-load of Lyonnais drove to the south coast on the last evening for
registrations, handing in an RGRIF list at every prefecture. But French thrift saw
to it that expenses were kept down; as a deposit was paid on each candidate, small
seats with few members were cheaper. The average number of bogus lists per con-
stituency varied inversely with its number of seats, falling steadily in 1956 from 4-5
in two-member districts to 0-25 in those with seven or more members.
Eleven 'national parties' qualified in 1951, eighteen in 1956. In 1951 there were
the six main parties; UDSR and RGRIF; the ephemeral Taxpayers' group
(p. 179); RGR, which was used by the Radicals and UDSR to give facilities to
their small-party allies; and the Democratic Republicans, a satellite of MRP
invented largely (but in vain) to allow Louis Marin to join an apparentement, with-
out making him change his political label at his advanced age. By 1956 the Taxpayers
were dead and the Poujadists very much alive. Three more minor parties qualified :
Jeune Rtpublique, the Catholic Mendesists, and Tixier-Vignancour's National
Rally (pp. 161,171, 173). RGR was now the right-wing Radical party, and RGRIF
was its satellite : see, pp. 179-80. MRP kept its shadow party, CNIP and UDSR
each invented one, and the Poujadists had two.
5. Invalidations
Most satellite groups ran lists in constituencies not fought by their parent party, for
local or personal reasons like Marin's, or formed coalition lists with it to make up
their thirty. But the Poujadist satellites (one for farmers and the other for consumers)
always fought in apparent ement with the main group. This was illegal, for the same
party was expressly forbidden to present more than one list in a constituency;
however, the identical origin of their lists was concealed when they registered. The
device trebled their radio and television time, gave them extra poster space and
literature, and could have allowed appeals beamed separately at different social
groups - though in fact their themes and vocabulary were indistinguishable. In
the 22 constituencies with three Poujadist lists their median poll was 18% and they
won 16 seats; in 26 with two lists, 13% and 13 seats; and in 38 with one list only,
10% and 14 seats (my calculations).
The Poujadists' tactics were in flagrant violation of the law, and their plea that the
apparentements had been accepted by the prefects suggested that the offence had
been deliberate. For, had they announced beforehand that all three lists were
'presented by Pierre Poujade', that the separation was 'merely a tactical device',
or that all the deposit money came from and would be reclaimed by the same source,
no prefect would have registered their apparentements ; and indeed a dissident
Poujadist leader later claimed to have warned Poujade that members whose election
depended on them might be unseated (Pay sans, p. 193n, ; cf. Hoffmann, pp. 165,
187). The Assembly therefore invalidated eleven Poujadists who were behind a
competitor on their own votes but were put ahead by the allied lists : but seated
508 APPENDICES
three disputed winners (in Aube, Cher and Puy-de-Dome). Instead of holding
by-elections for the 1 1 seats, the house admitted the candidate who would win if the
apparentement were disallowed. Even if legally justified this was politically most
unwise, and helped to discredit the political system generally and the Republican
Front in particular. The Assembly also unseated a Radical, nominally for his du-
bious wartime record rather than for his blatant attempts to purchase votes, but
it admitted him when he was re-elected with an increased majority at the by-election.
6. By-elections
Under the 1946 law a deputy who died or retired was replaced by the next candidate
on his list. The 1951 law reintroduced by-elections. To fill a single vacancy the whole
constituency had to poll, so that scores or even (as in Paris) hundreds of thousands
might vote. A candidate needed an absolute majority of votes cast to win on the
first ballot, a relative majority (as in Britain or the United States) at the second a
fortnight later. The turnout on the first ballot averaged 20% below, and on the
second 15% below that of a general election. Although the 20 metropolitan seats
which fell vacant in the second Parliament had all been won under PR or apparente-
ment s, and the by-elections to fill them were on a majority system, the incumbent
party held ten seats: 6 Conservatives, 2 RGR, 1 MRP and 1 SFIO. The other ten
changed hands, MRP making four net gains (from Communists, SFIO, RGR
and RPF) : see M. Merle, no. 159, and B. Jeanneau, no. 129. In the third Parliament
Communists, Radicals and Conservatives each held a seat, and 6 changed; the
Conservatives made 4 net gains and UD SR 1, Radicals lost 3 and Communists and
RS one each. A bill to abolish by-elections passed the Assembly but not the upper
house in 1956.
APPENDIX VII
COMPOSITION AND OUTLOOK OF THE PARTIES
I am indebted for these figures to the Institut fran$ais cT opinion publique. Most of them
were published in Sondages, 1952, no. 3, from a poll of February and March 1952,
before the Pinay government and the decline of RPF. They show the percentage of the
voters for each party who belong to the category or give the answer indicated on the
left; in some cases only the highest percentages were stated; 'don't knows' are omitted.
The' Institut has kindly corrected some of the published figures. (The smaller the category,
the less reliable the figures.)
Percentage of electors, 1951 election
Age : over 50
35 to 49
18 to 34
Sex : men
women .....
Occupation : ouvriers industriels .
„ agricoles
fonctionnaires .
employes ....
industriels et cadres -
commercants .
cultivateurs exploitants
professions liberates
rentiers et retrains .
femmes sans profession
total salaries (first 4 categories) -
total owners (next 3 categories) .
total peasants (cultiv. exp. plus ouv. agr.)
Wealth : own a car ....
have a domestic servant .
Size of town : over 100,000 .
20-100,000 .
5-20,000
under 5,000 .
Full confidence in own party
Not „ „ „ .
(P) Full „ in one leader*
„ „ „ another leader*
Have never voted for any other party
Own party only is deserving of interest
Several parties are „ „ „
No party whatever is „ ,, „
(P) Own party is not intransigent enough
„ „ „ just right .
„ „ „ too intransigent .
* Most frequently named leaders: first, Thorez, Mollet, Bidault, Herriot and de Gaulle;
second, Duclos, Moch, Schuman, Queuille and Soustelle.
509
Total
Com.
Soc.
MRP
Rad.
Cons.
Gaull.
100
20
11
10
8
9
17
37
23
37
34
65
45
37
29
35
33
35
24
25
25
34
42
30
31
11
30
38
48
61
59
47
64
47
47
52
39
41
53
36
53
53
19
44
25
15
10
10
18
7
10
9
3
5
4
4
5
4
9
3
5
6
2
7
6
4
11
1
3
7
5
1
4
3
4
10
7
4
3
3
5
7
7
7
16
5
9
20
31
35
18
1
1
1
2
1
1
1
6
3
7
6
14
8
4
- 30
22
28
30
19
15
32
38
64
47
32
21
23
31
25
9
16
28
42
52
32
23
15
18
23
36
39
22
23
11
21
21
30
43
33
13
3
5
15
20
31
17
24
20
16
19
23
29
22
17
22
18
14
11
11
22
11
10
16
14
6
5
11
48
48
50
53
60
55
45
62
48
51
37
31
45
20
33
35
50
55
42
47
27
35
45
1
68
47
12
34
21
1
12
68
71
74
59
36
36
60
19
12
11
2
28
18
35
49
43
40
30
16
26
25
24
38
28
29
33
26
31
30
28
42
33
40
38
39
34
13
7
13
8
14
29
510
APPENDICES
Com. Soc. MRP
Rad. Cons.
Gaull.
(P) Own party most useful when in office
41
61
85
82
77
54
Favour progress by means of revolution
41
6
—
1
1
9
„ „ „ „ „ reform
50
91
95
92
94
85
(P) Own party shd. never take power by force
40
71
79
80
70
52
,, „ might have to do so
40
2
3
1
13
26
Some party /parties should be banned
43
31
45
39
70
77
What is most important about your party? (Ql) :
Doctrine
44
32
34
29
25
13
Programme ......
25
26
22
25
31
20
Leadership
10
7
11
20
14
35
Cohesion ......
5
4
3
3
6
5
(P) Spirit
3
12
18
4
14
12
What attracted you to your party? (Q2) :
travailler pour la paix ....
32
28
27
18
17
23
fac.onner 1'avenir de la France .
4
7
13
11
24
33
defendre des interets tegitimes .
28
24
22
27
30
11
programme, lutte contre capital
39
personnalit6 de son chef
18
contre le regime, contre partis .
15
esprit de tolerance .....
38
entourage, famille, relations
15
12
What are the most important problems? :
vie chere ......
32
43
23
13
31
25
instability politique ....
41
37
60
62
injustice sociale .....
17
23
guerre, armements, Indo-Chine
46
(P) France shd. stay neutral in a general war .
74
78
75
76
67
63
(P) Rearmament reduces risk of war
4
26
53
42
59
60
increases,, „ „
83
29
14
22
12
17
(P) U.S. troops reduce risk of war
2
21
39
54
56
38
„ „ increase,, „ „ .
82
11
14
13
6
13
„ „ make no difference
11
50
27
20
22
37
From IFOP polls in Aug.-Sept. 1958, published
in Elections
1958
> PP-
278-9
.
IV Rep. Parliament was too strong
25
36
56
38
67
50
not „ .
58
31
24
23
7
19
„ „ had bad m&urs
63
79
76
75
85
82
„ „ not „ ,, .
20
6
6
7
1
4
Hope most deputies will lose their seats .
55
67
68
67
72
80
» „ „ won't „ „ .
21
14
11
21
9
7
(P) These questions were put to those interviewed in the provinces, but not in Paris.
(Ql) Categories asked in the question; (Q2) Replies spontaneous.
USING THE INDEX
Arrangement
Principal page references are set in bold type.
French names are indexed according to French practice, with the article, but not de or
geographical prefixes, as part of the name: e.g. Bas-Rhin and Haut-Rhin under R, de
Gaulle under G, Le Pen under L, de La Rocque under L> Mendes-France under M.
Organizations are indexed under their initials, where these are used in the text, at the
beginning of the first letter in the title: e.g. CFTC is the first entry under C. Full titles
are in the list of abbreviations on p. ix (and for collective books, indexed by short title,
on pp. 465 f.).
Where a source is quoted on three or more pages, the index references are preceded
by 'cit. nn.': all subsequent references are to footnotes and not to the text.
The page reference A refers to Appendix III, for men who were ministers between 1944
and 1958, and also to Apps. II and IV for those who were candidates for the premier-
ship.
Biographical notes (corrected to the end of 1963)
For political careers beginning before 1945, only the date of first election to either house
of Parliament (MP) or appointment as prime minister (PM) is normally given. For those
extending into the Fifth Republic, only major changes of party are noted. In the Fourth,
a few shifts between conservative groups are not recorded. Where a member sat both
before and after 1958 for a department which formed more than one constituency in the
Fourth Republic, the constituency number is pre-1958. Members of de Gaulle's pro-
visional government at Algiers in 1943-4 (commissaires) are referred to as 'Gaull. m/
The June and November elections of 1946 are referred to as '46 J and '46N.
Abbreviations
A: see Appendices gov
admin -istration, -ive MP
AFU: Assembly of French Union m:
amb -assador NA
b: born org
CR: Council of the Republic P.
cand -idate PM
cap -ital (of department) Parl
Com -munist Peas
Cons -ervative Pres
cons.- conseil-general, departmental Prog
gen. : council Rad
const -itutional rapp.-g.
C'tee: committee
d.: deputy rep
dd.: died Rep
dir. de cab directeur de cabinet RI
diss -ident sec.-g.:
econ -omic Soc
elec -toral TU
-ernment
member of parliament
minister, -ry
National Assembly
-anization
Party
Prime minister
-iament, -ary
-ant
-ident
-ressive (pro-Corn.)
-ical
rapporteur-general of the finance
committee
-resentation, -ives
-ublican
Republican Independent
secretaire-g6ne*ral
-ialist
trade union, -ist
INDEX
ACJF, 103, 114
APEL, 330, 366, 370n., 372, 381n.
APLE, 366 and n., 377, 429n.
ARS (diss. GauU.), 20n., 63, 136, 138n., 140
and n., 150 and n., 151n., 152-3 and
nn., 156n., 158n., 159n., 331n., 371n.,
398, 407, 425, 432, 433, 438
Abbott and Sicard, 347n.
Abstention, parl., 135, 175n., 228, 241, 246n.,
297 and n., 397, 410, 420; of govt, 410
Abyssinia, 104
Academic francaise, 169, 285
Action democratique et republicaine, 138n.
Action democratique et sociale, 138n.
Action Francaise, L\ 62, 103 and n., 149,
160, 162, 170, 179, 396
Action liberate populaire, 103, 148
Adenauer, K., 435
Administration, see Bureaucracy; Civil
servants, -ice; reforms in, 1945-6, 345,
394, 449
Africa: Black, 50, 100, 181, 248; Equa-
torial, 408; North, q.v.; Territories in,
288, 294, see Overseas; West, 171,
204n., 408; other, 101, 182, 209n., 312
Agriculture, see CGA; Food policy;
Peasantry; Ctee (NA), 244n., 245,
247 and n., 248, 249; (CR), 363n.; M.
of, 36, 123, 344, 354, 356, 378; -al
instruction bill, 1955, 245, 367
Agulhon, M., 116n.
Aid, see Marshall Aid
Air Force, 54, 391n., 411; Royal, 162
Air, M. of, 391 and n., 410-11
Aisne (cap. Laon), 139, 166n., 167n.,
179nn., 276 and n.
Alain (£mile Chartier, 1868-1951), 6 and
n., 7, 8, 126, 169
Albanian Communists, 75
Alcohol: interest, -ism, 46, 161n., 163,
258n., 272, 274, 330 and n., 344n.,
353-4, 355-8, 369n., 373, 374-5 and nn. ,
379, 380, 384, 423 and n., 424, 447;
Commission, 333; Ccnseil . . ., 379; see
Beets; Beverages; Bouilleurs; Cider;
Fastis; Wine
Algeria, French opinion and, Ch. 4; p. 69;
also Com., 75n., 79n., 82 and n., 85
and n., 86-7, 400; Soc., 32, 91 and n.,
93, 96n., 98, 100 andn., 101, 128, 198,
404, 431, 438, 440; Mendesists and
Left Cath., 128, 170, 173, 174, 21 In.,
367-8, 377, 381, 402, 436, 446; Gaull.
144 and n., 145, 146, 162, 435; cons.,
112, 126, 153, 159, 162, 235, 377, 402,
440, 448; diehards, see Algerie fran-
caise
Algeria, govt. of, 49 and n., 293; admin.,
341, 349-50, 354; 'elections', lack of,
180, 181 and n., 209n., 503; Govs-
Gen., 46, 329, 350n., 408, 435; parl.
rep., 161, 180, 209 and n., 244n., 248,
279, 293, 294n., 295; 1947 statut, 32,
231, 232, 233n., 250, 286, 349-50 and
n., 355 and n.; 1956-7 special powers
in, 75, 259n., 272n., 273 and n., 275
and n., 400n.; 1957-8 hi cadre, 51,
52, 54, 221n., 248, 250, 260, 274, 288,
364, 412, 426
Algeria, parties of, 46, 82, 123, 125n.,
144n., 180, 354; crypto-fascists, 54,
162, 163, 164, 167, 168; settlers, see
N. Africa; Riots
Algeria, war in: and govts., 202, 235 and n.,
304, 315, 344; and 4 Rep., 16, 44, 55-6,
106, 171, 193, 247n., 273, 288-9, 294,
301, 302n., 350n., 351, 377, 381, 397,
411, 412, 444, 448, 449, 450, see Civil
liberties; and 5 Rep., 192, 289, 346n.
(ref.), 355, 443
Algerian Assembly, 293n.; 'charter', 433;
wine, 339, see Scandals
Algerians in France, 51, 93, 19 In., 330,
440; see Camps
Alge'rie francaise and 'party', 46, 54, 69,
124n., 130, 152n., 158, 173, 351, 377,
425, 435
Algiers: in world war, 20, 47n., 133, 197;
as capital city, 55, 75, lOln., 106, 123,
144 and n., 163, 350, 354, 435, 449;
Moslems and FLN in, 50, 51n., 52,
q.v.', settler plots, riots in, 6n., 45, 49,
50-2, 54, 55, 153n., 164, 167, 438
Allen, L. A., cit. nn. 119, 127, 129
Alliance Democratique, 62, 148, 149, 158,
170, 176-7 and n., 214, 360
Alliances, electoral : role of, 121 and n., 216,
317-19, 323; in 3 Rep., 72, 88-9, 116-
17, 307-8, see Elec. systems (s.d.a.) ; in
1945-9, 24, 118 and n., 122 and n., 134,
142, 143n., 158, 174, 310-11; in 1951,
47-8 and n., 97 and n., 105, 118, 121n.,
125 and n., 134n., 150, 175n., 176, 177
and n., 178-9, 313-14, 326, 328, 366; in
INDEX
513
1956 47-8 and n., 72, 90, 105, 136 and
n., 168, 172 and n., 178, 315-16, 326 ; in
1958, 174; see Apparentements
Alliances, govtl., see Coalition politics
Alliances, parl., 29, 32, 47, 88-9, 106, 175-
6, 250, 288, 309 and n., 312, 318,
319
Allier (cap. Moulins), 171, 323, 328
Allies, 20, 44, 46, 54, 112, 348, 351, 448
Alpes, Basses- (cap. Digne), 329
Alpes-Maritimes (cap. Nice), 330n., 363n.
Alpine, 383
Alsace, -Lorraine, Alsatian, 69, 80, 103,
107, HO, 143n.> 323, 326n., 329-30,
376, 506; in Africa, 201
Amendments, see Bills ; Constitutional —
America, see United States
Ames, Fisher, 45 In.
Amicale parlementaire agricole, 363, 375
Amiens, 325n., 327n., 331n.; Charter of,
116
Amnesty, 161, 163, 208, 210n., 259n., 288,
342, 410
Amsterdam, 88
Anbert, C., 300nn., 301n.
Anciens d'Indochine, 162
Andre, Pierre (b. '03, PRL and Cons. d.
Meurthe-et-M. '46J-58), 327, 429
Andrews, W. G., cit. nn. 216, 412, 426, 451
'Angels', 372 and n. ; see Money
AngoulSme, 262
Anthonioz, Marcel (b. '11, Cons. d. Am
•51- ), 429
Anticlericals, -ism: and parties, lln., 22,
29-30, 69, 86, 90, 96, 97-8, 113, 125,
142-3, 148, 310-11, 313; other, 11 and
n., 29, 95, 306 and n., 313, 330,
365-7; see Church; Freemasonry
Anti-communism, 18, 25, 84, 90, 97, 141,
162, 194, 258n., 270, 289, 307, 308,
310, 315 and n., 367, 389, 433 and n.,
438, 451
Antier, Paul (b. '05, MP '36, Peas. d. H-
Loire '45-58), 67, 153, 159, 166,407, A
Anti-semitism, see Jews
Anti-trust, see Cartels
Apparentement, electoral, 313-16, 317-19,
322, 323, 326n., 328, 400, 439, 504-5,
506, 507, see Alliances, Electoral law
1951 ; parl., 139n., 171,243, 328
Appeasement, 18, 72, 73, 89, 100, 149,
152, 21 5n.; see Pacifists
Appointments, 198 and n., 204 and n., 300,
301, 350-1; see Patronage
Arabs, -ic, 45, 330, 351 ; see Moslems
Aragon, Charles d' (b. '11, MRP and
Gauche Ind. d. H-Pyrenees '45-51,
Left cand. Paris 1951, later UDT),
llOn., 325, 329n., 366n.
Arbitration, see Wages
Arboussier, Gabriel d' (b. '08, MP '45-6,
v-pres. AUF '47-51, RDA), 180n.,
181n.
Archambeaud, Y., 296n.
Aristocrats, 167, 171 and n., 332
Arleux (Nord), 280
Armagnac, 376n.
Army: power of, civilian control, 3, 8, 45,
50-6, 202, 217n., 347; and 4 Rep.,
freedom in, 16, 45, 50, 52, 54-6, 106,
302n,, 350-1, 438, 448; and domestic
politics, 22n., 27, 34, 68, 99n., 254 and
n., 422 and n. ; overseas, 45, 47, 50-1,
54-6, 346 and n., 350, 354, 377, 435,
446 ; and de Gaulle, 5 Rep., 22, 45, 55-6,
132, 146, 153n., 161, 191, 230, 302n.,
443 ; see European Army ; Scandals
Army C'tee (NA), 242, see Defence C'tee
Arn6, S., cit. nn. 196-207, 220, 224, 227-
40, 257-8, 260, 268-70, 273, 281,
286-7, 292, 294-7, 301, 304, 338, 344,
376, 378-80, 382, 392, 397, 405-23,
426, 432, 438, 440-2
Aron, Raymond, 143n.; cit. nn. 4, 11, 12,
13, 15, 19, 26, 27, 34, 41, 146, 401,
442, 449-50
Arras, 94n., 371n.
Arrighi, Pascal (b. '21, d. Corse '56-62,
Rad., Neo-, UNR and E. Right), 211
and n., 438n.; cit. nn. 215, 388, 393
Artisans, 68n., 95, 166 and n., 296n., 297,
392-3 ;^UDCA
Asnieres (Seine), 130 and n.
Aspects de la France, 62
Assemblies, Constituent, 1945-6, 22-4,
180, 181, 191, 200, 209n., 222, 230n.,
260, 270, 278, 292, 309, 386, 388 and
n., 394, 428; Presidents, 22, 24, 197,
217; demanded 1958, 56
Assemblies, Territorial, 181, 293, 489, 490
Assembly, Algerian, 293n.
Assembly, Consultative, 20, 363n.
Assembly, National, 1871-1940, 7, 20, 186,
191, 195
Assembly, National, 4 Rep.: bureau, 212,
213n., 215n., 216 and n., 237, 257 and
n., 280; bureaux, 210n., 242; commit-
tees, ff.v.; dissolution, q.v.\ officers,
200, 216, 218, 219, 237, 264, 414;
Pres., 41, 122n., 197, 203 and n.,
216-19, 225, 235 and n., 236, 237, 239,
258, 284, 305, 433; Presidents' Con-
ference, tf.v.; standing orders, 208-9,
213 and n., 215, 216, 218, 221, 230,
240, 252, 259n., 263, 284, 338, 374
and nn., 433, see Parl. (procedure);
superiority to other assemblies, 208,
280-1, 286n., 295, 296, 298, 324, see
Council of Rep.; other, 209 and n.,
298-9, 334, 360; see Committees,
Groups, Parliament
Assembly, Nat. 1946-51: 22, 24, 25, 31,
32, 36, 37, 63-4, 107, 122n., 134n.,
149, 192-3, 224, 250, 297, 303, 335,
388n., 389, 425, 427, 431, 440
Assembly, Nat. 1951-5: 8, 10n., 31, 38-9,
44,47, 105, 136, 150, 153,260,361,
364-5,377,425,433,440,441
514 INDEX
Assembly, Nat. 1956-8: 45, 49, 51, 56, 63,
69, 106, 108n., 150-1, 153, 164, 235n.,
260, 304, 342, 362, 377, 380, 408, 433,
438, 440
Assembly, Nat. 1958-62: 56
Assembly, Nat. (building), see Palais
Bourbon
Assembly of French Union, 178, 208, 281,
293, 294-5, 296, 297n.; Pres. of, 122n.,
293, 295, 325, 414
Associated States, 293-5, 496
Association . . ., see initial A ...
Association for Educational Freedom, 39;
see APLE
Association of labour and capital, 138, 143
and n.
Astier de la Vigerie, E. d' (b. '00, Gaull.
m. '43-4, Prog. d. Ille-et-V. '45-58),
171n.
Atlantic Allies, q.v.\ Pact, 44, 198, 225;
Wall, 35 In.
Atomic energy and nuclear power, 205n.,
251, 341, 391, 447
Attentistes, 132, 158, 437
Attlee, Earl, 425
Aube (cap. Troyes), 121, 508
Auhe, L\ 61, 103, 104, 108
Aubry, M., 296n.
,Auge-Laribe, M., lln.
Aujoulat, Louis (b. '10, MRP and IOM
d. Cameroun '45-55), 181n., A
Aumeran, Gen. A. (b. '87, PRL and Cons.
d. Alger '46N-56), 435
Auriol, Vincent (b. '84, MP '14, Soc. d.
H-Garonne '45-6, Pres. Constituent
Assembly '46, Pres. Rep. '47-54):
before Pres., 20, 22, 24, 197, 202n., 217,
225, A; const, ideas, 190 and n., 197
and n., 222n., 236n., 251n., 33 In.
as Pres., 37, 40, 195, 197-201, 202, 226,
231n., 232n., 237, 238 and n,, 281 and
n., 294 and n., 300-1, 353n,, 385 and
n., 390, 414, 415n., 416 and n., 422;
const, ideas, 226, 234, 238 and n., 239,
265n., 294 and n., 300, 305n.
after Pres., 90, 91n., 198, 201n., 203
and de Gaulle, 20, 22, 197, 201n., 203
and all parties, 200-1; and Com., 198,
199; and Soc., 90, 91n.; and Rad.,
Gaull., 416
Aurore,L\ 384
Austria, 12
Authority and democracy in France, 2-4,
5-9, 12, 15-16, 20, 63, 110-11, 141n.,
316, 317, 319, 332, 333-5, 383, 385,
413,428,446,447,452-3
Aveyron (cap. Rodez), 150, 166n., 313,
324n., 329n., 334n,
BBC, 132
Baby,J., cit. nn. 75-8, 81-2, 85
Badie, Vincent (b. '02, MP '36, Rad. and
Neo- d. Herault '45-58), 244n., A
Baecque, F. de, cit. nn. 196, 198, 200
Baldwin, S., 36
Ballanger, Robert (Com. d. Seine-et-O. 1
'45- ), 265n.
Bank of France, 343, 384 and n.
Bao Dai, ex-Emperor, 199 and n., 202
Barange, Charles (b. '97, MRP d. Maine-
et-L. '45-55, rapp.-gen. '46-55), 253,
254 and n., 323, 429 ; loi — , see Church
schools
Bardeche, M., 164n.
Bardonnet, D,, cit. nn. 98-9, 115, 117,
119-22, 127, 129-30, 176-8, 372, 374,
381
Bardoux, Jacques (1874-1959, MP '38,
Peas, and RI d. Puy-de-D. '45-55),
243n.
Barnes, S. H., 114n.
Barrachin, Edmond (b. '00, MP '34, Gaull.
and Cons. d. Seine 5 '46J-58, s. '59- ),
159 and n., 214n., 283n., 285n., 433
and n., A
Barres, Maurice (1862-1923, MP '89,
writer), 158
Barrillon, R., cit. nn. 75, 137, 139-41,
143, 150, 153, 156, 160, 363,365
Barth61emy, Joseph (1874-1945, d. '19-28,
m. '41-3), cit. nn. 11, 215, 242, 244-6,
255, 277, 374-6
Barthou, Louis (1862-1934, MP '89, PM
'13), 276n.
Basques, 323, 330, 376
Bauchard, P. cit. nn. 77, 94, 108
Baumel, Jacques (b. '18, d. '45-6, s. '59,
sec.-g. UNR '62- ), 143n., 174
Bayet, Albert (1880-1961), 124n.
Bayeux, — const., 23 and n., 133, 191, 293
Baylet, Jean (1904-59, Rad. d. Tarn-et-
Garonne '45-58), 126, 129, 130 and
n., 402, 429
Baylot, Jean (b. '97, prefect of police
'51-4, E. Right d. Seine '58-62), 46n.,
98n., 130n., 347-8, 367n.
Bazooka plot, 51, 52; see Plots
Beam, 323
Beau de Lomenie, E., 4n.
Beaulieu, G. de, 83n.
Beer and Ulam, cit. nn. 7, 346, 433
Beets: growers, 159, 342, 355-6 and n., 357,
358, 364, 369 and n., 370, 379, 434, 438
BSgouin, Lucien (b. '08, Rad. d. Seine-et-
M. '46N-58), 143n., 230n.
Belfort, Territoire de, 109n., 172n.
Belgium, 79, 300n.
Belin, Ren<§ (b. '98, m. '40-2), 89, 137n.
Ben Arafa (Sultan of Morocco '53-5),
224n.
Ben Bella, Ahmed (b. '19, Pres. of Algeria),
50, 349, 434
Berlia, G., cit. nn. 199, 203, 211, 216, 228,
241, 283, 303, 315, 371
Bermuda, 409
Bertaux, Pierre, 289
Berthoin, Jean (b. '95, Rad. s. Isere '48- ),
290, A
INDEX
515
Bertrand, A., cat. nn. 198, 205, 260, 337
Bessac, Abel (d. Lot '45-55), 179 and n.,
325n.
Betolaud, Robert (b. '01, PRL and RI d.
Seine 2 '46J-51), 363n., A
Beuve-Mery, Hubert (b. '02, ed. Le Monde),
426n., 442n.
Beverages c'tee (NA), 243n., 244n., 248,
249, 262 and nn.
Bev of Tunis (Lamine; deposed '57, dd.
'62), 199, 349
Beziers, 356
Biaggi, Me J. B. (b. '18, UNR and E.
Right d. Seine '58-62), 162
Biarritz, 156n., 177
Biays, P., 223n.
Bichelonne, Jean (m. industry '42-4, dd.
'45), 14n.
Bidault, Georges (b. '99, Pres. Nat. Coun-
cil of Resistance, Pres. MRP '49-52,
MRP and E. Right d. Loire '45-62,
exile '62): career, 35n., 227n., 324n.,
430, 442n., A; cand. PM, 24, 37, 40,
55, 226 and n., 227, 228n., 416 and
n., 418 and n., 419; as PM, 27, 112,
226 and n., 233 and nn., 235, 239, 253,
254, 341, 441; on colonialism, 41, 106,
112, 130, 293-4, 349, 351, 377, 411,
441; as foreign m. also 44, 50, 224n.;
in 5 Rep., 98n., 108n., 437; and par-
ties, 37, 124n., 233n.; also Soc., 226,
254, 264, 421, 441; MRP, 55, 105, 106,
108, 400, 402, 418 and n., 509n.; Rad.,
218, 234n.; Gaull., 37, 105, 402, 417;
Cons., 234n.
Bidault govt., June-Nov. '46, 23, 112, 205,
293, A
Bidault govt., Oct. '49-June '50: 27, 37,
124n., 218, 226 and n., 253, 287, 290,
375, 406; fall, 27, 238, 254, 264, 342n.,
A
'Bigamy', -'ists', pol., 118, 120n., 121 and
n., 129 andn., 175,286,311
Billeres, Ren6 (b. '10, Rad. d. H-Pyren6es
>46J- ), 342, A
Billoux, Francois (b. '03, MP '36, Com. d.
Bouches-du-Rhone 1 '45- ), 72n.y
74n., 429n., A
Bills, 255, 258, Ch. 19; also amendments
to, 257n., 258 and nn., 259n., 260 and
n., 263, 264, 268, 269, 282 and n.,
283nn.; constitutionality of, 197,
257n., 302, 306; govt., 204, 245,
259-60, 283, 284-5 and n.; money,
257n., 258n., 261, 263-6, 282, 283-4,
303n.; private members', 165 nn.,
245, 248n., 257-63, 275, 285n., 373
and n.; promulgation of, 217, 258,
284n., 305, 306; ref. back, to c'tee,
258-9, 288n., by Pres. Rep., 196, 200
and n., 258, 259n., 260, 265n., 306;
senators', q.v.; see Parl. debate
Binion, R., 9n.
Birthrate, see Population
Biton, L., cit. nn. 103, 108, 110
Blachette, Georges (b. '00, RI d. Alger
'51-5), 355
Blamont, Emile (sec.-g. NA), cit. nn. 213,
218, 221, 223-4, 232, 235, 239, 249,
252, 255, 257-60, 266, 268-9, 272-4,
281, 283-5
Blanchet, A., cit. nn. 180, 181
Bloch-Morhange, J., cit. nn. 47, 49, 65,
322, 331, 354, 377
Blocquaux, Jean (MRP d. '46N-51), 343n.
Blondel, J., cit. nn. 100, 325, 327, 331
Blondelle, Ren6 (b. '07, founded first beet-
growers' assoc. *29, ex-Pres. FNSEA,
Peas. s. Aisne '55- ), 289, 356, 363n.
Blum, L6on (1872-1950, MP '19, PM '36):
pre-war, 18, 35n., 72, 89, 157, 177, 187,
204, 236n., 339n.; PM '46, see next
entry; cand. PM '47, 32-3, 82n., 180,
228, 416; post-war, 22, 89, 90, 96n.,
97, 226n., 300n., 403, 430, 436, A;
views on const., 190 and n., 193, 203
and n., 204 and n., 207, 222n., 226n.,
229 and n., 236n. ; on parl., 218n., 221
and n., 248n., 251n., 255n.
Blum govt., Dec. '46-Jan. '47, 24, 27, 98-9,
157, 205n., 238, 349, A
Bobigny (Seine), 116
Bodin and Touchard, cit. nn. 109, 158,
166, 429, 432
Bodley, J. E. C., 2n., 5nn., 7n., 9n., 10n.,
332 and n., 449 and n.
Bogus lists, parties, see National parties
Boisd6, Raymond (b. '99, Gaull. and Cons,
d. Cher. '51- ), 230n., 373
Boissarie, A., 21 3n.
Bottlers, 213, 214 and n.
Bolsheviks, 88
Bonaparte, Louis, 195; -ism, 87n., 124,
139, 141 and n., 159, 192, 318, 449,
452; see Napoleon
Bonnard, Abel (b. '83, m. '42-4), 159n.
Bonnefous, fidouard (b. '07, UDSR d.
Seine-et-O. 2 '46N-'58, s. '59),
298n., A
Bonnet, Christian (MRP d. '56- ), 214n.
Bonnet, Georges (b. '89, MP '24, RGR and
Rad. d. Dordogne '56- ), 210n.
Bordeaux, 121 and n., 152n., 153n., 155n.,
166n., 200n., 325 and n., 327n., 328,
331
Borgeaud, Henri (b. '95, Rad. s. Alger
'46-59), 289, 354, 429
Bosworth, W., cit. nn. 103, 108-10, 113-
14, 125, 161, 171-2, 366, 372, 381-2
Bottomore, T., 337n.
Bouches-du-Rh6ne (constituency 1 Mar-
seilles, 2 the rest), 79n., 91, 94n., 97n.,
99n., 109n., 167nn., 276n., 280, 388n.
Bouhired, Djamila, 52 •
Bouilleurs de cru, 86, 161n., 166, 214n.,
264 and n., 274, 330n., 355, 357 and
nn., 358, 363, 369, 372, 375 and n.,
383, 429, 438
516
INDEX
Bouju, P., 371n.
Boulanger, Gen. G., -ism, 8, 115, 141n.,
145, 187, 316
Boulogne (Seine), 168
Bourdet, Claude (b. '09), 19n., 61, 73ii.,
74,172, 173andn.,354n.
Bourgeois, L6on (1851-1925, MP '88, PM
'95), 277 and n.
Bourges-Maunoury, Maurice (b. '14, Rad.
d. H-Garonne '46J-58), career and
views, 121n., 130, 253, 322 and n.,
430, 436; as m., 51, 52, 239n., 339
and n., A; as PM, 51, 228, 235, 281,
412, 421, 426, 441; and Socs., 51, 98,
417,421; and others, 240
Bourges-Maunoury govt, June-Sep. '57,
51, 206n,, 239, 240, 273, 344, 364, 375,
408, 411, 423n., 432, A
Bourguiba, Habib (b. '03, Tunisian PM
'56, Pres. '57), 426
Boussac, Marcel (b. '89), 384 and n.
Boutemy, Andr6 (1905-59, Peas. s. Seine-
et-M. '52-9), 65, 156n., 224 and n.,
289, 371 and n., 377, A
Bowditch, J., 382n.
Boyer de la Tour, Gen., 47
Brayance, A., 83n.; cit. nn. 76-9, 82-3,
358, 381
Brest, 211 and n.
Briand, Aristide (1862-1932, MP '02, PM
'09), 170, 195, 404, 428n.
Brindillac, C, cit. nn. 167, 214, 275, 290,
337-8, 343, 346, 374, 379, 423, 431
Brinon, Fernand de (Vichy rep. in Paris,
executed '47), 298n.
Britain, 18n., 54, 73, 82n., 212, 449
Britain and France compared: admin, and
courts., 196, 206, 273n., 338, 339, 341,
419n.; bills and budgets, 246-7, 255-6,
257 and n., 258, 259n., 260, 261, 267,
268, 464; elec. system, 307-8, 309n.,
314, 317; other parl. and govt., 186,
187-8, 189, 203 and n., 206, 208, 216,
218, 223, 229, 240, 276-7, 334, 425-7,
440 ; parties, 4-5, 29, 63, 66 and n., 69,
184-5, 222, 308n., 317, 324, 370, 413;
soc. and pol. outlook, 2-4, 4-7, 25-6,
28, 96, 111, 360, 370, 440, 444, 445
Brittany, Bretons, 103, 106, 109n., 110,
153n., 248, 280n., 330, 376, 407
Broadcasting, 22, 60, 62, 99n., 132, 161n.,
177n., 205n., 271, 324, 341n., 440,
445, 506, 507
Brogan, D. W., 195 and n.; cit. nn. 7, 9,
246, 256, 339, 451
Broglie, Prince J. de (b. '21, Cons. d. Eure
'58 and '62, m. in 5 Rep.), 33 In.
Brokerage (by PM), 195, 390, 404, 408-12,
413, 418-19, 441-3; see Coalition
politics
Bromhead, P., cit. nn. 243-6, 248, 250-1
Brossolette, Mme Gilberte (b. '05, Soc.
d. Seine '46J-N, s. '46-58, later PSU),
lOOn.,327
Brown, B., cit. nn. 55-6, 355-7, 360-1,
364, 366, 371, 375, 377, 381
Brune, Charles (1891-1956, Rad. s. Eure-
et-L. '46-56), 287, A
Bruyas, J., cit. nn. 259, 280-1, 283, 286-7
Budapest, 75, 162
Budget : and Parl. time, 260, 267 and n., 269
and n. ; as pol. problem, 6-7, 25-7, 28,
51, 249, 254, 257, 264-6, 269, 358, 375;
see Investment ; Tax System
Budget division of finance m., 342n.
Budgetary procedure, 185, 212, 223,
249n., 252, 257, 260, 263-9; provi-
sional twelfths, 185, 266, 267, 268,
288n.
Budgets, annual: for 1947-9 (and Mayer
levy), 34, 232, 253, 263, 266, 286-7,
373, 375; for 1950, 37, 124n., 218, 233
and n., 253, 264, 266, 290, 361; for
1951 (and rearmament), 249, 253 and
n., 261n., 264, 267, 269, 273n., 284;
later, 27, 39-40, 254, 261n., 264, 269,
284
Bugnicourt, J., cit. nn. 166, 167, 325
Buisson, Ferdinand (1841-1932, MP '02,
educationalist), 126n.
Bureau, -x, of NA and CR, q.v.
Bureaucracy, 3, 8-10, 11 and n., 13-14,
253n., 255, 260 and n., 270, 274-5
and n., 335, 336-46, 377-8, 411, 423,
448, 453; see Centralization; Civil
servants, -ice
Bureaucracy, colonial, 47, 52, 180, 336,
349-50, 354, 448
Burke, Edmund, 449
Buron, Robert (b. '10, MRP d. Mayenne
'45-58, m. in 5 Rep), cit. nn. 66, 81,
198, 212, 214, 220, 223, 243, 245, 249,
252, 260-1, 263, 265, 269, 318, 323-5,
329-30, 334, 338-42, 345-7, 370-4,
383, 406, 423, 429-30, 432-3, A
Business, -men, 3-4, 12, 13-14, 27-8, 65,
68, 69, 123, 155 and n., 156nn., 157,
289, 297-8, 332, 334n., 338 and n.,
344n., 358, 360-2, 371-2, 377, 379-80,
385, 392-3, 431; seeVUE
Butchers, 300, 332, 382
Butler, D. E., 57n., 66n.
Butter, 378 ; see Milk
By-elections, 50, 54 and n., 100, 129, 130,
135, 152 and nn., 161, 165-6 and nn.,
167, 313, 328, 331n., 371n., 413-14,
508; local, 143 and n.
By6, M., cit. nn. 296, 298, 391
CFTC, 28, 34, 69, 83 and nn., 103, 105 and
n., 109n., 114 and n., 297, 359, 360,
362, 365, 366, 370n., 372, 380, 381,
392; see Catholics (TU)
CGA, 36n., 296n., 297, 364-5, 381, 382n.,
393
CGC, 359, 381
CGSI, 137n., 359
CGT, 18, 19, 34, 78, 83 and nn., 84, 296n.,
INDEX
517
297, 359, 360, 370n., 380n., 381, 385,
392n.
CNI, CNIP (named), 62, 63, 65n., 68 and
n., 109n.5 150-9, 167, 177, 178, 258n.,
289, 290, 311, 325nn., 331n., 398n.,
402n., 407, 433; see Conservatives
CNPF, 15, 65, 360-1, 362, 371, 372, 379
Cabinet: checks upon, 9-12, 185-90, 222-5,
229-42, 252-5; if dissolution, 215n.,
217 and n., 236-7, 239; divisions,
22-4, 28-30, 31-2, 34, 37-8, 46, 47,
51-2, 207, 234-5, 342, 380, 390-5,
403, 404-7, 408-12, 423, 440-2; org.,
196 and n., 198, 204n., 205-6 and nn.,
232n., 239; secretariat, 260n., 345; see
Premiership
Cabinets, ministerial, 336, 339-40 and nn.,
341n., 343n., 380, 391; presidential,
199n.
Cachin, Marcel (1869-1958, MP '14, Com.
d. Seine 2 '45-58), 21 6n.
Cadart, J., 286n., 296n.
Cadillac c'tee (Rad.), 120 and n., 341n.
Cagoulards, 164, 348
Caillaux, Joseph (1863-1944, MP '98,
PM '11), 17, 116,448
Callen, J., 356nn., 358n.
Calvados (cap. Caen), 153n., 161, 328
Cambodia, 293-4; King of, 41, 294, 422
Cameroons, 294n.
Campbell, P., cit. nn. 65, 107, 193, 205-10,
223-4, 243, 257-9, 281, 283, 307-10,
314, 320, 323, 328, 397, 409-10, 419,
437, 505
Camps, internment, 51, 93 and n., 100,
288-9, 400; other, 74n., 371n.
Canar d Enchatne, Le, 61, 145
Canossa, 174
Capitant, Ren6 (b. '01, Gaull. d. B-Rhin
'45-6, Seine 2 '46-51, '62- ), 133 and
n., 144 and n., 174, 193 and n., 240,
270, 271 and n., 273n., 274n., A
Careerists, 17, 99, 120, 121 andn,, 185 and
n., 228, 252-3, 420-1, 423, 430, 432,
434, 438-9, 440-1, 450; see Feuds;
Patronage
Carnot, Sadi (1837-94, Pres, '87-94), 195
'Carpetbaggers', 158n., 169, 329, 330 and
n., 332-3
Carrefour, 142n., 31 In.
Carte Ides Gaudies -, 45, 88, 116
Cartels and trusts, 143, 287 and n., 297,
344, 362, 369, 376 and n., 380, 386;
see Steel
Cartier, Raymond (b. '04, ed. Paris-
Match), 377, 448
Cartou, J., 268n.
Casablanca (Morocco), 112
Casalegno, C., 132n.
Casanova, Laurent (b. '06, Com. d. Seine-
et-M. '45-58), 75n., 85n., A
Casimir-Pe~rier, Jean (1847-1907, Pres.
'94-5), 195
Cassin, Rene", 345n.
Catalans, 330
Catherine, R,, cit. nn. 95, 337-41, 347, 391
Catholic Action, 103 andn., HOn.
Catholics, 68, 69, 79n., 86, 97, 125n., 148,
155, 158 and n., 174, 340, 350, 353,
365, 365-8, 445-6; in colonies, 112,
180; extreme Right, 161, 168, 367, 437;
Left, 61, 62, 69, 97, 103, 104, 105, 106,
108, 113, 161, 171 and nn., 172, 173,
367, 435, 436, 437; trade unionists,
106, 367, 385, 437, see CFTC; non-,
139n.; anti-, see Anticlericals ; see
Church
Catroux, Diomede (b. '16, Gaull. d,
Maine-et-L. '51-5, Alpes-M. '62- ),
136n.
Catroux, Gen. Georges (b. '77, Gov.-G.
Indo-China '40, Syria '41, Algeria
»44), 49, 136n., A
Cayeux, Jean (MRP d. '45-58), 356n.
Cayre, Henri, 356 and n., 379 and n.
Censure, vote of, 208, 213, 217, 230, 232n.,
237, 239n., 240-1, 375
Centralization, 2-3, 6, 293, 335; de-, 345,
347
Centre, 10, 20, 31, 47, 54, 136, 148, 250,
254, 283, 309, 311, 312, 313, 314, 317,
366, 372, 417, 430, 431, 439; in-
discipline of, 64, 184, 187, 214, 216,
246, 308 and n., 319, 322, 324, 326,
353; see Compromisers; Left and
Right; Marginal votes; Patronage;
Third Force
Centre . . ., see CNI
Cevennes, 78
Chaban-Delmas, Jacques (b. '15, Rad. and
Gaull. d. Gironde 1 '46N- , mayor
of Bordeaux, Pres. NA '58- ), 47,
54, 121, 136, 137, 142, 325, 327 and
n., 331, 340n., 377, 430, 442n., A
Chalandon, Albin (b. '20, sec.-g. UNR
'58-9), 158
Chambaretaud, Leon, 120n., 178-9, 507
Chamber of Deputies, 9, 10, 11, 12, 17, 20,
45, 72, 148, 149, 184-6, 209, 212, 214,
215, 222, 225, 236, 242, 276, 298, 308,
374, 387, 389; President of, 9, 217;
building, 72, 212n.
Chambrun, Gilbert de (b. '09, Prog. d.
Lozere '45-55), 171n., 172n.
Champagne, 155
Channel, English, 2, 206, 256
Chapman, B., cit. nn. 337-8, 347, 376
Chapus, R., 267n., 272n.
Charente (cap. Angouleme), 325
Charlemagne, 435
Chariot, J., cit. nn. 109, 366-7
Charpentier, J., cit. nn. 260, 273-4
Chartres, 163n.
Chataigneau, Yves (b. '91, Gov.-G. Al-
geria '44-8), 354, 408
Chatelain, A., 61 n.
Chaumi6, Pierre (Rad. s. Lot-et-G. '35-40),
363n.
518
INDEX
Chavagnes, R., 296n.
Chavanon, C., cit. nn. 337, 342, 344
Chenot, B. (m. in 5 Rep.), 296n., 343n., A
Cher (cap. Bourges), 5, 508
Chevallet, Paul, 163,164
Chevallier, Louis, 4n., 363n.
Chiappe, Jean (1878-1940, prefect of
police '27-34), 18
China, -ese, 74n.
Chouans, 167
Christian Democrats, 18, 19, 108, 447;
German, 109; Bidault's party in
1958, 98n., 108n.; see MRP
Christopher, J. B., 4n.
Church, Catholic: prelates, 104, 109, 367,
382, 393; priests, 68, 97n., 104, 118,
247, 367, 445; and State, separation of,
115, 116, 148, 186; and pol, 2, 7, 60,
130, 289n., 365-8, 445-6; and Corns.,
22, 78, 86, 367; and Socs., lln., 22,
89, 97-8, 326, 367; and MRP, 22, 31,
103 and n., 105, 109-11, 114, 393;
and Rads., 115, 125, 307-8, 323, 342;
and Gaull., 31, 135, 139n., 142-3; and
Cons., 148 and n., 156; and Pouj., E.
Right, 161, 168n.; see Catholics;
Church schools ; Pope ; Rome ; Vatican
Church schools: as pol. problem, 15, 23,
28-30, 31, 38, 39, 78, 105, 125 and n.,
128n., 142-3, 204n., 292 and n.,
365-7, 370, 372, 419, 434-5, 438, 439;
as regional problem, 317, 318, 330,
366-7, 376 and n., 382; in 1948, 34,
250-1, 344, 405n., 410; hi Barange,
39, 98 and n., 105, 125 and n., 134,
175, 220, 233, 245 and n., 251, 260,
265, 306, 343n., 344, 366, 367, 398n.,
410, 434
Churchill, Sir W, S., 132, 409
Cider, 418, 419n.
Cine-clubs, 82
Cities, 3, 84, 94, 98 andn., 110 andn., 115,
134, 139, 155 and n., 161, 276 and n.,
279-80 and n., 323, 331, 445; see
Regions (town v. country)
City of London, 18n,, 73
Civil liberties, 50-1, 52, 173, 273, 275n.,
289 ; see Camps ; Press
Civil servants: conditions and career, 34,
163n., 272, 338, 339-40, 341, 379;
pay, 27, 37, 231, 232, 249, 254, 265,
342, 344, 362n.5 373; and Parl., poli-
tics, 68, 95 and nn., 213 and n., 251,
296n., 344, 378; and policy, see
Bureaucracy
Civil service, org., 35, 204, 336, 391-2
Classes moyennes, 157, 297n., 361-2 and
n.
Clemenceau, Georges (1841-1929, MP
'76, PM '06 and '17), 9, 11, 116, 124,
128, 168, 195, 206, 215n., 223, 353
Clermont-Ferrand, 84
Clostermann, Pierre (b. '21, Gaull. d. B-
Rhin '46N-'51, Marne '51-5, Seine 1
'56-8 (Rad.), Seine-et-O. '62- ), 144,
173
Cloture, 212; see Parliament (sessions)
Coal industry, 36, 74n., 231, 252, 362, 391
and n.
Coalition politics, 22, 25, 29-30, 31-2,
35-6, 46, 99, 100, 112-13, 159, 231,
242, 250-1, 335, 380, 384-5, 386-7,
389-95, 396-7, 404-12, 417-18, 421-2,
423-4, 434, 437-8; see Brokerage;
Compromisers; Marginal votes; Pat-
ronage
Cobban, A., 276n.
Coca-cola, 171, 262n., 330
Cochin-China, 180n., 209n., 222n.
Colin, Andr£ (b. '10, MRP d. Finistere
'45-58, s. '59- , sec.-g. MRP '45-
55, Pres. '59-62), 105, 107, A
Colistiers, 324; see Tetes de liste
Collaboration, -ists, 7, 74, 103n., 134,
159n., 160, 162, 210, 288, 298 and n.,
300 and n., 327n., 392
Collective bargaining, see Wages
Colliard, C., cit. nn. 231-3
Colmar, 323
Colombey-les-Deux-£glises, 202
Colonial policy: of parties generally, 28-9,
41, 46-7, 50n., 293, 435-6; Com., 50n.,
74, 401; Soc., 45, 96n., 98, 101;
MRP, 41, 105-6, 112; Rad., 39, 112,
354; Gaull., 112, 144; Cons., 39, 112,
158 and n.; see Algeria; Morocco;
Tunisia; Decolonization
Colonialists, 288, 293, 355 and n.
'Colonization' (of admin.), 336, 340-1, 347,
391-2; see Communist P. (infiltration)
Colonna, Antoine (b. '01, d. '45-6, Rad.
and Gaull. s. '47-59), 289
Colons, see N. Africa (settlers)
Combat, 61, 28 5n., 290n.
Combes, fimile (PM '02-05), 186
Cominform, 74 and n., 198
Comite de defense latque, 330
Comite des Forges, 362, 384; see Steel
Commerce, M. of, 206
Commin, Pierre (1907-58, Soc. d. '45-6J,
s. Seine-et-O. '52-8), 289
Committees of Public Safety: 1793, 242;
1958, 55, 56
Committees, parl., Ch. 18 and pp. 9, 186,
210 and n., 223, 257-9, 262-3, 270n.,
277, 296, 373, 411-12, 429; ad hoc,
242, 255; chairmen, 41, 220, 224n.,
237, 243, 244-5 and nn., 250n., 251n.,
253, 264, 375, 399n., 418, 433; in
debate, 219 and n., 243, 259, 28 In.;
of enquiry, 223 and n., 243; member-
ship of, 93n., 171 and n., 180, 215,
243, 247-50; rapporteurs, 165n., 215n.,
243, 244nn., 248 and n., 250, 251,
261, 262 and n., 263, 269, 285, 303
and n.; sub-, 223 and nn., 253n.
Common Market, see European —
Communications C'tee (NA), 249, 271
INDEX
519
Communist Party, Ch. 6
history, 4, 17-18, 18-19, 20-2, 24-5,
26-7, 31, 36-41, 62, 70-5, 78
composition, 68-9, 80n., 289, 332
clientele, 14, 34, 50, 54, 71, 75, 78-9,
82-3, 85 and n., 86-7, 95-6, 279, 358,
381, 394, 401, 414
and peasantry, 5, 69, 73, 79, 326-7,
328n., 356, 364-5, 393, 394
discipline, 63-4, 85, 310, 329
divisions, 71, 74-5 and nn., 80-1, 83,
85, 376, 401
membership, 63, 71, 77-8 and nn., 79n.,
93n., 108
militants, 73, 77n., 80-1, 83, 85, 87
org., 65n., 75-7 and nn., 80, 81, 84, 85-6
funds, 65 and n., 80, 371n., 372, 387
in Parl., 65, 78, 80-1, 212-13, 216 and n.,
224, 227, 240, 244n., 255, 261, 262 and
nn., 263 and n., 264, 265, 282, 285, 286,
287, 299, 316, 375
obstruction, 210n., 213, 218-19, 220n.,
221 and n., 232n., 258 and n.
and govt., 24-5, 46, 74 and n., 83, 86n.,
228, 331, Ch. 27, 401
infiltration, 24, 46 and n., 84 and n., 271,
340, 341, 347, 348, 391-2
and regime, 54, 56, 70, 74, 75, 80, 87,
179, 396
outlook, 86-7, 335, 365, 383, 435
policy, see Algeria; Colonial; Const.;
Econ.; Electoral; Foreign
tactics, 82-4, 85, 86-7, 324, 326, 330
untouchability, 45, 93, 202, 206, 237n.,
244n., 245, 250, 263, 306, 327n., 337,
338, 360, 371, 377, 380n., 392n., 422,
431, 433 and n., 438
and Church, press, TUs, q.v.
and all parties, 28, 29, 41, 84-5, 210n.,
228,250,317,319
and Soc., 24, 71-2, 73, 81n., 83, 89, 90,
92n., 94, 98, 99, 100, 235, 311, 318,
323, 330, 367, 390, 397, 400, 403, 435
and q.v.',
and MRP, 24, 104, 109, 111, 288, 309,
310, 315, 390 andtf.v.
and Rad., 20, 116, 118, 121, 124 and n.,
125, 126, 314, 315, 367, 435 and q.v.
and Gaull., 25, 31, 36, 38, 54, 73, 81n.,
134-5, 139-41, 143, 146, 210n., 312,
314, 362, 366 and q.v.
and Cons., 83, 156n., 288, 315, 329, 362
and q.v.
and Pouj., 48-9, 79n., 83, 163 andn., 164
andn., 165, 167 andn., 172n. and<?.v.
and fascists, 72, 82
and small parties, 82n., 171-2, 174, 175,
176 and n., 180
and pol. leaders, q.v. individually
Communists, individual, 199, 223n., 300
and n., 301, 329, 429n.; crypto-, see
Fellow-travellers; diss., 171n., 215;
ex-, 18, 75n., 78, 85n., 137n., 160, 174;
non-French, 74 antf n., 75? 88, 19§
Comores, 294n.
Compagnies republicaines de securite, 347
Compromisers, 70, 125, 175 and n., 176,
317-19, 333-4, 396-7, 404, 407-8, 410,
413, 418-22, 424, 430-1, 436-8, 439,
440-3, 449-53; see Coalition politics
Compulsory arbitration, see Wages
Concierges, 374, 429n.
Confederation . . ., see initial C
Confidence, votes of, 35, 45, 190, 204, 208,
213, 220, 226, 229-36, 237, 238-40,
264-5, 274, 409, 441, 495; subjects of,
224, 234 and n., 235 and n., 247n.,
248n., 253, 254, 264-5, 266, 269
Congo, French, 214n.
Congress, parl., 201, 217, 280; see Presi-
dent (elections)
Congress, U.S., 192, 218, 219, 245, 256,
331, 333, 409, 413, 432
Congresses, international, Comm., 75;
Soc., 88
Conscripts, -ion, 6, 16n., 45n., 49, 85n.,
290n., 376, 401
Conseil de cabinet, des ministres, 196n.,
204n., 205n.; see Cabinet
Conseil d*£tat, 54, 204n., 211, 260 and n.,
271-3, 274, 292n., 304, 337-8, 344,
345
Conseil national du patronat francais, see
CNPF
Conseil superieur des alcools, 379
Conservatives, British, 29, 66n., 370, 425
Conservatives, Ch. 11
defined, 20n., 148n.
history, 22, 37-41, 47-9, 62, 148-54
composition, 68-9, 154-6 and nn., 364-5
clientele, 28, 50, 85, 154-5 and nn.,
157-8, 365, 380
discipline, 67, 151-2, 311, 315n., 404,
412
divisions, 152-4, 157-9, 432, 433
org., 62, 63, 65n., 150-4
funds, 65n., 372
in Parl., 20n., 31-2, 32-6, 51, 63, 410,
412, 421
and govt., 35n., 39, 40, 46, 51, 70, 148,
153, 157, 228
outlook, 148-9 and n., 154, 156-9, 332,
438
policy, see Algeria; Colonial; Const.;
Econ.; Electoral; Foreign
and all parties, 25, 28, 29, 30-2, 317
and Pouj., 153 and n., 154, 155n., 159,
163, 165n., 166, 179
and small parties, 124, 174 and n., 177,
179
and Church, Press, Corns., Socs., MRP,
Rad., Gaull., all f.v.
and pol. leaders, q.v. individually
Conservatives, individuals, 46, 54n., 165,
166n., 243n., 250, 289, 325 and nn.,
327, 330, 331, 378,420, 435
Constantine (Algeria), 354
Constituent < • •? see Assemblies
520
INDEX
Constitution, April 1946 draft, 22-3, 89,
104, 176, 190, 191, 196, 197, 199,
203n., 209n., 225-6, 230, 236, 237, 388
Constitution of 4 Rep., 7, 20-3, 40, 41,
104, 180, 188-94, 196-200, 204 and n.,
215, 242, 271, 273, 278-82, 291, 292
and n., 293-4, 295, 298-300, 343, 347;
see Gaulle, C. de (views); App. I for
detailed refs.
Constitution, party views on, 20, 22-3, 25,
56, 189-92, 227-8, 278, 282, 283, 299,
305 and n., 387; Com., 302 and n.,
304, 347; Soc., 98, 222, 229-30, 236,
273, 276-7, 283n., 347; MRP, 226,
236n., 240, 283n., 296; Rad., 37, 226,
237n., 276-7, 281, 302; Gaull., 240,
284n., 306; Cons., 37, 306
Const. Amendment, 301-6, also in 3 Rep.,
20, 115, 192, 197, 270, 275, 276, 302;
procedure, 191, 208, 209nn., 281, 292;
resolution Nov. 1950, 192-3, 227, 239,
283, 303; bill, July 1953, 192-3, 240,
303, 304; amendment Nov. 1954, 46,
193 and n., 210, 212, 213, 216, 217n.,
222, 227-8, 232n., 237, 257n., 278,
280, 281, 282n., 283-4, 303; 1957-8
proposals, 52, 56, 193-4, 240-1, 266,
275 and n.; other proposals, 40, 134n.,
286 and n., 295
Constitutional Ctee, 197n., 200 and n.,
208, 215n., 217, 259n., 281, 282, 292,
305-6
Consultative Assembly, 363n.; C'tees, 260,
378-9
Conte, Arthur (b. '20, Soc. d. Pyren6es-O.
'51-62), lOOn., 179n., 328 and n.,
41 In., 507
Contract of the majority, 405 and n.
Convention africaine, 181
Convention (of 1793), 189; — government,
187-8, 189, 191
Converse and Dupeux, 16n., 29n.
Cooperatives, 96, 163, 296n., 384
Corail, J. L. de, 225n.
Coret, A., 295n.
Corps intermediates, see Intermediaries
Correze (cap. Tulle), 5, 79n., 504
Corruption, lack of, 334 and n., 372; see
Money and politics ; Parl. (character) ;
Scandals
Corsica, -ans (Corse, cap. Ajaccio), 56,
209, 211, 302n., 339n., 376, 438n.
Coste-Floret, Paul(b. '11, MRP d. H6rault
'45- ), 112, 191, 200 and n., 203n.,
226n., 240n, 244n., 300n., 304n., 313,
A
Coston, H., cit nn. 82, 94, 98-9, 130, 139,
143, 160-1, 164-6, 171
Cot, Pierre (b. '95, Rad. MP '28, Prog. d.
Savoie '45-51, Rhone 1 '51-8), 13n.,
72n., 81, llln., 171 andn., 172,225n.,
234, 236n., 265 and nn., 299 and n.,
329, 387,414,429,442
Cote d'Qr (cap. Dijon), 151, 325, 4Q4n,
Cotteret, J. M., cit. nn. 79, 220, 257, 259,
261, 269-74, 285, 355; see Inegalites
Coty, Frangois (1874-1934, s. '23-4), 18
Coty, Ren6 (1882-1962, MP '23, RI d.
Seine-Inf. '45-8, s. '48-54, Pres. Rep.
>54_8), 42, 45, 54, 55, 56 and n., 157,
169, 195, 196n., 201-3, 217, 236n.,
238n., 239 and n., 289, 294n., 300n.,
350, 415nn., 416, 417, 420, 422, 429,
432, A
Council of the Republic, 278-91
own electoral law, 36, 37, 196 and n.,
208, 278-80, 322, 388, 450; see Elec-
tions (second chamber)
officers, bureau, 122n., 197, 201, 280,
284, 305, 414
outlook, 285-91, 376
party composition, 134, 138n., 178, 285,
286, 503
powers, 200 and n., 258, 259, 265, 270n.,
280-5, 302-3, 315-16
and elec., const, reform, 47, 288, 302-4,
312-13, 315-16, 363 and n.
and foreign policy, 225, 281, 288, 434,
441
and NA, 208, 21 1, 228n., 259, 268, 270n.,
278-91, 305, 306, 324
see Parl. (members)
Countersignature, 195, 196, 197 and n.,
199 and nn., 203n., 204 and n., 300,
305n., 410
Cour des Comptes, 266-7, 338-9, 345
Courant, P. (RI. d. '45-62), 267n., 426n., A
Courrier de la Colere, 54
Courts: admin., 274, see Conseil d'Etat;
of Cassation, 299, 300; see Cour des
Comptes; High Court; Judiciary
Crapouillot, 7 In., 72n., 74n.
Crepuscule, Le, 104
Creuse (cap. Gu6ret), 5, 172nn.
Crimean War, 188
Crises, ministerial, Ch. 29, also 12, 34,
36-7, 45, 55, 93, 107n., 120, 201n.,
206, 225, 227, 229 and n., 236, 238,
240, 253-4, 354, 377, 401, 403, 432,
439, 450 ; see Instability ; Investiture
Crises, specific (in 4 Rep.), all, 495; 1946,
197; 1947, 34, 416; 1948, 35, 125, 363,
418, 427; 1949, 403, 407, 418, 427;
1950-2, 37-40, 407, 416, 418, 427;
1953, 40-3, 105, 201, 227, 272, 407,
408n., 411, 416; 1954, 47; 1955,
419-21; 1957, 51, 52, 269, 411, 427;
1958, 55, 91, 355
Croix, La, 61
Croix de Feu, 18, 149, 159n., 381
Crozier, M., cit. nn. 6, 68, 86, 366, 453
Cure's, see Church
P.C.D., 392n.
DST, 348
Dakar (Senegal), 210n.
Daladier, fidouard (b. '84, MP '19, PM
'33, Rad, d, Yauduse W-58), 12,
17 67, 72, 74, 117, 120, 121 and nn.,
127n., 130, 175, 177-8, 210n., 270,
322 and n., 401-2, 415, 435, A
Dallin, D. J., 89n.
Dansette, A., cit. nn. 103, 110, 114, 141,
171-2, 195-9, 201-3, 417
Dardel, Georges (b. '19, Soc. s. Seine '58- ,
Pres. Seine cons.-gen.), 93, 327
Darnand, Joseph (head of Vichy militia,
executed 1945), 298n.
Dauzat, A., 376n.
David, Jean-Paul (b. '12, Rad., RGR, E.
Right d. Seine-et-O. 1 M6N-62), 129,
130, 432
Deat, Marcel (1894-1955, MP '24, Soc.
and Neo-Soc., m. '44), 8, 18, 89, 160,
161n.
Death penalty, 377 and n.
Deauville, 31 In.
Debre, Michel (b. '12, Rad. and Gaull. s.
Indre-et-Loire '48-59, PM '59-62, d.
Reunion '63- ), 16, 54, 137, 142,
143n., 193-4, 223, 224n., 281n., 290,
301n., 312n., 337, 343, 358n., 366, 430,
435; cit. nn. 193, 214, 393, 429; A
Debu-Bridel, Jacques (b. '02, Gaull. s.
Seine '48-58), cit. nn. 73, 388, 390,
393-4, 411
Decolonization, Ch. 4; and 181, 194, 346,
368, 447; see Africa; Algeria; Colonial
policy; Indo-China; Morocco; Tuni-
sia; N. Africa
Decrees, 270n., 271, 272 and n., 273 and n.,
274, 295, 343-4, 358n., 379; Decree-
laws, see Special powers
Defence: M. of, 54, 198, 204 and n., 205
and n., 244n., 336, 344, 391n., 392;
C'tee (NA), 223, 224n., 242, 243n.,
244n., 246, 247-9, 250, 251, 254 and
n., 269, 273n.; Council, see National
. . . ; policy, see Foreign policy
DefFerre, Gaston (b. '12, Soc. d. Bouches-
du-Rhone '45-58, s. '59-62, d. '62- ,
mayor of Marseilles), 49, 50, 91 and
n., 97n., 248, 273 and n., 331, 376 and
n., 388n., 392, 430, 436 and n., A
Deixonne, Maurice (b. '04, Soc. d. Tarn
'46J-58), 98n., 21 6n., 247, 313, 429
Dejean, Rene" (Soc. d. '51- ), 275n.
Delbecque, Leon (b. '19, UNR and E.
Right d. Nord '58-62), 54, 146, 340n.
Delegation des Gauches, 9, 186, 224, 246
Delouvrier, Paul (b. '14, delegate-gen, for
Algeria '58-60), cit. nn. 41, 61, 340,
345, 364, 368, 372, 383-4, 394, 412,
414 423
Delpuech, Vincent (b. '88, MP '38, Rad. s.
Bouches-du-Rhone '55- ), 289
Demarquet, J. M. (b. '23, Pouj. and E.
Right d. Finistere '56-8), 165n., 167
Democracy, see Authority; 'Peoples, 25,
318; 'Presidential', q.v.
Democratic Alliance, see Alliance . . .
Democratic Republicans, 507
INDEX 521
Denais, Joseph (b. '77, MP '11, Cons. d.
Seine 2 '45-55), 372n.
Denis, Andre (b. '20, MRP and ind. d.
' Dordogne '46J-55), 107, 174, 325
Departmental councils, see Elections,
local; Local govt.
Departments of govt., see Cabinet; minis-
tries individually
Depeche, La, 60, 123, 125 and n.
Depreux, fidouard (b. '98, Soc. d. Seine 4
'45-58, sec.-g. PSU), 90, 91 and n.,
lOOn., 350n., 400n., 403, 410, A
Derczansky, A., 97n.
Derruau-Boniol, S., 79n.
Deschanel, Paul (1855-1922, MP '85,
Pres. Jan. '20, mad Sept., s. '21), 3,
195
Destalinization, 75, 85
DeTarr, F., cit. nn. 117-18, 120-31, 163,
174-6, 178, 261, 412, 433, 441-2
Devaluation, 34, 37, 212, 221, 410
Diamant, A., cit. nn. 336, 337, 341
Dicey, A. V., 337
Dides, Jean (b. '15, Pouj. and E. Right d.
Seine 6 '56-8), 46n., 52, 146n., 164n.,
165n., 167, 168,218n., 348
Dien-Bien-Phu, 45, 162, 224 and n., 227,
419, 424, 441
DieThelm, AndrS (1896-1954, Gaull. d.
Vosges '45-6, s. Seine-et-O. '48-51, d.
'51-4), 136, 137, 138n., 442n., A
Direct action, 45, 76, 161-2, 163, 359-60,
361, 364, 380, 381-3; see Violence
Disarmament, 333
Disraeli, B., 188n.
Dissident Radicals, see Neo-
Dissolution, 236-40, also', in 3 Rep., 9,
184-5, 195, 222; in 4 Rep., 40, 190,
217, 222, 234, 452; in 1955, 47, 128,
202, 288; de Gaulle demands, 32, 134,
192, 209 and n., 312; in 5 Rep., 192n.;
Doctors, Tlo!iei27n., 171, 247, 323, 330,
358, 362, 378n., 380
Dogan, M., cit. nn. 68, 80, 95, 109-10,
123, 14), 151, 154, 156, 165-6 . 205-6,
210 248, 255, 262, 323-9, 332, 360,
363, 371, 373, 419, 4-29, 437
'Domain of the Law', 271-2 and nn., 273
and n., 275n. .
Domenach, J. M. (ed. Esprit}, cit. nn. 73,
76-8, 82-3
Donnedieu de Vabres, Jacques, 270n.,
Dordogne (cap. PSrigueux), I?7* 325 T11
Dorgeres, Henri (b. '97, E. Right d. Ille-
et-V '56-8), 153 and n., 161n., 162,
166, 168, 357n., 365 and n.
Doriot, Jacques (1898-1945 Com d.
'24, founded PPF '36), 18, 160, 162,
404
Doumer, Paul (1857-1932, MP '88, Pres.
'31-2), 195
522
INDEX
Doumergue, Gaston (1863-1937, MP '93,
PM '13, Pres. '24-31, PM '34), 45,
185, 440
Downgrading, 326 and n., 327, 388 and n. ;
see Elec. systems (list voting)
Doyen d'dge, 21 6n.
Drago, R., cit. nn. 196, 198, 200, 211, 238,
273, 306
Drevet, P., cit. nn. 193, 222, 295, 302-5
Dreyfus, F. G., cit. nn. 109, 143, 167, 330
Dreyfus case, 7, 88 and n., 115, 148, 446
Dreyfus-Schmidt, Pierre (b. '02, Rad. and
Prog. d. Belfort '45-6 J, '46N-51,
'56-8), 172n.
Dronne, Raymond (b. '08, Gaull. s.
Sarthe '48-51, d. '51-62), 294n.
Dubost, Antonin (1844-1921, Pres. Sen.
'06-20), 277 and n.
Duchet, Roger (b. '06, RI s. Cote d'Or
'46- ), 130, 151, 152 and nn., 153n.,
154n., 158 and n., 261n., 290, 377,
430, 433 and n., A
Duclos, Jacques (b. '96, MP '26, Com. d.
Seine 6 '45-58, s. '59- ), 65n., 74
and nn., 75n., 79n., 81 and n., 210n.,
211 and n., 237, 240, 265n., 327n.,
401, 509n.
Duhamel, G., 376n.
Duhamel, Jacques (b. '24, Rad. d. Jura
'62- ), 339
Dulin, Andre (b. '00, Rad. s. Charente-M.
'46- ), 363n., A
Dulles, J. F., 46
Dumaine, J., cit. nn. 74, 198, 200, 322, 394,
401
Dupeux, G., 5n., 16n., 29n.
Dupuy, Marc (b. '94, Rad. d. Gironde
'46N-51), 327 and n.
Durance, river, 335
Durand-Re~ville, Luc (b. '04, Rad. s.
Gabon '47-59), 288, 289
Duveau, Roger (b. '07, MRP and UDSR
d. Madagascar '46-58), 181n.
Duverger, Maurice, 193, 308 and n.; cit.
nn. on institutions, 202, 255, 264, 266,
268, 273, 277, 280, 285, 292, 296-8,
339, 342-4, 363, 374-5 ; on parties, 76-9,
82, 92, 94-6, 101, 107, 113, 119-22,
149, 155, 307-8; on regime, 110, 188,
193, 239, 241, 424, 433, 438, 452; other,
26, 49, 157, 201-2, 239, 265, 401
EDC, see European Army
ENA, 337, 338, 345
Earle, E. M., cit. nn. 4, 19, 34, 79, 146,
327, 361, 382
Scale libre des sciences pol, 337
Ecole normale, 78n.
Economic Affairs: C'tee (NA), 252, 298n.;
M. of, 205, 341, 342-3
Economic Council, 122n., 208, 295-8, 333;
Pres., 297n., 414
Economic Front, 361
Economic, social and TU policy:, generally,
all parties, 4-6, 12-15, 25-8, 37-8, 39,
44, 264n., 287, 359-60, 361-2, 363,
380; also Com., 82-4, 86-7, 345, 356;
Soc., 31, 49, 50, 97, 101, 171, 343 and
n.; MRP, 41, 105, 108, 171, 343n.;
Rad., 126, 285, 343, 357; Gaull.,
143-4; Cons., 267n., 285, 343, 356,
370 ; see Budget ; Devaluation ; Family ;
Food; Housing; Inflation; Invest-
ment; Social security; Tax system;
Trade unions; Wages
'Economism', 84
Economist, 126n., 188n.
Economizers, 40, 41n., 52, 265, 267 and n.,
301 n.; see Budget; Decrees; Special
powers
Merits de Paris, 62
Education: C'tee (NA), 245 and n., 247,
248, 249, 250-1, 252n.; M. of, 205n.,
252, 336, 340, 342, 344
Egypt, 128; see Suez
Ehrmann, H. W., cit. nn. 7, 11-12, 14-15,
26, 34, 65, 70, 79, 82, 94, 96-7, 141,
143, 157, 287, 297-8, 337, 343-4, 355,
360-2, 371-2, 376, 378-9, 384, 394,
423
Eichmann, A., 453
Einaudi, M., cit. nn. 73, 103, 110, 113, 171
Eisenhower, Pres. D. D., 74, 172, 409, 425
Election expenses, 371-2
Electioneering, 48, 76, 164, 311, 313-14,
316, 323-4, 326-7, 329-32, 366, 370-1,
420, 438; in Parl., 'election fever',
31-2, 37-8, 47, 249, 261-2 and n.,
263n., 265-6, 287n., 315, 330, 357,
370-2, 433
Elections, 1945-58 (all), 78-9, 94 and n.,
108, 109-10 and n., 154, 502-3,
505-6
Elections (specific):
1924-36, 17-18, 71-2, 78, 88-9, 94,
llOn., 116-17, 307nn., 346
1945-6, 22-4, 31, 85, 89-90, 104, llOn.,
11 In., 176, 309, 310n., 322-3, 366, 367
1951, 38-9, 72n., 97, 105, llOn., 139,
143n., 150, 160, 175, 176, 177, 178-9,
180 (overseas), 218, 311 and n.,
313-14, 323, 366, 367, 372
1956, 44, 47-9, 51, 90, 99, 105, llOn.,
113 and nn., 128, 129, 136, 152, 161
and n., 164, 166 and n., 172 and n.,
173 and n., 178 and n., 217, 315-16,
323, 365, 367, 370, 371, 372
1958, 80n., 98n., 130, 131, 162, 166
and n., 172 and n., 174
1962, 96n.
Elections Abroad, 56n., 327, 429n., 439n.
flections 1956, cit, nn. 48, 66, 68, 78, 95,
99, 108-10, 113, 123, 128, 136, 139,
143, 155, 164-8, 210, 239, 315, 323-31,
^ 334, 360, 367, 370-2, 433
Elections 1958, 132n., 154n., 510
Elections, local, 32, 36, 38, 54, 79n., 84,
104, 106, 110, 118, 123n., 134, 136,
INDEX
523
139, 161, 162, 164, 245n., 279, 310
andn., 33 In., 389
Elections, 2nd chamber, 31-2, 118, 122,
135, 286 and n., 310, 503
Electoral laws, of 1945-6, 20, 23, 51, 118,
309-10, 314, 322, 327-8, 392n., 504-5,
508
of 1951 (kept 1956), 38-9, 47-9, HOnn.,
135, 139, 154, 210, 220-1, 231, 283,
310-16, 317-19, 327-8, 339n., 372,
400, 410, 418, 426, 450, 504-5, 506,
507, 508
of 1951 (Paris), 313 and n., 328, 504
of 1958, 56 and n., 275n., 312n., 316
local, 32, 122, 231, 245n., 286, 309, 410
overseas, 181, 220, 288, 312
Parl. and, 56 and n., 273n., 275n., 308n.,
320n.
see Alliances; Apparentement; By-elec-
tions; Highest average, remainder;
National party, pooling; Panachage;
Preferential vote
Electoral systems:
PR, 15, 22, 51, 190, 308-10, 311, 314,
315-16, 317-19, 388-9; notional (1951),
38-9
scrutin d'arrondissement, double ballot,
60, 72, 172n. (1958), 184, 279n., 288,
307-8, 309, 311 and nn., 312n., 315-16
and nn., 316-19, 331, 374, 389, 410
scrutin de liste, list and personal voting,
150, 152 and n., 172, 261, 307-8,
318n., 322-8, 330, 331, 332n., 370n.,
387-9, 439, 504, 507; see Downgrad-
ing, T£te de liste
single- or multi-member constituency,
110 andn., 117, 184, 261, 307, 309 and
n., 329, 331, 442
parties and, 38, 288, 308, 309-12, 314-16,
319; also Com., 29, 36, 47; Soc., 98,
276-7; MRP, 29, 32, 36, 231, 233;
Rad., 117-18,231,233,276-7; GaulL,
245n., 312 and n.; Cons., 48, 276
filysee, 198, 199n., 200, 217, 226, 277, 300,
301 and n., 425
Ensor, R. C. K., 301 n.
Entreprise, 338n.
Epinal, 23
Esprit, 62, 70n., 71n., 171n.
Essig, F., cit. nn. 324, 331, 334
Estier, C., 171n.
Eurasians, 332
Euratom, 51, 165 and n., 213, 246, 288n.
Eure (cap. Evreux), 152n., 324 and n.,
331n., 334n.
Eure-et-Loir (cap. Chartres), 209n.
Europe, 162, 444; Council of, 205, 329;
No. 1 (radio), 62; Eastern, 82; war in,
386
European Army, Defence Community
(EDC): defeat of, 41n., 44, 46, 246,
258, 448; in party politics, 40, 41, 45,
46, 49n., 90-1, 100, 106, 112, 113, 136,
144, 153, 158 and n., 202, 214n., 217,
250, 290, 372, 377, 400 and n., 404,
411, 419, 420, 433-4, 450; and Parl.,
const., 225, 227 and n., 234-5, 258,
284n., 288, 292n., 410, 419; and 43,
69, 75, 101, 167, 173, 232n., 243n.,
304, 326, 341, 346, 351, 418
European Coal and Steel Community, 39,
44, 98, 111, 232n., 234n., 246 and n.,
296, 298, 346, 358, 362, 379, 385, 397
European Common Market, 51, 98, 225,
246, 274, 288n., 380n., 385
'Europeans', 'Anti-Europeans' in France,
40, 41, 46, 106, 111-12, 217, 221, 225,
288n., 346, 368, 370n., 377, 400, 405,
419, 421, 429, 434, 435, 437, 438, 448
Europeans in N. Africa, 336, 349, 350 and
q.v. (settlers)
Evreux, 119nn.
Express, V, 54, 61, 113n., 168n., 171n.,
340n., 433 and n.
Ex-servicemen, 72, 149, 162, 232n., 352,
358, 369, 370 and n., 381n. ; see Pen-
sions
Extreme . . ., see Left; Right
FLN, 50, 54, 55, 288, 341, 351
FNSEA, 15, 363n., 364-5, 380 and n., 381
FO, see Force ouvriere
Fabre, M. H., cit. nn. 197, 201, 227
Fajon, fetienne (b. '06, MP '36, Com. d.
Seine 5 '45-58, '62- ), 199n.
Falloux, loi, 434-5
Family: allowances, 232n., 248n., 249 and
n., 264, 297, 357, 360n., 362, 363n., 424 ;
associations, 96, 172, 296n., 297, 380,
392; firms, 3, 361 and n.; vote, 190-1
Fascism, -ists, 18, 72, 82, 104, 117, 145-6,
149, 154, 162, 164, 351, 396, 399, 433,
435; crypto-, 49, 54, 130n.
Faucher, J. A., cit. nn. 65, 127, 344, 348,
351, 371, 376-7, 408, 411, 433, 442
Fauna and flora, pol.: chameleons, 429,
433; dinosaurs, 161n.; donkeys, 211;
pigeons, 211 and n., 270; porpoises,
261; rabbits, 195; wolves, 8; beet q.v.,
cauliflower, seaweed and thistles,
261n.; orange-peel, 240; tobacco, 375;
tomatoes, 49
Faure, Edgar (b. '08, Rad. and RGR d.
Jura '46N-58, s. '59- ), career, 35n.,
40 41, 50, 238, 253, 322 and n., 339n.,
357n., 363n., 417, A; elected PM,
47 119 andn., 227 andn., 228, 420-1;
as PM, 39, 47, 220, 225, 226, 232 and
n., 233n., 234 and n., 235n., 236, 281,
288, 315, 316, 339, 349 and n., 357,
376, 408, 423, 426, 443; and dissolu-
tion, 47, 164n., 209, 238-9 and nn.;
on finance, 26n., 265nn., 267 and nn.,
268 and n; on N. Africa, Suez, 41,
50n., 128n., 349 and n., 408, 426, 443;
on Parl., govt, 267 and n., 411, 423,
426n., 432, 433n., 436, 438, 441 and
n., 442n.; and parties, 47, 254n.;
524
INDEX
Fame, Edgar (cont'd)
also Com., 75, 119, 239, 433n.; Soc.,
39, 119, 234, 404; MRP, 322 and n.;
Rad., 127-8, 178 and n., 407; GaulL,
48n.,136,145,226,406-8;Cons., 39,152
Faure govt, Jan.-Feb. '52, 27, 39, 175,
205n., 206n., 234, 238, 254 and n.,
342n., A
Faure govt., Feb. '55-Jan. '56, 45, 47,
48n., 49, 75, 136, 152, 228, 239 and n.,
268, 272, 274, 284, 407, 421 and n.,
437, A
Faure, Felix (1841-99, Pres. 1895-9), 195
Faure, Gen. Jacques (b. '04, Pouj. cand.
'57), 50, 51n., 52, 167, 350
Faure, Marcel, HOn.
Faure, Maurice (b. '22, Rad. d. Lot '51- ,
Pres. Rad. P. '61), 339n., A
Faure, Paul (1878-1960, MP '10. sec.-g.
SFIO '21-38, on Vichy nat. council),
89, 170, 177, 323n.
Fauvet, Jacques (ass. ed. Le Monde), cit.
101 and: on events, nn. 19, 34, 46,
49, 50, 201, 287, 315, 343, 348, 351,
394, 399, 408-11, 416-17, 422, 432-3;
on French pol. generally, nn. 4, 7,
13, 41, 96, 155, 265, 320, 364, 367;
on overseas, nn. 41, 199, 248, 349,
354, 440; on elect., parties, nn. 14, 77,
79-81, 94-6, 98, 101, 108, 110, 119,
122, 125-6, 138-40, 143, 146, 149-50,
164, 174, 179, 287, 363, 399, 401-2,
406, 411, 418; other, nn. 65, 98, 198,
253, 287, 363, 372, 402, 406, 426, 441
Fauvet and Mendras, see Paysans
Favrod, C. H., 82n.
Federation Rdpublicaine, 62, 148, 149
Fellow-travellers, 72n., 75, 82, 124n.,
170-2, 180, 224, 250, 332, 341, 348,
367, 381
Ferhat Abbas (b. 1899, MP '46J-N, FLN
PM '58-61, Pres. Algerian Nat. Ass.
1962, expelled FLN 1963), 180
Ferniot, J., lOln.
Ferrand, Pierre (b. '13, Prog. d. Creuse
'56-8), 172nn.
Ferry, Jules (1832-93, MP '69, PM '80,
passed lots lalques), 195
Feuds, 67, 120-1, 129-30, 152, 176, 177-8,
327-8, 401-2, 432-3
Feyzioglu, T., 337n.
Fifth . . ., see Republic
Figaro, Le, 26n., 61, 137n., 168n., 289n.,
301n., 327n., 330n., 340n., 376n.,
410n., 432n.
Fighting France, 447
Finance: C'tee (NA), 187, 215, 223, 242,
243, 244nn., 245, 247n., 248, 249,
251-5, 262, 263-4, 267, 268-9, 273
and nn., 282, 287, 338, 373, 374, 375;
(CR), 223, 252, 268, 269n., 273; M. of,
23, 27, 34-5, 205 and n., 226, 251 and
n., 252, 268n., 269, 342-3, 344, 354,
356, 358, 360, 378, 405, 421
Finistere (cap. Quimper), 327, 329
Flagrant delit, 210-11
Flandin, P. E. (1889-1958, MP '14, PM
J34, foreign m. '36, '40-1), 149, 160,
177 and n., 204, 210n., 384n.
Fleurant-Agricola, 149
Floating vote, 10, 60, 192, 308, 317, 352,
401, 447; see Marginal votes
Florenne, Y., 398n.
Flory, M., 238n., 353n.
Fogarty, M. P., cit. nn. 109, 110, 125
Fonteneau, J., 109n.
Food, M, of, 394 and n.; policy, 26 and n.,
28, 35, 199, 200, 205n., 234n., 240,
362, 363-4
Force ouvriere, 34 and n., 83n., 94 and n.,
297, 359, 360, 362, 380, 381
Foreign Affairs: C'tee (NA), 93n., 215n.,
223, 224n., 242, 243n., 244nn., 245,
249, 250 and n., 251; (CR), 246n.;
M. of, 198n., 205 and n., 336, 338, 340,
341, 344, 346, 349, 354, 405, 418, 421,
425
Foreign and defence policy generally: all
parties, 18, 22 and n., 29, 41, 44, 46,
51, 98, 106, 113, 221, 224-5, 435,
447-8; also Com., 40, 72-3, 74 and
nn., 82 and n., 86, 198; Soc., 17, 90-1
andnn., 100, 111; MRP, 111-12, 225;
GaulL, 19, 40; Cons., 225
Forestry, 374, 375n.
Fouchet, Christian (b. '11, GaulL d. Seine
3 '51-5, m. in 5 Rep.), 144, A
Fougeyrollas, P., 76n., 86n.
Fourcade, Jacques (1902-59, Pres. AFU
'50-1, RI d. H-Pyr<§nees '51-9), 325,
433 and n.
Fourcaud, Col., 348 and n.
'Fourth Force', 28, 29
Fourth . . ., see Republic
Frachon, Benoit (b. '92, sec.-g. CGT '45),
78,84
Fraissinet, Jean (b. '94, Cons. d. Bouches-
du-Rhone '58-62), 152n.
France, Anatole, 145
France, Regions of . . ., q.v.
France-Observateur, 54, 61, 75n., 82n.,
86n., 131n., 171n., 172, 356nn., 358n.
France-Soir, 61
Franchise: C'tee (NA), 240, 245n., 249,
250 and n., 304 and n., 312, 315; over-
seas, 181, 220, 288, 312; for women,
q.v.
Franco, Gen. F., 18, 104
Franco- African Federation, 181
Franco-Italian Treaty, 297, 384
Fraternite Fran$aise, 163
Fr<§d6ric-Dupont, fidouard (b. '02, MP '36,
PRL, RPF, ARS and Cons. d. Seine
1 '45-62), 154 and n., 159, 331, 373,
429n., 432n., 433, A
FrMerix, P., cit. nn. 120, 295, 364, 384
Free French, 132, 138n., 334, 444, 447
Freedeman, C. E., cit. nn. 269, 272, 338
INDEX
525
Freedom of association, 292, 353; of press,
q.v.; see Civil liberties
Freemasonry, 60, 98 and n., 115 and n,,
130n., 341, 347, 351, 365, 367 and n.,
369, 435
Frenay, Henri (Resistance leader), 19n., A
French: Abroad, 279 and n.; Free — , q.v.
French Union, 41, 112, 180, 193, 293-5,
303n.; Assembly of, q.v.; Pres. 197n.,
198-9 and n., 202; Secretariat, 199n.,
294n.
Frossard, L. O. (1889-1948, sec.-g. CP to
'22, Rep. Soc. d. '28, Vichy m.), 404n.
Funeral trade, 262n.
Fusilier, R., cit. nn. 92, 371
Gabon, 289
Gaborit, Roger (b. '03, Rad. and Neo- d.
Charente-M. '46N-58), 41 2n.
Gaillard, Felix (b. '19, Rad. d. Charente
'46N- , Pres. Rad. P. '58-61), career,
121n., 253, 342, 430, 441, A; as PM,
54, 98, 220, 221n., 233n., 235, 236,
269, 410, 411-12, 426, 442
Gaillard govt. (Nov. '57-Apr. '58), 51,
52, 229, 239, 240 and n., 247n., 290
and n., 304, 364, 380, 408n., 410, 411,
423n., 425, A
Gaitskell, H. T. N., 172
Galant, H., cit. nn. 83, 362, 391, 393
Galichon, G. (de Gaulle's dir. de cab. in 5
Rep.), cit. nn. 205, 220, 242, 245,
258-9, 263, 267-70, 274, 282, 379
Gallup, see Polls
Gambetta, L6on (1838-82, MP '69, PM
'81), 119, 195
Garaudy, Roger (b. '13, Com. d. Tarn
'45-51, Seine 1 '56-8, s. '59-63), 329
Gard (cap. Nimes), 79, 167n., 168
Garonne, Haute- (cap. Toulouse), 280n.
Gauche, see Cartel, Delegation, Left;
— independante, 171n., 172, 399n.;
— republicaine, 8 ; — socialists, see UGS
Gaulle, Charles de (b. '90, Free French
leader '40, PM '44-6 and '58, Pres.
'59- ):
to '44, 18, 19, 35n., 132, 153
in '44-6, 19-22, 23, 26-7, 104, 133, 175n.,
191, 197, 199, 230, 293, 307, 309 and
n., 343, 348, 386-7, 392n., 393, 394,
396, 406, 443, 449, A
in '47-53, 24-5, 34, 36, 63, 127, 134-9
passim, 154, 165, 209, 372, 398, 399,
in '57-8 crisis, 54, 55-6, 179, 194, 202-3,
235n., 275n., 303, 304 and nn., 400,
404, 416, 442, A
in power '58, 312n., 316, 348n., 355, 426,
440, 443
on colonial and foreign, 44, 144 and n.,
146,293
on const, and elec., 20, 23, 132n., 133,
179, 189 and n., 191-2, 278, 303-4,
305n., 309 and n., 312 and-n., 386
on Frenchmen, 329 and n., 45 3n.
on Vichy, 141-2
and parties and pressure groups, 1 9-20,
22 and n., 25, 64, 133, 143, 353, 386,
392n., 393n., 442
and coups d'&at, fascism, 22, 36, 133,
145-6, 191n., 209
fear of, 31, 32, 90, 118, 121, 189, 191,
196nn., 225, 226, 311, 397, 440
parties and ('40-57), 18, 20, 25, 54;
('58), 45, 54, 67, 91 and n., 101-2, 106,
130, 158, 162, 165n., 166 and n., 173,
179, 203; also Corns., 74n., 79, 175n.,
386, 401, 406; Socs., 49, 56, 90, 91,
175n., 203, 386, 397, 400, 404;
MRP, 20-2, 23, 35, 104, 133, 386,
394; Rads., 133-5, 140 and n., 142,
143; Pouj., 67; Mendes, 26-7, 49,
64, 144-5, 440 and q.v.
also 31, 34, 35, 38, 52n., 69, 80n., 84, 108,
129, 149, 150, 159n., 167, 168, 176,
217, 325, 390, 402, 415, 429n., 439
De Gaulle govts., 418, A; '43-5, 14n., 20,
22 and n., 74, 141, 174, 205n., 391
and n.; '58, 56, 205n., 209, 364, 421n.
Gaulle, Pierre de (1897-1959, brother;
RPF s. '48-51, d. Seine 1 '51-5), 286,
324n.
Gaullist Union, 132, 133, 173, 174
Gaullists, Ch. 10 and
divisions, 48n., 135, 138n., 142-4, 402
electoral, 44, 54n., 84, 135-7, 138
in Part., 8, 31, 39-40, 42, 64, 67, 213,
240, 245 and n., 248, 255, 265, 286-7,
410, 436, 437
and govt., 40, 46, 136-7, 226, 228, 417,
425
and System, q.v.
outlook, 110, 132-3, 141, 145-7, 160,
329, 402, 438
policy, see Algeria; Colonial; Const.;
Econ. and social; Electoral systems;
Foreign and defence
and Church, press, trade unions, q.v.
and all parties, 25, 28, 29, 317, 319, 397;
also Com., Soc., MRP, Rad., q.v.
and Cons., 104, 132-3, 134, 135, 139 and
n., 140 and n., 141, 143, 150, 154, 155
and n., 156nn., 158 and n., 159, 278,
323
and Vichyites, 141-2, 160-1
and Pouj., 165, 167 andn., 168, 169
and small parties, 133, 173, 174, 175, 180
dissident, see ARS
ex- 40, 150n., 165n., 167, 173, 325 and
n., 326, 399n., 429n.
fellow-travellers, 54, 75n., 120, 124 129,
140, 143-4, 153 and n., 278, 372
Left, 140, 144-5, 146, 171 and n., 173
indMdSal,347,n54, 69, 162 166n., 210,
223n., 247, 271n., 289-90 323n 325,
327, 330 and n., 331, 343, 348, 351,
393n., 394, 408, 414, 430
526
INDEX
Gaullists (confd)
in 5 Rep., 132n., 146, 331, 358
see Free French; RPF (history, com-
position, clientele, discipline, mem-
bership, org.); Social Republicans;
UNR
Gay, Francisque (1885-1963, MRP d.
Seine 1 '45-51), 103, 215n., A
Gazier, Albert (b. '08, Soc. d. Seine 5
'45-58), 91 and n., 248n., 342, 362,
380, 429, A
General Staff, 54, 194, 350
Generals, see Army; Scandals
Generations, pol., 13, 19, 35 and n., 40,
64, 78 and n., 95, 97 and n., 108 and
n., Ill, 114, 122, 132, 140, 154-5,
176, 202, 216 and n., 238, 276, 289,
399 and n., 401, 417, 442; see Youth
Geneva, 224n.
George, H., cit. nn. 258, 263-5, 267-8
George, P., cit. nn. 80, 116, 155
Georgel, J., cit. nn. 16, 198, 201, 205-7, 214,
220, 223-5, 230, 232-3, 236-41, 247,
257, 260, 262, 268-70, 274, 281, 286,
290, 303-4, 306, 315, 374, 383, 400,
417, 422, 426-7, 432
Gerber, P., 282n., 285n.
Gerbet, P., 346n., 362n.
Gerin-Ricard and True, 16 In.
German- Americans, 162
Germany:
and France compared, 3n., 88, 109, 146,
241, 309, 350, 393
French views on, 18, 29, 44, 46, 72, 82,
89, 98, llOn., 112, 149, 152, 225, 235,
292n., 397, 435, 447-8
occupation of France, 19, 26, 42, 61, 73,
117, 327n., 350, 351 and n., 363, 376,
386, 446, 448
rearmament of, 44, 46, 74n., 90-1, 93,
100, 173, 198, 282, 288, 400, 419, 424,
434, 440
also 12, 16, 18, 44, 47n., 51, 73, 82, 110,
160, 225, 232-3 and n., 264 n., 346
Giacobbi, Paul (1896-1951, MP '38, Rad.
d. Corse '45-51), 118, 230n., 402 and
n., A
Gingembre, L<§on (b. '04, Vichy official,
PME leader), 163 and n., 361, 362,
379-80, 382 and n., 385, 438
Girardet, R., 51, 179n., 346n.
Gironde (from '51, constituency 1 Bor-
deaux, 2 the rest), 140n., 179n., 313
and n., 327 and n.
Gladiators, 430 ; see Careerists
Godfrey, E. D., cit. nn. 34, 41, 76, 84,
86, 94, 96-7
Goetz-Girey, R., 298n.
Goguel, Francois, sec.-g. of Senate, 202n.,
21 9n.; cit., 502 and nn.; on elections,
nn. 3, 14, 22, 38, 79, 84, 98, 105, 109-
10, 118, 122-3, 128, 139, 150, 154-5,
308, 310, 318, 324; on institutions,
nn. 198, 211-13, 219, 221, 224, 242-3,
251, 255, 258-60, 265, 267-9, 273,
279-80, 282, 295-6, 301-2, 305, 358,
389, 423; on parties, nn. 98, 103, 110,
113, 119-20, 125, 131, 139, 164, 171,
179, 307, 311, 369, 380; on pressure-
groups, nn. 26, 358, 360, 365, 366,
369, 375, 379; on regime, nn. 195,
228, 334, 380, 389
Goldey, D. B., nn. 26, 277, 408, 423, 428
Gooch, R. K., 242n.
Gorse, Georges (b .'15, Soc. d. Vended
'45-51, m. in 5 Rep., Amb. Algiers
'63), 294n.
Gosnat, G. (Com. d. '45-58), 80nn.
Gouin, F61ix (b. '84, MP '24, PM '46, Soc.
d. Bouches-du-Rhone 2 '45-58), 23,
24, 35n., 97n., 205n., 217, 299, 339,
414, A
Gouin cabinet (Jan.-June '46), 22, 406, A
Gourdon, A., 120nn., 323n.
Government, see Cabinet; Confidence;
Ministers; Premiership
— Commissioners, 213 and n.
Graham, B. D., 443 n.
Grand electors, 278, 279
Grands corps de Vetat, 336, 337-9
Grandval, Gilbert (b. '04, Gov. and Amb.
Saar '45-55, Resident Morocco
June-Sept. '55, m. in 5 Rep.), 47, 49,
144, 173, 354, 408
Granet and Michel, 19n.
Grawitz, M., 94n., 99n.
Green Shirts, 161n.
Grenoble, 36, 109n., 135
Grevy, Mes (1807-91, MP '48, Pres.
'79-87), 195, 197n.
Grigg, Sir P. J., 430n.
Grimaud, H. L. (b. '01, MRP d. Isere '45-
55), 429 and n.
Gringoire, 62, 160, 396
Griotteray, Alain, 83n.; see Brayance
Gros, Brigitte, 127n.
Grosser, Alfred, cit. nn. on external
policy, 41, 82, 96, 144, 181, 198-200,
293-4, 349, 355; on institutions, 198,
224-5, 242-5, 250, 255, 281, 338,
340-1, 345, 391, 424; on parties, 82,
84, 86, 92, 96, 100, 107, 112, 113, 126,
144, 154, 158; other, 61, 109, 114,
203, 239, 368, 384, 433
Groups, parl.: parties, 65, 166, 178, 211
and n., 214-16, 220, 243, 387, 398;
other, 216, 374-5; see Inter-, Pressure-,
each party
Grumbach, Salomon (Soc. s.), 282n.
Guadeloupe, 209n., 294n., 504, 507
Guatemala, 144
Guerin, Maurice (MRP d. '45-51), 29 8n.,
374n.
Guery, L., cit. nn. 137, 146, 372
Guesde, Jules (1845-1922, MP '93), 88,
101
Guiana, French, 209n., 294n., 504
Guillemin, P., cit. nn. 180, 181, 429
INDEX
527
Guy, Christian, cit. nn. 110, 159, 161,
163-4, 168, 382
Guyon, Jean Raymond (1900-61, Soc. d.
Gironde '45-51, '56-8), 253, 254, 333
Guyot, Raymond (b. '03, MP '37, Com.
d. Seine 3 '45-58, s. '59- ), 75
Habsburg Empire, 1 1
Haiphong (Indo-China), 349
Halevy, D., 117, 119
Halleguen, Joseph (1916-55, RPF and
ARS d. Finistere '51-5), 138nn.,
139n.
Hamon, L6o (b. '08, MRP and IOM s.
Seine '46-58, later UDT), 227n., 290;
cit. nn. 14, 22, 80, 95, 126, 211-12,
214, 227, 229, 255, 262, 270, 273,
285-6, 289-90, 306, 332-4, 354, 369,
372, 374, 381, 384-5, 389, 397, 412,
439, 447
Hamson, C. J., 338 nn.
Hanoi (Indo-China), 112
Hamson, M., cit. nn. 55-6, 100, 154, 162,
165, 192, 219, 244-8, 250-2, 255,
258-9, 261-3, 275, 301, 331, 392, 423,
429
Hassner, P., 68n.
Hauriou, Andre (Soc. s. '46-55), 300n.
Health: C'tee (NA), 245, 247, 248, 264,
356n.; M. of., 378
Hfrault (cap. Montpellier), 313, 314, 330
andn., 506
Herriot, £douard (1872-1957, MP '12,
PM '24, Rad. d. Rhdne 1 '45-57, Pres.
NA '47-54), in 3 Rep., 88, 95n., 116,
217, 218, 276n.; in 4 Rep., 118, 292n.,
293, 313, 331, 435; in Rad. P., 67,
120, 121, 127, 177-8, 401-2, 509n.;
Pres. NA, 41, 122n., 217, 218, 237,
257n., 281 andn., 288n., 305n., 414, 433
Hersant, Robert (b. '20, Rad. d. Oise
'56- ), 371n.
Herv<§, Pierre (b. '13, Com. d. Finistere
'45-8, later Soc.), 75, 81n., 327 andn.,
329; cit. nn. 74-7, 81-2, 86-7
High Council:
of the French Union, 293-4 and n.
of the Judiciary, 196, 197n., 199 and n.,
204n., 208, 281, 292, 299-301, 345, 388
High Court of Justice, 72n., 208, 281, 292,
298-9
Highest average, — remainder, 309, 504
Highway code, 204n.
Histoire du PCF, cit. nn. 72-4, 76-7, 8 1 , 327
Hitler, A., 18, 104, 149, 326
Ho Chi-Minh (b. '90, Pres. N. Vietnam),
349
Hodgkin, T., 181n.
Hoffmann, S., cit. nn. 4, 5, 11-16, 113,
159, 163-9, 322, 331, 346, 357-8, 376,
378, 380-4, 412, 439, 447, 452, 507
Hofstadter, R., 169n.
Holland, 3n., 300n.
Hostache, R. (UNR d. '58-62), 19n.
Houdet, Marcel, 179n.
Houphouet-Boigny, Felix (b. '05, RDA d.
'45-58, PM Ivory Coast '59, Pres.
'60), 181, 182, A
House:
of Commons, 188, 189, 206, 208, 216,
218, 223, 229, 246, 255, 260n., 267,
268, 334, 389, 410, 427, 450
of Lords, 186, 188,276,277
of Representatives, 208, 216
see Speaker
Housing, 214n., 247 and n., 249, 287, 296,
352, 356, 358 and n., 369, 370 and n.,
373 and n., 376, 377, 378, 380, 383
and n., 429, 448
Hughes, H. S., 146n.
Hugues, fimile (b. '01, Rad. and Neo- d.
Alpes-M.'46J-58,s.'59- ).363n.,A
Human rights, 292-3, 301n., 349n., 368;
see Camps; League of —
Humanity U, 72, 73, 77 and n., 163n.,
223n., 262, 327n.
Hungary, 50, 75 and n., 82 and n., 83 and
n., 85, 172
Husson, R., cit. 502 and nn. 20, 110, 122,
154, 310, 332, 388
Hutin-Desgre'es, Paul (b. '88, MRP d.
Morbihan '46J-55, ed. Quest-France}.
407
IGAMEs, 345, 347
ILO (International Labour Office), 333
IOM, 180, 181, 234n., 243n., 244n., 250,
398n., 414, 420
Ille-et-Vilaine (cap. Rennes), 161n,, 370n.,
506
Illegitimacy, 289n., 328
Immobilisme, -iste, 16, 46, 51, 86n., 193,
241, 306, 315, 354, 369, 384, 399, 413,
414, 419, 443
Immunities : C'tee (NA), 247 and n. ; — of
MPs, 210-11,280, 306
Impeachment, 37, 208, 298-9, 313
Incivisme, 6, 317; see Authority . . .
Independents: Centre . . . des . . ., q.v.;
independent — , 151, 328; Left — , see
Gauche . . ., Mendesists, Progres-
sives; overseas — , see IOM; Repub-
lican — , q.v. ; — Socialists, 8
'Indexation', 364, 368, 380
India, 209n. ; French — , 209n., 225n., 279n.,
294n., 503; -n Ocean, 214n., 294n.
Indignit^ nationale, 210 and n., 298, 300
Indo-China: status, 41, 180n., 205, 209n.,
293-4 and n.; war and defeat, 44, 45,
46, 74 and n., 112, 348, 349, 350, 427,
448; French views and policies, 24, 41,
45n., 52, 69, 74 and n., 98, 112, 144,
145, 162 and n., 198 and n., 199n.,
218, 221, 234, 235, 240, 247, 253, 329,
350-1, 400, 406, 410, 424, 433, 510;
scandals over, 65 and n., 145, 223 n.,
348 and q.v. (generals, leakages,
piastres)
528
INDEX
Indre (cap. Chateauroux), 323n.
Industry, -ial: — C'tee (NA), 247, 248 and
n., 252, 274 ; M. of, 252, 391 ; — regions,
Inegalit'es, cit. nn. 79, 123, 139, 279-80,
307-10, 313-16, 328, 331, 363, 392,
410
Ineligibility, see Invalidations; Parlia-
ment
Inflation, 25, 26-8, 40, 49, 163, 364, 393,
394} 446; ministerial, 205-6
Information, M. of, 205n,, 392 and n., 405
Inspecteurs, -ion des Finances, 338, 343n.,
361, 379
Instability, govtl.: in 3 Rep., 2, 9, 11, 12,
31, 184-7, 224, 449; in 4 Rep., 27,
335, 403, 439; causes, 29-30, 31, 404,
413-14, 425-7, 449-50; consequences,
11, 345-6, 423-4, 450-1; cures, 188-90,
193, 222, 229, 238, 241; in Britain,
187-8, 206, 426; see Coalition; Crises;
Majority ; Marginal votes
Institutions, cit. nn. 196, 198-205, 210-11,
237, 239, 257, 260, 268, 270, 281,
294-6, 338-9, 343, 379
Intellectuals, 82, 85n., 106, 170, 296n., 297
Intelligence Service: British, 82n.; French,
205n,, 348, 349
Inter-groups: RPF, 25, 118, 134n., 138,
143, 286, 402; other, 178, 216, 361,
366, 377; see Groups
Interior: Ctee (NA), 244n., 245n., 248,
249, 250; M. of, 2, 17, 99, 116, 205
and n., 217n., 237 and n., 311 and n.,
336, 340, 346, 347, 348, 354
Intermediaries, 6, 14-15, 292, 353, 358,
369, 383, 393, 453
Internationals: Second, 88; Third, 71, 80,
81
Interpellations, 186, 215, 219, 220n.,
223-4, 226 and n., 234n., 240, 281, 373,
376, 410
Invalidations, 49n., 164, 210 and n., 371n.,
507-8
Investiture of PM, 24, 46, 55, 56, 197, 201,
221n., 222, 225-9, 415-22, 494
Investment, 252 and n., 267n., 287, 342,
343n., 373; see Plan
Ireland, Irish, 218, 308n., 407
Isere (cap. Grenoble), 99n., 109n., 155n.,
164, 167 and nn., 370
Isorni, Me Jacques (b. *11, Peas, and RI d.
Seine 2 '51-8, disbarred '63), 154 and
n., 160 and n., 162, 210n., 289n., 372,
429, 507; cit. nn. 50, 65, 81, 99, 110,
165, 213-14, 219, 244-6, 255, 260,
334, 347, 371-2, 377, 408, 422, 426,
429, 440, 446, 451
Italy, 18, 73, 82, 297, 384; and France
compared, 3n., 75, 86, 169n.
Ivory Coast, 176, 181n.
JAC, 103, llOn., 365
JOC, 103
Jackson, J. Hampden, 9n.
Jacobins, 110, 115, 116, 124, 144, 169, 353
363, 435; Club des, 127, 173
Japan, -ese, 326, 423
Jarrier, B., 376n.
Jaures, Jean (1859-1914, MP '85), 88 and
n., 101, 115, 116
Jeanneau, B., 508
Jeune Nation, 162
Jeune Republique, 103, 171, 172, 173 and n.,
174, 507
Jeunes Patrons, 385
Jews, 109, 143 and n., 163, 323, 330, 369;
anti-semitism, 18, 52, 82n., 146
Joan of Arc, 169n., 257n.
Joliot-Curie, Frederic (1900-58), 82, 341
Jouhaux, L6on (1879-1954, ex-sec.-g.
CGT), 297n.
Jouvenel, de: Bertrand, 26n.; Henri, 9n.,
408n.; Robert, 5n., 333n., 374n.
Judiciary, 52, 199, 202, 211 and n., 261n.,
299-301, 302, 305 and n., 337, 348,
350, 351 and n., 392n.; see Courts;
High Council
Juges d' Instruction, 301 and n.
Jugias, J. J. (MRP d. Seine 2 '45-51, Lot-
et-Garonne '51-5), 244n., A
Juin, Marshal Alphonse (b. '88, CGS '44-
7, Resident in Morocco '47-51, C.-in-
C. C. Europe to '56), 45, 351 and n.
Jules, J. Gilbert (b. '03, Rad. s. Somme
'48-59), 284n., 340n., A
Julien, Charles Andre" (b. '91), 294
July, Pierre (b. '06, PRL, RPF, ARS and
RGR d. Eure-et-L. '45-58), 158n., A
Jussieu, M., 114n.
Justice:
C'tee (NA), 245 and n., 247n., 249, 300,
301,376
High Court of, q.v.
M. of, 2, 199, 205, 299, 300 and n., 301,
336, 337, 340, 392 and n.
see Judiciary
Kaganovitch, L., 88n.
Kaiser, the (Wilhelm II), 435
Kayser, Jacques (1900-63, ex-sec.-g. Rad.
P.), 124n.; cit. nn. 94, 108, 115, 119
Kessel and Suarez, 428n.
Keynesians, 343
Kindleberger, C. P., 394n.
King, A. S., 88 n.
King, J. B., cit. nn. 99, 339-41
'King's friends', 70, 396-7, 407-8, 413,
438, 440
Kir, Canon F61ix (b. '76, RI d. Cote d'Or
since '45, mayor of Dijon), 325
Klatzmann, J., cit. nn. 79, 80, 95, 155, 166,
Koenig, Gen. Pierre (b. '98, of Bir-Hake-
im, Gaull. d. B-Rhin '51-8), 210,
244nn., 330, 412n., A, 506
Korean War, 27, 267, 375n., 416
Kovacs, Dr. Ren6 (champion swimmer
and terrorist), 51, 52
INDEX
529
Labbens, J., 367n.
La Bollardtere, Gen. Paris de, 51n.
Labonne, Eirik (b. '88, Resident in Moroc-
co '46-7), 47a, 354
Laborbe, lot, 344
Laboulaye, Lefebvre de (1811-83), 10
Labour: C'tee (NA), 243n., 247-9, 252,
264, 360 and n.; M. of, 392; Party
(British), 29, 61, 66n., 92, 370, 425;
— (French, lack of), 30, 89, 97
Lachapelie, G., 307n.
Lacharriere, R. de, 294n.
Lacoste, Robert (b. '98, trade union sec.,
Soc. d. Dordogne '45-58, '62- ), and
Algeria, 49, 51, 54, 55, 99, 248, 377,
406, 412, 432; also 49 and n., 90, 91
and n., lOln., 367, 377, 430, A
Lafay, Bernard (b. '05, Rep. Centre
leader; Gaull. Rad and RGR s.
Seine '46-51, d. Seine 2 '51-8, s.
'59- ), 128, 129, 130, 177, 429 and n.,
432 and n., A
Laffargue, Georges (Rad. and RGR s.
Seine '46-58), 284n.
Ldicitd, see Anticlericalism; Church
schools
Lalle, Albert (b. '05, RI d. Cote d'Or,
'46 J- ), 429
Lalumiere, P., cit. nn. 337-8, 340-1, 343
Lambersart (Nord), 280
Lamennais, Robert de (1782-1854, MP
'48), 103
Lamps, Rene" (b. '15, Com. d. Somme '45-
58 and '62- ), 21 8n., 327n.
Lancelot, A., cit. nn. 77, 214, 341, 358,
377, 380
Lancelot, M. T., 21 In.
Landes (cap. Mont-de-Marsan), 374
Landes, D. S., 4n., 361n.
Laniel, Joseph (b, '89, MP '32, PRL and
RI d. Calvados '45-58), 35n., 41, 45,
152, 158n., 227, 235, 238, 239, 267,
268n., 328, 333, 384, 400, 419 and n.,
426, 433, 441, A
Laniel govt, June '53-June '54: 40, 124n.,
152, 163, 224 and n., 238, 253, 272,
273n., 274, 347, 356, 362, 364, 379,
380, 383, 402, 406, 411, 414, 420, 422,
423, A; fall, 45, 119, 224 and n., 238,
407-8
Laniel, Rene" (RI s.), 334n.
Laos, 293, 294
Laponce, J. A., cit. nn. 66, 92, 107-8, 124,
127, 129, 131, 151
La Rochelle, 6
La Rocque, Col. Francois de (1885-
1946), 130n., 149, 177, 381
Latty, L., 123n., 381n.
Laurens, Camille (b. '06, Peas, and Cons,
d. Cantal '46J-58, sec.-g. CNIP
'61- ), 67, 153 and n., 210n., 407, A
Laval, Pierre (1883-1945, Soc. d. '14, cons.
s. '27, PM '31, '35, '40, '42-4), 8, 72,
119n,, 149, 187, 270, 298n,5 404, 448
Lavandeyra, L. A., 80n.
Lavau, Georges, cit. nn. 83, 122, 125-6,
164, 193, 296, 298, 329, 336, 339, 344,
356, 361-2, 370, 373-5, 378-85, 393,
423, 433, 439
Lawyers, 68, 109, 110, 123 and n., 140,
153n.} 156n., 162, 289, 332, 429; law
professors, 229, 300 and n., 305; 'law-
yer-peasants', 153, 438
Leagues : for the Rights of Man, 93n., 366 ;
other, 62, 103, 149, 435
Leakages, 345 ; — case, see Scandals
Le Brun, Pierre (b. '06, ass. sec. CGT),
83-4n,
Lecacheux, Joseph (1880-1952, MP '28,
Cons. d. Manche '45-8, s. '48-52),
363n.
Lecceur, Auguste (b. '11, Com. d. Pas-de-
C. '45-55; later Soc.), 75; cit. nn.
73-4, 76-8, 81, 85
Lecourt, Robert (b. '08, MRP d. Seine 2
'45-58, m. in 5 Rep.), 203n., 240n.?
301, 416, A; cit. nn. 221, 236, 340,
371,411,427,442
L6crivain-Servoz, A. (d. Rhone 2 '45-51),
398n.
Lectures fran$aise$, 126n.
Ledermann, S., 357nn., 358n.
Leenhardt, Francis (b. '08, UDSR and
Soc. d. Bouches-du-Rhone 1 '45-62,
rapp.- g. '56-8), 97n., 174, 253, 388n.
Lefranc, G., cit. nn. 19, 34, 83, 137
Left: see next entry; also in 3 Rep., 17,
79, 88, 98, 115, 184; in 4 Rep., 97,
98, 126, 226, 280, 309, 337, 338, 343,
348, 361, 393, 422, 446; Catholic — ,
q.v. ; extreme — , 87n., 171-2, 335, 351 ;
New — , 144-5, 172, 173 and n.; and
28, 47, 213, 265, 272, 290, 296, 297,
310, 311, 322, 326, 358n., 370
Left and Right: history, character, pol.
basis, 4-5, 8, 10, 60, 64, 110, 156 and
n. 160, 214, 276, 307-8, 365 ; since 1940,
18, 32, 34, 41, 47, 54-5, 63, 73, 188,
210, 248n., 315, 316, 344, 353, 362,
364, 365, 432, 436, 448, 451; and
const., 6, 196 and n., 235-6, 242, 283,
285, 293, 302, 304-5; drift to Right,
10, 31, 32, 34, 93, 187, 277, 404 and n,;
hard to distinguish, 103, 110, 121,
124-6, 136, 187, 215, 288, 323, 347-8,
420 ; extreme — and — , 18, 20, 54, 161,
and n., 363, 367, 396
Legaret, Jean (b. '13, UDSR d Seine 2
'52-5, Cons. d. '58-62), 304n., A
Legendre, Jean (b. '06, PRL, Gaull., Cons,
d. Oise '45-62), 159 and n.
Legion of Honour, 408
Le Havre, 323
Leites, N., 426n., 442n, and see Melmk .
Lejeune, Max (b. '09, MP '36 Soc. d.
Somme '45- ), 50n.s 90, 91 and n,,
93, 247, 349, 377, A
Leleu, C, 99n.
530
INDEX
Lemaigre-Dubreuil, Jacques (1 895-1955),
47n.,350n., 355n.
Lemasurier, J., 306n.
Lempereur, Rachel (b. '96, Soc. d. Nord 2
'45-58), 247
Leotard, Pierre de (b. '09, Rad. and RGR
d. Seine 2 '51-8), 177
Le Pen, Jean Marie (b. '28, Pouj. and Cons,
d. Seine 1 '56-62), 154, 165n., 166
and n., 167, 168, 247
LePuy, 21 6n.
Lerner, M., 41n.
Lesage, M., 21 In.
Lescuyer, G., cit. nn. 223, 271, 287, 343,
361, 374
Lesire-Ogrel, H., 297n., 298n.
Lespes, Henri (MRP and Gaull. d. '45-
51), 143 and n.
Letourneau, Jean (b. '07, MRP d. Sarthe
'45-55), 112, 199,406, A
Le Troquer, Andre" (1884-1963, MP '36,
Soc. d. Seine 3 '45-58, Pres. NA '54,
'56-8), 41, 203 and n., 217, 218n.,
219nn., 224n., 235, 257n., 348, 433, A
Leveau, R., 367n.
L6vy, Y., 324n.
Lewis, E. G., cit. nn. 223, 297-8
Liautey, Andr6 (b. '96, Rad. MP '32, Cons,
d. H-Sa6ne '51-5), 357, 375, 429, 507
Libels, 201, 210 and n., 245, 258n., 351n.,
356n.
Liberals, British, 3, 66n., 89, 308n.;
National — , 170
Liberation: generation, mood, ideals, 14,
35, 42, 64, 83, 89, 95, 97, 113, see
Resistance; reforms, 15, 38, 345, 394;
purge, q.v.; transfer of power, 14,
18-19, 60-1, 95, 123, 141, 343, 347,
386, 392; and parties, 62, 71, 77, 93,
97, 149, 156, 157, 159, 177, 277, 322,
326, 364-5, 365, 388; also 22, 25,
27, 28, 44, 78, 84, 98, 108, 109, 122,
191, 227, 327
Liberation, 171n.
Liberation-Nord, 89, 391
Lidderdale, D. W. S., cit. nn. 208, 210,
213, 215, 218-19, 229, 237, 242, 247,
257, 259, 264, 266, 281-2
Liet-Veaux, G., 273n.
Ligou, D., cit. nn. 66, 92, 96, 172, 403
Ligue . . ., see League
Lille, 94n., 153n., 276n., 280, 314
Limoges, Limousin, 69, 79n., 90, 376
Lipkowski, Irene de (b. '98, Gaull. d.
Seine 4 '51-5), 173 ; — Jean de (son,
b. '20, Mendesist d. Seine-et-O. 1
'56-8, Left Gaull. cand. '58 and d.
Charente-M. '62- ), 144, 173
Lipsedge, M. S., 163n., 166n.
Lipset, S. M., cit. nn. 68, 109, 125, 155,
166, 168
Local admin., govt., 64, 85, 86andn., 91, 99,
1 10, 260, 278, 289, 295n., 322, 328, 331-
2, 337, 338n., 347; see Elections, local
Lot: Barange, see Church schools; Falloux,
434-5; des finances, 263, 264, 266, 269,
287, see Budget; Laborbe, 344; des
maxima, 263-5, 267, 286
Loi-cadre, 223, 270, 271, 273-4, 275, 284n,
378; for Algeria, q.v.; colonial, 181,
248, 273 and n., 288, 295 and n.
Loire (cap. St. fitienne), 179n.; river, 123,
124, 140, 150, 167n., 314n., 376
Loire-Inferieure, now -Maritime (cap.
Nantes), 94n.
London, 18n., 19, 73, 133, 206, 348, 425;
Declaration (June '48 on Germany),
44, 46, 232-3
Long, R., cit. nn. 308, 325, 404
Lorraine, 5; see Alsace-
Lorwin, V. R., cit. nn. 19, 34, 83-^, 94,
96-7, 114, 137, 359-60, 382
Lot (cap. Cahors), 162, 167n., 168n., 179,
279n.
Lot-et- Garonne (cap. Agen), 326
Lottery, national, 21 In., 343n.
Louis XVI, 162
Louis-Lucas, P., 263n., 273n.
Loustanau-Lacau, G. (1894-1955, Cagou-
lard and Mendesist, Peas. d. B-Pyre"-
nees '51-5), 218n.
Louvel, Jean Marie (b. '00, MRP d. Cal-
vados '45-58, s. '59- ), 223n., 361, A
Louviers (Eure), 119n.
'Loyal Opposition', 244, 255-6, 413, 414,
416, 417
Lozere (cap. Mende), 279n., 506
Luciani, fimile (b. '13, Pouj. and UNR d.
Somme '56- ), 166n.
Lucon, bishop of, 382
Lussy, Charles (b. '83, MP '36, Soc. d.
Vaucluse '45-58), 230n., 399n.
Luthy, H., cit. nn. 3-5, 7, 11, 14, 15, 19,
25, 34, 79, 82, 116
Luxembourg : Palace, 280, 290 ; Radio — , 62
Lyons, 60, 64, 90, 91, 94n., 99 and n., 104,
109n., 121, 123, 128 andn., 130, 136n.,
139, 153n., 155n., 166n., 178 and n.,
179, 329, 331, 507
MLP, 172 andn., 173n., 435
MRP, Ch. 8 and
history, 19, 20-2, 36-41, 47-9, 62, 103-6,
170
composition, 68-9, 80n., 108-10, 171n.,
332, 404
clientele, 14, 15, 21, 28, 35, 38, 85 and n.,
104, 110, 113
discipline, 63, 107, 108, 111, 250, 325-6,
388n., 399-400
divisions, 37, 104-8, 113, 114, 247-8,
249n., 250, 252n., 323, 326, 357, 372,
394, 399-400, 402
membership, 63, 104 and n., 108-9, 111
militants, 63, 104, 105, 106, 107-8, 110,
113, 310-11, 402-3
org., 65n., 66, 67-8, 106-8
funds, 106
INDEX
531
in Parl., 31, 32, 35, 36, 42, 210, 21 5n.,
248, 286, 373, 375n., 412, 421, 425
and govt, 24, 46, 51, 70, 105, 112-13,
228, 340-1, 342, 347 and n., 351,
390-2, 405-6
and regime, 104, 105-6, 110, 382
outlook, 64, 110-13, 310-11, 402-3, 435,
437
policy: see Algeria; Colonial; Const.;
Econ. and social; Electoral systems;
Foreign and defence
and Church, press, trade unions, q.v.
and all parties, 24-5, 28, 29-30, 31, 250,
310-11, 317, 437, 449; also
and Com., Soc., q.v.
and Rad., 105, 106, 113 and n., 118 and
n., 178, 233, 420, 437, 450
and Gaull., 36, 37, 38, 105, 106, 109,
113, 133-5, 142-4, 312, 318, 402
and Cons., 40, 104, 105, 106, 150, 155,
156 and n., 158, 323, 362, 420
and Pouj., 163, 165, 167n.
and small parties, 174, 175n., 180
and pol. leaders, q.v. individually
MRP individuals, 46, 51, 55, 69, 223n.,
237, 239, 250, 264, 290, 330, 342, 351,
388, 408, 428, 430 ; ex-, 150n., 165n., 171
and n., 179, 180, 325 and n., 326, 398
and n., 399
MTLD, 180, 181
McCarthyism, -ites, 98n., 126, 162, 21 In.,
347, 438
MacMahon, Marshal P. de (1808-93,
Pres. 1873-9), 8, 9, 157, 185, 195, 237,
435
Macmillan, H., 425
Macouin, Clovis (b. '88, MP '28, PRL d.
D-Sevres '45-51), 65n.
MacRae, D. jr., cit. nn. 91, 108, 124, 139,
144, 152-3, 167, 400
Macridis, R., cit. nn. 55-6, 75, 82-3, 86,
152, 193, 205
Madagascar, nationalist ds., 180, 199 and
n., 209n., 210, 222n., 247; other, 24,
50, 191, 294n., 408
Maillaud, Pierre (1909-48, as Pierre Bour-
dan UDSR d. Creuse '45-6, Seine 3
'46-8), 4n., lln., A
Maine-et-Loire (cap. Angers), 166n.
Majority, absence of : in 3 Rep., 9-10, 184,
186-7, 229 ; in 4 Rep., 25, 29, 31-6, 37-8,
207, 222, 229, 230-1, 236, 255, 260-1,
274, 308, 314, 316, 318-19, 334-5, 405,
41 1-12, 413, 425, 427, 428, 439, 449-50,
451; see Coalition; Instability; Mar-
ginal votes
Majority, absolute:
in const., 24, 38, 46, 47, 201, 209n.,
220, 222 and n., 227-9, 230, 237,
238-40, 259 and n., 282, 283 and n.,
284 and n., 286, 288n., 298, 299, 302;
in elec. law, 313-14, 316
Majority, special (two-thirds or three-
fifths), 134n., 151, 196n., 208, 209 and
n., 281, 283, 299, 300, 302 and n,,
304n., 306
Malagasy, 199 and n., 209n., 222n.; see
Madagascar
Malignac and Colin, cit. nn, 258, 355, 357, 369
Malraux, Andr6 (b. '01, writer and RPF
leader, m. in 5 Rep.), 141 and n., 143,
173, 174, A
Malterre and Benoist, 139n.
'Malthusianism', 3, 12
Malvy, Jean Louis (1875-1949), 116
Manchester Guardian, 26n.
Mandel, Georges (1885-1944, MP '19, m.
of interior '40, murdered by Vichy
milice), 21 5n.
Maquis, 73, 79
Marabuto, P., cit. nn. 150, 364, 401
Marcel, J., 205n.
Marcus, J. T., 144nn., 171n.
Marginal votes, at elections, 184-5, 307-8,
see Floating vote; local, 99; in parl.
(and pivot parties), 10, 17, 63, 99,
112, 170, 175 and n., 181-2, 184, 185,
188, 190, 205, 217, 230-1, 236, 240-1,
253, 277, 354, 384-5 and n., 392, 410,
412, 437, 450; see Coalition politics
Marianne, 6 and n.
Marie, Andre (b. '97, MP '28, Rad. and
Neo- d. Seine-Inf. 1 '45-62), 27, 34,
35n., 40, 105, 121n., 128, 201, 205n.,
226 and n., 233, 270n., 281, 416, 418,
419, 430, A
Marie govt., July-Aug. '48, 27, 32, 34, 35,
134n., 201, 238 and n., 271, 274, 363,
422, 423n., 427, A
Marin, Louis (1871-1960, MP '05, RI d.
Meurthe-et-M. '45-51), 73 and n.,
149, 250, 327, 507
Marine, Merchant — : C'tee (NA), 248, 249 ;
M. of, 8, 206, 223n., 378
Marne (cap. Chalons), 505
Maroselli, Andre (b. '93, s. '35, Rad. d.
H-Saone '45-51, s. '52-6, d. '56-8,
s. '59- ), 314, 429, A
Marquet, Adrien (1884-1955, MP '24), 89
Marrane, Georges (b. '88, Com. s. Seine
'46-56, d. Seine 4 '56-8, s. '59- ),
80n., 226n., A
Marseilles, 32, 54n., 60, 64, 79n., 80n., 91,
94n., 95n., 97n., 99 and n., 121 and n.,
139n., 153n., 155n., 166n., 175, 276n.,
280, 324, 331, 339, 376, 388n., 430
Marshall Aid, 14, 27, 144, 267n., 343n.
Martinaud-Deplat, Leon (b. '99, MP '32,
Rad d. Bouches-du-Rhone 2 51-5,
cand. RGR '56, C Rep. '58), 121,
127, 128, 130, 178, 238, 347, 348, 354,
367n., 430, 438, A .
Martinet, Gilles (ex-Prog., PSU leader m
5 Rep,), cit. nn. 96, 100, 131
Martinique, 209n., 294n., 504
Marty, Andr6 (1886-1956, Com. MP '24,
d. Seine 1 '45-55), 74 and n., 75, 78,
81n., 219n., 401
532
INDEX
Marx, -ism, -ists, 22, 24, 88, 89, 90, 96 and
n., 100,101, 110, 124, 175,176
Massif Central, 69, 79, 150, 376n.
Massigli, Rene (b. '88, Gaull. m. '43-4,
Amb. London '44-55, sec.-g. foreign
m. '55-6), cit. nn. 339-41, 345, 391
Massu, Gen. Jacques (b. '08, at Suez '56, in
Algiers '57-60), 50, 54, 55, 75
Matignon, Hotel, 204, 217
Matthews, R., 19n., 34n.
Mauriac, Francois (b. '85, Catholic
writer; MRP, Mendesist and Gaull-
ist), 73 and n., 113 and n., 173, 174,
367, 431-2
Maurienne valley, 383 and n.
Maurras, Charles (1868-1952), 7, 8 and n.,
18, 103 and n., 158, 160, 161n., 168,
169
Mauvais, L6on (b. '02, Com. s. Seine
'46-8), 75, 80
Mayer, Daniel (b. 09, sec.-g. Soc. P. '44-6,
d. Seine 2 '45-58, later PSU), 37,
90, 91 and n., 93 and n., 96n., 174,
224n., 359n., 400n., 403 and n., 405,
432, 439, A
Mayer, Ren6 (b. '95, Rad. d. Constantine
'46J-55, Pres. Eur. Coal and Steel
Authority '55-7), finance m., 34, 39,
253, 286 and n., 360, 363, 373, 375, A;
cand. PM, 37, 39, 40, 119, 226-7, 228,
385 and n., 41 6n., 417, 419, 425, 441,
A; as PM, 40, 223n., 267, 271, 343,
344, 361, 373, 409; also 35n., 119n.,
127, 128, 178, 301, 354, 360, 408, 432
Mayer govt., Jan.-May '53, 40, 136, 224,
247n., 271-2, 274, 304, 371, 380, 422,
423, 425, 432, 441, A; fall, 27, 40,
238, 254, 273n., 356, 375, 414, 423n.
Mayors, 79n., 86n., 123, 212, 213, 262,
289, 323, 329 and n., 331, 347, 358,
367, 376, 382, 428
Mediterranean, 50, 52, 202, 273, 425;
coast, 69, 79
Melnik and Leites, cit. nn. 41, 100-1, 110,
112-13,201-2, 399
Melun, 143 and n., 179n.
Mendes-France, Pierre (b. '07, MP '32,
Gaull. m. '43-5, Rad. d. Eure '46J-
58):
to '53, 26-7, 35n., 25 In., 253, 341, 343,
393, 394 and n., 406, 430, 434, 443n.,
A
cand. PM, '53: 40, 41, 105, 234, 372,
399, 400, 418n., 419 and n., 422, 440;
'54: 45-6, 227, 228n., 229, 407-8, 419,
422,427, 431, A
as PM, 45-6, 62, 112, 197n., 225, 232n.,
234-5, 243n., 267-8, 284n., 339n., 347,
354, 356, 357, 360, 408, 409, 419,
432n., 433, 435, 440, 450; fall, see
next entry
later, 47-9, 127-9, 136, 174, 178n., 315,
319, 405, 434
reputation, popularity, 40, 44, 48, 49
and n., 55, 61,62, 64, 157, 178n., 232n
350, 367, 421, 422n., 425, 430, 436'
439, 440, 441n., 442
on alcohol, 161n., 356, 357, 358n., 373
423, 424
on Algeria, 45-6, 49, 128, 341, 435; see
Men desists
and constituency politics, 119n., 329.
331 andn., 429n.
on const, and elec., 47, 230n., 284n.,
304, 311n., 315, 331 and n., 435
on econ., 26-7, 49, 126, 343, 393, 394,
405, 409
on Europe, 46, 51, 112, 234-5, 341, 419
and all parties, 315, 399, 407-8 and n.,
419, also
and Com., 45, 46, 75, 119, 272, 394
and Soc., 49, 98, 119, 128, 272, 399, 405,
406 and n., 409, 417, 430
and MRP, 49, 105-6, 112, 113 and n.,
272, 372, 406, 407, 420, 437
and Rad., 46, 47, 49, 63, 64, 67, 119,
121, 122, 123, 126, 127-9, 131, 173,
178 and n., 290, 372 and n., 402, 413,
429n., 432, 433, 437-8
and de Gaulle, -ists, 26-7, 49, 128, 136,
144-5, 173 and n., 372n., 408, 409,
430, 442, 443n., 447
and Cons., 151n., 153n., 157, 159n., 228,
315, 398, 407
and Pouj., 163, 168n.
and small parties, 170, 173, 174, 176,
178, 399n.
Mendes-France govt., June '54-Feb. '55,
45-6, 151n., 197n., 205n., 226, 272,
274, 304, 348, 406, 410, 419, 420,
422n, 434, 437, A; fall, 45, 46, 119
and n., 158, 178, 238, 419-20, 423n.,
425, 441
Mendesists, -ism, 48, 50, 56, 98, 106, 113-
14, 123, 124 and n., 125, 126, 127-9,
130, 131, 144, 159, 170, 171, 173-4,
178n., 201, 239n., 265, 288, 315, 324
and n., 328, 335, 367, 377, 398, 399,
413-14, 421, 433, 450n., 507
Mendras, H., cit. nn. 356, 363-4, 374,
381; see Pay sans
Menthon, Francois de (b. '00, MRP d.
H-Savoie '45-58), 106n., 329-30 and
n., A
Mercier, Andre" (Com. d. '36, '45-58),
259n.
Meridional, Le (owned by Fraissinet, #.v.),
60
Merle, M., 508; cit. nn. 151-2, 155-9,
197-9,201
Messali Hadj (b. '98), 180
Meunier, Jean (Soc. d. '36, '45-58), 235n.
Meunier, Pierre (b. '08, Rad., Thorez' dir.
de cab., Prog. d. Cote d'Or '46N-58),
171n.
Meurthe-et-Moselle (cap. Nancy), 137n.
Meuse (cap. Bar-le-Duc), 150
Meyer, J,, cit, nn. 229-3 1, 233
INDEX
533
Meynaud, I, cit. nn. 26, 77, 210, 214, 243,
287, 296-8, 339, 341-5, 355-62, 365,
368-85, 394, 423
Mexico, -an, 144
Micaud, C, cit. nn. 74, 76-8, 81-2
Michel, H., 19n., 73n.
Michelet, Edmond (b. '99, MRP and
Gaull. d. Correze '45-51, s. Seine
'52-9, m. in 5 Rep.), 133n., 496-7
Michelin strike, 84
Middle-Classes Committee, 361-2 and n.
Middleton, W. L., cit. nn. 215, 276, 307-8
Midi, 5, 248, 307, 317, 330, 333, 357, 382
Midol, Lucien (b. '83, MP '32, Com. d.
Seine-et-O. 2 '45-58), 244n.
Militants, 318, 396, 401-4, 439; see Com.
P., Soc. P., MRP, Rad. P., Gaull.
Milk, 344, 382
Millerand, Alexandre (1859-1943, Soc. d.
'85, m. '99, Cons. PM '20, Pres.
'20-4, s. '25), 88, 195, 202, 404
Millers, 384 and n.
Ministers, 204-6, 227n., 299, 391, 418-19;
and civil servants, 11, 255, 341-3, 344,
345-6, 411, 438; in party and Parl.,
107 and n., 213, 223, 242, 258, 304,
412; junior, 205, 206, 226n., 228, 378,
421; responsibility of, 187-8, 189,
190-1, 200, 208, 281 and n., see Con-
fidence; ex-, 107 and n., 206, 244,
405n., 432n.? 440 and n.; minis-
trables, 165, 169, 206, 244, 289-90,
347, 430, 441; see Cabinet; Premier-
ship
Mmjoz, Jean (Soc. d. '45-58), 210nn.,
260n.
Missions d' information, 415, 416-17
Mitterrand, Francois (b. '16, Pres. UDSR
'53- , d. Nievre '46N-58, s. '59-62,
d. '62- ), 40, 41, 46, 47, 49, 67, 130,
164n., 175, 176 and n., 180, 221n.,
267n., 339n., 377, 406, 422, 430, 432,
434, 436, A
Moch, Jules (b. '93, MP '28, Soc. d.
Herault '45-58, '62- ): as M., 37,
99, 204n., 347 and n., 391n., A; cand.
PM 1949, 37, 74, 214n., 226, 405,
41 6n., 418, 419, A; in Soc. P., 90,
91n., 92, 93, 101-2, 509n.; also 26n.,
37, 241, 299, 313 andn., 324, 330, 333,
350n., 411, 415, 430, 432, 436, 443n.,
506
Moderes, 148n., 159 and n.; see Conser-
vatives Mft ^
Modernization, 14, 27-8, 337, 343, 345-6,
379-80, 384n., 435, 438, 444-6, 447;
see Regions
Moisan, Edouard (MRP d. '45-58), 240n.,
262n.
Mollet, Guy (b. '05, sec.-g. Soc P. 46- ,
mayor of Arras, d. Pas-de-C. 2 45- ;:
cand. PM, 37, 38, 51, 227, 347n., 363,
407, 408, 416, 418, 422, 423n., A
as PM, 45, 49-50, 99, 101-2, 207, 233n.,
234 and n., 235 and n., 269, 290, 304,
360, 380n., 431
reputation, 54, 101, 167, 174, 198, 411
and Marxism, 90, 96n., 97, 100
and all parties, 235, 254 and n.; and
Corns., 73, 75, 82n., 90, 401; and
Socs., 67, 90, 91 and nn., 93, 96n.,
214n., 327, 377, 399n., 403, 404, 430;
and MRP, 97, 422; and de Gaulle,
-ists, 56, 101, 102, 136, 407; and
Cons., 51, 234, 432, 509n.
other, 34, 47, 49n., 90, 136, 243, 319, 441
Mollet govt, Jan. -'56-May '57, 49, 50n.,
51, 127n., 128, 136-7, 205, 268, 273
and n., 274, 285, 290, 341n., 364, 384
and n., 407, 410, 414, 432, 434, 437,
A; fall of, 51, 239, 254 and n., 423
and n.
Monde, Le, 61 and n., 75n., 171n., 350n.,
445
Money and politics, 61, 65 and n.» 143
and n., 144, 151, 224, 324, 330n., 338,
371-2, 374, 387; see Parl. (salaries)
Moniteur Viticole, Le, 356n.
Monnerville, Gaston (b. '97, Rad. d.
Guyane '32-40, '45-6, s. '46-8, s.
Lot '48- , Pres. CR and Sen,
'46- ), 122n., 279n., 286n., 289n.,
290
Monnet, Jean (b. '88, Gauil. m. '43-4,
head of Plan '47-52, Eur. Coal and
Steel Authority '52-5), 14, 28, 343n.,
345-6,435 and see Plan
Mont Blanc, 376
Monteil, Andr6 (b. '15, MRP d. Finis-
tere '45-58, s. '59), 351n., A
Montel, Pierre (b. '96, PRL and RI d.
Rhone 1 '46J-58), 134n., 224n., 244n.,
269 and n., 402, A
Montesquieu, Baron de, 442n.
Mention, 323
Moraze, C., cit. nn. 3-4, 10, 20, 27, 70,
79, 80, 136, 140, 144, 155, 167-8, 427
Morbihan (cap. Vannes), 138n.
Moreau, fimile (1868-1950, Gov. Bank
'26-30), 384n.
Moreau, Jean (RI d. '45-58), 410, A
Morice, Andr6 (b. '00, Rad. and Neo- d.
Loire-Inf. '45-58), 55, 128, 130, 342,
351n., 377, 411, 412n., 432, 433, A
Morin, E., cit. nn. 81-2, 85
Morley, John Viscount, 449 and n.
Morocco, -an, status of, 180n., 205, 225,
293-4; French in (part, rep.), 209n.,
279 and n.; French views and policy,
45 47 and n., 50 and n., 52, 105, 106,
112, 136, 145, 152, 158, 173, 234,
239n., 244n., 333, 349-50, 354, 355
and n., 408, 420, 425, 431, 441, 443,
448
Morocco, Sultans of: Mohammed V
(1910-61), 41, 47 and n., 144, 158n.,
167, 213, 224, 339n., 349; Ben Arafa,
224n.
534
INDEX
Moscow, 20, 71, 83, 87, 88n., 21 5n., 289,
408, see USSR;$— conference, 24
Moslems, 49, 50, 51n., 52, 69, 82, 144n.,
180 and n., 199n., 248, 250, 274,
294n., 341, 355, 438; ^Algeria; N.
Mothe, D., cit. nn. 75, 77-8, 85-6
Motion prejudicielle, 258 and n.
Motorists, motor fuel, petrol, 233n., 240,
273n., 287n., 328, 356, 358, 371n.,
379; see Road hauliers
Mottin, J., 392n.
Moulins, 323
Moureau, Capt, 52
Mouvement . . ., see initial M ; — socialiste
africain, 181
Moyen-Congo, 18 In.
Mulhouse, 323
Munich treaty, 12, 72, 104, 117, 210n., 212,
270, 415
Muselier, K, cit. nn. 211-12, 214, 224,
257, 260, 266, 357, 371, 430
Mussolini, B., 18, 104, 149
NATO, 44, 225 and n., 419
Naegelen, Marcel Edmond (b. '92, Soc. d.
B-Rhin '45-51, B-Alpes '51-8, Gov.-
G. Algeria '48-51, cand. Pres. '53), 90,
329, 333, 408
Namier, L. B., 423n.
Nancy, 327, 370
Nantes, 69, 94n., 105
Napoleon I, 2, 8, 13, see Bonapartism;
— m, 4, 8, 141n., 195, 239
Natanson, T., 88n.
National . . .: Assembly, q.v. ; Defence
Council, 196, 198; 'disgrace', 210 and
n., 298, 300; 'party' (in elec. law, q.v.),
160 and n., 177n., 178 and n., 179,
313n., 316n., 506-7; pooling (in ibid.),
309, 310, 312n.; Rally/161 andn., 507
Nationalism:
French, 13, 44-5, 46, 49, 77, 82 and n.,
85, 90, 102, 106, 128, 141, 144, 145,
146, 148, 158-9, 193, 288, 355, 377,
435, 444, 447-8
Madagascar, q.v.; N. African, 28, 45,
46, 47, 50, 68, 82, 162, 180, 341, 355
other, 28, 112, 171, 176, 180-2, 218,
293, 348, 435, 436
Nationalized industries, 35, 86, 95, 141,
223 and n., 260, 271, 287, 292 and n.,
296n., 297, 305, 338, 339, 343 and n.,
361, 362, 373
Navette, 282, 283, 284, 304, 316
Naville, P., cit. nn. 76-7, 86
Navy, 8, 11; see Marine
Nazi, see Germany; — Soviet Pact, 18, 73,
74
4Neo-Radicals', Dissident — , 47-9, 63, 123
124, 125, 126, 127-8 and n., 129-30
and n., 154, 398, 407, 438n.
Neo-Socialists, 18, 89, 407
Netherlands, 3n., 300n.
Neuilly (Seine), 168
Neumann, R. G., cit. nn. 132, 313, 347
Neutralism, -ists, 62, 127, 144, 170-2 325
367, 448
New Statesman, 239n.
New York, 214n.
Nicholas, H. G., cit. nn. 48, 313, 323, 334,
Nicolet, C., cit. nn. 126-7, 129, 143
Niger (Territory), 18 In.
Noel, L6on (b. '88, Amb., Gaull. d. Yonne
'51-5, Pres. Const. Council in 5 Rep )
cit. nn. 81, 109, 133, 138, 157-9, 218*
223-4, 244, 259-60, 292, 334, 34l'
384, 430, 432
Nogueres, Louis (1881-1956, Soc. d
Pyr6nees-O. '45-51), 328
Nonconformists, British, 111, 112
Nord (constituency 1 Dunkirk, 2 Lille and
Roubaix, 3 Valenciennes), 67, 75, 90
94 and n., 101, 107n., 280 and n.
309n., 313, 314, 317
Normans, -dy, 155, 161, 173, 248, 280n.,
357, 376n.
North Africa, Ch. 4 and
French and, 28, 41, 44, 101, 105, 112,
126, 144, 152, 158n., 164, 221, 235
329, 330, 365, 400, 412, 419, 424 and
n., 434, 435, 440
Lobby, settlers, colons of, 123, 126, 144,
162, 181, 289, 349, 353-5, 358, 377,
384, 422, 423 and n., 425, 429, 438
-ns in France, 330; see Algerians
see Algeria; Colonial policy; Morocco;
Tunisia
Norway, 300n.
Notables, 63, 110, 115, 117, 121, 139, 140,
149, 151-2, 156, 186, 212, 324, 331,
400, 402, 404, 446
Nouvelle Gauche, see New Left
Nuclear . . ., see Atomic
OAS, 351
Office, see Careerists; Patronage; each
party (and govt.)
Oise (cap. Beauvais), 280, 371n.
Olivesi and Roncayolo, cit. nn. 79, 80, 95,
97, 99, 109, 139, 155, 164, 166-8, 367
Operation Resurrection, 56
Opportunists: 3 Rep., 437; 4 Rep., see
Compromisers
Oradour-sur-Glane, 376 and n.
Oran (Algeria), 161
Organic laws, 260, 278 and n., 295; decree,
268-9
Organization committees (Vichy), 13, 14n.
Osgood, S. M., 179n.
Osmin, Mireille, lOOn.
Quest-France, 60
Overseas: departments, 209n., 293 and n.,
- 295, 488, 489; Independents, see
IOM; members, 175-6, 180-2, 190,
209 and n., 244 n., 247, 248, 279, 289,
295, 312, 407, 408 and n., 428, 438;
INDEX
535
Territories, 181, 272n., 293, 294-5,
296n., 488-90, 491, see Africa,
Assemblies; — C'tee (NA), 243nn.,
244, 247 and n., 248, 273n.
PDF, 103, 109, 148
PME, 15n., 179, 361-2, 370, 373-4, 375
and n., 379-80
PPF, 162
PRA, 181
PRL,20n.,35n., 62, 118, 149-50, 153 andn.,
158, 177, 234n., 254n., 393, 398n., 407
PSA, 174, 400
PSF, 149, 165n., 177
PSU, 171, 172n., 174
Pacific Ocean, 121n., 294n.
Pacifists and defeatists, 17, 18, 72, 73, 88,
89, 177, 288, 448
Pactet, P., cit. nn. 223, 242-3, 251, 255
Painleve, Paul (1863-1933), 170
Palais Bourbon (Chamber and Assembly
building), 52, 72, 134, 163, 206, 211n.,
212n., 213, 275, 290, 295, 296, 298,
375, 436, 451
Palais du Luxembourg, 280, 290
Palais Royal, 27, 296, 298, 394 and n.
Palewski, Gaston (b. '01, de Gaulle's chef
de cab., Gaull. d. Seine 6 '51-5, Amb.
Rome, m. in 5 Rep.), 143n., 434, A
Palewski, Jean Paul (brother, b. '98, MRP
and Gaull. d. Seine-et-O. 2 '45-55,
'58- ), 143n.
Panachage, 309, 311, 313 and n., 314 and
n., 324, 328, 330, 505-6
Panter-Brick, K., 347n.
Pantouflage, 338 and n., 379
Parachutists, 50, 217, 350; parl., 329, 330
and n., see Carpetbaggers
Pardons, 196, 197n., 199 and n., 300, 340
Paris: as city, 79, 108, 120, 164, 211, 373,
376, 429n.; Council, 295n., 505; elec-
tion results in, 48, 50, 54n., 129, 139
and n., 141 n., 166, 508; elec. law, parl.
rep. of, 280, 313 and n., 328, 504, 505;
MPs, cands. for, lOOn., llOn., 124,
125n., 128, 135n., 154, 162, 167, 169,
171, 173, 21 In., 264n., 322n., 323,
325, 328, 329, 330, 331, 363 and n.,
371 and nn., 372n., 432; opinion in,
60, 71, 78, 115, 123 and n.; parties, 68,
80n,, 84 and n., 95n., 99, 109n., 115,
123 andn., 130, 139 andn., 151, 155n.,
161 and n., 166 and n., 167, 168n.,
317; press, 61-2, 77, 94, 111, 445;
riots, demonstrations, police, 49, 52,
56, 163, 168n., 347-8; university, 337,
342; in war, 18, 160; as HQ, nat.
capital, 2, 11, 17, 18, 41, 46, 47n., 54,
66, 73, 111, 115, 126, 137, 138, 143,
144, 193, 206, 211, 212, 217, 232n.,
293, 295, 308, 328, 331, 332, 334, 336,
338, 342n., 347, 349, 350n., 354, 363,
379, 381, 386, 388,425, 428, 435, 446
-ians, 60, 99, 117, 330, 333, 353, 365
— basin, 365
— suburbs, 5, 48, 80n., 84 and n., 115,
139n, 168, 173, 280, 331; see Seine,
Seine-et-Oise
— Agreements on Germany (1954), 46
Paris Commune, 6, 124, 189, 449
Paris, Henri, Comte de (b. '08), 179, 353n.
Parisien Liberd, Le9 61
Parliament, see Assembly, Nat., Council
of Rep.; also: in Const., Chs. 16 and
17, pp. 12, 185-6, 187-92, 200, 204,
302, 428; debate in, see next entry;
dissolution, q.v.; election by, 208,
243, 278-9, 281, 294 and n., 298, 299,
300, 305; eligibility for, 160, 161, 162,
176, 177 and n., 209-10, 21 6n., 280,
see Invalidations; and finance, see
Budget; and gqvt., see Cabinet, Con-
fidence, Investiture; and legislation,
see Bills; membership, 209 and n.,
279, see below; officers, bureau(x), see
NA, CR; procedure, 9, 185-7, 208-9,
218-21, Ch. 19, see Assembly, Bills,
Budget, Debate; questions, 223 andn.,
281 and nn., 282n., 286; resolutions,
ordres dujour, 221n., 223, 252 and n.,
see Interpellations; sessions, recall,
12, 212-13, 281, 283, 306, 364; sit-
tings, 212, 267n., 269 and n.; voting
methods, 1 16, 196 and n., 201, 213-14,
219, 226n., 230, 282, 298-9, see
Majority, PR, Proxies
Parl. debate, 218, 258, 389, 397; obstruc-
tion of, 213 and n., 218-21, 258 and
n., 289, 373; organized, 215, 219 and
n., 258, 259 and n.; restricted, 259
and n., 262n.; urgent, 219, 220n.,
258n., 259 and n., 260 and n., 263n.,
268, 269, 282 and nn., 284 and n.,
285, 296, 305; vote sans debat, 259
and n., 260, 262 and n.
Parl. members of: absenteeism, 81n., 212,
213-14, 218, 219, 244 and n., 373;
'back-bench', 228, 249 and n., 251,
256, 263, 312n., 357n., 399, 400, 410,
430, 432; character, 334, 372, Ch. 30;
and constituency, 15, 60, 66, 136 and
n., 169, 212, 287n., 308, 311, 324-7,
329-31, 332-3, 334, 429 and n.; im-
munity, 210-11, 280, 306; origins, 5
and n., 15, 68, 289, 332-3, 360, 364-5,
404, 444, see each party; overseas,
a.v' psychology, camaraderie, 10-11,
81, 255-6, 294n., -299n., 300n., 302,
333, 374, 396, 401-4, 423-4, 428,
430-1, 440-1, 465; salary, 65 and n.,
80-1 and nn., 106, 165 and n., 211
and n., 280, 295; suspicions of, 65n.,
66, 80-1, 107, 165n., 166n., 334, 403,
see Politicians; see Committees,
Groups, Parties (discipline)
'Parliamentary Government', 187-8, 189,
318
Parliaments, specific, see Assembly
536
INDEX
Parquet, 300, 301 and n.
Parties (generally): composition, 68-9,
364-5, 450n., 509; discipline, 63-8,
117, 189, 216, 246 and n., 253, 325-7,
329, 388-9 and n., 397-400, 404, 406-7,
409, 418-19; divisions, internal, 64,
69, 394-5, 399-404, 411, see Genera-
tions, Regions; organization, 60,
64-8, 167n,, 214-15, 289, 322, 323-4,
364, 365-6, 370, 387-9, 446; of pro-
test, revolt, 64, 70, 255, 317, 322,
328-9, 332, 335, see Politicians, the
'System', see each party
Parti . . ., see initial'? . . . and also — Agraire,
149, 150n. ; — Patriote Revolutionnaire,
162; — rdpublicain pour le redressement
economique et social, 173, 507; — re-
publicain socialists, see Rep. Socs.;
— Socialiste Democratique, 111, 323n.;
— Socialiste Umfid, 111, 172n., 174;
unitaire, 171, 172
Partis et Classes, cit. nn. 68, 76, 79-80,
83, 94-6, 109-10, 120, 137, 140, 143,
151, 155-6, 164, 323, 337, 360-1, 364,
366, 391
Partis, Statut des, 387-8
Party system, the, 16n., 69-70, 184-90,
193, 202, 207, 229, 308-9, 316-19,
352, 384-5, 386-95, 396, 404-6, 407-8,
413-14, 423-7, 432-4, 437-43, 449-50;
see Coalition politics; Marginal votes;
the 'System1
Pas-de-Calais (constituency 1 Boulogne
and Calais, 2 Arras and Bethune), 67,
92n., 94 and n., 101, 334n.
Passy, Col. (Andr6 Dewavrin, b. '11), 348
Fastis, 111, 248 and n., 330, 357
Patenotre, Raymond (1900-51, MP '28,
press magnate), 119n.
Patronage: by MPs, 116, 129 and n.,
301, 329; 339-41, 347, 351, 408; to
MPs, 170, 175, 177, 185 and n., 205,
228 and n., 245 and n., 294 and n., 333,
419 and n., 432, 438; other, 68, 86, 99
and nn., lOOn., 165n. ; see Parl. (cama-
raderie)
Patronat, see Business
Pau, 353n.
Paul, Marcel (b. '00, Com. d. H-Vienne
'45-8), 84, 391 and nn., A
Pays legal, reel, 446
Paysans, cit. 507; nn. 15, 26, 68, 78-9,
83, 97, 108, 110, 123, 125, 130, 143,
151, 153, 155-6, 161, 164, 166-8, 245,
248, 255, 262, 276, 323, 325, 329,
331, 339, 342, 357-8, 363-7, 373, 378,
381-2, 429
Peasants: nos. and weight, 3, 4-5, 12 and
n., 363-5, 381, 393, 423; and econ.
policy, 6, 10, 26, 28, 36 and n., 41,
362, 393, 394, 446, 447; and elections,
47, 280n., 288, 322-3, 326 and n., 329,
331 and n., 363 and n,; in Parl.,
262 and n., 289, 296, 297-8, 344, 356,
363 and n., 364-5, 423, 428-9; and all
parties, 509; and Corns., q.v.; and
MRP, 108, 109nn., 110 and n., Ill,
114; and Rads., Neo-, 115, 123 and
n., 381; and Cons., 1 55-6 and nn.; and
E. Right, 161n., 166-7 and n., 364, 365;
see Agriculture; Alcohol; CGA;
FNSEA; Food policy; Regions (town
v. country)
Peasant Corporation (Vichy), 153, 161n.
364, 393
Peasant party, 20n., 35n., 39, 62, 633 67,
149-50, 153-4 and n., 156 and n., 158,
160, 166, 234n., 248, 254nn., 312,
332, 343, 363, 365, 37p, 381, 398n.,
402n., 406 and n., 407; individuals in,
177, 243n., 262, 370, 372 and n.
P6bellier (Peas. ds. H-Loire): Eugene sr.
(1866-1952, sat '51-2), 216n.; Jean
(son, sat '52-3, resigned when am-
nesty voted), no ref.; Eugene jr.
(brother, b. '97, MP '36, ineligible till
'53, sat '53-8), 21 6n.
Pedestrians, 379
Peelites, 188
Peguy, Charles (1873-1914), 101
Pellenc, Marcel (b. '97, Rad. s. Vaucluse
'48- , rapp.~g.), 434n.
Pelletan, Camille (1846-1915), 8
Pensions: C'tee (NA), 244n., 247 and n.,
249, 251, 264; — M. of, 247n., 358,
375; also 232 and n., 252 and n.,
259n., 268, 269, 285, 287, 362; see
Ex-servicemen
Pe"py, D., 109n.
Pernot, Georges (Cons. MP '24, m. '40, s.
'46-59), 306n.
Pe"ron, Yves (Com. d. '45-51, '56-8), 261n.,
265n.
Peru, 423
Pe"tain, Marshal Philippe (1856-1951, PM
'40, 'Chief of State' '40-4), 8, 14n.,
18, 20, 42, 45, 72, 89, 117, 132, 141,
142n., 154, 156n., 160, 161, 170, 177,
179, 191, 210n., 216n., 270, 350; -ists,
see Vichyites
P6tain govts., '40-4, 18, 35n., 160, 177,
404n.
Petit, Eugene dit Claudius (b. '07, UDSR
d. Loire '45-55, '58-62), 174, 175n.,
176, 357n., 430, A
Petit, Guy (b. '05, Peas, and Cons. d. B-
Pyre~nees '46J-58, s. '59- , mayor of
Biarritz), 177, 272n., A
Petot, J., 273n.
Petrol, see Motorists
Petsche, Maurice (1895-1951, MP '25,
Peas, and ind. cons. d. H-Alpes,
'46J-51), 35n., 39, 227, 243n., 253,
360, 410, A
Peureux, G., 294n.
Peyre", Roger, 339
Peyroles, Mme (MRP d. '45-51, '54-5),
282n., 283n.
INDEX
537
Pflimlin, Pierre (b. '07, MRP d. B-Rhin
»45- , mayor of Strasbourg, Pres.
MRP '56-9), 41, 46, 50n., 51, 98, 106
andn., 217, 228, 342, 356,420, 421, 430,
434, A ; in '58, 55, 56, 203, 228, 355, 43 1
Pflimlin' govt., May '58, 55-6, 151n., 172,
226ii L., 239, 241, 273n., 302, 303 andn.,
407, 423n., A
Philip, Andre (b. '02, MP '36, Gaull. m.
r »43_4, Soc. d. Rhone 1 '45-51, later
PSU) 23, 90, 91 and nn., 92n., 93 and
n 99nn., lOOn., 174, 298, 302n., 329,
333, 341, 403, 429, A
Philip, L., 209n,, 210n.
Picasso, Pablo, 75, 82
P ckles, D., cit. nn. 14, 26, 34, 38, 191-3,
197-8, 200-1, 211, 241, 261, 270, 292,
294-5, 297, 305, 391
Pickles, W., llOn., 140n.
Perce, R, cit. nn. 48, 79, 94, 110, 128,
132, 153, 167, 178, 193, 239, 315-16,
323, 326
Pierre, Abb6 (b. '12, MRP and Gauche
ind. d. Meurthe-et-M. '45-51, Left
cand. '51), 171, 369, 370n., 377
Pinay, Antoine (b. '91, MP '36, RI d.
Loire '46J-59, m. in 5 Rep.): career,
35n., 177, 205n., 410n., 421 A;
cand. PM, 39-40, 46, 51, 166, 227,
372, 408, 415n., 416, 4*7, 420, 431, A;
as PM, 40, 163, 220, 232n., 234 and
nn., 235, 260, 265, 267, 339n., 343n.,
344, 361, 399, 409, 431, 441; popu-
larity, 40, 157, 232n., 421, 422n., 425;
views, 50n., 158nn., 159, 334 and n.;
other, 323n., 329; and all parties,
40 228, 397-8, 399, 417; also Socs.,
240, 404n., 411; and MRP, 105, 107
and n., 238, 246n., 372, 397n., 399,
402, 405, 406, 420, 424, 425, 441; and
Rad., 246n., 424, 432; and Gaull., 135
and n., 144, 150, 152, 228 372 399,
402, 416; and Cons., 152 and nn.,
430, 432, 441 ; and UDSR, 175
Pinay govt. (Mar.-Dec. '52) 40, 152, 201,
205n., 272, 287, 397, 409 410, 422,
425; fall, 27, 40, 105, 238, 271, 362,
423n., 424, 425, 432
Pineau, Christian (b. '04, rapp.-g. finance
c'tee '45-6, chairman '46-7 Soc. d.
Sarthe '45-58, cand. A pes-M. 62),
cand. PM, 47, 105, 228, 417, 420 421,
A; also 35, 36n., 81n., 91 and n
212n., 237n., 299, 323n., 341 and n., A
Pinto, R., cit. nn. 270, 272, 305-6
Pivert, Marceau (1895-1958), 93n.
Pivot parties, see Marginal votes
Place Vendome, 301 ; see Justice, M. • of
Plaisant, Marcel (1887-1958, MP '19, Rad.
s. Cher '48-58), 281n.
Plan, National Economic, 27, 221, Z£>,
296, 345-6 and n., 356, 362, 379,
Planning Commission, 343 ana n.,
345; reinvestment
Planchais, J., cit. nn. 51, 99, 341, 345,
351
Plantade, R., 108n., llOn.
Pleven, Rene (b. '01, Pres. UDSR to '53,
d. C6tes-du-Nord '45-6J, '46N- ):
stands for PM, 50, 130, 417, 433;
as PM, 37-8, 39, 227, 231 and n.,
232n., 233, 234 and nn., 236, 267, 419;
also 26, 27, 34, 35n., 45, 67, 167, 174
and n., 175, 176, 230n., 251, 265n.,
322-3, 324, 343, 344, 397, 399n., 411,
430, 438, 441, A; and all parties, 175;
Socs., 39, 343, 403 and n., 417; Rads.,
55; Gaull., 233, 234n.
1st Pleven govt,, July '50-Feb. '51, 37-8,
175, 238 and n., 247n., 253, 287, 406,
410, A
2nd Pleven govt., Aug. '51-Jan. '52, 39,
153, 232n., 233, 243n., 253n., 254, 354
and n., 410, A; fall, 27, 39, 238 and n.,
271, 272, 274, 343, 363n., 403 and n.,
423n.
Plots and conspiracies, 50, 51 and n., 54,
55, 83n., 161-2, 164, 167, 211, 348
and n., 350, 396; see Violence
Poincar6, Raymond (1860-1934, MP '87,
PM '12, Pres. '13-20, s. '20, PM '22-
4 and '26-9), 11, 45, 195, 244 and n.,
450
Poinso-Chapuis, Mme Germaine (b. '01,
MRP d. Bouches-du-Rhone 1 '45-
55), — decree; 34, 204n., 250-1, 344,
405n., 410, A
Poland, -ish, 75, 330
Police, in France, 2, 45, 49, 52, 55, 68, 99,
211, 217n., 292n., 334n., 340, 341,
347-8, 351; in N. Africa, 47, 51n., 350
and n., 354
Politicians, standing of:
low, of most, 11, 15, 48, 49n., 55, 70, 80,
83, 88, 93, 111 and n., 113, 162, 164,
193, 232, 320, 322, 332, 334-5, 446,
451, 510; see Parl. (members, sus-
picion of); Public opinion
high, of a few, 40, 45, 46, 157, 169, 203,
232n.,421,422n.,425
low, of those few in Parl., 40, 49n., 201,
440-1
Politique dupire, 161, 308n., 315
Polls, 27 and n., 66n., 68n., 85, 86n., 94n.,
95n., 109 and nn., 117n., 122nn., 123
and n., 125n., 139n., 140, 141n.,
146n., 152n., 164n., 166n., 168n., 311n.,
362n., 509-10
Pope, the, 169, 353, 406
Populate, Le, 61, 72n., 94n., 226n., 306n.,
443n.
Popular Front: in 3 Rep., 17, 41, 45, 72,
P 73, 77, 89, 103, 116-17, 149, 160, 217,
429n., 430, 446; in 4 Rep., 41, 48,
56 andn., 83, 127, 171, 172, 176,203,
235 401
Population, 3, 162-3, 445; M. of, 205
Populism (U.S.), 169
538
INDEX
Postmen, 68, 95, 364
Pouillon, J., 31 In.
Poujade, Pierre (b. '20, cand. in S. Paris
'57, Maine-et-L. '58, '62), 15n., 44,
47, 48, 50, 51, 62, 63, 67, 79 and n.,
130n., 153, 159n., 162-9 passim, 316,
358, 361, 365 and n., 376, 377, 381,
382, 399, 507
Poujadism, -ists, 163-9, also composition,
67, 68 and n., 358n.; clientele, 48,
54, 63, 94, 317, 324, 331 and n., 364,
365, 414; outlook, 8, 14, 160, 328,
329, 335, 343, 370n., 383, 438, 447,
453; in Parl., 51, 63, 64, 65, 67, 123,
161 and n., 206, 210, 213, 218, 245,
250, 255, 257n., 402n., 431, 436; un-
seated, 49n., 210, 218, 328n., 507-8;
and other groups, 258n., 353, 370, see
each party; ex-, 154; universal, 87n.,
162
Poujadisme, Le, 164nn., 165nn.
Poutier, C, cit. nn. 193, 240, 284, 302-4
Prague, 24, 387
Preamble: const., 271, 273, 275n., 292-3
305, 337; April '46 draft, 23, 292-3
294
Prefects, 60, 79n., 98n., 164 and n., 172n.
199n., 204n., 209n., 210n., 237 and n.
346-8, 350, 354, 374n., 446; super-
345, 347
Preferential vote, 308, 313, 330, 505
Prelot, Marcel (b. '98, Gaull. d. Doubs
'51-5, s. '59-), 305; cit. nn. 35-6,
223-4, 243-5, 260, 273, 298, 306
Premiership, 35 and n., 203-7, 226 and n.,
229, 239, 290, 390, 406, 408-9, 413
and n., 415-17, 422, 426, 440-2; ex-
premiers, 45-6, 128, 205, 414-15,
440n.; PM's office, 204-5 and nn.,
343n., 345; see Cabinet; Investiture
President, -cy of the Republic: 195-203 and
of 3 Rep., 9, 179, 185, 204 and n., 207,
212, 215
of 4 Rep., 9, 32, 179, 185, 190, 191-2,
239, 258, 259n., 260, 265n., 281, 293,
295, 299-300, 301, 305-6, 348, 353,
414-16, 417, 421-2
of 5 Rep., 443
election(s) of, 24, 41-2, 116, 152, 161,
191-2 and nn., 195-6 and n., 201-2,
208, 217, 226n., 238, 277, 280-1, 290,
442n.
President du conseil, 204 and n., 415, and
see Premiership; vice-, 205, 496
Presidential system, 25, 52, 98, 133, 191,
193-4,241, 318,452
Presidents' Conference (NA), 215, 216,
219-20, 224, 243, 259 and n., 262-3,
268
Press: generally, 54, 60-2, 93n., 170, 271,
351 and n., 391, 407, 422n., 445; free-
dom of, 50, 52, 61, 130, 247n., 292,
438, 442-3, see Libels; Left, 77 and n.,
80n., 81n., 93n., 94, 162, 171n., 210n.,
328, 391; Right and Centre, 108 and
n., 119 and n., 123, 160, 162, 360n.
Press C'tee (NA), 245, 249
Press law of 1946, 61, 117, 118n., 123, 344
392 and n.
Pressure-groups, Chs. 25 and 26, also: in
admin., 339, 342, 344, 423, 447; in
elections, 65 and n., 330-1; in Parl.
39,213,247,249,255,260,261,298
Pretenders, 179, 209, 353 and n.
Previous question, 219, 258
Prieur, C., cit. nn. 324, 329, 334, 367
Priouret, R. A., cit. nn. 4-5, 10, 13-15
80, 103, 116, 118, 159, 197, 242, 285,
310, 334, 354-5, 369, 371-2, 390, 393,
401, 432, 447
Progres, Le, 60
Progressives (pro-Comm.), 50, 54, 8 In.,
82n., 171-3, 180, 181, 244n., 246,
327n., 348, 398, 399n., 414; (U.S.),
146-7
Proletariat, see Workers
Pronteau, Jean (Com. d. '45-58), 65n.,
265n.
Proportional representation (PR): within
Parl., 208, 215 and n., 216, 237, 242,
247, 278-80, 294, 298, 299, 305, 388;
in govt., 390; in SFIO, 92; electoral,
see Elec. systems
Prost, A., 167nn.
Prot, Louis (b. '89, MP '36, Com. d.
Somme '45-58), 327 and n.
Protestants, 68, 69, 79, 97n., 109, 143 and
n., 168, 323
Provencal, Le (paper of Defferre, q.v.\ 60
Provincialism, 60, 115, 117 and n., 126,
168-9, 329, 330, 376
Provisional regime 1944-5, 20-5, 196, 225,
229-30
Provisional twelfths, 185, 266, 267, 268,
288n.
Proxies, parl., 201, 213-14 and nn., 232n.,
238-9, 398, 408 and n.
Public employees, 68, 94, 95, 96 and n.,
99n., 109, 333, 337, 359, 366, 373; see
Civil servants
Public opinion, 9-10, 16, 29-30, 54, 184,
187, 194, 239, 277, 318-19, 384-5,
422n., 423-5, 440-1, 445-8, 450-3,
509-10; impotence of, 15-16, 34 and
n., 201, 334-5, 383-4, 389, 452; Insti-
tute of, 164n., see Polls
Pucheu, Pierre (1899-1944, m. of interior
'41-2, executed by de Gaulle), 14n.
Purges: at Liberation, 7, 74, 103n., 141,
162, 176, 292n., 298 and n., 300 and
n., 337, 346, 391; other, 337, 341, 346,
347
Puy-de-D6me (cap. Clermont-Ferrand),
370, 508
Pyr6ne"es: Basses- (cap. Pau), 149, 161,
179n., 323; Hautes- (cap. Tarbes),
llOn., 155n., 325, 506; -Orientales
(cap. Perpignan), 93 and n., 179n., 328
INDEX 539
Quai d'Orsay, 198n. ; see Foreign m.
'Quartet', see Algerie fran^aise
Queen of England, 50n., 165
Questeurs, 216
Queuille, Henri (b. '84, MP '14, Rad.
and Neo- d. Correze '46N-58): as
PM, 35-8, 220, 226-7 and n., 228n.,
232n., 233 and nn., 234n., 235, 271,
343n., 372, 426; style of leadership,
52, 125, 235S 241 and n., 271, 441 and
n.; also 35n., 36, 41, 82n., 128, 130,
243, 251n., 261n., 376n., 419, 430,
438, A, 509n.; and Soc., 226, 417;
MRP, 226, 399, 402; Rad., 418;
GaulL, 228; Cons., 405, 497; UDSR,
175
1st Queuille govt, Sep. '48-Oct '49, 35
and n., 51, 134-5, 205n., 271, 273n.,
410, 414, A; fall, 27, 37, 238 and n.,
403, 423n., 432
2nd Queuille govt., 2-4 July '50, 37, 105,
205n., 226-7, 228n., 399, 402, 415,
419, 432, A
3rd Queuille govt., Mar.-July '51, 37, 39,
205n., 233, 238 and n., 271, 418, A
Quimper, 200n.
Quorum, see Absenteeism
RDA, 171, 176, 243n.
RGR: as alliance, 24, 38 and n., 67, 120-1
and n., 122nn., 123, 156n., 170, 174,
175, 176-8, 234n., 323n.; as party,
123n., 128, 129, 130, 178, 179, 254n.,
325, 429n., 438
RGRIF, 178-9 and n., 506, 507
RI, see Republican Independents
RN, 161 andn., 507
RPF, Ch. 10 and: history, 25, 36-40, 63,
132, 134-6, 139, 200 and n., 311,
335, 389; composition, 25, 68-9,
140-1 and nn., 143n.; clientele, 15,
28, 36, 84, 109n., 139-41, 279; disci-
pline, 64, 66-7, 134-6, 138-9, 143 andn. ;
membership, 63, 137n., 139 and n.,
140; org., funds, 65 and n., 137-9,
372; see Gaullists (divisions; in Pan.;
and govt.; outlook; policy; and
others)
RS, see Social Republicans
Rabat (Morocco), 52, 144, 354
Radical Party, Ch. 9; and
history, 8-9, 17-18, 19, 20-2, 36-41, 62,
63, 72, 102, 115-19, 148, 185, 186,
187, 364
composition, 68-9, 115, 122-3, 127
clientele, 5, 28, 69, 85, 94-5, 115, 123,
124,322,380,381
discipline, 64, 67, 115, 121, 124, 129,
131 404
divisions, 52, 116-17, 118, 120-1, 123-
30, 173, 177-8, 202, 290, 325, 372,
401-2, 407, 420, 433 •
membership, 63, 119-20, 122, 127 and
n., 130, 131
militants, 67-8, 366
org., 63, 65n., 68, 119-22, 126, 127 and
n., 129, 178, 381n.
funds, 65, 119n.
in Parl., 11, 17, 24, 31-2, 32-5, 41, 63,
128-9, 130-1, 173, 216, 253 and n.,
286, 287 and n. ; see Senate
and govt., 24, 39, 46, 49, 51, 70, 116-17,
118-19, 122 and n., 124 and n., 125,
127-31, 340, 347, 417
outlook, 95, 131, 311, 412, 438
and policy, see Algeria ; Colonial ; Const. ;
Econ.; Electoral; Foreign
proconsular, 124, 142
tactics, 116-17, 118-19, 120-1, 124, 126,
129-30
and Church, q.v.; and press, 61, 392
and q.v.
and all parties, 25, 28, 29, 30, 31, 124,
317, 319, 437
and Com., Soc., MRP, <?.v.; Cons., 40,
89, 105, 118, 122, 124, 125n., 126,
154-5, 156, 158, 277, 290, 307; and
GaulL, 118 andn., 121, 124, 129, 278,
416; and Pouj., 167n., 168nn.; and
small parties, 176-8, 180, 399n., see
UDSR
Radicals: individual, 47, 51, 69, 142, 144,
239, 289, 322, 323, 325 and n., 330
and n., 331, 342, 347, 351, 354, 363,
371n., 372, 378, 408, 419, 429 and n.,
430, 433 ; Left—, 124 and n., 171 ; ex-,
55, 63, 158, 165n., 171 and n., 172n.,
178, 325, 327, 430; Radicalism, uni-
versal, 86, 90, 94-5, 98, 99, 122n.,
162, 197
Raffarin, Jean (b. '14, Peas. d. Vienne
'51-5), 372n.
Railways, -men, 27, 41, 68, 109, 232n.,
249, 254, 271, 272, 323, 342, 343 and
n., 362, 370n., 374n., 383, 438, 447
Ralliement,!, 159
Ramadier, Paul (1888-1961, MP '28, Soc.
and Rep. Soc., Soc. d. Aveyron
'45-51, '56-8, cand. Lot '52): as PM,
24, 27, 32, 35n., 204n., 226, 231, 232,
238, 390; other, 98, 227n., 236n., 254,
299n., 313, 329, 333, 342, 351 and n
379, 430, A; and all parties 231;
Com., 24, 200, 226; Soc., 24, 98, 101,
403, 405, 408n.; MRP, 399, 402;
Ram?d1ergo4vt2(Jan.-Nov. W ), 24 206n
226, 253, 390, 392 and n., 403, A; fall,
09 Qf\ 238
Ramarony,'Mes (Cons. d. '45-55) 223n.
. ,
rapporteur-general of Finance C'tee, 220,
245n., 251, 253, 254, 414
t* Le, 144
540
INDEX
Rassemblement . , ., see initial R . . .;
— Paysan, 153n., 166n.
Rastel, Georges, 209n.
Reale, E., 74nn., 79n.
Rearmament: French, 72; German, q.v.
Reconciliation franc, aise, 111
Reconstruction: group in CFTC, 114;
C'tee (NA), 247 and n., 249, 264n.,
273 n.
'Rectification' (parl.), 267, 268n.
R6cy, Antoine de (b. '13, Gaull. d. Pas-de-
C. 2 '46N-51), 209n.
Red: Army, 84n.; 'Belt', see Paris suburbs
Referendum: in const., 208, 209nn.,
225n., 281, 302 and n.; fear of, 192
and n., 257n., 283 and n., 302 and n.,
304nn., 452; of 1945-6, 20-3, 31, 104,
117, 118, 133-4, 190, 191, 196, 226,
277-8, 292, 293, 388, 389, 502; of
1958, 56-7 and n., 177n., 194, 327n.,
425, 502; of 1962, 192n.
Reforme de VEtat, 161
Regime d'assemblee, see Convention gov-
ernment
Regionalism, 5, 6, 14, 15, 60, 330, 333, 366,
376; and parties, 48, 69, 79, 90, 94 and
n., 110, 115, 123, 124, 139, 153, 155,
166-8, 307-8, 317, 450 and n.
Regions of France:
C, 79, 168n., 365
E., ME., 5, 48, 78, 79n., 104, 105, 109-10,
113, 123, 130n., 155 and n., 167 and
n., 357
N. of Loire, 123, 124, 130n., 140, 150
and n., 167n., 168, 317, 364, 386
S. of Loire, 19, 48, 79, 103, 110 and n.,
123, 124 and n., 140, 150n., 155, 162,
163, 167, 168n., 314n., 358, 366, 386;
see Midi
SW., 90, 119, 123, 129 and n., 130n.
W. and NW., 69, 78, 104, 105, 110 and
n., 113, 124n., 140, 153 and n., 155
and n., 167-8, 307-8, 314, 317, 318,
366, 376n., 382; coast, 140
industrial, 5, 79-80, 90, 94n., 123 and
n., 124n., 130n., 135n., 140, 150 and
n., 153n., 155, 248, 309n., 313, 445,
450n.
modern and backward, 14, 28, 150 and
n., 155, 167 and n., 168, 400n., 445,
447, 450 and n.
seaboard, 248, 330
town v. country, 3, 5, 12, 26, 47, 156,
252, 276, 279-80 and n., 288, 309, 323,
326 and n., 329, 331 and n., 357,
363 and n.
R6mond, Ren6, cit. nn. 114, 159, 161, 344,
366, 381-2
Remy, Col. (Gilbert Renault), 141-2 andn.
Renaud, Jean (1877-1961, Com. d. '24-
40), 326, 327n.
Renaudel, Pierre (1871-1935, MP '14,
Soc., Neo-, Rep. Soc.), 89
Renault strike, 24
Rennes, 90
Republic, 8, 18, 145, 148, 156 and n., 159
161, 168, 169, 365; Council of the',
— Second, 192, 195, 225
— Third:
historical, 7, 11-12, 17-20, 88, 175
184-8, 195, 277, 422
const, and parl., 192, 195, 204 and n.
222, 229 and n., 255, 261, 264, 268n.,
280, 288, 307, 396, 41 8n., 449, 450
admin., 337, 341
opinion in, 5, 9-10, 60, 66, 79, 115, 148,
184, 447
opinion on, 20, 161n., 190, 308, 362
excluded groups, 13-15, 89, 103, 364
collapse, 275, 302
revival, 35, 193, 194, 229, 270, 288, 322,
363, 397, 408
see below
— Fourth (named):
govt., 24, 27, 415, 426, 442, 443
issues, 362, 365, 436n., 448
parl. and admin., 261, 278n., 301, 345,
350, 387, 395, 444, 448
parties in, 24, 56, 75n., 97, 123, 125,
157, 354, 448
pressure-groups, 354, 359, 362, 363,
369,371,448
unpopularity, enemies, 25, 38, 54 and n.,
56-7, 145, 397, 439
collapse, 44, 52-7, 106, 108, 146, 194,
21 1,235 andn., 275, 351
— Third and Fourth compared, 25, 31, 35,
125, 131, 145, 157, 159, 261, 279, 338,
339, 340, 350, 354, 364, 365, 367, 437,
440, 441, 451
— Fifth:
acceptance of, 56-7, 75, 91, 173-4, 176,
177n., 194, 425
admin., 336n., 337, 348, 351
const, and Parl., 179, 181, 192 and nn.,
213n., 216, 219n., 235, 240, 242n.,
245n., 255, 261, 269 and n., 278, 301n.,
374n.
govt. and policies of, 146, 158 and n.,
289, 292n., 349, 355, 358n., 364,
442-3
enemies of, 161-2, 201n., 289, 301, 348,
349, 351, 401, 447
groups, parties, opinion, 75, 124, 132n.
173n., 177, 365, 385, 452-3
press and radio, 62, 177n., 392n., 440
Republicans: populaires inde'pendants, 138n
— sociaitx, see Social Republicans
Republican:
Centre, 130 and n., 429n.
— Federation, see Federation . . .
— Front, 45, 47, 49 and n., 105, 113, 136,
217, 316, 319, 323, 335, 422, 508
— Independents, 20n., 35n., 149-50 and
n., 153, 154, 243n., 254nn.; see
CNIP, Conservatives
— Socialists, 70, 170, 177 and n., 408n,
INDEX
541
Republicans: in 3 Rep., 8, 185, 276; in
U.S., 425
Republique des Camamdes, 81; see Par!.,
members of
Resignations: individual, 37, 41, 49, 51n.,
356, 394, 411, 434, 443n.; insubordin-
ate, 349; involuntary, 406 and n.;
unacceptable, 201, 23 In., 238 and n.,
239; in extremis (1958), 56, 202, 226n.5
239, 304n.
Resistance: pre-war, 18, 72; composition,
orgs., 13, 18, 19, 54, 89, 97, 104, 365;
generation, 13, 97 and n., 402, 436;
ideals, contacts, 22, 42, 81n., 113, 435;
impact on France, 13, 14, 17, 18, 19,
22, 269, 270, 386, 393, 444, 446, 447-8;
and parties, 19, 62, 63, 97, 174, 322;
Corns., 73 and n., 75, 175; Soc., 89,
97; MRP, 97, 104, 437; GaulL, 54,
145, 447; Cons., 154, 156, 177; Pouj.,
168; also 55, 61, 133, 162, 296, 447-8,
449; ex-Resisters, 19, 54, 97 and n.,
132, 141, 142, 154, 158, 334, 391
Reunion (dept.), 209n., 294n., 504, 507
Revisionists, -ism: of const, 193, 302, 306;
in Com. P., 86; in Soc. P., 89, 90,
96 and n., 174, 394 and n., 436, 439
Revolution: of 1789, 4, 7, 8, 79, 88, 115,
124, 125, 141n., 168, 189, 242, 292,
301, 353; of 1917, 88
Reynaud, Paul (b. '78, MP '19, PM '40,
RI d. Nord 1 '46J-62, chairman
finance c'tee '51-3, '54-62): as finance
m. '48, 34, 35 and n., 36 and n., 134n.,
233 and n., 253, 270, 271, 399; cand.
PM '53, 40, 105, 234, 385 and n.,
419, A; also 36, 50n., 149, 152, 157-8
and nn., 210n. (elig. '46), 241, 253, 254
andnn., 263, 267 andn., 270, 385 andn.,
411, 413, 433, 436, 441, A; and Soc.,
405; MRP, 399, 402; GaulL, 402
—law, Aug. '48, 270-1, 272, 281, 286,
297n., 306 and n.
Rhin, Bas- (cap. Strasbourg), 109, 210,
388, 506; Haut- (cap. Colmar), 323,
324n., 401n.
Rhineland, 12
Ribeyre, Paul (b. '06, Peas, and Cons. d.
Ardeche '45-58, s. '59- ), 406n.
Ridgway, Gen., 74
Ridley, F., 223n.
Rieber, A. J., cit. nn. 19, 73-4, 82, 391-2,
401
Right: Ch. 11; see Left and Right; also
character, 7-8, 145, 322, 324, 326
in 3 Rep., 18, 115,148-9, 170,196
in 4 Rep., 19, 20, 47, 50, 51, 52, 54-5,
62, 69, 110, 156-7, 160, 271, 274, 288,
319, 331,342,372,373
also 17, 25, 28, 184, 214, 216, 227, 246,
375, 416, 434
Extreme — , Ch. 12, pp. 47 and n., 54 and
n., 98, 153-4, 224, 365, 435, 437; see
Left and Right (extremes)
Rimbert, P., cit. nn. 93-6
Riots, demonstrations: Algiers, 45, 49, 50,
54, 55, 167, 349, 422, 438; Paris, 49,
52, 56, 72, 154, 162 and n., 167, 211;
provinces, 36, 135, 361, 379, 393, 438;
see Violence
Rioux, L., cit. nn. 19, 34, 41, 84-5, 94,
96-7,114,137
Rivarol, 62, 160
Riviera, 363n.
Road hauliers, 356, 370-1, 374n., 375 and
n., 376n., 379; see Motorists
Robespierre, Maximilien (1758-94), 162
Robinson, K. E., cit. nn. 50, 293-5
Roche, fimile (b. '93, Rad. leader in
Nord '32- , Pres. Econ. Council
'54- ), 122n., 201n., 297n.
Rochet, see Waldeck
Rome, 161, 215n., 367, 382, 435
Roncayolo, see Olivesi
Roosevelt, Pres. F. D., 192; Pres. T. E., 146
Rose, S., cit. nn. 323, 334, 370
Ross, A. M., 360n.
Rossi, A., cit. nn. 18, 19, 70-1, 74, 82, 327
Rouen, 506
'Round Tables', 51, 216, 250 and n.,
411-12, 450
Roure, R6my, 312n., 375n.
Rousseau, Jean- Jacques, 6
Royalists, -ism, 7, 148, 151, 159, 161n.,
170, 179 and n., 185, 192, 195, 215,
396
Royer, J. M., cit. nn. 123, 150, 161, 164,
166, 357-8, 363, 365, 367, 370-2, 381
Russia, see USSR
SCC (Stances de la Commission de la
Constitution, of the Constituent
Assemblies), cit. nn. 270, 299-300,
305, 388
SDECE, 205n., 348 and n.
SEATO, 225n.
SFIO, see Socialist Party
Saar, 47 and n.
Sahara, 101, 181, 295n., 354; M. for, 205
St. C6r6 (Lot), 162, 163n., 164, 165
St. Die (Vosges), 367 and n.
St. fitienne, 153n.
St. Maur (Seine), 139
St. Nazaire, 69
St. Pierre et Miquelon, 294n.
St. Simonians, 14 and n.
Sait, E. M., 277n.
Sakiet (Tunisia), 54, 344
Salan, Gen. Raoul (b. '99, C.-in-C. Far
East '48, Algeria '56-8, led OAS), 51,
Sangnier, Marc (1873-1951, founded
Sillon '94, MP '19-24, MRP d. Seine
3 '45-51), 103 and n.
Santa Claus, 122n.
Saone, Haute- (cap. Vesoul), 150, 179*.
Sarraut, Albert (1872-1962, MP '02, PM
•'33, '36, Pres, AFU '51-8), 122n., 295
542
INDEX
Sarthe (cap. Le Mans), 178n.
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 75
Saumur (Maine-et-Loire), 166n.
Sauvageot. A., cit. nn. 217, 222, 226, 416
Sauvy, A., 384n.
Savary, Alain (b. '18, Soc. d. St. Pierre-et-
Miquelon '51-8, later PSU), 50n.,
174, 434, 436
Savoie (cap. Chamb6ry), 167n.; Haute-
(cap. Annecy), 332
Sawyer, J. E., 4n., 361n.
Scandals: generals, piastres, wine, 65 and
a, 89, 145, 223n., 299, 339, 348;
leakages, 46, 49 and n., 52 and n.,
159a, 161 and n., 339n., 341, 348,
350, 351a; other, 17, 334n., 351n.,
369, 431
Scandinavia, 96
Schmittlein, Raymond (b. '04, Gaull. d.
Belfort '51-5, '58- , ex-pres. UNR
group), 143n. A
Schneiter, Pierre (b. '05, MRP d. Marne
'45-58, Pres. NA '55), 217, 239 and
n., 433
Schoenbrun, D., cit. nn. 251, 355, 371, 384
Schram, S., cit. nn. 68, 79, 97, 143
Schuman, Robert (1886-1953, MP '19,
chairman finance c'tee '45-6, MRP d.
Moselle '45-62): as PM, 34, 227, 232,
233n., 410; as Foreign M., 40, 44,
198n., 346, 349 and n., 362, 405, 418,
425, 435; other, 23, 35a, 39, 46, 105,
251n., 420, 430, A, 509n.; and all
parties, 254 and n.; Soc., Rad., 238n.,
250-1; Rad., Cons., 39; UDSR, 175a,
397
1st Schuman govt, Nov. '47-JuTy '48,
27, 29, 204n., 225, 238 and n., 254,
410, A
2nd Schuman govt., 5-7 Sep. '48, 27, 35,
175a, 205n., 239n., 271, 415, 419, 427,
432
Schuman Plan, see European Coal and
Steel Authority
Schumann, Maurice (b. '11, Free French
broadcaster, Pres. MRP to '49, d.
Nord 2 '45- , chairman foreign affs.
c'tee '58- ), 112, 433
Scots, 407
Scrutin . . ., see Elec. systems; Parliament
(voting)
Scuttle, govt. of, 54, 55, 350
Search . . ., 394n.; see Change on p. 466
Secretaires d'etat, see Ministers of State;
sous-, see Ministers, junior
Secrets, see Intelligence; Scandals
Segelle, Pierre (1899-1960, Soc. d. Loiret
'45-58), 403n., A
Seine (constituency 1, Paris S. ; 2, NW.;
3, NE. ; 4, banlieue S. ; 5, NW. ; 6, NE.),
92n., 93 and n., 99, 152n,, 279n., 280,
309n., 323, 327, 357n., 504
Seine-et-Marne (cap. Melun), 323
Seine-et-Oise (constituency 1, Mantes and
N.; 2, Versailles and S.), 152n., 178n
357n., 504
Seine-Infdrieure (now -Maritime; con-
stituency 1, Rouen and SE.; 2, Le
Havre and NW.), 210, 323, 503
Seligson, H., 297n.
Senate: of 3 Rep., 8, 9, 20, 36, 185, 186-7,
195, 202, 236, 242, 276-8, 279, 280,
281, 285, 298, 308, 363, 387; Pres. of,
217 and n.; Rads. and, 17, 115, 116,
121, 185, 187, 214, 276-8, 287n., 308
— in 4 Rep., 324; of 5 Rep., 176n.
Senators, in 4 Rep., 121, 202 and n,, 214,
280-1, 286n., 287 and n., 289-90,
303-4, 311n., 323; bills of, 261,
281-2, 283, 285 and n.; see Council of
Rep. ; Parliament (members)
— U.S., 331
Senegal, -ese, 92n., 18 In.
S6rant, P., 158n., 160n.
S6rigny, Alain de (b. '12, ed. Echo d'Alger,
settlers' leader, cand. s. '59), 355 andn.
Serre, Charles (1901-53, d. Oran '46-51,
on Com. list Dordogne '51), 398n.
Servin, Marcel (b. '18, Com. d. H-Saone
'46N-51), 75n., 78n., 401
S6tif (Algeria), 82n.
Settlers, see N. Africa
Seurin, J. L., cit. nn. 339-41
'Shadow cabinet', 49n., 377n.
Sharecroppers, 79, 359
Sharp, W. R., cit. nn. 15, 276-7, 280, 301
Shopkeepers, 68 and n., 82-3, 86, 162-3,
166-7 andnn., 316n., 324, 332, 361, 379,
380, 381, 382, 384, 446, see PME
— and Artisans Defence Union, see UDCA
Shoup, C. S., 26n.
Siam, 41,294
Siege, state of, 303, 480
Siegfried, Andre" (1875-1959), 305; cit. on
French poL generally, nn. 3-4, 6-7,
12, 141, 207, 307, 426, 429, 447; on
Centre, pp. 117, 127, nn. 26, 109, 112,
120, 126, 185, 308; on Left, nn. 10,
79, 99, 126-7, 156; on Right, pp. 154,
156, 157, nn. 26, 156, 159, 163, 168-9,
192; on institutions, nn. 195-200, 250,
301, 313, 340, 379, 389, 401
Sieghart, M., 270n.
Sillon, Le, 103
Simon, J., 85n.
Simonnet, Maurice Ren6 (b. '19, MRP d.
Drome '46J-N, '47-62, sec.-g. MRP
'55-62), 107
Single-chamber government, 23
Sliding scale, see Wages
Snow-ploughs, 417
Social Republicans (RS: Gaullists), 40,
48 and n., 70, 136-7, 139 and n., 140,
143n., 145, 254n., 323, 412
Social security, 15n., 223n., 260, 305, 392,
394; elections, 83 and n., 84, 105n.,
166, 360; org., 27, 35, 39, 86, 271, 339,
343, 361-2, 391 and n., 392
INDEX
543
Socialisms ou Barbarie, 85n.
Socialist Party, SFIO, Ch. 7, and
history, 17-18, 19, 20-2 and n., 32-5,
36-41, 47-9, 62, 71, 72, 88-91, 187,
431
composition, 68-9, 94-6, 101, 404
clientele, 5, 15, 28, 50, 69, 85, 92-5, 96,
97, lOOn., 323, 375n.
discipline, 46, 56, 64, 67-8, 91, 93, 99,
100 and n., 288n., 290, 311, 328,
374n., 375n., 388
divisions, 88-90, 91, 92 and n., 93, 97n.,
100, 173-4, 250, 290, 31 In., 326, 367,
372, 377, 399, 400
membership, 63, 92, 93-4, 96, 99
militants, 67-8, 88, 90, 91, 93, 95, 97,
100 and n., 318, 366, 388 and n.
org., 64-6, 90, 91-3 and mi., 100, 107
and n., 290, 403 and n.
funds, 65 and n., 91-2, 371n.
in par!., 31-5, 41, 51, 63, 97-8, 212, 243,
245 and n., 248, 253, 265, 284-5,
410, 425
and govt., 24, 32-5, 37-8, 39, 46, 51, 55,
70, 88-90, 91, 98-9, 105, 226, 228,
Ch. 27, 397, 403-4, 405, 406, 412-13,
417
and regime, 88, 90, 96 and n., 98, 100-2,
179
outlook, doctrine, 88, 90, 96-8, 100-1,
110
tactics, 23, 51, 90, 97-8, 99, 100, 421
policy, see Algeria; Colonial; Const.;
Econ. ; Electoral ; Foreign
and civil liberties, 50, 61, 100
and civil service, 37, 68, 95 and nn.,
99, 264-5, 338, 339n., 340-1 and n.,
342, 343n., 347, 373, 391
and scandals, patronage, 99 and n.,
339n., and q.v.
and Church, press, trade unions, g.v.
and all parties, 24, 25, 28, 29, 30, 228,
317, 319, 397, 449; and Com., q.v.
and MRP, 37-8, 89, 90, 97 and n., 98,
103, 105, 106, 107 and nn., Ill, 113,
248n., 313, 362, 363, 366, 402, 420
and Rad., 88, 94-5, 97, 98, 111, 115-17,
118-19 and n., 122, 124, 125, 126,
128 and n., 277, 288, 290, 307, 310,
400, 403, 405, 417
and Gaull., 98, 134-5, 139, 143-4,
313-14, 323
and Cons., 89, 150, 154, 158, 228, 235,
308,311,363,427,440
and Pouj., 163, 167n., 168n.
and small parties, 174, 175, 179, 180
Socialists: individual, 47, 49, 69, 105, 165,
198, 223n., 237, 247, 250, 289, 299,
326 and n., 327, 328, 330, 331 333,
342, 347-8, 350n., 351, 367 and n.,
408, 414, 419, 430; ex-, 91, 100-1, 129,
160, 165n., 171, 172 and n., 173-4,
177, 178, 180, 325n.
Solal-Ceiigny, J., cit nn. 230-5, 239, 274
Somaliland, French, 294n.
Somme (cap. Amiens), lOOn., 155n., 166n.,
167nn., 325 and n., 327 and n.
Sondages, see Polls
Sonants, 48, 164, 166, 313, 324-5 and n.,
327n.
Soubeyrol, J., cit. nn. 217-19, 260, 269-
75, 297, 305, 338
Soudan, -ese, 181n., 289
Soudee, 2
Soulier, A., cit. nn, 120, 185, 200, 204,
207, 224-6, 229-30, 237-8, 244, 255,
270, 306-8, 398, 418
Soustelle, Jacques (b. *12, Gaull. d,
Mayenne '45-6J, Rhone 1 '51-9, in.
in 5 Rep., later E. Right leader, in
exile), and N. Africa, 46, 49, 130,
350n., 377, 408, 432; as Gaull.
leader, 54, 55, 56, 74, 121, 137, 139n.,
143 and n., 144, 146, 174, 316, 416,
430, 436, 509n.
Soviet Union, see USSR
Spain, 18, 104, 131 and n., 328n., 410n.
Speaker, 9, 216, 217, 218, 258
Special . . ., see Majority
Special powers: 257 and n., 266, 269-75,
344, 377-8; and const, 191, 270,
305n., 338; to 1940, 11-12, 18-20,
191, 269-70, 275; Reynaud's, 35, 233,
270-1, 281, 286, 297n., 306, 338;
1949-52, 267, 271, 272, 343; Mayer's,
27, 267, 271-2, 343-4, 380; Laniel's,
267, 272 and n., 273n., 274, 347, 356,
364, 380, 383, 426; Mendes-France's,
46, 105, 272; 1956-7, 75, 259n., 273 and
n., 281, 288-9, 400n.; after 1958, 56,
162, 275n., 358 n.
Special treasury accounts, 265 and n., 266,
343 and n,
Spinoza, B., 7
Spoils system, see Patronage
'Stalemate society', 4n., 11, 13, 16
Stalin, J. V., 72, 74, 75, 326; -ism, 82
State employees, see Public employees
States-general, 257n.
Statistiques . . ., 26n., 28n.
Statut des Partis, 387-8
Steel industry, 362, 379, 384, 429
Stibio, A., 432n.
Stoetzel, J., cit. nn. 68, 122, 125
Strasbourg, 24, 105, 129, 153n., 329, 330
Strikes: improbable, 358, 361, 376, 382;
pol. or econ., 72, 74 and n., 84, 360,
380, 381-2; right to, 116, 292 and n.,
337 338n. ; 1947-8, 24, 27, 32 34 36, 37,
74n., 84, 134, 171, 200, 218, 286,
347, 359; 1949-52, 74, 84, 380; 1953,
40-1, 84, 105, 163, 213n., 345, 382,
383; 1955,84, 85n., 94n 164
Students, 12, 78n., 95n., 11 .,160, 249,
337, 338, 342, 381, 382, 385
Sturmthal, A., 391n.
Substitutes (in c'tee), 244n., 252, 299
Suel, M., 198n., 204n.
544
INDEX
Suez, 49, 52, 67, 91n., 93n., 100, 128 and
n., 159n., 165, 172, 214n., 234, 341,
345n.
Suffert, G., cit nn. 108, 110, 113-14, 155,
158, 172-3
'Superman', 46
Suretd National?, 348
Syndicalism, 88, 116, 359, 396
'System', the, 20, 48, 79, 98, 128, 165, 166,
193, 366, 367, 425, 432, 435, 438, 440,
442, 443, 450, 451; compromises
with, 255, 333-4, 408, 426, 431, 436,
440; de Gaulle, Gaullists on, 16, 64,
65, 134, 136, 145, 201, 278, 315,
398-9, 406, 430, 436; other revolts
against, 44-57, 64, 113, 331, 332, 439,
447; see Coalition politics; Party
system
Systemes electoraux, 307n.
Tammany Hall, 126
Tanguy-Prigent, Francois (b. '09, MP '36,
Soc. d. Finistere '45-58, PSU d.
'62- ), 364
Tannenbaum, E. R., cit. nn. 4, 6, 12-13,
Tardieu, Andre (1876-1945, MP '14,
Cons. PM '29), 187, 229n., 261n.
Tarn (cap. Albi), 160n.s 313, 323n.
Tavernier, Y., 365n.
Tax: strike, 382; system, 35, 163 and n.,
167, 271, 344n., 362, 363 and n., 378,
384, 438; see Budget (as pol. prob-
lem)
Taxpayers' Defence, 179, 361, 507
Teachers, 12, 68, 95, 98, 232n., 247, 332,
336, 366, 367, 446
Technocracy, 13-14, 28, 140, 337, 343,
345-6, 353, 380
Teitgen, Henri (b. '82, MRP d. Gironde
'45-51, cand. Doubs '56), 247n.,
375n.; — Paul (son), 51n., 350
— Pierre Henri (son, brother; b. '08,
MRP d. Ille-et-V. '45-58, Pres. MRP
'52-6), 105, 239n., 247n., 312n., 434,
439n., A
Te'moignage Chretien, 61
Temps, Le, 61, 277
Temps Modernes, 62, 17 In.
Tenants, see Housing; — League, 82 and n.
358, 370n., 376
Terrenoire, Louis (b. '08, MRP and GauUL
d. Orne '45-51, '58-60, '62- , sec.-g.
RPF '51, UNR '62, m. '60-2), 137
T$te de liste, 323, 324 and n., 330, 388; see
Elec. systems (list voting)
Textiles, 167 and n., 362, 371 and n., 384
Thebault, Henri (b. '21, Cons. d. Cha-
rente '56-8), 262 and n.
Theolleyre, J. M., 46n.
Thery, J., cit. nn. 188, 191-2, 195-9, 203-4,
222, 225-6, 230, 236, 264, 389, 393
Thibaudet, A., cit. 14, 103, 125, 352 and
nn. 3, 98, 115-16, 119-20, 122, 161
TTiiers, Adolphe (1797-1877, PM *36 '40
'71), 159, 195 ' '
Third Force, 28, 29, 32-4, 120, 149, 171
175, 177, 178, 179, 200, 267n., 283*
286, 335, 366, 437 ; see Centre
Thomas, Abel, 339
Thomas, M., cit. nn. 164, 330, 334, 372
Thomson, D., 7n., 8n.
Thorez, Maurice (b. '00, sec.-g. Com P
'30- , MP '32, d. Seine 4 '45-* )'
cand. PM, 24, 394, 400, 401, A; in
party, 71 and n., 74nn., 75n., 78
85n., 86, 87, 324n., 505, 509n.; other
19, 49, 84n., 210n., 243, 327n., 391-2J
A
Tillion, G., 85n., 452n.
Tillon, Charles (b. '97, MP '36, Com. d
Seine 6 '45-55), 75, 391 and nn., A
Times, London, 21 In., 26 In.
Tinguy du Pouet, Lionel de (b. '11, MRP
d. Vendee '46J-58, '62- ), 263n.,
343n., A
Tito, President, 172n.
Tixier-Vignancour, Me Jean Louis (b. '07,
MP '36, head of Vichy radio '40-2, E
Right d. B-Pyr<§n6es '56-8), 130n.,-
161 and nn., 162, 168, 210n., 240,
348, 429, 507
Tobacco, 375
Tocqueville, A. de, 453n.
Togliatti, P., 86
Togo, 294n., 295 and n.
Tonkin, 112
Torres, Henry (b. '91, ex-Corn., MP '36,
Gaull. s. Seine '48-58), 143n.
Touchard, J., cit. nn. 163-4, 166n., 168-9,
355 ; see Bodin
Toulouse, 60, 69, 120, 121n., 123, 280n.,
401
Touraine, A., 113n.
Tournoux, J. R., cit. nn. 203, 239, 411
Tours, 71, 88, 93
Trade unions, 15, 19, 34, 96-7, 359-60,
368, 381-2, 446; and govt, 275n., 296
and n., 297-8, 345; as pressure-
group, 35, 36, 343, 363, 392, 423 and
n.; and Com., 24, 73, 82, 83-4, 96-7,
359-60, 386, 391, 394; and Soc., 15,
31-2, 34, 88, 96-7, 99n., 359-60, 380;
and MRP, 28, 360, 380; and Rad.,
116, 126; and Gaull., 137, 360
American, 34n.
British and French, 92, 96
see CFTC; CGC; CGSI; CGT; Force
ouvriere
Transport, M., 205n., 342, 379
Travail cit. nn. 214, 219-20, 223-4, 242-5,
251, 255, 257-60, 262, 264, 267,
269-74,282,298
Treaties, ratifying, 46, 51, 208, 213, 224-5
and n., 243n., 259nn., 281, 283, 284n.,
295, 362
Triboulet, Raymond (b. '06, Gaull. d.
Calvados '46N-59 and '62, ex-pres.
INDEX
545
UNR group, m. in 5 Rep.), 230n.;
cit. nn. 202, 259, 289
Tripartisme, 22, 31, 32, 133-4, 205, 207,
230, 277, 282, 287; opponents, 24,
142, 150, 175, 297, 317, 322, 336, 340,
341, 386-7, 390-5, 396, 397, 398, 431,
449, 465
Trotskyists, 95, 171 andn., 324n.
Trusts, see Cartels
Tsar, the, 435
Tunis, 40, 50 and n., 52; Bey of, 199
Tunisia: status of, 180n., 225, 293-4, 295;
M. for, 50n., 205, 354; French in
(parl. rep.), 209n., 279 and n., 289;
French views and policy, 39, 45, 46,
47, 52, 54, 105, 112, 158, 199, 221n.,
240, 349, 354, 420, 425, 426, 431, 441,
448; other, 34n., 54
Twenty-one conditions, 71
UDCA, 63, 163, 164n., 166-7 and n., 381
UDI, 150n.
UDMA, 180
UDSR, 174-6; nature of, 37, 63, 170, 180,
214-15, 322, 398, 410, 436, 438;
other, 48, 67, 70, 97, 171n., 254n., 392
and n., 397, 399n., 406, 414, 506, 507;
and Rads., 118, 122 and n., 130, 170,
171, 174 and n., 175 and n., 177 and
n., 178, 328; and other parties, q.v.;
individuals, 209n., 243n., 323n., 430
UDT, 173n.
UFD, 129, 174
UFF, 63, 164, 165n,, 166-7 and nn.
UGS, 172-3, 174
UNIR, 160 andn., 507
UNR, 143n., 146, 158n., 162
USSR, and French Corns., 18, 71, 73, 83,
84n., 86, 87; other, 73, 134, 144, 218,
447; see Moscow
Ulam, see Beer
Union . . ., see initial U ; — des Republicans
cT Action Sociale, 136, see Social Re-
publicans; — Gaulliste, 132, 133, 173,
174; — Progressiste, 171; — des Re-
pub licains et Resistants, 171n., see
Progressives
United Nations, 190n., 294n.
United States of America, French atti-
tudes to, 54, 74, 143, 144, 193, 198,
409, 447, 510; other, 27n., 198, 224n.,
348, 360n.
— and France compared: admin, and
courts, 273n., 301, 338, 342n., 464;
const., regime, 189, 192, 193, 381,
413, 425-6, 427, 440; elections, par-
ties, 146-7, 169, 307, 314, 418, 431;
parl., 216, 218, 219, 243 and n., 245,
256, 331, 333, 371, 409, 428, 432, 450;
soc. and pol. issues, 3n., 16, 28, 162,
364, 445
University /', 12, 336, 337, 382, 445-6,
453 ; see Teachers
Uomo Qualunque, 169n.
Urgency procedure, see Parliament
— state of, 273n., see Siege
Vallon, Louis (b. '01, Gaull. d. Seine 4
'51-5, Seine-et-O. '62- , rapp.-g.
'62- ), 133n., 140n., 143n., 144
Valmy, 168
Van Dyke, V., 84n.
Vatican, 103n., 114, 161,251
Vaucluse (cap. Avignon), 167n., 322
Vaugelas, C. de, 378n.
Vedel, G., 193, 281n., 374n.
Vendee (cap. La Roche-sur-Yon), 6, 153n.,
167n.; Tittle—', 167n.
Verdier, Robert (b. '10, ass. sec. Soc. P.
'44-6, d. '46J-N, d. Seine 1 '51-8,
later PSU), 400n.
Vermeersch, Jeannette (Mme Thorez, b.
'10, Com. d. Seine 2 '45-58, s. '59- ),
219n.
Versailles, 41, 201, 208, 294, 295, 302
Viatte, Charles (MRP d. '45-58), 230n.
Vichy, -ites: town, 323; regime, 3n., 8, 18,
72, 140, 159, 160, 346; lasting conse-
quences of, 13, 14 and n,, 15, 253n.,
347, 356-7, 360, 364, 365, 369; sup-
porters, 18, 149, 156, 161nn.; indi-
vidual, 7, 65, 153, 161nn., 162, 224,
323n.; ex-, 62, 104, llln., 137n., 141,
154, 157, 158, 160-1, 162, 177, 298
and n., 359, 372, 393, 433, 448, 506;
also 19, 73, 89, 197
Vienne (cap. Poitiers), 109n., 178n., 330n.,
334n.; Haute- (cap. Limoges), 79n.,
90
Vienot, Mme (Soc. d. '46J-47, later PSU),
329n.
Vietminh, 294
Vietnam, -ese, 41, 199, 209n., 279n., 293-4
Vincennes, 331
Vineyards, see Wine
Violence, pol.: assassination, 47, 51-2,
88, 348n., 350 and n., 355 n.; elec-
toral, 48, 164 and n., 167, 168, 371n.;
insurrection, 55-6, 161-2, 180, 191
and n., 202, 211, 217, 239, 302n., 333,
340n., 425, 438n., 448; strikes, 32, 36,
359; other, 18-19, 47, 50, 51-2, 239,
288-9, 327, 448; see Direct action;
Plots; Purges; Riots
Virements, 266, 268n., 273n.
Void pourquoi, 54
Vole Communiste, La, 82n., 85n.
Vosges (cap. fipinal), 172 and n., 316n.,
326n.
Vote sans debat, see Parliament
Wages, 248n., 249 and n., 296, 373; arbi-
tration, .collective bargaining, 37,
143, 249, 287, 297, 360 and n., 368, -
403; sliding scale for, 41, 233, 249
and n., 287; standard of, 13n., 26,
249; and parties, govts., 24, 27, 105,
135n., 394, 409, 442
546
INDEX
Wahl, Nicholas, cit. nn. 7, 12-13, 139,
146, 190, 339, 346, 433, 440
Waldeck Rochet (b. '05, Com. d. Saone-
et-Loire '45-58, Seine '58- , ass. sec.
Com. P.), 329
Waldeck-Rousseau, R. (1864-1904), 195
Waline, J., cit. nn. 214-16, 374, 398
Waline, M., cit. nn. 283, 292, 299, 329,
338, 340, 379, 389, 391, 393
Walter, G., cit. nn. 71, 76, 80, 93
Walter, J., 355
War, '14-18, 9, 18, 88, 116; '39-45, 12, 13,
18, 73, 386, see German occupation,
Resistance; — declaration of, 208, 281 ;
— M. of, 336
Warner, C. K., cit. nn. 355-6, 358, 369,
378, 382
Washington, D.C., 6, 19, 20, 46, 206, 342n.,
409, 425
Washington, Pres. G., 192
Waterloo, 132; par!., 285 and n.
Weber, E., cit. nn. 158, 160-1
Weill-Raynal, E. 276n., 306n.
Weiss, J. J. (1827-91), 195
Werth, A., cit. nn. 8, 34, 55-6, 79, 171,
270, 354, 357, 384, 429
Westminster, 6, 66, 187, 206, 256
White, T., 432n.
White, W. S., 427n.
Williams, P. M., cit. nn.: on elections, 38,
78, 97, 99, 123, 139, 164, 167, 237,
307, 316, 323-31, 357, 370, 424, 433,
439; on ParL, 210, 219-21, 223, 226,
229, 240, 243, 248-53, 259, 264, 266-7,
273, 276, 280, 282, 297, 299, 354, 363,
375, 410; on parties, 76, 90, 94-5, 103,
109, 128, 135, 137-8, 142, 151, 171,
174, 176, 331, 403-4; on regime, 188,
191, 193, 200-1, 236, 452; on 1958
and after, 55-6, 162, 191, 203, 290,
301; other, 46, 206, 300, 306, 338
343, 348, 351, 355, 363, 375, 417, 44<
Wilson, J. S. G., cit. nn. 14, 267, 343
Wine, -growers, vineyards, 69, 79, 166
171, 248, 330, 352, 355-6, 357, 35*
and n., 376 and n., 378n., 382
— scandal, 299, 339, 415
Wisner, S., 144n.
Wolfe, M., 26n.
Women in politics, 78, 95-6, 108, 109 and
n., Ill, 118, 133, 277n., 292, 307, 323,
330, 332 and n., 357, 358, 377
Workers, 3, 5, 10, 13, 14, 24, 28, 31, 32,
34n., 40, 68, 69-70, 80 and n., 83, 85
and n., 86, 95, 97n., 101, 104, 105n.,
108, 109 and n., Ill, 115, 123, 137,
139n., 140, 141n., 289, 292, 331, 332
and n., 359-60, 362, 382, 446, see
Trade unions, Wages
— , foreign, 34n.; white-collar, 68, 95 and
n., 96, 97n., 109 and n., 296n.
Wright, G., cit. nn. 19, 22, 26, 28, 46, 79,
104, 110, 132, 157-8, 168, 191, 197,
222, 255, 292-5, 305, 327, 364-5, 388,
390, 503
Wylie, L., cit. nn. 6, 77, 79, 109, 111, 139,
167-8, 329, 331, 334
Yiddish, 330
Yonne (cap. Auxerre), 179, 210n.
'Young Turks', 120, 121 and n., 125, 252-
3, 401-2, 410, 430
Youth, 12, 30, 77-8 and n., 85n., 95 and
nn., 103, 104, 108, 110, 111, 113, 122
and n., 140, 162, 164n., 365, 370, 385,
445-6, see Generations, Students
— , M. of, 205
Zhdanov, A. A., 74
Zoo, see Fauna and flora