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Democratic Stability and Instability: The French Case

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

Eric A. Nordlinger
Eric A. Nordlinger
Affiliation:
Brandeis University
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Extract

The outstanding characteristic of the French political system is its historical instability. Constitutional monarchy was overthrown by a revolution, replaced by a republic, which in turn quickly evolved into a dictatorship, and when it too was dismissed by an armed uprising, the interminable squabbles among the monarchist factions allowed another republic to come into existence by default. But for an “accident” of history this republic too would have given way to a dictatorship through the bloodless medium of the coup d'état, but while the republic tottered on in the interwar period the life-span of its governments was calculated in terms of months rather than years, and with its “collapse” under the coup de grâce of military defeat a new dictatorship immediately sprang up to take its place, to be succeeded by another republic lasting for thirteen years amid constantly recurring cabinet crises, then falling in the wake of an eminently successful revolution, out of which emerged the present regime. Here we have what sociologists might label the “institutionalization of instability”, interpreted by a number of leading writers on French politics as the product of a deep-seated conflict between the “two Frances”, whether these two political subcultures are viewed as the parties of mouvement and of I'ordre établi, or as the “administrative and representative traditions.”

Type
Review Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 18 , Issue 1 , October 1965 , pp. 127 - 157
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1965

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References

1 Goguel, Francois, La politique des partis sous la troisieme Republique (Paris 1946).Google Scholar

2 Wahl, Nicholas, “The French Political System”, in Beer, Samuel H. and Ulam, Adam B., eds., Patterns of Government (New York 1958).Google Scholar

3 Siegfried, André, France: A Study in Nationality (New Haven 1952), 26.Google Scholar

4 Sondages, No. 17 (1948), 222.Google Scholar

5 Cantril, Hadley and Rodnick, David, On Understanding the French Left (Princeton 1956), 14.Google Scholar

6 Ibid., 18, 67. Lewis, Roy and Stewart, Rosemary describe the French businessman as “paternalist and autocratic, treating his employees as ‘mes enjants’ …” (The Managers: A New Examination of the English, German, and American Executives [New York 1961], 186)Google Scholar. It is this hierarchical orientation among the employers that is responsible for the deep division between employers and employees. Given their elitist assumptions the employers have not been able to bring themselves to accept the legitimacy of trade unions in anything resembling a graceful fashion. Not even the crisis period of the “phony war” in 1940 dissuaded the employers and the Daladier government from mounting an unrelenting attack upon the unions' organizing and bargaining rights.

7 Lasserre, Georges, “Le Monde ouvrier dans la societé”, in Siegfried, André, ed., Aspects de la societé Française (Paris 1954), 122.Google Scholar

8 In a 1955 survey of manual workers, the questions were asked: “Are there ideas to which you are strongly attached in the political and social spheres? What are these ideas?” About twice as many workers selected “liberty” rather than “betterment of workers' conditions”, “equality”, or “social justice” (Les Temps Modernes, July 1955). These data sharply underline the workers' desire for liberty since more than twice as many workers prefer this amorphous entity to specific and concrete economic betterment and social justice.

9 For an excellent series of essays on political, social, and economic change in contemporary France, see Hoffmann, Stanley and others, In Search of France (Cambridge, Mass., 1963).Google Scholar

10 The place of ideology in the political system is discussed in Section IV of this review article.

11 “Continuity and Change in Bourgeois France”, in Hoffmann and others, 259.

12 This is true at the prefecture level as well as at the highest level of the Grand Corps, whose major function is to control and oversee the work of the lower echelons.

13 Melnik, Constantin and Leites, Nathan, The House Without Windows (Evanston 1958)Google Scholar. It is recognized that this study is based upon analysis of a single event—the process by which Rene Coty was elected President of the Fourth Republic—and that the conditions under which the election took place in Versailles differed from those prevailing in the Assembly and Senate: the absence of tradition-honored procedures for electing a President and the secret ballot are just two factors that differ from the conditions under which prime ministers were invested. Nevertheless, the generalizations cited here are thought to be almost equally applicable to the politicians in their usual habitat.

14 Ibid., 16, 66.

15 Ibid., 97.

16 Ibid., 34.

17 Ibid., 108.

18 “Paradoxes of the French Political Community”, in Hoffmann and others, 94.

19 This is not to say that ideological predispositions—with their affinity for deductive systems of thought in which the real world can often be ignored—have disappeared.

20 Kornhauser, William, The Politics of Mass Society (Glencoe 1959).Google Scholar

21 Rose, Arnold M., Theory and Method in the Social Sciences (Minneapolis 1954), 70.Google Scholar

22 Almond, Gabriel A. and Verba, Sidney, The Civic Culture (Princeton 1963), 302.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

23 And even these differences may not be reliable since the French survey was carried out in the early 1950's and the Almond and Verba surveys were done some six years later, when it is reasonable to expect that die continued industrialization of France had led to an increase in the proportion of group members.

24 Writing of the fin de siècle period, before further urbanization and industrialization led to an even greater increase in the number of voluntary organizations, Robert Michels noted that “the German worker, as his wages have increased, has acquired the disease which is in the blood of the German petty bourgeoisie, the club-mania. In every large town, and not a few small ones, there is a swarm of working-class societies” Political Parties [New York 1959], 289).Google Scholar

25 Rose, 73. Bettelheim, Charles and Frère, Suzanne come to the same conclusion in Une Ville Franfaise moyenne: Auxerre en 1950 (Paris 1950), 252.Google Scholar

26 Williams, Philip, Crisis and Compromise (London 1964), 440.Google Scholar

27 Such a theory is developed in the present writer's forthcoming study entitled The Working-Class Tories: A Study in English Political Culture.