As the recent parliamentary vote raises fears of an assembly divided between the right, left, and centre, the nation’s history shows it is no stranger to unstable governments.
The current chaos in France, where the parliamentary elections have thrown up a House divided almost equally between the far Right, the far Left and the centrists, is par for the course if one looks at the history of democracy in France. Taking into account the political philosophy of Voltaire and Rousseau, whose radical thinking undermined monarchy and gave rise to the French Revolution in 1789, in many ways, France is the true mother of democratic thought and practice.
But it is typical of French political behaviour that within five years of the Revolution, France had become synonymous under Maximilien Robespierre with one of the most vicious dictatorships the world has seen. And within a decade, Napoleon had risen as a dictator and crowned himself Emperor in 1804. After his fall, for more than half a century, a democratically elected parliament “co-habited” first with the whimsical restoration of the Bourbon monarchy (1814-1830), then with the Orleans “bourgeois monarchy” till the street revolution of 1848. Four years later, it elected Louis-Napoléon as President, who declared the Napoleonic Second Empire from 1852 till France’s 1871 defeat by the Prussians.
Twelve different ministries having failed to rule in the eight years that followed the humiliating military defeat and the consequent fall of the monarchy, attempts to restore the monarchy peaked in 1879. That was thwarted by the presence of three major contenders for the position of monarch, causing untold political instability. That instability seemed to be resolved when the Minister of War, General Georges Boulanger, won an election in Paris against the combined Republican parties in 1889, a century after the French Revolution.
He was rapturously received by a huge crowd in the Place de la Concorde to take him to the Palace of the Champs-Élysées to oust the President. Instead, Boulanger went off to see his mistress. By the time he returned, the crowd had dispersed — and he was never sworn in.
In the summer of 1914, France was on the edge of being swept into World War I. But the country was preoccupied with two other events that captured the public imagination. The first involved the mistress, and later the second wife, of the Minister of Finance, Joseph Caillaux. He was politically opposed by the editor of a conservative but highly popular newspaper, Le Figaro, who had a cache of love letters exchanged between Madame Caillaux and the minister when both were married to others. The paper was publishing them serially to much prurient public interest. She walked into his office on March 16, 1914, and seated herself as he was not in. When he arrived, she pulled out her revolver and, without a word, shot him six times. The French were riveted; the jury decided that she was not guilty of cold murder but a victim of a “crime of passion”. Accordingly, they released her on July 28, six days before the German ultimatum ran out. The French public was consumed with this scandal and quite distracted from the impending war.
Three days later, on July 31, 1914, France’s great socialist leader Jean Jaurès was at dinner at a Paris café when an assassin shot him. There were less than a hundred hours to go before the outbreak of World War I that, within its first month, was to take the lives of hundreds of thousands of young Frenchmen and the entire 1914 graduating class, bar one survivor, from the French military academy, Saint-Cyr, before Christmas.
Although “Tiger” Clemenceau had won the war for them, the French pushed him out of the presidency less than two years later. Five cabinets were thrown out between July 1929 and December 1930. With the onset of the Depression, five governments came and went between June 1932 and January 1933, when Daladier was elected the sixth prime minister of France in 18 months, just one day after Hitler was sworn in as Chancellor of Germany. Between them, they took their countries and the world to the disaster of World War II.
But, before that, France elected a Popular Front government under Léon Blum . It lasted only six months from June 1936 to January 1937 but turned out to be the most divisive government in a saga of divisive governments. France was without a government when Hitler annexed Austria (Anschluss) in March 1938 (as it had been when Hitler, in 1936, had invaded the neutralised Rhineland). While the annexation of Austria marked the inevitable march to mass death for Europe and much of the rest of the world, the French kept up with their record of whimsical governance, changing governments as if they were soiled table napkins. Blum was back as PM the day after Anschluss. A month later, he was out. Daladier again became PM.
When war came to France in May 1940, the French army folded in no time and Marshall Pétain became France’s collaborator President, with a parliament and government in Vichy that actively supported France’s submission to Hitler. The end of the war brought Charles de Gaulle to the fore but only briefly. There followed a revolving door of governments, one of which, Joseph Laniel’s, fell along with Dien Bien Phu, and brought the pacifist, milk-drinking Pierre Mendès-France briefly to power but long enough to pull France out of the mess in Indochina. The hope he brought with him vanished like morning dew on the outbreak of armed insurgency demanding freedom in the French colony of Algeria. De Gaulle was restored and inaugurated the Fifth Republic which has now come to the pretty pass it has under Macron.
No one need be surprised at France’s recent election outcome. They continue, as ever, to flourish in chaos.
The writer is a former Union minister