Society and culture under the Third Republic
Under the Third Republic the middle and lower sectors of society came to share political and social dominance with the rich notables. Universal suffrage gave them a new political weapon; France’s peculiar socioeconomic structure gave them political weight.
Economy
map of Paris c. 1900Map of Paris, c. 1900, from the 10th edition of Encyclopædia Britannica.
Republican France remained a nation of small producers, traders, and consumers. The surge of industrialization that marked the era of Napoleon III had stopped short of a full-scale industrial revolution. The new dynamic sector of the economy was far outweighed by a static or slowly changing sector. The bulk of industry remained smaller and more dispersed than in other industrializing countries. As late as the decade before 1914, 90 percent of France’s industrial enterprises employed fewer than five workers each; in the extensive textile and clothing trades, more than half of the employees still worked at home rather than in factories. Commerce and trade followed the same pattern, with small shops and banks surviving in profusion. Similarly, rural France was dominated by small, subsistence family farms. The proportion of farmers in the total active population, which stood at 52 percent in 1870, was about 45 percent in 1914 and 35 percent in 1930. When grouped together, the small independent producers, traders, and farmers far outnumbered any other segment of society, including the proletariat.
The reasons given for this slow pace of socioeconomic change are varied: shortages of basic natural resources, a tradition of specialization in luxury items, a code of mores that emphasized prudent management rather than risky experiment and that regarded as ideal the “family firm,” small enough to be financed and managed by the owners alone. In any case, French industrialization took a different form from that of England or Germany. An initial burst of growth in the 1850s was followed by several decades of much more gradual expansion, which did not threaten the existing structure of society and the underlying value system. Most segments of society were reasonably satisfied and felt no threat to their way of life (only the members of the working class, both urban and agricultural, considered themselves outsiders and victims rather than participants); thus, the stability of the system was ensured. Not until well into the 20th century, and especially after 1918, did this state of affairs begin to change.
The governments of the Third Republic were representative of the small independents and responsive to their interests. Most of the bourgeoisie and the peasantry wanted a laissez-faire policy: low taxes, hands off the affairs of private citizens. There was little popular enthusiasm for costly ventures in foreign policy or expensive social reforms; the major exception—the conquest of colonial empire—had to be accomplished somewhat secretively and with limited resources. Only in tariff policy was laissez-faire flagrantly violated by the government, with the active consent of its bourgeois supporters. When the low-tariff treaties of Napoleon III expired in 1877, the government promptly returned to protectionism. Much of French agriculture and industry was thereby protected against more efficient foreign producers and insulated against the need for modernization. The short-range interests of the small independent producer were thus guaranteed; the prospect of harm to his longer-range interests—as well as to those of the nation as a whole—was not yet clear.
From 1873 to the mid-1890s the French economy experienced a period of slackness. This trend reflected a condition affecting most of Europe, although France suffered a special blow when an epidemic of phylloxera in 1875–87 destroyed one-third of the nation’s vineyards. From 1896 to 1914 industrial output rose impressively, exports increased by 75 percent, and prices returned to the pre-slump level. This upturn was also generally Europe-wide rather than peculiar to France; but some special factors, such as the opening of a vast new iron-ore field in French Lorraine, did increase the French rate of industrial expansion. By 1914 French Lorraine had become the major centre of French iron and steel production, and France had become the world’s largest exporter of raw iron ore (primarily to Germany). Yet the French were being outpaced by rivals. In 1870 France had still ranked as the world’s second industrial and trading nation; by 1914 it had fallen to a poor fourth. Much of the liquid capital that might have been used for business expansion at home was being siphoned off into foreign investment; by 1914 almost one-third of such available French capital had been placed abroad—one-fourth of that sum in Russia and only one-tenth in the French colonies. Yet few Frenchmen had serious doubts about the course of economic policy under the Third Republic.
Only after World War I, and particularly after 1930, were such doubts widely shared. The disruptive impact of the war exceeded the understanding not only of most citizens but also of most political leaders. Efforts to return to normality were futile because the postwar world and France had changed vastly. The enormous cost of a four-year mobilization, of reconstruction, and of war debts had to be borne. By the time of the Great Depression, the government had been forced to write off a large share of war costs by devaluing the franc (1928) to one-fifth of its old value, costing many Frenchmen on fixed incomes much of their savings and shaking their confidence in the future. Still, no large group of embittered déclassés was created, ripe for the appeals of a demagogue. And after 1926 there was a brief resurgence of prosperity, so that by the end of the decade the indexes of industrial production, foreign trade, and living standards had risen well above the 1914 peak. Some illusions about the future and hopes of a happy return to prewar stability could therefore be retained.
But by 1935 industrial production had fallen to 79 percent of the 1928 level and exports to 55 percent. Registered unemployment hovered at less than 500,000, but this figure concealed the fact that many urban workers were subsisting on family farms owned by relatives. Besides, the French exported much of their unemployment; thousands of immigrant workers lost their work permits and had to return home. Not until 1938–39 did a measure of recovery set in, thanks to Reynaud’s business-oriented policies plus the stimulus of rearmament. By the time war broke out again, France had barely returned to the pre-Depression level.
The workers, always outside the bourgeois consensus, were by now largely hostile to the system; most of the gains they had finally achieved in 1936 had quickly been snatched away again. But in addition many bourgeois Frenchmen now questioned the virtues of the traditional system. The 1930s therefore brought an intense fermentation of political and social thought; dozens of study groups and movements sprang up in Paris, seeking or preaching doctrines of drastic renovation and structures of government that might carry them out.
Cultural and scientific attainments
The cultural climate of the later 19th century in France, as in the Atlantic world generally, was strongly marked by the current called positivism. The post-1848 generation looked with contempt on what it considered the excesses and the bad taste of the preceding Romantic era. A new interest in science and a new vogue of realism in literature and the arts prevailed during the Second Empire; it was best embodied in the novels of Gustave Flaubert and the paintings of Gustave Courbet. By the 1870s this mood had formed into what its advocates regarded as a coherent philosophical system, the content and label of which they borrowed from the French thinker Auguste Comte. These self-styled positivists placed their faith in science and reason as the path to inevitable progress, with only the remnants of superstition (surviving mainly in the church) still blocking the hopeful future. The positivist temper is manifest in the novels of Émile Zola and the paintings of Impressionists such as Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir.
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The French also showed great creativity in pure science and made major discoveries in a wide variety of fields. Among the most notable figures were Louis Pasteur in medicine, Pierre and Marie Curie in physics, Marcelin Berthelot in chemistry, Henri Poincaré in mathematics, and Jean-Martin Charcot in psychopathology. In the social sciences the work of Gustave Le Bon and Émile Durkheim had a broad and enduring impact.
Although the positivist mood prevailed at least until World War I, it was contested by a rival current of thought that from the 1890s onward began to assert itself. To some sensitive people of artistic temperament, the positivist outlook seemed arid and narrow, neglecting the emotional side of man. This was the view of the school of poets, including Paul Verlaine and Stéphane Mallarmé, who called themselves Symbolists. A remarkable group of composers carried the upstart Neoromantic mood into music: mainstream works by composers such as Jules Massenet, Georges Bizet, and Camille Saint-Saëns were followed by the more experimental compositions of Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel.
Of equal significance was the growing influence after 1890 of such writers and thinkers as Paul Bourget, Maurice Barrès, and Henri Bergson. Bourget’s novels challenged what he called “brutal positivism” and asserted such traditional values as authority, the family, and the established order. Barrès preached what Charles Maurras had defined as “integral nationalism”; Barrès called for a return to “the sources of national energy,” which he found in historic institutions, the soil of the fatherland, and the solidarity between the living and the dead. The philosopher Bergson attacked scientific dogmatism and exalted humankind’s nonrational drives—notably a creative force that he called élan vital, which he held distinguishes heroic individuals and nations from the plodding herd.
This new spirit had its parallel in political thought and action as well: in the syndicalist doctrines of Georges Sorel, in the activism of a minority in the labour movement, and in the resurgent nationalism that strongly affected many French young people in the years just before 1914. It also brought a return to the church and to an emotional patriotism. In the fine arts a new generation of painters abandoned both realism and Impressionism. These so-called Post-Impressionists were moved by an intense subjectivism, an urge to express in various ways the artist’s inner vision and deeper emotions. The changed mood was best-embodied in the work of Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, and the Dutch immigrant Vincent van Gogh.
The terrible strain and disillusionment of World War I weighed heavily on French cultural life during the interwar era, leading to the development of the literary and artistic movement called Dadaism. Its program of calculated nonsense was inspired by a deep revulsion against the insanity of war and the positivist view that the world had sense and meaning. Dadaism soon gave way, though, to the more durable Surrealist movement, whose principal theorist and founder was the poet André Breton. The declared goal of Surrealist writers and artists was to free man’s unconscious impulses from the distorting controls of rational reflection; creativity, they said, came from deep nonrational drives.
A number of France’s most notable writers, however, remained within the older humanistic tradition; yet they likewise reflected the doubts and neuroses of an age of crisis. Marcel Proust, whose massive multivolume novel À la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past) began to appear in 1913, used the stream-of-consciousness technique to probe, in minutely introspective fashion, into the recesses of his own mind and memory. André Gide, in similarly sensitive and introspective fashion, wrestled with the psychological difficulties arising from the conflict between a bourgeois society’s values and the individual’s instinctive drives.
As the mood of crisis deepened in the 1930s, so did the intensity of the challenge to old values, bringing forth men of frankly fascist temper, such as Robert Brasillach, and brutally nihilistic literary experimenters, such as Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Other writers continued to create works in the older tradition, including the supple, sensual explorations of (Sidonie-Gabrielle) Colette; the social commentary of Roger Martin du Gard, Georges Duhamel, Jules Romains, and François Mauriac; the Neoromantic novels of André Malraux, preaching a modern gospel of heroic activism; the first writings of Jean-Paul Sartre; and the essays of Emmanuel Mounier, who was to inspire the new Catholic left after World War II.
France since 1940
Wartime France
The German victory left the French groping for a new policy and new leadership. Some 30 prominent politicians—among them Édouard Daladier and Pierre Mendès-France—left for North Africa to set up a government-in-exile there; but Pétain blocked that enterprise by ordering their arrest on arrival in Morocco. The undersecretary of war in the fallen Reynaud cabinet, General Charles de Gaulle, had already flown to London and in a radio appeal on June 18, 1940, summoned French patriots to continue the fight; but few heard or heeded his call in the first weeks. It was to Pétain, rather, that most of the nation looked for salvation.
The Vichy government
Parliament met at Vichy on July 9–10 to consider France’s future. The session was dominated by Pierre Laval, Pétain’s vice premier, who was already emerging as the strongman of the government. Laval, convinced that Germany had won the war and would thenceforth control the Continent, saw it as his duty to adapt France to the new authoritarian age. By skillful manipulation, he persuaded parliament to vote itself and the Third Republic out of existence. The vote (569 to 80) authorized Pétain to draft a new constitution. The draft was never completed, but Pétain and his advisers did embark on a series of piecemeal reforms, which they labeled the National Revolution. Soon the elements of a corporative state began to emerge, and steps were taken to decentralize France by reviving the old provinces. In the early stages of Vichy, Pétain’s inner circle—except for Laval and a few others—was made up of right-wing traditionalists and authoritarians. The real pro-fascists, such as Jacques Doriot and Marcel Déat, who wanted a system modeled frankly on those of Hitler and Mussolini, soon left Vichy and settled in Paris, where they accepted German subsidies and intrigued against Pétain.
In December 1940 Pétain dismissed Laval and placed him briefly under house arrest. Laval had offended Pétain and his followers by his arrogance and his obvious taste for intrigue. His critics charged him also with attempting to bring Vichy France back into the war in alliance with the Germans. Both Laval and Pétain had accepted Hitler’s invitation to a meeting at Montoire on October 24, 1940, and, during the weeks that followed, the French leaders had publicly advocated Franco-German “collaboration.” Whether Laval hoped for a real Franco-German alliance remains somewhat controversial. If so, it was a futile effort because Hitler had no interest in accepting France as a trusted partner; “collaboration” remained a French and not a German slogan. Hitler tolerated the temporary existence of a quasi-independent Vichy state as a useful device to help police the country and to collect the enormously inflated occupation costs imposed by the armistice.
Laval was succeeded by another prewar politician, Pierre-Étienne Flandin, and he, in turn, by Admiral François Darlan, who was intensely anti-British and an intriguer by nature who followed a devious path that involved continuing efforts at active collaboration with the Germans. Hitler, meanwhile, concentrated on draining France of raw materials and foodstuffs that were useful for the conduct of the war.
In April 1942 Pétain restored Laval to power, partly under German pressure. Laval retained that post until the collapse of Vichy in 1944. His role was increasingly difficult because the terrible drain of the war in the Soviet Union caused the Germans to increase their exactions. The Germans were short of manpower for their factories, and Laval, under heavy pressure, agreed to the conscription of able-bodied French workers, allegedly in return for the release of some French prisoners of war. He also assumed the task of repressing the French underground movement, whose activities hampered the delivery of supplies and men to Germany. After the war, Laval and his friends were to argue that he had played a “double game” of limited collaboration to protect France against a worse fate.
Most of Vichy’s remaining autonomy and authority was destroyed in November 1942, in direct consequence of the Anglo-American landings in North Africa. Vichy troops in Morocco and Algeria briefly resisted the American invasion, then capitulated when Admiral Darlan, who happened to be visiting Algiers at the time, negotiated an armistice. On November 11 Hitler ordered his troops in the occupied zone to cross the demarcation line and to take over all of France. The Vichy government survived, but only on German sufferance—a shadowy regime with little power and declining prestige.
The Resistance of France
Vichy’s decline was paralleled by the rise of the anti-German underground. Within weeks of the 1940 collapse, tiny groups of men and women had begun to resist. Some collected military intelligence for transmission to London; some organized escape routes for British airmen who had been shot down; some circulated anti-German leaflets; some engaged in sabotage of railways and German installations. The Resistance movement received an important infusion of strength in June 1941, when Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union brought the French Communist Party into active participation in the anti-German struggle. It was further reinforced by the German decision to conscript French workers; many draftees took to the hills and joined guerrilla bands that took the name Maquis (meaning “underbrush”). A kind of national unity was finally achieved in May 1943, when de Gaulle’s personal representative, Jean Moulin, succeeded in establishing a National Resistance Council (Conseil National de la Résistance) that joined all the major movements into one federation.
De Gaulle’s original call for resistance had attracted only a handful of French citizens who happened to be in Britain at the time. But, as the British continued to fight, a trickle of volunteers from France began to find its way to his headquarters in London. De Gaulle promptly established an organization called Free France and in 1941 capped it with a body called the French National Committee (Comité National Français), for which he boldly claimed the status of a legal government-in-exile. During the next three years, first in London and then (after 1943) in Algiers, he insisted on his right to speak for France and on France’s right to be heard as a Great Power in the councils of the Allies. His demands and his manner irked Churchill and Roosevelt and caused persistent tension. The U.S. government unsuccessfully attempted in 1942 to sidetrack him in favour of General Henri Giraud, who immediately after the Allied landings in North Africa was brought out of France to command the French armies in liberated North Africa and to assume a political role as well. De Gaulle arrived in Algiers in May 1943 and joined Giraud as copresident of a new French Committee of National Liberation. By the end of the year he had outmaneuvered Giraud and emerged as the unchallenged spokesman for French resisters everywhere. Even the Communists in 1943 grudgingly accepted his leadership.
Liberation
When the Allied forces landed in Normandy on June 6, 1944, the armed underground units had grown large enough to play a prominent role in the battles that followed—harassing the German forces and sabotaging railways and bridges. As the Germans gradually fell back, local Resistance organizations took over town halls and prefectures from Vichy incumbents. De Gaulle’s provisional government immediately sent its own delegates into the liberated areas to ensure an orderly transfer of power. On August 19 Resistance forces in Paris launched an insurrection against the German occupiers, and on August 25 Free French units under General Jacques Leclerc entered the city. De Gaulle himself arrived later that day, and on the next he headed a triumphal parade down the Champs-Élysées. Most high-ranking Vichy officials (including Pétain and Laval) had moved eastward with the Germans; at the castle of Sigmaringen in Germany they adopted the posture of a government-in-exile.
De Gaulle’s provisional government, formally recognized in October 1944 by the U.S., British, and Soviet governments, enjoyed unchallenged authority in liberated France. But the country had been stripped of raw materials and food by the Germans; the transportation system was severely disrupted by air bombardment and sabotage; 2.5 million French prisoners of war, conscripted workers, and deportees were still in German camps; and the task of liquidating the Vichy heritage threatened to cause grave domestic stress. An informal and spontaneous purge of Vichy officials or supporters had already begun in the summer of 1944; summary executions by Resistance bands appear to have exceeded 10,000.
A more systematic retribution followed. Special courts set up to try citizens accused of collaboration heard 125,000 cases during the next two years. Some 50,000 offenders were punished by “national degradation” (loss of civic rights for a period of years), almost 40,000 received prison terms, and between 700 and 800 were executed.
The Fourth Republic
Shortly after his return to Paris, de Gaulle announced that the citizens of France would determine their future governmental system as soon as the absent prisoners and deportees could be repatriated. That process was largely completed by midsummer 1945, soon after Germany’s defeat, whereupon de Gaulle scheduled a combined referendum and election for October. Women, for the first time in French history, were granted suffrage. By an overwhelming majority (96 percent of the votes cast), the nation rejected a return to the prewar regime. The mood of the liberation era was marked by a thirst for renovation and for change.
New men of the Resistance movement dominated the constituent assembly, and the centre of gravity was heavily to the left: three-fourths of the deputies were Communists, Socialists, or Christian Democrats who had adhered to the new party of the Catholic left—the Popular Republican Movement (Mouvement Républicain Populaire).
Constitution of the Fourth Republic
It soon became clear that the apparent unity forged in the Resistance was superficial and that the new political elite was sharply divided over the form of the new republic. Some urged the need for greater stability through a strong executive; others, notably the Communists, favoured concentrating power in a one-house legislature subject to grassroots control by the voters. De Gaulle remained aloof from this controversy, though it was obvious that he favoured a strong presidency. In January 1946 de Gaulle suddenly resigned his post as provisional president, apparently expecting that a wave of public support would bring him back to power with a mandate to impose his constitutional ideas. Instead, the public was stunned and confused, and it failed to react. The assembly promptly chose the Socialist Félix Gouin to replace him, and the embittered de Gaulle retired to his country estate.
The assembly’s constitutional draft, submitted to a popular referendum in May 1946, was rejected by the voters. A new assembly was quickly elected to prepare a revised draft, which in October was narrowly approved by the voters. De Gaulle actively intervened in the campaign for the second referendum, denouncing the proposed system as unworkable and urging the need for a stronger executive. His ideas anticipated the system that later was to be embodied in the constitution of the Fifth Republic (1958).
Political and social changes
The structure of the Fourth Republic seemed remarkably like that of the Third; in actual operation it seemed even more familiar. The lower house of parliament (now renamed the National Assembly) was once more the locus of power; shaky coalition cabinets again succeeded one another at brief intervals, and the lack of a clear-cut majority in the country or in parliament hampered vigorous or coherent action. Many politicians from the prewar period turned up once again in cabinet posts.
Yet outside the realm of political structure and parliamentary gamesmanship there were real and fundamental changes. The long sequence of crises that had shaken the nation since 1930 had left a deep imprint on French attitudes. There was much less public complacency; both the routines and the values of the French people had been shaken up and subjected to challenge by a generation of upheaval. Many of the new men who had emerged from the Resistance movement into political life, business posts, or the state bureaucracy retained a strong urge toward renovation as well as to a reassertion of France’s lost greatness.
This altered mood helps to explain the economic growth that marked the later years of the Fourth Republic. The painful convalescence from the ravages of war was speeded by massive aid from the United States and by the gentle persuasion (and ample credits) of Jean Monnet’s Planning Commissariat (Commissariat Général du Plan), adopted in 1947. A burst of industrial expansion in most branches of the economy began in the mid-1950s, unmatched in any decade of French history since the 1850s. The rate of growth for a time rivaled that of Germany and exceeded that of most other European countries. The only serious flaw in the boom was a nagging inflationary trend that weakened the franc. Short-lived coalition cabinets were incapable of taking the painful measures needed to check this trend.
Colonial independence movements
A less fortunate aspect of the national urge to reassert France’s stature in the world was the Fourth Republic’s costly effort to hold the colonial empire. France’s colonies had provided de Gaulle with his first important base of support as leader of Free France, and, as the war continued, they had furnished valuable resources and manpower. The colonial peoples, therefore, now felt justified in demanding a new relationship with France, and French leaders recognized the need to grant concessions. But most of these leaders, including de Gaulle, were not prepared to permit any infringement on French sovereignty, either immediately or in the foreseeable future. For a nation seeking to rebuild its self-respect, the prospect of a loss of empire seemed unacceptable; most of the French, moreover, were convinced that the native peoples overseas lacked the necessary training for self-government and that a relaxation of the French grip would merely open the way to domination by another imperial power. The constitution of 1946 therefore introduced only mild reforms: the empire was renamed the French Union, within which the colonial peoples would enjoy a narrowly limited local autonomy plus some representation in the French parliament.
This cautious reform came too late to win acceptance in many parts of the empire. The situation was most serious in Southeast Asia, where the Japanese had displaced the French during World War II. Japan’s defeat in 1945 enabled the French to regain control of southern Indochina, but the northern half was promptly taken over by a Vietnamese nationalist movement headed by the communist Ho Chi Minh. French efforts to negotiate a compromise with Ho’s regime broke down in December 1946, and a bloody eight-year war followed. In the end, the financial and psychological strain proved too great for France to bear, and, after the capture of the French stronghold of Dien Bien Phu in 1954 by the Vietnamese, the French sought a face-saving solution. A conference of interested powers at Geneva that year ended the war by establishing what was intended as a temporary division of Vietnam into independent northern and southern states. Two other segments of Indochina, the former protectorates of Laos and Cambodia, had earlier been converted by the French into independent monarchies to preserve some French influence there.
On the night of October 31, 1954, barely six months after the fighting in Indochina ended, Algerian nationalists raised the standard of rebellion. By 1958 more than a half million French soldiers had been sent to Algeria—the largest overseas expeditionary force in French history. France’s determination to hold Algeria stemmed from a number of factors: the presence of almost a million European settlers, the legal fiction that Algeria was an integral part of France, and the recent discovery of oil in the southern desert. Fears that the rebellion might spread to Tunisia and Morocco led the French to make drastic concessions there; in 1956 both of these protectorates became sovereign states.
The long and brutal struggle in Algeria gravely affected the political life of the Fourth Republic and ended by destroying it. A vocal minority in France openly favoured a negotiated settlement, though no political leader dared take so unpopular a position. Right-wing activists, outraged at what they saw as the spread of defeatism, turned to conspiracy; both in Paris and in Algiers, extremist groups began to plot the replacement of the Fourth Republic by a tougher regime, headed by army officers or perhaps by General de Gaulle.
These plans had not yet matured when a cabinet crisis in April–May 1958 gave the conspirators a chance to strike. On May 13, when a new cabinet was scheduled to present its program to the National Assembly, activist groups in Algiers went into the streets in an effort to influence parliament’s vote. By nightfall they were in control of the city and set up an emergency government with local army support. De Gaulle on May 15 announced that he was prepared to take power if called to do so by his fellow citizens. Two weeks of negotiations followed, interspersed with threats of violent action by the Algiers rebels. Most of the Fourth Republic’s political leaders reluctantly concluded that de Gaulle’s return was the only alternative to an army coup that might lead to civil war. On June 1, therefore, the National Assembly voted de Gaulle full powers for six months, thus putting a de facto end to the Fourth Republic.
The Fifth Republic
During his years of self-imposed exile, de Gaulle had scorned and derided the Fourth Republic and its leaders. He had briefly sought to oppose the regime by organizing a Gaullist party, but he had soon abandoned this venture as futile. Back in power, he adopted a more conciliatory line; he invited a number of old politicians to join his cabinet, but, by naming his disciple Michel Debré head of a commission to draft a new constitution, de Gaulle made sure that his own ideas would shape the future. This draft, approved in a referendum in September by 79 percent of the valid votes cast, embodied de Gaulle’s conceptions of how France should be governed. Executive power was considerably increased at the expense of the National Assembly. The president of the republic was given much broader authority; he would henceforth be chosen by an electorate of local notables rather than by parliament, and he would select the premier (renamed prime minister), who would continue to be responsible to the National Assembly but would be less subject to its whims. In the new National Assembly, elected in November, the largest block of seats was won by a newly organized Gaullist party, the Union for the New Republic (Union pour la Nouvelle République; UNR); the parties of the left suffered serious losses. In December de Gaulle was elected president for a seven-year term, and he appointed Debré as his first prime minister. The Fifth Republic came into operation on January 8, 1959, when de Gaulle assumed his presidential functions and appointed a new government.
The new president’s most immediate problems were the Algerian conflict and the inflation caused by the war. He attacked the latter, with considerable success, by introducing a program of deflation and austerity. As for Algeria, he seemed at first to share the views of those whose slogan was “Algérie française”; but, as time went by, it became clear that he was seeking a compromise that would keep an autonomous Algeria loosely linked with France. The Algerian nationalist leaders, however, were not interested in compromise, while the die-hard French colonists looked increasingly to the army for support against what they began to call de Gaulle’s betrayal. Open sedition followed in 1961, when a group of high army officers headed by General Raoul Salan formed the Secret Army Organization (Organisation de l’Armée Secrète; OAS) and attempted to stage a coup in Algiers. When the insurrection failed, the OAS turned to terrorism; there were several attempts on de Gaulle’s life. The president pushed ahead nevertheless with his search for a settlement with the Algerians that would combine independence with guarantees for the safety of French colonists and their property. Such a settlement was finally worked out, and in a referendum (April 1962) more than 90 percent of the war-weary French voters approved the agreement. An exodus of European settlers ensued; 750,000 refugees flooded into France. The burden of absorbing them was heavy, but the prosperous French economy was able to finance the process despite some psychological strains.
The Algerian crisis sped the process of decolonization in the rest of the empire. Some concessions to local nationalist sentiment had already been made during the 1950s, and de Gaulle’s new constitution had authorized increased self-rule. But the urge for independence was irresistible, and by 1961 virtually all the French territories in Africa had demanded and achieved it. De Gaulle’s government reacted shrewdly by embarking on a program of military support and economic aid to the former colonies; most of France’s foreign-aid money went to them. This encouraged the emergence of a French-speaking bloc of nations, which gave greater resonance to France’s role in world affairs.
The Algerian settlement brought France a respite after 16 years of almost unbroken colonial wars. Prime Minister Debré resigned in 1962 and was replaced by one of de Gaulle’s closest aides, Georges Pompidou. The party leaders now began to talk of amending the constitution to restore the powers of the National Assembly. Faced by this prospect, de Gaulle seized the initiative by proposing his own constitutional amendment; it provided for direct popular election of the president, thus further increasing his authority. When his critics denounced the project as unconstitutional, de Gaulle retaliated by dissolving the assembly and proceeding with his constitutional referendum. On October 28, 62 percent of those voting gave their approval, and in the subsequent elections (November) the Gaullist UNR won a clear majority in the assembly. Pompidou was reappointed prime minister.
When de Gaulle’s presidential term ended in 1965, he announced his candidacy for reelection. For the first time since 1848 the voting was to be by direct popular suffrage. De Gaulle’s challengers forced de Gaulle into a runoff, and his victory over the moderate leftist François Mitterrand in the second round by a 55–45 margin was closer than had been predicted but sufficed to assure him of seven more years in power. Although de Gaulle’s leadership had not ended political division in France, his compatriots could not ignore the achievements of his first term. Not only had he disengaged France from Algeria without producing a civil war at home, but he could also point to continuing economic growth, a solid currency, and a stability of government that was greater than any living French citizen had known.
The mid-1960s were the golden years of the Gaullist era, with the president playing the role of elected monarch and respected world statesman. France had adjusted well to the loss of empire and to membership in the European Common Market (later the European Community), which brought the country more benefits than costs. De Gaulle could now embark on an assertive foreign policy, designed to restore what he called France’s grandeur; he could indulge in such luxuries as blocking Britain’s entry into the Common Market, ejecting North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces from France, lecturing the Americans on their involvement in Vietnam, and traveling to Canada to call for a “free Quebec.” He continued the Fourth Republic’s initiative in developing both nuclear power and nuclear weapons—the so-called force de frappe. His foreign policy enjoyed broad domestic support, and the French people also seemed content with the prosperity and order that accompanied his paternalistic rule.
Beneath the surface, however, basic discontent persisted and was startlingly revealed by the crisis that erupted in May 1968. Student disorders in the universities of the Paris region had been sporadic for some time; they exploded on May 3, when a rally of student radicals at the Sorbonne became violent and was broken up by the police. This minor incident quickly became a major confrontation: barricades went up in the Latin Quarter, street fighting broke out, and the Sorbonne was occupied by student rebels, who converted it into a huge commune. The unrest spread to other universities and then to the factories as well; a wave of wildcat strikes rolled across France, eventually involving several million workers and virtually paralyzing the nation. Prime Minister Pompidou ordered the police to evacuate the Latin Quarter and concentrated on negotiations with the labour union leaders. An agreement calling for improved wages and working conditions was hammered out, but it collapsed when the rank-and-file workers refused to end their strike.
By the end of May various radical factions no longer concealed their intent to carry out a true revolution that would bring down the Fifth Republic. De Gaulle seemed incapable of grappling with the crisis or of even understanding its nature. The Communist and trade union leaders, however, provided him with breathing space; they opposed further upheaval, evidently fearing the loss of their followers to their more extremist and anarchist rivals. In addition, many middle-class citizens who had initially enjoyed the excitement lost their enthusiasm as they saw established institutions disintegrating before their eyes.
De Gaulle, sensing the opportune moment, suddenly left Paris by helicopter on May 29. Rumours spread that he was about to resign. Instead, he returned the next day with a promise of armed support, if needed, from the commanders of the French occupation troops in Germany. In a dramatic four-minute radio address, he appealed to the partisans of law and order and presented himself as the only barrier to anarchy or Communist rule. Loyal Gaullists and nervous citizens rallied round him; the activist factions were isolated when the Communists refused to join them in a resort to force. The confrontation moved from the streets to the polls. De Gaulle dissolved the National Assembly, and on June 23 and 30 the Gaullists won a landslide victory. The Gaullist Union of Democrats for the Republic (Union des Démocrates pour la République [UDR]; the former UNR), with its allies, emerged with three-fourths of the seats.
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The repercussions of the May crisis were considerable. The government, shocked by the depth and extent of discontent, made a series of concessions to the protesting groups. Workers were granted higher wages and improved working conditions; the assembly adopted a university reform bill intended to modernize higher education and to give teachers and students a voice in running their institutions. De Gaulle took the occasion to shake up his cabinet; Pompidou was replaced by Maurice Couve de Murville. De Gaulle evidently sensed the emergence of Pompidou as a serious rival, for the prime minister had shown toughness and nerve during the crisis, while the president had temporarily lost his bearings. The economy also suffered from the upheaval; austerity measures were needed to stabilize things once more.
Although normalcy gradually returned, de Gaulle remained baffled and irritated by what the French called les événements de mai (“the events of May”). Perhaps it was to reaffirm his leadership that he proposed another test at the polls: a pair of constitutional amendments to be voted on by referendum. Their content was of secondary importance, yet de Gaulle threw his prestige into the balance, announcing that he would resign if the amendments failed to be approved. Every opposition faction seized upon the chance to challenge the president. On April 27, 1969, the amendments were defeated by a 53 to 47 percent margin, and that night de Gaulle silently abandoned his office. He returned to the obscurity of his country estate and turned once more to the writing of his memoirs. In 1970, just before his 80th birthday, he died of a massive stroke. His passing inspired an almost worldwide chorus of praise, even from those who up to then had been his most persistent critics.
France after de Gaulle
De Gaulle’s departure from the scene provoked some early speculation about the survival of the Fifth Republic and of the Gaullist party (the UDR); both, after all, had been tailored to the general’s measure. But both proved to be durable, although his successors gave the system a somewhat different tone. Pompidou won the presidency in June 1969 over several left and centre rivals. He adopted a less assertive foreign policy stance and in domestic affairs showed a preference for classic laissez-faire, reflecting his connections with the business community.
The turn toward a more conservative, business-oriented line contributed to a revival of the political left, which had been decimated by the aftershocks of the events of May 1968. Mitterrand, leader of a small left-centre party, took advantage of the change in political climate. In 1971 he engineered a merger of several minor factions with the almost moribund Socialist Party and won election as leader of the reinvigorated party. He then persuaded the Communists to join the Socialists in drafting what was called the Common Program, which was a plan to combine forces in future elections and in an eventual coalition government.
Unexpectedly, in April 1974 President Pompidou died of cancer. Mitterrand declared his candidacy as representative of the united left, while the conservatives failed to agree on a candidate. The Gaullists nominated Prime Minister Jacques Chaban-Delmas, but a sizable minority of the UDR broke ranks and instead declared support for a non-Gaullist, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, who was the leader of a business party, the Independent Republicans (Républicains Indépendants). Giscard won over Chaban-Delmas in the first round and narrowly defeated Mitterrand in the runoff.
Despite his conservative connections, the new president declared his goal to be the transformation of France into “an advanced liberal society.” He chose as prime minister the young and forceful Jacques Chirac, leader of the Gaullist minority that had bolted the UDR in Giscard’s favour. The new leadership pushed through a reform program designed to attract young voters: it reduced the voting age to 18, legalized abortion within certain limits, and instituted measures to protect the environment. But the course of reform was stalled by the oil crisis of 1973, brought on by events in the Middle East. Industrial production slowed, unemployment rose, and inflation threatened.
As discontent grew, Giscard’s leadership was challenged by his ambitious prime minister, Chirac. Open rivalry between the two men led Giscard to dismiss Chirac in favour of Raymond Barre, a professional economist. Chirac retaliated by persuading the divided and disheartened Gaullists to transform the UDR into a new party, the Rally for the Republic (Rassemblement pour la République; RPR), with himself as its head. He also gained an additional power base by standing successfully for election to the revived post of mayor of Paris.
These factional conflicts on the right opened new prospects for the coalition of the rejuvenated left and seemed to assure its victory in the 1978 parliamentary elections. But at that point the Socialist-Communist alliance fell apart. The Socialists had made dramatic gains at Communist expense since the Common Program had been adopted, and the Communists decided it was safer to scuttle the agreement. The collapse of leftist unity alienated a large number of left voters and enabled the conservatives to retain control of the National Assembly in the 1978 elections.
When Giscard’s presidential term ended in May 1981, opinion polls seemed to indicate that he would be elected to a second term. He overcame a vigorous challenge by Chirac in the first round of voting and seemed well placed to defeat the Socialist Mitterrand in the runoff. But Mitterrand surprised the pollsters by scoring a slim victory—the first major victory for the left in three decades. Profiting from the wave of euphoria that followed, Mitterrand dissolved the National Assembly and, calling for elections, succeeded once again. The Socialists won a clear majority of seats (269 of the total 491) and seemed in a position to transform France into a social democratic state.
France under a Socialist presidency
Mitterrand’s first term
François MitterrandMitterrand moved at once to carry out what appeared to be the voters’ mandate. He named as prime minister a longtime Socialist militant, Pierre Mauroy, whose cabinet was almost solidly Socialist except for four Communists. Major reforms followed quickly. A broad sector of the economy was nationalized (including 11 large industrial conglomerates and most private banks); a considerable degree of administrative decentralization shifted part of the state’s authority to regional and local councils; social benefits were expanded and factory layoffs made subject to state controls; tax rates were increased at the upper levels; and a special wealth tax was imposed on large fortunes.
The Socialists hoped that other industrial countries would adopt similar measures and that this joint effort would stimulate a broad recovery from the post-1973 recession. Instead, most of the other Western nations took the opposite course, turning toward conservative retrenchment. Isolated in an unsympathetic world and hampered by angry opposition at home, the Socialist experiment sputtered: exports declined, the value of the franc fell, unemployment continued to rise, and capital fled to safe havens abroad. The government was soon forced to retreat. Mauroy was replaced by a young Socialist technocrat, Laurent Fabius, who announced a turn from ideology to efficiency, with modernization the new keynote.
Many leftist voters were disillusioned by the frustration of their hopes. Discontent also emerged on the political margins. On the far left the Communists withdrew their ministers from the cabinet. On the far right a new focus of discontent emerged in Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front (Front National), which scored successes with its campaign to expel immigrant workers. To nobody’s surprise, the Socialists lost control of the National Assembly in the March 1986 elections; they and their allies retained only 215 seats, while the rightist coalition rose to 291.
Mitterrand’s presidential term still had two years to run. But the Fifth Republic now faced a long-debated test: Could the system function when parliament and president were at odds? Mitterrand sidestepped the dilemma by choosing the path of prudent retreat. He named as prime minister the conservatives’ strongest leader, Chirac of the Gaullist RPR, and abandoned to him most governmental decisions (except on foreign and defense policy, which de Gaulle himself had reserved for the president). This uneasy relationship was promptly labeled “cohabitation”; it lasted two years and in the end worked in Mitterrand’s rather than Chirac’s favour.
Chirac acted at once to reverse many of the Socialists’ reforms. He began the complex process of privatizing the nationalized enterprises, reduced income tax rates at the upper levels and abolished the wealth tax, and removed some of the regulatory controls on industry. These moves brought Chirac praise but also criticism. His popularity suffered in addition from a series of threats to public order—notably a long transport strike and a wave of terrorist attacks on the streets of Paris—that cast some doubt on the government’s promise to ensure law and order. As Chirac’s approval ratings fell, Mitterrand’s recovered. Cohabitation enabled him to avoid making sensitive decisions, and voters gave him credit for faithfully respecting his constitutional limitations.
Mitterrand’s second term
Restraint paid dividends when Mitterrand ran, against Chirac, for a second term in April–May 1988 and scored a clear victory (54 to 46 percent). The resurgent president chose the Socialist Michel Rocard as prime minister and once again dissolved the National Assembly in the hope that the voters would give him a parliamentary majority. That hope was only partially realized this time; the Socialists and their allies won 279 seats, but they fell short of a clear majority.
Mitterrand’s choice of Rocard as prime minister caused some surprise, for the two men had headed rival factions within the Socialist Party, and they were temperamentally alien. Rocard was a brilliant financial expert and an advocate of government by consensus of the left and centre, while Mitterrand was considered a master of political gamesmanship. The uneasy relationship lasted three years, and Rocard was successful enough in managing the economy to maintain his high approval rating in the polls until the end.
Edith CressonEdith Cresson, 2007.
Mitterrand’s decision to replace Rocard in 1991 with France’s first woman prime minister, Edith Cresson, provoked serious controversy. Cresson, a Mitterrand loyalist, had held a variety of cabinet posts during the 1980s and was seen as an able but tough and abrasive politician. Brash public statements by Cresson affected her ability to rule, the Socialists suffered disastrous losses in regional elections (March 1992), and Mitterrand replaced Cresson in April 1992 with a different sort of Socialist, Pierre Bérégovoy.
“Béré” (as he was familiarly known) was a rare example of a proletarian who had risen through trade union ranks to political eminence. The son of an immigrant Ukrainian blue-collar worker, he had earned a reputation as an expert on public finance and as an incorruptible politician. His promise to end the plague of financial scandals that had beset recent Socialist governments won applause but left him vulnerable when he, in turn, was accused of misconduct: he had accepted, from a wealthy businessman under investigation for insider trading, a large loan to finance the purchase of a Paris apartment. Although no illegality was involved, Bérégovoy’s reputation for integrity suffered. In the parliamentary elections that took place in March 1993, the Socialists suffered a crushing defeat; they retained only 67 seats compared with 486 for the right-wing coalition (RPR and UDR). Bérégovoy resigned as prime minister and a few weeks later shocked the country by committing suicide.
Although the triumphant conservatives called on Mitterrand also to resign, he refused; his presidential term still had two years to run. But he had to face cohabitation again, this time with another Gaullist, Édouard Balladur. Chirac preferred to avoid the risks of active decision making while he was preparing his own campaign for the presidency.
Mitterrand entered his second cohabitation experience with his prestige damaged by his party’s recent misfortunes. He had also lost stature by a mistaken judgment in his own “reserved” sector of foreign policy. Mitterrand had been a leading drafter of the Maastricht Treaty (1991), designed to strengthen the institutional structures of the European Community. When the treaty encountered hostile criticism, he gambled on a popular referendum in France to bolster support. The outcome was a bare 51 percent approval by the French voters, and, although it was enough to put Maastricht into effect, the evidence of deep division in France further reduced the president’s prestige. Still another embarrassment was the revelation in 1994 that Mitterrand had accepted a bureaucratic post in Pétain’s Vichy regime in 1942–43. There were cries of outrage, yet the shock and fury quickly faded. In some circles he was credited with throwing his critics off balance by his clever management of the news. Prior to his death in January 1996, Mitterrand left his mark culturally on Paris as well, where grandiose architecture projects such as the Opéra de la Bastille, the expanded Louvre, the towering Grande Arche de la Défense, and the new Bibliothèque Nationale de France kept his name alive.
Mitterrand’s second venture into cohabitation (1993–95) had proved more helpful to Prime Minister Balladur than to the president. It also had proved deeply disappointing to Chirac, who had engineered Balladur’s appointment on the assumption that he would stand in for Chirac and step aside in his favour when the presidential election approached. Chirac had failed to see that his stylish and courteous stand-in might develop into his own most serious rival. By 1995 Balladur was the clear front-runner and announced his presidential candidacy against his own party leader, Chirac. Meanwhile, the Socialists, after some initial scrambling to find a viable candidate, ended by choosing party official Lionel Jospin, who led the field in the first round of voting on April 23. Chirac, a vigorous campaigner, outpaced Balladur, and in the runoff he won again, this time against Jospin. His victory brought to an end the 14-year Socialist presidency.Gordon WrightEugen Weber
France under conservative presidencies
The Chirac administration
Jacques ChiracJacques Chirac, 2006.
The right-of-centre triumph of 1995 did not last. In the anticipated elections that Chirac called in 1997, a Socialist majority swept back to power, and Jospin returned to head a coalition of Socialists, Communists, and Greens. Whereas the policies of Mitterrand’s second term had made concessions to the free market, Chirac’s moderate prime minister, Alain Juppé (1995–97), made serious concessions to the welfare state. Under Jospin, as under Juppé, pragmatic cohabitation struggled to maintain both economic growth and the social safety net. Privatization proceeded apace, inflation remained under control, and the introduction of the euro (the single European currency) in January 1999 boosted competition and investment. Yet unemployment stubbornly hovered around 12 percent in the last decade of the century, casting doubt on Jospin’s hope that growth and social progress would be reconciled.
When France hosted and won the football (soccer) World Cup in 1998, however, it was a triumph not only for national sporting pride but for cohabitation at the highest levels, as it showcased multiracial cooperation on a winning squad made up of Arabs, Africans, and Europeans, reflecting France’s increasingly diverse society.
In 2002 the RPR merged with other parties to create the centre-right Union for the Presidential Majority—later renamed the Union for a Popular Movement (Union pour un Mouvement Populaire; UMP)—which succeeded in securing Chirac’s reelection that year. Chirac easily defeated the extremist Le Pen, whose surprisingly strong showing in the first round of voting led Jospin to announce his resignation. No longer having to share power with the Socialists, Chirac named fellow Gaullist Jean-Pierre Raffarin to replace Jospin as prime minister. This socioeconomic balancing act remained in place, though, pitting the popularity of progressive social legislation against the difficulties of high taxes, restrictive social security demands on employers, and precarious funding for health and welfare projects.
France took the world spotlight in 2003, when the Chirac administration—believing the regime of Iraqi leader Ṣaddām Ḥussein to be cooperating with United Nations inspectors searching for weapons of mass destruction—led several members of the UN Security Council in effectively blocking authorization of the use of force against Iraq. Although the French public largely agreed with Chirac on Iraq, the UMP suffered losses in both regional and European Parliament elections in 2004. The following year Chirac experienced a further loss of prestige when French voters rejected the ratification of a new European Union constitution, which he had strongly supported. In the aftermath of the failed vote, the president named his protégé Dominique de Villepin to replace Raffarin as prime minister. He selected Villepin over his longtime rival Nicolas Sarkozy, who then added the duties of interior minister to his job as head of the UMP.
Later in 2005, French pride in the country’s diversity wavered when the accidental deaths of two immigrant teenagers sparked violence in Paris that spread rapidly to other parts of the country. Nearly 9,000 cars were torched and nearly 3,000 arrests made during the autumn riots, which were fueled by high unemployment, discrimination, and lack of opportunity within the primarily North African immigrant community. In 2006, in a further illustration of widespread dissatisfaction with the government, more than a million people gathered around the country to protest a law that would have facilitated the dismissal of young employees. Chirac, already suffering a sharp decline in popularity, was forced to suspend the law.
The Sarkozy administration
Although he was constitutionally eligible, Chirac chose not to run for president again in 2007. Echoing the public’s desire for change, the country’s two main political parties nominated a pair of relative newcomers to replace him. The Socialist Party selected Ségolène Royal, a former adviser to Mitterrand, while Chirac’s rival Sarkozy easily won the nomination of the centre-right UMP. Both advanced to the second round of elections (Royal was the first woman ever to do so), in which Sarkozy won a decisive victory. Although Socialists disparagingly likened Sarkozy to an American neoconservative (see conservatism), his supporters welcomed his promises to reduce unemployment, cut taxes, simplify the public sector, and toughen immigration and sentencing laws.
By 2010, however, high unemployment and economic uncertainty had contributed to growing dissatisfaction with Sarkozy and the UMP. Having fared poorly in French regional elections that March, the UMP retained control of only 1 of 22 régions, while the Socialists and their allies captured the remainder. That summer the French government’s proposed austerity measures, particularly a plan to raise the retirement age, prompted a nationwide strike and other protests; further strikes in the fall brought hundreds of thousands of people to the streets and wreaked chaos in the country’s transportation networks. Sarkozy drew additional criticism, notably from the European Union, for the deportation of hundreds of Romanians and Bulgarians, most of whom were Roma (Gypsies) living in illegal camps.
In September 2010, following a July vote by the lower house of the French parliament, the Senate overwhelmingly approved legislation to outlaw face-concealing garments in public places. The ban did not explicitly refer to Islamic dress but was widely understood to target veils that fully covered a woman’s face. The law took effect in April 2011, with violators facing fines of €150.
The euro-zone crisis and the Socialist resurgence
The 2012 presidential campaign
French foreign and domestic policy throughout 2011 focused on the ongoing euro-zone debt crisis, while support began to coalesce around a small group of candidates who were likely to contest the 2012 presidential race. Marine Le Pen was chosen to succeed her father as the leader of the National Front, and her populist appeal quickly made her a factor in the contest. Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the director of the International Monetary Fund, who was presumed by many to be the likely Socialist candidate, was dramatically removed from contention after he was arrested on sexual assault charges in New York City in May 2011. Although the charges were dropped several months later, the Socialists had already found a new candidate in former party leader François Hollande. Sarkozy, for his part, spent much of his time on international issues, acting as president of the Group of Eight and the Group of 20, as well as teaming with German Chancellor Angela Merkel to try to halt the financial contagion that was spreading throughout Europe.
Sarkozy’s domestic economic policies contributed to a steady erosion of his support, as he proposed a series of austerity measures that were intended to reduce France’s budget deficit. In a shock to Sarkozy’s administration, the Socialist Party and its allies won control of the Senate in September 2011. This represented the first time that the Socialists had held a majority in the indirectly elected upper house since the proclamation of the Fifth Republic in 1958.
The Hollande administration
Hollande secured his position as the Socialist candidate in France’s first-ever open primary in October 2011, and he went on to top a field of 10 candidates in the first round of the presidential election in April 2012. In that contest Le Pen led the National Front to its best-ever performance in a presidential election, capturing more than 18 percent of the vote for a strong third-place finish. Sarkozy, who finished second, qualified for a runoff against Hollande, and he spent the next two weeks courting the National Front voters who represented his best chance at victory. On May 6, 2012, Hollande defeated Sarkozy, capturing almost 52 percent of the vote and becoming the first Socialist to win a presidential election since Mitterrand bested Chirac in 1988. One month later the sweep was made complete when the Socialist bloc captured 314 seats in the National Assembly, giving it a clear majority in the lower house. Although Marine Le Pen narrowly lost her bid for a seat in the legislature, two other National Front candidates were victorious, and the party returned to parliament for the first time since 1997.
Within hours of his inauguration, Hollande flew to Berlin to meet with Merkel about Franco-German strategy regarding the euro-zone crisis. He endeavoured to shift the emphasis of the response from austerity to growth, but the March 2012 EU fiscal pact reduced the ability of signatory countries to embark on stimulus programs funded by deficit spending. In subsequent meetings, Hollande continued to place growth at the forefront of the economic agenda. On the domestic front, Hollande quickly made good on several promises made during the presidential campaign. He implemented a 75 percent tax rate on incomes above €1 million (about $1.3 million) and accelerated plans for the withdrawal of French troops from the NATO mission in Afghanistan. Although the “millionaires’ tax” was overturned by France’s Constitutional Court in December 2012, the proposal remained popular with the French public, and Hollande vowed to resubmit the tax law in an amended form. With his administration beset with declining approval ratings, Hollande struggled with an unemployment rate that topped 10 percent. His attempts to foster growth with pro-business measures rankled his supporters on the left, and his tax policies sparked resistance from the right. In March 2013 he announced an amended form of his “millionaires’ tax” that would collect the tax in question from companies rather than individuals. On April 23, 2013, the National Assembly voted convincingly to legalize same-sex marriage and conferred the right to adopt on same-sex couples.
Despite Hollande’s efforts, France’s economy continued to struggle. Concerns about a jobless recovery were heightened as the unemployment rate crept stubbornly upward despite the country’s slow movement out of recession. While his economic policy failed to gain traction, Hollande pursued a hawkish foreign policy. French troops intervened in Mali in January and in the Central African Republic in December 2013. Hollande also pushed for Western military intervention in the Syrian Civil War after chemical weapons were used on a rebel-held area outside Damascus. Faced with wavering support from the United States and Britain, Hollande backed a diplomatic initiative that led to the dismantling of Syria’s chemical arsenal.
The successes of the so-called “Hollande doctrine”—which sought to position France in a more prominent place on the global stage—did not translate into popular support, as evidenced in municipal elections in March 2014. Hollande’s Socialists were crushed, whereas the UMP and the National Front picked up scores of mayoral offices and hundreds of city council seats. Record low voter turnout was seen as symptomatic of apathy among Socialist supporters, while Le Pen’s continued rebranding of the National Front led to that party’s best-ever electoral showing. Hollande responded by reshuffling his cabinet, replacing Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault with interior minister Manuel Valls, a centrist whose sometimes controversial views found support among the French right. The National Front’s ascent continued in May, when it topped the polls in the election for the European Parliament.
The French economy continued to lag, with unemployment topping 11 percent in July 2014, and Valls faced a revolt within his own cabinet. In August 2014 economic minister Arnaud Montebourg, who had long advocated a program of growth over austerity, was sacked after publicly criticizing Hollande’s economic policy. Valls announced the resignation of his cabinet, and Hollande promptly asked him to form a new government. While Hollande’s popularity languished, scandals within the UMP limited the party’s ability to capitalize on the president’s weakness. Sarkozy, in an effort to right the listing party and launch his own political comeback, successfully won the leadership of the UMP at a party congress in November 2014.
Charlie HebdoThe website of the satirical weekly newspaper Charlie Hebdo on January 7, 2015, after 12 people were killed in a terrorist attack on the publication's editorial offices. The slogan “Je suis Charlie” (“I am Charlie”) was adopted by those wishing to express solidarity with the slain journalists.(more)
On January 7, 2015, gunmen attacked the Paris offices of the satirical publication Charlie Hebdo, killing 12 people. The terrorist action was the bloodiest such incident on French soil in more than 50 years, and it was believed that the magazine had been targeted for its portrayal of the Prophet Muhammad. As French authorities embarked on a nationwide manhunt, world leaders condemned the attacks, and thousands converged on city centres throughout France to demonstrate their solidarity with the victims. On January 9 the suspected gunmen, two brothers who were known to U.S. and French authorities for their connections to militant Islamist groups, fled to a printing plant in a small town northeast of Paris, where they took a hostage and engaged in a standoff with police. Meanwhile, another gunman, who claimed to be working in concert with the others and who was suspected of killing a police officer in Montrouge the previous day, seized hostages at a kosher grocery store in Paris. After several hours, French security forces stormed both locations, killing all three gunmen. The hostage at the printing plant was freed safely. Four hostages were killed at the market, but more than a dozen were rescued.
November 2015 Paris attacksInvestigators examining the bodies of victims of a terrorist attack on a Paris restaurant, November 13, 2015.(more)
On November 13, 2015, coordinated teams of gunmen armed with automatic weapons and explosive belts attacked targets in and around Paris, killing at least 129 people and injuring hundreds. It was the deadliest terrorist incident in Europe since the 2004 Madrid train bombings. Three attackers blew themselves up outside the Stade de France in the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis; Hollande was among the thousands of people inside the stadium watching an association football (soccer) match between France and Germany. In Paris dozens were killed when Islamist militants opened fire on crowded cafés and restaurants in the 10th and 11th arrondissements (municipal districts). At least 89 people were killed when a trio of gunmen attacked the Bataclan music venue, where the American rock band Eagles of Death Metal were playing before a sold-out crowd. The attackers occupied the Bataclan for more than two hours, holding hostages and shooting survivors of the initial assault, before French police stormed the building. Two of the attackers detonated suicide belts and the third was killed by police. The Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL; also known as ISIS) claimed responsibility for the attacks, and Hollande declared that France was “at war” with the group. Over subsequent days, French jets bombed targets in ISIL-held areas in Syria and Iraq, more than 100,000 security personnel were mobilized, and police raided scores of locations across France and Belgium in search of suspected accomplices.
On July 14, 2016, at least 84 people were killed and scores were injured in France’s third major terrorist attack in 18 months, when a truck was driven through revelers celebrating Bastille Day in Nice. Tens of thousands had gathered along the city’s beachfront Promenade des Anglais to view a fireworks display, and the crowd had just begun to disperse at the time of the attack. The truck traveled roughly a mile (2 km) down the promenade, plowing through barricades and into a designated pedestrian zone, striking hundreds of people before it was brought to a halt. The driver, who had a history of petty crime but no known association with terrorist groups, was killed in a gun battle with police. Hours before the attack, Hollande had announced the planned lifting of the state of emergency that existed since the November 2015 attacks; he subsequently extended the state of emergency for an additional three months and called up the country’s military reserves.
With Hollande’s approval ratings dipping into the single digits, he announced in December 2016 that he would not seek reelection. Days later, Hollande’s prime minister, Manuel Valls, resigned his post and declared his intention to pursue the Socialist nomination for the presidency. The presidential race had already experienced one surprise, when the Republicans (formerly the UMP) resoundingly closed the door on Nicolas Sarkozy’s political comeback ambitions. Sarkozy finished a distant third in the first round of the Republican presidential primary in November. That race was won by Sarkozy’s former prime minister, François Fillon, a standard-bearer for France’s right-leaning provincial Roman Catholic population. Polls suggested that he likely would face the National Front’s Marine Le Pen in the second round of the presidential election in May 2017.
Emmanuel MacronEmmanuel Macron, 2017.
Fillon’s campaign collapsed amid accusations that he had created fake jobs for members of his family, and in March 2017 both he and his wife were charged with the embezzlement of nearly $1 million in public funds. The presidential race essentially became a three-way contest between outsider candidates: Le Pen, former Communist Party presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon, and Hollande’s finance minister, Emmanuel Macron. Macron had formed his own political party—En Marche!—in April 2016, with a platform that echoed the “third way” policies of British Prime Minister Tony Blair. As the left and right wings of the major parties accrued to Mélenchon and Le Pen accordingly, Macron peeled away the centrists, earning endorsements from former Socialist prime minister Manuel Valls and former UMP prime minister Alain Juppé.
The first round of the presidential election was held in April 2017, and, for the first time in the history of the Fifth Republic, both of France’s mainstream parties were shut out of the second-round runoff. An eleventh-hour online information dump, dubbed “MacronLeaks,” was attributed to the same Russian hackers who had attempted to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election, but it failed to significantly affect the result. Macron and Le Pen advanced to the second round, held on May 7, with Macron winning a convincing victory to become France’s youngest leader since Napoleon. The following month Macron’s En Marche! secured a commanding majority in parliamentary elections. The coalition of En Marche! and François Bayrou’s Democratic Movement (MoDem) held 350 of 577 seats. Women composed a record 39 percent of the National Assembly, but the election was marred by the lowest voter turnout in a French parliamentary election since World War II.
Notre-Dame Cathedral: 2019 fireFlames and smoke rise from Notre-Dame Cathedral on April 15, 2019.
Macron quickly became a presence on the world stage. He established an unlikely friendship with U.S. Pres. Donald Trump but worked to preserve both the Paris Climate Agreement and the Iran nuclear deal, two measures that the American president opposed. Macron’s growing influence abroad did little to bolster his domestic approval, however. In an effort to attract foreign investment, he enacted a tax regime that benefited France’s wealthiest citizens, earning him the nickname président des riches (“president of the rich”). Public criticism of Macron sharply intensified in November 2018, when demonstrators took to the streets in opposition to a proposed fuel tax increase. The protesters, who came to be called gilets jaunes (“yellow vests”) after the bright traffic safety vests they wore, were broadly supported by the French public, and Macron was eventually forced to withdraw the fuel tax. The country briefly rallied around Macron in April 2019, when a fire seriously damaged Paris’s iconic Notre-Dame Cathedral. Macron vowed that the cathedral would be rebuilt, and he launched a fundraising campaign that brought in hundreds of millions of dollars in donations from around the world.
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