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The French National Assembly Elections of March 1978*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

J. R. Frears
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Extract

WHEN A SLEEPER AWAKES FROM A BAD DREAM HE FINDS THE BEDCLOTHES a little rumpled but nothing else changed. The dream itself quickly fades. However the recurring dream is a phenomenon well-known to psychology. The French electorate of the Fifth Republic goes in for the insubstantial dream as an important form of experience. The most famous example was the ‘Events of May 1968’. Like a sleepwalker the whole country acted out the myth of revolution with all its romantic folklore. Comfortable, even wealthy, people manned the strike committees at their children's schools. However nobody turned the power or the water off and nobody did any shooting. People only began to get killed when petrol distribution was resumed for the Whitsun holiday weekend and there were 120 deaths in road accidents. Nonetheless the government tottered and the world trembled. No one noticed that in an affluent industrial democracy with a standard of living among the highest in the world the kind of discontent that leads to violent cataclysm did not exist.

Type
Article
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 13 , Issue 3 , 01 July 1978 , pp. 323 - 340
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 1978

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References

1 Ministry of the Interior figures: Le Monde, 22 March 1978.

2 Quand la gauche peut gagner, Paris, eds. Moreau, 1973.

3 Post-election broadcast on 22 March 1978.

4 Paris, Fayard, 1976.

5 Ibid., p. 155.

6 Broadcast on II March 1978.

7 On Representative Government, Everyman edition, pp. 179 and 185.