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The Crisis of Politics and Government in France

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

Mario Einaudi
Mario Einaudi
Affiliation:
Cornell University
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Extract

The French elections of June 1951 and the serious difficulties experienced by the victorious constitutional parties in the formation of a government call attention once more to the problems of a parliamentary system in a multiparty state, and underline the urgency of a redefinition of the roles of parties and government within a constitutional democracy. These developments also draw attention to the basic constitutional problems which affect the political stability of France, and thereby weaken the Western community. With an occasional glance at parallel Italian developments, this article will first analyze the new electoral law and the election returns before proceeding to a discussion of the constitutional issues that contribute to the deepening crisis of the Fourth Republic.

Type
Research Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 4 , Issue 1 , October 1951 , pp. 64 - 84
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1951

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References

1 Proportional representation was kept in Paris, essentially because the Third Force, which was responsible for the new law, knew that both the Communists and the De Gaullists were so strong in Paris that there was no chance for any Third Force alliance to obtain a majority. Under the circumstances, as a matter of expediency if not of principle, it was better to leave proportional representation untouched.

2 The new Italian law, to be used only in municipal and provincial elections, provides in essence that two-thirds of the seats in any electoral college go to the list, or alliance of lists, obtaining a plurality of the votes cast, with the remaining one-third distributed by proportional representation among all other lists. Allied lists, in case of victory, divide the seats among themselves by proportional representation.

3 Whenever a group of allied lists obtained a majority of votes, the new French electoral system came close to the old scrutin d'arrondissement with two ballots, with the important difference that most of the power had shifted to the party machines deciding upon the alliances before the elections. The new system turned out to be a compromise between the old and the new. In a little less than half of the departments, the majority principle operated, and in a little more than half, proportional representation. Under the old majority system in 1936, 44 per cent of the votes were not represented in the Chamber of Deputies. In 1946 with proportional representation, only 9 per cent were left unrepresented. In 1951, the percentage went back to 24. The greatest sufferers were, as expected, the Communists, as 1,400,000 Communist voters, or nearly 30 per cent of the total Communist vote, were unable to elect a single deputy. Less important losses were sustained by the De Gaullists, who wasted only 600,000 votes, or 15 per cent of their total.

4 For a much more careful presentation and defense of the “community of interests” approach to the reform of industrial enterprises, see Georges Lasserre, Rapport sur la Réforme de l'Entreprise. The report was rejected by the Economic Council, to which it had been presented on March 22, 1950. For the text, cf. Avis et Rapports du C. E., Journal Officiel, March 24, 1950, pp. 174–97.

5 This rejection was not achieved by a very great margin, for 48.a per cent of the French voters voted either for Gaullism or communism, and the more comfortable majority enjoyed by the republican parties in the National Assembly (391 deputies against 235 for the Communists and Gauilists together) is due only to the operation of the electoral law. It should also be noted that the new electoral law produced a National Assembly oriented to the right, while 53.3 per cent of the votes were given to parties of the left: 26.5 per cent to the Communists, 14.5 per cent to the Socialists, and 12.3 per cent to the MRP (stripped of its conservative element and reduced to less than half its 1946 strength, the MRP should be classified as a party of the left).

6 They were not alone in Italy. The Socialist company the Italian Communists were able to keep, as well as the more difficult economic circumstances of the country, explain the increase in “Popular Front” vote in the Italian local elections of May and June 1951. In the provinces where elections were held (and they included two-thirds of the country), the Popular Front vote increased from 31 to 36.9 per cent. But in north and central Italy, the increase was entirely due to an increase in the Socialist and so-called independent votes within the Popular Front. By comparison with 1948, the Communist vote alone decreased fractionally everywhere (2 per cent in Tuscany and Emilia, 12 per cent in Piedmont). This indicates that within the Popular Front a shift has occurred between 1948 and 1951 away from the Communists and toward the Socialists. In the elections of 1951, out of every 100 Popular Front votes, the Communists received an average of only 57 votes, as against about 63 in 1948. The Communist vote was less than one-half, or barely one-half, of the total Popular Front vote in Veneto and Liguria and was between 55 and 60 per cent in Lombardy, Piedmont, and Tuscany. Only in the south did the relative strength of communism within the Popular Front increase.

7 ' The losses of Christian democracy in Italy were less severe than in France because of the lack of as strong an attraction as General de Gaulle, but they were serious enough to cause many people to wonder whether the Christian Democratic party had not lost the opportunity it gained with its decisive 1948 victory. The party's losses were due to dissatisfaction with the concrete achievements of the government since 1948 and with the repeated interventions of the ecclesiastical hierarchy and of Catholic Action in the political struggle, as well as to the inability of the strangely silent and inactive Christian Democratic left to arouse any serious hopes in the progressive and reformist intentions of the party. Lombardy remained the main fortress of Christian democracy, and in this most highly developed Italian region the loss of votes was small. In the pagan and impoverished south, the decline reached 40 per cent and indicated the ease with which the voters can be swayed from one church to another. As a whole the party was still able to obtain 39 per cent of the vote, which is more than three times what the MRP got in France.

8 The Osservatore Romano, on May 25, 1951, wrote that “it would certainly be painful to see a part of the Catholic electorate choose, as against the Popular Republicans who are in spite of their shortcomings firmly committed to a well-defined program deserving of support for the sincere effort it shows of leading France toward a better future, a vague transformism of the right which fatally might [sic] slide down into intransigence.”

9 Hilton-Young, W., The Italian Left, London, 1949, p. 185.Google Scholar

10 See, on these issues and on the crisis of democracy in France, Goguel, François, “La Démocratie en France,” Christianisme Social (December 1950 and January-February 1951).Google Scholar