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France Marks the Mitterrand Decade
| Article
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18670 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1991 |
2,946 Words |
| Author
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Harvey B. Feigenbaum
Harvey B. Feigenbaum teaches political science at the George
Washington University in Washington, D.C. He is the author of
The Politics of Public Enterprise: Oil and the French State
(Princeton University Press, 1985) and is coauthor of Politics
and Government in Europe Today (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1990). |
On May 10, 1991, France celebrated the tenth anniversary of the Mitterrand presidency, la decennie Mitterrand. May 10, 1991, was considerably more somber than the spring evening of ten years ago when, shortly after 8 P.M., news programs announced the results of the presidential election, and people spontaneously poured into the streets and plazas of Paris. They danced into the wee hours of the morning celebrating the Left's return to power after 23 years in the political wilderness. Not everyone, of course, danced. Supporters of outgoing conservative President Giscard d'Eastaing feared the worst: if it was not the radical economic program that disquieted them, it was certainly the fact that members of the French Communist Party would serve as government ministers for the first time since 1947. The morose Giscardiens would prove eventually to be right in their skepticism of the socialists' economic program. The communists, on the other hand, turned out not to be a problem. Mitterrand and his colleagues had promised to changer la vie (change life). After ten years, it is not obvious that they have changed the majority of French lives. On the contrary, as the quintessential establishment newspaper Le Monde noted, la vie had changed the socialists.
Perhaps more than the tenth anniversary of Mitterrand's election, May 10, 1991, marked the absolute stability of French political institutions. Not a mean achievement. Since the Revolution of 1789 the country persevered under a myriad of political regimes: two empires, two restored monarchies, a fascist dictatorship, and five republics. The Fifth Republic was inaugurated in 1958 by Charles de Gaulle to solve the problem of revolving-door governments that had plagued the French political system since the end of the Second World War. Governments in the Fourth Republic were easy prey to votes of no confidence from the legislature, and thus could not take decisive action on crucial issues. Most importantly, politicians of the Fourth Republic were unable to extricate France from the bitterly divisive war in Algeria. They called upon Charles de Gaulle, the hero of Free France during World War II, to save France again. His price was a new constitution that gave extraordinary powers to the president. So powerful was the new presidency that some feared France would once again fall victim to another Bonaparte. A disgruntled minister of the outgoing Fourth Republic referred to the new constitution as a "permanent coup d'etat." The name of that minister was Francois Mitterrand. He would later change his mind.
Getting there is not always half the fun. Mitterrand's struggle to return to the corridors of power was a long and difficult one. American presidents have often proven that it's
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