French History, 1944 - 1963
A Certain Idea of France: The French Empire under the Fourth Republic
Le grand Charles: the last-known photograph of Charles de Gaulle, taken shortly before his assassination in November 1946
The French surrender in 1940 and the subsequent ‘Vichy’ regime lead by Philippe Petain brought the curtain down on the Third Republic, a regime which, while it was the longest-lasting constitution since the fall of the ancien regime, had never commanded unqualified support nor quelled the doubts of many elements of society, both reactionary and revolutionary, about the viability of democracy as a governing system. Charles de Gaulle had been the leading figure of the Free French forces during the War and was widely expected to take a senior position in the government of the new Fourth Republic. As head of the provisional government set up in 1944, de Gaulle had declared war on the Axis and chaired the subsequent constitutional convention.
The convention produced a constitution with a unicameral legislative assembly elected every four years. Presidents were elected via an electoral college to a maximum of two five-year terms, on a joint ticket with a Vice President whose main job was to chair the council of ministers. Despite his domineering presence at the convention, de Gaulle was not wholly satisfied with its results - in particular he was dissatisfied that the presidency would not be subject to direct elections - and he was initially minded to withdraw from public life. However, he was prevailed upon by his allies to stand for the presidency, for which he was generally regarded as a shoe-in, on the assumption that he could make whatever amendments he regarded as necessary down the line.
However, whatever dreams de Gaulle may have had for the future would come to nothing. In November 1946, only eleven months after he won the first presidential election, he was assassinated in Paris by the right wing activist Paul Touvier. Into the vacuum, the Vice President Georges Bonnet ascended to the presidency. Bonnet’s presidency would be troubled and dominated by the question of the future of France’s colonial empire. Bonnet was unwilling to make concessions to nationalist leaders, an attitude which had begun a war in Indochina in December 1946 and which was causing trouble to brew in Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria. His equivocation on the issue, combined with the continued failure of French forces to control the growing insurgency in Indochina and the victory by Pierre Mendes France’s Radical Party in the 1948 elections, resulted in his attempted impeachment in 1949. Although the vote failed, Bonnet was left as a lame duck and did not stand for re-election in 1950.
This vote was won by Philippe Leclerc, a hero of the World War who had urged reconciliation between imperial and nationalist forces in Indochina during his tenure in command there (1944-46). In March 1951, a tentative agreement was reached between Leclerc and the two senior Vietnamese leaders: Emperor Bao Dai and the communist leader Ho Chi Minh. While the Emperor and Ho had no love for one another, the Emperor had earned the revolutionary’s respect owing to his activity in the anti-Chinese resistance during the war. Furthermore, while Ho was no fan of French power, he saw it as being in long-term decline and feared it less than the Chinese or the Japanese. Under the terms of the Leclerc-Ho-Bao Agreement, French Indochina would be disestablished and divided into the kingdoms of Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam (the last of whom would have Ho as its prime minister) and the Republic of Cochinchina (the region around Saigon and the Mekong Delta that was dominated by white French merchants and plantation owners). They would all be independent members of the French Union.
Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia would agree to join in this putative union in 1954 but the organisation would not take its full form, with a bureaucracy and decision-making forum, until 1958, with the accession of Guinea, Senegal, West Africa and Equatorial Africa. However, hopes that the FU would emulate the example of the Commonwealth seemed fanciful almost immediately: in the first place, only residents of certain communes of Senegal (since 1879) had been French citizens prior to 1958; secondly, none of the French colonies (including Senegal) had undergone the process of building up civil society institutions or a Francophilic elite that would make the transition easier. As Harold Nicolson (who, as Lord Nicolson, was not above a bit of continuing freelance diplomatic work) rather dismissively noted in his diary after leaving a Commonwealth-FU conference in 1959, “the French simply haven’t put the work in.”
The first elections to the FU assembly took place in 1958 and the campaigning season was marred by violence and disruption and, on polling day, rioting broke out across a number of colonies. Allegations of voter intimidation were rife, both in the former colonies and in Metropolitan France. During his final years in the Elysse, Leclerc worked to try and ensure that there were free and fair elections along the lines of universal suffrage that was (theoretically) guaranteed, as well as making big gestures towards including black and Muslim members of the FU assembly in its decision making process.
But the reality was that a large minority of his party (the Union of Democrats (“UD”) founded by de Gaulle) were not with him on this, instead favouring the pieds-noirs (where they were a relevant minority) and/or French business interests at the expense of native Africans, Muslims or Indochinese. The pieds-noirs in north Africa caused a particular problem, working to try and minimise Arab turnout through a mixture of violence and bureaucratic maneuvering. A veneer of free and fair elections open to all had been maintained only by the heavy presence of French and Foreign Legion soldiers and it was clear that this would have to be the case for the foreseeable future. Even notwithstanding this, a great deal of communal violence still occurred and it was particularly bad in Oran and Algiers, where 133 Muslims and 56 pieds-noirs were killed in political violence over the course of 1958-59. In an attempt to evolve the empire into something more just, Leclerc looked to have accidentally increased French military commitments to its colonies.
Leclerc’s relatively progressive attitude towards France’s former colonial subjects, as well as his willingness to use French troops to enforce voting rights for non-whites in the FU, caused a backlash amongst conservative-minded opinion in metropolitan France itself. Many thus deserted the DU and found their voice in the Union of Independent Republicans, a party led by a mix of social conservatives and, some pointed out, those who had collaborated with the German occupation. A particular source of outrage for many was the decision to make Algeria a member of the FU separate from France itself.
By the mid-1950s, therefore, France had developed for itself an almost unique party-political structure. Rather than two competing parties of the centre-left and centre-right with assorted smaller parties milling around, as was the case in most western European countries, France instead developed a tripartite party division. The DU became a mainly rural party advocating a small but protective state, mixed in with a support for the FU and anti-socialism. The Independent Republicans (who shortened their name to simply the Republicans in 1960) also took a right wing perspective but their political base was drawn mainly from the business class and those who felt strongly about French grandeur and the empire. Many of their supporters were also unreconstructed white supremacists and anti-democrats, although these messages were often kept quiet. The French Communist Party had been discredited after the failure of a minor Soviet-backed coup in 1947, leaving the Radical Party as the supposed voice of the French left. But it did so in a unique way. The easiest way to describe its political position is somewhere around the left wing of the Liberal Party and the right wing of the Labour Party in the UK. Representing a belief in a protective and proactive state, the party drew much of its support from the urban working classes and the trades union movement. However, it was never the only party advocating for state direction or intervention (both the DU and the Republicans did so to differing degrees) which stopped it holding this territory to itself and becoming the kind of fully social democratic party seen in the Commonwealth or the United States.
Well funded and with close ties to the business community and the military, the Independent Republicans became the largest party in the assembly in 1956, forming a minority coalition under General Raoul Salan. In the elections of November 1960, they went one better and managed to form a majority government. This posed huge questions for the presidential elections only a month later. The Republican candidate, Said Boualam, failed to fully capitalise on the breakthrough of his party in the legislative elections (partly because of the anti-democratic sentiment he espoused repeatedly on the campaign trail) but was still left with enough electoral college delegates to block either the Radical candidate Felix Gaillard or the DU candidate George Pompidou from receiving the necessary 50%+1 to win the presidency. In negotiations between Salan and the DU, Salan agreed that Republican votes would go to the DU on three conditions: that a pieds-noir exclave be carved out of independent Algeria and governed as an autonomous part of metropolitan France; that French troops be withdrawn from monitoring the next FU elections in 1962; and that the constitution be amended to grant greater budget-setting authority to the legislature. Pompidou agreed to the terms and, with the votes of the Independent Republicans, he won the presidency on the next ballot of the electoral college.
The partition of Algeria (without consultation with the Algerian government, of course) took place on 3 May 1961, with the city of Oran and the area around it returning to French control as the Department of the Maghreb. The partition, appearing as it did with little to no foreknowledge, immediately initiated a widespread refugee crisis as pieds-noirs and Francophile Muslims (often former or present harkis) sought to enter the Maghreb and many Muslims sought to flee to independent Algeria. In the resulting civil violence, the numbers of killed and missing has been estimated from anywhere between 5,000 to 30,000. With all sides overwhelmed, in July the government of Algeria and France together forcibly shut the border and banned movement of peoples between Algeria and the Maghreb.
Over the next few years, the Republicans began to work with various political factions around the FU to draw together an alliance of co-opted colonial elites and French business interests which triumphed in the 1962 FU elections. With France no longer going to send troops to enforce elections, these various colonies all began systematic voter suppression exercises designed to entrench their own power. In November 1963, Ho was turfed out of power in Vietnam following elections marred by widespread vote-rigging. Responding to this, Ho retreated to the countryside where he declared Vietnam’s secession from the FU as a republic and began a guerilla campaign against royal forces.
Presidents of the Fourth Republic
Premiers of the Fourth Republic
Le grand Charles: the last-known photograph of Charles de Gaulle, taken shortly before his assassination in November 1946
The French surrender in 1940 and the subsequent ‘Vichy’ regime lead by Philippe Petain brought the curtain down on the Third Republic, a regime which, while it was the longest-lasting constitution since the fall of the ancien regime, had never commanded unqualified support nor quelled the doubts of many elements of society, both reactionary and revolutionary, about the viability of democracy as a governing system. Charles de Gaulle had been the leading figure of the Free French forces during the War and was widely expected to take a senior position in the government of the new Fourth Republic. As head of the provisional government set up in 1944, de Gaulle had declared war on the Axis and chaired the subsequent constitutional convention.
The convention produced a constitution with a unicameral legislative assembly elected every four years. Presidents were elected via an electoral college to a maximum of two five-year terms, on a joint ticket with a Vice President whose main job was to chair the council of ministers. Despite his domineering presence at the convention, de Gaulle was not wholly satisfied with its results - in particular he was dissatisfied that the presidency would not be subject to direct elections - and he was initially minded to withdraw from public life. However, he was prevailed upon by his allies to stand for the presidency, for which he was generally regarded as a shoe-in, on the assumption that he could make whatever amendments he regarded as necessary down the line.
However, whatever dreams de Gaulle may have had for the future would come to nothing. In November 1946, only eleven months after he won the first presidential election, he was assassinated in Paris by the right wing activist Paul Touvier. Into the vacuum, the Vice President Georges Bonnet ascended to the presidency. Bonnet’s presidency would be troubled and dominated by the question of the future of France’s colonial empire. Bonnet was unwilling to make concessions to nationalist leaders, an attitude which had begun a war in Indochina in December 1946 and which was causing trouble to brew in Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria. His equivocation on the issue, combined with the continued failure of French forces to control the growing insurgency in Indochina and the victory by Pierre Mendes France’s Radical Party in the 1948 elections, resulted in his attempted impeachment in 1949. Although the vote failed, Bonnet was left as a lame duck and did not stand for re-election in 1950.
This vote was won by Philippe Leclerc, a hero of the World War who had urged reconciliation between imperial and nationalist forces in Indochina during his tenure in command there (1944-46). In March 1951, a tentative agreement was reached between Leclerc and the two senior Vietnamese leaders: Emperor Bao Dai and the communist leader Ho Chi Minh. While the Emperor and Ho had no love for one another, the Emperor had earned the revolutionary’s respect owing to his activity in the anti-Chinese resistance during the war. Furthermore, while Ho was no fan of French power, he saw it as being in long-term decline and feared it less than the Chinese or the Japanese. Under the terms of the Leclerc-Ho-Bao Agreement, French Indochina would be disestablished and divided into the kingdoms of Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam (the last of whom would have Ho as its prime minister) and the Republic of Cochinchina (the region around Saigon and the Mekong Delta that was dominated by white French merchants and plantation owners). They would all be independent members of the French Union.
Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia would agree to join in this putative union in 1954 but the organisation would not take its full form, with a bureaucracy and decision-making forum, until 1958, with the accession of Guinea, Senegal, West Africa and Equatorial Africa. However, hopes that the FU would emulate the example of the Commonwealth seemed fanciful almost immediately: in the first place, only residents of certain communes of Senegal (since 1879) had been French citizens prior to 1958; secondly, none of the French colonies (including Senegal) had undergone the process of building up civil society institutions or a Francophilic elite that would make the transition easier. As Harold Nicolson (who, as Lord Nicolson, was not above a bit of continuing freelance diplomatic work) rather dismissively noted in his diary after leaving a Commonwealth-FU conference in 1959, “the French simply haven’t put the work in.”
The first elections to the FU assembly took place in 1958 and the campaigning season was marred by violence and disruption and, on polling day, rioting broke out across a number of colonies. Allegations of voter intimidation were rife, both in the former colonies and in Metropolitan France. During his final years in the Elysse, Leclerc worked to try and ensure that there were free and fair elections along the lines of universal suffrage that was (theoretically) guaranteed, as well as making big gestures towards including black and Muslim members of the FU assembly in its decision making process.
But the reality was that a large minority of his party (the Union of Democrats (“UD”) founded by de Gaulle) were not with him on this, instead favouring the pieds-noirs (where they were a relevant minority) and/or French business interests at the expense of native Africans, Muslims or Indochinese. The pieds-noirs in north Africa caused a particular problem, working to try and minimise Arab turnout through a mixture of violence and bureaucratic maneuvering. A veneer of free and fair elections open to all had been maintained only by the heavy presence of French and Foreign Legion soldiers and it was clear that this would have to be the case for the foreseeable future. Even notwithstanding this, a great deal of communal violence still occurred and it was particularly bad in Oran and Algiers, where 133 Muslims and 56 pieds-noirs were killed in political violence over the course of 1958-59. In an attempt to evolve the empire into something more just, Leclerc looked to have accidentally increased French military commitments to its colonies.
Leclerc’s relatively progressive attitude towards France’s former colonial subjects, as well as his willingness to use French troops to enforce voting rights for non-whites in the FU, caused a backlash amongst conservative-minded opinion in metropolitan France itself. Many thus deserted the DU and found their voice in the Union of Independent Republicans, a party led by a mix of social conservatives and, some pointed out, those who had collaborated with the German occupation. A particular source of outrage for many was the decision to make Algeria a member of the FU separate from France itself.
By the mid-1950s, therefore, France had developed for itself an almost unique party-political structure. Rather than two competing parties of the centre-left and centre-right with assorted smaller parties milling around, as was the case in most western European countries, France instead developed a tripartite party division. The DU became a mainly rural party advocating a small but protective state, mixed in with a support for the FU and anti-socialism. The Independent Republicans (who shortened their name to simply the Republicans in 1960) also took a right wing perspective but their political base was drawn mainly from the business class and those who felt strongly about French grandeur and the empire. Many of their supporters were also unreconstructed white supremacists and anti-democrats, although these messages were often kept quiet. The French Communist Party had been discredited after the failure of a minor Soviet-backed coup in 1947, leaving the Radical Party as the supposed voice of the French left. But it did so in a unique way. The easiest way to describe its political position is somewhere around the left wing of the Liberal Party and the right wing of the Labour Party in the UK. Representing a belief in a protective and proactive state, the party drew much of its support from the urban working classes and the trades union movement. However, it was never the only party advocating for state direction or intervention (both the DU and the Republicans did so to differing degrees) which stopped it holding this territory to itself and becoming the kind of fully social democratic party seen in the Commonwealth or the United States.
Well funded and with close ties to the business community and the military, the Independent Republicans became the largest party in the assembly in 1956, forming a minority coalition under General Raoul Salan. In the elections of November 1960, they went one better and managed to form a majority government. This posed huge questions for the presidential elections only a month later. The Republican candidate, Said Boualam, failed to fully capitalise on the breakthrough of his party in the legislative elections (partly because of the anti-democratic sentiment he espoused repeatedly on the campaign trail) but was still left with enough electoral college delegates to block either the Radical candidate Felix Gaillard or the DU candidate George Pompidou from receiving the necessary 50%+1 to win the presidency. In negotiations between Salan and the DU, Salan agreed that Republican votes would go to the DU on three conditions: that a pieds-noir exclave be carved out of independent Algeria and governed as an autonomous part of metropolitan France; that French troops be withdrawn from monitoring the next FU elections in 1962; and that the constitution be amended to grant greater budget-setting authority to the legislature. Pompidou agreed to the terms and, with the votes of the Independent Republicans, he won the presidency on the next ballot of the electoral college.
The partition of Algeria (without consultation with the Algerian government, of course) took place on 3 May 1961, with the city of Oran and the area around it returning to French control as the Department of the Maghreb. The partition, appearing as it did with little to no foreknowledge, immediately initiated a widespread refugee crisis as pieds-noirs and Francophile Muslims (often former or present harkis) sought to enter the Maghreb and many Muslims sought to flee to independent Algeria. In the resulting civil violence, the numbers of killed and missing has been estimated from anywhere between 5,000 to 30,000. With all sides overwhelmed, in July the government of Algeria and France together forcibly shut the border and banned movement of peoples between Algeria and the Maghreb.
Over the next few years, the Republicans began to work with various political factions around the FU to draw together an alliance of co-opted colonial elites and French business interests which triumphed in the 1962 FU elections. With France no longer going to send troops to enforce elections, these various colonies all began systematic voter suppression exercises designed to entrench their own power. In November 1963, Ho was turfed out of power in Vietnam following elections marred by widespread vote-rigging. Responding to this, Ho retreated to the countryside where he declared Vietnam’s secession from the FU as a republic and began a guerilla campaign against royal forces.
Presidents of the Fourth Republic
- Charles de Gaulle; Union of Democrats; December 1945 - November 1946
- Georges Bonnet; Union of Democrats; November 1946 - December 1950
- Philippe Leclerc; Union of Democrats; December 1950 - December 1960
- Georges Pompidou; Union of Democrats; December 1960 - present
Premiers of the Fourth Republic
- Charles de Gaulle; Union of Democrats; August 1944 - December 1945
- Robert Schuman; Union of Democrats; December 1945 - November 1948
- Pierre Mendes France; Radical Party; November 1948 - November 1952
- Robert Schuman; Union of Democrats; November 1952 - November 1956
- Raoul Salan; Union of Independent Republicans; November 1956 - April 1962
- Maurice Faure; Radical Party; April 1962 - November 1964
- Edmond Jouhaud; Republicans; November 1964 - present