The Holy Innocents: The Triumph and Failure of the French Fifth Republic
Jean Marie Le Pen addressing the nation, December 1995
During Raymond Barre's premiership, France had entered into an economic boom which had persisted, with some minor ups and downs, over the course of the 1970s and 1980s. As we have seen elsewhere, although Socialist presidents (Francois Mitterrand in 1975-80 and again in 1985-90) and premiers (Jacques Delors in 1980-88) were periodically elected, they had failed to fundamentally alter the ‘neoliberal’ settlement beyond tinkering on the sidelines. For a time, economic growth was impressive and, in the context of the stagnation of the Commonwealth in the 1970s, many suggested that France’s model should be emulated. (Indeed, this was basically the economic argument for voting for Thatcher in 1976.) The same could be said for the other countries in the French Union, which did experience substantial economic growth, even if critics noted that it remained vastly unevenly distributed, most Africans continued to live in poverty and government was almost entirely under the control of a corrupt, Francophilic elite.
The Republicans returned to unified control of both the Elyse Palace and the Hotel Matignon in December 1990 when Edouard Balladur won the presidency and Pascal Salin won a second term as Premier in the November 1992 elections. Almost immediately, however, trouble began. Starting in July 1993, the economy entered a serious downward trajectory. Although the proximate cause of the crisis was what was known as the European savings and loans crisis (an interconnected series of failures in loan associations which affected Spain, Catalonia, Italy, Austria, Bavaria, Hanover and the Benelux too), the crisis hit particularly hard in France, where excessive fiscal laxity (in particular Salin’s first budget in 1989) helped to unleash an inflationary spiral.
This in turn caused a severe credit contraction which had dire consequences for the French public. To compensate for the skimpy social security provided by the French state, the living standards and consumption habits of the French people had been maintained through the loosening of credit regulations, making credit available to a greater number of the poor and middle class. Meanwhile, wealthier Frenchmen got wealthier through the expansion of derivatives and futures markets that had made Paris such a financial hub. As the academic Colin Crouch has noted, the system bore many superficial resemblances to the Keynesian model that had obtained in the UK in the 1930s. The key difference was that individuals, rather than the government, took on debt to stimulate the economy. In addition to a highly-leveraged housing market, the most obvious physical manifestation of this ‘privatised Keynesianism’ was the proliferation of credit card schemes, both from banks and store-specific ones. In this context, it is easy to see how the ‘credit crunch’ of 1993 rapidly became a secular problem for the French economy.
Governments in the other member states of the French Union tended to be more interventionist and directorial than the one in Paris but consumption in metropolitan France very much underpinned the economic health of the whole block (a persistent problem in its functioning that political elites had proved incapable or unwilling to alter since the 1950s). This meant that the slowdown in the French economy lead almost immediately to recession abroad too. Inflation in France hit 15% and unemployment hovered around 10%, accompanied by widespread company bankruptcies (corporate earnings fell by 25%). In response, waves of civil unrest broke out over the autumn.
The most notable source of unrest was a movement led by students and left wing activists of various stripes. Although they had been able to occasionally elect Socialist politicians, they were held back by a combination of gerrymandered legislative districts and their poor geographical spread. To them, the recession was conclusive proof of the failures of Barre's ‘neoliberal’ system and, despairing of a democratic way of removing the Republicans, saw this as their chance, perhaps their only chance, to remove them through other means. A general strike on 13 September saw workers take control of Paris and other large cities, effectively shutting down the French economy. An attempt at mediation between the government and the protestors over the next two weeks floundered for a number of reasons, not least the decentralised leadership of the protestors - the crushing of the centralised French trades union movement in the 1970s now looked shortsighted as it left the government with no-one to negotiate with. The attempt at negotiation was therefore abandoned after a fortnight. The following day, 28 September, Balladur and Salin agreed to postpone the scheduled meeting of the council of ministers and both made their own, separate, ways out of Paris. Balladur fled to Rome, Salin to Brussels.
It appears that both Salin and Balladur initially sought to encourage NATO aid to help them return to power. However, when their flight became known, on 30 September, the Socialist leader Oskar Lafontaine declared that there was ‘no more state’ in France and, consequently, the Fourth Republic had ended and he would form the first government of the Fifth. A new constitution was promulgated on 1 December and Lafontaine was elected to the presidency the following month. The complete collapse and replacement of the entire governing system of a permanent member of the Security Council had occurred in six months. The world was stunned. But it was not to last.
The French left had seized the opportunity of a lifetime and drafted a constitution with a powerful presidency and elections via a general ticket that allowed an informal alliance of the Socialist Party, the PCF and smaller, miscellaneous parties including the leftmost wings of the Radicals to seize control of the levers of government in the first elections in July 1994. In truth, this was hardly harsher than the roadblocks the Republicans had put in place under the Fourth Republic in the form of gerrymandering and the electoral college. However, the thing that most scares people is loss and this certainly was a loss for the French far right. Although the far right had never been quite as in control of the Republicans as many have suggested at the time and since, they nevertheless found themselves with figures around the top table, even as Republican governments since the 1960s had mostly focused on neoliberal economics rather than social and cultural conservatism. But there was no doubt that this seat at the table was now conclusively taken away from them and, unlike their leftwing opponents, they were not willing to wait decades before resorting to extra-parliamentary action. The final spark was a presidential order signed in April 1995, which ordered the abolition of the French Union and called for immediate free elections in the former French Empire.
On 31 May the National Front (“FN”), a newly created mix of political party and paramilitary led by Jean-Marie Le Pen, began a general uprising. A former minister in various Republican governments and long-time member of the legislature, Le Pen was an unashamed member of the cultural far right and had long been ambivalent both about neoliberal economics and the democratic process itself. He was able to mobilise his forces by a full-throated defence of what he saw as French civilization, accusing the Fifth Republic of selling it out to Jews, foreigners and communists. In this, he found unlikely allies in France’s former colonies, who saw the maintenance of the French Union as necessary to secure their positions in their own countries. With the West African President Faure Gnassingbe playing a leading corralling role, troops from the former French African colonies began landing in Marseille in August in support of a general bout of FN terrorist violence across metropolitan France.
Three months later, what members of the Fifth Republic’s government could escape managed to get to the Channel Islands, where they received asylum from the UK. The FN was victorious and in January 1996 promulgated the constitution of the Sixth Republic with Le Pen as president (in effect dictator), which immediately ordered the reinstatement of the French Union as if nothing had happened. Any hope of active support for the Fifth Republic from abroad rapidly dissipated. Le Pen immediately guaranteed the continuation of France’s debt repayments to the Commonwealth and the SWF, as well as her continued abiding by the terms of the Buenos Aires summit (he also played a constructive role in the promulgation of the New York declaration in 1997). The French left would have to await their moment once more.