In my first article in this series I surveyed the description given by French writer Marcel Gauchet of the present situation in France in his latest book entitled Understanding the French Curse. The first third of the book is devoted to historical background, and though the analysis brings few new insights it remains a brilliant introduction to France's modern history and a must read for those wishing to get a better understanding of the country. It is impossible to sum up the narrative. Suffice it to say that we are told that France reached its peak and was the leading European power after the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. Then England rose, and since then France has tended to think it is in decline and has sometimes been in a pessimistic and gloomy mood. Now and then it reacts, and there comes about a renaissance that lasts some time. The French Revolution of 1789 was itself manifold, being a collective attempt to become a political model for other countries as France was no longer the dominant economic power. When the French political model finally stabilised in the 1870s, the country became the first continental European democracy. When France clashed with the Catholic Church and organised the separation between Church and state at the beginning of the last century, it was the first country that had gone so far. Today, we may forget how difficult and tense this struggle was. France mastered many of the tools of modernity: A rational and centralised state that was ruled by law, the scientific management of society, and a school system promoting a top-down national culture. However, it had problems with others, including trade and entrepreneurship. It slowly adapted to industry. The country that won the First World War was still basically a rural one. Culture has always been an essential component of French identity and a tool of state hegemony. In France, there are also several political cultures – Catholic versus Protestant, Catholic versus secular, authoritarian versus democratic, presidential or monarchical versus parliamentary, extremes versus the centre, and the old versus the new regime. The Catholic tradition is itself diverse. All this is well known. But Gauchet's analysis of the post-1945 period is more original and thought-provoking. Two outstanding personalities have dominated the past 70 years in France, presidents Charles de Gaulle and François Mitterrand. The two men had much in common: Both had a Catholic and rural background; both were raised in families with a rightist political culture; both were authoritarian with a refined sense of culture and understanding of French history. Both had many tries at becoming president before succeeding. But they also differed on many crucial points. They did not belong to the same generation, and while Mitterrand basically belonged to the parliamentary tradition, this was scorned by de Gaulle. It seems to me that de Gaulle had specific ideas on how to solve France's ills. Gauchet points out that these ideas were rejected by French opinion after the Second World War and were only adopted at the end of the 1950s. Mitterrand had few personal convictions, but he was a good reader of the public mood and was quick to adapt. Of course, de Gaulle could change his mind on some important issues, but he was seldom inconsistent. It seems clear that this “rightist” politician quickly understood that the times were in favour of decolonisation, including in Algeria. However, this was not difficult for him, as he viewed the world as a conglomerate of nations with different political cultures and appreciated the role played by the French colonies in the Free French Forces during World War Two. By contrast, the French left in the 1950s still believed in internationalism, universal values, and the burden of the white man in teaching peoples who were lagging behind. De Gaulle did not like political parties, and he despised their bureaucracy, oligarchy, and power plays. For him, representative democracy was an oligarchical and highly unstable system that had led France to disaster. He always thought a head of state should be above party politics and enjoy enough stability to oversee long-term change. He found the institutional solution for this in the constitution of the French Fifth Republic, which made the president directly elected by the people and gave him enormous power. This solution reconciled democracy and authoritarianism, and it brought stability without endangering democracy. De Gaulle frequently organised referendums, in effect direct consultations of the people without intermediaries. When he was disavowed and betrayed by his own camp, he resigned. Gauchet wryly underlines the similarities between de Gaulle's way of doing things and those of the former French kings who had also often allied themselves with the people against the aristocrats. Reading Gauchet's book, I'm strongly tempted to draw a distinction between two kinds of centrism: The centrism that says no to the extremes and the centrism that tries to include ideas stemming from these extremes. De Gaulle belonged to the second type of centrism, and Gauchet frequently quotes him in a distinctly Marxist vein. De Gaulle, like many Catholics with social sensitivities, understood the centrality of the workers' condition to society and the specificity of their plight, enslaved to the capitalist and the machine and suffering from alienation. His solution to this was to introduce greater workers' participation in ownership and management. However, the French state bureaucracy and the senior civil service effectively prevented de Gaulle from succeeding in this solution, which had common features with the German system. De Gaulle never trusted the French parliament and preferred to rely on the bureaucracy. Many senior civil servants played key and lasting roles in managing state capitalism under de Gaulle's rule, with the state owning large firms, strongly regulating markets, and engaging in social engineering. Discussions between the social actors, the union activists and leaders, the capitalists, the civil servants and the social scientists all took place in the state's planning commission. De Gaulle was also a magician: He succeeded in convincing French public opinion that his country, which was losing its colonial empire, sometimes in a humiliating way, and was not aligned with the US or the former USSR, was still a world power. The key to this success lay in the combination of France's nuclear bomb and its independence from the two superpowers. The writer is a professor of international relations at the Collège de France and a visiting professor at Cairo University.
