March 2/9, 2020 The Nation. 33 DE GAULLE’S LONG SHADOW The making and unmaking of France’s Fifth Republic by HUGO DROCHON n May 8, 1789, at the onset of the tion, and for good reason: Until recently, the other a bottom-up demand for demo- French Revolution, the deputies of French politics has usually opposed a left- cratic participation and popular control. In the Third Estate, one of the three wing president (Mitterrand, Hollande) to short, much like the situation during the “estates of the realm” under the an- a right-wing one (Chirac, Sarkozy). But it Terror, the struggle in France’s postwar re - cien régime, were asked to vote on would be a mistake to think that this was construction was less left versus right than Ohow to bring together the country’s three the only opposition in existence at the elites versus the people. orders (the clergy, the nobility, and the time or, indeed, that it has been the only This, at least, is the central claim that commoners) by filing to either the left or opposition since. Although Robespierre Herrick Chapman, a professor of history the right of the president of the session. and the Jacobins were to the “left” of the at New York University, makes in his new Having done so, they sat down as they had Girondins, the dynamics of La Terreur, for book, France’s Long Reconstruction: In Search voted, and the left/right division of politics instance, seemed more to oppose a central- of the Modern Republic, a history of France was born—a division that would play a ized, revolutionary Parisian government to from the end of World War II to the Alge- decisive role in the subsequent course of opposition in the provinces. Instead of left rian War of Independence. Chapman fo- events, notably during the debates about versus right, what existed in this case was cuses on the social, economic, and political what to do with the deposed king. (The left a conflict between a top and a bottom— dynamics of the reconstruction effort, and wanted to send him to the guillotine, the between elite designs and popular demands. in closing his book in 1962 rather than in right did not.) The same might be said of the country 1958, with the end of the Fourth Republic Ever since, we have tended to tell the after World War II, when what was at stake and the founding of the Fifth, he follows a history of France through that opposi- was less whether left or right visions of trend in French historiography that aims France would win out than the existence to integrate colonial Algeria into the his- Hugo Drochon teaches politics at the University of tensions between two competing visions tory of France. He does this not simply to of Nottingham and is the author of Nietzsche’s of modernization: one centered on a top- underline how France’s domestic recovery CHARLES DE GAULLE, SECOND FROM LEFT (REPORTERS ASSOCIÉS / GAMMA-RAPHO VIA GETTY IMAGES) GETTY VIA GAMMA-RAPHO / ASSOCIÉS (REPORTERS LEFT FROM SECOND GAULLE, DE CHARLES Great Politics. down, elite-run, state-driven program and was deeply entwined with two full-scale 34 The Nation. March 2/9, 2020 colonial wars, in Algeria and Indochina, but France’s Long Reconstruction in family support, that consensus soon also because the referendum of Charles de In Search of the Modern Republic cracked under the bottom-up pressures of Gaulle that brought the Algerian conflict to By Herrick Chapman second-wave feminism, leading to clashes an end marked what has often been dubbed Harvard University Press. 416 pp. $46.50 with administrators over marriage law re- the “second founding” of the Fifth Repub- form and contraceptive rights, among the lic. This was the moment when the “pres- day as the feared anti-riot police. many fissures between the country’s ruling identialism” of the French political system De Gaulle also worked to erode old left/ elite and those resisting them from be- came into being, and de Gaulle carved out right divisions. As head of the Provisional low. Those clashes made their way back for himself and future presidents certain Government of the French Republic, he into national politics, with Communists domaines réservés—notably in foreign policy, formed a government of “national uni- posing the question of women and work military affairs, and national security—that ty” after the liberation of Paris that was in opposition to the more traditionalist, established the president as the lead actor in composed of all the political actors in the child-centered Catholic approach. When French political life. Resistance: Communists, Socialists, left- François Mitterrand, the future Socialist wing Catholics, as well as the conservatives president, challenged de Gaulle for the t is hard to overstate the challenges closer to de Gaulle. All parties agreed that presidency in 1965, the debate no lon- France faced after World War II. Fight- the modernization of France should occur ger concerned family policy but women’s ing during the first war was concentrat- through a two-pronged process: The state rights—and here, too, the arguments were ed in the northeast, but in the second, should take the lead in postwar recon- about the level of popular participation in 74 of the 90 French départements were struction, while democracy was revived at state decisions. Itouched by combat. A total of 1 million the grassroots. This began the process of These top versus bottom tensions could families were homeless; 2 million people reorienting politics away from older di- be seen in postwar economic policy, too. were former prisoners of war. Thanks in visions and creating others. At the state France was the only country in Western part to the successful work of the French level, for instance, the Communists were Europe that took on all three of the in- Resistance, only 45 percent of the country’s keen to present themselves as a “party novations available at the time: national- rail lines were serviceable—and really only of government,” following Stalin’s diktat izations, work committees, and planning. in unconnected sections, with just one in from Moscow that the European Com- Top-down dirigisme, best incarnated by six locomotives working—making commu- munist parties should participate in post- the Monnet Plan of 1946–52—which nication between Paris and the rest of the war rebuilding efforts. Yet the party’s rank sought to modernize electricity, gas, coal, country virtually impossible. There were and file, continuing a Resistance tradition rail lines, cement, and tractors—was highly massive labor shortages and even less trust of self-government, persisted in calls for successful, with France going through an among French citizens in a country torn new forms of democratic participation and unprecedented 30-year economic boom, apart by what had essentially been a civil helped organize the nationalization of the known as Les Trente Glorieuses. Again, while war between Vichy collaborators and the automaker Renault. Although he was less everyone from conservatives to Commu- Resistance at the end of the occupation. open to exploring ideas of economic de- nists and the trade unions was on board, France also needed to regain its interna- mocracy, de Gaulle declared his desire to the strains between economic recovery tional standing and independence vis-à-vis “remain faithful to the democratic princi- and democratic renewal played out in the the Allied forces after the war. ples that our ancestors drew from the ge- conflict between centralized parliamentary Returning to France from London, nius of our race and that are the very stakes oversight of economic policy on the one where he had led a government in exile of this life-and-death war” in his 1941 ad- hand and workplace democracy on the and established himself as the undisputed dress at London’s Royal Albert Hall. other. The distinguished civil servant Jean leader of the French Resistance after his Monnet, with Robert Schuman, the French “Appeal of 18 June” was broadcast by the hapman follows these competing im- minister of foreign affairs, was at the heart BBC in 1940, de Gaulle quickly turned to pulses in the postwar years through of the subsequent project to establish the solidifying his authority in his own country. the prism of four policy domains: European Coal and Steel Community, for He did so by victoriously parading around labor and immigration, tax reform which his plan—with all the advantages of town centers after liberation to the acclaim and the regulation of small enter- postwar industrial recovery—served as a of the local people. These “street proces- Cprise, family and the welfare state, and model but which precipitated the growing sionals,” as Chapman calls them, helped de the nationalization of industry. On the “democratic deficit” that is still playing out Gaulle unite the country around him and family, for instance, Chapman shows that in France and across the European Union. cement his legitimacy as the leader of the a pro-natalist policy, although it echoed Chapman also documents how the French people. At 6 foot 5, he had a stature Vichy’s slogan of “Travail, famille, patrie,” growth of the French security services that conferred a natural authority. This was widely consensual, with de Gaulle emerged as the state expanded its social was reinforced during the victory parade calling for 12 million “beaux bébés”; soon security programs and as immigration from in Paris on August 26, 1944, when enemy France’s baby boom started in earnest. the colonies increased. Desperate to attract snipers took potshots at him but he refused Family allow ances even managed for a foreign workers to help in the reconstruc- to back down.