The Fifth Republic is the present political system of France. It came into being in 1958, when mutinies by the French Army in Algeria proved too much for the weak government of the Fourth Republic and forced the president, René Coty, to invite General Charles de Gaulle to take office as prime minister. De Gaulle made it a condition of his acceptance that he be empowered to write a new constitution and submit it to the public in a referendum. He was elected president in December, taking office in January 1959. De Gaulle’s analysis was that the troubles of the Third Republic, as well as the Fourth, had stemmed from strong and undisciplined National Assemblies with a cumbersome multiparty system, and the constitution he designed was close to the one he had advocated for the immediate post-war Fourth Republic, with very strong presidential powers (see presidential government) and a much weakened legislature. This was approved by an overwhelming majority of the electorate.
There is no doubt that the Fifth Republic has been the most successful French regime since Napoleonic times, although there are still fierce arguments about the extent to which this is the result of constitutional engineering, the General’s charismatic authority, the popularity of Gaullism (his party dominated government coalitions from 1958–81) or a coincidental upsurge of economic prosperity.
(From the mid-1950s France enjoyed almost continual economic prosperity for some 30 years, known, indeed, to the French as the ‘Trente Glorieuse’.) Politics in the Fifth Republic have certainly been more stable than in preceding regimes, and the peaceful transfer of power to the socialists in 1981 is in certain respects unique in French history. Even more important as a test was France’s experience of cohabitation from 1986–88 when there was a socialist president but a conservative majority in the legislature and a Gaullist prime minister and government. So easily did this go that subsequent periods of cohabitation—France had another, with a conservative President and socialist prime minister at the beginning of the 21st century—go almost unremarked. Although such divisions of political power are common in systems with elected presidents, and very regular in the USA, it had been feared that even the strong Fifth Republic might founder under the strain. Coming after nearly 90 years of immobilisme and 10 years in which the life expectancy of a government was measured in weeks rather than months, the Fifth Republic has come to be seen by the French as constituting a radical change in the very nature of French political life. François Mitterrand, France’s first socialist president, and himself a past member of Fourth Republican governments, who had attacked the Fifth Republic’s transfer of power away from the legislature for years, happily accepted the powers and authority of the presidency and failed to consider a reform he had previously urged, to shorten presidential terms from seven to five years, until the end of his own second presidential term was in sight (a constitutional amendment to this effect was eventually approved in 2000, and Jacques Chirac began his second term in the presidency, of five years’ duration, following his re-election to the post in May 2002). It is, perhaps, the ability of the system to function during a prolonged period of economic decline and public collapse of confidence, such as happened at the end of the 20th century, that most underlines the permanence and stability of the Republic.
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