The French Fourth Republic came into being in 1946 after the newly-liberated French electorate resoundingly rejected a continuation of the Third Republic, which had been in abeyance since the German victory of 1940 and the setting up of the collaborationist Vichy regime. The Fourth Republic was never popular, and never enjoyed the support of a clear majority of the electorate. Designing a new republic after liberation in 1944 was not easy: the first proposals for a new constitution were rejected in a referendum, and the second draft, which became the Fourth Republic, actually differed very little from the discredited Third Republic. Although this draft was given a majority vote in a further referendum, nearly 30% of the electorate abstained (mainly under orders from the Communist Party) and the final vote in favour was actually smaller than the minority which had approved the first draft. The main reason for this outcome was that the leaders of the traditional parties who had governed France before 1940 had no wish for their parties and themselves to lose power, and feared the effects of a strong presidency and a unicameral legislature without the conservative blocking-function of an upper house. The result was a political system no more stable than the previous Republic, with over 20 governments in its 12-year lifetime, many lasting weeks rather than months or years.
In some ways the Fourth Republic did, admittedly, have greater problems than its predecessor. There were overt anti-system parties on both the left and the right. On the left the Parti Communiste Français (PCF) regularly won nearly a quarter of the votes in elections, at a time when it was much dominated by Moscow and quite unprepared to accept the legitimacy of the Republic.
Gaullism, on the right, had backed a very different constitutional plan, not only opposed the Fourth Republic publicly but intrigued against it in private, ultimately bearing a considerable degree of guilt for the Army mutiny in Algeria which overthrew the government, and finally also the constitution. Indeed, the specific political problems that caused the Fourth Republic so much trouble and led to its collapse were the problems of decolonization, the first being the loss of French Indo-China to a guerrilla movement, the area then becoming North Vietnam. Given that the much more stable and powerful USA lost its own Vietnam War, the size of the task for a weakened immediate post-war European nation can be appreciated. The second and fatal problem was in North Africa, where France was reluctant to let Algeria become an independent Arab state. Algeria is somewhat misunderstood outside France, because to the French it was not, in fact, a colony, but an integral part of metropolitan France, with a huge number of white French residents. This fact, combined with the bitterness of the French army, determined to recover their prestige after the disasters of 1940, and what they saw as a political betrayal in Indo-China in 1954, suggests that few governments could have hoped to resolve the problem. To set against these hardly-surprising failures, one should note the extremely rapid industrialization and economic recovery, influenced largely by the entirely new Commissariat Général du Plan, set up by the Republic, and its vital role in creating the European Communities (now the European Union). The Republic was ill served by its parliamentarians, and by the numerous centre, centre-right and centre-left governments that ruled it in much the same squabbling fashion that had made the Third Republic a disaster of immobilisme. However, at no time has the French parliament been held in greater respect by either the French or foreign analysts, and the contrasting political stability of the Fifth Republic is often said to follow de Gaulle’s emasculation of the National Assembly and his contempt for political parties.
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