The French Marmite

The Fifth Republic is dead; long live the Fourth, the Sixth, and the Third too. France has had twenty years of strong presidential rule and it is enough. The regime General de Gaulle created and incarnated as a monarch could not survive in the persons of lesser presidents, lesser if only in their inability to prolong what de Gaulle had made—a magnificent political vacuum.

Elections for a new National Assembly will be held in mid-March, and the clamor which has been shrill for months approaches the deafening. The Assembly is much less powerful than the United States Congress, for example, and on paper the fuss might seem exaggerated. But what it heralds is a return to the rhythmic political tumult of the late 1940s and 1950s, and even the 1930s, that old “spirit of the parties” which de Gaulle denounced so often, the carnival he would not give the people and which, apparently, they cannot do without.

NK

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Nicholas King

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The Fifth Republic is dead; long live the Fourth, the Sixth, and the Third too. France has had twenty years of strong presidential rule and it is enough. The regime General de Gaulle created and incarnated as a monarch could not survive in the persons of lesser presidents, lesser if only in their inability to prolong what de Gaulle had made—a magnificent political vacuum.

Elections for a new National Assembly will be held in mid-March, and the clamor which has been shrill for months approaches the deafening. The Assembly is much less powerful than the United States Congress, for example, and on paper the fuss might seem exaggerated. But what it heralds is a return to the rhythmic political tumult of the late 1940s and 1950s, and even the 1930s, that old “spirit of the parties” which de Gaulle denounced so often, the carnival he would not give the people and which, apparently, they cannot do without.