October 4, 2006
The French Fifth Republic Posted by Fredric Smoler at 04:00 PM EST Tomorrow is an anniversary: The French Fifth Republic was legally established on October 5, 1958. The conditions of its founding are worth remembering, for they cast an interesting light on current politics. In 1958 France was waging a very bitter war in Algeria, and her army’s leadership thought that democratic politics at home were undermining the war effort. Early in 1958 the governor general of Algeria began to organize a coup, and in May an army junta seized power in Algeria and formed a Committee of Public Safety. The junta demanded that de Gaulle be made head of the government of France and given extraordinary powers to win the war. On May 24, French paratroopers seized Corsica. The junta made plans to invade mainland France, and threatened to do so unless de Gaulle was made head of the government. On May 29, 15 hours before the invaders were scheduled to land, and very much on account of that threat, de Gaulle was made leader of France. The Fifth Republic’s constitution was ratified by referendum in late September and formally took effect on October 5.
I think this history has some lessons, and they are not necessarily unhappy ones. Less than 50 years ago, what is now seen as one of the bedrock democracies of the West was acting like a banana republic, and it would act like one for a while longer: In January 1960 there was another attempted coup in Algiers, and in April 1961 a successful coup occurred, led by a number of French generals. De Gaulle beat down that coup, but a year later Rightist terrorists were still attempting to disrupt the Evian Accords, which created modern Algeria. From our current perspective, the savagery of terrorists, and of colonial warfare—the war in Algeria was horrifically cruel—is sadly unsurprising, but in 1961 the French police were murdering hundreds of peaceful demonstrators in Paris itself.
You can, of course, interpret this history to suggest the fragility of decency and the rule of law, but the history may also suggest a more cheering possibility, which is that building stable democracies may not be quite as quixotic a project as is nowadays asserted by newly-fashionable “realists.” France, to be sure, had been a democracy 1870 and 1940, but it had been an unstable and at times remarkably brutal polity before and after. In 2003 some of the architects of the Iraq War seem to have assumed that moderate and democratic political arrangements are very easily achieved. In the wake of the very violent disappointment of those hopes, some people seem eager to assume that the most crucial features of liberal modernity are culturally specific, and probably irreproducible. Maybe so, but if you had looked at France in July of 1940, after briefly surveying the world outside the Anglophone periphery, you would probably have concluded that post-democratic authoritarianism was the terminus ad quem—the goal and final end—of political development. Even 20 years later the idea that Latin Europe could sustain democracies might have seemed quixotic. In light of that very recent history, it seems perverse to bet that the war of each against all, or tyranny, are the only two “natural” political arrangements in the Middle East.
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