Is France on the road to a Sixth Republic?
The demonstrators at Place de la Rpublique in Paris were chanting, weirdly, in Italian: Siamo tutti antifascisti, We are all antifascists. In French, they targeted their chief enemy, the president: We are here, even if Macron doesnt want it.
Watching them were ranks of massed riot police, who, in the French policing tradition, made no effort to mingle with the crowd and defuse trouble, but instead stood waiting for the moment to unleash their tear gas and batons. The crowd were waiting for it, too. ACAB, they chanted, the English abbreviation for All Cops Are Bastards. A-ca-buh, it came out in French.
Then someone set a dustbin on fire the perfect Instagram image and other demonstrators began filming it. They knew they were taking their places in a glamorous Parisian tradition, stretching from 1789 through 1944 and 1968. At last the police advanced, and people began chucking bottles.
France was in turmoil even before Emmanuel Macrons unilateral decision last week to raise the minimum general retirement age from 62 to 64, after he couldnt get it voted through parliament. In Paris, following a winter of rolling strikes, the metro is becoming a theoretical concept, while rats pick through heaps of uncollected garbage. Peak Paris was arguably reached last Saturday, with a demonstration for the rats. NO, rats are not responsible for all thats wrong with France! said the organising group, Paris Animaux Zoopolis.
French anger transcends pensions and Macrons high-handedness. Theres a generalised, long-term rage against the state and its embodiment, the president. After 20 years living here, Ive become used to the French presumption that whoever they elected president is a moronic villain, and that the state, instead of being their collective emanation, is their oppressor. But Macrons unpopular ramming through of a higher retirement age without a vote increases the risk that the French will follow Americans, Britons and Italians and vote populist: President Marine Le Pen in 2027. The far-rights vote in presidential run-offs has gradually risen this century, to 41 per cent last year.
France cant go on like this. Its time to end the Fifth Republic, with its all-powerful presidency the closest thing in the developed world to an elected dictator and inaugurate a less autocratic Sixth Republic. Macron might just be the person to do it.
The Fifth Republic was declared in 1958, amid the chaos of the Algerian war and fears of a military coup. The constitution was written for and partly by Charles de Gaulle, the 6ft 5in tall war hero, the man of providence whose very name made him the embodiment of ancient France. He consented to return as leader if France muzzled political parties and parliamentarians. (He even disliked his own party, the RPF, the Rassemblement du peuple franais.)
So the constitution created a strong executive, albeit not centred on the president. Clause 49.3 allowed the executive to over-rule parliament, and pass laws without a vote. Triggering the 49.3 allows opposition parties to file a no-confidence motion. If the motion fails, the law is considered passed. The pensions manoeuvre was the 11th time that lisabeth Borne, Macrons prime minister, had invoked 49.3 in 10 months in power.
In the 1958 constitution, the president was still a relatively modest figure, elected by about 80,000 officials. But in 1962, de Gaulle enhanced the presidents status: he would be elected by universal suffrage. As de Gaulle later explained: The indivisible authority of the state is entrusted entirely to the president.
The Fifth Republics governing philosophy became a sort of French-Confucian rule by the cleverest boys in the class, plucked from all ranks of the population. Prime Minister Pierre Mends Frances father sold affordable ladieswear, President Georges Pompidous was a small-town schoolteacher, and President Franois Mitterrands the stationmaster of Angoulme. Typically at G7 summits, the leader with the highest IQ and broadest hinterland beyond politics is the French president.
The republics technocrats gradually extended their writ to the most isolated villages. Almost everything that moved in western Europes largest country was administered from a few square kilometres in Paris. The various waves of decentralisation since 1982 never got far. The guiding belief of Parisian technocrats, says the liberal writer Gaspard Koenig, is tatisme, statism. He notes that they are typically described as servants of the state, rather than of the people.
The deal became that the French would hand over a big chunk of their income to the state, and navigate an often nightmarish bureaucracy, in exchange for free education, healthcare, pensions and often even subsidised holidays.
Into the 1990s, the system more or less worked. France experienced its Trente Glorieuses 30 glorious years of economic growth, from 1945 until 1975. It built Europes fastest trains, the TGVs; co-created the worlds fastest passenger plane, Concorde; it went on to invent the proto-internet, Minitel, which French people used to book tennis courts and have phone sex; it pushed Germany into creating the euro; and became an independent actor in world affairs. The all-powerful presidency enhanced Frances international standing: the administration spoke with one mans voice, and foreign leaders always knew which French number to call.
The moment when the Fifth Republic lost its sheen was possibly the oil shock of 1973, since when the economy has mostly stagnated. Or perhaps it was April 21 2002, when far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen reached the run-off of the presidential elections. He lost to Jacques Chirac, but from then on, spurred by French disquiet over immigration and unemployment, there was a credible threat to the republic.
The disenchantment with the president showed in approval ratings. Mitterrand (president from 1981 to 1995) and Chirac (1995-2007) generally had ratings between 40 and 60 per cent, according to pollsters Kantar Sofres. But the last three presidents, Nicolas Sarkozy, Franois Hollande and Macron, have usually ranged between 20 and 40 per cent. Hollandes rating in one poll hit 4 per cent (not a typo). These figures from the post-heroic age were too small for de Gaulles job. Few voters now even expect that the next president will be the national saviour. Although Marine Le Pen may become president, she too has lost her magic after years of scandals. Its hard to attach fantasies to her today.
But the technocrats look tarnished too, especially since they have congealed into a self-perpetuating caste. Todays ruling class consists disproportionately of white sons of the book-owning high bourgeoisie, who travelled together from Parisian Left Bank nursery school to Left Bank cole prparatoire, where they crammed for exams for the grandes coles, before acquiring their own Left Bank apartment. If they didnt come from Paris, they generally moved there as teenagers, like Hollande, a rich doctors son from Normandy, or Macron, a neurologists son from Picardy.
It was as the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, a south-western postmans son, had warned decades earlier: the French elite was reproducing itself. (And nobody mastered elite self-reproduction better than Bourdieu himself: all his three sons followed him to the most intellectual grande cole, the cole Normale Suprieure on the Left Bank, which trains social scientists.)
French technocrats spend their working lives in a few arrondissements inside the Priphrique, the ring road that encircles the Parisian court like a moat. They treat the rest of France almost like a colony, inhabited by smelly peasants who failed to absorb the Parisian culture they had been taught at school, and who vote far right or far left.
The fundamental facts of life outside Paris escape many decision makers. Jean-Pierre Jouyet, an cole Nationale d Administration (ENA) classmate and right-hand man of Hollande, realised that large swaths of the countryside had no broadband internet only because he suffered the experience in his second home (his parents old house) in Normandy. He never got around to alerting Hollande. In my defence, he notes in his memoir LEnvers du dcor, nobody in government was interested in the subject. When Macron decided to add a few cents to the fuel tax in 2018, he had no idea it would spark a months-long nationwide uprising by the gilets jaunes, the yellow vests, because he and the technocrats around him hadnt grasped how much people beyond the Priphrique relied on their cars.
When things go wrong, the French blame the technocrats and above all the president, who decides without consulting them. Ordinary peoples lives feel determined, down to the day they can retire, by a Parisian pretend meritocracy from which they were excluded at birth. Three-quarters of people who identify as belonging to popular classes say they feel the object of social contempt and lack of recognition, reports Luc Rouban, an expert on politics at Sciences Po, an elite Paris university. This is particularly galling, given the countrys promise, proclaimed from the facades of every post office and primary school: Libert, galit, fraternit. France isnt the UK or US, where the power of social class or money is frank.
While the French population defy the technocrats, so the technocrats defy the population, diagnoses Chantal Jouanno, who has just served five years as head of the National Commission for Public Debate. French deciders often describe society as conflictual, uncontrollable, irreformable, she told Le Monde. Perhaps she was thinking of Macrons jibe about refractory Gauls. On Wednesday he lamented, We have not succeeded in sharing… the necessity of doing this reform, as if the problem were the publics inability to understand reality.
Since Macron became president in 2017, popular anger has targeted him. It was said of US President George HW Bush that he reminded every woman of her first husband. Macron reminds every French person of their boss: an educated know-it-all who looks down on his staff. He understood that Hollande had lacked presidential grandeur, and cast himself as Jupiterian; but most voters just saw a jumped-up little ex-banker dressing up as king. Even many who voted for him never liked him, nor felt that they were endorsing his platform, with its pledge to raise retirement ages. In both the 2017 and 2022 run-offs, the other choice was Marine Le Pen. The French president has gone in 60 years from man of providence to not the devil.
Macrons brief employment at Rothschild inevitably generated antisemitic conspiracy theories among people who confuse todays boutique Parisian investment bank with the Europe-straddling behemoth of the 19th century. A common jibe is that Macron is neoliberal or worse, ultraliberal: busy dismantling the French social safety net to benefit the shady forces of global capital.
The charge is ludicrous: France remains about the least neoliberal place on Earth. Government spending in 2021 was 59 per cent of GDP, the highest in the OECD, the club of rich countries. The perennial French fear of losing entitlements above all, their 25-year retirements betrays how good their lives are. On the downside, people pay so much to the state that many run out of money at the proverbial end of the month. The French net median income 22,732 in 2021 is lower than in the northern European countries that France likes to see as its peers.
Especially after the gilets jaunes, Macron has tried to rein in the elites privileges. Sarkozy and his former prime minister Franois Fillon have both been sentenced for corruption, though neither has gone to jail yet and both are appealing. A new sobriety has been imposed on parliament: gone are the days of deputies taking pretty interns for Chteau Lafite-fuelled lunches on unregulated expenses.
Macrons ministers have been taken off dossiers where they have conflicts of interest though that has highlighted the sheer number of these conflicts within the tiny Parisian ruling caste: Marlne Schiappa, minister of state for the social economy, had to hand in much of her portfolio after shacking up with the boss of a big mutual health insurance provider. The minister for energy transition, Agns Pannier-Runacher, cannot touch matters involving petrol company Perenco, which her dad used to run, nor deal with the energy company Engie, where her ex-husband is a senior director. And Jean-Nol Barrot, minister delegate for the digital economy, cannot handle matters involving Uber, where his sister is a communications chief.
These concessions havent appeased the population. Nor has the melting-away of the longstanding French scourge of unemployment. Its now at 7.2 per cent, its lowest since 2008, without Macron getting any thanks. Such is the anger over ramming through the new pensionable age without a vote that he might struggle to pass any laws these next four years, unless he dares to resort to ramming them through without votes again.
The fruits of the Fifth Republic arent so bad. But the system itself has gone out of date, says Catherine Fieschi, founder of the think-tank Counterpoint. The states autocratic nature helps explain why the French are so angry despite living relatively well. You could describe the republics workings without mentioning the almost irrelevant parliament. France today has three branches of government: the presidency, the judiciary and the street. If the president decides to do something, only the street can stop him by stopping the country through protests and strikes. Street and president rarely seek compromise. One wins, one loses.
Historically, the trade unions control the street. But as they too lose relevance Macron barely consulted them over pensions the street has become increasingly violent and undirected, from the leaderless gilets jaunes to todays burning dustbins. My daughters lyce is intermittently blockaded by pupils waving banners with slogans such as Against Capital. At a neighbouring school, a group of pupils and teachers are conspiring to turn their own blockade into a week-long occupation, a sleepover with fun activities including designing banners and repainting buildings. My daughters friend there plans to participate till Saturday: Then Ill take my weekend.
This is no way to run a country. In last years presidential elections, far-left candidate Jean-Luc Mlenchon campaigned on a promise of a Sixth Republic. He wanted a new constitution that shrank the powers of the monarch president.
But the person best-placed to usher in the Sixth Republic is Macron himself. Hes a politician who hunts big game, notes Fieschi. He has already variously tried to charm Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, and to remake the French labour market, European defence and the EU. His schemes usually founder, but at least he aims high. A Sixth Republic is an idea on a Macronian scale. It could be his legacy, suggests Fieschi. It might just get the French train back on the rails.
On Monday his party, currently called Renaissance, sent an email to members headlined, On the Reform of Institutions. Members were invited to give their views on elections to parliament, the use or otherwise of referendums, and local powers. There was an open-ended question: In a few words, on which subject(s) do you think it would be useful to organise a citizens convention?
Its a strength of France that it can update itself by revising its constitution as it has done 24 times in the Fifth Republic. What might a Sixth Republic, or at least a reformed Fifth one, look like? Koenig recommends scrapping de Gaulles innovation of an elected president. That would deflate the role, and boost parliaments status. Koenig also favours devolving powers to Frances 35,000 communes: in effect, local authorities. Surveys repeatedly show that the French have much more trust in their local representatives than in national ones.
Koenig made a symbolic run for president last year on a liberal platform of a shrunken presidency. Travelling around the country, he was enthused: many French people live in beautiful places, near mountains or beaches or sheep meadows. They are reasonably well off, eat well, and have the time to develop passions outside work.
They might function even better without some guy in Paris micromanaging their lives.
Simon Kuper will appear on Saturday April 1 at 2pm at the FT Weekend Oxford Literary Festival to talk about the power of elites and his book Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK
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