gramme, a Kennedy-style ‘new society’, but was
able to win the president’s consent only to limited
reforms. Decentralisation and cooperation bet-
ween the modern and the traditional sectors of
French industry and commerce were furthered in
1969 by creating local commissions and elected
chambers of commerce and industry. Indirectly
elected regional bodies, created in 1972, to over-
see regional development were another half-
hearted attempt to broaden participation at the
local level. None of these reforms went far enough
and Pompidou’s last year in office before he died of
cancer in April 1974 saw a decline in the economy
and, in July 1972, the replacement of Chaban-
Delmas by the more conservative Pierre Messmer.
French politics were not a straightforward two-
or three-party contest, as in Britain and the
Federal Republic of Germany. The success of a
dominant coalition depended on manoeuvring by
the main parties, not least among groups further
to their right or left. Two groups made up the
right–centre coalition. First were the Gaullists,
known after 1968 as the Union Democrats pour
la République (UDR). Many of the UDR’s pro-
minent members were powerful former Gaullist
resistance leaders, who had accepted de Gaulle’s
leadership and his emphasis on French independ-
ence and nationalism. On other economic and
social issues, however, they differed widely, so as
soon as the recognised leader, de Gaulle, and his
accepted heir, Pompidou, had departed, their
cohesion became fragile. They had also inherited
the Gaullist tradition of lax discipline, which
made their continued cohesion after 1974 even
more problematical when the more powerful
politicians contested the leadership. Though in
decline after 1968, and more so after 1973, they
still formed the majority in the coalition of the
right.
The other party of the right–centre coalition
had been founded by Pompidou’s minister of
finance, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. More liberal
than the UDR, closer to the social-market views
of the West German CDU, the Independent
Republican Party (RP) was also less nationalistic,
more open to European cooperation and more in
favour of the American alliance. The excitement
aroused by French politics in the 1970s and
1980s was therefore as much due to the rivalries
within the right–centre coalition as to its contest
with the socialists.
On the left, the traditional division between
the political parties and the trade unions dated
back all the way to the Tours Congress of 1920,
at which they had split. The post-war French
Communist Party (PC) modelled itself closely
on its bigger Soviet brother and was loyal to
Moscow; but it had in its way become a conser-
vative force too, and was careful to have nothing
to do with the students’ revolutionary tactics in
- It took a more democratic stance in the
1970s and for a time, from 1972 to 1977, once
more accepted the popular-front electoral alliance
with the Socialist Party, after being wooed by
François Mitterrand, the wily Socialist Party
leader. But the PC’s rapid decline after 1978 (in
the election of 1986 it gained only thirty-five
seats, no more than the extreme-right National
Front) has effected a radical change in French
politics.
The Socialist Party, before 1971 a creature of
the centre as much as of the left, had also pre-
cipitously lost support. When François Mitterrand
became its leader, he undertook to revive it with
a more democratic socialist-oriented programme
of nationalisation, worker control and decentrali-
sation. He also espoused a reduction of presiden-
tial government, in line with his bitter attacks on
de Gaulle’s autocratic style. Most important in
laying the foundation for his eventual triumph
in ending the twenty-three-year run of right–
centre coalitions was his success in securing the
agreement of the communists to a common pro-
gramme of government. To this coalition were
added other groups, including the new Radical
Movement of the Left (MRG). In the presiden-
tial elections of 1974 Mitterrand came close to
defeating the man who had finally emerged as the
right–centre coalition’s presidential candidate,
Giscard d’Estaing.
Though Giscard had beaten off a Gaullist chal-
lenge in the first ballot of the elections for the
presidency, before going on to beat Mitterrand
by a whisker, the Gaullists in the National
Assembly were not only the largest party but they
had more than three times as many seats as
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