Europe in the Age of The Cold War,1945–75627conservative nationalization even larger than the
Labour Party’s efforts in Britain.
Charles de Gaulle also gave women the vote be-
cause he believed a common stereotype holding that
women would vote conservatively, as their priests di-
rected. While this was an important step in equal rights
for women, it did not lead to a large role for women in
French politics; until the socialist parliamentary victory
in the spring of 1997, France remained nearly last
among European states in electing women. (The French
did, however, accept a woman as prime minister—
Edith Cresson in the 1980s—long before Germany or
the United States accepted a woman at the head of
government.) De Gaulle’s concession of the vote thus
did not convince all French women that they had yet
won equality. One prominent intellectual, Simone de
Beauvoir, responded with a landmark manifesto of
women’s rights, The Second Sex(1949), showing that
women were “still bound in a state of vassalage” (see
document 31.3). The late twentieth-century reinvigora-
tion of feminism throughout the Western world owed
much to de Beauvoir’s book, and the next generation of
feminists hailed her as “the mother of us all.”
The French postwar elections divided power
among three parties, each with 25 percent of the seats:
a Catholic party (the MRP), the socialist party of Léon
Blum (who had survived Nazi imprisonment), and the
Communist Party (which was popular because of its
role in the wartime resistance). When each of these
parties rejected de Gaulle’s ideas for a strong presidency
(designed to suit his own leadership), he retired in
anger to write his war memoirs. The French conse-
quently created a parliamentary democracy known as
the Fourth Republic (1946–58), which greatly resem-
bled the Third Republic (1871–1940). When the wars
of decolonization—especially the Algerian War
(1954–62)—destroyed the Fourth Republic in 1958,
de Gaulle returned to politics and created his strong
presidential government in the constitution of the
Fifth Republic.
The greatest French contribution to postwar
democracy was neither De Gaulle’s concept of a presi-
dential republic nor his specific accomplishments such
as women’s suffrage (which most of Europe had granted
before he did). It was, instead, a democratic version of
economic planning. Jean Monnet never led the govern-
ment, but his Plan for Modernization and Equipment
(1946), embodied in the First Plan (1947–53) and the
Second Plan (1954–57), shaped the French postwar re-
covery. He created an “indicative plan” that set goals in
important sectors (such as mining or transportation)
and then provided government assistance to private
businesses in reaching those goals. The plan was not
compulsory, and it did not create government control
over private firms. Monnet thus pioneered the “mixed
economy,” combining elements of capitalist and non-
capitalist economics. French steel output doubled be-
tween 1950 and 1960, wheat output doubled between
1950 and 1962, and other governments soon followed
Monnet.
As the French economy recovered, France became
more conservative. The popularity of the Communist
Party declined sharply, from 25 percent of the seats in
Parliament in 1945 to 5 percent in 1988. The govern-
ments of the 1950s were so conservative that they even
changed the traditional French insistence upon secularDOCUMENT 31.3
De Beauvoir: Emancipation
of the “Second Sex”
Simone de Beauvoir (1908–86) was the daughter of a re-
spectable bourgeois family who rebelled against the standards
of her world. She became a leader of Parisian intellectual soci-
ety, a novelist, and a philosopher closely associated with
Jean-Paul Sartre and the school of existentialist philosophy,
which held that people create their identity through acts of will
throughout their existence.French Law no longer lists obedience among the
duties of a wife, and every Frenchwoman now has
the right to vote; but these civil liberties remain
only theoretical while they are not accompanied
by economic freedom. A woman supported by a
man—a wife or a mistress—is not emancipated
from him because she has a ballot in her hand; if
customs now constrain her less than before, this
has not profoundly changed her situation; she is
still bound in a state of vassalage. It is through paid
employment that women have covered most of the
distance separating them from men; nothing else
can guarantee her freedom. Once woman ceases to
be a parasite, the system based on her dependence
falls apart; there is no longer any need for men to
mediate between women and the universe.
Beauvoir, Simon de. Le Deuxieme Sexe.Vol. 2,L’Expérience
vecue.Excerpt trans. Steven C. Hause. Paris: Gallimard, 1950.