The post-war history of France is full of contra-
dictions. To outward appearances the Fourth
Republic was plagued by a degree of political
instability that promised to repeat the weaknesses
and follies of the Third, which had ended with
Vichy’s disgrace. The individualistic French,
divided on so many issues and by so many parties
and groupings, seemed ill-suited to a parliamen-
tary democracy. De Gaulle certainly believed this
when he withdrew from government in January
1946 and then, a little less than a year later in
1947, launched his movement grandly called the
Rassemblement du Peuple Français, offering his
leadership above party in place of the squabbling,
weak politicians who by their jostling for power
were reducing the National Assembly to ridicule.
But the constitution of the Fourth Republic had
vested power in the National Assembly rather
than in the president and the executive. De Gaulle
had to wait in the wings for eleven years.
The spectacle of twenty-two governments
from December 1946 to May 1958, the shortest
lasting four days and the longest a little over a
year, seemed to justify the behaviour of those
groups who treated parliamentary democracy
with scorn. The French Communist Party, which
still looked to Stalin’s Russia for guidance and was
excluded from any share in responsible govern-
ment after May 1947, attacked each government
successively, and felt no sense of commitment to
the institutions of the Republic. Its domination
of the trade unions through the communist-led
Confédération Général du Travail (CGT), whose
membership was larger than that of the MRP–
Catholic Union and the Socialist Union (Force
Ouvrière 1947) combined, enabled it to harass
the governments of the Fourth Republic. Dur-
ing the years of acute inflation and shortages
(1945–8), when wholesale prices tripled but
wages lagged behind, there was plenty to fuel dis-
content. Split ideologically and frequently calling
strikes that were politically motivated, organised
labour was limited in the constructive role it
could play to help reform and modernise the
economy. French working people did not feel
that their standard of living had significantly
improved during the twelve years of the Fourth
Republic or that disparities of wealth had de-
creased. Apart from a short period of comparative
price stability from 1952 to 1955, inflation had
become endemic.
The difficult conditions of working people’s
lives help to explain why, despite the Cold War, the
French Communist Party was able to retain the
electoral support of one in every four voters,
polling the largest percentage of the votes in every
election from November 1946 to January 1956.
But its split with the fiercely anti-communist
socialists deprived the left of a commanding parlia-
mentary role. Support for the socialists was not as
strong as that for the communists and fell away
from the end-of-war peak of 23 per cent to 15 per
cent in 1956. The Fourth Republic was also threat-
ened by the re-emergence and recovery of the rightChapter 47
THE FRENCH FOURTH REPUBLIC
ECONOMIC GROWTH AND POLITICAL
INSTABILITY