actually smaller than the minority which had approved the first draft. The main
reason for this outcome was that the leaders of the traditional parties who had
governed France before 1940 had no wish for their parties and themselves to
lose power, and feared the effects of a strong presidency and a unicameral
legislature without the conservative blocking-function of an upper house. The
result was a political system no more stable than the previous Republic, with
over 20 governments in its 12-year lifetime, many lasting weeks rather than
months or years.
In some ways the Fourth Republic did, admittedly, have greater problems
than its predecessor. There were overt anti-system parties on both the left and
the right. On the left theParti Communiste Franc ̧ais (PCF)regularly won
nearly a quarter of the votes in elections, at a time when it was much
dominated by Moscow and quite unprepared to accept the legitimacy of the
Republic.Gaullism, on the right, had backed a very different constitutional
plan, not only opposed the Fourth Republic publicly but intrigued against it in
private, ultimately bearing a considerable degree of guilt for the Army mutiny
in Algeria which overthrew the government, and finally also the constitution.
Indeed, the specific political problems that caused the Fourth Republic so
much trouble and led to its collapse were the problems of decolonization, the
first being the loss of French Indo-China to aguerrillamovement, the area
then becoming North Vietnam. Given that the much more stable and power-
ful USA lost its ownVietnam War, the size of the task for a weakened
immediate post-war European nation can be appreciated. The second and fatal
problem was in North Africa, where France was reluctant to let Algeria
become an independent Arab state. Algeria is somewhat misunderstood out-
side France, because to the French it was not, in fact, a colony, but an integral
part of metropolitan France, with a huge number of white French residents.
This fact, combined with the bitterness of the French army, determined to
recover their prestige after the disasters of 1940, and what they saw as a political
betrayal in Indo-China in 1954, suggests that few governments could have
hoped to resolve the problem. To set against these hardly-surprising failures,
one should note the extremely rapid industrialization and economic recovery,
influenced largely by the entirely new Commissariat Ge ́ne ́ral du Plan, set up by
the Republic, and its vital role in creating the European Communities (now
theEuropean Union). The Republic was ill served by its parliamentarians,
and by the numerous centre, centre-right and centre-left governments that
ruled it in much the same squabbling fashion that had made the Third
Republic a disaster ofimmobilisme. However, at no time has the French
parliament been held in greater respect by either the French or foreign analysts,
and the contrasting political stability of theFifth Republicis often said to
followde Gaulle’semasculation of the National Assembly and his contempt
for political parties.
Fourth Republic