The Unknown Republic
By DARSIE GILLIE By Christmas Charles de Gaulle will have been elected President of the Republic by the thirty- nine thousand mayors, the town councils of the larger cities, the county councils, the assemblies of the African republics that are members of the French community, the deputies and the senators. But the figures of the vote will only be officially made Public in the first week of the NeW Year, when President de Gaulle will succeed to President Coty and appoint • the first prime minister of the Fifth Republic, The Assembly will meet for a few days to hear a statement of policy and signify its aPproval by not disapproving and then go away till May, when it will meet for its first ordinary session—unless the Government needs urgent legislation after its special powers of decree have lapsed on February 5. By that time, however, there will have been a great deal of legislation by decree, including the budget for 1959, an overhaul of the judicial mathinery of France and of her educational system. There will thus be no pile of arrears when the machinery of the Fifth Re- Public is brought into action in the course of 1959. On the contrary, the difficulty will be to bring into play so much that is new quite apart from the constitutional arrangements for metro- Politan France's governance.
It is impossible not to talk of the constitutional Machinery to some degree in terms of the parliaL tnentary republic, known in its successive avatars as the Third and the Fourth. The Fifth is equipped With much the same machinery, but relationships of the different parts to one another is at least not intended to be the same. It certainly cannot be the same with the most powerful personality of the country occupying the Presidency. It can be argued that the Presidency as conceived by its new occupant is roughly the head of state as intended by the Conservative majority in the National Assembly of 1871. The Fifth Republic Will be the third as it was planned. The error of some eighty years is to be undone at last. But if the principles of the constitution-makers of the early Seventies never received their intended appli- cation; if the strong Presidency that President Macmahon, and after him President Millerand tried to implement was throttled first by a parlia- ment dominated by lawyers and then by one dominated by schoolmastersand professors, what Will be the fate of the same principles in 1959?
It is quite certain that they will be applied with much greater moral authority by the man who is at once the creator and the executant of the constitution. But he will not be all the constitution, and he can only play his part in the centre of it for a few years. Paris The new Assembly contains 188 deputies of the UNR committed to assist and support the new President, with 132 Conservatives who are new converts to de Gaullism and are certainly com- mitted to nationalism and to the defence of an old-fashioned liberal economy already strongly buttressed by subsidies and State assistance be- cause left to itself it would fall down. There are also the seventy Algerian deputies, committed to the policy of integration to which the General has given, to say the least, only a very modified ad- hesion. How far will the UNR be content to follow the indications of a President who has so far refused to be a party leader—and in particular how far will its most ambitious leader, M. Jacques Soustelle, accept such a subordinate role? How far will the other two groups—the Conservatives and the Algerians—remain submissive? Will the new Prime Minister be chosen as an exponent of the majority or as a man above party but able to work with it? Or will he be an exponent simply of the new President's own ideas? There is also the new Senate to be taken into account; to be elected in the early summer, largely by mayors and municipal councillors, who will themselves owe their authority to elections the spring. The Senate has, formally at least, recovered much of the powers it possessed under the Third Republic. but its ability to use them and the way it will use them are entirely unknown.
Then there is the problem of relations with the new republics of the French community, and the impact they will have on the central organs of the community on which they are represented, and over which the President will preside.
When so much is unknown, and indeed un- knowable, the impact of resolute individuals knowing what they want may well be decisive. The General is not lacking in resolution. Nor is M.
Soustelle—a master of organisation and man- ceuvre, whose purposes have been served by events, probably beyond his expectation. The General's action must depend on the circum- stances in which he finds himself, and M. Soustelle will certainly contribute to shape those circum- stances.
'What will be the type of man who will set his stamp on the Fifth Republic? Neither the great barristers who shaped the Third, nor the school- masters and dons who dominated its later years. Trade union leaders are not to the fore; the French tradition has never made it easy for them to step into politics and they have played a very small part in the year's events. The Fourth Repub- lic failed in part because it did not provide a vehicle for those who in the resistance had dis- covered a , new vocation to be men of action. Today, again, it is those who aspire to be men of action, shaping events with less talk, less red tape and less legalism, who are knocking at the door. Many of them might easily throw over demo- cratic institutions, if there was another deadlock, or a perfectly legitimate obstacle. The ordinary citizen's instinct 'to defend the principles of the constitution, or even fundamental civic rights, is clearly much weakened. What sort of team will man the institutions of the Fifth Republic, and to which of the institutions will they attach im- portance? That is the unknown factor that will determine its fate.
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