French Foreign Policy
Parliament and Foreign Policy in France. By J. E. Howard. (Cresset Press. 10s. 6d.)
MR. HOWARD'S theme is extremely important, not only for students of modern France but for all who are concerned with methods of popular and parliamentary control over foreign policy in a modem democratic State. He is concerned with the Third Republic and more particularly with its last twenty years, and he scrutinises with care and detailed study the mechanism of parliamentary control over foreign policy in these years. As a technical, juridical and con- stitutional explanation of how far the devices of the Third Republic led to effective parliamentary control his work is admirable. He sketches briefly the background of the ancien regime, the French
Revolutionary experiments and the earlier nineteenth-century methods of conducting foreign policy. He shoivs that " the ancien regime bequeathed to later French political organisation ... the formal supremacy in external affairs of the head of the State " ; that the rule of Napoleon reverted, after the Revolutionary attempts at more popular control, to " complete executive freedom in foreign policy " ; and that the predecessors of the Third Republic alternated between Revolutionary and Napoleonic arrangements, leaving a division of opinion on this issue in the National Assembly of 1871. The con- stitution of 1875 reached a compromise here, as in so much else. Nominally the President controlled foreign policy ; but the Ministers wielded this power in effect, subject to requiring legislative sanction for certain acts and subject, too, to the general restrictions of ministerial responsibility to Parliament.
The bulk of Mr. Howard's book is devoted to examination of how these restrictions operated, how the system of collapsible Cabinets was offset by a high degree of individual continuity in office at the Quai d'Orsay, how the Committees of Foreign Affairs influenced the direction of foreign policy, and how the electorate itself might at times influence policy. His examination unfortunately ends in 1939, which limits its value in many ways. He insists that " there has always been a fundamental agreement, shared by the whole nation, as to what should be the object of French policy," and he defines this aim entirely in terms of the German question. But events since 1939 have shown clearly enough that there was very consider- able and vital divergence of aim between those who sought prepared- ness against German attack in foreign alliances and those who sought safety in an understanding with Germany, and this goes deeper than a mere difference about methods of policy. Even before 1918 there was also deep divergence between the colonial expansionists and the " continentalists," which affected foreign policy much more than he allows.
This failure to penetrate formal similarities. and seek the essential differences behind them springs largely from his excessively juridical and legalistic approach, and mars certain parts of even his constitu- tional descriptions. It is not strictly accurate to describe the French Cabinet as " an executive committee of Parliament from which it emanates," or the French Senate as occupying ." a position some- what similar to that of the British House of Lords." Nor is the author happy in his incursions into wider aspects of French political life during the Third Republic. It is highly dubious to generalise that " in France financial, industrial and commercial groups are quite as subservient to political needs as these are to them." M. Flandin would have been a happier man in 1935 had this been true. The historical and intellectual horizon of the whole work is, in short, too limited, and although most of it was admittedly written before 1939, there has been an opportunity to revise it in the light of more recent events which Mr. Howard has deliberately rejected. He has done so on the grounds that none of his conclusions " should be modified in the light of what has happened since the end of 1939." This decision and this doubtful, if comforting, belief have diminished the quality and usefulness of the book. It is to be hoped that a future edition may be used to.effect some more radical revision of judgement, for the merits of the book deserve it.
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