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Further Reading

Government of the Fifth Republic

President	Party	Years
Charles de Gaulle	UNR / UDR	1959-1965
Charles de Gaulle	UNR / UDR	1965-1969
Georges Pompidou	UDR	1969-1974
Valéry Giscard d'Estaing	UDF	1974-1981
François Mitterrand	Socialist	1981-1988
François Mitterrand	Socialist	1988-1995
Jacques Chirac	RPR / UMP	1995-2002
Nicolas Sarkozy	UMP	2007-2xxx

The final years of the Fourth Republic were marked by the paralysis of the system and by its inability to deal with the major challenge posed by decolonization. Faced with a rising in Algeria, which was demanding its independence and the threat of an insurrectional takeover of power by French military leaders in Algiers (May 13, 1958), René Coty, the President of the Republic, called upon General de Gaulle, who had, at that stage, withdrawn from political life, to form a new Government. The threatened coup led the parliament to call on General de Gaulle to head the government and prevent civil war.

The Constitution of October 4, 1958 was framed in reaction to the excesses of the assembly system and to the Fourth Republic which was unable to deal with the crises created by decolonization. General de Gaulle became Prime Minister in June 1958 (at the beginning of the Fifth Republic) and was elected President in December of that year.

The Fifth Republic was established by General de Gaulle with the Constitution of 4th October 1958. The Constitution is the legal cornerstone of the Republic. It delegates powers, and has the specific task of defining the functions and relationship of the executive and the legislature. Since the Constitution was approved by French voters in a referendum in September 1958, it has been revised ten times. It can be modified by referendum or by Parliament (the National Assembly and Senate combined to form Congress).

The Constitution of the Fifth Republic declares that "France shall be an indivisible, secular, democratic and social Republic. It shall ensure the equality of all citizens before the law, without distinction of origin, race or religion. It shall respect all beliefs." The Constitution also states the attachment of the French people to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789 and to the principle of national sovereignty.

It lists the symbols of that sovereignty as follows:- The national emblem shall be the blue, white and red tricolour flag. The national anthem shall be the Marseillaise. The motto of the Republic shall be "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity". The language of the Republic shall be French.

There is separation of powers between the three branches of government - the executive, the legislature and the judiciary. But the three are not equal and in political terms the executive, which includes the President of the Republic, is the most powerful.

The Third and Fourth Republics had been true parliamentary systems: "the government reports to Parliament as a slave reports to his master," said PierreMendès France, Prime Minister in 1955 and a major figure of the Fourth Republic. With the Fifth Republic, all that changed. In the view of Charles de Gaulle, the first task was to put an end to the "regime of parties" and restore the authority of the executive, in order, ultimately, to restore the authority of the State, which he considered to be seriously weakened. The head of government was no longer voted into office by Parliament. Whereas under the Fourth Republic the Prime Minister had been "invested" by the National Assembly, he was now "appointed" by the President of the Republic. Admittedly, the government was still accountable to the Assembly, but a motion of censure could now only be passed by an absolute majority of deputies.

The new constitution was designed both to closely regulate the government's accountability to the National Assembly and to put an end to unstable cabinets. The government was given powers to control legislative procedure. This distrust of Parliament was also expressed in the creation of the Constitutional Council, charged with ensuring that laws complied with the Constitution. Last but not least, the new constitution conferred special powers (i.e. not subject to approval by the Prime Minister and the relevant minister) on the President of the Republic, beginning with emergency powers.

The institutions of the Fifth Republic borrow classic elements both from parliamentary and presidential systems. This has led certain constitutional specialists to class the Fifth Republic as a "semi-presidential" system. The parliamentary nature of the system is clearly displayed through the existence of a Government led by a Prime Minister who is accountable for his actions before the Chamber elected by direct universal suffrage. To counterbalance this accountability, the Prime Minister may call upon the President of the Republic to dissolve the National Assembly. On the other hand, the election of the President of the Republic by direct, universal suffrage, his major role in foreign policy and his pre-eminence in the conduct of national policy, outside of periods of cohabitation, have no equivalent in such parliamentary systems as those of the United Kingdom or the Federal Republic of Germany where the role of the Head of State is in fact only a matter of protocol. These elements make the French system closer to the American model.

The constitutional reform of 1962, which introduced the election of the President of the Republic by direct universal suffrage, substantially increased his legitimacy. From being a simple "referee" above party politics, he has become the real leader of a governing majority when the governing majority in the National Assembly coincides with that which elected him. He thus has the final say when a decision must be taken jointly with the Prime Minister and he determines the main direction of the policies to be pursued by the Government. In the case of cohabitation, i.e. when the presidential majority and the parliamentary majority do not coincide, the President of the Republic loses such powers which are only available to him with the agreement of the governing majority.

The Constitution provides the Government with many powers which are not carried out in the same way depending on whether or not the President of the Republic and the Prime Minister belong to the same governing majority or if they are forced into a cohabitation situation. It is the responsibility of the Government to determine and to conduct the policy of the Nation. Thus the Government has a great variety of means available to direct, speed up or slow down the discussion of bills during the legislative procedure before the assemblies. The Prime Minister heads the state civil service and is responsible for national defence. He has the power to make regulations, i.e. to take either general measures outside matters for statute, or specific measures setting down the exact mechanisms for the application of the law (implementation decrees).

General de Gaulle, in moving from the Hôtel Matignon to the Élysée Palace, in no way gave up his actual exercise of executive power; on the contrary, he chose to govern from the Élysée. Only a combination of circumstances made possible this unexpected interpretation, so contrary to "republican traditions": the war in Algeria, first, which had brought General de Gaulle back to power; the exceptional personality of the founder of the Fifth Republic, who possessed, as he put it, "historical legitimacy"; the firm support of the French people, expressed in the constitutional referendum of 28 September 1958, and repeated in three later referenda in 1961 and 1962; and the connivance of the Prime Minister, Michel Debré, who agreed to this new hierarchy between the two executive posts.