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The Fifth Republic Must End
The presidential elections have come and gone in France. Legislative elections will come soon. I’ve made some dark remarks on events, but sparsely — I think it’s too early to talk about it in detail. Few now speaking seem to take the situation in France seriously enough. To me, it seems obvious that suffering and humiliations will multiply in France. I have seen much excellent coverage of the elections; I recommend John O’Sullivan in National Review. For people less concerned with the elections and more concerned with what’s happening in France, I recommend an essay by Chris Caldwell on French critics of the French governing classes. The best author to read is the wise Pierre Manent in a journal I recommend, American Affairs.
But our own @Claire Berlinski, whom I admire so much, said “Macron vanquished Le Pen.” The depth of futility in that statement — the desperate fantasy of that sentiment — the unbending silence it invokes — was too much for me. I decided to write against everything that stands for, what Manent calls “the fanaticism of the center.” I will warn of the coming disaster like the prophets did in previous ages.
The facts of the election
Let me begin in the American way, by stating the facts of the matter. Emmanuel Macron won some 20.7 million votes and defeated Marine Le Pen, who won 10.6 million. It was a 66-34 election. The LePen name, as well as the Front National party, are poisoned in France. To round out the voting, I’ll add that 4 million votes were blank or null. Add up the tallies, and that’s about 35.5 million votes total, or a turnout of 74.5%, in a country with a population of about 65 million.
Here’s what these numbers mean. First, turnout was remarkably low for France (6-10% below recent elections); a more conventional turnout would be around 80%. Further, turnout was lower than in the first round of balloting, which was 77.7%. This is unheard of in a generation at least. Wasted votes should be accounted for as well: There were less than a million wasted votes in the first round of balloting, at a higher turnout. There were more than four times more protest votes in the second round of balloting, making up 11.5% of the votes cast That lowers turnout significantly — and uniquely.
In 2012, there were only half that number (2.1 million) of protest votes. In 2002, when the previous Le Pen had to be exorcised from the body politic, only 1.7 million. A quarter of the electorate disliked the election, even more on the second round than the first. A ninth of the voting electorate couldn’t bring themselves to vote for either candidate. The party politics of the Fifth Republic is losing a significant part of its democratic consent.
Second, let’s talk about the Le Pen curse. Nobody in this world or the next believes that Macron could have won 66% of votes against anybody but a Le Pen. So let’s recall the previous Le Pen election in 2002. Back then Jean-Marie Le Pen, father of the current nightmare of all respectable people, won 4.8 million votes in the first round and 5.7 million in the second (going from 16.8% to 17.7%). His opponent, Jacques Chirac, went from 5.6 million to 25.5 million (going from 19.8% to 82.2%). Already you could see the fracture of the parties and the democratic incompetence of the oligarchic politicians of France. Nevertheless, that year, France rallied. Respectable people wanted to exorcise the specter of fascism. Turnout also leapt that year, from 71.6% to 79.7%. (Wasted votes that year were under a million in the first round, same as now — but they almost doubled in the second round then, whereas they more than quadrupled now.)
If you wanted to talk about vanquishing the far right, that was the moment to do it, not in 2017. If you wanted to gloat about how respectability outperformed the polls, that was the moment — not this. These days, comparatively, things are miserable. France cannot summon the numbers — people do not care. And there are twice as many voters willing to associate with the specter of fascism haunting France. They don’t care about the press or public opinion either. The Le Pen name has risen from the grave once and it might do it again.
Perhaps the respectable people believe they have duped democracy and things will be as they want them now, because Macron has been elected. This 30-something president, the youngest ever, does worst with French 30-somethings, where Mme. Le Pen won more than 40% of them. Old people love him or at least loathe her. How about the young? In the first round of balloting, the candidates running against the two major parties of France won a majority of the youth vote, although Le Pen has only won a third of them. There is reason to worry there, too. But the oligarchs of France may not care — perhaps the political collapse of the last 15 years means nothing to them. The failure of the parties and the party leaders, the failure of the presidents in both respectable parties, the failure of the electoral system in 2017 — the political system that produced Macron.
The last Paladin of the oligarchy
Perhaps people think this man is a new hope, but he is the dying gasp of the Fifth Republic. On Ricochet’s own GLoP podcast, some of the insanely funny guys were saying Macron is anti-establishment, or an outsider at any rate. You must understand that to be a hilariously funny remark. An irony. A witticism. The ugly truth, of course, is that he is a creature of the governing classes.
Having failed to make it into one of the prestigious schools of France, where the ruling classes learn how to be ruling classes, he made it into another one. That’s how he got to work for the government in a fairly prestigious administrative position, until his patrons got him a banking job — he left that to go back into government soon enough, but now a millionaire. Like in America, in France politics and finance meet at the top and the privileges a few insanely rich people bestow on each other are adorned with the self-righteousness of meritocracy. They are just better than people like you — they deserve their wealth because they shoulder the awesome responsibility of running the country while the likes of you get in the way.
Soon enough, he went back into politics, as his patrons acquired for him more prestige and then a job as an economics minister. Always, new and old patrons, businessmen and politicians and political advisors, made his way for him. None of his jobs ever lasted long because they didn’t matter in any sense except increasing prestige without involving much real work. He’s not trying to do anything, other than be the person in the position that will get him the next position. Never has he achieved anything even at the level of someone like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg.
We’re not talking about the ancient aristocracies that could promote young men of genius into positions of rule: Think about the indomitable opponent of Napoleon, the brilliant UK Tory William Pitt the Younger, Prime Minister at 24. Think about America’s own Founders — men making the greatest republic known to human history in their 20s and 30s. This no longer seems possible in our time.
The French case is merely a show of the ugly self-flattery of the very oligarchies that have failed France. They flatter themselves that by deceiving the democracy, they will save their unearned privileges, unaware of how they have become mutilated because of them. Macron constantly talks about the failures of the previous 30 years, never mentioning that he will not change them, much less that he himself has been made by the very people responsible for those failures at every institutional level. But in this youngish man the corruption of those institutions is revealed — they only serve to create the men the oligarchs want.
This goes far beyond the state and the financiers that hired him. This goes beyond the government. The press loved Macron, and almost nobody cared to think of the ugly truth about this shameful creature of the oligarchy. He has refused, to my knowledge, to say how he got the money to fund his new party. The party, such as it is, will be the socialist party among whose ranks he ascended so quickly. Nobody has succeeded as fast as him within the system — never has the press fawned over so unknown a man. Thus, France has elected as president an unknown man of no ability for governing and without a party, except whatever the old parties he supposedly opposes can offer him.
In a month, legislative elections will happen. In the foolishness that will follow, a mindless coalition government will form, with neither mandate nor hierarchy. Then the suffering will turn to humiliation for France and the humiliation to despair; the supposed new dawn will be merely a glimmer of dusk. There are dark days coming, and who among the respectable or those who believe the respectable will be able to say he acted in good faith?
Anti-semitism
Finally, let us condemn the respectable people out of their own mouths. We are told that the Front National is somehow haunted by fascism. They are for that reason intolerable. One does not know exactly what to believe. Do the respectable say on their moral authority that the people would taint themselves with blood by such a vote? Or that fascism would come to France with the FN? If the latter, then the institutions of the state are worthless. If the former, then the political parties are worthless.
Further, Mme. Le Pen has been humiliated publicly again for defending the official position of France until the last two decades or so: Blaming the Vichy government for anti-Semitic slaughters and the French participation in the Holocaust. That is a historical fiction — the French could not bear the thought of their crimes in the dawn of Liberation. The people hysterical about her statements and enthusiastic about her defeat apparently believe only other Frenchmen might bear the taint of fascism through Vichy. They themselves are pure souls — only the potential or actual FN voters could be evil.
But who has been governing France in these recent decades? Le Pen and her father and their crazy party? Or the respectable people? What life do Jews live in respectable France? The holy anti-fascists run a country from which many thousands of Jews flee every year. A country where vast majorities of Jewish children are kept out of public schools for their safety. A country where crimes against Jews are increasing and fortified synagogues adorned with French law-enforcement prepared for war no longer shock.
What, but their own sickening failure to protect Jews, drives these respectable people to become hysterical at the supposed anti-Semites who do not actually harm Jews? What drives the enthusiasm for the Macron victory, but a desire to go back to running France as they have before, in a way that makes Jews want to run away?
Conclusion
Look at the Fifth Republic. It started with the last great Frenchman, General de Gaulle, and it ends with a puppet, Macron. At 59 years, this is the second longest-lived French regime since the Revolution (the Third Republic made it to 70) and it does not look like it will last. The problems France faces politically get to the core of its organization. The separation between the governed and the governing classes is turning toward oligarchy. The great successes of French administration and the reputation — damn near incorruptibility — of its administrative classes are real assets. But the old weakness of French politics — parties that can neither legislate nor earn the loyalty of the democratic electorate — is coming back. And there is no one to save the parties this time.
Published in Politics
I wouldn’t bet on it. Anyway, whatever Germany had to contribute to Europe has been seen in the last decade-
We face the same big lumpy problems and a policy dillemma. We are hit with demographics that are different than in the past and technological change and trade that is even more disruptive and rapid than we’ve suffered in the past, and we both have increasingly rigid systems that adjust slowly and poorly to these things; France because it has always been an administrative state, but now has the EU to deal with as well, and us because we have become an administrative state. On the opposition side, we have misdiagnosed the basic problems, or mislabeled them. We speak of globalization by which we mean different things, but among them is free trade, and indeed we’ve both been impacted by external competition as the poor third world entered the global market. Our dilemma is that the rigidities, the elitism, the skewed income distribution are products of the administrative state. Economies adjust from the ground up and the freer the market and the less encumbered by rules, regulations, market distortions, government fostered monopolies the faster will be adjustments. So we have to approach internal and external trade, technological adjustment and immigration knowing that a top down approach, which our elite will warmly welcome will not only not work but will make matters worse. It’s the problem. So we must find ways to free the market for goods, people, investment and money and at the same time recognize that we cannot adjust fast enough to be wholly open to the billions of new workers entering the global economy or the millions who press on our borders. I don’t think this is technically difficult but we have to recognize that we must always move toward freer less encumbered markets and we must find ways to help our population adjust to the blistering speed of change we cannot escape. Waves of unskilled culturally different peoples do not help our population adjust, nor require that our elite understand the dilemmas our people face.
This is an assertion, not an argument. What is it about France or even Britain (although their rejection of the Anglo-model (if they have rejected it) is certainly less self-conscious than France’s) that prevents them from adopting separation of powers and sovereignty of the people? If you tell me it’s their history and mindset, I’ll likely concur, but it’s still a choice — just one they’ve rejected.
Inasmuch as you’re against more unskilled immigration from foreign places, sure, that makes sense. Civilized countries first need to learn to deal with the immigrants they’ve taken in already!
But on the economic matter–I’m not sure the economy is the solution now. Who trusts whom to legislate & implement serious changes to the state & the state of the economy? Maybe the British will trust PM May with that. I dunno. But what other civilized country has any political consensus left for national concord, much less for inevitably divisive legislation?
I think you’re mistaking two different things for one. It’s one thing to look at possible alternatives–say, American separation of powers vs. English parliamentary government (legislative & executive power in the same hands). It’s another thing to say that England could choose to be like America.
Further, I have the stronger position here. It is not the case that countries keeps choosing to be this way or that. That they are set in their ways is the case. Whoever wants to effect regime change or contemplates its possibility faces a great burden.
(Think about how Wilson admired British government & wanted America to do it, too, through the presidency. Think about the desire to rationalize the state through the federal gov’t in America. These things have never really worked so well as they were expected to, nor have people reconciled themselves to these impositions–America can no more become British than the other way around…)
One difference between France & America. Americans cannot be bothered to vote like the Frenchmen; but the Frenchmen cannot be bothered to take their local affairs in hand; (mayors are elected in France, but are rather powerless, & so quite popular.)
By the way, I should probably have written a bit more, to include this FT set of charts about the election. The more urban, more educated, wealthier, happier people are exceedingly for Macron. The less urban, the blue collar, the unhappy, the poorer people–they were just anti-Le Pen.
Titus,
I’d say that’s as fair an abstract of the election as I’ve seen.
Regards,
Jim
Yes, indeed, Mr. Gawron. It’s hard to say that there’s much nation left when electoral politics serves to drive people apart into classes. The need for national concord & earned trust is great in ways politicians & the well-to-do just do not understand. I’m not sure they’re even trying…
Dense but very informative, thanks @titustechera
You’re welcome Mr. Lockett–thanks for the kind words.
I find it hard to take seriously anybody looking at these numbers and concluding that the National Front party has been vanquished.
On the right, this view seems predominant among those who hit their professional peak by being against Communism, and have failed to realize we live in a dynamic world with many competing sources of danger.
year / first round votes / percentage / place.
1974 190,921 0.8% (#7)
1981 —
1988 4,376,742 14.4% (#4)
1995 4,570,838 15.0% (#4)
2002 4,804,713 16.9% (#2)
2007 3,834,530 10.4% (#4)
2012 6,421,426 17.9% (#3)
2017 7,678,491 21.3% (#2)
These numbers are from Wiki.
Any idea what’s up with Marion Marechal-Le Pen’s quitting? My impression is she’s more old school FN; is this Marine purging that from the party?
Marion-Marechal is the future of the party. Reactionary Catholics.
It’s risky, but wise to leave the party now. Mme. Le Pen doesn’t even understand she’s part of the past. She won’t give up power-
That sounds like a shrinking voter base.
Reactionary Catholicism is the only social basis on which a party can grow. What else is going to give the young people, a majority of whom voted people called communist & fascism, any future? Opposition to individualist centrism is growing. What can give it shape? What has France to offer better than membership in corporations on the basis of productivity?
That is a fact glossed over far too often, left without comment. Four million voters, 11.5% of all votes cast, who did not stay at home in a fit of ennui and disgust but instead went to the polls solely for the purpose of making it known, “No one here represents me.” What kind of despair arises from that? What alternatives will such voters seek upon concluding that no one in their government speaks for them?
Exactly so.
France ran out of future some time in the 90s. One might as well say the election of M. Chirac sealed the fate of the republic.
I do not know who can offer Frenchmen a future, but it will not be the successful classes who neither know nor care what life is like for the majority of the population!
Reactionary to 1789, in fact. A lot of people have been noting that there are similar forces acting in France and the US, but that the national responses don’t have the same flavor.
Daniel Greenfield has a very smart analysis of the post-defeat Democrat dilemma in the US; it’s relevant to this discussion as well.
Some associations are standing up for themselves, but the left keeps beating them down anyway. Witness what ObamaCare has been trying to do to Little Sisters of the Poor, for example.
Perhaps you meant something more than thwarting the attempts of the left to bring all private associations into the fold of big government, but in that case, what?
So one thing conservatives should read is Mr. Codevilla’s new essay on statesmanship in America today. He says, Americans are almost waging war, for ideological purposes, when they should leave each other alone. Texas forbad abortions by closing almost all clinics. SCOTUS nixed it. Texas should have stuck to its ways–like states with Sanctuary cities do. Federalism has to be learned again, because Americans are no longer of one mind!
This way, conservatives will be able to defend their own associations.
We had a wonderful visit by Dr. Joseph Wysocki at our school yesterday, and the focus was on Tocqueville and associations. One thing I am concerned about – the revival of robust associations may simply accelerate the partisan divide and our current animosity since even the most benign modern American associations seem to end up quickly being defined, in part at least, by a certain level of cultural and political partisanship.
He shares your love of film, and it’s role in American culture, I hope I can get you together if you come East again.
Great post by the way, excellent, and I hope you and @Claire can develop these ideas in a good back and forth, being among my two favorite Richocetti.
I’m sure I’ll make it out that way again!
As for partisanship–I think that’s probably true, but there’s no other way now. The question is where you push. So Mr. Codevilla’s essay brilliantly points out, things like voter ID laws or similar are national necessities. Americans cannot live with each other if half the nation suspects the others is making millions of illegal voters by giving them, say, drivers licenses.
But most things allow for states to separate along their political lines without breaking the Union. States would become super-partisan so as to not enforce federal law anymore in cases that annoy them. Like California turns its nose at immigration law with Sanctuary cities–so should all red states ruin Roe v. Wade in practice. More partisanship at state level, far less political hysteria nationally. Less of the fear that someone somewhere else is shoving stuff down everyone’s throat in defiance of habit & decency & any criterion of consent…
I’m not sure there’s a future for this, because Americans might not have it in them to stand up for themselves in their states. Anyway, social conservatives have been the laughing stock of the anti-liberal-progressive alliance for generations. I’m not sure the anti-Dem coalition is going to care about them now any more than in the past, although that’s the one SCOTUS decision that more & more of the nation opposes, as time passes.
Do you mean your claim that Macron will be the final President literally? If so, would you accept a bet on the subject?
If you mean it hyperbolically, but there is some smaller objective truth intended by the claim, could you offer an objective metric by which you feel your correctness could reasonably be justified? I suspect that I would also be interested in a bet on that criterion.
Do you understand the difference between states refusing to have their resources coopted by Federal laws and having them ignore a Constitutional bar to action? If you’re making some argument that the Court’s decisions are not binding or some such that’s fine, but I’m curious about whether that’s really what you mean.
To speak very quickly: About SCOTUS, are you familiar with Lincoln’s famous argument about tyrants in black robes?
About the 5thR: Do you understand the meaning of the word must?
My views are in the comments, but I do not now have the time to link them. I think the future of the 5th ended with the Chirac election.
I dunno what will follow. I see only one future: Catholic reactionaries forming a new majority.
Again, it’s all there if you care for it.
If you have predictions to offer–please, use this as an opportunity. I do not–only my own expectations about the legislative elections–coalition without mandate or hierarchy–and the next gov’t–no real improvements, increasing democratic discontent. More depressed or more angry? Dunno…
If, however, you want to talk over the 5thR, what it means, what it is–I’d love to & will have time tomorrow. It’s nearing one in the morning in Eastern Europe…
Then, it is tomorrow. ;)
Yeah, it turns out I’m not asleep! So, @jamesofengland?
The Right has been leaving the war alone, not recognizing that it is a war. Domestic Communists were working in the service of a foreign power, but a revolution began in 1968 in Chicago in which Americans serving an international ideology went to war against their own country. The immediate violence was strategically put aside, in order for the New Left’s operatives and followers could take over the media and the educational establishment, which they did. Obama’s mentor Bill Ayers is a prime example: an unrepentant domestic terrorist who became an influential educator and a behind the scenes political power.
One of the institutions that was taken over is the Democrat Party. The extent to which that this part is now a criminal enterprise facilitated by its supporters at the highest levels of government can be heard in a stunning Whiskey Politics interview with Megan Barth.
Codevilla writes as if this is not part of today’s reality.
It appears to me that you are advocating going further than Lincoln in calling for Texas to repudiate the core holdings of Whole Woman’s Health.
If your piece were confined to the headline, this would be more apparent. Scroll down to the conclusion, though, and you will see the description of Macron as the final President given in descriptive rather than aspirational terms. You shift to what “will” happen rather than what “must”.
In the sense that history ended with the battle of Jena, sure. This is why I asked you if you had anything that you would accept as falsifying your claim.
No, no, it is not. I ask for prose to clarify your poetry.
I feel pretty confident that the Fifth Republic will survive Macron and Macron’s successor. Putin’s funding swells the bellies of the malcontents, but that funding is unlikely to last forever. Without the engine of their perfidy, it seems unlikely that they will do much better in the future. It might not even take that long. Did you see the collapse in the UKIP vote? We have professionals consolidating power in the U.K. at an unprecedented rate. In Germany the FDP+ CDU+SDP vote seems pretty constant, although there has been a little bleed from the CDU to the still more establishment FDP.
The combination of the combination of Putin’s weaponization of Syrian refugees (and the shameful success of his lackeys in Congress and American politics more broadly in enabling this) with his funding of the fringes produced a lot of regrettable results and might produce another in Italy soon. Nonetheless, the PIIGS crisis has mostly passed (only the Greeks are still squarely in bailout territory), the Syrian crisis is mostly through its ugliest patches, and the continent seems likely to calm down generally over the next few years. The bad fringes have mostly been excluded and the apparent fringes that succeeded (say, Law And Order) turned out not to be so bad. Which decade of the Twentieth Century other than its last was so supportive of the elite consensus? Venezuela has kindly offered to remind people why outlandish leftism is a bad idea in substantive terms and Corbyn is reminding people why it’s suboptimal politically.
I’m sure you’ll find plenty of reasons to condemn France’s essence/ strength of will/ spirit etc., but the circumstances look pretty good for her surviving and prospering for the medium term.
What it means and what it “is”, if by that you mean something other than a verifiable and objective metric by which its end can be determined, is not something I have any interest in discussing.