The Telegraph: France’s Fifth Republic could collapse this week
British historian Robert Tombs believes in an article in the Telegraph newspaper that France and Britain are preparing for simultaneous unrest, stressing that it’s precisely Paris that faces the most worrisome prospect.
Tombs wrote, “Britons had little doubt about who would govern them and had an idea of what they planned to do… Thursday’s general election results resulted in a landslide victory for the opposition Labor Party over the ruling Conservative Party”.
In France, the outlook is highly uncertain regarding people, policies and consequences.
Tombs, who is professor emeritus of French history at St John’s College, Cambridge University, wonders how it got there.
The writer criticized French President Emmanuel Macron for calling for early elections, calling it a reckless gamble that exposed the fragility of the regime in his country, which relied on historical factors for its survival.
The pattern of freedom and order, democracy and power, and freedom and democracy often found expression in the streets, on barricades, in troubled parliaments that used to topple governments every few months, and in their inability to deal with crises, critics say.
Tired of chaos and uncertainty, public opinion – in the opinion of the British historian – shifted from opposite to opposite.
As a result of these conditions came the Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, who ruled France from 1804 to 1814, and then his son Napoleon II (22 June 1815 – 7 July 1815).
The Bourbon royal family’s restoration of power in France is the period of French history that followed the first fall of Napoleon on May 3, May, 1814 and continued to rule until the July Revolution of 1830.
The First French Republic was officially proclaimed on 21 July 1792 during the French Revolution and lasted until 1804.
When power faltered or was destroyed by foreign armies, according to Tombs, democracy reappeared in the Second Republics (February 25, 1848 December 2, 1851), Third (1870-1940) and Fourth (1946-1958).
In October 1958, President Charles de Gaulle established the Fifth Republic, the republican system of government currently prevailing in France.
From the point of view of the British historian, the basis of French policy was the constant struggle between freedom and order, which manifested itself in the left and right currents.
Although the conflict was sometimes violent, the political situation was stable.
In his essay, the French history professor describes de Gaulle as the last political giant, an exemplary right-wing savior, and a patriotic Catholic soldier who, in a quasi-coup succeeded in ending the chaos of the Fourth Republic, which collapsed in the midst of the Algeria War.
But riots and unrest wiped out de Gaulle’s legacy, and in the next half century he was replaced by politicians of modest stature, as in all democracies of the world, in the words of the British historian.
But the deep-rooted political forces that shaped political life began to collapse, and Gaullist lost its appeal and became just another center-right force.
Tombs stressed that Macron, after causing the French to alienate him, his country has become between two extremist currents: left and right, and a sterile centrist current.
