Bonapartism, Gaullism, Macronism

‘Citizens, you are dissolved.’ With those words General Joachim Murat dispersed the Council of Five Hundred in November 1799 and ended France’s first experiment with parliamentary democracy. The scene was the culmination of the 18 Brumaire coup, which enabled Napoleon Bonaparte to seize power. A British cartoon mocked ‘the Corsican crocodile dissolving the council of frogs’, but in France the coup’s success was mostly greeted with relief. After ten years of revolutionary chaos, the French people wanted a strong government and the man who had conquered Italy and Egypt before he turned thirty seemed the ideal candidate to restore order. His success has cast a long shadow over French politics.

There was an echo of Murat’s laconic severity in Emmanuel Macron’s announcement on 9 June 2024: ‘I therefore dissolve the National Assembly.’ An hour earlier, exit polls had shown that his party, Renaissance, and its allies had been routed by the far right in elections for the European Parliament. The dissolution wasn’t a coup in the ordinary sense of the term, though Macron played fast and loose with constitutional conventions (the speaker of the Senate, who ought to have been consulted, was informed in a quick phone call). But it had the hallmarks of a coup d’état in the original sense of the phrase, as coined by Gabriel Naudé in the 1630s. According to Naudé, a protégé of Cardinal Mazarin, coups are ‘bold and extraordinary deeds, which princes are obliged to resort to in the face of desperate and difficult circumstances’; they may ‘exceed common law’ and ‘harm particular interests’ in order to promote ‘the public good’.* Naudé opposed religious fanaticism, yet he upheld as a model coup the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre of 1572, when Charles IX ordered the slaughter of thousands of Protestants. Naudé regretted only that the deed ‘was but half done’, because too many Protestants, whose republican ideas endangered royal authority, survived.

Macron’s act took everyone by surprise. His opponents were stunned. The leaders of the far-right Rassemblement National (RN), who had perfunctorily requested a dissolution only thirty minutes before the announcement, were fearful of falling into a trap. Macron’s supporters were horrified. Transposed to a national election, the results of the European poll implied a near annihilation of Renaissance MPs. Why had the president decided to organise a St Bartholomew’s Day massacre of his own side? Pundits wondered about his sanity, while journalists pointed to the influence of malevolent advisers, little known to the public. Was the president-king the toy of courtly intrigues?

The decision to dissolve the Assembly, and the manner in which it was taken, reminded everyone of the awesomeness of presidential powers in the Fifth Republic. A British prime minister can call a snap election, but Parliament – in practice usually the prime minister’s own party – can also oust him or her from power. In lieu of this balance of fear between the executive and legislative branches, the US constitution provides for a balance of impotence: the president cannot dissolve Congress; Congress can remove the president only through an impeachment procedure that has never succeeded. The French president combines the powers of a British prime minister with the political immunity of an American president. His constitutional stature resembles that of Russia’s head of state, who can dissolve the Duma of his own accord. This is no coincidence, since the 1958 constitution of the Fifth Republic was one of the sources of inspiration for the Russian Federation’s constitution of 1993. In theory, the French president’s powers are even more extensive than those of his Russian counterpart, since in ill-defined circumstances, Article 16 of the 1958 constitution allows him to assume ‘exceptional powers’, unlimited in scope and time, subject only to the non-binding consultation of a handful of officials.

French presidents have not always been endowed with powers greater than those of other Western leaders. The origins of the current dispensation lie in the 1958 constitution, designed by Charles de Gaulle in the midst of the Algerian war of independence. After liberation, with the military but also constitutional debacle of 1940 in mind, de Gaulle had argued for the creation of a powerful presidency: the head of state should be ‘an arbitrator above political contingencies’, able to call for new elections in moments of ‘confusion’ and with the means to act as ‘guarantor of national independence’ in cases of emergency. Instead, the founders of the Fourth Republic (1946-58) established a parliamentary regime with a weak presidency. The regime proved unstable, with 24 prime ministers in a dozen years. In 1958, a putsch led by officers determined to prevent Algerian independence threatened to march on Paris if de Gaulle was not recalled to power. The government caved, enabling de Gaulle to establish a republic that conformed to his views on presidential powers, and he became its first head of state.

In Le Coup d’État permanent (1964), François Mitterrand inveighed against the Gaullist regime as the product of a coup and as leading inevitably to ‘the continuous strengthening of personal power’. He wondered whether the Fifth Republic should not instead be characterised as a ‘temporary dictatorship’, an ‘elective monarchy’ or a ‘pashalik’. The brilliance of his polemic helped Mitterrand become the leader of the left and later, ironically, the longest-serving president of the Fifth Republic (from 1981 to 1995). In those years he did nothing to constrain presidential power. Instead, he extended it when he refused to resign after his Parti Socialiste lost the general election in 1986. When, in 1969, de Gaulle had narrowly lost a referendum, he duly resigned. Mitterrand, by contrast, remained as president in 1986 and appointed Jacques Chirac, the leader of the centre right, as his prime minister. Sticking to the letter of the constitution, Mitterrand acted as a check on the government’s power. Chirac confirmed the legitimacy of the practice a decade later when he, too, remained as president after his opportunistic dissolution of the National Assembly in 1997 resulted in his party’s surprise defeat.

The ‘cohabitation’ of a president with an opposition prime minister might seem to restore the status of parliament. But in such circumstances the president retains enough powers – especially in foreign affairs and defence – to obstruct and undermine the prime minister. France has experienced three such cohabitations (1986-88, 1993-95 and 1997-2002), each of which ended with the resounding failure of the prime minister’s presidential bid.

The young Mitterrand’s intuition that the president’s powers would keep growing has proved correct. In 2000, constitutional reform sought to make the risk of cohabitation less likely, by aligning the president’s term with that of the National Assembly: it was argued that if general elections immediately followed presidential elections, the president would command a parliamentary majority (this hope was disappointed in 2022, when Macron only obtained a plurality). Nicolas Sarkozy, president from 2007 until 2012, was known as the ‘omnipresident’ due to his day-to-day involvement in domestic affairs. His successor from 2012 until 2017, François Hollande, propounded a less assertive presidency – and went on to see his popularity disintegrate. In an interview in 2016, Macron explained that a president should be ‘Jupiter-like’ rather than ‘normal’. ‘The French, a political people, want something more,’ he said. ‘Hence the essential ambiguity of the presidential role, which, in our institutional system, is connected to the monarchical trauma.’

Macron’s analysis implied that the French president’s extensive powers have deeper roots than de Gaulle’s return to power in 1958, pointing towards a secret yearning for the absolute king put to death in 1793. French history since the revolution of 1789 certainly doesn’t suggest an unequivocal abhorrence of kingly power. After Napoleon became first consul in 1799 and crowned himself emperor in 1804, France experimented with a restoration of the Bourbon dynasty, the liberal monarchy of their cousin Louis-Philippe and the rule of Napoleon’s nephew as president of the ephemeral Second Republic (before he became prince-president and finally emperor). The Constituent Assembly of the Third Republic (1870-1940) originally favoured another monarchical restoration, but the conditions posed by the pretender, the would-be ‘Henri V’ (notably the replacement of the Tricolore by the fleur-de-lys flag), foiled royalist hopes. In 1875, the Assembly passed constitutional laws that avoided the word ‘republic’, except to describe the extensive powers of a ‘president of the republic’, who could easily be replaced by a dynastic monarch.

It was political contingency, specifically an ill-advised dissolution of the Chamber of Deputies by the royalist president Patrice de MacMahon in 1877, which turned the Third Republic into an authentically republican regime. Republicans had won the 1876 general election and an uneasy, forgotten first cohabitation between a royalist president and a republican premier ensued. MacMahon’s dissolution, in the hope of regaining a parliamentary majority, was denounced by republicans as a ‘coup’. The republicans won the snap election and asked MacMahon ‘to submit or resign’. MacMahon submitted before resigning two years later. His successor, the republican Jules Grévy, renounced his right to dissolve the Chamber of Deputies in 1879. The resulting supremacy of parliament lasted until July 1940, when the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate infamously handed over unlimited powers to Marshal Pétain, yet another providential saviour – one imbued with corporatist and fascist as well as monarchical ideas.

Revolutionary republicanism saw the personal power of surrogate kings as a grave threat to liberty. Germaine de Staël, who supported a constitutional monarchy or a moderate republic, insisted that only dynastic kings could exercise monarchical power wisely: ‘A man who’s not a king should not be placed alone at the head of the government,’ she wrote on the eve of Bonaparte’s Brumaire coup, ‘and a man who is placed there would want to become king.’ This traditional conception of republican power lost much of its appeal after the Third and Fourth Republics collapsed in ignominy. But it remains influential on the left, which continues to see the Fifth Republic as republican in name only. It also helps to explain why the French left hates Macron almost as much as it does Le Pen. For the left, Macron isn’t just a French version of Bill Clinton or Tony Blair – a supposedly progressive politician who extols the free market and has sold out to big business. He also conjures up memories of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, who launched his 1851 coup by papering Paris with posters announcing: ‘I have dissolved [the National Assembly] and I make the entire people our judge.’

Such suspicions may appear ill founded. After all, de Gaulle, too, was accused of wanting to create an authoritarian regime, yet no serious scholar would describe the Fifth Republic as a dictatorship. It has proved compatible with freedom of expression and for decades the centre left and centre right alternately exercised power, as in most liberal democracies. But the party system that sustained the Fifth Republic has collapsed in the last ten years. Since 2017, the left-wing and right-wing coalitions have been replaced by three irreconcilable poles: a radicalised left, a pro-Macron centre and the far right. This new three-way system, combined with a majority vote, presents two risks: that no coalition will obtain a sufficient majority of seats to govern, or that it will do so only with a minority of votes. Grudging support from the left in the second round enabled Macron to defeat the far right in 2017 and 2022. But in 2022, the pro-Macron majority was reduced to a plurality in parliament, making the passing of new legislation excruciatingly difficult.

The best explanation for Macron’s decision to dissolve the National Assembly is that he hoped to reactivate the left’s endorsement of him as a lesser evil, in the face of the serious threat that the far right would gain a majority. The left itself seemed weak, and bitterly divided over Israel’s invasion of Gaza, with its different constituents accusing each other variously of antisemitism or Islamophobia. Yet within a few days, the left formed a new coalition which, on 7 July, went on to gain nearly two hundred out of just under six hundred seats (though they are having difficulty deciding on a candidate for prime minister). The pro-Macron MPs were relieved that their numbers were only reduced to 170, while the RN and its allies gained only 140 seats, despite topping the first-round poll. The rump centre right held on to its fifty seats. The ‘clarification’ called for by the president has instead produced unprecedented confusion, with no discernible majority or significant plurality.

In the short run, the only certainty is instability. Any minority, coalition or technocratic government is unlikely to last long or pass substantial legislation. The fragmented parliament resembles those of the detested Fourth Republic. The French president retains extensive constitutional powers, however. He is barred from dissolving parliament again for twelve months – a provision rooted in memories of consecutive dissolutions by the last Bourbon king, Charles X, which the liberal opposition also castigated as an attempted coup, triggering the revolution of 1830. But Macron’s other prerogatives remain intact, and his supporters, though diminished in numbers, occupy a pivotal place in the new National Assembly. Macronism is wounded, but not dead.

Three-way logjams have in the past proved propitious for ‘ordinary’ coups. Napoleon’s Brumaire coup broke a deadlock between the Jacobin left, moderate republicans and the royalist right. Louis-Napoleon’s 1851 coup broke a deadlock between the democratic-socialist left, Bonapartist supporters and the reactionary Parti de l’Ordre. Even de Gaulle’s quasi coup of 1958 owed much to the tripartite division between a communist-dominated left, moderate republicans and a hard right hostile to decolonisation. In each case, the centre and the right benefited to varying degrees, while the left lost out.

Will the dissolution of 2024 lead to a genuine coup? A coup is usually staged from within the state apparatus and Macron is a confirmed gambler: he may wish to take even more risks. The coming instability could provide a motive and Article 16 of the constitution on exceptional powers would grant legal cover. But a coup also requires at least the acquiescence of the army and police, which currently support Le Pen. Macron rose to power as a champion of opposition to the RN and any rapprochement seems implausible, but French monarchs or surrogate monarchs, from Henri IV to Mitterrand, have accomplished more spectacular political reinventions in the interests of the state. Over the past six months, Macron has begun to decry the radical left as an existential threat comparable to that posed by the far right. It’s not inconceivable that the plurality of left-wing MPs in the new National Assembly will accentuate the president’s pivot against islamo-gauchisme, a nebulous concept but a convenient slogan. The anglophone media like to portray Macron as a liberal centrist. But his rhetoric of ‘transcending’ (dépasser) the left-right divide also harks back to a Bonapartist tradition of authoritarian centrism. What distinguishes Macronism from Bonapartism or Gaullism is its lack of support among the working class. The logical step, according to this way of thinking, would be for Macron to strike a deal with the RN, whose voters mainly come from the white working and lower middle classes.

As things stand, such a scenario is nothing more than a frightening fantasy. But the crisis unleashed by Macron’s dissolution is only in its early stages. Who could have predicted the twists and turns that followed the Brexit referendum and Trump’s election in 2016? The growth of nationalist populism has tested constitutional order in other countries: Boris Johnson unlawfully prorogued Parliament while Trump abetted a mob attack on the Capitol. France is a country of coups as well as revolutions, historically far more tolerant of extra-legal means of seizing or consolidating power than the anglophone world. If the outbreak of national populist fever in France doesn’t result in greater political or constitutional upheaval than in Britain or the US, it will be a happy surprise.