Lorna Milne - French Presidentialism and the Election of 1995

French Presidentialism and the Election of 1995

Edited by

JOHN GAFFNEY

LORNA MILNE

First published 1997 by Ashgate Publishing

Reissued 2018 by Routledge

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Copyright John Gaffney, Lorna Milne 1997

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A Library of Congress record exists under LC control number: 97022278

ISBN 13: 978-1-138-31644-7 (hbk)

ISBN 13: 978-0-429-45565-0 (ebk)

CONTENTS

John Gaffney and Lorna Milne

Peter Morris

Lorna Milne

Alistair Cole

David B. Goldey

Irne Hill

John Gaffney

David Bell and Byron Criddle

Catherine Fieschi

Mairi Maclean

Susan Milner

Pamela M. Moores and Christophe Texier

Jean and Monica Charlot

Catherine Pradeilles

Douglas Johnson

John Gaffney

Christophe Texier

We are indebted to a number of people and organisations who have helped to fund, research, organise and prepare this project for publication. In particular, we would like to thank the Nuffield Foundation whose grant allowed members of the research group to assemble documents and to travel to France. In addition, we are grateful to the Aston Modern Languages Research Foundation for grants and support which allowed contributors to meet to discuss the project; and to the Association for the Study of Modern and Contemporary France, which helped to fund a one-day conference on the presidential election in May 1995. Aston Universitys Institute for the Study of Language and Society provided an ideal environment in which to pursue our research. Of the many individuals who contributed to the project, we especially wish to thank Julie Ramsden, Administrative Assistant to the Institute; Christophe Texier for work during his tenure as the Institutes Research Assistant; Wendy Firmin of the Department of Languages and European Studies, Aston University, for collecting and cataloguing our audio-visual resources; Ian Henderson for his help in preparing the manuscript; and Dartmouth Publishers for general encouragement and assistance. Finally, it is the editors privilege to thank our colleagues and contributors for their positive cooperation in preparing this volume.

John Gaffney and Lorna Milne

JOHN GAFFNEY AND LORNA MILNE

In 1995, and for the second time in the course of the Fifth Republic, a presidential election took place during a period of cohabitation between the Socialist President Franois Mitterrand and a right-wing coalition government, installed after the legislative elections of 1993. For a range of reasons, however, the 1995 election was fundamentally different from the last such occasion in 1988. Most importantly, it was clear that the President would not seek re-election, and the general sense of Mitterrands failing health and declining power raised public expectations that 1995, by closing the Mitterrand era, would also bring about some sort of renewal of the political scene. Such hopeful predictions of a political watershed were heightened by mass-produced media clichs which stereotyped as