Philip M. Williams - The French Parliament (1958-1967)

The decline of Parliament is an old story. Announced by Bryce in 1920, it has characterized a century which, as Wheare has shown, has been hard on legislatures. Many explanations have been offered: the mass electorate; the States intervention in the economy; the growth of bureaucracy; the need for strong and rapid executive decisions in an age of economic and international crisis; the concentration of public attention and loyalty on heads of government through the mass media; the complexity of modern military and economic problems compared to the (supposedly) simple issues of principleslavery, home rule for Ireland, relations of Church and Statewhich dominated the politics of the liberal era. While parliaments may function and even flourish from India to Germany, in their old homes they seem weaker than ever before.

Among the major States, only three have a long-established democratic tradition. In these three countries the legislatures play quite different roles. In the United States, Congress and the Presidency are independent of one another: each can hamper the others activities but not threaten its existence. But whereas in the last century Congress was often the real originator of policy and source of effective leadership, in recent decades the power of the Presidency has grown overwhelmingly. Congress now rarely takes the lead even in the legislative field proper. Its incapacity to initiate action or dominate policy is seen most clearly when, with a weak President in the White House, the United States suffers from a vacuum of leadership. But its esprit de corps remains strong and as an obstructive force Congress can still be very effective, especially when the party opposing the President controls one or both houses. In Great Britain the House of Commons is no longer a forum where cabinets, or even major laws, are created or destroyed. Except in very unusual circumstances the electorate chooses the government, and the government, through party discipline, controls the House of Commons. Almost every important bill is brought in by the cabinet and none passes without its tolerance. Parliament can still play an important role in ventilating the grievances of groups and individuals and in persuading ministers, by argument or by arousing public opinion, to modify their proposals in detail. Sometimes it can veto a measure which never sees the light of day at all. But its most conspicuous function is to provide a forum for criticism and debate, and to conduct over five years the real election campaign which reaches a climax when the house is dissolved.

The French Parliament today is much weaker than the Congress of the United States and somewhat weaker than the British House of Commons. But under the Third and Fourth Republics it was far stronger than either. In contrast to the United States, the French government was responsible to the legislature: in contrast to Britain, the French legislature remained so predominant that for nearly eighty years no ministry dared dissolve. British cabinets were formed by the leaders of the majority party and its discipline gave them power over their nominal parliamentary masters; but in France, government and Parliament alike were paralysed by the number of small parties, the individualism of their members, and the fragility of their coalitions. Moreover, unlike Britain or the United States, France had emerged only recently from authoritarian rule and there were always strong political forces on the far Right or Left (usually both at once) which wanted to scrap the democratic system and revert to autocracy. The threat was the graver because a nineteenth-century French government presided over a powerful and centralized administrative machine, which could be matched neither in the United States with its federal system nor in Great Britain with its flourishing local authorities. The republicans who came to power in the 1870s feared to see this machine controlled either by the authoritarian Right, sheltering behind its royal, imperial or military figureheads, or by the urban revolutionary Left which had been savagely repressed in two bitter civil wars within twenty-five years.