The eventual consequences of the May—June revolt are perhaps only now starting to become visible in France. The months since the great explosion have been marked by swift changes in both the economy and polity of French capitalism: the monetary crisis of November last year, the April referendum that led to De Gaulle’s resignation, the election of Pompidou in June, and the devaluation in August. What is the significance of this succession of events for the pattern of bourgeois power, and what are the present perspectives for class struggle in France?
The original vocation of Gaullism had a certain resemblance to that of Mendèsism. French capitalism needed in both cases to end a disastrous colonial war and to implement rationalizing and modernizing reforms at home. Mendès terminated the expeditionary adventure in Indochina; De Gaulle disengaged the Army from Algeria. But neither were able to achieve substantial or comparable successes in France itself. The fundamental reason for this is that there does not exist in France an adequate social base for a coherent modernizing programme, nor a hegemonic group within the capitalist class capable of winning the whole bourgeoisie to acceptance of such a programme. Capitalist rationalization thus had to be imposed on the bourgeoisie itself. For this, a central State at once authoritarian, liberal and technocratic was necessary. Yet constituted by an ‘outsider’, it then lacked a stable social foundation. This phenomenon is, indeed, a constant of French history: there is no other advanced capitalist country where central State power assumes such a directly techno-bureaucratic and administrative form, and in which its political mediations are so fragile. It was this tradition that produced the advent of the Fifth Republic.