France, geographically and politically the hinge of the European Union, where its northern and southern tier join, has undergone a more drastic change of position within it than any other member state. Germany, already with the largest economy and population before unification, has since become—once again—the dominant power of the continent, and as its franker spirits make no secret, hegemonic in the Community. Spain, long marginalized by poverty and dictatorship, has lived entry into the Community as status-promotion to European prosperity and respectability. These have reason for satisfaction with the eu. Italy less so: its economic slippage under the single currency, however, has not substantially altered what was always a supporting rather than leading role in the Community. France, on the other hand, which was once premier among the six founders—capable under De Gaulle of bending the other five to its will, French functionaries and language first in influence and use in the Commission, and down to the turn of the eighties still diplomatically senior partner with Germany—has seen a remorseless fall from former heights. In part this was an inevitable consequence of German reunification, which automatically gave the Federal Republic a still greater demographic and economic advantage. But in larger measure its sources were endogenous.

The indices of the country’s loss of standing, most of them well advertised in native debates, are legion. Many go back to the nineties, but have become starker since the crisis of 2008. Economically, growth has crawled, averaging less than 1 per cent a year; unemployment increased to 10 per cent—among youth 25 per cent;footnote¹ the budget not been in the black for over forty years; public debt risen to 96 per cent of gdp; per capita income scarcely moved. Diplomatically, Paris has more and more taken its cue in Europe from Berlin and in the world beyond from Washington, its elites barren of significant independence in either arena. Culturally, English has become the lingua franca of the Union, official and popular. Socially, no other large country in the Eurozone has seen such levels of social and racial unrest, or consistent expressions of popular dissatisfaction with the state of the nation. For years now, with the briefest intermissions, morosité has become a settled mood.

Politically, the Fifth Republic created by and for De Gaulle, with a unique concentration of executive power in the Presidency and a legislature rigged to exclude trouble-makers, functioned more or less smoothly for thirty years after his death, down to the end of Mitterrand’s time in the Élysée. By then the era of fast growth and rapid rise in living standards that had underpinned its original success was long over, and the effects of the global downturn since the mid-seventies were beginning to tell. Mitterrand’s sharp turn of 1983, abandoning public spending to prime the economy for austerity to stabilize the currency, talk of socialism for rhetoric of financial discipline, was widely greeted as putting the political system on a sounder basis. In neutering French communism as a helpless junior accomplice to the change, and discrediting the pernicious revolutionary strain in the country’s culture, he had laid the foundations of a stable Republic of the Centre: no longer dependent on the individual charisma of a national hero who was distrustful of parties, but now solidly anchored in a cross-party ideological consensus that capitalism was the only sensible way of organizing modern life. With the pcf at last eliminated as any serious presence from the scene, France could look forward to the kind of alternation between a Centre-Left and Centre-Right, differing on details but agreed on essentials, that was the certificate of a liberal democracy.

So, on the surface, it came to pass. At the Élysée, Mitterrand from the former was succeeded by Chirac and his faithless minister Sarkozy from the latter, followed by Hollande from the former: nineteen years of presidential rule by the Centre-Left, seventeen years by the Centre-Right. Until 2002, when the Presidency was abbreviated from seven to five years, making elections to the executive and legislature coincident, there was even alternation within alternation—‘cohabitation’—as one side captured the Premiership with a majority in the National Assembly while the other continued to hold the Presidency: Chirac and Balladur under Mitterrand, Jospin under Chirac. But below the surface, for deep-lying cultural reasons, the equilibrium was always less stable than it seemed. From the eighties onwards, as elsewhere in the West, the continuous imperative of the time was neoliberal radicalization of the operations of capitalism: deregulation, privatization, flexibilization. In France, this was an agenda calculated to provoke tensions within the electorates of both Centre-Right and Centre-Left.footnote²

Gaullism, of which the Centre-Right presented itself as the—albeit increasingly notional—heir, had never attempted to undo the local version of the post-war welfare state, if anything expanding it as fiscal revenues rose, and always secured at least a third of the working-class vote, while holding fast the traditional bastions of conservatism in rural and small-town society, topped up by the modern entrepreneurial and technocratic elites at the switches of French capitalism. Liberalism had never been much of a watchword in post-war France, where it was typically associated with unbridled laissez-faire. The arrival of neoliberalism—the prefix scarcely even necessary to raise hackles—predictably opened up a fault line in the Centre-Right bloc between its business, bureaucratic and professional components, over time increasingly eager to benefit from a striking off of outdated fetters on the pursuit of profit, and its provincial notables and petty-bourgeois clerks or artisans, not to speak of workers, who stood to suffer or be sidelined by them; similar tensions arising when in a subsequent phase divisive moral questions—should there be a market in reproductive rights, should marriage be gender-neutral?—were added to economic issues.

Inevitably, the advent of neoliberalism split the Centre-Left electorate too. There Mitterrand’s skills had left the Socialist Party in all but complete command of the situation, with a Communist remnant obliged to tag behind it by the two-round electoral system. The majority of Centre-Left voters came from the lower end of the income pyramid: workers, schoolteachers, poorly paid white-collar and public-sector employees, with superimposed above them better-off professionals, semi-managerial personnel and state administrators, flanked by the country’s large, well-endowed media-intellectual establishment, and in control of the ps machine. Hayekian doctrine had little to offer the former, but a growing attraction for the latter, increasingly persuaded that the basic drivers of a much needed modernization of society could only be the firm and market. The fissure in the Centre-Right was thus reproduced on the Centre-Left. On each side, the dominant layer of the bloc was committed to advancing the neoliberal turn Mitterrand had set in motion in the early eighties. But since both had to win elections to achieve power, neither could risk alienating essential voters by campaigning too openly for a neoliberal agenda, or provoking violent social reactions by pursuing it too radically in office. The result was the unsatisfactory record of half-measures deplored by every right-minded organ of liberal opinion—the Financial Times, the Economist, the Frankfurter Allgemeine—abroad. Public spending remained far too high; the welfare state was not cut down to decent size; business was not set properly free; budgets were not in surplus; unions were not broken; post office, prisons and too much else remained in the hands of the state. In their timidity, Centre-Right and Centre-Left shared responsibility for the failure of France to embrace modernity.

In point of fact, the symmetry was incomplete. There was a significant difference in the problems that neoliberalism posed to each coalition, and the ways each handled it.footnote³ For the Centre-Left, the component of its electoral base that stood to lose from any French version of the achievements of Thatcher or Blair was larger than the corresponding segment of support of the Centre-Right, and bound to lose more, as socially most vulnerable at their receiving end. To meet this difficulty, the ps required an altogether more affirmative ideological lamination of its course, capable at once of embellishing and distracting from its objectives. This was bequeathed it by Mitterrand: the inspiring ideal of Europe. It was in its service that the French were called upon to liberalize and modernize themselves. In private, Mitterrand—more candid than his successors—knew what that meant, as he confided to his familiar Jacques Attali at the outset: ‘I am divided between two ambitions: the construction of Europe and social justice. The European Monetary System is a condition of success in the first, and limits my freedom in the second.’footnote⁴ Once the eu was in place, every market-friendly initiative could be extolled or excused as required by solidarity with Brussels. Not infrequently, the Centre-Right too found this a convenient exutoire, but it could never resort to Europe as an all-purpose ideological trump without renouncing its claims to some memory of Gaullism, and did not need to. Neoliberal aims came more naturally to a larger part of its constituency, requiring less borrowed finery for them.