FRENCH POLITICS
683
portant as they often seem to outsiders. Given the existence of a parlia–
mentary rather than a presidential system-and it so happens that the
two are not compatible, whatever some Gaullists may assert to the con–
trary-the controlling position allotted to the National Assembly is a
necessity. The reason has been stated, in what one would have thought
was a thoroughly convincing fashion, by an American historian, Henry
Bertram Hill, in an important paper delivered at a conference held at
Princeton in February of 1950 (Cf.
Modern France,
Princeton Uni–
versity Press, 1951) : given the power-and the very high competence–
of the French bureaucracy, especially in its upper ranks, a democratic–
ally elected and nominally all-powerful assembly is the only possible
guarantee of liberty, of compromise between social classes, and there–
with of political (as distinct from ministerial) stability. The fact that
this stabilizing function entails frequent minor shifts among personalities
and sub-groups is of secondary importance. In fact, as every detailed
investigation shows, France has since the war suffered no greater in–
stability than some of its neighbors. The key posts have for years been
in the hands of the same small group of men, and
if
the general trend
has led away from the high hopes of the Resistance period there is no
proof that this tendency has had anything to do with the institutional
framework under which the French prefer to live. Conversely, an event
such as the sudden dramatic formation of the "Mendes-France coalition"
last June, with its incalculable effect on the public mind, could not
conceivably have occurred under any other system.
What then are the causes of the current political and social weak–
ness?
If
one abstracts from the underlying discrepancy between the
country's economic potential and its international obligations (which is
rather like abstracting from the formation of a body and concentrating
on its skin), one is immediately struck by the odd contrast between
the technical excellence of so much that has been done in postwar
France and the ricketiness of the financial props. The same railways
whose heavy annual deficit was largely responsible for the recent political
convulsion are, by every technical standard, among the best in Europe,
having been extensively modernized (at vast expense) since the war;
much the same might be said of the huge and costly power dams and
electrical works built since 1947; of the nationalized coal mines, and
other State-subsidized enterprises. In the privately owned sector, ultra–
modern steel mills-in advance of anything in the Ruhr-testify to the
same combination of energy and perfectionism. Nor are these isolated
instances of success in reaching the ambitious goals of the 1946 Monnet
Plan, which has been unflinchingly carried through by a succession of
