6. From Gaullist Exception to Standard Model

the fact of ruling is taken to be primary, with the recognition of his authority by those subject to it subsequently validating, which is to say legitimizing, their state of domination. But if such recognition were to be granted beforehand (by casting a vote, for example), then it could be considered a source of legitimacy rather than the consequence of it. In that case it would be possible to speak of a properly democratic form of legitimacy. Whence Weber’s definition: “In its authentic form, plebiscitary democracy—the principal type of Führerdemokratie—is a kind of charismatic rule whose legitimacy derives from the will of those who are ruled. The leader (demagogue) rules by virtue of the devotion and trust his political followers place in him personally.”23 By way of example he cited ancient dictators as well as Cromwell, Robespierre, and the two Napoleons. The modern instances seemed to him no more than expedients, however, mixing old and new elements in response to particular circumstances. What was needed for present purposes was a revised conception of plebiscitary democracy that would serve as a model for stable government in an age of mass democracy.

Weber set out to do just this in a series of newspaper articles first published in 1917 and collected the following year under the title Parlement und Regierung im neugeordneten Deutschland.24 To follow his reasoning one must keep in mind what, as a sociologist, he took to be the point of departure for all political reflection at that time. Three structural factors in particular needed to be taken into account. First, bureaucratization and the selfguiding tendencies of administration to which it gave rise, both of which were signs of efficiency and sclerosis. Second, the central role played by political parties, together with the growing influence of local machines and professional politicians (on this point Weber adopted the arguments of James Bryce, Robert Michels, and Moisei Ostrogorski, to whom he often referred). Third, the danger in an age of mass democracy that the “emotional element” would prevail in political deliberation. Accordingly, Weber thought it necessary to do the following things: channel the energies of public administration and direct its course, since otherwise it would be inclined to obey its own internal dynamic; find a good use for parties, now an inescapable fact of political life (he had, in any case, already acknowledged their value in helping to restrain the wilder expressions of popular feeling); and, finally, considering that universal suffrage was now no less irreversibly

established than parties themselves, show respect for popular sovereignty while at the same time holding it in check.

Electing the Reich’s chief executive by universal suffrage seemed to him a way of achieving all three objectives at once. He therefore urged that the new Weimar Republic be founded on two complementary principles: constitutionalparliamentary legitimacy, on the one hand, and what he called the revolutionary legitimacy of a president elected directly by the people, on the other. Revolutionary legitimacy represented a position of both subservience and empowerment: while it ceded to the parties the right to determine which candidates were qualified to hold the highest office, it also granted the right of choosing among them to the masses, who in this way affirmed their sovereignty. A new age of democracy was at hand, displacing the previous partydominated system. “Active democratization of the masses,” Weber wrote, “means that the political leader is no longer declared a candidate because a circle of notables has recognized his proven ability, and then becomes leader because he comes to the fore in parliament, but rather because he uses the means of mass demagogy to gain the confidence of the masses and their belief in his person, and thereby gains power. Essentially this means that the selection of the leader has shifted in the direction of Caesarism. Indeed, every democracy has this tendency. After all, the specifically Caesarist instrument is the plebiscite.”25

In this regard Weber was not interested in whether one form of democracy could be said to be more “advanced” than another. He had always been a highly skeptical democrat; the idea of an active general will, for example, made no sense to him.26 As a sociological realist he was accustomed to regard power as something that was bound to be exercised by an oligarchy.27 One might say that he took a purely instrumental view of democracy, not at all a philosophical one. Rather paradoxically, as it may seem, he used the plebiscitary model to work out a minimalist conception of democracy28 (clearly Schumpeter was influenced by it, even if he does not cite Weber, in holding, for example, that “acceptance of leadership is the true function of the electorate’s vote”).29 Nevertheless it was a conception of democracy that took into consideration the link, which seemed to him apparent everywhere, between the democratization of the masses and the personalization of politics.30 In this sense one might say that he intended to make only limited use of Caesarism.

It is important to remember that Weber did not fear that a modern plebiscitary democracy might deteriorate into charismatic dictatorship (though he recognized there was no reason in principle why such a thing could not happen). For him the present danger was quite different, namely, that the mounting influence of party machines would interfere with popular support for strong leadership by inducing an “increasing bureaucratic rigidification of voluntary political action.”31 At the same time, however, he counted on the major parties to keep the masses in line, even in the event that new plebiscitary procedures were to be authorized.

Weber died in 1920. Probably he would have been surprised to discover that one of his most attentive readers a few years later would be Carl Schmitt, but of course Weber did not live long enough to see how problematic the hybrid character of the 1919 constitution would turn out to be. Schmitt, for his part, took from Weber only the idea that democraticplebiscitary legitimacy superseded the authority of both political parties and acts of parliament, and used it to redefine democracy in a radically illiberal fashion while at the same time stripping it of the constitutional safeguards that Weber had devised for the purpose of forcing the president to continually “live up to his charismatic leadership endowments.”32

Weber’s view of the tendency to Caesarism was inseparable from his understanding of political power as essentially executive in nature. To his mind, the executive had the dual characteristic of being a directly active power (it consists in making decisions) that is exercised by individuals. “This inevitable circumstance,” he wrote, “means that mass democracy, ever since Pericles, has always had to pay for its positive successes with major concessions to the Caesarist principle of leadership selection.”33 Legislative power, by contrast, he saw as collective and for the most part essentially negative.34 A realist in matters of political theory, as we have seen, Weber utterly rejected the legalistic assumptions of the liberal democratic regimes of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He also recognized that political will was perceived, no longer as a body of statutes expressing a “general” will, but as a set of specific, immediately apprehensible decisions. This is why popular antiparliamentarianism declared its opposition to the sort of “will to powerlessness”35 it detected in the activity of parliaments and parties, united in their indifference to the daily needs and expectations of ordinary citizens.36 The

Caesarist perspective was part and parcel of a new age of agency and the will, as these things were now understood by the masses, the unmistakable mark of a fundamental rift between the governed and their governors that had somehow to be repaired democratically. All of this was, in any case, very far removed from the old revolutionary utopia in which the people themselves legislated directly.

Laboratory of Disaster

How did it come to pass in the space of a few years that the Weimar Republic, which sought to lay the foundations of plebiscitary democracy, should have given way to Nazi dictatorship? The total concentration of power in the executive, and the cult of personality that accompanied it sprang from a radicalizing impulse whose motivations have been endlessly debated. Everyone will agree that it was crucially connected with the disrepute into which the Reichstag had fallen. Yet this antiparliamentarian sentiment was not very different from what one encountered everywhere else in Europe at this time. Not only was it of a piece with the popular mistrust that was already widespread in imperial Germany, the atmosphere then was less acrimonious than what one found in France, for example, in the late nineteenth century. There was no equivalent in Germany of the Panama affair or the influencepeddling scandal several years earlier involving decorations for prominent persons.37 The image of representatives profiting from the system was also less vivid there than in France, where the vote of an allowance of 15,000 francs for deputies had provoked a public outcry and jibes about potbellied parliamentarians (les ventrus) feeding at the public trough. Members of the Reichstag, by contrast, received no compensation before 1914. Scandals did, of course, break out at the beginning of the republican period (one thinks especially of the famous Barmat affair in 1924),38 but there was no peculiarly German predisposition to antiparliamentarianism.

There were other reasons for the upsurge in antiparliamentarian feeling from the mid1920s onward as well, beginning with what may be called functional causes. Many members of the Reichstag also held a local seat in a state parliament (Landtag), and their strong provincial loyalties often led them to attach greater priority to their work in the Länder than in Berlin. Parliamentary life in Germany had none of the

sparkle and excitement it enjoyed in France and Great Britain. Party discipline was strict, and it was the party leaders who decided on voting and strategy, not the elected representatives. Nor was there any of the brilliant oratorical jousting and interpellation that elsewhere attracted the public’s attention and gave parliaments their political prominence. In short, there was nothing that in any way resembled a parlement de l’eloquence in the French or English style.39 The Reichstag’s sessions amounted to little more than a succession of long, boring speeches read out from the floor of the chamber. Few people paid any notice.

There were also purely partisan reasons for the disfavor with which the parliament was now regarded. They were linked in the first place to the rapid loss of support for the Republic’s founding political parties, due not only to dissatisfaction with the government on the part of a section of the electorate but also to the lukewarm endorsement of new regime by those whom Friedrich Meinecke called rational republicans (Vernunftrepublikaner). At the same time, beginning in the mid1920s, several parties with significant parliamentary representation were less and less willing to conceal their scorn for the Reichstag. One of these was the German National People’s Party (DNVP in its German acronym). In 1928 its leader likened the Reichstag to a mire into which the German people were being dragged down and smothered, and called for the overthrow of the Republic and democratic institutions.40 The Communist Party (KPD), which had come into existence at the same time as the regime, bitterly denounced the parliament as a laughingstock and advocated a revolutionary strategy of disruption. As for the Nazis (NSDAP), their growing power was accompanied by an increasingly hostile display of utter contempt for the Reichstag. Even before their electoral breakthrough in September 1930, they constantly railed against the institution. Adolf Hitler had spoken of it in Mein Kampf as a “vacillating majority of individuals,” attacking the deputies as “moral shirkers” and “narrowminded dilettantes” who constituted “a demimonde of intellectuals of the worst sort.”41 Joseph Goebbels, later to be put in charge of the NSDAP campaign in the federal elections of 1930, had noted during his first successful attempt to win a seat in the Reichstag two years earlier that its sessions put one in mind of a “school of rabid Jews,” and went on to say: “Parliamentarianism has long been ready to fall. We are going to sound its death knell. I have already had

enough of this comedy. They will not have occasion to see me there very often, in their High Assembly.”42

Finally, constitutional reasons for the demotion of the Reichstag counted for a great deal in the collapse of the Weimar Republic. The hybrid character of the 1919 Constitution, a combination of presidential and parliamentary systems, suggested to some that it might contain its own alternative. Article 48, which permitted the president to issue emergency decrees, seemed to offer a way out from the difficulties created by the absence of a majority and the corresponding paralysis of the chancellor. The effect of this perception was to put all “ ‘consciousness of parliamentary responsibility’ to sleep.”43 Gradually at first, then more quickly, the conviction grew that presidential power could be freed from legislative constraint altogether, further aggravating the decadence of the parliamentary order—and this all the more as neither the president nor the chancellor had commanded a majority since 1920. Even outside the procedures authorized by Article 48, beginning in 1919 the Reichstag passed a series of framework laws (“skeleton bills”) that granted the government the right to act directly by means of decrees in certain areas. The president, for his part, relied on the authority of Article 48 to issue a series of emergency decrees (from October 1919 until January 1925, Friedrich Ebert issued no fewer than 136 decrees of this type). Carl Schmitt’s authoritarian vision, expounded first in Die Diktatur and then, two years later, in Die geistesgeschichtliche Lage des heutigen Parlamentarismus [1923], was well suited to a set of circumstances that Weimar had created almost from the beginning.

The critical moment in the transition from presidentialism to dictatorship, which nonetheless had been only very vaguely foreshadowed in the early years of Weimar, was suddenly hastened in March 1930 with the appointment of Heinrich Brüning as chancellor. Lacking a clear majority, Brüning now sought to govern as independently of the Reichstag as possible. Parliament thus found itself effectively supplanted by an executivelegislative power that was bound to rely even more heavily on Article 48 than before.44 Ultimately it was owing to the tolerance of a slender majority, made possible by the Social Democratic Party’s refusal to join forces with the two extremist parties, the KPD and the NSDAP, in an effort to bring him down, that Brüning was able to bring into existence an “explicitly antiparliamentary presidential government.”45 If its

authority could be sustained, it would amount to nothing less than a change of regime. The turning point came finally in July of that year, as President Hindenburg began to rule almost exclusively by emergency decree. From 1930 to 1932, a time when the Reichstag had already shortened its sessions and did still less than before, he issued 116 such decrees. The steady dissolution of parliamentary responsibility only worsened a chronic imbalance. Under Franz von Papen, appointed chancellor in June 1932, this course of events gathered additional momentum, with the result that the new form of government came to be irreversibly established. The general sense of quasipermanent crisis was further encouraged by the economic turmoil of the period (deflation, massive unemployment, bank failures), which the Nazis were able to successfully exploit at the polls in March 1933. The longing for bold executive action at a moment of paralyzing confusion, the sense of humiliation that the crushing weight of reparations imposed by the victors of 1918 had made only more painful to bear, the promise at last of enduring national unity (“Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer”)—all these things allowed a transient disequilibrium of presidential power to be converted into a permanent dictatorship, with the acclamation of a Führer now replacing customary mechanisms of legitimate succession.

The reason for the catastrophe, according to Friedrich Meinecke, was that “the German people were simply not ready for parliamentary democracy.”46 It is very difficult to say whether a people is ever ready for democracy, if by that one means that all voters behave as rational actors concerned with the common good. But it is plain that the divisions of German society, as they were expressed in the party system, played a decisive role. The thing that needs to be emphasized above all is that democracy during the Weimar period was primarily conceived of as an authorizing procedure, a granting of permission to govern, and not as a constant process of adjusting the balance of powers between government and society, in the manner of what I have called a permanent democracy. German history has shown us, tragically, what is likely to happen when democracy is turned back against itself.

B 6 b

From Gaullist Exception to Standard Model

Postwar Hesitations

By 1919, in the aftermath of the First World War, the executive had been strengthened everywhere in Europe by force of necessity. With the exception of Germany, however, this development was not the result of adopting a new constitution. In the French case one might speak of technical adjustments under an existing constitution, such as the granting of new powers to the President of the Council and the increasingly frequent resort to framework laws.

After 1945, the horrors of Nazism and fascism provoked a visceral reaction against anything even remotely resembling a personalization of power in Germany and Italy, both of which reverted to a partybased regime and traditional parliamentarianism. The chronic instability this produced in Italy aroused much misgiving and complaint, though it was masked to some extent by the strong economic growth of the postwar period. It should also be noted that in the Italian case, as under the Third Republic in France, the rapid succession of cabinets that accompanied constant shifts of party alliance occurred against a background of considerable continuity within the governing political class. Governments came and went, but the holders of ministerial portfolios often remained the same.

And yet the return to parliamentarianism of these years was not without its critics. In France, for example, the various movements of the Resistance were united in emphatically denouncing the crisis of authority from which they believed the country had suffered under the Third Republic and calling for the executive to be strengthened and principles of sound government to be acted upon.1 Above all this meant modernizing the apparatus of the state, as we have already remarked. Yet the technocratic augmentation of executive authority, at a time when the classic style of parliamentarianism was once more in vogue, raised a great many questions to which there was no ready reply. The striking change of position on the part of someone like Léon Blum testifies to a peculiarly French quandary in thinking about democracy.

We saw earlier that at the close of the First World War Blum had advocated a thorough reconstruction of executive power, this with a view to creating what he came close to calling a republican monarchy. After the Tours Congress in December 1920, having inherited leadership of the Socialist movement in France, he had to choose his words more carefully. Presenting the constitutional program of the French Section of the Workers’ International seven years later, he nonetheless said much the same thing, only now even more firmly: “We do not confuse parliamentarianism with political democracy.”2 On this point his opinion never changed. In an essay written in his prison cell at Bourrassol, in 1941, Blum insisted that “democracy and parliamentarianism are not at all equivalent and interchangeable terms”; indeed, “parliamentarianism is not essentially democracy.” From this he drew the conclusion that “the parliamentary or representative regime does not constitute the form of democratic government exactly adapted to French society, and so it is necessary to search for forms that better suit it.” He went on to praise the Swiss and American models, recommended that an important place be given to the device of referendum, and argued in favor of equipping the executive with “an independent and continuous authority.”3 He was troubled, too, by one inadequacy of French parliamentarianism in particular, that the absence of highly structured and disciplined parties had led to an increase in disruptive personal rivalries. All these reservations were to be swept away soon after the Liberation. In early 1946, in response to de Gaulle’s warning against the danger of a return to parliamentarianism and a partybased system, he categorically disagreed: “In France, for the time being, there is no viable and stable democracy outside a parliamentary regime, and there can be no viable

and stable parliamentary regime outside an organized party system.”4 Blum’s striking reversal reflected the state of mind of many people during this period.

The drafting of the constitution of the Fourth Republic left no doubt that at least a rough consensus had been reached on this point, the essential features of which are worth recalling. The first version (adopted on 19 April 1946 by the National Constituent Assembly) was wholly parliamentarian in spirit, providing for the election by a simple majority of the president of the Council of Ministers by the National Assembly itself. The procedure’s staunchest defenders, the Communists and the Socialists, were able to turn aside the strong objections brought against it by René Capitant, an eminent constitutionalist.5 While the office of president was retained, its occupant was clearly meant to serve only with the express consent of the people’s representatives, since approval by a twothirds majority of the Chamber of Deputies alone was needed (once again without having to consult its companion body, the Council of the Republic). Significantly, the minutes of the meetings of the Constitutional Committee record no speaker proposing election by universal suffrage. The president’s prerogatives were dramatically reduced as well. Only after debate was it accepted that he should preside over the Council of Ministers, the High Council of National Defense, and the High Council for the Judiciary, while nonetheless being denied the right of reprieve. All these arrangements, by means of which a pure assembly regime was established, were regarded as the ultimate expression of democratic progress, particularly on the left. The apprehensions of the Popular Republican Movement (MRP) were widely enough shared, however, that a referendum on the draft constitution, held on 5 May 1946, resulted in its rejection by 53 percent of the votes cast. Work therefore began on a new version with the aim of moderating the most extreme features of the original proposal. Now the president was to be elected by both chambers. And although the old practice was revived of entrusting the appointment of a President of the Council to parliament as a whole, the prime minister still found himself deprived of the right to dissolve parliament.6 Narrowly approved in a second referendum on 13 October 1946, the Constitution of the Fourth Republic looked to the past for inspiration, not to the future.7 The institutions it put in place were not very different from the ones then found in most other European countries. As in Italy, the fragmentation of the party system made it impossible to create clear and durable parliamentary majorities.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the Western democracies by and large formed a system of assembly regimes. The Weimar experiment with presidentialism was now a remote interlude, and the name “Weimar” itself had become a shorthand for democracy’s most abysmal failure. The great exception to this system, of course, was the United States. In Europe only two countries, Ireland and Finland, elected the head of the executive branch by universal suffrage.8 In Ireland, the procedure was bound up with the winning of independence from the British crown in 1917; more than anything else, it symbolized the fact that the people were now citizens of their own country. In Finland, following the proclamation of independence from Russia in 1917, the Constitution of 1919 provided for popular election, but with the final outcome being settled indirectly through the ballot of an Americanstyle electoral college. The eccentric customs of two small countries could hardly be supposed to supply the basis for a general model, however, and therefore they were the object of no larger debate.

The American Exception

The American presidential system, in spite of its earlier prestige, did not seem to Europeans after the Second World War to constitute a universalizable model either. Nor was the indirect method it stipulated for electing the president thought to represent a step in the direction of democratic perfectibility. It was regarded instead as a sort of aberration, the product of particular circumstances and, above all, the result of a negative choice. When the Constitution was ratified, in 1787, the idea of direct election by all the citizens had been explicitly rejected, as had the further suggestion of congressional appointment. Agreement on selecting a president by the vote of a small body of electors from the individual states—an electoral college, as it was called—emerged as an alternative to these two failed proposals. In the event the practical difficulties of holding a general election (bringing a great many people to Washington was no easy thing in those days) and a rather aristocratic view of suffrage9 combined to ensure the adoption of this arrangement. It was therefore something very different from popular election, and all the more so because the state legislatures were free to designate their electors by a method of their own choosing. In some states the legisla

tures themselves named these electors. Others preferred a form of direct election, dividing their territory into districts equal in number to the electors apportioned to the state on the basis of its representation in Congress. Under this system candidates in each district soon came to be identified with their support for a “ticket” bearing the names of party nominees for president and vice president. By 1832 this more democratic procedure had prevailed almost everywhere.10

The people themselves only very gradually began to take part in the choice of candidates for the nation’s highest office. At first it was exclusively the prerogative of local selfappointed caucuses, and then, beginning in 1824, the business of party conventions. With the appearance of a primary system in the early twentieth century the conduct of presidential elections underwent considerable modification; since then the electoral college vote has almost invariably produced results equivalent to those of direct popular election.11 In the eyes of a European observer of the midtwentieth century, however, this style of election could not serve as a guide for making executive power more democratic. In America, the embodiment of a republican executive branch by a single person was a consequence of the circumstances of the country’s founding in the aftermath of a war of independence, its initially small population, and the federal structure of its government. In historical perspective, then, it stood out as a system that grew up in a specific time and place. Even the innovation suddenly made possible by the widespread availability of television in 1960, when the KennedyNixon debates were broadcast to an audience of millions, was thought to have more to do with a distinctively American taste for spectacle than an emergent form of personalized democracy.12

Instead it was the advent of the Gaullist regime in France that was to mark the pivotal moment when presidentialism, in the form of election of the head of the executive branch by universal suffrage, finally came to be accepted as the hallmark of democratic government.

The Gaullist Moment

The Fifth Republic, by giving its founding father greater and greater autonomy while at the same time insulating his office against the corrupting influence of Caesarism, inaugurated an age in which the presidentialization of democracy was to be commonplace. There was, first of

all, a structural element: the vigorous assertion of the powers and prerogatives of the executive. This lay at the heart of the Gaullist undertaking. As Capitant, an advisor to the regime on constitutional matters in 1958 and later a Gaullist member of the National Assembly, put it, “I believe that a strong state is suited to democracy in the twentieth century, rather than the weak and divided state to which the liberals aspire.”13 This view had a positive aspect, which consisted in affirming the preeminence of that directly active power which was believed to be necessary in a modern and constantly changing society. But the Gaullist determination to exalt the executive, in the dual sense of the independent exercise of this power and the display of preeminence that it implied, was also associated with a demeaning opinion of the legislature, in the first place because of its reflexive obedience to sectarian impulses. A parliament, in de Gaulle’s famous phrase, “convenes a delegation of special interests.”14 The natural function of the executive, by contrast, on account of its unified structure, is to represent the general will and unity of the country. This entailed two things: first, attributing to the office of chief of state a capacity for embodying the nation; second, giving it a type of legitimacy that raised it above partisan rivalry. In 1946 de Gaulle had called for the chief of state to be chosen by an electorate much larger than the French parliament. It will be recalled, too, that he severely criticized the American system on just this ground, that the electoral process in the United States was largely subservient to party organizations15 (while at the same time lacking a sufficiently solemn character, in part because of the journalistic fascination with the boisterous side of political competition). But he had not seriously contemplated the idea of election by universal suffrage. It needs to be kept in mind that none of the many constitutional schemes drawn up by the various Resistance movements had envisaged such a procedure. The specter of Caesarism was once again widely dreaded, and authorities on nineteenthcentury history could be counted on to remind one and all that the experiment of 1848 had not ended happily.16

Twelve years later, in 1958, the situation was essentially unchanged.17 It was not until 1962 that direct popular election of the president was approved by referendum. How are we to explain the delay in instituting a procedure that now seems in retrospect virtually synonymous with the Gaullist view of democracy? There were, first of all, technical obstacles. In 1958 the chief of state was simultaneously president of the