7. Unavoidable and Unsatisfactory

French Republic and president of the French Union, an alliance of francophone nations created by the Fourth Republic to replace the old colonial system. Formally, then, the Constitution of the Fifth Republic had a federalist dimension (some experts, Capitant among them, actually spoke of a “FrancoAfrican federation”). Election by universal suffrage would have posed the problem of determining the population of eligible voters. Would all Union nationals be qualified to cast ballots on the same basis? Or would it be necessary to devise different modes of election, one for Metropolitan France and another for the confederated territories? The case of wartorn Algeria presented still more perplexing difficulties.

But these were not the only reasons the issue was not broached in 1958. Even if de Gaulle was subsequently to say more than once that he had “long” believed that universal suffrage was the only possible method for electing a president,18 he could not help but recognize that both tactical and strategic considerations counseled caution. He was, of course, well aware that many of his adversaries feared him as a potential dictator, and therefore thought it prudent to take into account the “passionate prejudices” that for more than a century had held sway in France.19 “Furthermore,” he was to later emphasize in explaining his frame of mind in 1958, not without a certain hauteur, “I had intended to assume the duties of head of state myself at the outset, in the belief that, by reason of past history and present circumstances, the manner of my accession would be a mere formality having no consequence with regard to my role. On further consideration, however, I resolved to complete the edifice in this respect before the end of my sevenyear term.”20 There is a sense, too, in which the four referendums conducted between 1958 and 1962 amounted to a substitute for direct popular election, by effectively sanctioning the bond between the people and the Gaullist regime.21

By 1962, decolonization had mostly been accomplished and Algeria had won its independence. The technical obstacles having now been removed, de Gaulle was able to turn his full attention to the task of securing the future of the Republic he had founded. His successors, he felt sure, would not enjoy the advantage of what he grandly called his “personal equation.”22 The time had come at last to place the constitutional reform authorizing direct election of the president before the people. Reaction was swift. The left was adamantly opposed. The indignation of the Communist Party, which had already hinted at a coup d’état, was

redoubled with the announcement of the referendum, but in hopes of attracting broader support it was content to issue vague warnings against the dangers of “personal power”23 while at the same time presenting itself as the most resolute defender of classical parliamentarianism. The Socialists, for their part, revived the charges that Léon Blum brought against the General in June 1946 after the second Bayeux speech: “What General de Gaulle calls a true leader,” Blum had written then, “is a president of the Republic who, without being responsible to the Assembly, would yet possess real power of his own, a president of the Republic of whom the principal ministers and the president of the Council himself would be the representatives and the emanation. . . . Such a conception is not viable. . . . Not only does it create a personal power, its implementation would require that all public life be dominated by this personal power. What republican could consent to that?”24 And he went on to say:

All sovereignty necessarily emanating from the people, one would have to go back all the way to the source of sovereignty, which is to say restore election of the head of the executive branch by universal suffrage, as in the American Constitution, as in the French Constitution of 1848. There lies the logical conclusion of the system. . . . But in France, where the passage from presidential power to personal power is one of the tried and tested perils that threaten democracy, the granting of executive power to one man by universal suffrage is called a plebiscite.25

Non au plebiscite—thus the slogan urging a vote against de Gaulle’s plan that was to be painted on walls throughout the country in 1962.

Pierre MendèsFrance, though he had been highly critical of the Fourth Republic, threw all his energies into the fight and inveighed against the increase in authority, great enough to crush any opposition, of a “governing president” elected by universal suffrage. In a widely noticed book that came out in early October 1962,26 only weeks before the scheduled vote, MendèsFrance expressed alarm at the prospect of an “elective monarchy . . . [a] centralization of power in the hands of a man who deliberates alone, orders alone, decides alone.”27 Such a mode of election, he argued, “cannot provide any real political control; it risks depoliticizing the electorate, forces it to neglect its democratic duties, to become accustomed to alienating its sovereignty. . . . It also gives adventurers an unexpected opportunity.”28 For these and other charges he cited the authority of the General himself, in a passage of the Bayeux

speech two decades earlier on the subject of dictatorship.29 François Mitterrand showed still less restraint. In a polemic of exceptional vehemence that appeared a year and a half after the referendum, Mitterrand took oblique aim at the Stalinist overtones of the constitution of the Fifth Republic,30 railing repeatedly and at great length against “completely domesticated executive power,” “dictatorship,” “a monarch surrounded by his personal servants,” even “totalitarian propaganda.” In the eyes of a man who was himself preparing to go before the voters in the 1965 presidential election, de Gaulle was nothing less than an “enthusiast of absolute power”—living proof that there was still “a strong remnant of Bonapartism” in many parts of the land.31

Conservative opinion was no less harshly critical. Raymond Aron, though he had himself been an active member of the Rally of the French People (RPF) from 1948 to 1952, condemned a “despotic constitution” and the “invocation of a mysterious legitimacy superior to legality”;32 describing de Gaulle as a “monarch” given to a “typically Bonapartist style of acting,” he concluded that such a form of government could “in its essence [be] only provisional.”33 Those on the right who lamented the loss of French Algeria were for their part violently opposed to a mode of election that put the crowning touches on a despised regime. On both the left and the right, at least twothirds of the political class called for a vote against the referendum of 28 October 1962.34 In the event, 62 percent of the French people approved the proposed reform. A majority of the electorate, in other words, did not see the man who had issued the appeal of 18 June 1940 as an apprentice dictator.35

The referendum’s result was evidence, too, that most people welcomed this reform as a step forward, for they now enjoyed an important additional civil right. And because its opponents could not be troubled to say exactly what they considered democratic government to consist in, whether they were content to circulate nebulous insults (Mitterrand ridiculed a “trompel’oeil democracy”)36 or whether they did no more than recycle old and increasingly less persuasive arguments that founded parliamentary authority on an implicit hierarchy setting representatives above those whom they represent, the presidential system—whose great virtue, from the point of view of the people, was that it confided responsibility for electing the head of state to them—steadily gained acceptance in France. Minor political movements on the left that had been alone at first in defending this type of regime saw the major parties

start to quietly line up alongside them. Now that everyone could cast a ballot in a presidential election, and therefore had a reason to follow the campaign that led up to it (this at a moment when television was coming into living rooms throughout the country), universal direct suffrage rapidly acquired popular legitimacy. By the time a Socialist candidate was elected president, in 1981, the procedure had become a familiar feature of the political landscape. Today, a little more than fifty years after the referendum of 1962, all parties speak favorably of this facet of the Gaullist tradition, now universally considered to be a part of the republican heritage.

The Spread of Presidential Election

Long regarded with suspicion by a whole segment of opinion in his own country, and often looked upon abroad as an incongruous and unclassifiable figure, de Gaulle must be seen in retrospect as having inaugurated a new era in the history of democracy by giving what has been called (following Max Weber) “routine plebiscitary democracy” its first face.37 The presidential regime de Gaulle instituted in France did indeed appear in the early 1960s to be a special case, strongly marked by the personality of its founder and the troubled circumstances of his return to power. No one then would have imagined that the new French system might become a model for other countries, much less prefigure a worldwide transformation of democracy. For the time being it remained one of a kind even within Europe itself, owing in part to the persistence of constitutional monarchies on both sides of the Channel, as we saw earlier, but also to the memory, still fresh in many minds, of the disasters of the interwar period. All that was about to change, however, beginning with France’s former colonies in Africa.

The principle of election of the head of the executive by universal direct suffrage, absent at first from the majority of constitutions drafted on the French model in that continent, gradually spread in the wake of the reform approved in Metropolitan France in 1962: Madagascar imported the procedure the same year, Senegal and the Central African Republic the next. The transition to presidentialism was complicated by the fact that many countries on gaining their independence had adopted a singleparty system, with the result that popular election was able to

be dissociated from any form of pluralistic competition. Fifty years after emancipation from colonial domination, the situation in a part of the world where civil wars and coups d’état continue to be commonplace still remains unstable. Nevertheless, setting aside the case of the Moroccan monarchy, the presidentialization of regimes elsewhere in Africa redefined what was considered to be both normal and desirable in a democratic order. By the beginning of the twentyfirst century, its place had been widely and securely established.

In Asia and Latin America, disappointment of varying kinds with parliamentarianism in the aftermath of dictatorship produced a similar response. On these continents, as in Africa, election of a head of state by universal suffrage was adapted to a broad range of circumstances, from authentically democratic regimes to variants of Caesarism and charismaticpopulist styles of leadership. In all these cases, however, presidentialism came to be seen as the general form of good government. Latin America is perhaps the most striking example: in the early 1980s there were only three countries where the president was elected by popular vote in a competitive election (Colombia, Costa Rica, and Venezuela); thirty years later, with the notable exception of Cuba, the practice was universal. In Europe itself, the situation changed considerably during this period—not in the west, to be sure, the parliamentary model having remained dominant in the lands where it had been invented; but in the east, where the collapse of the Soviet Union unleashed a wave of presidentialization, both in former republics and in countries that had belonged to the Soviet bloc.38

Personalization Beyond Presidentialization

In 1974, Maurice Duverger, another leading French constitutional expert, published a work with the provocative title La monarchie républicaine.39 He argued that the power of governing in France belonged to a person invested with supreme legitimacy, by virtue of his selection by universal suffrage, who took or inspired all important decisions and who presided over the conduct of the nation’s policy. In short, a monarch—but a republican monarch because he had been elected in an open ballot, exercised a mandate limited to a fixed term of office, and was subject to some measure of parliamentary scrutiny. At a distance

of almost sixty years, Duverger spoke in terms similar to the ones Léon Blum used in 1917 to describe the type of efficient and structured government that in his view all democracies ought to aspire to. In the early 1970s, however, there was nothing novel about this way of looking at the matter; the Gaullist regime, after all, had been severely criticized for having assumed just such an aspect. But Duverger’s purpose was not to add his voice to a chorus of opposition. It was to suggest that, beyond their formal differences, all the major democracies were now evolving in the same direction. The heads of the executive branch of government at the time were not, of course, directly elected in West Germany, Canada, the United Kingdom, or Sweden. Nevertheless, Duverger maintained, it was owing to a “disguised election” that the prime ministers of these countries had come to power, legislative elections having become, at bottom, the equivalent of presidential elections. “When one considers the assemblies of these countries,” he wrote, “one describes their regimes as [examples of] majoritarian parliamentarianism; but, when one looks at their governments, one must speak of republican monarchy.”40 Several years earlier the Irish political scientist Brian Farrell had made the same observation in Chairman or Chief?: “In almost all political systems, executive dominance and the personification of this domination in a single leader is a central fact of political life.”41

Four decades after the publication of these two pathbreaking works, what might be called a sociopolitical tendency for executive power in democracies to become personalized has effectively been realized everywhere, above and beyond a constitutional tendency to presidentialization. But it must also be emphasized that these first attempts to analyze the convergence of the different manifestations of executive power, as distinct from the functional properties of particular regimes, went farther than earlier expressions of concern in the face of personalization,42 which often amounted to little more than nervousness about the uncertain effects of the increasing power of audiovisual media in enlarging the traditional scope of political leadership. The notion of personalization, it needs to be remembered, had never been mentioned before in connection with democracies. Historically, it was considered mainly to be a structural aspect of despotic regimes, superimposed on the fact of an individualization—that is, an undue privatization and illiberal concentration—of power. Applying the concept of personalization to

the study of democracy therefore represented a sharp break with the prior emphasis on impersonal authority.

The phenomenon of presidentializationpersonalization assumed a great variety of forms,43 as much on account of differing constitutional frameworks as because there are as many individual personalities as there are chiefs of state. If the figure of the great man came to be associated with it in the first instance (in this regard the persona of General de Gaulle functioned as both image and screen), over time persons holding a nation’s highest office came to seem more like the people who had elected them, and expectations regarding presidential stature were correspondingly lowered. Even in France one spoke of “Caesarism without genius” in describing the Fifth Republic after 1969.44 In this way there opened up a divide, which has not ceased to widen in the meantime, between the political form of presidentializationpersonalization and its social incarnation. The former has continued to expand, whereas the latter was bound to shrink with the advent of “normal” presidents. The gap between the two has also been sustained, as we will see, by the ever more pronounced distinction between the political qualities required to win election and those that make a good governor.

All these considerations suggest that the notion of a presidentialgoverning model must be set in a broader perspective. The model comprises three dimensions: functional, institutional, and constitutional. The first two are common to all modern regimes: personalization (functional dimension) and preeminence of the executive (institutional). In strictly constitutional terms, however, the differences between specific cases are much greater, since the institution of the presidency does not exist everywhere and, where it does, the forms it assumes vary both with regard to the powers of the office and the manner in which it is established. But if the constitutional aspect is understood more generally to include the notion of a head of the executive branch, and if the phenomenon of disguised elections is taken into account, then it becomes possible to detect a tendency to constitutional convergence as well, which in turn permits us to speak of a standard presidentialgoverning model.

B 7 b

Unavoidable and Unsatisfactory

The Democratic Motives of Presidentialization

Beyond the creation by the media of a personalized style of politics, which has been analyzed in great detail since the 1960s,1 the phenomenon of presidentializationpersonalization sprang from specifically democratic impulses of three kinds. First, presidentialization answers a social demand for accountability. On this view, democracy is primarily a regime in which the government is to be held responsible for its actions, election being only one of the methods available for doing this. Responsibility, because it implies judgment, places governors in a subordinate relation to the governed. It therefore can be meaningful only under a personalized form of government, for responsibility must be attributive in order to be exercised, which is to say assignable to an individual; an assembly, by contrast, cannot properly be said to be responsible. This is a point on which Jacques Necker, finance minister to Louis xVI and the first true theorist of modern executive power, had laid great emphasis. “How,” he asked in respect of the revolutionary assemblies, “could one fail to be frightened by the unlimited authority of a collective being, which, passing in the blink of an eye from a living to an abstract nature, has no need either for compassion or pity and for itself has no fear either of condemnation or censure?”2 Louis Fréron, editor of L’Orateur

du Peuple and a man of opposite political views, had arrived at much the same conclusion, calling upon his parliamentary colleagues in 1795 to loosen the grip of their “inviolable hands” and allow executive power to be confided instead to “responsible hands.”3 For Fréron, this sort of responsibility was necessarily associated with popular election. Objections to the assembly regime fell on deaf ears at the time, however, so strong was the hold of the principle of impersonality on people’s minds. Eventually the spell of dogma was broken and critics gained a hearing. Over the course of the following century the belief grew that the exercise of power had become a monopoly of traditional representativearistocratic governments, with no corresponding obligation of civic responsibility, since everything was played out behind the closed doors of partisan scheming and parliamentary dealmaking. Popular election of the head of the executive had the opposite effect of radicalizing and polarizing responsibility. This is what made it attractive to the masses, who yearned to be able to influence the course of immediate events. No more forceful proof of this ability could be given than the act of turning an incumbent out of office.

Presidentialization responds in the second place to a social desire, which the personalization of politics furnished with a visible object, that became more powerful as the revolutionary urge receded. No matter how it was expressed, the idea of revolution sought to embed dreams of changing the world in a larger vision of historical development. In its fully elaborated Marxist version, which was long to dominate the thinking of much of the left, history could be seen to have brought forth a demand that lay at the heart of democratic modernity, arising from the will that each person be an actor by taking part in movements devoted to assisting and accelerating the course of history itself. With the waning of revolutionary fervor, hope gave way to a sense of loss and dislocation, which in turn caused the deepseated longings of the people to be projected onto the figure of the person elected to the highest office in the land.

Third, and finally, the presidentializationpersonalization of democracy corresponds to a demand for greater transparency—what I call legibility—of institutions and decision making. In an age marked by the growing complexity of government and by the increasing anonymity of large bureaucracies, it gratifies a desire for simplification. The head of the executive branch, whose face is seen everywhere and whose

words are heard by all, stands in the sharpest contrast imaginable to the ambient opacity of the politicoadministrative system. It is above all for this reason that a presidential system appears to ordinary citizens to hold out the prospect of reclaiming politics for themselves.

These three democratic impulses, acting in combination, have given presidentialization an irreversible momentum. At the same time they are apt to be regarded with suspicion, since each one can be turned back against itself. Responsibility is now more readily assigned, while simultaneously assuming the form of a blank check. The more directly the will of the people is brought to bear, the greater the risk that it will be permanently degraded into a form of spectacle, with the result that the confusion of words with action becomes intensified still further. What is imagined to be superior institutional transparency turns out to be only a mirage, a delusory effect of modern communications technology. It is plain to see, then, that the presidentialization of democracy is at once deeply unsatisfactory and altogether unavoidable. But we cannot be content to leave matters at that. We need to look more closely at what makes this state of affairs so fraught with difficulty. The first step will be to distinguish between the method used to select and legitimate a chief executive, which is election, and the very nature of presidentialism itself, which consists in the supremacy of the executive over the legislative branch.

Legitimation by Election

The classical theories of legitimacy were theories of the authorization of power, of how command over others is made acceptable to them. It was on just this understanding that Max Weber constructed his famous typology distinguishing legal, traditional, and charismatic forms of legitimate rule.4 Guglielmo Ferrero approached the subject from the same perspective, in a work that likewise came to fruition amid the turmoil of a global conflict. “The principles of legitimacy,” Ferrero held, “are justifications of power, which is to say of the right to rule. Of all human inequalities, none has greater need of reasoned justification than the inequality established by power.”5 Whereas power comes from above, legitimacy in modern societies, he argued, always comes from below, for it requires in one way or another “the consent—active or passive, but