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France may have elected Francois Hollande, but she really needs a Napoleon Bonaparte
It looks like Socialist Francois Hollande has won the French presidency. His platform: raise taxes on business to fund a lower retirement age and more spending. Things dont look good for poor old France. Either Hollande will stick to his promises and ruin the economy or hell u-turn and reveal himself to be a reckless opportunist. Whether he's a fool or a knave, this election cycle has exposed just how broken the French political system is. The kind of economic reforms that are necessary to put the country back to work simply cant be enacted under the present arrangement. France needs to change. She needs another Napoleon.Ever since the French Revolution of 1789, the French have struggled to keep a constitution going beyond two or three generations (theres a reason why la grande dame is on her fifth republic). The cause is the imbalance between government rooted in law and the free expression of mass democracy. On the one hand, the French revolutionaries wanted to create a government that limited powers and liberated the economy (one of the first things they did was abolish serfdom and end regulation of the grain market). On the other hand, to give the new government legitimacy they acknowledged the political authority of the Parisian mob. What was the point of democracy if children starved? The policies passed by elected delegates had to be rubber-stamped by the sans-culottes. The result was that within a few years of the revolution, the constitution (by far the most admirably liberal in the world) was suspended and terror was the order of the day. Food prices were set by the government and paper money was printed to keep the mob happy. A consensus was reached that veered between moments of chaos and stultifying bureaucratic corruption. Eventually the rotten system was brought to an end by Napoleon, on 9 November 1799. Napoleon kept what was best about the republic and established an empire in its place. This is the pattern of French history: revolution, chaos, consensus, breakdown and a coup led by a strong man who embodies the nation. Charles de Gaulle did it twice: first as the leader of the Free French in the 1940s and second in 1958, when he formed the current Fifth Republic. Posted by: tipper 2012-05-06 |
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