I saw a funny carton in The Telegraph this morning. One man says to another in a pub: “The worst thing about our government’s blunders is that we can’t properly enjoy all France’s problems.”
I laughed on cue because, though my list of things not to laugh at has widened with age, France hasn’t yet made it. However, any tears of laughter should really give way to those of sadness.
It’s not that gloating is wrong – when it’s about the French, it isn’t. It’s just that both “our government’s blunders” and “France’s problems” have the same aetiology: the chronic and fatal disease of modernity. And that, as Hilaire Belloc wrote, is no laughing matter:
“We are tickled by [the Barbarian’s] irreverence, his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creeds refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond; and on these faces there is no smile.”
Both France and Britain, along with all other major Western countries, pursue an unsustainable social and economic model, one demanded by their democracies. I shan’t repeat what I wrote on this subject yesterday, but let’s just say that neither country is, nor ever will be, governed wisely.
In both countries, central government amasses more and more power, while showing less and less ability to use it sensibly. As a result, both governments either try to seduce people into compliance with extravagant promises or else bribe them with handouts.
Any attempt to act on the promises or deliver the full scale of the handouts creates gaping holes in the budget and a constantly growing mountain of public debt (amply matched by the private debt amassed by a population incapable of restricting or deferring consumption). Both governments respond by printing or borrowing money, and also by beggaring people with confiscatory taxation.
Neither measure makes things any better, quite the opposite. When a disaster begins to loom, the governments have no option but to cut spending, but that runs into the stonewall of a thoroughly corrupted populace. The people don’t want their entitlements to stop or even become smaller. And they’ve been sold the canard of governing themselves.
Well then, those upstarts in the capital only have their jobs because the people voted them in. And the people didn’t cast their ballot to become poorer. They want the gravy train to run on time, even if it’s the only train ever to do so. We got you in, we can get you out, comes a collective roar, and it gets louder by the day.
A government, in fact the very system it fronts, has to be strong and stable to survive such turmoil, and that’s where the similarity between Britain and France ends. Or rather becomes less obvious.
The French like to say that their system is a monarchical republic whereas ours is a republican monarchy. This isn’t bad as far as one-liners go, but the implied suggestion of an almost complete convergence is an illusion.
While neither country boasts political competence, Britain enjoys political stability and France doesn’t. Britain has had more or less the same constitution since 1688 (and only a slightly different one in the several preceding centuries), but during the same time France has had 16 different constitutions, three monarchies, five republics, a Directory, a military dictatorship and two empires.
It’s debatable whether the French Revolution delivered on its promise of liberté, égalité, fraternité, but what’s beyond dispute is that it never delivered political stability. Not for longer than a decade or two at a time anyway.
France may be a monarchical republic but, more to the point, it’s also a revolutionary republic constituted on Enlightenment principles. The American republic has the same genealogy, but it was blessed with sage founders who devised a system of checks and balances keeping the system intact even when a particular government collapses.
Nevertheless, it took America a civil war, the bloodiest conflict in her history, to inject some sturdy fibre into her constitutional spine and to communicate to recalcitrant states in no uncertain terms that the central government was playing for keeps.
France has also had her share of civil wars, the latest one in the early 1960s, and any number of smaller social outbursts since then, but no stability emerged at the other end. The state structure has been deflecting at different amplitudes ever since 1789, and at several moments it has tottered badly.
Our monarchy may be republican (or, more appropriately, constitutional), but a monarchy it is, which makes a world of difference. Our king lacks executive power but not the power to make his kingdom united, both at present and over history. The monarch perpetuates organic legitimacy going back so far that, as both Burke and de Maistre wrote, we might as well assume it comes from God.
Such is the centre of our constitution, and it holds whatever turbulence erupts at the periphery. Cabinets come and go, so do ruling parties, so do oppositions, but the system stays upright, able to survive even such cosmically stupid and subversive governments as our present one.
Witness the collapse of Liz Truss’s government after barely six weeks in office. Miss Truss tried to perform the contortionist trick of cutting taxes without cutting public spending, which spooked the markets and drove her out. Less than two years later her party lost the election, and the present calamity on wheels rolled in.
However, we may huff and we may puff, yet no one is seriously suggesting that the whole system is on the verge of collapse. Come what may (up to a point, it has to be said), the monarchy will keep the constitution together – as it has done for centuries.
In France, such continuous survival isn’t a foregone conclusion – the country is paying the full cost of destroying political continuity in 1789. The collapse of Michel ‘Brexit’ Barnier’s government has rung up a new set of charges.
Like that other revolutionary republic, the USA, and unlike states that have evolved organically, the French state is a political contrivance designed by a sort of committee. Under such circumstances the sagacity of the committee members is paramount, and the Americans were luckier in that respect (of course, their founders did their work at a time when the world was still saner).
I wonder how De Gaulle and his people devised their Fifth Republic. Why don’t we make it a presidential republic, one suggestion must have gone. What, like les états unis? Well, sort of. Non, merci. We aren’t les américains you know.
Then how about a parliamentary republic, with the leader of the majority party becoming prime minister? You mean like les rosbifs? Well… at that point de Gaulle must have interfered. Where does it leave me? I want to be king. Or, at a pinch, president. With full powers, and never mind parliament.
Much hand-waving and shoulder-shrugging must have ensued, and as a result a compromise was reached. Let’s have both a parliamentary democracy and a presidential one, in the same state. The president is elected but he isn’t accountable to parliament, you are right about that, Charlot. But he then appoints a prime minister who is. There we go, everyone goes home happy.
That was like putting béchamel sauce on a roast gigot, to explain it in a customary French idiom. Each may be fine in its own right, but together they add up to dog’s dinner.
What if the president comes from one minority party, his prime minister from another, and neither has the majority? And the two largest parliamentary blocs cordially loathe both parties, and also each other? Oh well, that’s letting your imagination run wild. Such a thing will never happen.
Well, it has. Macron’s party was an ad hoc concoction slapped together to get him into power. Its popularity rating is well below what Louis XVI’s was, but no guillotine is on the cards. No resignation either: Manny may not be especially bright, but he knows what he wants, which is power at all costs.
The two blocs, led by Le Pen’s national socialists and Mélenchon’s Trotskyist socialists, suspended hostilities for long enough to drive Barnier’s government out and communicate to Macron that they’ll do the same to whomever he’ll appoint next.
At the same time, each is strong enough to prevent the victory of the other bloc. That stalemate leaves France without a government and on the brink of a popular uprising.
As a part-time French resident, I have a vested interest in something like that not happening. As a full-time British subject, I find it hard not to gloat.
But then I look at our own government and begin to regret its stability. No, scratch that. Stability is good. Governments are transient, but a real constitution is transcendent. Unless, of course, it’s concocted by a committee of near-sighted men.