‘The president’s idea’, the fictional French finance minister Bruno Juge announces halfway through Michel Houllebecq’s 2022 novel Anéantir, ‘would be to change the constitution… The idea would be to move to a real presidential regime, to get rid of the post of Prime Minister, reduce the number of MPs and hold mid-term elections like they do in the United States.’

Such a system, Juge, a thinly veiled cipher for the then finance minister Bruno Le Maire suggests to the narrator, is ‘a bit post-democracy’, and yet, he continues, ‘everyone’s doing that now, it’s the only way that democracy works, democracy is dead as a system, it’s too slow, too ponderous’.

Whether this is a vindication of Houellebecq’s widely proclaimed reputation as a Cassandra or merely the ordinary chameleonic behaviour of intellectuals in politics, it is obvious that the anxious speculations about the erosion of the French Republic that suffuse Anéantir exactly capture the mood of ‘late Macronism’ and the creeping breakdown of France’s present system of government. With the collapse of Michel Barnier’s government after just three months and the uncertain ascension of François Bayrou, it is now beyond question that the constitution of the Fifth Republic has reached its breaking point.

Yet that breaking point is not the result of the Constitution established by General de Gaulle in 1958 failing to operate as intended, but of the exact political behaviours that the constitution was designed to promote.

Since Charles de Gaulle came to power in 1958 – principally to resolve the civil war in Algeria – and remade the constitution of the French Republic in his own image, France has been governed by a complex ‘hybrid’ political system combining elements of British-style parliamentary and American-style presidential constitutionalism. This system, termed a ‘Semi-Presidential’ regime by the French political scientist Maurice Duverger, was designed, in effect, to break the cycle of weak governments. The Third French Republic cycled through 94 cabinets and 44 premiers between 1870 and 1940, only 18 of which lasted more than a year and none more than two.

Under the Fifth Republic, the presidency was elevated from a largely ceremonial office, whose holders were frequently hounded from office by the National Assembly, to an almost monarchical role in the state. Yet even the position of this monarchical presidency has always been contingent and ambiguous. Although the French constitution makes no mention of an ‘executive’, only of a president and a government, it formally grants the government the right to direct policy.

At the founding of the Fifth Republic, it was therefore widely assumed – and hoped – that the president would primarily use their majesty, dignity, and function as the first representative of the nation and act as a mediator, arbiter, and pouvoir neutre (neutral power) for the preservation of the regular functioning of the constitutional order.

This turned out, quite quickly, not to be the case. As de Gaulle himself joked: ‘Who ever believed that General de Gaulle, once called to the helm, would be content with opening displays of chrysanthemums?’ He quickly came to act as the central figure of the republic’s political life, based on his function as the sole representative of ‘the whole nation’ by dint of his unique and personal national mandate.

Only the direct exercise of total authority exercised as a matter of individual discretion, de Gaulle maintained, could suffice to untangle the various Gordian knots facing France amid the crises of the late 1950s and early 1960s. It was critical to the president’s ability to do so that they could both appoint the government and dissolve the legislature if it voted down the cabinet, making the president the lynchpin of the whole political order.

For Gaullists, in this careful balance, France had finally found the means ‘of constituting the republic wisely, even if the president were hereditary and wore a crown’ as the Marquis de Lafayette had suspected would be necessary as far back as 1799.

But constitutions written with one, indispensable, individual in mind rarely outlast that individual’s political lifetime; for every Washington who furnishes a constitution made in their image to posterity, we find a Napoleon, the constructs of whose will pass away with their political demise.

In the 1960s, there was much speculation that the Gaullist republic would take the latter route and that General de Gaulle’s constitution would not outlast his reign, unable to operate without the charismatic leader who had brought it into being at the helm.

The situation facing President Macron today, in which he cannot form a government of his choosing and instead attempts to rule through temporary, minority, and ‘emergency’ governments, might have seemed more or less inevitable. Such, after all, had been the fate of the strikingly similar constitution of the Weimar Republic, where the failure of President Hindenburg to work with parliaments largely opposed to his policies eventually brought about the demise of democracy.

Through prudent political management, the Gaullist constitution has persevered, mostly in spite of itself, through the development of an odd – purely conventional – constitutional dialectic in which the president oscillates between a de facto republican king when their supporters command a parliamentary majority and recedes into the background as an arbiter and figurehead – like the British monarch or Benjamin Constant’s pouvoir neutre – when they do not.

This oscillation, between the monarchical Gaullist presidency and the ‘cohabitation’ governments of Mitterrand and Chirac, has made the unusual constitution of the Fifth Republic workable. But that functionality has primarily been achieved through restrained statesmanship separate to the constitution itself, above all, the willingness of past presidents to appoint governments outside their party when they could not command a majority in the National Assembly.

But as the last few months have shown, there is no requirement that the president of the republic act prudently, and the entire mythology of the Gaullist republic centres on a certain conception, as the current holder of the office has put it, of the president as a ‘Jupiterian’ figure, rising above and ruling over the French nation, filling the ‘emotional and collective void’ left by the absence of a king. And if that is the president’s role, why should Jupiter descend from Olympus to compromise with mortals?

It is one thing to act like a king when one is a military hero, the saviour of the nation, and a symbol both at home and abroad of French honour, courage, and heroism. It is another entirely to act as such when transient personal charisma alone is the source of one’s authority. Yet Macron’s intransigence is not only allowed by the French constitution but encouraged by its foundational myths and incentive structures, which promote presidential non-cooperation with parliament, so long as the president is willing to ride out the storm of political crisis.

Although some French political commentators have proposed resolving the crisis, or at least preventing its future repetition, through a shift to a proportional system that would prevent the far right and radical left from forming a substantial bloc opposed to any government of the broad centre, it seems unclear whether such a system would exacerbate the problem. The Weimar experience shows that a legislature elected by proportional representation is even less likely to be able to support stable cabinets, exacerbating the slide into personalist presidential rule through exceptional and extra-constitutional means.

Increasing the regularity with which the president can dissolve the assembly would not solve the issue, and neither would de Gaulle’s probable response – a direct appeal to the people via referendum.

Such tinkering cannot resolve a crisis rooted in the system itself. Whether France adopts Houellebecq’s vision of an anti-political, monarchical presidency or disempowers the president, decisive action is required. Without it, institutional dysfunction and public disillusionment will deepen.

As de Gaulle’s successor, Georges Pompidou, wrote in his 1974 political testament The Gordian Knot, at times of crisis: ‘Someone will cut the Gordian Knot. The question is to know whether it will be by imposing a democratic discipline which guarantees liberty or if some strong and helmeted man will draw his sword like Alexander.’ In 2024, the presidency itself has become the obstacle to such a peaceful and legal resolution.