Determinism takes many forms. Marxism is the determinism of class, Nazism the determinism of race. But the idea of men and women as the slaves of history runs athwart the deepest human instincts. Rigid determinism abolishes the idea of human freedom — the assumption of free choice that underlies every move we make, every word we speak, every thought we think. It abolishes the idea of human responsibility, since it is manifestly unfair to reward or punish people for actions that are by definition beyond their control. No one can live consistently by any deterministic creed. The Marxist states prove this themselves by their extreme susceptibility to the cult of leadership.


“The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong,” wrote John Maynard Keynes, “are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. The power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas.”

But, as Woodrow Wilson once said, “Those only are leaders of men, in the general eye, who lead in action. It is at their hands that new thought gets its translation into the crude language of deeds.” Leaders in thought often invent in solitude and obscurity, leaving to later generations the tasks of imitation. Leaders in action have to be effective in their own time.


By command or by consent? Through most of history, leadership was exercised by the divine right of authority. The duty of followers was to defer and to obey. “Theirs not to reason why/Theirs but to do and die.”


It is easy to issue commands and enforce them by the rope and the stake, the concentration camp and the gulag. It is much harder to use argument and achievement to overcome opposition and win consent. The Founding Fathers of the US understood the difficulty. They believed that history had given them the opportunity to decide whether men are indeed capable of basing government on “reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend on accident and force.”


No leader is infallible, and every leader needs to be reminded of this at regular intervals. Irreverence irritates leaders but is their salvation. Unquestioning submission corrupts leaders and demeans followers. Making a cult of leader is always a mistake. Fortunately hero worship generates its own antidote. “Every hero becomes a bore at last.”

The single benefit the great leaders confer is to embolden the rest of us to live according to our own best selves, to be active, insistent, and resolute in affirming our own sense of things. For great leaders attest to the reality of human freedom against the supposed inevitabilities of history. And they attest to the wisdom and power that may lie within the most unlikely of us. A great leader exhibits new possibilities to all humanity. “We feed on genius. Great men exist that there may be greater men.”

Great leaders, in short, justify themselves by emancipating and empowering their followers. So humanity struggles to master its destiny, remembering with Alexis de Tocqueville: “It is true that around every man a fatal circle is traced beyond which he cannot pass; but within the wide verge of that circle he is powerful and free; as it is with man, so with communities.”


What made the November riots so politically embarrassing to Chirac was that he had entered power 7 years earlier promising to heal the “social rift” that divided France along fault lines of class, religion, and ethnicity.


Whether or not he could be held personally to blame for all their troubles, the French had evidently lost faith in their leader. In a poll that December only 1% of voters wanted Chirac to stand for a 3rd term of office in April 2007.


Nothing in de Gaulle’s early years suggested that he would one day achieve greatness.


Petain, believing that all hope was lost, began negotiating surrender terms with the Germans. De Gaulle refused to accept this humiliating capitulation and flew to England, determined to continue the fight somehow. In his first radio broad cast to his countrymen, he admitted that the Germans had won a temporary success, but he insisted that the war was not over. “Has the last word been said? Must hope disappear? Is defeat final? No!”


France’s crushing defeat in 1940 left psychological scars that continue to influence the country’s politics and society to this day. At the time, the French considered themselves Europe’s dominant power and one of the major colonial empires in the world. They controlled huge territories in North Africa, West Africa, and Southeast Asia. The thunderclap of invasion and conquest after just 6 weeks of fighting shook France’s self-confidence to the core, and its people are still struggling with the consequences of that failure even now, more than 60 years later. Some would argue that ever since 1940, France has been seeking to overturn this disaster, and to prove to itself as well as to other countries that it remains a great nation. It is for this reason that de Gaulle’s almost lone defiance that grim summer would eventually become so important in recreating France’s self-respect.


It was necessary for the general to foster the myth that the majority of French citizens had been patriotic resisters of the Germans throughout the war, but, in fact, most people had adopted a passive, wait-and-see attitude toward their conquerors — and some had openly welcomed Petain’s Vichy regime as an opportunity to settle old scores.


Miscalculating the public mood, he resigned his post in January 1946, believing that his popularity among the masses was so great that the would demand his immediate return to office under conditions of his own choosing. But after 6 years of war, the French were weary of drama, and de Gaulle’s departure was met with little objection. Stung by his people’s apparent ingratitude, the general retired to his country home to write his war memoirs.


The country’s 2 most important colonial territories were Indochina and Algeria; both of which had been occupied by the Japanese and Germans respectively during the war. It was difficult for the imperial “liberators” to reassert their authority after such a humiliating defeat.


Despite his willingness to accept Algeria’s independence, de Gaulle remained passionately committed to the idea of France as one of the world’s great powers, and he pursued what was called the “Politics of Grandeur,” a bid to secure his country’s place among the leading nations of the globe. Under de Gaulle’s direction, France acquired the atomic bomb, making it the world’s 4th nuclear-armed state, and in 1965, it joined the space race when it launch a satellite into orbit. Critics charged that the vast budgets given to these programs would have been better spent within the economy at home; supporters, however, argued that, given France’s turbulent and often shameful experience during the previous 25 years, it was vital to restore the country’s dignity by grand (though expensive) gestures. De Gaulle certainly took the dignity of his own office of state very seriously, often behaving more like a 17th-century monarch than a 20th-century politician. He established the tradition of being a kind of elected king that has persisted throughout the Fifth Republic of the president.


After 3 years, however, he attracted the notice of de Gaulle’s PM, Georges Pompidou, and was recruited to serve as the head of the premier’s personal staff. Chirac’s dynamic energy and often ruthless determination to get the job done no matter the obstacles won him the nickname the Bulldozer.


It is also worth considering why France has needed 5 attempts to create a workable democratic settlement.


In a reaction to the dangers of Bonapartism, the role of president was made very weak and power rested with the legislature, known as the National Assembly. This might have been successful had France enjoyed a small number of well-disciplined political parties, but instead the Assembly was divided between feuding coalitions of many tiny splinter groups. Governments rose and fell rapidly, sometimes only lasting a handful of days before being forced to resign due to loss of support. This drained the country of strong and effective leadership and often left it floundering without any clear direction in times of crisis.


France has always been highly centralized, with weak regional politics. In the UK, the Westminster Parliament holds the key to power, but the British have a tradition of well-organized political parties that only switch places occasionally, maintaining consistency in government. France’s parties were (and still are) made up of relatively loose and fragile coalitions.

What de Gaulle proposed was a compromise: a semi-presidential system in which the day-to-day running of France was split between a president and a prime minister. This remains the basis of the Fifth Republic’s government today. The intention was to combine the best aspects of both offices while avoiding their pitfalls.


The president chooses his PM from among the deputies in the National Assembly. However, while he can pick whomever he wishes, the Assembly has the power to force the PM to resign simply by passing a motion of censure. That means that in practice the president must choose someone who commands the favor of the majority of deputies. If his own coalition is in control, the decision is fairly straightforward. If it is not, then he faces the unpalatable decisions of having to choose one of his political opponents, perhaps even someone who ran against him in the presidential race. This is called cohabitation. It has been one of the unexpected product of the Fifth Republic’s constitution, for de Gaulle never imagined that the public might vote in a National Assembly of a different political complexion from the current holder of the presidency.


French planners argued that dirigisme was a far more rational approach than the laissez-faire free-market system that had preceded it before WW2. It appealed to the logical mindset of the graduates of the grand establishments, many of whom found jobs in the growing state bureaucracy. It was sometimes claimed that through dirigisme France had found a “third way” of compromise between the extreme capitalism of the US and the communism of the USSR, a sensible middle ground in which freedom to spend and accrue wealth was balanced with social responsibility.


France tried to adjust to this energy crisis by switching to nuclear power production — the country today generate about four-fifths of its electricity this way, the highest percentage in the world — but slower overall growth inevitably meant more difficult times for business. Unemployment began to rise, and it has remained a problem ever since. The extensive benefits promised to the jobless in happier days now became a serious burden to the French treasury.


Under French law, employers were heavily restricted from firing or laying of their employees. Disgruntled former workers could take their grievances to a tribunal, at which the employer faced the burden of proving that his decision was lawful rather (as in most countries) than the claimant having to prove that he or she had been unfairly dismissed. Given such legal headaches French business owners were very wary of hiring new workers, and so there was little incentive for job creation. Moreover, companies were required to provide their employees with a profuse array of benefits, ranging from a high minimum wage and a fat pension to a maximum workweek of 40 Horus and generous sick and vacation time. From an employer’s point of view, this raised personnel costs so high that many thousands of potential jobs were priced out of the market. This created a nation of haves and have-nots — a pampered majority with jobs who clung to their excessive legal protections and privileges regardless of the wider cost to society, versus an excluded minority who paid the rice in perpetual unemployment. By selfishly feathering their own nests, French workers were living in a dreamworld that would have their country incapable of competing in an increasing globalized marketplace.


Most French workers are not union members, but there is strong union representation of railroad and transportation employees, school and university teachers, and civil servants — groups which can, if they choose, cause major disruption to the country’s economic life.


On many occasions during the last 200 years, the French people have felt obligated to march “to the barricades” in opposition to the sitting government. It is a principle of protest that the French feel is particularly theirs, and it haunts the nation’s historical consciousness in a way that is unknown in, say, the US.


By appearing to manipulate his constitutional powers in order to gain a short-term advantage against his rivals, Chirac had come across as “unpresidential,” a major sin for a Gaullist, who was after all supposed to be somewhat aloof from party politics.


Although supporters of the status quo applaud their defense of workers’ rights, critics grumble that the country continues to prefer a sugarcoated fantasy to the starker realities of the world economy, an evasion of unpleasant facts that they will one day have to face. Either way, Chirac himself admitted in 1995 that “you can’t change France without the French,” and the French have proven unwilling or unable to change very much.


For many decades, however, it had experienced a stagnant birthrate, and after the mass casualties of two world wars it was feared that the country could simply not produce a large enough population to fulfill all its future manpower needs. One response to this was a series of “natalist” laws encouraging French parents to have as many children as possible through subsidies, tax incentives, and generous childcare provision.


It was originally hoped that, with the passage of time, their children would gradually assimilate into mainstream French society, erasing economic and social differences, but that has largely not happened. They remain segregated, poor, and alienated, with unemployment reaching as high as 40% in places.


There are similarities between laicite and the separation of church and state found in the US, but the French government has traditionally had a much stricter and more aggressive definition of that separation than that in America. It has been said that whereas the US government chooses to stand apart from religion, the French state actively opposes it. This is because of the rivalry that traditionally existed between the Catholic Church and the Republic, 2 powerful institutions that have often come to blows during their history.


One cannot trust people whose cuisine is so bad. The only thing they have ever done for European agriculture is mad cow disease.


He has taken so many positions on the EU, both for and against, the he has been nicknamed Chameleon Bonaparte. His critics claim that he switches from being pro-European to anti-European and then back again purely on the basis of what seems politically expedient at the time.


The EU began life with the much humbler name of the European Coal and Steel Community, founded in 1951 by France, Italy, West Germany, and the 3 Benelux countries: Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. It was intended to be a pooling of the member states’ industrial raw materials so that none of them could ever go to war with any of the others again. By the end of the decade, the ECSC had proved so successful that it was decided to take the idea a stage further and create a “common market” of goods, services, and labor within Western Europe, providing the continent’s states with a free-trade zone in which they could compete on equal terms. The European Economic Community (EEC) was signed into law in 1957.


Outside of Europe, de Gaulle provided generous sums of foreign aid to developing countries in Africa and the Middle East in order to develop strong friendly relations with them. The French arms industry particularly benefited from these growing connections; France developed a huge weapons export business, and it remains today the 3rd-largest international supplier of armaments after the US and Russia.


The 2 leaders negotiated a lucrative oil deal and also laid the foundations for Iraq’s purchase of a French designed nuclear reactor, which was constructed in 1977 just outside Baghdad. Many believed that this was the first step in Saddam’s plan to acquire nuclear weaponry, and in 1981, the Israeli government launched a surprise air strike at the facility, destroying it. France initially considered a request to help rebuild the plant, but, in 1984, facing international pressure, declined to do so.


Either way, Chirac has failed to make the impression upon French life that he had hoped. He has been around for as long as anyone can remember, but the young wolf of de Gaulle’s and Pompidou’s days have been found, in what was supposed to be the peak of his career, to be curiously toothless. He has been a competent enough steward of the Fifth Republic, but it is hard to imagine posterity looking back on the Chirac years with any real nostalgia. Days of Gaullist grandeur they were not.