I AM in Paris at the invitation of the French Foreign Ministry as a participant of the Programme d’invitation des personnalites d’avenir to immerse myself in French institutions and culture; a far cry from previous trips here that focused on ‘faire du shopping’.
Studying the French Revolution back in school, I knew that the development of the French state was quite different from the British experience, but I now appreciate it with much greater clarity. It has been a very traumatic journey since 1789, and to put that date into context, consider that it was only two years prior to that that the Constitution of the United States of America was adopted, a document that has survived with amendments – or consider that Raja Melewar arrived as Yang di-Pertuan Besar in 1773 to complement institutions derived from ancient history and still functioning today.
So, briefly: four years after the 1789 revolution began, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were executed, replaced by the First Republic that comprised the authoritarian Terror in which over 16,000 people were guillotined. Napoleon rose to power as First Consul in 1799 after a coup and subsequent referendum, then establishing the First Empire (1804-1815) dominated by the Napoleonic Wars and the dissemination of the Napoleonic Code. Napoleon’s military defeat in 1814 saw him being exiled on the island of Elba, but he escaped and re-established power. After these ‘Hundred Days’ he was again defeated (at Waterloo), and exiled in Saint Helena, dying there in 1821. Attempts to have his toddler son recognised as Napoleon II failed.
Thus the Bourbon Restoration in 1815 saw Louis XVI’s brother Louis XVIII becoming constitutional monarch of the French Kingdom (XVII was XVI’s son who never officially became king) until his death in 1824, but the next king, his younger brother Charles X, was too authoritarian and was deposed in the July Revolution of 1830 in favour of a distant cousin, the liberal Louis Philippe I. This chap had Napoleon’s remains returned to France, but he was forced to abdicate after an economic crisis 1847, amidst the wave of revolutions across Europe in 1848.
The next arrangement was the Second Republic, which lasted only three years because its elected President, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte (the earlier Napoleon’s nephew), succeeded in becoming Emperor of the Second French Empire, reigning as Napoleon III until captured in battle in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. This paved the way for the Third Republic – but not before France nearly became a monarchy again, because the election of 1871 saw monarchists gain a majority in the National Assembly. However, Comte de Chambord who was offered the throne (a compromise between supporters of the heirs of Charles X and Louis Philippe I) was not willing to be a mere constitutional monarch.
Instead, the French Constitutional Laws of 1875 were promulgated, and the republic saw the expansion of French colonialism and the explicit separation of church and state in 1905, establishing the principle of French secularism (laicite). Surviving the First World War, the Third Republic fell at the beginning of the Second World War, replaced by Vichy France, today detested as a regime that collaborated with the Nazis. After the war the Fourth Republic was formed, but this only lasted 12 years as domestic instability caused by the Algerian War of Independence paved the way for General Charles de Gaulle (who had led the Free French Forces against the Vichy Regime) to come to power as President of the Fifth Republic, which remains to this day.
Finally, it seems that the French have a system that enables change without the need for revolution (and it helps that war does not dominate the landscape). For instance, major decentralisation reforms occurred in 1982, and today there is a debate about whether to abolish one layer of government.
Still, the historical experience utterly defines the state’s approach to so many things. The explicit embrace of multiculturalism I saw in Australia is not only completely absent here, but it is actively discouraged: the state is not allowed to label anyone as a member of a ‘community’, or even collect data on ethnicity. The French conception of equal citizenship seeks to ignore expressions of extraneous affiliations, whether religious or ethnic, rather than celebrate them. (But still there are exceptions from quirks of history, such as in the overseas department of Mayotte where a blend of Islamic and traditional law has long been practised and funded by secularist mainland France.)
There is so much more to say, but for now, this nation is hoping that Jo-Wilfried Tsonga will deliver a tennis revolution: in the Fifth Republic only one Frenchman has won at Roland Garros.
Tunku Abidin Muhriz is president of Ideas.