Michel Euler/AP Photo
French President Emmanuel Macron delivers a speech during the National Roundtable on Diplomacy at the foreign ministry in Paris, March 16, 2023.
Louis XIV has been dead for more than 300 years, but apparently his watchword—L’état c’est moi—guides France’s current leader, President Emmanuel Macron.
For months, Macron’s main domestic priority has been to persuade the National Assembly to raise the country’s retirement age from 62 to 64. As every poll has shown 2 out of 3 Frenchmen and women to be emphatically opposed to that change, Macron faced an uphill battle to persuade members of his own party and the other center-right party in the Assembly to vote for the bill. That vote was scheduled for today, but when the whip counts showed it would fail, Macron’s prime minister, Elisabeth Borne, announced that it would be enacted nonetheless, under the republic’s constitutional clause 49.3, which permits the government to enact legislation even if the legislative branch doesn’t go along.
As the invaluable Art Goldhammer pointed out to me earlier today, invocations of 49.3 aren’t totally foreign to French lawmaking. Indeed, this marked the 89th time it has been invoked since the advent of the Fifth Republic in 1958.
When it’s been in power, Goldhammer told me, “the left has used it frequently. However,” he added, “it’s usually been done on budgetary questions, not on anything as fundamental as this—which came as quite a shock to the system.”
It should even come as a shock to the system beyond France’s borders. France, after all, has at least as much cred as our United States when it comes to pioneering the idea and practice of democracy. At a time when the West has been concerned about autocratic creep in such NATO-aligned nations as Hungary, and American Democrats and Jews have been alarmed by the Netanyahu government’s proposed dismantling of Israel’s democracy, the very idea that France could be compelled to see a major rewriting of its social contract by presidential fiat should come as a shock to Western democrats more generally. Macron doesn’t make claims for illiberal democracy in the manner of Hungary’s Orban, much less those for autocracy from China’s Xi, but he now personifies the latent autocracy that characterizes much of the capitalism of the past 50 years, which has used globalization and deregulation to place financial “imperatives” beyond the purview of popular control.
For their parts, both Xi and Putin have erected autocracies so complete that they can get their parliaments to ratify their every whim. The French system doesn’t give a president that power—parliaments are elected freely and independently of the president—but it does allow that president to override the parliament when he so chooses. Since 1958, French presidents have generally been discreet about doing that, but today marked a reversion to the days of the Louises.
Or at least, to Louis XIV. Does it also portend a reversion to Louis XVI (the one who was beheaded in the Revolution)?
Goldhammer doesn’t think so. The parliamentary wing of Macron’s government will face a vote of confidence in the next several days, but losing that vote would require a number of defections from other center-right parties. Instead, Goldhammer thinks that Macron might himself dismiss his prime minister and her Cabinet before then, thereby squashing any parliamentary move to bring them down, a move that would also automatically undo the change to the retirement age. The king and his social-contract rewrite would thereby remain intact (Macron isn’t term-limited out until 2027), but there would be new faces, and the same politics, among his courtiers at his neo-Versailles.
Goldhammer is pessimistic that the parties of the left, which remain badly divided both internally and from one another, can realize any political gains from what should be the golden opportunity that Macron’s shock to the system affords them. He thinks it more likely that Le Pen’s right-wing nationalist party, which, like the left, opposed the change to the retirement age, may benefit. Macron’s campaign to change the law, however, has produced a different kind of left unity: unity on the streets. France’s long fissiparous union movement, which has been divided ideologically for more than a century, has come together in recent months to coordinate strikes and massive demonstrations, which are sure to swell in view of today’s law-by-fiat. Goldhammer notes that a 1995 attempt to raise the retirement age passed the legislature, but in the face of ensuing demonstrations that all but shut down the economy, the government never promulgated the new law.
It’s not at all clear what level of social disruption would compel Macron to back off what is the linchpin of his domestic agenda. What is clear, Goldhammer said, is that “France is now in for four years of a completely crippled president.”
