There are those who give off just a little whiff of derision at the behavior of the French in the national plebiscite last Sunday. Gallic lordliness on all matters great and small isn't really sustained by the historical record. They began it 200 years ago with a bloody revolution followed by the dictatorship of Napoleon, the surrender to Bismarck, the bloodletting of the First World War, and the diplomatic and military ineptitude that brought on Nazi occupation.
The republic was pretty down and out when President de Gaulle jacked up its glory with the Fifth Republic. And a centerpiece of it, a seven-year term for the president of France, has now been revised at the polls. What smarted was not the rejection of the seven-year term in favor of five years, but the utter indifference of the French voting public to a civic exercise.
The reform was backed by the two principal political organs, President Chirac's Gaullist party and Prime Minister Jospin's Socialist party. These antipodean political entities had engaged in cohabitation (the French word for it) for three years. President Chirac had committed one of those great political blunders, absolutely counting on one result, and begetting a different one. (Milosevic has just finished doing the same thing: calling an election in full confidence that he would win it, and then losing. President Marcos of the Philippines did it, too, calling for national affirmation, and getting thrown out of town.) Rather than ratify the call of Chirac in 1997 that the voters reaffirm him and his policies, the socialists swept in and have been sharing the bed all this time.
At least what we can do about such anomalies in government -- the thinking went -- is reduce the elongated presidential term, which was created in the image of Charles de Gaulle, who was unique. A French legislative election can take place whenever the two houses vote for it or when the president decrees. The result of this is that even with a set five-year term, there is no guarantee that, in the future, government will be any less incestuous than it is today. But the French would have better protection against such afflictions as 14 endless years of President Mitterrand, marked by scandal and corruption, and an hauteur that only de Gaulle could realistically get away with.