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Republican, Radical and Radical-Socialist Party

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Parti Radical
Image:Logo parti radical.png
Leader Jean-Louis Borloo and André Rossinot (co-presidents)
Founded 1901
Headquarters 1, place de Valois 75001 Paris
Political Ideology Radicalism, Liberalism, Social liberalism, Secularism
European Affiliation none
International Affiliation none
Colours Blue, Red
The 2007 Presidential Election Candidate
Website www.partiradical.net
See also Constitution of France

France Politics
French Parliament
French Government
French President
Political parties
Elections

The Republican, Radical and Radical-Socialist Party (Parti Républicain, Radical et Radical-Socialiste), more commonly called Radical Party, is a French liberal party.

It was a major political force of the early to mid 20th century, part of the radical Republican tradition. The Radical-Socialist Party represented one of the mainstream parties of the Third Republic, especially in the 1920s and the 1930s, as well as during the Fourth Republic (1946-58). The name became rather famously a misnomer, as by the 1920s the Radicals, then led by Edouard Herriot were generally a moderate center-left party, and continued to move to the right over the course of the second half of the 20th Century.

Replaced by the SFIO as the main party of the left, the Radicals continue to exist as a minor liberal party under the umbrella of center-right Union for French Democracy (UDF), then of the conservative Union for a Popular Movement (UMP), while the more left-wing members of the party split off in the 1970s to form the Left Radical Party (Parti radical de gauche or PRG), which exists to this day as a small ally of the Socialist Party (PS).

Even today, Radical senators of both the left and right wing often sit in the same group, the "Democratic, Social and European Rally". They thus represent both center-left and center-right and their anti-clericalism, although softened because of the lesser importance of the subject, still separates them from the conservatives on specific and exceptional issues (such as the conservatives' demonstrations in the 1980s against president François Mitterrand's bill on private schools, which are mostly Roman Catholic). However, despite the UDF's refusal to join the UMP founded in 2002, the center-right Radicals decided against their UDF allies and were thus absorbed into the UMP, which is led today by Nicolas Sarkozy.

Contents

[edit] 1901 foundation and gathering of the radical republicans

Radicalism was already a well-established movement in France before the Radical Party itself was established in 1901 in wake of the Dreyfus Affair. The government of René Waldeck-Rousseau, which was dominated by Radicals (although Waldeck-Rousseau himself was not a Radical) had been responsible for major reforms since 1899 and the creation of the Radical Party was an attempt to regroup all the radical republicans into a unified political force to support his government against the political influences of the Roman Catholic Church and the right. It was successful, and Waldeck-Rousseau's successors, Émile Combes and Maurice Rouvier, maintained a radical agenda, culminating in the 1905 laws on secularity which formed the backbone of laïcité, France's separation of church and state.

For the latter part of the Third Republic (1870-1940), the Radicals, generally representing anti-clerical peasant and petit bourgeois voters, were usually the largest party in parliament, but with their anti-clerical agenda accomplished, the party lacked any real guiding force. Its leader before World War I (1914-18), Joseph Caillaux, was generally more noted for his advocacy of better relations with Germany than for his reformist agenda.

[edit] After World War I: from the Cartels des gauches to the overthrow of the Republic

By the end of the First World War the Radicals, now led by Édouard Herriot, were generally a moderate center-left party. In 1924 and again in 1932, the Radicals formed electoral alliances with the Socialists, but then gradually drifted right over the life of the parliament, moving from Radical governments supported by the non-participating Socialists (called "Cartels des gauches" or "Coalitions of the Left" - 1924-1926, 1932-1934) to coalitions with more conservative parties (1926-1928, 1934-1936). The second Cartel des gauches fell on 7 February 1934, following riots organized by the far-right leagues of the night before. Radical Camille Chautemps's government had been replaced by a government led by his popular party rival Édouard Daladier in January, after accusations of corruption against Chautemps' government in the wake of the Stavisky Affair and other similar scandals.

This pattern of initial alliance with a socialist party unwilling to join in active government, followed by disillusionment and alliance with the right seemed to be broken in 1936, when the Popular Front electoral alliance with the Socialists and the Communists led to the accession of Socialist leader Léon Blum as Prime Minister in a coalition government in which the Radical leaders Camille Chautemps and Édouard Daladier (representing respectively the left and right of the Radical Party) took important roles.

Over the tempestuous life of the coalition, however, the Radicals began to become concerned at the perceived extremism of their coalition partners. Hence, they opposed themselves to Blum's intention to help the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), forcing him to adopt a non-interventionist policy. Following the failure of Blum's second government in April 1938, Daladier formed a new government in coalition with conservative parties.

After the 29 September 1938 Munich Agreement, which handed over the Sudetenland to Germany in exchange for what proved to be a temporary peace, Daladier was acclaimed at his return to Paris as the man who had avoided the war. However, with the invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939, the French government led by Daladier, making goods its guarantees to Poland, declared war alongside Britain two days later. Following the 23 August 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between Germany and the Soviet Union, Daladier engaged in an anti-communist policy, prohibiting the French Communist Party (PCF) and the Party's newspaper, L'Humanité.

Furthermore, Daladier moved increasingly to the right, notably repealing the 40 hour work week which had been the Popular Front's most visible accomplishment. Daladier would eventually resign on March 1940, and take part in Paul Reynaud's (Alliance démocratique, center-right) government as minister of National Defense and of War. After the defeat of the Battle of France, the French army being overwhelmed by the Nazi Blitzkrieg, the French government declared Paris an "open city" on 10 June and flew to Bordeaux. The same month, Daladier would escape to Morocco in the Massilia. Thus, he wasn't there during the suspicious 10 July 1940 vote of the full powers, which Charles de Gaulle and several historians (Michel Winock, etc.) refused to recognize, arguing that although it had superficially respected legality, it had taken place amid lies from Pierre Laval, pressions on deputies, and the absence of main political figures such as Daladier.

[edit] The Fourth Republic (1940-1958)

After World War II (1939-45), the Radicals, like many of the other political parties, were discredited by their support for granting emergency powers to Marshal Pétain on 10 July 1940, which led to the instauration of the Vichy regime (Etat Français), this despite the ambivalence of such senior radical leaders as Edouard Herriot, the President of the Chamber of Deputies.

Edouard Daladier was judged in 1942 by the Vichy regime during the Riom Trial, which accused him of being morally and strategically responsible of the defeat of France, among others political leaders such as socialist (SFIO) Léon Blum and conservative Paul Reynaud.

After the war, the Party was reconstituted, and formed one of the important parties of the Fourth Republic (1946-58), but never recovered their dominant pre-war position. With the Democratic and Socialist Union of the Resistance, it formed an electoral entity, the Rally of the Republican Lefts.

In the early years of the Fourth Republic the party returned to the moderate left under the leadership of Pierre Mendès-France (PMF), a strong opponent of French colonialism whose premiership from 1954 to 1955 saw France's withdrawal from Indochina and working out an agreement for French withdrawal from Tunisia. Mendès-France, a very popular figure who helped renew the Radical-Socialist Party after its discredit, had been elected on a program of stopping the Indochina War (1946-54).

Mendès-France hoped to make the Radicals the party of the mainstream left in France, taking advantage of the difficulties of the SFIO socialist party. The more conservative elements in the party, led by Edgar Faure, resisted these policies, leading to the fall of Mendès-France's government in 1955. Another split, this time over France's policy at the beginning of the Algerian War (1954-62), where Mendès-France opposed the hard-line policies of Socialist prime minister Guy Mollet, led to his resignation as party leader, and the party's move in a distinctly conservative direction.

The Fourth Republic was characterized by constant parliamentary instability because of the divisions of the different political parties on the issues of the Algerian War, which until the 1990s was officially called a "public order operation". Leader of the left-wing of the radical party Pierre Mendès France opposed the war and colonialism, while the right-wing of the SFIO led by Guy Mollet supported it. Because of the beginning of the Cold War, all political parties, even the SFIO, opposed the French Communist Party (PCF), which was very popular due to its role during the Resistance (it was known as the parti des 75 000 fusillés, or "party of the 75 000 executed people"). The PCF was also opposed to "French Algeria" and supported its independence.

In the midst of this parliamentary instability and divisions of the political class, Charles de Gaulle took advantage of the May 13, 1958 crisis to return to power. On 13 May European colonists seized the governor general's building in Alger, while Opération Résurrection was launched by the right-wing insurrectionary Comité de Salut Public. De Gaulle, who had deserted the political arena during a decade by disgust over the parliamentary system and its chronic unstability (the système des partis which he severely criticized), appeared on this day as the only man able to reconciliate the far-right and the European colons, which were threatening Paris of a coup d'état, with the Republic. He was thus called to power and proclaimed the end of the Fourth Republic, according to him too weak because of its parliamentarism, and replaced it by the Fifth Republic, a hybrid presidential-parliamentary system tailored for himself.

The Radicals party supported him at this crucial moment, which led Pierre Mendès-France to quit the party, while François Mitterrand would later write the Coup d'Etat permanent ("The Permanent Coup d'Etat") to describe this quasi-putsch <ref> Concerning the 13 May 1958 crisis, see Michel Winock, L'agonie de la IVe République - 13 mai 1958 (Gallimard, 2006) ISBN 2-07-077597-6 </ref>. Opposed to the constitution project presented by de Gaulle, Mendès-France campaigned for the "no" at the 28 September 1958 referendum. However, the new Constitution was finally adopted and proclaimed on 4 October 1958.

[edit] The Fifth Republic (1958)

Popular figure Pierre Mendès-France (or PMF as he was familiarly called) thus quit the Radical-Socialist Party, which had crossed the threshold to the center-right, as had the early moderate Republicans at the beginning of the Third Republic, when the Radical-Socialist Party appearing to their left pushed them over the border between the left-wing and the right-wing, a process dubbed "sinistrisme".

Mendès-France then founded the Centre d'Action Démocratique (CAD), which would later join the Autonomous Socialist Party (PSA, which had split from the SFIO), which in turn would fuse into the Unified Socialist Party (PSU) on 3 April 1960. This new socialist party thus gathered all the dissidents from the Radical-Socialist Party and the SFIO whom were opposed both to the Algerian War and to the proclamation of the new presidential regime. Mendès-France would become officially member of the PSU in 1961, a year before the 18 March 1962 Evian Accords which put an end to the Algerian War.

The Radical-Socialist Party supported the 1958 come back of Charles de Gaulle, then returned in opposition in 1959. It declined in the 1960s. Allied with the SFIO in the Federation of the Democratic and Socialist Left, it supported François Mitterrand at the 1965 presidential election. This federation split in 1968.

Under the leadership of Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, the party again made tentative moves to the left in the 1970s, but stopped short of an alliance with Socialist François Mitterrand and his Communist allies, leading to a final split in 1972, when the remaining left-wing Radicals left the party, becoming eventually the Movement of the Radical-Socialist Left

The remainder of the party continued in a conservative direction. After the failure of the alliance with the Christians Democrats into the Reforming Movement, it joined President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing's Union for French Democracy (UDF), an umbrella organization for the non-Gaullist right, in 1978.

In 2002 the Radicals decided to leave UDF and they are an associate party of the Union for a Popular Movement so far it was founded. Anyway some members, as Thierry Cornillet, continue to be part of UDF.

After the rise of Nicolas Sarkozy to the leadership of UMP, the Radicals launched a sort of re-foundation of their party in order create a counterbalancing moderate and social wing within the UMP. The party soon started to attract other centrists (as Jean-Louis Borloo, Renaud Dutreil and Véronique Mathieu) and even some anti-Sarkozy Gaullistes (as Serge Lepeltier and Alain Ferry).

As a result the Radical Party is having an unexpected comeback in French politics and has now 17 deputies (8 more from those elected in 2002), 6 senators (one more from 2002) and three ministers in Dominique de Villepin's government: François Loos, Jean-Louis Borloo and Renaud Dutreil.

[edit] Presidents

[edit] References

<references/>

[edit] See also

[edit] External link

fr:Parti radical valoisien nl:Républicains Radicaux et Radicaux-Socialistes

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