ABSTRACT
The referendum establishing the Fifth Republic, and with it a strengthened presidency, was passed in September 1958 by 79.2 per cent of the voters. Four years later, de Gaulle’s revision of his ‘own’ constitution, establishing the direct election of the president, was approved by 62 per cent. For a while François Mitterrand continued to refer to the régime as a ‘permanent coup d’État’; and the constitution has been revised, sometimes in important ways, eleven times since 1962. But in retrospect, the referendum of 1962 can be seen as a closure of the debate over the régime. The Fifth Republic survived de Gaulle’s resignation in April 1969. Five years later, it survived the election of a President from the non-Gaullist Right (Valéry Giscard d’Estaing), following Georges Pompidou’s sudden death in office. In 1981, the constitution passed the ultimate test of allowing peaceful alternation in power when François Mitterrand led the Socialists to victories in both presidential and parliamentary elections. Constitutional debate continues, notably over questions as important as the independence of the judiciary or the practice of multiple (national and local) elective office-holding. But it has lost the passion and urgency it provoked in the 150 years after the Revolution. Nearly 70 per cent of the electorate abstained at the September 2000 referendum that reduced the presidential term from seven years to five; opinion polls found that a majority of abstentionists considered high petrol prices a more important issue.
