ABSTRACT
France has operated under two constitutional regimes since the end of the Second World War, the purely parliamentary Fourth Republic (1946–58) and since then the semi-presidential Fifth Republic. The immediate cause of the Fourth Republic's demise was the open refusal by the French military to countenance the decolonization of Algeria, but the Algerian Crisis was itself rooted in the structural weakness of the Fourth Republic: the country's deep-seated social cleavages combined with the Fourth Republic's permissive proportional representation electoral system to produce legislative assemblies that were too fragmented and polarized to maintain stable cabinets. The chronic cabinet instability of the Fourth Republic thus left French civil servants and military officers in the regions and colonies to their own devices, unconstrained by and ultimately resentful of civilian executive authority. The crisis was averted by de Gaulle agreeing to return to power, but he did so on the condition he be given a free hand to draft a new constitution. This draft constitution was put to referendum on 28 September 1958, and endorsed overwhelmingly by the French electorate. The Fifth Republic came into force on 4 October 1958.
