ABSTRACT
The president is the master of the substance as well as of the processes of policymaking. This was first acknowledged in November 1959, when Chaban-Delmas invented the domaine réservé over which the president had more or less exclusive control. Chaban was seeking chiefly to deflect criticism within the Gaullist party of de Gaulle’s moves towards Algerian independence. His term is political; it lacks any constitutional status. But it has stuck, and has been taken to include foreign affairs, defence matters and questions relating to the French Community – or, more recently, to the vestiges of empire in Africa. In practice, though, the president controls as much or as little of policy-making as he wishes: when Mitterrand observed in 1983 that ‘it is up to the president to decide which policies should be decided by the president’, he was merely echoing his old enemy de Gaulle’s claims of 1964.
