ABSTRACT
This, paradoxically, was the corollary of their wish to reinforce the administration. The Gaullists subscribed to the (half-true) legend that the real government of the Fourth Republic had been, not the changing, immobile and pusillanimous ministers, but the omnipresent and omnipotent administration. They were resolved to end the ‘administrative state within the State’ and to secure the loyalty and subordination of civil servants to a strengthened political executive: the government ‘has at its disposal the administration’, as Article 20 of the constitution puts it. Their determination was reflected in the 1959 revisions to the civil service charter of 1946; in the 1964 decree regulating relations between the State and the French radio and television network personnel; in (fairly slight) limitations on the right of State employees to strike; and in tightened control over nationalised industries, the police and the prefects – quite aside from the measures needed to bring the army into line in the aftermath of the Algerian war. Conflict was inevitable between civil servants who believed they were defending an impartial view of the national interest against politicians prey to the demands of parties, pressure groups or voters, and politicians who saw themselves as the embodiment of democratic legitimacy against antediluvian, lethargic, obstructive civil servants whose attachment to the status quo was equalled only by their appetite for new privileges for themselves. There were some epic struggles under the Fifth Republic between civil servants and politicians; between Debré (as Defence Minister from 1969 to 1972) and the defence chiefs; between the Education Ministry under Giscard and two successive higher education ministers (one of whom used methods described as those of a ‘Gauleiter in occupied territory’); between Jacques Delors and the leaders of the nationalised banks; between Mitterrand’s Interior Minister Gaston Defferre (and above all, his liberal Justice Minister Robert Badinter) and the police. The civil servants did not invariably get the better of such scraps.
