Political Leadership in France: From Charles de Gaulle to Nicolas Sarkozy (review)

Within specific institutional and cultural contexts, the role individual political leaders play, how they play it, and what causal impact they have on political outcomes remain the core issues of the growing literature in leadership studies. The centrality of the presidency in the Fifth Republic constitution, combined with the personal, dramatic, and exalted nature that de Gaulle conferred on the function, provides John Gaffney with the opportunity to evaluate the nature, style, and mechanics of political leadership in contemporary France. De Gaulle, by adding ‘as a permanent and complex feature of the [Fifth] Republic the influence of the personal within the institutional’ (p. 6), provided the matrix of such leadership. Gaffney explains how political leaders construct —symbolically, rhetorically, discursively— a personal and imagined relationship with their national constituency, thus insisting on the critical interplay between leaders and followers. He does it convincingly, with the exception of Mitterrand’s leadership between 1981 and 1986, as the nature of his interaction with real and imagined followers (the PS, le peuple de gauche, public opinion) remains unexplained. The book is organized chronologically, but each presidential — or présidentiable — leader does not enjoy the same level of scrutiny: de Gaulle’s imprint on political leadership is meticulously and lengthily explained. Mitterrand’s second term and Chirac’s first term are conflated into a single chapter, as both exemplified how the miscalculations of the presidents themselves led to dysfunctional leadership. Chirac’s second term is omitted completely, and one senses that Chirac’s inability to dramatize his presidential function (with the exception of the Iraq war), coupled with his seemingly indolent persona, does not fit well with the sort of leadership Gaffney presents. With the last chapter devoted to the presidential elections of 2007, Gaffney finds his second wind, as Ségolène Royal’s gender, the role of new media, and the blurring of the candidates’ public and private lives allow him to speculate on the advent of a new type of presidential leadership influenced by celebrity culture. As a fine observer and analyst of French presidential elections, Gaffney sees political leadership in terms of constructing a presidential persona and winning elections rather than developing effective policy objectives and ensuring their implementation: as such, he does not explain systematically how leaders diagnose problems, prescribe solutions, and mobilize followers to implement their visions (although the analysis of Michel Rocard’s and Édith Cresson’s premierships offers some illuminating insights into failed leaderships). This approach is unsurprising: after all, the Gaullist settlement implies a major difference ‘between the Fifth and earlier Republics, [. . .] the division of labour between a time serving manager, [. . .] and the symbolic nature of new leadership with its emphasis upon visionary leadership’ (p. 63). Gaffney argues that the Fifth Republic enshrines the presidentialization of politics rather than the politicization of the presidency: it is essentially a discursive Republic, where the performance, discourses, and gestures of the leader have real and enduring consequences. As such, the leader’s persona introduces a high level of volatility at the top. This alone is a stimulating take on the subject.