France still has a Communist Party with a capital C. It has several Trotskyist parties. It has large parties on the right, left and center with meaningless names — Les Républicains, En Marche, Rassemblement National, La France Insoumise. But it has no significant party that confesses to being “liberal.”
Emmanuel Macron’s La République En Marche (LREM) is in many respects a liberal party. It is engaged in a coy flirtation with the liberal group in the European Parliament ahead of the election in May — but it refuses to fully jump into bed with the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE).
Why?
"The word liberal is not a great word in France,” said Luis Garicano, who will contest the EU election for Spain's Cuidadanos, which is part of the ALDE family.
Officials in the LREM say the reasons are more nuancées. As a “party of government” with an overwhelming majority of seats in the National Assembly, Macron’s 3-year-old party is reluctant to commit itself to a group that uneasily unites smallish parties from 21 countries.
But one LREM official admitted that the word “liberal” is also an obstacle, especially in the wake of the Yellow Jackets movement.
Macron has blown apart, for now, the left-right division in French politics.
“In France, the word liberal is rarely used these days except as a term of abuse — as in the term ‘ultra-liberal,’ meaning ultra-capitalist,” the official said. “Macron is accused by the Yellow Jackets of being an ultra-liberal president for the rich. It’s not a label we accept or want to encourage.”
Liberalism, the belief in freedom of the individual, was largely defined by British and French intellectuals from the 17th century to the early 19th century, from Locke through Voltaire to J.S. Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville. About 25 percent of French voters are still defined by the country’s pollsters and political scientists as being broadly “liberal” in their views.
In domestic terms Macron is “liberal” in his reforms of taxation, employment law and the state-owned railways.
The popular meaning of the word “liberal” has long been variable. In the United States it means “leftie." In Britain it means “centrist.” In Europe it means secular right-wing — pro-market and pro-individual liberties, anti-state and anti-church.
In France, however, the word has taken on the darker meaning of “heartless capitalist.” Liberalism is a force in French politics but it no longer dares to answer to its name.
French liberalism was born in the 18th century as an intellectual and mostly bourgeois rebellion against the absolutist powers of church and monarchy and the Jacobin and Napoleonic states. In the 19th century, there were also pro-market French liberal thinkers influenced by Adam Smith, but they failed to budge the French state-interventionist tradition, which went back at least to Jacques-Baptiste Colbert in the 17th century.
The French “historian of ideas” Françoise Mélonio pointed out that the vision of a largely beneficial, controlling, protecting state has been accepted in France by both Catholics and Socialists, conservatives and radicals, revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries. One branch of “liberal” thought in the early 19th century even supported state power and Bonapartism.
The Anglo-Saxon, Protestant tradition of individualism — the primacy of individual economic rights and entrepreneurial freedom — has never been powerful in France.
Tocqueville, though a great liberal thinker, was more concerned with political and personal freedoms than economic freedom and the power of the market. He warned against the market-driven, despotic power of the “manufacturing aristocracy,” which he saw developing in Britain and the U.S. The “French Adam Smith,” Frédéric Bastiat, was admired in theory but ignored in practice.
The different strands of liberalism — personal freedom and economic freedom — have tended to split within political parties of the left and right in France. Social democratic, radical and progressive parties have campaigned against the spiritual oppression of church and state. Conservative parties have campaigned for economic freedom (up to a point) but have supported state control of morals and ideas. The Bonapartist-Gaullist tradition of reverence for state power remains strong on what remains of the French center right but also in the center left, far left and far right.
The only exception, the brief period of “liberal” government in France, was the presidency of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing from 1974-1981. Neither his party — the Parti Républicain — nor the alliance to which it belonged — L'Union pour la démocratie française — dared to use the word “liberal.”
In the first part of his presidency, Giscard was a genuinely liberal president. He oversaw economic reforms that reduced the power and cost of the state but also social reforms such as the legalisation of abortion and the removal of state controls from broadcast media. In the second part, as the first great oil crisis undermined his popularity, Giscard reverted to something closer to a typical French conservative president, illiberal both in economic and social policy.
Giscard has often been compared to Macron, who did once admit to being “a social liberal.” Macron’s people now prefer the word “centrist” but that has also become a term of abuse.
Macron has blown apart, for now, the left-right division in French politics. His natural supporters tend to be people who are open to both market economics and personal freedoms — in other words natural liberals. But they amount, according to French political scientists, to at most 25 to 30 percent of the electorate.
In domestic terms Macron is “liberal” in his reforms of taxation, employment law and the state-owned railways. In European terms, he is “interventionist” in his desire to see more trade protection, stronger governance of the eurozone and a new budget to protect the single currency from future crises.
According to Garicano of Spain's Ciudadanos, it is a “done deal” that Macron’s party will join the “liberal group” after the May election. The enlarged group expects to be the strongest voice for Europe and against populist nationalism in the new assembly.
It will also probably drop the word “liberal” from its title.
