Page 329 - DPOL202_COMPARATIVE_POLITICS_AND_GOVERNMENT_ENGLISH

Comparative Politics and Government

Notes While the business and labour-agrarian groups constitute the volatile element of pressure group
politics in France, a brief reference may be made to the organisation of the intellectuals and the
veterans. The most important organisation of the ‘intellectuals’ is the Confederation of the Intellectual
Workers of France. Avery loose organisation of some 400,000 members representing about 80
association, it includes printers, painters, writers, journalists, teachers and like. A special point to be
noted about this organisation is that the members have sharp differences on the merits of economic
issues and the strategy of action to be adopted for protecting and promoting their interests. The
League of the Rights of Man founded at the time of the Dreyfus Affair champions the cause of freedom
of the press, maintenance of individual liberty and opposes all forms of authoritarianism. It is mostly
dominated by the ‘left’. The teachers have their Federation of National Education. The students have
their own organisations like National Students Union of France that remain concerned with the
advancement of their own status and well-being in the form of scholarships, loans, living quarters
etc.
Finally, we refer to the associations of the army officers and the veterans that are dominated by
different shades of political forces. The ‘centrists’ have their National Union of Veterans, the
‘communist-minded’ have their Republican Association of the Veterans, the ‘radicals’ have their
National Federation of the Republican Veterans, while the ‘socialist-minded’ have their Federation
of Workers and Peasant Veterans. All these organisations of officers, non-commissioned officers and
graduates of the different military schools have their own groups that largely concentrate on obtaining
pensions and other financial privileges. During the times of Algerian crisis and war in Indo-China,
there came into being the French Union of the Associations of Veterans and War Victims.
Not the variety of organised groups but their role in the politics of the country is of real importance
that places France in a category quite different from that of England and the United States. It can be
visualised in the fact that interest groups play a very powerful and, at the same time, a very
irresponsible role not because the political system of this country pertains to the hitherto parliamentary,
now quasi-parliamentary system, but for the reason that the people have a different temperament
and their sectional interests “tend to take precedence over the national interest”.
Lobbying is the main tactic of the business pressure groups. The owners of hotels, gas stations, liquor
distillation centres, automobile productions, oil companies and the like have their powerful groups
engaged in influencing the legislators and administrators. These ‘lobbies’ give financial support to
the candidates at the time of elections, induct their own men into the high ranks of the bureaucratic
administration, release their own journals and handouts in an attempt to sway the public opinion in
their own favour and do a lot of other things that brings them close to their American counterparts so
far as the method of action is concerned. Their agents are very much in the National Assembly and
the Senate to support or oppose a bill as per their interest. In case their purpose in not served in the
legislative world, they shift their attention to the world of administration where every interest
“attempts to ‘colonise’ the government in a number of ways: by influencing administrators, by offering
them important jobs in their own organisations, by representing them with facts and figures that
appear to be convincing”.
Critical Appreciation: However, the political behaviour of the interest groups in France is much
different from that of their Anglo-American counterparts in view of the fact that here pressure groups,
like political parties, frequently take to the course of agitation and violence in which the part of the
communists is too obvious. The multi-party system of this country with the tradition of violent
revolutions is responsible for making the position of institutional and anomic groups more important
than that of the situation obtaining in Britain. The Communist Party has its ‘supporters’ in the trade
union organisations and certain institutional groups (like the Catholic Church) have their colonies in
the political parties with the result that the parties and pressure groups interpenetrate each other.
Such a study of the existence and articulation of interest organisations in the politics of France shows
that here political pluralism has a very fragmented character. Not the existence of so many political
parties and groups but the state of isolation and the process of disintegration engage our attention. The
differences between different groups, even among the important figures of the same group, have been
so deep that they have not been able to act in unison. Quite often the groups have failed to generate a
common strategy with the result that no definite rule of political behaviour can be laid down after

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