Democratic Backsliding—Lessons from France

Abstract This article discusses the state of French democracy between 1958 and 1962 as a neglected case of democratic backsliding. This historical case has gone unnoticed in the literature, and the fact that it can be studied in hindsight reveals several observations that are of potentially wider interest. Indeed, the French 1958–62 period displays many of those characteristics that generate scholarly worry about democratic backsliding in contemporary states: A military coup was followed by a countercoup, the surrender of the legislature, the coming to power of an authoritarian-leaning general with declared hostility to the political system, a gradual concentration of powers to the executive, constitutional violations, a sense of crisis, and state interference with elections, media freedoms, and civil rights. The methodology includes a qualitative analysis of French liberal democracy, which leverages the different levels of detail and the contrasting standpoints of contemporaneous and recent historiography. The analysis uncovers contradictions between long-run and short-run developments, the difficulty of grasping democratic developments also in hindsight, and the fact that changes that appear undemocratic in the contemporaneous context can come to appear democratically acceptable with time. Thus, the case reveals new complexities concerning backsliding processes, and it suggests that backsliding periods can alter conceptions of democracy.