FRANCE AND GERMANY: LESS DIVERGENT OUTLOOKS?

In Germany as in France, 1969 will be remembered as the year of the break in continuity. The principal break is in each case obvious: the departure of General de Gaulle after eleven years in power and the relegation of the Christian Democrats to the opposition after twenty years in power. But the nature and import of these breaks call for interpretation.

Both resulted, in large measure, from a fairly continuous evolution of the electorate. In the Federal Republic, the figures are quite clear. Although it is true that their participation in the government since December 1966 made the Socialists "respectable," even to petits bourgeois previously frightened by the "Reds," the rise in their share of the vote in 1969 did not represent a big leap forward in comparison to previous advances: they received 28.8 percent of the ballots cast in 1953, 31.8 percent in 1957, 36.2 percent in 1961, 39.3 percent in 1965, and now 42.7 percent. Further advances are possible, too, thanks to the gradual transformation of society: the cities are continuing to grow, as in other industrial countries, and the big cities are inclined to vote Socialist; the generations in which women greatly outnumbered men because of war losses are gradually being superseded by age groups in which men are in a slight majority; and the feminine electorate itself-because social constraints are waning and because the Church's grip on it is weakening-is less bound to the CDU. Moreover, the Catholic Church itself is intervening less and less to procure a "Christian" vote.

In France, the continuous evolution has been of another order. A kind of junction occurred between two curves: the descending curve of General de Gaulle's personal prestige and the ascending curve of organized Gaullism. In the consultative referendum on the Fifth Republic in September 1958, 79.2 percent of those who cast ballots voted yes, while two months later the candidates espousing Gaullism garnered only 20.4 percent of the ballots. In December 1965, the General gained reflection only with difficulty, while in the parliamentary elections that followed, in March 1967, the Gaullist candidates received 37.7 percent of the vote. They were to obtain 43.6 percent in June 1968.