Originally published in 1970, this collection of essays, in which Mr Williams displays his exceptionally wide learning and sympathetic insight into French political life, is an indispensable guide to anyone interested in the background to and achievements of de Gaulle's regime. It surveys French elections in the Fourth and Fifth Republics: the issues, the changing methods of campaigning, and the sharp mutations in voting behaviour, illustrated in a series of maps and tables. The electoral chapters are linked by discussions of the principal political developments between the successive appeals to the people. Each of the four chronological chapters sections concentrates on a leading theme.
This collection, first published in 1970, brings together twelve articles on French political subjects, mostly concerned either with the plots and scandals that arose out of the long struggle for decolonisation, or with the culmination of that struggle in the Algerian war. In his introduction as well as throughout the book, Williams demonstrates the connection between these two themes, and explains why political scandals have been so prominent and recurrent a feature of French public life and how these scandals affected both France as well as Algeria.
