How to Become a Cabinet Minister in France: Career Pathways, 1870-1978

Abstract

How does someone become a minister? To give a satisfactory answer to this ambitious question we would need a wealth of documentation, systematically analyzed, so as to indicate what the careers of a thousand men who have succeeded to government under three republics have in common. The difficulty becomes even greater if we want to avoid unnecessary theorizing and an overly descriptive approach. We are proposing to sketch a collective portrait without excessively simplifying the diversity of politicians, whose personalities were usually quite complex. Our study concerns two processes or stages of recruitment. In the preselection process, we refer to those realities which predispose individuals for a national political career even though they are not fully conscious of them. The second stage, the selection process, implies such an ambition. We propose four aspects of preselection which are related to profound affective ties: family, school, homeland, and companionship. In the selection process, we follow the future ministers, whose recruitment base has already considerably shrunk in the preselection phase, through the mazes which lead to power. The documentation at our disposal indicates four principal career pathways in the selection process: parliamentary legitimation, the filter of parliamentary committees, the political party channel, and the higher administration channel. Most of these factors are objectively observable. They are not strictly personal qualities, such as oratorical skills or a sense of timing, but observable, classifiable, and quantifiable facts. After having followed the rise of the ministrables to the top, we attempt in the last part to outline a typology of ministers according to the length of their ministerial careers and their postministerial activities. The turbulent history of France for over a century obliges not only the historian but also the sociologist to distinguish several periods for the purposes

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