Abstract
The Fourth Republic, which lasted only eleven years and twelve months, is the shortest regime in French political history since 1852 ; because there were about twenty-eight successive governments within this period, it is a common view that instability is the reason of its failure. Then, it is sometimes argued that instability was foreseeable, being essentially due to certain flaws in the constitutional scheme ; but we shall endeavor to show that the picture is a bit more complex than this deterministic, positivistic view, for it includes many more contingent, political and historical reasons.
It is certain that the nature of the constitutional text finally enacted on the 13th of October, 1946, has one role to play if one is to explain the following governmental instability. For, though its writers had explicitly aimed at avoiding the mistakes of the previous Third Republic, many persons, mostly gathered around De Gaulle, could already tell at the time that the new regime was equally mistaken.
