12
RICE UNIVERSITY STUDIES
and slightly more often from business and industry. In the fall of 1958,
when 67 percent of all respondents in a national poll indicated that they
wanted “new men” in parliament,52 it was natural enough that the legislative
elections of November, 1958, should have produced a turnover of parlia-
mentary personnel unprecedented in this century. The National Assembly
elected in that year included only 131 holdovers out of 465 deputies from
the métropole, plus another 48 former deputies or senators. Among the
198 UNR deputies, only 16 were holdovers and another 27 former deputies
or senators. As Mattei Dogan has shown, all but 27 of the UNR’s “new
men” had had some kind of political experience in the Fourth Republic,
as parliamentary candidates (49), as party leaders (37), in quasi-political
functions such as membership in ministerial cabinets (9), or in local po-
litical office (33).53 Nonetheless, only 43 of the 198 UNR deputies elected
in 1958, and 36 of the 229 elected in 1962 had ever sat in the parliament
of the Fourth Republic.54
With a massive turnover in personnel, the average age of deputies drop-
ped markedly in 1958, as it had after the Liberation. UNR deputies were
the youngest of all.55 The expansion of UNR ranks in the 1962 election
brought in more young men, giving the UNR a delegation 53 percent of
whom were under fifty years of age, as opposed to 44 percent in all other
groups.55 One-fifth of the UNR deputies were under forty, as opposed to
one-fifteenth in all other party groups.57 With the reelection of many UNR
incumbents in 1967, the average age of course increased. Still, however,
the average age of UNR deputies (52 years) was below that of opposition
Federation deputies (55) and Communist deputies (53).5s It is most likely
that the average age of Gaullist deputies was reduced by the elections of
June, 1968, when 142 new deputies were elected under the official Gaullist
label.
As indicated in Table 1, the UNR delegation in the National Assembly
included slightly fewer workers and farmers than the average in other
parties and slightly more businessmen and military officers. The contrast
sharpened slightly in 1962, when the representation of the Communist
Party (the majority of whose deputies are workers and employees) rose
from ten to forty-one seats. Preliminary figures for the Assembly elected
in 1967 indicate no striking changes in the occupational backgrounds of
UNR deputies, although there was a decline in the proportion of workers
and clerks.5’1
The UNR deputies elected in 1962 were similar to the fifty Independent
deputies (the traditional Right) in overall percentage of liberal professional
men and businessmen, but significantly different in three respects.60 While
the Independents had no workers or employees among them, the UNR was
at least represented here by seven percent of its delegation. Secondly,