Historians have made much of the power that organized business exercised in the Fourth Republic. Georgette Elgey entitled a section of a chapter on the 1951 election ‘L'église et le patronat interviennent’, and numerous commentators repeated the allegation that every successful candidate in that election had received 50,000 francs of business subsidy. This perception of business power is increased by the anti-capitalist perspective of many Fourth Republic writers, and by the magnifying power of repeated gossip.

Hard information about the political influence of the patronat is hard to come by, but it is worth beginning by making three general points. Firstly, in spite of the alleged power of big business in France, there was not a single political party that was willing to present itself as a defender of big business. In post-war Britain, the Conservative party openly claimed to be the spokesman of business. Subsidies to the party were declared in company accounts and substantial donors were rewarded with honours. In America, the assumption that business interests, and particularly big business interests, ran parallel to those of the rest of the nation was even more widespread: both major political parties expressed this point of view and individual companies often chose the recipients for their largesse on the basis of specific advantages offered to certain kinds of activity. In France, by contrast, all parties expressed some degree of hostility to large-scale business.