It's been almost 30 years since a French president dissolved parliament and called snap elections, as Emmanuel Macron did on Sunday. When France votes for a new legislature at the end of the month, it will be only the sixth time the country has done so in its post-war history.
France's constitution allows the president – after consulting the prime minister and the speakers of both houses of parliament – to dissolve the National Assembly, the lower house that is directly elected by French voters, and hold fresh polls within 40 days.
The president, all the while, remains in the top job.
Since the constitution was adopted in 1958, only three presidents have resorted to the measure, which is supposed to be reserved for otherwise intractable political crises.
The most recent precedents suggest that Macron may not get the outcome he wants.
1962: De Gaulle takes a stand
The founding father of modern France was the first to use the option. President Charles de Gaulle called snap elections in autumn 1962, amid a stand-off with parliament over changes he wanted to make to the presidency itself.
At the time, French presidents were selected by members of parliament and other elected officials, not by voters. De Gaulle instead wanted to put the choice directly to the public – reasoning that the president would have more legitimacy to make big political decisions if he'd been elected by the people.
That meant rewriting France's freshly signed constitution. Parliament was divided on whether and how to revise it and, in early October, called a vote of no confidence that resulted in defeat for the government and forced the prime minister to resign.
De Gaulle, who was already planning to put the constitutional reform to a referendum the same month, promptly dissolved the National Assembly on 9 October.
The referendum duly approved the reform, after which de Gaulle could argue that obstinate lawmakers were at odds with the will of the people.
"I say it is absolutely essential, if democracy is to last, for this majority to grow stronger and larger, and first of all for it to establish itself in parliament," he declared, urging voters to return to polling stations to elect lawmakers who'd back him.
He got his will: two rounds of voting on 18 and 25 November gave the Gaullists a healthy majority.
1968: President versus protesters
De Gaulle repeated the move in 1968, as waves of protests called the French establishment into question.
It was May '68 and what began as student demos had snowballed into mass rallies, street battles and France's biggest ever general strike.
After almost a decade of de Gaulle in power, the protesters were calling for revolution. "Dix ans, ça suffit," they chanted: "Ten years is enough."
The president's opponents were talking about forming a new government and many expected de Gaulle to resign. Instead he secretly fled to West Germany on 29 May, prompting a 24-hour crisis where no one was sure who was in charge.
The next day, having received assurances that he had the military's support, the president returned to France refusing to step down.
Instead, he announced in a speech broadcast on 30 May that he would dissolve parliament and trigger elections – the only democratic alternative, he claimed, to the "dictatorship" threatening to overthrow France's institutions.
The same afternoon, hundreds of thousands of his supporters filled the Champs-Elysées in one of the biggest demonstrations of that entire turbulent spring.
Voting took place on 23 and 30 June; de Gaulle's conservatives won by a landslide.
1981: Mitterrand resets the balance
By May 1981, de Gaulle was long gone, the right was divided and François Mitterrand had just been elected the first left-wing president in more than 20 years.
But the National Assembly – elected three years earlier and due to sit for another two – was still dominated by conservatives, undermining the new president's mandate for change.
On 22 May, the day after his inauguration, Mitterrand called snap parliamentary elections to give voters the opportunity to bring the two branches of power into sync.
Three weeks later, they took it. Voting on 14 and 21 June, France elected a left-wing majority in a so-called "pink tide" – the colour of Mitterrand's Socialist Party.
1988: Second time less lucky
Mitterrand found himself in a similar position in May 1988, when he was re-elected as president to a right-wing parliament.
At the time the French presidency was a seven-year job, while MPs got five years in office. That two-year gap between when voters chose their parliament and their president increased the likelihood of the two being at odds. (Since 2002, both terms have been set at five years with elections within months of each other.)
When it came time to elect a new National Assembly in 1986, Mitterrand's pink tide was washed away by a blue one of the right and centre. That forced him into awkward "cohabitation" with its leader, Jacques Chirac, who became prime minister.
When Mitterrand beat Chirac in the presidential election two years later, he took it as a sign that voters' confidence in the left was returning. Like in '81, he dissolved parliament and called fresh elections in the hope of winning back a "parliamentary majority that will help us move the country forward".
But unlike in '81, Mitterrand's momentum didn't hold. The elections of 5 and 12 June left his Socialists short of an outright majority – making them the first minority government in post-war France and leaving them struggling to get legislation through a divided parliament for the next five years.
1997: Chirac's losing gamble
Chirac was eventually elected president in 1995, backed by a parliament with the biggest conservative majority in decades.
But what should have been a comfortable term quickly descended into crisis when the government announced swingeing cuts to France's welfare system. Mass strikes followed, forcing the government to drop its plans and decimating its popularity.
Seeing his party flounder and knowing the National Assembly was up for re-election in 1998, Chirac took a gamble: calling parliamentary elections before things had a chance to get even worse.
In a lengthy televised speech on 21 April 1997, he argued that snap polls were in "the interest of the country", a way to give voters a say on his programme and the government a mandate to carry it out.
But critics argued they were in the interest of Chirac himself.
"It's the first time a head of state has used this prerogative for no reason other than his own current interest," said a scathing editorial in Le Monde. "No political crisis to resolve, no national drama to overcome, just – in his own words – the President's 'comfort'."
In the end, Chirac got exactly what he'd bet on avoiding. In elections on 25 May and 1 June, the left took the majority from the conservatives and Chirac found himself cohabiting with Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin for all five remaining years of his term.
Chirac's manoeuvre has since gone down as one of the worst miscalculations in French political history.
It's also the one with the closest parallels to Macron's. Will his produce the same result? We'll find out on 30 June and 7 July.
