French Politics and Society

Alistair Cole

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317376958
• Édition: 3
• Sujet: Politics & International Relations
• Sous-sujet: Politics

French Politics and Society is the ideal companion for all students of France and French politics with a strong reputation for its lucidity and lively exposition of the French polity. This third edition remains a highly readable text and offers a broad, critical and comprehensive understanding of French politics.

The book provides an excellent description of French institutions and ensures readers access to background information through discussing historical developments, political forces, public policy, and the evolution of important aspects of French society.

Key updates for the third edition include:

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• extensive updates including the Chirac, Sarkozy and Hollande presidencies;

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• inclusion of constitutional and state reform coverage since 2008;

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• the French party system and evolution of the French left and right;

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• more on France's positioning with regards to Brussels and the impact of the European economic crisis.

French Politics and Society is essential reading for all undergraduates studying French politics, French studies, European studies or comparative politics.

Part I
Introduction

1
The making of modern France

1.1 Introduction

This introductory chapter places the evolution of the French polity in its broad historical perspective until 1958. The chapter provides an overview of French political history, with particular emphasis on the role of the state in building a French polity and upon the legacy of the French Revolution and its aftermath. The problem of political legitimacy is revealed as an essential problem throughout most of French history, the result of multiple social, economic and ideological cleavages and of territorial, linguistic and religious identities. Chapter 1 also highlights various sources of historical continuity between the pre-Revolutionary monarchy (known as the ancien régime) and the post-revolutionary order, and puts into context the impact of political divisions upon the operation of French society.

By comparison with most of her European neighbours, such as Germany, Italy or the Netherlands, France is an old country. Modern France can trace its lineage back at least to the Capetian monarchy of the tenth century; Italy and Germany were only unified as independent nation-states in 1861 and 1870 respectively. But her relative age must not disguise the fact that the modern French nation is in certain respects an artificial creation. There was no natural empathy between the various provinces which came to form France. In the pre-Revolutionary period, many of the provinces of France shared no natural common cultural or linguistic ties. Small rural communities throughout France were suspicious of all outside authorities, and lived a largely self-sufficient autarkic existence. The preponderance of agriculture in the French economy suggested why features of this social model survived until the early twentieth century. Identity was rooted in locality, or town, rather than the nation. The fact that French nationhood was imposed upon unwilling provinces (such as Normandy, Brittany, Aquitaine, Burgundy, Provence) by a succession of French kings, and later by the Revolution, served to reinforce this point. A city as French as Lille only became part of the nation in the late seventeenth century; Nice in the nineteenth century.

France was overwhelmingly a rural nation. Even in the pre-Revolutionary period, there were marked regional variations in the economic prosperity of the peasantry, and in the political freedoms exercised by subjects. In certain regions of France, forms of traditional local self-government had existed for centuries. In other areas subjects were deprived of any political rights and tightly controlled by a zealous aristocracy. Regional differences were themselves linked to varying kinship and economic structures in different parts of the country (Mendras 1989).

Pre-Revolutionary French history had usually appeared to turn around the attempts made by the central government in Paris to impose its will upon existing provinces, to conquer new regions and to extend the orbit of its competence. The attempt to impose central control was a constant feature of the pre-Revolutionary French monarchs, most notably of Louis XIV (1648–1715), whose chief minister Colbert endeavoured (with mixed success) to expand the competence of the state into the economic sphere, as well as to impose a measure of political uniformity upon the provincial nobles.

1.2 The ancien régime

Political historians dwell correctly on the importance of 1789 and the French Revolution as the fundamental reference point in French history. But many of the predominant traits of the French political tradition are older than the Revolution, rooted in the ancien régime, as the pre-Revolutionary monarchy is known. The main historical legacy of the ancien régime was to have created a central institution in the form of the monarchy, which was able to impose a degree of authority upon the powerful feudal aristocratic landowners, and other particularistic interests (such as the church). In a number of key spheres, the Revolution built upon the centralising pretensions of the old absolutist monarchy:

• The origins of state economic interventionism lay with the ancien régime, although efforts at state-sponsored commercial and industrial development met with limited success. France remained a feudal society until the Revolution.
• French monarchs named officials (intendants) in each of the kingdom’s provinces to administer the core functions of the state: public order, the raising of finances and the levying of troops for military adventures abroad. In practice, these officials were forced to bargain with powerful vested interests, including the nobility and the clergy.
• French kings claimed their legitimacy from divine right: they were answerable to God alone. They were supported in this claim by the Catholic Church. This undivided form of political legitimacy was echoed later by the Revolution, with the insistence on the general interest.

The heyday of the old monarchy was in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, when, under the influence of Louis XIV, France became the dominant power in Europe. The palace of Versailles remains until this day a testament to the glory of the old French monarchy. But throughout the course of the eighteenth century, the monarchy became steadily less effective and more corrupt, its authority challenged by the rising bourgeoisie in the towns, by the state’s incapacity to control the feudal nobility, by an endemic crisis in public finances and by its diminishing international prestige.

1.3 The French Revolution: the making of modern France

The statist tradition in France certainly preceded the Revolution, but the case must not be overstated. The French Revolution, with its civil wars and its crushing of the power of the aristocracy and the clergy, created the conditions for the emergence of France as a genuinely unified post-feudal nation (Wright 1987). The French Revolution was thus the fundamental reference point in the development of the French nation-state.

The Revolution abolished the absolutist monarchy, which claimed to rule by divine right, and replaced it with a republic committed to the values of freedom, equality and brotherhood (liberté, égalité et fraternité). In spite of the restoration of the monarchical or imperial forms of government in 1815, 1830 and 1852, and, leaving aside the authoritarian Vichy government during the Second World War, the republic became firmly embedded in French political consciousness as the natural revolutionary form of government.

The French Revolutionary settlement also satisfied the mass of the peasantry. It achieved this notably by the sale of lands confiscated from the Church and nobility, which created a class of prosperous small landowners indebted to the Revolution. Loyalty was further assured by the abolition of feudal labour obligations to the aristocracy. The Revolution thus transformed the peasantry into one of the mainstays of support against any return to the pre-Revolutionary social order, even after the monarchy had been restored in 1815. The conservatism and loyalty of the peasantry underpinned the stability of the Republic as a form of government after 1870.

The Revolution crushed the political and economic power of the old landed aristocracy. More than anything else, this facilitated the creation of a more uniform centralised state, begun under the Revolution but greatly developed under Napoleon. The key foundations of modern Republican France might be traced to a synthesis of the parliamentary regime (régime d’assemblée), the revolutionary tradition and the authoritarian centralising institutions created or consolidated by Napoleon (Rosanvallon 1990; Alexander 1999).

The Revolutionary–Napoleonic legacy continues to shape many of the institutions of contemporary France. These include (or included until recently):

• Administrative uniformity throughout France, notably by the division of the country into departments, cantons and communes, each with the same legal responsibilities. Administrative acts are judged by a system of administrative courts, separate from the legal system.
• Central control over territorial administration and local government. The prefect was created as the representative of the central government in each department; the mayor was first and foremost an official of central government.
• A high measure of state interventionism in social mores by means of the civil code, a detailed regulation of family and property relations, and codes of moral conduct.
• A professional bureaucracy, conceived of as an elite to serve the state, to create order and enforce uniformity. The école polytechnique was created in 1804 to train an elite dedicated to state service.

The emergence of a strong central state during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods was accompanied by a gradual but ruthless suppression of all linguistic and regional identities; the progress of the idea of nation thus became largely synonymous with that of the state itself. It is in this sense that modern France might be considered a state-led creation.

1.4 The French Revolution: a divisive heritage

The legacy of the French Revolution itself was highly divisive. This divisive heritage can be illustrated in relation to three spheres: the conflict between the Church and anticlerical movements; the legacy of political violence and the Revolutionary tradition, and the lack of consensus over the form of government.

The Catholic Church, anticlericalism and the Republican state

The most divisive legacy bequeathed by the French Revolution related to the bitter dispute between the Catholic Church, the anticlerical-Republican movement and the French state. The close association of the Catholic Church with the ancien régime made it into an obvious target for the Revolution. The Church condemned the Revolution of 1789 as godless; in turn, the Revolution led a fierce attack on the privileges enjoyed by the Catholic Church under the monarchy, notably by confiscating church lands and redistributing them to the peasantry. Church and state reached a new compromise under Napoleon’s concordat of 1801, but they remained ideological rivals. The concordat recognised Catholicism as the religion of ‘the great majority of French people’, although Protestantism and Judaism were also tolerated religions. When the monarchy was restored in 1815, the Church recovered much of its former political influence, but by then it was probably too late. To be Republican became synonymous with an anticlerical stance; to be a practising Catholic automatically signified opposition to the notion of restoring a godless, secular republic. The Church also became associated with defence of a hierarchical conservative, pre-Revolutionary social order (Nicolet 1982).

Once the Republic had been restored in 1870, the ideological battle between church and state began in earnest. This took two forms. First, there was an attack by the Republicans on the continuing existence of powerful schools run by the Catholic Church; these schools were suspected by Republicans of perverting the nation’s schoolchildren with the anti-Republican ethos of Catholicism. Second, the period from 1870 onwards was characterised by an uneven but fierce ideological battle between the Catholic Church and the Republic, culminating in the separation of church and state in 1905 and the renewed de-facto opposition of the Church to the Republic until 1944 (Ravitch 1990).

One of the principal battlegrounds between church and state was in the sphere of education. The state’s response to perceived clerical influence was to create its own echelon of Republican primary schools. In the Ferry laws of 1881–2, the Republican state created a secular rival to the powerful church schools, which aimed to reproduce Republican values. The conflict between church and state schools has remained imbued in French consciousness ever since. The ideological conflict between church and state (fanned by the Dreyfus Affair of 1899–1902) culminated in 1905, when the Republic decreed the separation of church and state, which had been tied since Napoleon’s concordat of 1801. Catholicism was no longer recognised as the official state religion; priests were removed from the state payroll, and many church lands were again confiscated. Henceforth, the Republic was to be a secular one.

Until the First World War, religion was more important than social class in explaining political divisions within France. A party such as the Radical Party, which was fiercely anticlerical, was automatically placed on the left of the political spectrum, in spite of its basic social and economic conservatism. And Catholics were automatically considered to be on the right, even when they declared themselves to be socially progressive. This situation only gradually changed with the rise of the Socialist and Communist parties in the 1930s and the breakthrough of the politics of class and nationalism. Catholics became fully reconciled with the Republic as a result of their participation in the wartime resistance, despite the ambiguous role performed by the Church during the Vichy regime. The formation of a progressive Christian-democratic party in 1944 – the Mouvement Républicain Populaire (MRP) – symbolised the final rallying of the Catholics to the Republic. While this party started out as a left-of-centre party imbued with reformist notions of social Catholicism, it became transformed into a recognisably conservative party, under the pressure of its conservative, Catholic electorate. As the church schools example illustrated, vestiges of the clerical–anticlerical conflict remain today, and a practising Catholic is more likely to support a right-wing party than a declared atheist.

The revolutionary tradition

The second sphere in which the Revolution left a distinctive legacy was in the creation of an ill-defined revolutionary tradition, perhaps better expressed as a revolutionary myth, which spurned its own antibody in the form of a powerful counter-revolutionary movement. The upheavals of 1789–99 were not unique: there were further revolutionary outbreaks on a smaller scale in 1830, 1848 and 1871, as well as various abortive attempts. There developed a disposition towards the use of violence and street protest to achieve political ends: relatively small groups of conspirators might succeed in toppling a regime, as occurred in the uprising of 1830. As the levers of power were so centralised in Paris, the capital became the theatre for countless confrontations, which then extended to the provinces. In the nineteenth century, French people turned against each other with great ferocity. To take one example, the Paris Commune of 1871 was crushed with 20,000 deaths. The revolutionary tradition was itself highly ambiguous. It could mean either the tradition bequeathed by the French Revolution (which included a moderate Girondin phase as well as the more violent and messianic Jacobin phase), or else a commitment to using revolutionary means to seize power, a more specific connotation that would exclude most moderate Republicans. One powerful strand in the French revolutionary tradition became legitimised that was extremist, authoritarian and potentially violent rather than committed to compromise. And yet the prevailing Republican strand hardly fitted this description. By the early twentieth century, Republicanism became synonymous with preservation of the existing social order (Anderson 1970). The aspirations of moderate Republicans were largely satisfied with the consolidation of the Third Republic after 1875; these men became transformed into conservative supporters of the existing political, social and economic order. With the consolidation of the Third Republic, the mantle of revolutionary challenge to the status quo shifted from Republicans to anarcho-syndicalists, to Marxist Socialists and (after 1920) to Communists (Ridley 1970; Tiersky 1972; Kriegel 1985). For several generations, the Parti Communiste Français (PCF) successfully articulated the aspirations of a...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface
• Glossary
• List of abbreviations
• Part I Introduction
• Part II Institutions and power
• Part III Political forces and representation
• Part IV Reshaping modern France
• Index