The Government and Politics of France
Andrew Knapp, Vincent Wright
Language: English
Pages: 557
ISBN: B000PLXD76
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The Government and Politics of France has been the leading textbook on French politics for over a generation, and continues to provide students with a comprehensive and incisive introduction to the intricacies of French politics and government. This edition updates every chapter, with the addition of a new chapter on France and Europe. Recent events necessitate a new edition, particularly the 2002 elections and the growing interpenetration of France and the EU in student programmes, as well as in the real world.
Whether covering the shifting balance within France's two-headed executive, the paradoxes of the French party politics, the power and fragmentation of France's administration, the growing assertiveness of French local government, or the newly visible world of the judiciary, The Government and Politics of France has always sought to confront established paradigms with the complex and untidy reality of French politics at the grass roots.
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party-free zone, it is more remarkable that parties have penetrated to other aspects of society where in other countries their intrusion would be considered unwelcome. In other ways, however, French parties can be considered weak. In the first place, parties command little respect among a public that is generally inclined to share de Gaulle’s view of them. Successive surveys since 1985 have found between 18 and 24 per cent of respondents trusting ‘parties in general’, compared with ratings of
fraternity To the common core should be added two more distinctly modern notions of the French state, one built around the republican triptych of liberty, equality and fraternity, the other the set of economic doctrines and relationships known from the mid-twentieth century as dirigisme. The adoption in 1880 by what was to prove France’s longest Republic, the Third, of the most obvious Republican symbols – the Marseillaise as the national anthem and the 14th July, anniversary of the storming of
governments of the Right (1986–88 and 1993–97) but also of the Left (1997–2002). Practically no state-owned firm remains in what had been seen as the ‘competitive’ sector; not only industrial companies like St-Gobain or Renault but also banks and insurance firms like BNP or UAP that had underpinned the state’s former de facto control of credit passed into the hands of private shareholders, many of them foreign; they became less and less tied to the state, and indeed, as they 34 French political
(notably in speeches at Bayeux and Épinal in 1946) would therefore necessarily include the reinforcement of the government at the expense of the legislature, and thence of the parties. Thus, the Gaullists claimed, the authority of the state would be re-established, the nation’s fissiparous tendencies reversed, and the obedience of the state’s servants, notably the army, enforced. There was a further dimension to the Gaullist agenda. In many ways the formative experience of de Gaulle the politician
Chirac, though a less constant European than either of his two predecessors, has overseen the negotiation of no fewer than three European treaties – Amsterdam in 1997, Nice in 2000 (when he was chiefly remembered for his fierce defence of France’s parity of voting rights on the Council of Ministers with Germany) and the European constitutional treaty of 2004. He also took the ill-fated decision to submit the last of these to a referendum. Defence policy The president’s constitutional position as
