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This paper investigates changes in the French parliament’s role in the control of military missions, introduced by the 2008 constitutional reform, and examines their effects on practices of parliamentary control and legislative‒executive interactions. The paper analyses how the constitutional changes have developed; the attitudes of parliamentarians towards control; the knowledges they relate to legislative-executive relations; and the post-reform practice of parliamentary control of French military missions. Although legislative‒executive relations with regard to military missions have been recalibrated and formalised, they have not fundamentally challenged the executive’s lead. Reasons include a strong belief in the need for effectiveness, acceptance of the institutional order, and a foreign policy culture of executive leadership. French parliamentarians value their new powers, but mostly do not seek their further extension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The political-legislation-cycle theory predicts a peak of legislative production in the pre-electoral period, when the legislator focuses on voters' welfare in order to be reelected. This paper tests the theory on the French semipresidential system, characterized by direct election of both the executive and the legislative branch. We use a data set that encompasses all the legislation passed in France from 1959 to 2012 at a monthly rate, and find a dual cycle of the production of laws, connected to both the presidential and the legislative elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper, written for the Forum section of Critical Policy Studies, is a personal account of public policy analysis in France which was first presented at the 2010 Grenoble Interpretive Policy Analysis conference. It aims to complement the piece published in this journal by Philippe Zittoun in 2010. It is not fully referenced, and only reflects the author's limited understanding and knowledge of different traditions of research in the French context. In contrast with many analyses in the social sciences that invent, or reinvent, some kind of 'French touch', I argue that there were always many contrasting intellectual traditions that were drawn on to analyze public policy in France, that none of them was dominant, and that many of them were not specifically French. Also, analysis of public policy was mainly developed within political science and sociology, where postmodern literature from Lyotard to Derrida was more or less non-existent The 'French theory' tradition, as invented in the United States, has had little or no influence on public policy analysis, with the important exceptions of Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu. In other words, this short paper aims at rebutting the continuing external 'intellectual commodification' of French policy studies, while engaging with the unique sets of intellectual traditions that have emerged in France, with their cross-influences, in the study of public policy [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the significance of resources in determining a group's ability to respond to the European Integration process. Both domestic and supranational opportunity structures are constantly shaped and re-shaped by EU policy processes. The single country case study of France is selected on the basis of the state's longstanding traditions of civil society exclusion. The influence of the EU in transforming these Jacobin predilections is explored with reference to a comprehensive European environmental implementation programme (NATURA 2000). Resource Mobilisation theory reminds us that a group's resource base is a decisive variable in attempting to influence decision makers. It is argued, first, that the European Commission has empowered some French civil society actors with resources allowing them to mobilise on more levels for longer, while failing to influence others. Second, it is revealed that this empowerment is dependent upon the level of financial incentives offered as well as the overall favourability of the group to the EU project itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with political as well as economic collaboration. It conceptualises collaboration as a form of cooperation with the occupying power that is - at least to a certain extent - voluntary and goes beyond the search for a pure modus vivendi. The aim of the paper is twofold. First, it presents a synopsis of the framework and central political aspects of collaboration in France. In doing so, it points out the classic distinction between state collaboration and collaborationism, stressing, however, that this distinction is not clear-cut. Both state collaboration and collaborationism interacted with and influenced each other, as is shown by the armed collaboration. Second, the paper problematises one particular dimension of collaboration, which the historiography has rather neglected even though it was the most prevalent and crucial of factors for the occupying power: economic collaboration and especially business collaboration. Focusing on the example of the construction industry, it maps out different patterns of behaviour of companies within the framework of the German policy of economic exploitation and Vichy's economic state collaboration. Even though proper 'economic collaborationism' was as rare as proper resistance, the great majority of enterprises accommodated themselves to the new circumstances. This accommodation could, however, take very different forms. Choices were based on multiple, partially overlapping, partially contradictory logics, and both collaboration and resistance proved to be multidimensional phenomena. It is argued that collaboration is and remains a fruitful concept for the study of occupations, including economic issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

These days the secret ballot is taken for granted and it is often seen as the natural complement of universal, democratic suffrage. Its emergence, however, was just as contested and varied as the franchise and raised similar issues concerning the nature and practice of citizenship. This article focuses on the emergence of the secret ballot in Britain and France, two countries with a long history of parliamentary and local elections. In Britain, the secret ballot was introduced in 1872, while in France, which introduced universal male suffrage in 1848, it was as late as 1913 before envelope and polling booth rendered the vote completely secure. This study documents the varied polling practices employed in both countries prior to the onset of the secret ballot. It also highlights the contentious nature of polling reform. For some, the secret ballot was regarded as a means of safeguarding electoral independence and eliminating corruption. Others, including radicals, argued quite the opposite: that secret voting was an affront to honourable, public-spirited citizenship. In the end, full secrecy was achieved as part of the broader process of domesticating and disciplining the exercise of a mass franchise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Citizenship scholars in Europe often focus on the institutional factors that influence naturalisation, but a less explored topic in the literature is the role of politics and group belonging in naturalisation behaviour—factors that have been proven to influence immigrants' behaviour in the North American context. Through analysis of the extensive Trajectories and Origins (2008) data-set, I find that interest in politics shapes naturalisation behaviour and outcomes, and living in an anti-immigrant climate, identifying as Muslim and feeling otherised is negatively correlated with naturalisation behaviour. Lastly, Arab immigrants are more likely to seek French naturalisation and have this status than White, non-EU immigrants. This paper sets a quantitative foundation for the role of political orientation and context, and ethnic group belonging in shaping immigrants' naturalisation behaviour in France. It ends with proposals for a future research agenda on studying the political integration of different ethnic groups in France, and Europe generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Labor unions are key stakeholders in the field of corporate social responsibility but researchers have paid surprisingly little attention to their CSR strategies. This article extends stakeholder theory by treating unions as having stakeholders that influence their CSR strategies. Drawing on qualitative data from a longitudinal study on selected unions in France between 2006 and 2013, this paper analyzes the underlying reasons for the differences in their approaches. It finds connections between the unions' CSR strategy, and the perception of and cooperation with stakeholders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the political economy of French imperialism from a critical Marxist perspective. It demonstrates how France has maintained a major role on the international scene, especially militarily, despite experiencing a relative decline in world economic power since the 1990s. In this regard, three features have marked the French imperial project: (1) the core role of state institutions and corporate elites in making French capitalism, and the protracted closeness of the state-capital nexus; (2) the strength of militarism in economic, political, and social realms; and (3) the consolidation of rentier interests not only in the corporate power bloc, but also at a political level. Over the past century, these three dynamics have underpinned and reinforced a particular project of empire in France – one that bears relevance to current debates on globalisation and the ‘new imperialism'. By examining these issues, this paper seeks to further develop the Marxist theory of international political economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The reaction to the law legalising same-sex marriage in France shocked the nation and the world in 2013. Opposition to the law seemed to join forces with a plethora of new right-wing activist groups, leading to mass demonstrations, violence in the streets of Paris and even to a death in the cathedral of Notre Dame. The social unrest can be explained in part by the increasing pressures of economic recession and the emergence of the far right as a mainstream but divisive political force; still, the level of passion that the law unleashed seems puzzling. A more profound explanation of that passion is that the law opened a deep faultline that has divided France throughout its modern history - the concept of its national identity. Contemporary France is troubled by frequent comparisons to the political ferment and disastrous turmoil of the 1930s. Diametrically opposed moral visions of national identity seem to recall, above all, the anneés noires, the 'dark years' of German Occupation when the Vichy regime attempted to regenerate France though its National Revolution while also pursuing a policy of collaboration. Social reform in France, particularly any reform relating to perceptions of national identity, is still today overshadowed by the legacy of Vichy's moral vision and its attempt to create a New Man for a New Order. This paper will explore that legacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What are the electoral impacts of perceptions of unemployment under different partisan persuasions of the government? Neither the literature on retrospective economic voting nor partisan voting has provided a compelling answer to this question. This paper addresses this puzzle by analyzing panel surveys and leveraging differences in government partisanship in two consecutive elections. I argue that negative evaluations of the employment situation induce voter transition to support a left-wing party under a right-wing government, but that such voter perceptions do not affect vote choice under a left-wing government. An analysis of a voter transition, using British Election Panel Study 1992–1997 and 1997–2001, reveals findings that support my argument. My argument suggests conditional partisan voting effects. Essentially, the effect of economic issues on vote choice is conditional on issue salience and which party "owns" the issue, namely, the varying levels of issue salience related to government partisanship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Julien Freund (1921–93) was a French sociologist and political theorist who taught at the University of Strasbourg in the 1960s and 1970s. Although he is the author of over two dozen books, Freund remained throughout his lifetime something of a marginal figure in his own country. Yet, strangely, Freund is now receiving more scholarly attention in France than ever before. The question is why? This paper attempts to provide an answer by looking at Freund's attempt to establish an alternative intellectual canon in France that was heavily indebted to the German tradition of political realism. The story begins with Freund's early relationship with Raymond Aron, and suggests, perhaps provocatively, that Freund is responsible for luring Aron back into his studies on Max Weber dating from the 1930s. It then moves on to explore Freund's relationship with Carl Schmitt. Freund became Schmitt's closest French friend and, for forty years, exhibited a veritable obsession with disseminating Schmitt's work in France. Finally, it suggests that recent attempts by those who wish to place Freund within a current tradition of French liberalism are mistaken. Instead Freund must be placed within a German Neue Rechte context, and specifically his desire to introduce the German tradition of political realism into France. In the end the article argues that the French Nouvelle Droite—with its stress on the cultural and ethnic foundations of the nation-state—pushed Freund's political thought in a decidedly anti-liberal and seemingly pseudo-fascist direction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Atlantis: Critical Studies in Gender, Culture & Social Justice / Études Critiques sur le Genre, la Culture, et la Justice is the property of Mount Saint Vincent University and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper engages with the notion of ideology, bringing together Laclau's theorisation of the specificity of the ideological, and Rancière's notion of aesthetic regimes. Ideology, I argue, works through what it makes available to the senses and what it makes to make sense. It is in this sense that it is an aesthetic affair. This argument is illustrated with an account of the so-called 'securitarian ideology' in France that characterises the repressive policies of the recent governments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The presidential election of 2012 produced a high turn-out. Only 20 percent of the electorate abstained. This significant mobilization, however, hides renewed social inequalities in political participation that seemed to have previously disappeared. Based on national and local data surveys, this paper shows that certain kinds of people are less likely to vote than the average citizen. While traditionally more prone to abstain than other voters, many young, poorly educated, and suburban people participated in the presidential election in 2007, but not in 2012. In this later case, they seem to have not been interested in the electoral campaign. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of security sector reform (SSR) was first formulated by UK development actors. Since 2008, France has officially adopted an SSR strategy and promoted the concept at the European level during the country's 2008 EU Presidency. However, what appears on paper to resemble full support from French institutions is in fact more complex. If the anglophone roots of the policy initiative do not seemingly explain its lack of institutionalization in the French context, it would appear that the difficulty faced by the French administration in finding a whole-of-government agreement on what the content of SSR should be, does. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper offers a translation of key texts by the contemporary Mouvement des Indigènes de la République (MIR) and its key intellectuals: Sadri Khiari and Houria Bouteldja. Following Khiari, post-colonial situations are best understood as recompositions: territorially mediated re-articulations of colonial pasts with other social relations. To respond to the complexities of this post-colonial recomposition, MIR propose an ambitious politics of 'autonomy' and 'mixity'. 'Autonomy' (externally in relationship to the state and organized politics and internally for feminist groups) is seen as an indispensable precondition for a socio-politically mixed, and potentially universalizing, political formation politics. More counter-colonial than post-colonial in orientation (Hallward), MIR attempt to give direction to three decades of revolt emanating from France's racialized popular neighbourhoods, including the uprising of 2005. I argue that MIR's interventions take up themes from the analyses by Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi and Suzanne and Aimé Césaire to make countercolonial critique 'live' in France today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mainly because the French parties in the twentieth century were weakly organized, their history does not fit well with any of the established schemas of party development. This paper seeks to understand their particular path by connecting it to the changing patterns of the country's associational life. Four different party models, based on types of associational network, are proposed. The paper then traces back how each type of party network emerged and gave rise to the corresponding party model with specific internal structures (discipline and leader-follower relations). We also discuss the impacts of these different associational (party) models on the functioning of the party system. Indeed, some of the major political crises in the twentieth century can be better understood with these impacts in mind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper assesses the views on European integration in the French Socialist Party (PS) expressed before the internal referendum on the European Constitutional Treaty on I December 2004. Using content analysis of 112 public statements that formed part of the preceding debate, I establish the ideological characteristics of support and opposition to the EU in the PS. This paper has three main aims. First, it considers the extent and nature of opposition to the Constitution in the PS. Second, it places the ratification debate within the context of wider ideological conflicts that oppose social democracy, socialism and left-liberalism. Third, it examines ideological differences within the 'no' camp in the PS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since France introduced the 'parity' law, the percentage of women candidates has increased significantly while the percentage of women elected has trailed behind. This makes it hard for the electorate to know how women candidates will translate into women elected, or to judge which party is most likely to honour its commitments to parity. This is particularly the case as parties often field women in the most challenging seats. This paper introduces a model to forecast how many women would be elected to the National Assembly under a variety of potential electoral outcomes. Using the example of the 2007 elections, the paper demonstrates how the conversion of candidates to seats can be forecast prior to the election in order to give a clearer indication of party behaviour towards women, as well as illuminating what the outcome would have been under a left-wing victory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the core issues in 'rethinking the Left in France' is the question of whether and how the Left in France can give renewed life to its basic values in the context of a transformed society. This paper analyses the historical relationship between the Left and the idea of community. It suggests some problems in the way in which the Left has conceptualized the idea of community. Those problems centre on the greater salience of difference, traditionally viewed with suspicion in the republican tradition inherited and developed by the French Left. A concept of community derived from the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy can be used to develop a revised and revived republicanism, a form of community appropriate to contemporary politics, thus contributing to a necessary rethinking of one of the French Left's most basic ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a report that addresses the challenges of government decentralization in France, which was intended to avoid overlapping responsibilities and improve transparency and accountability in local government finance. It first discusses the importance of local public finances and the main characteristics of the decentralization system adopted by the French government. It then explores several strategies that can help the country achieve successful government decentralization. For France to meet the challenges of decentralization, the author recommends the government to keep pressures on public spending under control, make sub-national governments accountable, and develop a finance information system to ease the evaluation of local government expenditure efficiency.

This paper assesses economic, political and national institutional explanations for continued resistance to the multidivisional form in France, Germany and the United Kingdom during the 1980s and 1990s. It finds that the economics of different diversification strategies play a significant but changing role in the structural choices of large corporations. The political interests of personal, banking and government owners are exercised variably. There remain strong national influences on structural choices, with resistance to the multidivisional form particularly pronounced in Germany. Overall, our results call for an increased contextual sensitivity in management research while acknowledging the possibility of convergent processes in business organization, represented here by the slow progress of the multidivisional firm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From 1988 to 1997, all French prime ministers launched administrative reform programs with numerous concerns for increasing efficiency, strengthening responsiveness, or redesigning political and administrative roles within the state. However, these initiatives have never led to radical and disruptive changes. The institutional legacy seems to have strongly constrained the politics of administration. What, then, is the meaning of launching administrative reforms within the French political power configuration, and how does it "fit" with the way leaders try to establish their political authority? This article provides two empirical studies of different prime ministers (Michel Rocard under the Mitterrand presidency and Alain Juppé under the Chirac presidency) that can explain the nature of the French governments' commitments to these issues. It argues that understanding administrative reforms requires a mixture of institutional and actor-centered explanations, because these policies are really leadership challenges to the preexisting institutional order. As such, they are reflexively shaped or constrained by what they try to control and define. This paper shows that for a French prime minister to define the administration as a problem while building his own leadership can jeopardize the resources he will get from that same bureaucratic administrative system. This "power-reform dilemma" may explain why administrative reforms have proven more politically effective as an instrument of order-affirming impulses rather than as a disruptive strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay traces the press coverage of the strike wave of 1936 which greeted the first Popular Front government in France. The strikes were represented in the press as both revolutionary events and joyous festivals, yet it is the festive image of the strikes which has persisted in most accounts of the Popular Front. However, the essay argues that this festive imagery emerged and circulated in a particular fashion: the imagery of the strikes was constituted by the evolving relationship between the strikers and the workers' organizations, and the festive imagery only appeared as the workers' organizations progressively gained control of the strike movement and attempted to curb it. Thus, the imagery of the joyous strikes operated within this suppression of militancy, as the figuring of relations between workers served to obscure the other relations defining the strikes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the characteristics of the ghost deputies of the French National Assembly, i.e. deputies who do not have any official recorded activity over a whole year. Using a rich dataset providing various information about all deputies from 1959 to 2012, the results indicate that the typical ghost deputy is an old man with a low level of schooling, member of a large party which does not support the government and who is elected in jurisdiction with a low level of political competition. However, personal characteristics are less and less correlated with performance over the years. Finally, ghost deputies face more difficulties to achieve reelection, but are penalized only at the first round, voters exclusively considering national factors at the second round. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines societal beliefs about the use of force in Israel, Italy, and France, with a particular focus on their role in civil-military relations and public opinions regarding casualties. Details on casualty aversion, casualty sensitivity, and political decision-making are presented. Topics discussed include the Israeli Defense Forces, mourning, sacrifice, legitimacy, and the presence of French military personnel in public life. The structure and culture of each country's military is also examined.

The idea of resilience is increasingly prominent across a wide range of policy areas. This contribution looks at the emergence of resilience in UK security discourse and compares this with the situation in France. It argues that although the term is being debated in France, it is considered to be an Anglo- Saxon import. This article suggests that use of the idea of resilience has more to do with particular forms of governance than with security. It develops this argument through the idea of neoliberal governmentality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author evaluates whether the idea of planning is still relevant in the present society. The author argues on the assumption that planning is not applicable in today's community because of the unpredictability of factors that shapes the perception of an individual and the society in general. The author discusses issues in Europe including the British Government's declaration of reduction in its public sector and the strikes in France caused by change in government pension provision policy.

This paper asks whether French non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have fallen into line with the trend towards partnership with the state that has marked the Northern non-profit sector, most notably Anglo-American NGOs, over the last two decades. It shows how French NGO-state relations were poor over the early post-colonial years. It then demonstrates how, over the global era, the French government has made overtures and how NGOs, particularly developmental NGOs (NGDOs), have embraced these legal, financial and consultative concessions, while refusing to see them as the basis of a mutually Consenting partnership. Finally, it explains the continuing lack of French NGDO-state rapport in terms of Resource Dependence theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an original way of testing the 'partisan hypothesis'. Building on the substantial literature on the party-policy link, we test this link with respect to issue attention, rather than spending or macroeconomic outcomes. We examine the evolution of issue attention through the systematic analysis of agenda setting of three major French political institutions: the President, the government and the National Assembly. Although our results point to partisan differentiation on some issues, the overall conclusion is that partisan differentiation is at best one factor of variation among others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The influence of the extreme right National Front (FN) party has grown over the past three decades and previous research has shown that the left and right parties have responded in various ways, most significantly by bringing the issue of immigration into the national agenda. This study demonstrates that right party legislators have responded to the rise of the immigration issue by proposing anti-immigrant legislation. The findings of this paper suggest legislators propose anti-immigrant legislation at greater frequencies when they represent departments with high concentrations of immigrants or high levels of FN support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper presents a natural experiment, comparing the effects of two-round (TR) and proportional representation (PR) voting rules in French cantonal and regional elections. A series of rigorous model estimations demonstrates that the two electoral types clearly produce distinct outcomes. TR systems bring about less extremist party voting, less party competition, and perhaps less vote turnout, when compared to PR systems. These findings call into question the lack of attention to TR effects, and the notion that TR is not really a distinct electoral form. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper outlines the origins and institutionalization process of French political science since 1945. It sketches the present state of the discipline, and it analyses recent trends that appear almost as a form of 'de-institutionalization'. Overall, the discipline is quite well entrenched and is independent in terms of recruitment with its own teaching and research branches. However, political scientists suffer from a relative lack of visibility in the public space in comparison with their colleagues from more prominent disciplines. In many fields French political science remains invisible at the international level, though this may change considerably in the years to come. The main element of uncertainty comes from the ongoing reforms, the redefinition of the partnership between universities, the Instituts d'Etudes Politiques and the CNRS, and the way the autonomy of universities will be implemented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this short paper is to build and estimate a model that explains and forecasts the vote received by the National Front at the first round of the French presidential elections (1988-2002 and 1988-2007) with local economic conditions and turnout. The model has been accurate in forecasting the elections of the past and we make ex post and ex ante forecasts taking into account the 2007 French presidential election. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By 2004, the so-called 'parity' law had been applied to a full cycle of French elections. The Presidential elections of 2007, which fielded a woman candidate for the first time in French history, at least partially an effect of the parity campaign, and the subsequent 2007 legislative elections have brought further insights into the workings of parity law. This paper considers the origins and outcomes to date of 'parity' in France, quantitatively, but also, in relation to a changing discourse. It argues that an ongoing redefinition of 'parity', seen initially as perverse 'French exception', reflects an increasing sense of the legitimacy of women's presence at the highest levels of politics and some opening up of the conceptions of French political representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview and characterisation of the rejection of the European Constitutional Treaty by a majority of voters in France's referendum held on 29 May 2005. Whilst pointing to the salience of political discontent with the incumbent right-wing government and some elements of the longstanding crisis in French national party politics, the analysis places the emphasis on the central role played by social issues in the referendum, the transposition at the European level of the mechanism of the evaluation by voters of traditional parties' performances and responsiveness to the country's social malaise and the unilateral termination by a majority of left-wing voters of the ‘social welfare and economic growth’ confidence pact that they had made with their national political elites on the occasion of the Maastricht referendum in 1992. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1999 and 2000 the French parliament passed a constitutional revision and a set of legislation with the aim of achieving parity of representation between men and women in France's elected assemblies. France was the first country in Europe to institute such radical reform to address the issue of women's under-representation in politics. The success of the parity reforms in achieving equal representation for women has been limited, however. This paper will discuss how and why the issue of parity progressed onto the French political agenda, and will identify the main factors which have limited the impact of these reforms. It will be argued that both the electoral system and the attitudes of political parties remain important obstacles to achieving true parity in elected institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I employ a ‘bottom-up’ approach to analyze efforts to curb exurban sprawl in cross-national perspective. Based on local housing and environmental data in a total of eleven French, German, and US urban regions, the analysis demonstrates that policies and institutions addressed to urban governance made more of a difference for outcomes than did federalism and other aspects of vertical integration at the heights of national states. This result highlights the importance both of local policy determinations and of the supralocal institutional infrastructures in which they nest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers a comparison of parliamentary voting on European issues in Great Britain and France. In this paper, the recent roll-call votes in the French National Assembly and the British House of Commons were examined to see whether European integration issues continue to dichotomize both left and right internally, and to identify whether these divisions break up the far left from the moderate left and the far right from the moderate right. It is posed that findings confirm that European issues split up both left and right internally in both legislative setting.

This article argues that the opposition between political and legal constitutionalism can be traced to a cleavage in what philosophers have called the 'social imaginary': the shared understandings that underpin social life. Since social imaginary understandings are by their nature nebulous and ill-defined, political and legal constitutionalism should not be thought of as competing theories or heuristic models, but—more abstractly—contrasting ways of imagining the political world. Drawing on historical and contemporary examples, I argue that my claim is supported by the way in which legal constitutionalism embedded itself as the governing idea in the United States and in France, and also by the failure of the 'new Commonwealth model of constitutionalism' to yield a genuinely distinctive alternative to political and legal constitutionalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The popularity of Ultramontanism and the political energy provided by Sacred Heart piety gave French Catholicism of the post-Commune era a militant posture, one that republican socialists saw as antagonistic to their political objectives. This article shows that socialists responded by emasculating their Catholic opponents. Drawing on the materialist tradition that emerged from the Enlightenment and Revolution, and highlighting the resignation and emotive nature of radical Catholic piety, republican socialists maintained that religious belief was evidence of inadequate virility. Speaking to the anxieties of the period, which included concerns about racial degeneration and the adequacy of France on the world stage, this gendering of epistemological convictions allowed socialists to argue for the exclusion of religion and the religious male from French politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

More than any other belligerent power, France relied heavily on the contribution of her colonies during the First World War. Thus, the triumph over the Central Powers and the culture(s) of victory which emerged from it were undeniably 'imperial'. But what did this mean for the postwar Empire? This article explores the extent to which victory was a disruptive force in France's Empire. It examines how actors of all ideological, social and ethnic backgrounds from across France's colonies articulated their own visions of how victory in the First World War should shape the future of the Empire. It considers their attempts to place the war into their broader narratives of the Empire, past, present and future and thus impose their own ideas of what a just postwar imperial order should look like. Drawing on examples from across the Empire, it underlines the extent to which victory in the First World War gave rise to competing and often opposing demands for a new settlement among colonial administrators, colonial citizens and colonial subjects. In doing so, it teases out the contradictory role played by imperial cultures of victory in simultaneously facilitating contestation of the colonial system and limiting the radicalism of such challenges to Empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article highlights the political uses of mining identity in the North of France. Topics discussed include differences in how the two left-wing parties approached industrial heritage in the wake of deindustrialization; political meaning of Marion Fontaine, mining identity that has fragmented as the old Socialist and Communist Parties; and preservation efforts of for the industrial heritage by the right-wing popular party Rassemblement National.

The most prominent theory accounting for variation of morality politics across Western Europe is the so-called Two Worlds framework. According to this approach, the presence or absence of a secular‒religious cleavage in national party systems strongly affects the degree of conflict intensity and the framing of morality policy issues. This article shows that the explanatory power of the Two Worlds model could be enhanced significantly by introducing a second analytical dimension that captures the institutional venue (party politics vs. parliamentary politics), in which moral conflicts take place. This is useful because there are instances in which a religious cleavage is lacking, but moral conflicts are nonetheless highly intense and party-based (thetraditionalistworld), and there are cases in which the religious cleavage formally exists, but moral conflicts are nonetheless resolved in the parliamentary arena (theunsecularworld). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the use of public-private partnership (PPP) and public procurement contracts in France. It outlines the impact of the "Big Bang" legislative reform of 2015-2016 on the contracts. Topics discussed include major shifts in definition and typology of PPP contractual schemes in the country, general features of the contractual schemes and a PPP contract to be a long-term global contract.

Based on qualitative research, this article aims to shed some light on the criticism of the functioning of French society by youths of North African origin influenced by a Salafist reading of Islam. The arguments put forward, which draw largely on a religious theme, must be taken seriously. However, the references to a "Salafised" world of meaning are not exclusive and they coexist with an attachment to other, more liberal values. We will therefore endeavour to determine whether the criticism expressed generates separatist attitudes or whether it leads to individual and collective strategies founded on a dual cultural allegiance. Without denying the ambivalences or weaknesses, it is necessary to accurately clarify the identity constructs and social trajectories of the working-class youths studied here. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article examines convergences and divergences between various expressions of communism, French republicanism, and pan-black solidarity in overseas France and among metropolitan communities of activists from the 1920s to the rise of the Popular Front against fascism in the mid-1930s. From the time of the first administrative reforms arising from France’s official anti-communist colonial policies in 1922, until the formation of the Popular Front in 1936, anticolonial activism and anti-revolutionary policy dialectically produced sites of judicialization, with agitators deliberately harnessing legal processes to contest the policies, practices and politics of imperial France, and French officials variously legislating against protest, including by extra-parliamentary decree. Experiments in anti-revolutionary legislation culminated in 1935, when the French Minister of the Interior collaborated with the Minister of the Colonies and governors of overseas territories to legislate against ‘acts of disorder or demonstrations against French sovereignty’ whether committed by French citizens, subjects, or protected persons, and regardless of their location. By the early to mid-1930s, legalists on the French left – whether Marxist or republican and in large part due to their involvement with anticolonial activist groups in overseas France – viewed extra-parliamentary legislation and judicial irregularity in overseas France as a sign of increasingly authoritarian French governance. Many joined forces to mobilize against what some agitators described as fascist tendencies in French governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The informal refugee camp in Calais, dubbed the ‘new Jungle’, reached an approximate population of ten thousand people in 2016. The settlement, despite these high numbers, did not receive aid from the French government or international aid agencies. As a response to the lack of institutional support, and given the squalid conditions of the camp, hundreds of volunteers and grassroots organisations took on the burden of delivering humanitarian aid and basic services in the Jungle. This grassroots humanitarian aid, which I call ‘volunteer humanitarianism’, has particular characteristics that will be explored. The article argues that volunteer humanitarianism can be interpreted as a symbol against the violent border practices across Europe and, because of its informality, provides an alternative to formal humanitarian aid. The article also shows that volunteer humanitarianism formed a connection between humanitarianism and activism that stands in tension with neoliberal governmentality. As the Jungle was demolished in October 2016, this article is a contribution to the history of the camp as well as a testimony of the volunteers’ work there. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]