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This chapter argues that the pervasive sense of national decline among French public opinion can only be appreciated if it is judged against the elevated height of state self-esteem over previous centuries. Since the stabilization of the political regime in the second half of the twentieth century, the state has regressed as the overarching and unifying political framework, reversing its traditional standing. Now, many of the traditional state culture’s assumptions are no longer valid, creating a disjunction between expectations about what the state should do and what it can do. While those who speak on behalf of the state endeavor to sustain the myth of its sovereignty, their credibility has become increasingly implausible as the long process of state-building has been unwinding. Thus, France remains exceptional in terms of its norms and ideas about the state, even if it is no longer exceptional in terms of the behavior of the state.

Attempts to simplify by dichotomizing the complexity of French political traditions, either in an attempt to achieve intellectual clarity or from a polemical urge to promote guilt or virtue by repulsion and association, have been numerous since the French Revolution. There have been more historically sensitive efforts to respect the variety within each component of the left/right duality. In particular, Rene Remond's distinction between three French rights - ultra-racist legitimist, Orleanist, liberal and Bonapartist nationalist - had much to commend it when first formulated in 1954. However, in later editions he sought to force Gaullism into this tripartite straightjacket while warning that “Historical rapprochements are normally only the most subtle form of anachronism.” A presupposition of this chapter's deliberate use of hindsight to see nineteenth-century Bonapartism through the twentieth-century phenomenon of Gaullism is that it allows us to offer a retrospective corrective to ill-considered attributions of either ignominious or glorious ancestry. While acknowledging that the Bonapartist nationalist right incorporated minority left-wing elements, Remond argued that dependence upon its predominantly right-wing support pushed it rightward under Napoleon, Louis Napoleon, Boulanger, and de Gaulle. He was prepared to accept that in theory Bonapartism “lent itself to many interpretations. Political Janus, its ambiguity allowed within limits some scope for adaptation. In 1849 it could, almost equally and with equal likelihood, have given birth to a left-wing or right-wing Bonapartism.”

There is a French national predisposition to describe as true in principle what the wide awake realise as unlikely to be true in practice. This is particularly the case of its constitutions, which prescribe norms rather than realities. Couched in abstractions that elevate clarity of aspiration way above vulgar practicalities, Article 1 of the Fifth Republic’s Constitution asserts that ‘France is an indivisible Republic (…)’ an affirmation that is made with all the more conviction because of the divisions which continue to bedevil French politics and society. Out of a desire to attain an undisputed national unity and community that evades its grasp, the French political system has subjected democratic institutions and practices to the stifling constraints of a statism disguised by the seductive appellation of Republic (Levy 2006, Introduction and Conclusion) (I had not anticipated that the title of my book, The One and Indivisible Republic, would be taken literally by some (Hayward 1974)).

The contested but inescapable concept of sovereignty is our starting point in an investigation of power struggles at the summit of the European Union (EU). Uneasy references to pooled, shared and split sovereignty collide with sovereignty’s connotation of the purported unity and indivisibility of a supreme coercive power. At the interface between law and politics, sovereignty is the focus of an ‘ongoing dialectic’ between them in a polycentric EU whose variable boundaries are non-exclusive territorially and where sovereignty is functionally limited (Walker 2003:20; cf. 22–4). The results are ‘constitutional collisions’ between ‘sovereignty-encroaching claims’ in a context of ‘contingency, ambiguity and disagreement’ with, ‘profoundly unforeseeable and unintended consequences’ (Walker 2003:26, 28). It is a constitutional discourse that dares not speak its name for fear that would formalise explicitly on open-ended process of ‘shifting alliances and competitions between different geopolitical strategies and different substantive policy aspirations’ of the member states (Walker 2003:27; cf. 30).

The Euro crisis catapulted the European Union (EU) into its most serious political crisis since its inception, leaving it simultaneously torn between opposing demands for more sovereignty and solidarity. In order to save the Euro and ultimately the European integration project itself, the EU and its core policy actors oscillated between partial disintegration, which prepared for the possible exit from the Eurozone of one or several highly indebted member states, and deeper integration in the form of a fiscal union that was agreed in principle in December 2012 by all 27 member states with the exception of Britain.

Solidarity is a moral or legal obligation towards strangers going beyond fraternity or friendship. It is derived from the Roman law concept of the joint liability of citizens for debt (obligatio in solidum) (Brunkhorst, 2005, p. 2; cf. pp. 55–6, 64). It signifies specific shared responsibility but does not necessarily imply that the responsibility is shared equally. It can be extended to a general citizen commitment to the community public good. In the late eighteenth century, Graeco-Roman civic solidarity was conflated with a secularised Judaeo-Christian conception of fraternity in the American and French constitutional rights of man and the citizen. These rights gradually became the egalitarian foundation of first the democratic state and then the welfare state as the normative basis of national unity.

Piecemeal power-sharing by nation statesmen has inconspicuously promoted incremental complex change over time, and this has produced outcomes of imprecise parentage. The result is a polycentric European Union of member-state elites making consociational confidential concessions lacking democratic legitimacy, which has prompted populist hostility. Public acquiescence is secured by an increasing tendency to lead from behind, which relies upon humdrum rather than heroic decision-making. Surreptitious integration through action traps that lead further than it is at first apparent, and successive enlargements that seem boundless have created uncertainty about community and purpose. Veto groups constrain the capacity for non-covert change. Federalist ambitions have been replaced by the implicit acceptance of confederal tension between limited integration and residual sovereignty.

Intellectuals have imparted polemical contentiousness to French political controversy. Zola's role in the Dreyfus case had a literary legacy on both the Left and Right, with Surrealists and Communists or individuals like Sartre on the Left and Barrès and Maurras on the Right being prominent. Mounier's Catholic anti-liberalism met its reassertion by Aron. Decolonization prompted intellectual activism but Benda made the case against commitment.

The slow motion retreat from peasant and artisan ruralism underpinned an institutional immobilism mastered by a new professional political class of meritocratic barristers and businessmen. Politicized industrial relations and prominence of anarcho-syndicalist militancy in the weak trade unions led to general strikes becoming a mobilizing myth. Anticlericalism pursued the separation of Church and State, while anti-Semitism exploded in the Dreyfus Affair.

Republican values embodied in the French model have lost credibility and await a crisis to shake protectionist France out of its lethargy.

In the desperate search for uniformity, the French moved from regime instability to government instability. The July Monarchy, the Second Republic, and the Second Empire are successively discussed, with the Third Republic attaining relative regime stability but administrative instability was endemic. The press oscillated between long periods of repressive censorship and ephemeral orgies of uninhibited subversion.

The Left/Right bipolarization oversimplifies fractionalized schisms often prompted by personal ambitions disguised as ideological dissensions. The extreme Right was exemplified by the Action Française and various fascist movements which were active during the Vichy regime. The latter prompted Gaullism's reassertion of heroic nationalism. Catholic parties competed for control of the right-centre with liberal conservatism. A populist extreme Right re-emerged in Le Pen's National Front.

Weak party and trade union organizations have been fragmented by fascination with revolutionary rhetoric despite recourse in practice to reformism. Following a contrast between anarchist outsiders and Radical insiders, the vicissitudes of partisan French socialism are recounted. The secular decline of the sectarian Communist Party has coincided with the collapse of Marxism's ideological hegemony.

Inspired by a revival of Tocqueville's liberalism, the critique of French political culture was launched by Aron, Hoffmann, Crozier, Furet, and Rosanvallon. However, it was from socialist reformists Delors and Rocard that the priority for civil society over statism was pursued politically, especially in the 1980s. Despite its impact, compared to that of capitalist globalization associational liberalism has petered out.

Rival French conceptions of political representation with electable citizens limited to property owners, were implemented in a context of political destabilization and class conflicts. Roman Catholicism and Gallic secularism engaged in hostilities and the Left/Right dichotomy became established. Administrative centralization was embodied in the Prefect, while national assimilation was forcefully pressed. Attempts at alliance with Britain took the fitful form of the Entente Cordiale.

British Approaches to Politics: the Dawn of a Self-Deprecating Discipline Contextual and Non-Contextual Histories of Political Thought Visions of Freedom: the Response to Totalitarianism The Critique of Individualism Pluralism, Revenant or Recessive? Comparative Politics Pressure Groups and Parties: A 'Haze of Common Knowledge' or the Empirical Advance of the Discipline? Electoral Systems, Elections and Public Opinion The Analysis of British Political Institutions British Public Administration, Dodo, Phoenix or Chameleon? Nations and Nationalism in British Political Studies The Study of Totalitarianism and Authoritarianism A British School of International Relations The Study of Politics as a Vocation

This volume deals with the intellectual response of academics in Britain to the political challenges of the twentieth century. The distinctive identity of the British approach to the modern study of politics was formed during the latter part of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, at a time when the fledgling social sciences were differentiating into separate disciplines. Part of this book traces some of the vicissitudes of this process by which the specifically academic study of politics parted company from its subject matter and from other disciplines. If the syndrome of approaches that coexisted within nascent British political science is to acquire some semblance of cultural coherence, this chapter contrasts it with others – notably those of the United States and France – because ‘on the recognition of difference depends the significance of the assertion of identity’.

In France, if everything did not necessarily begin with the state, it used almost always to end with the state. It has become increasingly evident that there has been a loss of state autonomy both internationally and in the context of European integration. Less generally accepted has been the loss of control in internal affairs, to the extent that these can still meaningfully be differentiated from external affairs. France has been — with Britain — the state least willing to concede that its authority has been circumscribed, leading to a widening gap between generalized assertions of sovereignty and the prosaic reality of piecemeal concessions. France strives to preserve a central role for its state, like other major European states: ‘They retain a nodal decision-making position but their action is more indirect, more discreet and more bartered.’1 In seeking to assess processes that are still working themselves out, it is necessary to go back beyond the recent past to more deep-seated characteristics of the French polity as a corrective to the errors induced by extrapolation from current trends, the besetting weakness of economic forecasting. Being incapable of anticipating the unforeseeable and on the assumption that past experience is a relatively reliable starting point in a dependent polity, we are faced with rival interpretations of that past.

Despite ritual assertions by governments of their intentions to act in ways that demonstrate their wish to make policy rather than merely respond to external constraints, their will and capacity to do so has, for the last quarter of a century, appeared increasingly dubious. Although this has been a general phenomenon, its impact upon the conception of the function and scope of state intervention has been especially dramatic in those countries that have traditionally had an imperious, state-centred style of politics, in terms of the norms, institutions and practices of their political systems. If one excludes the states that have emerged from the collapse of Communism in the former Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe, as well as those such as Spain and Portugal which had experienced prolonged periods of dictatorship, France has probably faced the most searching self-doubt about its model of state-economy relations.

The conflict between representative and direct democracy over which is the more authentic reflection of public opinion poses the tension between competing political leaders and a purported will of the people. The discredit of mediated party politics has led to increased recourse to referendums and to the emergence of social protest movements, notably extremists of left and right. The closed politics of the European Union, combined with the limited democratic legitimacy of its decision taking, have promoted a tendency towards demagogic unreality expressed through anti‐elitist populism.

In the 1990s there has been an increasingly widespread sense that the governing elites are losing touch with their peoples. leaders are no longer able to count upon the acquiescence of their citizens to which they were accustomed. The disenchantment has resulted in the loss of public support for the political institutions of both the individual European nation states and of the European Union. Taking elitism and populism as the opposite poles between which the political leaders need to steer, the contributors successively consider why there appears to have been a degeneration in the quality of elite leaders, with civil societies turning against their governments and the elite mediators between the powerless and the powerful. The agenda-setting role of the media, the rival appeals to representation and referendum, the problems encountered by political parties and organised interests, and the tensions between public demand and economic constraints are all discussed. The chapters suggest that the need to lead from the front rather than from behind remains indispensable in elitist democracies.

One reason why it is so difficult to compare political systems is that the subject matter of political activity and the way it is studied by political scientists varies from country to country. Having scrutinised her political and governmental systems, the various public policies pursued and some salient political controversies that have marked recent years, let us consider what is special about the way political activity is studied in France. We shall focus upon three aspects of the role of the state in French political life. First, the pivotal place of the state institutions — government, Civil Service, Parliament, judiciary, police, armed forces — and of law-making has meant that the Anglo — American practice of focusing upon society is a misleading starting point for political science enquiries. Far from it being necessary to reintroduce a neglected state dimension into the study of French politics, it has if anything occupied too much space to the exclusion of the less formal aspects of the political process. Second, what has given French political science its status as a subject of relevance to those exercising power is that it has had a closer relationship to statecraft than in Britain or even the USA. Primary concern with practical problems and public administration have influenced both the methodology used and the subjects that are considered to be most worthy of investigation because they are useful. Instead of a speculative and descriptive emphasis derived from the impact of philosophy and history upon British political science, there has been a stress upon ‘applied politics’ derived principally from the study of law. Third, when the focus shifts from the administrators to the administered in a context of competitive party politics, French political scientists have devoted a disproportionately large amount of attention to public opinion and to voting behaviour. Here the legacy of political geography, as pioneered in the early twentieth century by Andre Siegfried, has proved enduring when treated with greater quantitative sophistication.

Two hundred years after the French Revolution, that historic upheaval still remains an indispensable initial point of reference for an understanding of contemporary French politics. This is because it simultaneously symbolises both the unifying founding myth of the democratic republic and the divisive dualism between a revolutionary ‘Left’ and a counter-revolutionary ‘Right’. Their substance has subsequently changed but their forms have stubbornly survived intact. The Revolution’s long-term effect was to promote the cultural, social, political, administrative and economic integration of the country, proclaimed as realities long before they were achieved (if they can yet be said to be fully achieved). The creation of a unitary state — asserted to be ‘one and indivisible’ — entitled to wield legitimate power because it was based upon the sovereign popular will, was the principal instrument of unification. Administrative centralisation, military conscription and national education were intended to achieve uniformity, if not equality. Fraternity was celebrated in secular festivals, at which the nation worshipped itself and its national symbols, its flag and its anthem. Liberty was to be guaranteed to all by a constitutionally enshrined declaration of individual rights, as well as by the ability of all citizens to be represented in a National Assembly which would make laws that would apply to all.

THE COMPARATIVE STUDY OF NATIONAL ECONOMIC PLANNING WAS fashionable in the 1960s at a time when the French model had become extremely popular in Western Europe. However, analyses of planning experience were then generally inhibited by a preoccupation with descriptions of the formal planning procedures rather than with any serious attempt to assess anything but the economic consequences of planning. (Andrew Shonfield's classic study of Modern Capitalism was a conspicuous exception to this criticism.) Attention was focused on plans as official documents rather than upon a set of planning practices that might be only remotely related to any formal statement of public policy. Planning was viewed too much from the forecasting end rather than the implementation end and the rationality of objectives became more of a preoccupation than the practical problems of translating them into reality. A normative model of efficient decision-making was all too often assumed to be readily transposable because of a wholly unrealistic notion of the ways in which organizations work.

FRANCE IS A COUNTRY IN WHICH PAST POLITICAL BATTLES ARE IN the forefront of the minds of those who are engaged in contemporary conflicts. The March 1977 elections in the 36,383 communes of metropolitan France could evoke memories of 1877 and 1947. The thirtieth anniversary of the Gaullist landslide of 1947 was directly concerned with local elections as such, while 1877 recalled the defeat of President MacMahon's attempt to impose his choice of government a century ago, which finally settled the struggle between Left and Right over the regime of the Third Republic. Anticipation that the regime established by General de Gaulle would be put to the searching test of a clash between the President and a Left-wing Assembly majority converted in some people's minds the March 1977 local clections into a prologue to this decisive national confrontation.

(1980). Trade union movements and their politico‐economic environments: A preliminary framework. West European Politics: Vol. 3, Trade Unions and Politics in Western Europe, pp. 1-9.

While the National Plan ceased until 1981 to be the framework within which the French government fits both its own medium-term policy decisions and attempts to co-ordinate in a comprehensive way the activities of the public and private sectors, it nevertheless still offers the best source from which one may discover how the government of the day perceives the current economic situation and the prospects facing the country. Consequently, if we wish to understand the state of mind of the official decision-makers, confronted by the post-recession problems of the 1970s, an indispensable starting point and permanent point of reference is the 1978 Report on the Adaptation of the Seventh Plan. Published in September 1978, just halfway through the duration of the Seventh Plan (1976–80), it helps us to understand the considered response of the tandem of President Giscard d’Estaing and Prime Minister Barre, drastically modifying the over-optimistic Seventh Plan’s presuppositions of 1975–6 and preparing the way for the Eighth Plan’s stoic summons to batten down the hatches for a stormy long haul. Though the Planning Commissariat (CGP) documents pay some passing attention to the views of other economic actors, we shall have to go beyond their increasingly governmentalised confines to consider how these other political and economic actors responded both to the 1970s’ recession and to the French government’s own attempts to cope with its consequences.