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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.

For centuries, France has struggled to impose unity upon its diverse components. Its leaders have defined its identity by opposition to the ‘Anglo-Saxons’: first England, then Britain and the USA. After exploring France's self-image by contrast with the Anglo-American counter-identity, Part One deals with the unfinished revolution from 1789 to 1878 when the Third Republic achieved relative stability. After examining the variety of symbolic representations of French exceptionalism in search of democratic legitimacy and national unanimity, the enduring divisions in French society are explained in their ideological, social, religious, territorial, and political aspects. Emphasis is given to writers and intellectuals in expressing these cleavages. Part Two relates French political paralysis to the slowness of socio-economic modernization and the polarizing role of intellectuals in perpetuating varieties of Left and Right battles over who personified anti-France. The adversarial character of French party politics fluctuated between the rhetorical revolutionary and reactionary extremes and the conservative or reformist realities. The colonial and international role of France is described, while the protectionist aversion to competitive global capitalism results in reluctant adaptation to forces beyond French control.

The contrast between an urbanizing and industrializing society and an enduring peasant and artisan population is emphasized, while the business-political elite networks achieved maximum power by the late 19th century. The clerical-anti-clerical struggle for control of education results in the victory of secularism. Committed historians shaped the dominant political culture, although writers (Chateaubriand, Balzac, Stendhal, Lamartine, Baudelaire, Hugo) and artists (Delacroix, Daumier, Courbet) were influential.

National disunity has been perpetuated and exacerbated by competing interpretations of the French Revolution despite effort to inculcate a common political culture. The authoritarian clericalism of Maistre, the Protestant liberalism of Madame de Stael and Constant, the political scientism of the Ideologues, the industrial positivism of Saint-Simon and Comte, the Republican political economy of Say, and the historicist Orleanism of the Doctrinaires are successively confronted.

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.

The interaction between French Anglophilia and Anglophobia is traced particularly in the 18th and 19th centuries. The USA is regarded as a modernized Britain and especially since the 20th century has superseded it as the main Anglo-Saxon ‘other’. The arguments for and against the American antithesis are analysed.

Civil discord and imperial aspirations gave the armed forces a powerful place in French politics. The officer corps has played a crucial part in ensuring domestic order, as well as fighting foreign and colonial wars, notably in Algeria. Francophonia has been used to preserve a neo-colonial economic and cultural influence, especially in Africa. The switch to a European Union emphasis has been based on Franco-German concerted amity.

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’.

Vincent Wright, a towering figure in political science, was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 1995. He had specialised in the history of French public administration and, on moving to Oxford to an Official Fellowship at Nuffield College, turned more to comparative politics. Wright was co-founder of the journal West European Politics. Obituary by Jack Hayward FBA and Sudhir Hazareesingh.

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.

All European countries have long been confronted with the expansion and balkanisation of public policy making, and, since the early 1980s, all have had to confront a series of policy challenges, with convergent pressures for change in most sectors. These administrative pressures are of an interlinked ideological, technological, financial, fiscal, external and internal economic and political nature. These pressures are mediated, in large part, by domestic actors, and amongst the most important of these actors are those located at the level of the core executive.

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.

Avant la commission Delors, l’Union europeenne reglementait de facon minimale la politique sociale car les gouvernements des Etats membres consideraient leurs Etats-providence comme des elements essentiels de la cohesion nationale. Les Etats membres ont ensuite agi de facons diverses pour eviter de mettre en œuvre les reglementations europeennes et ont egalement utilise leur influence au sein du Conseil pour les bloquer ou les modifier en amont. La Cour de justice de l’Union est parvenue a instaurer une certaine uniformite des reglements de la politique sociale. Entre les « partenaires sociaux », un recours accru a la marcheisation, a la dereglementation et a l’autoregulation a favorise les employeurs et les contribuables au detriment des salaries et des citoyens en general. L’austerite financiere imposee a entraine une precarisation variable des services de sante et de retraite dans les differents pays.

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.

This research into the career guidance experiences of nurses during their training was undertaken as an exploratory study upon which a series of larger studies will subsequently be based. Additionally, it contributed to a national cohort study of the careers of newly qualified registered general nurses. One hundred and twelve nurses were involved in the development and testing of questions for a postal questionnaire to be used in the cohort study of careers. Some problems encountered when investigating career guidance by questionnaire are described, in the light of which a revised research design is proposed and the career guidance experiences of 31 nurses presented. Twenty-one aspects of guidance were investigated, covering information and advice about applying for first post, post-basic courses and longer-term plans.

L’antiliberalisme est profondement enracine dans la culture politique francaise, a droite comme a gauche. Alors que la politique economique s’est eloignee des principes affiches, passant de la planification nationale a une acceptation honteuse du marche et de la privatisation, les partisans a gauche d’un socialisme liberalise ont ete incapables de convaincre le Parti socialiste. A droite, des tentatives peu convaincues de reformer le modele social francais ont ete suivies par une therapie de choc qui s’est rapidement heurtee a une resistance entrainant une retraite tactique desordonnee. Une politique au coup par coup d’intervention de l’Etat, motivee par le patriotisme economique, persiste.

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.

This article assesses the meaning of corporatism and asks whether this state form is likely to be successfully implemented in Britain and France. Concentrating on the period after 1970, the authors argue that the role of the trade unions, along with the financial and business sectors, can act as a constraint on the successful implementation of this solution to the problems facing advanced capitalist economies. It is contended that both weak and fragmented trade unions (as in France), as well as defensively strong but undisciplined and fragmented trade unions (as in Britain), can undermine the search for corporatist solu tions. The logic of this argument is then clear: There are severe intra-class obstacles to the successful implementation of corporatism. Neither Britain nor France possesses the disciplined or hierarchically structured trade unions that are necessary for the successful institutionalization of corporatism.

This paper is concerned with the output end of the policy process. It focuses upon the question of whether central government has changed the «mix» of tools by a change of emphasis as between high and low constraint tools, why such changes may have occurred and discusses the implications of the application of different mixes of tools. The increasing reliance upon contractual agreements in France is contrasted with the increasing use of legislation in Britain to achieve central objectives. The changing mix of instruments in Britain poses problems of enforcement in the pursuit of local expenditure control while the use of lower constraint tools in France might be expected to improve the coordination of central with local priorities. The hypothesis that there is a general trend from low to high constraint policy instruments among advanced industrial societies is rejected. The conclusion arrived at is that while inherited policy instruments are being adapted to carry out new tasks and are being used more vigorously, new policy instruments are not generally being utilised to undertake old tasks., Dans cet article relatif à la phase ultime du processus politique, les auteurs étudient les changements intervenus dans le type d'instruments utilisés par les gouvernements centraux pour la mise en oeuvre de leurs politiques ; sont examinées les raisons pour lesquelles ces gouvernements tendent à privilégier des instruments de plus ou moins forte contrainte ainsi que les conséquences de l'utilisation de combinaisons différentes de tels moyens. L'emploi de plus en plus fréquent de procédures de type contractuel en France est ainsi opposé au développement d'interventions de nature réglementaire en Grande-Bretagne ; les méthodes employées en matière de contrôle des dépenses locales entraînent certaines difficultés lors de la mise en oeuvre de la politique du gouvernement britannique, alors que l'utilisation d'instruments de moindre contrainte semble, en France, devoir favoriser une meilleure coordination des priorités définies aux niveaux local et central. L'hypothèse selon laquelle existerait une tendance générale à l'utilisation d'instruments plus contraignants dans les sociétés industrielles ne peut être confirmée. Pour conclure, les auteurs soulignent que si les instruments hérités du passé sont parfois adaptés et utilisés avec plus de vigueur qu'auparavant pour l'application de mesures nouvelles, aucun instrument nouveau de contrainte n'est mis en place dans le cadre de politiques traditionnelles., Hayward Jack, Page Edward. Instruments de mise en œuvre des politiques gouvernementales et relations centre-périphérie en Grande-Bretagne et en France. In: Politiques et management public, vol. 3, n° 1, 1985. Le management public entre les politiques nationales et les stratégies des organisations publiques. Actes du Premier Colloque International Paris - 26,27,28 septembre 1984 - (Première partie) Préparés par Guy Terny, sous la direction de Guy Terny . pp. 81-105.

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.