French environmental politics.

This article examines the French environmental movement as a product of two main structures of French political life: the centralized French technocratic state and the major parties as they exist in the current phase of French politics. The expansion of the state into new areas of life, and the failure of the political parties to act as intermediaries between national governments and citizenry, to serve as channels for organized conflict resolution, has stimulated the proliferation of citizens' groups which, deliberately bypass the parties and the state to articulate demands for better environmental quality. It is this failure of traditional political institutions that has generated what the author argues to be in the eyes of French analysts a particularly American solution, and in the eyes of American political analysts a very French solution. It is American in that it seeks to avoid questions of class, class-consciousness and collective versus private ownership of the means of production, and in that it is avowedly antistatist. It is French in that it has very quickly gone beyond a focus on site preservation, on reducing pollution, nuisance, disamenity, and other negative externalities to focus on restructuring French society in fundamental ways and that the route towards that social restructuring is political.