Contemporary France

Abstract

This textbook is designed mainly for use by students in departments of French Studies or European Studies, i.e. those who in addition to learning the French language are studying the social and political structure of modern France. We also hope, however, that it will be of interest to students in politics departments, perhaps by dint of its rather different approach. Our book aims to analyse the working of the French political system and set this into its social and economic context. We give considerable attention to the latter, in fact, and spend less time than some authors on the formal mechanisms of government decision-making; in our view, these are more than adequately analysed in much recent work on French politics (see bibliography) which fits into the ‘government and politics’ tradition, rather than into the ‘politics and society’ approach undertaken here. A second feature of the book is that its approach is historical. This reflects not simply the fact that its authors all teach modern French history, but also a methodological belief common to them all, viz. that a social system can only be understood in any of its constituent parts—political, cultural or whatever—if analysed in terms of its historical development. For this reason we begin with a general historical outline of developments in key sectors—social and economic structures, domestic politics, foreign relations— since 1945. After this, specific aspects of the social and political system are then analysed in turn, again from a historical point of view. It is hoped that thus equipped students will be able to engage in further exploration of French politics and society. Our book therefore embodies a third distinctive feature, a critical bibliography. At the risk of sacrificing quantity for quality, we have tried to give some idea of what various secondary works involve (degree of difficulty, type of analysis, etc.), rather than giving the undifferentiated list in alphabetical order that some textbooks use. As we assume that any serious student of contemporary France will have a reading knowledge of the language, no special effort has been made to single out material in English.