French Politics, Culture & Society

In June 1998, France’s Aubry Law initiated the move to a 35-hour workweek, a process that became mandatory for all private companies with more than twenty employees in January 2000. The three-fold goal of the Aubry legislation has been to lower the level of unemployment in France, to introduce greater flexibility into French labor contracting, and to bolster France’s weakening labor unions. When it was announced, the project was greeted with skepticism, verging on ridicule, from the economic community. The Financial Times suggested that the law was “little more than symbolic.”1 Economist Paul Krugman declared it “conceptually confused.”

French efforts in lobbying for a “cultural exception” in world trade agreements have attracted much attention. Less noticed have been the long-standing French attempts to support the film production of individuals from around the world, for whom making films in their countries of origin is difficult for economic, political, and social reasons. One of France’s areas of predilection for such cinematographic support has been francophone sub-Saharan Africa, specifically countries that were once former colonies. Shortly after most African countries in the region became independent, France created the Ministry of Cooperation and Development to administer relations with the African states; an important part of French support consisted of helping develop cinematographic production.

In the spring of 2000, the Financial Times eagerly predicted that the world would be piloted by a new global generation of managers who, having been educated at business schools, share similar ideas and values.1 To this generation belong managers in start-up companies that provide goods and services online. These e-managers work with and on the Internet, which reaches worldwide instantly and redefines our concepts of time and place. Since emanagers have the whole world as their “playground,” they are likely to replace traditional nation-based feelings of belonging with new values and identities. French magazines went even further than the Financial Times, stating that since e-managers speak English and have adopted the American way of doing business, they would eventually Americanize French society.2 Or, rather, e-managers would turn France into a society that mirrored the stereotypes of American society that have been prevalent in France.

In the United States, the expression “affirmative action” generally refers to a wide array of measures set up at the end of the 1960s by executive agencies and the federal judiciary. These measures grant some (more or less flexible) kind of preferential treatment in the allocation of scarce resources—jobs, university admissions and government contracts—to the members of groups formerly targeted for legal discrimination (African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans, women, sometimes Asians).1 In France, by contrast, the main operational criterion for identifying the beneficiaries of affirmative action policies (in French, “discrimination positive”) is not race or gender,2 but geographical location: residents of a socioeconomically disadvantaged area will indirectly benefit from the additional input of financial resources allocated by state agencies to that area as a whole.

A man has all his moral value, according to us, only in the middle of his fellow citizens, in the city where he has always lived under the eyes of those citizens, watched, judged, and appreciated by them … but in general the displaced person, whom we call a vagabond, no longer has his moral value.

- Adolphe Thiers

Between the world wars, France attracted more immigrants per capita than any other country in the world. Roughly 3 million had settled in the Hexagon by 1931, seven percent of the total population according to official statistics. They came primarily from Italy, Poland, and Spain, but also Russia, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Rumania, political refugees and workers alike. France also welcomed a greater non-European minority than any other country on the continent. Well over a hundred thousand arrived, almost exclusively from North Africa, especially Algeria.1 The level of immigration rose so high so fast that many commentators began to worry about the threat of increased crime and miscegenation. Some even feared for the survival of French culture.

Marcel Gauchet, dans ce nouvel essai, poursuit la réflexion amorcée dans son livre-programme, Le Désenchantement du monde, sur la construction de la modernité politique et sur la « sortie de la religion », c’est-à-dire la rupture progressive avec l’idée d’un fondement religieux de l’ordre collectif, qu’elle a impliquée. Travaillant dans la même perspective théologico-politique, qui met en avant l’interdépendance des phénomènes politiques et religieux, il choisit ici de s’attacher à l’analyse des mutations récentes de la laïcité en France pour comprendre les transformations du modèle républicain qui fut le sien, et plus généralement saisir les questions qui travaillent la démocratie contemporaine.

This compact essay, deceptively short in length, is densely packed with complex philosophical analysis of the uniquely French experience of the changing relationships between the state and the individual.

Il est toujours hasardeux d’évaluer l’importance d’un livre à son format et à son nombre de pages. Ce serait en l’occurrence une lourde erreur que de sousestimer la portée de ce petit livre, sous le prétexte qu’il se présente comme la reprise écrite et apparemment « facile » d’une conférence donnée en mars 1996 dans le cadre du Cercle Condorcet. Mon sentiment est au contraire que cet ouvrage réalise, en 127 pages, une double performance intellectuelle et pédagogique. Il met d’abord à portée de lecteurs non nécessairement familiers des outils théoriques de la philosophie politique la thèse principale du livre majeur paru en 19851 quant au devenir de la religion dans les sociétés modernes. Il offre ensuite une perspective d’une cohérence lumineuse pour penser la mutation présente des idéaux et de la pratique de la démocratie : une mutation qui fait vaciller l’édifice de la laïcité à la française.

Whitney Walton The Virtuous Marketplace: Women and Men, Money and Politics in Paris, 1830-1870 by Victoria E. Thompson

Catherine Bertho Lavenir Marketing Michelin: Advertising and Cultural Identity in Twentieth-Century France by Stephen L. Harp

Robert O. Paxton France: The Dark Years, 1940-44 by Julian Jackson

Marianne in Chains by Robert Gildea

Gérard Grunberg François Mitterrand: The Last French President by Ronald Tiersky

Martin A. Schain The Dignity of Working Men by Michèle Lamont

Public Attitudes Toward Immigration in the United States, France and Germany by Joel S. Fetzer

Notes on contributors