French Politics, Culture & Society

The interwar years have been characterized as a “watershed” in the history of French Catholicism,1 and it is not hard to see why. The Church had experienced the first decades of the Third Republic as a time of trial and persecution. World War I, however, gave believers reason to look forward to a brighter future. The republican establishment had welcomed the political representatives of Catholic opinion into the Union sacrée. The distress of soldiers and war widows had nourished a revival of popular faith.2 With the return of peace, the Catholic laity plunged into an associational activism of unprecedented proportions. The vaulting edifice of voluntary bodies they constructed reenergized the faith and at the same articulated a Catholic countervision of the proper constitution of la cité.

Kader was there on 17 October 1961—at the Madeleine metro station at about 6:30 in the evening. He was also there at the Palais des Sports three days after the demonstration, and for 33 days at the police department’s Identification Center at Vincennes. In 1981, when Kader gave this testimony to Libération, he was still “there”—in France—living in the same worker’s dormitory that had been his home in 1961. After being held in a camp in Algeria, he had returned to the country where he felt humiliated and where he had been tortured, because his family had been killed and his political allies exiled. He was not bitter. “We were at war.” Who is this “we”?

Le système français de retraite présente de façon typique, voire caricaturale, les caractéristiques des systèmes continentaux de protection sociale, qualifiés de conservateurs et de corporatistes par Gosta Esping-Andersen2. Ce système d’assurance vieillesse, financé en répartition, vise au maintien du revenu des salariés et garantit des prestations relativement généreuses aux travailleurs mais se soucie peu des plus pauvres ou de ceux (surtout celles) aux carrières discontinues et aux faibles revenus. Ce système, obligatoire, n’est pas géré directement par l’État mais par les partenaires sociaux, représentants de ceux qui cotisent et bénéficient du système. Dans la mesure où chaque catégorie professionnelle a tenu a conserver son propre régime de retraite, le système est très fragmenté.

In December 1996, the European Union gave its authorization to sell transgenic corn for consumption and cultivation in Europe. Some EU memberstates, notably Austria and Italy, refused to allow any imports of genetically modified organisms (“GMOs” or “OGM” in French). Resistance of that sort was unexpected from France. In Europe, France was originally the country most interested in advancing research and applications in the area of agricultural biotechnology. Before GMOs became a matter of public controversy, France led Europe in deliberate release trials.

Le premier tour de l’élection présidentielle française de 2002 a semblé confirmer en l’amplifiant la crise multiforme du système politique français : crise de la représentation, crise institutionnelle et crise du système de partis.

Once again, Martinique confounds by voting. In 2002, incumbent president Jacques Chirac obtained his highest final result throughout all of France— Metropolitan and overseas—in this département français d’Amérique (DFA). Chirac’s otherwise overwhelming score for the Republic as a whole—82 percent— was modest compared with the 96 percent he obtained in Martinique.

Jacques Julliard, ed., La Mort du Roi: Un essai d’ethnographie politique comparée (Paris: Gallimard, 1999).

David A. Bell Qu’est-ce qu’un Français? Histoire de la nationalité française depuis la Révolution by Patrick Weil

Judith Stone To Be a Citizen: The Political Culture of the Early French Third Republic by James R. Lehning

K.H. Adler Vichy in the Tropics: Pétain’s National Revolution in Madagascar, Guadeloupe, and Indochina, 1940-44 by Eric T. Jennings

Tyler Stovall Childhood in the Promised Land: Working-Class Movements and the Colonies de Vacances in France, 1880-1960 by Laura Lee Downs

Donald Reid Workers’ Participation in Post-Liberation France by Adam Steinhouse

Mark Kesselman Pour une critique du jugement politique: Comment repolitiser le jeu démocratique by Dick Howard

Michael S. Lewis-Beck Ces Français qui votent Le Pen by Nonna Mayer

Notes on contributors