French Politics, Culture & Society

Although it is not much mentioned in the scholarly literature, the school shows up as an important motif in both volumes of Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America. Tocqueville distinguished between civic education, which he saw as crucially important to the survival of democracy, and scholastic education, which could threaten it. There is a tension between these educations, which becomes clearer upon noticing Tocqueville's support for the political doctrine of freedom of education, which was so important in French politics during the July Monarchy (1830-1848). The source of this tension lies in Tocqueville's understanding of the American social condition and decentralized administration as being amenable to civic education, while centralized France precluded it. This tension is mediated, the article suggests, by Tocqueville's perception of the essential religiosity of French society.

The Paris police faced considerable problems in trying to identify migrant workers who, during the Algerian War, provided a support base for the Front de libération nationale. In order to overcome the failings of manual card-index systems (fichiers) the Préfecture of Police experimented in 1959-62 with IBM punch-card machines. The origin of these powerful identification techniques can be traced back to the inter-war statistical services headed by René Carmille. Although such methods were banned after the Liberation because of their repressive potential, they were discretely revived to track Algerians. Although the experiment proved successful, the proliferation of numerous decentralized fichiers continued to make the process of identifying wanted Algerians slow and cumbersome and this enabled FLN clandestine networks to survive intact to the end of the Algerian War. However, while rapidly superceded by true computers, the punch-card experiment was a precursor of contemporary, high-speed "Panoptican" systems and the computer driven" "révolution identitaire".

This article explores French attitudes about race during and after the years of the National Front's breakthrough by looking at French films and film reviews on the topic of interracial couples. In a country in which antiracists have been reluctant to legitimize the concept of race by talking about it, but in which the far Right has made gains by proclaiming its own views on race, French film-makers in the 1980s and after broached the topic in numerous films, but they often did so in ways that avoided controversy or serious reflection on current French racism. French critics of both French and American films featuring interracial couples also sidestepped the most explosive issues, revealing a disinclination to discuss a troubling and divisive concept, but also a persistent belief that racism remained an American problem and obsession.

In this article, we propose a definition of the elusive "French model" of societal success and explore its usefulness for understanding the forces shaping France's future. This model, we suggest, remains "statist-republicanist": its democracy revolves around the idea of republicanism, while its economy continues to rely heavily on market regulation and public intervention. We assess France's model of societal success, which requires exploring the country's long-term assets and liabilities for human development. We argue, first of all, that France relies on a combination of a high fertility rate, an excellent health care system, a low level of income inequalities, and "de-carbonized growth"; second, that it continues to have a major liability, namely, a shadow French model of cultural membership that sustains segregation and discrimination; and third, that it experiences an important decoupling between its profound socio-economic transformations, on the one hand, and its political discourse and representations of the polity, on the other.

"Youth" was once defined as the 15 to 24 year old age group. Today in France one sees a "first youth" (dependent on family and school) and a "second youth" in their twenties sharply divided between a successful elite with top degrees (or family wealth) and a highly marginalized workingclass. Between these extremes, a middle group often experiences frustration and anomie when their university degrees fail to launch the careers they desired. A "third youth" of thirty-somethings has also emerged still dependent on their families and the state. The French corporatist welfare regime, moreover, makes women, immigrants, and the young structural outsiders who must compete harder than Caucasian middle-aged men for jobs. Setbacks early in life in the labor market have long-term consequences (scarring effects) both for individuals and for the birth cohort as a whole. The political consequences are difficult to forecast, but much of the recent political volatility in France can be traced to these generational dynamics and failure to integrate youth since the late 1970s.

The evolution of French culture from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century is described as a succession of three "cultural configurations": humanist (or literary/philosophical), scientific/organic, and industrial. The transformation of the culture is linked to changes in the educational system in response to France's altered place in the global order after 1945. French attitudes toward, and internal critiques of, the shifting cultural hegemony are examined as both causes and consequences of these evolving configurations.

The French carbon tax was to become in 2010 the centerpiece of the country's new climate change mitigation strategy. After a heated public debate, the Constitutional Council, France's higher constitutional law body, censored the executive's proposal, which in turn, in the aftermath of a severe electoral defeat, announced the indefinite postponement of the carbon tax. This article tries to make sense of this important sequence in French contemporary public life by reviewing its different facets: environmental economics, political economy, constitutional law, and finally politics.

John Shovlin Reimagining Politics After the Terror: The Republican Origins of French Liberalism by Andrew Jainchill

Jann Matlock The Great Stink of Paris and the Nineteenth-Century Struggle against Filth and Germs by David S. Barnes

Christine Haynes The New Bibliopolis: French Book Collectors and the Culture of Print, 1880-1914 by Willa Z. Silverman

Caroline Ford An Empire Divided: Religion, Republicanism, and the Making of French Republicanism, 1880–1914 by J. P. Daughton

Martha Hanna Race and War in France: Colonial Subjects in the French Army, 1914-1918 by Richard S. Fogarty

Harry Gamble The Moroccan Soul: French Education, Colonial Ethnology, and Muslim Resistance, 1912-1956 by Spencer D. Segalla

Julian Wright Shades of Indignation: Political Scandals in France, Past and Present by Paul Jankowski

Clifford Rosenberg Liberté, égalité, discriminations: L’‘Identité nationale’ au regard de l’histoire by Patrick Weil

Cheryl B. Welch Critical Republicanism: The Hijab Controversy and Political Philosophy by Cécile Laborde

Katherine C. Donahue Judging Mohammed: Juvenile Delinquency, Immigration, and Exclusion at the Paris Palace of Justice by Susan J. Terrio

Abstracts