Abstract
What makes France different? More than two decades have elapsed since François Furet, Jacques Julliard, and Pierre Rosanvallon published a much-debated book which argued that the ‘French exception’ had come to an end. Writing in the wake of President Mitterrand’s re-election, they maintained that the advent of ‘the republic of the centre’, enjoying consensual legitimacy across the political spectrum, marked the end of the political divisions that had afflicted France ever since 1789.1 They predicted that this ‘banalization of French politics’ would also slowly erode the other central characteristics that made France different: the dirigiste centralized state; France’s sense of its universal mission as the depository of the values of enlightenment rationalism; and the republican model of citizenship, which recognizes only individual and not communal identities in the public square. Their book was written with an eye to the imminent celebrations of the bicentenary of the French Revolution, in which Furet, in particular, would play a leading role: indeed, in one sense La République du Centre simply reiterated the key message Furet had propounded in a famous work published a decade before: the Revolution is over.2 But, a generation on, the nature of French exceptionalism continues to be debated by political scientists and commentators on both sides of the Channel and on both sides of the Atlantic, which suggests that Furet and his collaborators were at best premature in their analysis.3
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Notes
François Furet, Jacques Julliard and Pierre Rosanvallon (eds), La République du Centre. La Fin de l’exception française (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1988).
François Furet, Penser la Révolution (Paris: Gallimard, 1978).
Emmanuel Godin and Tony Chafer (eds), The French Exception (Oxford: Berghahn, 2005);
Jill Lovecy, ‘Comparative politics and the Fifth French Republic: “la fin de l’exception francaise”’, European Journal of Political Research 21 (1992), 385–408;
Jill Lovecy, ‘The end of French exceptionalism?’, West European Politics 22 (1999), 205–24; Sylvain Allemand (ed.), L’Exception française: mythe ou réalité?, Sciences Humaines Hors-série no. 46 (Sept. – Nov. 2004);
Gilles Lazuech, L’Exception française: le modèle des grandes écoles à l’épreuve de la mondialisation (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 1999); ‘La France est-elle un pays d’exception?’, Le Monde 15 April 2002.
Christine Garin, ‘M. Chevènement défend l’exception culturelle’, Le Monde, 5 Apr.l 2002. See also Michelle Vovelle, Les Jacobins: de Robespierre à Chevènement (Paris: La Découverte, 2001).
Rod Kedward, La Vie en Bleu: France and the French since 1900 (London: Penguin, 2006), ch. 20 (titled ‘The Challenge of Plurality’).
Quoted by Cécile Laborde, Critical Republicanism: The Hijab Controversy and Political Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 38.
Mona Ozouf, “‘Jacobin”: fortune et infortune d’un mot’, in Ozouf, L’Ecolede la France. Essais sur la Révolution, l’utopie et l’enseignement (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), p. 75.
J.E.S. Hayward, Governing France: the one and indivisible republic, 2nd edn (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1983), p. 22.
Sieyès, ‘What is the Third Estate?’, in Political Writings: including the debate between Sieyès and Tom Paine in 1791, ed. and trans. Michael Sonenscher (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003), p. 156.
Many examples could be cited; for example, Stefano Mannoni, Une et Indivisible. Storia dell’accentramento amministrativo in Francia, 2 vols (Milan: Giuffrè, 1994–6), where vol. 1 part 1 deals with ‘Unification and pluralism: the strategy of the monarchy and its contradictions’;
and Jack Hayward, Fragmented France: Two Centuries of Disputed Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 10, 77.
Harold J. Laski, ‘The pluralistic state’, The Philosophical Review 28 6 (Nov. 1919), 570, fn 1.
Georg Gurwitsch [sic], ‘Otto v. Gierke als Rechtsphilosoph’, Logos: Internationale Zeitschrift für Philosophie der Kultur Bd XI (1922), 92–3.
For the influence of Proudhon and Bergson on Gurvitch: see Phillip Bosserman, Dialectical Sociology: An Analysis of the Sociology of Georges Gurvitch (Boston, Mass.: Porter Sargent, 1968), pp. 9, 11–12; for Gurvitch’s references to Duguit and Hauriou: Gurwitsch, ‘Otto v. Gierke’, 131.
Laski introduced American political scientists to the work of Duguit: Harold J. Laski, ‘A note on M. Duguit’, Harvard Law Review, 31 1 (1917), 186–92. Harold and Frida Laski translated one of Léon Duguit’s key works: Law in the Modern State (New York: Huesch, 1919).
Cécile Laborde, Pluralist Thought and the State in Britain and France, 1900–25 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), p. 185 n. 12.
F. W. Maitland, ‘Moral personality and legal personality’ [1903], reprinted in State, Trust and Corporation, edited by David Runciman and Magnus Ryan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 66.
Harold Laski, Authority in the Modern State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1919);
Léon Duguit, Law in the Modern State, translated by Frida and Harold Laski (London: Allen & Unwin, 1921).
On Duguit: H. S. Jones, The French State in Question: Public Law and Political Argument in the Third Repubic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press., 1993), ch. 6, and Laborde, Pluralist Thought, ch. 5.
André Tardieu, La Révolution à refaire. Le souverain captif (Paris: Flammarion, 1936), p. 126.
Joseph W. Evans, ‘Jacques Maritain and the problem of pluralism in political life’, Review of Politics 22 (1960), 307–23;
Jacques Maritain, ‘The concept of sovereignty’, American Political Science Review 44 (1950), 343–57, esp. 356.
See also Bernard Lavergne, Suffrage universel et autorité de l’Etat: leur conciliation effective par le pluralisme électoral (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1949).
Stanley Hoffmann, ‘Aspects du régime de Vichy’, Revue Française de Science Politique 6 (1956), 44–59; Robert C. Lieberman, ‘What to read on lobbying’, Foreign Affairs 26 May 2009.
René Rémond, ‘Droite et gauche dans le catholicisme français contemporaine’, Revue française de Science politique 8 (1958), 535.
Robert Derathé, ‘L’homme et l’Etat. A propos d’un livre récent de Jacques Maritain’, Revue française de Science politique 2 (1952), 141.
Raymond Aron, Sociologie des sociétés industrielles: esquisse d’une théorie des régimes politiques (Paris: Centre de Documentation Universitaires, 1959).
V. Giscard d’Estaing, Démocatie française (Paris: Fayard, 1976), ch. 6, especially pp. 96–7, 99, 104.
Benjamin Constant, ‘The spirit of conquest and usurpation and their relation to European civilization’ [1813], in Constant, Political Writings, ed. Biancamaria Fontana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 73.
On the curious position of liberalism in French political culture: David Howarth and Georgios Varouxakis (eds), Contemporary France: An Introduction to French Politics and Society (London: Arnold, 2003), pp. 18–23.
H. S. Jones, ‘French liberalism and the legacy of the Revolution’, in Carolina Armenteros, Tim Blanning, Isabel DiVanna and Dawn Dodds (eds), Historicising the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008), pp. 189–205.
Raymond Aron, ‘Les intellectuels français et l’utopie’, Preuves 50 (Apr. 1955), 9–10. We are grateful to Dr Iain Stewart for this reference.
In saying this, we are of course aware of Lucien Jaume’s argument that an important strand in French liberalism privileged the rights of the state over those of the individual. Rosanvallon too writes of the ‘liberal recasting of Jacobinism’ by Guizot, Thiers, and others. Lucien Jaume, L’Individu effacé ou le paradoxe du libéralisme français (Paris: Fayard, 1997), esp. ch. 2,
and Pierre Rosanvallon, The Demands of Liberty: Civil Society in France since the Revolution. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 8.
For example: Alexandre Ledru-Rollin, De la Décadence de l’Angleterre, 2 vols (Paris: Escudier, 1850);
Stuart Jones, ‘Taine and the nation-state’, in Stefan Berger, Mark Donovan and Kevin Passmore (eds), Writing National Histories: Western Europe since 1800 (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 85–96;
Alan Peter Russell Pitt, ‘The evolution of liberal thought under the Third French Republic c.1860–c.1940’, University of Cambridge PhD thesis, 1995).
On this, see the contributions to Eugenio F. Biagini (ed.), Citizenship and Community: Liberals, Radicals and Collective Identities in the British Isles 1865–1931 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
The distinction was developed extensively in the political science literature of the 1970s, when neo-corporatist politics were at their zenith: P. C. Schmitter, ‘Still the century of corporatism’, Review of Politics 36 (1974), 85–131;
Alan Cawson, ‘Pluralism, corporatism and the role of the state’, Government and Opposition 13 (1978), 178–98;
Frank L. Wilson, ‘French interest group politics: pluralist or neocorporatist?’, American Political Science Review 77 (1983), 895–910;
John T.S. Keeler, ‘Situating France on the pluralism-corporatism continuum: a critique of and alternative to the Wilson perspective’, Comparative Politics 17 (1985), 229–49.
Hayward, Fragmented France, v; Sudhir Hazareesingh (ed.), The Jacobin Legacy in Modern France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 6.
Rosanvallon, Demands of Liberty, pp. 186–91; Maurice Agulhon, Le Cercle dans la France bourgeoise, 1810–1848: Etude d’une mutation de sociabilite’ (Paris: Colin, 1977).
Vincent Wright, ‘Introduction: la fin du dirigisme?’, Modern and Contemporary France 5 (1997), 151.
For example, Th. Ferneuil, Les Principes de 1789 et la science sociale (Paris: Hachette, 1889).
For a novel approach: Odile Rudelle, ‘La gauche, les institutions et le gaullisme’, in Histoire des gauches en France, eds G. Candar and J.-J. Becker (Paris: La découverte, 2005 [2004]) ii, pp. 507–23.
Henry Bérenger in L’Action, 16 May 1910, quoted in Julian Wright, ‘Social reform, state reform, and Aristide Briand’s moment of hope in France, 1909–1910’, French Historical Studies 28 (2005), 32.
R. H. Soltau, French Political Thought in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Russell and Russell, 1931), p. 492.
Mona Ozouf, Composition française: retour sur une enfance bretonne (Paris: Gallimard, 2009).
Harold J. Laski, The Grammar of Politics (London: Allen and Unwin, 1925), p. 238.
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© 2012 Julian Wright and H.S. Jones
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Wright, J., Jones, H.S. (2012). A Pluralist History of France?. In: Wright, J., Jones, H.S. (eds) Pluralism and the Idea of the Republic in France. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137028310_1
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