France

As the mood of crisis deepened in the 1930s, so did the intensity of the challenge to old values, bringing forth men of frankly fascist temper, such as Robert Brasillach, and brutally nihilistic literary experimenters, such as Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Other writers continued to create works in the older tradition, including the supple, sensual explorations of (Sidonie-Gabrielle) Colette; the social commentary of Roger Martin du Gard, Georges Duhamel, Jules Romains, and François Mauriac; the Neoromantic novels of André Malraux, preaching a modern gospel of heroic activism; the first writings of Jean-Paul Sartre; and the essays of Emmanuel Mounier, who was to inspire the new Catholic left after World War II. France since 1940 Wartime France

The German victory left the French groping for a new policy and new leadership. Some 30 prominent politicians—among them Édouard Daladier and Pierre Mendès-France—left for North Africa to set up a government-in-exile there; but Pétain blocked that enterprise by ordering their arrest on arrival in Morocco. The undersecretary of war in the fallen Reynaud cabinet, Charles de Gaulle" class="md-crosslink">General Charles de Gaulle, had already flown to London and in a radio appeal on June 18, 1940, summoned French patriots to continue the fight; but few heard or heeded his call in the first weeks. It was to Pétain, rather, that most of the nation looked for salvation. The Vichy government

Parliament met at Vichy on July 9–10 to consider France’s future. The session was dominated by Pierre Laval, Pétain’s vice premier, who was already emerging as the strongman of the government. Laval, convinced that Germany had won the war and would thenceforth control the Continent, saw it as his duty to adapt France to the new authoritarian age. By skillful manipulation, he persuaded parliament to vote itself and the Third Republic out of existence. The vote (569 to 80) authorized Pétain to draft a new constitution. The draft was never completed, but Pétain and his advisers did embark on a series of piecemeal reforms, which they labeled the National Revolution. Soon the elements of a corporative state began to emerge, and steps were taken to decentralize France by reviving the old provinces. In the early stages of Vichy, Pétain’s inner circle—except for Laval and a few others—was made up of right-wing traditionalists and authoritarians. The real pro-fascists, such as Jacques Doriot and Marcel Déat, who wanted a system modeled frankly on those of Hitler and Mussolini, soon left Vichy and settled in Paris, where they accepted German subsidies and intrigued against Pétain.

In December 1940 Pétain dismissed Laval and placed him briefly under house arrest. Laval had offended Pétain and his followers by his arrogance and his obvious taste for intrigue. His critics charged him also with attempting to bring Vichy France back into the war in alliance with the Germans. Both Laval and Pétain had accepted Hitler’s invitation to a meeting at Montoire on October 24, 1940, and, during the weeks that followed, the French leaders had publicly advocated Franco-German “collaboration.” Whether Laval hoped for a real Franco-German alliance remains somewhat controversial. If so, it was a futile effort because Hitler had no interest in accepting France as a trusted partner; “collaboration” remained a French and not a German slogan. Hitler tolerated the temporary existence of a quasi-independent Vichy state as a useful device to help police the country and to collect the enormously inflated occupation costs imposed by the armistice.

Laval was succeeded by another prewar politician, Pierre-Étienne Flandin, and he, in turn, by Admiral François Darlan, who was intensely anti-British and an intriguer by nature who followed a devious path that involved continuing efforts at active collaboration with the Germans. Hitler, meanwhile, concentrated on draining France of raw materials and foodstuffs that were useful for the conduct of the war.

In April 1942 Pétain restored Laval to power, partly under German pressure. Laval retained that post until the collapse of Vichy in 1944. His role was increasingly difficult because the terrible drain of the war in the Soviet Union caused the Germans to increase their exactions. The Germans were short of manpower for their factories, and Laval, under heavy pressure, agreed to the conscription of able-bodied French workers, allegedly in return for the release of some French prisoners of war. He also assumed the task of repressing the French underground movement, whose activities hampered the delivery of supplies and men to Germany. After the war, Laval and his friends were to argue that he had played a “double game” of limited collaboration to protect France against a worse fate.

Most of Vichy’s remaining autonomy and authority was destroyed in November 1942, in direct consequence of the Anglo-American landings in North Africa. Vichy troops in Morocco and Algeria briefly resisted the American invasion, then capitulated when Admiral Darlan, who happened to be visiting Algiers at the time, negotiated an armistice. On November 11 Hitler ordered his troops in the occupied zone to cross the demarcation line and to take over all of France. The Vichy government survived, but only on German sufferance—a shadowy regime with little power and declining prestige. The Resistance

Vichy’s decline was paralleled by the rise of the anti-German underground. Within weeks of the 1940 collapse, tiny groups of men and women had begun to resist. Some collected military intelligence for transmission to London; some organized escape routes for British airmen who had been shot down; some circulated anti-German leaflets; some engaged in sabotage of railways and German installations. The Resistance movement received an important infusion of strength in June 1941, when Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union brought the French Communist Party into active participation in the anti-German struggle. It was further reinforced by the German decision to conscript French workers; many draftees took to the hills and joined guerrilla bands that took the name Maquis (meaning “underbrush”). A kind of national unity was finally achieved in May 1943, when de Gaulle’s personal representative, Jean Moulin, succeeded in establishing a National Resistance Council (Conseil National de la Résistance) that joined all the major movements into one federation.

De Gaulle’s original call for resistance had attracted only a handful of French citizens who happened to be in Britain at the time. But, as the British continued to fight, a trickle of volunteers from France began to find its way to his headquarters in London. De Gaulle promptly established an organization called Free France and in 1941 capped it with a body called the French National Committee (Comité National Français), for which he boldly claimed the status of a legal government-in-exile. During the next three years, first in London and then (after 1943) in Algiers, he insisted on his right to speak for France and on France’s right to be heard as a Great Power in the councils of the Allies. His demands and his manner irked Churchill and Roosevelt and caused persistent tension. The U.S. government unsuccessfully attempted in 1942 to sidetrack him in favour of Henri Giraud" class="md-crosslink">General Henri Giraud, who immediately after the Allied landings in North Africa was brought out of France to command the French armies in liberated North Africa and to assume a political role as well. De Gaulle arrived in Algiers in May 1943 and joined Giraud as copresident of a new French Committee of National Liberation. By the end of the year he had outmaneuvered Giraud and emerged as the unchallenged spokesman for French resisters everywhere. Even the Communists in 1943 grudgingly accepted his leadership. Liberation

When the Allied forces landed in Normandy on June 6, 1944, the armed underground units had grown large enough to play a prominent role in the battles that followed—harassing the German forces and sabotaging railways and bridges. As the Germans gradually fell back, local Resistance organizations took over town halls and prefectures from Vichy incumbents. De Gaulle’s provisional government immediately sent its own delegates into the liberated areas to ensure an orderly transfer of power. On August 19 Resistance forces in Paris launched an insurrection against the German occupiers, and on August 25 Free French units under General Jacques Leclerc entered the city. De Gaulle himself arrived later that day, and on the next he headed a triumphal parade down the Champs-Élysées. Most high-ranking Vichy officials (including Pétain and Laval) had moved eastward with the Germans; at the castle of Sigmaringen in Germany they adopted the posture of a government-in-exile.

De Gaulle’s provisional government, formally recognized in October 1944 by the U.S., British, and Soviet governments, enjoyed unchallenged authority in liberated France. But the country had been stripped of raw materials and food by the Germans; the transportation system was severely disrupted by air bombardment and sabotage; 2.5 million French prisoners of war, conscripted workers, and deportees were still in German camps; and the task of liquidating the Vichy heritage threatened to cause grave domestic stress. An informal and spontaneous purge of Vichy officials or supporters had already begun in the summer of 1944; summary executions by Resistance bands appear to have exceeded 10,000.

A more systematic retribution followed. Special courts set up to try citizens accused of collaboration heard 125,000 cases during the next two years. Some 50,000 offenders were punished by “national degradation” (loss of civic rights for a period of years), almost 40,000 received prison terms, and between 700 and 800 were executed. The Fourth Republic

Shortly after his return to Paris, de Gaulle announced that the citizens of France would determine their future governmental system as soon as the absent prisoners and deportees could be repatriated. That process was largely completed by midsummer 1945, soon after Germany’s defeat, whereupon de Gaulle scheduled a combined referendum and election for October. Women, for the first time in French history, were granted suffrage. By an overwhelming majority (96 percent of the votes cast), the nation rejected a return to the prewar regime. The mood of the liberation era was marked by a thirst for renovation and for change.

New men of the Resistance movement dominated the constituent assembly, and the centre of gravity was heavily to the left: three-fourths of the deputies were Communists, Socialists, or Christian Democrats who had adhered to the new party of the Catholic left—the Popular Republican Movement (Mouvement Républicain Populaire). Constitution of the Fourth Republic

It soon became clear that the apparent unity forged in the Resistance was superficial and that the new political elite was sharply divided over the form of the new republic. Some urged the need for greater stability through a strong executive; others, notably the Communists, favoured concentrating power in a one-house legislature subject to grassroots control by the voters. De Gaulle remained aloof from this controversy, though it was obvious that he favoured a strong presidency. In January 1946 de Gaulle suddenly resigned his post as provisional president, apparently expecting that a wave of public support would bring him back to power with a mandate to impose his constitutional ideas. Instead, the public was stunned and confused, and it failed to react. The assembly promptly chose the Socialist Félix Gouin to replace him, and the embittered de Gaulle retired to his country estate.

The assembly’s constitutional draft, submitted to a popular referendum in May 1946, was rejected by the voters. A new assembly was quickly elected to prepare a revised draft, which in October was narrowly approved by the voters. De Gaulle actively intervened in the campaign for the second referendum, denouncing the proposed system as unworkable and urging the need for a stronger executive. His ideas anticipated the system that later was to be embodied in the constitution of the Fifth Republic (1958). Political and social changes

The structure of the Fourth Republic seemed remarkably like that of the Third; in actual operation it seemed even more familiar. The lower house of parliament (now renamed the National Assembly) was once more the locus of power; shaky coalition cabinets again succeeded one another at brief intervals, and the lack of a clear-cut majority in the country or in parliament hampered vigorous or coherent action. Many politicians from the prewar period turned up once again in cabinet posts.

Yet outside the realm of political structure and parliamentary gamesmanship there were real and fundamental changes. The long sequence of crises that had shaken the nation since 1930 had left a deep imprint on French attitudes. There was much less public complacency; both the routines and the values of the French people had been shaken up and subjected to challenge by a generation of upheaval. Many of the new men who had emerged from the Resistance movement into political life, business posts, or the state bureaucracy retained a strong urge toward renovation as well as to a reassertion of France’s lost greatness.

This altered mood helps to explain the economic growth that marked the later years of the Fourth Republic. The painful convalescence from the ravages of war was speeded by massive aid from the United States and by the gentle persuasion (and ample credits) of Jean Monnet’s Planning Commissariat (Commissariat Général du Plan), adopted in 1947. A burst of industrial expansion in most branches of the economy began in the mid-1950s, unmatched in any decade of French history since the 1850s. The rate of growth for a time rivaled that of Germany and exceeded that of most other European countries. The only serious flaw in the boom was a nagging inflationary trend that weakened the franc. Short-lived coalition cabinets were incapable of taking the painful measures needed to check this trend. Colonial independence movements

A less fortunate aspect of the national urge to reassert France’s stature in the world was the Fourth Republic’s costly effort to hold the colonial empire. France’s colonies had provided de Gaulle with his first important base of support as leader of Free France, and, as the war continued, they had furnished valuable resources and manpower. The colonial peoples, therefore, now felt justified in demanding a new relationship with France, and French leaders recognized the need to grant concessions. But most of these leaders, including de Gaulle, were not prepared to permit any infringement on French sovereignty, either immediately or in the foreseeable future. For a nation seeking to rebuild its self-respect, the prospect of a loss of empire seemed unacceptable; most of the French, moreover, were convinced that the native peoples overseas lacked the necessary training for self-government and that a relaxation of the French grip would merely open the way to domination by another imperial power. The constitution of 1946 therefore introduced only mild reforms: the empire was renamed the French Union, within which the colonial peoples would enjoy a narrowly limited local autonomy plus some representation in the French parliament.

This cautious reform came too late to win acceptance in many parts of the empire. The situation was most serious in Southeast Asia, where the Japanese had displaced the French during World War II. Japan’s defeat in 1945 enabled the French to regain control of southern Indochina, but the northern half was promptly taken over by a Vietnamese nationalist movement headed by the communist Ho Chi Minh. French efforts to negotiate a compromise with Ho’s regime broke down in December 1946, and a bloody eight-year war followed. In the end, the financial and psychological strain proved too great for France to bear, and, after the capture of the French stronghold of Dien Bien Phu in 1954 by the Vietnamese, the French sought a face-saving solution. A conference of interested powers at Geneva that year ended the war by establishing what was intended as a temporary division of Vietnam into independent northern and southern states. Two other segments of Indochina, the former protectorates of Laos and Cambodia, had earlier been converted by the French into independent monarchies to preserve some French influence there.

On the night of October 31, 1954, barely six months after the fighting in Indochina ended, Algerian nationalists raised the standard of rebellion. By 1958 more than a half million French soldiers had been sent to Algeria—the largest overseas expeditionary force in French history. France’s determination to hold Algeria stemmed from a number of factors: the presence of almost a million European settlers, the legal fiction that Algeria was an integral part of France, and the recent discovery of oil in the southern desert. Fears that the rebellion might spread to Tunisia and Morocco led the French to make drastic concessions there; in 1956 both of these protectorates became sovereign states.

The long and brutal struggle in Algeria gravely affected the political life of the Fourth Republic and ended by destroying it. A vocal minority in France openly favoured a negotiated settlement, though no political leader dared take so unpopular a position. Right-wing activists, outraged at what they saw as the spread of defeatism, turned to conspiracy; both in Paris and in Algiers, extremist groups began to plot the replacement of the Fourth Republic by a tougher regime, headed by army officers or perhaps by General de Gaulle.

These plans had not yet matured when a cabinet crisis in April–May 1958 gave the conspirators a chance to strike. On May 13, when a new cabinet was scheduled to present its program to the National Assembly, activist groups in Algiers went into the streets in an effort to influence parliament’s vote. By nightfall they were in control of the city and set up an emergency government with local army support. De Gaulle on May 15 announced that he was prepared to take power if called to do so by his fellow citizens. Two weeks of negotiations followed, interspersed with threats of violent action by the Algiers rebels. Most of the Fourth Republic’s political leaders reluctantly concluded that de Gaulle’s return was the only alternative to an army coup that might lead to civil war. On June 1, therefore, the National Assembly voted de Gaulle full powers for six months, thus putting a de facto end to the Fourth Republic. The Fifth Republic

During his years of self-imposed exile, de Gaulle had scorned and derided the Fourth Republic and its leaders. He had briefly sought to oppose the regime by organizing a Gaullist party, but he had soon abandoned this venture as futile. Back in power, he adopted a more conciliatory line; he invited a number of old politicians to join his cabinet, but, by naming his disciple Michel Debré head of a commission to draft a new constitution, de Gaulle made sure that his own ideas would shape the future. This draft, approved in a referendum in September by 79 percent of the valid votes cast, embodied de Gaulle’s conceptions of how France should be governed. Executive power was considerably increased at the expense of the National Assembly. The president of the republic was given much broader authority; he would henceforth be chosen by an electorate of local notables rather than by parliament, and he would select the premier (renamed prime minister), who would continue to be responsible to the National Assembly but would be less subject to its whims. In the new National Assembly, elected in November, the largest block of seats was won by a newly organized Gaullist party, the Union for the New Republic (Union pour la Nouvelle République; UNR); the parties of the left suffered serious losses. In December de Gaulle was elected president for a seven-year term, and he appointed Debré as his first prime minister. The Fifth Republic came into operation on January 8, 1959, when de Gaulle assumed his presidential functions and appointed a new government.

The new president’s most immediate problems were the Algerian conflict and the inflation caused by the war. He attacked the latter, with considerable success, by introducing a program of deflation and austerity. As for Algeria, he seemed at first to share the views of those whose slogan was “Algérie française”; but, as time went by, it became clear that he was seeking a compromise that would keep an autonomous Algeria loosely linked with France. The Algerian nationalist leaders, however, were not interested in compromise, while the die-hard French colonists looked increasingly to the army for support against what they began to call de Gaulle’s betrayal. Open sedition followed in 1961, when a group of high army officers headed by General Raoul Salan formed the Secret Army Organization (Organisation de l’Armée Secrète; OAS) and attempted to stage a coup in Algiers. When the insurrection failed, the OAS turned to terrorism; there were several attempts on de Gaulle’s life. The president pushed ahead nevertheless with his search for a settlement with the Algerians that would combine independence with guarantees for the safety of French colonists and their property. Such a settlement was finally worked out, and in a referendum (April 1962) more than 90 percent of the war-weary French voters approved the agreement. An exodus of European settlers ensued; 750,000 refugees flooded into France. The burden of absorbing them was heavy, but the prosperous French economy was able to finance the process despite some psychological strains.

The Algerian crisis sped the process of decolonization in the rest of the empire. Some concessions to local nationalist sentiment had already been made during the 1950s, and de Gaulle’s new constitution had authorized increased self-rule. But the urge for independence was irresistible, and by 1961 virtually all the French territories in Africa had demanded and achieved it. De Gaulle’s government reacted shrewdly by embarking on a program of military support and economic aid to the former colonies; most of France’s foreign-aid money went to them. This encouraged the emergence of a French-speaking bloc of nations, which gave greater resonance to France’s role in world affairs.

The Algerian settlement brought France a respite after 16 years of almost unbroken colonial wars. Prime Minister Debré resigned in 1962 and was replaced by one of de Gaulle’s closest aides, Georges Pompidou. The party leaders now began to talk of amending the constitution to restore the powers of the National Assembly. Faced by this prospect, de Gaulle seized the initiative by proposing his own constitutional amendment; it provided for direct popular election of the president, thus further increasing his authority. When his critics denounced the project as unconstitutional, de Gaulle retaliated by dissolving the assembly and proceeding with his constitutional referendum. On October 28, 62 percent of those voting gave their approval, and in the subsequent elections (November) the Gaullist UNR won a clear majority in the assembly. Pompidou was reappointed prime minister.

When de Gaulle’s presidential term ended in 1965, he announced his candidacy for reelection. For the first time since 1848 the voting was to be by direct popular suffrage. De Gaulle’s challengers forced de Gaulle into a runoff, and his victory over the moderate leftist François Mitterrand in the second round by a 55–45 margin was closer than had been predicted but sufficed to assure him of seven more years in power. Although de Gaulle’s leadership had not ended political division in France, his compatriots could not ignore the achievements of his first term. Not only had he disengaged France from Algeria without producing a civil war at home, but he could also point to continuing economic growth, a solid currency, and a stability of government that was greater than any living French citizen had known.

The mid-1960s were the golden years of the Gaullist era, with the president playing the role of elected monarch and respected world statesman. France had adjusted well to the loss of empire and to membership in the European Common Market (later the European Community), which brought the country more benefits than costs. De Gaulle could now embark on an assertive foreign policy, designed to restore what he called France’s grandeur; he could indulge in such luxuries as blocking Britain’s entry into the Common Market, ejecting North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces from France, lecturing the Americans on their involvement in Vietnam, and traveling to Canada to call for a “free Quebec.” He continued the Fourth Republic’s initiative in developing both nuclear power and nuclear weapons—the so-called force de frappe. His foreign policy enjoyed broad domestic support, and the French people also seemed content with the prosperity and order that accompanied his paternalistic rule.

Beneath the surface, however, basic discontent persisted and was startlingly revealed by the crisis that erupted in May 1968. Student disorders in the universities of the Paris region had been sporadic for some time; they exploded on May 3, when a rally of student radicals at the Sorbonne became violent and was broken up by the police. This minor incident quickly became a major confrontation: barricades went up in the Latin Quarter, street fighting broke out, and the Sorbonne was occupied by student rebels, who converted it into a huge commune. The unrest spread to other universities and then to the factories as well; a wave of wildcat strikes rolled across France, eventually involving several million workers and virtually paralyzing the nation. Prime Minister Pompidou ordered the police to evacuate the Latin Quarter and concentrated on negotiations with the labour union leaders. An agreement calling for improved wages and working conditions was hammered out, but it collapsed when the rank-and-file workers refused to end their strike.

By the end of May various radical factions no longer concealed their intent to carry out a true revolution that would bring down the Fifth Republic. De Gaulle seemed incapable of grappling with the crisis or of even understanding its nature. The Communist and trade union leaders, however, provided him with breathing space; they opposed further upheaval, evidently fearing the loss of their followers to their more extremist and anarchist rivals. In addition, many middle-class citizens who had initially enjoyed the excitement lost their enthusiasm as they saw established institutions disintegrating before their eyes.

De Gaulle, sensing the opportune moment, suddenly left Paris by helicopter on May 29. Rumours spread that he was about to resign. Instead, he returned the next day with a promise of armed support, if needed, from the commanders of the French occupation troops in Germany. In a dramatic four-minute radio address, he appealed to the partisans of law and order and presented himself as the only barrier to anarchy or Communist rule. Loyal Gaullists and nervous citizens rallied round him; the activist factions were isolated when the Communists refused to join them in a resort to force. The confrontation moved from the streets to the polls. De Gaulle dissolved the National Assembly, and on June 23 and 30 the Gaullists won a landslide victory. The Gaullist Union of Democrats for the Republic (Union des Démocrates pour la République [UDR]; the former UNR), with its allies, emerged with three-fourths of the seats.

The repercussions of the May crisis were considerable. The government, shocked by the depth and extent of discontent, made a series of concessions to the protesting groups. Workers were granted higher wages and improved working conditions; the assembly adopted a university reform bill intended to modernize higher education and to give teachers and students a voice in running their institutions. De Gaulle took the occasion to shake up his cabinet; Pompidou was replaced by Maurice Couve de Murville. De Gaulle evidently sensed the emergence of Pompidou as a serious rival, for the prime minister had shown toughness and nerve during the crisis, while the president had temporarily lost his bearings. The economy also suffered from the upheaval; austerity measures were needed to stabilize things once more.

Although normalcy gradually returned, de Gaulle remained baffled and irritated by what the French called les événements de mai (“the events of May”). Perhaps it was to reaffirm his leadership that he proposed another test at the polls: a pair of constitutional amendments to be voted on by referendum. Their content was of secondary importance, yet de Gaulle threw his prestige into the balance, announcing that he would resign if the amendments failed to be approved. Every opposition faction seized upon the chance to challenge the president. On April 27, 1969, the amendments were defeated by a 53 to 47 percent margin, and that night de Gaulle silently abandoned his office. He returned to the obscurity of his country estate and turned once more to the writing of his memoirs. In 1970, just before his 80th birthday, he died of a massive stroke. His passing inspired an almost worldwide chorus of praise, even from those who up to then had been his most persistent critics. France after de Gaulle

De Gaulle’s departure from the scene provoked some early speculation about the survival of the Fifth Republic and of the Gaullist party (the UDR); both, after all, had been tailored to the general’s measure. But both proved to be durable, although his successors gave the system a somewhat different tone. Pompidou won the presidency in June 1969 over several left and centre rivals. He adopted a less assertive foreign policy stance and in domestic affairs showed a preference for classic laissez-faire, reflecting his connections with the business community.

The turn toward a more conservative, business-oriented line contributed to a revival of the political left, which had been decimated by the aftershocks of the events of May 1968. Mitterrand, leader of a small left-centre party, took advantage of the change in political climate. In 1971 he engineered a merger of several minor factions with the almost moribund Socialist Party and won election as leader of the reinvigorated party. He then persuaded the Communists to join the Socialists in drafting what was called the Common Program, which was a plan to combine forces in future elections and in an eventual coalition government.

Unexpectedly, in April 1974 President Pompidou died of cancer. Mitterrand declared his candidacy as representative of the united left, while the conservatives failed to agree on a candidate. The Gaullists nominated Prime Minister Jacques Chaban-Delmas, but a sizable minority of the UDR broke ranks and instead declared support for a non-Gaullist, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, who was the leader of a business party, the Independent Republicans (Républicains Indépendants). Giscard won over Chaban-Delmas in the first round and narrowly defeated Mitterrand in the runoff.

Despite his conservative connections, the new president declared his goal to be the transformation of France into “an advanced liberal society.” He chose as prime minister the young and forceful Jacques Chirac, leader of the Gaullist minority that had bolted the UDR in Giscard’s favour. The new leadership pushed through a reform program designed to attract young voters: it reduced the voting age to 18, legalized abortion within certain limits, and instituted measures to protect the environment. But the course of reform was stalled by the oil crisis of 1973, brought on by events in the Middle East. Industrial production slowed, unemployment rose, and inflation threatened.

As discontent grew, Giscard’s leadership was challenged by his ambitious prime minister, Chirac. Open rivalry between the two men led Giscard to dismiss Chirac in favour of Raymond Barre, a professional economist. Chirac retaliated by persuading the divided and disheartened Gaullists to transform the UDR into a new party, the Rally for the Republic (Rassemblement pour la République; RPR), with himself as its head. He also gained an additional power base by standing successfully for election to the revived post of mayor of Paris.

These factional conflicts on the right opened new prospects for the coalition of the rejuvenated left and seemed to assure its victory in the 1978 parliamentary elections. But at that point the Socialist-Communist alliance fell apart. The Socialists had made dramatic gains at Communist expense since the Common Program had been adopted, and the Communists decided it was safer to scuttle the agreement. The collapse of leftist unity alienated a large number of left voters and enabled the conservatives to retain control of the National Assembly in the 1978 elections.

When Giscard’s presidential term ended in May 1981, opinion polls seemed to indicate that he would be elected to a second term. He overcame a vigorous challenge by Chirac in the first round of voting and seemed well placed to defeat the Socialist Mitterrand in the runoff. But Mitterrand surprised the pollsters by scoring a slim victory—the first major victory for the left in three decades. Profiting from the wave of euphoria that followed, Mitterrand dissolved the National Assembly and, calling for elections, succeeded once again. The Socialists won a clear majority of seats (269 of the total 491) and seemed in a position to transform France into a social democratic state. France under a Socialist presidency Mitterrand’s first term

Mitterrand moved at once to carry out what appeared to be the voters’ mandate. He named as prime minister a longtime Socialist militant, Pierre Mauroy, whose cabinet was almost solidly Socialist except for four Communists. Major reforms followed quickly. A broad sector of the economy was nationalized (including 11 large industrial conglomerates and most private banks); a considerable degree of administrative decentralization shifted part of the state’s authority to regional and local councils; social benefits were expanded and factory layoffs made subject to state controls; tax rates were increased at the upper levels; and a special wealth tax was imposed on large fortunes.

François Mitterrand.SPC 5 James Cavalier/U.S. Department of Defense

The Socialists hoped that other industrial countries would adopt similar measures and that this joint effort would stimulate a broad recovery from the post-1973 recession. Instead, most of the other Western nations took the opposite course, turning toward conservative retrenchment. Isolated in an unsympathetic world and hampered by angry opposition at home, the Socialist experiment sputtered: exports declined, the value of the franc fell, unemployment continued to rise, and capital fled to safe havens abroad. The government was soon forced to retreat. Mauroy was replaced by a young Socialist technocrat, Laurent Fabius, who announced a turn from ideology to efficiency, with modernization the new keynote.

Many leftist voters were disillusioned by the frustration of their hopes. Discontent also emerged on the political margins. On the far left the Communists withdrew their ministers from the cabinet. On the far right a new focus of discontent emerged in Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front (Front National), which scored successes with its campaign to expel immigrant workers. To nobody’s surprise, the Socialists lost control of the National Assembly in the March 1986 elections; they and their allies retained only 215 seats, while the rightist coalition rose to 291.

Mitterrand’s presidential term still had two years to run. But the Fifth Republic now faced a long-debated test: Could the system function when parliament and president were at odds? Mitterrand sidestepped the dilemma by choosing the path of prudent retreat. He named as prime minister the conservatives’ strongest leader, Chirac of the Gaullist RPR, and abandoned to him most governmental decisions (except on foreign and defense policy, which de Gaulle himself had reserved for the president). This uneasy relationship was promptly labeled “cohabitation”; it lasted two years and in the end worked in Mitterrand’s rather than Chirac’s favour.

Chirac acted at once to reverse many of the Socialists’ reforms. He began the complex process of privatizing the nationalized enterprises, reduced income tax rates at the upper levels and abolished the wealth tax, and removed some of the regulatory controls on industry. These moves brought Chirac praise but also criticism. His popularity suffered in addition from a series of threats to public order—notably a long transport strike and a wave of terrorist attacks on the streets of Paris—that cast some doubt on the government’s promise to ensure law and order. As Chirac’s approval ratings fell, Mitterrand’s recovered. Cohabitation enabled him to avoid making sensitive decisions, and voters gave him credit for faithfully respecting his constitutional limitations. Mitterrand’s second term

Restraint paid dividends when Mitterrand ran, against Chirac, for a second term in April–May 1988 and scored a clear victory (54 to 46 percent). The resurgent president chose the Socialist Michel Rocard as prime minister and once again dissolved the National Assembly in the hope that the voters would give him a parliamentary majority. That hope was only partially realized this time; the Socialists and their allies won 279 seats, but they fell short of a clear majority.

Mitterrand’s choice of Rocard as prime minister caused some surprise, for the two men had headed rival factions within the Socialist Party, and they were temperamentally alien. Rocard was a brilliant financial expert and an advocate of government by consensus of the left and centre, while Mitterrand was considered a master of political gamesmanship. The uneasy relationship lasted three years, and Rocard was successful enough in managing the economy to maintain his high approval rating in the polls until the end.

Mitterrand’s decision to replace Rocard in 1991 with France’s first woman prime minister, Edith Cresson, provoked serious controversy. Cresson, a Mitterrand loyalist, had held a variety of cabinet posts during the 1980s and was seen as an able but tough and abrasive politician. Brash public statements by Cresson affected her ability to rule, the Socialists suffered disastrous losses in regional elections (March 1992), and Mitterrand replaced Cresson in April 1992 with a different sort of Socialist, Pierre Bérégovoy.

Edith Cresson, 2007.Jef-Infojef

“Béré” (as he was familiarly known) was a rare example of a proletarian who had risen through trade union ranks to political eminence. The son of an immigrant Ukrainian blue-collar worker, he had earned a reputation as an expert on public finance and as an incorruptible politician. His promise to end the plague of financial scandals that had beset recent Socialist governments won applause but left him vulnerable when he, in turn, was accused of misconduct: he had accepted, from a wealthy businessman under investigation for insider trading, a large loan to finance the purchase of a Paris apartment. Although no illegality was involved, Bérégovoy’s reputation for integrity suffered. In the parliamentary elections that took place in March 1993, the Socialists suffered a crushing defeat; they retained only 67 seats compared with 486 for the right-wing coalition (RPR and UDR). Bérégovoy resigned as prime minister and a few weeks later shocked the country by committing suicide.

Although the triumphant conservatives called on Mitterrand also to resign, he refused; his presidential term still had two years to run. But he had to face cohabitation again, this time with another Gaullist, Édouard Balladur. Chirac preferred to avoid the risks of active decision making while he was preparing his own campaign for the presidency.

Mitterrand entered his second cohabitation experience with his prestige damaged by his party’s recent misfortunes. He had also lost stature by a mistaken judgment in his own “reserved” sector of foreign policy. Mitterrand had been a leading drafter of the Maastricht Treaty (1991), designed to strengthen the institutional structures of the European Community. When the treaty encountered hostile criticism, he gambled on a popular referendum in France to bolster support. The outcome was a bare 51 percent approval by the French voters, and, although it was enough to put Maastricht into effect, the evidence of deep division in France further reduced the president’s prestige. Still another embarrassment was the revelation in 1994 that Mitterrand had accepted a bureaucratic post in Pétain’s Vichy regime in 1942–43. There were cries of outrage, yet the shock and fury quickly faded. In some circles he was credited with throwing his critics off balance by his clever management of the news. Prior to his death in January 1996, Mitterrand left his mark culturally on Paris as well, where grandiose architecture projects such as the Opéra de la Bastille, the expanded Louvre, the towering Grande Arche de la Défense, and the new Bibliothèque Nationale de France kept his name alive.

Mitterrand’s second venture into cohabitation (1993–95) had proved more helpful to Prime Minister Balladur than to the president. It also had proved deeply disappointing to Chirac, who had engineered Balladur’s appointment on the assumption that he would stand in for Chirac and step aside in his favour when the presidential election approached. Chirac had failed to see that his stylish and courteous stand-in might develop into his own most serious rival. By 1995 Balladur was the clear front-runner and announced his presidential candidacy against his own party leader, Chirac. Meanwhile, the Socialists, after some initial scrambling to find a viable candidate, ended by choosing party official Lionel Jospin, who led the field in the first round of voting on April 23. Chirac, a vigorous campaigner, outpaced Balladur, and in the runoff he won again, this time against Jospin. His victory brought to an end the 14-year Socialist presidency. Gordon Wright Eugen Weber France under conservative presidencies The Chirac administration

The right-of-centre triumph of 1995 did not last. In the anticipated elections that Chirac called in 1997, a Socialist majority swept back to power, and Jospin returned to head a coalition of Socialists, Communists, and Greens. Whereas the policies of Mitterrand’s second term had made concessions to the free market, Chirac’s moderate prime minister, Alain Juppé (1995–97), made serious concessions to the welfare state. Under Jospin, as under Juppé, pragmatic cohabitation struggled to maintain both economic growth and the social safety net. Privatization proceeded apace, inflation remained under control, and the introduction of the euro (the single European currency) in January 1999 boosted competition and investment. Yet unemployment stubbornly hovered around 12 percent in the last decade of the century, casting doubt on Jospin’s hope that growth and social progress would be reconciled.

Jacques Chirac, 2006.Marcello Casal Jr/ABr

When France hosted and won the football (soccer) World Cup in 1998, however, it was a triumph not only for national sporting pride but for cohabitation at the highest levels, as it showcased multiracial cooperation on a winning squad made up of Arabs, Africans, and Europeans, reflecting France’s increasingly diverse society.

In 2002 the RPR merged with other parties to create the centre-right Union for the Presidential Majority—later renamed the Union for a Popular Movement (Union pour un Mouvement Populaire; UMP)—which succeeded in securing Chirac’s reelection that year. Chirac easily defeated the extremist Le Pen, whose surprisingly strong showing in the first round of voting led Jospin to announce his resignation. No longer having to share power with the Socialists, Chirac named fellow Gaullist Jean-Pierre Raffarin to replace Jospin as prime minister. This socioeconomic balancing act remained in place, though, pitting the popularity of progressive social legislation against the difficulties of high taxes, restrictive social security demands on employers, and precarious funding for health and welfare projects.

France took the world spotlight in 2003, when the Chirac administration—believing the regime of Iraqi leader Ṣaddām Ḥussein to be cooperating with United Nations inspectors searching for weapons of mass destruction—led several members of the UN Security Council in effectively blocking authorization of the use of force against Iraq. Although the French public largely agreed with Chirac on Iraq, the UMP suffered losses in both regional and European Parliament elections in 2004. The following year Chirac experienced a further loss of prestige when French voters rejected the ratification of a new European Union constitution, which he had strongly supported. In the aftermath of the failed vote, the president named his protégé Dominique de Villepin to replace Raffarin as prime minister. He selected Villepin over his longtime rival Nicolas Sarkozy, who then added the duties of interior minister to his job as head of the UMP.

Later in 2005, French pride in the country’s diversity wavered when the accidental deaths of two immigrant teenagers sparked violence in Paris that spread rapidly to other parts of the country. Nearly 9,000 cars were torched and nearly 3,000 arrests made during the autumn riots, which were fueled by high unemployment, discrimination, and lack of opportunity within the primarily North African immigrant community. In 2006, in a further illustration of widespread dissatisfaction with the government, more than a million people gathered around the country to protest a law that would have facilitated the dismissal of young employees. Chirac, already suffering a sharp decline in popularity, was forced to suspend the law. The Sarkozy administration

Although he was constitutionally eligible, Chirac chose not to run for president again in 2007. Echoing the public’s desire for change, the country’s two main political parties nominated a pair of relative newcomers to replace him. The Socialist Party selected Ségolène Royal, a former adviser to Mitterrand, while Chirac’s rival Sarkozy easily won the nomination of the centre-right UMP. Both advanced to the second round of elections (Royal was the first woman ever to do so), in which Sarkozy won a decisive victory. Although Socialists disparagingly likened Sarkozy to an American neoconservative (see conservatism), his supporters welcomed his promises to reduce unemployment, cut taxes, simplify the public sector, and toughen immigration and sentencing laws.

By 2010, however, high unemployment and economic uncertainty had contributed to growing dissatisfaction with Sarkozy and the UMP. Having fared poorly in French regional elections that March, the UMP retained control of only 1 of 22 régions, while the Socialists and their allies captured the remainder. That summer the French government’s proposed austerity measures, particularly a plan to raise the retirement age, prompted a nationwide strike and other protests; further strikes in the fall brought hundreds of thousands of people to the streets and wreaked chaos in the country’s transportation networks. Sarkozy drew additional criticism, notably from the European Union, for the deportation of hundreds of Romanians and Bulgarians, most of whom were Roma (Gypsies) living in illegal camps.

In September 2010, following a July vote by the lower house of the French parliament, the Senate overwhelmingly approved legislation to outlaw face-concealing garments in public places. The ban did not explicitly refer to Islamic dress but was widely understood to target veils that fully covered a woman’s face. The law took effect in April 2011, with violators facing fines of €150. The euro-zone crisis and the Socialist resurgence The 2012 presidential campaign

French foreign and domestic policy throughout 2011 focused on the ongoing euro-zone debt crisis, while support began to coalesce around a small group of candidates who were likely to contest the 2012 presidential race. Marine Le Pen was chosen to succeed her father as the leader of the National Front, and her populist appeal quickly made her a factor in the contest. Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the director of the International Monetary Fund, who was presumed by many to be the likely Socialist candidate, was dramatically removed from contention after he was arrested on sexual assault charges in New York City in May 2011. Although the charges were dropped several months later, the Socialists had already found a new candidate in former party leader François Hollande. Sarkozy, for his part, spent much of his time on international issues, acting as president of the Group of Eight and the Group of 20, as well as teaming with German Chancellor Angela Merkel to try to halt the financial contagion that was spreading throughout Europe.

Marine Le Pen.Chamussy—Sipa/AP

Sarkozy’s domestic economic policies contributed to a steady erosion of his support, as he proposed a series of austerity measures that were intended to reduce France’s budget deficit. In a shock to Sarkozy’s administration, the Socialist Party and its allies won control of the Senate in September 2011. This represented the first time that the Socialists had held a majority in the indirectly elected upper house since the proclamation of the Fifth Republic in 1958. The Hollande administration

Hollande secured his position as the Socialist candidate in France’s first-ever open primary in October 2011, and he went on to top a field of 10 candidates in the first round of the presidential election in April 2012. In that contest Le Pen led the National Front to its best-ever performance in a presidential election, capturing more than 18 percent of the vote for a strong third-place finish. Sarkozy, who finished second, qualified for a runoff against Hollande, and he spent the next two weeks courting the National Front voters who represented his best chance at victory. On May 6, 2012, Hollande defeated Sarkozy, capturing almost 52 percent of the vote and becoming the first Socialist to win a presidential election since Mitterrand bested Chirac in 1988. One month later the sweep was made complete when the Socialist bloc captured 314 seats in the National Assembly, giving it a clear majority in the lower house. Although Marine Le Pen narrowly lost her bid for a seat in the legislature, two other National Front candidates were victorious, and the party returned to parliament for the first time since 1997.

François Hollande waving to supporters in Rouen, France, on February 15, 2012.Michel Spingler/AP

Within hours of his inauguration, Hollande flew to Berlin to meet with Merkel about Franco-German strategy regarding the euro-zone crisis. He endeavoured to shift the emphasis of the response from austerity to growth, but the March 2012 EU fiscal pact reduced the ability of signatory countries to embark on stimulus programs funded by deficit spending. In subsequent meetings, Hollande continued to place growth at the forefront of the economic agenda. On the domestic front, Hollande quickly made good on several promises made during the presidential campaign. He implemented a 75 percent tax rate on incomes above €1 million (about $1.3 million) and accelerated plans for the withdrawal of French troops from the NATO mission in Afghanistan. Although the “millionaires’ tax” was overturned by France’s Constitutional Court in December 2012, the proposal remained popular with the French public, and Hollande vowed to resubmit the tax law in an amended form. With his administration beset with declining approval ratings, Hollande struggled with an unemployment rate that topped 10 percent. His attempts to foster growth with pro-business measures rankled his supporters on the left, and his tax policies sparked resistance from the right. In March 2013 he announced an amended form of his “millionaires’ tax” that would collect the tax in question from companies rather than individuals. On April 23, 2013, the National Assembly voted convincingly to legalize same-sex marriage and conferred the right to adopt on same-sex couples.

Despite Hollande’s efforts, France’s economy continued to struggle. Concerns about a jobless recovery were heightened as the unemployment rate crept stubbornly upward despite the country’s slow movement out of recession. While his economic policy failed to gain traction, Hollande pursued a hawkish foreign policy. French troops intervened in Mali in January and in the Central African Republic in December 2013. Hollande also pushed for Western military intervention in the Syrian Civil War after chemical weapons were used on a rebel-held area outside Damascus. Faced with wavering support from the United States and Britain, Hollande backed a diplomatic initiative that led to the dismantling of Syria’s chemical arsenal.

The successes of the so-called “Hollande doctrine”—which sought to position France in a more prominent place on the global stage—did not translate into popular support, as evidenced in municipal elections in March 2014. Hollande’s Socialists were crushed, whereas the UMP and the National Front picked up scores of mayoral offices and hundreds of city council seats. Record low voter turnout was seen as symptomatic of apathy among Socialist supporters, while Le Pen’s continued rebranding of the National Front led to that party’s best-ever electoral showing. Hollande responded by reshuffling his cabinet, replacing Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault with interior minister Manuel Valls, a centrist whose sometimes controversial views found support among the French right. The National Front’s ascent continued in May, when it topped the polls in the election for the European Parliament.

The French economy continued to lag, with unemployment topping 11 percent in July 2014, and Valls faced a revolt within his own cabinet. In August 2014 economic minister Arnaud Montebourg, who had long advocated a program of growth over austerity, was sacked after publicly criticizing Hollande’s economic policy. Valls announced the resignation of his cabinet, and Hollande promptly asked him to form a new government. While Hollande’s popularity languished, scandals within the UMP limited the party’s ability to capitalize on the president’s weakness. Sarkozy, in an effort to right the listing party and launch his own political comeback, successfully won the leadership of the UMP at a party congress in November 2014.

On January 7, 2015, gunmen attacked the Paris offices of the satirical publication Charlie Hebdo, killing 12 people. The terrorist action was the bloodiest such incident on French soil in more than 50 years, and it was believed that the magazine had been targeted for its portrayal of the Prophet Muhammad. As French authorities embarked on a nationwide manhunt, world leaders condemned the attacks, and thousands converged on city centres throughout France to demonstrate their solidarity with the victims. On January 9 the suspected gunmen, two brothers who were known to U.S. and French authorities for their connections to militant Islamist groups, fled to a printing plant in a small town northeast of Paris, where they took a hostage and engaged in a standoff with police. Meanwhile, another gunman, who claimed to be working in concert with the others and who was suspected of killing a police officer in Montrouge the previous day, seized hostages at a kosher grocery store in Paris. After several hours, French security forces stormed both locations, killing all three gunmen. The hostage at the printing plant was freed safely. Four hostages were killed at the market, but more than a dozen were rescued.

Charlie HebdoThe Web site of the satirical weekly newspaper Charlie Hebdo on January 7, 2015, after 12 people were killed in a terrorist attack on the publication's editorial offices. The slogan “Je suis Charlie” (“I am Charlie”) was adopted by those wishing to express solidarity with the slain journalists.© 2015 Charlie Hebdo

On November 13, 2015, coordinated teams of gunmen armed with automatic weapons and explosive belts attacked targets in and around Paris, killing at least 129 people and injuring hundreds. It was the deadliest terrorist incident in Europe since the 2004 Madrid train bombings. Three attackers blew themselves up outside the Stade de France in the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis; Hollande was among the thousands of people inside the stadium watching an association football (soccer) match between France and Germany. In Paris dozens were killed when Islamist militants opened fire on crowded cafés and restaurants in the 10th and 11th arrondissements (municipal districts). At least 89 people were killed when a trio of gunmen attacked the Bataclan music venue, where the American rock band Eagles of Death Metal were playing before a sold-out crowd. The attackers occupied the Bataclan for more than two hours, holding hostages and shooting survivors of the initial assault, before French police stormed the building. Two of the attackers detonated suicide belts and the third was killed by police. The Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL; also known as ISIS) claimed responsibility for the attacks, and Hollande declared that France was “at war” with the group. Over subsequent days, French jets bombed targets in ISIL-held areas in Syria and Iraq, more than 100,000 security personnel were mobilized, and police raided scores of locations across France and Belgium in search of suspected accomplices.

November 2015 Paris attacksInvestigators examining the bodies of victims of a terrorist attack on a Paris restaurant, November 13, 2015.Thibault Camus/AP Images

On July 14, 2016, at least 84 people were killed and scores were injured in France’s third major terrorist attack in 18 months, when a truck was driven through revelers celebrating Bastille Day in Nice. Tens of thousands had gathered along the city’s beachfront Promenade des Anglais to view a fireworks display, and the crowd had just begun to disperse at the time of the attack. The truck traveled roughly a mile (2 km) down the promenade, plowing through barricades and into a designated pedestrian zone, striking hundreds of people before it was brought to a halt. The driver, who had a history of petty crime but no known association with terrorist groups, was killed in a gun battle with police. Hours before the attack, Hollande had announced the planned lifting of the state of emergency that existed since the November 2015 attacks; he subsequently extended the state of emergency for an additional three months and called up the country’s military reserves.

With Hollande’s approval ratings dipping into the single digits, he announced in December 2016 that he would not seek reelection. Days later, Hollande’s prime minister, Manuel Valls, resigned his post and declared his intention to pursue the Socialist nomination for the presidency. The presidential race had already experienced one surprise, when the Republicans (formerly the UMP) resoundingly closed the door on Nicolas Sarkozy’s political comeback ambitions. Sarkozy finished a distant third in the first round of the Republican presidential primary in November. That race was won by Sarkozy’s former prime minister, François Fillon, a standard-bearer for France’s right-leaning provincial Roman Catholic population. Polls suggested that he likely would face the National Front’s Marine Le Pen in the second round of the presidential election in May 2017.

Fillon’s campaign collapsed amid accusations that he had created fake jobs for members of his family, and in March 2017 both he and his wife were charged with the embezzlement of nearly $1 million in public funds. The presidential race essentially became a three-way contest between outsider candidates: Le Pen, former Communist Party presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon, and Hollande’s finance minister, Emmanuel Macron. Macron had formed his own political party—En Marche!—in April 2016, with a platform that echoed the “third way” policies of British Prime Minister Tony Blair. As the left and right wings of the major parties accrued to Mélenchon and Le Pen accordingly, Macron peeled away the centrists, earning endorsements from former Socialist prime minister Manuel Valls and former UMP prime minister Alain Juppé.

Macron, EmmanuelEmmanuel Macron, 2017.AP/REX/Shutterstock

The first round of the presidential election was held in April 2017, and, for the first time in the history of the Fifth Republic, both of France’s mainstream parties were shut out of the second-round runoff. An eleventh-hour online information dump, dubbed “MacronLeaks,” was attributed to the same Russian hackers who had attempted to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election, but it failed to significantly affect the result. Macron and Le Pen advanced to the second round, held on May 7, with Macron delivering a convincing victory to become France’s youngest leader since Napoleon. The following month Macron’s En Marche! secured a commanding majority in parliamentary elections. The coalition of En Marche! and François Bayrou’s Democratic Movement (MoDem) held 350 of 577 seats. Women composed a record 39 percent of the National Assembly, but the election was marred by the lowest voter turnout in a French parliamentary election since World War II. Society since 1940

The surge of economic growth that lasted from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s brought extensive changes in French lifestyles and in some of society’s basic structures. As the century neared its end, most French people had come to enjoy greater comfort and security than their forebears; they took for granted automobiles, modern household appliances, and vacation homes in the country, which had been regarded as luxuries not too long before. The French had been converted to installment buying and supermarket shopping; they spent less on food and drink and more on health and leisure. Thanks to the social security system that was expanded after World War II, they were better protected against the hazards of illness, unemployment, and a neglected old age.

The most striking structural change taking place in France was rapid urbanization. The farm population, which stood at about one-third of the total population in 1940, fell to less than 5 percent in the 1990s, yet farm production increased as modern techniques spread, making France one of the world’s leading agricultural exporters. In the industrial regions, modern technology and a new managerial spirit brought France to the threshold of the postindustrial age. The proportion of unskilled workers declined in favour of technically trained specialists, and even more dramatic was the explosive growth in the number of white-collar employees and middle-level managers. At the base of this social pyramid was a new proletariat of immigrants from southern Europe and Africa, who provided the manual labour that most French workers were no longer willing to perform. In the 1990s these immigrants constituted between 5 and 10 percent of France’s population, and their presence fed social and racial tensions, aggravated by widespread joblessness.

Anti-immigrant resentment spurred the rise of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front, which called for casting out aliens and reclaiming “France for the French” but benefited more from morose protest against the sitting government than from prejudice. In 1999 the Front, which had always stood more for protest than principle, succumbed to internal dissensions and broke apart, but it experienced a dramatic rebirth under Le Pen’s daughter Marine. The challenge for French society in the 21st century came from a Europe without borders or national currencies—where workers, students, businesses, and immigrants from beyond the European Union could move freely from one country to another.

High culture has always seeped into popular culture and coloured it, perhaps more so in France than in other countries. Today, in France as elsewhere, the reverse is also true: the culture of everyday life encourages dislocations that elude socioeconomic and national boundaries. Differences of taste or of opinion, once dismissed as superficial, aggravate moral and political rifts. Sponsored by past Socialist governments as popular art, rock music in the 1960s called yé-yé (yeah-yeah) and hip-hop music and graffiti art at the end of the 20th century were perceived by some as playful and by others as threatening. In the 21st century multiculturalism was both welcomed as emancipating and scorned as divisive, as was the diffuse anti-Americanism, which for many stood in for antimodernism. All these disruptions were by-products of accelerated societal change. The cultural scene

Paris after World War II quickly regained its stature as one of the world’s great centres of intellectual creativity. A cluster of brilliant thinkers and writers competed for influence, attracting acolytes both in France and abroad. The first postwar wave was led by Jean-Paul Sartre, whose influence made existentialism the leading ideology of the time. Sartre saw the world as “absurd” and irrational, lacking guideposts for humans adrift in a meaningless universe. People, said Sartre, know only that they exist and are free to cast their own lot. In the absence of any guiding power, individuals are condemned to freedom (hence responsibility), forced to forge their own lives, however insecure and contingent these may be, and to give them meaning by commitment to a course of action. Sartre’s essays and novels made him the most admired intellectual of his generation and won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1964 (which he refused). His rival Albert Camus, also a Nobel Prize winner, broke with Sartre over the latter’s support of the Soviet Union and over Sartre’s inability to define an ethical base for commitment to a cause. Camus’s agnostic humanism led him to insist that even in an absurd world commitment must rest on clearly defined ethical principles—on the need to resist oppressors and fanatics and to respect the shared humanity of all people.

Sartre, Jean-PaulJean-Paul Sartre, photograph by Gisèle Freund, 1968.Gisele Freund

The dark postwar mood that lent existentialism its appeal faded when economic recovery set in. In the 1960s it was replaced by a new vogue called structuralism, whose scientific aspirations better suited a technological age. Drawing on the ideas of the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, the structuralists stressed the persistence of “deep structures” that were held to underlie all human cultures through time, leaving little room for either historical change or human initiative.

For a time structuralism became the dominant intellectual wave both in France and abroad; it showed signs of crystallizing into an ideology or worldview. But by the 1970s it gave way to a cluster of doctrines loosely labeled “post-structuralist,” each variety identified with its own master-thinker: the philosopher Jacques Derrida, the intellectual historian Michel Foucault, the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, and the Marxologist Louis Althusser.

The structuralist vogue also affected the novelists who, beginning in the mid-1950s, launched le nouveau roman, the antinovel. More interested in theory and the subversive play of language than in storytelling, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, Michel Butor, and their imitators attracted much media and critical attention; but their provocative and demanding output stimulated more publicity than sales. Their iconoclastic aspirations were paralleled by those of a nouvelle vague (New Wave) of filmmakers such as Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais, and François Truffaut, whose movies of the late 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s revolutionized French cinema. “New novels” and “new wave” films may be compared to another contemporary creation popularized by the media: nouvelle cuisine, whose aesthetic objectives also evoked more critical than gourmandizing interest.

Those discouraged by pretentious fiction were turning to biography and general history, a realm dominated by the contributions of scholars such as Fernand Braudel, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, and Pierre Nora. Marked by pathbreaking investigation of long-term perspectives and by a vivid, seductive style, their explorations of social, cultural, and economic history proved broadly appealing. On all these fronts, French works and ideas continued to generate worldwide attention and, often, imitation. Gordon Wright Eugen Weber The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica Major rulers of France

The table provides a chronological list of the major rulers of France.

Major rulers of France See also the table of Holy Roman emperors Carolingian dynasty Pippin III, the Short (mayor of the palace) 741–751 Pippin III, the Short (king of the Franks) 751–768 Carloman (king of the Franks) 768–771 Charlemagne (Charles I; king of the Franks) 771–800 Charlemagne (Charles I; Holy Roman emperor) 800–814 Louis I, the Pious (emperor) 814–840 Lothar I (emperor) 840–855 Louis II, the German (king of the East Franks) 840–876 Charles II, the Bald (king of the West Franks) 843–875 Charles II, the Bald (Holy Roman emperor) 875–877 Louis II (emperor) 855–875 Charles III, the Fat (king of the East Franks) 876–887 Charles III, the Fat (Holy Roman emperor, king of the West Franks) 884–887 Louis II, the Stammerer (king of the West Franks) 877–879 Louis III (king of the West Franks) 879–882 Carloman (king of the West Franks) 879–884 Arnulf (king of the East Franks) 887–899 Capetian (Robertian) dynasty Eudes (king of the West Franks) 888–898 Carolingian dynasty Charles III, the Simple (king of the West Franks) 898–922 Louis IV, the Child (last king of the East Franks) 899–911 Capetian (Robertian) dynasty (king) Robert I 922–923 Rudolf 923–936 Carolingian dynasty Louis IV d'Outremer 936–954 Lothar 954–986 Louis V 986–987 Capetian dynasty Hugh Capet 987–996 Robert II, the Pious 996–1031 Henry I 1031–60 Philip I 1060–1108 Louis VI 1108–37 Louis VII 1137–80 Philip II 1180–1223 Louis VIII 1223–26 Louis IX (St. Louis) 1226–70 Philip III 1270–85 Philip IV 1285–1314 Louis X 1314–16 John I 1316 Philip V 1316–22 Charles IV 1322–28 Valois dynasty Philip VI 1328–50 John II, the Good 1350–64 Charles V 1364–80 Charles VI 1380–1422 Charles VII 1422–61 Louis XI 1461–83 Charles VIII 1483–98 Valois dynasty (Orléans branch) Louis XII 1498–1515 Valois dynasty (Angoulême branch) Francis I 1515–47 Henry II 1547–59 Francis II 1559–60 Charles IX 1560–74 Henry III 1574–89 House of Bourbon Henry IV 1589–1610 Louis XIII 1610–43 Louis XIV 1643–1715 Louis XV 1715–74 Louis XVI 1774–92 Louis (XVII) 1793–95 First Republic (president) National Convention 1792–95 Directory 1795–99 Consulate (Napoleon Bonaparte) 1799–1804 First Empire (emperor) Napoleon I (Napoleon Bonaparte) 1804–14, 1815 Napoleon (II) 1815 House of Bourbon (king) Louis XVIII 1814, 1815–24 Charles X 1824–30 House of Orléans Louis-Philippe 1830–48 Second Republic (president) Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte 1848–52 Second Empire (emperor) Napoleon III (Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte) 1852–70 Third Republic (president) Adolphe Thiers 1871–73 Patrice de Mac-Mahon 1873–79 Jules Grévy 1879–87 Sadi Carnot 1887–94 Jean Casimir-Périer 1894–95 Félix Faure 1895–99 Émile Loubet 1899–1906 Armand Fallières 1906–13 Raymond Poincaré 1913–20 Paul Deschanel 1920 Alexandre Millerand 1920–24 Gaston Doumergue 1924–31 Paul Doumer 1931–32 Albert Lebrun 1932–40 Vichy France (head of state) Philippe Pétain 1940–44 Provisional government 1944–46 Fourth Republic (president) Vincent Auriol 1947–54 René Coty 1954–59 Fifth Republic Charles de Gaulle 1959–69 Georges Pompidou 1969–74 Valéry Giscard d'Estaing 1974–81 François Mitterrand 1981–95 Jacques Chirac 1995–2007 Nicolas Sarkozy 2007–12 François Hollande 2012–17 Emmanuel Macron 2017–

Citation Information

Article Title: France

Website Name: Encyclopaedia Britannica

Publisher: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.

Date Published: 14 August 2019

URL: https://www.britannica.com/place/France

Access Date: August 17, 2019

Additional Reading Geography General works

Comprehensive surveys of the country, using both descriptive and analytic approaches, include Philippe Pinchemel et al., France: A Geographical, Social, and Economic Survey (1987; originally published in French, 1964); Christopher Flockton and Eleonore Kofman, France (1989); Hilary P.M.Winchester, Contemporary France (1993); and Xavier de Planhol, An Historical Geography of France (1994; originally published in French, 1988), all with important bibliographies. Graham Robb, The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography from the Revolution to the First World War (2007), offers an engaging examination of the emergence of a French geographic identity. Michelin Pneu, Michelin: Atlas Routier et Touristique, 7th ed. (2004), is a useful reference source with more detailed information than its title suggests. Land

Characteristics of major physical regions of France are provided in Clifford Embleton (ed.), Geomorphology of Europe (1984); and Gérard Mottet, Géographie Physique de la France, 3rd rev. and enlarged ed. (1999). Comité National Français de Géographie, Atlas de la France rurale: les campagnes françaises (1984), contains maps and photographs illustrating aspects of rural France, both by type of agriculture and by region; and André Brun et al., Le Grand Atlas de la France rurale (1989), provides documentation on all aspects of life from the point of view of agricultural geography. Ian Scargill, Urban France (1983), includes case studies of new towns. Human geography

General overviews of regional planning, demography, social structure, economic conditions, culture, and politics are found in John Ardagh, France in the New Century: Portrait of a Changing Society (2000); J.E. Flower (ed.), France Today: Introductory Studies, 8th ed. (1997); Robert Gildea, France Since 1945 (1996, updated 2002); and Emmanuel Todd, La Nouvelle France (1988, reissued 1990). Urban France is discussed in Maryse Fabriès-Verfaillie, Pierre Stragiotti, and Annie Jouve, La France des villes: le temps des métropoles, 2nd ed. (2000). Demographic analyses are provided in Daniel Noin and Yvan Chauviré, La Population de la France, 5th ed., updated (1999); Hervé Le Bras and Emmanuel Todd, L’Invention de la France: atlas anthropologique et politique (2012); and Alec G. Hargreaves, Immigration, ‘Race’ and Ethnicity in Contemporary France (1995). Economy

Comprehensive surveys of modern economic conditions include John Tuppen, The Economic Geography of France (1983); Jean-François Eck, La France dans la nouvelle économie mondiale, 3rd ed. updated (1998); Marcel Baleste, L’Économie française, 13th ed. rev. (1995); and John Tuppen, France Under Recession, 1981–1986 (1988). Additional surveys include Colin Gordon and Paul Kingston, The Business Culture in France (1996); Frances M.B. Lynch, France and the International Economy: From Vichy to the Treaty of Rome (1997); Joseph Szarka, Business in France: An Introduction to the Economic and Social Context (1992); Dominique Taddei and Benjamin Coriat, Made in France: l’industrie française dans la competition mondiale (1993); and Jean Jacques Tur, Géographie humaine et économique de la France (1994). Comprehensive regional studies can be found in Marcel Baleste et al., La France: les 22 régions, 5th ed. (2001); and Pierre Estienne, Les Régions françaises, 2 vol. (1999). Current developments are brought together in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, OECD Economic Surveys: France (annual). Studies of special features of the French economy include Dominique Gambier and Michel Vernieres, L’Emploi en France, new ed. (1998); Nacima Baron-Yellès, Le Tourisme en France: territoires et stratégies (1999); Laurence Bancel-Charensol, Jean-Claude Delaunay, and Muriel Jougleux, Les Services dans l’economie française (1999); and Pierre Bloc-Duraffour, L’Industrie française (1999). Politics and society

Studies of political administration include Sudhir Hazareesingh, Political Traditions in Modern France (1994); Alistair Cole, French Politics and Society (1998); James F. McMillan, Twentieth-Century France: Politics and Society 1898–1991 (1992); Nick Hewlett, Modern French Politics: Analysing Conflict and Consensus Since 1945 (1998); and Maurice Larkin, France Since the Popular Front: Government and People 1936–1996, 2nd ed. (1997). Law is treated in Christian Dadomo and Susan Farran, The French Legal System, 2nd ed. (1996); and John Bell et al., Principles of French Law (1998). On the more specific question of decentralization, see Jean Marc Ohnet, Histoire de la décentralisation française (1996). Health care is discussed in Marc Duriez et al., Le Système de santé en France, 2nd updated ed. (1999). Social conditions and organizations in the social sphere are the focus of Pierre Laroque (ed.), Les Institutions sociales de la France, updated ed. (1963, reissued 1980). A general view of contemporary features of French society is given in Insee, Données sociales: la société française (1999), France, portrait social 1998–1999, 2nd ed. (1999); and H.R. Kedward, France and the French: A Modern History (2006). A detailed discussion of urban policy is provided in Antoine Anderson, Politiques de la ville (1998). Culture

The philosophical perspectives of French cultural life are examined in Alain Finkielkraut, The Defeat of the Mind (1995; also published as The Undoing of Thought, 1988; originally published in French, 1987). Cultural policies and the interaction of politics and culture are the subject of Pascal Ory, L’Histoire culturelle, 3rd ed. (2011). Bernard-Henri Lévy, Éloge des intellectuels (1987), is an introduction to intellectual life. For literature, see Denis Hollier (ed.), A New History of French Literature (1989, reissued 1994). General views of French culture and society are given in Jill Forbes and Michael Kelly (eds.), French Cultural Studies: An Introduction (1995); Max Silverman, Facing Postmodernity: Contemporary French Thought on Culture and Society, (1999); Martin Cook (ed.), French Culture Since 1945 (1993); and Alex Hughes and Keith Reader, Encyclopedia of Contemporary French Culture (1998, reissued 2002). Thomas Henry Elkins John N. Tuppen Jean F.P. Blondel John E. Flower History General Works

A great historian’s review of the long sweep of French history, from prehistoric times to the modern era, is Fernand Braudel, The Identity of France, 2nd ed. (1988–90, originally published in French, 1986), and The Identity of France: People and Production (1990; originally published in French, 1986). Excellent thematic treatments are provided in Marc Bloch, French Rural Society: An Essay on Its Basic Characteristics (1966; originally published in French, 1931), a classic study; Fernand Braudel and Ernest Labrousse (eds.), Histoire économique et sociale de la France (1970–82); Georges Duby and Armand Wallon (eds.), Histoire de la France rurale, 4 vol. (1975–76, reprinted 1992); and Georges Duby (ed.), Histoire de la France urbaine, 5 vol. (1980–85). Gaul

A stimulating overview of Gaul in the context of French prehistory and early history is found in J.M. Wallace-Hadrill and John McManners (eds.), France: Government and Society, 2nd ed. (1970). Outstanding investigations of particular sites and areas of relevance to the study of Gaul as a whole are Edith Mary Wightman, Gallia Belgica (1985); and A.L.F. Rivet, Gallia Narbonensis: With a Chapter on Alpes Maritimae: Southern France in Roman Times (1988). Life in later Roman Gaul is studied in John Matthews, Western Aristocracies and Imperial Court, A.D. 364–425 (1975, reissued 1998); and Raymond Van Dam, Leadership and Community in Late Antique Gaul (1985, reissued 1992). John Frederick Drinkwater Jeremy David Popkin Merovingian and Carolingian age

A comprehensive introduction to the period is found in J.M. Wallace-Hadrill, The Barbarian West, 400–1000, 3rd rev. ed. (1998). On the Merovingians, see the engaging overview in Patrick J. Geary, Before France and Germany (1988), and J.M. Wallace-Hadrill, The Long-Haired Kings and Other Studies in Frankish History (1962, reprinted 1982). For the Carolingians, see Pierre Riché, The Carolingians: A Family Who Forged Europe (1993; originally published in French, 1983); and F.L. Ganshof, The Carolingians and the Frankish Monarchy, trans. from French and German (1971). Special studies of the civilization of the period include J.M. Wallace-Hadrill, The Frankish Church (1983); Pierre Riché, Education and Culture in the Barbarian West, Sixth Through Eighth Centuries (1976; originally published in French, 3rd ed., 1962); Suzanne Fonay Wemple, Women in Frankish Society: Marriage and the Cloister, 500 to 900 (1981, reprinted 1985); and Georges Duby, The Early Growth of the European Economy: Warriors and Peasants from the Seventh to the Twelfth Century (1974, reissued 1978; originally published in French, 1973). Gabriel Fournier Bernard S. Bachrach Jeremy David Popkin The emergence of France in the Early Middle Ages, c. 850–1180

This period as a whole is well treated in Jean Dunbabin, France in the Making, 843–1180 (1985). The political history of this and the succeeding periods is surveyed best in Elizabeth M. Hallam and Judith Everard, Capetian France, 987–1328, 2nd ed. (2001); but Robert Fawtier, The Capetian Kings in France: Monarchy & Nation, 987–1328 (1960, reissued 1982; originally published in French, 1942), is still a useful classic. Social change and feudalization are studied in Marc Bloch, Feudal Society (1961, reprinted 1989; originally published in French, 1939–40), a seminal work. An alternative to Bloch’s model has been developed by Georges Duby, La Société aux XI^e et XII^e siècles dans la région mâconnaise (1953, reissued 1988), and The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined (1980; originally published in French, 1978). Dominique Barthelemy, La Mutation de l’an mil, a-t-elle eu lieu?: servage et chevalerie dans la France des X^e et XI^e siècles (1997), is also important. France in the later Middle Ages, 1180–1490

For the general political history of the period, see the works of Hallam and Fawtier in the previous section. Individual reigns are studied in John W. Baldwin, The Government of Philip Augustus: Foundations of French Royal Power in the Middle Ages (1986); and William Chester Jordan, Louis IX and the Challenge of the Crusade: A Study in Rulership (1979). For economy and society, see Georges Duby, Rural Economy and Country Life in the Medieval West (1968, reprinted 1998; originally published in French, 1962). Social unrest is discussed in Michel Mollat and Philippe Wolff, The Popular Revolutions of the Late Middle Ages (1973; originally published in French, 1970). Charles Petit-Dutaillis, The French Communes in the Middle Ages (1978; originally published in French, 1947), remains the standard account on the cities and towns. T.N. Bisson Jeremy David Popkin France from 1490 to 1715

Janine Garrisson, History of Sixteenth-Century France (1995; originally published in French, 1991); and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, The Royal French State, 1460–1610 (1994; originally published in 1987), offer clear summaries of French history from the Renaissance through the Wars of Religion. David Potter, A History of Modern France, 1460–1560 (1995), is institutional rather than chronological in approach. J. Russell Major, Representative Government in Early Modern France (1980), and From Renaissance Monarchy to Absolute Monarchy: French Kings, Nobles & Estates (1994), explain the role of representative assemblies. Sarah Hanley, The Lit de Justice of the Kings of France: Constitutional Ideology in Legend, Ritual, and Discourse (1983), analyzes one particularly important aspect of the relationship between monarch and institutions. See also R.J. Knecht, Renaissance Warrior and Patron: The Reign of Francis I, rev. and expanded ed. (1994); and David Parker, Class and State in Ancien Régime France: The Road to Modernity? (1996). Donald R. Kelley, The Beginning of Ideology: Consciousness and Society in the French Reformation (1981), is a study of political thought.

Robin Briggs, Early Modern France, 1560–1715, 2nd ed. (1998), is a reliable introduction to 17th-century history. On the religious wars, Mack P. Holt, The French Wars of Religion, 1562–1629 (1995), is an able synthesis. Barbara B. Diefendorf, Beneath the Cross (1991), shows the social origins of the rival religious parties. Roland Mousnier, The Assassination of Henry IV (1973; originally published in French, 1964), is a brilliant analysis of the intersection of politics and religion at the beginning of the 17th century.

Yves-Marie Bercé, The Birth of Absolutism: A History of France, 1598–1661 (1996; originally published in French, 1992), is an admirably clear narrative of the rise of the absolutist monarchy. James B. Collins, The State in Early Modern France (1995, reissued 1999), is an overview of the development of monarchical institutions from 1600 to the Revolution. David Buisseret, Henry IV (1984, reissued 1992), is a good life of the monarch who ended the religious wars. A. Lloyd Moote, Louis XIII, the Just (1989), brings Henri IV’s enigmatic successor to life. A.D. Lublinskaya, French Absolutism: The Crucial Phase, 1620–1629 (1968; originally published in Russian, 1965), discusses the economic crisis of the 17th century. Other works on the period’s political developments include Joseph Bergin, Cardinal Richelieu: Power and the Pursuit of Wealth (1985); J.H. Shennan, The Parlement of Paris, rev. ed. (1998); N.M. Sutherland, The French Secretaries of State in the Age of Catherine de Medici (1962, reprinted 1976); Richard Bonney, The King’s Debts: Finance and Politics in France, 1589–1661 (1981), and Society and Government in France Under Richelieu and Mazarin, 1624–61 (1988); and Sharon Kettering, Patrons, Brokers, and Clients in Seventeenth-Century France (1986). Yves-Marie Bercé, History of Peasant Revolts (1990; originally published in French, 1986), synthesizes scholarship on popular movements. Orest Ranum, The Fronde: A French Revolution (1993), is a concise summary of the confusion of conflicts from 1648 to 1653. A. Lloyd Moote, The Revolt of the Judges: The Parlement of Paris and the Fronde, 1643–1652 (1971), covers one important aspect of the Fronde. Geoffrey Treasure, Mazarin: The Crisis of Absolutism in France (1995), is a thorough biography of the man who preserved Richelieu’s handiwork and set the stage for Louis XIV’s reign. Elizabeth Rapley, The Dévotes: Women and Church in Seventeenth-Century France (1990, reissued 1993), highlights the role of women in the period’s Catholic revival.

On social conditions, see Robert Mandrou, Classes et luttes de classes en France au début du XVII^e siècle (1965); James R. Farr, Hands of Honor: Artisans and Their World in Dijon, 1550–1650 (1988); and Georges Vigarello, Concepts of Cleanliness: Changing Attitudes in France Since the Middle Ages (1988; originally published in French, 1985). The Age of Louis XIV

Pierre Goubert, Louis XIV and Twenty Million Frenchmen (1970, originally published in French, 1966), provides a synthesis of Louis’s reign; it is supplemented in such special accounts as Lionel Rothkrug, Opposition to Louis XIV: The Political and Social Origins of the French Enlightenment (1965); John C. Rule (ed.), Louis XIV and the Craft of Kingship (1969); Louis André, Louis XIV et l’Europe (1950), on foreign policy; and John B. Wolf, Louis XIV (1968). François Bluche, Louis XIV (1990; originally published in French, 1986), is the most recent full biography of France’s most famous king. Daniel Dessert, Louis XIV prend le pouvoir (1989, reissued 2000), offers a revisionist account of the reign’s beginnings. Albert N. Hamscher, The Parlement of Paris After the Fronde, 1653–1673 (1976), and The Conseil Privé and the Parlements in the Age of Louis XIV: A Study in French Absolutism (1987), provide good introductions to the period. Roger Mettam, Power and Faction in Louis XIV’s France (1988); and Roger Mettam (ed.), Government and Society in Louis XIV’s France (1977), analyze the political structure. William Beik, Absolutism and Society in Seventeenth-Century France (1985), demonstrates in detail how Louis XIV’s government enlisted the collaboration of the nobility. John A. Lynn, Giant of the Grand Siècle: The French Army 1610–1715 (1997), recounts the rise of the main tool of France’s international power. Warren C. Scoville, The Persecution of Huguenots and French Economic Development, 1680–1720 (1960), is important in assessing the effects of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Peter Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV (1992), shows the interconnection between politics and art under the “Sun King.” J.H. Shennan Jeremy David Popkin France from 1715 to 1789

Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Régime and the French Revolution (1955, reprinted 1978; originally published in French, 1856), is still a basic source for the study of the period. Comprehensive histories include Daniel Roche, France in the Enlightenment (1998; originally published in French, 1993), a detailed survey of the period’s society and culture; and vol. 1 of Alfred Cobban, A History of Modern France, 3 vol. (1969). Michel Antoine, Louis XV (1989), is both a biography and an exhaustive account of high politics in that monarch’s reign. Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret, The French Nobility in the Eighteenth Century (1985; originally published in French, 1986), explains the changing nature of the country’s ruling elite.

Steven Laurence Kaplan, Provisioning Paris: Merchants and Millers in the Grain and Flour Trade During the Eighteenth Century (1984), describes a basic feature of the period’s economy. Economic histories make much use of the 18th-century travelogue of Arthur Young, Travels During the Years 1787, 1788, & 1789: Undertaken More Particularly with a View of Ascertaining the Cultivation, Wealth, Resources, and National Prosperity of the Kingdom of France, 2nd ed., 2 vol. (1794), available in many later editions. There are fascinating glimpses of urban life in Louis-Sébastien Mercier, Panorama of Paris: Selections from Tableau de Paris (1999; originally published in French, 1781); and Jacques-Louis Ménétra, Journal of My Life (1986; originally published in French, 1982). The culture and ideology of the period are explored in Robert Darnton, The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (1995); Lieselotte Steinbrügge, The Moral Sex: Woman’s Nature in the French Enlightenment (1995; originally published in German, 1992); Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (1994); and Thomas E. Crow, Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris (1985). David Bell, The Cult of the Nation (2001), offers an important new analysis of the growth of national identity. A classic analysis of his thought is Jean Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Transparency and Obstruction (1988; originally published in French, 1957). Keith Michael Baker, Inventing the French Revolution (1990); and Dale K. Van Kley, The Religious Origins of the French Revolution (1996), show how revolutionary ideas developed out of prerevolutionary political discourse. Patrice Louis-René Higonnet Jeremy David Popkin France from 1789 to 1815

Reliable overviews of the period include D.M.G. Sutherland, France 1789–1815: Revolution and Counter-Revolution (1985); William Doyle, The Oxford History of the French Revolution (1989); and Norman Hampson, A Social History of the French Revolution (1963, reissued 1995).

On the origins of the Revolution, see Jean Egret, The French Pre-Revolution (1977; originally published in French, 1962); and William Doyle, Origins of the French Revolution, 3rd ed. (1998). The best book on the Terror is still R.R. Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled: The Year of the Terror in the French Revolution (1941, reissued 1989). George Rudé, Robespierre (1967), provides excerpts from the Jacobin leader’s speeches. Martyn Lyons, France Under the Directory (1975), surveys the Revolution’s later phase. François Furet and Mona Ozouf (eds.), A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution (1989; originally published in French, 1988), is an important and original collection of short essays on selected events, actors, institutions, ideas, and historians of the French Revolution. Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (1984), analyzes the imagery and sociology of revolutionary politics. Notable thematic studies include Georges Lefebvre, The Great Fear of 1789: Rural Panic in Revolutionary France (1973, reissued 1989; originally published in French, 1932); P.M. Jones, The Peasantry in the French Revolution (1988); Albert Soboul, The Parisian Sans-culottes and the French Revolution, 1793–4, trans. from French (1964, reprinted 1979); George Rudé, The Crowd in the French Revolution (1959, reprinted 1986); Dominique Godineau, The Women of Paris and Their French Revolution (1998; originally published in French, 1988); John McManners, The French Revolution and the Church (1969, reprinted 1982); Jean-Paul Bertaud, The Army of the French Revolution (1988; originally published in French, 1979); Emmet Kennedy, A Cultural History of the French Revolution (1989); and Jacques Godechot, The Counter-Revolution: Doctrine and Action, 1789–1804 (1971, reissued 1981; originally published in French, 1961). The international dimension of the Revolution is interpreted in R.R. Palmer, The World of the French Revolution (1971). The best biography of a revolutionary leader is Leo Gershoy, Bertrand Barère: A Reluctant Terrorist (1962). John Hardman, Louis XVI (1993), is a life of the movement’s most illustrious victim; and the reasons for his fate are explained in David Jordan, The King’s Trial (1979, reprinted 1993). Isser Woloch, The New Regime (1994), shows how the Revolution’s principles were institutionalized. Jeremy D. Popkin, Revolutionary News (1990), explains the “media revolution” that was an integral part of the upheaval after 1789.

Martyn Lyons, Napoleon Bonaparte and the Legacy of the French Revolution (1994), is a good overview. On Napoleon’s life, see Felix Markham, Napoleon (1963); Jean Tulard, Napoleon: The Myth of the Saviour (1984; originally published in French, 1977); and Geoffrey Ellis, Napoleon (1997, reissued 2000). The best volume on the Napoleonic regime in France is Louis Bergeron, France Under Napoleon (1981; originally published in French, 1972). Owen Connelly, Blundering to Glory: Napoleon’s Military Campaigns, rev. ed. (1999), is a critical and incisive analysis. For the views of historians across the generations, see Pieter Geyl, Napoleon: For and Against (1949, reissued 1976; originally published in Dutch, 1946). Isser Woloch Jeremy David Popkin France since 1815

Volumes 2 and 3 of the already mentioned Alfred Cobban, A History of Modern France, 3 vol. (1957–62, reprinted 1969), present the period from the First Empire to the Republics in a sophisticated synthesis. Gordon Wright, France in Modern Times: From the Enlightenment to the Present, 5th ed. (1995); and Jeremy D. Popkin, History of Modern France, 4th ed. (2012), are general surveys. Good introductions to the periods they cover are H.A.C. Collingham and R.S. Alexander, The July Monarchy 1830–1848 (1988); Maurice Agulhon, The Republican Experiment 1848–1852 (1983; originally published in French, 1973); Alain Plessis, Rise and Fall of the Second Empire 1852–1871 (1985); Jean-Marie Mayeur and Madeleine Réberioux, The Third Republic from Its Origins to the Great War 1871–1914 (1984; originally published in French, 1973); Eugen Weber, The Hollow Years: France in the 1930s (1994); Julian Jackson, France: The Dark Years, 1940–1944 (2002); Jean-Pierre Rioux, The Fourth Republic 1944–1958 (1987; originally published in French, 1980–83); and Serge Berstein, The Republic of de Gaulle 1958–1969 (1993). Serge Berstein, La France de l’expansion: l’apogée Pompidou 1969–1974 (1995), continues the story through the presidency of de Gaulle’s successor. Annie Moulin, Peasantry and Society in France Since 1789 (1991; originally published in French, 1988); and Gérard Noiriel, Workers in French Society in the 19th and 20th Centuries (1990; originally published in French, 1986), are good introductions to social history.

Surveys of special topics on all or most of the period since 1815 include René Rémond, The Right Wing in France from 1815 to de Gaulle, 2nd ed. (1969; originally published in French, 1954), tracing change and continuity of the political right; Gérard Cholvy and Yves-Marie Hilaire, Histoire religieuse de la France contemporaine, 3 vol. (1985–88, reissued 2000), an analysis of the role of various religions; and Raoul Girardet, La Société militaire dans la France contemporaine, 1815–1939, updated ed. (1998), on the changing role and composition of the military corps. The role of France in world affairs is emphasized in Pierre Renouvin, Le XIX^e, 2 vol. (1954–55), on the developments of the 19th century, part of the series Histoire des relations internationales. François Caron, An Economic History of Modern France, trans. from French (1979, reissued 1983), revises older views about France’s rate of growth. Theodore Zeldin, France, 1848–1945, 2 vol. (1973–77), explores modern French society, stressing its complexity and continuity. Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France: 1870–1914 (1976), argues that a sense of nationhood came to rural France only in the late 19th century.

Period studies include Guillaume de Bertier de Sauvigny, The Bourbon Restoration (1966, originally published in French, 1955), the standard work on the period 1815–30; Claire Goldberg Moses, French Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (1984), which narrates the growth of women’s movements; Bonnie G. Smith, Ladies of the Leisure Class (1981), a model study of women’s lives; David H. Pinkney, Decisive Years in France, 1840–1847 (1986), arguing that France changed fundamentally in these years; Roger Price, The French Second Republic: A Social History (1972), a thoughtful reevaluation; Philip Nord, The Republican Moment (1995), which analyzes the rise of opposition to the Second Empire; Michael B. Miller, The Bon Marché: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store, 1869–1920 (1981); Michael Howard, The Franco-Prussian War: The German Invasion of France, 1870–1871, 2nd ed. (2001), a model study; Stewart Edwards, The Paris Commune, 1871 (1971), a balanced reevaluation; and Eugen Weber, France fin de siècle (1986). Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant Garde in France, 1885 to World War I, rev. ed. (1968, reissued 1984), is a brilliant survey of Parisian culture of the period. Charles Rearick, Pleasures of the Belle Époque: Entertainment and Festivity in Turn-of-the-Century France (1985), describes the high life in Montmartre. D.W. Brogan, France Under the Republic: The Development of Modern France (1870–1939) (1940, reprinted 1974), is a classic account. Jean-Denis Bredin, The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus (1986; originally published in French, 1983), provides a highly readable account of the great crisis.

For the 20th century, see Eugen Weber, Action Française: Royalism and Reaction in Twentieth Century France (1962), a full analysis of this right-wing movement; Zeev Sternhell, La Droite révolutionnaire, 1885–1914: les origines françaises du fascisme, new ed., enlarged (2000), a controversial argument that fascism was born in France; Jean-Jacques Becker, The Great War and the French People (1985, reissued 1993; originally published in French, 1980), which shows how France endured the ordeal of total war; Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944 (1972, reissued 2001), a critical analysis of the Pétain regime; Jean-Baptiste Duroselle, La Décadence, 1932–1939, 3rd rev. ed. (1985), and L’Abîme: 1939–1945, 2nd rev. ed. (1986, reissued 1990), two volumes of devastating analysis of French foreign policy before and during World War II; Philippe Burrin, France Under the Germans (1996; originally published in French, 1995), a synthesis of research on the occupation; Charles de Gaulle, War Memoirs, 3 vol. (1955–60; originally published in French, 1954–60), and Memoirs of Hope: Renewal and Endeavor (1971; originally published in French, 2 vol., 1970–71), indispensable for an understanding of the Gaullist era; Jean Lacouture, Charles de Gaulle, 3 vol. (1984–86), a full and perceptive biography; Robert Gildea, France Since 1945, rev. ed. (2001), good on the postwar period; and Alfred Grosser, Affaires extérieures: la politique de la France, 1944–1989 (1989), a penetrating analysis of postwar France’s role in the world. Julius W. Friend, The Long Presidency: France in the Mitterrand Years, 1981–1995 (1998), is a handy guide to the recent past. Hugh Dauncey and Geoff Hare (eds.), France and the 1998 World Cup: The National Impact of a World Sporting Event (1999), examines France as the host country and winner of the 1998 football (soccer) championships. Gordon Wright Eugen Weber