Centralization and Decentralization in French History

Abstract

French politics and society have been dominated by two conflicting ten­dencies. On the one hand, there is the centuries-long trend towards cen­tralization, beginning under the French monarchs and culminating in the French Revolution and the First Napoleonic Empire. On the other hand, as historians such as Fernand Braudel have shown, there is the great diversity of France with its variety of climates, landscapes, regional cuisines and, historically, political, social and economic systems.¹ Although modern French school children were taught that the ‘Hexagon’, as France was called in reference to its final shape, had a kind of natural unity, this diver­sity is the result of a long process of piecemeal accumulation of territories between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean Sea. As General De Gaulle is said to have remarked, perhaps apocryphally, ‘You can unite the French only through fear. You simply cannot bring together a country that has over 365 kinds of cheese’. Indeed, centralization was born partly out of conquest and partly out of fear. It was an attempt by the country’s ruling elites to answer the question: how could they dominate and keep under control such a vast and diversified country?