Globalisation and the Specificity of the French Republic: the End of the French Counter-Model?

Abstract

When the deprived suburbs of Paris and other French conurbations erupted in the autumn of 2005, in the worst display of civil unrest in France for four decades, there was no shortage of commentators willing to recall the attempt to overturn the authority of the state that was led by the students at the Sorbonne in 1968. In his memoirs, the president at the time, Charles de Gaulle, had himself admitted that one of the specificities of French democracy was that nothing seemed to change in France unless the people took to the streets, and the period generated numerous academic studies that underlined France’s failings as a society incapable of overcoming a sense of stifling immobilism (Crozier, 1970). Certainly, the scale of the unrest was evocative of a major urban challenge to the peace and security of civil society, lasting for a full three weeks, and resulting in over 8000 vehicles being torched. Moreover, the special measures taken by the government to bring the situation under control, notably the resort to emergency curfew powers, seemed like an atavistic response from the worst days of the Fifth Republic under de Gaulle. Some have argued that France had been in revolt for a decade already, starting with the mass mobilisation against the plans drawn up by the government of Prime Minister Alain Juppé in 1995 to reform the country’s generous social security system; that the challenge to the authority of the state peaked again in 2003 in response to government proposals to reform the pensions system; and that the challenge posed by the youth of urban France in 2005 was the most dramatic expression of the frustration felt by a significant portion of society at the impoverishment and social neglect caused by the neo-liberal agenda imposed by governments of Left and Right in France since the early 1980s (Wolfreys, 2006).