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The president – a former left-wing minister – is now beholden to the support of the far right. Yet in this summer’s snap election, they are the very group Macron tried to keep out of ...
Nov 20, 2020 · The religious differences were settled in 1905, when the church and the state were legally separated. The state was declared neutral with respect to religion, and people were free to believe and ...
Apr 25, 2023 · The current political crisis in France now goes beyond the detested pensions reform; It is a rejection of the Fifth Republic’s constitution. Revolution is in the air. After three months of turmoil over President Emmanuel Macron’s flagship pensions reform, France is tempted once again to rip up its constitution and start afresh.
- John Lichfield
Jun 30, 2024 · The head of government would also have a very important power: appointment to civil and military posts, a fundamental strategic issue for the top jobs in the State.
- The Elites Always Come Out on Top
- The Origins of Mistrust
- New Crisis, New Training Ground
- A Very French Paradox
France has undergone thirteen major political changes since 1789, and yet there have been very few major changes to the country’s elite, despite an undeniable but slow process of democratisation. The sequence from 1815 to 1848 is particularly emblematic. Only those who paid a certain amount of tax were eligible to vote and run in elections, and the...
Mistrust of the elites is not specific to France, as shown by the populist victories of the past ten years in Great Britain, Italy, Eastern Europe and the USA. People largely distrust their leaders because of the results of globalisation, the remoteness of supranational institutions, the power of big tech companies and the associated economic and s...
At each major crisis in post-Revolutionary French history, the people have questioned the role of the institutions that train the members of the elite. France’s “grandes écoles” – its most prestigious academic institutions – were created during the French Revolution. In 1800, the Conseil d’État was founded to act as a nursery for the senior civil s...
The mistrust of the elites may have a long history in France but today, in an age of extreme media coverage and immediacy, the associated defeat of intelligenceis worrying. Genuine intellectual debate all too often disappears in favour of ersatz ideas dominated by the one-track thinking and the politics of offence. What a long way we have come from...
- Eric Anceau
Montesquieu on government types and systems, from his 1748 text on political philosophy The Spirit of the Laws (De l’esprit des Lois): “There are three kinds of governments: the republican, the monarchical and the despotic. Under a republic the people, or a part of the people, has the sovereign power. Under a monarchy one man alone rules ...
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Apr 5, 2022 · Keane argues that we are witnessing a global trend towards more despotic regimes in certain parts of the world today. Despotism, for Keane, is not an ‘ideal’ or abstract measure of reality but is a ‘mode of power’, effectively a type of regime (Keane Citation 2020, p. 227). It exists, empirically, in particular places and not in others.
