A Divided Republic: Nation, State and Citizenship in Contemporary France
Cambridge University Press, 4/2/2015
EAN 9781107061514, ISBN10: 1107061512
Hardcover, 314 pages, 22.8 x 15.2 x 2 cm
Language: English
This book is an original and sophisticated historical interpretation of contemporary French political culture. Until now, there have been few attempts to understand the political consequences of the profound geopolitical, intellectual and economic changes that France has undergone since the 1970s. However, Emile Chabal's detailed study shows how passionate debates over citizenship, immigration, colonial memory, the reform of the state and the historiography of modern France have galvanised the French elite and created new spaces for discussion and disagreement. Many of these debates have coalesced around two political languages - republicanism and liberalism - both of which structure the historical imagination and the symbolic vocabulary of French political actors. The tension between these two political languages has become the central battleground of contemporary French politics. It is around these two poles that politicians, intellectuals and members of France's vast civil society have tried to negotiate the formidable challenges of ideological uncertainty and a renewed sense of global insecurity.
Introduction
French politics after the deluge
Part I. Writing the National Narrative in Contemporary France
The Return of Republicanism
1. Writing histories
two republican narratives
2. From nouveaux philosophes to nouveaux réactionnaires
Marxism and the Republic
3. La République en danger! The search for consensus and the rise of neo-republican politics
4. Postcolonies I
integration, disintegration and citizenship
5. The Republic, the Anglo-Saxon and the European project
Part II. Liberal Critics of Contemporary France
Le Libéralisme Introuvable?
6. In the shadow of Raymond Aron
the 'liberal revival' of the 1980s
7. Rewriting Jacobinism
François Furet, Pierre Rosanvallon and modern French history
8. Postcolonies II
the politics of multiculturalism and colonial memory
9. Whither the Trente Glorieuses? The language of crisis and the reform of the state
10. Liberal politics in France
a story of failure?
Conclusion
political consensus in twenty-first-century France
Bibliography
Index.