French Politics, Culture & Society

The future of democracy under globalization is the most burning political debate in France today.1 It lies at the heart of the quarrels between souverainistes and federalists; it is the focus of the assault on neoliberalism and on the media led by Pierre Bourdieu and of the attack on globalization mounted in the pages of Le Monde diplomatique.2 In parallel with these intellectual battles of the past decade, there has been a rising tide of social mobilization and protest over globalization in France. The highwater marks start with the vast strike wave of December 1995, described by a Le Monde journalist as the first strikes in an advanced industrial nation against globalization.

This article compares three health, safety and environmental policies in France and the United States: the regulation of asbestos, the regulatory impact of the health crisis associated with AIDS, and the regulation of genetically modified foods and seeds. These cases illustrate the evolution of regulatory policies and politics in France and the United States over the last three decades. In brief, risk management policies have become less politicized and risk averse in the United States, while they have become more politicized and risk averse in France. In many respects, regulatory politics and policies in France during the 1990s resemble those of the United States from the 1960s and through the late 1980s.

Le 9 mai 2001, un sondage BVA sur l’opinion des Français sur « la torture pendant la guerre d’Algérie » est publié dans le journal Libération. Dans ce sondage, 56% des Français se déclarent favorables à une demande officielle de pardon au peuple Algérien de la part du président de la République et du Premier ministre. À la question « Selon vous, qui sont les principaux responsables du recours de la France à la torture durant la guerre d’Algérie? », 50% des Français répondent « les autorités politiques françaises de l’époque », alors que 31% placent la responsabilité sur les officiers de l’armée française.

Les élections municipales constituent, en France, un évènement politique national dans la mesure où tous les électeurs sont appelés, le même jour, tous les six ans, à choisir les membres des futurs conseils municipaux des quelque 36 500 villes et villages du pays. Dans le courant de la semaine suivante, les conseillers municipaux élisent parmi eux le maire de la commune et ses adjoints, ainsi que les membres des assemblées intercommunales lorsque ces communes sont membres de regroupements de ce type.

Parallèlement au ralentissement de la croissance économique qui affecte en particulier l’Europe au début des années quatre-vingt-dix, on observe dans l’opinion publique des réserves de plus en plus répandues vis-à-vis de la construction européenne. Ces réserves se concrétisent électoralement à l’occasion des référendums organisés dans un certain nombre de pays sur le Traité de Maastricht.

If social science were a sport, Norbert Elias (1897-1990) would receive the award for comeback of the century. He was undistinguished during much of his career: an interminable graduate student in Weimar Germany; a disregarded refugee in Paris in 1933-1935; a prisoner in a British camp for aliens in 1940; an adjunct in adult-education centers during the immediate postwar years in London; a prey to writer’s block with no publications in the 1940s and only a few articles in the 1950s and 1960s. Elias finally got a full-time teaching job at Leicester University in 1954. The extent of his obscurity is evident from an incident at the meeting of the International Sociological Association in 1956. When a Dutch sociologist, Johan Goudsblom, asked to be introduced to him, Elias was astonished: It was the first time anyone had made such a request. In fact, it was the first time Elias had met anyone outside of his personal circle who had read The Civilizing Process.

Elias was very old when he died in 1990 at the age of 93. And like Lear he “bore the most.” His father, Hermann, died during the war in 1940, and his mother, Sophie, disappeared in a crematorium at Auschwitz during the year 1941.

“Intellectual life is a kind of combat,” wrote Fernand Braudel. I see no reason why historians, who happen to study early-modern civility, should behave like courtiers toward each other. But in point of fact, I do not describe Professor Chartier as a member of a terrible “sect.” The term “sect” appears only in a quotation from Zygmunt Bauman. And readers will observe that what Bauman and I are both getting at is the need to be critical of the process of canonization that has been at work in Elias’s case.

Pierre Grémion, La Plume et la Tribune: Jacques Nantet, homme de lettres parisien (Paris : Gallimard, 2001)

Volker R. Berghahn, America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).

K. Steven Vincent Victor Considérant and the Rise and Fall of French Romantic Socialism by Jonathan Beecher

Thomas Kselman Educating the Faithful: Religion, Schooling, and Society in Nineteenth-Century France by Sarah A. Curtis

Hollis Clayson Impressionists and Politics: Art and Democracy in the Nineteenth Century by Philip Nord

Alice Bullard The Colonial Bastille: A History of Imprisonment in Vietnam, 1862-1940 by Peter Zinoman

Michael Miller Cette vilaine affaire Stavisky. Histoire d’un scandale politique by Paul Jankowski, trans. Patrick Hersant

Philip Nord Les Orphelins de la République: Destinées des députés et sénateurs français (1940-1945) by Olivier Wieviorka

Daniel G. Cohen The Legacy of Nazi Occupation: Patriotic Memory and National Recovery in Western Europe, 1945–1965 by Pieter Lagrou

Warren Motte French Fiction in the Mitterrand Years: Memory, Narrative, Desire by Colin Davis and Elizabeth Fallaize

Christopher S. Thompson “Être Rugby”: Jeux du masculin et du féminin by Anne Saouter

Sylvie Waskiewicz Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain by Jean-Pierre Jeunet

Notes on contributors

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