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provide a French perspective on world events. The impetus for the creation of France 24 was, therefore, overtly political, with President Chirac one of the early supporters of the project after his re-election in 2002. Despite official backing, however, French news broadcasters had to overcome a series of difficulties in the run-up to the launch of the new service. The first was that France has no organisational equivalent of the BBC, whose size and output of English-language content make it a natural player in global news markets. In contrast, not only is the largest single French television network, TF1, in private hands, but the public service provider, France Tlvisions, benefits from neither the status nor legitimacy in the French media landscape that the BBC routinely enjoys in the UK. Nor does France Tlvisions enjoy a reputation among international audiences on a par with the BBC. In part this is because the experience of governmental intervention in news production in the early years of French television prevented public broadcasting as a whole from developing a tradition of political independence which would allow the organisation to foster a positive relationship with civil society and embed itself in popular consciousness as a national icon. There has never been a French equivalent of the Beeb. In addition, the break-up of the unitary broadcasting organisation of the Office de radiodiffusion-tlvision franaise (ORTF) in 1975 split public radio and television, with the result that for over 30 years there has been no single public broadcasting organisation which could maximise its influence internationally. Finally, while the BBC has for long regarded news and information provision as a central component of its mission indeed arguably the principal defining feature this has been much less true of either TF1 or France Tlvisions. Thus, while the contemporary BBC regards itself not just as a broadcaster but as a major public communications actor, embracing radio, television and on-line services, TF1 and France Tlvisions are still in many ways old-fashioned suppliers of television programming with some web content as an add-on service. The project was held up by discussions among stakeholders about which national broadcaster would take the lead role. The government wanted TF1 to be involved, while France Tlvisions wanted to be in total charge. In the end, ownership of France 24 is equally shared between these two private and public companies. Second, a prolonged debate took place and, given the sensitivities involved, probably needed to take place regarding the language(s) in which France 24 would broadcast. In particular, the question of whether the news channel should broadcast in French was an important aspect of the pre-launch debate. In the end it was decided that the channel would broadcast in three languages French, English and Arabic so

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as to maximise audiences and extend its potential for influence among elite opinion formers who were regarded as the channels main target audience. Broadcasting in the French language was not considered to be a point of principle. Third, TF1 did not want France 24 to be available within France for fear that this would provide unwanted competition for its own domestic rolling news service, LCI. Finally, the project was held up by disagreements about the amount of financing required and where the money would come from. Its initial operating budget of a80 million, most of it from the public purse, is comparatively small by the standards of international rolling news channels. Launched in December 2006, the channel was praised by Le Monde for its coverage of the conflict in Iraq, the amount of space devoted to cultural issues and its reporting of events in Africa (Larrochelle, 2007). Only time will tell whether the objective of reaching out to key international opinion-formers has been a success. The channels capacity to reach out to economic, business and political elites rather than simply to a mass audience will therefore be the key criterion of evaluation by all those involved in the journalistic enterprise.

Conclusion
How successful have stakeholders in the national media policy community been in ensuring Frances place in global television markets in the early years of the twenty-first century? The answer is at best mixed. In terms of pushing back, there has been a strong and concerted attempt to maintain a distinct French identity to French television content through the use of prescriptive and proscriptive regulation. Has this ensured the distinctiveness of French television when compared to that of other European nations of similar size? Not particularly. In terms of the amount of imported programming, French television is not especially exceptional or distinct when compared to the UK or Germany. However, in fairness to the French authorities it could be argued that without regulatory constraints on content the amount of domestic product shown on French television would probably be significantly lower, as French companies took advantage of the financial savings to be made through a policy based on cheap imports. If so, then regulation does allow for a certain amount of cultural and economic protectionism. In terms of reaching out, France has certainly not been as successful as it would have wished. As regards producing a Gaullist style national

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champion in global media markets, the results are poor. Vivendi Universal represented a heroic failure, while Canal+ has pulled back from foreign incursions for example its forced withdrawal from the Italian pay-TV market, in which it was forced to sell its holdings to Murdochs News Corporation. Meanwhile TF1 has been largely content to dominate the domestic television market. The company remains a major player within France, but not a big global player in terms of its portfolio of assets/activities in foreign markets. It is certainly not a rival to the BBC in terms of external commercial activities such as programme sales. Nor is France Tlvisions. Moreover, French production companies are often weak and under-capitalised by international standards. In addition, programme exports have been hindered by language constraints, by the cultural specificity of much of the content and by idiosyncratic national particularities regarding length of programmes 90 minutes is quite common in French production, while the international standard is 52 minutes (one hour including time for commercial breaks). Another aspect of the failure of Frances reaching out strategy has been political confusion. Turf wars between the ministries of foreign affairs on the one hand and culture on the other have not helped forge a joinedup policy. The result has been a fragmentation of effort across different broadcasting actors, including Radio-France internationale, TV5 Monde and France 24 among others (Brochand, 2006: 43568). Yet it is also the case that fragmentation is to some extent inevitable: the mission of TV5 Monde is to supply French language content to those with a knowledge of French, while that of France 24 is to put across a French perspective on global events. These are two quite separate objectives, catering for different audiences and requiring different skills on the part of the content providers. What of the future? As national borders become more porous in the face of global technological change, corporate transnational ownership strategies and liberal WTO and European regulations, a defensive national strategy of pushing back will become more difficult to deliver. This will be true whether pushing back is evaluated in cultural or economic terms. In an age of multi-channel television, content segmentation and audience fragmentation, there will be increasing pressures on the financial bottom-line. French product will have to compete to secure its privileged position on domestic television. At the same time, the regulatory tradition in French television is well entrenched and so the significance of defensive strategies in the face of external competition should not be underestimated. It is also important to remember that

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French-produced television content is much appreciated by the national audience. As far as reaching out is concerned, more emphasis needs to be placed on this activity. French television is important in certain global regions (notably French-speaking markets in Europe, Africa and North America), but tangential in other global regions (English- and Spanish-speaking markets, India and China). At present there are insufficient incentives for many policy stakeholders as well as significant corporate resistance. In particular, the lack of a powerful global media company represents a major constraint to French efforts to play a major role on the world stage.

References
Brianon, P. (2002) Messier Story, Paris: Grasset. Brochand, C. (2006) Histoire gnrale de la radio et de la tlvision en France, Tome III 19742000, Paris: La Documentation franaise. Chalaby, J.K. (2002) The de Gaulle Presidency and the Media, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Chauveau, A. (1997) LAudiovisuel en libert, Paris: Presses de Sciences Po. Dagnaud, M. (2000) Ltat et les mdias, Paris: ditions Odile Jacob. Gordon, P.H. and S. Meunier (2001) The French Challenge? Adapting to Globalisation, Washington, DC: Brookings Institution. Hallin, D.C. and P. Mancini (2004) Comparing Media Systems, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harcourt, A. (2005) The European Union and the Regulation of Media Markets, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hayward, S. (2005) French National Cinema, 2nd edn, London: Routledge. Herman, E.S. and R.W. McChesney (1997) The Global Media, London: Cassell. Kuhn, R. (1995) The Media in France, London: Routledge. Kuhn, R. (2005) The myth of exceptionalism? French television in a West European context, in E. Godin and T. Chafer (eds), The French Exception, Oxford: Berghahn. Larrochelle, J.-J. (2007) 24 heures sur France 24, Le Monde, 45 February. Open Society Institute (2005) Television across Europe: Regulation, Policy and Independence France, http://www.soros.org/initiatives/media/articles_publications/ publications/eurotv_20051011, consulted 18 April 2007. Orange, M. and J. Johnson (2003) Une Faillite franaise, Paris: Albin Michel. Steemers, J. (2004) Selling Television, London: British Film Institute. Tunstall, J. and D. Machin (1999) The Anglo-American Media Connection, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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

Introduction
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 Frances 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 Jupp in 1995 to reform the countrys 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).
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A closer analysis of the social realities, however, leads to a more nuanced view of what the riots of 2005 signified, and especially what the youth involved represented. Statistical analyses after the event showed that half the young people arrested were under 18 years of age, operating in groups of 30200 individuals according to the banlieue in which they lived. On no occasion could it be said that a representative cross-section of the population of the suburbs concerned took to the streets in an act of defiance against the state. They were, in fact, the principal victims of the disorder due to the damage done by the rioters to their property and the amenities they used. Attempts to interpret the riots as the reaction of a generation fighting the discrimination suffered by the Muslim community in France overlook the fact that the many thousands of often highly politicised students of Muslim origin or persuasion in French universities did not join the unrest. Apart from the occasional piece of abusive graffiti regarding the then French Interior Minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, later elected President of France in May 2007, the rioters had no political agenda as such. There were no demands, no spokespersons, there was no network of support and no organisation. In contrast to this, the students of 1968 were highly politicised and could be seen as invoking their rights as citizens, according to that first, heady declaration of the rights of man and the citizen in 1789, to wrest sovereignty back from an authoritarian government, while the rioting adolescents of 2005 seemed to be turning their backs on the blueprint for citizenship that the French revolution bequeathed to the modern world. For them, the rights of citizenship and the concomitant obligation to participate in the life of the polity and shape its future were at best hollow, and at worst a deliberate deception aimed at masking the fact that there was no upward socio-economic mobility for them in contemporary France. In short, for these young rebels, and in contrast to their predecessors in 1968, the grand narrative of modernity flowing from the Revolution of 1789 that allied the progress of a democratic state with the empowerment of the individual citizen with universal rights, had broken down. What this chapter will do, therefore, will be to survey first of all some of the essentially conservative arguments suggesting that the revolutionary impetus, and the political culture that it engendered and that underpinned the specificity of the French polity, has come to an end. It will then examine the view that rather than marking a dangerous form of anomie, the decline of the old Republican paradigm has, in fact, released new forces and provided a platform for a new politics. And in the final section, a synthesis will be offered which suggests that the French Republican model for assuming citizenship through action

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in the public space remains pertinent, albeit in a more modest manner where its specificity has accommodated the prospect of convergence with other post-modern liberal democratic societies.

The decline of the French Republican paradigm

Observations and anxiety about the failure of a growing number of citizens to take an active part in political life through the processes of representative democracy are not new, and certainly not unique to France. Empirical surveys, notably in the USA in the 1950s and 1960s, illustrated the considerable gulf that existed between the active citizen envisaged by the fathers of the American Revolution or the citoyen actif conceptualised by the authors of the French Revolution and his modern twentieth-century counterpart (Berelson et al., 1966). What emerged was the image of a citizen who was poorly informed politically, undynamic and lacking in self-motivation with regard to participation in the life of the body politic. Subsequent surveys in Britain and France during the two following decades suggested that democracies that had enjoyed generations or even centuries of stability had developed a complacent coexistence with the apathy of many of their citizens. The sociological interpretation of this that emerged, especially from the research of individuals such as Pierre Bourdieu in France, shed a particular light on the classic notion of the active citizen by asking whether it was only ever an illusion. The nineteenth-century barriers to participation posed by property qualification had gone, but, according to Bourdieu, the right to influence decision-making remains illusory due to the cultural capital that is shared by modern political elites in a market from which the ordinary citizen is excluded. And Bourdieus ideas were fed back into the debates occurring in English-speaking countries about the cultural underpinning of political representation (Bourdieu, 1991). But one could argue that, notwithstanding the parallels with other modern liberal democracies, the specificity of Frances political culture made the sense of anxiety engendered by the crisis of representation more acute there than elsewhere. As Jrgen Habermas has observed, the eighteenth century marked a watershed in the context framing the relationship between the governing and the governed in Europe by offering the individual the principle of public deliberation as a means of legitimate control over political authority (Habermas, 1993). The relationship between those exercising power and the people was expressed by the emergence of a public space or dimension that conditioned new forms of sociability, defining the individual through his or her commitment to

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action in that space. The ambition to create a res publica or public entity that emerged from the Revolution of 1789 can be seen as setting a new template and temporal framework for modernity, and the depth of that conviction was evoked by George Steiner (1988: 151) when he argued that the cycle of lived history, was deemed to have begun a second time. Such hyperbole provides an implicit link to the metaphysical understanding of citizenship that characterises the specificity of the French approach in contrast to the empiricism of the Anglo-American one, and points to the inevitable sense of anxiety that must surface when the Republican ideal collides with reality. Almost from the beginning of that new dawn in history, as Steiner would have it, there has been a tension between the prerogatives afforded to the citizen according to the Republican ideal, and the way this was translated in terms of political practice. Entry and action in the public space did not conform to the idealised image of the active citizen. It is noteworthy that, when, on 29 October 1789, the National Assembly passed the decree introducing the category of active citizens (male and tax-paying), this was challenged by figures like Camille Desmoulins who asked: But what is this much repeated word active citizen supposed to mean? The active citizens are the ones who took the Bastille (Wickham Legg, 1905: 1734). Those who in previous generations had theorised the way the role offered to the citizen by the Revolution had not been realised in terms of political practice would have recognised the democracy minus the people identified by Maurice Duverger (1967) in the early life of the Fifth Republic, when the operation of the public space was incomparably more transparent and the processes of representation more established. As Duverger argued, the fundamental mediating role that should be played by political parties in translating the preferences of civil society into the choices of the state, is weaker in France than in other comparable democracies such as Britain or Germany. Whereas the mass party memberships in those democracies provided a form of leverage that allowed considerable direct pressure to be brought on the leaderships in question, the weak membership bases of mainstream French political parties (with the historical exception of the French Communist Party), and the reliance on tendencies and factions as the conduit for changes in party policy, has resulted in what has been perceived as the rise of a class of party notables who have come to dominate public life. Furthermore, by operating through a form of centrisme that perpetuates itself precisely by occluding the fundamental oppositions that should separate the adversaries, the parties deprive the voters of a genuine choice and preside over

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a system that could be termed la dmocratie sans le peuple or democracy minus the people. The frustration identified underlined the enduring challenge of reuniting the citizen with the vocation defined by the Revolution, and whether it was Duverger or other figures exercising a seminal intellectual influence, the guiding assumption was that the citizen cannot fulfil himself or herself without engaging actively in the life of the Republic. But as the end of the twentieth century approached, the focus of anxiety moved from the obstacles in the way of participation to the fundamental relationship between the individual citizen and politics in the Republic. The interaction between the citizen and those mediating institutions identified by Duverger and others was conceived, originally, in a way that buttressed the specificity of the French Republic. The ethical voluntarism that characterised the Revolution posited the notion of a citizen emancipated from the claims of heredity, and whose judgement was founded on the exercise of reason alone. In terms of political fidelity, the claims of genealogy had to give way to the choices constructed within a broad set of values defined by the collectivity, the nation. The inevitable corollary of Jacobin ideology was that the children of the revolution were constitutionally innocent (Borie, 1981: 215), because any kind of social determinism passed from one generation to the next would militate against the democratic structuring of political choices that individuals would make as free and equal citizens. Political theorists from other democratic cultures could be tempted to establish a causal link between the political convictions of parents and the partisan preferences of their children, even to the point of extrapolating from this a fundamental factor responsible for the stability of a mature democracy like that of the United States. However, Anglo-American political scientists have tended to cast France as an idealised counter-model where, it has been argued, the weakness of family-based factors in the formation and transmission of political loyalties is a determining factor in the turbulence that sometimes characterises political life, and especially the susceptibility to the sudden emergence of new movements (Converse and Dupeux, 1962: 23). The typical reaction in France itself to the notion that a correlation could be drawn between the state of the polity and the state of the family was to query the criterion chosen as the basis for such a model. The indicator of continuity in terms of political commitment could lie within a broad ideological tradition that in a country like France was perpetuated by classic divisions such as those between Left and Right, and constituted non-family factors of political socialisation that were just as influential and self-perpetuating

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as family factors were perceived to be elsewhere (Percheron and Jennings, 1993). A difficulty arises when defending the specificity of political socialisation in France, if those non-family factors that had characterised the strength of the Republic are perceived to have faded. It can justifiably be argued that the very notions of Left and Right, and the ideological antitheses they imply, were universalised from the French revolutionary tradition. The ensuing narrative of social transformation perpetuated allegiances and galvanised constituencies as it was defined through struggles such as anti-clericalism in the inextricably linked pursuit of freedom and secularism, and the attempt to give concrete social form to the ideal of equality in the face of the inequalities generated by the amoral forces of money and markets. But as some commentators observed, as the French Republic reached the threshold of the new millennium the concept of liberty as a project building on the visions of the kind of new society described by figures like Rousseau and Saint-Just was in retreat, faced with the rise of a parasitic notion of liberty, that is liberty as a niche or individual space to be hollowed out of the body politic; a process accelerated by what was regarded by an increasing number of French citizens as the redundancy of the political cleavages and causes emanating from 1789 (Tenzer, 1990: 216). This desertion of lespace public, the public space that is supposed to be the privileged platform for the actions of the citizen as a political animal, was the consequence of what had been identified elsewhere as the distancing of the individual from both normative systems of belief, such as ideology, and a sense of their social origins, resulting in an imperative of fulfilment that had become powerfully and personally differentiated in a kind of vacuum (Lipovetsky, 1983: 14). Empirical studies, as opposed to theoretical speculations, suggested that although it was premature to conclude that old cleavages like Left and Right no longer conditioned political commitment, it could certainly be asserted that they were far from sufficient in operating as coherent global indicators of the way political identities were formed in individuals. The analysis of attitudes among the electorate suggested rather that their fidelities and choices were subject to a process of dstructuration or dismantling, with the fading of former patterns of allegiance (Schweisguth, 1994). In an implicit admission of the declining specificity of the French counter-model, due to the growing failure of mediating institutions to condition the participation of the individual citizen in the life of the polity, surveys carried out in France as the 1990s drew to a close appeared to acknowledge that the existence of a pre-existing

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parental template of political preferences could play a significant part in anchoring the individual citizen in his or her role as a political actor, as in the USA or Britain. In an analysis of the post-electoral Cevipof survey of 1995, it was argued that the transmission of political convictions from one generation to the next in a family context could operate as a conditioning factor, and moreover a positive one, since those citizens without it could find themselves less able to make clear choices as voters and therefore be relegated to the sidelines as hors jeu politiques. In the wider context of the functioning of the political system itself, the rise in the number of individual citizens without a parental legacy of political commitment might lead to a worst-case scenario where they would comprise the constituency most vulnerable to expressions of political extremism (Jaffr and Muxel, 1997: 85). Such an implication, however qualified by the usual caveats that accompany empirical research, would suggest an undermining of the vocation of the French Republic on two related fronts. On the first front is the dstructuration diminishing the range of binary oppositions that once defined the variety of options to which the individual could commit as an active citizen. On the second front, the metaphysical conception of the citizen that had given the Republic its specificity might in fact be inadequate faced with the new realities of French society, and the yardstick of stability used by Anglo-American commentators might not be entirely inappropriate for France after all. In short, the dstructuration of political choice at home and the convergence with other liberal democracies abroad might represent a fatal blow to the singular and very specific ideal of the French Republic. At the most pessimistic end of the scale, one kind of reaction to the decline of the ideal of the Republic has been to declare its veritable demise as a mobilising concept for the active citizen. The notion of filiation politique or inherited political conviction, whether attributable to familial factors or the broader context of ideological ones, could not withstand the kind of idoltrie dmocratique that has pushed the individuality of choice to an extreme that is neither sustainable nor desirable. It is the fruit of an unhealthy adulation of the individual that has severed him or her from the ties that provide a framework of orientation (Finkielkraut, 1999). This is an evolution that, in some eyes, constitutes a reversal of the modernising thrust of the Revolution. With the unravelling of the nexus provided by a political culture that once bound the citizen to the Republic, comes a situation where the boundaries determined by its institutions are occluded by grey zones no longer susceptible to the authority of those institutions, thereby undoing the integrating impetus

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of 1789 and, in so doing, drawing France into a kind of new middle ages (Minc, 1993). Conversely, there is a much more sanguine reading of the dstructuration of the range of political options to which the active citizen can commit. Rather than the retreat of the Republic being seen as the abandonment of lespace public to its inevitable transformation into a wilderness, it has also been interpreted as a new horizon of possibility in which the notion of commitment and the sphere of politics can be fundamentally rethought.

Politics outside the paradigm

As has already been implied, the perception of the Republic and its vocation is inextricably woven into the great narrative of modernisation. The inculcation of the Republics values was crucial to the political socialisation of its citizens, and its institutions were the key to their integration. But the viability of that narrative, and therefore the credibility of the Republics mission, rested on the claim to universality that translated practically into a monopoly of the forms of engagement in the public space by which the citizen could define him or herself. The desire to step outside the offre politique or choices provided by its mediating institutions would inevitably be perceived as a crisis for the concept of the community of citizens (Schnapper, 1994) whose fulfilment is meant to be defined and underwritten by the universalism of the Republics values. As has been cogently argued elsewhere, the claim to embody the values that would elevate and gratify the fundamental aspirations of all citizens, was sustained by the corresponding resort to a process of othering (Silverman, 1999: 133). The ambitions of the Republic were historically underpinned by the systematically negative construction placed on what was portrayed as the embodiment of antithetical values, whether it was the caricatural contrasting of ethno-cultural concepts of citizenship with Frances universalist one (Brubaker, 1992: 2), or the depiction of those (such as in the colonies) who could not be elevated to the metaphysical citizenship offered by the Republic, and were therefore categorised as subjects to be administered, as opposed to citizens empowered to act by rights. This projection of particularism, corporality and difference on others outside the Republic could sustain the contract with the active citizen operating in the public space as long as the Republican state could maintain the credibility of its modernising mission of securing economic progress, cultural unification and the formulation of political responses

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to social demands. But the increasing difficulty of responding successfully to those challenges is what can be characterised as the crisis of modernity for Western countries (Dubet and Wieviorka, 1995), and, one could argue, especially for France, where it constituted the essential trade-off between the concrete particularisms defining the individual and the disembodied universalist rights empowering him or her as a citizen. Implicit in the complaint, nobody knows today what it is to be a citizen (Castoriadis, 1996: 92), is the fear that if the Republic loses the monopoly of defining the nature of citizenship then the cohesion of the collectivity it embodies is seriously threatened. Conversely, the argument can be turned on its head with the proposition that it is the opening up of the public space to the clash of particularisms that now drives the definition of citizenship (Nar, 1992) and that by extension should redefine the role of the Republic, bringing it into line with the evolution of post-modern democracy globally. Empirical evidence suggests that the Republics monopolistic definition of action in the public space is being increasingly challenged by bottom-up pressures in French society. On the one hand, the political life of the Republic over the last three decades has been characterised by the ever-rising tidemark of abstention among its citizens from the rationalist and universalist activity that evokes Ernest Renans nineteenth-century description of the nation as a daily plebiscite. In the definition offered to a representative cross-section of the electorate of what constituted a good citizen, the characteristic of being a regular voter had, in 1976, been cited by 51 per cent of the respondents, in 1983 this figure had dropped to 43 per cent, and by 1989 it was down to 38 per cent (Jaffr, 1990). In the referendum that marked the opening of the new millennium, the disinclination to engage was starkly illustrated by the 69.2 per cent of citizens who abstained from voting on the reform of the presidential mandate (Ponceyri, 2000: 14). On the other hand, recent surveys of French society reveal a remarkable willingness on the part of its citizens to commit themselves to a multiplicity of projects that challenge and impact on the life of the collectivity (Crettiez and Sommier, 2002). Although individuals are unquestionably less willing than in previous generations to subscribe and effectively fold their individuality into organisations with programmes that operate in the public space, many from varied backgrounds and generations are now prepared to invest in a project that is limited in time and space while preserving the distance that safeguards their individuality, an engagement distanci or arms length commitment (Ion, 1997: 88). The investment in parochial concerns and punctual objectives has seen a remarkable

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flourishing of la France associative. Up to 1970 the number of new associations created annually was less than 20,000, but by the 1990s the figure was nudging up to 70,000. While in an obvious respect comprised of individuals committed to collective interaction, the typical association is nonetheless task-driven rather than ideologically-driven, whether responding to changing social needs, humanitarian or cultural imperatives, eschewing the assumptions that would characterise an enveloping political project. Such has been the rise in the popularity of these vehicles for action that, by some estimates, France entered the new millennium with up to 800,000 officially registered associations (Waters, 2003: 22). More pertinently for the mission of the Republic is the way mobilisations have occurred in recent years, challenging the institutions that mediate its role in formulating responses to social needs. A salient example is the emergence in the 1990s of varied and widespread expressions of militancy by a social group that up to then had been envisaged in the kind of passive terms that reflected their economic inactivity. The marches of the unemployed launched by AC! (Agir ensemble contre le chmage) in 1994 encouraged a growing determination that a once virtually invisible section of society should deploy its demands in the public space, and do so on its own terms. The wave of protest that culminated in the winter of 199798 was vigorously independent of any kind of rcupration politique or instrumentalisation by established parties or organisations like trade unions. As for the Republics vocation of cultural integration, the mobilisation against racism that took shape in France during the 1990s provides a rich example of how the traditional expectations regarding the political mediation of social change are challenged by the multiplicity of ways that social change is ramified culturally. In many ways, SOS Racisme (SOSR), formed in 1984, became an archetype of the mediatised social movement, with all the short-term advantages and medium-term disadvantages that entails. In the short term, the accomplished performances in the media of their charismatic first leader, Harlem Dsir, set a benchmark with regard to the ability to communicate a message to a mass audience, since televised appearances provided the profile for an orchestrated campaign using the tools of regular press conferences and the co-opting of various celebrities to support the cause, which in turn provided more fodder for television exposure. That the movement succeeded in alerting the nation to the dangers posed by the rise of racism in 1980s France, especially the rise of the Front National (FN), is generally uncontested. The most optimistic interpretations of the significance of the movement

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credited it with being no less than the only force to have understood and subsequently mobilised the moral generation (Joffrin, 1987: 13). In retrospect, the anti-racism movements might not have obtained a measurable institutional impact commensurate with the initial enthusiasm they generated, but the impact on the consciousness of individuals and the processes of self-understanding, though less quantifiable, was nonetheless very significant. Many individuals who, by their ethnic and/ or cultural origin, had lived with the implicit pressure to conform to an abstract Republican identity that denied them the positive display of those defining characteristics as citizens, began to assume those particularist attributes, but in a way that circumvented the traditional political practices of the public space. What these movements appeared to challenge in practice was what others had articulated in theory, namely that a universalist concept of citizenship predicated on the value of equality can in fact veil hegemonic processes that can be experienced as controlling, oppressive and in effect inegalitarian. The greater the tension this creates in society, the more the need emerges for an understanding of citizenship that gives individuals the opportunity to participate in a democracy that is radical and plural (Mouffe, 1992). This would translate into an opening up of the public space to citizens as social actors where the interaction of plural identities would, by definition, work through antagonistic processes that are nonetheless positive rather than the unsustainable assumption of an abstract consensus. This concern with concrete rights and the prerogatives that citizens ought to possess in order to constitute the public space from below, as opposed to its being something imposed from above, has led some to argue for a fracturing of the traditional integration between the concepts of citizen and state in the Republic. If the evolution of society has transformed France into what is in reality a multiple and moving border, undermining national specificity (Balibar, 1998: 6), then the understanding of citizenship should reflect that evolution and be framed in transnational terms. For its most enthusiastic advocates, recasting French citizenship into a European mould may be the only way to preserve the relationship between the individual citizen and his or her role as a political actor, by preventing the triumph of those global liberal economic forces that provoke a kind of fatalism that disempowers and depoliticises the individual citizen (Bourdieu, 1998: 74). However attractive these transnational reconceptualisations may be with regard to breaking the homology between the citizen and the nation as represented by the Republic, they are evocations of a society that may or may not depending on the evolution of the European

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Union (EU) be in the process of being fulfilled (see Chapters 6 and 7). However great the potential may be for a European notion of citizenship to transcend the limitations of a national one, the absence of factors like the shared cultural symbols that are constitutive of a common identity mean that, so far, the EU has been more inclined to define the membership of individuals and states through the elaboration of regulations. The reality for the Republic of today is that the established conceptualisation of the public space is still operational and may possess a greater potential for adaptation than its critics are prepared to admit.

Revitalising the vocation of the French Republic

The presidential elections of 2002, and more precisely the shock result of the first round when the Socialist, Lionel Jospin, was beaten to the second place spot by the FNs Jean-Marie Le Pen, focused a profound and wide-ranging debate about the relationship between the citizen and the Republic and the consequences for its mediating institutions. One of the paradoxes observed was, at one end of the spectrum, the unchanging nature of the offre politique or the options in terms of the prospective leaders entering the race. Unlike other systems where a losing candidate normally gives up the leadership of his or her party and retires to the political sidelines, the system in France repeatedly throws up the same faces. Lionel Jospin and Robert Hue were entering the contest for the second time, Jacques Chirac and Jean-Marie Le Pen for the fourth time, and Arlette Laguiller for a remarkable fifth time. This over-familiarity, it has been argued, bore a causal relationship to the explosion of options at the other end of the spectrum among those candidates with little established profile. With a total of sixteen candidates entering the first round, on the surface there appeared to be a balanced political choice, with eight candidates coming from the Left or extreme Left, and eight coming from the centre Right, the Right and the extreme Right. But in reality the results of the first round testified to the miettement or break-up of the vote that had little to do with Left-Right allegiances: fifteen of the sixteen candidates each gathered more than 1 per cent of the votes cast, and none of them crossed the threshold of 20 per cent. Moreover, for the first time in the life of the Fifth Republic, there were four women candidates standing for the supreme office and a youth (in political terms) of twenty-seven, Olivier Besancenot, standing as the candidate of the Ligue Communiste Rvolutionnaire (LCR), who, according to the Louis Harris

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poll of 21 April 2002, attracted 14 per cent of the votes cast by 1824year-olds (Gattolin and Miquet-Marty, 2003: 28). There was, therefore, on the one hand, a striking number of voters who were prepared to step outside of the mainstream in their choice of candidates, and on the other hand, with a first-round rate of abstentions and spoilt ballots touching 30.05 per cent, no shortage of commentators to remark on the reluctance of citizens to exercise their rights actively in the public space. Well before the events of 21 April 2002, however, there had been interpretations of the abstentionist phenomenon that did not see it as an inevitable and cataclysmic indicator of disengagement. A rising level of abstention may be read as signalling political engagement by another means. Studies have shown that there are very few permanent abstentionists in France, and that they are difficult to categorise in fixed terms demographically and socio-economically. The refusal to vote among erstwhile supporters of mainstream parties, can express a desire not to betray the party with which they are most closely aligned, but which they also reproach for not fulfilling their expectations. On a broader and related level, abstention can be a deliberate choice in response to what is perceived as the absence of genuine alternatives. The voter may therefore opt to abstain, but this is not a blanket response, being instead one that is modulated according to a possible host of variables, resulting in multiple modes of behaviour, and constituting an eloquent reflection on what is on offer politically (Subileau and Toinet, 1993: 193). It may be that the voter may temper his or her incursion in the public space in a way that balances his or her sensibilities as an individual subject and as a citizen. Thus, the sujet -citoyen intervenes when there is a correspondance or alignment of personal and collective convictions, and withdraws when they can safely diverge, leaving the public space to be filled by a second-order partisan discourse. Less interest in party politics does not mean that there is less interest in democracy, as the massive mobilisation behind Jacques Chirac in the second round of the presidential election illustrated, allowing him to be elected on 5 May 2002 with 81.75 per cent of the vote, and crushing his far-right rival Le Pen. This result, followed by the solid presidential majority acquired as a result of the legislative elections of the following month, can be translated as a return to the sources of the Fifth Republic (Cole, 2005: 43). It may also be viewed as a clear contradiction of the argument advanced by some commentators that France was on a path of convergence with other parliamentary regimes in Europe where the head of state is an arbiter but where the key consideration is who heads the government and therefore exercises real executive power

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(Avril, 2003), given, notably, the way cohabitation had clipped the wings of the presidency. However, resurgent abstention in the first round of the legislative elections of June, at 35.20 per cent, allows for a more nuanced interpretation, certainly of the behaviour of the sujet-citoyen. The mobilisation behind Chirac in May 2002 could be read as evidence of a new engagement lgitimiste, or legitimism that asserted a conviction, beyond partisan politics, in the enduring value of French democratic ideals and institutions and the need to defend them. By the same token, it is not the kind of engagement that is drawn by the ritualised conflict of party politics. Instead, it is an engagement that mobilises around themes, such as the right to work, education or residency when that coincides with the defence of fundamental democratic rights, or the demand that those rights should be actualised. It is a kind of engagement that requires a rethinking of lespace public, possibly along the lines of an espace commun or common space, opening up and grounding the understanding of citizenship to accommodate the needs of subjectivation, and freeing the ends of action from the pressure for uniformity expressing itself as consensus, thereby removing the obstacles to active participation in the shaping of the Republic by the sujet -citoyen previously held back by the conflicting and identifying particularisms of his or her subjectivity. Interestingly, participation in the 2007 presidential elections was significantly higher than in 2002, with 85 per cent and 84 per cent of the French electorate voting in the first and second rounds respectively. If, as the notion of lengagement lgitimiste suggests, the appetite exists for a re-affirmation of the legitimacy of the French Republics democratic ideals, then the onus is thrown back on its mediating institutions to frame the political options in a way that is capable of drawing that engagement. France is characterised by democratic structures that are deeply rooted, and in a sense the Republic has always been running to catch up with its citizens. Those movements whose relation to the polity falls outside the established modes of action in the public space may represent, today, what the battle for the third estate was two centuries ago, but focusing instead on new divisions, such as that between those with homes and the homeless (Guilhaumou, 1998: 32), and engaging above all with everyday social realities instead of abstract projects.

Conclusion
The suggestion by some commentators that the Revolution is not only over, but that the specificity it gave to the Republic has been defeated by the excesses of individualism, is exaggerated and overlooks the fact

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that if there is one thing that embodies the leap forward it represents it is way the rights of the individual came to constitute the beating heart of the French Republican project. Conversely, the suggestion that as in the USA and elsewhere citizens doing it for themselves by wresting universal rights out of the abstract and giving them individual and embodied particularities is the best way of revitalising the Republic overlooks the prospect that, even with a much broader concept of the public space which accepts as normal the perpetual collision of actors in pursuit of individual and communal difference, the need for a modus vivendi to be defined remains, and that the best embodiment of that consensus is the Republic. As was argued at the beginning of this chapter, the actions of the youth who rioted in autumn 2005 in urban France were apolitical and did not mark the demise of the specific French model of polity. The rioters attacked the police, the emergency services and sometimes journalists in the same way that they might attack gangs from other neighbourhoods. As for the demand for economic opportunities, too often these young people had excluded themselves from the processes of socialisation afforded by the world of work by their contempt for the kind of employment their parents, notably their fathers, had settled for, instead living on a combination of welfare payments and petty crime. It could be argued that the events of autumn 2005 illustrated the extent to which the reality of the French Republic was marked by a pattern of social convergence with other post-industrial liberal democracies. In spite of their identification by others as young people of Arab and Muslim origin, the rioters constitute a social sub-class whose model is not Cairo or Mecca, but the alienated young blacks of urban America (Roy, 2005). It is also impossible to ignore, however, the weight of Frances modern history and the political culture that gives the Republic its specificity. France remains susceptible to what has been called spontaneous aggregation and social crisis, because a significant proportion of its citizens find themselves in a double-bind (Pernot, 2004: 134). On the one hand, there is the feeling that they are deprived of effective political representation; and, on the other, there is the enduring expectation that the organisational and institutional infrastructure of democracy in France will allow the Republic to assume its social vocation. Looking to the future, the French Republican state will be less inclined to resort to the othering that was a historic aspect of nation-building after 1879; and the evolution of political practices such as the gathering of information about its citizens according to race, illustrates the convergence with Anglo-American style liberal democracies. But, at the same time, the

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conditioned expectations of the governing elites and the constituencies at the grassroots of society will continue to make action in the public space the privileged arena for defining the options for a society in search of reconciliation with itself.

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