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The Constitution of the Fifth French Republic was adopted by referendum in September 1958, and this chapter explores the relationship between the president and the prime minister in that Fifth Republic. The first section of the chapter, Patterns of Political Leadership, provides an overview of presidential–prime ministerial relations. The second section, French Semi‐Presidentialism in Context, discusses the constitutional situation, the founding context of the 1962 reform, and the relationship between the president and the parliamentary majority. The concluding section, The Contemporary Nature of French Semi‐Presidentialism, considers the wider context of presidential–prime ministerial relations, and discusses the changing parameters of executive leadership generally. In these ways, the contemporary nature of the Fifth Republic's semi‐presidential system is established.

This paper, which was originally published in the journal Comparative Political Studies in 1999, is the second of two that elaborate a relatively general approach to judicial politics, which emphasizes the underlying social logics not just of law and courts but also of politics and government. The triad – two contracting parties and a dispute resolver – constitutes a primal social institution, a microcosm of governance, so in uncovering the institutional dynamics of the triad an essential logic of government itself is also uncovered; the objectives of this paper are to defend the validity of these contentions and to demonstrate their centrality to the discipline. After introducing the key concepts of dyad, triad, and normative structure, a model is presented of a particular mode of governance, i.e. the social mechanism by which the rules in place in any given community are adapted to the experiences and exigencies of those who live under them. The theory integrates, as interdependent factors, the evolution of strategic (utility-maximizing) behaviour and normative (cultural or rule-based) structure, and captures dynamics of change observable at both the micro level (the behaviour of individual actors), and the macro level (the institutional environment, or social structure, in which this behaviour takes place); the mechanisms of change that are endogenous to the model are specified, and the conditions under which these mechanisms would be expected to operate, and fail to operate, are identified. The model is then used to explain two hard cases of systemic change: the international trade regime, established by the 1947 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT); and the French Fifth Republic, founded in 1958; the conclusion draws out some of the implications of the analysis for understanding of the complex relationship between strategic behaviour and social structure.

Henry Morton Stanley's fellow Congo explorer, the French naval officer of Italian birth, Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza, had been attacking him, and the audience knew Stanley had prepared a blistering response. Journalists encouraged leaders of the Third Republic, long averse to territorial annexation, to plant the French flag in equatorial Africa. In doing so, they helped transform the image—or at least the self-image—of the new regime. Leaders of France's new democratic Third Republic would construe the new imperialism as a humanitarian and civilizing mission. France's political leaders had to take Brazza's image and popularity into account in policy discussions and negotiations over African lands.

This chapter locates the figure of Félix Éboué in the cultural politics of commemoration in Guyane. It offers a cultural history of the production of memorials to Éboué in Guyane (his birthplace) and beyond, assessing the role of these markers of national power in the local landscape. The chapter focuses first on the monument located in central Cayenne, produced at the instigation of a local committee and inaugurated in 1957, towards the end of the Fourth Republic. It then addresses the revival of 'memory' of Éboué and the renewal of his presence in Guyane which occurred during the 2000s. Instigated in part by Christiane Taubira, this culminated in the renaming of the only international airport in the Département — the key point of arrival and departure between Paris and Cayenne. The chapter concludes by asking how the vision of Guyane asserted in the act of ‘remembering’ Éboué has changed or been adapted in the twenty-first century.

This chapter examines the conflict between commercial Paris and the civic vision of the French Republic. It discusses the development of new forms of consumer capitalism and the emergence of bourgeois women as the primary consumers in the late nineteenth century. It describes the perception of the modern marketplace and traces the processes the led to the creation of a female commercial culture and the impulse shopper. It explains that as the ethos of the market collided with that of the civic public in late-nineteenth-century France, bourgeois elites found themselves forced to grapple with the question of how to map the boundaries between the market, the political public and the domestic sphere.

This chapter reconsiders the goals, policies, and diplomatic accomplishments of Charles de Gaulle as president of the Fifth French Republic. It explains that de Gaulle is considered in contemporary French diplomatic historiography as the founder of a new French independence and the creator of a virtual revolution in French diplomacy. The chapter discusses de Gaulle's plan to achieve full integration of Algeria through the help of the Anglo-Saxons and his effort to build a “Europe of states.”

This introduction aims at defining how Postcolonial Realms of Memory builds upon Pierre Nora’s seminal collection Les Lieux de mémoire (1984-92) while fostering a new perspective on the French past actively informed by the memorial legacy of colonialism. After contextualizing Nora’s project, analysing his ground-breaking paradigm and exploring the concept’s complex afterlives with a particular emphasis on the criticism that has been levelled at it over the past three decades, the editors illustrate their conceptual framework and scope of investigation — the ‘Republic’ in its broadest sense — by introducing several representative realms including the Panthéon, seen as a metonymic example of a postcolonial realm of memory. This introduction’s objective is therefore to lay the ground for understanding the rationale behind the will to postcolonialize the French Republic’s lieux de mémoire whilst at the same time presenting the tools mobilized to do so. It ultimately highlights how the volume is imagined as a disruptive challenge to current nationally-focused understandings of sites of memory, a call to integrate colonialism and its legacy more actively into the practices and study of collective memory, but also an invitation to take in new directions the current debate at the intersection of memory studies and postcolonialism.

This chapter traces the growing interconnection with the Ottoman Empire, and in particular the North African powers, who rejected pressures to join the coalition against France and became increasingly critical partners in economic, military, and diplomatic terms. Algiers at the time was in rapid transformation, a kind of “republic” analogous to France, adapting to the new geopolitical context. North Africans were crossing to France with greater frequency, so much so that the Algerians hoped to establish a passenger ferry between the two countries. As republican France articulated a new openness to Islam, Algeria began to view the republic as a friend and partner rather than a religious enemy. In France, older fears of the barbarian pirates were giving way to the new conceptions of Muslims, but could still exert considerable force. The dey of Algiers demonstrated particular support for the new French Republic, offering financial support that would never be repaid, and which would ultimately serve as a catalyst for the French invasion of Algeria four decades later.

This introductory chapter comments on the changes made to the current 2007 edition of this book for the purpose of developing a novel approach to the history of the French Republic. To that end the chapter explains the book's restructuring and added content, noting the differences between this and the previous 2002 edition. On a broader scale the chapter seeks to initiate a more transatlantic understanding of the Republic, particularly as French history has also become an international history—the nation's status as a former empire has deeply implicated it in the history of Africa, Asia, and the Americas. For U.S.-trained historians and others in the English-speaking world, the story of French republicanism is rife with a great many uphill battles, such as those against Jacobin and Bonapartist dictatorships, as well as monarchical restorations, Catholic reactions, and the proto-fascism of the Vichy regime.

This chapter traces the events that led to the degeneration of the Fourth French Republic. It explains that as early as the end of 1956 France and the United States were already on bad terms and that this was aggravated by the Algerian War, particular the French use of torture. The same issue became an irritant in French relations with Great Britain and the disagreements spilled over into Tunisia and Morocco. These events marked the re-emergence of the British–American special relationship and the corresponding demotion of France from membership in the putative big three alongside the Anglo-Saxons.

This chapter explores Kennedy’s pre-presidential political career. By the end of World War II he had emerged as a well-connected Harvard graduate, author of a popular book, a decorated navy veteran of the Pacific War, and a budding young journalist with the Hearst chain. His political career began in 1946 when he was elected Representative for Massachusetts’s 11th Congressional District. In 1952 he was elected to the Senate, where he gained a reputation for sharp anti-colonial rhetoric that often targeted French policy. Throughout his pre-presidential political career, from 1946 to 1960, Kennedy’s most biting commentary was consistently reserved for the French in Vietnam and later Algeria. While Britain had negotiated its way out of India and later ran a successful counterinsurgency campaign against communist Malayan rebels, Kennedy worried openly that French colonial rule would drive the most rebellious of the Fourth Republic’s subjects toward the Sino-Soviet camp. Early postwar decolonization cemented Kennedy’s perception that the British were clear thinkers with long-term vision, while the French by contrast were characterized by a toxic mixture of short-sightedness, stubbornness, and indifference to the collective interests of the West.

This chapter discusses the influences of war on the French Republic. It argues that the Republic originated in war, which then shaped the representations and practices of the res publica. In particular, World War I had revived the century-old tradition of the embattled Republic, while casting an immense shadow on the nascent century. The chapter argues that the pacifism of the 1920s and 1930s and the Resistance of the 1940s were thus consequences of World War I and its memory, which was as much republican as it was national. The “Great War” is therefore particularly deserving of a place in a critical history of the Republic and of France.

This concluding chapter argues for the need to move on beyond sterile analyses of the “republican model” in French historiography. It reiterates the conclusions drawn by the previous chapters of this book: that the Republic must be historicized; that is, a study of the political experience of society in the period during which the republican regime consolidated its position in France has become imperative. To that end, we must adopt a more open concept of the Republic, abandoning its narrow legal definition as a regime founded by the constitutional laws of 1875, the existence of a Jacobin state, and the regular functioning of institutions such as the electoral process and governmental policymaking. The chapter contends that the Republic should not be identified with any specific republican model or order.

This chapter examines the interest of the United States in the Algerian War and in the fall of the Fourth French Republic. It explains that during this period the French economy has become independent of U.S. assistance and that there existed a growing threat from the French communist party. The chapter also highlights the frustration of the United States with the French inability to bring a conclusion to a war that increasingly appeared to play into the hands of Soviet ambitions.

This chapter examines the U.S. government's stand on the fall of the Fourth French Republic and the coming to power of Charles de Gaulle. It explains that American policy when the republic faced collapse was to stay out of French affairs and to behave as circumspectly as possible. The chapter argues that the equanimity with which the Americans watched the collapse of the republic remains a glaring reflection of a policy based on disillusionment with a dysfunctional guide.