French Power-Seeking and Overachievement

Abstract

Power appears as a paradox in French politics as well as in the French policy. The French sociologist Michel Crozier (1957) pointed to his motherland as “the land of Command” and stressed the exceptional role of power in French political culture. We can hardly find a country in which power was so debated and was finally so inefficient. France was defeated at least three times within one century: the 1871 defeat resulted in the construction of the French Republic; the 1940 trauma has never been overcome and is still ignored by generations of young pupils who imagine that their country was among the “four winners” of the World War II. Moreover, the colonial wars led to a strange combination of military victories and political defeats. Among the P5 members, France was the first to understand that, in the new world, power was not always powerful (Badie 2004).