Conclusion

Abstract

The purpose of this study has not been to provide a general overview of government and politics in France during the period 2002–2012. It has instead, to paraphrase Hall, explored just some of the key sites upon which the governing right sought during these years to ‘construct, contest and win’ hegemony (Hall, 1988, p. 168). These aspirations required processes of ‘government through culture’: the harnessing of symbolic means to work with and upon the values and references of target populations. The endeavour to build a leading (‘hegemonic’) cultural front involved not simply the resonant projection of a particular political stance but also calculated moves of symbolic annexation, disarticulation and rearticulation. These worked upon and supplemented the existing elements of a politico-cultural repertoire which they thereby reframed. Quite clearly, these processes are not the whole of politics: apart from anything else, their capacity to impose themselves on people’s attention depends on the manifold coercive, legal, logistical, technological and economic means that underpin their diffusion and reception, as well as their ‘fit’ with the socio-economic experience of the populations they are addressing. However, they were strikingly prominent during the period of national right-wing governments under consideration. This challenges the political shorthand that assigns preoccupation with ‘cultural’ questions predominantly to the left — though one should stress that the right-wing cultural strategies across the period were not uniform.