The American media rarely report news about France unless it is sensationalistic and upholds Gallic stereotypes: French foreign policy determined to make the United States fail! France engulfed in religious riots! France outraged at decision to open McDonald's in the Louvre museum! This news usually confirms two long-held clichés about French politics: its exceptionalism and its resistance to change. Indeed, many recent political developments in France could be interpreted in light of these clichés. The 2000 law on the 35-hour work week was about carving a French exception in a world governed by neoliberal imperatives. The 2004 law banning religious symbols in France was about refusing the changes brought about by immigration and affirming the exceptionalism of the French Republican model. The French rejection of the European constitution in 2005 was about resistance to the forces of globalization and European integration.

Yet for all this talk of immobilism, France is a country that has undergone considerable political and social change over the past 20 years. Five decades after its creation under inauspicious circumstances, the Fifth Republic has proved a resilient yet malleable political armature that has enabled France to adapt to the twin challenges of Europeanization and globalization. The American media may have perceived a whiff of change with the election of Nicolas Sarkozy in 2007, but while Sarkozy is proving to be a traditional French leader in the conduct of both economic and foreign policies, the real change in the French economy and society lies elsewhere, and has been more insidious. France has been on a reformist trajectory long before the election of Sarkozy, even if French leaders have always been cautious about publicizing reform and have preferred a path of reforming by stealth.

The two books under review complement and update a growing literature analyzing how much France has really changed in the past two decades and how much it still clings to its “exceptional” status.

In The French Fifth Republic at Fifty, Sylvain Brouard, Andrew M. Appleton, and Amy Mazur assemble a team of transatlantic experts to assess the successes and failures of the Fifth Republic in a variety of policy areas on the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary. The central argument of the 15 brief chapters is that France has partly lost its “exceptionalism,” making it easier to include now in cross-national comparisons. In a country where peaceful reform sounds like an oxymoron, important change has gradually and silently occurred across the board, from the functioning of decision-making institutions to state–society relations. As Appleton writes in his introduction, “the triumph of the Fifth Republic is to have become a European regime comparable to any other” (p. 3). This is a good primer about contemporary French politics for all the scholars who have not really kept up with recent institutional and political developments. It offers a comprehensive map of the complex interactions among the various political institutions and social practices.

In the first part of the book on “decision-making institutions,” contributors attempt to answer the questions of whether the institutions originally designed by the 1958 constitution have persisted and how they have been adapted. Designing durable political institutions had indeed proven a challenge in the past in a country prone to revolutionary tendencies, but the institutions of the Fifth Republic born out of chaos and crisis have been able to withstand the test of time.

To be sure, France is still a presidentialist regime, and at the time this book was written, no fundamental change had occurred on paper in the executive institutions of the Fifth Republic (with the exception of the five-year presidential mandate inaugurated in 2002). Foreign policy and defense, studied respectively by Richard Balme and Bastien Irondelle, are still firmly in control of the executive branch. But there have been clear shifts in the practice of power within French political institutions. On one hand, some instruments of executive control have been reinforced. As Emiliano Grossman argues in his chapter: “[W]hile no major institutional change has taken place, some substantial changes in the institutional practice have changed the face of the Fifth Republic. It has become increasingly presidentialist and executive dominance is exerted through new instruments” (p. 55) that governments can use in order to impose their will on uncooperative majorities or filibustering minorities. On the other hand, the National Assembly has also improved its position in the institutional edifice, in part by a 1995 constitutional reform that expanded its competences and consolidated its role, as described in the chapter by Eric Kerrouche. As for the Constitutional Council, its powers have been progressively expanded, with a strong role in regulating electoral competition, and politics have therefore become increasingly judicialized in France. According to Brouard, “the politicization of the Council is probably the only remaining element of French exceptionalism” (p. 116).

Unfortunately, the book was not able to address the sweeping 2008 constitutional reform that imposed a limit of two presidential terms, allowed the president to address a joint session of the French Congress, strengthened parliamentary powers by enabling deputies to veto some presidential appointments and restricting the use of the infamous “Article 49-3”, and empowered individuals to appeal to the Constitutional Council.

Party politics have changed as well. Throughout the Fifth Republic, political competition has been mainly bipolar, even if the number of parties making up the “Left” and the “Right” have changed with every election and the names and labels of parties have been very unstable. But this bipolarity is constantly being challenged because, as Nicholas Sauger explains, “the institutional system does in fact provide two kinds of contrary incentives: incentives for concentration around two main parties or coherent blocs but, at the same time, incentives for entry by new challengers” (p. 93). The French party system no longer looks so atypical, but smaller parties continue to emerge and to thrive during each electoral cycle.

The second part of the book focuses on state–society relations, in particular the central role of the state in the management of the economy. Ben Clift examines the evolution of dirigisme, the French tradition of directive state intervention in economic activity. Building on the works of Jonah Levy (Tocqueville's Revenge: State, Society, and Economy in Contemporary France, 1999) and Vivien Schmidt (From State to Market: The Transformation of French Business and Government, 1996), Clift finds that liberalization, Europeanization, and globalization have seriously diminished the interventionist capacity of the state, but he also argues that the dirigiste reflex is so strong that economic interventionism finds its expression in new forms nowadays, such as Dominique de Villepin's notion of “economic patriotism.” The conclusion is that dirigisme is not dead, though it has been weakened, and it continues to live on at least in rhetoric.

Challenges to the central role of the state are also explored in the chapters on public budgeting (Frank Baumgartner, Martial Foucault, and Abel Francois) and on center-periphery relations (Patrick Le Galès and Gilles Pinson). Both conclude that while France is still highly centralized, politics have been increasingly taking place at the regional and local level, thereby limiting the margin of maneuver of the central government. In her chapter, Cornelia Woll argues that one consequence of Europeanization, decentralization, and the gradual demise of statism has been the emergence of new forms of interest intermediation and the explosion of associational life in France.

The final, and shortest, part of the book explores the limits of the Republican model in the face of contemporary social and political challenges. Eléonore Lépinard and Amy Mazur analyze the evolution of the politics of gender equality, while Ariane Chebel d'Appolonia studies racism, ethnicity, and immigration. Both contributions conclude that the Republican model, with its focus on equality and allegiance to the nation protected by a strong central state, is under severe pressure and cannot survive intact.

While French readers of The French Fifth Republic at Fifty may be saddened to learn that their country has lost its “exceptional” status, this news may encourage comparativist scholars to more eagerly focus on France. Appleton and Mazur have indeed done much to foster the study of France in American academia, from the creation of the journal French Politics, designed to bring France into the mainstream of comparative research, to their energetic spearheading of the French Politics Group of the American Political Science Association, meetings of which are at the origin of this volume. One can question why this “normalization” of French politics has occurred. While the individual contributors try to address this question, some more than others, overall the book lacks emphasis on one especially important factor—European integration.

By contrast, the way complex external constraints have determined the French institutional and political agenda over the past two decades is a prominent theme of Alistair Cole's Governing and Governance in France. Cole argues that the French state, once heavily centralized and almighty, is nowadays embedded in a complex system of multiple legal orders as a result of Europeanization and globalization. Governing in France has thus undergone a dramatic transformation, characterized by the emergence of cross-sectoral and multilevel public policies and a state whose central role is now primarily regulatory.

Cole analyzes the reform of the state, the gradual decentralization and increase in regional and local governance, the adaptation and adjustment to European integration, the capacity of the state to affect public policy, state–society relations, and the meaning of the state in contemporary France. Rejoining some of the conclusions in The French Republic at Fifty, he highlights one fascinating paradox, namely, that “the capacity of the state has been challenged at the same time as government, understood in its broadest sense, has never performed so many functions” (p. 10). Another paradox that is not highlighted as clearly but still derives from the analysis is that while the state has lost some of its capacity to direct the French economy, it has also gained some capacity to upload some of its policy preferences at the European level and, in so doing, to contribute to the management of globalization.

Governing and Governance in France is a thorough and detailed analysis, and it skillfully draws on extensive interviews to support its central thesis of the emergence of a more networked, less centralized, mode of governing in France. For all its thoroughness, many questions remain unanswered, and the book feels strangely apolitical. Is there a difference between the Left and the Right on the reform of the state? Why was decentralization initially a project of the Left, and how and why has it been co-opted by the Right today? Why, if France has been forced to some institutional and policy convergence by Europeanization and globalization, are some “exceptional” policy proposals, such as a move from a 35-hour to a 32-hour workweek still being seriously discussed? Where are the political lines of cleavage, if any, in the contemporary challenges to republicanism?

Both books concur that France has changed and that reality is far from the static image of an exceptional and recalcitrant France often portrayed in the United States. The institutions of the Fifth Republic have proved durable while, or because, they have allowed for evolution and adaptation, most notably the fragmentation of authority caused by decentralization and Europeanization. Paradoxically, the state is now bigger than it has ever been under the Fifth Republic even though its power has diminished. Despite an apparent rigid labor market and even more rigid public attitudes, dynamism has been introduced in labor and social policies. And even with the social challenges to the Republican model, greater xenophobia coexists with greater tolerance toward immigrants.

All this talk of change should not be exaggerated, however, and Francophiles and Francophobes alike can rejoice that France is still, well, French. Though Governing and Governance in France was published just one year into the Sarkozy presidency, Cole was prescient in arguing that Sarkozy is not at all an economic liberal, unlike what so many Anglo-Saxon commentators had erroneously written during the presidential campaign, but a modern-day dirigiste who revealed his interventionist streak even before the financial and economic crisis hit. The French presidency of the European Union in the second half of 2008 was an example of French interventionism in action, transposed at the European level. As for the financial crisis, it gave France the opportunity to reorganize international institutions and to give lessons to the rest of the world. Who would have thought that The Economist would ever lead, as it did in May 2009, with an article celebrating the French model?