ABSTRACT
Contemporary France is a democratic polity within which political parties perform such essential functions as political mobilisation, the aggregation of interests, organising political competition, feedback, public management and political recruitment. In comparative terms, however, the French polity is usually perceived to perform these essential functions rather poorly. The portrayals of French political culture we encountered in Chapter 3 pointed to incivisme, individualism and a distrust of organisations as important features of French society. Though these portrayals are overly impressionistic, French citizens do appear more reluctant to join party organisations than their northern European counterparts. Mass membership parties of the German or Scandanavian variety are rare; only the Gaullists and Communists have presented examples of mass parties. Of most significance, a powerful strand of the French republican tradition has denigrated political parties as divisive, fractious organisations, whose existence is barely tolerated, and this on condition that they do not threaten the superior interests of the Republic. This distrust is best exemplified by the classic Gaullist tradition, within which the political movement facilitates a direct relationship between the providential leader and the nation, but does not presume to intervene in this privileged relationship (Knapp, 2003). The distrust of parties is deeply embedded in the ideology of the republican state itself, where the state represents the general will, superior to the particularistic interests represented by parties, groups and regions. There is no natural sympathy for doctrines such as pluralism which emphasise the importance of the corps intermediaires between the citizen and the state.
