ABSTRACT
France has traditionally been seen as the archetypal dirigiste state. The period since the end of the great post-war economic boom of the ‘30 glorious years’ has been one of considerable change in this respect, as France has attempted to adapt to and accommodate the competitive pressures unleashed by economic globalization. Developments in French employment relations will then be outlined before the salience of different theoretical approaches to the study of employment relations are considered in the light of evidence from France. In contrast to the pluralist polities of Anglo-Saxon countries, in France the political culture of Jacobinism has been hostile to intermediary bodies between the state and the people. In France, the state has played an essential mediating role between capital and labour in French system of employment relations. This was due in part to its own interventionism in economic policy-making and in part to the ideological hostility between capital and labour that rendered collective bargaining problematic and under-developed.
