ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the notion of a French political culture. Any appraisal of the distinctiveness of French political culture needs to take account of how it is transmitted and how it remains salient in everday experience. The emphasis in French state schools on civic instruction, on an early familiarization with French history, on the acquisition of a ’culture generale’, and at later stages on formal intellectual training through subjects like philosophy, literature, mathematics and physics, has an impact on generations of young people which is difficult to measure but which certainly cannot be dismissed. The political culture is expressed through continuing traditions of political activism, which still mark out the school and the university as natural breeding-grounds for radical ideas. The students and teachers have thus been associated with many of the social movements of the 1980s and 1990s, mobilizing around issues like anti-racism, unemployment and defence of public services.
