ABSTRACT
This chapter examines developments that have affected civil-military relations at the political-military interface in France recently. By way of introduction, it presents an overview of the post-Cold War context, and justifies the selection of themes to be considered in the two case studies offered. One deals with the growing dissatisfaction now openly expressed by general officers at the lack of attention paid to their professional viewpoints by politicians in office – a distinct novelty since 1962. The other scrutinises the roots, development and effects of the public protest staged by gendarmes in late 2001. In both cases, it concludes that the main reason behind such new phenomena lies in the deep change which has positively affected the symbolic resources available to uniformed personnel in the last few years, while the political class saw theirs considerably dwindle. However, such developments can only be understood if one takes into account the fact that military grievances were mostly justified by decades of relative neglect, now recognised by politicians. In more ways than one, therefore, these protests have served to redress a severe imbalance inherited from the last three decades of the Cold War, when the military’s symbolic resources were scarce, the utility of conventional forces within the framework of a strategic doctrine based on nuclear deterrence was comparatively low, and successive governments used the defence budget as an adjustment variable without heeding professional advice. While such developments have not been widely perceived as endangering civil control or the proper bounds of collective bargaining in a liberal democracy, the author, while not pessimistic, refrains from passing judgment on the innocuous or deleterious character of such developments for the future of French civil-military relations.
