ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the institutions involved in defence decision-making in the Fifth Republic. The key issue was that the armed forces claimed that they were speaking on behalf of the entire country. The “military society” thought itself as the ultimate line of defence guaranteeing the protection of French interests, and conceived its relationship to the political sphere as conditional obedience:everything seems to happen as if the armed forces thought of themselves as holding, on a political level, some sort of arbitrary power, or veto. The institutional configuration of French defence policy is then de facto dominated by the primacy of the president, which in practice validates presidentialism, while the constitutional text looks more like a dyarchy, that is, the government is supposed to determine and conduct national policies, decide on the use of armed forces, and the prime minister is responsible for national defence.
