ABSTRACT
“Associations,” which is the French term for NGOs, were instrumental in disseminating and consolidating the values of individual freedom, political pluralism, and secularism in the long-lasting period when the Republic, as a regime, had yet to win the battle against the Royalists and the Conservative Right (1870–1914). They mobilised civil society in support of those values until the Vichy regime, in 1940, banned most of the NGOs and set up its own network of organisations, thus giving credit to David Truman’s disturbance theory according to which interest groups mobilise in order to counter the action of NGOs with an opposed agenda. This chapter focuses on the action of antiracist and civil rights NGOs in their relation to the action of the State. It also claims that such NGOs, which had become more or less “institutionalised,” are now challenged by more spontaneous forms of organisations/protests, both in the defence of human rights and new topics of concern such as environmental policies.
