The characteristics of traditional French social movements

Résumé du document

The events of May-June 1968 in France broke out in the wake of an international wave of protest that occurred previously in many countries such as the United States, Germany and Italy (Duyvendak 1992, 137-138). The events of 1870, 1919 and 1936 provide also many examples of disruptive and short term insurgencies trying to bypass the institutionalized frame so as to claim demands for political change. Can we thus talk about "French exceptionalism" in terms of patterns and dynamics of social movements' political protests? Social movements, in the frame of political process theories, can be define as "strategically and/or thematically connected series of events, produced in interaction with adversaries and carried out by a coherent network of organizations and participants who use unconventional means of attaining political goals" (Duyvendak 1992, 30). In this theoretical frame, the political opportunity structure (POS) based on formal institutional structures, informal procedures and strategies, and the configuration of power, determines to a large extent mobilization patterns of "challengers" and "members" strategies such as repression or facilitation (Kriesi and Koopmans 1992, 172; Duyvendak 1992, 60-66). Why French social movements are often disruptive, revolutionary and short term collective action processes?

Extraits

[...] However the idea is that politics and elites belong for social movements to another sphere. The system, albeit closed to the people, works with screen” (Crozier quoted by Duyvendak 75) between those who are entitled to take decisions and those who can just try to influence them. Beyond formal institutional structures the opportunities to claim depends on informal procedures and prevailing elite strategies. Nelkin and Pollack ( quoted by Duyvendak 1992, 78) highlight the historical tradition of proactive repression and the tendency among elites to adopt a superior attitude and ignore the popular expectations, but what is actually broadly relevant is, rather than the idea of “full exclusion”, the one of “selective exclusion” (Duyvendak 1992, 80). [...]

[...] First edition, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts and Oxford. p 1-16 and 165- 186 Tilly Charles (1993) in Europeans Revolutions, 1492-1992. First edition Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London. p 1-12, 320-347 and 380-398. Duyvendak Jan Willem (1993) in The power of politics: new social movements in a old polity 1965-19. First edition, University van Amsterdam. [...]

[...] As we can see, the social movements' practices evolve according to the changes in its environments, particularly the political ones. However the social movements do not only adapt to the existing opportunities in interaction with the state, there are also able news opportunities when they succeed in influencing the state system, particularly through revolutions. Pattern and opportunities of the French contemporary political system In the wake of this historical inheritance, the French state remains still, nowadays, a strong state (Kriesi quoted by Duyvendak 1992, 60-66). [...]

[...] Second the concentration of the state power is very high. greater the degree of separation of power between the executive, the legislative and judiciary, the greater the degree of formal access” asserts Kriesi (1991 quoted by Duyvendak 1992, 68). On the contrary, the President in France who is usually the informal or formal leader of the majority at the Assembly can take the support of the latter for granted. He can ensure, as a result, by preventing the political responsibility from the government with regard to the Assembly to be effective, the sustainability of the former. [...]

[...] How did the revolution of 1789 break out and had those events some consequences on the French political structure? Tilly (1993, 4-10) defines a revolution as a “forcible transfer of power over a state in the course of which at least two blocs of contenders gain significant support from the subject population and make incompatible claims to control exclusively the state”. This definition implies the incapacity of the members to repress quickly and efficiently the rising organization of challengers and, as a result, the vulnerability of the established state. [...]