Compared to other countries in Europe, public policy analysis in French universities began rather late. Indeed, this research approach proved largely dependent on the state in which it was undertaken and on the nature of the elites that were likely to drive it. In addition, it depended on cultural elements that shaped how public affairs were defined and justified. In this regard, France subscribed to a highly structured unitary state in which legal reasoning not only played a historically dominant role in the training of civil servants but also dictated how they carried out their duties (Duran, 1990). Moreover, the very idea of public policy had little empirical clout and even less scope because the technical reasons associated with public finance made it impossible to adequately connect policy to specific French programmes that might have been granted specific funds within the budget. It was not until the reform of the legal framework of the finance laws of 1 August 2001, upon the adoption of the organic law relating to the finance laws (LOLF), that public spending began to be correlated with public policy objectives in order to present state policies as ‘performance programmes’. It is noteworthy that Raymond Aron, one of the few French authors to evoke the term ‘policy’ in the 1950s and 1960s, spoke only, and rather vaguely, of programmes of action through which individuals and groups could assert their interests (Aron, 1962; 1965). Given the absence of more in-depth analyses, references to ‘policies’ and ‘programmes’ remained ambiguous from both a theoretical and an empirical perspective. These terms were associated with ‘fields’ as vague as social, cultural, economic and industrial policies. In no way was policy analysis associated with a genuine research approach.

Extending beyond the inevitable fashion trends around the discovery of a new approach, however, policy analysis established itself from the 1980s. It emerged as indispensable to the study of political power and soon became a dominant field of research within French political science. Even today, policy analysis is fully acknowledged by other social science disciplines such as sociology, economics and even law (Caillosse, 2016; Mockle, 2007). The reception and development of public policy analysis in France is strongly tied to the question of the state for several reasons.