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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 January 2009
National stereotypes have an understandable attraction, but are often a snare and a delusion. There has been no lack of commentators, in recent years, to remind the French that their structures of local administration were laid down at the Revolution, and have been little changed since. Fragmented into nearly 38,000 urban and rural communes, which vary enormously in population and wealth, the country has more local authorities than the other five states of the EEC and Britain put together. Most people, on both sides of the Channel, accept the idea of reform, but we find something of a contrast when we look at what has happened in practice. President Pompidou said at Lyon on 31 October 1970:
1 The word tutelle was legally replaced by contrôle administratif in the Constitution of 1946, but is still universally employed.
2 Crozier, M., The Bureaucratic Phenomenon (London: Tavistock, 1965)Google Scholar; La Société Bloquée, (Paris: Seuil, 1970).Google Scholar
3 Kesselman, M., ‘Overinstitutionalization and Political Constraint: the Case of France’, Comparative Politics, III (1970/1971), 21–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also his book The Ambiguous Consensus (New York: Knopf, 1967).Google Scholar Kesselman acknowledges his debt to the seminal article of Worms, J-p., ‘Le Préfet et ses notables’, Sociologie du Travail, VII (1966), 249–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
4 Their service titles, Ponts et Chaussées and Génie Rural, are still the best known, though they now appear as divisions of the Ministry of Equipment and the Ministry of Agriculture respectively.
5 M. Kesselman, ‘Overinstitutionalization’.
6 Hayward, Jack and Wright, Vincent, ‘The 37,708 Microcosms of an Indivisible Republic’, Parliamentary Affairs, XXIV (1971), 284–311Google Scholar, provide an early analysis of the election results. The anti-GauIlist Association des Maires is the most powerful body in the capital representing local authorities, and government attempts to divert support from it have had little success.
7 UN Publication ST/TAO/M/19, Decentralization for National and Local Development. The French however employ no blanket term. For them decentralisation normally means devolution.
8 Georges Vedel, in a review of Les Citoyens au Pouvoir (Le Monde, 5 April 1968), recalls that it was an old gambit of the Second Empire government to equivocate, for its own advantage, between deconcentration and devolution.
9 ‘Le grand dessein de la société francaise, aujourd'hui et dans les annees qui viennent, c'est la décentralisation. Ce que nous voulons c'est ramener les competences et les décisions aussi pres que possible des hommes qu'elles concernent.’ Speech to Mouvement National des Elus Locaux, 11 December 1970.
10 Savigny, J. De, L'Etat contre les Communes? (Paris: Seuil, 1971).Google Scholar Specifically, the writer proposes a three-tier structure, with executive power concentrated in the middle tier — above the commune and below the Department.
11 Syndicat Intercommunal à Vocation Unique (SIVU).
12 Syndicat Intercommunal à Vocation Multiple (SIVM).
13 Detton, H. and Hourticq, J., L'Administration régionale et locale de la France (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968), p. 115.Google Scholar The district closely resembles a SIVM in its structure and financing. Until 1971 the legal term was district urbain, but there was nothing in the law to guarantee the urban character of such a grouping.
14 Marcellin, M., Minister of the Interior, addressing presidents of the conseils généraux at Paris, 4 02 1971.Google Scholar
15 Notably in the Fouchet Bill, which was dropped after the Paris disturbances of 1968.
16 Schmitt, C., ‘Le Regroupement des communes en France’, Revue Juridique et Politique Indépendance et Coopération, XXII (1968), 739–56.Google Scholar
17 Only fifty communes in all were freed from the requirement to submit their budgets for approval — M. Marcellin, 4 February 1971.
18 See Book IV of the Code Municipal. Ultimately these moves in the direction of a career service may strengthen the communes; but there is no doubt that the immediate effect was centralizing.
19 Sudreau, P., ‘Le Chemin de croix des elus locaux’, Le Monde, 13 and 14 10 1970.Google Scholar
20 Homont, A., ‘ La Gestion municipale et les libertés communales’, Actualités Juridiques (03 1971), 139–46.Google Scholar
21 Club Jean Moulin (Paris: Seuil, 1968).Google Scholar
22 The period is counted from the opening of the Autumn meeting of each conseil général, which by law falls between 1 September 1971 and 15 January 1972.
23 The ‘qualified majority’ is constituted by either half the communes of the area in question provided that they contain two-thirds of the total population; or two-thirds of the communes in the area, provided that they contain half of the population.
24 However the Conseil d'Etat had, until 1970, the power to create a district.
25 In the two articles in Le Monde.
26 M. Marcellin, 4 February 1971.
