With the news that Les Républicains are about to choose Christian Jacob as their new leader, it is clear that the party has no idea where it intends to go […]

Since November 17 of last year, we have been regaled every Saturday with the lament of the Gilets Jaunes, those salt-of-the-earth French men and women who join together to protest […]

Jean-Luc Mélenchon contains multitudes. After the Notre-Dame fire, he was among the most eloquent of commentators, intimately familiar with the history of the cathedral. But his familiarity with the vast […]

As France’s political parties wither away, French civil society may be organizing itself to fill the void. Perhaps that is too optimistic a read of what those perennial civil-society reformers, […]

Image by the Executive Office of the President of the United States via Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain) Since the election of Donald Trump in 2016, a common narrative to explain the […]

Image by Jack Downey via United States Office of War Information (Public Domain ; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Crowds_of_French_patriots_line_the_Champs_Elysees-edit2.jpg) To mark the sixtieth birthday of France’s Fifth Republic, I recently went and flipped through a […]

Image by Claude Truong-Ngoc via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0 ; https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Jean-Pierre_Raffarin#/media/File:Jean-Pierre_Raffarin_par_Claude_Truong-Ngoc_2013.jpg) What better time to launch a few trial balloons than the August doldrums. A Le Monde interview with former prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin […]

The French party system, devastated by the Macron tsunami, has not recovered. Only a bleak wasteland remains. If one looks closely, there are signs of life, but just barely. Small […]

  It’s a year and a half before the European elections of May 2019, which will be the voters’ first turn to give a verdict on the Macron presidency at […]

This week’s Canard enchaîné reports that Emmanuel Macron—along with Richard Ferrand, the president of the parliamentary group of La République en marche—are struggling to control the left-leaning members of the governing majority who […]