Regional Governance and Power in France

The Dynamics of Political Space

R. Pasquier

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781137484451
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137484468
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In the shadow of a French national narrative which demonises and rejects local specificities, highly differentiated territorial political spaces have been created, shaped by identity, decentralisation, and public policy. This book analyses regional power in France and paints a picture of a controversial central state undergoing fundamental changes.

Part I

The Region as a Space of Mobilisation

Introduction

When I think of the ways in which the French have felt, thought, and expressed their sense of collective belonging, two opposing definitions come to mind [ . . . ]. The first, from Julien Benda, is pithy and haughty: ‘France is the revenge of the abstract over the concrete’. The second, from the pen of Albert Thibaudet, is careful and respectful ‘France is an old and diverse country.’

Mona Ozouf (2009)
Composition française. Retour sur une enfance bretonne,
Paris Gallimard: 13

Stein Rokkan and Derek Urwin (1983) identify the divide between the centre and the periphery as one of the fundamental political divisions in western Europe. From this division emerged the cultural movements and ethno-regional political parties from the end of the nineteenth century. The pertinence of Rokkan’s approach to political division is reinforced by numerous contemporary works (Bartolini 2000; Caramani 2004), and the Rokkanian paradigm is an indispensable point of reference for all comparative scholars working on the structure of European political systems. When considering territorial divisions, long-term factors remain essential for an understanding of the ethno-regionalist phenomenon. Long economic cycles (the industrial revolution at the end of the nineteenth century), the Trentes Glorieuses (the economic boom in France between 1945 and 1975) and the globalisation of the end of the last century and the beginning of the 2000s as well as the policies of central administrations towards national unification (based on the capacity to integrate all regional political spaces at the economic and cultural level) and the consecutive transformations within the regions (industrialisation, emigration, immigration, the survival of distinct regional identities, etc.) continue to shape the structural framework of regionalism. Using these long-term variables as a starting point, we can identify periods of growth for regional movements in western Europe: the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, the 1960s–1970s and the 1990s–2000s emerge as key periods in the proliferation of ethno-regional mobilisations (Keating 1998).

The state construction of the centre effectively creates resistance and/or contra-mobilisations from the periphery. In France, as in the rest of Europe, the heightened self-awareness of the periphery comes as a result of the combination of three variable factors: political centralisation, cultural centralisation and unequal economic development (Seiler 1994). The gradual self-awareness of the periphery in France led it to resist the centre in a variety of ways: through cultural, conservative and economic regionalism, and finally through nationalist regionalism. Depending on the period in question, the focus may be on cultural, economic or political aspects of nationalism to a greater or lesser degree; yet these aspects are, as we shall see, inseparable. In these different guises, regionalism influences the institutionalisation of regional political space by (1) creating regional narratives and allegiances which differ from those of the nation-state; and (2) setting up a political power struggle through electoral competition or, on occasion, political violence.

1

Regionalism and the Construction of Identity

Ernst Gellner (1989) has convincingly analysed the competing mechanisms which seek to effect national integration in political and cultural terms, particularly in France. From the nineteenth century, political nationalism added the creation of national identity to the state’s traditional monopolies on tax and violence. From that point on ‘state control and the nationalisation of space and the way people thought went hand in hand’ (Déloye 1997). At the same time as national identity was closed off from outside influences, public space was reconstituted around republican institutions, thus contributing to the unification of the cultural marketplace in the sense of a ‘national imaginary’ (Anderson 1996) which was meant to detach individuals from their particular surroundings in order to add them to the melting pot constituted by the sovereignty of the nation-state. From this point of view, the French Revolution – through its organisation of regional space and the homogenising republican narrative it propagated – is a key event in understanding the forces shaping the institutionalisation of regional space in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; all the more so as the Third Republic extended the Revolutionary legacy by heavily investing its dividends from the second industrial revolution in a wide variety of policy initiatives concerning education, roads, railways, heritage projects and the military in order to consolidate this national identity (Weber 1983).

Regionalism in France is thus a direct result of the social, political and economic establishment of the nation-state. It reflects the struggles to integrate the local into the national, and the centuriesold struggle between the universal and the particular, so admirably described by Mona Ozouf (2009). Powerful as the processes of political, economic and cultural centralisation were, the region was to be at the heart of the reactions of some areas to national stigmatisation; and a provincialism, perhaps even a ‘proto-nationalism’, developed there as the peripheral elite classes asserted the existence of a specifically regional society with its own history, language, traditions, literature and religion. The first effect of regionalism in France was the reconstruction of regional identity following the territorial ‘big bang’ created by the French Revolution. From the second half of the nineteenth century, cultural movements and political organisations developed strategies to overturn the stigmatisation of the regions by developing provincial culture and promoting regional languages (Harguindeguy and Pasquier 2011). Thus, the protean protest against the Jacobin narrative led to an initial institutionalisation of regional space. From that initial institutionalisation, regional space came to embody the refusal of centralism and hegemonic nation-state constructions. Recent studies have shown that, over time, this process contributed to creating an enduring sense of very particular loyalties to particular regional spaces and thus to the construction of a type of ‘banal regionalism’.¹

The republican narrative or the denial of distinctive identities

The Revolution and its ideological and political legacies constitute an unavoidable fault line in understanding the particularly French construction of regions. In L’Ancien régime et la révolution (1952), Alexis de Tocqueville showed how political, economic and cultural centralisation was inscribed in the long-term development of the state in France. Indeed, from the thirteenth century onwards, the French monarchy never gave up on the project of political and cultural unification despite opposition from the centrifugal force of the provincial elite. The Revolution put an end to this project, but the extent of the subsequent rupture was unprecedented in scope. The patchwork of regions inherited from the ancien régime disappeared and was replaced with a rationalised map of France divided into départements. Beyond the territorial rationalisation, the Jacobin, then republican, narrative of the regions was to deny, and then to combat, all regional diversity, and particularly linguistic diversity. The construction of modern France was thus undertaken in opposition to distinctive regional identity, and it wasn’t until the last quarter of the nineteenth century that the republican narrative of the regions – one of uniformity and invisibility – was called into question.

The ancien régime and the patchwork of the regions

The territorial divisions of the ancien régime resembled nothing so much as a patchwork. The men who undertook to destroy these divisions in the first months of the Revolution viewed them as more than just symbolic, they viewed them as the spirit of privileged society and the articulation of a regime which only managed to survive by dividing men and isolating them within what amounted to a regional labyrinth. Yet, there was a logic to this organisation of the regions which was completely opposed to the logic which prevailed after the Revolution. The former served as a reminder that the link between the monarchy and its constituent parts was for a long time of a contractual nature. Depending on when and how they had become part of the kingdom, regions did not enjoy the same privileges or have the same types of administrative subdivisions, no matter how powerful the propensity towards homogenisation between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries. Even when an institution was established nationally, such as the system of intendancies² in the seventeenth century, it found itself confronted by existing structures (Nordman and Revel 1989). This was the second guiding principle of territorial organisation under the ancien régime: although it might create new territorial divisions it did not suppress those that already existed, with the result that administrative districts stacked up and overlapped.³ Even though, by the end of the eighteenth centuries, many such districts were no more than empty shells, evidence of their existence remained: they had established exceptions, rights and obligations. Finally, in contrast to the Revolutionary period, territorial divisions were not evidence of a global political project but of the particular circumstances of their establishment. Even though the French monarchy had effectively desired the establishment of a state administration which covered the whole territory since the Middle Ages, this initiative did not take the form of a consistent chequering of the institutional landscape, but instead embraced its unevenness.

Two examples usefully illustrate this territorial fragmentation: the establishment of baillages⁴ and sénéchaussées⁵ in the Middle Ages, and of intendancies from the seventeenth century. Baillages and sénéchaussées represented the first network of state administrative units established by central government during the Middle Ages (Deyon and Leroy-Ladurie 1996). But these structures were not planted in virgin soil; they were laid over the basic structure of the châtellenies (castellanies), which had existed since the ninth century and consisted of the extent of the land and jurisdiction controlled by the lord of the local castle.⁶ It is from this core geography, the fabric of which can sometimes still be discerned in the design of present-day cantons (French local administrative districts), that larger units were constructed. The task of the first baillis and sénéchaux⁷was to oversee the dispensing of justice in the king’s name and to control the financial management of the royal châtellenies. They took note of these earlier forms of territorialised power and adapted to them, thus reproducing multiple variations in how political power was organised. This system was at its height in the fourteenth century. Each bailli or sénéchal represented the king in a particular district and exercised full royal authority in administrative, legal, financial and military matters. However, this first step in the centralisation of local administration was unable to resist the demands of a state which was engaged in a struggle to monopolise political, tax and military resources (Elias 1991). With the new military requirements, an increase in royal taxation and territorial extension as a result of war or marriage, the baillis and sénéchaux soon lost administrative control of military and tax matters⁸ and new administrative districts were drawn up, in particular the élection at the end of the fourteenth century. Initially congruent with the dioceses, élections were then grouped together in larger généralités under the authority of inspectors of finance. Ignoring the more stable ecclesiastical (administrative) divisions, this means that there were two main systems of territorial organisation at the end of the Middle Ages: the military governments and the généralités. To these, from the end of the fifteenth century, must be added the pays d’état, a type of province⁹ which retained an assembly in which all three orders were represented (a parlement) whose main function was to negotiate with the king’s administrative officers or intendants over the amount of taxes (Map 1.1).

Administrative centralisation under the ancien régime was thus subsumed by the density of local and regional idiosyncracies. The history of the intendance in the seventeenth and eighteenth century suggests a similar experience (Nordman and Revel 1989). The example is even more telling as it concerns an institution which has often been perceived – as much at the time as by later observers – as an essential cog in the machine of absolutist centralisation, to the extent that it has often been interpreted as a forerunner of the Napoleonic prefectures (Deyon 1992). Initially, intendants were not invested with extensive powers of territorial management, and it was only during the first half of the seventeenth century that their role changed. Once again, war imperatives and the financial demands from the king provoked a shift in local administration. The intendants, highest ranking civil servants, came to prop up regular institutions who were failing in terms of public order and tax collection. In pays d’élection the intendant was part of the territorial framework constituted by the généralités; in the pays d’états (Brittany, Languedoc, Burgundy), on the other hand, this was a newly created role. The role of intendant became increasingly subject to regional variation as it became institutionalised and ended up reproducing the prior pattern of territorial fragmentation.

Map 1.1 Map of the administrative and tax districts in seventeenth century France

On the eve of the French Revolution, then, administrative centralisation had very largely reached its limits and was experiencing centrifugal pressure. In particular, in 1787–1788 the provincial assemblies, founded in 1787 by Loménie de Brienne, came into conflict with the centralising authority of the intendance (Soboul 1997). The administrative inefficiency of the king’s power was questioned by both the aristocracy and the third estate: from Fénelon to the Marquis of Argenson, from Turgot to Necker, much thought went into how to improve the management of France. The debate was over the search for the right balance between the necessary unity of the kingdom and the desired autonomy of its constituent parts.¹⁰ Thus, in the last years of its existence, the ancien régime formulated the question which the Constituent Assembly would have to address: how to institutionalise the new state power in the regions.

Revolution and territorial unification

The Revolution brought both new arguments and a new capacity for action to this long-standing dilemma. Probably no other political and institutional rupture has demonstrated more clearly the links between a political project and the organisation of the regions than the division of France into departments.

The preparation for the Estates-General (of 1789) made the multiplication and entanglement of traditional administrative districts even more of a sensitive matter. Many of the registers of grievances condemn the problems which resulted (Nordman and Revel 1989). However, in 1789, the desire to simplify administration and unify the kingdom administratively was reinforced by a real political demand. Now what was expected of the organisation of the regions was nothing less than a guarantee of the egalitarian representation of the nation which the previous divisions had made impossible. Whether the new divisions were based on surface area, or population, or a combination of the two, they were to guarantee the participation and the equal status of all within this ‘great whole’ (Rosanvallon 2004). This new division ‘shall produce the inestimable advantage of fusing the local and the particular into the national and public, making all the inhabitants of this empire French, rather than the people of Provence, of Normandy, of Paris, of Lorraine that they are today’.¹¹ This was the main objective of Abbé Sieyès, the real father of departmentalisation, who on top of his Revolutionary fervour insisted on an additional imperative: the abolition of all privileges. The night of 4 August 1789 swept aside the previous organisation and, to general enthusiasm, decreed ‘the abolition of all privileges specific to the inhabitants of the provinces, principalities, pays [distinct geographical, economic or cultural areas], cantons, towns and communities’. The nation was henceforth to be a mass of citizens who all enjoyed the same rights. Particular allegiances to provinces, religious orders and social class, languages or trade corporations would disappear and were consigned to the rank of archaism or obscurantism. The uprising in the Vendée from March 1973 finally separated into two irreconcilable camps: the supporters of the one and indivisible Republic on the one hand, and, on the other, all those who were suspected of separatism, such as the Girondists¹² (Furet and Ozouf 1991). But getting rid of the provincial and local elite, and of the old administrative districts only represents the negative part of the undertaking: what the criteria for a new territorial arrangement might look like remained to be defined.

It was in these circumstances that on the 7 September 1789, Sieyès suggested to the Assemblée nationale that a committee be appointed to propose a way forward. The few historians who have studied the new administrative division of France into departments underline that it was not the result of an arbitrary or hasty undertaking (Ozouf-Marignier 1989). Sieyès’ preference was for a solution based on geometry which would determine the series of ‘equal areas’ felt necessary to achieve national unity. He recommended dividing France into 80 squares of 18 leagues each side. Each department would then be further divided into nine cantons, and each canton into nine communes. This far-reaching rationalisation¹³ of French political space underlined, were any such confirmation needed, the desire of the members of the committee to establish a blank slate for regional space, stripped of feudal trappings. They sought to create purely functional divisions which bore no relation to any social, political or cultural reality. However, like any reform, it was the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction: Regions and the Dynamics of Political Space
• Part I: The Region as a Space of Mobilisation
• Part II: The Region as Functional Space
• Part III: The Region as Space of Governance
• Conclusion: Regional Power and Territorial Differentiation
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index