A comprehensive account of French society and politics, proposed through an original analytical framework that is applicable to other nations and their comparative analysis.
Recent pressures for change in France have impacted upon a country which, from 1945 to 1975, had featured both unprecedented economic growth and the building of a powerful state. Drawing upon a plethora of social science research and data, this book sets out what has been made in France since that period and, as importantly, what this has 'made' of the French. Centred upon institutions and power relations as societal structures, together with the 'political work' that has changed or reproduced them, in seven chapters the book takes the reader 'from the cradle to the grave' to assess and explain where significant change has occurred over the last four decades.
