No Western country is as deeply shaped by the state as France. For much of the country’s history, the state served as a powerful vehicle for social solidarity and political unity. But what was once seen as a remedy for many of France’s ills now stifles political creativity, serving instead to entrench elite control and power hoarding.

The experience of recent years has served as an acute reminder of that reality – faced with an unprecedented budget deficit of 5.8 per cent in 2024 (despite the highest tax burden in OECD countries) and an existential political crisis, the elite has shown a striking incapacity to imagine solutions beyond the state. Leaders have offered superficial short-term and state-reliant fixes – from unfunded welfare pledges on the left to equally unfunded policing promises on the right – while ignoring the deeper social fractures. In these conditions, it is almost impossible to meaningfully reduce the deficit, which is now projected to fall only marginally, to five per cent, through a mixture of modest austerity measures and additional taxation.

Yet, this crisis is not the responsibility of one party; it is an endemic issue at the root of France’s political system. Failed providential figures or ‘Wannabe Napoleons’, such as Nicolas Sarkozy or Emmanuel Macron, or ‘flaccid Louis XVIs’ such as Jacques Chirac and François Hollande, have come and gone. But the trend remains the same: an ever-increasing expansion of the state. Over the past 25 years, the country has seen the addition of one million civil servants – now representing one in five employees – a 163.7 per cent increase in the number of regulations, and, despite already being among the highest spenders globally, an eight per cent rise in public spending. Then, as now, nothing seems to challenge its hegemony over France. Whatever the cost, whatever the crisis, France is of the state, by the state, and for the state. For a country known for its intellectualism, how can one explain such political and conceptual narrowness?

The first germs of French Statism began from the 14th century onwards when an increasingly strong monarchy imposed itself on local lords and barons. In his L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution Alexis De Tocqueville showed that the monarchy progressively substituted intermediary powers and local autonomy (lords, clergy, communal and municipal institutions) through the development of a centralised administration and a new class to serve within it.

Commenting on Tocqueville’s analysis in Penser la Révolution, French historian François Furet observed that, already in the 18th century, ‘the welfare state did not yet exist in fact, but already existed in people’s minds’. Behind this impetus towards state centralisation lay the principle of ‘absolute monarchy’: in stark contrast to their English neighbours, French kings (and through them the central state) saw their power as absolute, meaning their rule was indivisible and answerable to no one but God. But the Ancien Régime was a system filled with contradictions. Tocqueville noted the contrast between the centralised administrations’ ‘extraordinary meticulousness’ and the ‘chronicle disobedience’ of local officials. Local lords, customs, and municipal powers still effectively reigned supreme in their area.

For Tocqueville, the French Revolution and Napoleon’s regime are best understood as completing the unresolved contradictions of the Ancien Régime, primarily through the dismantling of historical barriers to state centralisation. The standardisation of France into departments, the establishment of ‘prefets’ (central state representatives in local areas), the creation of the civil code – the revolutionaries and Napoleon were simply pouring plaster into a statist mould already established by the Ancien Régime. This, I would contend, is only partly true.

Though the monarchy strived to progressively undermine intermediary institutions, much of its legitimacy still rested on local customs and traditions. The challenge to the state’s ability to centralise was not merely technological; it was also cultural. Towns, parliaments, guilds, corporations, lords and the clergy – all were given rights that legally and morally fettered the power of the central monarch. What the revolution achieved, something that French kings could never dream of doing, was to break these traditional bonds.

Indeed, for revolutionaries, the local traditions that served to legitimise the monarch were largely viewed as primary obstacles to their ideals: democracy, freedom, equality, and fraternity. Influenced by Enlightenment-era ideas and thinkers (most notably Jean-Jacques Rousseau), they sought to radically reinvent the state’s legitimacy: they grounded it in a uniform ‘will of the people’ that did not exist. While a great many of the old régime’s institutions, in particular those benefiting the nobility, were artificial and unjust, the social realities they rested upon were deeply rooted and far from artificial. Rather than being a uniform people, 18th-century France was an extremely diverse patchwork of communities and regions. The country was so fragmented that it was not uncommon for villages a few kilometres apart to speak dialects as different as contemporary French and English.

Faced with this problem, the revolutionaries elaborated a solution that has since shaped French political life. They uniformised the ‘people’ by shifting the source of authority from individual or communal public wills to one institutional will: the state. As Danielle Allen observes in Talking to Strangers – in which she analyses enlightenment theories of the state – ‘the state stood in for a consensus that was impossible to achieve’. This is the genesis of the French Republic, ‘une et indivisible’ (one and indivisible).

The state-coerced uniform will of the people became the republic. The French Republic was now the immanent and inseparable contract between the state and its people. In this framework, the state does not merely govern the people; it incarnates their political will. The new arrangement is devastatingly clear: the state (through the republic) ‘rule’; the non-state multitude is ‘ruled’. Importantly, as Allen makes clear, ‘citizens are politically active only insofar as they are members of the people, but since the people now mean institutions [understand in the French context: the Republic], their political activity consists only of acting through state institutions’. In their personal and social life, individuals must remain politically passive, accepting what the republic does for them. Here lies the intellectual mind virus at the root of France’s structural political crisis: the belief that politics, in its legitimate form, can exist only through the state.

The revolutionaries soon translated their vision of the state into action. They quickly used their powers to de-legitimise any other forms of political organisations and to establish the state’s monopoly over political life. Beginning with the suppression of the noble and clerical order, the process of enforcing a singular state legitimacy continued in 1791 with the suppression of guilds, trade unions and workers’ groups. It reached its symbolic peak in 1793 with the creation of a unique state-backed religion called ‘the Cult of the Supreme Being’. In 1794, the first republic was replaced by a bourgeois regime – the Directorate – thus marking the formal end of the revolutionary period. However, the intellectual foundations had been laid and would go on to shape the next two centuries of French political life.

Indeed, the political class’s persistent inability to understand or accept that legitimate politics can operate outside the remit of the state underpins its confrontation with regional identities or its strict conception of secularism, in which religion must remain utterly private. Its unique history of internal political violence can be explained by the Republic’s continuous attempt to impose itself, and its bureaucratic apparatus, on French society. As the 19th-century French politician Victor de Broglie put it ‘La France est un pays conquis par son administration’. The statist blinkers worn by the French political class also elucidate France’s desperate dependence on providential men. A political system that permits no competing centres of legitimacy will, most inevitably, concentrate all authority in one unique ‘Jupiterian’ figure (to quote Macron) to efficiently steer the overly powerful French state.

In more recent decades, the supremacy of the state in France has also been the source of its unsustainable expansion. Since they hold no real legitimacy, local and citizen-led associations are slowly but surely either replaced by bureaucratic institutions or, at best, subject to top-down regulatory control. Crucially, in this era of widespread political disenfranchisement, the unlimited growth of the state holds a precious purpose for the elite: the re-legitimisation of the republic (i.e. the contract between the people and the state). For every new problem the French citizen has, it can appear as the only viable solution. Beyond the ballot box, the ideal French citizen is expected to remain politically passive, waiting for the state to deliver for them.

France is world famous for its lively political life – from mass demonstrations to regular strikes, politics undoubtedly occurs outside of the state. But most of these demonstrations today remain within the confines of French statism. They are usually citizens demanding that the state maintain its services and benefits. The challenge is not to the state but to the elected government in power. The elite can thus better control and absorb democratic life, convincing citizens that acting politically does not involve citizen initiatives outside of the state but ritualised protests that ask for more of it. The state paradigm still reigns supreme.

Often the source of admiration or amusement for foreign observers – depending on their political inclinations – statism is crushing France’s soul. It is eroding the country’s long-standing popular support for solidarist policies. France’s exceptional ability to maintain the highest fiscal burden in the OECD rests on fragile but crucial foundations: trust. Citizens need to be able to trust that the state efficiently and fairly redistributes financial resources across society. Yet when their generosity is exploited to sustain a president emperor and a bureaucratic machine – in both cases more concerned with their own survival than addressing deep-rooted problems – that trust inevitably begins to collapse. The relentless expansion of bureaucratic services, through the endless creation of subsidies, is only delaying the reckoning temporarily (i.e. as long as it remains possible to borrow extra cash).

More worryingly however, France’s over-reliance on the state is stifling political innovation and civic vitality. Citizen-led initiatives are suffocated under a constant churn of regulations, administrative interference, and centralised control. The heart of democracy – citizen action, civic engagement, and local initiative – is being crushed by the very body meant to serve it. In an age of permacrisis, France doesn’t need another providential man or the expansion of a burdensome and controlling bureaucratic machine. It needs its citizens.

To devolve power out of the state towards civil society and local communities, France will have to reinvent its theory of political legitimacy. It needs to move away from an ideal of uniformity towards what Danielle Allen calls ‘wholeness’ – recognising that democracy is made of diverse and divisible parts that can nevertheless work together in pursuit of a shared purpose. Such a shift would mark a profound transformation:  from a republic that is ‘one and indivisible’ towards one that is ‘whole and divisible’, constituted by a pluralistic society – a ‘community of communities’ – that nonetheless shares a commitment towards the common good.

However, for anyone who knows France, this might seem too chimerical. The revolutionary settlement that binds the state to its supposedly uniform people — enshrined in the ideal of a ‘one and indivisible’ republic — remains deeply entrenched in the elite psyche. Policies that challenge or even appear to threaten this state-enforced unity are met with suspicion and hostility. Rather than sacrificing part of the state to save France, the political class is sacrificing all of the nation in order to save the state.