France. Emile Chabal

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Название France
Автор произведения Emile Chabal
Жанр Зарубежная публицистика
Серия
Издательство Зарубежная публицистика
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781509530045



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2012–2017 Presidency of the socialist François Hollande (one term). January 2013–July 2014 French intervention in Mali. May 2013 Legalization of same-sex marriage (le mariage pour tous). 2015–2016 A series of Islamist terrorist attacks on the offices of Charlie Hebdo magazine in January 2015, a number of locations in Paris in November 2015, and in Nice in July 2016. 2017–present November 2018 Presidency of the liberal Emmanuel Macron. Start of the gilets jaunes (yellow vests) protests.

      France is a country bristling with paradoxes. It harbours global ambitions, but it invests huge amounts of money in supporting minor arts festivals in small villages. It is the undisputed home of revolutionary politics, but it has been overwhelmingly governed by conservatives in the last two centuries. It is a land synonymous with strikes and labour unrest, but it has one of the lowest rates of unionization in Europe. It is one of the world’s most advanced capitalist economies, but almost half of French people say they are opposed to the capitalist system. It is a place where citizens are deeply attached to their state, but do not hesitate to go into the street to protest the state’s irresponsibility. And it is a country in which millions of immigrants live, but which has one of the longest-standing extreme right movements in the Western world.

      I am hardly the first scholar of France to identify paradox as a major theme of French history. In his classic five-volume study of France from 1848 to 1945, published in the mid-1970s, the historian Theodore Zeldin used binary opposites to structure his entire text. The titles of each volume – Ambition and Love, Intellect and Pride, Taste and Corruption, Politics and Anger, Anxiety and Hypocrisy – were designed to capture the contradictory aspects of French life. More recently, the historian Sudhir Hazareesingh has suggested that binary opposites have been a constitutive part of French thought since the Enlightenment, a legacy of a Cartesian tendency to think in rational and abstract terms about philosophical problems. In the same vein, a rich English-language literature about contemporary French republicanism and a stimulating French-language literature about the emergence of democracy have highlighted a range of paradoxes and unresolved tensions in French history.