The French Exception: Rise and Fall of a Saint-Simonian Discourse

Abstract

What, if anything, makes the French claim to exceptionalism more convincing than others such as the American, the German or the British (Lipset 1996; Adams and van Minnen 1994; Madsen 1998; Gauzy 1998; Colley 1992)? Aren’t all nations in some respect exceptional? What exactly is the French exception? These questions lie at the heart of all the chapters in this volume, but in contrast to other contributors, my approach is not to seek the answers through a scholarly demonstration of the ways in which French history, politics and culture have combined to produce a particular set of events, traditions and discourses that are allegedly different from those of any other country, or to undertake a comparative study of particular policy areas in order to highlight particular aspects of divergence or convergence. Rather, I shall first of all seek to show that what has made the case for the French exception so much more convincing than any other is the manner and extent to which the expression ‘French exception’ and the concepts that it denotes came to pervade public discourse in France. It is this that makes the French exception so exceptional. Secondly, I shall show how a group of centrist and centre-left intellectuals, politicians and business people with a specific political agenda of their own orchestrated and promoted the notion of the ‘end of the French exception’ during the late 1980s and 1990s.

An earlier version of this chapter, entitled ‘The Elusive French Exception’, was published in E. Godin and T. Chafer (eds) 2005. The French Exception, pp. 30–44 (Oxford: Berghahn).