Changing French capitalism: Political and systemic crises in France

Abstract

France's model of capitalism experiences a crisis with multiple aspects. First, the French model of capitalism has undergone deep reforms since the 1980s. Second, the French political life is characterized by a political crisis: the vanishing of the space for mediation between the divergent expectations of the social groups composing the dominant social bloc. These crises are linked. First, because the institutional reforms undertaken since the 1980s have changed French capitalism, its institutional complementarities, the profile of socio-political groups, and have contributed to destabilizing social alliances. Second, because the political crisis has pushed policy-makers to turn to institutional change as a necessary condition for opening up new spaces of mediation. This contribution surveys the main changes experienced by the French model over the past 30 years, analyses the break-up of the traditional social alliances and presents the elements of the political crisis in relation to neoliberal structural reforms.