This research article examines France’s maritime security within the European Union’s (EU) framework, analysing whether the country’s naval ambitions align with broader European maritime security policies. As a historical naval power, France has maintained significant maritime capabilities and strategic interests, often advocating for autonomous military initiatives in line with the concept of “Grandeur”. The study explores the French role in shaping the EU’s maritime security policy, assessing its contributions to naval operations, strategic autonomy, and governance within EU institutions. By examining parliamentary papers, policy documents, military operations, and elite interviews with diplomatic, military and policy experts, the study offers insights into France’s ambition for maritime “Grandeur” and its impact on the EU’s evolving security architecture. The findings suggest that while France allegedly plays a leading role in European maritime security, tensions between national sovereignty and collective defence persist.

Abstract In this introduction to the special issue, we make the case that while the French context of reception of the concept of intersectionality has been somewhat an antagonistic one, the travels of intersectionality have been productive for the scholars who have adopted it as part of their critical toolkit, in particular when it comes to documenting and analyzing the workings of racialization in a race-blind context such as the French one. Hence, we argue that oppositions to intersectionality in French academia, together with the hegemonic norms of race-blindness, have led scholars who study intersectional politics in France to be particularly attentive to not essentialize race and to treat it as always coproduced with other categorizations such as class, gender, sexuality, citizenship or religion. In this endeavor, qualitative methods, and in particular ethnography, have proven potent allies. Drawing on the rich fieldworks and analyses of the articles in this issue, we finally propose a typology of patterns of intersectionality, highlighting how individuals leverage their intersectional positioning, rearranging the categorizations imposed onto them so as to euphemize or re-signify racialization, playing with the ambivalences that arise from incongruence between different social statuses linked to race, class, gender, religion or sexuality. Doing so they commodify , decontextualize or silence some of the social characteristics imposed onto them, or that they have actively adopted.