Explaining the French Bureaucratic Leviathan
Three hundred and sixty types of taxes, 36 769 communes, 15 903 unions, 27 regions, 101 departments of the state, 163 embassies for 191 ambassadors, 103 types of social aid - with 700 billion euros in spending a year, 618 384 elected officials, 1244 public agencies, 400 000 norms, 10 500 laws, 127 000 secrets, 3500 pages of the labour code, 37 programmes of retirement (Verdier-Molinié, 2015). The mentioned numbers demonstrate the size of the French state. Its leviatanesque structure, which encompasses all from a law protecting the smell of the rural areas (Guy, 2015) to the law against the intentional harm to devices by the manufacturer (Za „kazítka“ v elektronice bude ve Francii vězení, 2015). The French state is more or less everywhere the eye can see. But what are the reasons for this bureaucratic paternalistic development?
I propose to examine this problem with the case study method - a method that explores the depths of one unit, to be later applied more extensively to a greater set of them (Gerring, 2004). However, the weakness of this approach is the difficulty to generalize over another set of units (Lijphart, 1971). Nonetheless, the case study method is an important part, which tries to lay the foundation for the later examination of the attempted definitive hypothesis -it being the theory-building block - (1971). The unit of analysis is the county of France. The analysis will not contain a spatial variation - focusing only on one country.
The following study will employ a case study method with temporal variation cross-series cross-sectional analysis without spatial variation., the variables - “units of observation” (Kusá, 2021) - of this study will be built upon are those of: historical development, cultural attitudes and institutions. This study will take into account the social and historical developments - during the Industrial Revolution - and its subsequent impact and the perception of the government as an authority - the prestige and reputation - in working in a state´s institution
Historical Analysis
Why does France have a bureaucracy of such an extent? Barrington Moore and Theda Skotpol explain this phenomenon, inquiring into the historical developments of counties and examining the relationship between the peasant society and the landowners. It is important to note that the peasant class has remained and to this day it has its impact on politics in France. The happenings of the current policy developments can be traced back before the French Revolution to the relationship of the peasant and the lord. The post-peasants having an aura of success in demanding their social rights and protesting against claiming them vigorously.
Comparing the United Kingdom and France. In the United Kingdom, the landed aristocracy had started to commercialize, setting the peasants free, subjecting them to the market forces. In France, the peasants were bonded to their soil, taxed by their local landholders.
Moore puts into perspective a third variable the relationship between the landed aristocracy and the town dwellers. The interest of the town dwellers for affordable food and high prices for their own goods and vice versa in terms of the landed aristocracy. In England, the town dwellers and the landed aristocracy had managed to find themselves in the same ranks during the Tudor and Stuart England - the era of early modernization, the same can not be said about France. The artisans produced for the king and aristocracy. The aristocracy being largely centralised around the king, making the factors of Moore even more difficult to achieve when living next to a king - as happened after the construction of the Palais de Versailles. Still, France has been able to be a democratic pluralistic country. Even with the factors like unfree peasants and subjected town dwellers. Moore attributes the French democratic development to the happening of the French Revolution. The French Revolution had, in a sense, reset the power structure of the aristocracy in the society. The “bond of serfdom” has been broken and new institutions were erected. Although they did not answer the “final question regarding the peasant situation” comparable to the United Kingdom - through market forces and urbanization - this fact had come to haunt them throughout the two upcoming centuries.
According to Theda Skocpol (1979), the French Revolution was a key engine for France to dismantle its three-way system of bureaucratic control (monarch - seigneur - peasant). Sweeping away the territorial privileges - taxation and security - of the local landlords to the state. Thus creating the direct link between the state and the peasant, further enhanced by Napoleonic France, which had further promoted the relative equality of getting into the states bureaucracy (1979).
The current size of the government of France can be explained through Moore´s understanding of the peasant-ruler power structure. The peasants, even though they had overthrown the monarchical system a new style of state feudalism - securitism - had been introduced by Napoleon and the subsequent rulers of the country. The existence of the public works, rationing of alimentation and an omnipresent threat of public discontent - revolution - has been reminded to the ruling class numerous times. Just to name a few significant social events: the establishment of the Paris commune, the events of Mai 1968, the gillets-jaunes - yellow jacket - movement. During these events, popular opinion has been followed politically. The events of Mai 68 had brought more social protection (Gorz, 1969) and the Yellow Jacket together with the protests against the pension reform had reversed government decisions and halted the reform (Mediavilla, 2019).
In conclusion, Moore (1966) argues that the roots of pluralistic democracies are in the power dynamics and developments of the landed aristocracy, the king, town dwellers and the peasants. This sets the United Kingdom as an example of distant nobility which had been able to develop rules and regulations - proto-notion of the rule of law - and the right to protest against the king. The landed aristocracy releasing the peasants from their serfs to be free and move according to the market needs. Producing for demand - commercializing their land. The factor of setting the peasants free has individualized their position in the society - disintegrating their class. The “great peasant revolution” has not played like in France, where the peasants had been chained to the land. However, the trajectory that would have been towards communism - due to the large peasant population has diverted thanks to the French Revolution.
On the other hand, Charles Tilly is proposing a different theoretical answer to the size of the French state. Where Barrington Moore fails to include the role of the war and its consequences Charles Tilly constructs his own state-making theory around it. In his essay War Making and State Making as Organized Crime (1985), a theory of war and its inherent extraction of resources from the subject - taxes - of the war wager and its subsequent effect in states building is formulated. He formulates four actions - state-making, war-making, protection and extraction as the key denominators for the contemporary state.
He argues that the existence of war against the external agency - war-making - is quintessential for the explanation of the state of today. The existence of the external threat and its reaction to it had given the ruler to demilitarize its internal opponents - state-making. He points at the Tudor dynasty for their accomplishments in creating the monopoly on power, they did so by:
eliminating their great personal bands of armed retainers, razing their fortresses, taming their habitual resort to violence for the settlement of disputes, and discouraging the cooperation of their dependents and tenants. (Tilly, 1985, as cited in Kusa, 2021, p. 44, para. 6)
War-making - while disarming the internal opponents - also puts pressure on the resources with which the ruler can dispose of. To increase those taxes needs to be levied on the subjects. By financial necessity, a state agency needs to be erected, creating a framework of the state for the extraction of the resources for war-like purposes. For the extraction to be of the greatest amount the state needs to provide protection - i.e. security from internal and external threats - for the capital to be accumulated, hence for it to finance the war efforts. France has been a key military player on the continent. Practically waging from its establishment to this day. The states-making process has started with the reign of Louis XIII and Richelieu, during their time they had accomplished to:
systematically destroyed the castles of the great rebel lords, Protestant and Catholic, against whom his forces battled incessantly. He began to condemn duelling, the carrying of lethal weapons, and the maintenance of private armies. By the later 1620s, Richelieu was declaring the royal monopoly of force as doctrine. (Tilly, 1985, as cited in Kusa, 2021, p. 44, para. 2)
With the monopoly over violence, the state also needed to support the military and colonial expeditions and their governance. Together with keeping the nobility intact with the royal policies - by spending a vast amount of resources on their loyalty by creating and providing positions in the government and extending the state´s reach, through the state´s own police presence in the regions (Tilly, 1985). A vast amount of bureaucracy had been needed to be established to support the order and security of the state.
It is thinkable that those two variants of bureaucratization of the French state are not separable but interlinked. Tilly's war-making theory, together with Moore's peasant revolution theory go hand in hand with the further unfolding of the understanding of the size of the French state. Those two development trajectories resulting in the welfare system they have - a largely conservative one according to Esping-Andersen (1990). Conservative social system being erected through pre-industrial and pre-commercial social channels, Esping-Andersen (1990) assessing that the conservative social ideology dismissing the commodification of a human, considering it as a “morally degrading, socially corrupting, atomizing, and anomie”. Conservatism sees individuals that they “are not meant to compete or struggle, but to subordinate self-interest to recognized authority and prevailing institutions” (Esping-Andersen, 1990, p. 38). The genesis of a welfare conservatism being a
reaction to the French Revolution and the Paris Commune. It was avowedly nationalistic and anti-revolutionary, and ·sought to arrest the democratic impulse. It feared social levelling, and favoured a society that retained both hierarchy and class. Status, rank, and class were natural and given; class conflicts, however, were not. If we permit democratic mass participation, and allow authority and status boundaries to dissolve, the result is a collapse of the social order (Esping-Andersen, 1990 pp. 10-11 ).
Method of control applied to the French bureaucracy to ensure their allegiance, giving them a status and thus, as Bismark and von Taaffe did, ensure through the social system the detente of radical ideas which could change the social structure (Esping-Andersen,1990).
References
Esping-Andersen, G. (1990). The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism. Princeton University Press.
Gerring, J. (2004, May). American Political Science Review 98(2), pp. 341-354
Guy, B. C. J. (2021, January 22). France has passed a law protecting the sounds and smells of the countryside. CNN. https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/france-rural-noise-law-scli-intl/index.html
Kusá, D. (2021). Comparative Politics Reader. Bisla College Press
Kusá, D. (2021) Scientific Research Methods Exercise Book. Bisla College Press
Lijphart, A. (1971). Comparative Politics and the Comparative Method. American Political Science Review, 65(3), 682–693. https://doi.org/10.2307/1955513
Mediavilla, L. (2019, December 6). Réformes des retraites : un an après les « gilets jaunes », l’inquiétude des commerçants. Les Echos. https://www.lesechos.fr/industrie-services/conso-distribution/reformes-des-retraites-un-an-apres-les-gilets-jaunes-linquietude-des-commercants-1154225
Moore, B. (1966). Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World. Beacon Press.
Skocpol, T. (1976). France, Russia, China: A Structural Analysis of Social Revolutions. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 18(2), 175–210. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0010417500008197
Verdier-Molinié, A. (2015). On va dans le mur. . . Albin Michel.
Za „kazítka“ v elektronice bude ve Francii vězení. (2015, February 21). Česká Televize. https://ct24.ceskatelevize.cz/ekonomika/1504398-za-kazitka-v-elektronice-bude-ve-francii-vezeni
