French Politics, Culture & Society

This article examines how Guadeloupe's two main trade unions, the UGTG and the CGTG, mobilize race in their discourse and activist practices. Drawing on fieldwork and biographical interviews, it shows that race is not merely a contextual factor but a strategic axis of political differentiation in a postcolonial setting marked by social and racial inequalities. The analysis highlights contrasting and intersectional uses of race and class, revealing how these organizations articulate competing visions of trade unionism, subalternity, and emancipation within a broader context of French domination.

During the colonial period in Indochina, tens of thousands of mixed-race children were born of relations between foreign men and local women. Between 1947 and 1975, the Fédération des oeuvres de l'enfance française en Indochine (the Federation for the Welfare of French Children in Indochina), acting on behalf of the French government, directed the move of five thousand of these children to France. The memories of the transplant experience vary widely among the people involved, ranging from gratitude to criticism of the conditions they experienced, with differences along generational and gender lines. While the memory of migration is vivid among the now-grown children, its history is beginning to be written thanks to archives and personal accounts. The aim here is to see how the narrative between history and memory is constructed, what conflicts of loyalty and legitimacy are posed by historical inquiry, and how the historian should assume their social role.

In 2024, France garnered international attention as it became the first country in the world to include the liberty to access abortion in its Constitution. This comes after a long French history of tension between pronatalism and advocacy for reproductive rights. Abortion, or in French interruption volontaire de grossesse or IVG, however, is infrequently considered as an object of study. This review identifies scholarly works that document incremental changes in legislation on reproductive health and cultural attitudes on abortion from the early modern period to the present, pinpointing continuities and ruptures in the history of the French family and French Republican ideology. I suggest that, in this emerging subfield of abortion studies, examining abortion as both a political concept as well as a lived experience is essential to understanding a lingering taboo around women's experiences with abortion.

This article examines how Emmanuel Macron has reinvested the presidential role through a vertical, solitary, and symbolically charged (i.e., Jupiterian) conception of power. Relying on the institutional specificities of the French Fifth Republic—further reinforced by the quinquennat reform and the inversion of the electoral calendar—Macron has consolidated the centralization of executive power, sidelining intermediary bodies and weakening parliamentary logic through the recurrent use of ordinances and Article 49.3 of the Constitution. The article also explores the impact of this intensified presidentialization on French representative democracy in a context marked by a growing distrust of political parties, the depoliticization of public debate, and the rise of citizen mobilizations outside traditional partisan structures. Using Colin Crouch's concept of post-democracy, it interrogates the dialectical relationship between Macronism and the erosion of classical democratic mechanisms. It concludes that Macron's style of governance is both a product and a catalyst of a post-democratic transformation.

Anaïs Fléchet, Martin Guerpin, Philippe Gumplowicz, and Barbara L. Kelly, eds., Music and Postwar Transitions in the 19th and 20th Centuries (New York: Berghahn Books, 2023).

Joseph F. Byrnes, God on the Western Front: Soldiers and Religion in World War I (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2023).

Deborah Reed-Danahay, Bourdieu and Social Space: Mobilities, Trajectories, Emplacements (New York: Berghahn Books, 2020).

Hajer Ben Boubaker, Barbès Blues: Une histoire populaire de l'immigration maghrébine (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2024).

Douglas W. Leonard, Anthropology, Colonial Policy and the Decline of French Empire in Africa (London: Bloomsbury, 2020).