The French state in question : public law and political argument in the Third Republic

The French State in Question places the idea of the state back at the heart of our understanding of modern French history and political culture, and challenges the accepted view of the Third Republic as a 'weak' state. At its core is an examination of a central problem in French politics of the belle epoque: should the employees of the state have the right to join trade unions and to strike? The book examines this as a problem of intellectual history: it seeks to explain why this was such an intractable question, and does so by demonstrating the importance of legal theory and the idea of the state in French political culture. In this important and innovative essay in the history of ideas, Stuart Jones shows how during the Third Republic French legal thinkers engaged in a vigorous rethinking of the idea of the state, and assesses their significance for the development of French political discourse. The French state in question places the idea of the state back at the heart of our understanding of modern French history and political culture, and challenges the accepted view of the Third Republic as a 'weak' state. At its core is an examination of a central problem in French politics of the belle epoque: should the employees of the state have the right to join trade unions and to strike? Stuart Jones shows that the intractability of that issue has to be understood in the light of a profound cultural preoccupation with the state and its purposes - a preoccupation that is largely alien to British and European political cultures. In this important and innovative essay in the history of French political ideas, Stuart Jones shows how during the Third Republic legal thinkers engaged in a vigorous rethinking of the idea of the state, and assesses their significance for the development of French political discourse. The study thus seeks to rectify previous historians' neglect of the place of law in French political culture

The French State in Question places the idea of the state back at the heart of our understanding of modern French history and political culture, and challenges accepted views of the Third Republic as a "weak" state. At its core is an examination of a central problem in French politics of the belle epoque: Should the employees of the state have the right to unionize, and to strike? The book examines this as a problem of intellectual history: it seeks to explain why this was such an intractable question, and does so by demonstrating the importance of legal theory and the idea of the state in French political culture.