According to Countryaah.com, with capital city of Paris, France is a country located in Western Europe with total population of 65,273,522. France is bordered by several countries, including Belgium and Luxembourg to the northeast, Germany and Switzerland to the east, Italy to the southeast, and Spain to the southwest. To the northwest of France lies the English Channel which separates it from the United Kingdom. The Atlantic Ocean lies to the west of France, while the Mediterranean Sea lies to the south. France also shares a border with Monaco in its southeastern corner. The country also has several overseas territories located in various parts of the world. These include French Guiana in South America, French Polynesia in Oceania and Réunion in Africa. Visit countryaah for countries that start with letter F.
State and politics
The Constitution of France, commonly called the Constitution of the Fifth Republic, was drafted in 1958 after General Charles de Gaulle formed government after the military revolt in Algeria in May. It was adopted in a referendum with 80% jar votes. In 1962, as well as by referendum, direct elections were introduced by the president of France.
The state of France is parliamentary with strong presidential power. Parliament consists of two chambers, the directly elected National Assembly with 577 members and the Senate elected by local assemblies with a maximum of 348 members. Both are involved in the legislation. If the chambers cannot agree on a decision, the National Assembly has the final say. However, in a few cases, the Senate can block a decision. Voting rights are general and voting age 18 years. The presidential election takes place in two rounds. If no candidate has received more than half of the votes in the first, in the second the two candidates who receive the most votes will meet.
The term of office was reduced in 2000 from seven years to five years and in 2008 the number of terms in succession was limited to two. The election to the National Assembly takes place in one-man constituencies in two rounds, if no candidate in the first receives over half the votes; in the second, where more than two candidates are allowed to stand, the one with the most votes wins. The term of office is five years. The government is appointed by the President but is responsible to the National Assembly. See cachedhealth.com for shopping and eating in France.
The president’s most important power is the right to call a referendum and a new election to the National Assembly. In emergency situations, he can, by virtue of § 16 of the Constitution, govern by decree (this section has only been applied once – after a military revolt in Algeria in 1961). The president has a particular influence on foreign and defense policy (decides, for example, on the use of nuclear weapons).
The government has a strong position vis-à-vis Parliament due to its influence on the chambers’ agenda and the right to use a decision-making system, according to which the budget and to a limited extent other government proposals are considered adopted unless the government falls into a distrust vote. The decisive power of the National Assembly is the opportunity to defeat the government through a declaration of confidence.
The way in which elections are held and, albeit less important, in elections to the National Assembly, has led to the division of political parties into two blocks. When the parties supporting the president have a majority in the National Assembly, the president is the real leader of government policy. This has been the case for most of the Fifth Republic.
If the opposition to the president wins a majority in the National Assembly, the president’s power will be curtailed in favor of the government. This has been the case in 1986–88, 1993–95 and 1997–2002. Ultimately, a conflict between the president and the parliamentary majority can only be resolved by the president resigning or announcing new elections to the National Assembly.
The French political parties are to a large extent associations around individual politicians and act as their campaign organizations like other political systems with one-man constituencies. There is no party support in France. Funding comes from outside and is often tied to people rather than parties.
The Union for a People’s Movement (Union pour un mouvement populaire, UMP) was formed after Jacques Chirac’s and the bourgeois parties’ election victory in 2002 through a merger of the gaullist party RPR and parts of the right-center party UDF. In 2015, the UMP changed its name to the Republicans (Les Républicains, LR). The Gaullist Party, from 1976 known as the Rassemblement pour la republic, was originally a nationally oriented, socially progressive bourgeois party, open to government control of the economy. After de Gaulle, it was transformed into a general conservative party. In terms of opinion, it was little different from the Union for French Democracy (Union pour la démocratie française, UDF), which was an association of Christian Democrats, right-wing liberals and liberal radicals formed in 1978 to support Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. UDF leader François Bayrou (born 1951) was successful in the 2007 presidential election, but his new party Democratic Movement (Mouvement démocratie, MoDem) has never had any impact. The UMP was the dominant government party in 2002–12.
Since the 1980s, the populist, EU-critical and under its former leaders have also achieved anti-Semitic National Collection (formerly the National Front), not least because of its immigrant hostility and party leader (since 2011 Marine Le Pen, before her father Jean- Marie Le Pen) ability to attract voters. Although the 2007 elections meant a significant decline for the party, in the 2012 presidential election, almost every fifth voter voted for the UN candidate Marine Le Pen. At the 2017 presidential election, Marine Le Pen received 33.9 percent of the vote.
The Socialist Party (Parti socialiste, PS) represents socialism in France. For decades the party has been characterized by internal tensions between a more moderate, almost social-democratic, direction and a left-wing socialism with Trotskyist roots. Unlike the Swedish social democracy, the party has no organizational cooperation with the trade union movement. Party secretary has been Jean-Christophe Cambadélis (born 1951) since 2014. After great successes in local elections, PS regained government power through François Hollandes (party leader from 1997 to 2008) the victory in the presidential election in 2012. Hollande’s unpopularity meant that he did not stand for presidential elections in 2017. In the primary election organized to develop the party’s next presidential candidate elected left Socialist Benoit Hamon.
The Left Party (Parti de gauche) was formed in 2008 by defectors from PS. In the 2012 presidential election, the party and PCF collaborated in the Left Front (Front de gauche), whose candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon received just over 11 percent of the vote. In the 2017 presidential election, Mélenchon stood as candidate for the newly formed La France Insoumis movement and unexpectedly achieved great success with just under 20 percent of the vote.
The political environmental movement has grown in strength since the 1980s, but has collapsed in the late 2010s. Nowadays, the sitting party is called the National Assembly EELV and is not part of any party group. Both the left-wing radicals and the Communist Party and the Greens (Les Verts) joined forces with the Socialist Party in Lionel Jospin’s left government in 1997–2002. The Greens have since been divided and as a party are marginalized by dropouts both from and to governments as well as in and out of the party.
Only LR (formerly UMP) and PS can be designated as mass parties. In the Fifth Republic, for a long time it has been crucial for a party to have a candidate with a view to being elected President of the Republic. In practice, this is the case only with LR (formerly UMP/UDF) and PS who have had opportunities to win the presidential power. This was overthrown at the 2017 presidential election where the Socialist Party collapsed and LR’s candidate François Fillon ended up in a scandal and was investigated for misuse of public funds, which ruined his lead over the other candidates.
Ahead of the 2017 presidential election, Nicolas Sarkozy announced he wanted to aim for a return, but when the Republicans held the primary in November, he was eliminated in the first round. The decisive vote was between the former two prime ministers François Fillon and Alain Juppé , with Fillon winning.
Prior to that, the Minister of Economy, Emmanuel Macron, appointed by François Hollande had resigned and announced that he would stand as an independent candidate for the La République en marche (formerly A marché!) And thus officially withdrew from his former party PS. Marine Le Pen candidate for the populist and EU-critical National Front. She stood in the second round of the election against Macron, who won the election with 66 percent of the vote against her 35 percent.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon resigned as party leader for the Left Party in 2014 and started the political movement La France insoumise in 2016, which he represented in the 2017 election. Mélanchon was eliminated in the first round of elections.
After President François Hollande announced that he would not stand for re-election, Prime Minister Manuel Valls resigned to run in the Socialist Party’s primary election in January. He was replaced by Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve. Benôit Hamon, who is for citizen pay and robot tax, unexpectedly won in the primary election held in January 2017 when he was put against former Prime Minister Manuel Valls. Hamon’s victory came to be regarded as the voters’ way of punishing Valls for what they considered to be an overly harsh political line against refugees, the country’s finances and labor legislation. In the first round of the French presidential election, Hamon received just over 6 percent, leading to a mass escape from the party to the newly formed La République a marche and open speculation that PS was about to disappear as a party.
Emmanuel Macron won the second round of the 2017 presidential election, becoming the President of France. To get through its political agenda, it was required that the hitherto politically untested movement La République en Marche gained a majority in the National Assembly. Although the final election on June 18 did not confirm the success figures received by the party in the first round, the election for the party, which had never been in parliament until now, was a success.
La République en marche received just over 43 percent of the vote in a vote that was characterized by a very low turnout (just over 43 percent). Macron’s party thus got 308 of the 577 seats of the National Assembly. This means that La République en marche together with the Modem partner (which got 42 seats) has great powers to enforce a mid-political program. The largest opposition party became the Republicans.
The French legal system is one of the world’s largest legal systems. It has exercised and continues to exert a strong influence on the law in a number of countries, primarily in the former French colonies outside Europe, but also in Belgium, Luxembourg, Spain, Portugal and the Latin American countries.
Before the Revolution of 1789, France lacked a uniform legal order, especially in the field of private law. In the southern parts of the country were Roman law-inspired written laws, while in the northern parts followed several hundred different, more or less locally restricted customs, of which Coutume de Paris was the most important. The revolution made possible the realization of the old regime’s pursuit of a uniform legal regulation for France as a whole.
In 1804, the Civil Code, Code civil (also called Code Napoléon), was issued, which is still today the essence of French law. The importance of the Napoleonic Code is not limited to legal life, as it is considered to be one of the cornerstones of the entire French culture. The viability of this legislation is best shown by the fact that, with some modifications and additions, it has survived about ten French constitutions.
During the Napoleonic period were added a number of other important codifications, including the Commercial Code, the Code de Commerce, 1807, and the Criminal Code, Code pénal, 1810. A new criminal code was adopted in 1992. The procedural kodifikationerna from Napoleonic times has been replaced by the Code of Criminal Procedure, the Code de procédure penale, 1958, and (partly) Civil Procedure Law, Nouveau Code de Civil Procedure, 1975.
The highest court of the judicial organization is the Court of Cassation, the Cour de cassation, under which there are a number of appellate courts, the Cour d’appel. In the first instance, more important cases are decided by the Tribunal de grande instance, while litigation is tried by the Tribunal d’instance and the trespass offenses, contraventions, are prosecuted by the Tribunal de police. Some serious criminal cases are tried by the jury at the Cour d’assises. Certain types of business disputes are initially decided by the Tribunal de Commerce, consisting of laymen selected from among the businessmen themselves.
There are also special courts for, among other things. labor procedure. France also has a system of administrative courts with the highest authority of the Conseil d’état. Although the decisions of the higher courts are, in principle, considered to be merely an application of existing rules of law without themselves being a source of law, they are carefully studied and are usually followed in the practice of the lower courts.
French law has been affected by the adaptation requirements that follow from its membership in the EU. The death penalty was abolished in 1981; the last execution took place in 1977.
The fundamental freedoms and rights are respected, however, with the exception. France has not signed the Council of Europe’s Framework Convention on the Protection of National Minorities and does not recognize minorities at all. Roma are exposed throughout society, but especially in the labor market and in the education system, where Roma children are denied access to education. Evictions of Roman settlements are common. Evictions and forced removals also affect migrants and asylum seekers who have built makeshift camps around the Calais area in connection with the Eurotunnel. In most cases, the authorities do not offer alternative housing for forced relocation.
In 2004, the government banned veils and other religious symbols in state schools. Since 2010, women have been prohibited from wearing veils that cover their entire face in public places, a legislation that mainly affects the Muslim population and has been criticized for restricting religious freedom.
Since a law change in 2013, same-sex couples can enter into civil marriage, something that was not possible before.
Purchase of sexual services was banned in 2016. France became the fifth country in the world to criminalize sex purchases.
Heads of state, governing assemblies etc.
|Carolingian kings and emperors from 843
(For former Frankish kings and emperors, see merovings and Carolingians.)
|843-877||Charles II (The Bald; Emperor 875–877)|
|877-879||Louis II (the stammering)|
|879-882||Louis III and Karloman|
|885-888||Charles III (The Thick; Emperor 881–888)|
|893-922||Karl III (The Foolish)|
|922-923||Robert I (roberting)|
|923-936||Rudolf of Burgundy (roberting)|
(Former members of the family are called robertings.)
|996-1031||Robert II (the pious)|
|1108-37||Louis VI (the thick one)|
|1180-1223||Philip II August|
|1226-70||Louis IX (the Holy One)|
|1270-85||Philip III (The Bold)|
|1285-1314||Philip IV (the beautiful one)|
|1316-22||Philip V (The Long)|
|1322-28||Charles IV (the beautiful one)|
|The house Valois
(really a younger branch of the house Capet)
|1350-64||Johan II (the good one)|
|1364-80||Karl V (The Wise)|
|1380-1422||Karl VI (The Mad)|
|The house Plantagenet|
|1422-53||Henry VI of England|
|The house Valois|
|The Valois-Orleans branch|
|The Valois-Orleans-Angoulême Branch|
|The House Bourbon
(really a younger branch of the House Capet)
|(1793-95||Louis XVII, titular king)|
|(1814||Napoleon II, titular emperor)|
|The house bourbon|
|First Empire (“The Hundred Days”)|
|(1815||Napoleon II, titular emperor)|
|The house bourbon|
|Pine Bourbon Orleans|
|1830-48||Louis Philip I|
|Second Republic (President)|
|1848-52||Louis Napoléon Bonaparte|
|Third Republics (Presidents)|
|1873-79||Patrice Maurice de Mac-Mahon|
|1894-95||Jean Paul Casimir-Périer|
|1944-46||Charles de Gaulle|
|Fourth Republic (Presidents)|
|Fifth Republic (Presidents)|
|1959-69||Charles de Gaulle|
|1974-81||Valéry Giscard d’Estaing|
Heads of Government (from 1914)
|1934-35||Pierre Étienne Flandin|
|1944-46||Charles de Gaulle|
|1957||Maurice Bourgès- Maunoury|
|1958-59||Charles de Gaulle|
|1968-69||Maurice Couve de Murville|
|2005-07||Dominique de Villepin|