French political culture in the 1970s: Liberalism, identity politics and the modest state

French politics in the 1970s is notoriously hard to decipher. The increasingly violent attacks on Gaullism and Communism, the decline in French geopolitical power, and the end of postwar economic growth led to unprecedented unease about the nation’s collective future. But rather than treat the 1970s as an endpoint, I argue in this article that the 1970s represented a new beginning. I explore how more modest conceptions of political action, the emergence of a new kind of liberalism, and the development of identity politics led to a profound transformation of French political culture – one that tried to reconcile France’s long statist tradition with the realities of an ever-more fragmented polity.