Histoire de la République en France

What is the Republic? What are its principles and values? Some argue that the Republic is just a word "meaningless". Yet, it continues to federate the French around the same hope of "dignity for all". Paradoxically, the history of the Republic remains poorly known. This manual retraces as a whole the political, institutional and legal history of the First to the Fifth Republic, exercise so far unpublished. Presenting this controversial and still widely debated story requires going back to its ideological foundations from the rediscovery of Aristotle in the Middle Ages that gave birth to a "classical republicanism" that will spread from Italian cities to the United States of America. But the "radical lights" will give this republicanism a particular connotation in France, by associating it with democracy, what will be called the "French republican exceptionalism". From 1789-1792, the Republic became the object of great political clashes and for more than a century source of divisions, sometimes even within the Republican camp. More complex than the teleological study of the republican idea had once glimpsed , this story reveals that there is not one republican tradition but several (conservative, liberal, Jacobin, plebeian ). These sensitivities are sometimes confused but often confronted around the perimeters of a regime that wants to be the thing of all.--Translation of back cover.