France 101

You're listening to The Royal Palace, the podcast where we explain French law to Americans. I'm your host Patrick, here with my co-host Liam. Hey everyone. Today on the first episode of The Royal Palace, we're going to introduce listeners to France. Where is it? What is it? And how is it? [Music] Great to get. But first, a bit about who we are and why we're making this podcast. We're both fans of the recent wave of American podcasts that talk about the law from a leftist perspective, like 5-4, Alab, and of course the late Mike Dicte. Rest in peace. And through this podcast, it is our goal to bring an international perspective to the discourse. An international perspective isn't something we get in the US very often. We're a very insular society. We tend to think that we're the only country that has freedom, burgers, and a red, white, and blue flag. But would it shock you to learn that many other countries have all three of these things? Growing up in the US, we all come away with this impression, you know, from our education and also from the political culture, that the US is some sort of anomaly. We are the only country that lives up to the aims of justice, and that our system is somehow unique or exceptional in the world. I think once we start looking abroad, looking at other countries, we start to see quite a lot of similarities between the way the United States works and the way other countries work. But we also learn that sometimes they do things better. It's not just in the US that we tend to think we're the best at everything. We tend just to not even think about how other countries do things. Of course, we assume the large swaths of the world are just dictatorships where they don't have liberties, and so it doesn't really matter how they do things. But even about your king countries tends to be very little discussion in the US about anything, healthcare, politics, or indeed, of course, the law. It's just not within the national conversation. In our case, we've chosen mostly folks on France, but you're more generally, not only because we can sort of relitify our own place in the world, but we can also look at how other countries solve problems, often quite easily, that we seem to still be struggling with, and may not even understand as problems that can have solutions. That's why we think we should look beyond the US, but why specifically at France? The most important reason is that it's the case that we know, however, it is also a very good key study in terms of a major country that has a radically different legal system that's developed in parallel to the US. France has professional judges, as opposed to the way most you should be familiar with how it works in the United States. It's an inquisitorial system, not adversarial. We have a strong separation between public and private law, and there's quite a noticeable difference in the way the state and state power are apprehended. And a rather key thing about all these differences in France is that the way France does it is actually the normal way, if you look globally, for all or most of these things, because most countries in the world, basically outside of the English-speaking world, and a few other exceptions, inherit their modern legal tradition from the French model. But what qualifies us to talk about French law, Patrick? Well, frankly, nothing. Neither of us are lawyers, and nothing we say should be interpreted as legal advice. That being said, I did law school here in France, and I'm currently preparing for the bar. I, however, am not qualified at all. I have a background in urban planning and political science, so I'm also about to touch with an American's think. Our goal in the Royal Palace podcast is to explain French law in terms of Americans without prior knowledge of either France or Europe will understand, and in doing so to mystify both French legal and political systems, as well as our own. As a final note, before we get started, we want to make this podcast as accessible as possible to an English-speaking audience. To that end, we will make an effort to avoid using French terminology whenever a suitable English term exists. In the case of names, it's a bit trickier, but we'll try to anglicize them to some extent. We don't want to pronounce names like Emmanuel Macron and Francois Mitterrand. Because then we'd sound like Protentius Conard, as they say in Paris. But at the same time, we've reinforced ourselves to say Emmanuel Macaroon or Francois Mitterrand, we'd go crazy pretty quickly. So we'll try to do something in between. In any case, we'll do our best to provide listeners with the French terminology that we use as well as our approximation of their meaning into English in the show notes. So there's a lot of terminology in French law that is different than that in American law. Most of that will cover when it comes up. However, there are several terms that we think that we need to talk about right off the bat, because they are words that are used to mean different things in the French context, which is the American context. So first of all, the term "the state" or "litre" in French. In the US, when you hear the word "state", it's usually referring to, of course, one of the 50 states. France, however, does not have states in that sense. It's not a federation. So what do people mean when they say the state? I would say this most simply translates to the national government. Yeah, so we're talking about the elected governments, the parliament, the judiciary. And we're also talking about all the institutions of the state, things like the police, the military, and so on. So when you hear the state, you can basically translate that in your head to what we'd call the federal government in the US, which brings us to our second term, which is the government. So again, in the US, we use the government to refer to basically what they call the state in France. In France, the government, or "l'huvernement" means something completely different. Okay, so the government refers to the prime minister as well as the ministers. This is most similar to the president and his cabinet. This huge, the word "government" is the same as the way it is used in the UK, for instance, to refer to the elected executive of the government, the current one. So you'll often hear people say the current government in both the French context or the British context. And that is because they're specifically referring to this current executive. And you'll also hear different consecutive governments referred to by the prime minister they were under. So this next term is a bit tricky to talk about because it is a case where we have one word in English where they have two words in French. So the word is law or laws. And this is equivalent to two completely separate words in French, which are "droit" and "droit". So Patrick, what is "droit"? Alright, so "dwa" refers to the field of law. So when we talk about going to law school, we're going to study the law. Which includes plenty of different things, right? It includes the study of statute, jurisprudence, regulations, etc. Yes, it's law, the law, and the abstract it can also be used to refer to different fields of law, like criminal law, administrative law, or different levels of law, like European law. Whereas the word "dwa" can be translated basically as a law, statutory law. So just something to keep in mind that this distinction exists in French. Whereas it's sort of, I don't want to say confusion, but a merging of those two terms exists in English. As we're talking about France, a term that you're going to hear come up quite a lot is the fifth republic. This is a term that's quite common in France and not just in legal contexts. What you have to understand is that the US and France share a very common origin, let's say. The history of modern France, the origin of modern France, for pretty much all intents and purposes, was in 1789 with the French Revolution. This was of course also the year that the American Constitution came into effect. Since the American Constitution came into effect in 1789, there have been only sort of a gradual evolution. Of course, the way that the federal government in the US has functioned has changed dramatically. The territory of the US has changed dramatically. There have been many amendments to the Constitution, but still we think of it as still basically being the same Constitution from 1789. France, in the same amount of time, has not had one Constitution. Yeah, exactly. Instead it has gone through 14 different constitutions since 1789. Yeah, so we're going to give you a little crash course on France here. Very broadly, this is the first episode. Everything here, we're going to go into a more depth at some point. Okay, Liam, so let's talk about the history of France. So France and the US, the Constitution orders basically date from the same year, 1789, that's the year of the French Revolution. And it's also the American Constitution came into effect. However, the French Constitution, unlike the American one, doesn't go back to the 18th century. The current French Constitution only dates from 1958. So a major difference we're going to see here between France and the US is even though they share a similar origins. Well, the US Constitution order has had continuity from 1789 to the present. The French one has gone through a series of dramatic and often violent changes. So we are currently in the 10th iteration of France, basically, since the French Revolution. We're in the 5th Republic, but interspersed between those republics, there have also been two empires, two kingdoms, and one Nazi collaborationist regime. So France did exist before 1789, of course. There was the Kingdom of France, Louis XIV, Louis XV, all that stuff. I'm sure you've heard of. That isn't what's known as the Olesien regime or the Old regime in modern French terminology. But France, as we know it, and as for pretty much all intents and purposes, it matters for understanding French law, began with the French Revolution. So what do we have to say about the French Revolution here, Patrick? The classical view of the French Revolution is that it was a bourgeois revolution, resulting from the development of capitalist productive forces, which saw it necessary to topple the Old monarchical order. Whether or not this causality is necessarily true, this underlying idea is omnipresent in the discourse around the French Revolution. So the abolishment of the monarchy, of course, and also the adoption of the French national model still used today, which is liberty, equality, fraternity, as I'm sure many people have heard. And that really embodies the ideals of the French Revolution. And we will see these ideals coming up again, again, as you talk about the modern French state, and the modern French Constitution. These ideals are sort of in many ways at the core of how the French conceive of themselves. And I would say the most important one we're going to see is equality, equality before the law. So I would say the biggest difference, or at least one of the ones that stands out to me the most, is the idea of territorial equality in France. So in the US, this isn't a principle that we really have, or it's not that important, right? If you're in Arkansas, you're going to be subject to a completely different set of laws than if you were in New Hampshire, for example. And in the US, we don't see this as violating any sort of principle of equality before the law. The French do, the French are big on this idea of territorial equality. And that was a major break from feudalism, right? Where if you were in different parts of France, you'd be subject to different local fiefdoms, local duchies, provinces, and so on. And you'd be subject to different tax regimes, different laws, and under Republican France, this is never supposed to be the case. Of course, these days, that principle is moderd downstum, but it still underpins a lot of sort of things that immediately strike us as Americans as weird when we look at France. Here's a good anecdote up until very recently. It was impossible for cities to set their own parking fines because of the principle of equality. Why should a parking fine in Paris be more expensive than that in another part of France, right? I mean, it's breaking the same law, so why should you be treated differently? Yeah, and another one that really stands out to people when they come to France is this really rejection of the idea of there being autonomous regional governments in the way that you'd get in a lot of neighboring countries, for example, Spain or Italy both have autonomous regions for areas that speak different languages. And the French also have a number of minority languages, but there's consistently been a very strong opposition within the political mainstream in France to allowing those regions to have any of their own meaningful self-government because that would then violate this principle of territorial equality if there's a different official language in one region of France than another. Under this revolutionary conception, you're kind of back to feudalism. So the French Revolution gave way to the First Republic, however that didn't last so long did it. Yeah, so the First Republic, the OG Republic was, was of course full of turmoil and violence. They were constantly at war with their neighbors and also facing a bunch of uprisings, royalist uprisings within France. 1799, Napoleon does a coup, but we're still under the First Republic. Our old friend Napoleon, I'm sure you've heard of him, and we see important legal innovations, notably the creation of the civil code. And then we have in 1804 the definitive end of the First Republic and the creation of the French Empire. I think the most important basic takeaway on this and the, again, Napoleon's going to be someone who's going to come up again and again this show because many, many French institutions and, of course, argue with the most important French institution, the civil code or the Napoleonic codes, is often called dates from this period. And what you really have to get out of your mind is the sort of the Anglo concept of Napoleon, which I think we largely adopted in the US. Of course, Britain was the continued enemy of Napoleon. And so in British history, British historiography, Napoleon is this tyrannical villain. And I think that's how most people think of him in the US too. Really important to understand that in France, he's not seen that way. In some ways, he's a contested figure, but he's just like his legacy is much more complex. And he's got a pretty positive, there's a pretty positive view of him in general in France. And also in a lot of the rest of Constantine's Europe. Because the thing is this code that Napoleon, I don't want to say he wrote it, there was codified under him, let's say, based on Roman law, is now the code that is used throughout Europe. And so the question is, is the question that Napoleon is the most important figure in the world? And the question is, is the question that Napoleon is the most important figure in the world? And the question that Napoleon is the most important figure in the world is the question that Napoleon is the most important figure in the world. But it's general ideals remain intact. However, even empire can't last forever. Yeah, so we've got within within the space of a decade, we got Republic to we got well, first of all, the Kingdom of France, then we got Republic, then we got the French Empire, and then we got back to Kingdom in 1815, the final defeat of Napoleon. We have the Bourbon Restoration, essentially France at this time has reactionary forces, which are trying to revert the achievements of the revolution and even of Napoleon's empire, and they succeed. Or do they succeed? Because although they get rid of a lot of the more radical parts of the Republic and the empire, and of course they do reinstall the Bourbon monarchy for much of the modernization. And including for the legal system, for most of the institutions, the ship has sailed. The force of history was with the revolutionaries and within the Napoleon. And for however much of the the the Bourbons and the Aristocs would like to get rid of that, they can't. Yeah, and perhaps one way to look at it is that when you try to go back on capitalism, it doesn't work very well because what keeps the economy going is no longer the monarchy, but instead sort of individual entrepreneurs. Yeah, and long story short, the Bourbons, they can't wrap the head around this, they're greedy. And in 1830, they're definitively out. There's a bourgeois liberal revolution that installs a different branch of the Bourbons, known as the Orleens, onto the throne, who have a much more liberal monarchy. Yep, still not enough, doesn't work. The economy is not doing great. 1848. So across Europe, we have, it's a year of revolutions, it's a year of, yeah, basically liberal revolutions. In some ways you could say it's the death now for traditional absolute monarchy's across the continent. In Austria, for example, in Italy, all over and in France, we get the final abolition of the monarchy and we get the second republic. Now here under the second republic, we see a familiar name, Louis Napoleon Bonaparte. So this is Napoleon III. This is the nephew of Napoleon I. He's the third on a technicality. They probably should have called him the second, but. And so he runs for president under the new second republic, claiming that he is both from the left and the right. Listeners familiar with French politics might recognize that this will come up later. Then we have a couple years later in 1851, old Louis does something taken from his uncle's playbook and does a coup and for Crames another empire, which is known as the second empire. So the second empire, just like the first one, sees great progress in terms of state building. And then we have colonial projects all around the world and especially North Africa. Yeah, this is really in many ways the height of the French colonial empire. These days, Napoleon III is, I think in popular history, largely seen as kind of an ineffective buffoon because he led France to a humiliating defeat at the end of his reign. I think a lot of the things we're going to talk about, a lot of the modern French state dates back to this period. And entirely what Paris looks like today also dates back to this period. Then in 1870, you have France sort of blundering overconfirming into a war with Prussia. France at this point, they're writing on their high horse. They think they're, they think they're still the most powerful country in Europe and have the best military in the world. And they find out that that is not true and they are humiliatingly crushed very quickly by Prussia's modern military might and we have Napoleon III getting out of there and the siege of Paris, occupation of Paris, then of course the Paris commune, which is a very interesting subject for another time. And then finally you have the third republic founded in 1870. The third republic gets off to a good start because the Treaty of Frankfurt, which was signed after the end of the Frankopression War, France found itself owing billions of Franks to Germany. And they lost there to German speaking regions, as us and Loren, which of course would come back in World War I as a pretty important thing. Basically this is a time of the 70 years, the longest of these ten iterations of France so far. The fifth republic is getting there, but there's still a few years away from being 70 years old. It's a time of largely humiliation for the French ruling class resentment towards Germany about its loss, about the loss of us and also a country racked by anti-Semitism and this massive scandal, the Drefus affair. What I think listeners should take away is it's the first time that we have a fully parliamentary regime in France that turns out to be quite unstable, which ultimately leads to constant political turmoil. And that during some of the most important years in Europe. And we'll see the memory of the third republic's instability as being a major part of the reason why the current fifth republic has just strong president as we get into in a bit. That's debatable how true that was. It was also just a time of turmoil. Generally you had going labor movements and then of course you had World War I. And then we finally get the fall of this rickety regime in 1940. France of course was defeated remarkably quickly by the Germans in just one month, two weeks and one day. Yeah, and the British retreated quickly, sort of abandoning them. At least that's how a lot of French really saw it. And this ultimately will lead to a split up of France into an occupied territory occupied as an occupied by the Nazis and a territory that would be the home to a collaborationist regime Vichy. So they could they capitulated they lost Paris they lost about half of France. They lost part of it to Italy and they lost Alsace again. They were allowed to continue on as this sort of like rump state based in Vichy, which is a resort town a bit south of Paris. And this is a very controversial episode of French history, right? Was it like a puppet regime imposed by the Nazis? Was it a collaborationist regime that was doing fascism, homegrown fascism was on accord? Did they have the Holocaust force onto them or did they enthusiastically take part? This is stuff that very much not a subtle affair within French politics today. Then an important thing here is that when we have the fourth republic founded in 1946 after the liberation of France, Vichy France is not seen in the French political establishment in the way that like the fascist governments of Italy and Germany are seen. It's not like every part of this needs to be erased. It's unequivocally bad. We still have at least one very important institution that was founded under Vichy France. The National Police, pretty important institution. It's the if you go to France and you see the police in Paris, you're seeing the National Police most likely. And those guys were founded under a fascist regime that participated in the Holocaust. Something to think about, something we'll get into. We're almost there. We're at the second to most recent French regime, the fourth republic. The fourth republic is largely I'd say a blip in the French imagination, but it's nonetheless a time of struggle, right? Because you have to rebuild Europe under the martial plan. Yeah, and of course you have France trying to take back Vietnam, which was a French colony that had been or French into China more broadly, which also was Laos and Cambodia that was occupied by the Japanese. They tried to take it back. The Vietnamese themselves were not too happy about this. That started, let's say, a whole thing. And I think we all know where that where that went a decade on. Yes. But that now we're up to 1958, the year of the founding of the fifth republic and the coming of force of the modern French constitution. Yeah. Now, obviously we skipped a couple important things there. The crisis in Algeria, which would sort of give way to the fifth republic, but all that we hope to cover on a future episode, because there's just so much more to say about it. [Music] Liam, what do you say we get into the constitution of the fifth republic? Let's talk about it. Who doesn't love talking about constitutions? All right. So the constitution of 1958 also can also refer to it as the constitution of the fifth republic. How is it different fundamentally than the American one? The biggest difference, of course, is that the United States is a federation. That's kind of one of our founding principles, of course. We're not unique in that, of course. There's many major countries that are federations. Canada, Australia, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, Russia, etc., etc. But France is one of those countries that is not. France is a unitary state, meaning there is only one level of government that is capable of legislating, and that is the state to go back to our terminology. Perhaps more precisely, it is the national assembly and the senate. Sure. It's the French parliament. The point is, you know, you can go to Brittany in France. That's a place that exists. That's a region of France. They don't have a parliament. They have a regional council, which has some power and election so forth, but there aren't laws that only apply to Brittany. In the same way that a state in the United States can generally reorganize its internal organization, right? They can like change the borders of towns and whatnot. The French state can also reorganize itself, right? It can reorganize its cities, its regions, etc. Right. So in a federation, constitutionally, the central government doesn't have all the power. They can't just do whatever they want. The states in some sense have a bit of sovereignty that they will only like lent to the central government, right? In France, the central government is completely sovereign. The French people are expressed in through their parliament, and that parliament can pretty much do anything they want. They can change the constitution, of course. Now, there are some limits on how this happens, but they don't have to go around asking all the regions, basically. So Liam, you studied politics. Unfortunately. What kind of form of political organization do we have in the United States? Let's get nerdy about this. So the US is a presidential system. It's super, super democratic. We put a lot of power in this one figure, that one figure, and appoints everyone else in the executive. Of course, we have the checks and balances, yada yada yada of the judiciary and the legislature, but we still consider to have a presidential system, which is contrasted to the other major system of government, which is a parliamentary system, where the, like Britain would be the, the, the, the, the Earth example of this, but of course you also have this in, in Spain, Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, almost all other European countries. And yeah, lots of countries around the world, where the sovereignty is ultimately invested in the parliament, and the parliament then has the power to choose their executive based on who conforms majority and parliament basically France has theoretically a hybrid of these two systems, pretty unusual. You know, parliament of the system is a prime minister presidential system is a president of France has both so it's considered a semi presidential system now there are a number of other countries that have a president of prime minister, for example, Italy, Germany, Israel, so name a few, but in those countries, the president has only formal power. So the distinction there is that they have a president by name only right his job is from what I understand if our works in Germany and Italy is his the president's job is to just be a guy that everyone likes isn't really doing anything and he just goes around shaking people's hands and and signing treaties and so on. But in the French system where you have a powerful prime minister and a powerful president who kind of share power, although as we'll get into. It's complicated that's a pretty rare system there's only a few other countries in the world that have that and they're all bastions of democracy all super democratic countries, for example, Russia and Ukraine would be two of the other major countries that have that have a semi presidential system also Romania and South Africa, an important thing you notice in all of those is that their current constitutions all date from the 90s so they all probably took a lot of inspiration from the French system. But within Europe within Western Europe, this is an unusual system. So we thought a lot about how we should present this and I think the best way to do it is if we start with the president look at his authority and then go down in the prime minister in his government and then we'll look at the assembly or well the legislature sounds good to me. All right, so the president of the Republic sounds a little pedantic that I'm calling in the president of the Republic and not just the president. It's because the French are pedantic. That is another theme we should mention about they will see throughout this the French are our pedantic and Patrick. I prefer to say from the French so he himself has become pedantic now. I would point out that they say this in other places like Matt. But I guess also lawyers are larger pedantic right so yeah, I think the audience the audience of this podcast probably isn't on my side with this one. All right, so president of the Republic, you know, I don't actually know why everyone insists on saying that other than that's what we see in the laws, but common answer you get to this is well, there's other presidents, there's presidents of companies, there's presidents of councils, you know, so we have a president of the Republic that way nobody is confused. Which rather stupid to be asked me, but anyway, speaking of Republics, that is another phrase will hear so much in France, the Republic, the Republic, the values of the Republic, everything's about the Republic. It's for some reason they love to say the Republic in France to refer to France and in a lot of like political and legal context, you're going to hear them say the Republic more than you can hear them say France. Yeah, it's also important to note that you shouldn't make the mistake saying the French state because that refers to Vichy France. Yeah, confusingly so the Republic or the French Republic. So anyway, what's the role of the president Patrick, if we look to article five of the Constitution 1958, we see that the president of the Republic is viewed as a head of state figure right not as an actor of daily government, but enough, enough constitution, what does it really mean? Well, basically, in this, I would say the figure of the president, it's a lot like in the US, the president has a lot of power. They appoint the prime minister and they also appoint all the members of his government on his recommendation, on the right, his or her recommendation, his or her because they're there are sometimes female prime ministers, but we can say his with president because France is so far not had a female president. So we're not being sexist, Francis. So yeah, so so this is kind of comparable to the US, right, where the where the president points the cabinet. And the president himself is elected for a period of five years with a term limit of two consecutive years and in a much more democratic two round system, where if nobody gets over 50% in the first round, which pretty much never happens, you go to a second round. About a month later, where they get to choose between the top two candidates, so you could never have like the whatever when says happened in 2000, we're Ralph Nader's, but whatever. So it's definitely more democratic process than we have. But again, very similarly, very strong president. He can't technically veto laws, right, unlike in the US, but he can effectively send a law back to parliament, doesn't like it. Right, under article 10 of the Constitution, the president of the republic has the ability to force parliament to reopen debate on a law or section of a law, but not to veto it. Yeah, so that's a bit different in the US, but still you can generally think, okay, here's a similar kind of really strong executive figure. However, it gets stronger because the president of the republic can do something that the president of the United States cannot do, which is that if he's got a really a parliament that is really against him, he can just get rid of it. Right, so if the president of the US has a problem with Congress, there's not much the president can do. You know, basically has to work with Congress or wait, wait for a new election in France, you can just dissolve the national assembly, which is the lower house, the French parliament. The only sort of restraint on this is the fact that he better be sure when he doesn't, because he'll be stuck with them for a whole another year after that election. Right, he can't just dissolve them again immediately. This is obviously to present there being endless elections, which that over and over again, which again was something that happened in the third republic and something that that still does happen in some parliamentary systems, especially in France's notoriously dysfunctional Northern neighbor Belgium. That basically the takeaway here is super, super, super, super strong president. It's commonly said among the left and France who are opposed to the system and opposed to the fifth republic that France has a presidential monarchy, meaning that you know this guy is this is elected democratically, but then for the five years of the president's term, there are like so few checks on what the president can do. And this has been a, this has been a very big topic recently in France, especially over the past year as president, my colon has been trying to implement a very unpopular reform of the retirement, how retirement works. And even despite the opposition of the majority of the national assembly, the president is still able to push things through. So we'll get into the details of that, but take away here really powerful presidential, presidential monarchy, right? To be clear what Liam's doing here is he's doing a realist interpretation of how these things work. If you take a look at the French constitution, it will not be immediately obvious to you that this has things work, but I think things will become more clear once we start looking at the prime minister and the government. Yeah, which is again, maybe to justify my own role in the podcast is I'm not a lawyer. I don't weed this this lawyer stuff. But I do see how it works in practice and and and basically that's how so we mentioned the prime minister, France is a president and a prime minister, right? That's confusing because in a country like Britain, the prime minister basically does what the president does in the US. So what is the prime minister doing, France, Patrick? So the constitution essentially attributes two roles to the prime minister, one that of being head of government in charge of his cabinet ministers, if you will. And that of being the executive of France more similar to the role of the president of the United States and has accordingly regulatory power. Right. So again, if you read the constitution, you're going to come with the impression that most important figure in the state is the prime minister, but the crucial thing there is who appoints the prime minister, the president. And who can fire the prime minister, the president. Exactly. So the prime minister here, she has a ton of power on paper and a ton of power in the day to day running. You can basically say the prime minister takes over the day to day running of most of the state with the exception of like the armed forces, which is and foreign policy and stuff, which is the president. I mean, I guess the I guess foreign policy is also the foreign minister. Anyway, but the really important thing is that the prime minister is doing something the president doesn't like. The president can just say you're fired and the president does this all the time. So in fact, again, a realist interpretation of how this works. You could basically say the prime minister generally acts as a kind of like the lack of the president. It's often used, especially under under macrons presidency as a kind of a scapegoat, right. Have this have this figure to do these and be the one who's out there and proposing all these reforms that are unpopular and then you know have their face will be a thing and then get rid of them. You've done a hell of a lousy job. I'm sorry. You're fired. Get out of here. This of course is a realist interpretation on Liam's part. Since in the constitution, it says that the prime minister may only be fired, if you will, once they have tendered their resignation to the president. Of course, in practice, the way this works is that the prime minister is usually from the same party as the president. Thus, there's sort of a coercive party apparatus that makes this happen. Right. The prime minister is appointed by the president and the president is not going to point someone who's going to defy him. However, again, you may be wondering yourself, what if the president isn't able to choose the prime minister he wants because again, the prime minister and all the other members of the government do have to be approved by parliament. Here Liam is referring to the possibility for the national assembly to do a vote of no confidence, essentially forcing the resignation of the prime minister and thus his government. This can happen for a number of reasons, but most likely it is because the national assembly does not approve of the composition of the government or the policy that the government intends to enact. In any case, this has very little to do with the congressional appointment system that we have in the United States. This vote of no confidence poses a problem for the president when the national assembly is against him. Generally speaking, this is when the national assembly is not made up in majority by the president's party or by a party that's at least ideologically close to his own. So what happens here is what we call co-avitation. It is called this because essentially the president finds themselves forced to appoint a prime minister from an opposing party and this has a major effect on the actual political day to day of France. When this co-appetation happens, that whole dynamic between the president and the prime minister is described kind of gets almost reversed. The president is kind of limited in what they can do. You get a lot of conflict. Basically it's chaotic and in the year 2000 they changed the way the elections were previously the president had a seven year term. Now they made it only a five year term which means that the president and the national assembly, the lower house, are on the same election schedule and that's made it so that the president has always had or almost always, not currently, but almost always had a majority in parliament since then. That brings us to, of course, parliament. What are the two branches of the French parliament base? And again, parliament, Congress, I think everyone gets that. What's the equivalent of the House of Representatives Patrick? France's legislature is divided up into two chambers. We have the national assembly, which is most equivalent to the House of Representatives in the United States or the House of Commons in the case of the UK and the Senate. Now in the case of the national assembly, its members are called deputies and they are elected by direct universal suffrage. Meanwhile in the Senate there is a system of electoral college, which is quite interesting. It's a weird one. So in the US, right, the Senate represents states basically. And in France, there are no states. So the Senate represents mayors. That's right. The electoral college is made up of local elected officials, the vast majority of which are mayors. Also kind of like in the US, the terms of the Senate are longer. The House that represents in the US is a crazy two, is two years. Yeah, it's crazy. And in France, the national assembly, the lower house is five years, well the Senate is seven. So the senators, they're there for a long time. They're elected by mayors and they don't have a lot of power. Of course they do still have some, but really the star of the show is the national assembly. I'm just a bill. Yes, I'm only a bill and I'm sitting here on Capitol Hill. Well, it's a long, long journey to the Capitol city. It's a long, long wait while I'm sitting in committee, but I know I'll be a law someday. You least I hope I pray that I will, but today I am still just a bill. Since this is a legal podcast, I think we should start with some of the more overarching legal principles that we find in the Constitution in 1958. Yep, so I assume most of our listeners are familiar with the concept of judicial review in the United States as it pertains to the constitutionality of a law. I'm sure most people are familiar with the way in which the Supreme Court often declares illegal, a certain statutory provision on the basis that it violates the Constitution or that it's actual execution violates the Constitution. Yeah, now this is a post the way it has been historically done in France, where judicial review is done a priori, meaning that the legislature itself or members thereof essentially submit a law to review in front of the so-called constitutional council that we'll get into later. But what's important to understand is this is a form of recognition that the legislature is the will of the people and that once a law has been validly passed, it ought to be applied without question. Right, the legislature is supposed to be the representative of the people and again the legislature has the ability to change the Constitution itself within certain parameters. So it doesn't make sense within this conception of the state that there would need to be this constant constitutional challenge to the legislature. In fact, when it was done on a completely a priori basis here in France, the legislature had the choice to submit a law to judicial review or not. So actually if it knew that the statute would not pass judicial review, it could decide that it will not submit it to the court. Right, so different from the American system, which we all know and love. Yeah, now it's actually a bit funny that I use the word court there since the body that is responsible for reviewing constitutional questions is actually a council they call it the constitutional council. But like the Supreme Court of the United States, it has nine members. Yeah, who's the Ruth Bader Ginsburg of France, Patrick? That's an interesting thing, right, is that these judges are not, well, they're not actually judges like us, but they're not public figures in the way they're in the US. In the US, we have these nine gods that are people who not very familiar with the law are probably can't name all the judges, all the justices, but they do. They have heard of a number of them at least ended France. It's not quite like that, I would say I certainly can't name anyone on the constitutional council, but yeah, let's let's make this clear again for Americans. So the constitutional council equals US Supreme Court or is it not so simple equals US Supreme Court on constitutional questions, but also all the lower courts on constitutional questions because no other court may render a decision on the constitutionality of anything other than the constitutional council. So this is like only doing part of what the US Supreme Court does, but at the same time, on constitutional questions, this is doing things that are also done by lower courts in the US. So what about the other, what about the other roles of because the US Supreme Court doesn't just do constitutional questions, right, it's also the highest. A judge, a cater is at the word of all legal matters, at least the federal level, right, so who does that in France? So we have the court of castation and that is the court that is competent for any private matter, generally speaking, so you know, contract disputes between two private parties, labor disputes, again, only in last resort and criminal matters as well. Okay, that's two Supreme courts. There anymore. Yep, there's a third one. It's called the council of state. Now the council state is very particular because not only is its competence reserved to public matters, even contracts, so long as there's a public party or a public element involved, but it can also involve administrative matters like immigration, for example, imminent domain in a limited way. That's a shared competence, but we don't need to get into that now, but they also have an advisory role, so there are court, but they're also sort of a consulting firm for the government. And another weird thing, right, for Americans is that the people on this court slash council are not necessarily judges, right? They don't even lawyers necessarily. So the question of how judges are appointed in France is the topic for a whole nother episode. I mean, it's so different than what our listeners would be familiar with in the United States. As far as the council of state is concerned, I can say it's even more particular since its members are public servants. That's three Supreme courts. Are there any more? Yes and no. What happens, Liam, when you have two orders, right? You have kind of generally private order and a public order. Private order is the Supreme Court is the court of castation and the public order is council of state. What happens when these two cannot agree on who is competent for a specific case? I don't know. The president should just decide. No, you should have another court. Ah, of course. They call it a tribunal, the tribunal of conflicts. So that's a very specific thing. They're just there to like decide jurisdiction, like kind of jurisdictional conflicts. And I think it's worth saying that whether or not that constitutes a Supreme Court or not is pedantic. Yeah, but to sum it up, basically, the highest level of the French judiciary is a lot more complicated than it is in the US. One court in the US, four in France. It's interesting, Liam, that you use the word judiciary since in France, that word actually has a particular meaning. It only refers to courts of private law. As you see, we have this complicated divisions at in the way this whole system works that there just isn't in the US. And we'll get into the specifics of all of these more quite a lot because Patrick, especially as being someone who specializes in administrative law, a lot of what you deal with has to do with these courts or decisions by the council of state, especially. But something that came up when you were talking, or you would make this distinction between public and private matters, is a super important distinction within French law that maybe we can talk about for a minute now. And again, this is also true in the majority of the world outside of like the Anglo-Saxon system to defer to a fairing stance, but it's, it's an important, like at least theoretical distinction. And I think this is probably one of the distinctions that Americans, who's the legal law are the most likely to know about, but I still think we can talk about it quickly here because I'm sure a lot of people aren't familiar. So how would you explain this distinction? The basic idea here is that there are matters that the state or government itself has no overriding interest in. It's a contract dispute between Person A and Person B, and the courts job is to look at these people as equals and decide how their individual dispute should be adjudicated. But of course, when we're talking about more public matters, we're not just worried about equality between these people because there's necessarily an inequality. Right, the state is the state, the state's all of us. So how could it possibly be a matter between two people? Absolutely, like think of imminent domain. It makes sense that the state should be able to, in certain circumstances, take away land from private people with just compensation in order to build a train line. But maybe it doesn't make as much sense that Liam's train company should unilaterally be able to take away someone else's land for their own personal private interests. So it's essentially a legal recognition that there's inequality in parties when we're talking about public matters. Yeah, so to take the eminent domain thing, correct me if I'm wrong, but in the US, right, if my state wants to take away my house due to eminent domain, that's going to be treated by the same courts and kind of in the same way, my dispute with my state or my city, as my dispute with my neighbor because he keeps parking on my lawn. You're right in the sense that you're going to go in front of the same courts and that those courts generally will have more of an inspiration from more private principles of law. But in reality, obviously there is a power that that courts in the United States have recognized and is in fact in the constitution to expropriate. Right, so this distinction maybe then isn't so big as it seems, but what's the major difference is that the French have formalized this in a really important way where the court systems that you'll go into if you have a dispute with any part of the state is completely different. It's it functions differently. They're using different judges. It's just a completely separate, different laws. It's just completely separate. That's again, you know, we'll talk about that. I'm sure more in depth at some point and how meaningful this distinction really is, but something to understand because it's very, very different from the general US idea that you have, you know, the court system basically is like a pyramid, right, where all these lower courts are leading up to the one big court on top. Now, and a point you brought up there, I think unintentionally actually is in the United States now there's very important exceptions to this, but generally speaking, disputes are brought before a general judge, right, like a judge whose competence is pretty wide, right, they can receive cases of all sorts in Europe. But I want to speak more to France because it's the one the example I'm more familiar with you will find specialized courts kind of all over. It's a whole thing, but what's important to know is that it makes a judecation a lot easier because you're talking to someone who actually knows what's going on, right, they know their field. And would you say this is related to probably what people in the US know as the other big difference of how French law works, which is that it is a codified law. Yes, mostly so right, right, okay, mostly and again, we'll get into this and you've expressed to me before that this this difference is not as big as it seems in certain formal sense in certain aspects, but the important thing about this right is that like the law is really segmented into these different codes. There's a civil code for civil matters. There's a criminal code for criminal matters. One, I think thing that really a good takeaway from this and something that could really put this idea in the minds of the listeners is that if you go into a bookstore in France, you can buy the codes, right, you can buy the law, it can be yours and you can change it, you can cross things out, not like citizens United, you can buy a little book. It looks kind of like the Bible in the sense that this printed on really thin paper and it is the Bible for us and for all the France, right, but yeah, you can go in and you can be like, okay, I want to know about how transport law works well, you can buy the transport code. And it's the official one. This is the law. This is not just like a textbook version that someone's like written it out in an understandable way. Now this is the official law updated every year and there are uncutified things in France. That's a whole topic. Yeah, it's all very well organized compared to you. It's very, very well organized. It's ever to figure out how anything works in you. Right. And this is good also just for ordinary citizens. You know, you can kind of do, I think your own research is a non-lawyer and stuff more. Yeah, you'll probably be wrong, but you'll be less wrong. I walked up on a mountain in the middle of the sky. You'd see every farm in every town. I could see all the people in this whole wide world. That's a union of fair and fair. It's just down, down, down. Americans love rights. We put a lot, a lot of importance in the Bill of Rights, right? I think you'll often hear people be like, well, what they don't have in Europe is the, they don't have the First Amendment. They don't have the Second Amendment. That is true because they just would put it in their constitution. They wouldn't have to amend it. Exactly, but this idea that, you know, I think you often hear this idea in the US, including under, like, from people who aren't, like, you know, super ignorant about other countries, is that this right-to-free speech is something really unique that we have in the US. To be fair, it can be really extensive in the US to the point that, you know, you can be pretty mean to other people and it's fine. Yeah. So, right, it is true that other countries often have more restrictive versions of that or something, but the point is, other countries also have constitutional rights. France has constitutional rights that are just as old as ours. Yeah, it's called the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. So 1789 before the American Bill of Rights? Yes. And it's much more extensive, right? Like, it's a much more global vision of what rights means. Yeah, I mean, that just goes back to the French Revolution as we talked about briefly before, right? This idea of tearing down the feudal order. And this idea of, again, of a quality of the citizen before the state. You know, this kind of creation of the idea of the modern citizen and the citizen has the right to be treated by other governments equally to all of their citizens. And again, it's, yeah, it's important to know here that this is not the right. It wasn't called the rights of the French man and the French citizen. It was the rights of man because it's supposed to be everyone, right? It's supposed to be a universal principle. This would be an important document globally, and we'd eventually lead into the European Charter on the rights of the rights. And the UN has something similar. Again, both of these, the EU and the UN, mainly based off the French one, not the American one. Now, the details here are like, how is this different from the American Bill of Rights? I think that could be a whole episode is just that maybe we'll do at some point. Is like comparing the American Bill of Rights to the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the citizen. I think what people need to know is that France has rights. However, I do think it's meaningful to know that not all rights need to be constitutional. And that might seem a bit surprising. I sort of feel that when we look at judicial decisions in the United States, what's happening is we're attaching an alarming number of rights that aren't explicit in the Constitution to constitutional principles. This is arguably like a result of our just general political dysfunction in the US where it's sort of accepted that things can't go through the means, you know, we can't make these changes to the means they were supposed to be, you know, the political and constitutional means. And instead, these things have to sort of be adapted through these kind of, yeah, loopholes, right? Whereas the French, that's not the case. The French actually adopted a new Constitution, right? This year. Yeah. They, they introduced in the French Constitution the right to abortion. Right. Now, this isn't like, this wasn't a super meaningful change because they've already had the right to abortion in the law for a long time. But it does go to show that this in France, again, both the Constitution and the French idea of rights isn't a lot more something that can be changed and adapted and added to. But it says the law determines the conditions under which the freedom guarantee to a woman to have recourse to a voluntary termination of pregnancy is exercised. Now that wording is quite a lot different than what you would see in the Bill of Rights, right? Where we'll see things like shall not be infringed. And the basic idea here is like, obviously everyone agrees that there is a right to have recourse to an abortion. But that we have a legislature that is capable of actually implementing that. Right. And in some ways, in the American conception, like, you know, in the Bill of Rights example, these are rights that like exempt you from the government, right? They're rights that you have to not be touched by the government on these certain matters, whereas you can definitely see in this French conception, it's much more like, in a sense, like a positive right, but the legislature is supposed to cater to. And now we have plenty of other rights. We don't need to get on all of them. They have civil liberties, freedom, pluralism, independence of the media, you know, etc. But I think what's notable is that if any of our listeners actually want to look at the French Constitution, it's in English, it's online. You'll notice that it's a much more modern constitution, right? We're talking about employment law is mentioned as something that the legislatures were required to enact, right? Trade union law, social security law, preservation of the environment. So it's clearly not from the same era. Yeah, again, it's from 1958 and it's been amended many times since 1958. So yeah, you know, in the US, there's this kind of strange idea that we don't really change the constitution that much, even though there's clearly like a bunch of things that exist now that didn't exist in 1789. And the French stuff, they have a lot more fluid version of that. If any of our listeners have any questions about any of this, I'm sure we'd love to do another episode on maybe sign more specific relating the Constitution, but I think we should move on to the territory of the fifth republic. You know, the big overview to take away that we're going to see here is again, this territorial equality that we mentioned before, this sort of uniformity, especially the level of local government. But let's start with a distinction that you will hear come up, which is the phrase metropolitan France when sending this metropolitan people kind of think like urban, right? That's not what this means. And this is more like metropolitan in the empire sense, which I don't know, I find that a weird holdover, they still call it that, but basically, there's something they call overseas France. And this is all of France's overseas areas and territories. An important thing here is do not think Puerto Rico, because Puerto Rico and all the other US territories are, you know, they don't have the same people who are there, don't have the same rights, they don't have the same relation to the American government that people in the American states do. To the point that they call it insular law over there. Yeah, and it's, I mean, it's, it works. It's quite complicated. There's there's there's like unincorporated territories and incorporated territories. But anyways, like, obviously, as everyone knows of you live in Puerto Rico, you can't, you can't vote for the president in France. That's not the case in France. The citizenship is uniform. So when we go to somewhere like, let's say French Polynesia, Tahiti, I think people have heard of that's that's a, it's called a territory of France. It's an overseas territory of France. But that isn't like Puerto Rico. Think of it kind of, I guess more like Hawaii. Now, not exactly, but they like, they have the four rights of France citizens. They have, they're represented in the national assembly on the completely the same footing as every other part of France. And they vote for the president, etc, etc, etc. It really functions the same. Now personally, I think that overseas France is a super interesting topic that I think is pretty unknown outside of France. But obviously, we won't go into specifics right now. But one interesting thing to note, I guess, is that you have what you could think of as France is Hawaii's. These are parts of France that are, that are regions, just like any other region of France with some allowances made for the fact that they're on the other side of the world. And this is, for example, Viyunyan Island, which is near Madagascar, out the coast of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean. So they're like basically the same as any other. There certainly are quite legitimate grievances that these various territories have towards the national state. And, you know, I'd love to get in and then in another episode. But nonetheless, these are seen as part of the republic. And then, but I do want to, I do want to give this, I think, important distinction, which is, again, often overlooked in these things. Everyone's talked about the territorial uniformity of France as we are, is that there are then the overseas collectivities, which are not overseas regions. And these actually have a lot of autonomy. And here we're talking about places like French Polynesia and New Caledonia, notably because they've, they have a very unusual relationship with the state. These places, again, they are fully part of France, but they have their own laws. They're sort of an exception to this territorial equality that's largely come about because they're so far away. And also they've had, especially New Caledonia, has had a major independence movement that achieved a lot of its aims, the size and dependence. But that's a whole, another very interesting issue. The main thing to note for now is that most of the things we're going to say here apply to only to metropolitan France, that is France, as in mainly on France, plus Corsica. Yeah, so now let's jump, now let's jump into it. So besides the central government in metropolitan France, there are basically only three levels of government below it. At the lowest level, we have communists, these are municipalities, I guess, in the American sense, with some meaningful differences. And then above them, we have departments, and then finally regions. Now when I say above, I mean in terms of size, they're coverage. These are actually not hierarchical. So it isn't like the relationship between states and towns in the US because all of them have the relation, that relation only to the central government. So the way this works is the national legislature is going to assign to each level their specific competencies. Now there's certain that they can share, but fundamentally it's like cities you pick up trash. That's, you know, something you can do while departments, you need to provide this aid or this service and regions, you know, you need to focus on economic development or whatever. The ideas, these are not dependent on each other, they're not hierarchical. So the lowest level government, the communists. This is, yeah, again, equivalent to the city or whatever in the US again, again, a major difference between the US and France is again this idea of this territory, the quality, right. So in the US, how this works is very much dependent on the state. They're often isn't an equality between like like most states outside of New England, have counties with unincorporated areas and whether you're more like under the county's jurisdiction, or you're under your city or some sort of consolidated thing. It's a whole confusing mess. Take this from someone who studied urban planning. In France, there's an almost complete uniformity with the exception of the two larger cities, Paris and Leon, which have their own thing. But for everything else, it is the commune. France has a lot of these things. They have 34,935 just in metropolitan France. So that is more than all of Europe combined. Yeah, so that's three times as many as Germany has. And what this means, of course, is that most of these have a tiny population. Over half have a population of less than 500. So your average one needs you're going to grab out of a hat is tiny. It says has a couple hundred people living it. There's a there's famously one commune that has only one person living it. And he is the deputy mayor apparently because the mayor doesn't live there. But that kind of place has in theory is the same thing. It's the commune. It's the same as a city like Bordeaux, which has a population of several hundred thousand. And they're using the same system of government. And so that means you don't need to look at local bylaws and try and understand how things work or look at state statutes to see what kinds of, you know, whether or not they can do city manager model or whatever. So in France, it's all the same, generally speaking, and you have a municipal council, which is essentially the deliberative body of the commune, you as a citizen, elect for a period of six years, counselors that will be on this council. And then these counselors will then elect their mayor. Yeah. And again, I want to emphasize this difference because I think it's also not so obvious to us because we're both from New England where things basically work the same way as in France in the terms of the uniformity of local bodies in some sense. But in most of the US people are very used to unincorporated areas. Like, you know, if you're in the middle of nowhere in the US, if you're out hiking somewhere. There's not a mayor there, right? Usually you're in an area that's just directly administered by your county. In France, everywhere, there's nothing like that. Everywhere is part of a commune, the whole terror, sorry, everywhere has a mayor. Yes. And people love their mayors. I mean, that's why the legislature has not been willing to really touch the commune, meaning. Yeah. And of course, another thing might be as we said, one of the two bodies of the legislature is entirely elected by mayors, mostly the senate. Now, the mayor is really viewed in the image of the prime minister as the executive of the commune. So that means he can institute police powers, which is not something his council can do. And we'll get into this at another point. Yeah. I think a fun fact is that all the mayors are what they call judiciary police officers, which means that in theory, they are able to arrest people for crimes. But this never happens. But it could. So the takeaway is if you're on vacation of France, and you see a mayor, usually got a sash watch out. And again, statistically, if you're in rural France, and you see a guy or a gal, they're probably the mayor. There's a very good chance that is the mayor. Awesome. So statistically, if you live in France, also, you are a mayor. I just want to point out that to our clever listeners who are thinking, oh, well, this must be horrible. I mean, how do you organize trash pickup as a town of one person? There's ways. Don't don't bring up Metropole. Don't bring up. Wow. It's not just the Metropole. But anyway, there's ways. Don't worry about it. Nonetheless, there's certain things you can expect from your commune. You can expect a very nice town hall. Like, beautiful, most beautiful buildings in France. Every little tiny village has a beautiful town hall. And of course, a memorial to the brave soldiers fallen in World War One. Yep. That's right. And you can also expect that your mayor is in charge of waste management and collection. Probably personally, if you're in a small enough town. If you're in, if probably if you're in the town of one person, the mayor has to take the takes out the trash himself. The mayor is also expected to maintain the roads. Again, also personally, rainwater management, sewage, drinking, fire, whatever, you know, a lot of things. A lot of things, level. The department. So yeah, the department. This is a super weird thing. I guess the kind of equivalent to counties in terms of like size. They're roughly equivalent to counties, right? There's a there's a 101 of them in France. And these were the most important, like, level of government under the original, like the first public, the original conception of the state. Because the idea was it was it was a way that the state could exert central power all over the territory of the Republic. Right? And so these were actually the size of them was they're all roughly the same size, except for the really open ones. And the original way that the sizes were decided during the revolution. You're like from the the chef, you're from like the capital, or they don't call it capital from the from the central administrative place of the department. You're supposed to be able to get there from anywhere else in the department in a day's horse ride. So the idea is like, how does the central government exert itself over this vast territory before there's anything like cars or trains or anything? Well, by sending a representative to implement their laws in these in these local areas. And another important thing about them that dates from the French Revolution is that they are almost all named after geographical features. So this was again, part of the revolution getting rid of these feudal things, these historical ties to local local fiefdoms and so on. No, your tie should be to France to the Republic. And as a result, they didn't name they decided not to name any of them after like the names of the traditional provinces. Instead, they were all named after the most like the largest river that goes through there or or mountain ranges or stuff like this. So they have a very interesting important historical role. However, throughout the fifth Republic, even before that, they've been losing power and they've been losing centrality in the way the state functions. Wouldn't you say that's correct Patrick? Yeah. And also the department, the modern department is a formal local government in itself. Yes, now it is elected previously that it was just like so there's this guy called the prefect who sent by the central government. And now there is a democratic government that is elected as a departmental council. But especially then like the political form of it, the administrative form still matters. That's still like the main way that you interact with the central French government for administrative and the advantages you go through your go through your prefect or you go through your right. So it's a weird history and the history of how this change sort of shows a lot of about how modern France has evolved. But currently the elected thing is kind of like I don't say it's residual, but it is for an a weird like they often don't seem like they know what they're supposed to be doing. Given that there's these levels of governments right below them and level government right above them, the region that we get to a second, obviously the the days horseback riding thing is no longer particularly relevant. So they've been left with some like they do middle schools, for example, and they do some roads that are like sort of important but not really important. It's almost like with this level of government there they've been trying to like figure out what it is they're actually supposed to be doing fundamentally they're coming up to this problem, which is the can't camera there's already it's how the organization of the state is you know still organized so you still have the prefecture there. You know at the sort of departmental level, but it's also because it's also because you know these are things that have been around for a long time. And it has this historical importance and it again was a really important like conception of the French Revolution and it also still has an important like people often identify where they live based on their department and in fact they identify it based on the number of their department. You could example for example say oh I live in the 52 and you mean you live in Marne, which is an in Eastern France and like people often or 92, which is which is some suburbs of Paris. So you have like a weird I guess like cultural attachment to these these as being sort of like the basic units of France. The reasons which is the highest level of government for the central state have been gaining a lot of power and they're super recent they were only created in 1956 and they've only actually been the constitution since 2003. So they've been they've been gaining power over the past 70 years and they basically more represent what you might see as cultural regions for example Brittany Burgundy and Normandy like like the grandest though you got to talk about the grandest. The grand the grand the great east is something no one wanted so the weird thing about these is it sort of goes against the principle of the revolution as I said when talking about departments which was this like stop identifying with regional things were all French. And we identify only with the French state. So this idea of regional things has sort of come back and it really never went away right there's always been a strong regional identity in places like Brittany or Normandy or Alsace. And there's for a long time local elites there and local people there wanted there to be some level of government that represented them and represent their local identity. And for very very long time that was completely resisted because there's against the ideals of French revolution and also just against the interests of Paris and the super super centralized state in Paris. And again that's been changing over the course of the fifth republic and now those places do have regional councils but again they can't pass like laws or anything it is still very limited in what they can do. And again and also as Patrick alluded to the central state has complete jurisdiction over them and can just redraw them whatever they want which they did in 2015. And it was super controversial because for example regions with really strong local identities like Alsace were abolished Alsace was like completely cease to exist in entity. It merged with a bunch of other regions that are like really far apart from each other and don't have a lot in common to form what is now called the great East. So you have sort of these zombie regions that no one's really happy with. Okay so yeah that there was a basic crash course from France. Of course we all all the the pedantic types including my co-host are livid right now because we left out so much we probably mischaracterize some stuff but everything you've heard in there is a little taste. We will get into a lot of detail maybe too much detail about pretty much every subject you've heard today in a future episode so stay tuned. I hope our listeners who manage to get all the way here know that our future episodes are going to be a little bit more topic specific. I know on the sort of docket we have you know talking about police we want to do a movie episode on the anatomy of a fall. We'll tell you how healthcare works in France and how it does in the US. How about how auto insurance works in France and does in the US. And something important for the people who are itching to bring this up is yes we know about the opinion. We've heard of it. We've heard of it. We're looking into that and seeing what they're doing up there in Brussels but we're looking into it heavily and we'll bring you some analysis of that soon. What more can we say? People in the public live the values of the Republic until next time. Cheers goodbye. The Royal Palace Podcast. Podcast. Podcast. Podcast. Let's go children of the Republic. France is a thing in my eyes. Very considerable. I'm doing a fact of the French certainty. I want to say that my sense is something very large. There's something extraordinary. The French certainty is that. And why the Jews are the Jews? They have to be the French.