Anti-immigrant resentment spurred the rise of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front, which called for casting out aliens and reclaiming “France for the French” but benefited more from morose protest against the sitting government than from prejudice. In 1999 the Front, which had always stood more for protest than principle, succumbed to internal dissensions and broke apart, but it experienced a dramatic rebirth under Le Pen’s daughter Marine. The challenge for French society in the 21st century came from a Europe without borders or national currencies—where workers, students, businesses, and immigrants from beyond the European Union could move freely from one country to another.
High culture has always seeped into popular culture and coloured it, perhaps more so in France than in other countries. Today, in France as elsewhere, the reverse is also true: the culture of everyday life encourages dislocations that elude socioeconomic and national boundaries. Differences of taste or of opinion, once dismissed as superficial, aggravate moral and political rifts. Sponsored by past Socialist governments as popular art, rock music in the 1960s called yé-yé (yeah-yeah) and hip-hop music and graffiti art at the end of the 20th century were perceived by some as playful and by others as threatening. In the 21st century multiculturalism was both welcomed as emancipating and scorned as divisive, as was the diffuse anti-Americanism, which for many stood in for antimodernism. All these disruptions were by-products of accelerated societal change. The cultural scene
Paris after World War II quickly regained its stature as one of the world’s great centres of intellectual creativity. A cluster of brilliant thinkers and writers competed for influence, attracting acolytes both in France and abroad. The first postwar wave was led by Jean-Paul Sartre, whose influence made existentialism the leading ideology of the time. Sartre saw the world as “absurd” and irrational, lacking guideposts for humans adrift in a meaningless universe. People, said Sartre, know only that they exist and are free to cast their own lot. In the absence of any guiding power, individuals are condemned to freedom (hence responsibility), forced to forge their own lives, however insecure and contingent these may be, and to give them meaning by commitment to a course of action. Sartre’s essays and novels made him the most admired intellectual of his generation and won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1964 (which he refused). His rival Albert Camus, also a Nobel Prize winner, broke with Sartre over the latter’s support of the Soviet Union and over Sartre’s inability to define an ethical base for commitment to a cause. Camus’s agnostic humanism led him to insist that even in an absurd world commitment must rest on clearly defined ethical principles—on the need to resist oppressors and fanatics and to respect the shared humanity of all people.
Sartre, Jean-PaulJean-Paul Sartre, photograph by Gisèle Freund, 1968.Gisele Freund
The dark postwar mood that lent existentialism its appeal faded when economic recovery set in. In the 1960s it was replaced by a new vogue called structuralism, whose scientific aspirations better suited a technological age. Drawing on the ideas of the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, the structuralists stressed the persistence of “deep structures” that were held to underlie all human cultures through time, leaving little room for either historical change or human initiative.
For a time structuralism became the dominant intellectual wave both in France and abroad; it showed signs of crystallizing into an ideology or worldview. But by the 1970s it gave way to a cluster of doctrines loosely labeled “post-structuralist,” each variety identified with its own master-thinker: the philosopher Jacques Derrida, the intellectual historian Michel Foucault, the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, and the Marxologist Louis Althusser.
The structuralist vogue also affected the novelists who, beginning in the mid-1950s, launched le nouveau roman, the antinovel. More interested in theory and the subversive play of language than in storytelling, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, Michel Butor, and their imitators attracted much media and critical attention; but their provocative and demanding output stimulated more publicity than sales. Their iconoclastic aspirations were paralleled by those of a nouvelle vague (New Wave) of filmmakers such as Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais, and François Truffaut, whose movies of the late 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s revolutionized French cinema. “New novels” and “new wave” films may be compared to another contemporary creation popularized by the media: nouvelle cuisine, whose aesthetic objectives also evoked more critical than gourmandizing interest.
Those discouraged by pretentious fiction were turning to biography and general history, a realm dominated by the contributions of scholars such as Fernand Braudel, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, and Pierre Nora. Marked by pathbreaking investigation of long-term perspectives and by a vivid, seductive style, their explorations of social, cultural, and economic history proved broadly appealing. On all these fronts, French works and ideas continued to generate worldwide attention and, often, imitation. Gordon Wright Eugen Weber The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica Major rulers of France
The table provides a chronological list of the major rulers of France.
Major rulers of France See also the table of Holy Roman emperors Carolingian dynasty Pippin III, the Short (mayor of the palace) 741–751 Pippin III, the Short (king of the Franks) 751–768 Carloman (king of the Franks) 768–771 Charlemagne (Charles I; king of the Franks) 771–800 Charlemagne (Charles I; Holy Roman emperor) 800–814 Louis I, the Pious (emperor) 814–840 Lothar I (emperor) 840–855 Louis II, the German (king of the East Franks) 840–876 Charles II, the Bald (king of the West Franks) 843–875 Charles II, the Bald (Holy Roman emperor) 875–877 Louis II (emperor) 855–875 Charles III, the Fat (king of the East Franks) 876–887 Charles III, the Fat (Holy Roman emperor, king of the West Franks) 884–887 Louis II, the Stammerer (king of the West Franks) 877–879 Louis III (king of the West Franks) 879–882 Carloman (king of the West Franks) 879–884 Arnulf (king of the East Franks) 887–899