List of political systems in France

A political system (French: système politique^[a]), also known as a "form of government" ^[b][c] is a way of organizing a state. Some different political systems are: democracy, totalitarianism, authoritarianism, theocracy, feudalism, monarchism, republicanism, and various hybrid systems. Each of these may be further subdivided, for example: absolute monarchy, constitutional monarchy, and feudal monarchy, all of which have been present in France. Many of these forms of government were known in Classical antiquity, and pre-date the existence of France.

Classical French historiography ^[fr] usually regards Clovis I (r. 509–511) as the first king of France, however historians today consider that such a kingdom didn't begin until the establishment of West Francia in 843.^[1][2] For the purposes of this article, all political systems from Clovis on are considered to be in scope.

The Franks were a group of Romanized Germanic dynasties within the collapsing Western Roman Empire, who eventually commanded the region between the rivers Loire and Rhine. Clovis I established a single kingdom uniting the core Frankish territories, and was crowned King of the Franks in 496. He and his descendants ruled the Merovingian dynasty until 751, when it was replaced by the Carolingians (751-843).

West Francia c. 843, after the treaty of Verdun

After the coronation of Charlemagne in 800, the Carolingian Empire (800–888) gradually came to be seen in the West as a continuation of the ancient Roman Empire. After the Treaty of Verdun in 843, the Kingdom of the Franks ("Francia") was divided into three separate kingdoms, merging into two: West Francia and East Francia. The latter became the Holy Roman Empire, and West Francia eventually became the core of the Kingdom of France, which was structured as a feudal monarchy and lasted for eight centuries (987–1792).

During the French Revolution, the last pre-revolutionary monarch, Louis XVI, was forced to accept the French Constitution of 1791, thus turning the absolute monarchy into a constitutional monarchy. This lasted a year, before the monarchy was abolished entirely in September 1792 and replaced by the First French Republic, marking the beginning of republicanism in France.

For roughly the next eighty years, there was an alternating series of empires, republics, and a kingdom, until the 1870 establishment of the Third Republic. From that point on, it was republics down to the present day, with the exception of the authoritarian Vichy regime during World War II. The Fifth Republic, established as a semi-presidential system in 1958, remains the political system in France as of 2022.

• Malvin, Christian; Société de l'Ecole des chartes (1996). "La baptême de Clovis : heurs et malheurs d'un mythe fondateur de la France contemporaine, 1814-1914". In Guyotjeannin, Olivier (ed.). Clovis chez les historiens [Clovis according to the historians] (in French). Librairie Droz. ISBN 9782600055925. OCLC 36533794.
• Sewell, Elizabeth Missing (1876). Popular History of France. Longman. OCLC 81375924.

• Armenteros, Carolina (7 July 2011). The French Idea of History: Joseph de Maistre and His Heirs, 1794–1854. Cornell University Press. pp. 331–. ISBN 978-0-8014-6259-7. OCLC 1091534547.

• Birnbaum, Pierre (2001). The Idea of France. Hill and Wang. ISBN 978-0-8090-4650-8. OCLC 1097906514.

• Bonaparte (King of Holland), Louis (1829). Réponse à Sir Walter Scott sur son Histoire de Napoléon [Response to Sir Walter Scott on his History of Napoleon] (in French) (2 ed.). C.J. Trouvé. pp. 1–. OCLC 669775736.

• Israel, Jonathan (23 March 2014). Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution from The Rights of Man to Robespierre. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-1-4008-4999-4. OCLC 1034959418.

• Ladurie, Emmanuel le Roy (2017). Mind and Method of the Historian. Edward Everett Root. ISBN 978-1-911454-13-7. OCLC 987900976.

• Poitras, Daniel. Expérience du temps et historiographie au XXe siècle: Michel de Certeau, François Furet et Fernand Dumont [Experience of time and historiography in the 20th century] (in French). Les Presses de l'Université de Montréal. ISBN 978-2-7606-3889-1. OCLC 1035256822.

• Ranum, Orest (1 March 2017). Artisans of Glory: Writers and Historical Thought in Seventeenth-Century France. UNC Press Books. ISBN 978-0-8078-3642-2. OCLC 1099156876.

• Rearick, Charles (1974). Beyond the Enlightenment: Historians and Folklore in Nineteenth Century France. Indiana University Press. ISBN 978-0-253-31197-9. OCLC 2725983.