Politics 101: How France Is Governed

Part of the Politics 101 series, an explainer of how governments work across the transatlantic world.

Last time, we covered the United States, a country that has had exactly one constitution for two hundred and fifty years. This time, we turn to France, a country that has packed an extraordinary amount of history into the past two hundred and thirty. Kings, emperors, republics, kings again, more emperors, more republics, and two world wars along the way. To understand how France is governed today, you first have to understand how it got here.

A Brief History of Modern France

In 1789, the ancien régime (the absolute monarchy under Louis XVI) collapsed under the weight of debt, rising bread prices, and an Assemblée nationale (National Assembly) that had decided it, not the king, spoke for France. France tried a constitutional monarchy for a few years, with Louis kept on as a figurehead. That arrangement did not last: Louis was executed, and France was declared a republic in 1792. A few years of the Terreur (Reign of Terror) followed, in which thousands more lost their lives, before a young general named Napoleon Bonaparte seized power in a coup in 1799.

By 1804, Napoleon had crowned himself emperor, turning the Première République (First Republic) into the Premier Empire (First Empire). He invaded Russia, failed, was ousted, returned, and was finally defeated at Waterloo in 1815. The Bourbon Restoration then brought monarchs back to power for roughly fifteen years, under Kings Louis XVIII and Charles X, until Charles tried to roll back civil liberties in 1830 and was overthrown. He was replaced by the so-called "roi citoyen" (citizen king), Louis Philippe.

That arrangement lasted until 1848, when revolution brought Louis Philippe down as well and France declared the Deuxième République (Second Republic), electing Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, nephew of the original, as president. Barred from seeking a second term, he staged his own coup in 1851 and, a year later, crowned himself Emperor Napoleon III. (There was no Napoleon II.) The Second Empire lasted until 1870.

France then declared the Troisième République (Third Republic), which held for seventy years, until the Second World War brought German invasion and Nazi collaboration under Marshal Philippe Pétain, a hero of the First World War, while General Charles de Gaulle led a government in exile.

After the war, the Quatrième République (Fourth Republic) was born, but its constitution preserved the same weak executive that had plagued earlier republics: twenty-one different governments in twelve years, some lasting only days. It also proved unable to manage decolonization, and unrest in Algeria (at the time a French colony, and legally part of France itself) brought the whole system down in 1958. A new constitution followed, giving the executive considerably more power, with modest checks from the legislature. That constitution created the French Cinquième République (Fifth Republic), the government France still has today. In theory, a strong executive has kept France's often-volatile politics from toppling the entire system the way previous republics repeatedly did.

The Executive: How France is Governed Today

France's government today is described as "semi-presidential," meaning executive power is split between two offices. At the top sits the president, elected to a five-year term through a two-round voting system. The president handles what amounts to the marquee responsibilities of government: head of state, head of the military, and lead on foreign affairs and defense. The president can also dissolve the Assemblée nationale, the lower house of parliament, and call new elections.

The president also appoints a prime minister, who actually runs the government day to day and oversees domestic affairs such as economic policy, education, and healthcare. While the president is elected directly by voters, the prime minister must retain the support of the Assemblée nationale. Ordinarily this isn't a problem, since legislative elections follow presidential ones by only a few weeks, and the results tend to track closely. But when the president and the parliamentary majority come from different parties, the result is known as "cohabitation": a president and prime minister running two different, often opposing, agendas. As politics grows more fractured, especially in multi-party systems, outright majorities are becoming harder to come by, and cohabitation or its equivalent chaos becomes more likely.

Elections

France's electoral system works very differently from the American one. There are no primaries that winnow the field down to two major-party nominees. Instead, France is a genuine multi-party state, and presidential elections use a two-round system. In the first round, every party fields a candidate, and France has a lot of parties, ranging from the Parti communiste français (French Communist Party) on the left to the hard-right Rassemblement national (National Rally). The top two finishers in that first round then face off in a runoff, which guarantees the eventual winner at least 50 percent of the vote.

That produces presidents who can claim a clear mandate, though French presidents tend to have unusually short honeymoons: the French public, like their eighteenth-century predecessors, has little patience for underperformance.

The two-round system can also produce artificially inflated approval numbers. Current President Emmanuel Macron won his first-round votes with only around 25 percent support in both 2017 and 2022, before winning the runoffs with 55 to 66 percent against Rassemblement national candidates who failed to expand their coalition beyond their base; in 2017, they barely picked up any new voters at all. In other words, French voters in both elections were largely choosing the candidate they disliked less, rather than expressing enthusiastic support for Macron himself.

The Legislative Branch

France's parliament has two chambers: the Assemblée nationale and the Sénat (Senate). The Assemblée nationale is the lower house, and the only one that holds real power. It has 577 deputies, directly elected every five years from constituencies across France and its overseas territories.

The Sénat is the upper house, with 348 members chosen indirectly by roughly 150,000 local officials, serving six-year terms with half the chamber up for election every three years. Both chambers debate and write legislation, but when the two disagree, the Assemblée nationale almost always prevails — Article 45 of the French constitution allows the government to give the Assemblée the final word.

The Assemblée holds one additional power the Sénat does not: it can pass a motion de censure (motion of censure), forcing the entire government to resign, the rough equivalent of a vote of no confidence. That gives parliament real leverage over the executive, even though the government typically controls the legislative agenda.

Parliament can propose and debate freely, but it's the prime minister's government that usually decides what actually comes up for a vote and when. A successful motion de censure also puts pressure on the president, who then has to select a new prime minister capable of winning the Assemblée's support. This has happened only three times since 1958, and two of those three came in just the past two years, 2024 and 2025.

The Judicial Branch

Here is where the French system diverges most sharply from the American one most readers will be familiar with. France does not have a single court system topped by one supreme court. Instead, it runs two parallel tracks. One handles ordinary civil and criminal matters, moving up through courts of appeal to the Cour de cassation (Court of Cassation), which functions as the "supreme court" for that track. The other handles disputes between citizens and the government itself, culminating in the Conseil d'État (Council of State).

Above both sits a third body, the Conseil constitutionnel (Constitutional Council), which is the closest French equivalent to the U.S. Supreme Court and handles judicial review. It has nine members serving nine-year terms, appointed in equal thirds by the president, the Assemblée nationale, and the Sénat. Its job is to determine whether laws comply with the constitution.

France's legal system is also fundamentally different in character, rooted in the Napoleonic Code. French law is a civil-law system, in which judges apply written statutes and codes; American law is a common-law system, built heavily on judicial precedent. French judges are not bound by precedent in the way American judges are, and French courts operate under an inquisitorial model, with judges taking an active role in investigations rather than acting as neutral referees between opposing sides.

Subnational Government and the European Union

Unlike the United States, France is a unitary state rather than a federal one. There is no French equivalent to a U.S. state with its own constitution and constitutionally reserved powers. That said, French governance is not run entirely out of Paris either: it is best described as a decentralized unitary state, with power delegated downward across three tiers: eighteen regions, roughly a hundred departments beneath them, and about 35,000 communes at the base, each with its own elected council. Regions oversee economic development and high schools; departments handle social welfare and middle schools; communes manage elementary schools, local policing, and most of the day-to-day services residents actually interact with.

The structure resembles America's states, counties, and cities, but with one crucial difference: none of these French layers holds power in its own right. Everything is delegated by Paris, and Paris can claw it back through ordinary legislation. There is also a préfet (prefect) in every department, a national government representative tasked with ensuring local decisions don't conflict with national law, a role with no real American equivalent.

Layered on top of all of this is France's membership in the European Union. As a founding member, France has voluntarily ceded pieces of its own sovereignty, over trade, currency, and more, to institutions in Brussels. That relationship will be covered in detail later in this series.

Putting It Together

The French president handles the big picture, foreign policy and defense, while the prime minister, backed by whichever party or coalition controls the Assemblée nationale, runs domestic affairs. When the president and that parliamentary majority come from opposing parties, the result is cohabitation and a genuinely divided government.

Parliament writes the laws, but the government sets the agenda, and the Assemblée nationale retains the power to bring down the entire government with a single vote of censure. The courts are split into two separate systems — one for disputes between citizens, one for disputes between citizens and the state — with a wholly separate Conseil constitutionnel reviewing the laws themselves. And behind all of it sits a unitary state built from regions, departments, and communes, with Paris still the undisputed center of political power.

It is a system built, quite deliberately, from the wreckage of everything that came before it: a kingdom, an empire, a second empire, and four republics that didn't survive. Modern France, under the Cinquième République, exists precisely because every earlier version of French government eventually fell apart.

Next in the series: Germany, and how a country that rebuilt itself twice in the twentieth century ended up with one of the most consensus-driven, coalition-obsessed governments in Europe, designed specifically to ensure no single person could ever seize total power again.