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International Political Science Review (2005), Vol 26, No.

4, 413430

The Sociology of Political Elites in France: The End of an Exception?


WILLIAM GENIEYS

ABSTRACT. This article presents the position of, and debates within, French elite sociology today. The analysis stresses the reasons for the fields weak development, and discusses current debates about politicians (politics as profession versus political savoir-faire) and about the relationship between elites and the state (their role as custodians of the state). The author underlines the dilemmas stemming from these debates, points out the three directions (the comparative approach, the historical approach, and the policy-making approach) that French neoelitism has taken, and suggests the need for a cognitive framework permitting the study of elite action within the decision-making process in order to improve empirical observation of how new power elites are formed. Keywords: Elite theory France Civil service State Regime change

Introduction
Since the beginning of the classic controversy between the partisans of monism and partisan pluralism, elite theory has facilitated the understanding of political regimes real nature (totalitarian versus authoritarian versus pluralistic). Indeed, an ongoing controversy regarding elite sociology stems from the contradiction between the theoretical debate, strongly linked to the expansion of modern social sciences, and the refinement of methodological tools (social classes versus elites).1 For some time now elite theory has been a field of research within political science, a discipline in which the study of the opposition between structure and agency is omnipresent and in which empirical research is mobilized in order to provide a comparative vision of the reality of political regimes. However, since the 1980s, certain Anglo-Saxon sociologists have suggested that the approach used by elite theorists be reconsidered and that greater emphasis be placed on how the
DOI: 10.1177/0192512105055808 2005 International Political Science Association SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)

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arrangements and agreements between elites help one to assess the coherence of democratic configurations across the world (Field and Higley, 1980; Higley and Burton, 1987). The problem of democratic transitions has reinforced this trend toward international research (Dogan and Higley, 1998; Linz and Stepan, 1996). This article looks at how this debate has been viewed in French political science, showing how it was initially bypassed and then led to a greater focus on the structure of the states political elites. More generally, we attempt to show in what ways this response has contributed to the weak development of comparative elite sociology in France (Aberbach et al., 1981; Putnam, 1976). From a slightly naive culturalist approach, one might suggest that the ideology dominant in France is one of mritocratie rpublicaine, an ideology which is incompatible with an elitist conceptualization of power. Up until now, the ideas of the founding fathers of elitist theory, notably Pareto and Mosca, have been reduced in France to a simple perpetuation of French counter-revolutionary political philosophy (from Maistre, Bonald, and so on) and have not prompted careful thought about the relationship between elites and democracy. As a discursive category, elites are conceptualized negatively (Its the fault of the elites). After two important military political defeats in France in 1870 and 1940, two great intellectual figures, Ernest Renan in La rforme intellectuelle et morale and Marc Bloch in Ltrange dfaite, despite a 60-year gap, evoked the same cause: the weakness of French elite leadership, which they blamed for the collapse of the countrys political system. Similarly, in a book tracing the imaginary foundations present at the birth of modern France, Pierre Birnbaum (1998: 19) shows how there arose, after the events of 1789, a division between two Frances due to differences between two sets of elites. Partly because of these sociohistorical reasons, the notion of elites has never been considered in France as an analytical variable or even as a useful concept with which to understand changes in political power. There have been remarkably few articles on elites published in either the Revue franaise de sociologie or the Revue franaise de science politique since the 1950s. A synthetic overview written by researchers from the Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques (FNSP) put the word elite in quotes, clearly indicating the problems faced by political scientists in using this term or concept (Cayrol et al., 1970). In analyzing the social mechanisms at work in the French social reproduction process, Pierre Bourdieu argued that the elite concept was irrelevant for a sociology of domination. According to Bourdieu, whose influence on the development of French political science has been notable since the 1970s, one should refuse to give any scientific value to the theories or traditional methods of the sociology of elites, and use instead the theory of a dominant class (Busino, 1992; Genieys, 2000). There has, however, been a recent change in the literature, as some authors have begun to discuss the study of elites as a way of understanding changing regimes (Genieys, 1996; Higley and Pakulski, 2000). In this new approach to a comparative sociology of elites, the old modes of study, as exemplified in the elite theorists approach to the study of French politicians, are rejected and the problem of the comparability of elites or the French politico-administrative elite (or elites) and the general weakness of comparative analysis are emphasized. A sociology of elites as prisoners of the state is emerging. Understanding these differences allows us to discern the hidden reasons for French tardiness with regard to the comparative sociology of political elites. Consequently, it is necessary to take a closer look at the path French researchers have been following as they change their methods for studying political elites.

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A Sociology of Elites Very Different from the Anglo-Saxon Tradition


In a synthesis of the indicators used to study social positions and understand the professionalization of parliamentary representatives, Frdric Sawicki (1999) has pointed out a key difference between the French and US approaches to the study of political elites: when studying politicians, French researchers tend to give excessive weight to the question of political representations of social classes, whereas in the USA, the politicians profession receives greater attention.2 To understand the reasons for this difference and the impact it has had on the French study of political elites, it is useful to begin by considering the heritage of Raymond Aron. In two texts, printed 10 years apart (Aron, 1950a, 1950b, 1960), Aron began the debate in France. In a first discussion on the articulation between the elite structure and the social structure, he considered key factors determining whether a political regime is oppressive or liberal, the homogeneity or diversity of its elites, plus their dispersal or concentration. In a second contribution, he returned to elites and the ideological implication that drives the theory of elites, at the same time denouncing the Marxist approach to political domination in terms of social class, political class, and ruling classes. To get out of this impasse, he criticizes excessively global approaches and suggests the analytical concept of catgories dirigeantes as a tool allowing us to understand political developments in their context rather than as a whole (Aron, 1960). For Aron, this analytical concept designates more a function than a social group and ... it allows us, at the same time, to analyze the organization of power, the relationship between power and society in a certain country, and to outline comparisons between countries and regimes. In short, if Arons leading categories are the same as Paretos elites, his skepticism as regards elite theory has nevertheless left its traces on French political scientists. Since Aron, the notion of elites and especially political elites (elected officials, civil servants, and so on) has been regularly denigrated as unoperational. An illustration of this evolution can be seen as early as 1963. La classe dirigeante: mythe ou ralit? was the question asked by Aron in the context of a roundtable of the Association Franaise de Science Politique (November 1516, 1963), the contributions to which were published in the Revue franaise de science politique.3 In the context of the cold war and the confrontation between Marxists and liberals, Aron carried on a debate with Jean Meynaud around the concept of the ruling class, a notion for which he sought to substitute that of catgories dirigeantes. The discussion that followed was a rich one, and underscored the importance of vocabulary in both scientific and ideological debate.4 Despite the small number of scholarly publications devoted to it, the question of whether a ruling class does indeed exist in contemporary France remains relevant (Dogan, 2003). In fact, in the 1970s only one French empirical study was carried out. Distancing itself from the Aron approach, it dealt with the question of the French ruling class in order to discover to what extent the cohesion of these ruling classes depends on both objective and structural links between them and on the circulation between the personnel who ... occupy places within this space of rulership (Birnbaum et al., 1978: 18). (It should be mentioned here that Pierre Birnbaum, in his individual research, simultaneously aligned himself with Raymond Arons way of thinking and the re-examination of elitist theory in the USA.5 As will be discussed further below, he has been one of the rare French comparatists to deal explicitly with the problems of elites in his research on the logic of the French state, using the notion of a French leading class.)

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Other empirical research on French politicians has pointed out ways to ascend in French society via politics (Cayrol et al., 1970, 1973; Charle, 1987; Charlot, 1973; Dogan, 1961; Gaxie, 1983). But even these studies have demonstrated a continuing aversion to using elite theory. The very qualifying of someone as a politician poses an epistemological, or even cultural-political, problem which is only just beginning to fade in France (Genieys, 2000). Why has traditional French analysis of French politicians been so slow to employ the tools of the sociology of political elites? In France, there seems to be a sort of refusal to define political elites. Robert Putnam, who has carried out a comparative analysis of elites throughout the world, reserves the term political elites for those who have more power than others. Power is here understood to mean a power to truly influence, directly or indirectly, politics and state activity (Putnam, 1976: 6). Members of parliament, ministers, presidents, and highly placed administrative workers are seen as persons having the possibility of exercising political domination, regardless of the type of political regime they are in. What Putnam gains in comparability by thus defining elites, and deliberately putting aside the decisional approach, he loses by limiting his sociology of elites to legitimate political personnel. Colette Ysmal, who wrote the article Elites and Leaders in the Trait de science politique (the French equivalent of a handbook of political science), deeply criticizes this definition of political elites as an unnecessary cutback which eliminates non-office-holding partisan elites (1985: 604). Ysmal does not denounce the comparative approach to the study of political elites, but she does find that Putnams particular approach leads to a perverse effect. As she, Cayrol, and Parodi had earlier demonstrated, in France a research tradition does exist which focuses explicitly on partisan elites (Cayrol et al., 1970, 1973). Paradoxically, however, these researchers distance themselves from that tradition by advocating partial skepticism toward the heuristic value of the notion of elites and by implicitly suggesting the importance of comparative research when they outline the sociological profile of French members of parliament (Cayrol et al., 1973). Indeed, the authors mentioned that, Regardless of the theoretical or political methods used, and being that there are so many questions left unanswered regarding American pluralist political science and Marxist research, it appears only logical to develop new theoretical and empirical research ideas about elites and the nature of power (Cayrol et al., 1970: 811). Their research on French parliamentarians is focused on recruitment methods and the roles and political careers of members of parliament, and is clearly influenced by the work of Matt Dogan on French members of parliament (see below). Other, more complex differentiations have emerged. We can, for example, agree with Putnam that it is illogical to think that good representativeness within elites necessarily means good democracy,6 and this question has been amply addressed by Best and Cotta (2000) in their important comparative study of the evolution of the social properties of parliaments and democratic representation in western Europe since 1848. Overall, however, two options have come to be privileged: the first aiming to examine the connections between the differentiations of the state and the unity of elites (Badie and Birnbaum, 1979; Birnbaum, 1977, 1984) and the second, inspired by Bourdieu, challenging the use of the term elites and trying to underline the effects of the professionalization of politicians. The question asked regarding the relative autonomy of elites becomes essential in order to escape

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marxisme orthodoxe (Gaxie, 1973). Work on the French political class has begun to focus on these two main research points and has tended to put aside the debate about Anglo-Saxon sociology on elites.

Politics as Profession and Political Savoir-Faire: The First French Debate


French researchers who analyze the effects of the professionalization of politics on politicians deliberately leave aside the sociology of elites in order to encourage a way of thinking which privileges the independence of a group of people around a specific interest. All the same, in reducing the causes of political attitudes to social properties, this research attempts to go beyond the classic empirical work on the continuity of politicians and the institutionalization of a new social class of political representation when regimes change. Here, one must recall the pioneering empirical research of Matt Dogan (1953, 1957, 1961, 1967) on the social properties of French members of parliament. It should be pointed out that until the 1970s Dogan was one of the rare researchers in France who carried out quantitative sociographic studies on French politicians. He studied the origins, religious and political socialization, and the careers of parliamentarians as well as ministers, especially those under the Third and Fourth Republics. The great intuition of this scholar lay in his decision to analyze regime change and personnel change simultaneously. Nonetheless, Dogan (1953, 1957) remained very focused upon the role of social properties (in the broad sense) in the building of political careers, in order to emphasize the fact that the social recruitment of members of parliament is correlated with the social image of the voters. In his later work on political representation under the French Fifth Republic, he gives much more attention to the question of social origins as a factor in understanding political careers. It is the extension of this research that gave rise to empirical inquiries into the Le dput franais by researchers from the FNSP (Cayrol et al., 1970, 1973). This latter line of study was inspired by the increasing use in the 1960s of survey research to study members of parliament in Europe and the USA. As noted above, in the first article, the writers criticized the research done on politicians and at the same time pointed out the limits and put in doubt the relevance of an elitist approach to this object (Cayrol et al., 1970). The second article begins with the clear observation that in France no empirical inquiry had, until then, regularly asked a large part of the members of parliament about their social backgrounds, their discovery of politics, their entrance into political life and their career, their conceptions of the parliamentary function, their opinions and their beliefs (Cayrol et al., 1973: 8). These same researchers decided to make up for lost time by doing a large empirical study. Unfortunately, this study was never repeated over time, which prevented the production of longitudinal knowledge of French politicians. While on this subject, it is interesting to note that, years later, Colette Ysmal moved slightly away from her initial way of thinking. While still believing in the theory of elites as prolegomenous, as in her Les lites politiques: Un monde clos? (Ysmal, 1995), she was now able to draw on a fund of empirical material which enriched the initial inquiry. With a more critical view, Daniel Gaxie published Les professionnels de la politique (1973), in which the question of the relative autonomy of politicians was clearly asked. Gaxie suggested an analysis of internal relationships within the articulated political sphere which centered around a way of thinking about the concepts of

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differentiation, specialization, and professionalization. The paradigm proposed by Gaxie is fairly ambitious in the sense that he tends to offer a theoretical exit to the debates between partisans of an analysis in terms of class and the few French defenders of an analysis in terms of homogeneous and differentiated elites.7 Gaxie interprets the professionalization process by attributing a particularly strong role to two classical sociological variables: those of social origins and socio-professional categories. Starting from this and backed up by numerous empirical inquiries, he shows how, for the past 20 years, there have been effects of his paradigm on all categories of political actors, from party activists to members of parliament to ministers (Gaxie, 1980, 1983). Moreover, Gaxie continues along the same lines as his first thoughts on professionals in politics and refuses to use the term elite in his work.8 Lastly, it is interesting to note that in his large contribution in collaboration with Heinrich Best on the recruitment of MPs in France since 1848, he discusses the heritage of Dogan, at the same time continuing to insist upon his own paradigms relevance (Best and Gaxie, 2000). These authors show that correlatively to changes of political regime in France, especially since 1946, it is the figure of the professional politician and politics as a profession which must be taken into consideration. Notwithstanding this finding, the approach in terms of politics as a profession has come to be the object of criticism in a series of works around the question of political savoir-faire, in studies which propose a more global vision of political activities (Garraud, 1989; Offerl, 1999). In mobilizing the US sociology of professional roles and in becoming interested in the political practices of local elites in the decentralization process, these researchers show that political professionalization in the Weberian sense of the term is not as obvious as in the reality of French political life. Without referring at all to the theory of elites, this research on the background of parliamentary members shows the importance of the learning process of politics and of political savoir-faire at the heart of the National Assembly at the end of the 19th century (Joana, 1999). These various attempts to circumvent the sociology of political elites has had an isolating effect on research results. Research emphasizing the importance of the political savoir-faire of political elites looks for the specificity of these politicians, thereby losing the capacity to analyze political change. From a methodological point of view, in losing itself in the quest for singularity, French research cuts itself off, in the short term, from all comparative perspectives and, in the long term, from a more general pool of thinking on the articulation between regimes and political elites. Lastly, if there is a research field in which the French situation justifies an approach in terms of exceptionnalisme, it is not in the relative autonomy of staffing policies compared to civil society, because this articulation is always reinforced by the state. Since 1958, with the beginning of the Fifth Republic, the politicoadministrative elite has been seen in two ways: that of the involvement of senior officials in the structures of political representation and that of a politicization of the senior spheres of the civil service (Chevallier, 1997). This debate constitutes a real challenge for the comparative sociology of elites in France as they are still considered as custodians of the state.

Custodians of the State Versus State Elites: The Second French Debate
Indeed, as we shall see below, in France the development of the comparative sociology of elites came about due to the question of the complicated relationship

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between such elites and the state. In response to the classic question of the theory of elites, the question of who governs France, the answers are complicated and contradictory: the custodians of the state versus the elite of the state. The monism or pluralism debate is more or less explicit with an unsurpassable analytical threshold: the French state.9 Why has comparative sociology in France come to be so focused on the complex relation between the elite (or elites) and the state? To answer that question, it is important now to look at the second dimension which tends to make the analysis of elites and their relationship to the state exceptional in France.10 The first trend in this research work can be found in the excellent first books of the US political scientist Ezra Suleiman (1976, 1979) about elites and politics in France. This author shows that elites who were educated in the grandes coles had the necessary strong and homogeneous bureaucratic training to be placed in the world of politics. For him, the secrets of a successful, French, modern political world resided in the emergence of these custodians of the state. From a slightly different analytical perspective, he also analyzes the mechanisms which lead to the production and reproduction of French politicoadministrative elites. He entirely accepts an elitist perspective, inspired by Schumpeter and centered on the elites capacity to adapt (Suleiman, 1979: 16). He tries to show how French elites successfully adapted to social changes while maintaining their power. This certainly explains why the important empiricotheorique works by Ezra Suleiman were, in fact, rarely discussed in the political science field in France. From his empirical study, Suleiman (1979: 19) gives a wider definition, characterizing his subjects as follows:
[They are] state elites because they are trained by the state and destined [for] its service. If they had restricted themselves just to the public services, this same service would insure them a remarkable influence. But their importance goes much further than the public sector as its members occupy today (even monopolize) the key positions of the administrative, political, industrial, financial and even teaching sectors. We are therefore interested in the elites totally created by the state, that is to say those who are trained, promoted and legitimized by a highly selective teaching system and who use the education given them by the state and the services of the state as a springboard to jump to other careers.

In a general way, as regards elite sociology, by emphasizing the importance of the role of institutions and organizations leading to the formation of a particular elite, Suleiman enhances French research which tends to be focused more on the social structure of senior officials (Darbel and Schnapper, 1969), on the technocratization of top public functions (Thoenig, 1973), or even on les grands corps (Kessler, 1986).11 For Suleiman the specificity of the elite of the state lies primarily in the special schooling given in the grandes coles, which leads to certain posts in this power structure (grands corps, Direction dadministration centrale, and cabinets ministriels). In becoming interested in more recent publications on the question of limpossible reform of the Ecole Nationale dAdministration (ENA), he underlines the phenomenon of devolution affecting this institution, which has become a machine for classifying and for teaching. For him, For the last 20 years the ENA has tried to choose a certain elite rather than to give new technical training to future state administrators (Suleiman, 1995: 293). He then shows how the principle of the availability of these administrative elites creates the possibility of pursuing political careers. He also analyzes how the development of

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pantouflage (a political phenomenon which is particular to French political culture and which is characterized by the fact that certain former students of the grandes coles and senior officials hold management positions in large French capitalist companies) has accelerated due to the nationalization or denationalization of large industries by the French state. He has counted 4500 narques (former students of the ENA) present in private industries to show that service to the state truly constitutes a wonderful path to management positions in the capitalist system in France (Suleiman, 1995). Lastly, he develops his ideas on the articulation between social changes and changes in the elite yet further by showing that the Golden Era of the State, linked to the action of the grands commis de lEtat, today seems to be part of the past (Suleiman and Courty, 1997). In fact, the continuity of public policies that we have seen over the 30 glory years (194474) is now questioned by the interpenetration of power between the administrative, political, industrial, and financial elites. All the same, although this research trend underlines the central political role of the custodians of the state, its devotees are nevertheless subscribing to the pluralistic approach of the elites. In contrast, the French variant of the monist approach to power puts forward the scholarly mechanisms of the reproduction of the elite, while challenging the scientific validity of the elite concept. The perspective of this research is doubly flawed, in that working on elites can often lead, on the one hand, to legitimizing the political point of view of the dominants and, on the other hand, to relying on contestable, scientific empirical data (Bourdieu, 1989). Oleg Lewandowski (1974) ably describes the nature of the debate: on the one hand, publications such as Whos Who can be used as a base for a critical sociology of the elites (the image of the elites for the ruling class), but on the other hand, recognition of the structural differentiation of the ruling class is less important than the integration mechanisms, which means that social representations are strongly shared at the heart of the elite. Pierre Bourdieus way of thinking denounced the weakness of the empirical source (Whos Who and so on) on which the works of these elites were founded. For these writers, a true sociology of the dominant class should concentrate on the role of scholarly institutions, as it is there that the sentiment of belonging to one world is inculcated. The mere existence of a sociology of elites is rendered difficult by the criticisms offered in the sociology of domination (Bourdieu, 1989). Pierre Bourdieu denounced the principal research carried out on elites as being founded on the construction of a partial object (or a biased one), which makes it impossible to understand fully the phenomena of social reproduction and the auto-legitimating of the noblesse dEtat.12 Although pursuing a different theoretical direction, he goes along with Ezra Suleiman, saying that the phenomenon should be considered in its totality if one wishes to understand how today, in France, a noblesse dEtat disposes of a large range of economic, bureaucratic, and even intellectual powers. He concludes that a conceptualization of power around the elite category is not scientifically founded. A recent study by Eymeri (2001) gives a summary of both Bourdieus and Suleimans opinions, showing how today narques are able to monopolize the role of custodians of the state. This author also rejects precise discussions on the sociology of elites and shows how the socialization process of the narques begins long before they enter the school, then showing how the ENA acts on people as a conforming machine. This special training, which functions like a parallel university, offers access to all the major state jobs, and the bureaucratic elites in France form the only social group having no power equivalent. An illustration of this phenomenon can be

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seen in the manifesto Notre Etat, written by some senior officials regarding a reform project for the French state (Fauroux and Spitz, 2000).13 In short, in France, research on elites is frequently concentrated on the central role of the custodians of the state in political life. Some of Bourdieus critical sociology and his refusal to validate the elite concept stems more from a political ideology than a scientific one. In a more general way, we can say that the analysis of elites in France focuses much more on the process of elite bureaucratization in other words, considering what happened to such leaders before they reached positions of power. However, having emphasized the singular dimensions of French elite sociology, it then becomes necessary to show how, in the past few years, the foundations of a neo-elitism have been laid. In this new direction taken by elite research, more emphasis is placed on the interactions between elites and institutions in the decision-making process.

Some New Paths to a French Neo-Elitism


French neo-elitism has its foundations in the work of critics who focus on the question of how the research object is constructed. The creator of the elite object often stumbles on the polysemy of the term elite (or elites), to which one must add the strong theoretical implications linked to it when it is used in the singular or the plural. Indeed, the French neo-elitist perspective is built from two questions. The first is how these elites come about in society, that is to say, their social properties and ideological representations. The second resides in the analysis of the involvement of elites in the decision-making process by taking into account multi-positional and relational resources. In short, the aim is to develop a more integrated approach which devotes a large part of the research to the empirical study of the interactions within power configurations. A more integrated approach is made possible by a combination of several analytical methods: (1) social analysis permits us to grasp social properties; (2) positional and reputational analysis focuses on the usages of positions; (3) the cognitive approach of the referential allows us to interpret action logics; and (4) relational and decisional analysis leads to an understanding of the recomposition of power. The French neo-elitist approach thus analyzes the dynamics of political regime changes and the transformation of the state more precisely. It can be presented as having three main directions: the comparative approach, the historical approach, and the public policy approach.14

A Comparative Neo-Elitism
The first research carried out on comparative neo-elitism was simply an extension of what Matt Dogan had already written in his empirical research about politicians. From this perspective, Pierre Birnbaums works are both innovative for the time and decisive for understanding how the comparative sociology of French elites was built (Badie and Birnbaum, 1979; Birnbaum, 1977, 1985). In the middle of the 1970s, in order to go further than Nicos Poulantzas or even C. Wright Mills interpretations, this sociologist undertook research on the historical building of the state in France, privileging the changes in the relationship between the elites inside the politico-administrative power and those outside (Birnbaum, 1977). Influenced by Stein Rokkans historical sociology perspective,15 he showed how

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one can understand the progress and consolidation of state institutionalization from the analysis of the birth of a particular politico-administrative personnel, a particular meritocratic recruitment belonging to a system of roles, and the pursuing of careers in a special politico-administrative space which remains closed to intruders from the business world. In these essays on French power elites, Birnbaum (1977) analyzes the specificity of political power and the careers of people inside the state. Building a relational model between political elites (administrative and economic) at different periods in contemporary French history allows him to put forward the idea of a strong state whose institutional form was represented by the Fifth Republic (Birnbaum, 1977, 1984, 1985). Then, in moving on to a comparative sociology of different states, he shows that if senior officials are very much present among the politicians of the strong state (as in France), they are almost never present in the political elites of weak states (such as Great Britain or the USA).16 From this perspective, Birnbaum underlines the particularity of French political elites, such that even when there were radical changes in governments (as in 1985), a very strong link between bureaucrats and politicians still remained. Subsequent events, such as political alternation (CURAPP, 1986) and then the period of cohabitation, only helped to confirm this theory.17 Lastly, the most recent research shows that the members of the socialist governments ministerial cabinets have political careers fairly similar to those of senior officials from conservative governments (Mathiot and Sawicki, 1999a, 1999b). Other French researchers have developed this approach in a comparative perspective of western Europe (Genieys and Hassenteufel, 1997). This lastmentioned work has shown that French research on the comparative sociology of regime changes often tends to overestimate the role of elites in the analysis of such transitions in Spain and Germany. An effort is made to avoid a simplistic sociology of the political trajectory of elites in order not to exaggerate its impact upon their capacity for action, but it seems obvious that in this particular type of political situation, in which the question of legitimation and delegitimation is asked with more acuteness than in routine political life, understanding the potential to mobilize political resources requires analysis of individual or collective elite backgrounds, or both, as is shown in the analysis of the role of elites within changing Spanish political regimes.18 Indeed, in western Europe today, a research field which is opening up more and more deals with the comparison of the political paths of the intermediary elites and their capacity to influence politics on a meso-governmental level (Pasquier, 2004).

A Historical Neo-Elitism
Some French social scientists have set out to understand the reality of elites from the perspective of a historical sociology of politics. Pierre Birnbaum pursues his research through the complex process of the integration of Jewish people in the higher reaches of the state around the question of the role of juifs dEtat. He shows that to understand the actions of the elites, one must take into account the cultural specificity of the social-historical context. Since the mid-1980s, Birnbaum has worked on a large historical research project about the integration of Jewish people in French public professions. His careful study of the political trajectory of people from this faith, analyzing the biographical trajectory of certain families (in its true sense) who have worked for the state, permits him to analyze the

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integration process over a long period of time and ultimately to put forward a new analytical category: the State Jew. What he means by the latter is the Jewish elite who from the outset show a true appreciation of their new roles in the public interest service, and invest all their energy in their job, ridding themselves of their old mindsets to now put on the noble badges of serious and responsible state dignitaries (Birnbaum, 1992: 8). In this analytical, historical framework, it is not a matter of measuring the social determinism of the elites, but more of identifying the elective affinities and the adhesion logic which supports an elite category which is singular in the development of the sens de lEtat rpublicain. Strong on this innovative social-historical way of thinking, the writer opens up a second area of research with the story of 171 Jewish grands commis de lEtat (judges, generals, prfets, and sous-prfets), showing the career impediments due to race or religion under the Third Republic as these madmen of the Republic are obliged to face a regime which willingly embraced popular anti-Semitic presumptions. In a more explicitly comparatist register, the historian Christophe Charle (1987) uses the elite concept in the comparative analysis of processes regarding regime change in Europe.19 This author breaks down the elements for a comparative social history of the elites and state in France and western Europe (19th and 20th centuries). He invites us to understand better why since the French Revolution, the elites and the State have seen their legitimacy contested at regular intervals (Charle, 1997). Remembering the three successive ambitions of the study of elites, and in particular those linked to the state, this writer affirms that today we need to answer only two questions: Who governs? and How does one get to the top? The sociology of power elites must explain the traits of specific regimes, their relationship with the whole society, and the possible blocking mechanisms which arise and make political crises more serious in France than in other European countries. Starting from this dynamic approach, this historian puts forward a comparative social history of elites in which the Napoleonic and Prussian integration model of the state is seen as completely opposite to the English model (Charle, 2001). He therefore shows that the behavior and the choices of the successive elites depend simultaneously on their social characteristics, on their margin for maneuver compared to the demands of their employer, or at least to those demands which they take into consideration according to the relationship of the political forces of the moment and regarding the senior officials who ensure the continuity of this policy, especially its application in the mid-to-long term. Insisting on the changing relations which exist between elites and institutionalized forms of power, these social historians once again place emphasis upon the weight of these social-historical and cultural contexts, thereby supplementing the findings of Anglo-Saxon research on this question (Reinhard, 1996).

A Public Action Neo-Elitism


The third path of French neo-elitism is definitely the most original and interesting one for international comparison from both an empirical and a theoretical point of view. In this approach, the role of ideas in transforming institutions and public policies is introduced in a particularly stimulating manner (Hall, 1997). This approach is also a continuation of the work of Aberbach, Putnam, and Rockman on the varied roles of bureaucrats and politicians in the decision-making process. In the French research field, the analysis of public policies was inspired by the

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work of Jobert and Muller (1987) on lEtat en action. The analysis of public policies (in asking about the roles of actors in public policy-making) has opened a fertile area for this type of investigation regarding the role of the French custodians of the state in political changes. The early research emphasized the interrelations between ideological representations and the production of a particular rfrentiel daction publique on sectoral public policies.20 From this perspective, which goes beyond statist, neo-corporatist approaches, it is necessary to understand how sectoral elites see the world when structuring the logic of state action. Therefore, public decisions can be considered to be the result of a process of imposing cognitive representations elaborated by the sectoral elites (which are most often composed of different groups of custodians of the state). This research perspective inspired a major work of comparative sociology studying the role of certain elites in the imposition of neo-liberal ideas in French public policies (Jobert and Thret, 1994).21 This research, even if it does not explicitly adhere to an elitist perspective, opens the way to a research area in which state elites are understood from the point of view of cognitive mobilization and intellectual influence on the decision process. Comparative analysis of this differential reception of neo-liberalism allows us to update the different elite categories, particularly in France by including the state economists, who in the socialist government cabinets since 1983, have carried this change to the heart of the state (Jobert, 1994). This new elitist perspective can be interpreted as a reconsideration of the role of bureaucratic elites in the state transformation process. Since then a new sociology of elites in interaction has come into being whereby the question of who governs goes along with that of what is governed. From the perspective of the elites-in-action analysis, some work on the role of this sectional elite in employment, health, and public social policies in France since 1981 has been carried out (Genieys, 2005; Mathiot, 2000). Understanding of the role of these elites or elite groups in the decision-making process in the state welfare sector was enriched by pursuing a deeper explanation of their social background and their politico-administrative trajectory. The use of this method helped explain the turn toward neo-liberalism in France, led by the left, and made it possible to show the existence at the heart of the state of a small group forming a Welfare elite that was characterized by the accumulation of several types of resources (administrative, political, survey, and relational) and the long period spent in one sector (more than three years). The analysis of these trajectories shows how specialized bodies such as the Cours des comptes or the Inspection gnrale des affaires sociales (IGAS), but also the training given in the Direction de la Prvision and the Direction du Budget at Bercy (Finance Ministry) are strong indicators of the growing autonomy of this elite. In terms of social representation, the welfare state shares a common cognitive framework (referential): To keep social security one must adapt to financial constraints, reinforcing the role of State piloting and focusing social allowances on those the least provided for (Genieys, 2005). By way of conclusion, we wish to insist on the fact that the work done on French neo-elitism is particularly significant for the development of French elite sociology when dealing with international comparisons. It is thus important that this most recent approach to the study of elites always takes into account both the programmatic ideas that elites generate and the strategic positions that they occupy in western democracies, in order to be able better to compare the changes now taking place in the capitalist model of government (Lehmbruch, 2003: 41).

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Notes
1. In Anglo-Saxon countries, the elite concept became an alternative to the Marxist concept of the ruling class when the first empirical research was undertaken. We refer here to the works of Eva Etzioni-Halevy (1993, 1997), who shows how Anglo-Saxon social scientists slowly admitted the utility (or the relevance) of elite sociology in understanding democratic theory. 2. The mritocratie rpublicaine is the ideological syncretism formulated by the founding fathers (Gambetta, Ferry, and so on) of the Third Republic in 1877. Besides the fact that access to citizenship is available regardless of all social, cultural, or racial considerations, this republican philosophy invents a model of social promotion founded on taking into consideration an individuals effort and talent, which is tested by a system called the concours (a highly competitive exam). Thus, doing this concours becomes a mandatory step in joining the elite channels of the grandes coles or in entering the state administration. 3. For an overview of the stakes involved in the debate carried out in this roundtable, see the three dossiers (I, II, and III) produced from it and published in Revue franaise de science politique (1964a, 1964b, 1965). 4. Aron points to a pre-existing semantic quarrel around the terms ruling class, elites, and establishment. He specifies that I have myself used the term [elites] in other circumstances because it is in current use but, upon reflection, I think it better to speak of political personnel. Arons expression, personnel politique, might seem to refer generally to all elected officials, but its use by him and his successors, as we will see below, makes it clear that the reference is more narrowly to members of parliament only. 5. In an autobiographical article which he presented at the ECPR sessions at the University of Leiden in April 1993, Pierre Birnbaum admitted, As luck would have it Raymond Aron, the holder of the only chair of political sociology, agreed to act as my supervisor ... From that time on the study of elites, which was to be the salient feature of my long academic career, allowed me to focus on the working of influence and power within the Etat fort. I hesitated between several research paths: I was first tempted by Paretos elite theory, then by elite theories in the United States. My first study thus consisted of an examination of the American debate between pluralism and elitism (Birnbaum, 1997: 179). 6. Putnam (1976: 44) writes: To summarize, the impact of elite social background on politics and policy remains plausible, but ambiguous and unsubstantiated. We cannot be certain that an elite that represents all social groups proportionally would actually foster stability or effectiveness or responsiveness ... This moral answer to the So what? question remains the bedrock on which interest in the social composition of elites is founded. 7. Here a slightly different intellectual slant is presented in Eva Etzioni-Halevys (1997) debate between classes and elites because of her understanding of democratic theory. 8. In his recent synthetic article on the question of the analysis of professional politics in France, Dominique Damamme points out two limits to this paradigm. For him the French paradigm of the professionnels de la politique leads to lintellectualo-centrisme or, even to populisme dnonciateur (Damamme, 1999: 66). 9. I have already shown in an article which argues for the return to a comparative sociology in the field of political science in France how this subdiscipline of political science was a prisoner due to its originality. From all this we can see the strong contrast between, on one side, Anglo-Saxon work in which the theory of elites is always more or less employed in the quest for a better-functioning democratic regime and, on the other, French research which is focused on the analysis of the relationship between the custodians of the state and the elites of the state (Genieys, 2000). 10. This remark could be addressed to all the researchers at Harvard University, who in their vast comparative analysis of the relationships between bureaucrats and politicians

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in western democracy tend too often to group Frances situation with that of countries such as Germany and Italy (Aberbach et al., 1981). 11. Much research followed which confirmed this sociological singularity and which also separated itself from the comparative sociology of elites. This is the case with Dominique Chagnollaud (1991), who is interested more particularly in the history of institutions such as the Ecole Libre des Science Politique (today, Science Po) or even the Ecole Nationale dAdministration (ENA), in order to show how senior officials became, in France, le premier des Ordres in the second half of the 20th century. 12. This phenomenon is even more explicit in Alain Garrigous (2001) work Les lites contre la Rpublique. Here, the author denounces both the transformation of Science Po into a business school and the conflict generated by ENAs being the center for the states nobility. In the framework of this work, the term elites is used in order to denounce the monopolizing of power by the states aristocracy. 13. In a critical article on this work, Franoise Dreyfus (2002) shows how, in France, this state elite claims a monopoly of state expertise. She attributes this recent phenomenon to a considerable weakening of academic work on the administrative science of the state. 14. By French neo-elitism, we refer to the work done in the 1980s which simply added to what Matt Dogan had already written about politicians, leading to the role of elites and the dynamics of political regimes. Following the example of certain political scientists, he puts forward the importance of both the functioning of the state and of democratic procedures (Dogan and Higley, 1998; Field and Higley, 1980; Higley and Gunther, 1992). 15. In an introductory chapter about his own research background, it is the author himself who mentions the help and support which Rokkan gave him in developing this research perspective (Birnbaum, 1997). 16. In collaboration with Betrand Badie, he shows how the processes of differentiation or of dedifferentiation of the state leads to the emergence of a particular type of elite. From this, the apprehension of values and cultural codes become elements for the comprehension of the training of an elite (Badie and Birnbaum, 1979). 17. Cohabitation goes back to a period when duel executive power opposed a prsident de la Rpublique and a premier ministre from different political parties. Since the middle of the 1980s, France has seen three periods of cohabitation: 198688, 199395, and 19972002. This institutional dysfonctionnement is not innocent with regard to the crises which today affect the Fifth Republic. 18. It was then a question of rereading the role of the elites committed to this process, taking into account not only their social attributes and their political trajectory (individual or collective), but also the political representations which they bear. The analysis of the political trajectories of Spanish peripheral elites confirms the overlap of two logics within the political representation (central and periphery) at the heart of this political system (Genieys, 1997). 19. The following is Christophe Charles (1997: 39) recent defense of the terminology of the word elite: Je reconnais les inconvnients de lemploi de lexpression les lites en raison de lhritage partien et de son usage empirique vague dans certains travaux de sociologie ou de science politique. Deux avantages expliquent malgr tout que jy recoure: dune part, le syntagme permet dembrasser, sous un concept plus abstrait, les divers types de groupes dirigeants ou dominants qui se sont succds en France depuis deux sicles et dont les appellations, historiquement dates, ont chang au fil des rgimes; dautre part, la forme plurielle rappelle deux traits affirms des groupes dirigeants en France que cet article essaie dexpliquer: la pluralit des groupes en lutte dans le champ du pouvoir et leur lgitimit en permanence conteste. 20. Bruno Jobert and Pierre Muller (1987: 689) define this as: limage dominante du secteur, de la discipline, de la profession ... Il est construit: cest une image sociale du secteur. Il nest pas rationnel parce quil correspond dabord la perception quont les groupes dominant le secteur et conforme leur intrts corporatifs ... Cest une image

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qui est elle mme le produit des rapports de force dans le secteur. Souvent, la structure mme du rfrentiel refltera un compromise entre les diffrentes lites en comptition au sein du secteur. 21. This research opens the way to a research area in which state elites are understood through their cognitive mobilization and intellectual influence on the decision-making processes. The comparative analysis of this differential reception of neo-liberalism allows us to update different elite categories which have carried this change into the heart of the state. Therefore, it is up to researchers to grasp the modalities of ideational imposition in a new way in order to build public action without falling into a linear approach to new elites whereby those with the most appropriate world vision would come to replace the old elite (Jobert and Thret, 1994).

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Biographical Note
WILLIAM GENIEYS is a CNRS Senior Research Fellow at the Centre dEtude du Politique en Europe Latine at the University of Montpellier. His publications include Les lites espagnoles face lEtat in 1997 (translated into Spanish in 2004); De la thorie la sociologie des lites en interaction: Vers un no-litisme? in CURAPP; Les mthodes au concret in 2000; Pour une sociologie compare des lites en interaction, Revue internationale de politique compare in 2002; and La constitution dune lite du Welfare en France dans la France des annes 90, Sociologie du travail in 2005. He is also the editor of Le choix des armes: Thories, acteurs et politiques, published in 2004. ADDRESS: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, CEPEL University of Montpellier 1, 39, rue de lUniversit, 34060 Montpellier cedex France [email: wgenieys@univ-montp1.fr].
Acknowledgments. The author thanks Holly Chevalier for translating this article from French into English and his colleagues John Higley (University of Texas at Austin) and Marc Smyrl (University of Montpellier) for their helpful comments.

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