France and Its 36,000 Communes: An Impossible Reform?

Abstract

In a classic work, Albert Mabileau (1991) described French local government as a ‘homeostatic system’ because of its ability to resist any kind of reform and to return to its initial state. This characterization of French local government was mainly based on the failure of a law, passed in 1972, that was meant to reduce the number of communes drastically by amalgamating them. This failure is all the more puzzling as most of France’s European neighbours had managed to reduce the number of their own local entities by the mid-1970s. In Belgium, Denmark or Germany, for example, such a reduction varied between 40 and 80 per cent. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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