Melting an Iceberg: The Struggle to Reform Communal Government in France

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Abstract
National stereotypes have an understandable attraction, but are often a snare and a delusion. There has been no lack of commentators, in recent years, to remind the French that their structures of local administration were laid down at the Revolution, and have been little changed since. Fragmented into nearly 38,000 urban and rural communes, which vary enormously in population and wealth, the country has more local authorities than the other five states of the EEC and Britain put together. Most people, on both sides of the Channel, accept the idea of reform, but we find something of a contrast when we look at what has happened in practice. President Pompidou said at Lyon on 31 October 1970:

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