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Fixing France: How to Repair a Broken Republic

Fixing France: How to Repair a Broken Republic

By Nabila Ramdani
PublicAffairs, 2023, 352 pp.
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Reviewed by Andrew Moravcsik

March/April 2024Published on
In This Review
Fixing France: How to Repair a Broken Republic

Fixing France: How to Repair a Broken Republic

By Nabila Ramdani

PublicAffairs, 2023, 352 pp.
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Ramdani, a French journalist who specializes in explaining her country to Anglo-Saxons, offers a lurid litany of well-known complaints about how the contemporary reality fails to match the country's revolutionary ideals of "liberty, equality, and fraternity." French politics has become an elitist preserve of white men from the best schools. French economy and society are unequal and self-dealing. Cities institutionalize neocolonial segregation, with those of immigrant origin banished to dreary suburbs, hemmed in by brutal police and overseen by corrupt officials. Upward mobility is all but impossible, and access to education uneven. France can save itself only by setting aside its commitment to republican ideals and by adopting an explicitly Anglo-Saxon identity-based view and, with it, affirmative action. Perhaps. Yet one wonders if Ramdani would have reached a different conclusion had this screed been leavened by statistical data, which shows that the 20 percent of the French with the lowest income enjoy more upward mobility than their counterparts in the United Kingdom or the United States (especially if they live in cities), the children of immigrants to France have greater chances to rise than their nonimmigrant counterparts, and France offers a level of universal social support exceeded only by a few of its neighbors.


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