France is a European country governed under its Fifth Republic, a constitution designed in 1958 to secure stability after the chronically unstable Fourth Republic, which from 1946 went through 24 governments in 12 years. Charles de Gaulle, dismayed by those antics, wanted a constitution that would provide a powerful, centralised state and stable majority governments. Strong powers were vested in the presidency, shaped to his own towering persona and based on an august seven-year term. The constitution is a hybrid system based on a strangely ambiguous text—it does not specify, for instance, how the president should pick the prime minister, only that it is his role. De Gaulle, wrote Julian Jackson in his biography of the general, wanted a text "obscure enough to allow it to be adapted to different circumstances." The presidency was made directly elected in 1962; the seven-year term was shrunk to five in 2000. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the hard-left leader who casts himself as a blend of Bernie Sanders and Che Guevara, wants to replace it with a Sixth Republic: a parliamentary system mixed with direct democracy.
France is a secular state by law since 1905. Less than 5% of its people attend a religious service every week, compared with 20% in Italy and 36% in Poland.
The Fifth Republic vests unusually formidable powers in the presidency: the president can send troops into battle, appoint the top general, press the nuclear button, name the prime minister, dissolve parliament, declare a state of emergency, pass decrees and pick the heads of public bodies. Article 16 gives the president the right to exercise "emergency powers" if the country is under "serious and immediate threat"; it has been invoked only once, by de Gaulle after an attempted putsch in 1961 during the Algerian war. Article 11 governs legally binding referendums.
The president names three of the nine members of the Constitutional Council, each for a nine-year term. In 2025 Emmanuel Macron named Richard Ferrand, a political ally, as head of the Constitutional Council. Since 2013, heads of the public broadcaster are named by an independent body rather than the president. CNews, owned by Vincent Bolloré, a right-wing business magnate, has been dubbed "France's Fox News".
Despite its secular culture, France is witnessing an unexpected surge in Catholic fervour. At Easter 2025, 10,384 adults were baptised, a jump of 46% on the previous year and nearly double the number in 2023—the highest since France's Conference of Bishops began such records 20 years earlier. Some 7,404 teenagers were baptised that Easter, more than double 2023 and ten times the figure in 2019. Nearly a quarter of adults baptised at Easter in 2024 were students; 36% were aged 18-25; three-fifths were women; and nearly a quarter came from a non-religious background.
France spends 12.1% of GDP on health care (total: €266bn), well below America's 16.6%, yet the French live on average six years longer than Americans. France's obesity rate is about a third of America's, and its mortality rate from heart attacks a third as high. Its rate of opioid-linked deaths is a tiny fraction of America's.
France outperforms its European peers on several measures. It has a lower breast-cancer mortality rate than Britain and Germany, and the best heart-attack survival rate of any OECD country after Japan and South Korea, tied with the Netherlands. Life expectancy at 65 is higher than in any other EU country bar Spain, which it equals.
The French system combines national public health insurance, which reimburses patients for on average 70% of medical bills, with private mutual insurance covering most of the balance. Employers must provide top-up insurance to employees. For the self-employed and pensioners it costs on average €1,540 a year for a family, far less than the $25,570 figure in America. The state covers those on low incomes. Private contracted hospitals provide 35% of hospital care. Government caps on fees charged by most self-employed family doctors help control costs. Families pay on average just 2% of household spending on health bills, lower than the 2.5% in Britain despite its free National Health Service. France conducts twice as many CT, PET or MRI scans per person as Britain.
Doctolib, a French tech start-up used by 50m patients, allows appointments with GPs, specialists and labs to be booked online.
For decades the government capped the number of medical students. President Emmanuel Macron abolished the cap in 2019, but it will take a decade for numbers to recover. Nearly a third of French GPs are aged over 60. "Medical deserts" in rural areas mean waiting times to see an ophthalmologist vary from six days in some areas to 123 days in others. Visits to accident and emergency doubled from 10.1m in 1996 to 20.9m in 2023, with 72% classified as "not very serious or urgent".
In 2024 France recorded fewer births than in 1806, when the population was less than half its current size. See global population decline.
France maintains an independent nuclear deterrent, not assigned to NATO. De Gaulle pulled France out of NATO's integrated military command in 1966 and booted American soldiers off French soil, having concluded after the 1956 Suez crisis that America could not be fully trusted. Explaining France's need for its own force, he asked whether America would trade "New York for Paris"—that is, whether it would unleash a nuclear war to avenge Soviet strikes on France. France also sends its own satellites into space, supplies itself with nuclear energy and builds its own fighter jets—capabilities that underpin its claim to "strategic autonomy", a concept Emmanuel Macron has championed for nearly a decade, to much eye-rolling from more Atlantic-leaning capitals.
On March 2nd 2026 Emmanuel Macron flew to the Île Longue naval base in Brittany and announced that France would increase its nuclear stockpile, the first such expansion in decades. France currently maintains 290 warheads, slightly more than Britain. Henceforth France will not disclose how many it possesses. He also unveiled a new doctrine called "forward deterrence": a partnership with Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Greece, the Netherlands, Poland and Sweden, involving joint exercises with France's nuclear-armed air force. From time to time this could mean deploying nuclear-armed fighter jets to other European countries, though there is no plan to station nuclear weapons permanently abroad. Norway is considering joining. France and Germany launched a joint steering group on nuclear deterrence. France retains full control of its launch authority. The partnership comes with no financial contribution requested. Bruno Tertrais, a specialist on France's nuclear forces, called the speech "the most significant update to French nuclear deterrence policy in 30 years."
France and Britain are Europe's only nuclear-armed powers and the continent's only permanent members of the UN Security Council. The Lancaster House defence treaties, signed in 2010, state that a threat to the "vital interests" of one country is a threat to the other. On July 10th 2025 the two countries for the first time agreed to "co-ordinate" the use of their nuclear weapons, stating "there is no extreme threat to Europe that would not prompt a response by both nations." France's nuclear force, unlike Britain's, is not assigned to NATO. The two countries set up a joint nuclear steering group, composed of top diplomatic and military officials, which met for the first time in December 2025 in Paris. There France for the first time invited Britain to observe its "Poker" simulation exercise, a quarterly demonstration of its airborne strategic nuclear force. An Italian tanker aircraft had taken part in a Poker exercise as early as 2022. On July 13th Macron asked the military and Sébastien Lecornu, his defence minister, to start a strategic dialogue with European partners about the role of France's deterrent; France formalised this intent in its national strategic review. Macron has ruled out any change to France's fully independent launch authority. In 2025 France deployed fighter jets from the nuclear-capable part of its fleet—without their nuclear payloads—to Sweden and Poland. The relationship had been strained by the AUKUS submarine deal of 2021, which cancelled a Franco-Australian contract.
France has strict campaign-finance rules and caps party donations at €7,500 per person per year.
France has moved from a culture of impunity for politicians to one of increasing judicial accountability. Jacques Chirac became the first former president in modern times to be tried in court, in 2011, over "fake jobs" at the Paris town hall during his stint as mayor; he was given a suspended sentence. On October 21st 2025 Nicolas Sarkozy, president from 2007 to 2012, was imprisoned at the Prison de la Sante in Paris—the first French ex-head of state jailed since Marshal Petain. He was found guilty of "criminal conspiracy" over the illicit financing of his 2007 campaign by Muammar Qaddafi and sentenced to five years with immediate effect. The ruling divided France: the left applauded, the right cried political motivation.
France has not run a budget surplus since 1974. In 2025 its budget deficit will reach 5.6% of GDP, according to the European Commission, with public debt of 116% of GDP—behind only Greece and Italy in the EU. Its borrowing costs are now steeper than Greece's much-improved rates: the yield on ten-year French government bonds climbed to 3.6% in late 2025, above Greece's and on a par with Italy's. In a surreal turn, the French government now pays higher interest than some French firms, including LVMH and L'Oréal, on debt of similar maturity. The IMF considers the risk of bond-market stress moderate; according to Bruegel, a think-tank, France would need to generate a primary surplus of only 1.2% of GDP to stabilise its debt-to-GDP ratio—far less than the 3.5% Greece's creditors demanded during the euro crisis. The problem is that France ran a primary deficit of almost 4% of GDP in 2024, meaning it would need spending cuts and tax rises worth about 5% of GDP to stabilise its debt. Any attempt to do so would be politically explosive, undermining the chances of the prime minister who tried it.
François Bayrou, the centrist prime minister heading a fragile minority government, announced €44bn of savings in 2026 to curb the deficit to 4.6% of GDP, including cancelling two public holidays and freezing all budgets except defence. Parliament voted to bring down his government on September 8th 2025 over the budget—the second government to fall in nine months (his centre-right predecessor, Michel Barnier, was also toppled, in December 2024). Mr Macron on September 9th named Sébastien Lecornu, his defence minister and close ally, as his fifth prime minister since 2022. The Socialists, led by Olivier Faure, hold 66 seats in the 577-seat National Assembly; Mr Faure has argued for a 2% minimum annual tax on fortunes over €100m.
On October 5th 2025 Mr Lecornu unveiled a new government that looked like the old one; the Socialists cried foul, and even the Republicans threatened to walk out. He resigned less than four weeks after his appointment—the shortest-serving prime minister under the Fifth Republic and the fourth Mr Macron lost in little over a year. On September 12th Fitch downgraded France's credit rating from AA- to A+, citing worries that "instability weakens the political system's capacity to deliver substantial fiscal consolidation." After Mr Lecornu's resignation, the yield on France's ten-year government bond rose nearly eight basis points to 3.6%, close to its highest level since 2011, and shares of France's two biggest banks fell by over 4%. Marine Le Pen said the appointment of Mr Lecornu was "the last bullet of Macronism" and called for fresh elections.
Mr Lecornu ultimately stayed on as prime minister, forming a new minority government dependent on the 69 Socialists in the 577-seat lower house. Roland Lescure, a former financier and Macronist since 2017, became finance minister. The pension reform was suspended as the price of compromise; the Republicans, supposedly fiscal conservatives, allowed it, at a cost of €100m in 2026 alone; the national audit body calculates that freezing the retirement age at 63 would cost an annual €13bn by 2035. The 2026 budget includes around €30bn in savings and targets a deficit of 4.7% of GDP, after 5.4% in 2025, with a pledge to the EU to reach 3% by 2029. Deputies voted to increase taxes on multinationals and on American big tech. In December 2025 the government failed to pass a full budget for 2026 and rolled over the previous year's spending; a series of parliamentary battles to adopt a proper budget by the end of January 2026 followed. GDP growth for 2025 is expected to reach 0.9%, with the third quarter outperforming expectations. Unemployment stands at 7.5%, nearly two points below its level in 2017. In 2025 some French companies recorded huge stockmarket gains: Société Générale (up 153%), Thales (up 66%) and Safran (up 40%). Two rating agencies recently downgraded France's sovereign credit rating. Since the new government took office, the spread on French ten-year bonds over German bunds has eased a bit, but France is now, unusually for a wealthy sovereign borrower, obliged to pay more to borrow than some of its big companies.
Mr Lecornu is seeking a budget compromise with a target deficit of 5% of GDP. Without a new budget France cannot finance Mr Macron's promised €6.7bn boost to defence spending in 2026.
France has 35,000 mayors; opinion polls suggest trust in their mayor (66%) crushes that in the president (25%). The mayoral elections held on March 15th and 22nd 2026 offered hope to the mainstream: of the ten biggest cities, the Socialists won six (Lille, Marseille, Montpellier, Nantes, Paris and Strasbourg); the Greens won Lyon; the centre-right took Toulouse; and Macron's centrists (whose party is now called Renaissance) captured Bordeaux. The only big city won by the National Rally was Nice, where it backed Eric Ciotti, a former leader of the Republicans who had defected to Marine Le Pen and had strong local roots. Jean-Luc Mélenchon's hard-left Unsubmissive France took no big cities, though it secured the large towns of Roubaix and Saint-Denis.
In Paris the Socialist Emmanuel Grégoire defeated the centre-right's Rachida Dati; in Marseille the Socialist Benoît Payan defeated the RN's Franck Allisio. In both cases the Socialists refused tactical links with Mélenchon's hard left. François Bayrou, a former prime minister, lost in Pau, where he had been mayor for 12 years. Edouard Philippe held on to Le Havre in a tough three-way fight, boosting his 2027 presidential bid; an opinion poll found 46% of respondents thinking he would make a "good candidate" for the presidency, putting him in a near dead heat with Jordan Bardella (45%) and ahead of Marine Le Pen (42%).
Renaissance, Mr Macron's party, fielded fewer candidates than the RN but captured Bordeaux and Annecy; its allies won Angers, Mulhouse and several smaller towns. The RN claims to have won 70 town halls, up from 13.
French doctors still prescribe more antibiotics than those elsewhere, and France is one of the last OECD countries to reimburse thermal spa treatments (€250m in 2023).
Christine Lagarde, president of the European Central Bank, said in September 2025 she was watching French bond spreads "very attentively". The ECB is in effect the lender of last resort for European public debt, but its backstop was never intended for the core economies that ultimately stand behind the central bank's balance-sheet. Xavier Ragot, president of the French Economic Observatory, noted that a consensus exists between Republicans and Socialists that the deficit is a problem, but it had proved insufficient to force a compromise between centre-left and centre-right parties.
In 2023 Macron pushed through a pension reform raising the legal minimum retirement age from 62 to 64, provoking fierce opposition.
Greater Paris is building the biggest expansion to the capital's underground network for half a century: four brand-new driverless Metro lines with a total of 68 new stations, adding 200km (120 miles) to the system and creating loops around the outer suburbs. It is one of Europe's biggest public engineering projects; the total budget is expected to reach €40bn ($48bn). The station at Villejuif—Gustave Roussy, part of an extension to Metro line 14, was designed by Dominique Perrault as an "inverted skyscraper" and won the Prix Versailles for the world's "most beautiful" station in December 2025. Hector Guimard bequeathed the original floral Art Nouveau Metro entrances, first designed in 1900. Valerie Pecresse, head of the greater Paris region, introduced a single-price ticket for travel across the network to avoid penalising those with longer commutes from the outer suburbs.
France has gone further than most countries in legislating against cults. A 2001 law criminalises the "fraudulent abuse of weakness", allowing prosecutors to target leaders who exploit vulnerable followers. A reform passed in 2024 expanded this by outlawing "psychological subjugation", defined as any deliberate effort to deprive a person of free will. MIVILUDES, the government's watchdog on "sectarian aberrations", logged more than 4,500 reports of suspected cult activity in 2024, more than double the level in 2015.
France's overall tax take is at 46% of GDP; total government revenue is 52% of GDP, the highest in the EU. France has the most billionaires in the EU. The old wealth tax, abolished by Macron in 2018, was paid by 358,000 households. Economist Gabriel Zucman has proposed a 2% annual tax on wealth exceeding €100m, which would affect the richest 1,800 households. He calculates that the top 0.01% of French households pay a lower effective tax rate than everyone else due to tax-optimisation vehicles—an average of 27% for billionaires, against 50% for the population overall. The taxe Zucman became a political flashpoint in September 2025; a poll found 86% of the public in favour. LVMH paid nearly €3bn of tax in France in 2024 alone.
The Fifth Republic's first presidential elections were held in December, with the winner taking office in January. That calendar was disrupted by accident: Georges Pompidou, de Gaulle's successor, died in office in April 1974, and the French have voted for a new head of state around that time ever since. In most presidential systems the scheduling of elections is fixed by law; only in France is it both accidental and, for half a century, set for the most awkward time of the year. Spring voting followed by the summer political recess means that by the time a new president can govern properly, it is October—some 170 days after voters first went to the polls. French presidents tend to lose popularity at a precipitous pace: in June 2017 Macron had the backing of 64% of French voters, according to Ifop; by October the figure had slumped to 42%. The sequencing of presidential-then-legislative elections is a feature of the Fifth Republic's 1958 constitution, but the 2000 reform cutting the presidential term to five years (the same as parliament) has in practice meant fresh legislative elections after every presidential one.
Emmanuel Macron became president in 2017 as a 39-year-old electoral debutant, promising "to ensure that there is no longer any reason to vote for the extremes." By bringing moderates from both left and right together in a post-partisan movement, he twice kept Marine Le Pen out of the presidency, beating her in run-off votes in 2017 and 2022. But the centrist project has since unravelled. The number of parliamentary seats in the 577-seat lower house held by Ms Le Pen's National Rally has shot up from eight in 2017 to 123; those held by Jean-Luc Mélenchon's hard-left Unsubmissive France from 17 to 71. As of late 2025, the National Rally topped first-round parliamentary voting intentions with 32%; the hard left came next, on 25%; Macron's centrists trailed in third place, on just 15%.
The rate of government turnover—six prime ministers since 2022—has not been seen in France for over half a century. Sébastien Lecornu, the fifth prime minister, called himself "the weakest prime minister under the Fifth Republic" before becoming the shortest-serving. France lacks a culture of political compromise. Edouard Philippe, a former prime minister, is the best-placed centrist candidate for the 2027 presidential election.
Jean Pisani-Ferry, an economist who was in charge of Macron's manifesto in 2017, warned in 2025 that France faced "the ultimate threat of a swing into authoritarianism." When tested in November 2025 against four potential second-round rivals, the polls' favourite to win the next presidential election was Jordan Bardella, leader of the National Rally.
As of April 2026—twelve months before voters elect Macron's successor—polls consistently show that the only candidate almost certain to reach the presidential run-off is whoever represents the RN, whether Marine Le Pen or Jordan Bardella. A court of appeal rules in July 2026 whether to uphold Le Pen's ban from office; if it does, Bardella becomes the RN's candidate. The rest of the field is crowded and split. On the left, Raphaël Glucksmann polls 10-14% in first-round voting but refuses to take part in a primary that Socialist leader Olivier Faure wants to hold. On the right, Bruno Retailleau, the Republican party leader, polls mostly in single digits; rivals include David Lisnard, the mayor of Cannes, and Dominique de Villepin, a former prime minister. In the centre, Edouard Philippe (boosted by his re-election as mayor of Le Havre) and Gabriel Attal, who runs Macron's Renaissance party, both intend to stand. Philippe could win 25.5% of first-round voting (second to Bardella on 38%) and is currently the only candidate with a chance of beating the RN in a run-off.
Macron is pursuing a bill to ban social-media use for under-15s, similar to the one Australia introduced in 2025, citing teenage mental health and poor school performance. He has held town-hall discussions in different parts of France on the question. He has also championed a "die in dignity" bill to legalise assisted dying, which he cited in his 2026 new year's message. A citizens' convention had previously aired the issues; parliament began debating draft legislation in 2025 until it was put on hold when Mr Bayrou's government fell.
France abolished compulsory military service in 1997. On November 27th 2025 Emmanuel Macron announced ten months of paid, voluntary military service for 18- to 25-year-olds, starting in 2026 and aiming to recruit around 3,000 volunteers that year and as many as 50,000 a year by 2035. France has ruled out reintroducing mandatory national service.
Research by Isabelle Sommier at the Paris-I Panthéon-Sorbonne University has classified 2,300 acts of political violence in France over the past decade, compared with 5,500 in the 30 years from 1986 to 2017, suggesting an increase in frequency. Over 60% of political aggression over the past decade has been carried out by the far right. Deaths from political violence (excluding terrorism) remain rare: since 2022 there have been six—roughly the same yearly rate as between 1986 and 2017.
General Thierry Burkhard headed France's armed forces for four years until September 1st 2025. In July 2025 France announced it was resuming production of SCALP cruise missiles after a 15-year pause. General Burkhard warned that Russia is rearming fast enough to pose a "real threat" to Europe within five years—by 2030.
France spends over six times more on pensions each year than on defence. It spends around 2% of GDP on defence and has agreed at a NATO summit to raise this to 3.5% by 2035—implying more than a doubling of its 2024 defence budget, an increase of nearly €80bn. Over two-thirds of the French public told a recent poll they were in favour of a bigger defence budget, including a narrow majority of supporters of Marine Le Pen's hard-right National Rally. Macron promised an extra €6.5bn for defence over two years. France hopes joint European borrowing for defence can complement its domestic effort, but "frugal" EU members led by Germany are firmly opposed.
In February 2026 Emmanuel Macron declared that Europe faced a "geopolitical and geo-economic state of emergency" and called for action on four fronts: simplifying regulations; diversifying suppliers to curb reliance on non-European providers (including reinforcing the euro's international role); "European preference" to protect critical industries such as steel, chemicals and defence, via minimum shares of European inputs and "buy European" public-procurement rules; and a push for public and private investment in innovation through "eurobonds for the future" devoted to defence, green technology and AI, in line with the 2024 report by Mario Draghi.
SAFE, the EU's new joint defence-procurement scheme, mandates—at French insistence—that at least 65% of the components of many systems it pays for must come from EU or associated countries. Stéphane Séjourné, the European industry commissioner and a longtime friend of Macron, is negotiating a French-backed "Industrial Accelerator Act" with strong European-preference rules. Germany, Italy and Nordic and Baltic countries have pushed back, warning that such rules risk protectionism and pushing investment away from the EU.
Under Anne Hidalgo, the Socialist mayor of Paris from 2014 to 2026, the city's cycling network more than doubled from 700km to over 1,500km of cycle lanes—a bigger network than Amsterdam's. Streets were blocked, on-street parking was curbed and roads including a former riverside expressway were reclaimed for pedestrians and cyclists. More daily trips in Paris are now made by bike than by car. Only a third of Parisians own cars, though the share reaches half in the posh western quartiers. The transformation of the Rue de Rivoli, once clogged with traffic, into a mostly protected cycle corridor epitomises the shift.
After Ukraine, France is the European country most targeted by foreign disinformation campaigns—107 in 2025, according to the EU's diplomatic service. Viginum, France's foreign-disinformation watchdog set up in 2021 and reporting to the defence secretariat inside the prime minister's office, has detected over 150 since March 2025, more than twice the number in the previous 18 months.
The most prominent campaign, known as Storm-1516, is run by the GRU, Russia's military-intelligence agency. It creates false claims using photo and video montages, fake news sites, AI-generated images, deepfakes or hired actors, which are amplified by pro-Russian channels and paid influencers and hundreds of fake-news sites belonging to a network called CopyCop. The method has evolved from relying on bots to paying co-operating accounts per click. Between January 2025 and February 2026 NewsGuard, an American service that investigates disinformation, identified 20 Storm-1516 false claims in France; these drew 194m views.
The more outspoken France has become about Russia, the more it has been targeted. Russia is the most aggressive actor, but France is also targeted by Iran, Israel and pro-Chinese actors pushing economic interests.
In September 2025 France's diplomats set up an account on X, @FrenchResponse, which trolls Russian and MAGA accounts with cheeky denials in English. France has published a new anti-disinformation strategy; Alexandre Alaphilippe, who runs EU DisinfoLab, says France "was initially slow to respond, but has become best in class in Europe for exposing operations." General Fabien Mandon heads France's armed forces as of 2026.
France is the world's top tourist destination, ahead of Spain, China and America.
The wine region of Languedoc-Roussillon, along the south-west Mediterranean coast, accounts for 28% of France's wine production by volume, with an output of nearly 10m hectolitres in 2024—almost three times that of the Bordeaux vineyards. Much of the wine around Perpignan is made from grapes grown on small plots by farmers belonging to local co-operatives.
France's vineyards are shrinking. Between 2000 and 2020 the department of Pyrenees-Orientales, which surrounds Perpignan, lost nearly half its vines; in 2025 farmers ripped out a further 14%. Across Languedoc-Roussillon, nearly 15,000 hectares of vines were being torn out in 2025. The International Organisation of Vine and Wine notes an "abandoning of vineyards" in Languedoc-Roussillon but also around Bordeaux and the Rhône valley. Farmers blame drought, lack of access to reservoir water and higher costs since Russia's invasion of Ukraine. A government scheme pays farmers €4,000 per hectare of vines destroyed; in 2024 the government received applications for the destruction of nearly 30,000 hectares countrywide.
Wine-drinking in France has collapsed. The share of French people who drink a glass of wine every day has fallen from 51% in 1980 to 11% today. Nearly a quarter of French adults aged 25 or under do not touch alcohol at all. Gen Z considers wine "complicated" and mainly for "old people"; apart from chilled rosé in summer, young people prefer spirits, beer or no booze at all. Even le dry January has reached France. Cheaper wine has suffered the most: people prefer to buy one bottle of good wine rather than drink in volume. Some former vignerons are turning to olives, pomegranates, pistachios, peppercorns and other drought-resistant crops.
I have made mistakes but I have never made the mistake of claiming that I have never made one.