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France is a democracy organised as a unitary semi-presidential republic. It is a developed nation whose modern economy is the fifth-largest in the world in 2003. Its main values are expressed in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.

The most distinctive feature of the French judicial system is that it is divided into the judicial and the administrative orders of courts.

Traditionally a predominantly Roman Catholic country, with anticlerical leanings, France is since the 1970s a very secular country. Freedom of religion is a constitutional right, as reflected by the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. The dominant concept of the relationships between the public sphere and religions is that of laïcité, which implies that the government does not intervene in religious dogma, and that religions should refrain from intervening in policy-making. Tensions occasionally erupt about the alleged or real behaviour of some part of the Muslim minority, or about alleged or real discrimination against that community; see Islam in France.

France is a unitary state. However, the various legal subdivisions, the régions, départements and communes, have various attributions, and the national government is prohibited from intruding into their legal normal operations.

While the main territory of France (la métropole) is located in Western Europe, France is also constituted from territories in North America, the Caribbean, South America, the western and southern Indian Ocean, the northern and southern Pacific Ocean, and Antarctica (sovereignty claims in Antarctica are not recognised by most countries).

Statute legislation may be proposed by the government (i.e. the council of ministers), or by members of parliament. In the first case, it is a projet de loi, in the latter case, a proposition de loi. All projets de loi must undergo compulsory advisory review by the Conseil d'État before being submitted to parliament. Propositions de loi cannot increase the financial load of the state without providing for funding.

Although ultimately a victor in World Wars I and II, France - much like Britain - suffered extensive losses in its empire, comparative economic status, working population, and status as a dominant nation-state. Since 1958, it has constructed a semi-presidential democracy (known as the Fifth Republic) that has not succumbed to the instabilities experienced in earlier, more parliamentary regimes.

Current President Jacques Chirac assumed office May 17, 1995, after a campaign focused on the need to combat France's stubbornly high unemployment rate. The center of domestic attention soon shifted, however, to the economic reform and belt-tightening measures required for France to meet the criteria for Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) laid out by the Maastricht Treaty. In late 1995, France experienced its worst labor unrest in at least a decade, as employees protested government cutbacks.

Membership in France's labour unions accounts for less than 10% of the private sector workforce (in 2003, 8.2% of the workforce) and is concentrated in the education, manufacturing, transportation, and heavy industry sectors. Most unions are affiliated with one of the competing national federations, the largest and most powerful of which are the CGT, FO, and CFDT.

In 1959, in an occasion marking the first time in the 20th century that the people of France went to the polls to elect a president by direct ballot, de Gaulle won re-election with a 55% share of the vote, defeating François Mitterrand.

The gouvernement, or cabinet, is headed by the Prime Minister of France. It has at its disposal the civil service the government agencies and the armed forces. (The term "cabinet" itself is rarely used in this sense, even in translation, as it is used in French to mean a minister's private office. In French, the word gouvernement can refer to government, but generally refers to the cabinet.)

The National Assembly may cause the resignation of the executive cabinet by voting a motion of censure. For this reason, the prime minister and his cabinet are necessarily from the dominant party or coalition in the assembly. In the case of a president and assembly from opposing parties, this leads to the situation known as cohabitation. While motions of censure are periodically proposed by the opposition following government actions that it deems highly inappropriate, they are purely rhetorical; party discipline ensures that, throughout a parliamentary term, the government is never overthrown by the Assembly.

After the war of 1689-1697 gained France only Haiti (lost to a slave revolt a century later), the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1713) ended with the undoing of Louis's dreams of a Franco-Spanish Bourbon empire: the two conflicts strained French resources already weakened by disastrous harvests in the 1690s and in 1709, as well as by the revocation (1685) of the Edict of Nantes and the consequent loss of Huguenot support and manpower.

France surrendered to Nazi Germany early in World War II (June 24, 1940). Nazi Germany occupied three fifths of France's territory leaving the rest to the new Vichy collaboration government established on July 10, 1940 under Henri Philippe Pétain. Its senior leaders acquiesced in the plunder of French resources, as well as the sending of French forced labor to Nazi Germany; in doing so, they claimed they hoped to preserve at least some small amount of French sovereignty. The Nazi German occupation proved costly, however, as Nazi Germany appropriated a full one-half of France's public sector revenue.

France has 26 régions: 21 of these are in the continental part of metropolitan France, one is Corse on the island of Corsica (although strictly speaking Corse is in fact a "territorial collectivity", not a région, but is referred to as a région in common speech), 4 are overseas. The région are further subdivided into 100 départements.