Top France Resources

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.

Government economic policy aims to promote investment and domestic growth in a stable fiscal and monetary environment. Creating jobs and reducing the high unemployment rate has been a top priority. The Government of France has successfully reduced a double-digit unemployment rate in excess of 10% to 8%-9%, recently. France joined 10 other European Union countries in adopting the euro as its currency in January 1999. Henceforth, monetary policy will be set by the European Central Bank in Frankfurt.

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.

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

France has an important aerospace industry (lead by Airbus Industrie) and is the only European power to have its own national space centre. France is also the most energy independent Western country due to heavy investment in nuclear power, which also makes France the smallest producer of carbon dioxide among the seven most industrialised countries in the world. Large tracts of fertile land, the application of modern technology, and EU subsidies have combined to make France the leading agricultural producer in Western Europe.

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.

Due to its numerous overseas departments and territories scattered on all oceans of the planet, France possesses the second-largest exclusive economic zone (EEZ) in the world, covering 11,035,000 kmē (4,260,000 sq. miles), just behind the EEZ of the United States (11,351,000 kmē / 4,383,000 sq. miles), but ahead of the EEZ of Australia (8,232,000 kmē / 3,178,000 sq. miles). According to a different calculation cited by the Pew Research Center, the EEZ of France would be 10,084,201 kmē (3,893,532 sq. miles), behind the United States (12,174,629 kmē / 4,700,651 sq. miles), but ahead of Australia (8,980,568 kmē / 3,467,416 sq. miles) and Russia (7,566,673 kmē / 2,921,508 sq. miles).

A popular referendum approved the constitution of the French Fifth Republic in 1958, greatly strengthening the authority of the presidency and the executive in relation to Parliament. The French constitution establishes a semi-presidential system, where the President of France has a strong influence, but where, ultimately, the deciding factor is the majority of the French National Assembly.

Parliament meets for one 9-month session each year: under special circumstances the president can call an additional session. Although parliamentary powers have diminished from those existing under the Fourth Republic, the National Assembly can still cause a government to fall if an absolute majority of the total Assembly membership votes to censure.