In search of France.

Six writers, four in America and two in France, have collaborated to assess the present condition and future potential of France with comprehensiveness, clarity, and depth. Over the last decade, the French economy has acquired competitive confidence, and is growing rapidly; the familiar image of France as economically “retarded” is no longer valid. Social change has included a rising birth rate, a transformation of the family, a resurgence of religion. In foreign policy, France has largely adapted itself to the new facts of international life. The authors, however, are not sanguine about the political system; France, in Stanley Hoffmann’s words, “is surrounded by the ruins of the old political system and does not know how to get to the new.”