The Changing Relations between Trade Unions and Working-Class Parties in France

In: Government & opposition: an international journal of comparative politics, Band 13, Heft 4, S. 437-457

Abstract

The intellectual structures which can easily be applied to the political and social realities of Northern Europe are largely irrelevant to those of Southern Europe, and certainly, to those of France.Three postulates are implicit in considering the problem of the changing relations between the trade unions and the working-class parties.One is that in every European industrial country there are working-class parties. In addition there are parties which are not working class, but bourgeois middle class, conservateurs, popolare or volksparteien (and the logic of this postulate even implies that there is, in fact, only one working-class party of any real political significance).