The subject of the present chapter attempts to ‘deconstruct’ the French territorial question and demonstrate that territorial policy analysis can break free from the limitations imposed by the primarily ‘statist’ conceptual framework in which it has hitherto been viewed. In the first section of the chapter, we indicate the scale and nature of the present political and administrative territorial structures and comment also on the paucity of academic research work on this subject. In the second section, we highlight the main changes in the territorial framework of policy building, through an evolution from vertical to horizontal dialectic of powers and capacities. In the third section we discuss territorialisation, as the results of a double process. On the one hand, the role of ideas in territorial policy building; on the other hand, the dynamics of differentiation that put the French model into question. Thus, focusing on policy analysis in French local policies – in a global comparative perspective – sheds light on the huge challenge it causes for the coherence of ‘national models’. As in other countries, local policies in the French context are simultaneously influenced by globalisation and decentralisation, opening new scenes for vertical and horizontal interactions toward the provision of public goods and service.

An old, dense and underestimated territorial administration

The structures of French territorial government are notoriously complex. Many of its contradictions and paradoxes can be traced back to its origins in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic period when the much-desired tabula rasa was put into operation to destroy and even to eliminate the memory of the traditional, often millennial, territorial structures. And yet, for all its rationalist features, the new structures could scarcely avoid or conceal new and long-lasting conflicts, concerning different meanings as well as applications of concepts such as ‘popular sovereignty’, (‘direct democracy’ or versions of the ‘general will’), ‘federalism’ (compared with ‘Jacobinism’), plus conflicting theories of representativeness and electoral practice, and, above all, the emergence of the ‘nation’ – as the paramount unitary organisational structure which led Napoleon (particularly when faced with foreign wars) to settle the arguments by streamlining the administrative system, with an overwhelming stress on ‘top-down’ rather than ‘bottom-up’ processes.