Measured by the yardstick of party membership, political commitment in France seems doubly fragile: weaker than its European equivalents, they too in decline, and weaker than other forms of collective engagement. Between 1970 and the end of the 1990s, France was the European country that experienced the highest number of those abandoning membership of the political parties: almost two thirds of their membership dissolved. Today party members represent less than 2% of the electorate. As for other forms of collective engagement, the rate of membership of the trades union has stabilised around 8% of the working population (over half trade-union members consist, moreover, of civil servants and public sector employees), whereas the percentage of members of one or more association, mainly of sporting or cultural character, is around 45%. According to Pierre Lefébure, researcher at the “Laboratory of Communication and Politics”, a Paris think-tank, “political involvement occupies the lowest rung of the ladder of collective commitments”, probably “due to the ever weaker appeal of political organizations, a consequence of the discredit cast on them by the financial scandals discovered since the end of the 1980s”, and “the widespread conviction that the differences” between the parties “are ever less marked”. He further identifies a series of “internal factors”. They include “the disintegration of what is called the material and especially symbolic reward of militancy, in proportion as the organizations become more specialized and marginalize the rank and file”. Another reason is “increasingly unsatisfied relational expectations”; for instance, as far as the National Front is concerned, explains Lefébure, “the feeling of finding a second family in it had counted a lot in the choice of militants”. A further factor of crisis is the “ever more reactionary and negative politicisation ( contra rather than pro)” which contributes to the diffusion of “more sporadic protest rather than constant, long-term commitment”. To reverse this trend, says Lefébure, “organizations would need to be able to establish a social bond with the territory”, even if “the goals and values that motivate commitment are ill-adjusted to localism and particularism, where scope for action is in effect revealed as limited”. “Commitment concludes the researcher is found more in a dialectic of the collective imagination and personal involvement that in any adjustment to territorial levels or to available technologies”.
