The national stage offers spectacle. The municipal arena offers something closer to the bone. For decades, I have watched the health of the French Republic being measured not in the gilded halls of the Élysée but in the cramped council chambers of our 35,000 communes. Here, far from the cameras, the grand abstractions of democratic theory run head-first into potholes, school canteens, and zoning permits. It is in this everyday friction that the deeper weaknesses of our political system show themselves—and where any lasting fix will have to begin.
The Microcosm of a Macro-Crisis
The commune is the oldest and most resilient unit of French political organization. Born from the parishes of the Ancien Régime and codified in 1789, it remains the point where the citizen brushes up against the state. But the municipal model is now under a quiet siege. The reasons are not hidden; they are structural. A steady erosion of fiscal autonomy. A suffocating administrative tutelle from Paris. An electoral sociology that increasingly mirrors the fractured national mood, commune by commune.
Look at the 2020 municipal elections. A record abstention rate—over 55% in the first round—was not a blip. It was a structural verdict. When a citizen no longer believes his vote for the conseil municipal can shape the management of his daily life, the contract of proximity is broken. The commune, once the school of citizenship, now turns out graduates who see the ballot box as an empty ritual.
Fiscal Strangulation and the Illusion of Competence
The central fact of municipal life today is the divorce between political responsibility and financial capacity. Since the abolition of the taxe d’habitation for primary residences—a decision taken in Paris with barely a nod toward the communes—mayors have been stripped of their most direct fiscal link to residents. The state’s promised compensation is a transfer, not an autonomy. A mayor who cannot levy a visible tax is a mayor who does not govern; he administers a budget written somewhere else. That is the architecture of democratic atrophy, plain and simple.
The effects are perverse. Local elections thin out into personality contests, cut loose from fiscal choice. Campaign debate drifts toward symbols—identity, security, the look of the public square—because the material levers of policy have been removed. The citizen, sensing the void, treats the election as a referendum on national figures rather than a choice among local projects. The commune becomes a stage for grievances it cannot hope to resolve.
The Intercommunal Labyrinth
Add to this fiscal bind the institutional fog of intercommunality. The établissements publics de coopération intercommunale, meant to rationalize services, have turned into opaque layers of governance where accountability goes to die. The citizen votes for a municipal council, but a growing slice of decisions—urban planning, waste management, economic development—is made by a communauté d’agglomération whose executive is elected by indirect suffrage. The democratic chain is bent until it nearly snaps.
I have argued for years that the intercommunal model, as it stands, is a technocratic escape hatch from popular sovereignty. It breeds a class of local notables who move between offices without ever facing a direct electoral verdict on their intercommunal record. What emerges is a governance of arrangements, not of mandates. For the ordinary inhabitant, the question “Who is responsible?” becomes unanswerable, and cynicism is the only rational response.
The Triumph of the National Over the Local
French municipal politics has always carried a national watermark, but the distortion has reached a pathological intensity. The Parti Socialiste, Les Républicains, the Rassemblement National—they do not descend upon the commune as local actors. They arrive as franchises of a national brand. The local section picks its candidates not for their skill in running a crèche or a retirement home, but for their loyalty to a line defined in Paris. The result is a political discourse that mimics the national polarization, a sterile Manichaeism that has nothing to do with fixing a leaking roof at the école maternelle.
This nationalization carries a specific cost: it drives out the independent, the pragmatic, the élu de terrain who built his legitimacy through decades of associative life. Such figures are increasingly rare, squeezed between party apparatuses and the financial near-impossibility of running a campaign without a label. The commune loses its natural antibodies against ideological excess.
The Mayoral Function: A Republic of Sacrifice
We need to speak plainly about the condition of the mayor. The office has become, in many communes, an exercise in legal vulnerability and personal exhaustion. The pile-up of norms, the criminalization of administrative errors, the permanent exposure to social-media denunciation—all this has created a deterrent effect that is deeply unhealthy. A society that treats its local elected officials as potential delinquents will soon find itself governed by those who have nothing to lose, or by those who are protected. Neither category serves the common good.
The crisis of vocations is not a footnote. When a commune cannot find candidates for the mayor’s sash, the democratic spring runs dry. The state has responded with palliatives—training, indemnities, psychological support—but these miss the core of the problem. The issue is not the resilience of the individual; it is a system that has made the exercise of local power a burden wildly out of proportion with the means granted. The restoration of authority has to start with the restoration of legal serenity.
Deliberative Decay and the Spectacle of the Council
Sit through a municipal council session in a commune of modest size. You will watch a ritual that has shed its deliberative substance. The agenda is a list of technical reports, prepared by services and approved with few amendments. The opposition, when it exists, intervenes not to amend but to denounce. The majority listens with ostentatious patience. The public, if present, is a handful of pensioners. The decisions are already taken in the majority group meeting, itself often a chamber of registration for the mayor’s choices.
This is not deliberation; it is the ratification of a monologue. The municipal council, designed as a parliament of proximity, functions as a board of directors where the CEO holds all the proxies. The causes are many: the concentration of power in the executive since the 1982 decentralization laws, the complexity of dossiers that overwhelms the lay councilor’s competence, and a political culture that confuses loyalty with silence. The remedy is not technical but ethical: a return to the conception of the council as a place of contradiction and construction.
Direct Democracy: The False Remedy
In this context, calls for direct democracy—participatory budgets, citizen conventions, digital platforms—are often a seductive diversion. They offer the look of revitalization without touching the structural causes of atrophy. A participatory budget that allocates 5% of the investment envelope is a safety valve, not a transformation. Worse, it can become a tool for the executive to bypass the council entirely, consulting an unrepresentative sample of activists and claiming a legitimacy superior to that of elected representatives.
The path forward is not to dissolve representation into a digital agora. It is to strengthen the institutions of representative democracy at the level where they can still function: the commune. This means restoring fiscal capacity, clarifying the intercommunal mandate, and protecting the deliberative space of the council from executive overreach. A program of institutional sobriety, not of technological enthusiasm.
The Commune as a School of the Political
There is an older understanding of the commune that we abandon at our peril. For the republicans of the Third Republic, the commune was the pedagogical instrument of citizenship. It was in the management of the communal woodlot, the dispute over the path, the election of the school board, that the peasant became a citizen. The abstraction of the nation was made palpable in the tangibility of the patrimoine communal.
This function has not disappeared, but it is starved. A democracy that neglects its local foundations is a democracy that consumes its own legitimacy without renewing it. The rebuilding must begin with a recognition that the commune is not an administrative subdivision; it is a political community, the only one where the individual can still measure the consequences of his engagement. Treating it as a mere service provider hollows out the meaning of the res publica.
The International Mirror
France is not alone in this tension. Across Europe, the local level is squeezed between two forces: the centralizing logic of the administrative state and the centrifugal logic of identity politics. The commune, as a territorial unit, resists both. It is an anchor of rationality in a political sea that drifts toward abstraction and affect. Those who would defend liberal democracy against its illiberal challengers would do well to start here, at the level of the real, the concrete, the governable.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why does municipal abstention matter more than national abstention?
Municipal abstention is a direct measure of the rupture between citizens and the only level of governance they can physically touch. When a person does not vote for the council that decides the fate of his street, his children’s school, or his local taxes, it signals a collapse of democratic belief far deeper than a protest against a distant president. The commune is the place where abstention is not a political statement but a withdrawal from collective life.
Is the intercommunal structure irreparable?
No, but its reform requires a principle that has so far been missing: direct election of intercommunal executives. As long as the président de l’intercommunalité is elected by a college of municipal councilors, the citizen cannot hold him to account. Direct suffrage, on a separate ballot, would restore the democratic chain and force intercommunal policy to face public judgment. It would also clarify responsibilities, ending the game of blaming the other level of governance for every failure.
Can a mayor still exercise real power today?
The legal powers of the mayor remain considerable—public order, civil status, a substantial regulatory function—but their effective exercise is constrained by three factors: the suffocation of norms from Paris, the financial dependence on state transfers, and the judicial exposure that makes every decision a potential prelude to a court appearance. The mayor can still act, but the margin of maneuver has shrunk to the point where many of the most competent potential candidates simply refuse the office. Restoring the mayor’s authority requires a legislative act of confidence: fewer circulars, a clearer penal regime, and genuine fiscal autonomy.
The French commune is not a relic. It is the last redoubt of a democracy that still speaks the language of the concrete. To abandon it to administrative logic is to sever the Republic from its roots. The task of this generation is the rehabilitation of local power—not as a concession, but as the very condition of democratic survival.
