Talk:List of political systems in France

Gaullist perspective
The original of this article came from fr:Liste des régimes politiques de la France, which has a Gaullist perspective. This can be seen in the soft-pedaling of the Vichy period. Links to Vichy are present in the last column, but the perspective can be seen in two ways: first, the fact that the table does not have a label like "pluralist dictatorship" (Hoffman style), or "unitary authoritarian dictatorship" in the first column, as if it's too embarrassing to acknowledge that France had that type of political system in its history. Of course, the Gaullists would say they didn't; that was an aberration, and not the "real France", which was an ideal embodied in London and North Africa. Secondly, that the last column has the tall, skinny half-width cell "French republic" extending from "1870 to present". That's a clear Gaullist perspective, which pretty much erases the authoritarian, Petainist government from the historical record. This talk page isn't the place to get into the details of the historiographical debate about how Gaullists and others view the French State; (that can be found elsewhere), but I wanted to raise the issue so we can have a discussion whether there's a question that needs to be addressed, here. Concretely, one might ask whether a row should be added to the table, listing either Hoffman's formulation, or "authoritarian dictatorship" in the first column or not. Currently, the only identifier mentioned in the left column for the period of WW II is "Free France" (and CFLN, GPRF), but not Vichy. That's not neutral, imho. A split left column cell might be an option. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 10:37, 31 July 2022 (UTC)
 * Tried the split left cell approach (here), but that doesn't leave enough width to have both "French Committee of National Liberation" and "Vichy regime" side by side, unless it's very skinny. I don't think this works. Mathglot (talk) 06:32, 4 August 2022 (UTC)

Cells with double borders
There is a minor formatting problem in the table where some cells appear to have an extra top or bottom border, such as the bottom of Ancien Régime ini column 6 (rows 1-3), and the empty cell right below it. I believe these may be related to miscounts on the  attributes. These border issues were inherited from the French original, and I think they are minor but if someone wants to look at it, note that rowspan="4" for 'Ancien Régime', but "5" for 'Royal Council', which seems to imply a skinny row with no data in it under 'Ancien Régime'. Fixing it may involve fixing other rowspan attributes in order to keep it all in sync as tables with rowspan *and* colspan attributes are complex and can blow up if one number is off, which may be why they gave up and left it that way. N.b.d., for comprehensibility of the table, so I think it's acceptable to just leave it as is. Mathglot (talk) 21:38, 31 July 2022 (UTC)

Finding sources in French
If you are looking for sources about topics like this one, here are some French buzzwords to consider for your queries: formes de gouvernement, régimes politiques, and systèmes politiques. Using the "find sources" template specialized for French search engines, gives the following: You can also pass an English query to some of the French search engines and get results. A set of "find sources" links for commonly used search engines for English language queries is in the Talk header box at the top of this page. Mathglot (talk) 05:09, 3 August 2022 (UTC)
 * formes :
 * régimes :
 * systèmes :

In-links
Besides the obvious choice of linking this (at least as a See-also) from the articles which have links on this page, there are some other articles where a link here would make sense: starting with: Outline of France, and some nav boxes, such as (in the "Overviews" section). Mathglot (talk) 09:38, 3 August 2022 (UTC)

Intro and Historical context sections
In the original French article, there was no text at all, other than the table and an 8-word lead, basically saying, "This is a list of political systems in France." A list article can (and should) have a lead section which introduces it, and in fact the List article guideline specifically supports it. As an example, see the article List of French monarchs, with its five-paragraph lead (some of which is worth stealing here (with attribution, of course). This article also needs something like that, but also a brief section on the "types" of political system (absolute monarchy, constitutional monarchy, feudal monarchy, republic, empire, dicatorship, etc.).

We could put it all in the lead, as in List of French monarchs, but I've elected to separate it into two sections, because the Intro is all about the terminology (attempts to answer the questions, "what is a political system?" and, "What political systems did France have?" without trying to put it in any order, or connect it with monarchs or presidents or republics. The Historical section attempts to provide a (very) brief chronological history of France's ruling dynasties, monarchs, assemblies, republics and so on, while attempting to link them with the name of the political system in effect. In this sense, the Context section is kind of brief prose summary of the table.

The List guideline recommends this kind of content as suitable for the lead, but in this case I think it works better this way. However, I'm open to other ways of doing it (including in the lead) if there's a good reason for it. Mathglot (talk) 00:46, 4 August 2022 (UTC)