Two years ago, violent protests in many suburban areas (»banlieue«) drew attention to the growing social tensions in French society. In the elections this year, the issue of social cohesion was prominent. With the turn to a new generation of politicians, a new way of addressing the multi-dimensional complex of social problems has become a major concern of the French public. It is obvious that the emergence of urban violence has to be linked to the emergence of precarious living conditions for larger groups in French society. The opening up of the French economy to global markets has been a key factor in the rearranged role of the state in society which is particularly prominent with regard to the restructured welfare state.

The article follows Robert Castel’s line of analysis which asserts that the welfare state has been losing its anchorage in a broader concept of social democracy and can no longer cope with the challenges of a precarious society with a multitude of exclusionary processes. It argues that the difficulties of political representation in France, which were visible in the 2002 elections, have not been solved in 2007, when the abstention of voters at the presidential election was very low. Instead, the rebirth of political debate in the pre-election period expressed the »crisis of representation« in another way. With the persisting security discourse the fault line between insiders and outsiders in French society is still marked in the public debate. It is due to a long-term inability of the political system to establish sustainable links to civil society and new social movements. The renaissance of street protest since the mid-1990s and the banlieue uprising are seen as a consequence of missing forms of governance and the residue of republican concepts
of the state and politics. In short, the article critically observes that the sense of a new start in French politics must inevitably be reined in by the framework of permanent political arrangements and therefore limited in its ability to bridge the existing social divide of a precarious society.