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:This article is about the political and administrative structures of the French government. For French political parties and tendencies, see Politics of France.

In its Constitution, France declares itself to be an indivisible, laïque [roughly, " secular"], democratic and social republic. France's constitution enacts a separation of powers as well as the respect for a number of constitutional rights.

The national government of France is divided into an executive branch, a legislative branch and a judiciary branch. The President of France heads the executive branch; however, most of the power resides in his appointee the Prime Minister of France, the choice of which in practice has to be approved by the French National Assembly, the lower house of Parliament. Parliament passes statutes and votes the budget; it also controls the action of the executive through questioning and enquiry commissions. The constitutionality of the statutes is checked by the Constitutional Council. Finally, the independent judiciary is divided into the judicial branch (dealing with civil and criminal law) and the administrative branch (dealing with recourses against executive decisions), each with their own independent supreme court. In addition, the French government comprises various bodies checking against possible abuses of power.

France is a unitary state, meaning that its subdivisions do not have constitutional status. However, the various legal subdivisions, the régions, départements and communes, have various attributions, and the national government is prohibited from intruding into their legal normal operations.

1 The Constitution

Main article: Constitution of France

A popular referendum approved the constitution of the Fifth Republic in 1958, greatly strengthening the authority of the presidency and the executive in relation to Parliament.

The French constitution establishes a semi-presidential system, where the President of France has a strong influence, but where, ultimately, the deciding factor is the majority of the French National Assembly.

The constitution does not contain a bill of rightsA bill of rights is a statement of certain rights that citizens and/or residents of a free and democratic society have (or ought to have) under the laws of that society. In some jurisdictions, the bill of rights is entrenched in the constitution or Basic in itself, but its preamble mentions that France should follow the principles of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the CitizenThe Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen ( French: La Declaration des Droits de l'Homme et du citoyen , was one of the fundamental documents of the French Revolution, defining a set of individual rights (and collective rights of the people, as well as those of the preamble to the constitution of the Fourth Republic. This has been judged to imply that the principles laid in those texts had constitutional value, and that legislation infringing on those principles should be found unconstitutional.

Among these foundational principles, one may cite:

the equalitySee also the disambiguation page titled equality for the mathematical and geographical topics. Equality is a social state of affairs in which certain different people have the same status in a certain respect. There are different forms of equality, depend of all citizens before law, and the rejection of special class privileges such as those that existed prior to the French RevolutionThe period of the French Revolution in the history of France covers the years between 1789 and 1799, in which democrats and republicans overthrew the absolute monarchy and the Roman Catholic Church perforce underwent radical restructuring. While France wo;
presumption of innocence;
freedom of speech;
freedom of opinion including freedom of religion;
the guarantee of property against seizures;
the accountability of government agents before citizens.

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