An interactive timeline exploring the history of U.S.-France relations.

Charles A. Kupchan, CFR’s top Europe expert, says the French presidential election kicking off this Sunday is “one of the most open in modern French history. It’s anybody’s to win.”

Three new candidates—and one familiar spoiler—are trying to impress a skeptical French public as they compete to succeed a weakened Jacques Chirac.

France has been reviewing its military doctrine in Africa, with a new emphasis on multilateralism. But events in Chad suggest unilateral action remains on the table.

This paper from the German Marshall Fund of the United States looks at the troubled tripartite relationship between Poland, France and Germany. The paper says this unstable relationship – the so-called ‘Weimar Triangle’ – has made it difficult to coordinate relations between the three countries, but notes that recent meetings have seen leaders of the three countries put contentious issues aside and concentrate on finding solutions to outstanding problems.

France, experiencing a prolonged domestic malaise, is seeking to define itself again with an active role in the Lebanon crisis—one the United States welcomes, in spite of some differences, given Washington's own foreign entanglements.

This Congressional Research Service (CRS) Report for Congress deals with the factors shaping France's foreign policy and U.S.-French relations (PDF).

The French government's backdown on plans to reform youth labor laws has raised concerns about the country's ability to adapt to globalization, as well as how failure to pass the law will impact the continent.

Charles A. Kupchan, CFR's top expert on Europe, says the continuing demonstrations and protests over an attempt to change the labor hiring laws in France are only symptomatic of a wider political crisis in Europe.

France faces a problem with its Muslim population, but it is not the problem it generally assumes.Paradoxically, it is the exhaustion of political Islamism, not its radicalisation, that explains much of the violence, and it is the depoliticisation of young Muslims, rather than their alleged reversion to a radical kind of communalism, that ought to be cause for worry. 

Michael Moran reports that calm returns, but some say it is just a lull.