Maxime Lefebvre European Sovereignty Commentary on the Findings of the Survey in France A PARADOXICAL CONCEPT IN FRANCE The term»European sovereignty« confronts France with a paradox: France is the archetypal old sovereign nation-state built by the monarchy of the Ancien Régime and completed by the French Revolution. However, it is also France that has floated the notion of European sovereignty, specifically Em­manuel Macron, who has himself embraced»republican monarchy« à la française. We need to understand why this paradox is only apparent and draw what lessons we can learn from it in order to construct a European sovereignty. SOVEREIGNTY: A CONCEPT ASSOCIATED WITH THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE FRENCH NATIONAL STATE, BUT NOW LINKED TO THE AMBITION OF EUROPEAN POWER Until Emmanuel Macron’s speech at the Sorbonne on 26 Sep­tember 2017 European sovereignty did not exist in French public discourse, properly speaking. On one hand, there was French sovereignty, and on the other there were transfers or delegations of powers to Europe, which could be justified as being in France’s interests. The zealots of the construction of Europe have often argued that these transfers to the Europe­an Union do not curtail France’s sovereignty, but on the con­trary restore it, as the country’s influence and strength on the international stage diminish. This reasoning underlay the sup­port for the Maastricht Treaty and the project of the single currency. Before European sovereignty the notion generally supported in France was that of»Europe is strength«. But there is also a lot of dissatisfaction and disappointment in France in relation to various questions linked to European construction: loss of national control, the democratic deficit, an alleged»[economic/classical] liberal drift« by a Europe aiming to drive an unfettered globalisation, as well as Europe­an enlargement to encompass countries in central and east­ern Europe, which is not particularly popular in France. The project of a constitutional treaty, with its unfortunate conno­tations of building a federal European state, was accordingly rejected by the French people in 2005, by a clear majority of 55 per cent of votes cast. Many jurists, perhaps on purist grounds, reject the very notion of»shared sovereignty«: for them, sovereignty cannot be shared or delegated. France’s Constitutional Council initially re­jected out of hand any»transfers of sovereignty«(decision of 1976), before accepting»transfers of powers« on condition that the»essential conditions of national sovereignty« were preserved(decision of 1985). It has upheld this ever since. The positioning of French political forces in relation to the nov­el concept of European sovereignty is characterised by the same cleavages as afflicted the Maastricht Treaty, the project of a European constitution, and European construction in general. The pro-European Socialists, the Greens, the Republicans on the right, the»En Marche« movement and François Bayrou’s MODEM in the centre form a grand pro-European coalition