Focus on France European Sovereignty Ipsos survey on behalf of the Fondation Jean-Jaurès and the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung Survey conducted by Ipsos on behalf of the Fondation Jean-Jaurès and the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung. Some 8,000 people were interviewed over the internet via Ip­sos’ Access Panel between 28 December 2020 and 8 Jan­uary 2021, making up eight samples of 1,000 persons representative of the national population aged 18 and over in France, Germany, Italy, Latvia, Poland, Romania, Spain and Sweden. The sampling was carried out in ac­cordance with the quota method(sex, age, occupation, rural/urban location, region). This summary presents the results on France. SOVEREIGNTY? IN FRANCE, AN IDEA ­ASSOCIATED WITH ROYALTY By way of preamble to the questions on European sovereign­ty, Ipsos asked the French and the Germans what comes to mind when they hear the term»sovereignty«. In France, the response was unequivocal. Out of the 1,000 persons inter­viewed, 300(!) spontaneously associated sovereignty with »king«. As many as 30 % gave this answer, which is excep­tional for open questions of this kind. Usually, the most fre­quent responses total around 10 %. This figure is even more remarkable, given that a whole host of associations clustered around the word»king« in the same semantic field:»queen« (8.7 % of words mentioned),»royalty«(5.7 %),»sovereign« (4.9 %),»monarchy«(4.5 %),»kingdom«(4.3 %), and even »crown«,»royal«,»château«,»prince«, all garnering be­tween 1 and 3 % of the words mentioned. By comparison, in Germany the terms that come to mind most frequently are rather in the range of 10 % and refer to »independence«(»Unabhängigkeit«, 7.4 % of mentions, »Unabhängig«, 4.8 %),»the state«(»Staat«, 4.2 %) or»free­dom«(»Freiheit«, 3.7 %). However, one would be wrong to conclude at this stage that these represent opposing visions. The values highlighted in Germany are also present in France, and in relatively similar proportions: the term»independent« is mentioned by 7.9 % of the French, the term»state« by 3.7 % and»freedom« by 2.8 %. It’s just that these evocations are eclipsed by the predominant association between»sover­eignty« and»king«, which necessarily affects the term’s con­notations. Consequently, the word»sovereignty« only evokes»some­thing rather positive« for 29 % of the French, in comparison with almost half of Europeans as a whole(46 %) and just un­der three-quarters of Germans(73 %). Similarly, just under one in two French people consider the notion to be»outdat­ed«(49 %), with only 12 % regarding it as»modern« and 35 % as»neither one nor the other«. This is a considerable distance from the European average(32 %»outdated«, 20 % »modern« and 40 %»neither one nor the other«), and even further away from the levels found in Germany(9 %»outdat­ed«, 31 %»modern« and 50 %»neither one nor the other«). On these two questions, France is a lot closer to its southern European neighbours, Italy and Spain.