Is the Library a Political Institution?: French Libraries Today and the Social Conflict between Démocratie and République

Public libraries in the outlying suburbs of French cities, which are called banlieues, face many conflicts, occasionally violent. These conflicts take place within the context of important social, cultural, and political transformations that have accelerated during the last fifteen years. Librarians, faced with several competing conceptions of the political role of libraries, seem to waver among democratie (democracy), Republique (French Republic), and aspects of libraries that feature in social conflicts in which the classes populaires (roughly translated as " working classes ") are protagonists. The author of this paper shifts from French (his usual language) to English to highlight the place of libraries in the political sphere of contemporary French society. We hear and say that libraries are very important institutions for freedom and democracies. In France, both librarians and the authorities frequently acknowledge that libraries are political institutions, and they are. But what kind of political institution is a library? What is the nature of this political actor within its specific context? I will try to answer these questions from the point of view of French libraries. How do libraries fit into French political traditions? How do they project themselves into the future? What is the role that these libraries play in the current political situation, and how do they cope with the social conflicts that are found across French society? I refer in general to European libraries, but will focus principally on the French situation. This paper is not written in French (as I do most of the time), but in English. It is beneficial to write about French libraries in En-glish for an English-reading audience because if I think about this situation of the library as political institution in French, certain words and