The election of the president is the most important event in French political life. The president is a republican monarch who enjoys considerable powers and who is in a position to shape events not just in France but also in many different parts of the world. This is a study of the 1995 French presidential election.

It explains why Jacques Chirac was elected as the fifth President of the Fifth French Republic, examining the presidential campaign, the rivalries between the different candidates and the issues that preoccupied French voters. At the same time this is also a more general study of the French political system.

It places Chirac's election in the context of some of the long standing themes and debates in contemporary French politics, analysing the Fifth Republic's institutional structures, the behaviour of its political parties, the attitudes of its citizens and the nature of its governance.