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Introduction
In spite of Duverger's international notoriety, French legal scholars and political scientists did not pay special attention to the death in December 2014 of this particular French scholar. For example, the French Political Science Association paid homage to him on its Website but did not organize any specific event at its last congress in June 2015. However, it should be stressed that the Revue française de Science politique has very recently paid a short tribute to him and published in the same volume an article concerning the differences between Duverger and Sartori (Novak, 2015). For its part, the French Association of Constitutional Law decided not to mark his death, despite several requests from some of its members. That may be puzzling for Anglo-Saxon political scholars, who have, by contrast, paid great tribute to him notably by organizing two special roundtables: the first at the 2015 European Consortium for Political Research in Montreal, and the second at the 2015 American Political Science Association in San Francisco.
However, the lack of interest of French scholars with one of the world's most cited French authors is not really surprising viewed from France, since little attention is paid today to the things that mattered for Duverger. Certainly, French scholars who are working on political parties still refer to Duverger's (1951) seminal book, Les partis politiques. However, very few of them are interested in this issue today. There are even fewer French scholars who are concerned by Duverger's famous law. The lack of references is also particularly marked in France regarding the concept of semi-presidentialism that Duverger invented, while it has given rise to an extensive international literature.
What explains the persistent failure of Duverger's work to be recognized, even for it to be rejected, by French legal scholars and political scientists? Several reasons can be invoked to explain [...]such a disregard. Three are especially worth noting: an exclusive interest in the nature of the Fifth Republic, the particular structure of the French scientific field, and Duverger's scientific and political trajectory which gave rise to and continues to give rise to controversy.
The Nature of Fifth Republic
The concept of a semi-presidential regime that was first coined by Duverger in the 1970s has disrupted the classical binary classification of...