France is a country with a long-standing tradition of an emphasis on its ‘center’ and a big distinction between its center and its peripheral regions. In my typology of four European countries in this book, France is a constitutionally unitary country with low to medium levels of interactive governance. This chapter will explain why it is so, and how it exemplifies the unitary state with strong central features, which has undergone a significant process of devolution and decentralization. At the same time, some recent reforms have had more recentralizing tendencies, maintaining the strong hold of the center. Therefore, in terms of both static and dynamic decentralization, France is an appropriate case to test the argument of this book.