Handling the COVID-19 crisis in France: Paradoxes of a centralized state-led health system

France was one of the European countries that was most severely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic in the first half of 2020. Despite the effective capacity of crisis management often ascribed to majoritarian democracies, the French centralized state-led health system is subject to rising critiques for the measures it has adopted and for the strategies it deployed to fight COVID-19. The identified policy failures question the central government’ capacities in crisis management more generally. This article sheds light on the policy responses to COVID-19 taken by the French executive and emphasizes that to understand the link between crisis and policy change, the policy trajectories prior to the crisis, the degree of politicization of the crisis, and the actor constellations existing throughout the crisis play a major role. National crisis reactions thus were far more driven by policy actors and political constellations, than by scientific advice or functionality.