Though deeply rooted in the Middle Ages, as in every EuropeanThis article offers a first effort to trace the history of the nonprofit organizations in France. French historians have been more interested in the origins of capitalism than in the genesis of the nonprofit sector, and so far as the 20th century is concerned, few archives of nonprofit organizations have so far been explored. For these reasons this article relies mainly on the work of historians such as Mollat, Agulhon, Gueslin, Vovelle, Braudel, and Zeldin and social scientists such as Alexis de Tocqueville and Michel Foucault (e.g., see

According to the "social origin theory" of civil society studies (Salamon/Anheier 1998), the nonprofit sector of today constitutes a "repository of former societal struggles and conflicts". Correspondingly, nonprofits are embedded in administrative and organizational settings, which in many cases date as far back as the latter half of the 19th century-a time when industrialisation and urbanisation started to exert influence in the western world. France and Germany stand for very different societal traditions, political legacies and administrative structures. Traditionally, France is a highly centralized country in which local governments do not enjoy much autonomy. In contrast, Germany is a federalized country where self-government of local communities was introduced as early as at the beginning of the 19th century. Against this background, it comes as a surprise that, aside from few exceptions, the nonprofit sectors in the two countries are very similar. How does this come? We argue that the reason why the French nonprofit sector of today is very similar to the German nonprofit European Civil Societies Compared: Typically German-Typically French?

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