Anglo‐American guilty pleas have inspired criminal justice reformers in many inquisitorially based systems in recent years, in response to caseload pressures. In France, two different procedures based on the defendant's confession were introduced in 1999 and 2004 respectively: an out‐of‐court disposal (the composition pénale) and a prosecution pathway (the comparution sur reconnaissance préalable de culpabilité). Basing its analysis upon direct observations and interviews with French public prosecutors, this article examines the impact of these procedures on the French criminal justice system and its actors. Rather than a move from an inquisitorial to a more adversarial system, data collected for this study show a bureaucratization of the French criminal justice process. The role of public prosecutors is changing from that of judicial officers to caseload managers who have delegated part of their workload to less qualified staff for efficiency purposes.

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Tasked with enforcing criminal law, public prosecutors worldwide enjoy broad discretion. Existing literature on prosecutorial discretion and accountability tends to discuss the regulation of prosecutorial discretion or analyse the influence of the procedural environment in which public prosecutors operate. This paper focuses on occupational culture as an important factor affecting prosecutorial decisions. It draws particular attention to an understudied aspect of prosecutors’ professional identity: legitimacy and, specifically, self-legitimacy, ie the belief public prosecutors have in their own legitimacy to make decisions in individual cases. The paper presents research findings from direct observations and interviews which reveal a sense of a loss of self-legitimacy amongst Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) staff due to the constant monitoring of their decisions by colleagues and managers. This all-pervasive managerialism, paradoxically, undermines the very legitimacy (and, relatedly, transparency) which the CPS has had to work so hard to develop since its inception.

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