Résumé
This article examines the main drivers of French defense expenditure between 1960 and 2010. France has to balance with two contradictory issues: strategic constraint and budgetary process. We assume that nonlinear approach is suitable to evaluate the demand function. Our results support latter assumption and we use time trend as transition function. Economic factors play a major role and considering the nonlinear pattern, we show that, before 1983, economic growth is inversely related to defense expenditure whereas the opposite arises after this threshold. Strategic considerations exert a little impact.