# Pierre Mendès France, Financer la Reconstruction de la France. Problèmes économiques et financiers que pose la politique des investissements et de la reconstruction en France, Cours commun, ENA, promotion “Europe”, 1950

Présentation par Alain Chatriot, Paris, Comité pour l'histoire économique et financière de la France, 2023, 449 p.

Herrick Chapman

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URL: https://journals.openedition.org/histoirepolitique/18453

DOI: 10.4000/122m0

ISSN: 1954-3670

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Herrick Chapman, "Pierre Mendès France, Financer la Reconstruction de la France. Problèmes économiques et financiers que pose la politique des investissements et de la reconstruction en France, Cours commun, ENA, promotion "Europe", 1950", Histoire Politique [Online], Books reviews, Online since 22 July 2024, connection on 06 March 2025. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/histoirepolitique/18453; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/122m0

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Pierre Mendès France, Financer la
Reconstruction de la France. Problèmes
économiques et financiers que pose la
politique des investissements et de la
reconstruction en France, Cours
commun, ENA, promotion “Europe”,
1950

Présentation par Alain Chatriot, Paris, Comité pour l'histoire économique et financière de la France, 2023, 449 p.

Herrick Chapman

REFERENCES

Pierre Mendès France, Financer la Reconstruction de la France. Problèmes économiques et financiers que pose la politique des investissements et de la reconstruction en France, Cours commun, ENA, promotion “Europe”, 1950, présentation par Alain Chatriot, Paris, Comité pour l'histoire économique et financière de la France, 2023, 449 p.
1. From his early days as a rising star in the Radical Party of the 1930s to the end of his career, Pierre Mendès France made pedagogy central to his practice as a politician. He felt the French public needed a better understanding of economics if, as a democratic Republic, the country was to meet the challenges of economic modernization after World War II. Hence, he pioneered the use in France of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR)-style radio chats as Minister of National Economy in 1944-1945, a technique he would take up again as Prime Minister in 1954. He devoted much of his writing and speech-making over the course of his career to explaining economic problems and the ideas that informed the policies he advocated. As one of France's earliest and most visible proponents of the Keynesian revolution in economic thought, Mendès France brought to this pedagogy a missionary's sense of purpose.¹

2. He must have been elated, then, when in 1946 the newly founded École nationale d'administration (ENA) invited him to teach a course of his choosing in economics, an offer he took up in 1950 when he gave an ambitious series of lectures on what he entitled "Problèmes économiques et financiers que pose la politique des investissements et de la reconstruction en France." The course was well received by nearly forty students, who were all in the "Europe" promotion [cohort] of 1949-1951. The latter included many future luminaries in State Administration and public life, including François Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, who became a president of the Fifth Republic. The course gave Mendès France a chance to consolidate his thinking about public finance and the role of the State in economic reconstruction. It also strengthened his connection to a young generation of public servants, several of whom became policy experts in the *mendésiste* orbit of the 1950s.

3. To our good fortune, historian Alain Chatriot and the Comité pour l'histoire économique et financière have now published the full set of nineteen lectures that Mendès France delivered in the course, as well as verbatim renderings—pieced together in some instances from students' notes— of many of the discussions the teacher and his students had during class. Chatriot has annotated the text deftly with biographical and bibliographical references. Author of his own distinguished biography of Mendès France,² Chatriot introduces this volume with a superb essay situating the lectures in several contexts: Mendès France's career and thought, the early years of ENA and the distinctive features of the "Europe" cohort, and debates at the time in France over economic policy and Keynesian theory. The book, then, is much more than a welcome publication of one of the rare texts by Mendès France that have not already made it into print. It is an important contribution to the historiography on the man, on

Recueils de données

Financer la Reconstruction
de la France

Problèmes économiques et financiers
que pose la politique des investissements
et de la reconstruction en France

Cours commun, ENA, promotion - Europe -, 1950

Pierre Mendès France

Présentation
Alain Chatriot

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HISTOIRE ÉCONOMIQUE
ET FINANCIÈRE DE LA FRANCE
economic thinking in France in the late 1940s, and on the postwar reconstruction of France.

4 Few people were better positioned than Pierre Mendès France to teach such a course to an aspiring elite of public servants. He had a deep knowledge of economics and wide experience in government. By 1950 he had already served as Minister of National Economy during the first half year after the Liberation. Then, while continuing his career as a deputy in Parliament, he became an economic expert on the international stage through the late 1940s. He led the French delegation to the Bretton Woods conference (1944), where he finally met John Maynard Keynes himself, and he went on to work on projects at the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development.

5 Though he had a sophisticated command of economic theory, he brought to his ENA course something more unusual, a seasoned understanding of economic institutions, both French and international, and an astute sense of how to use them. He was a pragmatist, not a doctrinaire, and the voice of the learned practitioner comes through clearly in the lectures. Mendès France told his students to absorb Keynes's theories but also to recognize that their practical application varied over time and national context. History mattered. By way of example, he pointed to how the French acquired habits of economic misbehavior under the conditions of a foreign occupation during World War II (black market, tax evasion, and the like) that made it harder for many people to accept price controls and economic discipline after the Liberation. But as a pragmatic Keynesian he reminded his students that governments have many tools at hand to stimulate or constrain aggregate demand —monetary policy, taxes and subsidies, custom fees, control over the distribution of supplies— that need not always arouse strong public resistance. And his own adherence to Keynesian theory had its limits: as a staunch anti-inflationist, for example, Mendès France was less inclined than Keynes to acknowledge that moderate price rises could encourage investment.³

6 Mendès France's pragmatic Keynesianism shaped the very arc of the nineteen lectures. He began with the premise that the financing of investment lay at the heart of France's reconstruction and modernization. Public and private investment were equally important in his view, but the central challenge was for the State to stimulate investment, regulate demand, and contain inflation. The first half of the course explored how to generate investment, the second how the French State, notably via the Monnet Plan, chose to spend investment capital. Three themes ran through the entire course: the necessity of economic planning, the damaging effects of inflation, and the obligation to make choices, which were, he insisted, political.

7 Historians familiar with Mendès France's career will hardly be surprised by these themes. What is striking is how often his articulation of them in his lectures bore the scars of his experience as Minister of National Economy in 1945. In that role he had urged the de Gaulle government to embrace a robust approach to planning by giving his ministry strong command of formulating a multiyear program of investment and the power to channel resources accordingly. He envisioned this initiative as closely linked to an ambitious agenda for nationalizing banks and key industrial sectors, the better to implement the goals of planning, as well as to a tough anti-inflationary approach to monetary and fiscal policy. On all three fronts Mendès France faced opposition from Finance Minister Réné Pleven and then, fatefully, from de Gaulle himself. They deprived Mendès France of the Planning Authority he wanted, trimmed
back some of the targeted sectors for nationalization, and refused to take the political risks that austerity and tight money would have entailed. Mendès France resigned.⁴ But he remained confirmed in the conviction that only a strong, centralized Planning Authority could steer investment effectively to reshape the economy, thereby staking out the middle ground between laissez-faire and a command economy. He made this case in his lectures by criticizing Jean Monnet's "indicative" approach to planning as too weak to be worthy of the name. He also argued that it was a mistake for so many institutions —Parliament, local municipal authorities, big nationalized firms, and several key ministries— to raise and spend investment funds without the coordination and arbitration of a strong Planning Authority. The frustrations of 1945 cast a long shadow over his ENA lectures.⁵

The same could be said for Mendès France's scathing criticism of policy makers who, in rejecting his plans for financial rigor, acquiesced to inflation —which, as Alain Chatriot quotes him as saying in a radio chat of 1945, was “*le triomphe de l'immoralité et de l'inéquité sociale.*” (p. 12) Inflation was, of course, a not-so-hidden tax on those least able to pay it. But Mendès France argued in his 1950 lectures that inflation did economic damage far beyond social injustice. It stymied private saving, encouraged hording, weakened social security, and not least, in his view, undermined lending and hence investment. Inflation made serious economic planning nearly impossible. Monetary stability and price predictability, in short, were the sine qua non of a government-led drive for postwar recovery and economic modernization.

Creating these conditions required making hard political choices. Again, 1945 was his touchstone. In lecture five he argued that at the Liberation the de Gaulle government should have made the case to the public to limit consumption for a few more years for the sake of investment and a higher standard of living down the road. Here we see two Mendès France convictions at work: to govern is to choose (“*gouverner, c'est choisir*”); to lead is to educate the public. His most famous application of the imperative —to choose — was soon to come in 1953 and 1954 when he called on Parliament to end the war in Indochina, a choice made easier by the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu. Already in his 1950 lectures he was making the case that military spending was an unproductive use of resources at odds with the effort to reconstruct the country and invest in it.

If ministerial experience at the Liberation left its mark on his 1950 lectures, so too did his work as an international expert in the late 1940s. As a keen observer of policymaking and economic performance in Europe and North America, he wove international comparisons into many of his lectures to make arguments about the challenges and shortcomings of France. He especially relied on contrasts between the French and British economies and what he regarded as the Attlee Labour government's greater success in containing inflation and managing the postwar recovery. He admired the latter's willingness to urge the public to limit consumption to boost private saving (and thereby investment), as well as the British public's willingness to do so, for which he credited “*la psychologie (...) la discipline, et (...) l'esprit civique qui règnent en Angleterre.*” (p. 128) France, by contrast, had to turn to government funding to reach the same level of investment as Britain (about twenty per cent of national income). As a good Keynesian he certainly applauded the French State's prominence in this regard, but he envied Britain's capacity for private investment. He envied Britain, too, for its greater autonomy from American influence over the allocation of its Marshall Plan funds. From the vantage point of 1950, it is easy to see why Mendès France thought that “Socialist”
Britain was doing better than France. By the mid-1960s, however, after years of Tory rule in Britain and France's high growth rates after the early 1950s, that national comparison would no longer hold.

11 Mendès France brought to his fascination with international comparison a deep sense of economic patriotism. (I hesitate to say economic nationalism, which today connotes a more doctrinaire repudiation of the postwar liberal order that Mendès France played a role in building.) In his 1950 lectures he had little to say about the emerging CECA (Communauté européenne du charbon et de l'acier) and the prospects of continental economic integration. He was not, in fact, a fervent partisan of European integration in the late 1940s and early 1950s. He no doubt understood the difficulties that integration would create for national economic planning. Not until he was Prime Minister in 1954, when economic experts Simon Nora (General Secretary of the Commission des comptes de la Nation), Claude Gruson (Director of the Service des études économiques et financières), and François Bloch-Lainé (Director of the Caisse des dépôts et consignations) convinced him that France was ready for wider economic competition, did he call for steps such as liberalizing exchange controls, lowering tariffs, creating adjustment funds for workers and companies that would prepare the country for what would become the Common Market. And even then, he remained a critic of the proposed Treaty of Rome all the way to its signing in 1957.⁶

12 The lectures of 1950 represent a distinctive moment in the history of France's postwar reconstruction and in Mendès France's own career. Most of the institutional apparatus that the French employed to shape recovery and modernization—the Commissariat du Plan, nationalizations, the financial circuitry centered on the Treasury, the Marshall Plan, a Social Security system for pensions and medical care—were up and running by then. But no one could know how effectively these institutions would propel France into what would later be dubbed the *Trente Glorieuses*. The lectures capture the anxieties and uncertainties of the moment. Still, the tone of the lectures and class discussions that followed also convey a spirit of optimism, despite Mendès France's acerbic criticism of his governmental peers. He gave these lectures at the moment in his career when he was likely most confident about the positive role economic experts and Keynesian ideas could play in France's postwar recovery. It was the most dirigiste phase, you might say, in his intellectual trajectory. As Alain Chatriot notes in his introduction, not long before the lectures Mendès France had considered abandoning politics and becoming a full-time civil servant and expert on the international stage. He stuck with politics, of course, and in that respect the lectures not only displayed his extraordinary knowledge of the French economy but also prepared him to use that knowledge when given the chance to govern the country as Prime Minister in 1954. Ironically, as we know, his brief eight months in power, preoccupied as they were with Indochina, North Africa, and the question of German rearmament, largely diverted him from his economic agenda.

13 Another irony haunts these lectures in retrospect. For all the enthusiasm he felt for the training of future top civil servants in 1950, by the 1960s he would add his voice to the chorus of critics of the Gaullist “technocracy” of the Fifth Republic.⁷ He worried about how tightly connected many *énarques* had become to the Gaullist political elite and the dangers this posed to the independence of the high civil service.⁸ As a leading opponent of the Gaullist revolution of 1958, he remained a dogged critic of the General and an outspoken champion for democratizing the Fifth Republic, for finding ways to
counterbalance the expertise that all good government requires with a stronger voice for an active, well-informed citizenry. This conviction lies at the heart of the book he published in 1962, *La République moderne*, where he proposed a more democratic approach to economic planning. To read this latter text alongside the 1950 lectures is to see in stark relief both the enduring themes in Mendès France's postwar thought —the pedagogy, the enthusiasm for planning and State economic coordination, the ethic of choice-making— and his concerns for taming the administrative State in the later years of his career.

14

Publishing these lectures thus sheds welcome new light on a significant, but lesser known chapter in the life and thought of Mendès France. It makes more transparent what students experienced at ENA. And it exposes how they and their teacher, one of the key policy intellectuals of his time, sought to understand how to finance the most ambitious effort of economic reconstruction and modernization their country had ever undertaken.

## NOTES

1. On Mendès France et Keynes, see Philippe Wolff, « Pierre Mendès France et John Maynard Keynes: un premier repérage », and Robert Salais, « L'interprétation de Keynes par Pierre Mendès France », in Michel Margairaz (dir.), *Pierre Mendès France et l'économie: Pensée et action*, Paris, Odile Jacob, 1989, pp. 57-72 and pp. 103-108.

2. Alain Chatriot, *Pierre Mendès France: Pour une République moderne*, Paris, Armand Colin, 2015.

3. Robert Salais, « L'interprétation de Keynes par Pierre Mendès France », op. cit., p. 107.

4. On his struggles over economic policy in de Gaulle's government in 1944-1945, see Michel Margairaz, *L'État, les finances et l'économie: Histoire d'une conversion, 1932-1952*, vol. 2, Paris, Comité pour l'histoire économique et financière de la France, 1991, pp. 781-793.

5. On Mendès France and planning, see Olivier Feiertag, « Pierre Mendès France, acteur et témoin de la planification française, 1943-1962 », in Michel Margairaz (dir.), *Pierre Mendès France et l'économie: Pensée et action*, op. cit., pp. 365-393.

6. On Mendès France and European integration, see Richard Kuisel, « Pierre Mendès France et l'économie: une volonté de modernité », in François Bédarida et Jean-Pierre Rioux (dir.), *Pierre Mendès France et la mendésisme: L'expérience gouvernementale (1954-1955) et sa postérité*, Paris, Fayard, 1985, pp. 369-381.

7. See Gilles Le Béguec, « Pierre Mendès France et la technocratie », dans « Pierre Mendès France et la modernité », *Matériaux pour l'histoire de notre temps*, no. 63-64, juillet-décembre 2001, pp. 112-118.

8. Pierre Mendès France, « La Ve République et la haute administration ou le règne des "jeunes messieurs" », *Courrier de la République*, no. 34, novembre 1965.