Abstract
French economic expertise developed significantly during the interwar period when economic issues, and particularly those resulting directly from World War I, became the overriding concern for Europe's democracies. Before the end of World War II, three major institutes of conjuncture had been created, all of them driven by the need for economic policy indicators. ISRES was established in 1933 by Charles Rist, the Institut Français de la Conjoncture was founded in 1938 by Alfred Sauvy, and ISEA was founded in 1944 by François Perroux. Not surprisingly, all three were working on productivity measures. From 1936, debate was focused on the issue of the forty-hour week and then moved to the context of the arms race and the preparation for an inevitable war. The war period resulted in shortages that required planning of production; and in the postwar period the focus was on plans for the reconstruction of France and then Europe more generally. All these periods generated demand for differentiated economic expertise in productivity. In 1946, the first French National Accounts were published alongside the establishment of the Commissariat Général au Plan and INSEE, which resulted in another distinct period.
1. Introduction
In the early twentieth century, the world's nations were faced with a series of economic issues including war, economic reconstruction and the thorny problem of reparations, and successive economic crises (in 1923 in Germany, in 1929 in the United States, social crises in 1936). These enormously complex issues made people aware of the crucial need for international cooperation and economic expertise. The stakes were high in terms of both economic policy and democracy. It was also during this period that economics emerged as an autonomous discipline (Le Merrer 2011; Denord 2016). These two elements triggered the process of the institutionalization of economic expertise in France and the creation of economic institutes, an economics language, and specific economics tools.1 In this article, we consider experts as economic policy advisers who assess the economic risks and challenges and propose or design economic policies. We decided not to include consultancy services and to focus on public administration services and government and nongovernmental nonprofit agencies. We also further narrowed our scope. First, we focus on economic forecasting institutes. Second, recognizing that one of the main driving forces behind the discipline was economists’ growing interest in economic policy indicators, we identified in this wartime context the definition and measurement of productivity as being of central interest, a dominant but also structuring subject: the common thread running through the development of expertise in all these institutes. Finally, without denying important external influences, like the rising Keynesianism, or connections between international institutions that we mention sometimes, we are deliberately focusing on French institutional history.
Indeed, before the end of World War II, three major institutes of conjuncture had been created, all driven by the need for economic policy indicators. The Institut Scientifique de Recherches Economiques et Sociales (ISRES) was established in 1933 by Charles Rist,2 the Institut Français de la Conjoncture (IFC) was founded in 1938 by Alfred Sauvy,3 and the Institut de Science Economique Appliquée (ISEA) was founded in 1944 by François Perroux,4 with all three central to the productivity debate. This article uses archival material and the secondary literature to show how the three institutes grasped the productivity issue, driven by the specificity of the wartime economic context, but spurred, also, by academic competition.
Interestingly, the issue of productivity was present in all periods related to World War II—before, during, and after that global conflict. Debate began in 1936 in the context of the forty-hour week (Brisset and Fèvre 2023, forthcoming) and then focused on the arms race and the preparation for a war that had become inevitable (Marjolin 1986). The shortages imposed by the war period required production planning (Sauvy 1978; Grenard, Bot, and Perrin 2017), while the plans for the reconstruction of France and then the whole of Europe during the postwar period called for a national accounting system to guide and monitor these economic reconstruction policies (Boulat 2002, 2006, 2008). Each of these periods generated demand for differentiated economic expertise in productivity. The first French national accounts were produced in 1946 in parallel with the creation of the Commissariat Général au Plan (CGP) and the Institut National de la Statistique et des Etudes Economiques (INSEE), which represented another historical milestone.
We focus on the period from 1936 to 1946 and the history of the three main institutes referred to above. We analyze their missions, their—sometimes overlapping—communities, and their different trajectories. Although the economic priorities and productivity issues shifted during this period, we can identify individuals, structures, and continuities in the development of economic expertise in France. In line with other more historical works, we argue that the Vichy period, an undoubtedly specific episode in the rise of economic expertise in France, cannot be relegated to a “parenthesis” in this history of French economic expertise.
So far, most research on the history of French economic expertise focuses on the post–World War II period (Fourquet 1980; Touchelay 1993; Terray 2002; Chatriot 2002). For instance, although Fourcade (2009) provides an important survey of the development of economic expertise in France and compares the competences of academic economists and engineering economists,5 she focuses on the long term and neglects the World War II period and its influence on economic expertise. By focusing on the intersection between economic (and institutional) history and the history of economics, this article aims to contribute to a better understanding of this episode. Our “French” history,6 although not addressing this point directly, provides evidence of this international influence at different times. We exploit original archival material on various institutions (Banque de France, CGP, Rockefeller Foundation) and individuals (Rist, Vincent, Froment, Uri, Marczewsky, Marjolin, Perroux, Uri, Gruson, etc.) to shed light on the emergence of economic expertise as a type of economic knowledge, in its historical, institutional, and, sometimes, political contexts.7
Our purpose being to capture the impact the war context had on the development of French economic expertise, the article is organized as follows. Section 2 briefly depicts the context in which the three main institutes emerged. Section 3 exposes the development of the productivity issue—definition of the concept and measurement—in the prewar context when debates were mainly driven by the political and economic controversies of the forty-hour work week as well by the increasingly pressing context of the arms race against an increasingly powerful Germany. Section 4 examines the communities of experts that existed under the Vichy regime and how their priorities, while still related to productivity, were now to manage shortages. Such a context led them to review their position on planning. Section 5 concentrates on the end of the war. In section 6 we express our concluding remarks. We reflect on how the institutions, people, and economic tools developed and mobilized before, during, and finally at the end of the war period were being redirected to serve postwar economic national (and European) recovery from the immediate postwar period.
2. French Economic Expertise and the Development of Dedicated Institutes: A Brief (Institutional) History
During the interwar period, the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Foundation (LSRMF) provided support for thirteen economic institutes, mainly located in Europe, to “foster the growth of intellectually strong centres of interdisciplinary research where empirical methods of research were used” (Craver 1986: 207). Concerning France, Charles Rist was asked to develop a report to consider the potential of financing an institute of that kind.8 There were already institutes collecting data or experts’ committees, but Rist's report (1923: 7, 8) argued that a big transformation was needed:
To sum up; a great effort has been made during the last 50 years to introduce into France the teaching of economic, political and social sciences. But this teaching is very scattered although centered chiefly in the Faculties of Law and in the Faculty of Letters. . . . We perceive that the professors who are concerned with this branch of education, in spite of very great differences in training, are all working towards a common aim. . . . All look upon the social sciences as positive sciences, based on observation, and feel that the same method applied to the exact sciences should be applied more and more to their own field of inquiry.
His report focused on two distinct arguments. First, Rist stressed the urgent need for the establishment of a social science research institute in France to study rapid economic change and technical progress (productivity). Debate on production and productivity had begun but was seen as an element in an applied research program. However, Rist believed that applied research would lead to more “traditional” academic research and, perhaps, to more academic journals, which he saw as a benefit. Along with Sauvy (1972), he also believed that France was lagging behind the United Kingdom and Belgium.9 Finally, Rist argued forcefully for the rapid emancipation of economics from law faculties. He insisted on the need for quantitative and comparative studies (applied economics) and a center that would focus on the economics literature and on databases. Such an institute would enable the development of expertise while also working to inform the public “to [bring] to the fore controversies of public importance, those elements of fact which are unquestionable and undisputed, in the absence of which discussion is futile” (Rist 1923: 16). Although he agreed with Rist's diagnosis, Beardsley Ruml, then executive director of the LSRMF (Tournès 2011, 2008) disagreed with the solution. Ruml was in favor of the establishment of several institutes, within universities, to support the existing initiatives. For various reasons, any decisions were postponed. In 1926, Rist was appointed vice-governor of the Banque de France, a position he left in 1929, when he worked again as an international monetary adviser.10 The grandes écoles system included the important Centre Polytechnicien d’études économiques or X-Crise group, which was set up in 1931.11 The aim of the X-Crise group, which included several types of economic expertise, was to quantify facts, to develop econometrics. While their concerns were similar, the engineering economists criticized the academic economists for the lack of theory and formalization underpinning their work. The X-Crise group could be likened to an intellectual catalyst and a center for debate, although it did not pretend to contribute directly to the development of expertise.
In the 1930s, the emphasis on economic expertise increased markedly due to the seeming inevitability of another world war. Tensions among nations were palpable, the need for quantitative analysis became more urgent, and, as the onset of a second world war loomed larger, governments were forced to align their economies to focus on preparation for war. It resulted in the development of tools to manage a wartime economy: “France sails on . . . without lighthouses; it has no business institutes, no free information organisations” (Sauvy 1972: 18). The growing threat of war and the overall weakening of the French economy triggered serious consideration of these issues and resulted in the creation of three major Institutes of Conjuncture (ISRES in 1933 established by Rist, IFC in 1938 established by Sauvy, and ISEA in 1944 established by Perroux) over the next ten years. These institutions initially focused on distinct topics: price levels and world competition (ISRES), unemployment (IFC), and economic cycles and the international monetary system (ISEA). However, they all became involved in research on productivity and the need for macroeconomic (aggregate) models and the development of a national accounting system.
3. Economists Preparing the War
In the early 1920s, productivity became a central topic for French engineers and managers, who started to look at the innovative techniques that were developing in the United States: Taylor's scientific management had prompted the improvement in productive organization and a significant increase in productivity. French engineers and managers aimed at applying a similar productive organization. In France, Taylor's principles were first applied through the support of consultancy offices created in that period.12
The need for a rational organization of production became even stronger with the 1929 crash and the consequent economic difficulties of the 1930s. The so-called Bedaux system was increasingly applied to the detriment of labor conditions and wages (Moutet 1997).13
In April–May 1936, the Popular Front, a union of left-wing parties, won the political elections. Two main issues were at the core of the new government's reflections and program: the question of a forty-hour work week and the problem of prices. Both issues were strictly connected with the question of productivity. The way they were debated and dealt with had important consequences on the emergence of economic expertise. During the summer 1936, the newly elected Blum government promulgated the law that brought the working hours per week from forty-eight to forty for the same wage level. The government justified the law on the basis of some elements (the unemployment due to the economic crisis and the will to increase people's purchasing power; see Chatriot 2002), but of course the urgency to stop strikes and factory occupations played an important role. The law was strongly criticized from several quarters, especially because it occurred at a very critical time: the consequences of the economic crisis were increasingly combined with tensions that were inevitably to lead to war. Furthermore, the forty-hour law collided with the other crucial issues concerning the need to control prices in order not to capitulate to foreign competition.14 In an article titled “Prix français et prix étrangers” published in June 1936, the economist Robert Marjolin emphasized the severity of the situation: French prices were 50 percent higher than foreign prices. His article made use of the data provided by ISRES.15
ISRES produced a large body of documents. Its objectives related to economic expertise were clear: starting in 1934, Marjolin published some three hundred pages a year as part of a series titled the Chronologie économique internationale. A quarterly review, L'activité économique, was published in April 1935 and became popular in academic, political, and administrative circles. ISRES was also the first organization in France to promote an international vision of the economy. Rist and the staff he recruited had international experience (and reputation) and were embedded in a number of networks and academic and international organizations. ISRES expertise in 1935 was mainly in two economic areas: unemployment and the relative decline of France's economic power compared to its immediate neighbors. In this context, Philippe Schwob was an important actor and engaged in numerous overseas visits to eminent researchers (Bertil Ohlin, Ragnar Frisch, Jörgen Pedersen, Léon Dupriez, and Paul van Zealand). The question of economic recovery was linked closely to the debate on devaluation (or not) of the franc. These issues were discussed in the journals Europe nouvelle and L'activité économique to which Marjolin, for instance, contributed regularly, sometimes as coauthor with Schwob, and by the X-Crise group.16 The articles were precise, documented, and well argued: a format that was imposed progressively as can be seen from Marjolin's annual Chronologie économique internationale.17 When World War II broke out, the government turned to ISRES for advice.18 But let us go back to 1936.
The great social and economic turmoil and the complexity of the issues at hand urged the Blum government to create a new ministry, the Ministry of the National Economy (MNE; see Margairaz 1991) to support the already existing Ministry of Finance. MNE was headed by Charles Spinasse, an SFIO activist and a member of X-Crise (Dreyfus 1990),19 together with Jean Coutrot and Alfred Sauvy.
Coutrot became director of the Comité national d'organisation scientifique du travail (COST) created in November 1936. Its main aims were to deal with the problem of prices and to promote a more rational productive organization. Coutrot's ideas were synthesized in a book he published in July, L'humanisme économique, ideas that he tried to implement through the activity of the COST. The keyword was productivity, understood as “productivity of work hours” (Coutrot 1936: 72). Coutrot encouraged a number of measures, both micro and macro, that were typical of a “third way,” with an important role for the state (with a planned sector) and the unavoidable need to coordinate labor and capital.20 In order to deal with such important issues, it was necessary to have as much information as possible. This is why Spinasse decided to better organize the existing Statistique Générale de France (SGF) and increasingly rely on its work. Alfred Sauvy at that time was working at the SGF and, as we will see shortly below, in 1938 became director of the important Institut de Conjoncture, which developed the first attempts at national accounting.
Facing the problem of productivity and prices and at the same time attempting to guarantee the forty-hour week was not a trivial matter. The forty-hour week was increasingly perceived as an obstacle to growth and to the rearmament needs that were becoming pressing. A decree law of August 25, 1937, established a committee of inquiry on production (Margairaz 1991), which stimulated an open debate on productivity. The law provided for a division of labor among thirteen different technical departments by production branches and a central committee designed to organize the work among them. Each department was tripartite among ministries, trade unions, and employers’ organizations. This structure interestingly anticipates the future CGP modernization commissions but also the corporatism implemented by the Vichy regime during the war (Caldari 2021a).
While during the 1920s and in the early 1930s the question of productivity had interested mainly business managers and engineers at a micro level, starting from 1936 and during the war, it became a macro question that directly involved the state. Soon before the war, the main problem was to get the country ready for making a substantial war effort. It was Marjolin above all who openly underlined the urgency of this issue. In a paper published in March 1938,21 he anxiously questioned the economic capacity of France and its recent and rapid economic and financial decline, which he considered as dangerous for national defense. For him, the main problem related to the forty-hour week, which reduced France's productivity and production. Interestingly, Marjolin emphasized the links between economic power and war and how they influence the long-run relationships among nations: if France had economic weight, comparable to that of Great Britain, it would be able to have a major impact on the fate of Europe (1986: 72–74).
In May 1938, Marjolin came up with a recovery plan involving a massive mobilization of labor and investment under the authority of the state (Marjolin 1986: 79). He was a fierce critic of the policy of major works to remedy unemployment: in his view, France had no unused production capacity. Work was limited only by the forty-hour week. Comparing the measures taken in France to those adopted by Goering as plan commissioner in Germany, Marjolin considered that increasing production was a matter of “national salvation” (78).
In October 1938, Marjolin published a new article in Europe nouvelle and again warned about the “fundamental requirements of French economic recovery.” He referred to contemporary debates opposing the respective merits of a “directed economy,” a “controlled economy, and even an “oriented economy” and tried to move beyond: “France is not dying because its economy is not directed enough or not free enough. It is declining because we have lost the sense of effort, because the workers no longer work” (1938: 1308). Marjolin explained that his calculations showed that full employment of available labor would generate only a 10 percent increase in production. In his view, the only solution was to abandon the hard-won forty-hour week. Production and productivity entered these debates.
At this time still fundamentally opposed to planning à la de Man,22 Marjolin, as soon as the war started, accepted the necessity of planning imposed by the war and aimed at managing scarcity and shortages of resources and their allocation to essential activities. Marjolin insisted that effort was required to prioritize needs. The plan became a necessity and not an ideological stake anymore. Production, productivity, planning, and national accounting became closely interrelated topics.
Marjolin's position was far from being isolated, especially among the economists (Asselain 1984; Chatriot 2002). Their critical opinion toward that measure became dominant with the imminence of war, and the new government elected in April 1938 (Daladier government) repealed that law.
4. Economists Managing the War?
4.1. France Occupied: The Need for a Directed Economy
German occupation significantly disrupted the whole French economy and caused unprecedented shortages (Sauvy 1978). The Vichy regime responded by adopting measures aimed at establishing tight control over all economic activity. Historians such as Henry Rousso consider the Vichy experience as the most extreme dirigisme ever experienced in France. In the absence of trade unions or parliamentary representatives, the economy was controlled by Organizing Committees (OCs).23 The occupier plundered resources vital for production, but by devaluing the franc and setting up a currency of occupation, they made France finance this plunder (Grenard, Bot, and Perrin 2017). All of this was brutal for the French. With the law of August 16, 1940, the Vichy government created the Office Central de Repartition des Produits Industriels and the OCs that had to review the enterprises, define production programs, and regulate the market.24 The OCs had to give all the information to the Service des monographies industrielles, which was created in 1942 by the engineer Henry Fayol and subsequently integrated into the Centre d'Information Interprofessionel. Through these centers, Vichy greatly contributed to the development of industrial statistics and national accounting.
4.2. France Is “Occupied,” and So Are Economists: Who Is Working on What?
Another important center for collecting and spreading information was the Service National des Statistiques, which in 1940 merged Sauvy's Institut of Conjuncture and other smaller institutions. During this period, statisticians and engineers undertook new research and developed analysis techniques. Sauvy's (1972: 212) “admirable collaborator” was the engineer André Vincent.25 Vincent's major contribution was to productivity (firm productivity, national productivity, and the concept of total factor productivity).26 His work is recognized, also, as the first serious attempt to measure national income,27 and his influence can be identified clearly in the work of Fourastié.28 He identified productivity as key to understanding economic conjuncture and, also, as a measure that could not only guide economic policy but also assess the economic power of nations, enabling them to compare themselves with their partners and rivals (Boulat 2019: 107). He had published a few papers in 1936 and 1937, but his first important contribution was a book published in 1941. Building on his engineering background (Benistand 2022: chap. 1), Vincent proposed a relatively simple productivity calculation, which, long before Fourastié’s proposals, incorporated, in a single equation, “productivity, technical progress, standard of living and well-being of the population” (Boulat 2008: 81). His originality lay in the fact that he did not focus only on productivity calculation but immediately offered a general view, which described a directed economy and its planning requirements.29 Indeed, his aim was to transpose the scientific organization of work from firms to the national level.30 This experience convinced him that, while planning was necessary to control firm profitability and, logically, to control the nation, he did not consider either totally directed planning or pure liberalism as good options. The various production workshops had to be given freedom of action. He opted for centralized planning but left it up to teams to organize themselves in detail: “In the nation as in the firm, organisation must stop at the point where it becomes less effective than the action of individual initiatives” (Vincent 1941: 14). The intuition was that enabling national activities to be harmonized guaranteed, in that economic order, the smooth development of progress (7). Vincent considered that while the directed economy was a product of the war, it should not disappear with the end of the war: for him, the directed economy was (also) a response to the excesses of liberalism.31 His work perfectly reflected the concerns of the time (Benistand 2022). In a historical context marked by the violent economic crises of capitalism and the Marxist revolution, he rejected both liberalism and a totally directed economy. Like others,32 he was looking for a third way. His willingness to build an economic (and social) order based on rationalization of the labor forces was compatible with the type of corporatism supported by the Vichy regime; and, in addition, he developed his ideas at the exact moment France had to begin managing the shortages caused by the war. Planning became a matter of course, which, henceforth, was devoid of its prewar ideology. Vincent published regularly in La vie industrielle and later in Production, explaining how conjuncture analysis enabled the link between planning and a directed economy.33 He identified clearly that efficient planning in a directed economy required reliable statistics and national accounting.
In 1941, Sauvy contacted Vincent and in November Vincent joined the Institut de conjoncture Français (ICF) in Paris to head the General Economics section, responsible for producing the institute's industrial and international trade statistics. From 1943, he extended its research topics, including national accounting and technical progress. His ideas are summarized in his 1943 work on economic conjuncture (1943b). Gradually, productivity became not only a measure of efficiency or profitability but also a measure of technical progress.34 Vincent collaborated on this issue with Pierre Froment, a statistician, and their results were published in 1944 in a book entitled Le progrès technique en France depuis 100 ans (1944). Vincent's work gave scientific status to the concept (and measurement) of productivity (Boulat 2019: 107).35 When, in 1945, Sauvy accepted a position in the provisional French government,36 Vincent succeeded him as ICF director.
During the war, there was another group of economists working at the Centre d’échange de théorie économique (CETE), which was created by (and as part of) the Carrel Foundation (see Brisset and Fèvre 2021). The Carrel Foundation, for a time, was headed by François Perroux (September 1942 to December 1943), but Henri Denis was eventually appointed director of CETE. The center's scientific activity brought together renowned economists such as Maurice Allais, Charles Bettelheim (Allisson, this issue), François Divisia, Henri Guitton, Gaëtan Pirou, and Alfred Sauvy, who were to occupy key positions in postwar economic planning. In 1944, Perroux had a disagreement with the Carrel Foundation. He considered that its work was not sufficiently applied and took up the position of head of ISEA.
A large part of ISEA's entourage and Sauvy's team played a crucial role for the emergence and first steps of the CGP, as we will see shortly. First, we must introduce another figure who largely contributed to the development of studies on productivity and the expansion of economic expertise: Jean Fourastié (1907–90). The ideas developed in Vincent's and Froment's 1944 book (role of technical progress, links between technical progress and social progress, international comparisons) were taken and further developed by Fourastié (Boulat 2006). Fourastié was mobilized during the war and was captured, but he quickly escaped and soon after his return to civil life was invited to join the Vichy government. In 1942, he became a member of the cabinet of the minister of finance, Yves Bouthillier. Fourastié published several documents during the war period, but his L’économie française dans le monde, the book published in 1945, was what definitively identified him as a leading expert. The book aimed at understanding “how France missed the mark on economic progress in the interwar period and how it could remedy it” (Fourastié 1945: 5). In this book, Fourastié uses the term “productivity” as a synonym for “human labour return” and largely emphasizes labor productivity as the crucial factor for economic development. Fourastié’s book attracted the attention of Jean Monnet, who at that time was creating the CGP (Caldari 2021a).37 His contribution to the productivity calculation dates from 1949 and, thus, cannot be attributed to the Vichy period or only indirectly, via the influence of Vincent (1944).
5. Preparing the Postwar Reconstruction Era, 1944–46
By creating an urgency for expertise, the war undoubtedly accelerated its institutionalization, a process that started well upstream. It imposed a hierarchy of the necessary knowledge, but, in neither period before or after the war did its direction change fundamentally: the topics were already identified, and the research programs were underway.
The Vichy period is rightly considered as a specific French episode, but it does not mean that it represented a real break in the development of expertise. The diagnosis must be much more nuanced. On the one hand, the gradual transformation of expertise in France was part of a more profound trend already rooted in the history of the 1930s and, in some cases, a legacy of the aftermath of World War I. On the other hand, managing shortages through a combination of planning, dirigisme, and corporatism were its hallmark. If, in hindsight, we consider how this influence manifested itself, we cannot claim that the Vichy regime spawned a fully new approach, but by allowing experimentation, the Vichy regime undoubtedly solidified these visions in many administrations, which then prolonged their influence beyond the war. The Vichy period can be understood as a filter, alternately reinforcing or attenuating various emerging or preexisting influences and, potentially, producing an economic expertise dynamics of its own (Brisset and Fèvre 2020a, 2020b, 2021), which finally had a lasting influence on the definition and construction of the tools that would come to govern economic expertise after World War II.38
At the time of the liberation, when the cards seemed to have been reshuffled, the majority of those experts came back to work. In the postwar context of the reconstruction of national economies, those three institutes, along with the Service National des Statistiques (established 1940) and INSEE (established 1946), were, by necessity, urged to build national accounting and, more especially, to produce productivity calculations.
What expertise was needed for postwar reconstruction? The concept of productivity was closely associated with the idea of modernizing the economy, which was prevalent in the interwar period but took on a new dimension after the war. It was no longer a question of adjusting the economy but rather one of rebuilding the productive apparatus that the period of occupation had either rendered obsolete or totally destroyed (Marjolin 1986: 163–76). The economy remained in a state of extreme shortages;39 planning was still necessary and made the influence of those with experience of managing shortages crucial, so that opportunities sprang up for a new generation of experts either within or closely allied to the administration.
An overall plan was drawn up to ensure modernization of production capacity and rapid improvement to the population's living conditions. It involved a fine balancing act, combining the long- and short-term goals of efficiency and social justice.
6. Concluding Remarks: New Centers of Gravity for Economic Expertise in the Postwar Period
In the postwar period, the expertise landscape changed,40 although there was some continuity of institutions and staff. Some former members of ISRES had died or had joined other groups, like Marjolin, who joined Monnet at the newly created CGP (1946). The government and its structures took on some of the work of ISRES, but the postwar period was also a period of planification, an era less favorable to the ideas of Rist and his team. In 1949, ISRES became the center for the study of economic activity. ISEA remained unchanged until much later. IFC, which had been part of the Service National des Statistiques since 1940, was absorbed in the newly created INSEE in 1946 as we saw above.
The year 1946 is a very significant one for the history of France and is a natural boundary for our present investigations. World War II officially ended in May 1945, but after the collapse of Vichy (June 3, 1944), General de Gaulle had already established a provisional government that lasted until January 20, 1946, which was followed by the interim government of Felix Gouin. On October 27, 1946, the fourth French republic was then established. The CGP was officially established on January 1, 1946, and its activity deeply characterized the first postwar period. Its establishment was due especially to the efforts of Jean Monnet,41 who very skillfully managed to keep together the different economic and political trends that had emerged during the war.42 The CGP's main objectives were recovery and modernization, which, under Monnet's leadership, implied (i) development of national production and international trade, (ii) increased labor productivity, (iii) guaranteed full-employment, and (iv) improved living standards (Monnet 1976: 346). Achieving such ambitious objectives with the country's extremely scarce resources explains Monnet's key role in the introduction of planning in France. In the CGP, Monnet gathered a small team of collaborators, among whom we find Jean Fourastié, Etienne Hirsch (engineer), Robert Marjolin, Pierre Uri (ISEA), Vincent, Froment, and Dumontier (IC-SNS). At the CGP, Jean Fourastié led a subcommission whose objective was to analyze the human aspects of productivity. In his first report, Fourastié showed that labor productivity in France was a third of the productivity in the United States. At the end of the 1940s, Fourastié feared that French “underdevelopment” would tip the country toward Communism,43 and the Marshall Plan was adopted. Beyond provision of financial support, the Marshall Plan recommended deep economic reforms, including modernization of the productive apparatus and integration in the European Recovery Programme.44
Monnet also relied on the cooperation of Sauvy and the main institutes of research we mentioned above. ISEA, for instance, produced for the CGP a number of important studies on national accounting, including Perroux's “Evaluation du revenu national et la politique économique quantitative” and “L’évaluation du revenu national et ses utilisations,” Marczewski's “Les budgets nationaux” (1948) and “Les tableaux de la comptabilité et du revenu de la nation” (1946), and Uri's “Compatibilitè d'entreprise et revenu antional” (1946) and “Conditions et plan du travail nécessaire au calcul du revenu national français”(1947); in 1947, Perroux, with Pierre Uri and Jan Marczewski, published the first French volume on national accounting, Le revenu national.
The main need and target was to increase productivity. Since its inception, for the first plan, CGP created a productivity subcommission within the Manpower Commission: directed by Fourastié and Pouderoux, it was organized according to Monnet's idea of concert (and on the model of the 1937 committee of inquiry on production) with ministries, trade unions, and employers’ organizations working together. The subcommission relied on the information collected under Vichy and used the data provided by the Service des monographies industrielles. A large part of those data concerned American industry, which became the model to follow.
The Bureau des statistiques et d’études financières (BSEF) was established in 1946 and later became the Service des Etudes Economiques et Financières (SEEF) as part of the Finance Ministry and represented a consolidation of the organization set up by Claude Gruson in 1947.45 BSEF's mission was to focus on national accounting, which was extended to economic analysis and forecasting. It was responsible for establishing the economic accounts and the economic budgets, developing the financial aspects of the Plan, and producing studies related to sectoral economic policy. SEEF became much more, an intellectual center that welcomed reformers (Terray 2002).46 Both CGP and BSEF were created by economists who, despite their differences, are still considered part of an avant-garde (Gaïti 1989, 2002), “an almost mythical generation, great servants of the state . . . who had rebuilt France” (Raymond Barre, in Marjolin 1986: viii). It was in this context of enthusiasm combined with rebellion that Gruson and SEEF gradually regained control over the preparation of the nation's accounts: for ten years, Gruson was the person responsible for building the French national accounting system.47 He considered that the national accounting should provide information on levels of activity but should also guide public action and help to establish budget forecasts. In short, it should link all the economic sectors and, ultimately, provide an understanding of the evolution of a given economy over time. In this sense, it ousted Richard Stone's work (see, e.g., Meade and Stone 1944; Stone 1954), which focused on aggregate measurement of variables rather than an understanding of their evolution. This disagreement was profound and reflected Gruson's assumed interventionism.48 It might also explain why, for some time, France developed a national accounting system distinct from already existing systems.
We would like to thank Michele Alacevich, Spencer Banzhaf, Marcel Boumans, Vincent Carret, Robert Dimand, Ariane Dupont-Kieffer, Steve Medema, Antonella Rancan, Sylvie Rivot and the 2023–24 group of HOPE Center young scholars, and the two anonymous referees for comments on a previous version of this article. This article is part of ANR Project ANR-23-CE27-0013.
Notes
We define tools as knowledge that translates into actions (Terray 2002: 3).
Charles Rist (1874–1955) was a leading economist of his time, a university professor and international expert on monetary issues. He was one of the originators of the Franc Poincaré and a consultant to governments in Europe. He was the first director of the Banque de France’s first forecasting office and the first director of France’s first economic research institute, ISRES, created in 1933 with the financial support of the Rockefeller Foundation.
Alfred Sauvy (1898–1990) was a French economist, demographer, and sociologist. He was behind the creation of the Institut National d’Études Démographiques (INED), of which he was the first director (1945–62). During the interwar period, he took part in the discussions of the technocratic X-Crise circle. Involved with successive governments, under the Daladier government (1938), he was adviser to Finance Minister Paul Reynaud, who, on his recommendation, abolished the forty-hour week instituted by Léon Blum, increasing working hours to 41.5. At that same period, he became the first director of the Institut Français de la Conjoncture, created in 1938. Sauvy was professor at the Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris from 1940 to 1959.
François Perroux (1903–87) was a French economist. He quickly embarked on a brilliant career, receiving grants from the Rockefeller Foundation for stays in Berlin, Vienna, and Rome from 1934 onward. His work continued uninterrupted during the war (Brisset and Fèvre 2020a, 2020b, 2021, 2023, forthcoming). In January 1944, he founded the Institut de Science Économique Appliquée (ISEA), renamed the Institut de Sciences Mathématiques et Économiques Appliquées (ISMÉA) in 1974.
This dual higher education system is peculiar to France (Desrosières 2010; Fourcade 2009). The duality is depicted, traditionally, as represented by the theoretically oriented approaches preferred by academics at the law universities versus the more applied approaches favored by engineers in the grandes écoles. Such a distinction is clearly not unfounded, but we do not believe that the French research landscape is so binary or that such a representation really captures the complexity of the academic landscape in France in that period. Discussing this point would require going well beyond the necessarily limited scope of this article, but the intellectual permeability between these institutes that our research reveals challenges a view of these communities as truly segmented.
In line with Benest (2022), we think that French economists developed their expertise in isolation from other nations and, particularly, the Anglo-Saxon countries (Barbaroux, Dal Pont Legrand, and Torre 2018).
Archives consulted are as follows: Archives de la Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF) via Gallica, https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb32771271m/date; Archives Nationales, Commissariat au Plan, folder 80 AJ/91; Charles Rist Archives, Banque de France, Paris; Rockefeller Archives Center, Tarrytown, New York.
In the report, Rist also assesses the state of economics teaching in France. We focus on the orientation of expertise in a context of war and therefore do not examine this question. For a detailed analysis of this point, see Le Van-Lemesle 2004.
Marcel Boumans discussed the point with us during the conference. His opinion is that France was not specifically lagging behind other countries. We are not able to clarify this point so we do not argue this was really the situation in France but we report this element because it was intensively used by Rist as an argument in order to convince the RF.
See Barbaroux, Dal Pont Legrand, and Torre 2018 on that episode and Dal Pont Legrand and Torre 2015, 2018 for an investigation into this period of early economic expertise in France.
X-Crise is an economic think tank set up by former students of the École Polytechnique—including occasional outside contributors—in response to the Great Depression following the 1929 crash. The group was born in the autumn of 1931 and transformed into the Centre Polytechnicien d’études économiques in 1933. Overall, the group adopted a rather antiliberal, planning-favorable stance, advocating numerous nationalizations in key industrial sectors and stressing the importance of trade unionism. It is also considered to have been the crucible of French technocracy. See X-Crise, Centre Polytechnicien des études économiques 1982.
The American engineer C. B. Thompson, Taylor’s disciple, was the first to establish a scientific-management consulting practice in France (see Moutet 1997). He had already cooperated with the French during World War I, when he became consultant for the weapons ministry and worked in implementing Taylor’s methods in three marine engineering establishments: at Châlons-sur-Marne, Guérigny, and Clermont-Ferrand (Devinat 1927). But it was after World War I that he successfully established his consulting enterprise (see Wren et al. 2015). Modeled after Thompson’s, other consulting offices emerged, such as those of Paul Planus (1964, 1965), who collaborated with Thompson during the war, Suzanne Garcin-Guyne, who trained with Thompson in early 1920s, and Charles Eugene Bedaux, who had studied and gained experienced in the United States before going back to France.
The Bedaux system essentially consisted of a sampling of the work and in tracking the time taken by the worker for each single operation; then the amount of work that could be done in that portion of time was established, and a standard time was established that determined the basic pay. The work that could be done in one minute was called “Bedaux Point.” In one hour, it was therefore expected that the worker would achieve at least sixty Bedaux Points.
This was indeed a very old problem for France, which always faced inflation.
Marjolin played a pivotal role in the reconstruction of France after World War II and in the creation of the European Economic Community. He was deputy commissioner of the French Plan from 1946 to 1948, secretary-general of the Organization for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC) from 1948 to 1955, and vice president of the European Economic Community (EEC) Commission from 1958 to 1967 (see Caldari 2021b).
See, e.g., Marjolin 1937 on the increasing scarcity of raw materials in France.
Tournès (2006: 62) refers to a section in the newspaper Le Populaire in 1934 dedicated to economic issues.
For instance, Henry Laufenburger (1897–1964), a specialist in the economy of the Third Reich, joined the Ministry of National Defense and War (Tournès 2006: 65–66).
SFIO stands for Section française de l’Internationale ouvrière.
Indeed, his ideas were very representative of the X-Crise’s milieu where, notwithstanding the different ideological orientations of its members, the idea of a coordinated or planned economy prevailed (Bauchard 1966; Coston 1962; Margairaz 1991).
Europe nouvelle, March 8, 1938.
See de Man 1934. Henri de Man was a Belgian labor politician (POB-BWP) and one of the leading socialist theoreticians of his time. During the period of occupation, he was heavily involved as a collaborator.
The OCs were created to control and direct the French economy and, ultimately, to protect the French from its occupier. Their number increased from fifteen at the end of 1940 to nearly two hundred by spring 1944. However, far from protecting the French, they became an instrument of collaboration, primarily economic, but, finally, also political collaboration. Because these OCs regulated the professions, they promoted the application of anti-Jewish laws, especially in the artisan sectors (decree of June 6, 1942).
The Vichy regime established an industry monograph commission to produce documentation on industrial sectors. These documents are the source of many kinds of information—press, data, regulatory, etc. This was another attempt to set up channels to ensure systematic reporting of data.
André Vincent (1900–1990) was a self-taught economist. Forced to leave Alsace in 1940 while working on industrial planning for De Dietrich and during a sabbatical year spent in Nancy, he continued and intensified his study of economics. In 1941, Vincent joined Sauvy at the IFC and published his articles as a collection in L’organisation dans l’entreprise et dans la Nation, now considered a seminal contribution on productivity.
He termed it global (and not total) factor productivity, a concept he developed long after the end of World War II.
Sauvy and Léopold Dugé de Bernonville had already, but unsuccessfully, tried to do this (Boulat 2019: 90).
Fourastié (1943, 1944, 1949, 1951, 1952, 1973) is known for his work on prices, productivity, and, above all, technical progress. He coined the term “Trente Glorieuses,” which refers to the three postwar decades of strong and steady economic growth. See also below.
For Vincent, in a firm context, productivity was the ratio of the quantity of goods to the total amount of expenditure, i.e., the inverse of the cost price, while in a national-economy context productivity was the ratio of satisfaction to sacrifice. Therefore, the directed economy implied a broader conception than prevailed in the enterprise: it included both the notion of productivity, a certain social ideal, and value accounting and price (Boulat 2006: 82).
He was convinced (Vincent 1942a, 1942b, 1943a, 1943b) that a directed economy would enable France to move toward enlightened liberalism, i.e., liberalism emancipated from some of its natural laws and thus a more humane economy (Boulat 2019: 98).
The Walter Lippmann Colloquium was organized in Paris in late August 1938.
La vie industrielle was a journal (1940–44) that provided a sort of synthesis between prewar doctrines and the corporatism developed by Vichy, opposing irrational markets to planning, individual egoism to general interest, wrong information to statistics, etc. (Boulat 2008: 41).
Technical progress is defined as “the relative variation in overall productivity in a given field, between two given periods” (our translation, in Vincent and Froment 1944: 2).
Finally, perhaps ironically, Vincent became a kind of “anti-expert”: undoubtedly, although he was not well known to the general public and did not seek the limelight any more than he sought to influence the politicians of his time, his work shaped generations of economic experts in France.
After a few months, Sauvy left this position to take up the post of director of the Institut National des Etudes Démographiques (INED).
Monnet sent Fourastié to Sweden and the United States to observe firsthand their systems of national accounting and their productivity (Boulat 2005).
For similar arguments, see, e.g., Boulat 2002.
The Marshall Plan was formulated in 1947 in response to France’s dramatic economic situation in which stocks were too low to guarantee sustainable recovery.
In recent years, many interesting contributions have been published on the history of expertise and economic and financial administrations in France. See Fourquet 1980; Chatriot 2002; Gaïti 2002; Terray 2002.
Jean Monnet (1888–1979), deputy secretary-general of the League of Nations, was quite influential not only as a French official in France but also as a French official among (and for) the Allies. After the liberation, Monnet was nominated as the first commissioner (Commissaire au Plan) by General de Gaulle (from December 1945 to 1952). He then became one of the architects of French planning at the time of the Marshall Plan. Monnet contributed also to the Schuman Declaration of 1950, to the Franco-German rapprochement, and to the creation of the European Union.
The CGP is indeed shaped on the Délegation générale à l’equipement national (DGEN) (Kuisel 1977). Monnet’s idea of concert had many features that were drawn from previous experiences, of both planning and corporatism. See on this Caldari 2021a.
Marjolin (1946) delivers a very accurate self-diagnosis of the dramatically low level of productivity in France.
This passage is based on detailed explanations provided by Boulat (2006).
The link between CGP and SEEF was institutionalized in 1952.
Perroux was gradually steered away from this project, although some ISEA members joined SEEF.
Claude Gruson (1910–2000) was a French civil servant and economic expert. In 1948, he cofounded SEEF at the Ministry of Finance. He was director general of INSEE from 1961 to 1967.
Gruson considered the economy inherently unstable and believed that the state must provide individuals with employment and price stability.
