France, too, had its New Deal : This is the thesis developed by the American historian Philip Nord in a book which sheds light on the political and cultural aspects of strengthening the state of the 1930s to the 1950s. A stimulating rereading, at a time when institutions bequeathed by this “ new deal “Appear weakened.
Half a century after the pioneering analyzes, more often cited than exploited, of Stanley Hoffmann characterizing France from the 1930s to the 1960s by maturity, the stake and then the reconstruction of what he signed “ Republican synthesis », The historian of Princeton Philip Nord offers today, under the title France’s New Deala rereading of these years of transition between the Third Finishing Republic and the fourth Republic of the Third Force, once out of the game successively de Gaulle then the Communist Party.
Based both on the enrichment of historiography, French as Anglo-Saxon, and on its own research in little-frequented private funds (Carrel papers in Georgetown, Pierre Schaeffer archives in Montreuil and Sciences Po Archives … At Sciences Po), he delivers a reading of an undeniable wealth: institutional, intellectual and social history at the same time, the book presents this originality of approaching the chronological sequence of 1930s post-before popular/Vichy/fourth republic-that -even including Michel Margairaz, dealing with economic and financial policies, had shown that it was a “ conversion » – Under two angles: first in general, by focusing on the institutional translation of the program of the National Council of the Resistance, a true charter of the new deal (literal translation of New Deal) intervene at the Liberation, which has France with nothing less than social security, planning, public action in terms of demography, the national school of administration ; A second time tightening the focal length on cultural policies, chosen both because of the continuities that underlie them throughout the period and because the reconstruction of France was, for Philip Nord, a phenomenon at least as much cultural and economic.
The second part of the work thus takes the form of three chapters of cultural history, each analyzing, with the same periodization as that chosen in the first part, the evolution of the three vectors of expression studied by the author. These are probably not the first monographs on radio, theater and cinema from the mid -1930s until the mid -1940s, but they were both the most convincing, because the most intimately associated with the issues political, ideological and social of the period, and the richest, by the multiplicity of the perspectives they open. Thus the chain, a story of a historical moment seized by the institutions that shaped it, it meets with the frame, a set of political-intellectual biographies of the actors, whether it be the very leading roles ( Laroque, Sauvy, Debré, Monnet) or men of influence with the courses, the modes of thought and the visions of the world as diverse as those of Robert Buron or Louis Jouvet, Gaston Defferre or Jean Giraudoux.
State strengthening
This gallery of portraits leads Philip Nord to highlight the gradual appearance of a new ruling class. Summarizing it by the idea of technocracy seems insufficient to it, even if one of the major features of the sequence is precisely in the conviction that a necessary and sufficient condition to reform quickly and well consists in leaving only room for a place At best residual and ideally zero – what did, in contexts and with radically different ideological substrates, both the French state and the free France then the GPRF. The author deduces the highlighting of continuities of the period, relativizes the effect of rupture that the Popular Front would have constituted and underlines the plurality of possible becoming at Liberation.
Unlike the resistant left, which awaits the liberation a real renovation, not to say revolution, social, men in business from August 1944 (grouped by the author under the global label of “ Not-So-Left ») Put the reinforcement of the State at the heart of national revival, an idea shared by men as different as Charles de Gaulle, Jean Moulin and Adrien Tixier – these last two figures paradoxically absent from the work, even though the Like the other, during the brief moment when they were able to give full measure of their talents, turned out to be exceptional statesmen.
Let us take a closer look at this paradox. In the last pages of his book, Philip Nord warns criticism by believing that he could have reasoned on other institutions without his main conclusions being modified. Which is indisputable if he had studied, for example, the heritage slope of cultural policies (whether museums, long governed by an order of 1945, or archeology, modernized from top to bottom by Jérôme Carcopino in 1941), but which would have been less certain with regard to the sovereign state. Entities as important as the budget management, the prefectural body or the Council of State indeed only evolve at the margin during the period. Worse still: the only new institution, the police stations of the Republic, disappeared at the end of 1946 to the satisfaction of the entire political class.
In addition, and it is not a thin difference with the New Dealit was not in any way on the side of the judges that public authority had to fear anything. Franklin Roosevelt, as we know, had to lead, throughout his first mandate, a real battle against the Supreme Court, which only put in the spring of 1937 a term to his systematic invalidation policy of the measures of implementation of the implementation of the implementation of New Deal. Nothing like it in France: neither in 1936, nor in 1940, nor in 1945 the Council of State tried to oppose the barrier of the right to the choice of politics except perhaps, but this is a completely different story, At the extreme end of the period when he imposed his own vision of purification. The political context partly explains this situation. He thus went, in an exemplary way, in 1944-1945 due to the respect carried by de Gaulle, man of the state before being a statesman, towards the great administrative and technical bodies of the state-even if This respect for principle did not prevent him from feeling with bitterness opportunism, not to say worse, which most of the senior officials constituting these constituted bodies showed throughout the conflict.
But we must also recall the analysis in terms of structures, which publicist Gaston Jèze already highlighted in the first decades of XXe century when he described France as a republican regime built on a Bonapartist, uncle and nephew administrative framework. Enriched by the Third Republic of a more authoritarian colonial order, this framework has of course overcome the test of time, as evidenced by the series of institutional bicentennials that the country since 1994 (starting – to all honor all honor – by those of the École normale supérieure and the École Polytechnique), a series which will end in 2016 with the Caisse des Dépôts et Consignations.
A legacy in crisis
In view of this sustainability that nothing seems to threaten, all the institutions that appeared at the Liberation are – with the exception ofN / A Who survives, weakened, only at the cost of a permanent questioning – either in crisis such as social security, or already dead as a number of national companies or, even more characteristic, as the general police station in terms of. The latter, certainly already moribund from the 1980s, was thus thrown without flowers or crowns during the 2000s in the vast common pit known as the reform of the State – which was the case of the Almost all of the public places in which the difficult synthesis ended between reflection and action.
Basically, in the scholarly, dense and subtle book of Philip Nord, only one thing troubles me: the title. Am I alone in this case ? Over his demonstration, the author himself considers others, that he rejects one as excessive (Rebirth of a nation), the other as a caricatural (The vichy origins of the fourth Republic)… Fly of a check that I would have liked to be the builder, in my turn to intervene on the fringes in this debate: if we get attached to the first sense of dealthe situation of the card game, also called hand, and at the cost of a shift between metaphors, would only be in question one of the two hands of the social body, to use the old organic image, and we could consider that Philip Nord tells us about a France’s New Half Deal. If on the other hand we take the word in its franglais, that of market or compromise, it is then necessary to be interested in France’s New Dealsby posing that was played at the Liberation, as a few years earlier under Vichy, an implicit market between the State and its senior officials: not undoubtedly “ change everything so that nothing changes ” but “ change a lot without changing the essentials “, Explanation that allows the passage to better understand the” failures of purification »What was mentioned by Raymond Aron in October 1945 in the first delivery of Modern timefailed which still disturb France at the beginning of XXIe century.