• 1 On Mendès France et Keynes, see Philippe Wolff, « Pierre Mendès France et John Maynard Keynes: un p (...)

1From 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 Alain Chatriot, Pierre Mendès France: Pour une République moderne, Paris, Armand Colin, 2015.

3To 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 economic thinking in France in the late 1940s, and on the postwar reconstruction of France.

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

5Though 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

• 4 On his struggles over economic policy in de Gaulle’s government in 1944-1945, see Michel Margairaz, (...)
• 5 On Mendes France and planning, see Olivier Feiertag, « Pierre Mendès France, acteur et témoin de la (...)

7Historians 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

• 6 On Mendès France and European integration, see Richard Kuisel, « Pierre Mendès France et l’économie (...)

11Mendès 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

• 7 See Gilles Le Béguec, « Pierre Mendès France et la technocratie », dans « Pierre Mendès France et l (...)
• 8 Pierre Mendès France, « La V^e République et la haute administration ou le règne des "jeunes messieu (...)

13Another 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.