France's Long Reconstruction by Herrick Chapman

Author:Herrick Chapman [Chapman, Herrick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Europe, France, Western, Military, World War II, Modern, 20th Century, Political Science, Public Policy, General
ISBN: 9780674982451
Google: a2VEDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2018-01-08T22:28:12+00:00

As a dirigiste Debré sang in harmony with Mendès France and many other Young Turks. But unlike Mendès France, who had entered into Parliament full of idealism about leadership and worries about the role of experts in a democracy, Debré had opted for the grands corps de l’État and the role of the high-level civil servant. From his vantage point it was not uncommon in the 1930s to think that in some policy domains administration ought indeed to supersede politics.

Such convictions about the use of state authority and expertise—the need for “one good pilot”—served Debré well in Reynaud’s staff. The young legal civil servant was immediately put to work drafting the famous decree laws that within days would abolish the 40-hour week (enabling employers to require longer hours), triggering the general strike of November 30, 1938, that devastated the CGT. He did not hesitate to take the assignment; he had regarded the forty -hour week as a colossal mistake from the beginning.21 Sharing an office with the young Alfred Sauvy, Debré also played an important role drafting the 1939 Code de la famille (Family Code). This project, too, spoke to his convictions: Adolph Landry, a parliamentary champion of pronatalist policy and a family friend, had convinced him of the gravity of France’s demographic crisis.22 Debré served as well on the Comité de réorganisation administrative, dubbed in the press the Comité de la hache (the hatchet committee), which embarked on one of the most extensive surveys of the state apparatus that has ever been undertaken in France, with an eye toward administrative efficiency.23

What’s striking about Debré’s staff experience is how much he prized it as formative of his own political personality. He wrote extensively in his memoirs about his ten-month stint with Reynaud as a brief, if all too tardy, triumph of reason after years of governmental ineptitude and political self-serving. Among the country’s leading politicians, in his view, only the maverick Reynaud had the courage to see what needed to be done, “by opposing academic conformism in monetary policy, military conformism in armaments, national conformism in demography.”24 Of self-doubt Debré showed barely a trace. He saw in the 40-hour week only an obstacle to production, which by 1938 in some plants it surely was, but scarcely recognized it as a symbolic achievement for workers that could have a bearing on morale, productivity, and the industrial climate in the rearmament drive. The wider political ramifications of policy initiatives little interested him. He took enormous pride in having been one of a “very small number of civil servants” who drafted the family code, which, as he later said, “gave new authority to the health ministry, … affirmed the state’s responsibility [in this domain], … [and] opened a thirty-year period when, despite changes in regime, demographic preoccupations would remain dominant in the minds of political authorities.”25 Working, as he put it, at the “hinge” (charnière) between administration and politics, this experience of writing decrees and legislation that changed the social fabric of his

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