France in the Age of Organization: Factory, Home and Nation from the 1920s to Vichy by Jackie Clarke (review)

Jackie Clarke explores the development and reach of the ‘scientific organization’ movement in France from the 1920s until the end of the Vichy regime. This movement evolved from the theoretical work in organizational science of pioneering engineers such as Frederick Taylor and Henri Fayol, which had begun to be disseminated in France in the early years of the twentieth century. Clarke demonstrates how from these beginnings ‘a loose coalition of professionals’ (p. 2), or a ‘nébuleuse organisatrice’ (p. 6), including not only engineers and industrialists but also trade unionists, psychologists, architects, and domestic scientists, promoted the scientific organization of the factory, the economy, as well as the home. Scientific organization was advocated by these actors as the key to solving the social, economic, and political problems France faced at the time. Adopting a cultural history perspective, Clarke rejects the determinist view sometimes found in economic and political history analyses that France had to abandon its traditional liberalism and implement scientific organizational principles in order to modernize. Instead, she asks what modernity meant to these ‘particular historical actors in this particular historical moment’ (p. 7). Furthermore, Clarke suggests that a specificity of the scientific organization movement in France was that ‘organizers believed the science of organization was universal and that all human activity could be scientifically organized’ (p. 163). Indeed, an underlying ambition of the movement was to develop an archetype of a ‘new man’ — the manager, the planner, the organizational expert — in the public sphere of the factory and the state, and a ‘new woman’ — the housewife as household manager — in the private sphere of the home. By investigating the scientific organization movement in the interwar years, this book contributes to the revision of the periodization of French history current until the 1980s that viewed the Liberation as a watershed between pre-war backwardness and post-war modernization. The book seeks the origins of the ‘trente glorieuses’ in the debates around scientific organization between the wars and indeed during the Vichy period. Clarke’s detailed analysis of the activities, debates, and networks of a diverse group of experts interested in scientific organization before 1945 amply proves the point. In sum, this book is exceptionally well written, is based on the detailed investigation and evaluation of a wide range of sources, and contributes impressively to our understanding of the economic, political, and social development of France in the twentieth century. Lastly, but by no means least, it also elevates to the mainstream the gendered dimension of the ‘modernization’ of France. The section at the end of the book providing biographical profiles of the key figures in the French scientific organization movement is also a very useful resource.