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  • Les comptes de groupe en France (1929-1985). Origine, enjeux et pratiques de la consolidation des comptes
  • Béatrice Touchelay
Didier Bensadon . Les comptes de groupe en France (1929-1985). Origine, enjeux et pratiques de la consolidation des comptes. Rennes, France: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2010. 350 pp. ISBN 978-2-7535-0895-8, 18 € (paper).

This publication is an abridged version of an important PhD thesis in business administration whose full title is "Consolidations of accounts in France (1929-1985): Analysis of the introduction and expansion process of an accounting technique", presented in 2007 under the instruction of Yannick Lemarchand. The author examines the introduction of accounts consolidation in France in a process going from the 1920s (when French multinationals felt the need to supervise their foreign subsidiaries) to the Seventh European Directive in 1983, and the moment in which the French law made private enterprises and state corporations to publish consolidated accounts in 1985. Bensadon follows the stages leading to the creation of a method that could be accepted by the stock market, the auditing agencies, and public authorities in France and the European Community between the 1960s and the 1970s, and attempts to explain why the spreading of the consolidation methods was so slow in France in contrast to the English-speaking countries where these methods had been in use since the 1920s. He argues that the slow pace of adoption resulted from the French political and economic environment.

Bensadon follows an approach in which he combines the business administration analysis in which he analyzes technical problems and the methodology of a historian by doing extensive archival research in government records, corporate records from well-known French industrial groups such as Pechiney-Ugine-Kulhmann and Saint Gobain, bank records, and direct interviews. In addition to these primary sources, he uses a wide bibliography including the "grey documentation" coming from high school and university textbooks as well as conference papers. All this rich material allowed him to define a very precise and accurate chronology of the stages followed in the adoption of the Consolidation integrating in his analysis the interplay of a number of actors in different specific contexts.

A preliminary chapter is devoted to the 1920s, in which Bensadon shows the reluctance of the financial press as well as the business community to accept any accountancy rule that created the risks of opening the subsidiaries' activities to some degree of fiscal control. This climate explains why the need for information about the French multinationals is restricted within the realm of Law school research.

The Vichy regime achieved some important changes including the establishment of the Council of Chartered and Accepted Accountants, [End Page 633] the publication of the first French accounting general rules, and the first regulations for the auditing profession. Before 1945, however, the consolidation process, however, was particularly irregular. After that year, France entered a new international economic sphere, which is analyzed in the first part of the book. The post-1945 authorities were increasingly committed to the adoption of accounts consolidation. The first methodology was prepared by the National Accounting Board (CNC) and officially promoted by a ministerial decision in March 20, 1968. From that moment, firms willing to be listed in the stock exchange were compelled by the Stock Exchange Committee (COB) to publish consolidated financial accounts. After 1968, the enlargement of the European Economic Community helped to expand the practice of accounts consolidation. This marks the beginning of a second period that ends when legislators make consolidation compulsory by law in 1985.

The history of account consolidation in France is intrinsically linked to the opening of France toward the rest of the world. During the 1950s, the Productivity Missions, whose members included the elite members of the chartered accountants profession, diffused North American methods forcing the profession to find means and ways to overcome the new challenges created by the accounts consolidation. The inquiries by the Chase Manhattan bank about the investments of the French Oil Company (CFP-Total) and the requirements of the New York Stock Exchange requiring the enactment of consolidated accounts by Pechiney's Board as early as 1959, shows the weight of foreign forces in this...

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