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

For many years, one of the dominant narratives of French economic history fixed on the period following World War II as the beginning of French economic modernization, a view reinforced by the remarkable growth and prosperity of the trentes glorieuses between 1945 and 1975. Jackie Clarke contributes a fresh and nuanced approach to this topic by looking to the years between the world wars for the construction of “modernization” in the post-World War I discourses that promoted new techniques of scientific organization in the interest of efficiency, economic growth, and national renewal. Departing from the majority of scholars who have examined this movement, Clarke maintains that far from being marginal figures in interwar economic and social debates, these individuals and their organizations had broad significance as government planners, educational reformers, and as management experts. Moreover, their ideas appealed to the collaboration-ist Vichy administration during the German occupation of World War II; many joined Vichy as economic planners and technicians and then entered office under the Fourth Republic, following the War.

As Clarke demonstrates, men from across the political spectrum embraced the gospel of rationalization and management: industrial leaders and their allies such as Jean Coutrot, Henri Fayol, and Henri Le Chatelier; CGT trade unionist Hyacinthe Dubreuil; and Lucien Romier, August Detoeuf, and engineer Ernest Mercier, all founders of Redressement français in 1925, the conservative movement that promoted national renewal through technical and managerial competence. Right wingers Georges Valois and Colonel Francois de la Rocque, both known for their fascist organizations in the 1930s, likewise sang the praises of organization as the key to efficiency and the production of a rational social body. It was a diverse group indeed. Some believed in connecting science to Solidarism’s goal of social harmony; Catholics, whose social action organizations flourished in the 1920s and 1930s, likewise shared the belief in the capacity of science to foster social reconciliation and end class conflict. And there was a powerful gender dimension to these ideas, as well, Clarke maintains. The social Catholic Raoul Dautry, recalling the views of Hubert Lyautey (briefly Minister of War in 1917 and Resident General of French Morocco until 1925) on the role of the military officer in society, promoted the training of young engineers as managers who could address broader social relations between men, a role that he believed soldiers returning from military service could easily fulfill.

The gender dimension of management also extended to the household, the public service, and economic planning. For example, Paulette Bernège promoted the application of management science to domestic life, through her League for Household Organization, domestic science manuals, and her School for Advanced Study of Domestic Science, established in 1930. Whereas numerous reformers targeted the working-class, Bernège appealed principally to middle class women beset by organizing their households in the absence of servants, but she also engaged with the science of ergonomic design and the New Education movement that sought to apply aptitude testing and biometrics to pedagogy. Despite important political differences between the various exponents of management and organization, all shared the profound belief in the transformative power of science, and in the potential of the right combination of technical competence and managerial skill to shape economic and social progress.

The Depression of the 1930s led engineers and economists to question economic liberalism and refigure “economic problems as engineering or mathematical problems (102)” that required planning. Many technicians had graduated from the élite Ecole polytechnique and embodied the “new men” whose superior technical capabilities could lead France out of the crisis. Clarke offers a detailed analysis of the thinking of these men who included Alfred Sauvy, August Detoeuf, Jean Coutrot, and others associated with the group “X-Crise.” Distancing themselves from partisan politics, these men foresaw not the substitution of the state for the private sector, but the coordination of a mixed economy. In...