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  • L’État et l’entreprise: Une histoire de la normalisation comptable et fiscale à la française by Béatrice Touchelay
  • Cheryl Susan McWatters
Béatrice Touchelay. L’État et l’entreprise: Une histoire de la normalisation comptable et fiscale à la française. Rennes, France: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2011. 383 pp. ISBN 978-2-7535-1357-0, € 22 (paper).

Béatrice Touchelay’s volume examines the gradual conversion and acceptance by private enterprise in France to the standardization of their accounts and accounting. It presents a story of competing interests, those of government, tax authorities, business, and the accounting profession, all seeking to maintain or obtain their place within this contested terrain. Touchelay argues that the imposition and acceptance of accounting standards and norms was a lengthy battle of differing and changing ideologies and strategies, as groups worked to define and modernize the economic system of France.

This study is an accessible version of her habilitation à diriger des recherches published in 2009. It combines earlier research with additional and exhaustive use of primary and secondary sources. Covering roughly the period from 1916 to 1960, the study outlines the standardization and normalization of accounting within a context of dynamic political and economic events, conflicts, and compromises that eventually led to the irreversible and institutionalized process of conformance to le plan comptable. The volume is bookended by a preface and postscript by Yannick Lemarchand and Bernard Colasse respectively. Recognized experts in the areas of accounting and management history, they present context and interpretation of the bridging of history and management. The preface sets the work within broader historical questions while the postscript facilitates comprehension of Touchelay’s potentially confusing concept of nebula.

Part one analyzes the fiscal and economic changes during World War I and its lengthy aftermath. The author places particular emphasis on the special taxation of wartime profits combined with the introduction of the declaration principle on enterprise income. What becomes evident is that while taxation became part of the public realm, France lacked defined accounting principles to support the requirements of this new fiscal regime. Touchelay adopts the terms coined by F. L. Closon1, the first director general of INSEE, ‘la France des mots’ in opposition to ‘la France des chiffres’ to distinguish the trajectory of accounting standards and actors—government, accounting profession, business, and the public—within this intertwined web of conflicting interests. Numbers and statistics slowly began to displace and dominate language in the economic domain. [End Page 880]

This section underscores the intrigues revolving around excess wartime profits, the efforts by the government to collect them, and the equally stringent efforts by industrialists and other business interests to avoid their payment. Caught in this process, amongst others, was the accounting profession. The quest for fiscal equity revealed the laxness of accounting to provide sufficient guidance to accommodate competing economic and political visions.

Part two briefly covers the subsequent period to 1940 and the fall of France. This period is distinguished by enterprises which adopted accounting and accounting numbers to inform their decisions and practices and those that did not. These differing approaches also reacted to parliamentary debates for greater clarity and transparency of accounts. Governments had to walk a fine line between intervention and negotiation, the former more readily accepted as industry and government worked jointly in areas of national defense. This section ends with the onset of World War II, and the third part begins abruptly with the Vichy government in June 1940.

Touchelay analyses the Vichy period and the postwar period to 1952 in one section, reinforcing that developments during the Vichy government provided the foundation for the introduction of le plan comptable of 1947. In her view, postwar decisions and actions continued steps set in motion during the war in terms of the supremacy of accounting and statistical data. This section lacks critical analysis with the armistice of 1940 and subsequent events reading much like business as usual. The dirigisme of the time is evident, yet paved the way for postwar reform efforts.

The final part offers a concise review of the period from 1952 to the early 1960s. The epilogue and conclusion reinforce initial arguments of the shift from...

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