Free France Restored: Cold War Diplomacy and the Quest for Leadership in Europe, 1944-1954 by William I. Hitchcock Page A

employment and business expansion, and only modernization could provide them. Third, modernization would lead to increased productivity and would thus have a salutary demographic effect: economic expansion would provide France with the means and the motive for higher birth rates. Fourth, and most important, France's economic independence could only be maintained if its trade deficit was redressed; this made a dramatic increase in exports vital, and this in turn could be provided only by modernization. Finally, the war had shown that France's security would be greatly enhanced not by expenditure on arms but by strengthening the nation's productive apparatus. Power was a function of industrial potential, and France could thus be powerful only after an overhaul of its economy. These points were evidently persuasive, as the plan was submitted to the cabinet in January 1947 and approved without discussion. The orthodoxy of the 1930s was a distant memory. 61
Why was the Monnet Plan accepted so swiftly, and supported so widely, in a cabinet and a nation full of political contradictions, in which any consensus on postwar planning had been utterly absent until this point? Four basic reasons may be underscored. First, the plan was an effective and unspectacular way out of the deadlock between competing economic philosophies apparent in the Mendès France-Pleven debate. In promulgating the plan, Monnet had avoided jurisdictional squabbles by claiming that he was charting new territory, and thus represented no threat to established ministries. To some degree, this was disingenuous. The hopeful rhetoric of his memoirs aside, Monnet understood that politically, his chances of success would be increased by avoiding confrontation and by securing de Gaulle's backing within the cabinet. Once de Gaulle resigned, Monnet worked on successive presidents and prime

 

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ministers in a similar fashion, insisting on the importance of keeping the Planning Commissariat attached to the executive branch and out of the grasp of the ministries. In December 1946, just as the plan was being considered by the government of Léon Blum, again premier, Monnet reemphasized that the unwillingness of ministers to submit to the authority of one of their colleagues had made the notion of a strong Ministry of National Economy "an illusion." In a tone bordering on the presumptuous, Monnet argued to Blum that only a planning agency such as he had designed, "distinct from the various-ministries, and apolitical," would succeed in developing and implementing policy, and he actually recommended doing away entirely with the Ministry of National Economy. 62 Thus, the cooperative and unassuming rhetoric that Monnet employed in justifying the plan publicly hid the very specific agenda of the new planning structure: to circumvent bureaucratic bottlenecks and to streamline decision-making on economic policy. The plan provided a means to enact policy without overtly threatening the authority of any particular ministry. 63
Second, the plan rallied support from many quarters of the political landscape. It was able to function within the heterogeneous ideological environment of postwar politics precisely because, in contrast to the approach of Mendès France, it was not didactic or coercive, but inclusive, democratic, and "indicative." Production and investment objectives were developed by eighteen modernization commissions that drew upon recommendations of over one thousand technical experts, managers, and union personnel, thus allowing the plan to claim that it was democratic and consensual. The participation of the major labor and business organizations allowed the government to raise the ceiling of the fortyhour workweek without provoking a crisis. Once objectives had been formulated by the commissions, the Commissariat, on the basis of these recommendations, could allocate scarce resources and materials to key sectors, as well as channel credit and give tax breaks and