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

research and development subsidies to particularly important industries. The Commissariat acted as a source of information for the business community, a clearinghouse of ideas and objectives to which many participants were willing to subscribe. In this fashion, the normal French aversion to expansive business practices could be overcome. The result of such "indicative" planning was that the state could establish a role as an arbiter of economic conflicts, willing to set aside ideological principles in favor of pragmatic and flexible agreements on production and investment. It sought to establish a consensus on expansion, modernization, and lim-

 

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ited state intervention in a market economy, and to a large degree it succeeded. 64
Third, a younger, more receptive personnel in key administrative posts  enjoying greater stability than the ministers at the top  had emerged from the war and were favorable in general terms to the methods Monnet proposed. With Monnet at the CGP was Robert Marjolin, an economist and former Socialist who had joined de Gaulle in London during the war and who since the 1930s had been a proponent of more rational state intervention in the economy. In the Foreign Ministry, another Gaullist loyalist, Hervé Alphand, directed the Office of Economic Relations, from which he was to exercise immense influence on foreign economic policy. In the Finance Ministry, Guillaume Guindey and Olivier Wormser brought new blood and open minds to the problem of financing the plan; François Bloch-Lainé, a true résistant, directed the Treasury and became an adherent of Monnet's philosophy. And Monnet himself, ardent exponent of frank and open discussion, succeeded in breaking down many of the traditional barriers between ministries so that these types of men could come into contact with one another. Bloch-Lainé remembered the small dining room in the offices of the CGP that Monnet had had installed precisely for the purpose of encouraging informal contact. Here Monnet would roam, provoking conversation, yet, "rather like a fireman, falling on any spark of disagreement." 65 Over the next few years, these men were central in consolidating the planning process in the hands of the CGP and the Ministry of Finance, while stripping the Ministry of National Economy, still a symbol of dirigiste and corporatist economic philosophy, of any control over planning. The state, under the influence of these and other young and largely unconventional administrators, would swing increasingly in favor of a national strategy of recovery that relied on high levels of public spending and investment, accepting the risk of inflation against all the orthodoxy of Third Republic finance. As Bloch-Lainé put it, "a little bit of fuite en avant wasn't going to do [France] any harm. We had to profit from this exceptional moment . . .[and] to charge forward, even if we didn't know where we were headed." 66 These participants were crucial to the swift "mental conversion" of the French government in favor of productivity and expansion. René Girault has made the important point that among these figures serious differences arose, with Monnet often assailed by the Ministry of Finance for his elaborate public spending proposals. But over and against the financial dogmas of the previous Republic or Vichy, a new consensus on modernization, expansion, and international competition could be discerned. 67

 

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Finally, the plan provided an outline for a national strategy of recovery, one in which domestic needs were linked to international imperatives. It comprehended France's weaknesses and laid down basic guidelines by which they could be remedied. The implications of the Monnet Plan were lost on few observers. Here was a way to enlist American support for reconstruction objectives that envisioned France as the key economic power on the continent, forming a tripartite international regime with the United States and Britain, surrounding