The Weight of Memory

Shortly after the 1983 plan de rigueur was announced, socialist and conservative politicians rushed to offer their interpretations of the decision. The socialist leadership insisted that the plan was merely a continuation of existing economic policy. They contended that improving international competitiveness was a logical step after the summer 1981 social reforms, particularly through an increase in the minimum wage, social provisions and nationalisations in the industrial and banking sectors in early 1982. A few days before introducing the first set of austerity measures in June 1982, Mitterrand argued that the recessive international conjuncture, a critical economic legacy of the former conservative majority and the macroeconomic disequilibrium induced by the 1981 relaunch had necessitated a supply-side policy based on infrastructure investments and the modernisation of recently nationalised firms.Footnote ³² Shortly after stepping down in July 1984, Pierre Mauroy endorsed Mitterrand's argument. A leading figure in French socialism since the 1950s, Mauroy embodied the (minority) social democratic strand of the PS due to his leadership of the Fédération du Nord, whose members were primarily trade union affiliates.Footnote ³³ In La Revue politique et parlementaire, Mauroy called for a break with socialist governments’ customary tendency to achieve social reforms at significant economic and political cost, as Léon Blum and Guy Mollet had done in 1936 and 1956. He also acknowledged that French socialist elites had consistently failed to transform the PS into a viable governmental force. Mauroy and Mitterrand were determined to promote an alternative model of political action under the Fifth Republic, primarily by granting the PS the ability to durably remain in power. Mauroy presented two interesting technical arguments in support of this position. First, he maintained that the Keynesian relaunch in 1981 had been deliberately moderate. Second, recalling that numerous French and international OECD experts had predicted the return of global growth in 1982, he insisted that measures taken in 1981 were merely in anticipation of this economic upswing.Footnote ³⁴

Mauroy and his aides reiterated the ‘logical continuity’ of policies implemented between 1981 and 1983, a narrative that remained the socialist doxa until the general elections in 1986. These justifications were nevertheless unable to dispel the concerns of socialist grassroots activists, most of whom remained sceptical of the virtues of austerity. Consequently, Lionel Jospin, the First Secretary of the PS, offered an additional explanation of the policy, invoking the metaphor of ‘temporary interruption’ (la parenthèse):

It is important to note that, contrary to widespread belief, Jospin used this interpretation to justify the austerity plan of June 1982, but not the updated version in March 1983. Jospin's account underscores the discomfort of grassroots activists, who remained immersed in the anti-capitalist rhetoric espoused by partisan elites – notably within the strains led by François Mitterrand, Jean-Pierre Chevènement and Jean Poperen – throughout the 1970s.Footnote ³⁶ His personal papers as leader of the PS show that the official acceptation of austerity by the party did not silence the critics and pleas to turn the tide of economic policy that continued to be heard behind closed doors. On 20 November 1982, during the meeting of the Executive Committee that Pierre Mauroy attended, Lionel Jospin urged the government not to yield to the ‘deflationist Sirens who vaunt the charms of purchasing power. Accommodations are possible but let us be clear that we can neither politically nor economically renounce the “minimal dose of Keynesianism” that France needs.’Footnote ³⁷ In July 1983, the PS leader reiterated his concerns about the course of the economic policy. Having participated in three government meetings concerning how to cover growing social security deficits caused by increased unemployment, Jospin criticised Delors’ solutions based on a ‘2% proportional tax deducted from all incomes at the source’. As Jospin observed in a note to Pierre Mauroy, such a measure would signal a break with traditional socialist ideology – though rarely applied in office in the twentieth century – that sanctified progressive taxation over other fiscal measures. Jospin concluded by urging the prime minister not to forget the purpose of social justice, even in an austerity context.Footnote ³⁸ By early 1984, this type of critical comment had become increasingly rare within the party. Under the Fabius government (1984–6), the liberal turn was no longer challenged by the PS leadership, even though some left-wing strains continued in vain to call for an alternative policy based on Keynesian principles. In answer to one of these critics during an Executive Committee meeting in November 1984, Jospin abruptly blurted that ‘We cannot return to the policy of the first period.’Footnote ³⁹

On the opposite end of the political spectrum, the conservative opposition and right-wing commentators did not suffer similar oscillations. They immediately and unambiguously criticised the announcement. The central figures of the Gaullist and liberal parties viewed the plan de rigueur as an overdue necessity adopted by an incompetent, opportunistic administration. The former prime minister and academic economist Raymond Barre summarised the dominant mood among conservative leaders: ‘Never was there a greater intellectual reversal among men who were so certain of the truth and efficacy of their arguments’,Footnote ⁴⁰ a position echoed by numerous leading economic and political journalists.Footnote ⁴¹

On the eve of the 1986 legislative elections, competing narratives of left and right vied for supremacy. The success of the Gaullist Rassemblement pour la République (RPR) and the appointment of its leader Jacques Chirac as prime minister enhanced the success narrative of a policy U-turn. In the wake of the left's electoral defeat, only a minority of faithful Mitterrand supporters – among them Mitterrand's special adviser Jacques Attali – continued to defend the logical-continuity argument.Footnote ⁴² The persistence of the U-turn narrative cannot be ascribed entirely to French right-wing politicians; political journalists and former members of the Mauroy administration also played a role, publicly questioning the government's ability to formulate a rational and coherent plan between 1981 and 1983. In 1990, Pierre Favier and Michel Martin-Rolland, two journalists who were covering the Mitterrand presidency, published the first volume of a major book, The Mitterrand Decade (La Décennie Mitterrand). Based on numerous interviews and confidential archival access, their investigation emphasised the ‘schizophrenia’ of France's socialist leadership. From their perspective, Mitterrand's refusal to agree to reverse his economic line in 1983 was a smoke screen that masked a ‘cultural revolution’ among socialist elites.Footnote ⁴³

Although the publication of La Décennie Mitterrand was a watershed event in the literature of the tournant de la rigueur, it lacked methodological rigor. The numerous ‘archival documents’ referenced by the authors are not contextualised and it contains a range of inaccuracies. These flaws did not prevent Favier and Martin-Rolland's book from influencing scholarship about the period, as noted by the historian Matthieu Tracol:

The most prominent figures who adopted the retrospective illusion propagated by La Décennie Mitterrand were Jacques Delors, Michel Rocard and Jean-Pierre Chevènement, respectively the Ministers of Finance, Planning and Industry in the Mauroy government. The three ministers greatly contributed to the dominance of this dramatised account of the tournant, largely for political reasons. In early 1985, shortly after he was appointed head of the European Commission in Brussels, Jacques Delors had published a book-length interview with the journalist Philippe Alexandre, deftly portraying himself as the forerunner of austerity.Footnote ⁴⁵ Nine years later, when he was well positioned to represent the PS in the 1995 presidential race, Delors ardently defended this view. Before he withdrew from the race for political and personal reasons, Delors published a biographical book with the sociologist Dominique Wolton in which he offered a more radical interpretation of the tournant.Footnote ⁴⁶ By insisting on the plan de rigueur designed by his aides – and Mitterrand's economic advisers – rather than the 1982 austerity plan, which had primarily been created by Mauroy's aides, Delors sought to personify how the rigueur appeared to French voters. This was further evidence that Delors’ account of the event was thus heavily shaped by these political developments.

Michel Rocard, Delors’ long-term political rival, published several memoirs that were harshly critical of the economic trajectory of Mitterrand's first term in office, which he believed would have led the country to bankruptcy.Footnote ⁴⁷ Rocard, who vied with Mitterrand for leadership of the party from the late 1970s onward, argued, as had Delors, that competitive disinflation was the only realistic strategy for the Mauroy government. An ‘objective convergence’ began between the accounts of Delors, Rocard and Jean-Pierre Chevènement in the 1990s. Chevènement was the former leader of the CERES, the principal left-wing branch of the PS in the 1970s. Shortly after breaking with the PS in 1992, Chevènement – as prolific a writer as Rocard – concurred that the 1983 austerity plan had dashed the hopes aroused by Mitterrand's victory.Footnote ⁴⁸ In the early 1990s, a consensus thus emerged between political figures and journalists that March 1983 represented a crucial milestone in the Mitterrand presidency. This notion of an abrupt U-turn has permeated not only the standard media narrative until the present day,Footnote ⁴⁹ but also a significant body of English-language literature – albeit in a more sophisticated form.

A Socialist Neoliberal Turn?

Researchers studying the plan de rigueur in the early 1980s could not avoid popular memories of the era. Politically engaged economists were the first to participate in this debate, unexpectedly dismissing the U-turn interpretation. In a pamphlet published by the Club de l'Horloge, a think-tank affiliated with the French radical right, Jean Fourastié emphasised ‘the great prudence shown by the Mauroy government in its first months of existence’ while stressing the failure of the socialist government to curb unemployment.Footnote ⁵⁰ On the left, economist Michel Beaud, a leading CERES economic expert in the previous decade, argued that his comrades in office were deluded by ‘the mirage of growth’. He nevertheless acknowledged that the moderate 1981 relaunch stabilised unemployment and improved conditions for the lower and middle classes, whereas conservative governments in West Germany and the United Kingdom hardened austerity.Footnote ⁵¹

Similarly, political scientists Vincent Wright and Howard Machin offered a series of theories regarding the Mitterrand administration's decision-making process, rightly underscoring contiguities between Mauroy's economic measures and the policies of Raymond Barre, his predecessor. Wright and Machin also noted the persistence of significant disagreement within the government. They urged their peers to consider the socio-political context – particularly the high expectations of Mitterrand's voters – in order to comprehend the underlying logic of the choices made in 1981.Footnote ⁵² Stanley Hoffmann and the sociologist George Ross also emphasised the coherence of the economic policies implemented by the Barre and Mauroy administrations, which they believed had prevailed over right–left alternation. In his contribution to their edited volume, Peter Hall called attention to the symbolic turn in March 1983, while also carefully situating austerity measures within a broader chronological sequence. Hall distinguished between a ‘Mauroy moment’ during which the primary goal of economic policy was competitive disinflation from a ‘Fabius moment’ notable for what he described as a ‘neoliberal relaunch’.Footnote ⁵³

Things changed drastically in the early 1990s as a growing body of research was increasingly adamant that the 1983 plan de rigueur signified a radical break, depicting it as the cornerstone of the neoliberalisation of French capitalism. Peter Hall hardened his previous position, claiming that ‘few decisions have had such significance’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Although La Décennie Mitterrand is not mentioned in his bibliography – unsurprising given that the books were published in the same year – Hall's revised account of the tournant reflects the rising popularity of the U-turn narrative among American political scientists in the 1990s.Footnote ⁵⁵ It is worth noting that these historiographical developments coincided with the rising popularity of neoliberalism as a key concept ‘in scholarly writing on development and political economy’.Footnote ⁵⁶

With respect to French-language research, political scientist Bruno Jobert published a seminal edited volume about what he viewed as the ‘neoliberal turn’ in Europe.Footnote ⁵⁷ The chapter that Jobert wrote on the French case with economist Bruno Théret established a broader historical context for the decisions of March 1983. According to them, the plan de rigueur, which they considered the ‘republican consecration of neoliberalism’, had facilitated the homogenisation of the dominant economic culture among senior French civil servants in the finance ministry, who allegedly converted en masse to a neoliberal and monetarist approach in the second half of the 1970s. Jobert and Théret contended that the economic decisions made in 1983 were inspired by statist elites rather than elected politicians. The decision to remain in the EMS was not a product of the machinations of a few ruling socialist elites, but rather of the ideological hegemony of a new neoliberal framework forged in the 1970s and tirelessly promoted by the finance ministry experts. Jobert and Théret concluded that the 1983 plan de rigueur was a ‘radical turn’, interpreting the 1981 relaunch as a failure that would have signalled the death of the ‘modernising Keynesian referential’ that had prevailed since 1945, opening the door to an era of hard monetarism.

This interpretation enjoyed widespread popularity among both English- and French-speaking sociologists and political scientists, who frequently cite Jobert and Théret's contribution. The controversial theory posited by Rawi Abdelal – who claimed that, rather than the United States, four French policy makers were responsible for the global financial order that emerged in the 1980s – largely endorsed Jobert and Théret's arguments. Abdelal placed particular emphasis on the tournant de la rigueur. Relying on secondary literature, he argued that ‘much financial internationalization had already taken place by the spring of 1983 when the Mitterrand administration undertook its tournant, the famous U-turn that represented an admission of defeat for the socialist project. Mitterrand had succeeded only in destroying Keynesian reflation and redistribution as a legitimate alternative in Europe.’Footnote ⁵⁸ A number of thinkers and commentators from the left wing of the PS or the radical left endorsed Abdelal's thesis. In a 2022 special issue entitled ‘Why the Left Loses’ (Pourquoi la gauche perd) in the monthly Le Monde Diplomatique, journalists Benoît Bréville and Serge Halimi (a leading left intellectual) accused ‘three Socialists close to Mitterrand’ – Jacques Delors at the head of the European Commission, Henri Chavranski at the OECD and Michel Camdessus at the IMF – of engineering the deregulation of capital markets and, by extension, the current globalisation of finance initiated in the 1980s.Footnote ⁵⁹ Several academic reviews of Abdelal's book have noted, however, that his narrow focus on the four French socialists (Bréville and Halimi did not mention Pascal Lamy) overlooks the roles of other important institutional actors liberalising global finance, particularly sovereign states and central banks.Footnote ⁶⁰ Léonard Laborie astutely observed that, despite his express goal of breaking with the standard narrative of American and British-driven financial liberalisation, Rawi Abdelal took no critical distance from the actors whom he interviewed during his research.Footnote ⁶¹ In this respect, Abdelal, whose book relied almost exclusively on English-language literature, as well as interviews with political and administrative actors, unwittingly subscribed – albeit with far more conceptual refinements – to the dramatised account conveyed by Jacques Delors and Michel Rocard.

Since the 2000s, a significant body of work examining the emergence of French neoliberalism has nevertheless treated this concept with greater care. International scholars well versed in the political, economic and cultural life of France put forward the idea of state resilience in the management of the French economy. In 2002, Sarah Babb and Marion Fourcade noted that the situations in the United Kingdom and Chile were the opposite of those in France and Mexico, arguing that Thatcher and Pinochet ‘opened the channels of state administration to a new set of [monetarist] experts’, whereas the French and Mexican cases illustrated that the ‘turn to neoliberal economic policies was largely pragmatic and motivated in large part by international integration’.Footnote ⁶² Vivien Schmidt's research on French capitalism was also highly influential.Footnote ⁶³ Following her example, a number of analysts interpreted the economic transformations in France in the early 1980s as a discreet form of neoliberalism orchestrated by a post-dirigiste state.Footnote ⁶⁴ David Howell, for example, formulated a paradox according to which ‘the French state has used its powers to undermine dirigisme and reduce state capacity’.Footnote ⁶⁵ Highlighting the resilience of the ‘legacies of state-led industrialisation in the post-war period’, the sociologist Monica Prasad identified a thwarted neoliberal conversion under the rightist Chirac government (1986–8).Footnote ⁶⁶

Although it emphasises the role of the state, this body of literature continues to claim that 1983 represented a brutal conversion to neoliberalism. The political economist Mark Vail's remark that the French government made ‘a U-turn’ after 1983 to ‘completely dismantle the edifice of dirigiste policymaking’ is echoed by Elisabetta Gualmini and Vivien Schmidt's assertion that François Mitterrand chose the critical juncture of 1983 to implement ‘the “great U-turn” to neoliberal monetary policy, through monetarism and budgetary austerity’.Footnote ⁶⁷ Still, Gualmini and Schmidt offered the most sophisticated analysis developed by this post-dirigiste intellectual strain when they characterised French capitalism as ‘state-influenced market economies’. Mobilising a discursive institutional approach that enabled them to simultaneously integrate the ideas of policy makers, their communicational strategies and their political practices, both scholars argued that the French ‘post-dirigiste state was engaged in implementing neoliberal ideas focused on privatisation and deregulation, [although] it did not entirely give up on seeking to influence business indirectly where it saw fit’.Footnote ⁶⁸

Political science research supporting this approach has continued to flourish, although it has been recently challenged.Footnote ⁶⁹ Matthieu Ansaloni and Andy Smith have argued that the concept of the ‘post-dirigiste state’ fails to explain the persistence of strong state intervention in crucial economic sectors such as agriculture, defence, aerospace and pharmaceuticals. Instead, they advanced the concept of the ‘neo-dirigiste state’, highlighting the duality of marketisation and state resilience that prevailed throughout the 1980s. Without disputing that globalisation and Europe's increasing economic integration – embodied by the 1986 Single European Act – effectively ‘eroded national capacity to unilaterally determine economic practices and outcomes’, Ansaloni and Smith showed that, in some sectors, French politicians (on both right and left) and high-ranking civil servants succeeded in developing renewed modes of government intervention that enabled ‘the reproduction, through adaptation, of dirigiste institutions forged in the post-war period.Footnote ⁷⁰

Ansaloni and Smith's approach helps link macroeconomic and monetary policies with the other set of public policies implemented by the Mauroy government. This is particularly relevant as important sectors of socialist public policy reject neoliberal precepts. Addressing the central matter of administrative reform, Philippe Bezes emphasised the establishment of three contradictory répertoires de réformes between 1981 and 1984. Drastic measures intended to curb public expenses were implemented at the same time that Anicet Le Pors, one of the four communist ministers in the Mauroy government, was initiating significant administrative decentralisation and extending and consolidating the status of civil servants.Footnote ⁷¹ With regard to education, Ismail Ferhat highlighted the inaccuracy of the neoliberal label in defining the socialist policy under the Mauroy government. Indeed, Alain Savary, the Minister of Education, planned to provide a ‘great public and secular service to national education’ (Service public unifié et laïque de l’Éducation nationale), a project that failed due to fierce resistance from supporters of private, primarily Catholic, schools, whose massive demonstrations contributed to the fall of the administration in July 1984. In acknowledging this rejection of neoliberal values, Ferhat did not deny that an overall shift had had an impact on education policy. Rather, he pointed to the emergence of a ‘new liberalism’ reflecting the progressive introduction of ‘quasi-market policies’ throughout the decade.Footnote ⁷² The socialist administration's cultural policy offered another clear example of the persistence of state dirigisme long after March 1983.Footnote ⁷³ In contrast to the rising tide of austerity, minister Jack Lang championed cultural voluntarism via exceptional means, facilitating a significant increase in the budget of the Ministry of Culture. This budgetary effort was generally preserved until the fall of the Bérégovoy government (1992–3), the last socialist government under Mitterrand's presidency.Footnote ⁷⁴ Electoral pressures forced the socialist government to implement these state-driven public policies. From the end of the Second World War onwards, the PS had gradually become dependent on both the state and the interests of state employees, who came to form a significant portion of their electoral base, far more decisively than industrial workers. In the 1960s and 1970s, state employees pressured the parties to take measures to extend public sector prerogatives. The increasing overlap between French socialism and the interests of public authorities, which were indicative of the broader ‘cartelisation’ of the Western European socialist and social democratic parties, was particularly prevalent in the early 1980s.Footnote ⁷⁵

Ultimately, the paradigm shift identified by the proponents of the post-dirigiste and neo-dirigiste approaches to the topic of French capitalism and the state did not begin in 1983. An historian with a working knowledge of government and administrative archives would probably be surprised that researchers involved in such highly conceptual debates had neglected a critical historiography whose first findings were published more than twenty years ago.

Crying in the Wilderness: A Critical Historiography of the tournant

Historians were latecomers to the debate over the nature of the decisions made in March 1983. In the 1990s, their interpretations of the tournant were closely aligned with those of political scientists and sociologists. Although most historians rejected the thesis of a neoliberal turn, they endorsed the idea that an absolute reversal of economic priorities had taken place. In a reference book on the history of French socialism, Alain Bergounioux and Gérard Grunberg, former advisers to Michel Rocard, argued that the plan de rigueur signalled a radical break with the traditional socialist approach to economic issues.Footnote ⁷⁶ In a major publication four years later, Donald Sassoon drew a parallel between Mitterrand's decision and a speech by British Prime Minister James Callaghan to the Blackpool conference of the Labour Party in October 1976, calling for a break with Keynesian illusions.Footnote ⁷⁷ In the early 2000s, Geoff Eley carried this point further in an influential synthesis of the history of the left over the longue durée, arguing that ‘after 1982, Mitterrand's France and Gonzalez’ Spain rivalled Thatcher's Britain in neoliberal economics’.Footnote ⁷⁸ Eley provided no bibliographical references, however, and appeared to be unfamiliar with French sources. By the time he was writing, new archival sources had become available that offered a fresh perspective on Mitterrand's early years in office.

In 1999, about forty historians were invited to participate in a conference organised by the Institut François Mitterrand and the Centre for the History of Europe in the Twentieth Century and held at Sciences Po Paris. They benefited from extensive – although not unrestricted – access to archival materials about the Mauroy government from the Elysée. Some of them were disappointed by the restrictions, particularly in the realm of foreign policy. Economic historians, however, were able to access the majority of Mitterrand's advisers’ archives, including Alain Boublil, François Stasse, Elisabeth Guigou, Christian Sautter and the Secretaries General of the Elysée, Pierre Bérégovoy and his successor Jean-Louis Bianco. Scholars seized the opportunity to gain new insights into the factors that drove socialist elites to draft the austerity plan in March 1983.Footnote ⁷⁹ Three critical findings enabled them to dismiss the neoliberal U-turn thesis. First, since May 1981, rigueur had been an imperative of the technocratic elites involved in economic policy-making and had been championed by Pierre Mauroy in his inaugural address to the National Assembly on 8 July 1981.Footnote ⁸⁰ Presidential archives, as well as Pierre Mauroy and Jacques Delors’ papers, enabled historians to show that the Keynesian relaunch in summer 1981 had been deliberately moderate. Jean-Charles Asselain coined the expression ‘midget relaunch’ (relance naine) to counter claims that the socialist government had been careless with public funding. In fact, the relaunch had been initiated in late 1980 under Valéry Giscard d'Estaing and Raymond Barre for electoral reasons. Moreover, the overall cost of the 1981 relaunch was the equivalent of 1 per cent of GDP, whereas the Keynesian stimulus implemented in 1975 by the right-wing Chirac government had amounted to 2 per cent. Confidential notes to François Mitterrand and Pierre Mauroy also highlighted their economic advisers’ scepticism about the impact of the relaunch on unemployment. Henri Guillaume, one of Mauroy's primary economic advisers, claimed that the increase in social benefits ‘does not contribute to the government's other priority: combatting unemployment’.Footnote ⁸¹ This sentiment was widely shared by the Elysée and the rue de Rivoli. As Matthieu Tracol has shown, the relaunch was not replaced by rigueur under the Mauroy government: both imperatives were addressed throughout the Mauroy administration, although by late 1981, rigueur increasingly prevailed.Footnote ⁸²

Further, the characterisation of the 1981 relaunch as a ‘fiasco’ is an exaggeration, particularly in terms of employment: ‘The French are . . . the only industrialised nation that did not experience a recession in 1982 . . . without really being aware of it.’Footnote ⁸³ As a general trend, this claim is accurate, although it should be noted that French GDP actually grew to 1 per cent in 1981 and 2.5 per cent in 1982, whereas West Germany was stagnating (0.5 per cent in 1981 and −0.4 per cent the following year) and the United Kingdom was experiencing a rebound (2 per cent in 1982) after two years of negative growth (−2.5 per cent in 1980 and −0.8 per cent in 1981).Footnote ⁸⁴ The politicians and experts most involved in the drafting process quickly realised that, despite its moderation, the relaunch policy jeopardised the balance of payments without addressing the rise in unemployment. The relaunch also caused an increase in public debt, aggravating the financial constraints that weighed on every Western European country in the wake of the 1979 ‘Volcker Shock’. From 1981 to 1984, France's public finances were caught in a vicious cycle: ‘the periodic refinancing of the existing debt globally operated under increasingly bad conditions: more expensive and in the shorter term’.Footnote ⁸⁵ For the French socialist state, whose reputation in American and British financial circles had suffered, the high interest rates induced by Paul Volcker's monetary policy increased the difficulty of allocating funding for its relaunch policy based on social expenditures. The public deficit nevertheless remained roughly 30 per cent of GDP and the ‘crisis’ in public finances between 1981 and 1983 was largely conjunctural – a liquidity as opposed to a structural problem. Like their British counterparts in 1974, French socialists underestimated – but did not ignore – the steep rise in import prices induced by a Keynesian relaunch in an open economy. They appeared to be excessively confident in the capacity of the state to boost the competitiveness of French firms through public investment and structural reforms such as nationalisations. Most critically, the relaunch policy slowed but did not curtail the rise of unemployment, a political dilemma for François Mitterrand, who had been elected on the motto ‘Employment First’. Mitterrand and his prime minister were informed of this situation in the early days of their administration. Jacques Delors was also informed about the mitigating impact of the Keynesian relaunch on unemployment. On 21 May 1981, the day of Mitterrand's investiture, the head of the forecasts department (Direction de la Prévision) warned him against the ‘inability of the traditional instruments of conjunctural regulation to produce a genuine, durable improvement of the employment situation and a substantial reduction in the unemployment rate’.Footnote ⁸⁶ He also argued that a moderate macroeconomic relaunch around 0.75 per cent of GNP would have ‘beneficial effects on growth without leading to a drop in prices or an excessive deterioration of foreign trade’.Footnote ⁸⁷ The government followed these recommendations, implementing a moderate Keynesian relaunch. Nevertheless, socialist leaders and experts, as well as senior civil servants in the ministry of finance, underestimated the disequilibrium that was caused by this initiative on foreign deficits.Footnote ⁸⁸

Accordingly, the government prematurely interrupted the experiment as early as late 1981, and not in March 1983 as is too frequently claimed in the memoires from the period. In October 1981, Jacques Delors won an intra-governmental debate and froze fifteen billion francs (roughly 0.5 per cent of the GNP). One month later he symbolically called for a ‘break’ in the implementation of social reforms, as Léon Blum had done in early 1937.Footnote ⁸⁹ Delors’ public scepticism about the relaunch, of which he was supposed to be the primary architect, infuriated both Mitterrand and Mauroy. Delors voiced the prevailing feeling among socialist economic experts in office that the government was obliged to grant ‘the dream-share’ (la part du rêve) to leftist voters in the wake of their electoral victory. He believed that restoring the competitiveness of French firms was a more vital issue. To the small minority of socialists familiar with the contents of the unpublicised reformist economic programme drafted by the PS in the late 1970s, his position was unsurprising. In 1978, Delors had headed a commission of experts that proposed considerable changes to the quantitative approach to the 1972 Programme commun with the French Communist Party (PCF).Footnote ⁹⁰ As leaders relentlessly professed their loyalty to the union of the left (union de la gauche) and the radical transformation of global capitalism, these more pragmatic revisions of the economic programme were not reflected in Mitterrandiste public discourse.Footnote ⁹¹

Although this strategy changed after Mitterrand took power, the shift did not immediately usher in a set of coherent neoliberal policies. The decisions made between late 1981 and March 1983 can be best understood as three contradictory sets of state reforms.Footnote ⁹² The nationalisation of major banks and industries in early 1982 compelled the government to protect these companies against the budgetary austerity that it was discreetly implementing.Footnote ⁹³ After Pierre Mauroy's resignation, Laurent Fabius pushed for a more coherent socialist policy regarding the role of the state. From his inaugural address onward, the prime minister professed his objective to ‘modernise’ the French administration and industrial policy within a European and international free market framework.Footnote ⁹⁴ How the Fabius administration defined ‘modernisation’ remains unclear, although Philippe Bezes has observed that it achieved a set of administrative reforms intended to improve the efficiency of state bureaucracy while promoting a new role for the state in managing of the economy. According to Fabius, in the globalising world in which the socialist government operated, the state was less competent than the private sector at production and banking. This did not indicate that the state should encourage competition without regulation, as was increasingly the case in the Thatcher era. The self-proclaimed socialist ‘modernisers’ urged their comrades to accept certain criticisms of the welfare state while advocating for a regulatory, strategic and efficiently organised administrative machine.Footnote ⁹⁵ In meetings between Fabius and PS elites during his time at Matignon, he unerringly stressed the imperative of low expectations of the state as the lender of last resort: ‘We must demonstrate that Socialism is not, as adversaries say, higher taxes, but better distributed. For that, one of the essential conditions, beyond growth, resides in the fact that we will not consider the State budget as the hole-plugger or street-sweeper of every economic and social action’, as he wrote to Lionel Jospin shortly before the general elections of March 1986.Footnote ⁹⁶

Despite these calls for modernisation and a moderate state role, the ambiguities of the Fabius government's economic and social policies rapidly became apparent. On one hand, the financial sector was abruptly deregulated under the guidance of Finance Minister Pierre Bérégovoy and his closest aides – and against the recommendations of the Treasury.Footnote ⁹⁷ Broadly speaking, the financialisation of French capitalism, a powerful indication of ‘neoliberalism as economy’,Footnote ⁹⁸ was orchestrated by Bérégovoy and his successor, the right-wing liberal Edouard Balladur under the Chirac government, not under the Mauroy government.

Another argument typically advanced by proponents of the supposed 1983 neoliberal turn lies with the European question. In accordance with the ‘manifest European destiny’ announced by François Mitterrand in March 1983, the government made significant concessions to monetary and competitive policies whose regulations were fundamentally based on market principles. Yet the genuine step toward the Europeanisation of the French economy following principles largely inspired by German ordoliberalism occurred later, when Jacques Delors became president of the European Commission in 1985 and began drafting the blueprint of the Single European Act. Under the Mauroy government, the French state had played a dirigiste role in industrial affairs. Until 1984, François Mitterrand had attempted to Europeanise ‘French Colbertism’, namely the creation of European ‘high-tech champions’, which he considered the only way to compete with the United States and Japan in the technology sector. Afterwards, a trade-off with West Germany was initiated. In exchange for ‘strengthening the internal market and external policies’, France imposed a policy of ‘European preference’ to promote the growth of European competitors.Footnote ⁹⁹

A final argument is sometimes raised by the proponents of 1983 as the cornerstone of French neoliberalism. By opting to deepen austerity in March, the government would have deliberately sacrificed the fight against unemployment. From a short-term perspective, this assertion is correct, but it would be hasty to conclude that this socialist choice was the equivalent of implementing a neoliberal cure to deal with mass unemployment. Although not as great as that of West Germany and the United Kingdom, the French unemployment rate, which had begun rising in the second half of the 1970s, had exacerbated the social security deficit. Faced with this complex issue, the Mauroy and Fabius governments, as well as the Chirac government, decided to increase rather than decrease social benefits in order to ease ‘the harshest social consequences of industrial restructuring and the resulting layoffs’ and prevent victims of the crisis, most of them residents of the deindustrialising East and North of France, from descending into poverty.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ This ‘welfare without work’ strategy was partly the result of pressure from trade unions, which continued to influence social policy-making. In the 1970s, the PS had attracted new activists from the labour movement and affiliated groups, bolstering its connections to civil society and Christian leftist networks.Footnote ¹⁰¹ During the 1981 presidential campaign, François Mitterrand relied on these connections with teachers’ federations, secular networks, socio-cultural associations and the Confédération française démocratique du travail (CFDT) – a trade union whose relationship with the PS had always been complicated. Although party ties to these social movements began unraveling in the 1980s, the dialogue between the government and the trade unions remained effective under the Mauroy government. After a short ‘honeymoon’ period in summer 1981, the Confédération Générale du travail (CGT), the leading French trade union, which was very close to the French Communist Party (PCF), became increasingly reluctant to support economic reforms, although it never disavowed the government as long as the PCF stayed in office.Footnote ¹⁰² Even after Laurent Fabius’ appointment as prime minister, many CGT executives continued ‘to think that a Socialist Party government was better than a Barre government’, as one of Jospin's leading advisors observed.Footnote ¹⁰³ The government's relationship with another major trade union, the CFDT, that defended an economic analysis that was close to the ideas of Jacques Delors and Michel Rocard, and played a crucial role in the birth of the so-called ‘second left’ (la deuxième gauche), was also perturbed. Once again, however, the dialogue between the government and the CFDT was never broken. Even before opting for a new plan de rigueur in March 1983, the CFDT leader, Edmond Maire, called for such an austerity plan – although this did not prevent him from later severely criticising the government's text.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The gradual ‘cartelisation’ of the PS and its disconnection from the labour movement and lower classes became increasingly apparent in the late 1980s but this was still not the case in 1983.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

An additional argument should be noted alongside these key insights from the critical historiography of the tournant de la rigueur. Most European socialist elites were reluctant to embrace the austerity turn – with the notable exception of Helmut Schmidt's social democratic government in West Germany.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The early 1980s were a moment of hesitation – and at times resistance – particularly within supra-national organisations such as the Socialist International (SI) and the Confederation of the Socialist Parties of the European Community (CSPEC).Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Meetings between socialist heads of state held by the PS in 1983 clearly illustrated this atmosphere of mistrust. In January, Felipe Gonzalez, Bruno Kreisky, Pierre Mauroy, Olof Palme, Andreas Papandreou, Kalevi Sorza and Habib Thiam – the respective prime ministers of Spain, Austria, France, Sweden, Greece, Finland and Senegal – insisted on a global relaunch plan to reshape the international monetary order, developing impoverished countries and stabilising raw material costs.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Nine months later, the mood around the table had changed dramatically. A few days before the opening of the European Council in Athens, Pierre Mauroy launched the debate by stating, ‘In all my years of activism, no one ever taught me what an austerity policy is.’ Mauroy urged his peers to integrate their leftist principles with austerity measures, which he considered unavoidable. The leaders of the Southern European socialist parties took a harder line. The Portuguese President Mario Soares proclaimed:

Soares's Italian counterpart Bettino Craxi pushed this line of thought further, asserting that the European left ‘should no longer be revolutionary in a Europe in which revolution is never necessary’.Footnote ¹¹⁰ The spectrum of socialist resistance to austerity in this period is beyond the scope of this article, but the SI and the CSPEC drafted numerous documents in response to a 1980 report by the UN Brandt Commission urging developed countries to seriously address North–South inequalities.Footnote ¹¹¹

The Mauroy government conspicuously cited the Thatcher administration as a countermodel.Footnote ¹¹² Many politicians and senior civil servants actively involved in the tournant were hostile to Thatcher's monetarist policies.Footnote ¹¹³ Continuities with the ‘thwarted liberalism’ (libéralisme contrarié) of the conservative Barre government in the late 1970s prevailed over the crusades against neoliberalism orchestrated by socialist politicians and statist elites.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Similarly, historian Laurent Warlouzet, who studied the French socialist experience from a European perspective, contended that the 1983 plan de rigueur did not emulate the British economic policy, but rather sought to initiate a convergence between France and West Germany toward free-market policies that were adapted to the challenges of globalisation. Warlouzet did not deny the significant role of financial constraints in shaping the decisions of 1983. As with the United Kingdom in 1976 and Italy in 1977, the growing deficit would have obliged France to ask for assistance from the IMF in order to avert a financial meltdown. Warlouzet noted that France had implemented an austerity policy since June 1982 and that the decisions of March 1983 marked the triumph of a free-trade paradigm over a neoliberal model designed to retrench the welfare state and increase large-scale privatisation. Given growing alignment with German monetary and macroeconomic policies, Warlouzet argued that France persuaded several member states (including West Germany and the Netherlands) to re-evaluate their currencies, as well as a significant EEC loan. He emphasised that this economic alignment was compatible with the post-war welfare state and the preservation of social reforms achieved during the summer of 1981.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Broadly speaking, West Germany constituted the quasi-exclusive model of reference that the crafters of the tournant de la rigueur had in mind at the time. Even before the first austerity plan was announced in June 1982, the forecasts department of the finance ministry praised ‘the German example’, despite the harmful effects of Schmidt's sound budgets on unemployment. Citing the German model allowed senior civil servants to tacitly criticise the Keynesian relaunch and nationalisation, which they deemed excessively dirigiste and expansive: ‘the limitation of the public deficit clearly defines the room to manoeuvre of the German government and enables it to take an unshakeable position in internal (Bundestag) and external (international agencies) debates.’Footnote ¹¹⁶

Reassessing Mitterrand's first term through this broad European lens, Frédéric Bozo also emphasised the geopolitical aspect of Mitterrand's decision to remain in the EMS in Cold War Europe. Given that the Euromissile crisis had eroded German confidence in European infrastructure, Mitterrand's decision sent a clear message to the Kohl government that France remained committed to the ongoing construction of Europe.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Disagreements on economic matters aside, the French president considered security a top priority in the shared agenda of both countries. Mitterrand's famous speech at the Bundestag in January 1983 epitomised this mindset.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Unlike Michel Rocard and Jacques Delors, Mitterrand did not believe that economic expertise should be a necessity for politicians; he openly distrusted economists and economic forecasts. Like De Gaulle, he strongly subscribed to the primacy of politics over economics. From the latter half of the 1970s onward, Mitterrand was well aware that a growing number of politicians and experts from the PS had abandoned the ‘Marxist–Keynesian’ rhetoric promoted by the Programme commun de gouvernement, which had been signed with the PCF in June 1972. Privately, they argued that if the French left gained power, its leaders would be unable to ignore the constraints of a competitive globalised economy. Mitterrand's voters, however, did not elect the socialist candidate in order that his government adopt the same austerity policies as Raymond Barre's. In their view, Mitterrand embodied the union of the left and the radical transformation of capitalism, although he conspicuously refrained from using the motto ‘Changer la vie’ – the title of the 1972 PS programme – during his campaign. In May 1981, the newly elected president and his prime minister were keenly aware that leftist voters would have rejected a ‘competitive disinflation’ policy such as those adopted by the United States, the United Kingdom and West Germany. For Mitterrand, maintaining the support of his electorate and legitimising the PS as a political force required gradual, subtle manipulation of economic rhetoric. His public endorsement of the rigueur on 23 March 1983 indicated a shift toward ‘austerity with a human face’ and the pro-market policies that the Mauroy government had discreetly engaged in by late 1981. It was a powerful message to the French left that the time for a voluntarist approach to economic policy was ending. In this new era, promoting European growth and industrial modernisation within a liberal framework would be the core socialist creed, to the detriment of anti-capitalism and full employment.

The fact remains that Mitterrand's economic choices in late 1981 had a lasting influence on the economic approach to Western European socialist elites. Pierre Bérégovoy, the newly appointed finance minister in the Fabius government, developed the politique du franc fort, inspired by the Bundesbank's monetary policy, which prioritised a balanced budget and decreased inflation over full employment.Footnote ¹¹⁹ By late 1982, the Austrian socialist government, under Bruno Kreisky and later, Fred Sinowatz, ‘incrementally adopted an economic policy combining state budget austerity with specific policies for supporting rates of high unemployment’ in the name of the European imperative.Footnote ¹²⁰ The Soares and Gonzalez administrations in Portugal and Spain endorsed similar policies to avert economic crisis, defined by the rampant protectionism championed by Salazarism and Francoism.Footnote ¹²¹ By 1985, the Palme administration in Sweden had introduced similar austerity budgets that transformed employment ‘from a social citizenship entitlement to a market variable’.Footnote ¹²² Although this new socialist approach to economic issues included concessions to the pro-market paradigm, it did not signify the destruction of the welfare state or social policies benefiting low-income and unemployed workers. From the second half of the 1980s onward, the modest ambition of most leading socialist politicians and experts was to mitigate the most glaring inequalities engendered by free market policies and financial deregulation, not to radically change capitalism.

For all the above reasons, this article calls for the deconstruction and desacralisation of the 1983 tournant de la rigueur. It suggests that international scholars should consider familiarising themselves with French-language critical historiographical studies. By the late 2000s, a number of unorthodox French economists, political scientists and sociologists started to engage in a meaningful discussion on this topic.Footnote ¹²³ Although they agreed that the decisions of 1983 represented an important step in French socialism's acceptance of neoliberalism, they ceased to describe this event as the decisive moment in these developments.Footnote ¹²⁴ A well-informed recent comic book entitled Le choix du chômage has pursued this trend (Figure 1). Its authors (a journalist and a cartoonist) contend that French politicians in office from Georges Pompidou to Emmanuel Macron have implemented economic and social policies intended to favour the interests of investors and savers over a massive increase in unemployment. Albeit debatable on several crucial points, notably due to the insufficient attention paid to the impact of the Cold War on the dynamics of Europeanisation and the convergence of Western European economies, this successful comic book – with over 45,000 copies sold to dateFootnote ¹²⁵ – marked a major step in the dissemination of a more refined narrative beyond specialised academic circles.Footnote ¹²⁶

Figure 1.

Le choix du chômage de Damien Cuvillier et Benoit Collombat © Futuropolis, 2021.

As shown in this article, the case of Laurent Fabius was all but singular among the leading Mitterrandist politicians and economic experts. Confronted with Michel Rocard's bid for party leadership during the 1979 Congress of the PS in Metz, Mitterrand's supporters mobilised an anticapitalist phraseology primarily for tactical motives. Broadly speaking, the authors of Le choix du chômage have seriously taken historiographical findings into account, thus emphasising that the first signs of a socialist turn to austerity emerged by late 1981. While insisting on the decisive political and symbolical consequences of the economic choices made in 1983, they have also argued that what they interpreted as a neoliberal turn occurred in fact later in the decade.

A comparative perspective offers strong further arguments for this conclusion. In a fascinating book, Cornel Ban has introduced the concept of ‘embedded neoliberalism’ to portray the policies achieved by the Spanish socialist government led by Felipe Gonzalez from 1982 to 1996. He has proposed the following definition: ‘a hybrid that layered support for macroeconomic orthodoxy, deregulation and privatisation with the ideas (and corresponding policies) about the virtues of progressive taxation, robust public services, and broad public investment strategies’.Footnote ¹²⁷ As previously shown, this definition did not work for the Mauroy government. It is more pertinent to consider the spirit of the Fabius era, despite the fact that the banking and industrial sectors remained nationalised. Above all, Ban's concept meshes perfectly with the economic policy of the right-wing liberal Finance Minister Edouard Balladur under the Chirac government. Although reluctant toward the concept of neoliberalism, a group of historians mobilising unpublished archives and oral sources recently concluded that the Balladur moment had opened ‘an important and irreversible step in a long- and medium-term movement toward the insertion of the French economy into globalisation’ through the achievement of financial deregulation, privatisation and reduced taxes on capital and high wages incomes.Footnote ¹²⁸ In a recent book, political scientist Kevin Brookes drew the same conclusion: that radical neoliberal ideas imported from the United States in France since the late 1970s by small intellectual circles failed to become the Chirac government's guidelines for economic affairs. Although the use of neoliberal rhetoric allowed the different strains of the French Republican Right to gather in the perspective of the general elections, there was a large gap between Chirac's Hayekian accents in opposition and the actual practices of his government once in power. Brookes points out the lack of influence of leading political figures of this neoliberal right-wing strain in the decision-making process. The Minister of the Economy, Alain Madelin, and the Minister of Culture, François Léotard, both advised by major conveyers of this ideology such as the economic journalist Henri Lepage or the academic economist Pascal Salin, were strongly marginalised and frequently – albeit not systematically – overruled by Chirac and Balladur. On the economic level, Brookes argued, the most salient point was the resilience of a statist policy making, as epitomised by the implementation of industrial and banking privatisations. Far from being a replica of Thatcher's experience, Jacques Chirac, Edouard Balladur and a handful of senior civil servants took care to preserve the primacy of the state in the management of these (re)privatised firms. The government thus appointed CEOs coming from the top of the administration and strictly regulated the structure of their shareholding: a large amount of capital (15 to 30 per cent) was reserved for domestic partners who were carefully selected by the government, and it was determined that foreign shareholding should not exceed 20 per cent of the total.Footnote ¹²⁹

Beyond the issue over the nature of this economic policy – tempered liberalism or embedded neoliberalism? – this body of work confirms the relevance of deepened archival work for gaining new insights on the transformations of French capitalism in an age of global accelerated financialisation. Recent findings on the tournant de la rigueur by political scientist Matus Halas have once again aptly demonstrated it.Footnote ¹³⁰ Halas uncovered a number of notes drafted by François Stasse to François Mitterrand in late July 1983 whose contents may surprise even the best-informed historians. Typically presented as one of the most vocal advocates for France remaining in the EMS, Stasse had in fact urged Mitterrand to leave the system. According to Stasse, the success of the monetary stabilisation applied in March had provided an opportunity for shifting tactics. He advised Mitterrand to take advantage of the summer break to discreetly quit the EMS and implement a policy of industrial modernisation à la française that was freed from European macroeconomic and monetary constraints. Further, Stasse explicitly asserted that his views were shared by his colleague Elisabeth Guigou – another vocal supporter of France remaining in the EMS. When Matus Halas mentioned these notes in his interviews with Stasse and Jean-Louis Bianco, both men ardently insisted that they had no memory of these events – a response that is consistent with scholarly findings regarding memory distortions induced by popular narratives, as Maurice Halbwachs brilliantly demonstrated long ago.Footnote ¹³¹ Stasse's note again recalls the significant impact of political motives on the decision-making process, as well as the perils of over-reliance on oral sources. In sum, Halas's findings should serve as a gentle admonition to scholars who continue to neglect archival sources in studies of the making of economic policy.Footnote ¹³²