This article follows my summary of the essay by the young MIT economist Antoine Lévy[1] in Le Figaro of 2 January 2021, which received much attention in France. Lévy had lamented the late start of the Covid vaccination in France. He cited the disregard for logistics, evasion of responsibility, state and administrative failures, and the government's loss of reality as key features of the French backlog.
A week later, an article[2]
appeared in Le Monde (which has since been renamed), which puts the accent on
- France's hypertrophic bureaucracy in the health sector [2].
There, France has 93,000 administrative units (at the state, social security,
and municipal levels) that can spend public money; in Germany, there are
15,000.
- Centralism
with a vertical, silo-based organisation of ministries. The health minister
gives his instructions to the programme managers, who in turn delegate the
money to those responsible in the areas.
- Arrogance:
On the ground, mayors and local authorities complain about the arrogance of
senior officials, by whom they are disregarded even in an emergency situation
where there should be unity.
- Hyper
control: The central government's distrust and obsession with detail have
paradoxically been reinforced by the various decentralisation laws. The state,
no longer an actor but a client, then compensated for its loss of power by
hyper-control.
- Administrative
reform 2022: What has the Comité action publique 2022 achieved?
"Nothing," says economist Jean Pisani-Ferry succinctly. "It was
a kind of Mexican army[3],"
confirms Philippe Aghion, professor at the Collège de France, who was also a
member of the reform commission. "We used bureaucracy to deal with the bureaucrats".
It is depressing and impressive how little
France seems to have changed in this respect in the last century. Let us take
as crown witnesses, in chronological order, writings by Marc Bloch and Herbert Lüthy[4].
With their groundbreaking work, the
historians around the journal Annales revolutionised
the study of history. Instead of listing battles and events, the Annales
historians wanted to show human activity in its entirety, and to this end
sought cooperation with other disciplines such as geography, sociology or
economics. The medievist and agricultural historian Marc Bloch was a co-founder
of the Annales historiography (along
with Lucien Febvre); another famous representative was Fernand Braudel. Marc
Bloch came from a Jewish family originally resident in Alsace, which had left
Alsace after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870/1871. In 1944, he was captured in
Lyon and executed by a German firing squad.
In L'Étrange
Défaite (1946) published posthumously[5],
Marc Bloch (as a soldier in 1940) examines from a frog's perspective[6]
the reasons for France's defeat in the battle for France during the Second
World War, the Drôle de Guerre (Phoney War). Bloch's contemporary history essay
is a testament to the shortcomings of the elites who entered the war in May
1940.
First, Marc Bloch denounced the bureaucratic character of the army,
which he attributed to habits adopted in peacetime: in particular, the “cult du
beau papier” (superfluous written memos), but also the "fear of
displeasing a powerful man of today or tomorrow". According to Bloch, all this
bureaucratic organisation is also rooted in the training of officers
themselves, which revolves around a cult of theory and tradition. Officer
training was based on elegant and abstract theoretical rules of engagement that
did not stand the test of practice.
Second, a secrecy and command culture
slowed down the dissemination of information. The combination of bureaucracy
and rigid training led to general disorder in the field as leaders changed too
often. Intelligence on enemy positions was prevented by meagre information at
the operational level, as relevant information was classified and circulated
only high up in the hierarchy. Information went through very long layers and
ended up being outdated by the time it reached the people who were supposed to
use it.
Third, dilution
of responsibility between too many levels of the hierarchy and a delay in
the transmission of instructions. This makes it impossible to estimate within
what time span an order can be carried out, leading to counterproductive
manoeuvres, such as the retreat of the armies on the Meuse and at Sedan before
the German breakthrough in the Belgian Ardennes. Senior officers were also
repeatedly surprised that "the Germans had simply moved faster than seemed
to be the rule", the rule being based on the study of the Napoleonic
campaigns and the First World War: the rigid and backward-looking strategic
thinking of the French leadership, according to Bloch.
Fourth, shirking
responsibility: Marc Bloch's indictment of the French generals, who denied
any responsibility for the defeat of the French army in 1940, weighs
particularly heavily. Because, in his eyes, the generals were incapable of
adapting to the new realities of mobilised warfare of movement with tanks and
air power.
A book by the Basel historian Herbert Lüthy[7]
attracted attention in France[8]
as well as in Germany and Switzerland shortly after Bloch's publication.
France's clocks go differently, not necessarily wrong! This speaks, as
Friedrich Sieburg[9] noted,
of "insight into the outrageous stability of the French being, which
resists even the most stormy calls to adapt itself to the demands of the hour
with a tenacity that arouses in the same breath the anger and admiration of
those around it." The French version of Lüthy's book "A l'heure de
son clocher: essai sur la France" thus echoes the cosy provinces of
France, as evoked by Charles Trenet in "Douce France" in the 1930s[10],
rather than hectic Paris.
Lüthy notes how much France lags behind in
its mercantile economic concepts. For "France has not been governed but
administered for decades". What Herbert Lüthy wrote in 1954 could still
apply today: "Every new regime, and France has created more than a dozen
of them in the course of two centuries, has come to power with a revolutionary
programme of comprehensive state, administrative and judicial reforms; none has
been able to do more than change names and replace people". After all,
France was formed into the harmonious hexagon as we know it today under King
Philip II (1165-1223), also called Philip the Lazy. The ´lazy´ king built the
first beginnings of the administration in Paris and settled there with his
administrative substructure.
Administrative
dominance: Lüthy describes the continuity of France
as the history of the development of its administration, France is the
continuity of administration. "It has survived unshaken all dynasties, all
revolutions and all catastrophes. Behind constantly changing facades of feudal,
absolute, liberal monarchy, empires and republics in continuous numbering, the
great institutions and corporations - and thus this state itself - have
remained the same" (Lüthy, op.cit., p.20).
Elite: In reality, the administrative state is directed by the elite
civil service (´Grand Commis´), civil servants far superior to the politicians
in terms of seriousness and expertise. They shape the reason of state and
decide "almost always from the spirit of the past". The civil servant
elite is "a state of its own sovereignty, withdrawn from all political
intervention, responsible to no one but its own hierarchy; ...a completely
closed mandarinate that has acquired the esprit de corps and the consciousness
of a select elite ... from childhood onwards in the great boarding schools
preparing for careers" (Lüthy, p. 21).
Resistance to the 'technocrats' (eux!) from
Paris can sometimes come from ´France profonde´, the villages and provinces of
France. Shortly after television pictures showed President Macron being
celebrated, even adored, by OECD employees at the Château de la Muette, the
technocrat messiah was stopped by the protest of the yellow waistcoats from the
car-dependent province[11].
"Messianism and parochialism" form a unity in France, according to
Lüthy.
But anyone who loves France, not just as a
pensioner or tourist, has to fear for it. This is truer today than 50 years
ago; with a common currency and a common economic area, Germany in particular
has tied its fate to its western neighbour. Moreover, Germany itself, and even
more so the EU, which is strongly French in its bureaucratic nature[12],
is marked by similar burdens as Bloch wrote down for France's "Strange
Defeat" in 1940.
[1] Antoine Lévy (2021), "La lenteur de la vaccination française
est un symptôme de notre déclassement", Le Figaro, 1 January. My blog post
on this: http://shiftingwealth.blogspot.com/2021/01/covid-frances-clocks-tick-differently.html
[2] Claire Gatinois & Audrey Tonnelier (2021), "Vaccination:
la bureaucratie mise en accusation", Le Monde, 7 January.
[3] The idiom stems from the Mexican Revolution. Meaning: ineffective
organisation with a hierarchical structure involving an excess of managers and
superiors.
[4] See also Alain Peyrefitte (1976), Le Mal français, Paris: Plon.
[5] Marc Bloch (1946), L'Étrange Défaite, Paris: Société
des Éditions “Franc-Tireur”.
[6] Bloch did not want to register for the entrance examination at the
war college, which is why he did not advance beyond the rank of captain.
[7] Herbert Lüthy (1954), Frankreichs
Uhren gehen anders, Zurich: Europa Verlag. Idem (1955), A l'heure de son clocher: essai sur la
France, Paris: Calmann-Levy. The English versions of his book carry the
title France against Herself: A Perceptive Study
of France's Past, Her Politics and Her Unending Crises.
[8] See for example Jacques Chapsal (1955), "Luthy
(Herbert)", Revue française de
science politique, Vol. 5-4, pp. 898sq.
[9] Friedrich Sieburg (1954), "Im Brennpunkt des Gesprächs: France's
clocks go differently", Die Zeit,
13th May.
[10] The government of the united left French parties (Front Populaire)
that came to power at the time of the Third Republic in 1936 (Prime Minister
Léon Blum) made legal holidays (congés payés) universally binding.
[11] One of the few journalists who, unlike those from the FT or The Economist, seems to have intellectually penetrated Macron's
helplessness in France's difficult reform environment is Thomas Schmid (2018),
"Die
Gelbwesten oder Warum Frankreichs Uhren anders gehen",
https://schmid.welt.de/, 12 December.
[12] Hans Magnus Enzensberger (2011), Sanftes Monster Brüssel oder Die
Entmündigung Europas, Suhrkamp.
