Les services publics français à l'heure de l'intégration européenne

What are the characteristics of the French public services ? The evolution of the real frontier between the public and private sectors and its theoretical rationalization are tracked. During the liberalism period, regulation and public property were not to be mixed. The government influence has never stopped growing through the multiplication of its missions, even though they were implemented by the private sector. The theoretical technical criteria (increasing returns, etc) that were used in the mid-twentieth century to justify the extension of the public property, have only served to rationalize the objectives of a « visionary » State. Nowadays, the same criteria, still unduly neutral, are used to explain the contraction of the French public sector. The visionary State disappears and with him all the Society Projects that make the specificity of the « service public à la française ».