France: the Strategic Management of Impending Collective Impoverishment

While the National Plan ceased until 1981 to be the framework within which the French government fits both its own medium-term policy decisions and attempts to co-ordinate in a comprehensive way the activities of the public and private sectors, it nevertheless still offers the best source from which one may discover how the government of the day perceives the current economic situation and the prospects facing the country. Consequently, if we wish to understand the state of mind of the official decision-makers, confronted by the post-recession problems of the 1970s, an indispensable starting point and permanent point of reference is the 1978 Report on the Adaptation of the Seventh Plan. Published in September 1978, just halfway through the duration of the Seventh Plan (1976–80), it helps us to understand the considered response of the tandem of President Giscard d’Estaing and Prime Minister Barre, drastically modifying the over-optimistic Seventh Plan’s presuppositions of 1975–6 and preparing the way for the Eighth Plan’s stoic summons to batten down the hatches for a stormy long haul. Though the Planning Commissariat (CGP) documents pay some passing attention to the views of other economic actors, we shall have to go beyond their increasingly governmentalised confines to consider how these other political and economic actors responded both to the 1970s’ recession and to the French government’s own attempts to cope with its consequences.