L’allocation Barangé (1951-1990). Enquête historique sur la "légitimité" d'une dépense publique

The public finance manuals published under the Third Republic point to the difficulty - or even impossibility - of abolishing expenditure, an impossibility which, combined with the advantage politicians derive from the creation of new expenditure, aggravates the spendthrift tendency of democratic regimes. Economists and politicians have taken up and theorised, in various forms, this general intuition, which underlies the discourses of mistrust regarding the growth of public spending, and the proposals to cap this growth by means of "golden rules". If one follows this thread, spending (or some spending) would survive what initially underpins its legitimacy. The existence of these analyses is, in itself, an invitation to the historian to take a closer look at what happens to state budget spending when the context changes to the point where the arguments underlying their adoption become obsolete. For this survey, the so-called "Barangé allowance" provides a textbook case. Introduced in 1951 as a provisional measure in response to the financial difficulties of public schools, it survived for more than thirty years after the Debré Law of 31 December 1959, whose aim was precisely to provide a lasting solution to the problems raised by relations between the State and public schools. By retracing the history of the Barangé allowance, this study, based on public archives and parliamentary documents, does not claim to give an opinion on the legitimacy of the expenditure, but rather to analyse the various uses that the players were able to make of this notion of legitimacy, as well as its effects. The law of 28 September 1951 instituted both a (dynamic) resource, in the form of an additional contribution to the production tax rates, an allocation for this resource, the schooling allowance provided for all pupils in the public or private primary level, and a special Treasury account linking one to the other. This baroque arrangement has its origins in the political-legal imbroglio represented by the 'school question' under the Fourth Republic: it avoids openly subsidising public schools, a solution unacceptable to the secular movement. The education allowance thus created benefits 80% of public schools that are not the primary target (1). From 1951 to 1959, the question of the legitimacy of the allocation (in the sense of "conformity with the law") was at the heart of many controversies relating to the amount of the transfers, the definition of beneficiaries, the use of the funds by the APELs, the départements, the communes, etc. (2). The invocation of "the legislator's intention" offers here an effective lever for action, setting in motion a series of actions, the course of which can be followed, and sometimes back and forth, from Parliament to the administrative judge via the offices of the ministry. It makes it possible, little by little, to monitor the reality of expenditure (2). The Debré law of 31 December 1959 provides a lasting solution to the problem of state funding of public schools, but does not abolish an allocation, on which local authorities rely heavily for school construction. The education allowance was included in the general State budget from 1966 onwards, but it survived the "school explosion" of the 1960s and the decentralisation laws of the 1980s. Once the legitimacy of the expenditure has been legally established, nothing seems to be able to erase it from the state budget, except the slow but inexorable action of inflation. However, the Gulf War hastened its end, decided in extremis in August 1990, when it only involved amounts unanimously described as "symbolic" (3).