"Ententes and National Champions in Postwar France"

The paper is Chapter 4 of the recently-published Monopoly Politics: Competition and Learning in the Evolution of Policy Regimes (Oxford, 2025). The chapter examines France from 1945 to 1970, focusing on the French government’s pro-competition stance and policies following World War II, as they gave way to price protections and industrial consolidation in the 1960s. It first dispels with the conventional wisdom—of France as a fundamentally statist political economy opposed to market mechanisms—by demonstrating through new archival evidence that French policy favored expanding competitive mechanisms from the end of World War II through the early 1960s in an effort to modernize France through expanded output and productivity growth. The chapter then shows how an acceleration of these policies—through further tariff reductions, price ceilings, and industry reforms—threatened the profitability of French private industry and its prospects for making future investments. Established government advisors opposed changes to policy even as other areas of the government recognized it as a full-blown “crisis of investment.” Only after this information was spread across government bureaucracies and consultative bodies in the 1960s did France turn to the market power policy regime of “national champions,” built around corporate consolidation and price protections, precisely to restore private profits and investment.