The Making of Economic Expertise in France (1930-1952) – ExEco

Economic expertise has become the basic grammar of political discourse. When did this practice start? What are its specific characteristics and what role does economics and economists play in it? This project (ExEco) intends to address these crucial democratic concerns from a historical perspective. From the interwar to the post-war period, economic expertise gained traction as French authorities assumed that one of their main tasks was to steer the economic development of the nation. The term economic expertise refers here to the different ways economic knowledge provides a legitimate basis for political intervention in public affairs.
The ExEco project aims at providing the first comprehensive history of economic expertise as it emerged and developed in mid-20th century France (from 1930 to 1952), placing the Vichy regime as its focal point.
The central research hypothesis of this project is that World War II, and more precisely the period from the Vichy regime to the Liberation, worked as a catalysis that deeply transformed French economic science as well as economists’ practices as experts. This hypothesis thus challenges the standard narrative in the secondary literature that the Vichy period was merely a parenthesis without any significance for the institutionalization of the economic discipline. On the contrary, this project will highlight what the Vichy regime changed in the structure of economic knowledge and discipline in France in order to shedding light on the place of economists’ expertise in the discourse and decisions of this new political regime.
To corroborate this hypothesis, the main objective of the ExEco project is to understand how economic expertise and economic knowledge were mutually constructed, and how this co-construction took shape in the specific context of mid-20th century France. Examining and qualifying the rise of economic expertise in France calls for following the trajectories of economists, the creation of new institutions and the development of ideas, tools and techniques associated with them. In order to assess how economic ideas found their way into the administrative and political realm this project will combine the contextual analysis of sources (both published and unpublished) with the methodology of network and lexicographic analysis.
The added value of the ExEco project is twofold: historiographical and methodological. On the one hand, this project will offer the first ever cross history of economic discipline and expertise encompassing the Vichy Regime as its pivotal point. Thus, the project will provide a collective history of both the professionalization of economics and the place of economists as experts, showing that the two are not separated but strongly linked. From a methodological viewpoint, this project is not interested in a purely disciplinary history of French economic, but is rather in documenting the way knowledges and practices of economists related to the technical, ideological, and political challenges of their time. To do so, the project will deploy an innovative combination of qualitative and quantitative methods.
Hence, this project will shed light not only on the historical origins but on the mechanisms that still largely govern the relationship between markets, the state and public opinion in contemporary France.