“What stays of Georges Pompidou’s shortened seven-year time period? A nostalgia » | EUROtoday

VSt was fifty years in the past, on April 2, 1974, at 10:15 p.m.: the ORTF interrupted the movie “Dossiers de l’screen” to announce the loss of life of the President of the Republic, Georges Pompidou, who died of a coronary heart illness. Waldenström that he had hidden till the tip. With him disappeared the person whose title, related to that of General de Gaulle, nonetheless symbolizes a sure thought of ​​a France on the trail to prosperity, pushed by an financial pragmatism the place the strategic State coexisted with an assumed liberalism. What stays of this shortened seven-year time period, the final earlier than the nation plunges into what the French nonetheless really feel is an interminable disaster?

A nostalgia. That of the ending “glorious thirty”, some communicate of the “blessed ten”, when France posted an insolent progress fee of 6% and a debt of 15% of gross home product. That of a rustic nonetheless ignoring mass unemployment, rising buying energy (usually at the price of quite a few strikes) and lengthening the social safety internet. That of a Republic of engineers which launched packages as bold as Concorde, Ariane, civil nuclear energy or the TGV. The one which created highly effective industrial teams with the help of main our bodies of the State.

Idyllic occasions? The world was then at a tipping level, after the tip of the Bretton Woods agreements in 1971, which pressured France to adapt to floating alternate charges. Since the earlier decade, it has entered right into a “global economic war”an expression coined by the advisor already accountable for trade at Matignon, Bernard Esambert. “By accepting the common market, by subscribing to the spirit of the “Kennedy round” tending in the direction of a normal decreasing of customs duties, France has chosen to enter into worldwide competitors and subsequently to just accept the dangers and the legal guidelines »writes Pompidou in The Gordian Knot (Plon, 1974), revealed shortly earlier than his loss of life.

Priority to trade

She does this with out being absolutely ready for this openness to the open sea. Since the Sixties, it has been making an attempt to catch up industrially with the United States, however particularly with Germany and Japan. Traced at Matignon from 1962 and accentuated on the Elysée, a tenet will information Pompidou's motion: modernize and develop the productive equipment, a categorical crucial to take the lead in neighborhood Europe and preserve affect in world affairs.

In VI^e plan, launched in 1971, precedence is given to trade. The president multiplies the recommendation of restricted ministers, adopted by typically strategic selections, comparable to on nuclear energy, remembers Esambert. He takes the heartbeat of the bosses by receiving them on the Elysée, associating a few of them along with his journeys overseas. Not with out already encountering the resistance of a deep state at work in administrations.

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