The Making of the French Economy: Quantification and Expertise in the Interwar Period

Thomas Angeletti, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)

Since the mid-1990s, a large body of work investigated the emergence of “the economy” in its contemporary sense (Tooze, 2001; Mitchell, 1998, 2002; Hirschman, 2016). The work of the historian and political scientist Timothy Mitchell played an important role in this renewed interest. In a series of papers, Mitchell defined the economy as “the structure or totality of relations of production, distribution and consumption of goods and services within a given country or region” and he argued that this entity emerged as such in the mid-twentieth century. The birth of this entity is connected, according to Mitchell, to the development of Keynesianism and of national accounting. I argue in this paper that Mitchell’s thesis is transhistorical: it forgets the spatialized dimension of the emergence of the economy, and places this phenomenon in the same historical temporality for all nations around the globe. I demonstrate this argument through the study of the emergence of the French economy in the inter-war period. I study the investigations of economists, statisticians, politicians and high civil servants to unravel the French economy as a proper entity and to give it a proper form. Most of these attempts were based on the quantification of economic phenomena and on the development of economic statistics (national income, business cycle, sectorial quantification), and on theoretical works within economics to consider the nation as a proper economic unit. But another important attempt is the creation in 1925 of a council which gathers together representatives of the different economic sectors, the Conseil national économique.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 260. Constructing National Knowledges