Ministerial Control of Electricité de France
| Published date | 01 December 1954 |
| Date | 01 December 1954 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9299.1954.tb01218.x |
| Author | Margaret Finnegan |
Ministerial Control
of
Electricite de
France
By MARGARET
FINNEGAN
This is a first-hand study by a student
of
the London School
of
Economics
and Political Science
of
the relations between the Government and the
Electricity Board in France.
LECTRICITY in France, like many other of the country’s resources,
E
was nationalised after the last war, for a complex of reasons. There
were strong technical and economic reasons-the need for accelerated output
to meet the immensely greater demand called for large-scale investment,
new plant, and the pooling of supplies that could come from rationalising
over
600
firms into one large organisation; electricity was a major item
in the Monnet plan for increasing France’s productivity, and a centrally-
controlled industry was a much more effective economic instrument for
carrying out this plan than a fragmented one. And there were strong political
reasons, arising out of party creeds and the peculiar post-Liberation political
atmosphere in France
;
many of the Resistance parties had made the need
for nationalisation a feature of their post-war plans
;
’it was felt that
nationalisation would be one of the literal expressions of sovereignty
of
the
people, and would reverse the inter-war capitalist trends
;
there was thc
desire of the parties, immediately after the war, to co-operate, and therc was
the feeling that a clean sweep must be made of the old methods
of
running
the country-a feeling of which the Monnet plan was one economic
manifestation.
These reasons were all clearly delined in the debates which preceded
the passing of the Nationalisation Act, 1946, and are implicit, where not
actually stated, in the Act. Conscqucntly, the Act reads as a mixture of aims
and hopes, not all
thc
practical consequences of which are worked out in
detail by the legislators to make sure that they would not clash with each
other-or even to make sure they would become effective. Some of the vzry
complicated problems raised were referred forward to future decrees-a
typically French form of legislation. For cxarnple, Article
2
of the Act lays
down that regional autonomous boards would be set up to run the distribution
side of the electricity industry, the distribution to remain in the hands of the
National organisation until the autonomous regional boards should be set up.
Articles
21-23
deal with the functioning of the regional boards. But therc
are
no
provisions saying who is responsible for seeing that the boards
are
actually created, or by what date they must function. One is lefi to assume
that gaps such as these will be fdlcd
by
Ministerial decree.
But in this article wc are particularly concerned to see how the autonomy
of a nationalised industry works out in France. Thc question of how much
freedom should be given to a nationalised industry has been strongly debated
in England, and formed the subject last year of a Select Committee report
;
as this report showed, and as both politicians and writers on the subject have
always emphasised, the problem is one of achieving balance between
responsibility to Parliamcnt and independence in the running of the
P
441
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