17^th May 2024 marked the 30^th anniversary of the death of the French engineer, and civil servant Etienne Hirsch, who served as French General Planning Commissioner between 1952 and 1959. Born in Paris on 20^th January 1901 into a prominent bourgeois Jewish family, Hirsch has been largely ignored by scholars in favour of his quasi-legendary predecessor, Jean Monnet. Post-war commentators ironically nicknamed Hirsch “Mr. Production”, and identified his acute expertise of specific industrial problems as antithetic to the global visionary thinking of “Mr. Europe” (Monnet). Yet, such characterisation fails to do justice to Hirsch’s pivotal role in the consolidation of French ‘organised capitalism’.

A graduate of the Parisian École des Mines, in 1924 the young Hirsch joined the Kuhlmann Works, France’s leading chemical company, becoming General Manager by the eve of the Second World War. Hirsch’s industrial experience earned him the rank of Director of Armaments Supply to Charles De Gaulle’s Free French forces after the disastrous defeat of June 1940.

In this capacity, in 1942-43 Hirsch took part in the first debates concerning the post-war re-organisation of French capitalism. Hirsch endorsed new nationalisations, and acknowledged that the ‘social reconstruction’ of French industry would require the inclusion of workers’ representatives into ‘techno-corporatist’ committees charged with regulating each industrial sector. Hirsch also championed the social role of the engineer as a manager of conflicting interests and a stimulator of workers’ involvement in the resolution of productive problems.

In the autumn of 1945 Hirsch became a member of the ‘brain-trust’, which aided Jean Monnet in designing the General Planning Commissariat (CGP), the technocratic organ that coordinated the implementation of France’s industrial reconstruction strategy: the national Modernisation and Equipment Plan (PME) or “Monnet Plan”. As chief of the CGP’s Technical Division, in the spring of 1946 Hirsch devised the techno-corporatist Modernisation Commissions (CMs), which were tasked with drafting and monitoring the execution of the PME’s industrial restructuring programmes. The CMs partially inherited the planning powers of the Organisation Committees (COs), the equally techno-corporatist sectorial organs that had controlled wartime industrial production under the Vichy regime. This administrative reform made Hirsch – a committed anti-fascist whose parents had been murdered in Auschwitz – a key enabler of the institutional continuities that characterised the French “developmental state” in its transition from dictatorship to democracy.

Hirsch carefully selected the CMs’ personnel from among civil servants, business leaders and trade unionists, to consolidate what he termed a ‘concerted economy’. Hirsch’s determination to recruit supporters of industrial expansion rather than of pre-war ‘Malthusianism’, prompted him to choose technical experts who had previously served in Vichy’s industrial control apparatus. These controversial figures included the engineers that dominated the CM for iron and steel, which – with the enthusiastic support of Communist trade unions – devised an ambitious programme for the concentration of production into modern large-scale integrated steelworks and wide-strip rolling mills.

Between 1947 and 1953, Hirsch carefully followed the plan’s execution, lobbying for the Treasury’s financial support and persuading reluctant capitalists such as Francois de Wendel into endorsing its industrial expansion agenda. If Jean Monnet was the chief inspirer of the PME, Hirsch was a protagonist of its practical implementation. The same accounted for the launching of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), which Hirsch presented to French steelmakers as an essential stimulus for the successful completion of the PME.

As Monnet’s successor at the CGP, Hirsch undertook the difficult task of adapting French planning to the increasingly open European economy of the 1950s, and the turbulent political environment of the late Fourth Republic. Amidst continuous governmental changes and political pressures, Hirsch was able to defend the independence of France’s “Ministry of the Future” and ensure the implementation of the second PME (1954-57). The “Hirsch Plan” also saw the implementation of ambitious industrial restructuring projects such as the rationalisation of the Loire’s steelworks and mechanical workshops.

On the eve of the Fifth Republic, however, Hirsch clashed with de Gaulle’s orthodox liberal chief economic advisor, Jacques Rueff, over the deflationary austerity programme, which saved the franc, but almost sank the launching of the third PME. These policy disagreements – combined with his political opposition to Gaullism – led to the Hirsch’s resignation in January 1959 and to his subsequent appointment as Chairman of the European Atomic Commission. Concerted industrial planning nevertheless survived as a feature of French political economy at least until the neo-liberal “U-turn” of the mid-1980s.

On the 30^th anniversary of Hirsch’s death, industrial policy is no longer a dirty word and France is once again at the forefront of Europe’s ­ambitious quest to reclaim its industrial independence on the basis of a system of concerted planning not so distant from the model pioneered by Hirsch and his colleagues. The return of the developmental state at the centre-stage of European political economy may thus invite scholars to re-discover the life and plans of “Mr. Production”.

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Cesare Vagge recently completed his DPhil in Modern European History at the University of Oxford. His doctoral project, supervised by Professor Martin Conway, focused on the institutional and strategic evolution of French and Italian industrial policy from the late interwar period until the early post-war era. He is currently working as a Postdoctoral Research Assistant to Professor Andrew Thompson at Nuffield College, Oxford. His future post-doctoral projects include a political biography of Etienne Hirsch on behalf of the Jean Monnet Foundation for Europe in Lausanne. His e-mail is cesare.vagge@history.ox.ac.uk

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