Introduction

One thing that all recent historians of the business reorganization have in common is the belief that the patronat did not just wish for a return to the status quo ante Matignon. It is suggested that there was a wave of new thinking among French businessmen about how to organize the economy and indeed the state. This is important because the ideologies that arose seem to anticipate certain aspects of the Vichy regime. However, it will be suggested below that the new ideologies that were discussed among employers during this period did not penetrate very deeply, except within a small and unrepresentative group. Many industrialists, who were not personally sympathetic to such ideologies, saw them as tools to facilitate mobilization against the Popular Front. But they were tools which could be abandoned when they had served their purpose.

Corporatism

It is necessary to be clear about what corporatism is, or rather what it is not. Corporatism is used here to describe organization among industrialists that had a legal basis. It is not used here to describe voluntary cartels nor is it used to describe arrangements between capital and labour. There were significant degrees of light and shade within corporatist ideology. At its most moderate it could simply mean the application of legal restrictions on entry into a profession (such as those that the lot Pullen applied to the shoe industry). At its most extreme it could spill over into the political sphere with projects for a chamber of corporations that would have a role in government.