Alternating Currents: Nationalized Power in France, 1946-1970

Robert L. Frost
© Cornell University Press, 1991, Ithaca and London.

Table of Contents

Preface

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

Chapter One: Prelude to a Nationalization

The Physical, Structural, and Juridic Aspects of French Electricity to 1945

Utility Management, Strategy, and Structure to 1939

Political and Social Ideology in the French Electrical Industry, 1920-1939

Electrical Workers and Unionism to 1944

War, Collaboration, Resistance, and Liberation

Laying the Foundations for Nationalization

Chapter Two: The Nationalization of Electricity

The French Political Landscape, 1944-1946

Conceptions and Politics of Nationalization

Major Issues of the Electricity Nationalization

The Labor Statut

Chapter Three: EDF - State Relations and the Evolution of EDF, 1946-1954

"La belle France que nous allons faire..."

Financial Crises at EDF's Birth

Labor Power under Seige

EDF Under Attack

The Controls Campaign

EDF as Pariah: Politics and Ideology within EDF in 1954

Chapter Four: Relations of Production: EDF Managers and Political Economy

Changes in the Nature of the French State

EDF and the Modernist State

Changes at the Top of EDF, 1954-1970

Conceptual Revolutions in EDF Management

Economists as Managers, Part I: The Equipment Choice Model

Economists as Managers, Part II: Reforms of the Electrical Rate Structure

The Culture and Ideology of High Technology

Chapter Five: The Means of Production: Technological Choice at EDF

Choices of Primary Energy Sources

EDF Equipment Purchasing Policy: From Rival to Ally

The Nuclear Imbroglio

Labor and Technological Change

Chapter Six: Forces of Production: Work and Worklife at EDF

Union Strength and Politics

Remuneration

Changes in Work Methods and Workers' Response

Cogestion manquée

When Striking is Too Powerful: Methods of Workers' Action

Visions of Liberated Work and Technology: 1968

Epilogue

Appendicies

Bibliography

Preface

his study was first imagined in 1978-79, at the height of the second oil price shock and international opposition to nuclear-generated electricity. At that time, many activists presumed that public control of energy resources would mitigate the shocks caused by rising energy prices, guarantee against windfall profits by private energy suppliers, and give the public control over choice of technologies used to generate power. As a French historian, I was well aware that France had the largest publicly-owned integrated utility in the capitalist world and that despite France's lack of access to cheap primary energy, power rates there were relatively low. However, France also has the world's most aggressive nuclear power program. In order to explain that apparent contradiction, I began research on Électricité de France, only to find, as many younger historians do, that the issues were far more complex than I had envisioned. After a rapid stint of self-education in Wisconsin and Paris, I embarked on my study, concluding at the very least that public power is a highly worthwhile reform, but that it has little to do with socialism. In later research I began to discover a very rich body of emerging scholarship in the history of technology, particularly that made public after 1983. Historians of France, of technology, political economy, labor, and business have therefore all contributed to the perspective which informs this work.

Funding for this research, performed in France in 1980-81 and the summers of 1984 and 1988, came from a variety of sources. The largest were a fellowship from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs (a bourse Chateaubriand) and a fellowship from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation. Other sources include the Institute for Public Utilities at Michigan State University, the American Council of Learned Societies, the University of Wisconsin Department of History, the Association pour l'Histoire de l'Électricité en France, and the State University of New York at Albany. Various conferencing and seminar funds were provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities, Carthage College, Wabash College, The American University, and the State University of New York at Albany.

Research was performed at a number of sites in Paris, with generous assistance from countless individuals. Major sites include the Électricité de France archives, the Archives Nationales, the offices of the electrical workers' federations of the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT-Pantin) and the Confédération Française Démocratique du Travail (CFDT), the press archives of the Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, and those of the Bibliothèque de Documentation Internationale Contemporaine.

Valuable criticism and assistance in Paris were tirelessly given to me by Patrick Fridenson, Louis Puiseux, Bernard Court, René Gaudy, the collective at the CFDT national offices, Ernest Anzalone, Alain Beltran, Jean-François Picard, Antoine Prost, Karine Lowy, Sally and Huges Maquart-Moulin, Anne Saint-Guillain, François Caron, Frédérique de Gravelaine, and Sylvie O'Dy. Similar generousity was provided to me in the US by Richard Kuisel, Donald Reid, John Weiss, Peter Kuznick, Darryl Holter, Herrick Chapman, Laura Hein, Cecil O. Smith, Kendall Birr, and Robert Whitesell. Particularly valuable as well was the help given me by Sidney Tarrow during a stunning NEH Summer Seminar at Cornell in 1985. His colleague, Peter Katzenstein, helped to clarify some political-economic issues. While working at the New York State Energy Office in 1985-86, I enjoyed valuable contributions from Paul DeCotis. At Wisconsin, I received valuable inspiration and assistance from Edward Gargan, Harvey Goldberg, Rodgers Hollingsworth, Domenico Sella, and Rodney Stevenson. John Ackerman of Cornell University Press provided invaluable assistance and insistance on problems of prose. Constant friendship and constructive criticism were generously provided by Tyler Stovall. Top honors, however, must go to Margaret Hedstrom, whose patience and criticisms have been nothing short of heroic. I alone, however, remain responsible for any errors in my work.

Albany, New York

September 1989

rance's first elected postwar régime created Électricité de France by nationalizing virtually all of the nation's electrical utility facilities in 1946. Social, political, and economic goals converged in the nationalization process. The social goals for nationalization included efforts to end the sharp class divisions which had hampered both political democracy and economic development. Political rationales flowed from a perception that utility managers and owners had unduly influenced the course of prewar French politics to their own advantage. There were several economic reasons for the nationalization. France's utility sector had stagnated since the onset of the Depression. Utility expansion had to precede major industrial growth because electrical power was part of the infrastructure necessary for a modern industrial economy, but France's private sector was woefully short of the capital needed to modernize the capital-intensive industry.

Both France and Great Britain experienced a wave of nationalizations after the Second World War, but only the French took full control of the electric power industry from powerplants to meters. Far from a case of `lemon socialism,' the nationalization of electricity in France targeted an industry on the brink of massive expansion. Électricité de France (EDF) emerged in 1946 as a potential pillar of a technically and economically modernized France, as a pilot firm in an industrial modernization process, and as a harbinger of a more egalitarian society.

A lopsided parliamentary majority created EDF, but a quiet, resigned opposition despised its existence and its promise. Opponents remained hushed until mid-1947 because of a strongly leftist political climate, but they came into the open within a year after the nationalization as the political majority moved to the right with the onset of the Cold War. The opposition initially attacked the firm directly, but the EDF community and its supporters repelled the onslaught. The spirit of victory deceived the EDF community because productivism, not a progressive political agenda, had saved the firm. An implicit `proof by production' strategy preserved EDF and helped to table a more radical agenda, facilitating a fruitful (yet politically dubious) symbiosis between EDF and the private sector. By the mid-1960s, a consensus developed around a technocratic and productionist vision of EDF's place in the French economy and society.

The nationalization of electricity did not yield a socialist France, but a far more efficient capitalist one. EDF ultimately helped to build a society of abundance yet it failed to foster greater social equality. Productive triumphs, promethean language, and mathematical modelling obscured the fact that by 1970 EDF managers allied with the "trusts" that the nationalization of electricity was supposed to have undermined. The process that subordinated a publicly-owned firm to the interests of the private sector is the central focus of this work.

Électricité de France warrants a lengthy study for several reasons. From a position of technological backwardness in 1946, EDF has become the largest and one of the most cost-effective fully integrated power systems in the non-Communist world. EDF's technical and economic success played an important part in France's postwar modernization. The history of EDF reflects important factors intrinsic to electrical utilities, to French political economy, and to the political economy of mature capitalism generally. In addition, focusing upon a capital-intensive, high technology firm, a study of EDF offers a chance to examine many crucial issues in the history of technology and business history. Particularly because labor had a key position in the politics of the nationalization process itself, this work analyzes the internal politics of a firm where unions enjoyed considerable formal and informal power. Finally, a look inside of EDF illuminates the character of work and the politics of control over the labor process in a high technology industry.

Many writers have presented the mixed results of the postwar reforms generally and the nationalizations in particular as reflecting the rise of a new class of technocratic managers who displaced traditional capitalists at the helm of France's political-economic order. In short, some authors opine that a post-industrial society managed by experts replaced a class society based on wealth. The implication of this argument is that there has been a fundamental change of élites in France. This work argues quite otherwise--that the élite was not replaced, but that it modernized, replacing heritage with meritocracy as a mode of socio-political legitimation. Technocratic circles within France's élite successfully convinced their more conservative peers that modernization, industrial rationalization, and planned economic growth were absolutely essential, and that economic renovation need not be accompanied by social upheaval. EDF technocrats played a crucial role in showing private sector managers that rational management and coherent planning could minimize the financial risks associated with productive expansion. In addition, EDF managers demonstrated that a generous and cooperative attitude toward labor yielded higher productivity and greater social stability than did the usual rigid opposition to organized labor's demands. EDF helped to set a clear trajectory toward modernization for the postwar French economy and it helped to lay the technical, economic, and ideological foundations upon which a rejuvenated capitalism was erected.

EDF remains one of the purest examples of a modern technocracy. As with any hierarchical system, stability in a technocracy is predicated upon the consent of those at the middle and lower ranks. In non-technocratic social systems, that consent is usually attained by way of an ideology which legitimates the status quo as intrinsically valuable. Socio-political legitimation in a technocracy, however, is based on confidence in its ability to foster controlled change and growth, but that very approach inherently challenges the legitimacy of the status quo. As the history of countless social upheavals indicates and as the conservative French élite traditionally feared, a failure to legitimate the status quo could undermine popular consent and lead to social cataclysm. The task of technocrats, therefore, was to foster change while at the same time assuring that the changes would not stray beyond the bounds of élite control. At EDF, a new legitimating ideology, techno-corporatism, enabled the emerging technocrats to win the consent of non-élites to accept only limited change. One of the keys to understanding the history of EDF can be discovered by studying the ways through which potential opponents to technocratic power surrendered to it.

Two interrelated notions undergird techno-corporatism: meritocracy and a unilinear trajectory of all `progress.' A meritocratic basis for hierarchy serves to validate a new élite strategy by implying that expertise within the productive system assures ascendency of the fittest individuals. Mastery over the functional aspects of production is far easier to sell to labor and consumers than simple status by birth, and it appears to provide a measurable standard of success. The very notion of merit remains largely undefined in popular discourse, though it is usually derived from concepts of rationality and the capacity to abstract from function to model. The intellectual tradition out of which techno-corporatism emerged developed from the assumption that an analysis of component parts (or, in modern parlance, subsystems) can lead the way to an understanding of the whole. Analysis obviates synthesis, for synergy remains undefinable in an entirely quantitative framework. That which cannot be quantified is irrelevant. Functionalism precludes æsthetics and most qualities can be quantified; those that cannot are irrelevant. For the techno-corporatist, nothing succeeds like measurable success.

Productive successes and the techniques used to attain them forestalled internal and eventually, external, opposition to the management of EDF. Sophisticated models and specialized technical language effectively made it impossible for potential critics to frame a discourse of opposition. Many of the managerial models passed off political and social judgements as objective, science-based necessities. The new managers presented as revealed truths capitalist economic models which implicity subsidized large industry or limited EDF's presence on the capital market in order to avoid displacing private bond issues. The ostensible necessity for a market economy was as objective as Ohm's Law. Economic models emulated reality just as surely as E=IR describes the relationships among voltage, current, and resistance. One could no more violate the laws of marginalist economics than transgress the law of gravity. EDF managers ultimately used normative models of a purely competitive economy to make policy choices, just as engineers used hydrologic models to design dams.

The dynamics of consent explain why electrical workers and their unions, the key forces behind the nationalization, allowed EDF to cease challenging the capitalist order and to become allied with it. Ironically, whether an EDF union was Communist, Catholic, socialist, or purely `professional,' its leaders fundamentally accepted the technocratic notion of progress and the meritocratic structures of legitimation upon which the technocracy was based. Alternative visions of the possible remained elusive.

This work argues that `progress' is not unilinear, and analysis is not as objective as the experts claimed. While historical hypotheticals are always fraught with danger, it is clear that the characteristics of the nationalized power utility that oversaw all of France's electrical supply system in 1970 were not historically inevitable. It was possible to develop an institution which was more democratic internally and more open to public input. To gain a credible critical frame of reference, the opposition had to speak the language of the experts, yet it was incapable of doing so. The Marxist framework used by the majority of labor's leadership agreed with the technocrats on far too many issues--from a Promethean notion of progress to a respect for technically-based hierarchy--and could not offer conceptual bases upon which opposition could be built.

At EDF, the assumptions used to build models and the terms used to discuss them changed gradually and tacitly, but dramatically, between 1946 and 1970. Managers at EDF began with a highly politicized and fiercely independent stance toward the private sector. The latter was an object of rivalry and its methods were seen as archaic and inappropriate for a firm which placed public service above private profit. However, the initial set of normative standards lacked concrete, systematic parameters and EDF's early managers never succeeded in building an entirely new framework for decision-making in a public enterprise. Unionists conceded provisional power to experts while EDF was under attack in the late 1940s, but that surrender became permanent. Cowed by the glare of technical mastery emanating from the experts' successes, internal opponents systematically deferred to their superiors. The determination and skill with which early EDF managers defended the firm helped to quiet criticism permanently. Technocracy precluded democracy and made it easier to work with private sector managers who shared similar professional and cultural visions.

EDF managers who explicitly used private sector methods as normative standards shared several basic axioms with their erstwhile rivals: bigger is better (economies of scale), centralized is more efficient, and higher technology is intrinsically more productive. While these axioms may be true on small systems, this work argues that they have a number of limitations when applied to large, leading-edge public systems. Reliability and the propensities toward and costs of failures often weigh in favor of smaller and lower technologies. Intimacy with operational and social quirks as well as popular accessibility often weigh to the advantage of decentralized structures. Though largely a consequence of shared ideologies rather than overt conspiracies, the adoption of these axioms by EDF managers helped EDF operate to the benefit of large, centralized, and modern private firms. Modernist managers, whether in the public or private sector, shared a taste for hierarchy, scale, and novelty.

Marxist structuralists would argue that the process that integrated EDF with the private sector was inevitable because islands of socialism cannot exist in a capitalist sea. Parsonians would contend that the two sectors merged because a unified structure functioned most effectively. Instrumentalist approaches would stress the intelligence of the capitalist class, noting how the élite realized that by creating a non-profit publicly-owned core in the industrial infrastructure, profits foregone at the core could augment revenues in the privately-owned periphery. Evidence concerning EDF supports none of these analyses. The Marxist structuralist approach is over-deterministic because it neglects issues of human agency and will. The Parsonian stress on functionality begs the larger issues of initial intentions and political-social goals. While the instrumentalist theory may or may not be correct, its timing is wrong. Peaceful coexistence between the public and private sectors emerged only well after the nationalization, implying that private sector managers took several years to realize that nationalization could be turned to their advantage. The instrumentalist approach also implies a capitalist conspiracy on the part of actors inside and outside of EDF to turn the firm to the service of the private sector. There is no evidence of any such conspiracy.

A more accurate analysis of the transition in management must rest on a recognition of human volition and frailty. In the 1950s, EDF managers began to adopt private sector models for lack of alternatives. For example, cost and productivity analyses in business rely, in the largest sense, on profits as indicators of efficiency. In a non-profit enterprise surrounded by the private sector, downstream from private suppliers and upstream from private bulk consumers, `shadow profits' became the most defensible measures and the normative standards of productive efficiency. In addition to the lack of non-profit analytical models, one must also recognize the social background of EDF management itself. The most élite, technically-oriented managers who occupied leading posts in government and industry were often graduates of the École Polytechnique, where they developed a collective sense of community and mission. Top EDF managers were also Polytechniciens and shared in the élite engineers' subculture. To swim against the social tide would have been unthinkable for EDF managers.

Any work dealing with a nationalized industry must also directly address issues in historical political economy. In order to elucidate the place of EDF within French political structures and processes, this work explicitly addresses the changing character of the French state from the Liberation era to the end of the Gaullist period. During that time, a critical transition occurred. After the Second World War the resistance coalition tried to build a new French state on the basis of a broad coalition cemented by a broadly democratic, post-liberal, and productivist political-economic consensus. That strategy failed with the onset of the Cold War, and the provincial, small business coalition that had dominated the late years of the Third Republic retook power until it became eclipsed by gaullism between 1958 and 1961. With the implantation of the Gaullist régime by 1961, big business and centralized finance finally gained predominant political influence. EDF worked well with the initial postwar régime, but found little in common with the small-business conservatism and neo-liberalism of the late Fourth Republic. The economic practices of the Fifth Republic--centralized and negotiated control over the economy by state sector technocrats and the largest fifirms--offered the EDF managers a complemetary set of partners. On that basis, EDF found a new and secure place within the structure of French monopoly capitalism.

Finally, this work addresses the issue of technological change and its social, economic, and political environment. The first wave of historians of technology tended to argue that technology determines society--man is homo fabens, tools make the man, and the level of technology reflects the level of culture. More sophisticated supporters of this argument posit that the relations of production are also technologically determined. The notion of unilinear progress and the view that one technology or culture is `higher' than another are implicit in this technological determinism. This framework has recently been reversed. Many historians and technology analysts now argue that technology is socially and culturally constructed. Tools and techniques reflect not only the societies and cultures which produce them, they also reflect specific sets of political and social relations. Neither of these analyses transcend the notion of straight causal vectors. At the extremes, they simply mirror each other, for causation remains unilinear and only the directions have been reversed.

This work argues strongly that the relationship between technology and its context is far more complex, and that it is multi-faceted, interactive, and almost chaotic. Technologies emerge from specific historical contexts, but once in place, they help to shape the dynamics of those contexts. Integrated power systems could only emerge from societies able to mobilize and centralize large sums of capital. Once in place, however, the technical attributes of power systems themselves and the language used to understand and discuss them reshaped social and economic geography. The inescapable technical characteristics of electrical transmission and distribution equipment make service more costly in sparsely populated areas, whether the social system is capitalist, socialist, or theocratic. Decisions whether and where to install power systems, as well as on how much to charge for services, remain highly political because such choices can have considerable social and economic consequences.

This work is divided into two basic parts, one chronological, Chapters One through Three, and one thematic, Chapters Four through Six. A chronological framework guides us through the historical background to nationalized power (Chapter One), the nationalization of electricity (Chapter Two), and the startup of Électricité de France (Chapter Three). After 1954, with the major exception of the change of political regimes in 1958, there were few significant or cataclysmic events within or affecting EDF: process and evolution replaced events as the basic characteristics of change. By 1954, EDF management had already begun to shift its sense of purpose from the social reformism of the Liberation era to the efficient capitalism of the Gaullist Fifth Republic. Chapter Four deals with political economy and managerial ideology and methods. It closes with a discussion of the emerging culture of high technology among EDF managers and thus acts as a transition to Chapter Five, on the assumption that EDF management had near-total control over technological choice by the mid-1950s.

Chapter Five raises a number of issues in technological choice, demonstrating the failure of unilinear explanations for technological change and the need for an interactive, non-linear approach. The discussion focuses in particular upon how pressures applied by private suppliers shaped EDF's methods for choosing and purchasing equipment, and how France developed its own nuclear power plant design, only to abandon it under pressure from EDF's suppliers. Chapter Six examines how labor and the unions dealt with a political and technological environment that was largely pre-determined after the solidification of the new hierarchy. Labor's consent to technocratic power is discussed directly in this chapter. The work closes with an examination of the revolt of May 1968, dissecting the dynamics behind the one gash across the face of an increasingly complacent modernized France and the hopes that it raised for a post-scarcity social order. The epilog shows how the massive nuclear effort after 1970 solidifled the current image of EDF--a public service flrm run by expert managers in convivial concert with concentrated capitalist flrms.