472 



186 Walter A. McDougall 



Both "world systems" were unsuitable to the space age; de Gaulle 

 sought a juste milieu. Competition was indeed the engine of progress 

 but also the solvent ol community. Hence the competitive siiniukjs 

 nuist be international, while at home French institutions combined in a 

 dynamic unity. The initial results were stupendous: real growth of 

 7 percent per annum in the early 196()s, zero unemployment despite 

 the influx of demobilized soldiers and pieds fioirs from North Africa, a 

 fivefold increase in state R&D funding from 1959 to 1964 — imtil the 

 government subsidized three-quarters of all R&D performed in 

 France. To an even greater degree than in post-Spuluik America, R&D 

 in France was nationalized. But unlike space-age America, (iaullist 

 France sui)iccted its national effort to a (cntiali/cd plan. As Michel 

 Debre explained the Five-^'ear Plan for R&D in 19(")1, the additional 

 funds were to constitute a "masse de manoeuvre" which the state could 

 target on carefully selected sectors whose "spin-off" effects would 

 advance national technology across-the-board. Master planning fell to 

 various standing committees reporting diiectly to the prime minister, 

 like the Conute Consultatifde la Recherche (known as "1 he Wise Men") or 

 the Delegation Generale a la Recherche. Together with the Ministry of 

 Science, they plotted strategy for the conscious invention of the 

 future." 



Despite fimdamental restructuring of French ])olitical, academic, 

 and industrial life and the huge stiides made in the first decade of the 

 Fifth Republic, the evident explosion of technology in America sym- 

 bolized by Project Apollo seemed only to widen the "technology gap" 

 across the Atlantic. By 1964, de Ciaulle was warning of "bitter medioc- 

 rity" and the "colonization" of France if she did not push her technol- 

 ogy forward even more relentlessly. One economist believed Ken- 

 nedy's America had found "the keys to power" in conmiand R&D. By 

 means of its favorable "technological balance of payments," suj)eriority 

 in "point sectors," and direct investment abroad through multinational 

 corporations, the United States had adjusted first to the new techno- 

 logical age and threatened to dominate the world. The Fifth Republic, 

 therefore, embraced the assumptions of such American enthusiasts as 

 NASA administrator James Webb that (1) basic research is the cutting 

 edge of national competitiveness; (2) there is a direct relation in R&D 

 between scale and results; (3) multinational entities threaten national 



"Dcbre in "Le Programme pour la recherrhe scieutifiquc," Figaro. May 4, I9()l. 

 Vfener.\\\) , see iV\\^nn, France in tlie Age of the Srienhfir Stdte . .\m\i'.. Freeman and A. Young, 

 The Research and Dex'elopment Ejjort m Western Europe, \orth America, and the Soviet I 'iiion 

 (Paris: OECD, 1 905). 



