92
PARTISAN REVIEW
competItlOn. A major critique of France's social inequalities, privi–
leged groups, and protected sectors, defined in profoundly new
terms which eschew the old ideological division between "capitalists"
and "workers,"
les "gros" et les "petites':'
and a paradoxical optimism
based on the fact that France's major economic and social constraints
will force her to become more innovative and flexible, thus fulfilling
through austerity some of the 1968 dreams of prosperity.
Fran~ois
de Closets's
Toujours Plus!
is a scathing critique of
French society's many privileged castes, written by an essayist and
journalist with left-wing sympathies. The book has become in a few
months a major best-seller and a "bomb," and its author has been in–
terviewed by the press and invited to appear in numerous television
programs. Closets dares to go beyond the ritual attacks on France's
rentier
castes, whether notaries or liberal professionals, to show that it
is the vast number of small and middle-level privileged such as the
civil servants, bank employees, public sector employees, and super–
protected unionized groups which cost most to society. These groups
earn considerably more than their technical salary through a vast ar–
ray of nonmonetary advantages won largely in the 1960s and no
longer compatible with France's current low productivity.
In
Closets's analysis, this system of privileges has only one equivalent,
albeit of different intensity, the Soviet
nomenklatura.
The second
book,
Le pari jranfais,
written by Michel Albert, is the quintessential
voluntarist "bible" of a French high civil servant who, after drawing
the bleakest possible portrait of France's economic condition, pro–
ceeds to wax lyrical over French society's capacity to solve its
unemployment . The solution according to Albert lies in widely
spread part-time work, and a change of collective life styles. Albert
was
commissaire general au plan
toward the end of Giscard's presidency,
but he belongs to that small group of leading technocrats who ad–
minister and analyze France regardless of who is in power. The third
book, Alain Minc's
L'apres-crise est commence,
is the work of a promi–
nent
enarque
close to Rocard and the trade union,
Confederation Fran–
caise Democratique du Travail,
who entered the private sector at Saint
Gobain Pont
a
Mousson, to find himself in the leading ranks of a
newly nationalized giant. Minc draws the most ambitious portrait of
France's new look in the decades to come, basing it on a nearly
Copernican revolution in the respective roles of the state, the market
economy, and civil society . For Minc, the state should become an
industrial shield for France's international economic ventures, while
