To rebound in the face of the crisis, the executive brings out the High Commission for Planning. Premier Jean Castex has indeed used his policy speech on Wednesday afternoon at the National Assembly, to announce the return of this portfolio supposed " rééclairer public action of a vision of lon g -term " For him, the High Commission aims to allow " to plan economic policy and define the sources of future growth" .
Created in January 1946 by General de Gaulle - on the initiative of Jean Monnet -, the Plan's mission at the time was to modernize France on the basis of indications, and to distinguish France from the planned economy of the Soviet nations. This portfolio knew its peak under the IVth Republic, when it was supposed to establish the plans to rebuild the country at the end of the war. " The word" plan "had disappeared a little from the vocabulary," conceded the new prime minister, Jean Castex, on RMC / BFMTV last week, thus claiming his filiation from Gaullism.
A weapon "against the dictatorship of the moment"
The Plan notably enabled the technological modernization of France in the 1960s (regional planning, nuclear but also the Concorde or the TGV), before seeing its influence slow down in 1993, with the disappearance of the plans, under the presidency of François Mitterrand. While the Chirac government considered its abolition in 1986, the ex-commissioner general for the Plan Pierre Massé affirms: " To suppress the Plan in the name of an impulsive liberalism would deprive the power of one of its weapons against the dictatorship of the instant. "
Little by little, France abandoned planning to devote itself to analysis. The Commissioner's office was transformed in 2006 into a Strategic Analysis Center, at the origin of the current France Stratégie institution, under the supervision of the Prime Minister.
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Who will then invest in the Vogüé Hotel? Jean Castex did not rule out the appointment of François Bayrou. If the president of the MoDem inherits it, he will succeed Sophie Boissard, who replaced Alain Etchegoyen in 2005 before taking over the management of the Strategic Analysis Center. It is said to include many predecessors, including Jean-Baptiste de Foucauld, former adviser to Jacques Delors, appointed by the government of Edith Cresson in 1992.
Strongly criticized by Jacques Chirac, the latter was replaced in 1995 by the economist Hervé Guaino, loyal to the Rassemblement pour la République (RPR) and future pen by Nicolas Sarkozy. In a major interview with Le Point on May 30, the former commissioner urged the government to put the Gaullian institution back in the saddle. "I do not see that beyond the plans that we shoot at the comet for the future, we have taken the measure of the urgency with which we are confronted" he affirmed, assimilating the health crisis to the post-war situation.