The corporate welfare turn of state capitalism in France: Reassessing state intervention in the French economy, 1945–2022

Résumé :

In times of ‘whatever it takes’, COVID-19 stimulus packages and industrial policy, the literature on state intervention is burgeoning. While the new state capitalism debate mainly focuses on state-controlled capital and regulatory interventions, this paper’s long-run approach contributes to extending this strand of research to underdeveloped areas, namely public finances and monetary policy. The paper demonstrates that French state capitalism did not disappear with the demise of Fordism, but profoundly changed its shape. Using archives, statistics and grey literature, we demonstrate that since the 1990s it has consistently promoted corporate welfare: the state increasingly extracts revenue from households and unconditionally distributes it to corporations. Today, the latter enjoy unprecedented public funding amounting to a third of non-financial corporations’ investment. Combining regulationist and Marxist notions, we argue that this results from political accumulation in a context of a structural increase of capital’s bargaining power vis-à-vis the state, resulting from capital concentration, deregulation and heightened business unity.