But in France it was the state itself that seemed to hold the key to the country’s economic resurgence. Its managers were the country’s intellectual élite; its planners saw themselves as a class of disinterested civil servants unaffected by the nation’s ephemeral ideological passions and social eruptions. Politics in France divided the nation bitterly over the question of who would gain power and to what social ends; but concerning the question of how they would wield that power there was a remarkable practical consensus.
