In this chapter French politicians describe a cultural and institutional landscape that sets France apart from the coordinated and liberal market economy models of the other four countries in this study. Although I have discussed some aspects of French left ideas in Chapter 4, I bring other aspects of what French leftist politicians say in here so as to help us understand the perspectives of centrist and right-wing politicians and overall trends in the French approach. How do French politicians from the full range of parties interpret what “responsible” economic policies are and what the balance should be between being responsible and being responsive to voters? How do they see the role of economic experts? In line with politicians from the other four countries, I show that, despite being aware of great economic challenges, French politicians do not think it is necessary or desirable to cede more control to independent economic experts.

There is a huge body of scholarship on France's historic and distinctive pro-state-planning or “dirigiste” approach to economic policy-making. Many have debated how far France went in a more “neoliberal” direction in the early 1980s and how its neoliberal turn might have been different from that in the UK and United States. Ben Clift (2016) shows how in the “thirty glorious years” after the war there was a common education for top civil servants and politicians, to some degree separate from academic economics, sharing an underpinning belief in the value of dirigisme. In those years France's dirigisme seemed successful, and was even copied by other countries.