The State between Expertise and Accountability in France and in Its Empire

The central problem for postwar France, as Herrick Chapman describes it in France's Long Reconstruction: In Search of the Modern Republic , was the “inherent tension between administrative assertiveness and democratic participation,” or, put differently, the “tension between the democratic and the ‘technocratic.’” It might at first seem like a well-worn claim that Reconstruction in postwar Europe brought with it an unprecedented expansion of state power and channeled political authority into the hands of technical professionals—whether engineers or economists—who governed seemingly in the name of value-neutral “expertise.” France is certainly one of the most famous case studies for this sort of transformation, and it has lent itself to the development of many important conceptual tools for understanding modern statecraft.