Part III - Institutions
6 - Planning Commission
Strategic planning is not a new idea in France, it is a national tradition going back at least to Colbert that fifty years of liberal dogma have methodically dismantled. De Gaulle creates the Planning Commission in 1946. This is not an accident: it is a deliberate choice by a man who knows that the reconstruction of a ravaged country cannot be left to market forces alone. The Trente Glorieuses prove him right. Then come the 1980s, the primacy of the market erected as European dogma, and planning becomes suspect: too dirigiste, too Soviet, too contrary to the freedom of economic actors. The Commission survives in name, progressively emptied of its substance, transformed into a consultative body without real power. The result is visible: deindustrialization, critical dependencies, absence of long-term strategic vision, decisions taken in electoral urgency on subjects that require decades of planning.
The refounded Planning Commission is not a nostalgic return to the Trente Glorieuses. It is the institutional response to a simple question: who, in the architecture of the State, is tasked with thinking twenty years ahead? Not the government, subject to the electoral cycle. Not the Assembly, subject to coalitions. Not the market, subject to the quarter. The Planning Commission.
What it does concretely
It coordinates the critical sectors for national sovereignty: agriculture, energy, industry, digital, logistics, health, defense. It produces long-term projections, identifies critical dependencies, proposes corrective measures. But it does not work in a vacuum, it works with the field. It regularly brings together the actors concerned by each sector, from large companies to SMEs, craftsmen, and farmers, on an equal footing. This is not a facade consultation, it is the mechanism by which national strategic objectives are confronted with the productive reality of those who will have to implement them.
A concrete example. A plan to build fifteen additional reactors over ten or twenty years cannot be decided from a Parisian office and sent for execution. The Commission brings together EDF, industrial subcontractors, training bodies, and the local authorities concerned, sets out the plan, identifies the bottlenecks - shortage of qualified welders, component supply delays, site capacity - and coordinates efforts so that the plan is achievable, not merely decided. This is the difference between planning as injunction and planning as coordination.
What it does not evaluate
Evaluating public policies is not its role, that is the role of the HCEP. This separation is not a bureaucratic detail. The one who plans cannot be the one who evaluates: it is the same conflict of interest as entrusting an architect with judging the quality of his own construction. The Commission produces and coordinates. The HCEP evaluates and reports. The two institutions communicate, share their conclusions, but do not substitute for one another.
Its means of action
When an actor compromises national interests - circumvents sovereign obligations, endangers a critical value chain, violates the conditions of state aid - the Commission holds coercive means framed and validated by the reformed Senate. Suspension of licenses or authorizations, freezing of any public aid, obligation to return to compliance within a deadline with financial penalties, referral to judicial authorities for serious violations. These measures are not discretionary, they are framed, reasoned, public.
Its governance
The Commissioner of Planning is appointed by the king after consultation with the government and a consultative opinion from the reformed Senate. His mandate is limited in time and revocable according to the modalities defined in the section on censure and revocation. He is not a technocrat shielded from public scrutiny: he is an official whose mission is legible, whose mandate is defined, and whose revocability is real.
France has already known how to equip itself with an institution capable of thinking long-term and coordinating the productive forces of the nation. It did so in the worst conditions, in the aftermath of a war that had destroyed half the country. There is no reason not to do it again under far more favorable conditions, with far greater means, and with the experience of what has worked and what has failed.