The Neoliberal Republic

Corporate Lawyers, Statecraft, and the Making of Public-Private France

Antoine Vauchez, Pierre France, Meg Morley

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781501752551, 9781501752544
• eBook ISBN: 9781501752568
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: French History
• Index: Law

The Neoliberal Republic traces the corrosive effects of the revolving door between public service and private enrichment on the French state and its ability to govern and regulate the private sector. Casting a piercing light on this circulation of influence among corporate lawyers and others in the French power elite, Antoine Vauchez and Pierre France analyze how this dynamic, a feature of all Western democracies, has developed in concert with the rise of neoliberalism over the past three decades.

Based on interviews with dozens of public officials in France and a unique biographical database of more than 200 civil-servants-turned-corporate-lawyers, The Neoliberal Republic explores how the always-blurred boundary between public service and private interests has been critically compromised, enabling the transformation of the regulatory state into either an ineffectual bystander or an active collaborator in the privatization of public welfare. The cumulative effect of these developments, the authors reveal, undermines democratic citizenship and the capacity to imagine the public good.

Appendix 1 / Methodology

The idea for this research initially came from a few newspaper articles in the French national press that mentioned what appeared at the time as a very rare and surprising phenomenon—the passage of a prominent political figure to the Paris corporate bar. The first case was mentioned in 2007 by Le Canard enchaîné, an important investigative journal, which revealed that the majority leader in the Assemblée nationale, Jean-Francois Copé, was leading a parallel career as a part-time corporate lawyer. As the media started identifying more and more crossovers, it became clear that there was more at stake here than just a few anecdotal cases.

The research started with the simple objective to identify the scope and breadth of what looked like an important yet imprecise phenomenon. While the media focus had remained almost exclusively centered on the political profession, first empirical evidence seemed to indicate that this was just the tip of the iceberg. Our initial ambition was to collect all cases of crossing over from the public sector to the corporate bar along a period of twenty-five years.

Our first contacts in the legal profession did not prove very encouraging as the Paris bar authorities denied access to its data on the revolving door phenomenon between political elites and the legal profession. However, the research has benefited from the very changes it was trying to account for: while lawyers have historically made a point of maintaining discretion and low profiles, the rise of the Paris corporate bar has changed things dramatically. The emerging world of Paris law firms has developed a rich public façade with sophisticated websites, new professional magazines, numerous public events, rankings, and prizes, thereby producing an unprecedented amount of data on the inner life of this milieu: beyond the traditional Annuaire du barreau de Paris, and more international yearbooks (the Legal 500 and Chambers), there is now a rich material of online CVs, press releases, presentation brochures, anniversary books. As law firms increasingly resort to communication professionals and consultancy firms, they feed new professional journals and specialized websites (Legalnews, Le Monde du droit, La Lettre des juristes d’affaires, Option Droit & Affaires, etc.) with invaluable data on lawyers’ career moves inside and in-between law firms. This material certainly has its own biases as it heavily depends on the information that law firms and the specialized press themselves consider worthy to communicate. As a result, some less important or more routine career moves from public to private remain less documented—as is the case for example for tax inspectors moving to tax law firms or local government employees recruited by local law firms. This has required a variety of research techniques to cross-reference and enrich our knowledge of the phenomenon with Who’s Who, the website biographies.com, the ENA yearbook (Annuaire de l’ENA), biographical and historical dictionaries for various grands corps (Conseil d’État, Cour des comptes, Inspection des finances) and a website specialized on the French public sector: Acteurs publics.

This made a rich material for a biographical database of 217 profiles of top civil servants and politicians that have become lawyers in the 1990–2015 period, with a special focus on Paris and the Hauts-de-Seine bars where all the leading law firms are concentrated. With a view to build a collective biography of this population, we have collected information on: gender, birthdate, education, career moves in the public sector as well as in the legal profession, social capital (assessed through participation in expert committees, affiliation to clubs and think tanks, teaching positions in universities, op-eds and books).

As the biographical database revealed the breadth and depth of the public-private blurring, the inquiry moved to identify more closely the world of practices and the types of expertise that were emerging alongside this continuous movement of crossover in-between the public and the private. For lack of opportunity to study lawyers at work in a more ethnographical manner, we have had recourse to two research strategies.

First, we have built another database, not of people this time but of cases, with a sample of legal deals in which the public sector (local and national government, state-owned firms, etc.) has had recourse to law firms. This work was processed together with Charlotte Ducouret, at the time a master’s student in political science, in Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. Drawing from the specialized website http://www.lemondedudroit.fr which references important legal deals (for a critical assessment of this source, see chapter 1), two hundred cases were selected.

To this, we have added 25 in-depth interviews which were conducted with some of the key actors we had identified while exploring the specialized press: most of them are crossovers whom we have asked to account for their transitioning into the legal profession (motivations and difficulties) as well as the connections they have maintained with the public sector. Among the interviewees, we met 6 women and 19 men, 13 ENA graduates, 2 ENI (École Nationale des Impôts, the French National Tax School) and 1 Polytechnique graduate (engineer school). Another series of interviews was carried out with nonlawyers that were familiar with our phenomenon: the head of ministry’s legal service, a former secretary general of the Conseil d’État, the human resources director of a regulatory agency, two senior executives from the Paris bar, and two senior consultants. We also did interviews with “ordinary” corporate lawyers to hear about the experiences of insiders who worked with these crossovers.

Interviews (2012–2014)

Interview 1, woman, ENA, Conseil d’État

Interview 2, woman, regulatory agency

Interview 3, woman, specialized journalist

Interview 4, man, specialized consultant

Interview 5, woman, ENA, lawyer, financial law

Interview 6, man, lawyer, corporate law

Interview 7, man, lawyer, public law of business, environmental law

Interview 8, man, ENA, lawyer, tax law

Interview 9, man, Conseil d’État, lawyer, public law of business

Interview 10, man, ENI (École nationale des impôts), lawyer, tax law

Interview 11, man, ENI (École nationale des impôts), lawyer, tax law

Interview 12, man, ENA, Conseil d’État, lawyer, arbitration and public law of business

Interview 13, man, ENA, lawyer, financial law

Interview 14, man, ENA, Conseil d’État, lawyer, public law of business

Interview 15, man, ENA, lawyer, public-private partnerships

Interview 16, man, Polytechnique, lawyer, corporate law

Interview 17, man, ENA, lawyer, competition law

Interview 18, man, ENA, lawyer, public law of business

Interview 19, man, ENA, lawyer, EU competition law

Interview 20, woman, lawyer, national bar council (Conseil national des barreaux)

Interview 21, woman, magistrate, lawyer, financial law

Interview 22, woman, lawyer, criminal law

Interview 23, man, ENA, Conseil d’État

Interview 24, man, ENA, Cour des comptes, lawyer, public law of business

Interview 25, man, ENA, former minister, lawyer, public law of business/lobbying

Appendix 2 / Glossary

As the reader engages in this exploration of France’s field of power, he or she is bound to come across a whole set of idiosyncratic notions from the political and bureaucratic lexicon. Rather than providing a word-by-word translation or identifying at all costs functional equivalents for these many historically rooted institutions and professions, we have decided to keep the French wording while listing all of these into a little glossary that provides the definitional and contextual elements needed to make sense of these often “untranslatable” terms. These institutions and groups cover essentially five clusters of words mentioned in the body of the text (noted in italics): state elites, the ministry of economy and finance, regulatory agencies, ethics of public officials, and supreme courts.

State Elites

École nationale d’administration: the ENA was created in 1945 to professionalize the training provided to French top civil servants and democratize the access to the state grands corps. It is based on a highly selective national concours which selects each year 50 to 100 students (to whom must be added career civil servants who come for vocational training). After two years of seminars and internships, the ENA ranks the énarques (former graduates) according to their results: the top-ranked students (between 12 and 15 students) usually join the three state grands corps (Inspection des finances, Conseil d’État, or Cour des comptes). The other students will join the French treasury, the diplomat...

Table of contents

• Foreword by Samuel Moyn
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• ONE In-between the Public and the Private: The New Lawyering Business
• TWO The Public-Private Foundations of the Neoliberal State
• THREE The Hollowing Out of the Public Interest
• FOUR A Black Hole in Democracy?
• Conclusion: On the “Public-ness” of the State
• Afterword: Macron, the Nouveau Monde, and the Crowning of the Public-Private Elite
• Appendix 1: Methodology
• Appendix 2: Glossary
• General Bibliography
• Index