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percent. Streets filled with cars day and night; vehicles could be seen
parked outside farms that, even after the war, had still relied on horses.
Rush-hour traffic became a pain and worse, and cities like Paris began
to measure air pollution and warn the citizens of unavoidable poisons.
No one really cared; the freedom that came with mobility trumped all
the rest. Besides, a society that could smoke gauloises could breathe
anything.
Meanwhile the same people who had once sat for hours in a cafe
waiting for a long-distance call to go through (and maybe drinking a
litde and playing cards; the cafetier had to make a living too), now
began to have home telephones. They might have to wait a year or two
to get their connection. Central switchboards were swamped, particu
larly in Paris, and the post office, which ran the telephone service, had
litde sympathy for this rival mode of communication. People renting
apartments to foreign vistors made much of the fact that they already
had a phone. But not only foreigners; telephones are addictive, and the
French can talk with the best. In the end, P.T.T. (Postes, Telegraphs,
Telephones) hived off the phone system and the government created
France Telecom to deal with these matters—an indispensable first step
to autonomy, initiative, and market responsiveness.
In all this, the French economy grew and changed under govern
ment direction and planning (dirigisme, étatisme)—much more than in
other European countries. This accorded with national tradition, going
back to the Colbertism of the Old Regime and relying heavily on the
competitive recruitment of the best and brightest into the grandes
écoles—Polytechnique, Mines, Normale; and now a new one: the Ecole
Nationale d'Administration, ENA, with its graduating classes of fledg
ling bureaucrats and rulers-to-be—the énarques, as they quickly came
to be called.
Government engineers and functionaries, with and without the co
operation of private enterprise, modernized the infrastructure: roads,
railroads, communications, public housing, equipment. The results ex
ceeded expectations, and France in some areas, such as high-speed rail
service, set the pace for the rest of the world. Whether such develop
ments were always profitable is not clear; state subsidies, manifest and
discreet, obscure the realities of the market. But what a pleasure for the
privileged railway passenger, especially one favored by discount ticket
prices (state employees, for example), to ride some of the smoothest
and fastest lines in the world! France never became a giant maker of
standardized industrial products. The French typically bought house
hold machines in Germany and Italy, and as income rose, the richer