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When French Economists Were Wondering About the Reasons for Their Support for the Gold Standard

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When French Economists Were Wondering About the Reasons for Their Support for the Gold Standard Summary: This article aims to better understand how French and French-speaking economists analyzed the gold standard in the 1930s. At least two camps can be distinguished: the monetary-nominalist economists of the positivist school (Nogaro, Simiand as well as, to a lesser degree Aftalion) and the “metallist” economists (Rist and Rueff). For the latter, gold is endowed with something essential, if not essentialist, as it anchors money in reality, makes it possible to distinguish money from credit and participates in the value reserve function of especially currency. On the contrary, the rally of positivist nominalists toward the gold standard was temporary, and based upon their belief that the time had not yet come to do without gold, since, politically, they were wary of the “directed currency”. Among all, adherence to the gold standard also seemed to hinge around their desire to maintain France’s world rank. Finally, one should not overlook the moral element underlying the notion of the durability of contracts, which is so important for economists, most of whom were trained as lawyers in the continental sense of the term. In the 1930s: When French economists were wondering about the reasons for their support for the gold standard Fancis Clavé Introduction French economists in the inter-war years were often seen as supporters of the gold standard. Is it because after the Second World War two major proponents of the gold standard, Charles Rist (1874-1955) and Jacques Rueff (1896-1978), were French; or were there deeper reasons? This article seeks to answer this question by examining how French economists used to position themselves on the gold standard issue between 1933 and 1939, i.e. more or less between the period when the pound sterling broke away from gold (1931) and when the Bretton Woods system was introduced (1944). The study will be conducted mainly on the basis of discussions held on these themes during the annual conferences of French-speaking economists, who will be presented in the first part. It also examines the main protagonists’ states of research in the debates on the gold standard. A second part presents the participants’ analyses of the challenges economic development pose to the gold standard. 1 Finally, in the third part, we will discuss the reasons why, for all that, most French economists opted for the gold standard. I. Presentation of the discussion framework and of participants In this section, after presenting the various congresses and major participants in the debates, we will present the status of their work on currency at the time their meetings began. 1. The congresses of French-speaking economists. The French-speaking economists’ congress was founded at the end of the 1920s, on the occasion of a meeting between Gaétan Pirou – then economics professor in Bordeaux – and Maurice Ansiaux of the University of Brussels (Clavé 2018). Their aim was to provide a forum for discussion to professors of economics who were suffering from a degree of isolation at the time. The meetings were structured around the presentation of two reports on two themes, followed with a discussion among participants on the proposed topics. Each theme was the subject of a report published in the Revue d'économie politique, while oral presentations and discussions were transcribed, from 1933 onwards, in a document called Travaux des économistes de langue française. From a historical point of view, these publications provide information on participants’ “live” comments and help better understand their thoughts and work. The congresses brought together the then most renowned French-speaking economists. The economics professors at French law faculties were the most numerous. Here are some of the most famous members: Charles Rist (1874-1955), Bertrand Nogaro (1880-1950), Gaétan Pirou (1886-1946) and Jean Lescure (1882-1947), who presided with Maurice Ansiaux in the organization of the congresses. Among the French participants, it is also worth noting the presence of lawyers specializing in public finance such as Gaston Jèze (1869-1953) and Edgar Allix (1874-1938), as well as economists who, after training at the Ecole normale supérieure, turned to economics and became professors at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Adolphe Landry (1874-1956), François Simiand (1973-1935)). Finally, still among the French, must be mentioned economists from the Ecole Polytechnique (Clément Colson (1853-1956), François Divisia (1889-1964) and Jacques Rueff (1896-1978). On the Belgian side, three universities were well-represented: the University of Brussels with Maurice Ansiaux (1869-1943), Boris Chlepner (1890-1964) and Leener (1879-1965); the Catholic University of Louvain with Baudhuin (1894-1977) and Dupriez (1901-1988); the University of Liège with Mahaim (1865-1938) and Dechesne (1893-1955). On the Swiss side, the 2 University of Geneva was represented by William Rappard (1883-1958) Director of the Institut Universitaire des Hautes Études Internationales de Genève. It might be asked why the publication of the debates only began in 1933, though these congresses started in 1926. A remark made by François Simiand in 1935 seems to imply there was a willingness on the part of university professors to assert themselves against the X-Crise (Clavé 2018). It is reasonable to assume that internationally recognized financial and monetary affairs experts from law schools – such as Dean Allix, who was one of the experts responsible for drafting the Dawes Plan on War Reparations, or Gaston Jèze and Charles Rist, who designed the Poincaré stabilization – have, in a way, sought to affirm their presence in the debates at the time. This is all the more plausible as François Simiand, who mentioned this possibility, gave a conference at X-Crise in May 1933, when he met with a degree of hostility from Polytechnicians who blamed him for an approach to the economy they considered too “passive” (Froberg 2000, p. 165). Looking at the context1 (see Appendix 1), it should be noted that, until 1929-1930, there was a consensus in favour of the gold standard. England reverted to it in 1925; Belgium in 1926; and France in 1928. In 1931, England’s decision to abandon the gold standard completely changed the situation and caused the de facto consensus around the gold standard to collapse. Indeed, while the nominalists’ researches – since the publication by Georg Friedrich Knapp of his book The State Theory of Money (1905), followed after the war with Hawtrey’s and Keynes’s works (Blanc 2000, p10) – have laid the intellectual foundations for abandoning the gold standard, these were only studies, not a political decision by one of the major powers. It should also be noted that from the early 1930s onwards, the German currency became a “directed currency”, at the service of a tyrannical government, which could only rekindle congressmen’s fears of nominalism, which put the currency at the beck and call of the State; it should be recalled that congressmen did not only study monetary problems, they also repeatedly tackled the various economic experiments of totalitarian countries like Germany or the USSR (Table 1). The gold standard issues were discussed five times between 1933 and 1939. In 1933, the congress participants focused on a report on the gold standard by Bertrand Nogaro. In 1935, on the “monetary” theme about the evolution of credit. In 1937, on monetary stability and, in 1939, on value standards and on stabilization funds. 1 . For more precisions see Appendix 1 and Diagram 1. 3 2. The renewal of currency studies before and after the First World War Two regular participants in these congresses, Maurice Ansiaux and Bertrand Nogaro, were interested in monetary problems and the gold standard, even before the First World War. In 1892, Maurice Ansiaux published an article on the monetary issue in Belgium where, against bimetallism, he promoted the gold standard, a system that, according to Professor Chlepner (1956, p. 114) – one of his friends and colleague at the University of Brussels – “he remained faithful to all his life”. While he remained faithful to the gold standard, it is nevertheless indisputable that, in what is considered as his most important work in monetary theory, he showed that, contrary to common belief at the time, the gold standard does not work automatically. He made this observation while trying to understand why, though the gold standard was the rule, the Belgian franc was depreciated against the French franc. This is when he highlighted the role of the discount mechanism. Let us now look at the research conducted by the French: as early as 1905, Bertrand Nogaro worked on the subject of gold and, in the Paris Journal of Political Economy, published in 1906 an article entitled: Contribution à une théorie réaliste de la monnaie. A study that comes to a twofold conclusion: 1) Gold distribution is not automatic (Nogaro 1906, p. 722); 2) Exchange rate fluctuations do not depend on the currency itself but on the “ratio between the stock of gold made available to those who have to make payments abroad, in other words the balance of trade”. In this article, Nogaro claimed to follow a French method, which he dubbed realistic and that he contrasted on one hand with an Anglo-American school based on abstract principles, and on the other hand with the purely empirical German historical school (Nogaro 1906, p. 681). Inflation and the monetary disorders that followed WWI led economists to focus on these issues, which had, until then, been reserved for rare specialists (Lhomme 1957, p. 357). Bertrand Nogaro was the first economist (among those studied here) to publish a book on currency entitled “La Monnaie et les phénomènes monétaires contemporains (1924)”. In the second edition of this book, in 1935, he did mention the possibility of an international currency, but more as a theoretical possibility than as a reality.
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