Paris Lets Go

A new revolution

From the most remote Brittany fishing village to the tiniest French Alpine hamlet, no local matter is too minor to escape the attention of the Paris government. The Atlantic coastal town of Saint-Palais-sur-Mer wants to extend a street? It needs the signatures of the Minister of the Interior and the Premier before the asphalt can be poured. A poultry association in the small Vendee city of Challans wants to produce Christmas turkeys? It must satisfy the Ministry for Agriculture that its birds meet national standards. And so it has long been in France, the Western nation with the most centralized government. Last week, fulfilling a campaign promise, President Franc,ois Mitterrand's Socialist parliamentary majority approved the first half of a package that will return to local governments powers that, in some cases, they have not enjoyed since the 12th century.

All industrialized democracies are grappling with the problem of big government, but nowhere is the concept better understood than in France. Since 1800 an elite corps of Paris-appointed prefects--referred to by Napoleon as his "little emperors"--has carried the Tricolor and the edicts of the central government into each of the country's 95 departements, or districts. Under Mitterrand's reform, municipal and departmental decisions will no longer have to be submitted to the prefect for approval. Indeed, each prefect will be replaced by a Commissioner of the Republic, who will be informed only after action on such matters as roads, sanitation and budgets has been taken. If he has any objections, he will have to petition an administrative or fiscal court that rules on the legality of local decisions. Paris will continue to set the nationwide patterns only in education and law enforcement. "This is more than a reform," said the pro-government daily Le Monde. It is a revolution."

Most opposition members liked neither the manner in which Interior Minister Gaston Deferre rammed the bill through nor its contents. Warned Conservative Charles Millon: "The disorganization that it will provoke augurs a renaissance of local feudalism."

The new law leaves unresolved the politically sensitive issue of which financial resources will be shifted from Paris to local governments. This will be the subject of a second bill to be submitted to Parliament next year. But the first step was impressive enough. Said the liberal newspaper Le Quotidien de Paris: "We went to sleep in July in a Jacobin state more in the tradition of the monarchy than of the French Revolution. And voil`a, we woke up in August in a decentralized country. What an adventure!"

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