François Partant

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François Partant , actually François Roche (* 1926 - † June 25, 1987 ) was an economist who worked as a banker in development cooperation. After helping in the development of various Third World countries such as Iran and Madagascar in the 1960s , he gradually came to believe that development policy was leading to serious mistakes. He then worked for the governments and opposition movements in these countries before undertaking a broader reflection on the international political and economic system. He became one of the harshest critics of development and one of the pioneers of post-development .

Life

Because of his professional activities as an executive at a bank, François Roche decided to use the surname Partant as a pseudonym . He could express himself more freely.

He first worked in Paris for a large French private bank before taking over the management of the diplomatic mission in Tehran in Iran under the Shah's regime in the 1960s. It was there that he began to question the business practices that had been entrusted to him to lead. At the same time he met leaders of the opposition to the Shah and eventually made his house regularly available for meetings of various opposition groups.

After a few years and a heart attack, he returned to Paris and worked for a state bank that sent him to Madagascar, where he headed an investment company for four years. He worked for the 'development' of the island, an activity which he later harshly criticized. He returned to France shortly before the events of May 1968 . As a result, he decided not to accept any more employment as a clerk to devote himself to writing. His writings from this period are not accessible today because he later made them disappear because he found them inadequate.

In 1969, in Aden , South Yemen , Partant attempted his first non-professional intervention. In view of the lack of understanding of the state authorities, he worked out his project of the Centrale économique , which he revised again and again.

In 1971 he was asked by the government of the People's Republic of the Congo to investigate the financing of the country's development plan. Having become suspicious of his previous experiences, he first traveled to the country as a tourist to get an idea of ​​the situation for himself. According to his own words, he was dismayed at what he discovered. He then wrote a text intended for the relevant ministry in which he criticized the basis of the plan. The minister, who proved to be receptive to Partant's theses, was imprisoned as a result of an internal accounting within the Marxist party then in power. The text initially intended for the ministry was revised and expanded by Partant and in this form formed the basis for his book La Guérilla économique , which appeared in 1976.

Partant decided to hit the road again, and while touring Madagascar , the events of 'Malagasy May' of 1972 played out in Tananarive . Partant stayed in Madagascar for three years and participated in the revolutionary events that followed. He circulated the study he had done for the Congo to ministerial circles and analyzed the situation for various Malagasy newspapers and for Le Monde diplomatique under various pseudonyms . After he received death threats and conditions in Madagascar returned to the old order, Partant decided to return to France after a short stay in Tanzania .

From 1975 to 1976 he worked on the script and filming of the seven reports in the series Au nom du Progrès [In the name of progress] by Gordian Troeller and Marie-Claude Deffarge .

He continued to write articles and books and worked on various magazines. In 1978 he published Que la crise s'aggrave [Let the crisis intensify!], A book with a provocative title in which he developed his economic theses. Like the previous one, this book sold poorly. Partant then tried to spread his ideas in another way and wrote Pédalo ivre , an unusual book published in 1980 that tells the discovery of an ideal society in Lake Geneva , a mixture of a philosophical novel à la Voltaire and a libertarian utopia, a theoretical treatise and a happy shit.

Two years later, in 1982, his best-known book, La Fin du développement, naissance d'une alternative? [the end of development - birth of an alternative?], in which, after having buried the development over many pages, he tries to grasp theoretically what an alternative to the old, declining world might consist of. During this time and until the end of his life he worked regularly on the Bulletin of the Champs du Monde by François de Ravignan .

When Partant died in 1987, he was working on a new book. It was edited by a group of friends, the amis parisiens de François Partant, and was published in October 1988 under the title La Ligne d'horizon . It is not simply an addition to La Fin du développement , but an analysis of the ideology of progress, the crisis as a blockade of the system and agriculture as a possible hope for a new beginning.

La ligne d'horizon organized a congress in Paris in March 2002 under the title Défaire le dévelopment. Refaire le monde .

proof

  1. ↑ a b Notice de personne: Partant, François (1926-1987), pseudonyms forme internationale , catalog of the Bibliothèque nationale de France , accessed on January 4, 2019.
  2. ^ See La Fin du développement , new edition 1997, Coedition Actes Sud / Leméac, coll. Babel, présentation de l'auteur
  3. ↑ In the foreword to the 2007 new edition of La Ligne d'horizon , Michel Parfenov writes «(…) François Partant was a banker, then in a leading position at the Caisse centrale de coopération économique (predecessor of today's Agence française de développement), responsible for ' underdeveloped countries', as it was called in the terminology of the time ».
  4. ↑ See the program Profils perdus spéciale François Partant, France Culture, May 18, 1995. See also the introduction to La Guérilla économique , édition du Seuil, 1976.
  5. ↑ literally: the drunken pedal boat - an allusion to the poem Le bateau ivre by Arthur Rimbaud .
  6. ↑ Défaire le développement, refaire le monde , hrg. by Frédérique Apffel-Marglin, Paris: Parangon, 2003

Fonts

  • La Guérilla économique , Paris: Éd. du Seuil, 1976
  • Que la crise s'aggrave , Paris: Solin, 1978
  • Le Pédalo ivre , Paris: Solin, 1980
  • La Fin du développement 1982, new edition: La fin du développement: naissance d'une alternative ?, Arles: Actes Sud, 1997
  • La ligne d'horizon: essai sur l'après-développement , Paris: Éd. la Découverte, 1988, paperback edition. Paris: la Découverte, 2007, ISBN 9782707151360
  • Cette crise qui n'en est pas une , 1993 - posthumous collection of texts that appeared or remained unpublished between 1977 and 1983

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Partant, François
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Roche, François
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French economist
DATE OF BIRTH 1926
DATE OF DEATH June 25, 1987