| Summary: | <p>This comparative doctoral study analyses the role that fascist authoritarianism and state-led democracy played in the consolidation of organised capitalism in mid-20<sup>th</sup> century France and Italy. It argues that the Italian Fascist regime, Vichy’s French State, the Italian Social Republic (RSI), the French and Italian Provisional Governments, the Fourth Republic and the Italian Republic from 1946 were all developmental states, which utilised organised capitalism to modernise key industries such as iron and steel. Technocratic institutions such as Italy’s Institute for Industrial Reconstruction (IRI) and France’s General Planning Commissariat (CGP) became in this way pivotal industrial policy instruments.</p>
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<p>The national structures that resulted from these innovations had much in common, but they also had differences, which were the consequence of the post-war reformers’ interactions with the institutional legacies of authoritarianism. French post-war policy-makers exploited the techno-corporatist industrial planning bodies inherited from the Vichy regime to create a framework capable of orienting both public and private industries under the guidance of the CGP. The rationalisation of the French iron and steel industry during the ‘Monnet Plan’ was exemplary of the CGP’s capacity to co-opt an entirely private industrial sector. The post-war Italian Republic also inherited the IRI and its nationalised enterprises from Fascism. Nevertheless, due to the resistance of business organisations and liberal-conservative policy-makers, Italian reformers were unable to maintain the corporatist instruments that had allowed the Fascist regime and then the RSI to plan the development of private enterprise. As a result, the effort to restructure the Italian iron and steel industry was limited to IRI’s industrial shareholdings. By the late 1950s both states adopted a model of organised capitalism, which combined state direction with the permanence of private initiative. Yet, the lack of instruments capable of strategically orienting private investments continued to distinguish Italian industrial policy from its French counterpart.</p>
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