ABSTRACT
The Newsday item provides an ironically fitting postscript to the French government's twenty-year effort to develop a viable domestic industry in computers and related high technologies. Recognizing the failure of the Plan Calcul and its counterpart effort in components, the government of Giscard d'Estaing embarked upon a new course whose distinguishing feature was a greater reliance on foreign technology. The arrival in power of Francois Mitterand and the Socialist party in 1981 signaled less a radical departure from previous policy than yet another fiddling with the controls of the state's industrial policy machinery in the information sector. The nationalization of the major electronics firms provided drama but did little to alter the underlying relationships of dependency and direction to which the principal recipients of state largesse had long grown accustomed. A great deal of French political and economic history can be read into the nation's policy toward information technology.
