Maurice Petsche

Nationality

France

Date of Birth

1895

Date of Death

1951

Political
Preference

Liberal-conservative, Republican

Maurice Petsche was a French politician and economist, born in 1895. After studying economics and finance, he held several positions in the French government, and in 1925 was elected as a Republican representative to the French constituency of Hautes-Alpes, a position he held until the outbreak of World War II.

After the war, Petsche was the Minister of Finance and Minister of Economics between 1948 and 1951 in subsequent French cabinets. Here, he was also involved in the work of the Organisation for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC). His financial and economic policy in 1949 was aimed at creating a customs union between France, Italy and the Benelux countries. He was not fond of West-German participation in a system of increasingly multilateral European trade and payments, and in fact viewed the ‘Fritalux’-project as a means to strengthen its position against West-Germany. Eventually, the project for Fritalux turned out a failure, for the Americans (most notably by the efforts of Richard M. Bissell), as well as the OEEC’s General Secretariat (which was headed by Robert Marjolin) came up with a much more ambitious proposal – namely for the multilateralization of payments at the European level through the creation of a European Payments Union (EPU). The prospect of such an organization, and the enormous impact that such a multilateral monetary system would have on the growth of intra-European trade, rendered Petsche’s Fritalux-plan outdated.

In July 1950, when the EPU negotiations had been concluded, Petsche proposed the creation of a European Investment Bank through the so-called Petsche Plan. Petsche’s proposal was aimed at alleviating the negative consequences which would follow the liberation of trade between OEEC countries which was being proposed at the time.