The politics of high-speed rail in France, 1944--1983.

摘要

This dissertation traces the rise of high speed passenger train service in France from the end of the Second World War to the introduction of the Train à Grande Vitesse (TGV) between Paris and Lyon in the early 1980s. Until now, most published accounts of French high speed rail have been of a technical nature, and have ignored or minimized the historical, political, economic, and social context. Historians have been left with detailed descriptions of locomotives and experimental test runs, but little sense of why this rolling stock was built and why these tests were carried out in the first place. Which special interests favored the introduction of high speed rail in France and which opposed it? What role did the state play in the development of the TGV? Was the coming of the TGV “inevitable”, the logical consequence of decades of purposeful research by French engineers, or did chance play an important role?; The Politics of High Speed Rail answers these questions by examining a variety of sources, published and unpublished. It draws heavily on three decades of archival materials from the Centre des archives contemporaines in Fontainebleau: the minutes of the meetings of the Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer Français (SNCF) and numerous government documents relating to the development of the TGV and the Aérotrain. It also relies on hundreds of published accounts in popular newspapers and magazines in order to produce a clear snapshot of popular opinion.; The conclusions are surprising. The present-day enthusiasm for high speed trains dates only to the successful launch of the TGV in 1981. Prior to that year, the mood in France was uncertain, if not downright hostile. For much of the postwar period, society was deeply ambivalent about passenger trains: at one time prepared to write them off as quaint nineteenth century anachronisms, at another time fearful of their economic and social impact. In the end, the TGV was not—as might be supposed—the result of a government-led modernization drive, but of a lengthy, often confusing, debate in which the government was often the SNCF's main adversary.