THE EVOLUTION OF THE ECONOMIC THOUGHT CONFRONTED WITH WORLD WAR I AND THE REPARATIONS' ISSUE

FANNY COULOMB

The development of the neo-classical theory by the end of the 19th century had excluded issues of economic policy and international economic relations from the field of the mainstream economic analysis. The new "economic science" is apolitical and aims to explain the markets' functioning within the framework of pure and perfect competition. In terms of doctrine, the Liberals advocate for a minimal state and free trade. But the First World War, that broke out in a context of unprecedented economic and financial interdependencies at the world level, raises questions about the liberal optimism regarding the pacification of international relations through economic links. Moreover, the Russian revolution of 1917 enhances the popularity of the Marxist theory, which directly competes with liberalism: it is the return to the "political economy". Some heterodox theories arise out of this very period: as soon as the early 20th century, Hobson had criticized the imperialist policies of capitalist countries, within a perspective of reform. World War I accelerated the development of another major theoretical critic of capitalism, the one of Veblen, the founding father of institutionalism. The time is right for political debates, in which economists take part. Amongst Marxist economists, disagreements are numerous, in particular concerning the evolution of capitalism.

After the war, the issue of the reparations imposed on Germany by the Treaty of Versailles turned out to be important for the evolution of economic thought. Only in 2010 did Germany finish paying the last debts related to the post-World War I reparations, whose initial amount, determined in 1921 to 132 billion golmarks, has never been fully settled. These debts resulted from foreign loans to Germany, along with the Dawes (1924) and Young (1929) plans, aiming at reducing the reparations' burden on the German economy. In 1931, the payments were nevertheless interrupted, while only 20 billion had been paid; they resumed in 1953. Become an adviser to the British Treasury in 1915 and directly implied with the issue of war funding, Keynes argues in vain against the option of total war for Britain. He is almost about to resign from the Treasury when the British government launches the call for conscription. After the German defeat, his book The Economic Consequences of the Peace (ECP) 1 , published in 1919, is a major criticism of the conditions of the Versailles Treaty, allowing him to play a central role in the debate on the economic future of Germany. In the 1920's, the study of international economic relations developed a great deal, thanks to the debates on the issues of reparations and inter-allied debts, notably in France, Great-Britain and in the United States. The question of Germany's capacity to pay poisoned interwar international relations and fed the resentment against the « diktat » of the Treaty of Versailles. Later, the partial waiving of reparations sent out a signal favoring the German rearmament. The peace through free markets remains far, capitalism being plagued by financial disorders resulting from the war. Keynes will seek in his reflection on the inter-war economic and financial problems some principles underlining the General Theory, notably his mistrust towards world financial interdependencies ruled by speculation. This paper first presents the debates amongst Liberal as well as Marxist economists, fueled by the First World War, on the role of conflicts and wars in the capitalist system. A second part will show how the discussion on the post-war European order acted as a catalyst for the evolution of the economic thought, with the rise of Institutionalism and the foundation stones of Keynesianism, favored by the very lively debate between economists on the issue of the German reparations.

THE DISCUSSION ON THE REASONS FOR WAR IN A CAPITALIST SYSTEM

The explanation of the causes of the First World War is not easy for the liberal economists. In fact, the conflict occurs during an expansion phase of a Kondratiev cycle started in the last decade of the 19th century, with a first globalization began in the early 1870s and characterized by increasing international financial integration, facilitated by the stability of the gold standard system (but nevertheless leading to repeated financial crises), the rise in international trade interdependence and therefore the opening up of many economies, especially through investments in territories rich in raw materials. For the Liberals, why the pacifying effect of international economic relations has not worked is a challenge that few manage to overcome. The liberal theory is not the only one to question its doctrinal foundations. Marxism is indeed so challenged that strengthened by the world conflict, which arouses diverging interpretations. The theorists of imperialism in fact often disagree on the issue of the inevitability of interimperialist wars and on their destructive impact on the capitalist system.

The failure of the Liberals' assumption of the achievement of peace through economic interdependence  The pacifism of liberal economists during the 19th: the influence of Bastiat

The question of war and peace had been widely discussed by the Liberal economists during the second half of the nineteenth century, particularly in France. A disciple of Jean-Baptiste Say, Frédéric Bastiat, who is quoted by Karl Marx as "the most superficial and therefore the most adequate representative of the apologetic vulgar economy" 2 , et who has been claimed as a reference by the enthusiasts of ultraliberalism in the 20th century, raised the issue in his writings, without however completing his chapter on the war in his Harmonies Economiques, the text titled "Comment la guerre finit" remaining unfinished (chapter XIX)3 . But Bastiat represents those Liberals who consider that war can only come from the pressure of private interests to the detriment of the general interest, an idea already present in Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations4 . The idea behind the Bastiat's thought is that wars will end when public opinion in European countries will acknowledge the superiority of liberalism and free trade, incompatible with international conflicts and their side-effects: economic disorganization, greater state control and disruption to international trade. He does not fear the invasion of France and even suggests the unilateral disarmament of the country in 18495 , to set off a wave of pacifism at the European level. In a letter titled Propriété et Spoliation6 , defending the principle of ownership, Bastiat explains that it is the principle of dispossession, an inherent tendency of mankind, which is the origin of inequality among men: the economic freedom combined with the principles of justice can only lead to peace and global prosperity. All means of dispossession must be banned from human societies: not only war and slavery by also excessive taxation, public borrowing and war on capital.

In his wake, many proposals have emerged within the liberal current, for institutions capable of arbitrating international disputes, to avoid open conflicts that would increase the state control on public life7 . By the end of the 20th century, many congresses for peace have been held, where economists' influence was great8 . In 1901, the first Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Frederic Passy9 , a French politician and ardent pacifist aiming to mobilize public opinion to promote a culture of peace, together with the promotion of liberalism.

 Keynes' pacifism and support of Angell's views

Keynes' critique of the Versailles Treaty in the ECP is precisely part of this liberal pacifist tradition. He did not hide his enthusiasm for the League of Nations, founded in 1920, which raised much Pacifists' hope in the interwar period, but which however quickly showed its limitations. Keynes had moreover welcomed, a decade earlier, the book of his compatriot Norman Angell, titled The Great Illusion10 , which denounced the European arms race and criticized the principle of war reparations. The basic premise underpinning Angell's work is the idea of peace through economic globalization, given the fact that: -The economic benefits of colonialism are illusory ; -The potential economic cost of wars between industrial superpowers has become too great for policies of aggression to be considered, as economic isolation would very swiftly lead to economic exhaustion.

-The wars of predation are over, military conflicts' costs being too high because of destructions and induced economic disturbances, which cannot be fully covered by a potential war indemnity. Moreover, war indemnities can only be paid by the defeated country through an exports surplus that would compete directly with national products in the recipient country, with adverse economic consequences. This questioning of war reparations' effectiveness has influenced Keynes, when he wrote the ECP. Enthusiastically welcoming Angell's work, Keynes supported his (successful) candidacy for the Nobel Peace Prize, in the early 1930s11 . But the liberal pacifist optimism expressed in Angell's work of 1910 was tempered in a second edition, published in 1933. For his part, Keynes had already ceased writing on the reparations issue since many years.

 An heterodox call for peace : Hobson's denunciation of the Western world's imperialism As explained above, the liberal thought on war at this time was focused on challenging its cost and economic non-sense, as well as on the idea that war can only result from a diversion of the State machinery to private interests: it is not the capitalist system that is at issue, as the free operation of markets should on the contrary generate a common welfare, making wars always more absurd. But an alternative interpretation of the imperialist policies of capitalist countries had been suggested at the beginning of the twentieth century, by a British essayist supporting war resisters in the 1910s and, at that time, supporting the « new liberals » alongside Keynes12 : this is John Hobson, whose book published in 1902, Imperialism : a study13 , made him famous, all the more so as large parts of his analysis have been used by Lenin in his own analysis of imperialism. In his book, Hobson condemned the fact that liberalism needed jingoism, which allows maintaining the docility of workers who are subjugated by an increasingly mindless labor. He also explained that colonial expeditions are not only made to respond to the megalomania of national leaders and to make the people dream; they also have a distinct economic objective: let the surplus of the capitalist production slim down in the international markets. This idea, which is already present in Marx's 1848 text On the question of free trade, will be largely taken up by Lenin. Hobson thinks that the solution is to raise public's purchasing power so as to create internal opportunities for the capitalist production; one of the main reasons of wars would therefore be eliminated.

Hobson has published several papers in the review The Nation, that was acquired by Keynes in 1922. But their political paths separated in the late 1910s, when Hobson joined the future Labor Party. However, in the General Theory (1936), Keynes pays respect to Hobson's ideas, emphasizing his "ardour and courage against the ranks of orthodoxy" 14 .

The discussion within the Marxist current on the issue of the interimperialist war

The Marxist analysis of war and militarism in the early twentieth century lacks of unity: there are considerable divergences between theoreticians, regarding notably the inevitability of a conflict's outbreak and its impact on the proletarian movement.

 From Marx's economic war to Lenin's inevitable collapse of imperialist powers Karl Marx himself did not write specifically on these issues, maybe because he reserved his analysis of militarism for the last volume (never written) of The Capital, dedicated to the issue of the state. However, in his speech On the question of free trade (1848) 15 , he states a central idea for the Marxist rhetoric during the 20th century: the world trade will become increasingly contentious as capitalist systems mature, because export markets represent an efficient countertendency to the rate of profit to fall, while imports of cheap foreign products allow to exert downward pressures on workers' wages. All capitalist countries at the same stage of development having the same commercial and colonial appetites, economic conflicts may occur and the class war transform into a war among nations. Mocking the optimistic and pacifist views of the Liberals, Marx writes:

To call cosmopolitan exploitation universal brotherhood is an idea that could only be engendered in the brain of the bourgeoisie. All the destructive phenomena which unlimited competition gives rise to within one country are reproduced in more gigantic proportions on the world market 16 . However, free trade is considered more progressive than protectionism, which is viewed with distrust, as well as nationalism, chauvinism and independence movements, by Marx and Engels.

The Leninist theory of imperialism only partially comes from the Marxist idea of increased international disputes because of the transfer of internal economic contradictions on the world market. Besides, Lenin doesn't refer to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall in his theory of 1916, Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism 17 . It is the unequal development of national economies and of monopolies that lead to international relations' instability, at the stage of imperialism. With the rise in capital exports and in the economic concentration, the States are no more the central actors but the monopolies which 14 Keynes J.M. (1936), The general theory of employment, interest and money, Macmillan Cambridge University Press, chapter 23, VII. 15 Marx K. ( 1848), On the question of free trade, Speech to the Democratic Association of Brussels at its public meeting of January 9, www.marx.eserver.org 16 Op.cit. 17 Lenin V.I. (1916), Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism, in Lenin's Selected Works, Progress Publishers, 1963, Moscow, Volume 1, pp. 667-766, www.marxists.org control the world trade and make progressively disappear the free competition. The fight for raw materials exacerbates antagonisms on colonies' sharing; the new industrial powers, wishing to reverse the international economic hierarchy, are responsible for the outbreak of interimperialist conflicts, until the ultimate world war that will end capitalism.

 The non-orthodox scenarios of some Marxist economists Within the Marxist current, Lenin's theory was challenged by several competing and more or less incompatible analyses. If he does not criticize Hilferding, to whom he has borrowed the concept of financial capital but who had stated that, in the long term, an agreement between the more powerful capitalist interests, is very likely, Lenin targets Kautsky.

Hilferding is the theoretician of the "financial capital", appeared at the end of the 19th century18 : this capitalist model is characterized by a deterioration in competition, an increased concentration of industry and bank sectors and the growing power of just a few shareholders. The role of the state is enhanced because the state apparatus serves the interests of certain monopolies or cartels, with the setting up of protectionist measures that are circumvented by foreign direct investments. Moreover, the militarism is inherent to the financial capitalism, notably because the colonial expeditions allow to secure national economic interests abroad, the supply of raw materials but also to open foreign markets for domestic industrial goods. Only a strong pacifist opposition of the proletariat and of the medium class will permit to avoid a war between imperialist powers. However, in the longer term, the rise in firms' size and the internationalization of their activities, will lead to an agreement between the most powerful capitalist interests, beyond national borders, with the setting up of agreements between national cartels. The international agreements ensuring the inter-cartels peace must nevertheless be regularly reviewed, with the change in the balance of international power. This idea about an agreement between the most powerful interests, at the world level, was revisited by Kautsky, with the concept of « ultra-imperialism ».

Like Hilferding, Kautsky sees the state's power politics as being in the service of bourgeois interests, as it helps prevent the under-consumption crises and the proletarianization of the middle class. If Kautsky had an important role, from 1890 to 1914, within the Third International, he was no more considered an orthodox Marxist from 1915, when he published a paper in Neue Zeit that was fiercely contested by Lenin 19 . Kautsky indeed defended the hypothesis of another stage of capitalism, subsequent to imperialism: ultra-imperialism. At that stage, not yet been reached (and maybe will never be), it is likely that the struggle between national capital is replaced with a joint exploitation by a worldwide integrated financial capital, therefore limiting incentives for an arms race between capitalist economies. This theory irritated Lenin, who called Kautsky an "ex-Marxist".

Another Marxist economist attracted the attention of "official" theorists : N. Kondratiev, whose long wave theory, exposed as soon as 1925, portrays capitalism as a system always ready to be reborn from its ashes20 . In this theory, wars and political or social conflicts are more likely to occur in upward phases of long cycles, notably because economic growth exercises a pressure on the supply of raw materials. The downturn in raw materials' prices is therefore an early sign of the beginning of a new long economic crisis. If it is known that Kondratiev was deported to Gulag and executed by the Stalinist regime, because of his pessimist views concerning the inevitability of capitalism's disappearance, his reputation was enhanced by the works of Joseph Schumpeter based on his long-term cycles' theory. Schumpeter is focused on the issue of major innovations liable to initiate a new phase of long-term economic growth: he rejects the idea that wars are important determinants for the gestation of those innovations, opening up a still current debate 21 .

Lastly, the First World War and the previous arms race, by requiring an increasing interventionism, have addressed the problem of the role of the state in the evolution of capitalism. Hence, in his 1915 book Imperialism and world economy22 , Nikolai Bukharin develops the idea according to which capitalism has reached a new stage of its development, the one of "State capitalism", with a strong control of the state apparatus on economic activities, inducing the continuation of interventionism by the time peace returns. In the context of the worldwide fall in the rate of profit, illustrated by the internationalization of firms' activities, the state plays an essential role in the promotion of national interests on world markets; but the diverging interests of the various nations may create the conditions for international economic disputes, the economic war being liable to end in an open military conflict, inter-imperialist agreements being unlikely. Bukharin's views on international conflicts do not correspond to the pure economic determinism of Lenin's thesis of 1916, as states as able to change the world markets' structure through their foreign policy23 . The historical materialism therefore indirectly comes into question.

THE DEBATE ON THE POST-WORLD WAR I EUROPEAN ORDER, A CATALYST FOR THE EVOLUTION OF THE ECONOMIC THOUGHT

In the ECP, Keynes was in favor of reducing the reparations' burden for the German economy, in view of the double objective of a quick recovery of the European economy and of the durability of democracy. His position was criticized in two ways : by Veblen, who accused him of defending the statu quo of an unfair and ineffective capitalist system and whose thought on inter-war international relations was pivotal in developing his institutionalist theory; by Ohlin and other economists, who challenge Keynes' analysis of reparations, opening the way to a highly-focused debate on international transfers.

Veblen's attack on the institutions of capitalism through the question of war  Veblen's critique of Keynes' ECP Keynes will strongly mark the debate among economists on the relevance of the Treaty of Versailles' clauses on the reparations imposed on Germany, with the publication of his 1919 book, The Economic Consequences of the Peace. He incisively denounces the French position aiming at economically weakening the defeated country to prevent its rearmament and he advocates for a reduction in the reparations' burden, giving ammunitions for the supporters of the idea that Germany has no capacity to pay. Keynes is concerned with the political consequences of the Treaty, fearing a power takeover by reactionary forces both in Germany and in Russia, leading to their rapprochement.

From the military point of view an ultimate union of forces between Russia and Germany is greatly feared in some quarters. This would be much more likely to take place in the event of reactionary movements being successful in each of the two countries, whereas an effective unity of purpose between Lenin and the present essentially middle-class Government of Germany is unthinkable. 24 This position supportive of a political statu quo in Germany has been criticised by an heterodox economist, founding father of the institutionalist political economy, Thorstein Veblen. In his review of the ECP published in 1920, Veblen condemns the fact that the Allies' policy is more aimed at combating Soviet Russia than at reforming German institutions, as the victors are eager above all to safeguard the capitalist interests. He writes: "So also his oversight of this paramount need of making the world safe for a democracy of absentee owners has led Mr Keynes to take an unduly pessimistic view of the provisions covering the German indemnity." 25 Veblen there resumes a concept developed twenty years earlier in a key work, The theory of the leisure class : an economic study of institutions (1899) 26 . It was an analysis of the capitalism's functioning, highlighting the predatory behavior of the ruling class (absentee owners), which is losing contact with the concrete labor, left to engineers: speculation and economies' financialization are the inevitable outcomes.

 The critique of capitalism through the analysis of the role of patriotism and warlike spirit

The outreak of WWI brings to maturity Veblen's theory, already inclined to address war and militarism's issues, as it inquires into the internal factors of societal evolutions. In a key work published in 1915, Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution 27 , Veblen introduces the distinction between predatory dynastic states (like Germany) and modern states (Great-Britain, USA).

The predatory instincts of man have had a major impact on societies gone beyond the primitive stage, provoking the wars and conflicts that have marked the history of humanity and the changes in the institutions, the weakest ones being eliminated. Far from being mutually exclusive, war and trade have always interacted with each other, in spite of a perennial competition between commercial interests (prevailing in modern societies) and dynastic interests (prevailing in dynastic societies of industrially less developed countries). In dynastic societies, mental habits inherited from the feudal period (sense of duty, subordination, preparation for war…) still prevail, leading to more warlike policies than in modern societies : these latter being long accustomed to peace have benefited from an evolution in the mental habits, and are consequently more likely to develop peaceful activities, like trade or finance. The differences in the political systems (autocratic or democratic) result from these institutional differences and there is a risk of an international conflict initiated by dynastic states.

However, Veblen's theory is evolutionary but not determinist. The « normal » evolution of societies should in the long term transform all of them into modern States, as the changes in mental habits with the shifts in economic structures lead to institutional and social transformations. But as the evolution of societies ensues from a permanent adjustment between instincts and institutions, it is impossible to predict their future direction. In the dynastic states, forces of change (modernization) are exerted thanks to industrialization and technology boom, while in modern societies, the predatory instincts may spring back to life at any moment and lead to aggressive foreign policies. This latter point is studied in detail in a book written two years later, An inquiry into the nature of peace and the terms of its perpetuation (1917)28 , in which Veblen develops the three following ideas:

-In dynastic societies, the preparation to war should cause organisational changes in dynastic societies, because of the growing sophistication of armaments needing advanced technologies and skilled manpower: these are factors for them to become modern societies (chapter 1), that are more peaceful that dynastic ones.

-In modern societies, the evolution of the economic system tends to erase all economic solidarity (the ordinary man becomes always more mindless) ; Only remains patriotism to federate the system. Modern societies are thus forced to maintain a kind of warlike spirit in the population, capable of bringing up one day feudal instincts prone to war. (chapter 2) -The last chapter (7) develops a strong critique of the evolution of capitalism, which fosters a concentration of wealth in the hands of a few. International initiatives for peace, and notably international institutions, are therefore regarded with caution by Veblen, even if he doesn't venture to predict the future of the economic system.

Veblen's attack on patriotism and institutions has arisen hostile reactions, of which the one of Roosevelt 29 . Veblen's thought is however said to have had an influence on the content of the New Deal, through its critical approach of the institutions, even if there is no direct link [START_REF] Tilman | Wright Mills and the Generic Ends of Life[END_REF] . The influence of Veblen was more direct on the Technocratic movement, created by Howard Scott in the 1920s [START_REF]Veblen was besides member of the first movement founded by Howard Scott in[END_REF] and very popular in the United States in the 1930s ; this movement advocates for solutions largely inspired by Veblen's 1921 book, The Engineers and the Price System [START_REF] Veblen | The engineers and the price system[END_REF] , in which he recommends the abandonment of the price system and the seizure of power by engineers and experts, who are the only ones capable of managing the production with a long-term vision, without being permanently focused on profit maximization.

A further point to note is that Hobson was a huge fan of Veblen, to whom he devoted a book published in 1936. Both were heterodox authors rejecting the liberal theory and aiming at proposing alternative social models, out of the Marxist current.

The debate on reparations and the premises of the Keynesian theory

The reparations imposed on Germany were a key issue in interwar international relations. The non-payment of indemnities by the Weimar Republic, undermined by hyperinflation, caused the occupation of the Ruhr by France (until 1925, following the German refusal to pay the sums due for 1923), while the Dawes Plan (1924) confirmed a restructuring of the indemnities, in contradiction of France's demands, to allow the stabilization of the German currency and prevent the return of hyperinflation caused by money printing : lower amount of annuities, vagueness about their duration and, above all, an international loan of 800 millions (consisting mainly of bonds with a maturity of 25 years), to ensure the payment of the first annuity. Unable to generate lasting trade surpluses, Germany soon carried a heavy debt-service burden 33 . For the critics of the debt relief solution, this initiative has made it possible for Germany to pursue a rearmament program much more costly than the amount of indemnities set in 1921. The diagnosis about the German economic collapse in the 1920s was therefore wrong: it is a French economist, Etienne Mantoux, who has expounded this idea in « La paix calomniée ou les conséquences économiques de Monsieur Keynes » (written in 1943 and published in 1946) [START_REF] Mantoux | La paix calomniée ou les conséquences économiques de M[END_REF] . The complete renunciation of reparations decided in 1932 was held to have given to the German public opinion the signal of a permissiveness concerning the rearmament issue : Clémenceau has thus denounced in 1930 the revenge and militaristic spirit of the German elites in the aftermath of the defeat, and the immediate secrete rearmament [START_REF] Clémenceau | Grandeurs et misères d'une victoire[END_REF] .

 The Keynes-Ohlin debate

It is this issue of Germany's capacity to pay the reparations that has concentrated the economists' concerns at that time. This debate was called the « transfer problem », because the challenge for Germany was to get enough foreign currencies and gold to be able to transfer due amounts to recipient countries. Its most famous episode is probably the publication of an article written by Keynes in the Economic Journal in March 1929, titled « The German Transfer Problem » 36 and Ohlin's answer in the same review, in June [START_REF] Ohlin | The reparation problem: a discussion[END_REF] . The French economist Jacques Rueff has also contributed to the debate in this review (September) [START_REF] Rueff | Mr. Keynes' views on the transfer problem[END_REF] , directly criticizing Keynes' view and supporting France's position. The arguments presented during the course of the debate have been subsequently discussed at very great length, so much so that this debate has become quasi mythical. It is known that Keynes did not use arguments compatible with the General Theory published in 1936 : his argument is based on a classical view, with the anticipation of negative terms-of-trade effects for Germany as a result of the transfers [START_REF] Brakman | Transfers, non traded goods and unemployment, an analysis of the Keynes -Ohlin debate[END_REF] . Besides, the issue of the international loans to Germany expected from the Dawes Plan has also launched a controversy. According to the American economist H.G. Moulton, the induced debt may become dangerous for the German economy and these loans are high risk. But the American bank lobby dismissed his arguments, while the largest financial institutions transfered the risk on those loans to small financial institutions and ignorant investors [START_REF] Fraga | German reparations and Brazilian debt : a comparison[END_REF] .

Ohlin blamed Keynes for not having taken into account the existence of these loans to Germany from 1924, and to have kept on analysing the reparations issue in the same way as in 1919. Ohlin argues that the capital flows to Germany, mainly American, have rendered erroneous the assertion of Germany's inability to pay, as the United States have invested in Germany twice as much as the amount paid by Germany for reparations.

Concerning the structural consequences of these payments, Keynes and Ohlin had two different interpretations. Keynes' argumentation is similar to that of ECP in 1919 : in Germany, the devaluation and/or the deflation induced by the additional taxes financing reparations will not be enough to generate the trade surplus necessary to transfer the owed amounts, as marks must be converted to foreign currencies: indeed, the problem with Germany is that it is a key importing country, with a not export-oriented economy. If the industry of exports grows to the detriment of the domestic production, the flow of German products on the world market can lead to falling prices and to a worsening of the terms of trade for Germany. The burden of reparations on the German economy is therefore much more important than it seems at first sight. Keynes rejected the idea that the American loans have settled the transfer problem, contrary to what Ohlin thought.

For Ohlin, the lack of any significant change in Germany's structure of production in the 1920s (high production of capital goods for the home market without a development of the export goods' sector) is explained by the size of American loans to Germany: the issue of its capacity to pay has become irrelevant.

Ohlin challenged Keynes' view on reparations by using an analysis the development of incomes in the different involved countries : the rise in taxes in Germany for the reparation payments induce a decrease in incomes and demand in the country and therefore a fall in imports ; conversely, the recipient countries benefit from a rise in factors incomes and therefore favors German exports. There is no transfer problem nor change in the terms of trade. According to Metzler41 , Ohlin's « orthodox » explanation is innovative because international income transfers were mentioned for the first time. From a theoretical perspective, it represents an intermediary between the classical theory and the Keynesian one²² : Keynesian because it deals with trends in purchasing power and Classical as it assumes full employment and the validity of the Say's law. In the opinion of Robert Mundell 42 Ohlin was the clear winner of the debate with Keynes.

One year earlier, in 1928, the French economist Jacques Rueff43 had contested the existence of a transfer problem, by reference to the automatic adjustment of balance of payments' mechanism, related to the quantity theory of money. The purchase of foreign currencies by Germany on financial markets (financed through a rise in taxes or by loans) would cause an increase in German currency and therefore its decline in value against other currencies. The weaker Reichsmark has a stimulating effect on German exports, which would enable the transfers. Rueff put forward again this point in the Economic Journal in September 1929, in addition to the Keynes-Ohlin debate.



The transfer problem and the emerging Keynesian thought Keynes' analysis of the transfer problem was not "Keynesian" yet. However, three key ideas are reflected in it:

-The fear of an « economic war » : Keynes thought that Germany's necessity to create a trade surplus would induce a price war damaging for the whole European industry ; -The fear of a decrease in the people standard of living in Germany : for him, honoring the debts is less important than public welfare, rampart against fascism or communism; -The distrust of capital international flows: loans to Germany has been a key element in the overexpansion of the world financial sphere, leading to the great crash of 1929. Regarding this third point, the transfer debate was major in the genesis of the Keynesian theory.

According to Robert Skidelsky 44 , Keynes' analysis of the transfer problem contributes to the debate on the nature of the imperialism of capitalist economies : the superiority of Keynes' approach compared with the Hobson/Lenin thesis of imperialism is to have shown that the export of savings is not offset by an induced rise in foreign investment. Yet, according to Hobson's theory, only foreign investment can lead to a rise in exports preventing crises resulting from over-production. Skidelsdy explains: Keynes pointed out that the expansion of exports which a net transfer of money abroad required could be blocked at both ends: the capital exporting country might be unwilling or unable to increase its competitiveness sufficiently to allow the 'real' transfer of goods and services to take place; and the capital importing country might not be willing to suffer the loss of its own competitiveness. His argument was conducted in terms of a fixed exchange rate system, but it can be adapted to a system of managed floating.

According to Skidelsky, Keynes' mistrust in capital exports results from his analysis of unemployment in Great Britain in the 1920s, which stems directly from his thinking on the transfer problem linked to reparation payments imposed on Germany. The transfer debate has therefore proved essential in the emergence of an original Keynesian thought.

Conclusion

The interwar period was a favorable time for economists' discussions, which were important in the history of economic thought. The liberal orthodoxy is weakened by the outbreak of WWI, which refuted its optimistic view concerning the peacemaking effects of economic globalization. The Marxist theory, which has incorporated Hobson's analysis of imperialism, is significantly challenged by an abundance of contradicting interpretations regarding the evolution and survival of the capitalist system. The emerging Institutionalist theory is enriched by Veblen's critical analyses of international relations, based on a categorization of countries' institutions. Arising from the Treaty of Versailles, the debate on reparations reveals the prominent place of economists in the political debate of the period, concerning the Allies' policy towards Germany; and also, the complexity of interwar financial and trade linkages and the great volume of international capital flows. On both points, Keynes' view prefigures the idea of public welfare as a major objective of public policy and the mistrust towards international finance, paving the way for his subsequent critic of financial markets, expressed in the General Theory. Lastly, one final remark is that this debate has revealed the vagueness of the data on national economies and international economic flows, at that time. It will only be dispelled with the progressive upgrading of national accounting systems, based on Keynes' works, well after the Second World War.

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 44 Skidelsky R. (2012), Keynes, Hobson, Marx, October 10, http://www.skidelskyr.com


Building and Defending the Alternative Internet: The Birth of the Digital Rights Movement in France

Keywords: activism; alternative internet, freedom of expression, hackers

In the mid-1990s, as the Internet underwent a major wave of growth and commodification, it also became increasingly politicised. In this article, we analyse the process that led to the birth of the digital rights movement in France.

Based on archival work and interviews with key protagonists of the movement, this article blends historical, sociological and policy analysis to help explain the politicisation of French "Internet pioneers." It documents the emergence of alternative Internet service providers, their relationship to other activist groups, and to the wider digital economy. It then shows how the same small group of individuals turned to political advocacy by surveying some of their interactions with policy-makers, focusing in particular on the debate on intermediary liability and freedom of expression. We stress that the particular social trajectories of these digital rights activists confronted with the commodification of the Internet and the power practices of the state converged to create a "perfect storm" that led them to wield exceptional influence on Internet policy in this early phase of development. We also highlight some of the movement's internal contradictions and explain its waning influence from the early 2000s on. Through this article, we hope to help diversify the historiography of digital activism as well as to contribute to comparative-historical approaches.

Introduction

In 1992, a young French programmer named Valentin Lacambre had a simple yet brilliant idea: Connecting France's public videotext system Minitel to the open plains of Usenet -the decentralized and federated system for online forum established in 1980.

Two years later, his initiative expanded to the Internet, which was undergoing extraordinary growth, with a booming number of interconnected networks and connected machines [START_REF] Gerich | Guidelines for Management of IP Address Space[END_REF]. After having successfully trademarked the name "Internet", France Telecom agreed to give Lacambre the Internet Minitel domain, accessible through the 3615 dial number used for commercial Minitel services [START_REF] Lacambre | L'histoire d'altern[END_REF]. Now with a substantive revenue stream, Lacambre launched the website altern.org, a completely free hosting service that allowed any person with an

Internet access to open her online storage space to publish websites and manage emails accounts. According to him, the Internet came with "exceptional possibilities for public expression" and these needed to be made available to all "citizens," with "no advertising" nor "commercial exploitation." In a matter of months, the user base of Altern exploded.

But from 1997 on, Lacambre faced a number of trials, becoming the target of many plaintiffs that took issue with the publications of its users and thought that Lacambre should be liable for the damages they had suffered. The idea that any citizen could join the online public sphere with no prior authorisation or ex-ante oversight of their speech upset the political balance formed around freedom of expression. As many jurisdictions in North America or Europe grappled with difficult debates on "intermediary liability," Altern would become the focal point of this controversy in France. In 1999, an appellate court eventually held Lacambre liable for the content of its users because it gave them a free and allegedly anonymous channel to broadcast their voices. Appalled by the notion that he should verify the identity of its users and monitor their publications, the young man took a radical decision. Rather than accepting to play the role of a private censorsomething he could not nor would not do -, he decided to just shut down Altern, rendering the 47,000 websites he hosted unavailable.

The "Altern Affair" thus became a symbol of Internet censorship in France, mobilising a small digital rights activist milieu that had been in formation in the previous years. This activist scene was comprised of a handful of organisations with strong overlaps with each other: Along with Altern, other hosting providers like R@S and Globenet -both founded in 1995 and focused on helping activist groups fighting for social justice "get online" by setting up email servers, mailing lists and websites -rose to prominence.

They were complemented by the French Data Network (FDN), a non-profit Internet access provider created in 1992 and still in operation today. When these alternative infrastructures became threatened by the growing commodification of the Internet and the state's first attempts at enacting specific rules to regulate Internet content, these actors turned into political advocates through the creation of the Association des Utilisateurs d'Internet (AUI) and later of IRIS ("Imaginons un Réseau Internet Solidaire"), some of France's first non-profits focused on the political and legal defence of human rights online, founded in 1996 and 1997 respectively.

In this article, we seek to revisit the 1990s as a foundational moment for digital rights activism, a sub-field of media activism committed to fostering emancipatory uses of the Internet and making the digital infrastructure an object of political struggle. Focusing on France, our socio-genesis looks at the historical conditions that allowed a small group of computer scientists, programmers and hackers to wield significant influence over the Internet's political economy and policies. Through archival work, interviews with key activists and building on existing French literature, this article blends historical, sociological, and policy analysis to trace the politicisation of these individuals endowed with technical skills who came to play a central role in the advent and the political defence of an "alternative Internet," where alternativeness is usually a measured by the "distance from the centres of state and capital" [START_REF] Tréguer | Editorial notes for the JoPP issue on Alternative Internets[END_REF] and the ability of such socio-technical arrangements to challenge "established relations of authority and control" [START_REF] Bailey | Understanding Alternative Media[END_REF]. While doing so, we also aim to highlight internal divisions that laid bare during the movement's phase of emergence, divisions which would play a role in its weakening in the early 2000s.

Of course, the story that we narrate here needs to be situated in a global context: The 1990s saw the first large-scale government attempts at controlling the Internet, a then new and increasingly popular communication medium. In reaction, many countries saw the crystallisation of activist milieus that sought defend the rights of Internet users and the emancipatory potential of the Internet. Within these broader international trends, our goal is to highlight the specificities of the French situation. In this way, we hope to complement existing accounts of the history of digital rights activism -one that has long been dominated by Anglo-Saxon countries [START_REF] Coleman | Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking[END_REF][START_REF] Jordan | Hacktivism and Cyberwars: Rebels with a Cause?[END_REF][START_REF] Jordan | A genealogy of hacking[END_REF][START_REF] Levy | Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution[END_REF][START_REF] Levy | Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government Saving Privacy in the Digital Age[END_REF][START_REF] Postigo | The Digital Rights Movement: The Role of Technology in Subverting Digital Copyright[END_REF][START_REF] Sauter | The Coming Swarm: DDOS Actions, Hacktivism, and Civil Disobedience on the Internet[END_REF] -and contribute to the growing body literature focusing documenting European histories of the field (e.g. [START_REF] Bazzichelli | Networking: The Net as Artwork[END_REF][START_REF] Lovink | Dynamics of Critical Internet Culture[END_REF][START_REF] Löblich | ICT policy activism on a national level: Ideas, resources and strategies of German civil society in governance processes[END_REF][START_REF] Burkart | Pirate Politics: The New Information Policy Contests[END_REF][START_REF] Milan | Social Movements and Their Technologies: Wiring Social Change[END_REF][START_REF] Denker | Heroes Yet Criminals of the German Computer Revolution[END_REF]Nevejan & Badenoch, 2014;[START_REF] Medosch | The Rise of the Network Commons[END_REF][START_REF] Dufresne | Computing for Democracy: The Asociación de Técnicos de Informática and the Professionalization of Computing in Spain[END_REF]. At a broader level, the article reflects on the changing tensions and factors that shape the digital rights field, and through it the multi-faceted macrotechnical system we call the Internet.

Setting the French scene

The role played by France's first digital rights advocates can only be understood by retracing their unique trajectories in the field of computing. Even though there were differences in terms of age, background or status in the field of computing -some selfdesignated as hackers or pirates, others as computer programmers or "sysadmins" -, their life history often followed similar patterns. In many respects, they were what France had closest to a public "hacker scene."

Kiddies enter the professional computer field

Like Valentin Lacambre, most of those who would take an active part in the origins of French digital rights activism -mostly young white males coming from rather privileged, middle-class families -discovered computer networks as youngsters in the 1980s. Whether on closed switched telephone networks like the Minitel, Calvacom or, later on, the more open Usenet, they had first-hand experience of these online fora where they socialised by sharing knowledge, educational material and technical skills (interview 2).

As they graduated from school and transitioned to the job market, these young computer programmers quickly realised that their approach to computing was a distinctive one. Indeed, they were the first "personal computer (PC) natives." As underlined by Laurent Chemla -who in 1996, at the age of 32, co-founded the Association des Utilisateurs d'Internet (AUI), France's first digital rights organisation -, the arrival of this new generation was a "total disruption" (interview 1). Whereas the "old guard" had been trained at "data processing", using large systems in a corporate world undergoing computerisation, the geeky avant-garde had an agile, almost creative relationship to PCs. According to Chemla:

"When asked by their workmates to do something, they were used to saying 'no.' It was a very, very closed milieu, and here comes micro-computing where all of a sudden, a whole generation of kids starts making the things they were doing, only better, faster, and much more cheaply. And instead of saying 'no,' the kids say 'sure, that should be possible'."

These young competitors broke traditional hierarchies in the computer field. Though they had university degrees, they attended less prestigious universities than those of the "data processors" who were graduates from France's top elite schools. It was still a time when computers came with their schematic diagrams, and programming languages, such as BASIC, were simple enough that those who were committed could just pick it up.

Benjamin Bayart -a computer engineer born in 1973 who in 1997 became the president of French Data Network (FDN), a non-profit Internet access provider still in operation today -summed it up in this way: "Alone in your room, you could learn to program Tetris" (interview 1). In this particular moment of the history of computing, these individuals grew up to be perceived as self-taught "computer geniuses." A label that stuck with them and probably gave them the confidence to become something more than just skilled techies.

An apolitical scene

Unlike in other countries where some hackers claimed a political stance, these French Internet pioneers did yet not think of themselves as political. They typically had no direct experience with policy, much less activism,. This generation was too young to have participated to the free radio endeavours of the 1970s. They largely ignored the first experiments at setting up online alternative media anchored in social movementslike philosopher Félix Guattari, who in 1986 and with the help of the computer scientist Edgar Blaustein set up the 3615 Alter, a Minitel service that aggregated and broadcast news while offering forum-like features for activist groups [START_REF] Prince | Félix Guattari et les agencements post-média[END_REF]; or Samizdat, an autonomous-anarchist Bulletin Board System (BBS) that was set up in France with the help of Italian comrades from the European Counter Network [START_REF] Papatheorodou | Samizdat.net, l'histoire d'un projet de médias alternatifs sur Internet. Entretien avec Aris Papatheorodou[END_REF].

Even for those who indulged in illegal activities -and in contrast to North-American hackers [START_REF] Coleman | From Internet Farming to Weapons of the Geek[END_REF] -the direct experience of repression did not spark politicisation. In 1986, at the age of 22, Laurent Chemla worked in small company where he programmed a piece of software used by schools to set up their own Minitel portals. On the side, he was also developing his hacking skills by entering computer systems. One day, he got onto the unsecure Minitel server of France's leading coffee brand, Cafés Grand'mère. After using the company's messaging system for himself, he shared the good news with fellow hackers. The Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST) -France's domestic intelligence agency -worked the case, putting Chemla and one of his friends under surveillance for two months and eventually arresting them. Detained during two days, Chemla was charged with "electricity theft," as France lawmakers had yet to adopt criminal provision against "computer fraud." He was eventually acquitted, the judge holding that it was the company's responsibility to secure its servers.

Chemla, acting on his own, was exploring for fun and was not part of what is often referred to as the "hacker underground". In France, there was also an active scene of underground hackers breaking into systems with a number of them apprehended by state authorities. But unlike in the US, Germany or Italy, the French underground scene never got organised. It retained a very loose structure and did not boast overt political goals.

In part, this can be seen as the result of the infiltration by intelligence agencies who, in different ways, pressured young French hackers fearful of prosecution into working for them [START_REF] Guisnel | Guerres dans le cyberespace : services secrets et Internet[END_REF][START_REF] Tréguer | Pouvoir et résistance dans l'espace public : une contre-histoire d'Internet (XVe -XXIe siècle) (phdthesis)[END_REF].

Becoming Alternative Internet Service Providers

The political convictions forged by the French Internet pioneers came to the fore in the first half of the 1990s. According to them, it grew out of Usenet. Usenet was perceived as an implicit anarchist space with no formal structure of authority (interviews 1) -a feature that was the result of sustained struggles among Usenet's designers [START_REF] Pfaffenberger | If I Want It, It's OK': Usenet and the (Outer) Limits of Free Speech[END_REF]. The joys and wonders of these open networks -first Usenet, and then the Internet -needed to be spread.

The activist connection: Building the "free and non-profit" Internet

In 1992, FDN, one of France's very first publicly available Usenet access provider -and soon Internet access provider -was created. Two years later, it counted dozens of nonprofits among its 400-strong membership. After bridging the Minitel with Usenet and the Internet, Lacambre set up the web hosting provider Altern in 1994, which also gathered many non-profit among its users. In February 1995, Globenet was created to supply various online services and Internet access provision to activist groups working for social justice, with the support of international networks tied to the Association for Progressive Communication (APC).

The last months of 1995 were a turning point. In the Fall of that year, a vast government overhaul of the pension scheme sparked one of the biggest mobilisations in the country's modern history. Strikes paralysed the railways and the postal network.

Through François Sauterey, a friend who had connections with socialist groups and trade unions, Laurent Chemla and Stéphane Bortzmeyer helped unionised postal service workers connect one of their old computers -nicknamed "Emiliano" in reference to the Zappatista rebellion in Chiapas -to the Internet [START_REF] Granjon | R@S : la naissance d'un acteur majeur de l'« Internet militant » français[END_REF]. This ensured the ability of mobilised groups to coordinate via email and newsgroups, marking the creation of the so-called Réseau Associatif et Syndical (R@S): To make the initiative sustainable, R@S was registered as a non-profit a few weeks later, with Sauterey as president and de facto Chief Technology Officer. For several years, it would equip trade unions, journalist organisations, anti-racist or feminist groups as well as many others with websites, mailing lists and email accounts, free software being a vital component of this infrastructure.

Thanks to these various non-profit infrastructure providers relying on the voluntary contribution of a few isolated and trusted individuals, the country thus saw the formation of a self-proclaimed "free and non-profit Internet" sector ("Internet libre et non-marchand") that helped synchronise online mobilisations and allowed these various groups to coordinate. In November 1998, during the "Congress of the non-profit Internet," representatives of various activist groups offered the following assessment of this first experience: "The Internet is first used for traditional activist actions. It is used as an affordable publication venue, lowering the cost of communication between activists and, beyond that, allowing people and organisation to make contact that would otherwise not be easy to establish.

In parallel to this use, the Internet can represent a new means of struggle. Thus, the action of associations like Attac (Association for the Taxation of financial Transactions and Citizen's Action) and Glb (Gays and Lesbians connected) is structured with and around the Internet, and would have taken a very different form without the use of this tool" (IRIS, 1998).

Market connections: Subverting or cashing in?

To a large extent, these efforts aimed at getting these activist groups online was a conscious attempt on the part of techies to ensure that the recent wave of commodification would not wipe out the Internet's original ethos of free expression and sharing (interview 5). Naturally, these initiatives were very much dependent on the voluntary work of a handful of individuals. FDN, the non-profit access provider, was running thanks three second-hand NEXT computers and modems installed in the Parisian living room of one of its co-founder, Christian Paulus [START_REF] Trudel | Alternative Communications Networks Throughout History (report)[END_REF]. With this small infrastructure and no employees, FDN was still among the twenty largest Internet access providers in terms of market share in 1995 [START_REF] Rebillard | La genèse de l'offre commerciale grand public en France (1995-1996) : entre fourniture d'accès à l'Internet et services en ligne « propriétaires[END_REF]. In this foundational moment of the digital economy, in a booming but still fragmented market, small non-profit actors still had weight.

Although some of them like Bortzmeyer were working in the public sector, others were also marketing their skills to some of the rising players of the French digital economy.

By 1995, FDN's co-founders -who today pride themselves with being the first access providers to offer a flat-rate subscription model (interview 3) -left the group to pursue their careers in the booming tech sector (today, one of them currently works at Orange Telecom, another moved to California soon after the launch of FDN is now director of engineering at Google). Through a small company called Brainstorm, Chemla and his associates were building the "connexion kit" of Club Internet, a commercial Internet access provider (interview 1). Christophe Wolfhugel, vice-president of the AUI, was cofounder of Oléane, the first for-profit company providing Internet access to businesses across the country. By 1998, it was France's second largest Internet access provider with 50 employees and 50 million francs (€7,7 million) in revenue, and the same year was bought by France Télécom [START_REF] Deblock | Première success story : Oléane[END_REF]. Some, like Lacambre with his 3615 Internet, also developed strategies to make business contribute to the sustainability of an Internet commons open to all, free of charge -in that case Altern. Later on, in 2000, with Chemla and two other associates, Lacambre also created Gandi, a domain name registrar that aimed at "breaking the domain name market," with the firm conviction that domain names should be treated as public goods and made available as cheaply as possible [START_REF] Chemla | Confessions d'un voleur : Internet, la liberté confisquée[END_REF]. Gandi was an immediate business success and helped fund many alternative providers. But eventually, Lacambre and Chemla were forced to leave the company over a disagreement with the two other founders who thought this approach hindered the development of the business (Fievet & Manach, 2006).

Turning Into Digital Rights Advocates

These digital pioneers, straddling the line between advocacy and business, therefore held key positions to define and direct nascent Internet policy.

First debates on Internet intermediary liability

In February 1995, France's "Internet pioneers" faced a worsening situation, with a first crackdown on encryption on the part of the government [START_REF] Tréguer | Pouvoir et résistance dans l'espace public : une contre-histoire d'Internet (XVe -XXIe siècle) (phdthesis)[END_REF] and an increasingly hostile media coverage focusing on the alleged "lawlessness" of the Internet.

On the Usenet group fr.network.divers, someone floated the idea of creating a non-profit focused on Internet users ('Association usagers de l'Internet ', 1995). Discussions lasted for a year and eventually led to the creation of the AUI in February 1996, an volunteerrun organisation. Among this group, Meryem Marzouki -a young computer scientist brought up under Ben Ali's dictatorship in Tunisia who worked at CNRS, France's national research center -was elected director of the group, while Laurent Chemla and Isabelle Saint-Saëns -a social science researcher and activist born in 1948 who took part in the May 1968 protests -both served as deputy directors. They were joined in the board by Stéphane Bortzmeyer, treasurer, Christophe Wolfhugel -another computer scientist -as secretary of the organisation ('AUI -Historique et Fondateurs ', 2001).

That same year, as elsewhere in Europe and Northern America, many cases would be brought before French courts against Internet access providers, accused of being accomplices of hate speech or child abuse just because their users had accessed such content [START_REF] Schafer | Du grand secret à la « défaite de l'Internet » : Enjeux, mobilisations et controverses autour du pouvoir des intermédiaires en France dans la décennie[END_REF]. In June 1996, in a sudden attempt to establish clear rules regulating online freedom of expression and allegedly shield Internet intermediaries from litigation, the right-wing government -represented by the young minister in charge of telecommunications, François Fillon -tabled an amendment to the bill making its way through Parliament to privatise French incumbent telecom operator, France Télécom.

The amendment sought to re-establish the censorship system set up to regulate the Minitel [START_REF] Mailland | Minitel: Welcome to the Internet[END_REF]. According to Fillon's proposal, the Conseil Supérieur de l'Audiovisuel (CSA) -the state agency in charge of regulating broadcast media -would host a new committee tasked with drafting a "deontology code" for online services. Anybody could then report websites and other online services found in violation of the code, a procedure that would then lead the committee to issue an opinion on the matter at hand. In case of "negative opinion" confirming a violation of the code, Internet access providers would have to block access to the targeted service, or else risk being found liable of the offence. Rather than placing the regulation of online speech under the authority of the judiciary, as provided in the 1881 Law on the freedom of the press, the "Fillon amendment" established an extra-judicial censorship regime.

Against those criticising a liberty-killing provision showing the French state's longstanding disregard for freedom of expression, the minister even took the initiative of going on Usenet to defend its proposal ('Amendement Fillon', 1996). But despite opposition from a number of lawmakers, the amendment was adopted. It would mark the first full-fledged campaign for the newly-formed AUI. According to Chemla: "We were less than a dozen, and for the most part had never had any political activity (…). We started an intense work of telephone lobbying with the help of other novice activists, which managed to convince sixty Members of Parliament from the Socialist Party to refer the bill to the Constitutional Council" [START_REF] Manach | La contre-histoire d'Internet[END_REF].

Valérie Sedallian, a young lawyer who had joined the ranks of AUI even contributed to writing the brief. The Constitutional Council eventually struck down the provision, arguing that freedom of expression, protected at Article 11 of the 1789 Declaration of the Man and of the Citizen, deserved appropriate safeguards which were lacking. The first campaign of the AUI was thus successful, giving France's first digital rights advocates a boost of confidence : As Chemla puts it, "just a few of us took the responsibility to influence the direction of society as whole, and one of the highest authorities proved us right" [START_REF] Chemla | Confessions d'un voleur : Internet, la liberté confisquée[END_REF].

Indeed, the position defended by AUI members seemed rather marginal at first. Even large corporate providers, represented by the AFPI -the Association française des professionels de l'Internet -, approved the provision. But now there were forced to admit that the Council had a point [START_REF] Mauriac | Les sages gênent le Net. La censure de l'amendement Fillon divise les acteurs du réseau[END_REF]. The corporate position reflected their primary focus on overcoming an antiquated legal framework that created strong legal risk for the development of their business, and a way to shield themselves from the litigious activities of their users. Due to the Council's ruling, commercial providers were forced to start adjusting their stance to that of digital rights activists.

After the failure of the Fillon amendment, the debate on intermediary liability moved to a special committee created by the government -the so-called Beaussant committee, named after the president of the commission, also head of an industry group representing online media. The mandate of the committee, comprised of 88 members, was to establish mechanisms for so-called "self-regulation" to implement French laws on public speech.-an approach attuned to the neo-liberal spirit of the time then promoted at the global level for Internet governance.

After having managed to get a seat at the committee's table, the main task for the AUI in these discussions would be to advocate the trust economy that dominated the early-days of the Internet, known as the "netiquette" [START_REF] Hambridge | Netiquette Guidelines (Request For Comments[END_REF]. These were the forms of self-regulation that had worked so well for the Net's first users, but they were now being undermined by the diversification of Internet-users and the medium's growing commercialisation. In this context, the pioneers needed to make the customary laws explicit to preserve a space that they cherished, and of which they were the selfproclaimed stewards and guardians. As Nicolas Auray has shown (2012), French digital rights activists rejected both market mechanisms grounded in contract law and the state's authoritarian approaches to Internet regulation. Instead, they aimed for the "moral institution" of Internet users through the netiquette, whereby judicial authorities would act as ultimate referees in interpreting the right-respecting "laws of the Republic," as provided by the 1881 press law.

But in February 1997, AUI members withdrew from the Beaussant committee. They announced their decision during a press conference, citing the lopsided representation of the committee, which heavily favoured industry players. The latter's proposed "Internet Charter" came down to imposing contractual rules onto intermediaries, effectively pushing them to police the speech of their users ('AUI -"Charte de l'Internet", 1997).

By leaving the committee, AUI undermined the legitimacy of the committee, which in turn delayed the adoption of joint recommendations. They actually never saw the light of day: In an unexpected turn of events, the legislative elections called for by the French President Jacques Chirac led to the unforeseen victory of a left-leaning coalition, headed by Lionel Jospin. The change in government meant that the Beaussant committee was effectively dead. But the crucial question of the legal status of intermediaries still lacked a substantial answer, not only at the French level but also in Brussels where European lawmakers were starting to work on EU-wide rules on the matter.

Alternative providers become a target: The Altern Affair

In 1997, Altern was one of the biggest hosting providers in France. Not only was it free of charge, but it also had no advertising and was open no anyone -not just activist groups, which set Altern apart from other non-profit hosting providers like R@S and Samizdat (although its model was replicated by another hosting service created in 1996 which sold out to a larger commercial player the next year: mygale.org, see [START_REF] Trédan | Le serveur de pages personnelles Mygale. La trajectoire d'un chaînon manquant dans l'histoire de l'Internet français[END_REF]. As a single-person organisation, Altern epitomised the possibility of creating low-cost, non-commercial Internet services that rivalled for-profit alternatives. It also made it an easy target for those willing to re-establish law and order on what many saw as an untamed social space.

After the first trials involving Internet access provider in early 1996 [START_REF] Schafer | Du grand secret à la « défaite de l'Internet » : Enjeux, mobilisations et controverses autour du pouvoir des intermédiaires en France dans la décennie[END_REF], a consensus that these actors ought to play a neutral role in the transmission of content formed So the debate quickly refocused on the next intermediary in line: Hosting providers.

Several commercial hosting providers were already adopting contractual rules that gave them the right to take-down "illegal content" posted by their users upon being notified.

That meant that commercial providers were already starting to play the role of private censors. For Lacambre, such policies were unacceptable. Even though he had already taken down websites on Altern, he refused to make these exceptional interventions an official policy. That and the fact that the service was open to anyone, without any formal subscription (which gave users and observers an illusion of anonymity), made Altern an easy target for those concerned about the spread of unfiltered online speech. So from May 1997 on, the thirty-something Valentin Lacambre would repeatedly be summoned in court, facing no less than 15 cases over the next three years, two of which led to actual sentences.

It is one of these sentences that led to the shut-down of Altern. Nude pictures of the model Estelle Halliday published in the press ended up on the website of one of Altern's users, only identified by his pseudonym Silversurfer. When Halliday's lawyers went to court alleging a breach to the right to the protection of her image, Lacambre was the only one assigned. He argued -unsuccessfully -that the plaintiffs should have targeted the website's owner, who could be identified by some of the logs that Lacambre had kept (for all their defence of encryption as necessary for the protection of the confidentiality of communications, the right to anonymity was not high on the French activists' agenda at the time). The charge was relatively modest, but Lacambre knew that these trials touched on crucial, unresolved issue that the AUI and others had been struggling to solve. So he appealed the decision.

Retrospectively, this proved to be an ill-advised move, as the court of appeal proved to be much harsher. On February 10 th , 1999, it found that Lacambre, by helping others to "communicate anonymously," had exceeded "the technical role of a mere transmitter of information" and was therefore liable. The ruling pushed Lacambre to play the role of a censor, systematically checking the content posted by its users. At a practical level, this was just impossible. Screening the content and updates of more than 47,000 websites could not be automated -at least not in the late 1990s. In a interview given to the newspaper Libération a few days after the ruling, Lacambre explained that in order to screen the two million document stored on Altern plus the ten thousand uploaded each day, "I would need to hire a thousand people for six months" [START_REF] Dufresne | Computing for Democracy: The Asociación de Técnicos de Informática and the Professionalization of Computing in Spain[END_REF].

Among digital rights activists, the ruling was received as a blow. All the more considering that it came a few weeks after the police of Rennes had raided a non-profit hosting provider known as "The Village," arresting its system administrator on copyright grounds to stop the dissemination of an horror film posted by one of its users [START_REF] Schafer | Du grand secret à la « défaite de l'Internet » : Enjeux, mobilisations et controverses autour du pouvoir des intermédiaires en France dans la décennie[END_REF]. The Altern ruling was the straw that broke the camel's back.

Lacambre's conviction effectively meant that only large actors, with enough financial power to sustain legal challenges, could become hosting provider. In that regard, the ruling paved the way for the centralisation of the network and hurt the efforts of much of non-profit alternative hosting providers, but also of small commercial providers.

The "Altern Affair" led to the first large-scale mobilisation of digital rights activists and growing number of politicised Internet users. A collective of "independent webmasters" united under an initiative called "minirézo" published a manifesto. Whereas the rather pro-market US cyberlibertarians had declared the independence of "cyberspace" a couple of years earlier (Barlow, 1996), the French activists aimed to defend the "Independent Web" against a rising tide of state control and commodification: "The Independent Web is found in these millions of websites offering millions of pages made of of passion, of opinion, or information, put in place by users aware of their role as citizens. The Independent Web is a new link between individuals, a place where knowledge is exchanged on a free and open basis (…). [It] offers a free vision of the world, bypassing the economic censorship of information, its confusion with adversing and infomercial, its reduction to a stupefying and manipulative spectacle" (minirézo, 1999).

Political elites reacted to the Altern ruling and the ensuing mobilisation by expressing their support. Dominique Strauss-Kahn, minister of the Economy in the Jospin government, wrote to Lacambre and made clear that for him, "the host of websites [could not] be compared to a press publisher or a television channel," hinting at the fact that new rules needed to be found (Strass-Kahn, 1999).

The following month, in March 1999, the Jospin government was organising the "celebration of the Internet" ("fête de l'Internet"), an event aimed at popularising Internet use across France. In an act of protest against state censorship, more than 1300 websites responding to the call of minirézo shut down for three days. Chemla and other digital rights activists put together a website to relay this "Web blackout" campaign, entitled "the Defeat of the Internet" ('Défaite de l'Internet', 1999). In his speech opening the event, Prime Minister Lionel Jospin admitted that new rules would have to be found, citing ongoing negotiations in Brussels on this issue [START_REF] Jospin | Déclaration sur le développement de la société de l'information, notamment la modernisation de l'administration[END_REF].

Geeks rule

The adoption of these "new rules" materialised a few months later France with an amendment presented by Patrick Bloche, a socialist MP, in charge of a bill reforming the French audiovisual sector. In its first version, the amendment established exactly what the digital rights activists had hoped for: A judicial oversight over online speech. A host's failure to comply with a judicial decision ordering the takedown of an illegal was the only event in which it could have found liable. But later during the legislative debate, Bloch backtracked. The amendment was changed again to condition the liability exemption to the prior identification of all users, and to the respect of "due diligence" when the intermediary was notified by a third-party of the existence of litigious content on its servers. The notion of "due diligence" implied that the intermediary ought to act on its own initiative to take the reported content down, which amounted to private censorship. But because of the lack of safeguards, the provision was again struck down in June 2000 by the Constitutional Council, which re-established the initial version of the amendment. At the same moment in Brussels, EU lawmakers were adopting the directive on the Information Society (also nicknamed the eCommerce directive) which, despite ambiguities, also provided liability exemptions for internet intermediaries.

At the turn of the millennium, a fragile compromise was finally reached on the complex issue of online intermediaries, and their role with respect to the fundamental rights of Internet users. Despite the reluctance of important industry sectors and state officials, that compromise was aligned with the stance of digital rights activists, and had been sanctioned on two occasions by the Constitutional Court. Not only that, but these activists were also winning in their long-standing opposition to France's rigid rules on the use of encryption software [START_REF] Sedallian | Les problèmes posés par la législation française en matière de chiffrement[END_REF][START_REF] Warusfel | Dix ans de réglementation de la cryptologie en France : du contrôle étatique à la liberté concédée[END_REF]. By combining technical expertise, disruptive models for the provision of alternative Internet services, by building on hackers' special ability to learn the language of the law [START_REF] Coleman | Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking[END_REF][START_REF] Coleman | From Internet Farming to Weapons of the Geek[END_REF] -, but also by collaborating with other activists and lawyers to uphold fundamental rights in the digital world, a handful of French techies had become the leading "citizen voice" on Internet politics.

Their influence was also felt at the Europe and globally thanks to Meryem Marzouki.

First as president of AUI, she had become an important participant of the Global Internet Liberty Campaign (GILC) -a global network of digital rights activist formed in June 1996 with the support of the Open Society Institute. In June 1997, she represented the campaign in an address to diplomats at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) [START_REF] Marzouki | Présentation de la coalition GILC à l'OCDE[END_REF]. In 2002, she would also play an instrumental role in the creation of European Digital Rights (EDRi), a European offshoot of the GILC. Thanks to her, that small French activist milieu who had largely worked in isolation from their counterparts in other countries found itself connected to global networks.

The Weakening of a Movement

From 2000 on, with the burst of the dotcom bubble and the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Internet politics entered a new phase. In France, it would coincide with the waning of the movement's influence. A combination of endogenous factors explain this new state of play.

Losing ground: The shrinking membership of alternative providers

Already in December 2000, during the third "Congress of the non-commercial Internet," there was a shared understanding that it was getting harder for activists to stay on the edge and remain competitive against a now flourishing digital economy: "Overall growth in demand has been strong and has mechanically expanded the potential of 'alternative providers': the culture and use of the internet is reaching layers of society that are still in minority, but their represent larger segments of the population, associations, parties and unions.

However the qualitative offer of the commercial sector has evolved a lot: access and "free" hosting, unlimited connection (or almost!), broadband via ADSL or cable etc., start of the WAP and online television, creation of portals and brand effects. Each of these developments raises new questions for the non-profit sector, its objectives, its resources, its mode of financing, operation and development, and its visibility" ('Troisièmes Assises de l'Internet non marchand et solidaire ', 2000) This growing sophistication of online commercial services had another effect: Altering the relationship between users and alternative providers. According to Sauterey, of the R@S, "we were getting at a point where it was getting a little tense with our members who were becoming more and more not just members but users, leading to mercantile customer-to-business relationships" (interview 5).

For many activist groups who had relied on alternative providers in the second half of the 1990s, the convenience of commercial services was irresistible. Dial-up Internet access providers like FDN and Globenet saw their membership base shrink drastically in a few years, as the ADSL market boomed (in 2005 , FDN was left with only 40 member-subscribers, compared to half-a-thousand a decade earlier, and those who stayed were mainly motivated by the technical thrill of operating the service). Hosting providers like R@S saw many of their members moving to commercial providers with state-of-the art equipment with easy-to-use interfaces and graphical features. . According to Marzouki and Sauterey, from the mid-2000s on, with the wave of "Web 2.0" services, activist groups that were part of the movement for global justice felt like their audiences could be reached more easily on commercial platforms. In the costbenefit analysis, the control over the communication infrastructure did not seem all that important -a trend that has been observed in other contexts (e.g. [START_REF] Uldam | Online social media for radical politics: climate change activism on YouTube[END_REF][START_REF] Terranova | Occupy social networks: The paradoxes of corporate social media for networked social movements[END_REF][START_REF] Klang | The domestication of online activism[END_REF].

The plague of "Internet -centrism"

The weakening of non-profit providers -and the corollary atrophy of their political muscle -was connected to another hurdle: Disagreements over the political identity of the movement, and the political understanding of the Internet.

Looking back at the period, our interviewees expressed frustration regarding the readiness of other activist milieus to move to commercial alternatives, which they attribute to a limited understanding of the Internet. "I don't think that anti-globalization activists were aware of the what the Internet is and the kind of political questions that it raises", Bayart explained. "[the] Internet was seen as a tool, not as a militant act" (interview 1). Some might argue that here is another instance of "Internet-centrism," a propensity to see social change through the prism of the Internet [START_REF] Morozov | To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism[END_REF]. But the point reflects the shared feeling that a thorough understanding of the political issues specific to Internet policy was never fully appropriated by the activist groups that techies were working for. As Sauterey acknowledges regarding the founding of the R@S, "without Stéphane [Bortzmeyer] and his defense of Linux, I don't think we would have go down that path" (quoted in [START_REF] Granjon | R@S : la naissance d'un acteur majeur de l'« Internet militant » français[END_REF].

Conversely, despite the political acculturation reported by people like Chemla as they worked with trade unions and global justice activists, techies often failed to put Internet politics in a wider political context. Commenting on the founding of AUI, Meryem Marzouki stressed that for many of its members, the main goal was "the growth of the number of people connected to the Internet period, whatever the means used" (interview 6). A fact that Chemla also acknowledged: "I have always said that we would win when the mass of [Internet] users got large enough to appropriate the tool, so that going back to the way it was before would be impossible. In a way I was optimistic, because despite the huge mass of users, the resources facing us today have also become gigantic" (interview 1).

According to this Internet-centrist view, the spread of Internet technologies was in and of itself a positive development that would have political consequences at the macro level. But for Marzouki and others, "that wasn't the idea." For them, "the Internet itself was never the goal (…). The reason why the Internet matters is what it allows us to do.

What I'm interested in is not the development of the Internet for its own sake. It is a particular Internet that we were interested in, a certain way of developing it" (interview 6).

Part of these political disagreements might be exaggerated. Or at least, they seem exacerbated by the actors' different social positions at this crucial moment of the formation of the movement -and in particular their relationship to the corporate world.

In the first section, we offered a general overview of the trajectory of some influential techies, but a detailed prosopography would probably help refine our understanding of these disagreements, which had also a personal dimension. What we do know is that Marzouki and a few other AUI members eventually left AUI in 1997 to start another similar organisation, IRIS, which would take the lead on French digital rights advocacy until the mid-2000s and worked closely with the R@S, its members, as well as European and global digital rights networks. IRIS was a way for Marzouki to ensure that a critical political approach to the Internet grounded in the political left could develop. "Our vision of the Internet was included in the wider frame of our vision of the social world, of the economy, of society, our political vision." IRIS, fuelled by

Conclusion

Twenty years after the birth of digital rights activism, online communications have been absorbed by multinational infrastructure providers -mostly US tech companies -that top the world's biggest market capitalisations. These companies monitor the activity of their users to build user-profiles they sell to advertisers while regulating online speech based on vague provisions inscribed in their terms of services. States also readily make use of these company's data troves to develop sophisticated propaganda techniques and boost their own surveillance capacities, while pushing for the expansion of private censorship. Much of these efforts involve the development of filtering tools based on so-called "Machine Learning" techniques that aim to automate content take-downs, but also the work of tens of thousands of subcontractors in low-wages countries [START_REF] Roberts | Commercial content moderation: Digital laborers' dirty work[END_REF][START_REF] Casilli | Never mind the algorithms: the role of click farms and exploited digital labor in Trump's election[END_REF]. Privacy and freedom of expression online are thus increasingly subject to a form of public-private "hybrid rule" (Hurt & Lipschutz, 2015) that escapes judicial oversight and democratic accountability.

The new political reality of the Internet may lead to harsh judgements against digital rights activism. As a matter of fact, many of our interviewees expressed mixed feelings of pride and regrets for having failed to sustain the magic of the 1990s, and disenchantment about the evolution of the Internet's political economy. Their retrospective look at this early phase, however, gives us a better sense of the movements' successes, of its dead angles and their relation to a given historical context, of its inability to manage some of the contradictions that gave it strength before undermining its cohesion and influence, of the state's refusal to actively support alternative providers who achieved impressive results with very little resources. It also speaks to the importance of sustaining a dynamic alternative Internet sector and its connection to digital rights advocacy, but also the need to ground the later in a systemic, collective approach to empowerment that wards off a tendency to Internet centrism and technical solutionism.

Interviews

  Marzouki's work, slowly withered in the second half of the 2000s, before a new French digital right organization -La Quadrature du Net -emerged. At this point, around 2009, the movement as a whole was undergoing a sort of revival across Europe.

Interview 1 :

 1 Bayart, B and Chemla, L. (2016, July 15). Interview by Félix Tréguer and Camille Paloque-Bergès [Face-to-face]. Interview 2: Paulus, C. (2016, October 19). Interview by Félix Tréguer and Dominique Trudel [Telephone] Interview 3: Nicaise, J.-P. (2016, October 27). Interview by Félix Tréguer [Telephone] Interview 4 : Lunar, (2017, June 22). Interview by Patrick Pétin [Face-to-face]. Interview 5 : Sauterey, F (2017, November 13). Interview by Patrick Pétin [Face-toface]. Interview 6 : Marzouki, M (2017, October 4). Interview by Patrick Pétin [Face-to-face].

Funding

This work was funded by Agence Nationale de la Recherche (UTIC project ANR-14-CE28-0024) and Horizon 2020 Framework Programme (netCommons project n° 688768).