Henri Bartoli:THE ECONOMIST Henri Bartoli, who has died aged 90, made an important contribution to the creation of a French welfare state, but was also a man of action.
He was honoured by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes Remembrance Authority, as one of the "righteous among the nations" for his role in the Resistance during the second World War.
Bartoli, the son of a Lyons doctor and a law student, entered the resistance in 1941-42 after the murder of his brother, who was a distributor of banned Christian newspapers. He took up the cause of local Jews, persuading town hall officials to produce the false papers that would save them from deportation and the death camps.
This was also a time of direct action. Bartoli lobbed tear gas canisters into local cinemas showing an anti-Jewish film, The Jew Suss, still considered one of the most hateful depictions of Jews on film.
After this, the National Council of the Resistance (Conseil National de la Resistance or CNR) sent him to Paris to help liberate Jews from the Drancy holding camp in the city's suburbs.
His fights against anti-Semitism were unambiguous - though this could not be said of all members of the resistance, especially those on its Catholic wing - and he married a Jewish woman.
In 1943, Bartoli was recruited by the CNR's general studies committee, the Comite General des Etudes (CGE), to work on the future economic and social policy of post-liberation France. There he worked with the law professor and economist René Courtin, a key figure of the resistance in southern France (later to become a founder member of Le Monde, alongside Hubert Beuve-Mery).
The results were spectacular. They produced the outline of the key structures of the French welfare state - what became the 1945 law on social security, the creation of works committees and the French national plan. The work of William Beveridge and his colleagues in Britain had provided initial inspiration.
While working on these policies in Lyons, Bartoli was associated with Jean Moulin, the charismatic leader of the Resistance in the south. His colleagues were the often young activists from an assortment of non-communist resistance movements who went on to become the leaders of the French postwar state.
Many, like him, were driven by reformist Catholic values as well as the social reform ideas of the time. As the historian Julian Jackson has observed, in its technocratic values the CGE overlapped with the modernising movement within the hated Vichy regime.
Although Bartoli briefly joined Courtin's office when Courtin became a minister after the liberation, he made his career in academia, holding chairs at the universities of Grenoble and Paris and teaching at the French elite training ground, the École Polytechnique.
The Resistance experience and the strong belief in a reformist form of Catholicism were evident in his lifelong interest in how economic thought could contribute to the management of social transformation and herald policies to end poverty.
In one of his last works - published by Unesco in 2000 in English - he took a vigorous stand against the development aid industry, arguing that developing economies needed stronger states to stand up to multinationals.
He was always prepared to differ from the French establishment on the big issues of his lifetime. He was a strong opponent of the Algerian war. He was deeply saddened by the division of Europe. Forty years later, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, he seized the opportunity to preside over the French section of a European cultural movement devoted to reuniting intellectuals of east and west, a post he held until five years ago.
His strategy was disarmingly modest. In 1999, at the ceremony at which he was awarded the Holocaust Memorial Fund medal, he said: "You just have to put up your hand and say 'present' when needed."
It was an example of his conviction that, with willpower and wit, individuals can undermine a totalitarian state. In this he was emblematic of what was ultimately the most powerful strand in the resistance in terms of its later hold on power.
His wife, Renée, predeceased him.
...
Henri Bartoli: born April 22nd, 1918; died October 1st, 2008