Republican values: for overcoming the authoritarian managerial model inherited from Fordism and Nazism
Republican Values: Moving Beyond the Authoritarian Managerial Model Inherited from Fordism and Nazism
Workplace suffering is no longer a marginal issue that can be dismissed as a regrettable anecdote in an otherwise satisfactory professional life. Burnout, loss of meaning, and quiet disengagement—measured each year by Gallup barometers and DARES surveys—paint the portrait of a work organization that is running out of steam. Meanwhile, France continues to present itself as the homeland of human rights and the matrix of a universal motto: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.
Between these two realities lies a gap that deserves to be named: the gap between the values the Republic displays in the public sphere and those it tolerates, or even organizes, in the productive sphere.
The question structuring this article can be summed up in one sentence: Can the company embody the republican motto, or does it remain, by its very construction, foreign to the rule of law?
To answer this, we must first examine the genealogy of the managerial model that still structures a large part of contemporary organizations, and its debt to Fordism, then to German industrial organization in the 1930s—for, as we shall see, the two are intimately intertwined. Next, we must situate the company within the architecture of law, as a social space that largely escapes the principles of the rule of law. Based on this observation, we must examine what a serious application of the republican triptych to the company would entail. Finally, we must verify the economic viability of this model, before outlining its concrete translations at the level of the company itself, professional branches and territories, and the law.
An Authoritarian Matrix: From Fordism to Nazism
The Taylorist and Fordist Legacy
Contemporary management bears the imprint of Frederick Taylor, often without knowing it. In his Principles of Scientific Management, published in 1911, Taylor theorized the separation between the conception of work, reserved for the engineer, and its execution, entrusted to the worker. This fragmentation of the productive gesture has a direct consequence: craft knowledge is dispossessed, and the worker becomes the executor of a task thought out by others, no longer mastering either its meaning or its rhythm.
Henry Ford extended this gesture with the assembly line, which standardized operations and made each workstation interchangeable. The company then thought of itself as a machine, and management as an engineering of control over bodies and time, where pace replaced skill and the worker became just another cog.
The Nazi Graft onto Work Organization
This Taylorist and Fordist matrix underwent a graft in 1930s Germany that historian Johann Chapoutot documented with precision in his work Free to Obey. Albert Speer, Minister of Armaments for the Third Reich, imported American industrial organization methods to multiply war production. But this technical importation was accompanied by an ideological transposition.
The Betriebsführerprinzip elevated the company head to the status of Führer of his company, reproducing at the workshop level the principle of absolute authority that structured the entire political regime. The 1934 Law on the Organization of National Work enshrined this logic by abolishing union counter-powers and placing the employee in a relationship of total subordination, with no recourse or autonomous representation. Work became a national duty, and obedience a cardinal virtue, elevated to a moral principle as much as a management rule.
Very Contemporary Survivals
This genealogy is by no means anecdotal. Management by fear, permanent reporting, contradictory injunctions, and the systematic pitting of employees against one another perpetuate, under modernized guises, the same logic of control over bodies and time. The company remains, for the most part, a space where the asymmetry of the subordination relationship allows the spirit of labor law to be circumvented while respecting its letter.
The paradoxical injunction of demanding autonomy within a framework of total control—through individual objectives, dashboards, and continuous evaluation—constitutes one of the most sophisticated forms of this ideological continuity. Productivism and the reduction of the worker's body to a resource to be optimized have not disappeared with the military uniforms of the last century; they have simply been refined and diffused into the polished vocabulary of modern normative management.
The Company, a Blind Spot of Democracy
The Social Structure of Law in Question
The social structure of law refers to the set of norms, institutions, and practices that guarantee the effectiveness of fundamental rights in social relations. This notion finds its roots in republican political philosophy, in Rousseau and Montesquieu, and in the theory of the rule of law developed by Hans Kelsen and later by Raymond Carré de Malberg.
It presupposes three cumulative characteristics:
- separation of powers
- guarantee of fundamental freedoms
- equality before the law
All backed by popular sovereignty as the ultimate source of legitimacy.
Yet the company largely escapes this architecture. The employment contract remains, in its general economy, a contract of voluntary submission to a private authority. Article L 1221-1 of the Labor Code enshrines a power of direction that remains, in practice, almost absolute. No internal separation of powers truly frames it: the employer legislates by setting the internal rules, executes by directing daily activity, and judges by sanctioning breaches that he himself has defined.
Advances exist—the Social and Economic Committee, the right of employee expression, cooperative statuses, collective agreements—but they remain timid compared to the scale of the power they are supposed to counterbalance.
A Democratic Incompleteness
Jean Jaurès already observed, at the end of the 19th century, that democracy stops at the company gates. The citizen who exercises their sovereignty in the voting booth becomes a subject again upon crossing the threshold of their workplace, subject to an authority they have neither chosen nor consented to in the political sense of the term.
This contradiction weakens the Republic itself in its principle. One cannot sustainably form free and equal citizens through school, then place them for eight hours a day in a relationship of authority that contradicts everything that school has taught them about the dignity and sovereignty of the person.
The Republican Triptych Put to the Test of the Company
Liberty
The formal liberty guaranteed by labor law often masks the absence of real freedom within the subordinate framework. Procedures, welcome scripts, interview templates prescribe even the employee's gestures and words, leaving only a residual space for individual initiative.
Freedom of expression itself remains conditioned by a duty of loyalty whose deliberately vague contours discourage any frontal criticism of the organization. Applying the principle of liberty would require recognizing a genuine right to initiative and error, real autonomy in the organization of work—whether in terms of hours, telework, or methods used to achieve an objective. It would also require revitalizing the 1982 Auroux laws on the direct and collective right of employee expression, effectively protecting internal whistleblowers against disguised reprisals, and looking toward German co-determination as a working horizon rather than a foreign legal curiosity.
Equality
Pay gaps within the CAC 40 can reach a ratio of one to three hundred between the highest-paid executive and the lowest-paid employee in the company. The glass ceiling and systemic discriminations in access to voice, decision-making, and training persist despite several decades of incentive legislation.
A serious application of the principle of equality would lead to enshrining in the company's very statutes a maximum pay gap, on the order of one to twelve or one to twenty depending on the sector and its capital intensity. It would also lead to extending the scope of the Copé-Zimmermann law on parity beyond just boards of directors, imposing total transparency of remuneration at all levels, guaranteeing real equality of access to training and promotion, and ceasing to make precarious statuses an ordinary and sustainable mode of workforce management.
Fraternity
The permanent pitting of employees against one another—through forced ranking or all-or-nothing career policies—individualizes trajectories and fragments the work collectives that once formed the strength of organizations. Telework, like imposed presenteeism and the uncontrolled sharing of office spaces, adds a further form of atomization, depriving teams of informal opportunities for solidarity.
The principle of fraternity applied to the company would reverse this logic by making cooperation, not competition, the organizing principle of daily work. It would imply a real collective sharing of the value created, through profit-sharing, employee shareholding, and employee ownership; organized intergenerational solidarity through mentoring and knowledge transmission; and explicit consideration of vulnerability, whether it affects family caregivers, sick people, or those with disabilities. The company would thus become a community of destiny again, rather than the mere accounting sum of interchangeable individuals.
A Viable Model, and Economically Superior
Moving Beyond the Postulate of a Contradiction Between Virtue and Performance
The authoritarian model is not more efficient than democratic alternatives; it is simply established and comfortable for those who have been running it for decades. The work of Isaac Getz and Brian Carney on liberated companies, like the repeated studies by the Harvard Business Review and Gallup on the correlation between well-being at work and sustainable economic performance, all converge on the same finding. Republican virtue and performance are not structurally opposed; they reinforce each other over time.
Direct Measurable Gains
A more democratic governance model reduces absenteeism and turnover, the cost of which, for each unwanted departure, is estimated at between six and eighteen months of gross salary. It increases engagement and innovation capacity, because employees free to propose ideas invest more than employees simply tasked with executing. It strengthens the company's attractiveness to younger generations, who now place the meaning of work at least on par with remuneration in their choice criteria. Finally, it reduces psychosocial risks and litigation brought before labor courts, which weigh heavily on the most rigid organizations.
Systemic Gains for the Nation
Democratic organizations have proven more resilient in the face of recent crises, particularly during periods of health lockdowns, where collective intelligence enabled faster adaptation than in traditional hierarchical structures.
The republican company could thus become a national competitive advantage in its own right, a component of France's employer brand internationally, while reducing negative externalities currently borne by the entire community—whether it be the management of workplace suffering by Social Security or the social cost of unemployment and professional downgrading.
Toward an Economy of Fraternity
More broadly, it is about refounding the value of work itself. It is no longer enough to oppose capital and labor according to the classic schema; we must think of the relationship between contribution and recognition as the true engine of engagement.
The theory of care, developed by Joan Tronto and later taken up in France by Emmanuel Renault, offers a solid conceptual framework for thinking about this economy of fraternity. The cost of its absence is already measured in presenteeism, quiet disengagement, social movements, and sometimes internal violence in the most strained organizations. The 2019 PACTE law, by modifying Articles 1833 and 1835 of the Civil Code to make corporate social interest and purpose fully-fledged legal notions, opened a breach in which this project can now fully inscribe itself.
A Transformation at Three Levels: The Company, the Branch, the Law
At the Company Level
Internal governance can be transformed without waiting for the law, through the sole will of managers and work collectives. Several concrete levers are already available.
- An effective separation of internal powers, between an executive management, a supervisory board including employee representatives acting as a legislative power, and an independent ethics body playing the role of judicial power.
- Election of managers by employees, following the model already proven by cooperatives and certain French university institutions.
- A right of veto for the Social and Economic Committee on strategic decisions that directly affect the volume and quality of employment.
- Revision of the internal rules by the employees themselves, rather than their simple top-down notification after unilateral drafting.
Management itself must evolve toward a posture of facilitation rather than pure hierarchical control. This implies evaluating managers by their teams with real consequences for their career progression, eliminating symbols of arbitrary power such as closed offices or reserved parking spaces, and establishing a managerial right of withdrawal allowing a team to formally request the change of its supervisor in case of proven failure.
The annual publication of a republican index for the company, measuring liberty, equality, and fraternity in the same way as the existing index on professional equality between women and men, would give this transformation a measurement and comparison tool, subject to independent external audit and a certification procedure.
At the Level of Professional Branches and Territories
Between the company and the law, the intermediate level of professional branches and territories offers a valuable and often neglected space for experimentation. Republican branch charters, negotiated between trade union organizations and employer organizations, could set progressive objectives adapted to the specific constraints of each sector of activity. The right to experimentation provided for in Article 72 of the Constitution would allow testing this model in voluntary territories, supported by a dedicated transition fund and by exchange spaces between companies dedicated to managerial practices and their shared evaluation.
At the Level of Law and Norms
Nevertheless, the most profound transformation remains that which passes through the law itself. It would require inscribing the principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity in the constitutional bloc applicable to labor law, and extending the scope of the eighth paragraph of the preamble to the 1946 Constitution, dedicated to worker participation, to the very governance of companies and not only to their financial results. It would require a reform of the Labor Code introducing a genuine separation of internal powers, and the creation of a status of "company with a republican mission," going beyond the simple quality of "company with a mission" introduced by the PACTE law.
Taxation can accompany this movement by modulating corporate income tax according to compliance with the republican index, easing taxation for companies with proven democratic governance, granting targeted exemptions during their first years of transition, and reinforcing taxation of the most excessive pay gaps.
Public procurement, finally, could introduce a republican conditionality clause in all public contracts, reserve a portion of these contracts for social and solidarity economy structures, and grant a scoring bonus in calls for tender to companies that have adopted democratic governance.
At the Level of the National Narrative
A transformation of this magnitude is not imposed solely by legal or fiscal constraint; it is also built through the collective narrative that accompanies it. Making the democratic company a national narrative, in the same way that the republican school was for entire generations, would require teaching labor law and corporate citizenship from secondary school onwards, and carrying out an institutional communication strategy on this model for the general public.
Economic patriotism would benefit from explicitly linking itself to democratic governance, so that producing in France means, also and perhaps above all, producing in respect of the values that the nation otherwise claims.
A Historical Bifurcation
The managerial model inherited from Fordism and its authoritarian graft from the 1930s is not a fatality; it is a historical construction, therefore a construction that can be revised by political and social will. The Republic has both the conceptual resources—in the triptych of liberty, equality, fraternity—and the legal resources—in the notion of the social structure of law—to undertake this transformation without having to import them from outside.
The republican company is, moreover, not an abstract utopia; it already exists in embryonic form in cooperatives, in mission-driven companies, and in so-called liberated companies that have proven their viability.
This project transcends the usual left-right divide. It is conservative in that it aims to preserve the dignity of work and an ancient, sometimes forgotten, republican tradition. It is progressive in that it aims to democratize the economy itself, and not just the political sphere.
The urgency is now anthropological. Artificial intelligence and automation will destroy jobs in the years to come, and only two paths will then be open to the societies concerned. Either accentuate the authoritarian logic to manage the impending scarcity, or democratize power and meaning to better distribute them among all.
A Citizens' Convention on Democracy in the Company, built on the model of the Citizens' Convention for the Climate, could finally offer this debate the political and deliberative space it deserves.
