Jacques Attali
Jacques José Mardoché Attali is a French economic and social theorist, writer, political adviser and senior civil servant.
A very prolific writer, Attali published 86 books in 54 years, between 1969 and 2023.
Attali served as a counselor to President François Mitterrand from 1981 to 1991, and was the first head of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development from 1991 to 1993. In 1997, upon the request of education minister Claude Allègre, he proposed a reform of the higher education degrees system. From 2008 to 2010, he led the government committee on how to ignite the growth of the French economy, under President Nicolas Sarkozy.
Attali co-founded the European program EUREKA, dedicated to the development of new technologies. He also founded the non-profit organization PlaNet Finance, now called Positive Planet, and is the head of Attali & Associates, an international consultancy firm on strategy, corporate finance and venture capital. Interested in the arts, he has been nominated to serve on the board of the Musée d’Orsay. He has published more than fifty books, including Verbatim, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, Labyrinth in Culture and Society: Pathways to Wisdom, and A Brief History of the Future.
In 2009, Foreign Policy called him as one of the top 100 "global thinkers" in the world.
Early life
Jacques Attali was born on 1 November 1943 in Algiers, with his twin brother Bernard Attali, in a Jewish family. His father, Simon Attali, is a self-educated person who achieved success in perfumery in Algiers. He married Fernande Abécassis on 27 January 1943. On 11 February 1954, his mother gave birth to his sister, Fabienne. In 1956, two years after the beginning of the Algerian independence war, his father decided to move to Paris with his family.Jacques and Bernard studied at the Lycée Janson-de-Sailly, in the 16th arrondissement, where they met Jean-Louis Bianco and Laurent Fabius. In 1966, Jacques graduated from the École polytechnique. He also graduated from the École des mines, Sciences Po and the École nationale d'administration.
In 1968, while doing an internship at the prefecture of a French department, he met for the second time with François Mitterrand, then president of the department, whom he had met for the first time three years before.
in 1972, Attali received a PhD in economics from University Paris Dauphine, for a thesis written under the supervision of Alain Cotta. Michel Serres was among the jury of his PhD.
In 1970, when he was 27, he became a member of the Council of State. In 1972, aged 29, he published his first two books, Analyse économique de la vie politique and Modèles politiques, for which he was awarded with a prize from the Academy of Sciences.
Academic career
Jacques Attali taught economics from 1968 to 1985 at the Paris Dauphine University, at the École polytechnique and at the École des Ponts et chaussées.In his laboratory in Dauphine, the IRIS, he gathered several young researchers Yves Stourdzé, Jean-Hervé Lorenzi, and Érik Orsenna, but also leading figures in various fields.
Political career
Attali's close collaboration with François Mitterrand started in December 1973. He directed his political campaign during the presidential elections in 1974. He then became his main chief of staff in the opposition. After being elected president in 1981, Mitterrand named Attali his special adviser, and received notes from him every evening on economics, culture, politics, and other readings. Attali attended all the cabinet and meetings, and all bilateral meetings between President Mitterrand and foreign heads of state or government. He welcomed Raymond Barre, Jacques Delors, Philippe Séguin, Jean-Luc Lagardère, Antoine Riboud, Michel Serres, and Coluche into his circle. He advised the president to hire Jean-Louis Bianco, Alain Boublil and several young, promising graduates from the École nationale d’administration.In 1982, Attali pleaded for "economic rigour". Acting as Mitterrand's sherpa for the first ten years of his presidency, Attali organised the 8th G7 summit at Versailles in 1982 and the 15th G7 summit at the Grande Arche in 1989. He took an active part in the organization of the celebrations for the bicentenary of the French Revolution on 14 July 1989.
In 1997, upon the request of Claude Allègre, Attali proposed a reform of the tertiary education degree system which led to the implementation of the LMD model.
On 24 July 2007, he accepted a nomination from President Nicolas Sarkozy to chair the bipartisan ' charged with surveying "the bottlenecks that constrain growth" in the spirit of deregulation. The body was composed of 42 members freely appointed by Attali, mostly liberals and social democrats. Attali chose Emmanuel Macron, then an investment banker at Rothschild, as deputy to commissioner Josseline de Clausade. The radical recommendations presented in the commission's unanimous final report of 23 January 2008 included the deregulation of working hours and contracts, a boost to Sunday shopping, an end to regulated professions, and the removal of taxi licensing. Some of them were incorporated into the ' of August 2008.
In February 2010, Attali was asked by Sarkozy to suggest ways out of the economic crisis, and his 42-member commission produced a new report by October 2010.
In April 2011, in Washington, D.C., the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars of the United States' Smithsonian Institution presented the Woodrow Wilson Award for Public Service to Attali.
In 2012, President François Hollande ordered from Attali a report on the "positive economics" situation. The aim of this report was to put an end to the short-termism, to move from an individualistic economy based on the short-term to an economy based on public interest and the interest of future generations, to organize the transition from an old model based on the wealth economy to a model in which economic agents will have other obligations than profit maximization. The report, written by a wide-ranging commission and delivered in 2013, outlined 44 reforms. Some of its ideas were subsequently turned into law proposals by the Minister of Economy Emmanuel Macron.
Attali has supported Rattachism.
He is credited with having launched the political careers of presidents François Hollande and Emmanuel Macron. Attali met Macron in July 2007, probably through Hollande's friend Jean-Pierre Jouyet, made him a deputy rapporteur of the Attali commission, and in late 2010, at his own dinner party, formally introduced him to Hollande. Although Macron first met Hollande through Jouyet in 2006, he only became a member of Hollande's circle in 2010, which led to his appointment as the president's deputy secretary-general in May 2012.
International career
In 1979, Attali co-founded the international NGO Action Against Hunger.In 1984, he helped implement the European program EUREKA, dedicated to the "development of new technologies", the direction of which he entrusted to Yves Stourdzé.
In January 1989, he initiated a vast international plan of action against the disastrous flooding in Bangladesh.
In August 1989, during François Mitterrand's second mandate, Jacques Attali gave up politics and left the Elysée Palace. He founded the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, in London, and became its first president. He had initiated the idea of this institution in June 1989, before the fall of the Berlin Wall, in order to support the reconstruction of Eastern European countries. He chaired the Paris negotiating conference which led to the creation of the EBRD. Under his leadership, the EBRD promoted investments which aimed at protecting nuclear power plants, protecting the environment and, more generally, developing infrastructure, reinforcing private sector competitiveness and support transition to democracy.
In 1991, Attali invited Mikhail Gorbachev to the EBRD headquarters, in London, against the opinion of British Prime Minister John Major. By doing so, he compelled the heads of government of the G7, who were attending a summit in this town, to receive the Soviet head of state. After a stormy phone call between Jacques Attali and John Major, the British press started to criticize Attali and spread suspicions about his management of the institution. Uncontested details of the management of the EBRD – including of inefficiency and profligacy – were shocking. Some of these details were taken up by some French journalists. Attali explains his stance in a chapter of his book C'était François Mitterrand, entitled "Verbatim and the EBRD": "the work in question had been done under the supervision of an international working group to which I did not belong". Indeed, when Attali left the EBRD the board of governors gave him final discharge for the management of the institution. However, his reputation never recovered.
In 1993, Attali won a libel suit; he had been accused of having reproduced in his book Verbatim, without François Mitterrand's authorization, secret archives and several sentences of the French head of State which were meant for another book. The Herald Tribune even published, on the front page, an article claiming that President Mitterrand had asked for the book to be withdrawn from sale. François Mitterrand confirmed in a long interview that he had asked Attali to write this book, and acknowledged that he had proofread it and had been given the opportunity
to make corrections.
In 1998, Attali founded Positive Planet, a non-profit organization which is active in more than 80 countries, employing over 500 staff, and provides funding, technical assistance and advisory services to microfinance players and stakeholders. Positive Planet is also active in France empoverished suburbs.
In 2001 Attali was subject to investigations on the charges of "concealment of company assets which have been misused and influence peddling". He was discharged on 27 October 2009 by the magistrate's court of Paris, "on the benefit of the doubt".
Attali advocates the establishment of a global rule of law, which will condition the survival of democracy through the creation of a new global order. He thinks the regulation of the economy by a global financial supervisory institution may be a solution to the financial crisis which started 2008. The financial institution is a first step towards the establishment of a democratic world government, of which the European Union can be a laboratory, which was all laid to bare in his 1981 book Verbatim.