Local public policies of an industrial territory: the case of the Montbéliard region from 1959 to 1999.

Summary The Revolution of 1789 profoundly modified the art of governing the State. Public law should no longer serve to reinforce the power of the sovereign over his subjects. If its ambition was to promote and facilitate the development of commercial exchanges, it also proposed to justify to the citizens the validity of the ownership of capital by the bourgeoisie, as well as the legitimacy of this new State. To achieve these two objectives, violence alone, of which the state theoretically has a monopoly, would not suffice. The revolutionaries of Jacobin inspiration thus envisage an administrative reform of the Nation, which must prove to be simple, inexpensive and especially readable for the citizen. Two tendencies of territorial organization emerged: one was centralized and authoritarian, which regularly led to failures, the other preferred to stimulate local initiatives and to obtain better results. The Pays de Montbéliard, which was already one of the strongholds of the Industrial Revolution, was one of the forerunners of this second trend through the creation, as early as 1959, of an urban district, the DUPM. Under the presidency of André Boulloche, this new institution anticipated the decentralization laws almost two decades in advance by positioning itself as a counter-power, on the one hand to a State still considered very centralizing and authoritarian, and on the other hand to the car manufacturer Peugeot, whose development after the Second World War generated a prosperous but fragile situation of mono-industry. However, this very political vision did not last when the fight against unemployment became a vital issue in the 1980s. At the same time, the laws of decentralization, and then European construction, imposed an increasingly framed legal environment that seemed to diminish this anticipatory vision and tended, with local authorities, to favor increasingly wait-and-see and technical postures.