Philippe Lamour

File:Pierre Bonny et ses avocats - 1934.jpg

Philippe Lamour in 1934, on the right with one of his clients from the interwar period, Inspector Pierre Bonny

Philippe Lamour (12 February 1903 – 25 July 1992) was a French lawyer and senior civil servant. Convinced of the virtues of a managed economy and a fervent supporter of planning, he found the Marshall Plan and the reconstruction of war-torn Europe to be an ideal place to put his convictions into practice. He joined the team of Jean Monnet, "the father of Europe", who would become famous during the Glorious Thirty. Lamour carried out a study mission in the United States with the Tennessee Valley Authority, which served as a model for his great work: the irrigation of part of the Languedoc region by means of a connection to the Rhône, under the aegis of the Company for the Development of the Lower Rhône-Languedoc Area. He is considered to be the father of regional planning in France.

Biography

Philippe Lamour was born at Landrecies, in the Nord department. He began his career at an early age, after passing his baccalaureate at fifteen. Five years later, he was the youngest lawyer in France.

As a student, he joined The Fasces of Georges Valois and Jacques Arthuys, the first organized fascist party in France, which asserted to be both anti-parliamentary and revolutionary socialist, and where he rubbed shoulders with men from both the left and the right. In 1926, he published La République des Producteurs, in which he asserted his anti-parliamentarianism and regionalism by advocating a strong State whose power would be entrusted to those who worked and produced. After the break-up of the Fasces in 1928, he refused to follow Valois and Arthuys in the Republican Syndicalist Party. He joined the Revolutionary Fascist Party, a small group composed of former members of the Fasces who had remained loyal to Fascist Italy, led by Pierre Winter, and became secretary of the organization. He then participated in the translation of My Struggle in order to inform the French about the threat posed by National Socialism and on this occasion sued Adolf Hitler who had expressed his dissatisfaction with his translation.

In 1930, he founded the avant-garde magazine Plans, with intellectuals such as Le Corbusier and Fernand Léger. He elaborated a political theory called planism, which influenced the Fourth Republic as well as the Fifth, where he defended modernism and advocated from 1931 an energetic and bellicose policy against Germany.

In 1936, during the campaign for the legislative elections, in which he was an unsuccessful radical candidate, he reiterated his attacks on parliamentarianism and universal suffrage and declared himself in favor of "an integral fascism: social, economic, law enforcement wise, and judicial". He was then one of the few to condemn the Munich Agreement in 1938.

Disgusted by the defeat, he lost interest in politics: he decided to leave Paris and its hectic life, and to settle in the countryside with his family, in the Gard, to become a farmer. The new life would inspire him some ideas on agriculture. He also became president of the Gard Chamber of Agriculture.

After World War II, he committed himself "to the recovery of France": he became the deputy of Jacques Bounin, commissioner of the Republic in Montpellier. He was elected General Secretary of the General Confederation of Agriculture. He joined the National Credit Council and the Food and Agriculture Organization. These experiences (notably in Italy) inspired him to develop a major economic project and he participated in the rebirth of the Camargue through rice growing.

In 1955, Philippe Lamour became president of the Company for the Development of the Lower Rhône-Languedoc Area, where he undertook a major project in the field of irrigation. The Lower Rhône-Languedoc canal, which has been bringing water from the Rhône to the south of the Gard department and the east of the Hérault department since the 1960s, was renamed the "Philippe-Lamour canal" in memory of his work.

It is following a project elaborated by him in 1962, when he was president of the Conseil supérieur de la Construction, that the regional planning policy of the 5th Republic was initiated. As chairman of the National Commission for Regional Planning, he played a decisive role in the implementation of the 1962 regional planning plan and in the creation of the DATAR in 1963. In 1965, he was elected mayor of Ceillac, Hautes-Alpes. Philippe Lamour directed a television program on regional planning entitled 60 millions de Français. Under the same title, he published a book in 1967 recounting this vast experience. He remained at DATAR until 1974. Outside of France, he was a consultant for the United Nations Special Fund for African and South American countries, and the Compagnie du Bas-Rhône was entrusted with work abroad, notably in Algeria and Romania.

He gave his name to several high schools in Nîmes and La Grande-Motte.

He was a close friend of Hubert Sendra, president of the Crédit Agricole du Gard. Philippe Lamour was the first president of the Crédit Agricole Foundation, which included Michèle Puybasset, Max Querrien, Jacques Pélissier, Jacques Rigaud and Jean Fourastié.

He is the father of the director Marianne Lamour and the journalist Catherine Lamour.

Works

• La République des producteurs (1926)
• Entretiens sous la Tour Eiffel (1929)
• L'affaire Seznec (1931)
• Un dur (1934; with André Cayatte)
• L'affaire Peyrières (1934; with André Cayatte)
• Un monstre (1935; with André Cayatte)
• La peau des autres (1936)
• 60 millions de français (1967)
• Prendre le temps de vivre (1974; with Jacques de Chalendar)
• L'écologie, oui, les écologistes, non (1978)
• Le cadran solaire (1979)
• Les quatre vérités (1981)

External links

• Works by Philippe Lamour at Gallica