CNRS researcher Muriel Le Roux, deputy director of the Institute of Modern and Contemporary History, analyzes the population’s attachment to company services, despite their declining use.
The emotion aroused by the disappearance of the red stamp illustrates a still very strong link between the French and La Poste. How to explain it?
I believe that this stems from an attachment to the rural world, since the first rounds of postmen and the deployment throughout the territory of letterboxes date back to 1829. This must also be linked to the creation of the stamp by the Second Republic, which introduced equalization, ie the possibility of sending and receiving, for the same cost, a letter throughout the country. A formidable invention and an instrument of equity, of unification of territories.
We can therefore understand that in the popular, republican imagination, La Poste, like free and compulsory education, has become over time referents that come under the unconscious. Nor should we minimize the impact of conflicts: during the war [contre la Prusse] from 1870, the Commune [de Paris, en 1871]the two world wars or the war in Algeria [1954-1962], the letter allowed the families to maintain coherence, to receive emotional and moral support.
Over time, the services provided by La Poste – letters, press distribution, access to savings, access to postal current accounts, telephones, etc. – have therefore become obvious, as something that must be guaranteed by the state. Hence a situation of attachment to a past and to a sort of ideal.
How did this attachment survive the successive reforms of the statutes of La Poste, an administration that became a public company then a limited company, and the development of its activities?
The law of 1990 which transformed the administration of the PTT [Postes et télécommunications] into two companies, which have now become Orange and the La Poste group, imposed on the latter a delegation of public service, which over the years has become universal service. La Poste has therefore been a public limited company since 2010, quite paradoxically.
Its capital, totally owned by the State (the Caisse des dépôts and the State), authorizes monitoring, imposed by the legislator since its development, and explains the continuity of the feeling of ownership of the services rendered. Even if, in a completely contradictory way, very few people go to La Poste regularly.
You have 53.56% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.