Ambitions on A Grand Scale

By WILLIAM RADEMAEKERS/PARIS

In much of the world, certainly including America, France has long been looked upon as a country that knows how to produce fine wines, elegant clothes and exotic perfumes but that remains a bit of a joke when it comes to technology: a builder of cars that look funny (Citroen), planes that few will buy (Concorde) and telephones that don't work. Look again. France is rushing into the 21st century with more ambition, imagination and commitment than any other nation in Europe, maybe in the world.

In the far north, engineers are digging away at the Channel Tunnel, at a cost of $13.5 billion, the largest privately financed civil-engineering work of modern times. In the south, crews are extending Europe's most advanced high-speed rail system toward Spain and Italy. Everywhere workers are lacing the country with fiber-optic cable and new power lines. France is also the driving force behind Europe's innovative strides in civil aviation and space technology. Paris is headquarters for Arianespace, the world's leading launcher of commercial satellites. Airbus Industrie -- a four-nation consortium headquartered in Toulouse and run by a Frenchman -- is now the world's second largest producer of civilian aircraft after Boeing.

Most impressive, in contrast to the U.S., has been the government's overhauling of the national infrastructure. In the 1970s, pressured by the oil embargo and fearful of falling far behind its German neighbor, France decided ( to rebuild its road and rail network, update the telecommunications system and revolutionize its power-generating structure. Those projects alone account for $250 billion in long-term investment.

The projects have been designed, financed and carried out by the state, drawing on the expertise of the private sector but relying heavily on the leadership of specialized civil servants. All involve large state-run companies and secretive interlocking bureaucracies where public scrutiny is limited. All are controversial. The nuclear power program, its detractors claim, is a Big Idea gone haywire: too many reactors producing too much electricity. The state-of-the-art telecommunications network is heavily larded with gee-whiz gadgetry that is often user-mysterious and wastefully expensive. And rather than decentralizing the nation, the high-speed trains emphasize the predominance of Paris.

None of that is causing more than a hiccup here and there. There is no better example than the way France has shrugged off any doubts about the $110 billion nuclear program. Since 1977, the state-owned public utility has built 53 pressurized-water reactors to become the most densely seeded generator of nuclear power on earth. France has quintupled its production of electricity, cut its dependence on imported oil 40%, and made power so cheap that domestic rates are 20% to 30% below the European Community average.

Remarkably enough, the nuclear building program has withstood the two great shocks of the atomic era. The 1979 near meltdown at Three Mile Island spawned new safety regulations. The catastrophe at Chernobyl in 1986 set off a public outcry in most of Western Europe, forcing some governments to curtail nuclear programs -- but not France. Five reactors will be added to the national grid in this decade. The Superphenix fast-breeder reactor, a joint venture with Italy and Germany, is working, though it has been dogged by technical problems and will never recover its $4.5 billion development cost.

If the French had few options on the energy front, they had no choice at all regarding their telephones. In the 1960s the joke was that half of France was waiting to have a phone installed and the other half was waiting for a dial tone. Lines routinely went dead; when they worked, they regularly misconnected and disconnected.

Wisely -- and boldly -- the telephone company decided to scrap the whole system and start over. Investing $80 billion between 1975 and 1990, France . Telecom now claims the world's most digitized switching system, meaning that 75% of the lines use digitally transmitted signals for crisper connections. A telephone can be installed in a matter of days, dialing is swift, lines are clear. Public telephones are everywhere.

The revamped system is only part of the electronic wizardry on display at France Telecom. More than 5.5 million people have Minitel videotex terminals. The terminals, which are free, provide electronic access to services like home banking and do-it-yourself plane and train reservations.

By 1992, France will have nearly 17,000 miles of fiber-optic cable for transmitting anything from cable television to videophone signals. Three years later, France Telecom plans to begin installing video-phones in homes. The decision to go heavily into videophones is a gamble along the lines of the Minitel giveaway, which cost the treasury more than $1 billion. But France is well positioned to be a major player in tomorrow's telecommunications market. It has already signed contracts with Mexico, Argentina and Britain.

Among the grands projets, none is more spectacular than the high-speed TGV (train a grande vitesse). Since the TGVs first went into operation between Paris and Lyons in 1981, cutting travel time in half (to two hours for the 290-mile trip) by averaging 168 m.p.h., they have carried 140 million passengers without accident -- which the French claim is a record for a transport system.

The great technical advantage of the TGV is that it is compatible with existing tracks and station facilities; it moves to high speed only on specially built lines outside the towns. The TGV program achieved an American breakthrough when the Texas high-speed-rail authority chose the French system over a German competitor for a 600-mile high-speed route linking Dallas with Houston and San Antonio -- a contract worth $5.8 billion on completion in 1998. In the past few years, additional TGV lines have been built toward Rennes in Brittany, Bordeaux in the southwest and Le Mans in the northwest; by 2010 the government will invest an additional $34 billion to add high-speed lines to places like Lille and Strasbourg.

There is a reason for the haste. By completing a high-speed rail network several decades ahead of its neighbors, France hopes to ensure its place at the hub of Europe's new transportation system. Ferret-nosed TGVs and fiber- optic cables may not guarantee success in the global marketplace of the * future, but they aptly symbolize France's determination to maintain a key role in Europe's development in the 21st century.