A Revolutionary Moment? Experimenting E-Government in France

The end of the 1990s saw the emergence of Internet public policies in France and most European countries. Marked by a gradual shift in policymaking, State intervention in the realm of the Internet focused on administrative reform and the development of the digital economy. The chapter discusses the importance of this period as an open conjuncture, a “revolutionary moment” when new bureaucratic forms were experimented, computer knowledge revalued, sectoral boundaries blurred and traditional hierarchies questioned. It shows the entanglement between administrative modernization and Internet diffusion and the impact of these first policies on the socioeconomic arrangement of the digital space in France.