![100 years ago, in our archives: “The telephone scandal has gone on long enough” 100 years ago, in our archives: “The telephone scandal has gone on long enough”](https://media.lesechos.com/api/v1/images/view/66a39e081bbc8604bb664fd8/1280x720/01102734663623-web-tete.jpg)
The time has come to “Americanize” the international communications of old Europe.
Despite repeated protests from a section of the French press – and ours in particular against the “telephone scandal” – the service is far from improving as it should. (…)
What is needed, as we have always said, to achieve the result, is first to have a program. (…)
Today we want to stress the need to follow the American example in Europe in the matter of long-distance international communications: as always, its realization must be envisaged in execution of a precise program. Up to now, circumstances have not been favorable; an exacerbated economic nationalism has led since 1918 peoples to surround themselves with the barbed wire of the most intransigent protectionism, and to reduce their relations with the outside world to the strict minimum as if for pleasure. (…)
Pitiful results
In the field of telephones, the new French government appears to be particularly well placed to take the most useful initiatives. The mediocrity of international communications in old Europe is largely attributable to the political concerns of the States: one feared that the networks established across frontiers would not be sufficiently subject to its control, that their construction by foreigners would appear as a precedent, followed by other economic takeovers; the other trembled for its military security. All these worries led to a pitiful result: the non-construction of long-distance lines and the physical impossibility of telephoning in Europe more than a few hundred kilometers away – in other words, business and commerce sacrificed as always to extra-commercial concerns.
Should we, on the contrary, repeat the results obtained in the United States, the communications – carried out night and day over thousands of kilometers between New York and Omaha, between Key West in Florida and Los Angeles in California – which would be equivalent to communications between Paris, Moscow, Cairo and Dakar!
France, at the heart of all networks
Since it is mainly political scruples that have put obstacles in the way of such connections, the new French government, which is not afraid, it is said, of wise audacities, would act usefully by embarking on the path of the most fruitful of internationalisms, that of the telephone. Let it therefore propose to other European governments the construction of large networks intended to connect commercial capitals and major business centers. What more tangible pledge to give to the world of peaceful intentions than to propose the creation of an instrument indispensable to a true collaboration of peoples! (…)
France, by its geographical situation, is called upon to be the heart of all the communication networks of Western Europe: its national interest is closely linked to its commercial interest. Everything requires moving quickly, thinking big, and succeeding: what a magnificent opportunity is offered to our public authorities to take an initiative that will be the corollary of its projects of international political collaboration and pacification of the Old Continent! What an opportunity also to put national capital to work in the execution of a large-scale public works program, by giving trade the means of action that it urgently needs!