Economy

Republican France remained a nation of small producers, traders, and consumers. The surge of industrialization that marked the era of Napoleon III had stopped short of a full-scale industrial revolution. The new dynamic sector of the economy was far outweighed by a static or slowly changing sector. The bulk of industry remained smaller and more dispersed than in other industrializing countries. As late as the decade before 1914, 90 percent of France’s industrial enterprises employed fewer than five workers each; in the extensive textile and clothing trades, more than half of the employees still worked at home rather than in factories. Commerce and trade followed the same pattern, with small shops and banks surviving in profusion. Similarly, rural France was dominated by small, subsistence family farms. The proportion of farmers in the total active population, which stood at 52 percent in 1870, was about 45 percent in 1914 and 35 percent in 1930. When grouped together, the small independent producers, traders, and farmers far outnumbered any other segment of society, including the proletariat.

The reasons given for this slow pace of socioeconomic change are varied: shortages of basic natural resources, a tradition of specialization in luxury items, a code of mores that emphasized prudent management rather than risky experiment and that regarded as ideal the “family firm,” small enough to be financed and managed by the owners alone. In any case, French industrialization took a different form from that of England or Germany. An initial burst of growth in the 1850s was followed by several decades of much more gradual expansion, which did not threaten the existing structure of society and the underlying value system. Most segments of society were reasonably satisfied and felt no threat to their way of life (only the members of the working class, both urban and agricultural, considered themselves outsiders and victims rather than participants); thus, the stability of the system was ensured. Not until well into the 20th century, and especially after 1918, did this state of affairs begin to change.

The governments of the Third Republic were representative of the small independents and responsive to their interests. Most of the bourgeoisie and the peasantry wanted a laissez-faire policy: low taxes, hands off the affairs of private citizens. There was little popular enthusiasm for costly ventures in foreign policy or expensive social reforms; the major exception—the conquest of colonial empire—had to be accomplished somewhat secretively and with limited resources. Only in tariff policy was laissez-faire flagrantly violated by the government, with the active consent of its bourgeois supporters. When the low-tariff treaties of Napoleon III expired in 1877, the government promptly returned to protectionism. Much of French agriculture and industry was thereby protected against more efficient foreign producers and insulated against the need for modernization. The short-range interests of the small independent producer were thus guaranteed; the prospect of harm to his longer-range interests—as well as to those of the nation as a whole—was not yet clear.

From 1873 to the mid-1890s the French economy experienced a period of slackness. This trend reflected a condition affecting most of Europe, although France suffered a special blow when an epidemic of phylloxera in 1875–87 destroyed one-third of the nation’s vineyards. From 1896 to 1914 industrial output rose impressively, exports increased by 75 percent, and prices returned to the pre-slump level. This upturn was also generally Europe-wide rather than peculiar to France; but some special factors, such as the opening of a vast new iron-ore field in French Lorraine, did increase the French rate of industrial expansion. By 1914 French Lorraine had become the major centre of French iron and steel production, and France had become the world’s largest exporter of raw iron ore (primarily to Germany). Yet the French were being outpaced by rivals. In 1870 France had still ranked as the world’s second industrial and trading nation; by 1914 it had fallen to a poor fourth. Much of the liquid capital that might have been used for business expansion at home was being siphoned off into foreign investment; by 1914 almost one-third of such available French capital had been placed abroad—one-fourth of that sum in Russia and only one-tenth in the French colonies. Yet few Frenchmen had serious doubts about the course of economic policy under the Third Republic.

Only after World War I, and particularly after 1930, were such doubts widely shared. The disruptive impact of the war exceeded the understanding not only of most citizens but also of most political leaders. Efforts to return to normality were futile because the postwar world and France had changed vastly. The enormous cost of a four-year mobilization, of reconstruction, and of war debts had to be borne. By the time of the Great Depression, the government had been forced to write off a large share of war costs by devaluing the franc (1928) to one-fifth of its old value, costing many Frenchmen on fixed incomes much of their savings and shaking their confidence in the future. Still, no large group of embittered déclassés was created, ripe for the appeals of a demagogue. And after 1926 there was a brief resurgence of prosperity, so that by the end of the decade the indexes of industrial production, foreign trade, and living standards had risen well above the 1914 peak. Some illusions about the future and hopes of a happy return to prewar stability could therefore be retained.

But by 1935 industrial production had fallen to 79 percent of the 1928 level and exports to 55 percent. Registered unemployment hovered at less than 500,000, but this figure concealed the fact that many urban workers were subsisting on family farms owned by relatives. Besides, the French exported much of their unemployment; thousands of immigrant workers lost their work permits and had to return home. Not until 1938–39 did a measure of recovery set in, thanks to Reynaud’s business-oriented policies plus the stimulus of rearmament. By the time war broke out again, France had barely returned to the pre-Depression level.

The workers, always outside the bourgeois consensus, were by now largely hostile to the system; most of the gains they had finally achieved in 1936 had quickly been snatched away again. But in addition many bourgeois Frenchmen now questioned the virtues of the traditional system. The 1930s therefore brought an intense fermentation of political and social thought; dozens of study groups and movements sprang up in Paris, seeking or preaching doctrines of drastic renovation and structures of government that might carry them out.