Trente Glorieuses

Abstract

Between 1948 and and 1963, the French gross national product grew at an average of 4.6 per cent per year. During the 1960s, this growth reached 5.8 per cent per year. These figures were all the more spectacular when compared with the bleak years through which the French economy had passed between 1932 and the end of the war; many French people look back on this period as the ‘thirty glorious years’ which they associate with the end of French backwardness and the transformation of everyday living standards. Economic historians have been less sure. Some argue that post-war economic growth did not mark a turning point in French history, but rather a return to the healthy industrial growth that had been seen before the exceptional period of depression and war. Others argue that the growth of the post-war period was not unique to any one country and that France merely participated in the general prosperity of western Europe. Some contemporary perceptions of the French economy also suggest that economic growth was less straightforward than it appeared at first glance. Many of those involved with economic planning in the 1940s, such as Jean Monnet, Mendès-France or Etienne Hirsch, had spent the war in England or America.