Abstract
France presented almost the opposite pattern of the United States for consumer credit use after World War II, as Gunnar Trumbull emphasizes in the previous chapter. Whereas consumer credit was widely available in the United States, credit access was tightly restricted in France.1 This article aims to show that this situation was largely the result of French monetary policy. The main problem that dominated French debates over consumer credit from the end of the war to the liberalization of the banking system in 1966 was the question of legitimacy. This issue was illustrated by Pierre Besse, secretary of the National Credit Council, who in 1955 characterized consumer credit as “a necessary disease, which must be restricted as much as possible.”2 This phrase pointed to a paradox in postwar French consumer credit policy: regulatory authorities saw consumer credit as both indispensable and condemnable.
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Notes
On the history of consumer credit in France, see Rosa-Maria Gelpi and François Julien-Labruyère (both of whom worked for Cetelem, the largest finance consumer company in France), The History of Consumer Credit: Doctrines and Practices, trans. Mn Liam Gavin (1994 in French; New York, 2000);
Hubert Balaguy (economist), Le crédit à la consommation en France (Paris, 1996);
Alain Chatriot (historian), “Protéger le consommateur contre lui-même: la régulation du crédit à la consommation,” Vingtième Siècle: Revue d’Histoire 91 (2006): 95–109;
Hélène Ducourant (sociologist), “Du crédit à la consommation à la consommation de crédits: autonomisation d’une activité économique” (PhD diss., Université de Lille 1, 2009);
Laure Lacan et al., eds. (sociologists and political scientists), Vivre et faire vivre à crédit, special issue of Sociétés contemporaines 76 (2009): 5–119;
Isabelle Gaillard, “Il credito al consumo in Francia,” in Credito e Nazione in Francia e in Italia (XIX–XX secolo), ed. Giuseppe Conti et al. (Pisa, 2009), 457–71;
Gilles Laferté (sociologist), “De l’interconnaissance sociale à l’identification économique: vers une histoire et une sociologie comparées de la transaction à crédit,” Genèses 79 (2010): 135–49;
Gilles Laferté et al., “Le crédit direct des commerçants aux consommateurs: persistence et dépassement dans le textile à Lens (1920–1970),” Genèses 79 (2010): 26–47;
Sabine Effosse, “Le développement du crédit à la consommation en France pendant les Trente Glorieuses,” in Los niveles de vida en Espana y Francia en largo plazo, ed. Gérard Chastagneret et al. (Alicante, 2010), 317–34;
Sabine Effosse and Isabelle Gaillard, eds., Consommer à crédit en Europe au vingtième siècle, special issue of Entreprises et histoire 59 (June 2010): 5–141.
Pierre Besse, “Note au sujet du crédit à la consommation,” March 24, 1955, Bank of France Archives (hereafter BDF) 1357200901, box 79.
Richard F. Kuisel, Capitalism and the State in Modern France: Renovation and Economic Management in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, UK, 1981).
Claire Andrieu, “A la recherche de la politique du crédit, 1946–1973,” Revue historique 271, no. 2 (April–June 1983): 377–417.
Laure Quennouëlle-Corre, La direction du Trésor, 1947–1967: l’etat banquier et la croissance (Paris, 2000).
Claire Andrieu, La Banque sous l’Occupation: paradoxes de l’histoire d’une profession, 1936–1946 (Paris, 1990).
Gelpi and Julien-Labruyère, History of Consumer Credit; Patrick Fridenson, Histoire des usines Renault, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1998), 1:145, 173–74; “French Automobile Marketing, 1890–1979,” in Development of Mass Marketing: The Automobile and Retailing Industries, ed. Akio Okochi and Koichi S. Shimokawa (Tokyo, 1981), 130, 135, 138. Also, since the so-called Malingre Law of December 29, 1934, new cars and tractors could be repossessed.
On Regulation W, see Irving Michelman, Consumer Finance: A Case History in American Business (New York, 1966); and chapter 9 by Jan Logemann in this volume.
See Richard F. Kuisel and Claire Andrieu, “Le financement des investissements entre 1947 et 1974: trois éclairages sur les relations entre le ministère des Finances, l’Institut d’Emission et le Plan,” in De Monnet à Massé: enjeux politiques et objectifs économiques dans le cadre des quatre premiers plans (1946–1965), ed. Henry Rousso (Paris, 1986), 41–58.
Sabine Effosse, L’invention du logement aidé en France: l’immobilier au temps des Trente Glorieuses (Paris, 2003).
On this point, see Royston Miles Goode, “A Credit Law for Europe?,” International and Comparative Law Quarterly 23, no. 2 (1974): 227–91.
Jan Logemann, “Different Paths to Mass Consumption: Consumer Credit in the United States and West Germany during the 1950s and 60s,” Journal of Social History 41, no. 3 (Spring 2008): 525–59;
Sean O’Connell, Credit and Community: Working-Class Debt in the UK since 1880 (Oxford, 2009).
Jacques Marseille, “L’ère des industries de consommation,” in Histoire de la France industrielle, ed. Maurice Lévy-Leboyer (Paris, 1996), 358–73.
On the retailers’ black lending market in France, see Laferté et al., “Le credit direct des commerçants aux consommateurs: persistence et dépassement dans le textile à Lens (1920–1970).” For Great Britain, see Sean O’Connell, “Speculations on Working Class Debt: Credit and Paternalism in France, Germany and the United Kingdom,” Entreprises et histoire 59 (June 2010): 80–91.
Jean Acquier, “Le crédit à la consommation dans les budgets familiaux,” Consommation 4 (1958): 3–43;
Sabine Effosse “Le Unioni economiche: un terzo settore del credito al consume in Francia (1900–1954),” in Debiti e crediti, ed. Angiolina Arru, Maria Rosaria De Rosa, and Craig Muldrew, special issue of Quaderni Storici 137, no. 2 (August 2011): 577–592.
Hubert Bonin, Histoire économique de la IVe République (Paris, 1987).
On televisions, see Isabelle Gaillard, “La télévision comme objet de consommation en France des années 1950 aux années 1980” (PhD diss., Université de Paris I, 2006) and chapter 1 by Gaillard in this volume.
Herrick Chapman, “Shopkeepers and the State from the Poujadist Revolt to the Early Fifth Republic,” in Les PME dans les societés contemporaines de 1880 à nos jours: pouvoir, representation, action, ed. Sylvie Guillaume et Michel Lescure (Bruxelles, 2008).
Hubert Bonin, Les groupes financiers français (Paris, 1995).
Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge, MA, 1995);
Jean-Pierre Rioux, Au Bonheur la France: Des impressionnistes à De Gaulle, comment nous avons su être heureux (Paris, 2004).
Maurice Lévy-Leboyer, ed. L’économie française dans la compétition internationale au XX e siècle (Paris, 2006)
and René Leboutte, Histoire économique et sociale de la construction européenne (Bruxelles, 2008).
Rebecca Pulju, “The Woman’s Paradise: The American Fantasy, Home Appliances, and Consumer Demand in Liberation France,” in Material Women, 1750– 1950: Consuming Desires and Collecting Practices, ed. Maureen Daly Goggin and Beth Fowkes Tobin (Farnham, Surrey, 2009), 111–24.
Henri Morsel, ed., Histoire de l’électricité en France (Paris, 1996), 3:635–73.
This law was passed on July 1, 2010; see Georges Gloukoviezoff et al., “Crédit à la consommation et surendettement des ménages” (debate), Entreprises et histoire 59 (June 2010): 112–21.
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Effosse, S. (2012). French Consumer Credit Policy in the 1950s and 1960s: From Opposition to Control. In: Logemann, J. (eds) The Development of Consumer Credit in Global Perspective: Business, Regulation, and Culture. Worlds of Consumption. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137062079_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137062079_9
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