Europe saw many changes in the immediate post-war period. In part these
changes were brought about by a prosperity that was largely the result of
a stable world order - an international order led by the Americans - in
which major investments took place to rebuild national economies damaged
by war. In many European countries - and France is certainly no exception
here - there was an unbroken period of economic prosperity and rising
standards of living which lasted until the 1970s. In France the name given
to this period of growth, prosperity and abrupt social change was les
trente glorieuses - that is to say, the thirty glorious years between
1945 and 1975, or more accurately, between the liberation of France in
1944 to the economic downturn triggered by the oil crisis (crise
pétrolière) of 1973.
Here is Kristin Ross on this period in French history:
At the end of the Second World War France was, as you might expect, it was
happy to be liberated but the devastation caused by war and enemy
occupation was everywhere. Industrial production was down to half of its
pre- war level and agriculture was at a complete standstill due to an
absence of men and machinery.
The priority was recovery and the key words were remise en marche
and redémarrage. The injunction everywhere was to produce
(produire!), with a distinct stress on collective effort - phrases
like bas les vestes et haut les coeurs!, retroussons nos
manches! and et, hop, on s'en sortira! became part of the
political discourse of the day.
France was soon on its feet with industrial output up to pre-war levels by
1947. This was largely achieved by a number of initiatives. Firstly, there
was the active role of the state in industry oversaw the nationalisation
of public utilities (e.g. CDF - Charbonnages de France; EDF - Électricité
de France; GDF - Gaz de France), airlines (Air France), banks (Banque de
France) and many other private companies like the Renault car factory
(Régie Nationale des Usines Renault).
As a result of these nationalisations, France became the most
state-controlled capitalist country in the world. Another factor behind
economic recovery was the Marshall Aid Plan an American initiative which
gave grants, loans and subsidies to struggling post-war nations. The issue
of raising the birth rate was an additional factor in France's industrial
recovery: more babies meant more demand for goods and services and more
potential worker-consumers. There was a clear link, then, between
production and reproduction, conception and consumption. Immigration too
played a central role in the economic modernisation and growth that
characterises les trente glorieuses.
Les trente glorieuses witnessed rapid economic growth. For those
who like their statistics neat, between 1945 and 1975 the economy grew on
average by 5% per annum, which was a considerable economic achievement at
the time. Both industry and agriculture were undergoing a process of
increasing modernisation.
As a result of full employment, rising wages, and increasing holiday
provision, new patterns of consumption and leisure activities began to
emerge. A newly affluent working-class began to enjoy a higher standard of
living than ever before in the history of France. Les trente
glorieuses were the years of the ` affluent worker' and one writer,
André Gorz, even went so far as to claim that the working class was
disappearing (`adieu à la classe ouvrière'). Although disparities in
levels of income renamed significant, there was, on average, a 6% increase
in people's real incomes. The higher incomes and increased spending power
of post-war France, and in particular, of the 1950s and 1960s, was
created by economic growth and rising productivity.
This newly prosperous working-class was anxious to enjoy the possessions
and lifestyle hitherto afforded only by the middle-class and the wealthy -
la société de consommation had arrived in France. Frenchmen and
women enjoyed longer holidays: in little over a decade the average annual
holiday had increased from three weeks in 1956 to four weeks in 1969. Some
middle-class French looked on this phenomena with alarm as their formerly
exclusive resorts became open to more and more people - les prolos à la
plage) as they were sometimes contemptuously known. A number of
consumer durables came to symbolise this new age of prosperity and
consumer aspiration: the refrigerator, the washing machine, the television
and the car. By the end of the 1950s, for instance, 7.5% of French
families owned a refrigerator, 10% a washing machine, 26% a television and
21% a car (Price: 1993 p.292). The car became a particularly visible
emblem of France's new prosperity. In 1939, for example, there were an
estimated 500,000 cars in the Paris region. In 1960, there were a million
and in 1965 there were 2 million (Ross: 1996 p.53). The city had to adapt
to the pressure of increasing car use and in 1956 the Périphérique, the
motorway circling Paris was begun. The Right Bank Expressway along the
Seine was finished in 1967. This increase was due not just to higher
standards of living but to motor vehicule manufacturers targetting a new
mass market. The Renault 4CV, launched in 1947, and widely seen as the first
truly affordable mass market French saloon car is a good example of this.
Les trente glorieuses also witnessed the rapid process of
urbanisation and for this reason it is sometimes characterized as les
années de béton. Between 1946 and 1985 the population grew from 40.3
million to 55 million, 69% of whom were now living in towns or cities
compared with 51% before the war. (Price: 1993 p.273). In 1945 housing
conditions in the cities were little different from those of the
nineteenth century. The housing stock was old - most of it
nineteenth-century - and lacking modern amenities like bathrooms, kitchens
and running water. In 1954 more than a third of all households lacked
running water and only 17.5% had a either a bath or a shower (Price: 1993
p.292). Overcrowding was a major problem however. As late as 1962 in fact,
a census classified one flat in four as overcrowded and recorded that 60%
of all housing stock predated 1914. Housing stock was not only in poor
condition but it was also in high demand. Increasing numbers of Frenchmen
and women were moving from the country to the city and, just as important,
increasing numbers of Frenchmen and women were deciding to have children.
The rising birth rate exacerbated the already serious problem of
overcrowding.
The ideal for most young couples in France was a modern home with all the
now necessary amenities of modern living. A model of cleanliness and
logical design like the show kitchen featured in Femina pratique
(May 1955) below:
As France grew wealthier, some sociologists were quick to note that French
society was beginning to withdraw into the private space of the home. The
home became a space where new desires of comfortable, modern living were
created. Happiness was to be found within the four walls of le
foyer. This, of course, is one of the main themes of Rochefort's
Les petits enfants du siècle. Here is Kristin Ross on this trend:
Massive investment in France's housing infrastructure took place in the
1950s and 1960s to address the nation's needs. From 1954 onwards, new
building projects began to be realised - les grandes ensembles -
often supplanting as well as complementing existing housing stock. At its
peak, some 400,000 properties - modern, sanitised, standardised and
suburban - were created each year. One striking example of the council
estates created after 1954 was Sarcelles situated near Le Bourget airport.
Interestingly enough, it had a population of over 40,000 yet had neither
secondary school nor cultural centre. It created a new kind of
psychological depression or new- town blues that rapidly acquired its own
name: Sarcellitis.
The principal migratory movement from the middle of the nineteenth century
until the late 1960s was from rural to urban. In those one hundred or so
years, France experienced a rural exodus as more and more people moved
from jobs in agriculture in the countryside to jobs in industry and the
service sector in the cities and the suburbs of France.
Changes in transport infrastructure from the nineteenth century onwards,
like the construction of the railways, and cultural factors like the
increased provision of primary education and the introduction of military
service opened new horizons for many young men and women who would have
otherwise spent their lives in the field or the farmhouse.
During the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s - the so-called années de béton -
there was much movement from city to suburb. This process of urban
deconcentration was necessary due to the shortage, and general poor
quality of housing stock in urban centres and was made possible by the
large-scale construction of housing estates on the edges of most French
cities.
The most common population pattern in nineteenth-century Europe was rapid
growth with fertility rates exceeding mortality rates in countries like
Britain and Germany. This was not the case in France, however, which
experienced a period of population stagnation caused by low levels of
fertility (due to a desire to limit inheritance to fewer children, the
practice of coitus interruptus, comparatively late marriage of
women and higher levels of celibacy) and higher than average levels of
infant mortality (due to poor sanitation, nutrition and healthcare).
In 1881, for example, the birth rate in France was 25 per 1,000 as opposed
to 35 per 1,000 in Britain. Throughout the nineteenth century the
population of France grew from 28 million to 40 million (an increase of
43%) as opposed to the growth of the German population from 22 to 63
million (an increase of 186%) and Britain from 16 to 40 million (an
increase of 150%).
This low level of fertility continued into the twentieth century and,
indeed, was exacerbated by such events as the First World War (1914- 1918)
which claimed 1.3 million lives, the influenza epidemic of 1919 and the
Second World War (1939-1945). Indeed, it is following France's military
defeats of 1870 and the First World War, that France's falling birth rate
became a subject of much concern at the highest level of French political
life.
During the years of the Third Republic (1870-1914), successive French
governments adopted a pronatalist line, i.e. a policy that explicitly
sought to encourage a rise in the birth rate. In the 1920s, for example,
both abortion and the sale of contraceptives were prohibited and in 1939
the Code de la famille was introduced with a range of financial
incentives for married couples with children. During les années
noires of Nazi occupation between 1940 and 1944, the Vichy government
- whose slogan was Famille, Travail, Patrie - adopted a similar
pronatalist line and established a Ministry of Population (1940) and
introduced the death penalty for back-street abortionists (les
faiseuses d'anges).
It was not really until the middle of the 1940s that such measures began
to work and the years between 1943 and 1965 see the so-called `baby boom'.
The policies of earlier governments were taking effect and this, plus the
post- war coalition government's stress on boosting the birth rate - in a
speech made in 1945 De Gaulle wanted to see `en dix ans, douze millions de
beaux bébés pour la France' (`twelve million bouncing babies for France in
the space of ten years) - saw the beginning of `le baby boom'.
Between those years the number of births (14 million) in France greatly
exceeded the number of deaths (9 million). The rates of infant mortality
fell and more and more young couples, encouraged by state incentives
(family allowances, tax relief, housing allowances, cheaper transport and
cinema tickets etc.) had larger and larger families. A negative side of
this increase in the birth rate was the conservative attitude to gender
roles that accompanied it. Women returned to the home - le retour au
foyer - and a climate of what one might call regressive sexual
politics prevailed.
By the mid-1960s however, the `baby boom' had slowed down. The changing
attitudes of women to work, the availability of contraception (legalised
in 1967 under la Loi Neuwirth) and abortion (legalised in 1975
under la Loi Veil) led to a change in cultural attitudes and a
slowing down of the birth rate in France.
French society then, was undergoing a period of rapid change but in many
important ways it also remained profoundly untouched. It remained a
society in which class, race and gender inequality was perpetuated despite
the apparent transformations within the fabric of French society.
You might like to supplement your reading of these notes by clicking on:
One very interesting commentator on a variety of social and
cultural developments during the first half of les trente
glorieuses is Roland Barthes. You can find lectures on his best-known
work, Mythologies (1975) at:
In terms of old-fashioned books, there are many in the Main Library
(Chester Road) directly relevant to les trente glorieuses:
Introduction
The speed with which French society was transformed after the war from a
rural, empire-oriented, Catholic country into a fully industrialized,
decolonized and urban one meant that the things modernization needed -
educated middle managers, for instance, or affordable automobiles and
other `mature' consumer durables, or a set of social siences that followed
scientific, functionalist models, or a work force of ex-colonial laborers
- burst onto a society that still cherished prewar outlooks with all the
force, excitement, disruption, and horror of the genuinely new. (Ross:
1996 p.4)
Reconstruction
The New Affluence
The Consumer Society
Urbanisation
On the national level France retreats within the hexagon, withdraws from
empire, retrenches within its borders at the same time as those boundaries
are becoming newly permeable to a whirlwind of economic forces - forces
far more destructive of some received notion of `national culture' than
any immigrant community could muster. The movement inward - a whole
complex process ... that Castoriadis, Moran, and Lefebvre all called
`privatization' - is a movement echoed on the level of everyday life by
the withdrawal of the new middle classes to their newly comfortable
domestic interiors, to the electric kitchens, to the enclosure of private
automobiles, to the interior of a new vision of conjugality and an
ideology of happiness built around the new unit of middle- class
comsumption, the couple, and to depoliticization as a response to the
increase in bureaucratic control of daily life. (Ross: 1996 p.11)
The Rural Exodus
The Baby Boom
Conclusion
Further Reading
To cite:
McNeill, T. (1998) 'Les trente glorieuses: 1945-1975' in Communiqué online
http://eserve.org.uk/tmc/ [Accessed ]