As I was completing the research for this project in the dossier collection at the Sciences Po library in Paris, I wondered at the irony of reading newspaper articles from the 1950s advocating consumer credit as the means for expanding the French economy and achieving American levels of economic growth, while at the same time the contemporary news media were reporting on the credit crisis and overindebtedness in the United States. As columnist David Brooks opined in The New York Times in the fall of 2009, what the United States now needs is a new kind of culture war, one not pitting religious conservatives against secular liberals, but a “movement to restore economic values” whose goal would be to “make the U.S. again a producer economy, not a consumer economy” and to “champion a return to financial self-restraint, large and small.” This book emerges at a time when Western governments and peoples are questioning the wisdom of unrestrained consumer spending. Suddenly, the argument that credit could be a kind of “future savings” seems suspect, and the pessimism of those who warned that excessive consumer credit could exacerbate a financial crisis seems prescient. The consumer-driven economy in which all people enjoy a comfortable standard of living is currently associated less with social justice than with excess.

The American and French economies and peoples are linked more closely than ever and facing much more similar economic challenges than they did in the immediate postwar decades, when the United States was an economic powerhouse that France strived to emulate.