The 1930s were a sad decade for the French economy: defeated on the battle field in 1940, France had in the previous decade already suffered her ‘economic Sedan’. France, the last country to be affected by the Great Depression, was also the last to recover from it. The index of French industrial production, having fallen below 100 (base 1928) in May 1931, was not to reach that level again until June 1939; as for the peak of 1929, this was not reached again until 1950. In Britain, on the other hand, the economy started to recover from August 1932: by 1934, industrial output had attained the levels of 1929; by 1937 it was 24 per cent higher. In Germany, where output had fallen by 42 per cent between 1929 and 1932, the 1929 level was reached in 1935; by 1937 it had been exceeded by 16 per cent. In America also, where recovery was more halting and where unemployment remained high, industrial output which had almost halved between 1929 and 1932, stood in 1937 at only 8 per cent below its peak level of 1929. In France at this time it was 28 per cent below the peak of 1929.

At one time, discussion of French economic history was dominated by the problem of French ‘backwardness’, of French resistance to economic growth, of the prevalence of a stagnationist ‘malthusian’ – to adopt the French terminology – mentality. This debate was much influenced by observation of the poor performance of the French economy in the 1930s.