The post-war economic boom in France raised the whole society to unprecedented levels of affluence. The decade of the 1950s witnessed a period of industrial expansion that exceeded even those of ‘La Belle Époque’ and the 1920s. Purchasing power and standards of living increased across the board, even allowing for inevitable variations between different social strata. As technology advanced, production increased and the range of products extended and diversified: more and more goods and services flooded into the marketplace. The proportion of income spent on basic necessities such as food and clothing fell significantly, releasing income for discretionary expenditure. Spending on culture and leisure activities increased by 67 per cent between 1949 and 1959. The sector of ‘arts ménagers’ underwent a huge expansion starting in the 1950s; the production of kitchen aids and household technology grouped under the heading ‘électro-ménager’ increased by 400 per cent between 1949 and 1957, consumption of them doubling between 1954 and 1956. In part this reflected the major problem of the age: ‘la crise du logement’ and attempts to deal with it by demolishing slums and constructing modern, functionally designed accommodation that could be equipped with labour-saving devices. At the ‘Salon des Arts Ménagers’ in 1952, the magazine Paris-Match sponsored the creation of ‘L'appartement idéal dans une surface de 74m ’, which featured in its issue on 7 March 1952, with a commentary that declared at the outset: ‘Il n'y a pas d'actualité plus aiguë pour des milliers de Français que le problème du logement’. Photographs show a kitchen equipped with a refrigerator, an electric vegetable peeler, a coffee-grinder; ‘l’équipement mécanique est l'accessoire indispensable’, comments the text, beneath the title: ‘Dans sa cuisine mécanique la femme n'est plus une esclave’. Of course, all these details were purely aspirational in the early 1950s for the four-fifths of homes without an inside lavatory, the 60 per cent or so with only cold running water, and some 82 per cent without a bathroom or shower, where the kitchen sink served also for personal ablutions.