Like other very self-conscious nations, the French tend to view their past as an epic and read the twentieth century as the progress of their nation towards the realisation of a more perfect model. In most accounts of French economic history, the country's achievements tend to be assessed in a purely national framework, in the light not so much of comparable economies as of its own past achievements or else assessed in the light of moral values or expectations. The notion inherited from nineteenth-century geographers, that the French territory seen from on high espouses the ideal shape of a ‘hexagon’, suggests that, as General de Gaulle expressed it, the fate of the nation could not be equated with or reduced to the vicissitudes of its people.

Hence the tendency among historians of the French economy to study economic objects, such as firms, over the long term, or else to overemphasise political factors in short-term economic developments, while ignoring blatant cross-border similarities. With hindsight, the national economy of the second half of the century was markedly different from what it had been in the first.