France 1848 1945 Taste And Corruption

A History of French Passions Volume 4: Taste and Corruuption

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Sketches France's political and intellectual development and comments on social divisions and customs from the late 1840s through the Second World War.

At the end of World War II, experts on both sides of the Atlantic believed that France was doomed to economic stagnation. French culture and institutions, they argued, inhibited the changes in economic structure that sustained growth would require. But in spite of these predictions and the occasional volatility of the world economy, the French economy grew rapidly. Only the Japanese, of the major economies, has grown faster, and by 1975 the French standard of living matched that of West Germany. Restructuring the French Economy looks at the four decades of the structural changes that fostered growth and explores explanations of why such changes occurred. Drawing on many and diverse primary materials, including government statistics, judicial decisions, and professional memoirs, Adams examines three different explanations of France's postwar economic success. The first downplays the extent of structural change during the surge of growth. The second emphasizes the importance of government policies to compensate for inadequate private initiative. The third suggests that European economic integration and French decolonization created enough market competition to push the private sector into its own restructuring. Adams stresses that if government initiatives worked well, they did so in an environment of strong market competition; if competition seemed to work wonders, it occurred only as a result of government actions. He also devotes considerable attention to the implications of his findings for U.S. policy concerning European protectionism and the health and growth of American industries.

Whitney Walton approaches the nineteenth-century French industrial development from a new perspective—that of consumption. She analyzes the French performance at the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851 to illustrate how bourgeois consumers influenced France's distinctive pattern of industrial development. She also demonstrates the importance of consumption and gender in class formation and reveals how women influenced industry in their role as consumers. Walton examines important consumer goods industries that have been rarely studied by historians, such as the manufacture of wallpaper, furniture, and bronze statues. Using archival sources on household possessions of the Parisian bourgeoisie as well as published works, she shows how consumers' taste for fashionable, artistic, well-made furnishings and apparel promoted a specialization unique to nineteenth-century France.