Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Preface
- List of acronyms
- 1 The end of French exceptionalism?
- 2 French economic performance in international perspective
- 3 France and the wider world
- 4 The changing face of Colbertism
- 5 The institutions of French capitalism
- 6 Labour: the French at work
- 7 Plough and pasture: lifeblood or drain?
- 8 Industrialisation, de-industrialisation, postindustrialisation
- Conclusion
- Glossary
- A national portrait gallery of twentieth-century France
- Bibliography
- Index
- Titles in the series
8 - Industrialisation, de-industrialisation, postindustrialisation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Preface
- List of acronyms
- 1 The end of French exceptionalism?
- 2 French economic performance in international perspective
- 3 France and the wider world
- 4 The changing face of Colbertism
- 5 The institutions of French capitalism
- 6 Labour: the French at work
- 7 Plough and pasture: lifeblood or drain?
- 8 Industrialisation, de-industrialisation, postindustrialisation
- Conclusion
- Glossary
- A national portrait gallery of twentieth-century France
- Bibliography
- Index
- Titles in the series
Summary
By general European and world standards, French industrialisation started relatively early, France alongside Belgium and Switzerland being Britain's closest rival in the first half of the nineteenth century. However, as this survey has shown, the spread of industrial processes and the development of the secondary sector only really took hold after the First World War, and even more so after the Second. In 1970, France had become an industrial power, with 45 per cent of its GNP originating in the secondary sector. Within a decade, however, de-industrialisation had ushered in the virtual decimation of entire industries while service industries were, albeit imperfectly, taking their place.
Most French historians tend to treat the French ‘path of development’ as absolutely unique and are keen to vindicate the extensive government intervention which was supposedly deployed – in contrast to the British ‘laissez-faire’ model – to promote the country's industrial modernisation. On even a cursory inspection, however, the two paths appear remarkably similar if not parallel. Like Britain's (and those of most other developed countries), only with a varying time lag, France's economy went successively through the transformation of its agriculture and intensive industrialisation before shifting to sophisticated industrial operations and services. In the French case, the state is supposed to have played the decisive role in mobilising energies and encouraging technological innovation aimed at improving the wellbeing of the nation at large; but government intervention in industry for most of the twentieth century proved to be no less extensive in Britain than in France.
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- Information
- The French Economy in the Twentieth Century , pp. 112 - 127Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004