Forty years ago, the French economy was hit by its first recession since the end of World War 2, when France’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) fell by 1% on the previous year. A similar loss of growth has occurred on two occasions since (a fall of -0.6% in 1993 and notably a tumble of -2.9% in 2009), which has tended to minimize the importance of what happened in 1975. But at the time it was regarded as a major event. The crisis, this interminable economic crisis that those under the age of 40 in France have the impression of having always lived through, had begun.
In 1979, French economist Jean Fourastié, who was then well-known for his regular commentating on television, came up with a phrase for the title of a book and which would become widely popular to describe the 30-year period of economic growth in France which lasted from 1945 until 1975: “Les Trente Glorieuses” (“The Glorious Thirty”).
It was a clever literary play on the name given to the July Revolution of 1830,“les Trois Glorieuses”, the “Glorious Three” days during which the population of Paris rose up and overthrew King Charles X, symbol of the return of the French monarchy who was forced to abdicate. But what was glorious about seeing GDP progress by an average 5% per year? While the glory of battle was a well-established notion, Fourastié invented the glory of the economy.
His catchphrase was soon adopted in school books. It first appeared with the introduction of a reform of the teaching of history in 1983, which carried it through to contemporary times, and it was finally given capital letters at the beginning of the last decade. If one was to ask a pupil in secondary school what the period of the Trente Glorieuses represents, they would reply that it “marked the peak of industrial societies”, in a recitation of the official exam preparatory papers. In other words, it was a golden age.
Emmanuelle Fantin, doctoral student in information and communication sciences, wrote in an article published in the review Modern and Contemporary France in February this year that the spectacular success of the catchphrase is in part explained by its “advertising slogan” character, “short and impacting”, and which was easy to remember. She argued that this explained its appeal for advertisers who like to use, with references to the past, a “univocal vision of three decades of history, as if blocked in a sign of hyperbolic and welcoming happiness”.
The world of higher education in France is also keen on the term, cited in the titles of no less than 23 doctoral theses, either defended or in preparation. Politicians recurrently refer to it, whether this be “to remember the Trente Glorieuses [as] this miracle of a Republican ideal in line with the realities of its time”, as former conservative president Nicolas Sarkozy put it in a speech before parliament on June 22nd 2009, or to finish with “a Left stuck in the past […] haunted by the memory of the Trente Glorieuses”, as current socialist Prime Minister Manuel Valls said in an interview published weekly magazine L’Obs on October 23rd 2014.
But just what was glorious about those 30 years of economic growth that saw, especially as of the 1960s, households acquiring refrigerators, washing machines and cars?
After all, the distribution of the products of the consumer society (that phrase first appeared in France in 1954 in the articles of left-wing writer and thinker Jean-Marie Domenach in the review Esprit) did not only concern France. After World War 2, Germany had its Wirtschaftswunder, while Italy its own miracolo economico, which were both waves of economic expansion with a growth rate just slightly lower than that in France – which was only surpassed by that of Japan. But while they were nevertheless significant in Germany and Italy, neither boom gave rise to a similar national legend.
If one goes by the definition of the French dictionary Le Littré, something is glorieuse (which translates directly into English as “glorious”), when it “presents a dazzle worthy of praise”. But who sees the dazzling nature of those three decades, and who sings praise? Those nostalgic of the period are undoubtedly the first to do so. But more revealing is what was said at the time. Was that period really lived out as a golden age by those who look back on it as such today?
Housing had become 'a question of life or death'
The question was the subject of a remarkable doctoral thesis by Rémy Pawin in 2010, when he was a student with Paris university 1, and which was in 2013 published in France as a book, Histoire du bonheur en France depuis 1945 (‘A history of happiness in France since 1945’). Pawin examined a vast array of private diaries, films, novels and opinion polls which allowed him to reconstruct the perception of the Trente Glorieuses by the population at the time.
In his milestone book Les Trente Glorieuses, economist Jean Fourastié wrote that “historians who will, sooner or later, sift through the newspapers of the period [19] 44-75 will find little evidence of the passion and joy of the French people”, and his intuition has since been well demonstrated to be true. After reading Rémy Pawin’s book, one emerges convinced that the “glory” of those decades existed only in the imagination of a few specialists of economic history and in the title of Fourastié’s work.
Pawin’s research demonstrates that, over the period he focused upon, from 1945 to 1981, the term “glorious” soon proves anachronistic. “The activity of men is less and less influenced by the quest for glory […] It is more and more influenced by that of a happy life, the upheavals of practices and ethics occur in the name of happiness […] The ideal presents an invitation to be happy more than to be glorious”. However, the conversion from the ideal of glory to that of happiness is a long one. A third of those asked in an opinion poll in 1947 to say what would for them be “the elements of happiness” had nothing to offer in reply. The question even appears ludicrous given this was a time when life was difficult for everyone except the very rich. Indeed, in another poll that same year, 78% of those questioned believed that “the economic situation in France is less good than it was one year ago”.
Housing and food supplies were the main preoccupations. During the war, 11% of buildings in France were damaged to a greater or lesser degree, and a third of those were completely destroyed. But the priority of the state in the post-war reconstruction process was to re-build industrial plants rather than habitations. Even after the ending of the system of ration vouchers, in 1949, an opinion poll found 55% of those questioned reckoned that their quality of life had become worse than before the war – and just 15% believed it had improved. The housing problem prevailed, and was made a public cause as of 1954 by the campaigner for the homeless, Abbé Pierre (the late Catholic priest who founded the Emmaus movement). In 1953, only 300,000 new homes had been built, even though the reconstruction minister had warned before parliament in 1949 that to build 240,000 each year was for France “a question of life or death”. Shantytowns developed along with overcrowded slums.
“If one retains only the criteria of the perception of those at the time, the 1950s were not part of ‘the Trente Glorieuses’”, writes Rémy Pawin. “It is only around 1962 that a majority become optimistic.”
Pawin found 27 opinion polls, carried out between 1944 and 1981, in which members of the French population were asked to describe their “subjective wellbeing” (the American system and methods of opinion surveys arrived en masse in France just after the war). Of these 27 polls, it emerges that the French overwhelmingly declared themselves unhappy in the immediate post-war years, but that their subjective wellbeing then continues to steadily grow. “The level of declared satisfaction is high in France once the traumatisms of World War 2 are overcome, grows through the 1950s and 1960s, sees a peak around 1970-172, then declines as of 1973,” observes Pawin.
No Trente Glorieuses, rather Treize Heureuses
That might appear to confirm the idea that the Trente Glorieuses was largely a golden age during which the French were happy. But the sentiment of subjective wellbeing that the opinion surveys measured involves a large number of factors, beginning with those in a person’s private life. At a time of the baby boom, it is hardly surprising that many French feel the confidence and enthusiasm for the future that parenthood can bestow, especially at a period of full employment.
After reading through archives of private documents, Pawin concludes: “The French consider that a happy life is firstly [about] family, and afterwards about work.”
The most unhappy are the older members of the population, those who had lived through two world wars and who received miserable pension payments. When the minimum pension rate was established in France in 1959, it was set at one third of the legal minimum wage and applied to 50% of the over-65s (as opposed to 8% today, while it now represents two-thirds of the legal minimum wage).
Happiness in private life, for the active population at least, is not synonymous with confidence in the future. The 15 years that followed the liberation of France from German occupation were filled with conflict: there was the constant threat of nuclear war, while the French military campaign in Indochina saw some 40,000 French fatalities. That was followed by the Algerian war of independence when, between 1954 and 1961, 80% of French men aged 20 were sent to fight in North Africa. In an opinion poll carried out in 1957, half of young adults questioned said they believed a new world war would break out during their lifetimes.
In her 2007 book which studies the situation of young adults in France between the end of the war and the beginning of the Algerian war of independence - Le Plus Bel Âge? Jeunes et jeunesse en France de l'aube des Trente Glorieuses à la guerre d'Algérie (published by Fayard) - French historian Ludivine Bantigny writes that in the 1950s and early 1960s “the young became, during this period, a major theme of media reporting, a centre of political investment, the object of scientific investigation”. The press was filled with articles alarmed at the rise in violence and delinquency among those nicknamed the “J3”, after the name of ration cards issued to adolescents (and which were ended in 1949). The same was true of the end of the 1950s, with the emergence of the blousons noirs, the same youth subculture whose adepts were known in the Anglophone world as ‘Greasers’. Not unlike today, it was perceived that juvenile delinquents were getting younger and practiced ever-more gratuitous violence.
When it was not delinquency they were accused of, the young were lambasted for being amoral, sadly seeking out pleasure-making, with no ideals, and symbolized by the late French writer Françoise Sagan in her novel Bonjour tristesse, published in 1954 when she was just 18-years-old. The generation conflict was crystallized around director Marcel Carné’s 1958 film Les Tricheurs (whose English-language title was Young Sinners), which was immediately a massive box office success in France, about a group of well-off, frivolous and disillusioned young adults who hung out around the fashionable Saint-Germain-des Prés quarter in Paris, one of whom commits suicide. While the film was a runaway success among young cinema goers (a 1960 poll found it the most preferred film among boys aged 16-18 years), it caused indignation among Catholics, communists (who dismissed its portrayal of a decadent bourgeoisie), and Gaullists. The right-wing mayor of Nice at the time, Jean Médecin, banned the film from cinemas in the Rivera city, apparently persuaded of then-minster for youth and sport Maurice Herzog’s belief that “cinema is responsible for 80% of the ills of the young”.
The results of the series of opinion surveys studied by Rémy Pawin clearly show that this atmosphere of a brewing moral crisis, and notably the seemingly interminable Algerian war, affected the morale of the French population. It is not until 1963 that a majority of those questioned in the polls declared that the past year had been a good one. Importantly, 1962 saw the end of the Algerian war of independence and the passing of the Cuban missile crisis, when an agreement between the US and the USSR distanced the threat of a nuclear war.
Pawin’s diverse research suggests that it is as of 1962 that the French had finally found a confidence and belief in the future. But one issue continued to cloud the skies. This was a fear of being made jobless, a situation that might appear paradoxical today given then was a time of full employment. Opinion surveys throughout the 1960s regularly found almost two-thirds of those questioned were fearful of becoming unemployed.
All of which prompted Pawin to conclude that instead of the recall through rose-tinted glasses of a supposedly golden Trente Glorieuses, perhaps the closest to this in reality was a period that should now be known as the “Treize Heureuses” – the “Happy Thirteen” years between 1962 and 1975.
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse