LETTER FROM HOME
279
means it is worth recalling that the American gross national product was
tripling or quadrupling during the same period.) But then something
surprising began to happen. The post-war baby boom did not level off,
as the demographers had expected, but continued to add several hundred
thousand people to the population every year. The economy went into
a phase of positively dizzy, if financially imprudent, expansion.
In
fact
the French economy has been growing faster than any in Europe, even
faster (in percentage terms) than ours. Here is how the London
Econo–
mist
summed up the situation on January 4:
In 1956, for the first time in years, the best French manufactures
reached the top international class. French methods of electrification of
railways have been adopted
in
Britain and India. French mining engi–
neers are modernising the Japanese mines. The Renault Dauphine
In
a
single year has become the nearest rival to the Volkswagen in America.
French aircraft, dams, and electronic telecommunications have become
respected on the world markets. French industry still has innumerable
dark recesses of defeatist traditionalism, but the climate has changed....
Expansion has now become a fetish-to the exclusion, even, of common
sense-in dealing with the trade crisis. As for the wage-earner, his posi–
tion advanced more in France between 1953 and 1956 than in almost
any country. Recent inflation has probably cut two years out of this
progress, but meanwhile the attitude of the trade unions has changed.
Their vitality ... has been revived.... Rising population, a bountiful
agriculture easily improved, and the new sources of energy . . . give
France every prospect of acquiring a fertile modern economy.
So the typical French experience of stability at a low level
is
giving
way to an upward movement, despite the political anachronisms and the
Algerian nightmare. But all this is easier to grasp and to measure than
other Big Change, the moral and intellectual consequences of which
e pervasive. Every Frenchman who had reached adolescence at the
utbreak of the last war can recall a
time
when he stood, as it were,
d for all he knew eternally and by divine right, in the center of the
orId. The Empire was intact and seemed untouchable. Europe ruled
e world as it had for centuries, and France, the image and perfection
( European civilization, was predominant in Europe. Is it any wonder
t the immense
degringolade
that has occurred in less than two decades
not been and probably will never be fully assimilated into the re-
exes and world-view of those who lived through it .as adults?
The economic revolution might be expected to engender a new
timism; and it does. On the other hand, the shift in the power rela–
nships, which certain politicians seem to remember only in fits and
s, like old men nodding by the fire, reinforces the deep discourage-
