Diana Pinto
IS THERE HOPE IN ECONOMIC
STAGNATION? FRANCE REASSESSED
Three major French essays appeared during 1982, assess–
ing France's social and economic prospects in a new climate of
anxiety . When Mitterrand carne to power, Left and Right alike
stressed the fact that a new era of French political life had begun.
Today one is struck, in reading
Fran~ois
de Closets's
Toujours Plus!,
Michel Albert's
Le Pari Franfais,
and Alain Minc's,
L'apres-crise est
commence,
by their total indifference to the political "watershed" of
May 1981. Their principal reference is the international historical
caesura of the early 1970s: the end of the economically dynamic
postwar period with the collapse of the Breton Woods accords and
the Kippur War. The heated debates between Left and Right over
such controversial campaign issues as nationalizations, Communist
participation in power, and universal lay education, have given way
to one gloomy consensus : France is in a period of economic stagna–
tion which can no longer be called a "crisis" because the tunnel, at
whose end the proverbial light awaits, promises to be a long one.
Current evaluations of France center around three major prob–
lems: the rising number of unemployed (over two million), France's
catastrophic foreign balance of trade, and the crisis of the French
welfare state, in a no-growth economy. These familiar problems are
further compounded by what is considered to be a uniquely French
peste:
the existence of a vast, nationally accepted network of middle
level privileges which make France one of the more falsely egalitar–
ian countries of Western industrialized democracies, not
despite
but
precisely
because
of its revolutionary tradition of
Liberte, Egalite et
Fraternite.
France's economic and social problems would normally remain
within the purview of specialists alone were it not for the fact that
they have become the central topic for essays directed at a far wider
public . Closets's, Albert's, and Minc's essays reveal a new
etat d'ame
which has developed in the context of economic crisis and which
seeks to fuse economic realism and even pessimism with social in–
novation and optimism. This
etat d'ame
is based on three separate
reflections: a thoroughly negative assessment of France's economic
realities, constraints, and potential in an era of fierce international
