The governments of the Third Republic were representative of the small independents and responsive to their interests. Most of the bourgeoisie and the peasantry wanted a laissez-faire policy: low taxes, hands off the affairs of private citizens. There was little popular enthusiasm for costly ventures in foreign policy or expensive social reforms; the major exception—the conquest of colonial empire—had to be accomplished somewhat secretively and with limited resources. Only in tariff policy was laissez-faire flagrantly violated by the government, with the active consent of its bourgeois supporters. When the low-tariff treaties of Napoleon III expired in 1877, the government promptly returned to protectionism. Much of French agriculture and industry was thereby protected against more efficient foreign producers and insulated against the need for modernization. The short-range interests of the small independent producer were thus guaranteed; the prospect of harm to his longer-range interests—as well as to those of the nation as a whole—was not yet clear.
From 1873 to the mid-1890s the French economy experienced a period of slackness. This trend reflected a condition affecting most of Europe, although France suffered a special blow when an epidemic of phylloxera in 1875–87 destroyed one-third of the nation’s vineyards. From 1896 to 1914 industrial output rose impressively, exports increased by 75 percent, and prices returned to the pre-slump level. This upturn was also generally Europe-wide rather than peculiar to France; but some special factors, such as the opening of a vast new iron-ore field in French Lorraine, did increase the French rate of industrial expansion. By 1914 French Lorraine had become the major centre of French iron and steel production, and France had become the world’s largest exporter of raw iron ore (primarily to Germany). Yet the French were being outpaced by rivals. In 1870 France had still ranked as the world’s second industrial and trading nation; by 1914 it had fallen to a poor fourth. Much of the liquid capital that might have been used for business expansion at home was being siphoned off into foreign investment; by 1914 almost one-third of such available French capital had been placed abroad—one-fourth of that sum in Russia and only one-tenth in the French colonies. Yet few Frenchmen had serious doubts about the course of economic policy under the Third Republic.
Only after World War I, and particularly after 1930, were such doubts widely shared. The disruptive impact of the war exceeded the understanding not only of most citizens but also of most political leaders. Efforts to return to normality were futile because the postwar world and France had changed vastly. The enormous cost of a four-year mobilization, of reconstruction, and of war debts had to be borne. By the time of the Great Depression, the government had been forced to write off a large share of war costs by devaluing the franc (1928) to one-fifth of its old value, costing many Frenchmen on fixed incomes much of their savings and shaking their confidence in the future. Still, no large group of embittered déclassés was created, ripe for the appeals of a demagogue. And after 1926 there was a brief resurgence of prosperity, so that by the end of the decade the indexes of industrial production, foreign trade, and living standards had risen well above the 1914 peak. Some illusions about the future and hopes of a happy return to prewar stability could therefore be retained.
But by 1935 industrial production had fallen to 79 percent of the 1928 level and exports to 55 percent. Registered unemployment hovered at less than 500,000, but this figure concealed the fact that many urban workers were subsisting on family farms owned by relatives. Besides, the French exported much of their unemployment; thousands of immigrant workers lost their work permits and had to return home. Not until 1938–39 did a measure of recovery set in, thanks to Reynaud’s business-oriented policies plus the stimulus of rearmament. By the time war broke out again, France had barely returned to the pre-Depression level.
The workers, always outside the bourgeois consensus, were by now largely hostile to the system; most of the gains they had finally achieved in 1936 had quickly been snatched away again. But in addition many bourgeois Frenchmen now questioned the virtues of the traditional system. The 1930s therefore brought an intense fermentation of political and social thought; dozens of study groups and movements sprang up in Paris, seeking or preaching doctrines of drastic renovation and structures of government that might carry them out. Cultural and scientific attainments
The cultural climate of the later 19th century in France, as in the Atlantic world generally, was strongly marked by the current called positivism. The post-1848 generation looked with contempt on what it considered the excesses and the bad taste of the preceding Romantic era. A new interest in science and a new vogue of realism in literature and the arts prevailed during the Second Empire; it was best embodied in the novels of Gustave Flaubert and the paintings of Gustave Courbet. By the 1870s this mood had formed into what its advocates regarded as a coherent philosophical system, the content and label of which they borrowed from the French thinker Auguste Comte. These self-styled positivists placed their faith in science and reason as the path to inevitable progress, with only the remnants of superstition (surviving mainly in the church) still blocking the hopeful future. The positivist temper is manifest in the novels of Émile Zola and the paintings of Impressionists such as Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir.
The French also showed great creativity in pure science and made major discoveries in a wide variety of fields. Among the most notable figures were Louis Pasteur in medicine, Pierre and Marie Curie in physics, Marcelin Berthelot in chemistry, Henri Poincaré in mathematics, and Jean-Martin Charcot in psychopathology. In the social sciences the work of Gustave Le Bon and Émile Durkheim had a broad and enduring impact.
Although the positivist mood prevailed at least until World War I, it was contested by a rival current of thought that from the 1890s onward began to assert itself. To some sensitive people of artistic temperament, the positivist outlook seemed arid and narrow, neglecting the emotional side of man. This was the view of the school of poets, including Paul Verlaine and Stéphane Mallarmé, who called themselves Symbolists. A remarkable group of composers carried the upstart Neoromantic mood into music: mainstream works by composers such as Jules Massenet, Georges Bizet, and Camille Saint-Saëns were followed by the more experimental compositions of Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel.
Of equal significance was the growing influence after 1890 of such writers and thinkers as Paul Bourget, Maurice Barrès, and Henri Bergson. Bourget’s novels challenged what he called “brutal positivism” and asserted such traditional values as authority, the family, and the established order. Barrès preached what Charles Maurras had defined as “integral nationalism”; Barrès called for a return to “the sources of national energy,” which he found in historic institutions, the soil of the fatherland, and the solidarity between the living and the dead. The philosopher Bergson attacked scientific dogmatism and exalted humankind’s nonrational drives—notably a creative force that he called élan vital, which he held distinguishes heroic individuals and nations from the plodding herd.
This new spirit had its parallel in political thought and action as welclass="underline" in the syndicalist doctrines of Georges Sorel, in the activism of a minority in the labour movement, and in the resurgent nationalism that strongly affected many French young people in the years just before 1914. It also brought a return to the church and to an emotional patriotism. In the fine arts a new generation of painters abandoned both realism and Impressionism. These so-called Post-Impressionists were moved by an intense subjectivism, an urge to express in various ways the artist’s inner vision and deeper emotions. The changed mood was best-embodied in the work of Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, and the Dutch immigrant Vincent van Gogh.