France 1920-1970 [antikvár]

France 1920—1970 In 1914, France undeniably occupied a position among the leading nations in the West; nevertheless, she was not one of the world's great economic powers. Formerly she had run second only to Britain; but in the closing years of the nineteenth century she had been overtaken by Germany and the United States. In comparison with these industrial countries, France appeared to have performed the relatively rare feat of maintaining an equal balance between industrial activity and agricultural output - and to have done so while keeping her currency as stable as that of her neighbours, for throughout the nineteenth century, despite wars and crises, the so-called franc de Germinal (introduced in 1805) had been maintained at its defined weight of 0-2903 grammes of pure gold. Yet the picture was clouded by the stagnation of the population, which stood at barely 40 million in 1914. At the end of the eighteenth century France had had the highest population in Europe; on the eve of World War I she had been left far behind by Germany, Britain and Russia (not to mention the United States, whose population had grown spectacularly since the Civil War), and would soon be overtaken by Italy. In the present century, the balance of the French economy has been affected by two groups of factors: on the one hand, the rise of young economies not formerly active in international competition - the United States, followedby Japan, Soviet Russia and the countries of the Third World (whose labour costs are lower than those of countries that subscribe to the dogma of the Welfare State); on the other hand, a succession of political and economic crises. The first of these crises was World War I, which was fought on the soil of the most vigorous and most highly industrialised part of France: the coal and steel regions in the North and East. What is more, the war inflicted unprecedented losses of human lives on a population whose rate of growth was very low to begin [5]