France's new deal Nord, Philip G
2010., 20120826, 2012, 2010, 2010-01-01
eBook
France's New Deal is an in-depth and important look at the remaking of the French state after World War II, a time when the nation was endowed with brand-new institutions for managing its economy and ...culture. Yet, as Philip Nord reveals, the significant process of state rebuilding did not begin at the Liberation. Rather, it got started earlier, in the waning years of the Third Republic and under the Vichy regime. Tracking the nation's evolution from the 1930s through the postwar years, Nord describes how a variety of political actors--socialists, Christian democrats, technocrats, and Gaullists--had a hand in the construction of modern France.
Loyalists of France’s Third Republic presented the regime as heir to France’s revolutionary tradition and as such the bearer of a set of undying principles: liberty, equality, and fraternity. This ...narrative came under crippling pressure in the 20th century, and in the aftermath of the Second World War, a new set of narratives began to crystallize that rethought the meaning of republican democracy. Under the Third Republic, it was the venerable Parti Radical, dating back to Dreyfusard days, that had been the mainstay of the democratic idea, but in the Liberation era, the party was sidelined, and successors emerged, Socialist and Christian-democratic, which tendered new visions of democracy’s future. The place of the State in French life was also reconsidered. It ceased to be an object of democratic suspicion but came to be seen rather as an indispensable vehicle for effecting the nation’s reconstruction. France’s place in the world came in for a major rethinking at the same time. The nation remained as ever the bearer of the democratic idea, but it now expressed that commitment as a European power and not an imperial one, as a founding member of a brotherhood of democracies and not as a unilateral actor propelled by a self-appointed civilizing mission. In today’s post-colonial, post-industrial, and globalizing world, however, these narratives no longer have the same purchase as in decades past.
Invocations of a second French Renaissance, of a reawakening of the
national spirit, punctuated the public discourse of pre-First World War
France. Such declarations described a movement of opinion, ...conservative
in hue, but not without appeal to maverick left-wingers. The chief
political repercussion of the new, nationalist mood was Raymond
Poincaré’s elevation to the presidency in 1913. But it may fairly be argued
that the phenomenon played itself out, not so much at the level of partisan
as of interest-group politics. Poincaré’s person provided a symbolic focus
to the new nationalism, but the movement’s principal base of operations
lay in a network of interlocking voluntary associations.
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