ABSTRACT
Protectionism is hardly a new phenomenon in French life. Over the course of the Third Republic protectionist forces routed free traders and established a regime of tariff protection that enjoyed considerable support across the political spectrum. In the post-war period, there was considerable support for protection. The business community in the fifties divided sharply over trade liberalization and the Common Market. Even after the Treaty of Rome, politicians occasionally found appeals to the protectionist reflex a reliable way of boosting popularity, particularly in response to US or Japanese goods. Free trade won a wide majority of support in all social classes and political electorates, except for the Communists. The immediate trigger for the new attraction of protectionism was a sharp rise in unemployment. The actual imports of the largest retailers are less than 3 percent of their volume of trade— so proclaiming their responsibility for the transfer of production abroad rests on no simple extrapolation of their practices.
