ABSTRACT
The crisis of interwar France was a crisis of the universal nation. World War I revealed and underscored the stability of French national identity, definitively resolving the conflict between Church and state that had absorbed so much of the Third Republic's energy. The prosperity of the 1920s brought few benefits to French workers. The large number of immigrants tended to reinforce workers' isolation from the mainstream of French life during the interwar years. The Third Republic's triumph in World War I had driven antirepublicanism to the fringes of French politics. The interwar avant-garde continued and amplified the prewar attack on traditional rationalism. The collapse of New York's Wall Street stock market in 1929 triggered the worldwide crisis, but the fundamental causes of the Depression lay in the contraction of world trade and increased national debts after World War I. The Depression came late to France, in large part due to the country's relative insulation from global markets.
