ABSTRACT
“Capri, c’est fini!”: That was the headline in a Paris newspaper when the precarious state of the franc and of the country’s balance of payments in 1983 forced the government to impose severe restrictions on currency for foreign travel. In a way it is an epitaph for a whole period in which France was a paradise island of dynamic growth, modernisation, dramatic improvements in living standards and welfare, harmonious consensus over political institutions, and a marked absence of the social tensions reflected in terrorism, racism, and violence that characterised many European countries in the 1970s. Critics of the present French government have no difficulty in putting a date on the turning of the tide: 10th May 1981, when the socialist leader Francois Mitterrand won the presidency. While it is true that the early measures of his new government did have an adverse effect on the competitiveness of industry, in a deeper sense paradise had already been lost long before. The slowing of economic growth, the rise in unemployment, the growing strain on social security budgets, the realization that France was not going to achieve the breakthrough to a Japanese-type of leading high-technology economy these did not start on the 10th May 1981. The 1970s left some terrible problems for Western economies in particular the multiplication by fourteen of the price of oil and the shift in the manufacture of a wide range of quite sophisticated industrial products from advanced countries to less developed countries. How, then, economically, socially, politically, is France facing up to the difficulties of the 1980s?
