ABSTRACT
Rereading In Search of France 1 after more than two decades helps one to understand the magnitude of the changes that have occurred since the end of the Algerian War. As of 1963, France's economic and social future seemed to promise continuous expansion. One index of this is that the word unemployment appears nowhere in the book. Yet unemployment and the precarious economic nature of life, at least for an important minority of the French, returned to become an ominous reality in the 1980s. In 1963, state intervention was accepted as necessary and beneficial, as In Search of France confirms from beginning to end. Today, the French Right is united in its commitment to create a more modest state, following the first socialist experiment of 1981-86. 2 And even the Socialist Rocard government today champions civil society against the state.
