Abstract
Philip Nord's France's New Deal is an impressive achievement. Focusing on the period from the mid to late 1930s to the mid to late 1940s, the book charts the lasting influence of the ideas of right-leaning technocratic elites on France's postwar state and its New Deal consensus. This essay reviews Nord's intellectual history of these remarkable individuals – many with origins in the far right – on economic, administrative and cultural policy, then reflects on France's subsequent trajectory, raising two lingering questions. First, although the postwar consensus was clearly good for France's economy, how healthy was it for French democracy, given the consecration of elite-dominated, hierarchical patterns of leadership? And second, how durable has France's New Deal consensus really been? Might it not remain more as a (public) state of mind – generating discontent – than as the State in action, given policies since the 1980s that transformed the State (but not its enduring technocracy), while so undermining the postwar New Deal as to leave no deal at all?
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