The ‘Golden Age’ of the Gaullist Era

Abstract

The ‘thirty glorious years’ of economic expansion following the Second World War, during which GDP per capita grew at an annual average rate in excess of 5 per cent, are closely identified in the public mind with the return of de Gaulle to power, the restoration of order, and the establishment in 1958 of the Fifth Republic. This golden age of economic growth witnessed the modernisation of the French economy, the transformation of living standards and the birth of consumer society. In the 1960s France emerged as one of the world’s leading industrial economies: ‘France has married her century’, as de Gaulle theatrically put it.