The aim of this book is to present a comprehensive and synthetic view of the French economy in the twentieth century. It was intended as a sequel to Colin Heywood's volume on the nineteenth. Writing it at the beginning of the new millennium has entailed both advantages and drawbacks. Most historical accounts currently available stop short of the developments of the last twenty years (or alternatively treat them piecemeal), which means that they have yet to receive the full scrutiny they deserve. By contrast, this study attempts to provide an examination and interpretation of trends and features of the most recent period and integrate them in the longer term as well as set them in a wider European framework. Most historical surveys break down the twentieth century into several sequences or episodes (prewar, wartime, interwar, postwar), or they treat economic trends of the Third Republic (1870–1940), the Vichy regime (1940–44), the Fourth Republic (1944–58) and the Fifth Republic (since 1958) separately. This segmentation has been reinforced by the unrelenting specialisation of historical scholarship.

Rather than resorting to the chronological subdivisions imposed by political developments, the option adopted here has been to tackle broad (and popular) themes recurrent in the literature on French modern economic development. I begin with the classic claim, endemic among native (and sometimes foreign) authors, of a French Sonderweg or exceptionalism.