France's Economy, Year by Year: 1946–2026

Statsgrowth ~+28% (rebound from the 1945 trough) · GDP ~$293bn · per capita ~$7,260 = 36% of US · inflation ~52% (official; black market higher)

Events(1) The Monnet Plan launched (January): six priority sectors — coal, steel, electricity, cement, rail, farm machinery — modernization by indicative targets and cheap credit, the founding act of French postwar economics. INSEE itself was created in April: the state built its measuring instrument and its steering wheel the same spring. (2) The nationalization wave completed: electricity and gas (EDF-GDF, April), coal, the big banks, Renault — roughly a fifth of the economy moved to public ownership with broad consent. (3) De Gaulle resigned in January over the constitution; bread stayed rationed at 300 grams; the baby boom began — 846,000 births, the demographic engine of everything to come.

MoodCold, rationed, inflationary — and pointed: a country that had chosen reconstruction over recrimination, planning over drift, and cradles over despair.

Statsgrowth ~+8.5% · GDP ~$317bn · per capita ~$7,800 · inflation ~49%

Events(1) The hardest year as lived: the bread ration was cut to 200 grams in August — below the worst of the Occupation — after a catastrophic harvest; queues, gray bread, and fury. (2) May: the Communist ministers were expelled from government; by November–December, insurrectionary strikes — three million out, pitched battles, a sabotaged train derailment killing sixteen — brought the Republic nearer to breakdown than at any postwar moment. (3) June: the Marshall Plan was announced — and France, unlike Poland across the new curtain, was permitted to say yes: the fork in Europe's road, taken.

MoodThe volume's only 2: hunger-adjacent rationing inside a quasi-insurrection — the postwar low point, with the lifeline announced but not yet arrived.

Statsgrowth ~+7.5% · GDP ~$341bn · per capita ~$8,300 · inflation ~58% — the peak

Events(1) Marshall aid began flowing — France would draw some $2.7 billion, the Plan's financing secured. (2) The Mayer stabilization (see Money) attacked the inflation at its source. (3) October–November: the miners' strike turned violent — troops in the pits, deaths on the picket lines — the Cold War fought inside the French coal basin.

MoneyThe 5,000-franc recall (January 29): overnight, the largest banknote ceased to be legal tender — holders had to deposit and declare. A partial freeze aimed at black-market hoards and untaxed cash: France's one true confiscation-flavored monetary act of the era, mild by this scale's standards (Poland 1950 took two-thirds; France took names).

MoodInflation's crest and the counterattack: dollars arriving, banknotes recalled, coal fields under occupation — stabilization as a form of combat.

Statsgrowth ~+8.5% · GDP ~$370bn · per capita ~$8,920 · inflation ~13% — collapsing

Events(1) Rationing ended — bread in February, most of the rest by year's end: the queue economy dissolved four years after liberation. (2) Inflation broke — from 58% to 13% toward roughly zero the next year: the Mayer-era squeeze plus supply finally meeting demand. (3) September: the franc devalued alongside sterling; output regained prewar levels.

MoodThe corner, turned: white bread, stable-ish prices, and the Plan's furnaces lighting — the reconstruction's grim phase ending on schedule.

Statsgrowth ~+7.9% · GDP ~$400bn · per capita ~$9,560 · inflation ~10%

Events(1) May 9: the Schuman Declaration — coal and steel pooled with Germany: the single most consequential economic-strategic act in this volume, war made "materially impossible" by merging its industries. (2) The SMIG created (February): a national minimum wage, indexed to prices — the floor under the boom laid before the boom. (3) Korea's outbreak re-ignited world commodity prices; Indochina's war began devouring the budget in earnest.

MoodA middling year that founded two permanent structures — Europe and the minimum wage — while renting out its army to two wars.

Statsgrowth ~+6.2% · GDP ~$424bn · per capita ~$10,050 · inflation ~16%

Events(1) Korea-boom inflation ran through everything; rearmament strained the budget. (2) Indochina consumed roughly a tenth of state spending — the empire as fiscal hemorrhage, increasingly noticed. (3) The election survived on electoral engineering; governments rotated like shifts.

MoodGrowth with a fever: prosperity accumulating under a state too unstable to steer it and too committed to wars it could not win.

Statsgrowth ~+2.8% · GDP ~$436bn · per capita ~$10,260 · inflation ~12% → falling hard

Events(1) The Pinay experiment: an old-school liberal premier killed inflation by confidence, amnestied gold, and a famous indexed loan — prices went from +12% to negative within a year. (2) The price: growth throttled to under 3% — stabilization bought with slack. (3) The European Defense Community fight began poisoning the Republic's politics.

MoodThe rentier's favorite year: money hard, growth soft, the small saver avenged on a decade of inflation.

Statsgrowth ~+3.1% · GDP ~$450bn · per capita ~$10,510 · inflation −1.8%

Events(1) August: the great public-sector general strike — four million against decree-law austerity, the postal service and railways dead for weeks: the Fourth Republic's biggest labor event. (2) Deflation, literally: prices fell — the Pinay stabilization's afterglow. (3) In Saint-Céré, a stationer named Poujade launched a shopkeepers' tax revolt — the periphery's politics of grievance, founded.

MoodStable prices, striking posts, and a new voice from the market square: the modernization's future opponents introducing themselves.

Statsgrowth ~+4.8% · GDP ~$471bn · per capita ~$10,940 · inflation ~0.4%

Events(1) Dien Bien Phu fell (May 7); Mendès France ended the Indochina war within weeks (Geneva, July) — eight years and a treasury of blood and francs, closed by a premier in a hurry. (2) His seven-month whirlwind touched everything — housing, milk-over-alcohol campaigns, Tunisian autonomy — modernization as personal style. (3) February 1: Abbé Pierre's radio appeal for the homeless froze the country's conscience — the housing famine named; the HLM public-housing machine began spinning up. November 1: the Algerian war began.

MoodOne war closed, one opened, and expansion relaunched between them: the year France chose growth and, without admitting it, its next tragedy.

Statsgrowth ~+5.6% · GDP ~$498bn · per capita ~$11,470 · inflation ~1%

Events(1) Full boom: cars, appliances, and the Citroën DS unveiled — twelve thousand orders on day one: French modernity as sculpture. (2) Renault signed the third week of paid vacation — the social conquest that would generalize within a year: the boom starting to pay its workers in time. (3) Poujadism surged toward its electoral peak; a state of emergency was declared in Algeria.

MoodProsperity finding its objects — a goddess-shaped car, a third week at the beach — while two rebellions, shopkeeper and colonial, gathered at the edges.

Statsgrowth ~+5.0% · GDP ~$523bn · per capita ~$11,930 · inflation ~2%

Events(1) Mollet's government legislated the third week of vacation for all and a minimum old-age fund — and simultaneously poured 400,000 conscripts into Algeria: the welfare state and the colonial war expanding on the same budget line. (2) Suez (October–November): the Franco-British expedition collapsed under American pressure — petrol rationing returned briefly, and the lesson of 1956 was filed: Europe, not empire, would be the lever. (3) Growth held at 5%.

MoodSocial conquest, imperial humiliation, gasoline coupons: the Fourth Republic's contradictions, all invoiced in one year.

Statsgrowth ~+5.8% · GDP ~$553bn · per capita ~$12,480 · inflation ~3.5%

Events(1) March 25: the Treaty of Rome — the Common Market signed: France's biggest economic bet of the century, placed by its least stable regime. (2) The boom overheated into a balance-of-payments crisis: reserves gone by autumn, a disguised 20% devaluation in August, IMF and European credits negotiated — France as crisis borrower, two years before its miracle. (3) The Battle of Algiers ran all year; the war's costs compounded.

MoodSigning the future while pawning the present: the Republic booked Europe's founding and an IMF-adjacent rescue in the same twelve months.

Statsgrowth ~+2.6% · GDP ~$567bn · per capita ~$12,660 · inflation ~15% (devaluation pass-through)

Events(1) May 13: Algiers rose; June 1: de Gaulle returned; September 28: the Fifth Republic approved — regime change executed against the backdrop of near-civil-war. (2) December 27: the Pinay-economist Rueff plan — devaluation of 17.5%, budget truth, external convertibility restored, and the EEC's first tariff cuts honored on schedule days later: rigor plus opening, the refounding of French economic policy in one ordinance package. (3) The new franc was announced (see 1960); inflation spiked with the devaluation, by design.

MoodThe hinge: a political revolution that immediately spent its authority on the least popular thing in economics — telling the truth about prices — and got away with it.

Statsgrowth ~+2.9% · GDP ~$584bn · per capita ~$12,910 · inflation ~6.2%

Events(1) The rigor bit: real wages squeezed, spending held — the one austerity year the Fifth Republic ever fully executed, paid for with de Gaulle's personal credit. (2) January 1: the EEC's internal tariff cuts began — French industry, protected for a century, entered the German pool and, to its own surprise, swam. (3) Convertibility held; reserves rebuilt.

MoodThe medicine year: unpleasant, brief, and — uniquely in this volume — completed.

Statsgrowth ~+7.5% · GDP ~$627bn · per capita ~$13,230 · inflation ~4%

Events(1) The new franc (see Money). (2) Growth leapt back near 8% — the stabilization's dividend arriving on schedule. (3) The agricultural orientation law began the silent revolution: tractors for horses, consolidation for strips — the rural exodus that would staff the factories was organized, not merely suffered. In Algeria, Barricades Week showed the war entering its endgame — and on February 13, at Reggane deep in the Sahara, Gerboise Bleue, France's first atomic bomb, fired: the force de frappe born, and with it the state nuclear complex Messmer's reactors would one day civilianize.

MoneyThe nouveau franc (January 1): 100 old = 1 new. Two zeros — the Fourth Republic's accumulated inflation — cut cleanly, no freeze, no seizure: a Gaullist statement that the currency, like the state, had been refounded. France's money ledger now read: one recall (1948), one redenomination (1960) — and, forty-two years ahead, one abolition.

MoodA heavier coin and a lighter step: the takeoff resumed with a currency designed to be respected.

Statsgrowth +4.9% · GDP ~$658bn · per capita ~$13,750 = 55% of US · inflation 2.4% | world +3.9%

Events(1) April: four generals attempted a putsch — beaten by conscripts with transistor radios; the OAS turned to terror. (2) The economy ignored all of it: investment boomed, unemployment sat near 1%. (3) October 17: Algerian demonstrators were killed by Paris police in an atrocity the Republic would take decades to name.

MoodGrowth on one track, the war's endgame on another — the strange split-screen normality of the early sixties.

Statsgrowth +6.9% · GDP ~$704bn · per capita ~$14,540 · inflation 5.3% | world +5.3%

Events(1) Évian (March); independence (July): the Algerian war ended — the fiscal and demographic drain closed. (2) The great absorption: some 700,000–900,000 pieds-noirs crossed the Mediterranean in months — "the suitcase or the coffin" — and were swallowed by the boom within two years: the labor-hungry machine turning a feared catastrophe into fuel. (3) Growth near 7%; the referendum established direct presidential election; a late-year stabilization plan cooled the froth.

MoodThe imperial chapter closed and the economy barely broke stride — the clearest demonstration yet of what the machine could absorb.

Statsgrowth +6.1% · GDP ~$747bn · per capita ~$15,280 · inflation 5.0% | world +5.0%

Events(1) March: the miners' strike — de Gaulle signed a requisition order; the miners ignored it; the public sided with the miners; the state folded with double-digit raises: the General's first domestic defeat, delivered by the pits. (2) September: the Giscard stabilization plan — credit squeeze, price watch — attacked the 5% inflation. (3) The Élysée Treaty bound Paris to Bonn.

MoodFull employment discovering its bargaining power: even under the most authoritative government in the West, the price of labor voted for itself.

Statsgrowth +6.6% · GDP ~$796bn · per capita ~$16,110 · inflation 3.2% | world +6.6%

Events(1) The stabilization worked — inflation down to 3% with growth at 6.6%: the sweet spot, briefly held. (2) Consumer society arrived in force: the teenage market invented (yé-yé, transistors), cars per household climbing the S-curve. (3) The Plan's fourth edition quietly downgraded itself from commander to forecaster — the market outgrowing its tutor.

MoodThe high plateau's early air: modern objects multiplying faster than complaints, for once.

Statsgrowth +4.8% · GDP ~$834bn · per capita ~$16,730 · inflation 2.7% | world +5.6%

Events(1) De Gaulle opened his monetary crusade — press-conference gold-standard sermons, dollars exchanged for bullion: the anchor critique that history would half-vindicate. (2) December: Mitterrand forced the General to a runoff — prosperity, it turned out, purchased no gratitude. (3) France launched its first satellite; the freezer and the second car entered the aspiration set.

MoodComfort normalizing into entitlement: the boom's political paradox — the better it worked, the less it was thanked — now measurable in ballots.

Statsgrowth +5.2% · GDP ~$877bn · per capita ~$17,440 · inflation 2.6% · unemployment ~1.4% | world +5.4%

Events(1) Full employment in the strictest sense: unemployment near 1.4% — "we did not know the word," a generation would later say. (2) France left NATO's integrated command (March) — sovereignty politics at zero economic cost, courtesy of the boom. (3) The auto and appliance lines ran flat out; the Caravelle and the Mirage sold abroad.

MoodThe machine at cruising speed: jobs for anyone, raises annually, and geopolitics as a hobby the economy could afford.

Statsgrowth +4.8% · GDP ~$919bn · per capita ~$18,130 · inflation 2.8% · unemployment ~2.1% | world +3.7%

Events(1) The soft patch: unemployment crept toward half a million — front-page material then — and the ANPE, the national employment agency, was founded in July: the institution arriving just before its era. (2) August: the social-security ordinances trimmed benefits and raised charges by decree — union fury banked for later. (3) December: the Neuwirth law legalized the pill — the demographic modernity beneath everything.

MoodThe first faint knock in the engine: nothing visible in the showroom, but the young were queuing at a brand-new agency, and the unions were keeping receipts.

Statsgrowth +4.5% (a two-week national shutdown, absorbed) · GDP ~$961bn · per capita ~$18,810 · inflation 4.5% · unemployment ~2.6% | world +5.9%

Events(1) May: Nanterre to the Sorbonne to the barricades — and then the general strike: seven to nine million out, the country stopped for three weeks, fuel and cash rationed by queue. (2) Grenelle (May 25–27): the SMIG raised 35%, wages up double digits, union rights in the plant — the largest negotiated wage shock in French history. June: a landslide for order. (3) November: the franc buckled under the wage bill and capital flight; de Gaulle refused devaluation — pride as exchange-rate policy. And that August, at Fangataufa in the Pacific, Canopus — France's first hydrogen bomb — fired: superpower-grade physics in the year the state nearly fell.

MoodThe revolt of the prosperous: a boom interrupted by its own children, settled with a historic raise, and paid for, eventually, in the currency — the strangest economic year of the golden age.

Statsgrowth +7.1% · GDP ~$1,029bn · per capita ~$19,980 · inflation 6.0% · unemployment ~2.3% | world +6.0%

Events(1) April: de Gaulle lost his referendum and left within a day; Pompidou took the presidency with an industrial gospel. (2) August 8: the devaluation de Gaulle refused, executed cleanly at 11.1% in mid-vacation — technocratic, unannounced, effective. (3) Growth surged past 7% — Grenelle's wage money chasing goods, and finding French factories able to supply them; Concorde 001 flew (March 2, from Toulouse, André Turcat at the controls): the Anglo-French supersonic gamble airborne — prestige engineering as industrial policy.

MoodThe post-1968 boom nobody predicted: the raise absorbed, the parity fixed, the founder gone — and the fastest growth of the era printed in his absence.

Statsgrowth +6.2% · GDP ~$1,093bn · per capita ~$21,020 · inflation 5.3% · unemployment ~2.4% | world +3.8%

Events(1) January 2: the SMIC replaced the SMIG — the minimum wage now indexed to growth as well as prices: the boom's dividends legally attached to its lowest paychecks. Mensualisation — monthly salaried status extended to workers spread — workers moved from hourly to salaried status: security as a mass good. (2) Pompidou's "industrial imperative" at full throttle — autoroutes doubling, La Défense rising, the telephone catch-up ordered. (3) Real wages rose ~4–5% for the median household; the second car and the winter holiday entered ordinary life.

MoodThe volume's single 7 — the golden age's best-lived year: work for all, raises by statute, and the future arriving as concrete and chrome. Characteristically, the French spent it complaining; the name "Trente Glorieuses" would be coined only at the wake.

Statsgrowth +5.3% · GDP ~$1,151bn · per capita ~$21,930 · inflation 5.4% · unemployment ~2.7% | world +4.1%

Events(1) August 15: Nixon closed the gold window — Bretton Woods, the franc's postwar cage and cushion, dissolved; Pompidou negotiated the aftermath at the Azores. (2) The boom rolled on: Fos-sur-Mer's steel complex, towers at La Défense, records in housing completions. (3) Inflation settled onto its 5–6% plateau — indexation wiring it into every contract.

MoodProsperity with a low-grade fever: the machine still at speed, the money beneath it newly unmoored.

Statsgrowth +4.5% · GDP ~$1,203bn · per capita ~$22,720 · inflation 6.1% · unemployment ~2.8% | world +5.5%

Events(1) June: the Common Program united Socialists and Communists — nationalization of banking and industry on paper; capital took notes. (2) The European currency "snake" launched — France's first post-Bretton Woods attempt at monetary Europe. (3) Consumption plateaued at full: two weeks at the beach became four for many; the hypermarket conquered the periphery.

MoodThe last ordinary year of the boom: abundance routine, inflation chronic, and the political system quietly arming both of its futures.

Statsgrowth +6.2% · GDP ~$1,278bn · per capita ~$23,930 = 64% of US · inflation 7.4% · unemployment ~2.7% | world +6.5%

Events(1) A final sprint — growth above 6%, the fastest close any golden age on this scale gets to choose. (2) October: the oil shock — crude quadrupled against an economy importing three-quarters of its energy: the era's end, datable to a communiqué. (3) The Lip watch factory's self-management saga ("we make them, we sell them, we pay ourselves") and the Royer law protecting shopkeepers from hypermarkets: the boom's dissidents, left and right, both audible at the exact moment the music stopped.

MoodThe Trente Glorieuses' last page, written at full speed: nobody called them glorious yet, and after October, nobody would get the chance to live them again.

Statsgrowth +4.4% · GDP ~$1,334bn · per capita ~$24,820 · inflation 13.6% · unemployment ~2.8% | world +2.0%

Events(1) March 6: the Messmer Plan — thirteen nuclear reactors ordered at a stroke, the whole fleet to follow: the single best supply-side decision any rich country on this scale made, taken in the shock's first winter. (2) Pompidou died in April; Giscard won by a whisker in May — reform's technocrat at the wheel as the storm broke. (3) Inflation hit 13.6%; the Fourcade squeeze began; the majority at 18 and legal abortion (the Veil law, voted January 1975) marked the social modernization racing ahead of the economy.

MoodMomentum and foreboding: the boom's last kinetic energy spent under a new president, a new energy doctrine, and a price level suddenly out of control.

Statsgrowth −0.9% — the first postwar recession · GDP ~$1,321bn · per capita ~$24,470 · inflation 11.7% · unemployment 3.9% | world +0.8%

Events(1) The first minus sign since the war — industrial output down, order books empty. (2) September: unemployment crossed one million — the psychological wall, front pages black with the number; nobody guessed it was the floor of the next half-century, not the ceiling. (3) The Chirac stimulus reflated into the trough — growth would return; the jobs, durably, would not.

MoodThe end of the world as the French economy had known it: recession and 12% inflation — the impossible pair — and a millionth name on a list that would never again be short.

Statsgrowth +4.3% · GDP ~$1,379bn · per capita ~$25,420 · inflation 9.6% · unemployment 4.4% | world +5.2%

Events(1) The rebound came — and couldn't hold the franc: out of the currency snake in March, the drought of the century in summer (paid for with a special "drought tax") — while Concorde entered service (January 21, Paris–Rio): the fastest airliner ever built began carrying passengers, glory priced far above its fuel bill. (2) August: Chirac resigned the premiership; Barre — "France's best economist" — arrived with Plan I: freeze, squeeze, repeat. (3) Inflation stuck near 10%: the indexation machine defending itself.

MoodStagflation's routine setting in: each recovery weaker than advertised, each plan sterner than the last, and the price level ignoring both.

Statsgrowth +3.6% · GDP ~$1,428bn · per capita ~$26,200 · inflation 9.5% · unemployment 4.9% | world +3.9%

Events(1) Barre II ground on — monetary targets, wage norms; the municipal elections swung hard left. (2) Steel entered its agony: Lorraine's mills bleeding, "redeployment" the new euphemism. (3) Unemployment passed 1.1 million and kept walking.

MoodThe waiting-room years: rigor applied, results deferred, and an industrial heartland learning the vocabulary of its own closure.

Statsgrowth +3.9% · GDP ~$1,484bn · per capita ~$27,120 · inflation 9.3% · unemployment 5.1% | world +4.1%

Events(1) March: the right held the legislatives — the Common Program had cracked six months earlier; markets exhaled. (2) April: the steel plan — 20,000 jobs to go in Lorraine and the Nord; Denain and Longwy began to burn slowly. (3) August: Barre freed the price of bread — controlled since 1945: a thirty-three-year war economy artifact, retired; the Amoco Cadiz blackened Brittany.

MoodLiberalization by inches inside a slow-motion deindustrialization: the baguette floated free the year the blast furnaces learned their fate.

Statsgrowth +3.7% · GDP ~$1,539bn · per capita ~$27,990 · inflation 10.6% · unemployment 5.8% | world +4.1%

Events(1) February–April: the steel war — Longwy and Denain in open riot, CRS charges, pirate radio from the mills: the region fighting its sentence. (2) The second oil shock (Iran) re-lit inflation toward 13%. (3) March 13: the European Monetary System began — France chose the Deutschmark's discipline as its external anchor: the road to 1983, and to the euro, entered here. And on Christmas Eve, from Kourou in Guiana, Ariane 1 lifted off: Europe's own rocket, French-led — the space industry's founding launch.

MoodThe decade closing as it opened — oil, anger, and double digits — with one quiet signature that would eventually decide everything.

Statsgrowth +1.7% · GDP ~$1,565bn · per capita ~$28,310 = 69% of US — the relative peak · inflation 13.6% · unemployment 6.3% | world +1.8%

Events(1) Inflation back at its 1974 peak; growth at stall speed; unemployment past 1.5 million. (2) Giscard's septennat ended in an atmosphere of diamonds, jokes, and exhaustion — a comedian's presidential candidacy briefly polled in double digits. (3) Unnoticed in the gloom: France's income per head reached 69% of America's — the closest it would ever come. The catch-up ended here, at the worst-feeling moment of a generation.

MoodPeak convergence experienced as failure: the precise year France stood nearest its model, it wanted only to change everything.

Statsgrowth +1.2% · GDP ~$1,583bn · per capita ~$28,480 · inflation 13.3% · unemployment 7.4% | world +1.9%

Events(1) May 10: Mitterrand — the Fifth Republic's first Socialist president: the Bastille celebrated; capital fled the same night. (2) The 110 propositions rolled: SMIC +10%, a fifth week of vacation, the 39-hour week, retirement at 60 (decreed for 1983 — down from 65: the single largest social concession in the volume), and the nationalization of 39 banks and five industrial groups — the largest peacetime takeover in the West. And on September 27, the TGV opened Paris–Lyon at 260 km/h: the state-engineering triumph of the era, arriving in nationalization's autumn. (3) Reflation-in-one-country met Volcker's world: the first devaluation came in October.

MoodThe state of grace: half the country euphoric, the other half moving money to Switzerland — historic conquests distributed from a treasury already writing checks against the next two years.

Statsgrowth +2.4% · GDP ~$1,622bn · per capita ~$29,060 · inflation 12.0% · unemployment 8.0% | world +0.4%

Events(1) The conquests landed — 39 hours, the fifth week, retirement at 60 in force — as the money ran out: June: devaluation #2, with a four-month wage-and-price freeze — Socialists freezing paychecks thirteen months in. (2) The external deficit gaped; three franc crises in twelve months. (3) Unemployment crossed two million in the autumn.

MoodThe experiment hitting the wall in real time: the greatest expansion of leisure in French history legislated in the same year wages were frozen to save the franc.

Statsgrowth +1.3% · GDP ~$1,642bn · per capita ~$29,270 · inflation 9.5% · unemployment 8.3% | world +2.6%

Events(1) March: the tournant de la rigueur — the austerity turn — after ten days of secret argument, Mitterrand chose the EMS over the "other policy": devaluation #3, Finance Minister Delors's austerity plan, a forced loan of 10% of income tax, and exchange controls so tight that French tourists were rationed to 2,000 francs of foreign currency a year — the carnet de change, a vacation passbook. (2) "Rigueur" entered the dictionary as governing doctrine; désinflation compétitive was born. (3) Socialism-in-one-country was over, twenty-two months in; the euro's true origin story had just been written.

MoodThe volume's hinge: France chose Europe and hard money over its own program — its own Korea-1997 moment, except chosen — and everything after 1983, from the strong franc to the single currency to the permanent unemployment, descends from that March.

Statsgrowth +1.6% · GDP ~$1,669bn · per capita ~$29,600 · inflation 7.7% · unemployment 9.7% | world +4.7%

Events(1) The restructurings arrived all at once: steel plans for Lorraine, coal phase-out, shipyard cuts — and at Talbot-Poissy, immigrant assembly-line workers' strikes were painted as alien subversion: the deindustrialization acquiring its politics. (2) June: a million-plus marched for private schools; the government fell; Prime Minister Fabius, 37, arrived to "modernize." (3) Unemployment hit 2.4 million; the Minitel rolled out — a networked screen in millions of homes, the internet a decade early, French-built and French-fenced.

MoodThe payment years: the turn's bill collected in mill towns and ministries, while a small beige terminal quietly demonstrated what the country could still invent.

Statsgrowth +1.6% · GDP ~$1,695bn · per capita ~$29,910 · inflation 5.8% · unemployment 10.2% | world +3.7%

Events(1) Inflation below 6% — the first time since 1972: the forty-year fever visibly breaking; savers exhaled. (2) Prime Minister Bérégovoy's financial deregulation accelerated — money markets opened, the MATIF futures exchange chartered: Paris rebuilding itself as a financial place. (3) The Rainbow Warrior affair: the state as saboteur, caught.

MoodDisinflation's first dividends inside double-digit unemployment: prices finally believable, jobs still not.

Statsgrowth +2.4% · GDP ~$1,736bn · per capita ~$30,470 · inflation 2.5% · unemployment 10.4% | world +3.3%

Events(1) March: the right won the legislature; cohabitation — a Socialist president sharing power with a right-wing premier, the Fifth Republic's first such split — and with it the privatization wave: Saint-Gobain, Paribas, TF1 — 1.5 million first-time shareholders subscribed: capitalisme populaire, invented overnight. (2) December 1: the 1945 price-control ordinance was abolished — the war economy's foundational law repealed after forty-one years; the oil counter-shock helped drive inflation to 2.5%. (3) December: the Devaquet university reform died with a student, Malik Oussekine — withdrawn: the template refreshed.

MoodThe liberal turn's high tide: prices freed, firms floated, inflation dead — and the street's veto reconfirmed on schedule.

Statsgrowth +2.6% · GDP ~$1,780bn · per capita ~$31,080 · inflation 3.3% · unemployment 10.5% | world +3.8%

Events(1) October: the crash — the CAC's worst days on record; the real economy barely noticed. (2) Unemployment touched its eighties peak near 2.6 million. (3) The Disney park deal signed at Marne-la-Vallée; the Airbus A320 entered service — the two futures, entertainment and aerospace, both booked.

MoodA market panic over a becalmed economy: the decade's pattern — finance loud, jobs stuck — in miniature.

Statsgrowth +4.8% · GDP ~$1,866bn · per capita ~$32,390 · inflation 2.7% · unemployment 10.0% | world +4.5%

Events(1) The boomlet: investment surged, growth touched its best since 1976 — "the enterprise rehabilitated," the era of business celebrated. (2) Mitterrand re-elected; Prime Minister Rocard created the RMI (December, near-unanimously) — a guaranteed minimum income: the safety net's keystone, laid by consensus. (3) Disinflation locked below 3%.

MoodThe strong-franc strategy's first genuinely good year: growth, price stability, and a new floor under poverty — the model's promised trade finally paying an installment.

Statsgrowth +4.4% · GDP ~$1,948bn · per capita ~$33,620 · inflation 3.5% · unemployment 9.4% | world +3.6%

Events(1) The bicentennial year boomed; unemployment finally fell below 9.5%. (2) November 9: the Wall fell — and Mitterrand set his price for German unity: monetary union. The Delors Report's staged EMU, adopted that spring, became the continent's destiny within months. (3) The CAC 40 era opened in full cry; grands projets rose over Paris.

MoodHistory accelerating around a France briefly at cruising speed — and trading its say over Germany's future for a claim on Germany's money.

Statsgrowth +2.8% · GDP ~$2,003bn · per capita ~$34,380 · inflation 3.2% · unemployment 8.9% | world +2.7%

Events(1) The Gulf crisis spiked oil and sank confidence in August. (2) German reunification (October): the Bundesbank began tightening into Germany's boom — and France, pegged, imported restriction at the exact wrong moment: the EMS asymmetry trap, armed. (3) November: the CSG was born by one use of 49.3 — a 1.1% levy that would grow ninefold across the decades: the tax that ate the future, planted.

MoodThe cycle turning with the century: a small war, a big unification, and a new tax line — three quiet mortgages on the nineties, signed in one year.

Statsgrowth +1.2% · GDP ~$2,028bn · per capita ~$34,630 = 68% of US · inflation 3.2% · unemployment 9.4% | world +1.2%

Events(1) The Gulf War came and went; the slowdown stayed. (2) December: Maastricht negotiated — EMU designed with French fingerprints everywhere: the plan to Europeanize the Bundesbank, formalized. (3) Unemployment resumed its climb toward the wall.

MoodDrift with a destination: a stalling economy signing the most consequential treaty of the half-century, largely to escape its own monetary subordination.

Statsgrowth +1.5% · GDP ~$2,058bn · per capita ~$34,980 · inflation 2.4% · unemployment 10.2% | world +2.1%

Events(1) September 20: Maastricht passed by 51.05% — the petit oui: the map of yes-cities and no-periphery drawn that night would reappear in 2005, 2018, and every crisis since. (2) The EMS storm ejected sterling and the lira; the franc held — at the price of double-digit real interest rates into a stagnant economy. (3) CAP reform and the GATT endgame put farmers in the streets; unemployment crossed three million territory.

MoodEurope ratified by a whisker and defended at usurious rates: the strong franc kept its promise to the Bundesbank and sent the bill to the labor market.

Statsgrowth −0.4% — the worst year since the war to date · GDP ~$2,051bn · per capita ~$34,700 · inflation 2.1% · unemployment 11.7% | world +1.9%

Events(1) Recession plus a record jobless count: the fracture sociale diagnosed as the national condition. (2) March: the right took 484 seats; Prime Minister Balladur launched privatizations round two — and in August, the EMS crisis returned: the bands widened to ±15%, the system quasi-suspended, the franc holding inside them: the parity saved by loosening its cage. (3) December: the GATT deal closed with the exception culturelle won; the Crédit Lyonnais hole — a state bank's record-breaking wreck — began surfacing.

MoodThe trough of the franc-fort (the strong-franc anchor to the Deutschmark) era: everything sacrificed for a parity that survived by technicality, in an economy where one in eight now waited.

Statsgrowth +2.4% · GDP ~$2,100bn · per capita ~$35,400 · inflation 1.7% · unemployment 12.3% — the winter peak: 12.7% | world +3.4%

Events(1) Recovery without jobs: unemployment peaked near 12.7% — 3.3 million, the postwar summit. (2) March: the CIP youth sub-minimum wage sent students into the streets — withdrawn within weeks: the reform-veto template, now operating even on labor-market policy for the unemployed young. (3) May 6: the Channel Tunnel opened; the Crédit Lyonnais bailout machinery assembled.

MoodThe wall itself: the highest joblessness in French history alongside an infrastructure marvel — the country simultaneously world-class and out of work.

Statsgrowth +2.3% · GDP ~$2,148bn · per capita ~$36,080 · inflation 1.8% · unemployment 11.8% | world +3.2%

Events(1) May: Chirac won on the "fracture sociale" — the "social fracture" between France's included and its left-behind — — then October's Juppé Plan attacked social security and public pensions. (2) November 24–December 15: the great strikes — rail and métro dead for three weeks, two million in the streets, Paris walking and hitchhiking — and the public backed the strikers: the pension chapter withdrawn. The 1995 template — reform announced, street verdict, retreat — would govern for a generation. (3) Bombs in the RER (eight dead) shadowed the autumn; offshore, Chirac's final nuclear campaign began at Mururoa (September) — six last tests to January amid worldwide boycotts of French wine, then the signature that ended French testing forever.

MoodThe year the social model defended itself by general paralysis — and won: the strong franc stayed, the reform died, and the queue at the agency did not shorten.

Statsgrowth +1.4% · GDP ~$2,178bn · per capita ~$36,450 · inflation 2.0% · unemployment 12.1% | world +3.6%

Events(1) The Maastricht-criteria squeeze: budgets cut and taxes raised into a stagnant economy to hit 3% — the euro's entry fee, paid in jobs. (2) February: conscription's end announced — the professional army, a quiet revolution. (3) Real rates near 5% ground on; plans sociaux became the business-page furniture.

MoodAusterity for a currency that did not yet exist: the criteria years, when France ran policy for an examination board in Frankfurt.

Statsgrowth +2.5% · GDP ~$2,233bn · per capita ~$37,240 · inflation 1.2% · unemployment 12.2% — the peak, then turning | world +4.0%

Events(1) April: Chirac dissolved for comfort; June 1: he lost — Prime Minister Jospin, with the 35-hour week announced and 350,000 public youth jobs promised: the left back, with the boldest labor-market experiment in the rich world. (2) The euro's entrance exam — Maastricht's rule that 1997's deficit land at 3% of GDP, or the franc missed the launch — passed by artistry: France Télécom, being part-privatized, paid the state a one-off ≈37.5bn-franc "soulte" (balancing payment) to take over its staff's future pensions; the windfall was booked as ordinary revenue, and the deficit printed at exactly 3.0%: creative accounting present at the single currency's creation. (3) Unemployment peaked at last in June and began, at last, to fall.

MoodThe turn, reached by accident: a lost gamble delivering a new experiment, a fudged decimal delivering the euro — and the twenty-year number finally bending.

Statsgrowth +3.5% · GDP ~$2,310bn · per capita ~$38,390 · inflation 0.7% · unemployment 11.6% — falling fast | world +2.8%

Events(1) July 12: France won the World Cup at home — 3–0, a million and a half on the Champs-Élysées, the biggest crowd since the Liberation: black-blanc-beur, the country liking itself for a season. (2) May: euro parities locked; the first Aubry law voted the 35 hours for 2000. (3) Growth at its best in a decade; the CAC up 31%.

MoodThe feel-good year of the half-century: jobs returning, prices flat, a star over the Élysée — the long wait visibly ending, or seeming to.

Statsgrowth +3.4% · GDP ~$2,389bn · per capita ~$39,490 · inflation 0.5% · unemployment 10.8% | world +3.6%

Events(1) January 1: the euro launched — eleven currencies fused on the books; the franc fixed forever at 6.55957 and living out its notice period. (2) December 26–28: hurricane-force storms killed 92 and blacked out 3.4 million homes — EDF's armies in the field, the state at its most loved. (3) September: Michelin posted record profits and mass layoffs in the same week; Jospin's "the state cannot do everything" entered the anthology.

MoodThe new money born, the old jobs machine finally running — and a one-sentence confession of the state's limits that the country never quite forgave.

Statsgrowth +4.1% — the best since 1989 · GDP ~$2,488bn · per capita ~$40,840 · inflation 1.7% · unemployment 9.2% — from 12.5% in three years | world +4.6%

Events(1) February 1: the 35-hour week entered force — and "RTT" entered the language: the boldest redistribution of time in the rich world, arriving mid-boom; with 1.6 million jobs created in four years, unemployment broke below 9%. (2) September: fuel-price blockades — fishermen and truckers besieged the depots; the government cut the fuel tax: a rehearsal, unrecognized, of 2018. (3) September 4: the CAC peaked at 6,944 — a level it would not see again for twenty-one years; the Concorde crashed in July, killing 113.

MoodThe best-lived year since 1973, with 1998 its only equal: work returning, time expanding, the future priced for perfection — at the exact top of its range.

Statsgrowth +1.9% · GDP ~$2,535bn · per capita ~$41,310 · inflation 1.6% · unemployment 8.6% | world +2.0%

Events(1) The dot-com unwind hit the champions — Vivendi, Alcatel — and September 11 hit everything. (2) September 21: the AZF fertilizer plant exploded in Toulouse — 31 dead: industrial risk's brutal cameo. (3) December: euro starter kits went on sale — the franc's final Christmas.

MoodThe boom exhaling: unemployment still falling on momentum, the screens red, and a nation weighing coins it would use for eight more weeks.

Statsgrowth +1.1% · GDP ~$2,562bn · per capita ~$41,450 · inflation 1.9% measured — perceived far higher · unemployment 8.7% | world +2.3%

Events(1) The euro arrives in pockets (see Money). (2) April 21: Le Pen reached the runoff — the fracture's electoral debut at the summit; Chirac was re-elected 82–18 by a republic holding its nose. (3) Growth stalled near 1%; the jobless decline stopped.

MoneyThe franc abolished (January 1 – February 17): after 642 years, the currency of Jean le Bon, Napoleon, and Poincaré ceased to exist — 6.55957 to one euro, the third and final entry in France's money ledger: recalled (1948), refounded (1960), retired (2002). Measured changeover inflation was a few tenths; perceived inflation ran to 7% — the arrondi, the rounded-up baguette and café, became a folk grievance that outlasted the decade and seeded a lasting distrust of the official price index.

MoodThe oldest money in Europe traded for the newest, and a political thunderclap in between: the year the French began suspecting — of prices and of politics alike — that the official numbers and the lived ones had parted company.

Statsgrowth +1.0% · GDP ~$2,587bn · per capita ~$41,560 · inflation 2.1% · unemployment 9.0% | world +3.1%

Events(1) August: the canicule — a two-week heatwave killed some 15,000, mostly the old and alone: refrigerated trucks at the market halls, the state's competence and the society's solitude both indicted. (2) The Fillon pension reform passed — public-sector contribution years aligned to forty: strikes, then a rare completed structural reform. (3) November 25: France and Germany suspended the Stability Pact against themselves — the euro's authors bending its rules third year in: the currency's original sin, notarized. The Iraq split ran through everything.

MoodA dark ledger: the deadliest domestic event of the era, one real reform banked, and the continent's rulebook broken by its own writers.

Statsgrowth +2.9% · GDP ~$2,661bn · per capita ~$42,440 · inflation 2.1% · unemployment 9.2% | world +4.5%

Events(1) March: a regional wipeout for the right; Sarkozy took Bercy — the finance ministry — and rescued Alstom by decree — the interventionist template updated. (2) May: ten new members joined the EU — and the "Polish plumber" entered French politics as the face of enlargement anxiety. (3) Health-insurance reform trimmed at the margins; growth muddled near 3%.

MoodRecovery without conviction: an economy neither sick nor well, and a political class rehearsing the arguments for the following spring's explosion.

Statsgrowth +1.9% · GDP ~$2,712bn · per capita ~$42,920 · inflation 1.7% · unemployment 9.2% | world +4.1%

Events(1) May 29: France voted Non — 54.7% — to the European constitution it had largely written: the 1992 map, redrawn in bolder ink — métropoles for, périphérie against. (2) October 27 – November: the banlieue riots — two boys dead in Clichy-sous-Bois, then three weeks, 300 towns, 10,000 cars burned, the first state of emergency since Algeria: the parallel labor market — youth unemployment at 20–40% in the cités — announcing itself in fire. (3) Growth under 2%; the CPE youth contract was drafted for the new year.

MoodThe two excluded Frances spoke within six months of each other — one by referendum, one by riot — and the economy they were describing was the same one.

Statsgrowth +2.7% · GDP ~$2,785bn · per capita ~$43,780 · inflation 1.7% · unemployment 8.8% | world +4.5%

Events(1) The CPE — the contested youth job contract: a first-job contract with easier dismissal — one to three million marched, universities blockaded, and in April Chirac withdrew a law already passed: the 1995 template at its purest — a labor reform for the young, killed in the name of the young. (2) Growth improved; unemployment fell below 9. (3) Airbus's A380 delays detonated the crisis at EADS, Airbus's parent; "economic patriotism" guarded yogurt makers from rumored raiders.

MoodA recovering economy that could not touch its own rulebook: the reform-death ritual now so reliable it had a schedule.

Statsgrowth +2.5% · GDP ~$2,856bn · per capita ~$44,610 · inflation 1.5% · unemployment 8.0% — the best since 1983 | world +4.4%

Events(1) Sarkozy elected on "work more to earn more": the TEPA package — tax-free overtime, inheritance cuts, a 50% tax shield — arrived by August. (2) Unemployment hit a quarter-century low; the special pension regimes were reformed through strikes that fizzled. (3) August 9: BNP Paribas froze three funds — the world's money markets seized: the global financial crisis's opening bell, rung in Paris; Flamanville's EPR broke ground on a €3.3bn, 2012 promise that would become €13bn and 2024.

MoodThe best labor market in a generation, a hyperactive new presidency — and, in one August press release, the first tremor of the earthquake that would define the next decade.

Statsgrowth +0.4% · GDP ~$2,866bn · per capita ~$44,530 · inflation 2.8% · unemployment 7.4% — the trough, then up | world +2.1%

Events(1) January: Kerviel — €4.9bn lost by one Société Générale trader: the era's omen, priced. (2) October: Lehman — and Sarkozy's hyperactive autumn: an EU presidency wielded, €360bn in guarantees, Dexia rescued, no French bank failure. (3) The RSA in-work benefit was voted; "laisser-faire is finished," the president announced at Toulon.

MoodThe storm arriving against a French seawall that held — the model's automatic stabilizers about to earn a year of vindication.

Statsgrowth −2.8% — Germany: −5.7% · GDP ~$2,785bn · per capita ~$43,050 · inflation 0.1% · unemployment 9.1% | world −1.3%

Events(1) The deepest global recession since the war hit France least among big industrial economies: the social model as shock absorber — "le modèle protège" had its finest hour. (2) Car scrappage bonuses, a €35bn "investments for the future" loan, and bossnapping — executives sequestered by laid-off workers — filled the year. (3) A 44-day general strike in Guadeloupe over the cost of living previewed a mainland politics to come; the deficit hit 7.2%.

MoodThe mildest-in-class catastrophe: France's insurance policy paying out visibly — and the premium, as ever, booked to the national debt.

Statsgrowth +2.0% · GDP ~$2,841bn · per capita ~$43,690 · inflation 1.5% · unemployment 9.3% | world +4.5%

Events(1) The pension reform, 60 → 62: eight national strike days, one to three million marching, refineries blockaded into an October fuel panic — and it passed (November 10): the rare reform completed against the street. (2) May: Greece — and French banks stood among the largest holders of southern European debt: the euro crisis arrived as a French banking question. (3) Growth limped back to 2%.

MoodA reform forced through and a crisis moving in: the year the retirement age and the bond spread both became household words.

Statsgrowth +2.4% · GDP ~$2,910bn · per capita ~$44,540 · inflation 2.1% · unemployment 9.2% | world +3.3%

Events(1) The summer storm: rumors against the French AAA, Société Générale down 15% in a day, short-selling banned — and by November the OAT–Bund spread hit 190 basis points: the number that would return in 2024, making its debut. (2) "Merkozy" governed the eurozone from walkway photo-ops; two Fillon austerity packages (€19bn) landed. (3) May 14: DSK's arrest removed the presumptive alternative in a New York hallway.

MoodContagion's edge: France discovering it was the periphery's core — or the core's periphery — depending on the morning's spread.

Statsgrowth +0.2% · GDP ~$2,916bn · per capita ~$44,410 · inflation 2.0% · unemployment 9.8% | world +2.7%

Events(1) January: the AAA lost (S&P); May: Hollande elected — "my enemy is finance," a 75% top rate promised. (2) November: the Gallois report — and the CICE, €20bn in payroll tax credits: the supply-side U-turn executed six months after the anti-finance campaign; the fiscal treaty ratified unchanged. (3) The Florange blast furnaces produced a nationalization farce; Depardieu left for Belgium on the front pages.

MoodA presidency reversing itself in real time: elected against finance, governing for competitiveness, trusted by neither audience.

Statsgrowth +0.8% · GDP ~$2,939bn · per capita ~$44,530 · inflation 0.9% · unemployment 10.3% | world +2.9%

Events(1) The 75% tax died in constitutional and practical farce; the budget minister, Cahuzac, fell for a secret Swiss account — the credibility ledger emptied twice. (2) October–November: the bonnets rouges (the Breton ecotax revolt) — Brittany rose against the écotaxe; the highway tax gantries were burned and the tax killed, €1bn sunk: the gilets jaunes' dress rehearsal, five years early. (3) "The curve will invert," the president promised of unemployment; it did not.

MoodDrift quantified: a government promising an inflection it could not produce, retreating from a tax it had already built the hardware for.

Statsgrowth +1.0% · GDP ~$2,968bn · per capita ~$44,760 · inflation 0.5% · unemployment 10.3% | world +3.2%

Events(1) January: Hollande's supply-side coming-out — the Responsibility Pact, €40bn in cuts, "I am a social democrat": the pivot named; August: Macron to Bercy, replacing a minister who had toasted "the recovery" too ironically. (2) May 25: the Front National won a national election (the Europeans, 24.9%) — the tremor registered. (3) Alstom's energy business sold to GE amid sovereignty anguish; the deficit slipped again and Brussels granted another extension.

MoodThe pivot without the payoff: a left government adopting the rival doctrine mid-mandate, with the patience of neither its voters nor the bond desks fully banked.

Statsgrowth +1.1% · GDP ~$3,000bn · per capita ~$45,070 · inflation 0.0% · unemployment 10.4% — the second peak: 3.59 million · | world +3.1%

Events(1) The terror year: Charlie Hebdo and the Hyper Cacher in January (17 dead); November 13: the Bataclan and the terraces — 130 dead: a state of emergency, tourism and terrace life dented into the winter. (2) Unemployment set its all-time claimant record in December — the Hollande nadir, statistically datable. (3) The loi Macron (Sunday trading, intercity buses) passed by 49.3; COP21 closed in December — the diplomatic triumph of a wounded year.

MoodThe republic attacked at dinner and at a concert, with the jobless count at its historic worst: the darkest lived year of the postwar era that did not involve an economic collapse at all.

Statsgrowth +0.9% · GDP ~$3,025bn · per capita ~$45,340 · inflation 0.2% · unemployment 10.0% | world +2.8%

Events(1) The El Khomri labor law: three months of marches, Nuit Debout in the squares, CGT refinery blockades bringing back gas-station queues — passed, diminished, by three uses of 49.3. (2) July 14: the Nice truck attack killed 86. (3) Brexit sent Paris courting London's bankers; Hollande renounced re-election (a Fifth Republic first); an economy minister named Macron resigned in April and founded a movement.

MoodThe old system's last full year: a labor reform half-passed by force, a presidency ending by abdication, and the succession already walking out the door with a startup's name.

Statsgrowth +2.1% · GDP ~$3,088bn · per capita ~$46,150 · inflation 1.0% · unemployment 9.4% → 9.0% | world +3.4%

Events(1) May 7: Macron, 66–34 — the youngest president, the old parties swept, 350 seats from nothing. (2) September: the labor ordonnances — dismissal-award caps, firm-level bargaining primacy — passed with the streets half-empty: the 1995 curse broken on the first try. (3) The wealth tax became a property-only tax and capital income got a 30% flat rate — "president of the rich" was affixed within months, sealed by a €5 cut to housing benefit that cost more politically than the billions.

MoodThe system replaced in one spring: reform suddenly passable, growth at a decade high — and a distributional storyline written in the first hundred days that would find its roundabouts within two years.

Statsgrowth +1.6% · GDP ~$3,139bn · per capita ~$46,740 · inflation 1.9% · unemployment 9.0% | world +3.3%

Events(1) The SNCF reform ended the rail statute for new hires through 36 days of rolling strikes — passed in June: reform number two landed. (2) November 17: the gilets jaunes — a fuel-tax trajectory (+23% on diesel in a year) summoned 287,000 to the roundabouts; December 1: the Arc de Triomphe was sacked, the images global; December 10: Macron's address to 13 million — tax cancelled, a €100 minimum-wage top-up, €10bn conceded: the retreat that worked. (3) Growth sagged in Q4 with commerce besieged on Saturdays.

MoodThe periphery's uprising over ten cents of diesel: the fracture — 1992's map, 2005's map — now wearing a safety vest and holding the roundabout, the lived cost-of-living economy overruling the carbon spreadsheet in three weeks.

Statsgrowth +2.0% · GDP ~$3,203bn · per capita ~$47,530 · inflation 1.1% · unemployment 8.4% — the decade's best | world +2.7%

Events(1) The Grand Débat — 10,000 town meetings, the talking cure that drained the roundabouts — closed with €5bn of income-tax cuts and the ENA's abolition announced; purchasing power rose at its fastest in a decade: the gilets jaunes, paid. (2) April 15: Notre-Dame burned — €850M pledged within 48 hours, the billionaires' optics war included. (3) December 5: the universal-pension strike began — the longest rail stoppage since 1968, running into January against a points system that COVID would shortly kill; Brussels vetoed the Alstom-Siemens rail merger, igniting the EU industrial-policy debate.

MoodThe revolt's dividend year: jobs at a decade high, taxes cut under duress — and the December trains motionless again, as if the system needed to end the decade in its signature posture.

Statsgrowth −7.4% — among Europe's deepest falls · GDP ~$2,965bn · per capita ~$43,850 · inflation 0.5% · unemployment ~8.0% — the furlough paradox | world −2.9%

Events(1) March 12: "quoi qu'il en coûte" — whatever it costs: by April, 8.4 million workers — one private-sector employee in two — were on state-paid furlough, with €130bn in guaranteed loans to 700,000 firms: the most complete socialization of payroll on this scale. (2) Two lockdowns carved the deepest French recession since 1945; the mask-stockpile fiasco indicted the state's preparedness even as its checkbook performed. (3) September: a €100bn relance plan; hospital pay raised by decree; the pension reform quietly shelved; debt jumped to 115% of GDP.

MoodThe insurer-state at maximum extension: an economy ordered to stop and paid to stay intact — the model's logic taken to its limit case, on borrowed money nobody yet discussed.

Statsgrowth +6.9% — the best year since 1969 · GDP ~$3,169bn · per capita ~$46,710 · inflation 1.6% → 2.8% by December · unemployment 7.9% | world +6.5%

Events(1) The rebound outran every forecast; by year-end unemployment sat below its pre-crisis level — the furlough gamble won outright. (2) July: the health pass drove a million vaccine bookings a day after one presidential address; October: France 2030 — €30bn for small nuclear, hydrogen, semiconductors: reindustrialization named as doctrine. (3) November 5: the CAC finally repassed its September 2000 peak — a 21-year round trip closed; a €100 inflation allowance went out as prices stirred.

MoodThe V realized: the fastest growth in half a century, jobs above par, the index finally home — one deceptive breath of 1969 before the bills of the new decade arrived.

Statsgrowth +2.7% · GDP ~$3,255bn · per capita ~$47,730 · inflation 5.2% — the EU's lowest (euro area: 8.4%) · unemployment 7.3% — a near-50-year low | world +3.4%

Events(1) War — and the tariff shield: gas frozen, electricity capped, fuel rebates at the pump: France bought the lowest inflation in Europe, on the state's card. (2) The nuclear humiliation: stress-corrosion took up to 32 of 56 reactors offline — output the lowest since 1988, France a net power importer in the exact year of the price crisis; EDF, €17.9bn in the red, was renationalized to 100%. (3) April: Macron re-elected 58.5–41.5; June: the majority lost — the hung parliament arrived, and with it the 49.3 era; a July purchasing-power package added €20bn; apprenticeships boomed past 800,000.

MoodThe shield year: households sheltered better than any neighbors' while the state's two proudest machines — the reactor fleet and the parliamentary majority — both failed in the same twelve months.

Statsgrowth +1.4% · GDP ~$3,302bn · per capita ~$48,290 · inflation 4.9% — food +11.8% · unemployment 7.3% | world +2.9%

Events(1) The pension war, 62 → 64: fourteen national days, 1.3 million marching at the peak — March 16: the 49.3 on the reform itself; the censure motion failed by nine votes; the Constitutional Council validated; promulgation at 3 a.m. Casserolades followed the president for months; Paris drowned in strike-piled garbage. (2) June 27: Nahel — a teenager shot at a traffic stop: five nights, 23,000 fires, a thousand buildings, €1bn — 2005 compressed into a week. (3) The caddie shock: food inflation near 12% made "shrinkflation" household French; rates at 4% froze housing; Fitch cut to AA-.

MoodThe reform passed and the country unreconciled: a retirement age moved two years by procedural force, groceries up a tenth, and the banlieue burning on a June night — the social thermostat pinned red all year.

Statsgrowth +1.2% · GDP ~$3,341bn · per capita ~$48,730 · inflation 2.0% · unemployment 7.4% | world +2.9%

Events(1) The parenthèse enchantée: Paris 2024 — the Seine ceremony, swimmer Léon Marchand's four golds, 64 medals, six flawless weeks the country ached to keep; Notre-Dame reopened in December: the one finished thing. (2) June 9, 21:05: the dissolution — after the RN's 31% European win, Macron rolled the dice; July 7 returned three irreconcilable blocs; September's Barnier government proposed €60bn of repair and fell to censure on December 4 — the first since 1962; Bayrou inherited. (3) The dérapage: the deficit printed 6.1% against 4.4% promised — a forecasting scandal with a parliamentary inquiry; the OAT spread traded above Greece's for a late-November moment; Moody's cut in December.

MoodGold medals over a fiscal sinkhole: the best summer in decades bracketed by a self-inflicted political crisis and the discovery that the market now graded France below its own periphery.

Statsgrowth +0.9% · GDP ~$3,369bn · per capita ~$49,020 · inflation 0.9% — the EU's lowest · unemployment 7.6% — rising · | world +2.9%

Events(1) The year of four governments: Bayrou's €44bn plan (two public holidays included) died in a self-called confidence vote (September 8, 194–364); Lecornu resigned after fourteen hours in October, was reappointed within a week, and survived by suspending the 2023 pension reform until 2028 — the reform un-reformed, the see-saw's latest notch. (2) The ratings fell: Fitch to A+ in September — France's first exit from the AA class — S&P off-calendar in November, Moody's negative: the spread lived at 75–90 points, Iberia now the cheaper credit. (3) And beneath the theater, the economy quietly beat forecasts — 0.9% growth on Airbus deliveries and 100-million-plus tourists, inflation the continent's lowest, households saving a record 18.9% of income: fear as a financial flow; the Louvre was robbed in seven minutes in October, an allegory nobody requested.

MoodPolitical entropy priced by the basis point: a country with Europe's lowest inflation and highest savings rate paying Greece-adjacent spreads because no majority can sign its own arithmetic — the model intact, the state that runs it seizing up.

Events(1) A budget, at last: Lecornu forced the 2026 finance law through in mid-January — over €30bn of consolidation, a 4.7–5% deficit target, frozen benefits, a holding-company tax — with the left abstaining from censure: governance by exhaustion, but governance. (2) The Q2 Middle East oil shock cut growth forecasts and re-lit imported inflation just as the ECB finished easing; household confidence slid from its February high; unemployment drifted toward 8%. (3) The compensations: defense spending ramping on the 2025 doubling pledge, aerospace and luxury order books full, the AI push (a €1.7bn Mistral raise; February 2025's €109bn summit pledges) giving Paris a genuine new-economy claim — all of it under a debt line crossing 118% of GDP and a political system holding its breath until 2027.

MoodThe reckoning in slow motion: a rich, productive, low-inflation economy paying a rising price for an unpriceable politics — France arriving at 2026 as the rich world's most comfortable question mark.