In France, as in all combatant countries, World War I caused profound social changes. Because of the country's low birthrate, the staggering casualties--1.3 million men--had a lasting effect on its demographic structure, leaving a population disproportionately elderly and female. The needs of war production dramatized industrial workers' role in the country and gave them an increased sense of their importance. Inflation devalued the savings and investments that undergirded middle-class families' status. Women moved into many jobs that had formerly been reserved for men, causing further tension over gender roles; but France did not follow Britain, the United States, and Germany in giving women the vote. A conservative backlash followed the war, marked by a law banning contraceptives. Immigration, already significant before the war, continued afterward as employers and the government systematically recruited workers from Poland and Italy to fill the ranks of the country's depleted labor force. French industries followed American models in rationalizing their workplaces and trying to establish paternalist discipline over employees, whose militance diminished after the defeat of a widespread wave of strikes in 1919-1920. Industrial workers' living conditions continued to be worse than those of other population groups, especially in the desolate suburbs of Paris's ''red belt'' of communist-dominated suburbs and other urban areas.

Compared with more industrialized countries, France was not hit as hard by the world economic depression that started in 1929; but its effects were still significant. Together with fear of fascism, protest against economic conditions fueled a mass movement that swept the Popular Front coalition of Socialist, Communist, and middle-class Radical parties to power in 1936. Immediately after the elections, workers staged the largest wave of strikes the country had ever experienced, occupying factories to demand better pay and working conditions. The most long-lasting of the Popular Front's responses was France's first law on paid vacations, generalizing to the entire population what had been a bourgeois privilege. The Popular Front era allowed the Communist Party to implant itself solidly in working-class neighborhoods. The reunification of the French union movement in 1936 extended Communist influence. The party would dominate French labor politics until the 1970s. Some middle-class groups responded to the surge of leftwing radicalism in the 1930s by backing France's numerous quasi-fascist movements.

The military defeat of 1940 ended the Third Republic and brought to power the Vichy government of the authoritarian, conservative World War I hero Philippe Petain. Under Petain's aegis, conservative and fascist ideologues tried to remodel French society, often in contradictory ways. Vichy glorified the peasant and artisan traditions of the past but also accelerated industrial modernization to meet the production demands of the occupying Germans. Vichy propaganda talked of replacing the unregulated capitalist economy and its conflicts with a corporatist system, but the organizations it created heavily favored employers. Vichy's paternalist tendencies led to the continuation of prewar trends toward a more comprehensive welfare state: it was Petain's government that implemented the system of family allowances passed just before the war. Hostility to foreign immigrants, already heightened by the depression, played a role in Vichy's decision to pass anti-Semitic legislation and to turn many of France's Jewish residents over to the Germans. . . .

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