Economic reconstruction was high on the national agenda after the war, spurred by a centralized planning system and by generous American aid. France's version of the baby boom, evident in statistics as early as 1942, continued into the early 1960s and also stimulated growth. During the ''thirty glorious years'' from 1945 to the early 1970s, France became a consumer society. Urban centers grew rapidly; the more technocratic government of the Fifth Republic, established in 1958, deliberately encouraged the conversion of small farms into more efficient units and a shift of population from country to city. Increasing prosperity did not end social tensions, however. Workers continued to feel excluded from French society, and the large cohorts of young people born after the war chafed at its rigidity and conservatism. The marked decline in birthrates that followed the introduction of the birth control pill in 1965 was a sign of a widespread shift in social values. Even more spectacular were les evenements de mai (the events of May) in 1968, a nationwide wave of strikes by students and workers that completely paralyzed the country. Although this movement did not result in any institutional changes, it profoundly changed the social climate. After 1968 France would become more individualistic, more concerned with consumption than production, and less respectful of hierarchical authority structures.

In retrospect it also became clear that 1968 marked France's move into the era of postindustrial society. The 39 percent of the workforce employed in industry that year was an all-time high. The international economic slowdown that began in the early 1970s hit the country's traditional heavy industries hard and led to a decline of the classic factory proletariat that had been the basis for Communist support. Unemployment, almost unknown during the postwar decades, became a major issue, remaining above 10 percent from the early 1980s to the end of the century. The economic slowdown of the 1970s, like the Great Depression of the 1930s, led voters to turn to the left. The Socialist Francois Mitterrand, elected as the country's president in 1981, initially took measures similar to those put through by the Popular Front and the Liberation. The minimum wage was raised sharply, workers' rights were increased, and the government promised a break with the world capitalist system. When this policy proved impossible to reconcile with France's increasing integration into the European Community and the world economy, however, Mitterrand changed course. His subsequent policies, often damned by critics as neoliberal, reduced inflation and favored economic growth, but at the cost of high unemployment and the disappearance of many traditional industries.

The most prosperous sectors of the workforce in France, as elsewhere in the developed world, became those in white-collar managerial and bureaucratic jobs, the educated cadres whose consumer-oriented lifestyle has increasingly become the country's social model. Women have succeeded in moving into this group, but only with difficulty; France has lagged behind other industrialized countries on gender issues. Another social problem highlighted once economic growth slowed was the increasing population of non-European immigrants, often from France's former colonies. Many immigrants successfully assimilated into French society, but the poorest found themselves confined to ghettos in the suburbs of large cities, where riots have broke out on several occasions after 1980. As unemployment rose, so did resentment against these groups, particularly those from North Africa; in elections in the late 1980s and 1990s, the vociferously anti-immigrant National Front party regularly claimed up to 15 percent of the vote. . . .

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