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The Great Depression affected France from about 1931 through the remainder of the decade. The crisis affected France a bit later than other countries, hitting around 1931.〔Henry Laufenburger, "France and the Depression," ''International Affairs'' (1936) 15#2 pp. 202–224 (in JSTOR )〕 While the 1920s grew at the very strong rate of 4.43% per year, the 1930s rate fell to only 0.63%.〔Jean-Pierre Dormois, ''The French Economy in the Twentieth Century'' (2004) p 31 〕 The depression was relatively mild: unemployment peaked under 5%, the fall in production was at most 20% below the 1929 output; there was no banking crisis.〔Paul Beaudry and Franck Portier, "The French Depression in the 1930s," ''Review of Economic Dynamics'' (2002) 5:73–99 doi:10.1006/redy.2001.0143 〕 The depression had some effects on the local economy, which can partly explain the 6 February 1934 crisis and even more the formation of the Popular Front, led by SFIO socialist leader Léon Blum, who won the election of 1936. == Economic crisis of the 1920s == Like the United Kingdom, France had initially struggled to recover from the devastation of World War I, trying without much success to recover war reparations from Germany. Unlike Britain, though, France had a more self-sufficient economy. In 1929, France seemed an island of prosperity, for three reasons. First, it was a country traditionally wary of trusts and big companies. The economy of France was above all founded in small and medium-sized businesses not financed by shares. Unlike the Anglosphere and particularly Americans, the French invested little on the stock exchange and put their confidence into gold, which in the crisis of 1929 was a currency of refuge. Gold had played the same role in the first world war, which explained French attachment to it. Finally, France had had a positive balance of payments〔Eichengreen, Barry (May 1992), 'The Origins and Nature of the Great Slump Revisited', ''The Economic History Review'' pp 213-239〕 for some years thanks mainly to invisible exports such as tourism. French investments abroad were numerous. The German reparations decided by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 brought in large amounts of money which served principally to repay war loans to the United States.〔Eichengreen, Barry (May 1992), 'The Origins and Nature of the Great Slump Revisited', ''The Economic History Review'' p 220〕 Reparations payments ended in 1923. In January of that year, Germany defaulted on its payments and the French president, Raymond Poincaré, invoked a clause of the Versailles Treaty and sent troops to occupy the Ruhr valley in the hope of enforcing payment. Germany responded by flooding the area with inflated money, ruining its currency and denying France any hope of full reparations. Poincaré accepted an agreement mediated by the United States in which it received smaller payments, but Poincaré's government fell soon afterward. While the United States experienced a sharp rise in unemployment, France had almost none. Much of that was due to a simple lack of manpower; at the end of the war, France had 1,322,000 dead and three million wounded. One in four of the dead was younger than 24. That in turn lowered the birth rate, so that by 1938 France still had only half the number of 19- to 21-year-olds it would have had had the war not happened.〔Cole, Robert (1996); Traveller's History of France, Windrush Press, UK〕 But whatever the causes of full employment, confidence in the government was high. The French economy was stronger than those of its neighbours, notably because of the solidarity of the franc. The introduction of the US economic model, inspired particularly by Ford, ended suddenly and, with it, the modernisation of French businesses. Everything seemed to favour the French; production didn't weaken before 1930, particularly in primary materials, and the country was the world's leading producer of iron in 1930. France felt confident in its systems and proud of its ''vertu budgétaire'', in other words the balancing of the budget, which France had managed more or less for nearly a decade. In 1927, France gained from the world crisis in becoming the world's largest holder of gold, its reserves growing from 18 billion francs in 1927 to 80 billion in 1930. Le Figaro said: "For our part let us rejoice in our timid yet prosperous economy as opposed to the presumptuousness and decadent economy of the Anglo-Saxon races."〔''Le Figaro'', France, 7 October 1931〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Great Depression in France」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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