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  • Le crédit à la consommation en France, 1947–1965: De la stigmatisation à la réglementation by Sabine Effosse
  • Alexia Yates (bio)
Le crédit à la consommation en France, 1947–1965: De la stigmatisation à la réglementation. By Sabine Effosse. Paris: IGPDE/Comité pour l’Histoire économique et financière, 2014. Pp. xx+318. Ebook €28.

In this study of consumer credit in France after the Second World War, Sabine Effosse tackles the complex of institutions and political priorities that determined how ordinary French people gained access to the loans and payment plans that undergirded the postwar consumerist boom in numerous Western countries. Drawing on archives of governmental entities charged with managing the nation’s postwar economic recovery (primarily the National Credit Council and the Bank of France) as well as those of private enterprises that sought their fortunes in lucrative loans to French households (Cetelem, and the less-well-studied Sofinco), Effosse explores how credit for household consumption was transformed from a disreputable practice on the margins of the economy to a core pillar in the narratives and policies of France’s postwar prosperity.

In the early postwar years, France’s level of household debt was far lower than that of the United States, Germany, or the United Kingdom. The Bank of France’s studies on consumer credit after the war came down against encouraging its development (inflation was a particular concern), but a more robust consumer market was needed to support domestic manufacturing. Effosse meticulously reconstructs how consumer credit became integral to the macroeconomics of France’s recovery, inscribed within a producerist discourse and institutionalized as a lever of both monetary and industrial policy. The manufacturing interests that lay behind Cetelem and Sofinco advocated for credit expansion by speaking of “credit-savings” (p. 75) and “credit for domestic equipping” (p. 73) rather than using the more frivolous “consumer credit.” Credit remained linked to specific, durable material goods and particular manufacturing sectors; only toward the end of the period studied would firms begin to experiment with more flexible personal loans. Effosse demonstrates that prices and production goals, rather than a welfarist impulsion to redistribution, determined the institutional framework of modern consumer credit in France.

Some of the specificities of this assemblage confirm conventional appraisals of France’s Malthusian attitudes toward credit and market capitalism. The requirement, unique to France, that consumer lenders maintain a specific ratio between their reserves and their loans reserved the sector for large financial interests, constraining the credit supply. Other particularities of the system, however, challenge easy assumptions about hesitant French capitalists. Rather than follow their Common Market neighbors and protect consumers through caps on consumer loan interest rates, for instance, French authorities opted for requiring uniform and transparent [End Page 273] information on loan terms, presuming that informational equality would allow for the free play of competition and generate efficient outcomes. Consumers, workers, and white-collar employees who, for the first time, anticipated reliable and steady careers rather than fluctuating employment embraced debt as a means of enjoying their future earnings today.

Despite her focus on regulation and administration, Effosse provides a compelling picture of the continued relevance of personal relationships, local networks, and embedded knowledge to the working of large-scale consumer credit (see chapter 6 in particular). Cetelem owed its success to its ability to capitalize on the skills and connections of local retailers, who were charged with evaluating buyers, while the company’s small team of employees dedicated to payment recovery worked with individual clients to ensure repayment. Default rates were so low as to be negligible; combined with a precocious adoption of computer technology and simplified evaluative algorithms, the procedures of the large consumer credit firms were so effective that the development of a centralized information system on borrowers on the German or American model was moot. What appears as a French delay in technological modernization turns out to be an efficient alternative path.

Effosse is explicit about the circumscribed parameters of the study. This is not a cultural history of consumption nor a broad-based inquiry into the political economy of household debt. Neither consumer advocacy groups nor organized labor appear; newspapers from the right and left are...

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