France’s New Deal: From the Thirties to the Postwar Era by Philip Nord (review)

Since Bismarck proposed a social security system for Germany in the 1880s, scholars and political activists have debated the origins and nature of welfare state programs under capitalism, the motives for states, and the implications for labor movements. On one side are advocates of social democracy and reformist socialism who celebrate social welfare programs as victories for an organized working-class, steps on the road to democratic socialism (Esping-Andersen 1985; Harrington 1972; Korpi 1983; Stephens 1979). Against this perspective are radical activists and scholars who see welfare states as conservative ripostes, alternatives meant to divert the working class and its allies from the class struggle. While this view draws inspiration from the German experience, where Bismarck pioneered a welfare state to divert German workers from the growing Social Democratic Party, it is shared by many disappointed with the limited extent of social programs and the way they have been used to divide the working class (Esping-Andersen 1990; Friedman 2007). Finally, there are those who would separate welfare states from any vision of a Marxist class struggle; instead they see welfare reform as a political attempt to promote fertility, to increase the population available for war making or other imperial adventures (Accampo 1995; Folbre 1994).

The French experience has provided rich fodder for this debate. There has been a lively debate between those who sought the origins of the French welfare state in the politics of class (Friedman 1998; Stone 1985), gender (Accampo 1995; Stewart 1989), or in a neo-Bismarckian conservative attempt to divert labor (Elwitt 1986). A new element has been a serious attempt to understand French fascism as a project to restore social solidarity even at the cost of constructing systems of state-funded social support. For decades, the association of the French right with the Vichy regime and its collaboration with the German occupation prevented scholars from addressing the views of French fascists seriously. In the 1970s, however, Robert Paxton broke the taboo to bring Vichy and its supporters back into the sweep of French history (Paxton 1972). Scholars since have explored the ideas of those who would support Vichy, including proposals to restore social solidarity through welfare state programs (Kennedy 2007; Paxton 2004).

Into this debate comes Philip Nord. The author of already classic studies of social reform and the petite bourgeoisie in the early Third Republic (Nord 1986, 1995), Nord’s past work has been within the conventional Marxist class analysis albeit while recognizing the persisting role of other classes besides the capitalists and proletarians. In France’s New Deal, however, he breaks new ground, reinterpreting the origins of the modern French welfare state in light of the work of Paxton and others on Vichy and the interwar French right.

Challenging the casual dismissal of Vichy, Nord shows the continuities between the welfare programs of the Liberation and the Vichy regime and reactionary thinkers in the interwar years. Rather than the Popular Front, which he shows accomplished little in its short time in power, Nord shows how the postwar settlement was largely the work of those outside the socialist movement. Without discounting the role of the Socialists and Communists in the Resistance and the postwar governments, Nord highlights the behind-the-scenes work of institutional architects like Jean Monnet, Pierre Laroque, Alfred Sauvy, and Michel Debré, not one of whom, as he notes, “was a leftist stalwart” (22). While acknowledging the social democratic aspirations behind the French model, Nord sees the work of a “new elite at the Liberation.” These were men (virtually all male) who had spent the 1930s outside of mainstream politics, editing little reviews and forming new associations aimed at transcending what they saw as the sterile parliamentary politics of the aging Third Republic to restore the spirit of sacrifice and solidarity of the union sacrée. Nationalization and economic planning, family support and a national welfare system, the transformation of established...