Unit 14:   Modern Paris (World War I to the Present)

On November 11, 1918 , the First World War came to an end. This Armistice Day was a time of celebration in Paris . The joy expressed on this day and the peace treaty signed at Versailles in June 1919, however, could not hide the devastation that the country had suffered:

No other warring nation had suffered such high proportionate manpower losses: of the eight million men mobilized, five million were killed or wounded. The dead alone amounted to 10 per cent of the active male population and even more were partially or totally incapacitated. . . . Material losses were less critical, yet exceptionally severe; a large segment of France 's best industrial and agricultural territory had been devastated. Industrial production . . . dropped to 60 per cent of the prewar figure; in later retrospect, it was estimated that French economic growth had been set back by almost a decade (Gordon Wright. France in Modern Times . 3 rd edition. New York : W.W. Norton, 1981, p. 323).

In addition, France 's finances had been ravaged by the cost of the war , which had produced soaring inflation in the country. Within a decade this financial crisis was only exacerbated by the world-wide depression of the 1930s.

Between the wars the Third Republic remained in power; although beset after the war by the economic crisis and ultimately by the rise of Nazi Germany just across the Rhine , it was headed toward what Gordon Wright terms a “period of disintegration”:

The Third Republic, as seen in retrospect by observers of our day, seems to have passed through three distinct though interconnected phases: the heroic age from 1871 to about 1900, during which the republicans fought off all challenges and consolidated the regime; the stable era from 1900 to about 1930, when the system appeared to have won a degree of popular consensus unequalled by any of its predecessors; the period of disintegration that began about 1930 and ended in collapse a decade later ( France in Modern Times . 3 rd edition. New York : W.W. Norton, 1981, p. 343).