The Long Road of French Neoliberalism

France is often described as distinctly reticent (if not downright hostile) on the subject of economic liberalism. The State is interventionist, employers fear competition and political parties cultivate their Jacobin heritage. Despite these cliches, France has a long neoliberal tradition whose history is rooted in the intellectual ferment of the interwar period, when economists, employers and higher civil servants laid the basis for a new kind of liberalism which sought to carve out a “third way” between an outmoded laissez-faire model and a kind of economic planning deemed too close to socialism. By following neoliberalism’s crooked path from the 1930s through the 1980s, this paper reveals a series of transformations that touched the State, economic thought and modes of public action. It shows how neoliberalism gradually gained the upper hand via a long process in which a shifting constellation of forces internal to France (both political and institutional) interacted with interna...