Mitterrandian Reformism, or the Great Transformation of Declining French Capitalism

Zhiming Long and Rémy Herrera

A chapter in Trajectories of Declining and Destructive Capitalism, 2025, vol. 40, pp 99-105 from Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Abstract: We analyze how the French left led by F. Mitterrand and the Socialist Party failed to ‘change the lives’ of the French. We describe the difficulties encountered by the ‘relaunch’ policy of 1981 and the change of course carried out, first with the inflection to austerity in 1982–1983, accompanied by devaluations of the franc, then the turn to neoliberalism and financial markets in 1984–1985, with the emphasis placed on business recovery and European integration. This betrayal of the left's programme, leading to social inequalities and ‘new poverty’, partly explains the return of the right to power as early as 1986.

Keywords: France; capitalism; socialism; reformism; financial markets; currency devaluation; economic rigour; European integration (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.110 ... d&utm_campaign=repec (text/html)
https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.110 ... 1-723020250000040007
https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.110 ... d&utm_campaign=repec (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eme:rpeczz:s0161-723020250000040007

DOI: 10.1108/S0161-723020250000040007

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Research in Political Economy from Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Emerald Support ().