Remember When France Looked Like the Future?

While natives of the English-speaking world may be surprised to hear it, there was a time when France looked like "the future," Paris a glimpse of "tomorrowland."

This may seem strange given that we associate that status with countries that became industrial superpowers--like Britain or the United States, or more tentatively, Germany or Japan--and France never quite had that stature, for various reasons. (There was maritime Britain's advantage over continental France in chasing after colonial markets, and escaping the effects of continental land wars--like the defeat by Prussia in 1870-1871 that cost it critical natural and industrial resources. There was the extent to which a big and powerful financial sector that preferred speculation and capital export to investment in actually making stuff at home called the shots politically at critical times. And so forth.)

However, if France’s industry was less impressive than others with regard to scale, it consistently impressed qualitatively, the country tending to "punch above its weight class" in high-tech.

Thus while Britain became an industrial superpower on the basis of mechanized textile production, France produced the Jacquard loom--no great hit at the time, but a milestone in the development of computing. The redevelopment associated with Baron Haussmann and world capital-scale gas-light and the construction of the tallest building in the world out of iron (the Eiffel Tower) made Paris seem futuristically modern to Victorian eyes, while pre-Ford France was the world leader in auto production, and aviation too, because of the excellence of French engine-building.

So did it go in the post-World War II period. While people in other countries talked about nuclear power, France actually went and made it the basis of its grid (today getting 70 percent of its electricity from this source, while being a significant electricity exporter as well), and pioneered the "breeder" reactors that it seemed would be hugely important to any wider usage. France, not Britain or wartime era rocket pioneer Germany, was the West European leader in space, becoming the third country to orbit a satellite in 1965, after only the Soviet Union and the U.S.. The country also built high-speed trains, supersonic airliners, and the proto-Internet remembered as the "Minitel"--which gave the French public access to online amenities such as few Americans had at the time.

Why has all this not been more widely appreciated? I suppose there is the old "Anglo-Saxon" prejudice which held the continent, with the French the continentals par excellence, to be backward, poor, shabby in comparison with themselves. In the post-war era there was disdain for France's more statist and welfarist economic model--a disdain which only grew in the 1980s with France’s apparent left turn under a Socialist Party government as America and Britain went right, epochally. Information age euphoria also had its effect--convincing a great many Americans in particular that the Web was about to make the world a utopia, and that all the credit for that could go to Bay Area garage tinkering and absolutely nothing else, and anyone else doing anything in any other way was doomed to be left out forever, with the Europeans in particular an image of perpetual stagnation and inevitable decay.

The misapprehensions of this compound of nationalism and techno-libertarianism have been very, very slow to pass (Paul Krugman in 2011 quipping that "the US elite picture of Europe is stuck in a sort of time warp, in which it's always 1997, and we have the Internet and they don't"), and as yet have done so imperfectly. The result is that where, for example, Germany has managed to win some respect for its undeniable achievements as a manufacturer (such that even longtime Europe-bashers offer a word or two in praise for the German economy) it remains common to see France solely through the lens of the shopworn clichés discussed here, such that one can only wonder what we may be missing about France, and the world, as a result.