This paper presents a broad, quantitatively documented, overview of the French economy during World War One, trying to answer the question of whether the war was a turning point in French economic history. It first describes the various shocks the war imposed to the economy, from invasion to...

We present new indices of the Paris stock exchange during the interwar period. We first discuss the conditions for stock market indices to be useful instruments both of long term capital productivity measure and of portfolio performance, especially for international comparisons. We show that...

French life insurance remained underdeveloped in comparison with other countries during a long period between 1870 and 1939. We show that technical peculiarities of the contracts used and their interaction with macroeconomic fluctuations explain the wide fluctuations we observe in insurance...

We show that the size of the French public debt, the budget deficit and the monetary overhang made it impossible to stabilize immediately after World War I, even on the anti-keynesian assumption that a stabilization would have had no negative effects on income. The reason for the immediate...