France confronts the crisis: economic symptoms exacerbate social inequality

The economic crisis at the end of the 2000s was costly for the French economy. The number of employees in the non-agricultural market sector fell by 187,000 between the start of 2008 and the end of 2009. Never in the past forty years had job losses been so high. Overall, 412,000 jobs were eliminated in 2009. But this crisis does not boil down solely to job losses, nor even to a collapse in the growth rate (economic activity slumped by 2.2 per cent in 2009 alone): it is also rooted in economic and social inequality. And the responses provided by France's political authorities, in turn, had a distinct effect on the scale of this inequality. All of which conspires to permanently weaken the bedrock of the welfare state, and more generally the French model. We should like to demonstrate this by looking, first, at how this model evolved before the crisis. Next we shall examine the way in which France reacted to the crisis, in particular as concerns its labour market. Lastly we shall attempt to learn lessons from, and consider the implications of, the economic crisis three years after it erupted.