Mitterand’s Term: A Balance Sheet

When Francois Mitterrand came to power in 1981, he promised a “rupture with capitalism.” If his policies of the first year were not the clean break with the past they were supposed to be, they were an audaciously consistent and quite socialist version of that Keynesianism which, in its technocratic guise, had dominated France since 1945. One might argue that Mitterrand had discovered, and followed the path of, the radical John Maynard Keynes defined by Joan Robinson and systematic...