Trente Glorieuses

Yeah, I mean, m- maybe one thing before that, if you allow me, because it, it brings us back to a previous episode that you had with, uh, with Julie Kalman, that you were discussing Asterix and the, the 30 Glorious Years.

And we kind of forget the background that what we call les Trente Glorieuses, so the 30 Glorious Years of France, you know, this is already in the first decade of them, right? So by 1953, we're in the first decade of the 30 Glorious Years.

There's enormous economic growth.

France is an, is a rural country that's rapidly industrializing.

A big obvious choice is the moment of 1945. the spirit of 45 recently canonized in Ken Loach's film as a moment of socialism.

And then the ensuing 30 years after that, the Trente Glorieuses, they say in France, moments of an epoch of social democracy or a Fordist Keynesianism or of the welfare state.

These are all terms that you have kind of critically skewered.

And we could imagine how the declinist story Fails to see any kind of specific rupture and inventiveness in the 45 moment because there's just a long story of decline Yes from from the late 19th century, but also there's a certain kind of left revivalism Maybe we could say that imagines a very wonderful post-war world And you've talked about that post-war, in keeping with your stress on the actual long-term power of the British state and capitalist class, but also the rising power of others, not because of any failings or idiocy of the British capitalist class, just because of the changing structure of the world economy.

Humans were in charge of history.

But gradually, over the course of the next several decades, during the period of explosive economic growth that the French call les Trente Glorieuses, humans started to seem like puny things, especially, I think, in France, which was no longer sort of in charge of world diplomacy.

Interesting.

And so this idea of language as a system and a kind of more suspicious outlook in general took hold.