New York had its neon and its skyscrapers.

New York had its neon and its skyscrapers.

Berlin had its bars and cabarets, but ah, Paris.

Welcome to the history of the 20th century.

Music 20th century. Episode 245, Leszanne Fall.

I want to talk about Paris today.

Paris after the war, the Paris of the roaring 20s,

or as the French like to call them,

Lesanne Fall, the crazy years. I've touched on France's economic situation elsewhere in the podcast, especially in episodes 239 and 240. To summarize it briefly, the Great War left France in a difficult position, economically.

France owed large sums to the U.K. and the U.S., and paying off those war debts would have been

challenging enough on its own, but France had also loaned large sums to Russia, debts which the new

Bolshevik government refused to pay. And even beyond that,

the French government had the additional expenses of pensions for the wounded and for widows and orphans

of those who had died in combat. When you consider all the war costs the French government

was stuck with, it becomes easy to understand why the French were such sticklers in return

about getting those reparations payments from Germany. The French went in the opposite direction

from the British in terms of economic policy. While the British government and financial sector

were keen on putting the pound back on the gold

standard at the pre-war exchange rate, the French opted instead to allow the franc to devalue

before finally returning to the gold standard in 1928. By then, the franc was worth only about

18% of its pre-war value.

As John Maynard Keynes had pointed out, the choice of economic policy between deflation and devaluation isn't one of the right or wrong answer. Both choices come with costs. It comes

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