Keynesianism in France

International audienceAccording to Pierre Rosanvallon (1987), Keynesianism arrived very late in France but its triumph was complete. It offered a common language to a large group of senior officers and engineers working in public administration and nationalized firms. It reconciled the French tradition of Colbertism with the necessity of a modern State. Richard Arena (2000) insists also on the fact that Keynesian ideas spread in a hostile context and initially outside Universities and academia where typically French economic traditions dominated. The situation in universities started to change in the 1970s and 1980s when curricula in French Universities began to incorporate macroeconomic courses based on IS-LM and with the development of disequilibrium economics. The article retraces the unfolding of this historical process and insists on the variety of heterodox interpretations of Keynes that flourished in the French context like the works of Bernard Schmitt and circuitists