The Flood of "Progress": Technocrats and Peasants at Tignes (Savoy), 1946-1952

Abstract

In France, in the years directly after the Second World War, a broad political, economic, and social consensus centered on a recognition of France's relative economic and productive backwardness. For French people of almost all political persuasions, the main task in the imnmediate postwar years was a systematic reconstruction and modernilzatioi of the nation 's productive apparatus. Modernists were to transtorm France from a country dominated by small inefficient producers using outdated techniques to a modern industrial nation characterized by large, integrated corporations.2 In a cultural sense, peasants in remote communes were to give way to technocrats in high-rise office buildings. In the case examined here, a traditional Alpine commune, Tignes, disappeared under a hydroelectric reservoir. The modernization consensus embraced the nationalization of