History is often seen from the winners' point of view, but writing on France between the Liberation and the early 1950s provides a conspicuous exception to this rule. Historical accounts of the Fourth Republic concentrate on the early hopes that are seen to have been incarnated by the French Resistance. Subsequent developments are then presented as a depressing and tedious slide into immobilisme, and the most serious consideration is reserved for the political left, which was defeated during this period, or for those bourgeois politicians – like Mendès-France or de Gaulle – who rebelled against the Fourth Republic system. Those politicians who succeeded during the 1940s have attracted few historians: Paul Reynaud is better known for his unsuccessful attempts to save France from defeat by Nazi Germany during the 1930s than for his part in a successful effort to contain Communism during the 1940s.

In 1944 the property-owning classes of France seemed under threat from increasing Communist power (many feared an outright Communist take over), from a general belief that in future the state would play a greater role in the administration of the economy, and from the measures that had been taken to exclude from public life those who had supported Marshal Pétain's Vichy government of 1940–44. By the early 1950s all these threats seemed to have passed: the Communist party had been forced out of government in 1947 and Communist supporters had been forced out of administrative jobs; dirigiste economics had come to be seen less as a threat to the rights of property than as a means of managing capitalism, and measures taken against Pétainists were beginning to be formally rescinded or discreetly forgotten.