Concept

Jean Fourastié

Summary
Jean Fourastié (ʒɑ̃ fuʁastje; 15 April 1907 in Saint-Benin-d'Azy, Nièvre - 25 July 1990 in Douelle, Lot) was a French civil servant, economist, professor and public intellectual. He coined the expression Trente Glorieuses ("the glorious thirty [years]") to describe the period of prosperity that France experienced from the end of World War II until the 1973 oil crisis. Jean Fourastié received his elementary and secondary education at the private Catholic College of Juilly from 1914 to 1925. Then in Paris, he boarded at École Massillon and enrolled in classe préparatoire aux grandes écoles at Lycée Saint-Louis. He was admitted into École Centrale Paris, from which he graduated in 1930, but was not attracted by an engineering career. Instead, he pursued studies at École Libre des Sciences Politiques where his professors included Charles Rist and Jean Romieu. He received a law degree in 1933, followed by doctor of law In 1937 with a thesis on insurance supervision. In 1932, Fourastié successfully passed the examination to become an insurance supervisor for the French state (commissaire-contrôleur des compagnies d'assurances). He stayed two years at the Octroi de Paris, a low-level bureaucratic position, and in 1934 joined the Direction du contrôle de l'Etat sur les assurances, then part of the French Labor Ministry. He was instrumental in the adoption on of a mandatory accounting framework for insurance companies, France's first-ever attempt at accounting standard-setting. He would stay in the civil service until 1951. During World War II, Fourastié kept working for the state under Vichy France, while keeping distance from direct collaboration with Germany's Nazi regime. In January 1941, he started giving a course on insurance at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers (CNAM), replacing his ministry colleague Maxime Malinski who was Jewish and thus had been victim of the 1940 Vichy anti-Jewish legislation. Fourastié's course met instant success with CNAM students.
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