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Eleanor Lansing Dulles and James Harvey Rogers' Analysis of The Eleanor Lansing Dulles and James Harvey Rogers’ analysis of the French inflation during the interwar period (1919 – 1929) BY CONSTANCE ANDRÉ--AIGRET Working paper, please do not quote without permission Abstract: This paper studies the analysis of two American authors, Eleanor Lansing Dulles who lived from 1895 to 1996 and James Harvey Rogers who was born in 1886 and died in 1939, concerning the French inflation of the interwar period 1919-1929. During the years fol- lowing the First World War, constant inflation coupled with speculative attacks against the germinal franc obliged the government to reinstate Raymond Poincaré as Finance Minister and President of the Council of Ministers in 1926. A first debate took place concerning the theoret- ical framework to use in order to explain the French inflation. Our authors were in favor of a theory which includes qualitative factors such as confidence and speculation and doing so were criticizing the Quantity Theory of Money and Purchasing Power Parity theory. Then, a second debate emerged between advocates of a revaluation of the franc to its prewar level (Poincaré, Aftalion) and those in favor of a devaluation of the franc to its real value (Moreau, Rist, Keynes). This debate leads to the devaluation of the germinal franc by 80% by Poincaré in 1928. The new “franc Poincaré” was only worth a fifth of the gold equivalent of the franc ger- minal. The American analysis of this interwar inflation is not well known. Our authors exam- ined the French inflation and devaluation in order to compare it with the American situation at that time. The aim of this paper is twofold: to analyze the American contribution to this debate and to study the effects of foreign exchange fluctuations on the economy. JEL codes: B22, E52, F31 Keywords: Franc Poincaré, devaluation, Eleanor Lansing Dulles, James Harvey Rogers “The French fight against monetary collapse in the years 1922 to 1927 is one of the most dramatic struggles of the post-war period. As in all battles against in- flation, the issues were not at first clear” (Dulles 1933, p. 5). 1. Introduction The return to the Gold Standard via the establishment of the franc Poincaré by Raymond Poincaré in July 1928, led to a huge accumulation of gold by the Bank of France. This increase of gold reserves and the undervalued currency could have enabled France to hold off the Great Depression longer than other countries. In 2013, Paul Krugman, on his blog1, compared the French situation in 1930 with the German one during the debt crisis in Europe which started in *PhD Student supervised by Rebeca Gomez-Betancourt (University of Lyon 2, France) and Robert W. Dimand (Brock University, Canada). University of Lyon 2 and member of the Triangle Research Centre. Email: con- [email protected]. 1http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/02/france-1930-germany-2013/ 1 2010: Germany went into crisis later than other European countries and suffered less from the shock. Concerning the French economy in 1929-1931, he even wrote in this blog’s article: “No- tice, by the way, that the French weren’t evil or malicious here — they were just adhering to their hard-money ideology in an environment where that had terrible adverse effects on other countries”. Indeed, after World War I (WWI), the French currency had to face several speculative attacks which led to fluctuations of the value of the franc. The decrease of inflation at that time led monetary authorities to think that they could re-institute the gold parity of 19132. As we know, France will come out victorious of the War on November 11, 1918. At that time, the economic situation of the belligerent countries was disastrous: they were in debt and in deficit and had to face an enormous human loss. Then, the Allied Powers, composed of the French Republic, the British Empire, the Russian Empire and the United States of America (USA) signed the Treaty of Versailles the 28th of June 1919. This Treaty stated that Germany had to pay for the reconstruction of the countries which had been destroyed subsequent to the military conflict. The amount of money owed was of 132 milliards of gold German mark and France should receive more than the half amount as it was the country which suffered the most. How- ever, France had to reimburse the British Empire and the USA and, doing so, increased its debt by 20 milliards of francs thanks to advances from the Bank of France and the issuing of bonds. But, in 1922, Germany announced its refusal to pay for the war reparations. This event led to a depreciation of the germinal franc3 on the change market and to an increase of the French public deficit from 1923. From this date, inflation became cumulative; there was an external devalua- tion of the franc coupled with an internal devaluation. Moreover, in 1924, this depreciation became the main force of the inflation via the increase of the price of importations and the reinforcement of inflationist expectations. In 1926, the germinal franc was largely under-eval- uated compared to its purchasing power parity value. All these economic events generated a “franc crisis” in mid July 1926: change crisis, public cash-flow problems and political crisis. France was at the edge of a crisis, and a potential regime change. The 23rd of July 1926, Poin- caré, who had been President of the Republic from 1913 to 1920 and President of the Council 2At the dawn of the WWI, the French government decided to give up the gold standard in order to finance the War and they borrowed a huge amount of money: France moved to a fiat money regime: the franc was unpegged on the 14th of March, 1914. 3The germinal franc had been instituted by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1803 in the month that, in the French Revolu- tionary calendar, was called Germinal. One unit of germinal franc contained 290.034 mg of fine gold and it circu- lated with silver. The ratio between gold and silver were of 1:15.5. In 1865, the germinal franc became the common currency of the Latin Monetary Union. 2 of Minister in 1913 and from 1922 to 1924, came back to the government as President of the Council of Ministers as well as Minister of Finance. No sooner had he returned that the value of the franc stabilized on the market: Poincaré reinstituted confidence concerning the franc and the French economy. After that event, Poincaré was named “Poincaré la confiance” and the main question he was concerned with was at which value the franc should be stabilized. A debate then took place between the advocates of a reevaluation of the franc (such as Poincaré and Albert Aftalion) and those in favor of a devaluation of it (Emile Moreau, Charles Rist, Pierre Quesnay, John Maynard Keynes). This French monetary depreciation of the interwar period had been studied mainly by French authors (Rist, Rueff, Quesnay, Gide); the American analysis of it is not well known. We have chosen in this paper to study the analysis of two American authors: Eleanor Lansing Dulles, who lived from 1895 to 1996 and James Harvey Rogers who was born in 1886 and died in 1939. The first author, Dulles, compared the French inflation and the American situation in her book of 1933. That year, the USA faced a situation of inflation; the French case could be used as a theoretical case in order to highlight the issue of this monetary phenomenon4. Rogers analyzed the French inflation in order to explain the banking system of that time and the inter- relation between financial institutions. Both of them knew each other: when Dulles wrote her Ph. D thesis on the French franc (1929), Rogers was also writing his book about the same sub- ject and asked her for her work, she refused: “Professor Robert Murray Haig and Professor Harvey Rogers came to call me in the little room at Cola Rossi. They were in Paris with a group of their colleagues, under a large grant to study the French economy. Their reasons for calling on me were astonish- ing. Haig said, “You are here on a small grant and working alone, studying the nature of French inflation. Professor Rogers is working with our group and can do a more searching and complete job. We want you to turn over your notes to us and we’ll carry on your work as part of our comprehensive project. I’m sure Professor Young will ap- prove”. These men were years senior to me. Their reputations were established. I found it hard to believe that they would make such an approach to intimidate a young scholar and a woman as well” (Dulles 1980, pp. 101-102). 4“Fortunately, concrete evidence and direct testimony with regard to French inflation are available to guide Amer- ican public opinion in the struggle over monetary policies. By measuring the changes in bond values and stock prices in France one can gain some idea of what will happen if inflation continues in the United States. By inquiring into the condition of industry, the situation in agriculture, the role of the treasury and the Bank of France, one can detect somewhat earlier than would otherwise be the case, profound changes which are bound to affect the life of the nation. Those individuals who have the power to check the first movement may find in this past experience emphatic warning that the later stages are worse than the first. In the history of the sudden dramatic reversals of speculation and value in 1924 and 1926 there may be some clues to the secret of stopping inflation” (Dulles 1933, p.
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