This chapter introduces the extent and importance of black markets in Occupied France, reviews the historiography on the black market since 1945, and explains the central themes in the book.

This chapter surveys consumer experience in an economy with a shrinking supply of consumer goods, explaining how consumers responded to the shortages, price controls and rationing. It explains social experience with queues and the motivations and rationale for food protests by ‘housewives’ to obtain more food, and the family strategies to exploit opportunities for getting food from relatives and connections in rural areas. It also examines how consumer hardship was represented in the daily press and the use of humour in cartoons about the black market, queues, and restaurants.

Surveys how the French office known as the Contrôle économique was created for price controls and then charged with maintaining fixed prices in markets and suppressing the black market. The chapter then provides a critical evaluation of the control strategies for enforcement and their failure to contain black- market growth during the years of Occupation or to retain the initial popular support essential for having state controls work.

Sets French black-market experience in the context of recent research on black markets and economic controls in belligerent powers during the Second World War. It provides analysis of why the French case is so important and interesting, including conclusions on why black market was so extensive in France, how French policies and their enforcement alienated popular support for measures that claimed to ‘equalize sacrifice’ (and failed to do so), and the essential need for government regulation to protect property and market access to essential goods (Vichy controls failed on both counts).

Agricultural policy should have been a primary focus for the Vichy regime, to restore the values of working the land as promoted by their propaganda, and to feed French citizens. This chapter explains Vichy agricultural policies, the alienation of French producers, and it details the economic and individualist rationales for farmers to sell to and rely on the black market, with three product case studies for black- market behaviours and logic: butter, meat, and wine.

Explains the reasons for increased black market activity in France after Liberation, including the new black market for US Army goods, and the rising frustration of consumers, shopkeepers, farmers and intermediaries with the operation of price controls and rationing. This opposition resisted price control efforts in some cities and developed into a massive, organized wave of protest against control enforcement in spring 1947, forcing the state to retreat from enforcement of controls.

This chapter considers supply-side behaviour and commerce: how producers obtained essential raw materials needed to manufacture goods, and sold or exchanged their output on the black market. It also explores how retailers obtained goods to replenish their stock; how and why black-market restaurants thrived; and the importance of middlemen, using the extreme cases of two most infamous black-market billionaires, Joseph Joanovici and Michel Szkolnikoff.

Provides a critical evaluation of the state effort to confiscate ‘illicit profits’ from economic collaboration and black-market exploitation of public misery. The economic purge provides significant evidence for the practices of black-market traffic during and after the Occupation, for the extent of black-market trade, and for the impossibility of holding most offenders accountable because the traffic was so widespread and major offenders found ways to keep their activities and profits hidden from state investigation.

Summarizes the economic context for France during the Occupation and postwar period, covering the impact of the war, German Occupation policies and their impact on French GDP and consumption, and the unreliability of statistics on the French economy during the war.